Imagined Transnationalism: U.S. Latino a Literature, Culture, and Identity

U.S. Latino/a Literature, Culture, and Identity Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe Copyri...

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U.S. Latino/a Literature, Culture, and Identity Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Imagined Transnationalism

10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

IMAGINED TRANSNATIONALISM

First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-60632-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Imagined transnationalism : U.S. latino/a literature, culture, and identity / Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe, eds. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-60632-6 1. Hispanic Americans—Social conditions. 2. Community development— United States. 3. American literature—Hispanic American authors. I. Concannon, Kevin. II. Lomelí, Francisco A. III. Priewe, Marc. E184.S75I357 2009 973'.0468—dc22 2009013902 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions First edition: November 2009


Copyright © Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe, 2009. All rights reserved.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


Figures and Tables

v

Introduction Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe

1

1

Chicano Transnation Bill Ashcroft

2

A Schematic Approach to Understanding Latino Transnational Literary Texts Nicolás Kanellos

29

Para Español Oprima El Número Dos: Transnational Translation and U.S. Latino/a Literature Marta E. Sánchez

47

Transnational Migrations and Political Mobilizations: The Case of A Day without a Mexican María Herrera-Sobek

61

Imagining Transnational Chicano/a Activism against Gender-Based Violence at the U.S.-Mexican Border Claudia Sadowski-Smith

75

Precursors of Hemispheric Writing: Latin America, the Caribbean, and Early U.S. American Identity Gabriele Pisarz-Ramírez

95

3

4

5

6

7

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Slammin’ in Transnational Heterotopia: Words Being Spoken at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Harald Zapf “A Broader and Wiser Revolution”: Refiguring Chicano Nationalist Politics in Latin American Consciousness in Post-Movement Literature Tim Libretti

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117


Contents

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CONTENTS

With Bertolt Brecht and the Aztecs Toward an Imagined Transnation: A Literary Case Study Karin Ikas

157

10 Travel, Autoethnography, and Oppositional Consciousness in Juan Felipe Herrera’s Mayan Drifter Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger

171

11 ¿Dónde estás vos/z?: Performing Salvadoreñidades in Washington, DC Ana Patricia Rodríguez

201

12 The Final Frontier: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s The Great Mojado Invasion Catherine Leen

221

13 Writing the Haitian Diaspora: The Transnational Contexts of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker Ricardo L. Ortíz

237

Notes on Contributors

257

Index

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Figure 2.1 Hispanic cultures in the United States Table 2.1 Textual characteristics of U.S. Hispanic literature

32 34


Figures and Tables



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Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe

A

t the beginning of Cristina García’s 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban, Celia del Pino, the family matriarch, sits on the porch of her home in Cuba, staring out into the ocean through binoculars, purportedly looking for an indication of another Bay of Pigs invasion. Celia knows that spotting any sign of an invasion will help her curry favor with Fidel Castro and show her support of the Revolution. At the same time, her attention on the ocean becomes a reminder that much of Celia’s family lives away from Cuba, emphasizing her troubled relationship to an island that she has sworn to protect, but that also has driven away much of her family and isolated her. Celia’s conflicted relationship with Cuba highlights the larger history of exile for many Cubans from the island who find themselves able but unwilling to return to a homeland controlled by Castro. The use of the term “exile” is complicated, since many Cubans left the island as small children or were not born on the island, as Andrea O’Reilly Herrera (2001) points out, emphasizing the way in which imagination and history inform their sense of loss and exile from the island more than personal experience. The sight of Celia looking to protect Cuba by watching the ocean around it emphasizes this construction of Cuba as an image—and less a territorially defined space—as it reminds one of how the island exists within a larger diasporic consciousness. In a sense, Celia’s role as sentry on the waters around the island underscores her role as guardian for those thousands living in the Cuban diaspora in the United States who continue to draw meaning from an island connection; she is keeping an eye on them from a distance, stretching the meaning of Cuban identity and belonging to the communities and individuals beyond Cuba’s shores. This sense of the island’s deterritorialization is emphasized by Celia’s attire while looking out into the darkness. Dressed in her “best housedress” (García 1992, 3), and wearing the earrings given to her by her long-departed lover, Celia’s position as sentry merges into that of the jilted


Introduction


KEVIN CONCANNON, FRANCISCO A. LOMELÍ, AND MARC PRIEWE

lover waiting to welcome her lover Gustavo back from the other side of the ocean. Celia’s roles as both sentry and lover become reminders of the draw of the island to those who live beyond its shores, whether it be suspected traitors making plans for another invasion or long-lost lovers being encouraged to return. The island under Celia’s watch becomes translated as less a spaciousness of isolation and more a spaciousness of excess, one that moves beyond its physical and territorial borders. This sense of fluidity is highlighted by a vision Celia has, while on guard, of her husband seemingly emerging out of the ocean to speak to her. Ill with cancer in a New York hospital bed, Jorge appears to Celia as a sign that he has passed away, in a sense returning to the island but never really making it back. Celia’s vision becomes a reminder of the importance of the imaginary in defining Celia’s relationship to her family and to the island. Through Celia’s vision of Jorge, her husband is able to return to the island in terms of her memory, a vision that supports the continuing significance of the island in the lives of those who dwell in the diaspora. Celia’s experience on the shores of Cuba highlights many of the important themes addressed in this collection. Her role as sentry guarding the shores of the island emphasizes the ways in which migration today cannot be seen as a one-time, unidirectional event, and, at the same time, return to one’s exiled home cannot be defined always solely in terms of physical movement. Celia’s experience helps us to see how the recent phases of globalization have ushered in new forms of migrations that have decisively impacted the course and flow of cultures and identities, especially in the Western Hemisphere. Even as families, or whole villages, have relocated to (and often from) the United States, many of today’s migrants are no longer “at home” in one nation-state; they are often becoming transnational migrants, who live in a state of physical and intercultural transit between two or more national communities. The increasing permeability of boundaries between nation-states has threatened the traditional definition of an identifiable “homeland” from which to migrate and points instead toward a burgeoning transnational spaciousness crisscrossed by, among other things, movement, investment, TV images, text messages, cell phones, and videoconferencing. In this way, much migration to the United States has, in a sense, already occurred, either as a result of the growing global media and marketing strategies that turn other parts of the world into a U.S. subsidiary, or through a culture industry that stereotypes the future existence of migrants in the United States. Many migrants, it seems, are caught within a nebulous and paradoxical spaciousness where arrival is indefinitely postponed, and where one seems already “there” without ever leaving home. We are thus witness to an increasingly global phenomenon variously called “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (Bhabha), “transmigrancy”


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(Glick Schiller et al.), or “globalization from below” (Falk). These terms, among others, have now become part and parcel of an ever-increasing ensemble of signifiers that point to new cosmopolitan practices in which people on the move retain certain elements of their national identities and modes of cultural interaction, while also negotiating the demands of their host cultures. More popularly conceived today as the transnational, these bifurcated experiences of the migrant and the native emphasize a changing understanding of how we define mobility, belonging, and the nation. In the U.S. context, such an understanding dates back to Randolph Bourne’s use of the term “transnational” in his famous essays “Trans-national America” and “The Jew and Trans-national America,” both originally published in 1916, in which transnational refers to the importance of a more international understanding of American identity. Arguing against those who believed that immigrants held too tenacious a grip on their past homelands, Bourne was convinced of the benefits of dual identities and simultaneous space construction, maintaining that immigrant populations represented “threads of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves into a novel international nation, the first the world has seen” (Bourne 1916/1964, 120). Within this celebratory image one finds the outlines of much of the current discussions of the transnational as a critical methodology. Much as Bourne sees the transnational as a means of undermining certain myths of the nation, most notably the melting pot, critics today conceptualize the transnational as a means of challenging those myths of the nation that seek to marginalize others based upon race, gender, or sexual orientation. In doing so, a transnational approach can sometimes be mistakenly believed to be a libratory one, as conceiving of the world in terms of a mixture of flows of capital and individuals, and less in terms of boundaries, not recognizing the challenges faced by immigrants being forced to leave their home or being confronted with material and metaphorical barriers. Bourne’s vision of the transnational as rooted in the nation-state challenges more current conceptualizations of transnationalism that often denote and celebrate identities and cultural representations “beyond the nation.” To Bourne, distant conviviality or coexistence is very much an “American” experience, only to be understood by those who have been to the United States. As such, the nation and the transnational become inextricably linked, so much so that the transnational in Bourne’s essays becomes a means of celebrating the United States in terms of its difference with other nations, refiguring mythical national narratives of the United States as the city on the hill through a transnational perspective. It is this concern that has been voiced by many critics today, questioning how one can navigate between the terms “nation” and “transnational,” without also recognizing the different ways in which the transnational can also work


INTRODUCTION



to reaffirm the nation-state. As many scholars in American Studies argue, it is difficult to undertake seemingly transnational work outside of the shadows of America, an often unrecognized furthering of Bourne’s legacy (cf. Briggs et al. 2008). In a similar vein, the ethnic referent “Latino/a” in part replicates both the U.S. cultural mirage of melting pot unity and its Bournean counter-model by assimilating members of various Latin American subgroups living in the United States into an imagined, transnational cultural and communal formation (cf. Rodriguez 2002, 109). That is, the label “Latino/a” subsumes a variety of nationals from the Western Hemisphere (or their descendants) who moved to the United States and who share an ostensibly common language, culture, and history. Although such a broad and highly contested definition raises more questions than it answers—for instance, exactly which linguistic, cultural, or historical features are sufficient, and which are necessary, in applying this particular ethnic label?—“Latino/a” remains a useful shorthand for designating specific minoritarian experiences in the United States. Obviously, Latino/a social, political, and cultural experiences are in many respects similar to those of other ethnic groups in the United States; however, the ways in which “transnationalism” suffuses and shapes these experiences are unprecedented. For the contributors of this collection, then, “Latino/a” is a valuable category of investigation precisely because it represents transnational features of specific and salient movements and connectivities: temporary or permanent migrations to and from the United States; cultural exchanges among and beyond U.S. Latino/a subgroups; the imagination of manifold ties, in the past, present, and future, within transnational spaces across the Western Hemisphere. These transnational spaces between the United States and Latin America foster the emergence of pluri-local identities that are no longer subject to a unified, national imaginary. As a result, the dichotomy between acculturation and alienation in/from the United States has significantly changed toward various forms of transculturations, as migrated cultural practices are being filtered and recontextualized transnationally. Experiences of many so-called transmigrants in the United States, especially in “global cities” (Sassen), differ substantially from earlier migratory patterns in that assimilation to or estrangement from the culture of dominance has ceased to constitute the core of the migratory experience. Moreover, the plural experiences (and the representations) of migrant communities in the United States are no longer contained nor constrained by the “Manichean delirium” (Fanon) established by colonialism and postcolonialism. Instead, over the past two decades, migrants who come to the United States, especially from Latin American countries, are frequently finding themselves multi-positioned, involved in relations to more


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than one location, tradition, cultural, or social praxis. In short, for many migrants, a sense of home is no longer neat or easy to define as they live or interact with more than one spatial and cultural location, thus undermining the sense of one nation. Their cultural practices are therefore often no longer primarily constituted around essences (of nation, tradition, religion), but relationally, connecting different cultural spaces in ways that defy simplistic mapping. Critical scholarly analysis of these processes must thus try to uncover the transversal elements of cultural mobility, especially the efforts and structures of the flows and connectivities that (re)configure contemporary cultures at “home” and “abroad.” Conceptualizations of contemporary culture reflecting the impact of globalization sometimes have a tendency to conceive of culture with their own indelible characteristics that are then somehow penetrated or pervaded by phenomena such as intercultural contacts and global flows. In the process, heterogeneous, even irreconcilable, elements are then seen to be “somehow” incorporated, combined, or mixed to give way to new, hybrid configurations. Concepts such as multiculturalism or interculturality, while seemingly moving beyond traditional holistic concepts of culture, in fact, still conceptually presuppose these holistic concepts as givens, as that from which their recombinatory procedures can usefully begin. From such an essentially stationary point of view, cultures appear to be stable and preexisting wholes composed of localized elements that are then impacted by migrations and transmigrations to give rise to hybrid or crossover products or practices. Imagined Transnationalism takes a different approach, one that reverses the ontological polarity of this mode of theorization, by focusing instead on transnational connectivities and flows generally within the Western Hemisphere and at times reaching to Europe and Asia. According to such a focus, cultures organize themselves not around delimitation, the shoring up of unique, indistinguishable features (however “hybrid” they may be); rather, they are centrally about people being “in touch,” about negotiation and dialogue. Analysis of such cultural formations requires sustained attention to those occasions and locations, positions in space and time that are, in the most generative sense, pivotal sites for, and products of, transnational flows. Bill Ashcroft’s essay, “Chicano Transnation,” begins this collection by complicating our understanding of the nation-state and thereby encouraging one to reexamine how terms such as “diaspora” and “migrancy” are to be understood. The hyphen of the nation-state becomes for Ashcroft a signifier of separation rather than connection, and his essay calls for the possibility of multiple nations within the state. Seen in this way, the state is no longer understood in homogenous terms, but as made up of


INTRODUCTION



multiple nations that themselves are in transition. By purposefully adopting the term “transnation” rather than the more common “transnational,” Ashcroft emphasizes this sense of instability of the state, that the transnational subject should be seen as one that does move not only beyond the state but beyond the many nations that make up the nation-state. To Ashcroft, the transnation “does not refer to an object in political space. It is a way of talking about subjects in their ordinary lives, subjects who live in-between the categories by which subjectivity is normally constituted.” The borderlands hence become a means of conceptualizing these subjects who “live in-between” because they underscore images of the nation-state crisscrossed by borders that do not simply reflect the geographic margin of the state. Through the uncertainty of the borderlands, one sees the nationstate as one conceived of in terms of a fluidity of nations, of crossings and migrations, that in part explain the birth of different nationalist movements, and specifically for Ashcroft, the Chicano nationalist movement. Nicolás Kanellos’ “A Schematic Approach to Understanding Latino Transnational Literary Texts” also challenges present-day constructions of transnational mobility by contextualizing U.S.-Latino/a transnationalism within a deeper historical context. Problematizing calls to see the transnational as an approach that only reflects this contemporary period, Kanellos highlights the voluminous written and transnational history of Hispanics in the United States. By doing so, his essay highlights how traditional conceptions of immigrant literature often disregard U.S. Latino/a literature, either from the mistaken belief that the only material available would be lost oral stories or that early Hispanic literature cannot be understood in terms of an immigrant paradigm. By exploring the different categories of the native, immigrant, and exiled Latino/a writer, Kanellos emphasizes the significance of a transnational perspective to understanding early textual practices, but, more specifically, how authors, by moving between categories emphasize the fluidity of such terms. By doing so, the essay develops connections between an array of Latino/a cultures, complicating attempts to map difference in terms of geography or nation-space by posing vital cultural and political connections between authors. By foregrounding this history of the United States, Kanellos’ essay challenges both how the immigrant narrative is conceived as well as how the nation itself is to be understood. Marta Sánchez’s essay, “Para Español Oprima el Número Dos: Trans-national Translation and U.S. Latino/a Literature,” develops this critique of the nation by looking at the ways in which the rise in the number of Spanish speakers in the United States impacts calls to see English as the national language. Through an analysis of what she terms “trans-national translation,” Sánchez looks specifically at the publication of an increasing number of translations of Latino/a


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literature, written in English and published in the United States, into Spanish and directed to the Spanish-speaking population of the United States. The popularity of these translations, by publishing houses such as Random House and Harper Collins, constructs a linguistic mapping of the nation that is rooted not in juridical notions of citizenship or geographic ideas of the border, but in terms of movement, growth, and economic power. As a consequence, language becomes no longer a means of unifying the nation, but instead a means of identifying its fissures, detaching our understanding of the transnational from individual or collective mobility to focus instead on how nation-space itself has become “mobile,” rendered fluid by changing faces of economic and political power. The individual or collective no longer crosses over a geographic border to become seen in transnational terms, but becomes crossed itself by multiple national borders, emphasizing that transnational subjectivity is to be conceived as a process, one that must negotiate a number of borderlands. If the transnational experience means in part being crossed by different national or economic borders, one is left to wonder about the possibilities for political activism. In a world where economic investment and political action can challenge an individual’s national belonging in ways that are not always visible or even intelligible, questions concerning the forming of communal action or of creating political change become even more central. María Herrera-Sobek’s contribution to this collection, “Transnational Migrations and Political Mobilizations: The Case of A Day Without a Mexican,” explores these issues by examining both the film A Day Without a Mexican as well as the recent political protests that have adopted the film’s portrayal of a United States without Mexicans. Herrera-Sobek’s opening quotation, “In order to make the invisible visible you make it disappear,” marks a salient contradiction that emphasizes the extent of the many challenges faced by the Latino/a population in gaining equal footing in the United States. At the same time, it is the very possibility of Latino/as “choosing” disappearance that strikes at the possibility of change, of disappearing in such a way as to reimagine what “invisibility” in the nation might actually mean. As the protests of 2007 remind us, and as HerreraSobek highlights, this reimagining extends beyond the practical action of boycotts to include a reimagining of national belonging. Claudia Sadowski-Smith’s essay, “Imagining Transnational Chicano/a Activism against Gender-Based Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” examines both literary and filmic texts that present fictionalized representations of the recent disappearance and death of hundreds of women along the Juárez-El Paso border. The texts she explores, Gregory Nava’s film Bordertown, Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood, and Stella Duarte’s If I Die in Juárez, all work to challenge the political silence that has surrounded


INTRODUCTION



these crimes, as well as highlight the transnational context behind them. As Sadowski-Smith notes, these crimes have been perceived as a product of the larger economic flows that crisscross the border. U.S. capital is used to fund the maquiladoras (assembly plants), whose mostly female workforce create the goods that are then shipped back across the border and who are also often the victims of these crimes. The majority of the atrocities remain unsolved, and Sadowski-Smith examines how Nava’s, Gaspar de Alba’s, and Duarte’s texts construct differing senses of political activism in the hope of stopping the growing number of femicides. Similar to other essays in this collection, Sadowski-Smith looks to examine the drawing of connections across the border, but is sensitive to the ways in which differential economic and political opportunities on each side of the border challenge ideas of a truly transnational activism. As a result, the border is conceived as both a site of seemingly unbridled economic movement and a line of difference, where simplistic notions of transnational activism and community are compromised. Gabriele Pisarz-Ramírez’s essay, “Precursors of Hemispheric Writing: Latin America, the Caribbean, and Early U.S. American Identity,” looks at the ways in which late eighteenth-century writers sought to separate the burgeoning U.S. nation from England by creating a cultural genealogy that drew upon “pre-Columbian cultures as part of the emerging nation’s tradition and history.” Such an essentially hemispheric view of the nation works at once to create an instant history and culture for North America, even as this constructed history is at odds with how Native Americans were treated on the continent and by later nineteenth-century U.S. imperialist views. Just as American writers appropriated and modified Latin American cultural identity to suit the political whims of a developing nation, PisarzRamírez argues that abolitionists in the nineteenth century often turned to the Caribbean in order to write into existence alternative versions of national communities, opposed to inequality and slavery. These different visions of the construction of the United States underscore “the importance of non-European points of reference in the construction of identities in the early national period,” as well as the discursive transnational underpinnings of the United States as a nation. Harald Zapf ’s contribution, “Slammin’ in Transnational Heterotopia: Words Being Spoken at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe,” continues this focus on the Caribbean by exploring different ways in which Nuyorican spokenword poetry creates a transnational vision. While the very term “Nuyorican” is often understood as referring to a mixture of New York and Puerto Rico, conjuring up a history of migration between the two locations, Zapf explores how over time the meaning of the term has changed, transcending an insular ethnic understanding to include issues of economics, physical


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place, and cultural performativity. Drawing on a comparison between two anthologies by writers who are connected to the Nuyorican Poets Café, Zapf ’s essay explores the history of this institution, using as signposts Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero’s 1975 collection Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings and Algarín’s later 1994 collection coedited with Bob Holman, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café. The nearly twenty-year span allows Zapf to examine important thematics that remain constant at the Café and its poetry, including the democracy of performance, while at the same time identifying important changes that have occurred, including a deemphasizing of ethnic or racial identity. The result is an exploration of a transnational practice that avoids common references to border crossing or movement, a “de-essentialized” transnationalism, as Zapf terms it, that seeks to represent transnational experiences as coded in terms of performance and language. By exploring the Nuyorican Poets Café as a cultural practice, Zapf ’s essay examines how the spoken-word poetry of the mid-1990s looks past the nation as a critical term of definition. As a theoretical approach, the transnational is conceived as a means of questioning the narratives defining the nation and national belonging, opening up the nation to alternative representations of history, identity, and race. Within this model, the nation and nationalism have become conceived in problematic terms, as using violence and racism as a means to conceal the fissures that threaten to fracture the space of the nation. The question becomes, however, whether the “nation” as a term has lost its critical relevance. Tim Libretti’s essay, “‘A Broader and Wiser Revolution’: Refiguring Chicano Nationalist Politics in Latin American Consciousness in Post-Movement Literature,” examines this question, arguing that the nation and nationalist politics remain a crucial means of political organization and definition within a larger international context. Drawing on the works of Cherríe Moraga, Graciela Limón, and Helena María Viramontes, Libretti shows how these authors look to “re-situate” Chicano nationalist politics within a contemporary context, one that reflects the growth of a larger Latino/a population. Karin Ikas’ essay also points to the changing face of the United States population by highlighting how the growing Latino/a population necessitates a reexamination of the myth of Aztlán, as well as a reimagining of the borderlands as a spaciousness of transgression. Through an analysis of Cherríe Moraga’s play The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea, Ikas is critical of any calls for a new Aztlán, while arguing for the need to challenge traditional conceptions of the nation-state. Using Bill Ashcroft’s term “transnation” as a guide, Ikas argues for the need to conceive of the term in a more complicated manner, as in fact a state made up of multiple nations. This fragmentary vision challenges traditionally understood relationships


INTRODUCTION



between center and periphery and emphasizes the importance of understanding the borderlands in metaphorical terms. By calling for an end to the more traditionally viewed nation-state, Ikas is drawing attention to those groups who find themselves exiled within the nation, and, through her reading of Moraga, to a possible future where, according to Ashcroft, “national and cultural affiliations are superseded.” Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger’s essay investigates Juan Felipe Herrera’s novel Mayan Drifter through the prism of postcolonial conceptualizations of travel writing. She explores how the text both complicates and replicates power hierarchies deeply embedded in the Western tradition of ethnography, which places observer and observed, self and other, in a dichotomous relation. Crossing national, cultural, and linguistic borders, the narrative voice in Mayan Drifter exemplifies how transnational U.S. Latino/a subject positions are often characterized by a “utopian longing for wholeness, but [are] confronted with the disjointed remnants of modern history.” That is, Oliver-Rotger’s analysis shows how U.S. Latino/as are themselves implicated in reproducing power relations abroad that they justifiably criticize at home. Ana Patricia Rodríguez’s contribution continues this examination of Latino/a subjectivity by looking closely at the developing Salvadoran diaspora in the United States. By exploring the question of what it means to identify oneself as Salvadoran in Washington, D.C., Rodríguez’s essay challenges attempts to link individual identity to the nation, by looking at the ways in which identity is constructed in translocal or intercultural contexts. Such a borderlands identity is reflected by the hybrid crossings of language that Rodríguez analyzes, emphasizing how Salvadoran identity becomes understood as the “ability to masticate or domesticate multiple languages into new hybrid articulations or code-switching practices.” Rather than conceiving of this sense of mixture and movement only in terms of loss, Rodríguez examines the ways these changes can be seen as productive, as complicating essentialist attempts to connect Latino/a identity formations with Spanish language use, and as providing the opportunity to participate in “larger hybrid social dynamics.” Catherine Leen’s essay, “The Final Frontier: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s The Great Mojado Invasion,” examines the ways in which Gómez-Peña’s recent work challenges how difference is conceptualized by looking at the slippery use of “alien” in today’s society. Playing upon the meaning of the term as both a political designation for those who do not have citizenship as well as a reference to beings from outer space, Gómez-Peña complicates our understanding of the history of Mexican American relations, mixing seeming historical fact with science-fiction fantasy. As Leen highlights, Gómez-Peña’s approach forces one to reexamine the political and cultural


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underpinnings of how we conceptualize the nation, underscoring an ambiguity in those cultural and historical narratives that seek to authenticate belonging and otherness. Similar to other Gómez-Peña performances, the border is a central figure in this text, but as Leen’s analysis makes clear, the movement across the geographic space of the border must be understood in metaphorical terms as well. The documentary style that is adopted in The Great Mojado Invasion, for instance, becomes complicated by the introduction or crossing over of elements of sci-fi fictionality, emphasizing how the film works as a transnational project, complicating national belonging by asking the central question, who or what does not belong? Ricardo Ortíz’s essay, “Writing the Haitian Diaspora: The Trans-national Contexts of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker,” continues this exploration of national borders and belonging by drawing parallels between the health risks faced by those in U.S. prisons awaiting deportation hearings and the violence that seems an inextricable part of Haitian national history and identity. Through his examination of the work of Danticat the parallel is made explicit, since, as Ortíz observes, Danticat’s uncle died in U.S. prison while awaiting a hearing on his request for asylum from Haiti. The mistreatment by U.S. authorities that leads to her uncle’s death emphasizes the linkage of violence and the nation, making the question of who does not belong into a declarative statement: he or she will not belong. The challenge Danticat faces in coming to terms with this legacy of violence that extends beyond the borders of both Haiti and the United States becomes, as Ortíz highlights, a transnational process: “Danticat hopes to contribute, and precisely, strategically from her diasporic location, to what is now a transnational process of coming to terms with all the worst crimes committed, often in the name of the Haitian people and by institutions (like the nation-state) claiming to act for, and even as, the Haitian people, against the Haitian people” (emphasis original). The larger implication of this transnational perspective is clear. If Danticat is looking to try to understand the violence of Haiti from her perspective in the United States, her perspective on Haiti also allows one to understand better the violence against others in the United States. It is a viewpoint that ultimately seeks to counter a history of U.S. desire to recreate Haiti in its own vision, by recognizing the ways in which U.S. practices at home, against those it deems others, invoke reminders of a similar violence elsewhere. The reimagining of the United States is as much a critical means of challenging our conception of the nation as it is a means of recognizing how the United States as a nation is reimagining itself in transnational terms. Taken together, the essays collected here illustrate various segments of the multitudinous ways in which cultural practices physically grounded in the United States of America are impacted by, and construct, transnational


INTRODUCTION



flows, individual and collective. Imagined Transnationalism takes issue with the multifaceted and often contradictory ways in which cultural realities today (but also in the past) have been seemingly disembedded from any attachment or ground in the nation-state by processes of dislocation/ relocation, diaspora, migrancy and, as a consequence, have become as mobile as the people that sustain them. References Bhabha, Homi K. 1996. Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism. In Text and Nation, ed. Laura Garcia-Morena and Peter C. Pfeifer, 191–207. London: Camden House. Bourne, Randolph. 1964. Trans-national America. In War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915–1919, ed. Carl Resek, 107–123. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Briggs, Laura, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way. 2008. Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis. American Quarterly 60.3: 625–648. Falk, Richard. 1993. The Making of Global Citizenship. In Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order, ed. Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler, 39–50. Boston: South End Press. García, Cristina. 1992. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1995. From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration. Anthropological Quarterly 68.1: 48–63. O’Reilly Herrera, Andrea. ed. 2001. ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rodriguez, Richard. 2002. Brown: The Last Discovery of America. New York: Penguin. Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The editors would like to thank Gina Concannon and Miguel Jiménez for their assistance in this project.


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Chicano Transnation Bill Ashcroft

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n February 2008, during the Chinese New Year, when most Chinese travel back to their families for the celebration, more than one million Chinese migrant workers were stranded by snowstorms. Waiting for days at train stations for the possibility of a rare train to their home village, many of them did not move from the queue to eat or relieve themselves. This number of people is more than the populations of a third of the member states of the United Nations. But they were migrants and they were inside their country. They were, to all intents and purposes, a diaspora. They were away from home, within the nation. In India, more than double this number of people are on the move at any one time on religious pilgrimages. Clearly these two nations may force us to rethink the concept of nation as an imagined community in any but the most iconic sense. But what does this have to do with the situationf Chicano/as today? The link lies in the word “nation.” The reason for invoking China and India is that their very size forces us to reconsider the relationship between culture and nation, indeed to reconsider the existence of the “nation,” which, since the rise of globalization studies has been relegated to the status of an absent structure. But these meganations reveal something that is true for all nations: that the nation—held captive by the state as a homogeneous focus of identity, a bordered entity with its own integral relationship with other similarly constituted nation-states—is in fact a transitional, fluid interaction of nations and identities. In short, the nation is a transnation. This observation moves to center stage in Chicano/a life because the fight for self-determination has been led by an insurgent nationalism, driven to a large extent by a specific utopianism centered on Aztlán but committed to a concept of the nation within the state. China may be characterized as not only a multination state but as an empire parading as a nation, in


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which state propaganda vigorously propounds loyalty to the nation-state. As many commentators have suggested, this is not unlike the multinational state of the United States. But the concept of the multinational state, while separating the idea of the nation from that of the state, is still hampered by an incipient nationalism. The concept of the transnation aligns the actual disparity of intrastate nations with their fluid and transitional character—it frees them from borders. In this essay I want to explore ways in which the idea of Chicano nationalism with its energetic history and practical disappointments may be reconceived in terms of transnation. By the term “transnation” I mean something more than “the international” or “the transnational,” terms that might be conceived as denoting a relation or a crossing between states. Transnation is the fluid, metaphorically, migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation. This is possibly most obvious in India, where the “nation” is the perpetual scene of translation; but translation is but one example of the movement, the “betweenness” by which the subjects of the transnation are constituted. It is the “inter”—the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. In the context of Chicano/a culture, it also refers to the presence of various “nations” within the state. When we consider these “nations” as transnations, we may well see them as more empowered than cultural minorities. Nevertheless, the transnation does not refer to an object in political space. It is a way of talking about subjects in their ordinary lives, subjects who live in-between the categories by which subjectivity is normally constituted. The concept of the transnation therefore contests three things: the idea that the nation is an integral, imagined whole; the idea that the nation and the state are synonymous; and the idea that diasporas are necessarily outside the nation, characterized by absence and loss. But it also offers an alternative to the present buzzword of cosmopolitanism. I steer clear of the term “cosmopolitan” because it is both an essentially transatlantic word that refocuses attention back on the metropolitan center and one complicated by overtones of urbanity and sophistication. Cosmopolitanism has nothing to say about that enormous number of Chinese migrant workers waiting at train stations, nor has it anything to say about the Chicano transnation. In general, it seems to have nothing to say about the so-called Global South either. It is a useful term for describing the social dynamics of an urban, multicultural society, but it is essentially static in that it describes social relations in the polis. Transnation captures the fluidity of national subjects moving within and between the borders of the state. The term “transnation,” while it pivots on a critique of the nation, and a utopian projection beyond the tyranny of national identity, nevertheless


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acknowledges that people live in nations, and when they move, they do so within and beyond nations. But the term separates the nation from the state, and thus emphasizes its transitivity. The one thing the term “transnation” does share with cosmopolitanism is the sense of hope for what Paul Gilroy calls a “convivial multicultural democracy” (from Latin con, meaning “with,” and vivere, meaning “live”). The kind of society we discover beyond borders is a society in which interaction, difference, movement, and social complexity may be considered to be the norm. Gilroy’s aim is to see whether multicultural diversity can be combined with a hospitable civic order (2004, 1), whether a convivial acceptance of difference might be achieved in a different kind of convivial multicultural democracy than the examples presently available, particularly in Britain. A key moment in the book comes when he considers Freud’s rejection, in Civilization and its Discontents, of Christ’s admonition to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Not all men, Freud concludes, are worthy of love (Gilroy 2004, 72). But Gilroy responds: I want to dispute his explicit rejection of the demand to practice an undifferentiated attitude toward friends and enemies, intimates and strangers, alike. . . I want to explore ways in which the ordinary cosmopolitanism so characteristic of postcolonial life might be sustained and even elevated. (Gilroy 2004, 80)

Gilroy’s position relies on “a planetary consciousness” in which the world “becomes not a limitless globe, but a small, fragile and finite place, one planet among others with strictly limited resources that are allocated unequally” (2004, 83). On such a planet the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself,”—an undifferentiated attitude toward friends and enemies, including mutual respect, fellow feeling, and consideration— might become a necessity rather than a vain hope. This, at least for Gilroy, is worth exploring. It is worth exploring for our purposes as well, because the thing that such utopianism brings is a way out of despair, a way out of the trap of national boundaries, a way toward a sense of possibility. Transnation opens up the possibility of nations within and through nation-states. Gilroy poses the idea of imperial melancholia as the opposite of this convivial democracy, and we run the danger of presenting the transnation as always convivial, ignoring the plight into which globalization has thrown people disadvantaged by class, ethnicity, war, tyranny, and all of the many reasons why they may need to escape to another country. Therefore, we might see the transnational subject as perhaps both melancholically and productively “free” at the same time. The fascinating characteristic of


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post-colonial transnations, one shared by many Chicano/as, is the presence of an abiding utopianism that is both mythic and sacred in origin but which offers a symbolic anchor to identity in the fluid, between space of the transnation. Given that we can never shake ourselves free of the nation, the idea of transnation is built on the possibility of a national citizen being at the same time a transnational subject. The genuinely utopian possibility this presents is that of a “transnational citizen.” The closest thing we have to this transnational citizen/subject may be a member of the second-generation diaspora, who offers the most interesting possibilities of the liberating ambivalence of diasporic subjectivity. But when we consider the example of the Chicano transnation, we may discover a deep extension of this, when the second, third, and fourth generation each finds itself born into a transcultural space. These generations can say, in the words of a song by Los Tigres del Norte, “I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me.” Borders continue to cross the transnational subject born into competing ideologies. The borders from which we might be free are therefore not simply the boundaries of the nation but those of nation-ness, and ultimately of identity itself. It is the strange contrapuntal relationship between identity, history, and nation that needs to be unraveled. It is disrupted in many ways in post-colonial literatures, but one way that interests me is the way it is unraveled in a different kind of relationship, that of memory and place: memory rather than nostalgia, and place rather than nation. Utopianism takes cultural memory and turns it into what Eduardo Glissant calls a “prophetic vision of the past” (1989, 64). Glissant is talking here about history and such a vision enters the allegory of history to re-vision the future. Such a re-visioning is a critical feature of post-colonial literatures—generated by the meeting of cultural memory and anticipatory consciousness. 1. Aztlán as Utopia My interest in Chicano/a literature emerged from the importance of Aztlán and its relationship with the utopianism that is widespread in other postcolonial societies. Examples of these utopian formations include Oceania in the Pacific, Rastafarianism in the Caribbean, Pharaonic Africa, the religious profusion of the Indian mythic past, and various forms of possibility thinking from other regions. Although utopia is usually dismissed as a vain fantasy, Ernst Bloch shows, in his magisterial The Principle of Hope (1986), that future thinking, what he calls “anticipatory consciousness,” is fundamental to human life. The critical fact of post-colonial societies is that without a sense of hope for the future, a utopian vision of possibility, the liberatory impulse, is doomed to wither. The Chicano version of utopian


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thinking, the Aztlán myth, proved to be a surprisingly resilient weapon in the Chicano/a political arsenal because it so comprehensively united ethnicity, place, and nation. It differs from other post-colonial utopias because it combined the mythic and the political so directly: on the one hand, it was a spiritual homeland, a sacred place of origin; on the other, it generated a practical (if impossible) goal of reconquering the territories taken from Mexico. But this union of sacred and political proved to be its secret power. The pronouncement of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán at the First Chicano National Conference in Denver in 1969 confirmed three important things: a Chicano ethnicity, a homeland, and a nation. Chicano ethnicity could now be seen to be grounded in Aztec origins; its homeland was now identified as the territory ceded to the United States by Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848; that homeland was also accorded Chicano ownership because the land belongs to those who work it, who “plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops”; and Chicano nationality was now focused in the location, mythology, and significance of Aztlán: “We are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán.” In short, Aztlán became a focus for Chicano cultural and political identity and a permanent confirmation of the possibility of cultural regeneration. The concept of La Raza, or “the bronze race,” theorized by José Vasconcelos as an explanation of Chicano ethnicity seems at first to be a rather ambivalent assertion of identity since it taps into the same kind of eugenic discourse generated by the racialism that justified European imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It attempts to take the myth of white superiority head on by asserting its own superiority. This is quite ironic since the name of the place with which Chicano ethnicity became identified—Aztlán—means “whiteness.” However, its difference lies in the fact that it takes the reality of hybridity or mestizaje as a genetic and environmental strength. This directly contested the prejudice against “racial impurities” and “contamination” that characterized colonial discourse, locating the strength of La Raza not in genetics but in place. La Raza, then, is a resistant discourse much like the Negritude movement arising in Francophone Africa in the 1930s or the “black is beautiful” movement in the United States in the 1960s. Its distinctive feature is not so much that it provides a theory of racial identity for mestizos, but that it locates that identity in the borderlands of the Southwest, in the geographical space of Aztlán.


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2. Chicano Nationalism The more significant development from the cultural renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s is the emergence of Chicano nationalism. If Aztlán had become a vague utopia by the twentieth century, the situation changed 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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radically in the 1960s when it became the symbol of a Chicano nation. Aztlán became synonymous with the territory of the U.S. Southwest, a spiritual homeland that lay within the grasp of a determined nationalist program, a “mestizo nation” that had both a geography and a history. In this way the myth was transformed into a living dimension of Chicano/a life. Myths are stories that are neither true nor untrue, but are narratives that explain the cosmic structure of that culture’s world. Sacred myths in particular are important in post-colonial utopianism because they become the horizon of the culture’s world, and particularly the horizon of hope. The myth of Aztlán functions to provide identity, location, and meaning for a people who were previously scattered, directionless, and politically unorganized. This myth, as with myths in all cultures, became an essential dimension of their everyday experience. Aztlán has a place, it has a history, and most importantly it apprehends a future. However, as an imaginative feature of the rise of nationalism, utopianism carries dangers. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon launches into a discussion that has a direct bearing on the relation between Aztlán and nationalism, and on the liberatory function of utopianism itself, when he mentions the strategy of “looking back” to Aztec culture as a way of looking forward. The problem in essence is that utopianism may lull a group into inaction. While, as Fanon suggests, it may have been necessary for Chicanos to “renew contact once more with the oldest and most pre-colonial springs of life of their people” (1963, 209), the danger always exists that rather than allowing the mythic past to generate empowering cultural narratives, utopianism may lead to a kind of limp and nostalgic romanticism. The claim “to a national culture in the past . . . [may] serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture,” and such renewed contact with the “pre-colonial springs of life” provides a “psycho affective equilibrium . . . responsible for an important change in the native” (1963: 210), one that may lead to political resurgence and liberation. But it also involves dangers that Fanon warns may well end in forms of exoticism and romantic idealizations of the past, which, rather than furthering the material struggle, lead to its bogging down in dreams and delusions of a past grandeur. The tendency to idealize the past must be qualified; otherwise, the material aims of the group may indeed be led astray by idle dreams and empty symbols. As we may see repeatedly in post-colonial discourse, however, without the heroic dreams and cultural symbols generated by utopian hope, the material aims of a nationalist movement may lack the spiritual center that sustains struggle. In most post-colonial movements, the drive for a homeland, the dream of a liberated future, however illusory, obtains its power from its sacred nature, and is to a great degree inspired by literature and art


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of various kinds, within which a different kind of future is best imagined. Thus, despite materialist criticism of the place of cultural mythology, the vision of a utopian future in literature fixes the hope for that future in the cultural imagination. Whatever effect it may have on the immediate success or otherwise of political resistance, the spiritual sustenance of utopias such as the myth of Aztlán is inestimable, a sacred dimension that continues to be generated in art and literature. This sacred dimension shared by Aztlán with other post-colonial utopias appears to be the one thing that can preserve hope against discouragement. There is an interesting aspect of this question of Chicano nationalism, which has to do with the severance of the ties between the nation and the state. Nation and state are usually regarded as synonymous in the discourse of modernity. Post-colonial theory tends to critique nationalism, since its energy and promise in uniting people to anticolonial resistance inevitably degenerated, or became absorbed, into colonial-generated state structures, often characterized by authoritarianism or corruption, or both. However, we see from such huge and complex state societies as the United States, China, and India that the “nation” is actually a transnation, the idea of “nation” severed from clear identification with the state, except in times of pronounced state propaganda. Most commentators regard communities such as Chicano/as as oppressed national minorities forming part of a multinational state, rather than nations. However, the broad acceptance of the term “First Nations” has provided a conceptual basis for considering the presence of intrastate nations. Whether groups such as Chicano/as can be considered as nations raises broader questions of strategy, which Jorge Klor de Alva outlines in a Marxist context. Assuming that nationalism is a foremost organizational tool, he suggests that deploying nationalism raises several questions: What should be the goal of national liberation: Political autonomy? Effective political representation through electoral strategies? Or should the demand for self determination be primarily a call for cultural autonomy, with local control of schools and bilingual-bicultural education? Chicano and Puerto Rican strategists are not in agreement as to what the right answers are. For those who do not apply mechanically Stalin’s criteria for nationhood (common territory, language, psychology, and economy) or who accept with a critical eye Lenin’s theories on the subject, nationalism can mean many things: it can be political, economic, or cultural. But to what extent it truly can be of one sort without implying another is a crucial question; even though here as in the case of the question concerning the right to self determination material, objective conditions, rather than theoretical expertise, ultimately determine the answer.


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(Klor de Alva 1988, 143)


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Whatever that answer might be, we can see that the strategy involves the constant risk of essentializing and reifying a people into the particular kind of imagined community that is called a “nation.” While the myth of Aztlán may have led to a vital sense of identification in Chicano culture, and while the idea of an intrastate national identity has a proven utility in identity politics, the formalization of a Chicano nation, based on the territory of the Southwest, is almost certainly bound to be fruitless. 3. Nation to Transnation: A Borderland Subjectivity The solution to this may be that the Chicano nation be construed as a transnation. The idea of a transnation disrupts and scatters the construct of center and periphery, which continues, after Wallerstein, to maintain its hold on our understanding of the structure of global relations. But it also disrupts the implicit homogenizing force of the nation within state boundaries. If we think of the transnation as extending beyond the geographical, cultural, religious, and imaginative boundaries of the state, both within and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, we discover it as a space in which those boundaries are disrupted, in which national and cultural affiliations are superseded, in which binaries of center and periphery, national self and other, are dissolved. Interestingly, a ready-made conceptual framework already exists for this in Chicano/a geography in the term “borderlands.” This sets the scene for a concept of subjectivity as in-betweenness that goes beyond the reifying effects of national identity. This state of borderlands existence helps to redefine the subject. The transnation is an in-between space, which contains no singular, definitive people, nation, or even community, but is everywhere, a space without boundaries. The term “in-betweenness” circumvents the problematic, organic nature of that most contentious term—“hybridity.” It also approximates the actual contingent and liminal state of all contemporary subjects. It is perhaps nowhere more present than in the concept of mestizo or mestizaje, but it can also embrace a wide range of transcultural engagements, as it has in Chicano/a writing. The transcultural impetus of Chicano/a culture resists the power of “internal colonization.” This is often thought to be outside the scope of a post-colonial reading, an incorrect assumption that arises from a misunderstanding of the term “post-colonial.” “Post-colonial” doesn’t mean “after colonialism” but refers to the way colonized writers and cultural producers engage the imperial discourses to which they are subject. This applies in most cases to those engagements that occur within the historical period of colonization but continue into the present. The “post-colonial” begins with colonization, not with independence. Indeed “post-colonial”


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does not refer to a state of being at all but is a way of reading, a way of talking about those engagements. One of the most vigorous of these post-colonial engagements in all colonized societies occurs in language. This is particularly evident in the former colonies of the British Empire. The English language was held to be a supremely potent technology of civilization, and English literature was virtually invented as an academic subject to civilize the colonies (Viswanathan 1987; 1989). This had most unexpected consequences: colonials forced to learn the English language and literature learned to transform the language and create their own literatures. Hybrid and adapted forms of English transformed the language itself (Ashcroft 2008), offering a strategic intervention in the construction of identity that remains relevant to the complex nature of Chicano subjectivity. Alfred Arteaga claims: I define myself as a Chicano . . . My nation is not Mexico, yet I am ethnically Mexican and racially mestizo. But my people exist in the borderlands that traverse the national frontiers of the United States and Mexico. It is obvious for us here that the language we speak both reflects and determines our position in relation to the two nations. (Arteaga 1994, 3–4)

In literature and other forms of cultural production, this in-betweenness can be a form of strength. The relation between the two nations can be one emerging from and confirming the Chicano transnation. Rather than diluting cultural identity, linguistic versatility and adaptability can confirm it. This is true of all post-colonial literatures, which produce hybrid narrative strategies such as code-switching, glossing, syntactic fusion, untranslated words, all of which function both to hybridize and to distance, to communicate while establishing difference. This establishes a metonymic gap in which the transformed language is synecdochic of the writer’s culture (Ashcroft 2008, 174). Chicano/a developments of hybrid language strategies uncover an example of the felt experience of nation existing outside, or beneath, the racial and historical narrative of the nation-state. In this existence in the borderlands of the state, the use of language is not only a central fact but also an empowering technology for self-fashioning. The example of the borderlands’ culture is important because it reveals a truth about all languages: that while identity is usually held to reside in language, identity is actually performed in the range of different ways the language is used. Perhaps the exponent of in-betweenness par excellence is Gloria Anzaldúa, whose Borderlands/La Frontera crosses, or subverts, borders of nationality, ethnicity, gender, geography, and history.


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The issue of Chicano land, Chicano space, and the borderlands raises the associated issue of Chicano colonization and why we are justified in seeing Chicano resistance as a post-colonial movement. The border between the United States and Mexico is one of the longest between any two countries, some 3,000 kilometers from Tijuana-San Ysidro to Brownsville-Matamoros. The fact that seems to have disappeared from U.S. history is that this border is a consequence of the invasion and colonization of the inhabitants of North Mexico. Like many of America’s colonies, such as Hawaii and Puerto Rico, North Mexico was absorbed into the state of the United States, but in the case of Mexico, both the origin and process of that absorption disappeared from official and popular memory. In 1846 the United States provoked Mexico to war, the result of which was the invasion of Mexico and the annexation of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California. The border fence that now divides the United States and Mexico was created, in effect, on February 2, 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, annexing those states, left 100,000 Mexican citizens on the U.S. side. This puts a very different slant on the hysteria surrounding illegal immigration and border protection in the United States today. Land established by the Treaty as belonging to Mexicans was soon swindled away and the mestizo inhabitants originally working the land were by and large dispossessed. The borderlands therefore carry a meaning dense with history, belonging, and cultural identity. If we consider the borderlands to include all the territories taken from Mexico, it is an extensive region, a space of intense interaction, a contact zone like no other. As Gloria Anzaldúa writes, the “chainlink fence crowned with rolled barbed wire,” what some call a “Tortilla curtain,” is an “open wound” some 1,950 miles long. Such a line divides a people and their culture on both sides of the border. But it is not just a border in space, it is a lived border “running down the length of my body” splitting her very being. Yet this splitting, “this thin edge of barbed wire,” is home, and the utopian hope of an ancestral home in the future, a memory of the future, which Anzaldua shares with so much post-colonial writing, is captured in the lines: “This land was Mexican once, / was Indian always / and is. / And will be again” (Anzaldúa 1988, 193). The Chicano/a identity, split by the open wound of the border running down her body, must be continually reconciled in the vision of a utopian future provided by the myth of Aztlán. Borders are the classic instrument of othering. But they also correspondingly homogenize those within them:


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Borders are set up to define places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge.


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A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.

Therefore, Chicano/a literature has repeatedly transformed that ambivalent and often outcast space into a space of affirmation and possibility through the myth of Aztlán with its powerful fusion of the sacred, historical, geographical, and political. The border, which divides, has been replaced by the borderlands, which, ironically, dissolve borders.

4. Borderlands, Diaspora, and Smooth Space The borderlands may therefore be characterized by extension rather than enclosure. Sergio Elizondo makes the point that the Chicano/a population between the border and mid-America should not be regarded as a diaspora but as a continuation of the expanding population of the borderland: [T]he mere physical extension between the U.S. Mexico border and, let us say, Chicago, is a fact of human dispersion, and not a diaspora of the Chicano people. It is not static for us, but rather it has always been a dynamic and natural motion motivated by laws and processes common to all cultures. Our migrations north of the old historical border have extended the geography and social fabric of Aztlán northward in all directions; we have been able to expand our communal life and fantasies. (Elizondo 1988, 206)

We might add that in an enormous region covering five states, many Chicano/as are still living in their ancestral homeland. However, this may be the secret power of the borderlands’ concept—because they are interstitial, they cannot be bounded. The Chicano/a population is not a scattering, nor a diaspora, but rather the occupants of an expanding cultural space. This space may be called Aztlán, but it is an Aztlán that has taken on a radically different form. This form is that of the transnation, which contests the central assumption of diaspora studies that diasporic populations are characterized by absence and loss. This may appear to overlook the great number of people who have been exiled from a sense of home. In Paul Gilroy’s terms, we may appear to be in danger of assuming that all migratory populations are all “convivial” rather than “melancholic” (Gilroy 2004). But on the contrary, whether a refugee in the most perilous of circumstances, or the migrant


(Anzaldúa 1988, 194; emphasis original)


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worker exploited and underpaid in the Southwest, or the middle-class cultural producer who feels at home in global travel, all subjects of the transnation have access to the agency accorded by the ability to move between the structures of the state. The critical revelation of the transnation is that exile begins within the nation: it does not begin once borders have been crossed. The mobility and in-betweenness of the transnation injects the principle of hope into the equation. We can think of those borders within which the Chicano/a subject is born in terms of the relation between the transnation and the state, and a brilliant metaphor for this relationship is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of “smooth space.” This is the space of the transnation that the Chicano/a subject shares with the rhizomic interplay of traveling subjects within and between nations. The transnation exists within, beyond, and between nation-states. It is a collectivity comprised of communities that may be drawn in one way or another to the myth of a particular nation-state, but who draw away perpetually into the liberating region of in-betweenness. The distinction between “smooth space” and “striated space” seems odd at first, but Deleuze and Guattari explain it with a very concrete image: the contrast between a woven textile and felt. A textile fabric is composed of interwoven vertical and horizontal components, warp and woof, a delimited and organized structure that Plato used as a paradigm for royal science, “the art of governing people or operating the state’s apparatus” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 475). Felt, on the other hand, is a supple solid, more like an “anti-fabric.” It is an entanglement of fibers rather than a weave, one obtained by rolling the block of fibers back and forth, entangling, rather than weaving them. “An aggregate intrication of this kind,” they say, “is in no way homogeneous: it is nevertheless smooth” (2004, 475). Smooth space, for Deleuze and Guattari, contrasts with “striated space” or ordered space. Yet, smooth space is not separate from striated space. Smooth space takes form when the striated space of government institutions, fixed concepts, and essentialized peoples are broken into their composing forces, caught up in a swirling whirlpool that is capable of mixing these forces in new ways to produce monsters that may defy the categorizing machines of the institutions of striated space. It is the possibility that new and different kinds of subjects and spaces may emerge—a people and a nation yet to be known—that makes smooth space a space of potentiality. Smooth space indeed expresses a great intensity or depth that is beyond the measures of governed divisions, like the division of labor between thinking and acting, theory and practice. The smooth space does not distinguish the global from the local for it is found in both and in the interaction between them. Diasporas, both internal and external, become the inhabitants of smooth space. Deleuze and


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Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches, adversaries. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 500)

Deleuze, like Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), seems naturally drawn to the image of the city as the site of a relation between smooth and striated space. While the city is a clearly striated physical space, the “space” of the state is constituted within the striated structure of its laws, institutions, its governing structures, and even cultural expectations and racial orientations that emerge, for instance, in legislation on language policy. The smooth space is that space of the transnation that exists alongside, between, and even within the striated space of the state. It is constituted in such things as hybrid language, transformed literary and cultural productions, and the many ways in which people circulate around, in, and through the structures of the state. As we see in the passage above, Deleuze and Guattari avoid the utopian move that might see in smooth space, and its concomitants, the people who exist between, in, and around the institutions of administrative power, as a dimension of liberation. “Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us,” they conclude (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 500). Indeed, smooth space is also the space of globalization. It is the space of the affects of neoliberal utopias, the space in which ordinary subjects are drawn, regardless of the attachment to nation, to the subjectivity of capitalist consumption. Yet, by its very existence, the smooth space of the transnation challenges, because it mostly ignores, exceeds, surrounds, and interpenetrates the striated space of the state. It is not in itself liberatory, but it is the medium of liberation. While Deleuze and Guattari use the concrete example of the city, smooth space is eminently suited to theorizing the geographical and cultural borderlands, which Chicano/a culture has adopted as its own.


Guattari use the physical metaphor of the city to demonstrate the relation between the striated and the smooth:

5. Transnation as Borderland Heterotopia The constitution of the Chicano “nation” as a transnation has a corresponding impact in Chicano mythology. If the Chicano nation is a utopian idea, 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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the Chicano transnation is a reality. That transnation occupies a “real,” although fluid, site based in the partially desacralized and unbounded space of the borderlands. To conceptualize this, Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, which he outlines in “Of Other Spaces” (1967), may be useful. Unlike utopias, heterotopias are real sites. Society designates sites for work, for recreation, for rest, for education, for transportation, and so on. But Foucault is interested in counter-sites, places positioned on the outside of cultural space, irrelevant to the practical functioning of everyday life. These are real places but “absolutely different” from other sites: not utopias but “heterotopias.” They can be disruptive, as he suggests in the preface to The Order of Things: while “Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold”; heterotopias, on the other hand “are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language” (Foucault 1970, xviii). If we think of the transnation as an unbounded site, a “smooth space” but a real site, a site of extension rather than enclosure, we can see how disruptive its potential may be to state structures and their socially designated sites. If we can accept the fact that utopias—placeless places—are strongly imbued with the idea of the sacred, a fact that emerges in virtually all post-colonial utopias, then heterotopias are partially desacralized spaces. We may also see this partial desanctification in political utopianism itself, which never seems to discard nor appears to want to discard the sacred (although it may be variously defined), because this always emerges as an element of cultural identity. The relationship between utopia, with its sacred imaginary, and heterotopia, with its sacred trace, is comprehensively embodied in the metaphor of the mirror: The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface . . . But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. (Foucault 1967, 24)


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This seems to capture perfectly the metonymic relation Foucault is striving for in the apparent contrast between the sacred space, the placeless place of the utopian, and the real, yet only partially desacralized, reflection of that utopia in the heterotopia. Like the mirror, the transnation is both an imagined place—imagined most powerfully in literature in the symbol of Aztlán—and a real place occupied by real people, a transformed and inhabited Aztlán, a smooth space. 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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We can see therefore that the partially desacralized space of the borderlands, seen now not as a bounded site but as a fluid space, is the space of the transnation. But in case we are tempted to revert to an idea of the borderlands as a region occupied by the nation, let us remember the principle of smooth space. The beauty of the concept of the borderlands is their very interstitiality, their borderlessness. Like the transnation they operate between and through the political and geographic striations of the state. They are a real but unbounded site. One of the primary figures in the resurgence of Aztlán in the 1970s was Rudolfo Anaya, whose Heart of Aztlán (1976) offered a powerful fusion of the mythic and the political, the sacred and the national. In an essay he wrote in 1988, he suggests that now, having had its impact in Chicano resurgence, Aztlán should be considered as a “homeland without boundaries.” Anaya sees not just ethnicity but the idea of the nation-state itself, with its obsessive patrolling of the shadow lines of its borders, as something that needs to be transcended. For him, Aztlán is not just a myth but the promise of “a more fulfilling and harmonious future” (Anaya 1988, 241). “How is it possible,” we might ask, “to live in a way that might escape the borders of nation, maps and memory?” Because however illusory and arbitrarily established the borders of the state may be, they insist on their function as rigid constructors of identity. The Chicano transnation, impelled by the utopian myth of Aztlán, identifies the smooth space of the borderlands as a heterotopia. The transnation is an imagined community, occupying a partially desacralized space, the smooth space in between, around, and through the structures of the state. Like Foucault’s metaphor of the mirror, it is a spectral contact zone, reflecting the continual possibilities of negotiation, transformation, and change. These possibilities are those of the borderlands, which ironically dissolve borders, and perhaps confirm the possibility that lies at the heart of the transnation—a homeland without boundaries.

References Anaya, Rudolfo. 1976. Heart of Aztlán. Berkeley: Editorial Justa. ———. 1988. Aztlán: A Homeland without Boundaries. In Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí, 230–241. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1988. The Homeland Aztlán / El Otro México. In Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí, 191–204. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Arteaga, Alfred. 1994. An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands. Durham: Duke University Press.


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Ashcroft, Bill. 2008. Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope, 3 vols., trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum Books. Elizondo, Sergio D. 1988. ABC: Aztlán the Borderlands and Chicago. In Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí, 205–218. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Foucault, Michel. 1967/1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16.1: 22–27. ———. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. London: Routledge. Glissant, Edouard. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Klor de Alva, Jorge. 1988. Aztlán, Borinquen and Hispanic Nationalism in the United States. In Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí, 135–171. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Viswanathan, Gauri. 1987. The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India. Oxford Literary Review 9.1–9.2: 2–25. ———. 1989. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press.


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A Schematic Approach to Understanding Latino Transnational Literary Texts Nicolás Kanellos

T

ransnationalism is a concept developed by social scientists in the 1990s in order to understand the life and culture of people moving from one place to another, especially during the latter part of the twentieth century. The concept is often linked to another somewhat amorphous concept, that of globalization or the creation of a global economy that has the effect of uprooting populations. According to Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, the people they call “transmigrants” participate in the nation-building projects of their land of origin and that of their receptor land, where they are often considered “immigrants” or “ethnics” (1993, 45–46). The concepts of transnationalism and transmigrants depart from earlier postulations that saw immigrants as people who gave up their land of origin in order to settle permanently in the host country—a popular concept extrapolated from the settlement patterns of earlier European immigrants to the United States, who were subjected to the pressures of the “Melting Pot” and the “American Dream.” Transnationalism thus challenges the earlier concept of assimilation to the host culture, as related to these two nationbuilding American myths, in favor of a model that goes beyond the limits of political and geographic borders, languages, and national allegiances. Obviously we must consider these concepts when studying U.S. Latino literature, not only because the United States has been a destination for transmigrants from Spanish America and Spain since the early nineteenth century, but also because the geographic and political borders of the United States expanded various times to incorporate Spanish-speaking


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peoples whose relationship with the peoples of Spanish America may have been closer than that with the American mainstream and its nationalization imaginary. In fact, thousands of archival documents, 18,000 books, and 1,200 periodicals published before 1960 that we have gathered in the “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project”1 amply demonstrate how, by the end of the colonial period, the Hispanic peoples living north of the Río Grande prior to and after U. S. expansion southward and westward were never cut off from communications and intercourse with the rest of the Spanish-speaking world; it was often this world and its panHispanic imaginary that provided the history, literature, and symbolism to Latinos in the United States in their construction of national identity/ ies, even if that/those identity/ies were to be seen as existing within the American national paradigm. Furthermore, these documents, especially documents written and/or published in Spanish, demonstrate how the flow of literary discourse was northward and southward as well as transCaribbean and trans-Atlantic (to Spain and back). Therefore, if these realities are admitted, then we must examine some persistent premises that have emerged among academics in the last thirty or forty years, such as the Chicano Movement’s notion that the populations in the Southwest were bereft of a written tradition and literature and, thus, the academy needed to focus on the collection and study of oral lore. Or that Puerto Rican and Cuban letters in the United States are a recent phenomenon, intimately tied to the post–World War II diasporas brought about because of economic and political disruptions. Or Hispanic communities in certain geographic areas of the United States have been ethnically homogeneous and that we can study the literature and culture of each group in isolation. Other premises reign today, and must be examined, such as those relating to English or Spanish language preference, what constitutes literary creativity, and how political discourse and literary creativity relate to each other. Most of all, the segregation of immigrant literature from Chicano, Nuyorican, and Cuban American literatures must end, for these literatures are all intimately connected to transmigrant culture and its literary expression; they must be seen on the continuum of transnationalism. In this chapter, I would like to propose a schema to illustrate the transnational dynamic of U.S. Latino literature from the 1800s to the present (see fig. 2.1). The schema relies on the observation that there have been three general trajectories of Latino expression in the United States since the 1800s: native, immigrant, and exile. Hispanic native culture and identity developed among the descendants of the Spanish, Hispanicized Native American, Hispanicized African, mestizo, and mulatto settlers under Spain and later Mexico into areas stretching from Florida to Louisiana to Texas,


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the Southwest, and West that would later be incorporated into the United States. The literary expression created through generations by these groups presents a common stock of perspectives, whether we talk about the Isleños in Louisiana, the Floridians at the time of U.S. purchase, or the Californios and Tejanos newly subjected to Anglo-American political and cultural domination after 1848, the end of the war with Mexico: (1) an identity or sense of place with their geographic location; (2) a sense of history rooted in the Hispanic past; (3) a growing awareness of racial-cultural difference and resistance to assimilation into the new Anglo-Protestant majority overwhelming the native populations; (4) a sense of becoming a dislocated and oppressed minority within the new political-judicial-economic arrangements resultant from losing wars or being literally purchased by the United States; (5) despite all of the above, a sense of entitlement to civil and cultural rights, not only as a result of treaties but also because of their American citizenship. Most of these ideas were forged during the late colonial period, before the United States actually took over, but certainly under the perception of threat from the expanding Anglo-American empire during the first decades of the nineteenth century. On this base of native culture and attitudes, the culture of economic refugees, one type of transmigrant, and that of political refugees, another type of transmigrant, planted themselves and grew, repeating certain patterns of thought and interaction, one with the other, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present, and forging temporary and permanent relationships not only with native Hispanics and the American mainstream but also with their countries of origin. The economic and political refugees for the most part located themselves where there were already large populations of Spanish-speakers present, often native Hispanics with a long history in the United States. Because of the geographic proximity of the United States to their lands of origin, and because of the economic and political relations, in particular the U.S. interventions in their homelands, the flow of Hispanic transmigrants to the United States has been almost uninterrupted since the early nineteenth century. And with each wave of arrivals, newer and more up-to-date versions of culture from the lands of origin interacted with the Hispanic native culture in the United States—and this phenomenon continues to this date, perhaps even more powerfully through current technologies of travel and communications. That is not to say that the native Hispanic populations were just receptors of more up-to-date or advanced or evolved culture from the cultural capitals of Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, or Spain. At each step it can be shown how the advanced technology in the United States worked to the benefit of native Hispanic populations—as well as that of the transmigrants—in delivering their perceptions and even imagined nationhood to Spanish America.2 Entire books


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have been written, for instance, on how Cuban nationhood was forged in the nineteenth century, not on the island but in the native/transmigrant communities in Key West, Tampa, and New York.3 And while the dream of a United Spanish America may have been Simón Bolívar’s, countless native and transmigrant writers and activists from the late nineteenth century on furthered this dream from the shores of the United States. And calls for solidarity of Hispanic peoples from the U.S. Southwest to Tierra del Fuego in confronting the Colossus of the North were issued long before José Martí’s “Nuestra América” by such essayists as Francisco Ramírez in Los Angeles (Kanellos 2006–2007, 15–16). Thus, while it may be tempting to assign native, immigrant, or exile status to particular writers and communities, the schema more accurately relates to the texts that writers generate and the narrative stand that they assume in these texts with regard to the United States and the land of origin. That is to say that an exiled writer is quite capable of writing from the point of view of an immigrant in one instance and as a political refugee in the next. Likewise, an immigrant in some texts may confront life in the grand U.S. Metropolis; in the next, he may represent his culture as exiled, as in El México de afuera (Baeza Ventura 2005); and in another text, he may assume a native posture, because, after all, he has lived in the United States for more than thirty years and has become a voting citizen, as was the case


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Figure 2.1 Hispanic cultures in the United States


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of Adolfo Carrillo (Leal 1992, 53–55). Returning to Francisco Ramírez, although he was born and educated in California and was completely bilingual—actually trilingual with his command of French—he wrote as a native Californian while in Los Angeles, but then went into exile in northern Mexico, where he experienced this dislocation and uprootedness of the political refugee. He subsequently returned to California, where he worked for San Francisco immigrant newspapers La Voz de México and El Nuevo Mundo (Gray 2006–2007, 30–31). Here, then, is the full schema and the analysis of each of the categories: 1. Native texts reveal an identity with the geographic location in the United States. There is no question of return to a homeland; the United States is the homeland. This is as true for the Californio narratives and Tejano autobiographies in the nineteenth century as it is for Nuyorican and Chicano literature today. Immigrant texts, created by immigrants themselves, not their progeny, serve as a bridge from the old country to the new. All immigrant texts have an implicit binary of contrasting the land and culture left behind with those encountered in the new land; this is true for physical and cultural referents as well as for language, religion, landscape, and a host of other markers. Exile texts are usually directed to the homeland, in expectation of effecting change or waiting for change to occur in the homeland. 2. Native texts reveal an awareness and acceptance of the major American beliefs; they position themselves as American, although perhaps from a minority or marginal perspective. Immigrant literature promotes a return to the homeland and, in so doing, is antihegemonic and rejecting of the “American Dream” and of the “Melting Pot.” Immigrant literature, from the first immigrant novel, Alirio Díaz Guerra’s Lucas Guevara, to Daniel Venegas’s Las aventuras de Don Chipote to René Marqués’s La Carreta, proposes this return as the only solution to dying physically or culturally—that is, losing one’s identity and personality in the Metropolis. In addition, immigrant texts often assume the position of speaking to readers in the homeland, warning them not to come to the United States, because the mythic streets of gold are really paths to modern wage slavery, indebtedness, and loss of identity. Exilic texts often see themselves as engaged in the battle to change the governmental order in the homeland, and are often not concerned with politics and culture in the United States. As soon as their political cause has prevailed or there is amnesty, the authors plan to return home and end their exilic status.




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Table 2.1

Textual characteristics of U.S. Hispanic literature

Native

Immigrant

Exile

Has sense of place in the United States Endorses life in the United States as citizens

Is a bridge from old to new country Embodies dream of return to the homeland

3.

Protests injustice and effects cultural change in the United States

4.

Struggles for civil and human rights and against racism

5.

Displays working-class posture / popular culture / minority consciousness

6.

Characterized by cultural synthesis, hybridization, and new identities and home spaces: Aztlán, Loisaida, etc. A new aesthetic Represents culture conflict and cultural nationalism Character types: new, hybrid literary characters—pachucos and vendidos

Exhibits desire to preserve the culture of the homeland while living in the United States Struggles for human rights and labor rights. Protests racism and exploitation Displays working-class culture of the majority versus bourgeois posture of the minority of immigrants Characterized by the illusion of cultural purity, the colony as temporary: Little Mexicos, Little Havanas, and Little San Juans Represents nostalgic and conservative nationalism

Only relates to the homeland Aspires for return to the homeland when the political situation has changed Does not exhibit or support cultural change

1. 2.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Themes: identity crisis, language and culture, race-class-gender, community Bildungsroman, autobiography

Character types: the greenhorn, the flapper, the agringado, the pocho, the petit yanqui Themes: the Metropolis, the family, labor exploitation Picaresque narratives, road stories

Protests politics in the homeland, colonialism, dictatorships, etc. Displays elite culture

Characterized by cultural purity: exile as Babylonian captivity, the homeland as Paradise Lost; disillusionment Involves political/ revolutionary nationbuilding Character types: heroes, epic and tragic figures, dictators, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries Themes: political injustice, authoritarianism, etc.


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Novels of the revolution, epic dramas and polemic treatises, editorials and essays


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3. Positioned as a literature of citizens with civil rights, native texts protest the discrimination, marginalization, and dispossession of Latinos in the United States. In addition, these texts exemplify a desire to reform the national culture to be more equitable and accepting of linguistic, cultural, and religious differences. Immigrant texts promote an ideology of a Latino colony within the United States, which must preserve the language, literature, and culture of the homeland in order to resume the life they left behind when the transmigrants are able to return home. Immigrant texts often highlight and demonize symbols and representations of American culture, such as the Metropolis itself, capitalism, and social mores that represent threats to their own family, religious, and societal arrangements, especially as related to the liberalized lives of women and the incursions of Protestant conversions of Hispanic Catholics. During the early twentieth century, for instance, the attacks on American flappers were equally vitriolic in works by the Mexican Julio B. Arce, the Cuban Alberto O’Farrill, and the Puerto Rican Jesús Colón. (As Colón evolved more to the native position and began writing in English, his attitudes towards American and Latina women also became more liberal.) Exilic texts are not very concerned with American social arrangements other than that they seem to be foreign and very strange to them; this is consonant with their metaphor of sojourn in Babylon. Their only version of culture is the one left behind in the homeland; their imagined nation can be static, having become frozen in time beginning with the moment of exile, or dynamic, envisioning a completely new and liberalized social order or Utopia. Culture change, which is inevitable in the homeland, is only rejected as deleterious and not at all authentic to their imagined community. This, in fact, was taken to an extreme for decades by Mexican exilic texts created during the Revolution; they envisioned the México de afuera as the true Mexico and the culture in the homeland some deformed and degraded version of the national culture.4 4. As citizens, Latinos are entitled to civil rights protected by the Constitution, and they do not suffer the threat of deportation if they protest inequities or injustices. Their texts reveal these entitlements as well as others accruing to citizens. This empowers authors to use texts in the battle to reform society and make it live up to the principles of equality and protection under the laws that are codified in the national charter. Immigrants or economic refugees, whether documented or not, do not feel they have the rights of citizens, and their texts, instead of protesting the lack of civil rights and




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exposing themselves to deportation or further persecution, protest in Spanish the exploitation and oppression in industry and discrimination in the society. This stance of marginality and implicit protest are evident from Don Chipote to Mario Bencastro’s Odisea del Norte. In addition, many of the economic refugees worked historically in railroad construction and maintenance in the Southwest, steel mills in the Midwest, tobacco factories in Florida, and manufacturing plants in the Northeast. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they became advocates of unions as well as students and promoters of anarchism, socialism, and communism—and, indeed, some were arrested, deported, or imprisoned for long terms. Many of their anarchist and radical texts eschewed nationalism in favor of uniting the working classes and revolutionizing society. The workers’ texts themselves were used for these purposes, from those published by the Mexican Villarreal sisters to the Sephardic Daniel De León to Puerto Rican Luisa Capetillo to Luis Valdez during the Chicano Movement. Exilic texts are often polemic, attacking the government in the homeland and protesting against the colonial administration, dictatorship, and totalitarianism. The numbers of these texts read like a political history of Spain and Spanish America, from attacks on the King of Spain in El laúd del desterrado to attacks on Francisco Franco in Lirón’s Bombas de mano and Leopoldo González’s Abajo Franco, from protests against Augusto Pinochet’s, the Argentine generals’, and Evita Perón’s regimes in Ariel Dorfman’s La muerte y la doncella to Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita. 5. Due to what historians consider the “proletarization” (Mirandé 1987, 27–49) of the native Hispanic population of the Southwest with the advent of the Anglos in the mid-nineteenth century and the overwhelmingly working-class culture of the majority of the economic refugees from the Mexican Revolution and the Puerto Rican and Central American diasporas in the twentieth century, the majority of native and immigrant texts and oral literature has represented a working-class perspective, with its attendant reliance on oral and folk modes of transmission, as well as what Walter Ong calls secondary and residual oralities in written texts (1982, 37–57). Not only the Mexican corridos and the Puerto Rican décimas of immigration, but also such vaudeville sketches as Netty and Jesús Rodríguez’s Me voy pa’ México and Una mula de tantas and the Tampa cigar rollers’ labor agitprop plays, such as Vivan las Caenas, and the novels of immigration mentioned above, explicitly display working-class language, sensibility, and organizing ideology, just as


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would the Chicano and Nuyorican writers from the 1960s through the 1980s. From the texts of José María Heredia and Félix Varela to the writings of Reinaldo Arenas, Ariel Dorfman, and Tomás Eloy Martínez, the literature of exile has been the product of cultural elites, whose education and societal privileges in the homeland resulted in their texts standing as representatives of Spanish-language purity (casticismo), canonical European referents, and, at times, as in the case of the Porfirio Díaz regime in exile, a disdain for the working class and the racial inferiors (economic refugees) of their homeland now sharing their exile. It was often these elites who provided cultural products, such as popular theater, newspapers, and even books, who often promoted to the working classes—las clases populares, in their words—the idea of a national culture in exile alongside their propaganda against the regimes in power in the homeland. 6. From the 1800s to the present, native Hispanic texts have been written predominantly in Spanish; however, there have always been works written in English—today more than ever, of course.5 Since the late nineteenth century, native Hispanic texts have been synthesizing Latino and Anglo-American culture, creating a hybridism in language and outlook on life, relating both to mainstream American culture and the entire world of Hispanic letters and culture beyond the borders of the United States (Leal 1993). The most obvious manifestation of this is the bilingual poetry and song emerging in the late nineteenth century (Leal 1993, 92) but reaching its apogee in the poetic and theatrical works of such contemporary writers as Alurista, Tato Laviera, Carlos Morton, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Luis Valdez, and Evangelina Vigil; one of the few fiction projects to experiment with this code-switching and heteroglossia is Rolando Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip Series (Sánchez 1985). Some scholars have considered this phenomenon particularly characteristic of “border literature”; in any case, this synthesis has led to a new aesthetic in which a bilingualbicultural reader is implicit and the definition of literature has been altered. In some writers’ texts, as in the poetry of Alurista, the experimentation results in a text that is fully intelligible only to a reader who can understand the metalanguage created out of the artistic interface of two languages, as in Alurista’s Spik in glyph? Along with the synthesis and hybridism come new cultural spaces or homelands, such as the mythic Aztlán of Chicano literature, or the Loisaida of Nuyorican literature (see Zapf, in this collection), or even the mythologizing of Miami in Cuban American literature, as in Iván Acosta’s El super. An important transitional work is the creation of this type of mythic




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homeland in Guillermo Cotto-Thorner’s Trópico en Manhattan, which posits the “tropicalization” of El Barrio, a place where Puerto Ricans can maintain their culture and flourish as exemplified by his iconic metaphor of a flower growing out of the cracks in the cement. The “tropics of Manhattan” trope becomes fully realized, however, in the poems of such Nuyoricans as Víctor Hernández Cruz and Tato Laviera, especially in Hernández Cruz’s book Tropicalization and in Laviera’s birth-of-the Nuyorican poem, “Doña Cisa y Su Anafre” in his La Carreta Made a U-Turn. Immigrant texts envision an enclave or a “colonia” as a temporary home, where their culture can flourish until return to the true homeland is possible. Even while the beginning of cultural synthesis and hybridism is evident in these texts, as for example in the English loan words and neologisms used, they offer themselves as pure and exempt from bastardization or degradation of what is to them the culture the immigrants brought with them and must preserve—even while the culture in the homeland is evolving and perhaps incorporating Anglo-American or metropolitan ways of its own. In the ideology of El México de afuera, there is nothing lower than anyone who denies his culture of origin or forgets his native tongue (el renegado). These colonias, often the original ports of entry to the United States, are known in the English-speaking world and to many of the residents themselves as Spanish Harlem, Little Havana, Little San Juan, and Little Mexico; they are the spaces that later native literature will mythologize as Aztlán and Loisaida, for instance. There is no question of cultural mixing and hybridity in exile literature; the texts represent the best of language and learning that privilege, education, and high culture can offer. Some of the best examples are the poems in El laúd del desterrado. In many of them, as in much of the exile texts created to the present, the homeland is envisioned as a Zion longed for by the poet in Babylonian captivity, with the Metropolis configured as Babel. From the frigid shores of New York and the cement landscape of the Metropolis, Cuba and Puerto Rico are often configured as Paradise Lost. As political change in the homeland becomes more and more a lost cause, the plaintiff literature of exile exhibits a grand disillusionment and lost hope, the narrators thus forced to wander, rootless, in solitude through foreign lands and cultures. The greatest poet of this wanderlust and desperation was, perhaps, José María Heredia. 7. From the corridos forward to contemporary texts, culture conflict becomes a central motif and organizing force in Mexican American/ Chicano literature, as described in Américo Paredes’ scholarly studies


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(Paredes 1995) and illustrated in his literary works, such as George Washington Gómez. Cuban American and Puerto Rican texts, such as Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban American Way and Juan Flores’ Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity, attempt to resolve this conflict by celebrating the new hybridism; but in the end, according to Pérez Firmat, the loss of Latino culture will ensue, for he sees only his generation of Cuban Americans as able to balance the two cultures in opposition and conflict. However, the first phase of contemporary Chicano literature promoted a cultural nationalism and a separation from oppressive and corrupt AngloAmerican culture; today’s Mexican American literature, as much of Nuyorican and Cuban American literature, embraces the hybridism, synchronicity, and synthesis. Culture conflict was/is integral to immigrant literature’s binary structure and opposition of the homeland’s culture to that of the United States. It is highly nationalistic, although the nation is imagined more through nostalgia and illusion than through a realistic assessment of the difficult life left behind and of the negative aspects of the national culture. One of the few immigrant texts to follow a protagonist back to the homeland and to elaborate on his rejection of what it has become is Teodoro Torres’s La patria perdida; unable to fit in, he returns from Mexico to Missouri farm country and attempts to establish his own Utopian version of the México de afuera. Exile literature is often part of a nation-building project, despite its location outside of the geographic patria. It can be very militant, supporting revolution, coups, and invasions. The first Hispanic exiled texts, in fact, provided a liberal ideology for the wars of independence from Spain, as well as for the rise of democracy in la Madre Patria. To date, exilic texts support their imagined nation in opposition to the one currently institutionalized in the homeland. 8. Both positive and negative hybrid characters exist in U.S. Latino literature. There are hybrid characters who proudly reap the benefits of bilingual-bicultural life, such as Tato Laviera’s Tito Madera Smith, raised in the barrio by a Puerto Rican mother and a southern black father. Hinojosa, too, has created in Becky Escobar, in Los amigos de Becky, rather than a type, an individual who is a strong, capable navigator of both Anglo and Mexican cultures; her mixed Anglo-Mexican parents make her a full and equal match of Hinojosa’s bilingual-bicultural alter egos, Rafa and Jehú. The two most important character types to represent hybridism in native literature are the pachuco, uncomfortable in Mexican as well as American culture, and the vendido, or sell-out, who trades his Mexican ethnic




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and cultural allegiance for personal gain in the system of racial and economic oppression. It was Luis Valdez who produced the most enduring representations of these types in Los Vendidos and in Zoot Suit, but the types are ubiquitous in Chicano drama and narrative— ironically Hinojosa has given us an excellent rendition of the vendido in Becky Escobar’s husband, Ira, in Mi querido Rafa. Ultimately, the vendido is the native version of the negative immigrant stereotypes of earlier generations, such as the agringado, the pelona (flapper), and the renegade in the crónicas and the novels of immigration—not to be confused with the pocho, who was never considered a Mexican to begin with. Another frequent stereotype in immigrant literature, like the others born in oral lore, is the verde, or greenhorn, who misinterprets American language and culture and becomes the subject of extreme exploitation. The literature of exile, however, does not embrace culture change and hybridism. Thus, instead of characters that represent these social evolutions, it has historically produced both epic heroes and tragic heroes, as in Francisco Sellén’s play Hatuey, as well as blood-thirsty dictators, as in Gustavo Solano’s play Sangre, based on Guatemalan strong man Manuel Estrada Cabrera. 9. As a literature struggling for recognition and respect of its place in American society and culture, native literature develops themes around such issues as the identity crisis, bilingualism and biculturalism, race-class-gender discrimination, and the importance of community. These issues have been central to such foundational works of contemporary U.S. Latino literature as Iván Acosta’s El Super, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda, Tomás Rivera’s “… y no se lo tragó la tierra,” Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, and even such religious conversion narratives as Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby, Run. In the second and third waves of contemporary U.S. Latino literature, published by mainstream presses, these issues remain strong, as in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Sor Juana’s Second Dream and Desert Blood, Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accent, Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban, and Virgil Suárez’s Going Under, among many others. The latter waves have coincided with the increased number of Latinos writing in English and graduating from university creative writing programs and, thus, fully versed on the American literary canon and decidedly engaged in broadening it. From the early twentieth century on, immigrant literature has remained focused on writing the nation through rejecting the


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Metropolis as the vortex of values antithetical to the culture of the homeland: materialism versus idealism and spirituality, individualism versus family and community, labor exploitation and discrimination versus equal opportunity and egalitarianism, liberalism that verges on libertinism6 versus traditional gender roles, etc. This binary opposition remains strong from the first novel of immigration, Alirio Díaz Guerra’s Lucas Guevara, to the current installments, such as Roberto Quesada’s The Big Banana and Nunca entres por Miami. Despite the persistence of this binary, there is a growing immigration literature that is not positing a return to the homeland, as in Eduardo González Viaña’s El corrido de Dante. Exile literature today remains as committed to political causes as when José Alvarez de Toledo, Félix Megía, and Félix Varela attacked the French intervention in Spain and the Spanish monarchy and cultivated the Spanish Black Legend in support of their wars of independence in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Today, despite the restoration of democratic rule in Argentina, for example, a writer like Tomás Eloy Martínez, who has found a home in the American academy, continues to elaborate his attack on Argentine authoritarianism in Santa Evita, The Lives of the General, and The Tango Singer. And the Mariel generation of exile writers, as represented by Reinaldo Arenas and others, continues to attack Castro and Cuban communism. 10. While autobiography and memoir writing began among Latinos in the mid-nineteenth century, among such writers as Juan Nepumoceno Seguín, documenting their disillusion with the newly installed Anglo-American legal and governmental system in Texas and the Southwest, these genres became more popular as American Protestant influence increased and a number of converts documented, faithful to American canonical patterns, how they reformed their ways and accepted Christ. Of a number of these conversion narratives, the one that was most influential went through multiple printings from the time of its first publication in 1898 to 1968, its last edition: José Policarpo Rodríguez’s “The Old Guide,” Surveyor, Scout, Hunter, Indian Fighter, Ranchman, Preacher: His Life in His Own Words. Although this genre has remained strong among U.S. Latinos, actually producing in contemporary times the all-time best-seller in Latino literature, Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby, Run, some of the most recognized Latino novels have followed the patterns of American ethnic autobiography, especially as practiced by the children of Irish, Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century. Some of the most prominent works in




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contemporary U.S. Latino literature have been considered bildungsroman and künstlerroman, with their protagonists struggling as Latinos to come of age in American society, such as Rodolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda, Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets, José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho, and a legion of works of first-time U.S. Latino novelists issuing from mainstream, commercial presses since some of these foundational works were published. This type of writing, which usually reinforces the canons of American literature, seems to announce the presence and Americanization of the particular ethnic at a specific time in history, petitioning for admission to the American imaginary by adopting the national values of individualism and persistence in the face of discrimination and by chucking out the old-country language and values that hinder assimilation into American society, as in Richard Rodríguez’s Hunger of Memory. Many immigration narratives gloss on the Hispanic novel par excellence, Don Quixote, as their protagonists pursue the illusion of fortune and/or fame in the United States. Closely linked to the broad pattern canonized by Cervantes is the picaresque novel as an influence on immigration novels. As you would have it and despite its emerging from popular anecdote and lived experience, Daniel Venegas’s Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o cuando los pericos mamen glosses on these two sources. It can be argued that the novel of immigration in its examination of the life and culture of the United States, like the Quixote and many picaresque novels, is a novel of the road in which the characters suffer physical and emotional pain, exploitation, and discrimination during their journey, thus demythologizing the United States as the land of equality and opportunity. Such has been the case from Conrado Espinosa’s El sol de Tejas to Mario Bencastro’s Odisea del Norte and Eduardo González Viaña’s El corrido de Dante. Unlike the contemporary novel of native Hispanics, which explores the psychological conflicts and evolution of the protagonist as an individual, the novel of immigration remains more focused on the protagonist as a representative of his people in a plot that is often epic in scope. The greatest flowering of exile narrative has been in the novels of the Mexican Revolution that were published in the United States from 1915, the date that Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo was issued in El Paso, to 1935, when Alberto Rembao’s Lupita: A Story of the Revolution in Mexico adapted the genre in English to promote his religious ideology. From 1910 to the mid-1930s, Mexican political


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discourse accounted for much periodical and literary publishing in the Southwest. In the East, nonfiction prose, fiction narrative, and poetry from the 1930s to the post–World War II period often supported the Republican cause in Spain, as in the works of Prudencio de Pereda. And, of course, because we are still very close to the historical realities of contemporary Central America, Cuba, Chile, and Argentina, we are very familiar with the impact of politics on the literature being produced by the political refugees from those countries. Nevertheless, at this juncture in time, no genre has been more foundational to the national literature of a homeland and to the development of Latino literature in the United States than the long-lived novel of the Mexican Revolution. *** The preceding has been an illustration of the general schema of Latino literature in the United States. It is not meant to bind or limit interpretation of the various texts and their authors, but to serve as a general guideline to understanding the relationship of native, immigrant, and exile texts to each other, as well as to problematize the relationship of these texts and authors to their homelands and, indeed, to the whole Hispanic world. In essence, we have sought to illustrate that U.S. Latino literature has been from its origins in the early nineteenth century, and still is today, a transnational phenomenon, one that crosses borders physically and/or symbolically, constructs more than one national identity at a time, or deconstructs and rejects them all, always gazing either at the land it left behind or at the land of reception and reinvention. And even when reinventing itself in English along the lines of the American canon, it nevertheless continues to maintain a gaze on “our house in the last world,” as Oscar Hijuelos phrased it in the title to his first novel. For natives, the “last world” is the general Hispanic background in Spain and this hemisphere and the history on land that became part of the United States. But the economic and political refugees, on the other hand, continue to erase the borders separating them politically and geographically from very specific residences prior to their American sojourn.



Notes 1. The Recovery Project was founded in 1990 by scholars who recognized that a vast corpus of writing by U.S. Hispanics prior to 1960 remained virtually unknown and scattered across the United States and various “homelands.” Funded in the main by American foundations, the Project researches and preserves through microfilming the written culture of Latinos; makes it accessible through publications and online delivery; furthers its study through grants to researchers, conferences,


2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

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and curriculum projects; and seeks to integrate it into all levels of education and popular culture. Centered at the University of Houston, its advisory board is made up of scholars, librarians, and archivists from across the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Spain. For further information consult www.artepublicopress. com. While printing technology was not new to Spanish America, access to a free press, in fact, drew intellectuals and revolutionists to Philadelphia, Boston, and New York from 1800s to the 1830s to write their respective nations and smuggle the resultant books back into Spanish America. See Kanellos 2005. For nation-building efforts of Cubans in the United States during the nineteenth century, see Poyo 1989 and Lazo 2005. As Bruce-Novoa has stated, “And when exiles cannot return, they dedicate themselves to justifying their existence in a dual manner: they manipulate the image and significance of their resistance outside their country by discrediting what the homeland has become; and two, they set about proving that they are the authentic bearers of the true tradition of the homeland and even of the ideals of the attempted revolution. . . . Eventually this exercise in self-justification leads to the claim that the homeland has actually moved with the exiles, that they have managed to bring it with them in some reduced form, and that if the opportunity should arise, they can take it back to replant it in the original garden of Eden. This explains how the Lozano group dared called themselves ‘El México de Afuera’” (Bruce-Novoa 1989, 153). While many scholars believe that the great majority of U.S. Latinos write in English, they have not conducted the research that would conclude this. It is rather their observation of what is produced by publishers, not writers, that leads them to think this, without reflecting on such market conditions as reviewing media, language preference of librarians and bookstore owners/ managers, promotion, and distribution systems, etc. A round number for texts submitted to Arte Público Press in Spanish today would be 40 percent. Nevertheless, in the relative absence of reviewing and distribution systems for Spanish-language books today, Arte Público is forced to publish the majority of its adult literature in English. Alirio Díaz Guerra fully elaborates this theme, culminating with his characterization of the Statue of Liberty as the “Statue of Libertinism” (Estatua del Libertinaje) in the very first novel of immigration, Lucas Guevara (1914).

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Baeza Ventura, Gabriela. 2005. La imagen de la mujer en la crónica del “México de Fuera.” Juárez, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1993. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. New York: Routledge. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. 1989. La Prensa and the Chicano Community. The Américas Review 17.3–4: 150–156.


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Gray, Paul Bryan. 2006–2007. Francisco Ramírez. A Short Biography. California History 84.2: 20–39. Kanellos, Nicolás. 2006–2007. El Clamor Público: Resisting the American Empire. California History 84.2: 10–18, 69–70. Kanellos, Nicolás. 2005. Hispanic Intellectuals Publishing in the NineteenthCentury United States: From Political Tracts in Support of Independence to Commercial Publishing Ventures. Hispania 88.4: 687–692. Lazo, Rodrigo. 2005. Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States. Raleigh-Durham: University of North Carolina Press. Leal, Luis. 1992. Adolfo Carrillo. In Dictionary of Literary Biography 122: 53–55. Leal, Luis. 1993. Truth Telling Tongues: Early Chicano Poetry. In Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, ed. Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla, 91-105. Houston: Arte Público Press. Mirandé, Alfredo. 1987. Gringo Justice. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen. Paredes, Américo. 1995. Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border. Austin: University of Texas Press. Poyo, Gerald E. 1989. With All, and for the Good of All: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898. RaleighDurham: Duke University Press. Sánchez, Rosaura. 1985. From Heterogeneity to Contradiction: Hinojosa’s Novel. In The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Historical and Critical, 76–100. Houston: Arte Público Press.







Para Español Oprima El Número Dos: Transnational Translation and U.S. Latino/a Literature Marta E. Sánchez

I

n “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English,” an essay about the changing status of literary studies in English, Paul Jay refers to a relatively recent explosion of literature in English produced in the English-speaking postcolonial world. This literature, he says, has been coming into Britain and the United States from India, the Middle East, Canada, Africa, the South Pacific (Australia), the Philippines, and Guam, and it is reshaping and reorganizing the disciplines of British and U.S. literatures. No longer, he argues, are these disciplines limited only to cultural products produced inside the national borders of their respective countries, presumably united by common themes, values, a national language, and literature. British and U.S. literatures are also projecting expressive material from outside their national borders that is transforming them into open-ended cultural systems in a transnational market economy. Jay’s point is that British and U.S. literary studies in the modern era of globalization are “becoming defined less by nation than by language” (2001, 33). I want to take advantage of Jay’s observation concerning the ascendancy of language in a global world to offer some ideas on the Spanish language, acts of translation, and U.S. Latina and Latino writing. Jay’s claim about the new importance of language, over the political entity “nation” as a unit of analysis, highlights a move in literary studies in English away from more confining organizational terms, such as


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the “nation-state” and “national languages and literatures,” and toward a wider context suggested by the adjectives “continental,” “hemispheric,” and “global.”1 To say, for example, “Literatures in English” or “Literatures in French” is to emphasize broad elements of language, linguistic bonds, and literature as a continuum, regardless of national origin or cultural or ethnic heritage. It is different than saying “British literature” or “American (U.S.) literature,” headings that favor political borders and territorial maps of modern nation-states. English and American (U.S.) literary studies are not the only disciplines wrestling to enlarge their analytical domain. This reorganization also applies, especially in the twenty-first century, to literary studies in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and German, and it includes the less usual suspects of Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Korean, for that matter (“Papers” 2002). New communication technologies, the constant and multidirectional movement of millions of people across national borders, and the economic, familiar, and linguistic ties that migrants maintain with their home countries are making it necessary for us to refocus the direction of our scholarship in economics, law, the social sciences, arts, and humanities. I want to focus on an explosive growth of translations into Spanish of U.S. Latino/a literature written in English and published, generally speaking, in the United States. On the surface, this kind of translation seems to quarrel with the sovereign borders of the nation. It goes against the national equation of one nation one language, and it also promotes Spanish outside and inside the nation-state, because U.S. presses apparently are widening and deepening the development of publication and translation in Spanish. This involvement of U.S. presses in the translation of U.S. literature from English to Spanish for consumption in the United States is, as far as I know, unprecedented. The translation supported by major U.S. presses involves standard English to standard Spanish. At times, translators use Spanglish (el espanglés, el inglañol) in the translation of smaller linguistic units, such as dialogue or specific words: welfear/“welfare,” bloque/“block,” dáim/“dime” (Santiago Cuando 1994, 254, 271, 275).2 Spanglish is the creative linguistic and syntactic amalgam of Spanish and English, whose evolution and meaning is explained and performed by Ilan Stavans in Spanglish (2003, 1–54). Stavans describes el espanglés as “verbal promiscuity,” a linguistic form “that refuses to accept anything as foreign” (9, 15). To my knowledge, no major work of world literature has been translated into Spanglish, except the small segment Stavans himself daringly decided to adapt into a Spanglish mode of communication.3 He translates into Spanglish the first chapter of el tesoro de la lengua castellana (the treasure of the Castillian language), Don Quixote de la Mancha, to the chagrin of Spanish-language


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purists (Stavans 2003, 251–258). None of the Latino/a books that I allude to in these pages has been translated, in their entirety or in part, into Spanglish. Not yet. Two major U.S. publishing houses in the vanguard of this translation machine and with stated commitments to its growth and sustainability are Vintage Español and Rayo; the first is an imprint of Random House, the second of Harper Collins. These are multinational publishing houses with a major presence in the First World. They commission a good share of the translations from English to Spanish of Latino/Latina creative writings and then sell them in domestic and international markets.4 This turn in translation, a trans-national turn,5 of U.S. Latino texts begins in the early 1990s, and it is a result, in part, of the publishing houses’ perception that these books, once translated into Spanish, will be of interest to the increasing numbers of Spanish-speaking readers in the United States and also in the international market. Karin N. Kiser, an internationally recognized expert on the Spanish book industry in the United States, reports that in 2000 the Spanish book market was estimated at $368 million and that the New York Times had estimated the annual buying power of Hispanics to surpass $440 billion this same year (2000, 47). Carmen Ospina, writing for Críticas, the English-speaker’s guide to Spanish-language titles, estimated in 2006 that the purchasing power of Hispanic consumers in the United States had surged to a 700 billion-dollar market (3). This steadily upward-moving market has created a need, or desire, in the U.S. publishing industry to reach and attract the Spanish-reading segment of the larger U.S. Latino/a market audience. The term “Hispanics” seems to be the preferred label in the governmental and marketing sources I cite for this essay, but I prefer the label “Latinos/as” to designate the Spanish-language origin population in the United States. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita refer to a Latino/a population as “a nexus of diverse groups that differ at the level of national origin, race, residential status, class, gender, and political views” (2006, 25). They also include ethnicity, sexual orientation, and forms of labor (28). In a list of differentiating factors, I would stress “Spanish-language competence.” The unit guiding this market outreach is language. If the unit were the territorial boundaries of “nationness,” or the commonly assumed oneto-one correspondence between one language and a national literature written in that language, translation would not be necessary, but the publishing enterprise of converting Latino/a literature into Spanish depends heavily upon translation and translators. The organizing unit is not juridical citizenship or residency: what matters is not whether consumers with purchasing power in this market are citizens, legal residents, or undocumented migrants but whether they are Spanish-reading (Ospina 2006, 3).


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What seems to be happening is that the perceived and actual buying power of a Spanish-language reading public in the United States, rather than citizenship and legal status, is determining the influence of the Spanish language in the United States and the publication and distribution of books in Spanish in a transnational global market. Spanish has no institutional and political social standing as a second national language in the United States, there is no “army” to sustain and legitimate it, but it does have an important demographic and economic presence and force behind it (Villa 2000, 143). After all, it is the language that we hear again and again when we dial a business, a governmental agency, or practically any institution, public or private: Para español oprima el número dos. What does this phenomenon say about, and do to, the idea of “America,” “American,” and “Americanness”? Does the act of translating English texts into Spanish encourage a critical reimagining of the common and reductive mistranslation of the American hemisphere into the United States? Or, does it reinforce this mistranslation? How do the various presses position these books, and what do their marketing strategies tell us about how they perceive the needs of the Spanish-language audience? How well do they know this audience that is both in the United States and elsewhere in the Spanish-language world? Before I turn to describing in more detail this translational phenomenon, let me say a few words about the Spanish language today. Like English, the Spanish language is part of, and participates in, a complex system of transnational cultural exchange. The Spanish original of Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate, for example, was published by Doubleday in 1993 and the translation by Anchor in 1994. By 1994 it had sold over 70,000 in hardback and 63,000 in paperback in the United States (Bearden 1994, 40). Partnerships are formed between U.S. and Spanish publishers, such as Vintage Español and the Barcelona-based publisher Planeta, or Rayo and Planeta (Bardales 2006, 5); Grupo Santillana, a prominent Spanish publishing conglomerate, set up various imprints, such as Alfaguara and Punto de Lectura, in the United States. This is another indication that Spanish at least might have outgrown the conventional categories of “nation” and “national culture” and is complicating our notion of geopolitical borders. We know that Hindi and Chinese are the most spoken languages in the world. In third place is English, but as Mary Louise Pratt reminds us, English holds its ranking not as a native language but as a second language or lingua franca (2002, 1287 n1). In other words, English is a “foreign,” a learned language, not a native tongue, to the majority of people in the world. After English, Spanish is the most spoken language by native speakers. The United States, notably, is the fifth largest Spanish-speaking nation.


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Within ten years, it will have surpassed Spain, Colombia, and Argentina in number of Spanish speakers. Only Mexico will have more Spanish speakers than the United States (Kiser 1999, 35). Spanish (one of the LOTE [Languages Other Than English]) occupies a different place in the history and historical memory of the United States than the other European and Asian languages (the LOTS [Languages Other Than Spanish]) that make up a U.S. multilingual heritage. My intent is not to single out Spanish as some kind of exceptional language, deserving special status—all languages merit attention and cultivation. Rather, my intent is to recognize the role Spanish has played and is playing in the history and social reality of the United States. The United States, now more than ever, is part of the Spanish-speaking Américas. Excepting the Amerindian languages—Navajo, Lakota, Kumeyaay, Cree—which deserve protection against extinction, Spanish is the language with the longest, most sustained presence and largest population of speakers in U.S. territory. Proposing the term “modern languages” instead, Mary Louise Pratt has urged the expunging of “the term foreign to refer to languages other than English. Nothing is more repugnant to someone working in Spanish in this country than to hear it referred to as a ‘foreign’ language. Its history here, after all, predates English” (Pratt 1995, 64).6 Spanish speakers arrived on these shores more than a century before the Mayflower in 1620, when Juan Ponce de León landed in 1513 and called the land Florida. Addressing the issue of “foreign” languages in a transnational world and within the corporate university, Walter Mignolo asserts that after five centuries Spanish has become “not only a foreign language but also a minority national language in the United States” (Mignolo 2000, 1239). Adding his voice more recently to a discussion about the prevailing and erroneous perception of Spanish as a “foreign” language, in spite of the Spanish boom in language departments and the substantial rise in the U.S. Spanish-speaking and Latino/a- (or Hispanic-) identified population, is Carlos Alonso. Like Mignolo, Alonso captures the paradoxical status of Spanish in the title of his essay “Spanish: The Foreign National Language.” After noting the expected but no less “stunning announcement” in 2003 by the Bureau of the Census that “Hispanics had overtaken blacks as the largest racial-ethnic minority in the United States” (Alonso 2006, 16) and suggesting that scholars working in and on Spanish “undertake an institutional rethinking and reshaping of the place occupied by Spanish language and culture in the United States academic world,” he boldly argues that “Spanish is . . . no longer a foreign language in the United States”; it is rather, he says, a language possessing the status of a second national language: “the evidence of it is everywhere. The omnipresent bilingual English-Spanish signs, the ubiquitous automated telephone option ‘Para




MARTA E. SÁNCHEZ

español, oprima el número dos,’ the direct mailings written in Spanish, the targeted telephone solicitations in that language, the wide availability of dubbed versions of films, the snippets of conversations in Spanish that we hear with increasing frequency from couples or groups passing by on the street, and so on” (Alonso 2006, 17).7 Need he say more? Spanish extends beyond the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, where, one might argue, its speakers have been crossing national borders since the artificial line of demarcation was imposed in 1848 as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; it extends beyond the northeastern United States, where Puerto Ricans have been crossing “el charco” (the puddle, used ironically by Puerto Ricans to name the Atlantic Ocean) since U.S. citizenship was imposed on them by fiat in 1917. The number of Spanish speakers from Mexico and Southern, Central, and Caribbean Américas has grown in Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, and Spanish speakers are migrating into areas where previously there were no, or very small, Spanish-speaking populations: Georgia, North Carolina, Missouri, Utah, and Oregon, for example. The Latino population in New Orleans, legal and illegal, has tripled in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Lehr 2007). This type of migration shows the “foreign” (or global) impacts on the “non-foreign” (or the local) and vice versa: global and local are mutually implicating. Leaving aside the contentious debate about English-Only, the movement, political stand, and practice, Spanish is on the threshold: a “no-longer” and a “not-yet” that is no longer a foreign language but not yet a recognized second national language in the United States. As the world becomes more transnational, the ability to read and speak different languages and the art of translation become more necessary and important.8 But just as the homegrown movement of multiculturalism of the 1980s paid little attention to multilingualism, so too, transnationalism fails to bring with it a national awareness or support for linguistic diversity (Shell and Sollors 2000, 2–4).9 In the context of globalization, we hear “transnational,” “transethnic,” “multiethnic,” “multinational,” “multicultural,” but seldom “translingual,” “multilingual,” or “interlingual.” It is ironic: interest in the “other” implied by both multiculturalism and transnationalism, albeit in different ways and for different reasons, fails to promote interest and support for the study of languages, either at levels of social practice or in scholarship, spoken by those “others.” My concern here is a body of literature by Spanish-speaking heritage groups who reside in the United States and write in the national language but whose creative writings began to appear in the 1990s in Spanish translation. In 2000 the Census Bureau announced the figure of 35.3 million for the Latino population (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2001), but the trans-national phenomenon of these translations began before this fact became known. In 2003, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that over half


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of the estimated 15 million Latina/o immigrants currently in the United States entered the country after 1990 (Sánchez 2006, 39), the majority of whom, understandably, would use Spanish as their first language in private and public settings. The publication, translation, and distribution of books in Spanish in the United States in historical time not only coincides with the signing of NAFTA into international law in 1993, but also gels with the data reported by the Census Bureau in 2000 and especially the data about the new arrivals during the 1990s released in 2003.10 The increase in Latino/a buying power and the idea of dominant Spanish-language niche audiences would have encouraged presses to address these readers. Hence, the timing of the initiation of translations into Spanish coincides with the timing of NAFTA and the dramatic increase in Latina/o Spanishmonolingual immigrants, especially in the 1990s. This increase in Spanish-language publishing also coincided with events of different political impulses than the transnationalism of NAFTA and the more recent Spanish-speaking arrivals. The translation phenomenon I am addressing in these pages takes place at the juncture of ideologies that pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, there is NAFTA—a transnational, presumably open, trade agreement that relaxes barriers to the movement of goods and investments among Canada, Mexico, and the United States. One might have expected a free-trade market of economic goods to open up markets for the freer trading of words—the circulation of languages (and people), at least of Spanish and perhaps of some indigenous Mexican languages, such as Zapotec and Mixtec. But such was not the case because pushing against a free flow of peoples and their languages are Operation Gatekeeper (1994) and Operation Hold-the-Line (1993): border-sealing mechanisms aimed at tightening and upholding the boundaries of the border region. Complementing these last two operations is the highly limiting and restrictive English-Only movement led by U.S. conservatives, ready to defend the linguistic borders of “one nation, one national language.” The ideological intersection of NAFTA with Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Hold-the-Line, and English-Only language policies suggests that global (NAFTA) and local (the geographical and linguistic operations) contracts exist simultaneously. The transnational and the national are separate pulls but nonetheless are joined. I emphasize this opposing tension between the transnational and the national by hyphenating “trans-national” in my title. The translation of U.S. Latino/a literature by multinational publishing houses is transnational—it looks inward but also outward, and it highlights the relation of the Spanish-speaking population residing in and entering the United States to historical processes accentuated by globalization. It dramatizes the tensions between the demand of the free market for the integration of




MARTA E. SÁNCHEZ

financial global markets (NAFTA, the European community, CAFTA), on the one hand, and a nation’s political and nostalgic longing for a juridical citizenship demanded by the nation-state, on the other hand (Operation Gatekeeper etc. and English-Only). What is peculiar about this translational phenomenon is not the publication of creative texts in Spanish in the United States. Spanish-language presses began operating in Monterey, California, in 1834 (Meléndez 1997, 5), and about 132 Spanish-language newspapers were published in the Southwest between 1848 and 1900 (Savin 1996, 345–346). The newspaper El Clamor Público of Los Angeles dates to 1855, La Prensa in San Antonio to 1913, and La Opinión in Los Angeles to 1926 (Meléndez 1997, 5). Eusebio Chacón’s novels El hijo de la tempestad and Tras la tormenta la calma were published in Spanish in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1892. An El Paso newspaper, El Paso del Norte, published Mariano Azuela’s classic novel Los de abajo in serial format. The same newspaper published it as a book in 1916 (Parra 2005, 23, 144–145). Poetry written by Spanish-literate New Mexicans appeared in the Spanish-language press between 1889 and 1950 (Arellano 1976). Nor does the element of “newness” lie in the semantic and syntactic transaction from English into Spanish—albeit important and common enough in the world of translation. Four features characterize the novelty of the translation enterprise: (1) who commissions the translations, (2) their scale and intensity, (3) the source language of the texts being translated, and (4) their single-language presentation. First, U.S. presses are commissioning translations of books already written in what is thought to be the national language. Why are major presses translating them if they are already in English, especially in light of the notoriety of official English language initiatives in several states, most notably California in 1998 and Arizona in 2004, seeking to eradicate and, in some cases, criminalize all non-English languages—but mostly Spanish—and to enthrone English as the “one,” “the only” language of public space?11 This translation into Spanish is a significant modification of the classic kind of translation we are accustomed to seeing presses initiate. Usually, a book’s translation is commissioned by an outside publisher—a publisher of a different national culture to which the source book belongs. This publisher acquires the rights to the original and then arranges to have the novel, or other kind of verbal object, translated into the target, or national, language. Examples of classic translation into English are Gabriel García-Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970 (translator Gregory Rabasa by Harper & Row; original title Cien años de soledad, 1967); Günter Grass’s Tin Drum, 1961 (translator Ralph Manheim by Random House; original title Die Blechtrommel, 1959); and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, 1985 (translator Magda Gobin by Knopf; original title La casa


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de los espíritus, 1982). The kind of translation I am talking about might be thought of as a reversal of the classic type of translation, because instead of translating from a different modern language into the national language, U.S. presses are commissioning translations from the de facto “official” national language (English) into a relatively familiar language (Spanish). Second, the volume and scale of English-to-Spanish translations by major presses is significant. Among the titles published in translation in the 1990s were Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1992), Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (1994), José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1994), Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1994) and Almost a Woman (1999), Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1994), Ana Castillo’s Mixquiahuala Letters (1994), Oscar Hijuelos’ Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1996), Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek (1996), Junot Díaz’s Drown (1997), Graciela Limón’s In Search of Bernabé (1997), Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets (1998), and Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1998). The Spanish translation of Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), De cómo las muchachas García perdieron el acento, was released by Vintage in October 2007. This information tells us that market pressures are creating a demand “here” and “out there” for, broadly speaking, material in Spanish, and, more specifically, for these translations. Have Spanish-dominant and biliterate U.S. Latinos just begun to read? Or, has a demand increased exponentially, and the large presses now see financial reasons for entering into the market? Why the growth now? Are presses responding to a demand created by the rise in enrollments in Spanish in postsecondary education?12 Welles documents that almost 54 percent of all foreign-language enrollments in 2002 were in Spanish (2004, 12), and Furman notes a 10 percent increase in Spanish enrollments by 2006 (2007, 2, 13). Are these enrollments in Spanish significant enough in number to justify these translations? Third, these texts are written by U.S. Spanish heritage speakers in the language of the colonial country, but they are now being translated into the language suppressed in the colonization. There is an interesting irony here. Authors who write these books, one might argue, do not write in the home language, that is, Spanish: the home language has been prohibited over time by U.S. processes of linguistic assimilation. Rather, some of these writers— Helena María Viramontes, Piri Thomas, Julia Alvarez, Cristina García, Junot Díaz—have chosen to appropriate the English language and produce what Frances Aparicio calls “sub-versive” narratives: they produce “undercover” meanings to reveal their bilingual, bicultural sensibilities by encoding references, in English, to their lived realities in vernacular Spanish, showing us just how interdependent and interactive, in partnership or in conflict, the two languages and cultures are (Aparicio 1994). But since the 1990s, U.S.




MARTA E. SÁNCHEZ

presses are translating the products of this acculturated population into the language “forgotten” in the colonial experience and are marketing them in and outside the United States: to Latin and Central America, Spain, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. They are, at least on the surface, taking “familiar” domestic products and making them “strange” not only to international audiences but also to domestic readerships. The fourth characteristic is the single-language nature of these translations. They are not, that is, published in bilingual format—the kind of presentation Werner Sollors describes he wanted and obtained for the Multilingual Anthology of American Literature and that the initial publishers he approached turned down for various reasons (Sollors 2002, 1292).13 The translations I am talking about are not facing-page bilingual editions: non-English original on one side and English translation on the other side. One of the few exceptions published since the 1990s in a bilingual format is Tino Villanueva’s Escena de la película Gigante (2005), which is a translation of the English original Scene from the Movie Giant, published in 1993 by Curstone Press in Connecticut. In this case, the publisher of the translation, Editorial Catriel, is not in the United States but in Madrid. In this bilingual edition of poetry, Tino’s English originals appear on the left-sided pages and Rafael Cabañas Alamán’s Spanish translations on the right-sided pages. If the right side is dominant, then Spanish is privileged, a perfectly understandable decision since the book is a translation. A bilingual format in translation is important for several reasons. First, it goes against the normativity of English or Spanish. It tells us that one language is as necessary, as important, as the other. It alerts us to the fact that cultural contact does not flow only one way, through a single medium. Second, it speaks to the multilingualism of the United States, in this particular context English-Spanish. Third, it highlights the act of translation, thereby going against the invisibility of the translator and, thereby, his/ her translation. Lawrence Venuti has argued convincingly that fluency and transparency are the dominant objectives in an Anglo-American tradition of translation and that these desired outcomes, unfortunately, make the art of translation, and the translator, invisible. In other words, translation is considered excellent when it sounds “original,” when, in contradiction to its reason for being, it appears to have no relation to the real original text. A bilingual format emphasizes this relationship. Last, it interrupts the U.S. nationalist narrative of a one-language nation, of an English tradition starting with Jamestown and Plymouth, and of a self-evident truth that English is or should be the only means of communication. Werner Sollors has pointed out recently that the United States always has had, and still does, an immense, though unrecognized, multilingual diversity. Its inhabitants have not one but several linguistic mother countries (Shell and Sollors 2000, 8).


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Are these translations putting into question the normativity of English as the dominant language or are they part of larger processes—the growth in Spanish-language radio, television, the music industry; the growth of Spanish-language speakers—that stimulate a backlash and invigorate a nativist English-Only position? What may appear to be a process of denationalization through translation may really turn out to be more a process of renationalization. In conclusion I would like to return to my initial point: while language might not be the sole factor to consider in forming new units of analysis for literary studies and other disciplines, it is an important element to take seriously—more seriously than we do now—as we rethink the way we teach and study literatures, cultures, art, music, and the role translation plays in a global society where transnational perspectives, transcultural mediation, and translingual negotiation are iron necessities. Transnational audiences are being created that are changing the meaning of “America(n)” and showing that América is not just “over there”—beyond U.S. borders. The United States is more and more becoming part of América aquí (America is here), part of a hemispheric region that represents in its culture and language, at least for me, not some kind of nostalgic romantic longing for the past but a fact of historical and global development. Notes 1. Wai-Chee Dimock extends the scale of analysis to the “planetary.” 2. No attribution to a translator appears on the dust jacket of Cuando era puertorriqueña / When I was Puerto Rican or in the publisher’s information, but Santiago says in the introduction to the Spanish translation that she herself did the translation (Cuando 1994, xvi–xvii). 3. I say “daringly” because Stavans, as he himself acknowledges, crossed una linea peligrosa (a dangerous line) when he compiled a list of Spanglish terms, much less take on the most sacred of sacred texts in Spanish civilization. He says: “When news of my compilation of Spanglish terms spread throughout the Hispanic world, the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua, which remains but a branch of its Madrid headquarters, issued an open letter—a fatwah, as an interneta [Stavans’ spanglish term for “internet surfer”] described it once, portraying me as ‘el Salman Rushdie de los latinos’—denouncing the effort as an affront” (2003, 49). The phrase “el Salman Rushdie de los latinos” is from an internet essay “Viva-Spanglish!” by Jonathon Keats (2004: 2). 4. Books written in Spanish are also published in Spanish by U.S. presses. For example, the Colombian writer Laura Restrepo’s Dulce Companía (1995) and La novia oscura (1999) originally published in Colombia by Editorial Norma were republished in Spanish by Rayo in 2005 and 2002, respectively. Some canonical Latin American writers—Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and




5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

MARTA E. SÁNCHEZ

Octavio Paz, to name only three—are also published in Spanish by U.S. presses. In this paper I focus on U.S. Latino/a literature translated from English into Spanish. The hyphen in “trans-national” in my title stresses that the translation enterprise I speak about is not a matter of something that is totally unrelated to the nation-state, but neither is it a matter of something purely national, or confined to geographical borders. The hyphen underscores a slippage, an ongoing tension between global and local, transnational and national. Pratt argues that the idea and use of “‘foreignness’ equally misapplies [in the United States] to French, Cantonese, Italian, or Japanese—to say nothing of Lakota, Navajo, or Cree. Following the tradition of the MLA, let us agree on the term modern languages and put an end to another lexical legacy of the Cold War.” See also the other essays in the section “A Propos Spanish” in the ADFL Bulletin of Alonso’s essay. I do not want to imply that nations, or the idea of the “national,” do not exist any more. We know that the idea of nation and “nationness” are alive and well when it comes to the military and political industrial complexes. Issues of immigration reform and English as the “official” language, the one and only valid language for use in U.S. public spaces, are hotly debated in the media and in everyday conversations. Sollors calls language the blind spot of the modern multicultural age of the 1980s, when languages were not factored into the multicultural equation. In other words, we do not recognize or promote the multitude of languages that make up the United States. The Census Bureau has projected that by 2020 the Hispanic population will number 60 million, 18 percent of the total population, up from 6 percent in 1980 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2008). As of July 2006, the Latino population was estimated at 44.3 million, making it 15 percent of the total U.S. population (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2007). See also Pew Hispanic Center, “Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States 2006,” Table 1–36. I refer to California’s Proposition 227 and Arizona’s Proposition 203. Less commonly taught languages such as Chinese and Arabic have had dramatic increases since 1968. See Welles (2004, 8). Sollors explains how difficult it was to find a publisher willing to publish The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature in a bilingual format, thus respecting the value of the texts in their original language and emphasizing the multilingual roots of U.S. literature. Among the several reasons he gives are cost and readability.


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References Alonso, Carlos. 2006. Spanish: The Foreign National Language. ADFL Bulletin 37.2–3: 15–20.


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Aparicio, Frances. 1994. On Sub-versive Signifiers: U.S. Latina/o Writers Tropicalize English. American Literature 66.4: 795–801. Arellano, Anselmo F. 1976. Los pobladores nuevo mexicanos y su poesía, 1889–1950. Albuquerque: Pajarito Publications. Bardales, Aída. 2006. HarperCollins and Planeta Launch Joint Venture. Críticas (October): 5. Bearden, Michelle. 1994. Esquivel’s Spanish Primer. Publishers Weekly 241 (October 3): 40–44. Dimock, Wai-Chee. 2003. Planetary Time and Global Translation. Common Knowledge 9.3: 488–507. Furman, Nelly, David Goldberg, and Natalia Lusin. 2007. Enrollments in Languages Other than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2006. MLA Web Publication: 1–28. http://www.mla.org/pdf/06enrollmentsurvey_ final.pdf. Jay, Paul. 2001. Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English. PMLA 116.1: 32–47. Keats, Jonathon. 2004. “Viva-Spanglish!” http://www.utne.com/print-article. aspx?id=10138. Kiser, Karin. 1999. Selling to the Spanish-Language Market in the US. Publishers Weekly 246 (September 13): 35–42. ———. 2000. Spanish-Language Publishing in the U.S. Nears Critical Mass. Publishers Weekly (September 18): 47–52. Lehr, Jim. 2007. Jim Lehr Report. PBS. August 28. Meléndez, A. Gabriel. 1997. So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834–1958. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2000. The Role of the Humanities in the Corporate University. PMLA 115.5: 1238–45. Molloy, Sylvia. 2002. Introduction: Papers from the Conference on the Relation between English and Foreign Languages in the Academy: Constructing Dialogue, Imagining Change. PMLA 117.5: 1233–94. Ospina, Carmen. 2006. The Retail Explosion. Críticas (June): 3. Parra, Max. 2005. Writing Pancho Villa’s Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1995. Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship. In Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer, 58–65. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2002. What’s Foreign and What’s Familiar? PMLA 117.5: 1283–1287. Pew Hispanic Center. 2006. Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States 2006. Table 1–36. http://pewhispanic.org/factsheets/factsheet.php?FactsheetID=35. Sánchez, Rosaura, and Beatrice Pita. 2006. Theses on the Latino Bloc: A Critical Perspective. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 31.2: 25–53. Santiago, Esmeralda. 1993. When I Was Puerto Rican. New York: Random House. ———. 1994. Cuando era puertorriqueña. New York: Random House. Savin, Ada. 1996. Mexican-American Literature. In New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage, ed. Alpana Sharma Knippling, 341–65. Connecticut: Greenwood Press.




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Shell, Marc, and Werner Sollors, eds. 2000. The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: Reader of Original Texts with English Translations. New York: New York University Press. Sollors, Werner. 2002. Cooperation between English and Foreign Languages in the Area of Multilingual Literature. PMLA 117.5: 1287–94. Stavans, Ilan. 2003. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. New York: Harper Collins. U.S. Bureau of the Census. 2001. Hispanic Population of the United States. Census 2000 Briefs and Special Reports. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Issued May 2001. http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hispanic/ census.html. ———. 2007. Facts for Features. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census. July 16, 2007. Update. http://www.census.gov/PressRelease/www/releases/archives/ facts_for_features_special_editions/010327.html. ———. 2008. Hispanic Population of the United States 1970–2050. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Power Point Presentation, slide 4. http://www. census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hispanic/hispanic.html. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. New York: Routledge. ———.1998. The Scandals of Translation. London: Routledge. Villa, Daniel. 2000. Languages Have Armies, and Economies, Too: The Presence of U.S. Spanish in the Spanish-Speaking World. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 19: 144–154. Villanueva, Tino. 2005. Escena de la película. Edición Bilingüe. Trans. Rafael Cabañas Alamán. Madrid: Catriel. Welles, Elizabeth. 2004. Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2002. ADFL Bulletin 35.2–3: 7–26.


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Transnational Migrations and Political Mobilizations: The Case of A Day without a Mexican María Herrera-Sobek

In order to make the invisible visible you make it disappear. (Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi) One morning California wakes up to find that one third of its population has disappeared. A thick fog surrounds the State and communication outside its boundaries is completely cut off. As the day goes by we discover that the characteristic that links the 14 million disappeared is their Hispanic background. (A Day without a Mexican)

T

ransnational migrations from Mexico to the United States have significantly stimulated the creative imagination of Mexican and Chicano/a artists and have led to a robust cultural production in films, musical compositions (corridos or ballads and canciones or songs), visual art, cartoons, folk art, and literature (poetry, theater, novel, short story). In my book Northward Bound: Mexican Immigration in Ballad and Song (1993), I identified more than 150 corridos and canciones whose subject matter deals with transnational migrations. My book encompassed the period from 1850s to the early 1990s. In the last decade of the twentieth century and now the first decade of the twenty-first century, the cultural production focusing


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MARÍA HERRERA-SOBEK

In Mexico alone, close to one hundred full-length “immigration movies” have been produced and distributed in the Americas. The films have included works by many of Mexico’s most distinguished filmmakers such as Miguel Contreras Torres, Alejandro Galindo, David Silva, Pedro Armendáriz, Julio Alemán, Héctor Suárez, Ernesto Gómez Cruz, María Novaro, Patricia Reyes Spíndola, Mario Almada, and Gonzalo Vega. (Maciel and García-Acevedo 1998, 151)

With respect to Hollywood immigration-oriented film, Maciel and GarcíaAcevedo point out how this theme has been inscribed in Hollywood films since 1912 with the silent film Her Last Resort. According to the two authors, U.S. films tend to “follow basic discursive formula, a modified version of the western in which the hero struggles valiantly against gangs involved in the trafficking of undocumented workers, always defeating them at the end” (Maciel and García-Acevedo 1998, 164). Furthermore, their message seems to be unchanging, mainly pointing out “the importance of the control of our southern border and the need to institutionalize a campaign against the smuggling of undocumented workers to the United States” (164). Another critique leveled by the two authors vis-à-vis Hollywood transnational immigration films include their failure to provide rational solutions to the issue of migratory movements and their poor quality, that is, most of these films belong to the “B” category (low budget and secondary billing) (165). It is specifically on the film A Day without a Mexican, which premiered in 2004, that I want to focus my analysis. My study underscores how in the twenty-first century transnational migratory movements to the United States have taken a new tack consisting of open and massive political mobilizations protesting inhumane treatment of migrants. These protest movements also point out how the United States Congress and White House have been unable to enact rational immigration laws that address the transnational migratory movements of people. For the first time, undocumented migrants have taken to the streets of American cities and openly demonstrated and advocated for social justice and for an overhaul of immigration policy. It is ironic that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted by Congress in 1994, addresses the issue of products crossing borders in an orderly manner, but U.S. lawmakers have not been able to pass an immigration policy. Congress has been unable to come to terms with the transnational movements of people crossing


on Mexican transnational movements has continued unabated. Films with transnational migrant thematics have also been produced in large numbers. In their essay “The Celluloid Immigrant: The Narrative Films of Mexican Immigration,” David Maciel and María Rosa García-Acevedo state:


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national borders, and instead of rational legislation, what has been enacted is a concrete wall running several miles along the U.S.-Mexican border. Some of the above issues related to Mexican immigration are encapsulated in the film A Day without a Mexican and are dealt with in a satirical, humorous, but pointed, manner. The film, directed by Sergio Arau and co-written by Arau, Yareli Arizmendi, and Sergio Guerrero, was released on May 14, 2004, and soon became a rallying cry around which protest movements coalesced and organized. This work is often referred to as a “mockumentary” due to its combination of satire, comedy, and documentary. Its central plot posits the following question: What would California, and by extension the United States, be like if all Mexicans/Latinos (i.e., Mexicans, Mexican Americans, or Chicanos as well as Latinos) suddenly disappeared? The answer, given the great number of Mexicans/Latinos in California, is that without this ethnic population, who make up the bulk of the workforce but who are very much maligned, the Golden State would be an economic and social disaster. This then underscores the premise the film’s screenwriters seek to articulate: “[T]o make the invisible visible by taking it away.” Temporality is of primary importance in the film since the time frame (one day or twenty-four hours) and the issue of Mexicans/Latinos living in the United States are elaborated upon in the story line with respect to history. The film’s structure itself plays with temporality since time is fragmented and with a multiplicity of rapid-fire scenes projected on the screen provides the viewer with a myriad of perspectives on the sensitive issue of Mexicans/Latinos in the United States, both documented and undocumented. In addition to temporality being of central importance, the film uses flashbacks to travel back in time as historical and social issues are elaborated upon and discussed. The film’s closure is framed in a future-perfect idealized vision of Mexicans and Latinos returning to California and with the hegemonic population, Euro-Americans, exhibiting a new consciousness and displaying a new appreciation for the importance of this ethnic population living in the state. Temporality is of significant importance since it is conceived in a linear progression adhering to the Enlightenment’s concept of linking the passage of time to progress. As the narrative evolves from point A in time/space (the disappearance of Mexicans/Latinos) to point B in time/ space (their return), there is a change in the hegemonic society’s consciousness; that is, Euro-Americans finally realize the important role this ethnic group plays in the social and economic fabric of the United States. A Day without a Mexican also uses temporality as its structural axis to inscribe and articulate the film’s progressive ideology. Time is the element through which Mexicans appear and disappear. The film’s narrative is encapsulated in a twenty-four-hour time span; Mexicans disappear at


TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATIONS AND POLITICAL MOBILIZATIONS



six o’clock in the morning—the first Mexican to disappear is Roberto, a musician and Ellen’s husband, although the local television news in Los Angeles reports that by 6:00 a.m. there were 3,500 calls reporting workers missing. Ellen is one of the important protagonists/narrators in the film’s narrative. She is the voice that begins the narrative by stating how her husband, Roberto, was not by her side early in the morning when she woke up. The film’s story line follows Ellen on and off from the time her husband disappears to the following morning when her husband returns after a twenty-four hour absence. The main protagonist is Lila Rodríguez, a reporter for a Los Angeles television station, who has been assigned to follow the story of the disappearance of Hispanics in the state. The twentyfour-hour time span is given by the morning light, the characters commenting how Mexicans/Latinos began disappearing, and different clues given throughout the day both visually by the sun and then the coming darkness, night activity, and then early morning activities when Mexicans/ Latinos return. One important motif appearing and reappearing throughout the film is a leaky faucet that is dripping water into a glass. As time passes the glass begins to fill up. Early the next morning the Mexican or Latino plumber appears to fix it. Interestingly enough, the water motif is symbolically used to denote the new beginning of a different consciousness in California. It precedes the reappearance of the Mexican/Latino population. Drops of water are dripped onto the various important characters appearing in the film such as Ellen, Senator Steven Abercrombie, the elder Mr. McClaire, and Aunt Gigi, among others. The water then symbolically articulates a new beginning for California and its new appreciation for transnational migratory movements. The water provides a cleansing effect for the state; a cleansing of racism as well as benign neglect and indifference toward the Mexican/Latino population. Through this twenty-fourhour period, most of California’s white population is transformed from a racially insensitive group to a more appreciative and loving group. The film exhibits a combination of realist/formalist structures with a dash of Latin American magic realism thrown in. Its plot is straightforward: one day early in the morning, a pink fog descends on the state of California, enclosing it on all four sides of the state’s boundary lines, and all Mexicans/ Latinos disappear. Communication with the rest of the United States and the world is completely cut off. Where the Mexicans/Latinos go is not known. Soon chaos permeates the lives of Anglo-Californians: politicians disappear, the maids vanish, and white families are left helpless, unable to fend for themselves. The car washes are left empty without the workers, the agricultural fields are left to rot, and even the freeways are empty with only a car or two shown in the freeway lanes. This of course produces joy in some Angelinos as is evident in the blurb on the Internet advertising the


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film: “Millions are gone, Less Traffic!” and is followed by the comments: “Garbage accumulates on the city. There’s no health care, no teachers, no fruits or vegetables, no cleaning, no comedians . . . and, thank god, no traffic!” (A Day without a Mexican). In the film itself some characters, such as George McClaire, Mr. McClaire’s son, represents the redneck, racist sector of Anglo-America; he is the spokesperson for an anti-immigration group. He states at the beginning of the film while participating at a border vigilante demonstration: “We are Americans defending our land. White people are disappearing and it’s our country. They are stealing our way of life.” Equally racist is Senator Steven Abercrombie, of whom his aide states: “You got elected senator hating Mexicans and now you are a governor loving them” (A Day without a Mexican). Other evidence of Mexican/Latino haters includes a celebratory BBQ by the anti-immigrant group cited above. They announce their picnic via a poster that boldly announces the BBQ event to “Celebrate the Disappearance” and proclaims “It’s Our Country.” Lila Rodríguez herself is a target of Mexican/Latino haters since a baseball is thrown in her hospital room breaking a window and nearly hitting her. A written message inscribed in the baseball reads: “Disappear Bitch. We don’t want you back” (A Day without a Mexican). Throughout the day Mexicans/Latinos keep disappearing: professional workers such as teachers, television anchormen, baseball athletes, computer technicians, policemen, musicians, agricultural workers, maids, car wash attendants, restaurant workers, and others all vanish. The plot focuses particularly on one woman, Lila Rodríguez, who is the sole “Mexican” left in California. She is involved in a car accident since the streets are in complete chaos and ends up in the hospital where scientists begin to undertake tests to determine why she has not disappeared also. It turns out that she is not really a Mexican but an Armenian, thus demolishing the stereotype as to how Mexicans are supposed to look. Other characters in the film include members of the border patrol who, without undocumented Mexicans crossing the border, begin to fear for their jobs. The film’s form and content are excellent vehicles through which its ideology is explicitly articulated. Louis Giannetti’s book Understanding Movie defines ideology and offers insights into how ideological structures are embedded within films:



[Ideology is] a body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class or culture. The term is generally associated with politics and party platforms, but it can also mean a given set of values that are implicit in any human enterprise—including filmmaking. Virtually every movie presents us with role models, ideal ways of behaving, negative traits, and an implied morality based on the filmmaker’s sense of right and


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wrong. In short, every film has a slant, a given ideological perspective that privileges certain characters, institutions, behaviors, and motives as attractive, and downgrades an opposing set as repellent.

In A Day without a Mexican the ideology is explicitly evident throughout the film via the racial politics inscribed within it. If the chaotic conditions extant in California after the Mexicans disappear, and which are offered to the spectator via the movie camera’s lens, do not convey the message that California cannot function without this ethnic group, additional explicitly written reminders are given throughout the movie. At each important point in the movie’s plot the action stops completely and written across the screen are statistics or factoids purported to prove, from the director’s point of view, the importance of Mexicans in California. Some of these factoids inform us that ● ● ● ●

20 percent of the school teachers in California are Latino Agriculture, not Hollywood, is the state’s biggest industry 60 percent of the construction trade is Hispanic Mexicans/Latinos contribute 97 billion dollars to the economy

Even before A Day without a Mexican was released, controversy erupted in Los Angeles, California. The advertisements for the film appeared on large billboards along the freeways announcing, “On May 14, there will be no Mexicans in California,” and in Spanish, “El 14 de mayo los gringos van a llorar. [On May 14, the Gringos are going to cry.]” (A Day without a Mexican). The film underscores the fact that California is becoming increasingly Mexican, and in fact rumblings of a future Mexican California have been growing in the twenty-first century since the figures for the year 2000 census were released. For example, the Los Angeles Times’ headline on March 30, 2001, is attention-grabbing: “MILESTONES OF GROWTH AND A NEW ETHNIC ORDER: THE SOUTHLAND’S CORE BECOMES MORE ETHNICALLY AND RACIALLY MIXED, WITH LATINOS ASCENDANT CALIFORNIA GROWS TO 33.9 MILLION: NO GROUP MAKES UP A MAJORITY.” Similarly, the Santa Barbara News-Press’s headlines for the same date as above were equally focused on the census data collected in the year 2000 and released the previous day: “GOLDEN STATE SHIFTS TO MINORITY MAJORITY,” “LATINO AND NORTH COUNTY POPULATIONS BOOMING,” and “STATE’S 33.9 MILLION POPULATION NATION’S LARGEST, MOST DIVERSE.” The Santa Barbara News-Press then furnished


(Giannetti 1999, 396)


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more details regarding California’s population growth by highlighting them on the front page of the March 30, 2001, edition in bullet format: “California’s overall population grew 13.8 percent to 33.9 million people / California’s Latino population soared by 43 percent over the past decade / Nearly 1 of every 3 state residents is a member of the fast-growing ethnic group / Of the 3.7 million residents in Los Angeles, about 1.7 million, or 47 percent, identified themselves as Latino.” For Santa Barbara county, the above newspaper reports that “[a]bout 34 percent of all county residents are Latino; Latinos make up about 50 percent of people under 18.” The June 11, 2001, issue of Time magazine proclaimed on its cover in multicolored lettering (red, white, and blue, the colors of the United States’ flag plus red and green, the colors of the Mexican flag): “WELCOME TO AMEXICA.” And the subtext amplified: “The Border is vanishing before our eyes, creating a new world for all of us.” What exactly is being suggested by newspapers and weekly magazines regarding the emergence of “A Whole New World” in the twenty-first century? “A Whole New World” is the title of the lead article featured in Time magazine exploring the cultural and economic transformations taking place along the U.S.-Mexican border. The subtext hints at the answer: “Along the U.S.-Mexican border, where hearts and minds and money and culture merges, the Century of the Americas is born” (2001, 36). Both the census statistics and the series of articles published in Time magazine June 11, 2001, bearing the heading “New Frontier/La Nueva Frontera,” point to the importance of Chicanos in California society. The statistical calculations, percentages, and numbers underscore the enormous shift in cultural, economic, racial, and social transformations the state of California is experiencing in the twenty-first century. The change in the composition of the Golden State’s population has been of earthquake proportions, for, if we examine the census data taken ten years earlier, we see the explosion in Latino population that has been taking place. The 1990 census recorded the white population at 57 percent and the Latino population at 25 percent. In the 2000 census the white population had decreased to 47 percent—a substantial 10 percent decrease—while the Latino population surged to 29 percent of the total population of the state. That percentage translates into 9.831 million Latinos of which 8.5 million are Mexican American or Chicanos. Contrary to the most common perception of the Latino population explosion, most of the growth in this sector is attributed to a higher birthrate in this ethnic group than to immigration. The increasingly high numbers of the Chicano/Latino population in California imply cultural transformations of seismic proportions. These





transformations are manifested culturally (language, food, architecture, music, film, literary production, and the fine arts) as well as in the economic, social, educational, and political sectors. Chicanos have been living in California since the Spanish explorers first set foot on its golden shores and interior mountains and valleys in the eighteenth century. Aside from the cultural and economic contributions Chicanos/as make to California and the United States, they also offer a new paradigm of human interaction based on the concept of mestizaje that can be defined as the mixing of races and cultures and, more abstractly, as the breaking of boundaries and barriers such as antimiscegenation laws established in the colonial period by Spanish legal institutions. Mestizaje can be perceived not as an essentialist mode of ethnic and/or racial identity but as a form of cultural fluidity affording humans the potential for a more open way of confronting and living reality. Through this mode of being, one can see the possibilities of merging binary oppositions as well as promoting the reconciliation of opposites and the blending of margins and centers. Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana originally from Texas but living in northern California for many years, has explored the concept of mestizaje in her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza from multiple perspectives including one that views it from an epistemological angle related to what she calls “conocimiento” or “alternative ways of knowing that synthesize (i.e., blend together) reflections within to create subversive knowledge systems that challenge the status quo” (Anzaldúa 1987, 5). The new mestizo world order of the twenty-first century is one where, as Father Virgilio Elizondo declares in his autobiographical book The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, “We are moving from division to synthesis and from separation to unity. Something quite new and unsuspected is taking place. It is as exciting as it is mysterious, as painful as it is joyous” (Elizondo 2000, xiii). Father Elizondo recounts an epiphany he experienced in Paris while observing the multitude of people walking along the streets and boulevards of that great city. “It seemed,” he writes, “as if the whole world were parading in front of me. Peoples from all the nations of the world were experiencing a universal city, a place where boundaries did not exist, where differences did not mean barriers. Could this city be symbolic of the future of our planet?” (Elizondo 2000, xiii). In a similar manner, Chicanos in California can be viewed as a possible model for humanity since their multicultural and multiracial identity represents a new synthesis, a new beginning in the land where dreams become a reality. Father Elizondo further elucidates this point:


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In the southwest of the United States, the North of planet earth is meeting the South, and the result transcends old barriers by fusing North and



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(Elizondo 2000, xv)

Father Elizondo thus proposes a world where “all may be one.” This dream of the blending of cultures is becoming a reality as the new census figures demonstrate. The former Lieutenant Governor of California, Cruz Bustamenate, the first Chicano elected to a major public office since 1878, reflects on the new world order as evidenced in California: “The idea of having no majority in California is something that’s been known to Californians for more than a decade. The time has finally come for us to simply refer to ourselves as Californians” (Santa Barbara News-Press 2001, A3). Elizondo views the Chicano experience as a new model for humanity for it has the potential to be inclusive, to tear down what Harvard University religious studies scholar David Carrasco calls the “debilitating provincialism of the white/black discourse” (2000, xvii). Carrasco exerts us to say “yes” to the new mestizaje of democracy. He further comments: We are entering the Brown Millennium. By Brown Millennium I mean the type of hopeful and complex change . . . No more the color line as the only defining symbol of race and culture in this country. No more the border line as the primary defining political scar between Latin America and the United States. Latinos are speaking with voices and living lives that combine criticism and affirmation of the United States and ourselves. (Carrasco 2000, xvii)

Carrasco perceives Latinos as the “unsplit.” “We are the shades!” he exults (xvii) and views the Brown Millennium as encompassing all shades of people: Asians, Africans, Europeans, and Latin Americans (xvii–xviii). The above conceptualizations of mestizaje as a positive mode of perceiving the world can be viewed as a significant contribution Mexicans/Latinos are making to U.S. society. However, Anglo-American society in California and in the rest of the United States for that matter does not recognize the many contributions Chicanos/as have made to this country. Mestizaje in Anglo-American society has never been viewed as positive and thus the fear of the “mongrel race” or the “half-breeds,” common terms with which they have commonly characterized Mexican/Latinos in the past.


South into a new synthesis. In this portion of the earth, differences are not destroyed, hidden, or ignored, they are absorbed to become the active ingredients of a new human group. The borders no longer mark the end limits of a country, a civilization, or even a hemisphere, but the starting points of a new space populated by a new human group.



A Day without a Mexican underscores the fear Euro-Americans have of Mexicans/Latinos since this ethnic group is viewed as utterly different from white people, as George McClaire stated at the beginning of the film (see above quote). The film further focuses on the population statistics highlighting the growth of the Mexican/Latino sector and the threat this growth implies for the “disappearing” Anglo-Americans. Nevertheless, its explicit, overall message is that the Anglo hegemonic world is inextricably intertwined with Mexicans/Latinos and further highlights the importance of the latter two for the continued well-being of the state and the nation. In A Day without a Mexican temporality is linked to history, but not necessarily the history conceptualized in the term “historiography” or the collection of static events and data. Temporality in the movie is presented as an event that in fact reconstitutes reality so that reality is apprehended in a different form, in a different light. Many of the characters, including Lila Rodríguez, the main protagonist of the narrative, are living inauthentic time because they are experiencing it as a series of moments without examining their relationship to others. Particularly unexamined is the ruling society’s relationship to the Mexican American population and their human dependence on them. They are living a typically unexamined life, and it is the abrupt disappearance of this ethnic group for a twenty-four-hour time period that jolts them into a new reality and eventually catapults them into a new human understanding and interrelationship with the Other. Lila Rodríguez, too, is forced to examine the past. Her internalized colonization is exhibited in her shame of being a Mexican when she was a young girl and wanted to have a different set of parents who were not Mexican and changed her name from Lila Rodríguez to Lyla Rod. We meet Lyla (Lila) when she applies for a job as a reporter at the local Los Angeles television station. The manager inquires about her name and she answers she is Lyla Rod. Since the manager wants a “real” Mexican reporter, he wants to know what her real name is, to which she replies: Lila Rodríguez. As an adult she seems to have experienced a consciousness-raising regarding an appreciation for her Mexican background, although she recounts how when she was a child she was ashamed of her Mexican parents. She tells Aunt Gigi that she is being punished for having been ashamed of being Mexican:


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I figured it out. God is punishing me. Why am I the only one left? I used to make fun of mom and dad with my friends all the time. You know, I pretended my best friend’s parents were mine back in Junior High. You know that photo of my parents. Well, I moved a little closer to my friend’s parents so for as long that photo existed they would think I was their daughter and not my mom and dad. I miss them! . . . I deserve it, I deserve it I do! (A Day without a Mexican)


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Nevertheless, as she matures she seems to return to her roots and embraces her “Mexicanness.” Later, when she finally learns in the course of twentyfour hours, when Mexicans/Latinos have disappeared and she does not disappear, that she is not biologically a Mexican since her parents were Armenian, she experiences an epiphany: she realizes that there is no such thing as an essentialized Mexican, that Mexicans can be of European descent, of African descent, of Asian descent. To be Mexican is to be socially constructed, and as such she is a Mexican. The film depicts Aunt Gigi (her biological aunt) informing Lila that she is not a Mexican; that she is actually Armenian. Lila rejects this new identity by asserting: “I was raised Mexican. I was treated like a Mexican. My heart was born at 821 Margarita Street. That’s where I learned to share my toys with the kids around me; to pick up my own mess. Actions speak louder than words . . . You belong to the people who taught you the world. My heart, my heart is Mexican!” (A Day without a Mexican). When she realizes that culturally and at heart she is a Mexican, at 3:00 a.m. she too disappears. At the end of the twenty-four-hour time span all Mexicans reappear, but in the idealized world of the film, they appear to a more authentic world, to a world that appreciates them more as human beings, and to their rightful place in society. The director/screenwriter Sergio Arau cleverly plays with time and social issues in his film. Unfortunately, A Day without a Mexican was not well received by Anglo-American critics, as evidenced by most of the reviews that were quite acerbic and some downright racist. For example, Meghan Clyne from the National Review Online wrote: “A Day Without Misrepresentation. Not if you’re going to see A Day Without a Mexican . . . If you live in New York, Chicago, Miami, San Antonio, or Austin, be forewarned: Hypocrisy and disinformation are coming to a theater near you” (2004, 1). Achy Obejas, the Cuban American writer, had this to say: “[T]he movie in its extended version is frequently muddled, emotionally messy, a little heavy-handed and misses the real opportunity presented by the new format” (2004). Joe Guzzardi, an instructor in English at the Lodi Adult School in Southern California, wrote a review on the film that was published on the Internet on VDARE. This review was even more emphatic in its criticism, calling the movie “foolish and insulting” and adding:



A more important point about Arau’s mindless movie: he did not portray California without the many Mexicans who drain our social services and disrupt our quality of life . . . Neither did Arau include the many Mexican agitators and subversives living the high and mighty life in California while they blatantly promote Mexico’s agenda. But I’ll play along with Arau (with a twist or two of my own) by imagining a highly visible Mexican vanishing. (Guzzardi 2004, 2; emphasis original)



Nevertheless, in spite of the savage criticism A Day without a Mexican received, in analyzing the film’s text it is clear that the director Sergio Arau and the cowriters Arau, Yareli Arzmendi, and Sergio Guerrero skillfully intersected time and a social critique of the treatment of Mexican/ Latino immigrants. The use of a twenty-four-hour time period provided the director/screenwriters with a perfect forum through which a political issue could be explored. And as pointed out earlier, the incorporation of the literary technique of magical realism—which provides a suspension of disbelief and simultaneously allows for reality to be incorporated within it—allowed the political issue to be fully explored. In analyzing the use of time in A Day without a Mexican, I suggest that it becomes an important element in the structuring of the political elements the authors wished to underscore in the film. It was a clever use of temporality framing a political problem that is very much with us today in 2009. The subject matter of the film was put to a test on May 1, 2006, when immigrants both documented and undocumented mobilized nationally to demonstrate against what they perceived as unjust and unfair immigration laws. On that day a nationwide movement crystallized in the United States under the banner of “A Day without Immigrants.” Massive demonstrations took place throughout the United States and especially in large metropolitan centers such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. Organizers publicized a call via radio, newspapers, and television urging people not to purchase anything on that day and not to show up for work. It called for a boycott of school and work (Santa Barbara News-Press 2006). The film evidently raised the consciousness of immigrants, who used the theme featured in the film for their own political purposes. This call for “A Day without Immigrants” came as a result of proposed legislation by the U.S. Congress to make illegal immigrants, as they are called by the House of Representatives, felons and to tighten the U.S.-Mexican border. Equally upsetting was the proposal bandied around regarding the mass deportations of the 12–14 million undocumented workers in the United States (newspapers are citing 12 million plus undocumented immigrants; Santa Barbara News-Press 2006). In spite of the critical reviews the film received, it has had a tremendous impact with respect to incorporating transnational political issues from the screen to the streets two years later. The twentyfour-hour span resonated with immigrants in the United States as well as did the concept of demonstrating their importance to the U.S. economy.


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References Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Company.


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Arau, Sergio, dir. 2004. A Day without a Mexican. http://www.esma.com/ adaywithoutamexican/cuerpo.htm Carrasco, Davíd. 2000. Introduction. The Future Is Mestizo: We Are the Shades. In The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet. Virgilio Elizondo, xvii–xviii. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Clyne, Meghan. 2004. A Day without Misrepresentation. National Review Online. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/clyne200409170630.asp. Elizondo, Virgilio. 2000. The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Giannetti, Louis. 1999. Understanding Movies. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Guzzardi, Joe. 2004. A Day without Mexican Consul General Rubén Beltrán. VDARE. http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/beltran.htm. Herrera-Sobek, María. 1993. Northward Bound: Mexican Immigration in Ballad and Song. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Los Angeles Times. March 30, 2001. Maciel, David R., and María Rosa García-Acevedo. 1998. The Celluloid Immigrant: The Narrative Films of Mexican Immigration. In Culture Across Borders: Mexican Immigration and Popular Culture, ed. David R. Maciel and María Herrera-Sobek, 149–202. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Obejas, Achy. 2004. Movie review: A Day without A Mexican. http://chicago. metromix.com/movies/review/movie-review-a-day/159010/content. Santa Barbara News-Press. March 30, 2001. Santa Barbara News-Press. April 30, 2006. Time magazine. 2001. New Frontera/La Nueva Frontera: A Whole New World. June 11. 36–79.







Imagining Transnational Chicano/a Activism against Gender-Based Violence at the U.S.-Mexican Border Claudia Sadowski-Smith

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ince 1993, hundreds of women have been killed or have disappeared from Mexico’s largest northern border city, Ciudad Juárez.1 When bodies are found, they often show signs of prolonged and savage torture, (gang) rape, and mutilation. Many of the victims are young, recent arrivals from other parts of Mexico, and poor. About 20 percent worked in Ciudad Juárez’s maquiladoras or assembly factories, where young women from low-income families are most likely to find employment.2 Others are students, dancers, homemakers, store employees, and prostitutes. The few, seemingly haphazard convictions that have been handed down since 1999 have not stopped the violence. Instead, the murders have spread to Chihuahua City, the capital of the state. Bodies are also now found in more dispersed sites, and greater efforts are made to conceal them. While the femicide was initially taken to be a Mexican problem, U.S. journalists and academicians soon began to link the murders to the United States’ economic involvement in drastic transformations of the Mexican border region. Filmmakers, journalists, and writers/activists like Charles Bowden, Ursula Biemann, and Debbie Nathan highlighted connections between the U.S.-led industrialization of Mexican border towns like Ciudad Juárez and the large-scale murders and disappearances of women. These writers pointed out that, since the passage of the twin maquila program in 1965 and its intensification in the 1994 North American Free


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Trade Agreement (NAFTA), foreign businesses and investors have constructed large numbers of assembly factories along the U.S.-Mexican border. Even though many maquilas have been closed or have moved to other parts of the world following the recession in the United States, Ciudad Juárez continues to boast the largest number of maquilas in Mexico. While the creation of a border economy based on for-export assembly production has attracted migrants from central Mexico, the majority of workers hired in the maquilas continue to be women. Many of them are in their early twenties or younger, and some are below the legal working age of sixteen.3 The women’s newfound economic independence and, often, their ascendancy to positions of breadwinners of entire families have led to significant transformations in gender roles. Resentment of these changes has spurred violence, which is often directed against women maquila workers. The focus on the United States’ involvement in the creation of conditions enabling femicide soon came under fire for its failure to also examine the role of the Mexican nation-state. U.S.-based Chicano/a cultural workers, activists, and academics were at the forefront of this critique. Rosa Linda Fregoso, for example, has extensively criticized the “globalization narrative [that] fails to recognize multiple structures of oppression in the lives of women and provides insular explanation for killings,” thus “absolv[ing] the state of its complicity with feminicide” (2000, 142–143). As Fregoso asked, if the growth of export-processing companies in Ciudad Juárez were the only reason for the femicide, why are there “no similar reports of mass murder of women in other parts of globe with similar export-processing zones” (142)? Fregoso’s criticism manifests ongoing changes in Chicano/a scholarship from a focus on Mexican-descended people in the United States to a transnational lens that also includes developments in Mexico.4 Lourdes Portillo’s 2001 documentary Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Women) exemplifies an important milestone in this transnationalization of Chicano/a work, which adds developments outside the United States to an emphasis on the diasporic nature of Chicano/as and Latino/as in the United States. Self-identified as a Chicana, Mexico-born Portillo highlights the role of Mexican governmental institutions, especially the police and the juridical system, in covering up or even perpetuating femicide in Ciudad Juárez.5 Señorita Extraviada showcases the voices of surviving rape victims, victims’ families, and activists, who challenge official explanations of the murders. As the film shows, the Mexican judicial police and a Special Prosecutor’s office asserted that the crimes were solved as early as 1995 with the arrest of an Egyptian-born chemical engineer who worked for a U.S. maquiladora, named Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif.6 The case against Sharif was weak from the beginning, and the killings continued. When a gang of drug dealers,


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called “Los Rebeldes” (the Rebels), and a group of maquila bus drivers, nicknamed “Las Toltecas,” were arrested for more killings in 1996 and 1999, respectively, Sharif was characterized as the mastermind behind their actions. He had supposedly paid the gangs to commit further murders so he would appear innocent.7 In both cases, the arrested men soon recanted their confessions, claiming they were extorted under torture. As Portillo’s voiceover states at one point in the film, “[T]he facts of the cases are whimsically constructed . . . I find myself mistrusting everything I am told. The only reliable sources come from the victims and their families.” While these interviewees point to the role of governmental institutions in the femicide, some also allege the less-often discussed possible involvement of drug traffickers and maquila employees.8 Because so many actors are potentially in play, the crimes are difficult to solve. Portillo states toward the end of film, “The question remains who are the killers, the Egyptian, the bus drivers, drug traffickers, the police, or all of them?”9 Portillo’s emphasis on the Mexican dimensions of the murders has become the catalyst for a surge in representations of the femicide by Chicano/a artists. Among these cultural productions are fictionalized accounts of gender violence that address U.S. and especially Latino/a audiences in the United States.10 This essay examines how three such recent Chicano/a representations of the murders—Gregory Nava’s film Bordertown (2006), Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005), and Stella Pope Duarte’s If I Die in Juárez (2008)—explore gender violence at the U.S.-Mexican border from a transnational Chicano/a point of view that extends 1960s’ Chicano/a struggles for multicultural recognition in the United States to events in Mexico. This perspective creates two versions of transnationalism. First, the three representations participate in the growing acknowledgement of the transnational nature of the crimes and their perpetrators. By emphasizing the crossborder connections that create the conditions for femicide, the two novels and the film combine Portillo’s emphasis on the Mexican dimensions of the murders with the earlier focus of U.S. and European representations on the U.S. involvement in transformations along the border. The film and the two novels thus indict, much more explicitly than Portillo’s documentary, the involvement of Mexican elites in the femicide, elites who are becoming increasingly transnationalized through their growing ties to U.S. corporate and political interests.11 Second, the three representations similarly articulate explicitly transnational Chicano/a forms of solidarity to highlight the political implications of the femicide for Latino/as in the United States and also imagine ways to protest the violence. Bordertown, Desert Blood, and If I Die in Juárez set out to raise awareness of the atrocities among U.S. Chicano/as and move them to action. The three representations thus participate in ongoing efforts to


IMAGINING TRANSNATIONAL CHICANO/A ACTIVISM



articulate a transnational Chicano/a cultural and political imaginary. Just as feelings of belonging to a nation-state had to be created in the nineteenth century through representations in newspaper coverage as Benedict Anderson famously argued, such a Chicano/a transnationalism needs to be forged through representations, including fiction. In Bordertown, Desert Blood, and If I Die in Juárez, attempts to forge explicitly activist notions of transnationalism are central. Yet the three representations imagine the grounds for such Chicano/a solidarity with victims of the femicide very differently by articulation of what I term “identificational” and “pluralist” forms of activism. Bordertown and Desert Blood highlight pan-ethnic similarities among Mexican and Mexican American women as potential victims of femicide in Juárez. They emphasize ethnic similarities among Mexican and Mexican American women that put them in the position of potential victims of the Juárez femicide. In both cultural productions, manifestations of violence against women are recounted through the perspective of a middle-class Chicana protagonist in Mexico whose identification with the murder victims leads her to individual forms of activism. This type of identificational transnationalism relies on what Angie Chabram-Dernersesian has, in a different context, called “seemingly transparent lines of panethnicity” (2003, 106) that expand the 1960s’ Chicano cultural nationalist emphasis on shared ethnic similarities among Mexican Americans (including Mexican immigrants in the United States) to a transnational plane. This extension of theories of ethnic identity in the United States to transnational forms of identificational politics, however, minimizes immense differences among the fictionalized Chicano/a protagonists and the victims of femicide in terms of their differential positions within an uneven global economy. In contrast to such identificational forms of activisms, If I Die in Juárez articulates similarities among Mexican women of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds as the basis for collective forms of activism that are then also open to participation by U.S. organizations and individuals. Duarte’s novel thus offers a “pluralist” corrective to identificational forms of transnationalism that merely expand the emphasis on shared ethnicity globally, but fail to acknowledge the privileges of Chicano/as as First-World residents vis-à-vis citizens of Mexico and thus also ignore the uneven character of ongoing processes of globalization.


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1. Maquiladora Drivers and Mexican Elites in Gregory Nava’s Bordertown Chicano filmmaker Gregory Nava’s Bordertown portrays the Juárez femicide through the perspective of a fictional Mexican American journalist who 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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gradually comes to identify with the femicide victims on the basis of shared pan-ethnicity and gender. Born in Los Angeles of Mexican and Basque parents, Nava is well-known for his portrayal of Latin American immigration and Latino/a culture in such films as his 1985 Oscar-nominated El Norte, the generational drama My Family (1995), and Selena (1997), a film tracing the story of Texas-born Tejana singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez. Bordertown constitutes a deliberate return to El Norte, as both films’ screenplays were created from interviews—one with immigrants and the other with femicide victims’ families and activists. For the role of Bordertown’s protagonist, Nava approached Jennifer Lopez, who had also starred in his earlier films My Family and Selena. Despite what Nava has described as widespread interest in the movie among Latino/as (Gerson), Bordertown did not find a distributor in the United States. It was first screened at the Berlin International Festival in 2007, released only in European theaters, and then went directly to DVD.12 When the film was eventually shown in select Mexican theaters in May 2008, members of Ciudad Juárez’s activist organization Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home) received death threats warning them not to attend the screenings. Journalists were also cautioned against promoting the film. These threats occurred in a broader context of violent attacks and legal pressure against social activists of all stripes as well as intensified narco-violence in the state of Chihuahua (Anon. 2008). In an interview with Nava before the screening, Ciudad Juárez’s El Diario newspaper accused him of exaggerating the murders and profiting from the suffering of the victims and their families. This statement draws on opinions summarized in a 2006 report by the Procurador General de la República (Mexican Federal Attorney General’s Office), which asserts that the numbers of femicide victims are vastly exaggerated, that the majority of the deaths have been domestic violence cases, and that most of the slayings have been solved (Washington Valdez 2006, 4). In response to such accusations, Nava blamed Mexican authorities, free trade, and U.S. companies for creating an environment in which women’s lives have no value (Anon. 2008). Nava develops his criticism of the Mexican government and its involvement in free trade throughout Bordertown. The film’s opening titles place the femicide in the context of U.S. investment in maquilas. Perhaps because it wants to be taken seriously as a film “inspired by actual events,” as it insists in its opening, Bordertown fictionalizes a case in which maquila bus drivers were convicted. To this emphasis on bus drivers, the film then adds more speculative theories about possible connections between the choferes (drivers) and transnational Mexican elites who have ties to U.S. corporate and political interests.





In the opening scenes of Bordertown, a maquila bus takes a young factory worker, Eva Jiménez (played by Maya Zapata), on a detour to the desert, where the woman is raped, beaten, and strangled by the driver and a second man. Hers is the fictionalized story of a fourteen-year-old worker in a U.S.-owned maquila, who, in 1999, was raped, strangled, and left for dead in the Lote Bravo portion of the desert, where many victims have been found. She miraculously recovered and named a maquila bus driver who had picked her up from work in the early morning hours. When Jesus Manuel Guardado Márquez, nicknamed “El Tolteca” or “El Dracula,” was apprehended, he claimed he had consensual sex with the victim and blamed a group of fellow bus drivers for her attempted murder. The group was initially charged with the murders of six women, but the indictment was later expanded to a total of 190 slayings. Even though the suspects claimed to have been tortured and coerced into confessions, judges refused to investigate their allegations. After six years in prison, Guardado was sentenced to 113 years in January 2005, while four other members of the gang received verdicts of 40 years. One was found not guilty and released. In Bordertown, the fictionalized version of these events, the victim’s fate becomes inextricably linked to that of a Chicana reporter, Lauren Adrian, who arrives in Ciudad Juárez to investigate the unsolved crimes. Besides its overall questionable aesthetics, reviews of Bordertown have identified the focus on Lauren as the film’s greatest weakness.13 As one critic wrote, for example, Bordertown “is more interested in the banal inner life of its protagonist than in the working and living conditions of the women in the factories” (Funke 2007). While this assessment highlights Nava’s choice to emphasize the perspective of a Chicana protagonist on the femicide, it overlooks her role in exemplifying new notions of transnational solidarity among Chicano/as and rape victims in Mexico on the basis of ethnic identification. Such a perspective expands on Nava’s first film El Norte, which draws attention to Latin American immigration in order to articulate notions of political unity among Latino/as in the United States, those who have been here for generations and those who are newcomers in the country. Bordertown aims to extend this focus on Latin American immigrants and Latinos in the United States to also include developments in Mexico. Lauren’s investigation into the Juárez murders, particularly her attempt to find the two men involved in Eva’s rape, evokes “half-remembered memories” of her parents, Mexican farm workers in the United States, whose untimely deaths caused her to be adopted by an Anglo family. The film juxtaposes depictions of Eva’s rape with Lauren’s flashbacks to discovering her mother’s body and to observing her father’s accidental shooting death at the hands of a coworker who aimed at a pesticide-carrying helicopter. The conditions under which her father was killed allude to the


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1960s’ grassroots organizing of César Chávez’s United Farm Workers in response to the threat of pesticide poisoning. These activist struggles also put in place an emphasis on a shared Chicano/a identity as the basis for a political unity that become the basis for cultural nationalist versions of Chicanismo. Depicted as a career journalist, someone who had denied her Mexican background “all her life” and who is more interested in covering the war in Iraq than the femicide in Mexico, Lauren begins to acknowledge her Mexican American identity in the course of her investigation into the murders. This newfound identity then serves as the basis for her identification with femicide victims, which becomes complete toward the end of the film. At this point, Lauren impersonates a maquila worker in order to find Eva’s second rapist, the son of an elite family with connections to the maquila industry. Scenes of Lauren’s attack by the same bus driver are overlaid with representations of Eva’s earlier rape; Lauren here symbolically becomes a femicide victim. As Lauren says after the attack on her, “everything was as Eva told it. I felt like I was living her story.” Even though the second rapist never materializes at the scene of Lauren’s attack and the link between the bus driver and maquila owners thus remains elusive, the story Lauren submits to her editor in the United States insists on the role of Mexican elites and U.S. corporations in creating the conditions for the femicide. The article claims that “covering up [the murders] is less expensive than protecting the women” as “everything is about the bottom line.” In her exchange with her editor, Lauren explains her new identificational politics saying that “I could be one of the women in the factories. It could have been me in one of these graves.” But when her newspaper refuses to print her article, Lauren discovers that Mexican elites are not only protected by the Mexican government but also by U.S. corporate and political institutions. Interested in expanding NAFTA to South America, a U.S. senator with ties to Mexican maquilas had pressured the owners of Lauren’s newspaper into shelving her article to avoid bad press for free trade. Lauren’s newfound view of herself as a potential femicide victim eventually spurs her into personal forms of activism. The film ends with her leaving her job at the Chicago paper and taking over a progressive newspaper in Ciudad Juárez to pursue the kind of investigative reporting that would help to “tell the truth about Juárez.” This conclusion remains unconvincing, largely because the film refuses to problematize Lauren’s identification with the Juárez femicide victims, which is based solely on her ethnicity and gender. While the film articulates a poignant critique of the stark inequities that mark Mexican society—juxtaposing lavish houses and opulent parties with red light districts and the colonies where maquila workers like Eva live as well as





contrasting European-identified and indigenous Mexicans—it minimizes the immense economic, cultural, and linguistic differences between the Chicana reporter and the victims of femicide. Partially because of structural inequities between the two women, Lauren proves incapable of emphasizing Eva’s description of the circumstances that have displaced her from the state of Oaxaca to a city where her status as a poor indigenous woman, a newcomer, and a maquila worker makes her the target of sexual predators. Instead, Lauren condescendingly explains that the difference between her work as a journalist and Eva’s job at a maquila is that she has a “career.” Here the film glosses over Lauren’s immense economic and cultural privileges as a U.S. citizen (and also as the adopted child of most likely well-to-do Anglo parents) that have allowed her to choose a path unavailable to Eva and that would have largely sheltered her from the status of a femicide victim. Even though Bordertown presents a view of femicide that urges U.S. Latino/as to become involved in transnational activism, the film ends up reiterating the well-worn plot line of a hard-bitten First-World journalist finding spiritual redemption and self-awareness by exposure to, and empathy with, suffering in Third-World nations. Because the diasporic Chicano/a perspective developed in Bordertown cannot account for differences among women on both sides of the border and the FirstWorld privilege of Chicano/as, it is limited in its political efficacy. 2. Desert Blood: Mexican Elites and the U.S. Aspects of the Juárez Femicide Like Bordertown, Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood develops a transnational perspective on the Juárez femicide that highlights the involvement of Mexican elites, many of whom are connected to the maquila industry, and their ties to other transnational actors in the United States. Like Nava’s film, Desert Blood is a fictionalized account by a Chicano/a artist that recounts the murders through the point of view of a Chicano/a protagonist. Unlike Bordertown, which insists that it is based on actual events, however, Desert Blood begins with a “disclaimer” section emphasizing that the novel is a fictionalized account of the murders. The author writes that Desert Blood takes liberties with chronologies, events, and characters, adding metaphorical details to emphasize its theory of the identity of femicide perpetrators. Like Bordertown, Desert Blood fictionalizes events of the mid- and late 1990s and begins with a stark description of a sexualized killing. Already in the next chapter, however, the novel switches to the point of view of the Chicana protagonist, 31-year-old Ivon Villa, a visiting professor at a Los Angeles college and a former resident of El Paso. Many of this character’s features are modeled after Gaspar de Alba, who is originally from El Paso and now


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works as professor of English and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. When she arrives to adopt a child in Ciudad Juárez, Ivon becomes accidentally involved in an investigation into the femicide. Before Ivon can see the pregnant mother of her adoptive child, who is a maquila worker, she and her unborn baby are found murdered. To this account of murdered Mexican maquila workers, Desert Blood adds an emphasis on the U.S. aspects of femicide: the existence of U.S. victims and the possible involvement of U.S.-based sexual offenders and U.S. enforcement agencies in the killings. Like the unnamed victim with whom the novel begins, Ivon’s sixteen-year-old sister Irene, who lives in El Paso, disappears during a visit to the Juárez fair. The novel tells us that Irene thus joins a small number of U.S. women of Mexican descent from El Paso and Las Cruces, New Mexico, who disappeared or were killed in Ciudad Juárez and have profiles similar to many of the Mexican victims in terms of their appearance and age.14 In the course of her search for her sister, Ivon discovers an elaborate network of killers. Drawing on the work of journalist Diana Washington Valdez, whom Gaspar de Alba thanks in her acknowledgement section, the novel fictionalizes a woman-killing cartel made up of sons of influential families with ties to the maquiladora industry. They shoot “snuff films” that chronicle the prolonged torture, gang rape, disfiguration, and killing of young women by thugs who are connected to the jailed “el Diablo” and act on behalf of Egyptian chemist Amen Hakim Hassan. This is a fictionalized reference to the alleged connections between the convicted Egyptian scientist Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif and Sergio Armendáriz Díaz, nicknamed “el Diablo,” the leader of Los Rebeldes. Mexican police claimed that Armendáriz and his gang ritually killed at least seventeen women for Sharif. Several of the victims had bite marks all over their bodies, some matching Armendáriz’s dental plates. In 2005, six members of the “Rebeldes,” including Armendáriz, were convicted and sentenced to between twenty-four and forty years for six murders. The snuff films produced by Desert Blood’s fictionalized “juniors” are streamed live over the Internet on a site bearing the name of Richard Ramirez, a real-life convicted serial killer from El Paso. By linking the femicide to the desire for economic gain from snuff films, the novel reiterates one of the vaguer references in Portillo’s documentary, which other scholars of the Juárez femicide have, however, chalked up to the level of urban myth (Nathan 2002). In addition to the juniors and the “Rebeldes,” Desert Blood also fictionalizes the possible involvement of U.S. enforcement agencies, such as the Border Patrol. The chief detention enforcement officer of El Paso is shown to participate in the abduction of women from maquiladoras and public places in Juárez, and he also provides captured





undocumented women immigrants whom he is supposed to repatriate to Mexico. Desert Blood also adds another transnational explanation of the femicide, speculating that the murders may be an attempt to control women’s reproductive function in both Mexico and the United States. The novel asserts that maquilas ultimately profit from the serial killers’ way of “disposing . . . non-productive/reproductive surplus labor.” The novel further elaborates on this connection by describing maquila workers as “[u]nderpaid, sexually exploited, forced to live in hovels made of maquiladora scrap in the middle of the desert, their reproductive cycles under surveillance at the factories where they worked” (Gaspar de Alba 2005, 331). And because some of the women could potentially become U.S. immigrants, Desert Blood speculates that U.S. institutions may also benefit from the killings as they prevent the “infiltration by brown breeding female bodies” (333). The novel’s emphasis on similarities among Chicano/as and Mexican women as potential victims of femicide, however, translates only into limited calls for transnational activism. In contrast to Bordertown, which advocates the main character’s relocation to Mexico to conduct investigative journalism, Desert Blood’s Chicano/a protagonist abandons similar inquiries so that she can resume her academic job in California. Irene’s abduction, gang rape, and near death in an El Paso location are never solved because some of the perpetrators are killed in a shootout with U.S. police, and others simply disappear. In official U.S. accounts of the events, the two Border Patrol agents involved with the women-killing cartel are portrayed as undercover agents, and the Mexican “juniors” are never mentioned. Ivon nevertheless decides to abandon her investigation into her sister’s abduction, which already led her to possible links between the cartel and the disproportionably high number of sex offenders in El Paso.15 Instead, Ivon decides to turn her experiences into a chapter of her dissertation, which provides her with a “chance to do something” (Gaspar de Alba 2005, 98) and to secure her financial future on a tenure-track academic position. As Gaspar de Alba writes, “Ivon knew she could not allow herself to become obsessed with solving the Juárez murders. She had responsibilities and obligations of her own. Irene was safe, and Ivon had to switch gears now and focus on the dissertation” (Gaspar de Alba 2005, 328). Perhaps the protagonist’s retreat to a secure financial future, which includes pursuing a tenure-track job, buying a house, and adopting a child from Mexico, merely represents a convenient plot device, designed to highlight the unresolved nature of most of the murders. But the novel never critically comments on Ivon’s decision or on her consent to the kinds of adoption practices that involve paying Mexican mothers a few thousand dollars, bribing a nurse to forge birth certificates to get children across the


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border, and, if necessary, paying a mordida to the Mexican police. Ivon’s attempt to procure a baby from a young maquila worker, who is described as unable to care for her unborn child, is characterized as a way to help “those poor women in Juárez” (Gaspar de Alba 2005, 64). And after the mother and unborn baby are discovered dead, Ivon readily turns to the three-year old son of a would-be maquila worker with terminal cancer, who conceived the child as a result of experiments conducted by Egyptian scientist Hassan. Loosely based on Sharif, Hassan experiments with contraceptives and insemination, first on prostitutes and then on some maquila applicants. Even though the child has a (admittedly less than perfect) grandmother, the novel insists that only his adoption by Ivon will save him from becoming one of the city’s “child prostitutes, drug runners, or beggars” (Gaspar de Alba 2005, 82). This fictional treatment participates in what Laura Briggs has identified as the sentimental narrative of transnational adoption. The portrayal of adoption as a “child rescue mission,” she argues, enables U.S. American parents to see themselves engaged in a humanitarian endeavor, while the birth parents are usually portrayed as “(at best) happily sending their children off to a land where they will have more material benefits” (Briggs 2006, 7). As it perpetuates this view of adoption, Desert Blood fails to address the unequal power relations among poor Mexican and wellto-do Mexican American women like Ivon that enable the exchange of children for money—their commodification—in the first place. After all, the adoption is enabled by the same conditions of inequity that also create the profits for transnational elites involved in maquila industries. The parallelism between free trade and transnational adoption is also visible in narratives about adoption that circulate in Latin American countries. Here transnational adoption is, like free trade, often seen as an extension of U.S. economic and military power, and it is frequently contextualized in relation to child kidnapping, prostitution, murder, and organ-theft—in short, adoption is associated with some of the same ideas about global inequity that have been linked to the Juárez femicide. While Desert Blood supports the development of a diasporic Chicano/a activism based on viewing Mexican women on both sides of the border as (potential) victims of femicide, the novel fails to acknowledge the privileges Chicano/as hold vis-à-vis Mexican women, especially those who are poor, as well as Chicana women’s participation in U.S. politics of domination, as U.S. citizens, in Latin America. Perhaps this oversight explains the protagonist’s inability to imagine activism other than academic scholarship. That it is not sufficient, even for the author, becomes manifest in the novel’s acknowledgement section, where Gaspar de Alba encourages the audience “to join the friends and families of the dead and the disappeared




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women of Juárez. Only in solidarity can we help bring an end to this pandemic of femicides on the border” (Gaspar de Alba 2005, 348).

Of the three cultural productions examined in this article, Stella Pope Duarte’s novel If I Die in Juárez (2008) is the only one that refuses to filter the Juárez killings through the lens of a Chicano/a protagonist or to open with a sensationalized description of a serialized killing. Duarte is of Mexican descent and a native of Phoenix, Arizona. Unlike Bordertown and Desert Blood, which focus on maquila workers, her novel highlights the diversity of Mexican femicide victims and the general similarities in their economic status. The novel is attentive to the broad spectrum of killings associated with the term “femicide.” Not all of the murdered women in the novel are victims of serialized killings; some fall prey to domestic violence or revenge killings. Thus, one of the novel’s minor characters resigns herself to the fact that she would “join hundreds of other women who had been slain by their husbands and thrown into the desert to rot” (Duarte 2008, 170). If I Die in Juárez portrays ethnically and culturally diverse poor Mexican women in Ciudad Juárez, whose limited options expose them to similar forms of sexual violence and (near) death. The novel focuses on three women whose lives become increasingly interconnected during the early years of the femicide. Twelve-year-old Tarahumara Indian Mayela Sabina and eighteen-year-old Petra de la Rosa, a mestiza of Tarahumara background, leave their villages in the state of Montenegro after NAFTA has transformed farming there into an unsustainable economy. Upon their arrival in Juárez, the women take very different paths, yet they still become subject to similar forms of sexual abuse. After suffering harassment from a relative’s boyfriend, Mayela is abandoned in an orphanage, where she is sexually assaulted by its caretaker. Petra is exposed to constant sexual harassment from supervisors at the maquiladora where she works. And a third girl, 14-year-old Evita Reynosa, who grew up in one of Ciudad Juárez’s colonies, is regularly beaten by her mother and sexually threatened or abused by a neighbor, her mother’s boyfriend, and policemen. When Evita gets involved with the prostitution and drug trade of one of Ciudad Juárez’s many red light districts, she narrowly escapes becoming a victim of the women-killing cartel fictionalized in the novel. Unlike Desert Blood, which highlights perverted “juniors” and their possible economic gain from snuff films, or Bordertown, which points to connections among maquila drivers and “juniors,” Duarte’s novel highlights


3. If I Die in Juárez: Narco Trafficking and Mexican Women’s Activism


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the relationship of Mexican elites to drug trafficking. The leader of the fictionalized women-killing cartel, Agustín Miramontes Cortés Guzman, is a “junior” who owns a maquiladora and is connected to “drugs, prostitution, corruption” (Duarte 2008, 261). Miramontes procures his victims with the help of people working in the red light zone and in maquiladoras. Evita and other prostitutes are invited to a private party at his opulent villa in one of Juárez’s richest neighborhoods. Here Evita is gang-raped, beaten, drugged to the point of a near overdose, and left to die. Similarly, a maquiladora supervisor “selects” Petra for the Miramontes gang; he promises her a job when he first meets her in Montenegro, quickly moves her up in the hierarchy of the plant, based mainly on her “good looks,” and then introduces her to Miramontes, the new owner of the maquila.16 After abducting her from her job, Miramontes and other men, including his U.S. business partners, torture, rape, mutilate, and electrocute Petra for weeks. Like Desert Blood, Duarte’s novel speculates that one motive behind the femicide is the attempt to control women’s reproductive abilities. Miramontes uses electrical currents to destroy his victims’ wombs, “where he said were conceived the most despicable forms of life, clots of blood that must be destroyed” (Duarte 2008, 307). When his victims are near death, Miramontes hands them over to his driver and the fictionalized leader of Los Rebeldes, who continue raping, torturing, and mutilating the women and eventually dispose of their bodies in remote areas of the desert. To oppose the killings, the novel focuses on women’s friendships and collective forms of activism. Evita and Mayela piece together who has abducted Petra, and are able to save her from being killed. Yet, after Petra is found, the police fabricate a story about her “double life” as a prostitute, and the murders continue. This is no surprise because the police not only protects Miramontes’s cartel, but individual policemen also participate in the cartel’s atrocities, such as Evita’s rape at Miramontes’s private party. Unlike Bordertown, which emphasizes the femicide primarily as a vehicle for the internal transformation of a Chicano/a journalist, Duarte’s novel ends, like Portillo’s documentary and Desert Blood’s acknowledgement, with a focus on the collective activism of femicide victims and their relatives. This activism is recounted by a female Mexican journalist, who only appears in the novel’s epilogue. During her investigation into Petra’s disappearance, the reporter suffered a fate similar to that of the victims; she was abducted, beaten, and threatened by the Rebeldes leader and Miramontes’s chofer. In the epilogue, the journalist recounts that ten years after Petra’s abduction, she created an activist organization, Mujeres Unidas de Juárez. This organization also invites transnational forms of activism as it brings together “groups of women from both sides of the border into an alliance of courageous followers who took to the streets of Juárez determined to




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4. The Political Efficacy of Imagined Diasporic Transnationalisms Produced by Chicano/a artists, Bordertown, Desert Blood, and If I Die in Juárez articulate highly sophisticated theories of globalized conditions at the northern Mexican border as a transnationalized space. The three representations highlight the transnational dimensions of the Juárez femicide, particularly the involvement of Mexican elites who are connected to U.S. corporate and political interests. As they fictionalize differently configured transnational networks of perpetrators, the film and the two novels similarly suggest that the murders are deeply imbricated in the cultural, social, and economic conditions of Juárez, which have been produced in the interactions among increasingly transnationalized actors—governmental institutions, corporations, and drug cartels. The continuation of the femicide demonstrates the widespread acceptance of violence, particularly against poor women, by Mexican and U.S. governmental institutions as well as transnational elites and businesses. These actors have jointly transformed Ciudad Juárez into a transnationalized space in which serial murders of women go largely unpunished. It is ironic that the labor of many of the female victims has produced the wealth that has come with maquila industrialization, wealth that has been distributed unevenly throughout Mexican society and throughout the world. As Alicia Schmidt Camancho writes, the “acceptance of the femicide demonstrates the inability to imagine a female life free of violence in a globalized society created largely by women workers” (2005, 267). While the three representations similarly highlight the transnational dimensions of gender violence by fictionalizing crossborder networks of murderers, they articulate divergent forms of activism to oppose the atrocities. Bordertown and Desert Blood emphasize the potential victim status of Mexican and Mexican American women on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border as the basis for diasporic forms of solidarity. The fact that, because of similar appearance, U.S. Latino/as may be mistaken for the Mexican women who tend to be the subject of femicide—young, poor arrivals from other parts of Mexico or prostitutes—enables the articulation of theories of crossborder solidarity. As Gaspar de Alba poignantly writes, U.S. American women of Mexican descent who are mistaken for “thin, dark-skinned, dark-haired young Mexican [women]” become victims of


help in any way they could to end the murders” (Duarte 2008, 326).17 In its emphasis on collective activism by Mexican women and their invitation to U.S. allies, Duarte’s novel thus differs significantly from the forms of identificational solidarity imagined in Bordertown and Desert Blood.


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femicide alongside “muchachas del sur, girls from the south: poor, young migrant women” (2005, 255). However, this identificational panethnic transnationalism fails to address the immense differences between the fictionalized middle-class Chicanas through whose perspectives the slayings are told and the poor Mexican women who have predominantly been the victims of the killings. Their differences are rooted in deep inequities between the United States and Mexico that have increased in the context of a globalizing economy, and in the stark economic differences within Mexico that have left so many women and their families impoverished, allowing only a minute elite to prosper. In contrast, Duarte’s novel focuses on similarities among mostly poor Mexican women of different geographical, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. Their organizing into collective forms of activism also takes on transnational shapes as it invites the participation of U.S. groups. Duarte’s attempt to understand the deep roots of femicide in a globalizing Mexican society highlights what has, to date, been the most effective form of activism—the creation of activist organizations by victims and their families. Some of their achievements have included changes in the police and juridical system, such as the institution of a Special Prosecutor’s Office, the modernization of police techniques, and the implementation of new procedures for the identification of victims. But despite these changes, most of the murders have not been resolved. The coverage that the activist organizations have received in the kind of investigative news reporting and academic scholarship fictionalized in Bordertown and Desert Blood has very much helped their cause. But the notion of identificational forms of activism developed in Nava’s and Gaspar de Alba’s work may not be the most effective basis for investigative media and academic reporting. Perhaps these three divergent attempts to establish a transnational Latino/a perspective on the serial killings in Mexico spell the end of identificational forms of politics that have attempted to simply extend the emphasis on ethnic identity from 1960s’ civil rights struggles to the transnational plane, while failing to explore the privileges of First-World citizenship vis-à-vis Third-World denizens. As Pheng Cheah has recently asked in a different context, “[I]n an uneven world how can struggles for multicultural recognition in constitutionaldemocratic states in the North be brought into a global alliance with postcolonial activism in the periphery?” (2006, 42). Just as feminist work has had to recognize the limits of identificational approaches by addressing various ethnic, racial, and economic differences among women in the so-called First and Third Worlds, a transnational activism to counter the Juárez femicide may need to reach the level of activism described by Bina Agarwal. An Indian economist, she has described effective transnational




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Notes 1. Figures for the casualties of femicide vary greatly—between 200 and over 400—and so do definitions of victims (Ensalaco 2006, 419; Washington Valdez 2006, 63; Acosta 2005). In 2002, Debbie Nathan argued that only about 80 victims fit the scenario of young women who vanish without a trace and are later found in the desert. Higher numbers also include “the married women, the cohabiting women, the women with lots of kids, the middle-aged women, the old women, the exotic dancers—and yes, even the prostitutes—whose bodies have also been strewn across Juárez by their lovers, husbands and kin.” This view is in line with a 2003 Amnesty International report stating that motivations for the killings have varied from domestic violence, drug-related executions, gang shootings, and sexual assaults, but that a number of the killings has followed a pattern in which young women disappeared and were later found raped and murdered (Rodriguez 2007, 249). 2. For statistics on maquiladora workers among the murdered women, see Monárrez Fragoso 2003; Volk and Schlotterbeck 2007. 3. In 1999, routine state inspections of 500 businesses in Ciudad Juárez uncovered more than 550 workers below legal age. Maquila workers as young as twelve were found raped and murdered (Rodriguez 2007, 143, 133). 4. The shift to a transnational lens has occurred relatively recently. As BruceNovoa (1990) has shown, for example, in Chicano/a cultural productions throughout the 1980s, Mexico only figured metaphorically as a source of nostalgia for a lost paradise for Chicano/as or of disillusioned encounters between Chicano/a or Mexican American protagonists. Mexican theorists, such as María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba (1995), have also critiqued the tendency to employ Mexico merely as a metaphor for U.S.-specific preoccupations and theories. Alberto Ledesma (2002) draws attention to the still missing diasporic lens on similarities among Mexican undocumented immigrants and Chicano/as. 5. Now in her fifties, Portillo moved with her family from Mexico to Los Angeles when she was thirteen years old. 6. After his release in 1996, Sharif was rearrested under new charges for the murder of a seventeen-year-old computer school student and maquila worker, which led to his conviction in 1999. 7. Since the completion of Portillo’s documentary, the inconsistencies in the case against Sharif won him a reduction of his sentence to twenty years in 2003. But in 2006, Sharif died in maximum security jail at the age of fifty-nine. After serving eleven years of his prison term, he could have been on the verge of


work across global inequities this way: “[A]mong the women’s groups there is growing recognition of the importance of forging strategic links [among Northern and Southern women]. One could say ‘romantic sisterhood’ is giving way to ‘strategic sisterhood’ for confronting the global crisis of economy and polity” (qtd. in Ong 2006, 31).


8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

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winning his freedom; a judge was about to rule on Sharif ’s case within a week or two of his death. While activists and academicians long dismissed the role of the drug trade in the slayings, Diana Washington Valdez believes that it is above all the cartel’s corruption of police and officials that partially explains the persistence of femicide (2006, 177). Debbie Nathan has criticized Portillo’s film (for which Nathan initially worked as a researcher) for falling victim to speculations about “serial killers, several serial killers, the police, bus drivers, satanists, pornography makers, body organ traffickers,” and murderers “capturing and killing girls in order to make highly profitable ‘snuff films’” (2000). See, for example, Rubén Amavizca’s play “The Women of Juárez” (“Las Mujeres de Juárez”; 2004) and Lorena Mendez-Quiroga’s play Border Echoes (“Ecos de Una Frontera”; 2007). Theories indicting the Mexican elite were popularized by U.S. journalist Diana Washington Valdez in her 2003 book The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women. Washington Valdez believes that while Columbian-based drug gangs committed some of the murders, others were carried out by a cult of powerful multimillionaire businessmen, the sons of influential families, who have learned they are above the law and can pick their victims without fear of arrest. Such theories have also found Mexican adherents. For example, Jorge Campos Murillo, a federal deputy attorney general in Mexico City, identified “juniors”—sons of wealthy Mexican families whose money and connections had spared them from prosecution. After making this announcement at a press conference in Mexico City in early 2002, Campus was reassigned to another unit within the Federal Attorney General Office in Mexico City and has since then refused all interviews (Washington Valdez 2006, 136). Jennifer Lopez has acknowledged Washington Valdez’s work in an Amnesty International news release, and Gaspar de Alba thanks the journalist in the acknowledgment section of her novel. At the Berlin Film Festival, Lopez received the “Artists for Amnesty” award from Amnesty International. Bordertown is also featured on Amnesty International’s website. Artists for Amnesty, the Hollywood arm of Amnesty International, read the screenplay for accuracy. The film received overwhelmingly negative reviews and was greeted with boos and muted applause at its world premiere in Berlin, Germany (Anon. 2007). For example, in 1996, the bodies of two El Paso sisters, Victoria and Pearl Parker, were found in Juárez (Washington Valdez 2006, 83). The novel here reiterates the opinion of some Mexican and U.S. officials that registered sex offenders from El Paso County are responsible for killing women in Ciudad Juárez (Washington Valdez 2006, 155). That victims may be set up by maquiladora employees was also suggested by one of the activists interviewed in Portillo’s documentary. She speculates that the women were chosen on the basis of pictures taken by maquiladora photographers.




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17. The mention of U.S.-based groups could be a reference to organizations, such as Amigos de la Mujeres de Juárez or Justice for the Women in Juárez (Los Angeles).

Acosta, Mariclaire. 2005. The Women of Ciudad Juárez. Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Policy Papers 3. http:// repositories.cdlib.org/clas/pp/3. Amavizca, Rubén. 2004. The Women of Juárez (“Las Mujeres de Juárez”). Los Angeles: Teatro Frida Kahlo Theater. Anon. 2008. Death Threats and Email Warnings in Juárez. Frontera Norte Sur. May 23. http://www.newspapertree.com/news/2481-death-threats-and-e-mailwarnings-in-juarez. ———. 2007. Bordertown Booed at Berlinale. Spiegel Online International. February 16. http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,466779,00.html. Biemann, Ursula. 1999. Performing the Border. New York: Women Make Movies. Bordertown. 2007. Dir. Gregory Nava. Bowden, Charles. 1998. Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future. New York: Aperture Books. Briggs, Laura. 2006. Making American Families: Transnational Adoption and U.S. Latin American Policy. In Haunted By Empire, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, 606–642. Durham: Duke University Press. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. 1990. RetroSpace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature, Theory, and History. Houston: Arte Público. Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie. 2003. Latina/o: Another Site of Struggle, Another Site of Accountability. In Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, ed. Juan Poblete, 105–120. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cheah, Pheng. 2006. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Duarte, Stella Pope. 2008. If I Die in Juárez. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ensalaco, Mark. 2006. Violence against Women: Murder in Ciudad Juárez: A Parable of Women’s Struggle for Human Rights. Violence Against Women 12.5: 417–440. Felperin, Leslie. 2007. Bordertown. Variety. February 15. http://www.variety.com/ index.asp?layout=festivals&jump=review&id=2478&reviewid=VE1117932825 &cs=1&p=0. Fregoso, Rosa Linda. 2000. Voices Without Echo: the Global Gendered Apartheid. Emergences 10.1: 137–155. Funke, Thorsten. 2007. Bordertown. February 3. http://www.critic.de/filme/detail/ film/bordertown-787.html. Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. 2005. Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders. Houston: Arte Público Press. Gerson, Daniela. 2007. Bordertown Premieres at Berlinale: A Filmmaker’s Crusade to See Justice Done. Spiegel Online International. February 15. http://www.spiegel. de/international/0,1518,466465,00.html.


References


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Ledesma, Alberto. 2002. Narratives of Undocumented Mexican Immigration as Chicana/o Acts of Intellectual and Political Responsibility. In Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century, ed. Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quinonez, 330–354. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mendez-Quiroga, Lorena. 2007. Border Echoes. Peace at the Border Productions. Monárrez Fragoso, Julia. 2003. Serial Sexual Femicide in Ciudad Juárez, 1993–2001. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 28.2: 153–178. Nathan, Debbie. 1999. Work, Sex and Danger in Ciudad Juarez. NACLA Report on the Americas 33.3: 24–31. Nathan, Debbie. 2002. Missing the Story. Texas Observer. August 30. http://www. texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=1011. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press. Portillo, Lourdes. 2001. Señorita Extraviada. New York: Women Make Movies. Rodriguez, Teresa. 2007. The Daughters of Juárez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border. New York: Atria Books. Schmidt Camacho, Alicia. 2005. Ciudadana X: Gender Violence and the Denationalization of Women’s Rights in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. CR: The New Centennial Review 5.1: 255–292. Tabuenca Córdoba, María Socorro. 1995. Viewing the Border: Perspectives from “the Open Wound”. Discourse 18.1–2: 146–168. Volk, Steven S., and Marina E. Schlotterbeck. 2007. Gender, Order, and Femicide: Reading the Popular Culture of Murder in Ciudad Juarez. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 32.1: 53–84. Washington Valdez, Diana. 2006. The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women: The Truth about Mexico’s Bloody Border Legacy. Los Angeles: Pace at the Border.







Precursors of Hemispheric Writing: Latin America, the Caribbean, and Early U.S. American Identity Gabriele Pisarz-Ramírez

P

ostrevolutionary American writing does not have a strong tradition of being linked to the transnational. Texts that discursively cross national borders or that blend and mix different cultures and histories are usually related to the late nineteenth, the twentieth, or the twenty-first centuries. The “transnational turn” that has been identified in American studies by various critics, if it is put into a historical dimension at all, is mostly traced back to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century developments (Fisher-Fishkin 2005; Elliott 2007). Scholars such as Anna Brickhouse therefore speak of a widely spread “presentism” of transnational analyses based on the assumption that “literary transnationalism in the Americas and the critical perspectives it invites are natural outgrowths of the massive human migrations, urban pluralism, and cultural globalization the hemisphere has witnessed over the course of the twentieth century” (2001, 407). As Brickhouse continues, many of the literary configurations that are linked by critics to the twentieth century “were in fact addressed by writers in the Americas as explicit questions and problems well before the modern and contemporary periods to which they have largely been consigned” (2001, 408). Given that the critical vocabulary and the major strategic approaches of transnational studies have developed over the past few decades, the question arises what it means to look at transnationalism historically. Can we


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GABRIELE PISARZ-RAMÍREZ

simply replace national perspectives on earlier periods in American history and culture with transnational ones, and what do we gain by doing this? In a recent essay, Frank Kelleter has taken up this question, pointing to the fact that a mere application of contemporary critical methods to the study of the early national period is little productive. As he states, “[T] ransnational approaches . . . in their current form and institutionalization . . . trigger critical practices unable to answer—and sometimes even to ask—the relevant questions” (Kelleter 2007, 29). One reason for this, Kelleter observes, is that transnational scholarship usually proceeds from the assumption of a constructed coherent national identity (which it then sets out to deconstruct), without asking how and under which circumstances this construction had emerged (30). The increased interest in the deconstruction of the ideological foundations of American exceptionalism has privileged approaches that view the nation as an ideological fiction and whose main interest lies in exposing the nation to be not an inherent, but an “imagined community.” Relevant historical transnational research, then, needs to study the conditions and specific situations that guided the emergence of the nation and of national identity constructions, conditions and situations that are to be found both within the nation’s borders and without. U.S. American national identity, from its emergence in the late eighteenth century, was negotiated in the context of transnational interrelations, a fact that has long been occluded by early American studies’ focus on investigating the roots of American exceptionalism and on identifying specific features of an “American mind.” Even in more recent approaches that acknowledge the variety and heterogeneity of early American views and agents, scholarly attention, as Michael Drexler has pointed out, has often focused on texts that were constitutive in “producing” the nation as an ideological construct (2003, 14). This focus on the constructedness of the nation precluded or at least marginalized the study of extranational contexts and events that have impacted upon the formation of a national identity, a circumstance that may have “postponed” early American studies’ access to transnationalism. The question of what Americans saw when they looked beyond the borders of the former thirteen colonies—not only geographically, but also temporally—and in which ways this gaze has formed national identity constructions has only begun to be explored. Frank Kelleter names the French Revolution as one major transnational factor in the construction of a specifically American identity, which forced Americans to become aware of the differences between “contemporary European conceptions of nationhood and national identity” and their own “practices of national invention, modes of national contestation, and ideologies of national distinctiveness” (2007, 31). While I agree with Kelleter,


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I will suggest in the following that American national identity was not only constructed in contradistinction to England or Europe, but in the context of the United States’ position in the Western Hemisphere. Latin America and the Caribbean were crucial in the processes of inventing and negotiating a national identity that was still far from being coherent, and American authors participated with their writings in these negotiation processes. In exploring postrevolutionary literary culture in a hemispheric context, I am greatly indebted to the research that has been done in the field of nineteenth-century hemispheric studies and that has addressed the interconnectedness of nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture in a trans-American cultural network. I would like to refer in particular to two important studies, Kirsten Silva Gruesz’ Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (2002) and Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth Century Public Sphere (2004). Gruesz in her book reenvisions the American Renaissance in the context of the nation’s relation with its Southern neighbors, proposing to shift the attention from the conventional landmarks of nineteenth-century history such as Jacksonian individualism, the Civil War, and the rise of urban industrial capitalism to moments equally significant for the intellectual and cultural life of the period such as the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S.-Mexican War, as well as the filibustering of North Americans in Central America and the Caribbean. She outlines a hemispheric Spanish-language print culture reaching from New York to Cuba to Mexico City and shows how it was linked to AngloAmerican literature and print cultures. From this perspective Gruesz calls for “a new geography of American literary history that emphasizes its formation within and around a culture of the Americas” (2002, 6). In a similar vein, Anna Brickhouse in her study stresses the unstable boundaries of nation within a New World arena characterized by the overlap and simultaneity of different national claims upon territories as well as upon texts and traditions (2004, 7). She argues that trans-American literary relations in the nineteenth century and especially in the years between the Congress of Panama (1826) and the Continental Treaty (1856) considerably influenced the public sphere. Brickhouse contends that the American Renaissance—usually seen as a national literary phenomenon—should actually be reconfigured as a trans-American Renaissance, characterized by literary border crossing and exchange. As she shows, even some of the most influential writers of the period—Hawthorne, Cooper, Bryant, Melville, and others—were embedded within a hemispheric network of literary cultures and lines of influence that “provide crucial ways of understanding and delineating their character as national writers” (Brickhouse 2004, 10). While my own work profits immensely from the insights of these books, I would like to add to their trans-American explorations by focusing on


PRECURSORS OF HEMISPHERIC WRITING



the decades between the 1780s and the 1830s as the period in which major processes of national identity formation took place. Even if this period did not produce literary exchanges between the United States and the rest of the Americas in the same way as described by Gruesz and Brickhouse for the subsequent decades, it was by no means a period in which American writers ignored their hemispheric neighbors. Early American authors imagined America as a hemisphere even before the era of largescale expansionism. In a period when national borders were still flexible and subject to change, the American continent was often conceived of as a single entity made up of both North and South America. Thomas Paine’s famous observation, in Common Sense, that it was absurd for a continent to be governed by an island was an expression of British Americans’ collective self-image that considered the inhabitants of the British colonies as representatives of the entire Americas. Especially after the end of colonial rule, U.S. Americans saw themselves as part of a natural geographic entity—the American landmass—rather than of a nation bounded by the political borders prescribed by the former colonies. Moreover, both the early imperial ambitions of Jefferson and his contemporaries as well as the desire of the postcolonial nation to keep European powers at bay led to the notion that the United States had to act as the unrivaled power on the continent. The presence of Spain as a competitor on the American continent as well as the Haitian Revolution as an event that shook the entire slave-holding Americas influenced and shaped identity discourses in the young republic. Latin America and the Caribbean, then, were discursive reference points both as potential spheres of influence for the young nation and as sites of projection for the negotiation of national and group identities. In this essay, I will look at texts by American writers from different backgrounds that were written between the 1780s and the 1830s. I aim to demonstrate that Latin America became a transnational point of reference in texts by the revolutionary writers Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau, by the “father of American theatre,” William Dunlap, and by the first U.S. novelist who depicted Mexico, Timothy Flint, each of whom makes different uses of the extranational territory he refers to. In the period under study there is a move from the epic glorification of pre-Columbian cultures (Barlow, Freneau) to the operatic and romanticized rendering of the conflict between Spaniards and Incas (Dunlap), to the celebration of American enterprise and Republicanism against the background of a backward and uncivilized early nineteenth-century Mexico (Flint). The Caribbean, in turn, constitutes a discursive lacuna in the early nationalist texts. However, as I will point out, the West Indies, and specifically the Haitian Revolution, became a source of empowerment in early African


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American activist texts, even before the period of abolitionist activism in the 1830s to 1850s. In texts published in the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, free African Americans look across the nation’s borders to Haiti and to South American countries where slavery was declared illegal, using this transnational perspective to create alternative visions of community and identity that diverge from dominant national narratives. In 1786, Philip Freneau, one of the most important voices of revolutionary America, published a revised version of an epic poem that he had first composed together with Henry Hugh Brackenridge as a commencement poem in 1771. The 1786 version of “The Rising Glory of America”1 creates a line from America’s pre-Columbian past to its glorious millennial future. It positions Columbus at the beginning of a narrative of progressive history of the continent that culminates in a vision of the United States as the New Jerusalem, a land predestined to be the site of a new paradise due to its “innocent” character. In a manner similar to Freneau’s, Joel Barlow’s epic “The Vision of Columbus” (1787) links Columbus to the history of pre-Conquest civilizations in Peru, detailing the life stories of the mythical founder of the Incan dynasty, Manco Capac, and of his wife Mama Oella, who are presented as key figures in an indigenous myth of the New World. The epic has Columbus look both backward to the Incan civilizations and forward to the emergence of a magnificent American empire that eclipses the achievements of European civilization. As Kenneth Silverman has observed, after the American Revolution, the epic became “the showpiece of the new nationalism in America” (1976, 499). The need to create an exceptionalist New World history that differed from that of its motherland, England, led authors such as Barlow and Freneau to frame the American Revolution as a historical event of epic proportions, thus refuting European claims of superiority. One way of integrating the recent revolution with a history that provided both historical fact and mythical grandeur was to claim pre-Columbian cultures as part of the emerging nation’s tradition and history. Both Freneau and Barlow looked to Aztec and Incan civilizations as a “usable past,” foregrounding the fame and splendor of these ancient and bygone cultures. Striving to create a counterimage to the common European view of America as a place void of culture or tradition, Freneau, in “The Rising Glory of America,” uses the civilizations of Peru and Mexico to highlight the differences between “virtuous” America and greedy and profitoriented Europe. While Freneau suggests that Spain destroyed Incan and Mexican civilizations to acquire riches, he denies that North America has such base motives, as it prospers through agriculture and industry, not through robbery. Talking about Cortez and Pizarro, “[w]hom blood and




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Such is the curse, Acasto, where the soul Humane is wanting—but we boast no seats Of cruelty like Europe’s murdering breed— Our milder epithet is merciful, And each American, true-hearted, learns To conquer, and to spare; for coward souls Alone seek vengeance on vanquish’d foe (Freneau 1786, 50; italics added)

Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus goes even further than merely positing the Incas and Aztecs as civilizations in ruin because of European greed. His presentation of the Incan leader Manco Capac suggests that the Incas had established a nation that could measure up to any myth of origin from Europe. Presenting him as a reasonable and benevolent monarch, Barlow suggests that Capac is at least comparable (if not superior) to European mythical figures (Wertheimer 1999, 65–74). As Ralph Bauer has observed, Barlow was cognizant of earlier European texts written by eyewitnesses of the Conquest, such as Bartolomé de las Casas’ Brevísima Relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1607). As Bauer argues, Barlow borrowed countercolonial rhetorical strategies from these New World writers and thus “de-center[ed] the telos of European providential history,” offering “a linear and progressive concept of time for a New World age” (1995, 206). Appropriating and promulgating the classical and Renaissance concept of translatio studii (or translatio imperii)—a concept suggesting a linear movement of progress of civilization from east to west—Barlow was convinced that North America was the natural future site of progress and that the United States would eventually take the place of the most advanced nation regarding culture and the arts. While Freneau and Barlow praised pre-Conquest native populations, they were quite explicit about the difference between the Peruvian and Mexican cultures and North American Indians. As Freneau’s narrator observes, whereas Aztecs and Incas were builders of great civilizations, North American Indians had neither “towns” nor “arts”:


murder only satisfied, / And all to glut ambition!” Freneau points out the different mentality of Americans:

But here, amid this northern dark domain No towns were seen to rise.—No arts were here; The tribes unskill’d to raise the lofty mast, Or force the daring prow thro’ adverse waves . . .



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As Eric Wertheimer has revealed, the poem in this passage diverges considerably from the 1771 version, where this difference between northern and southern Indians was not made. The new hierarchy in the evaluation of native peoples had become necessary, as Wertheimer argues, since the oppressive policies toward Native Americans could no longer be placed in British responsibility (1999, 26). Like Freneau, Barlow casts the preConquest native civilizations as noble and equal to Europeans in their degree of cultivation, while at the same time presenting North American Indians as savages. The latter are described as “painted chiefs, in death’s grim terrors drest” who “rise fierce to war, and beat the savage breast” (Barlow 1787/1992, 49). But while Barlow presents Native Americans as barbarous, he also, as Danielle Conger has observed, depicts them as “vanishing Indians,” whose numbers are constantly diminished by “pale diseases” that “float in every wind,” (Barlow 1787/1992, 53) a condition that allowed him to deconstruct the image of the “red devil” and to mourn the cultural loss of an American treasure (Conger 1999, 565). This contradictory presentation of the Indians is representative of the changing view of these populations in the late eighteenth century’s public mind as tribes were slowly displaced geographically and ceased to be perceived in the public image as a serious danger. The desire for a “noble past” embodied in pre-Conquest civilizations was so strong that even imported texts were used to serve this purpose. William Dunlap, known as the “father of the American theatre,” envisioned a national theater that could serve as a “site for the permanent rehearsal and renewal of emerging civic and national characters” (Rinehart 2001, 268). Apart from writing plays himself, Dunlap translated and adapted a large number of German, French, and British plays for the American stage, among them the German dramatist August von Kotzebue’s Die Sonnenjungfrau and Die Spanier in Peru oder Rollas Tod (1796), which were both set in Peru. In Dunlap’s versions, the plays were entitled The Virgin of the Sun and Pizarro in Peru or The Death of Rolla. Whereas The Virgin of the Sun spotlights the unspoiled life of innocent noble savages in an exotic and idyllic landscape, the plot of Pizarro in Peru circles around morality and the heroism of the Peruvian leader Rolla. While both plays celebrate the victory of morality over corruption, of humanity over cruelty, here I will concentrate on Pizarro in Peru as the more well-known play. In Pizarro in Peru, the Spanish conqueror attacks the Incan band led by the Spanish Alonzo de Molina and the Indian Rolla.


This indicates they were a different race; From whom descended ’tis not ours to say—. (Freneau 1786, 56–57)



While Alonzo is arrested, Rolla manages to flee and later saves the child of Alonzo and his Peruvian wife Cora from the Spaniards. Although severely wounded, Rolla is able to return the child to Cora before he dies. The play establishes Rolla as a virtuous hero who although given the opportunity to kill the defenseless Pizarro in his sleep, declines to do so in order to stay loyal to his moral principles. Pizarro in Peru sets the honest and heroic Indians, along with the equally heroic Alonzo, who fights with the Indians rather than disgrace himself by serving the greedy Spaniards, against Pizarro and his soldiers, who epitomize the black legend of Spanish cruelty against native populations. Significantly, Pizarro in Peru pairs the unscrupulous Pizarro with the moral authority on the Conquest, Bartolomé de Las Casas, who by poetic license is part of the Spanish party and who openly accuses Pizarro of immorality. Pizarro in Peru was first performed at New York’s Park Theater in 1800 and remained part of the stock repertoire of American stages in the following years. Dunlap’s version of the play was based partly on Kotzebue’s original and to a larger degree on Richard Sheridan’s British adaptation that was first performed very successfully in London in 1799. Both Sheridan’s and Dunlap’s versions are considerably shorter than Kotzebue’s, an adaptation to the Anglo-Saxon theatrical tradition that had to leave time for an “after play” following the actual performance. Due to musical insertions between scenes and a spectacular stage setting, Sheridan’s and Dunlap’s versions are also much more operatic and depend to a larger degree on visual effects than Kotzebue’s original (Strohschänk 1992, 116). As opposed to Barlow’s epic rendering of the Incas, Dunlap’s play evokes an exotic spectacle of untamed landscapes and noble savages rather than of a glorious national past. The second scene of the second Act of Pizarro in Peru begins with the announcement of the “Temple of the Sun, with all the Magnificence of Peruvian Superstition. In the centre an altar.” The famous second scene of the fifth Act, in which Rolla saves Cora’s and Alonzo’s child from the Spaniards, is announced as “The out-post of the Spanish camp—the back ground wild and rocky, with a torrent falling down the precipice, over which a bridge is formed by a felled tree” (von Kotzebue 1826, 174). The Incas appear praying to the sun, living in pristine woods, and sacrificing themselves for moral goals. These adaptations to American theatrical conventions were not least a concession to an audience that wanted first to be entertained. Dunlap assessed the stage’s possibilities in America realistically. As director of the New York Park Theater between 1796 and 1805, he was faced both with financial problems and with the need to produce new plays incessantly, one reason why he adapted, apart from Die Spanier in Peru, a large number of other Kotzebue plays for the American stage. However, Dunlap’s adaptation also displays that the heroic and exotic Indian had become somewhat of a stock figure of


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the American popular imagination, one that was not necessarily linked to the national imagined community any longer. Dunlap’s version of Pizarro in Peru diverges from Kotzebue’s text in yet another aspect. There are several passages in Kotzebue’s play that describe the arrival of the Spaniards and the first contact with the Indians in ways that invite parallels to the manner in which English settlers conquered the Northern part of the continent. In Kotzebue’s text, Bartolomé de las Casas accuses the Spaniards of bloodshed and cruelty, pointing out that the natives had innocently welcomed the conquerors, whereupon the Spaniards came upon them like devils.2 These sentences are omitted in the translation, as are parts of the talk between de las Casas, Pizarro, and the Spaniard Valverde about the justification for colonizing the New World. Upon Las Casas’ description of the atrocities of Spaniards against the Indians, Pizarro, in Kotzebue’s original, retorts: Pizarro: What you tell does not concern us. What do I care for the cruelties of a Columbus, of an Ovando? Las Casas: Are you not about to repeat them? Valverde: And if so, as yet it is not decided if these Indians are men, or apes. Las Casas: Woe beget you! That the pope had to issue a bull for you to be able to recognize humans. Valverde: He gave us the New World to conquer, by grace of God. (My translation from the German)3

The entire passage is missing from Dunlap’s play, which is not surprising if we note that Pizarro here includes the venerated Columbus into the black legend of Spanish cruelty. Moreover, the missing passage broaches the issue of subjugation of the Indians—a subject that brought the Peruvian Indians too close to home, where the violent displacement of the native population was in full progress. One might argue that Dunlap simply followed Sheridan’s stage version, where these passages are also missing. Dunlap did, however, make very conscious decisions about which version he adapted at various points in the play. For example, he did retain Kotzebue’s original ending, in which Pizarro stays alive and which corresponds to the historical truth, whereas Sheridan changes Kotzebue’s plot to have the play end with Pizarro’s death. It can therefore be assumed that Dunlap intentionally followed Sheridan in the omission of the passages discussing the Conquest. Whereas Freneau in “The Rising Glory of America” had made a clear distinction between Incas and Aztecs as opposed to the native populations in North America, thus justifying westward expansion, Dunlap apparently thought it safer to leave out the topic of white colonization entirely. The conquest of





American Indians was difficult to harmonize with the republican rhetoric of virtue, liberty, and morality that dominated his play. Twenty-six years after Dunlap’s glorification of Peruvian heroism and his romantic and exoticizing construction of its native population, the view across the southern U.S. border rendered a different image of Latin America in literature. In this period, the young republic had begun to expand toward the West and toward the South. The Louisiana Purchase had added a huge territory to the United States, and travelers exploring these new regions also started to portray areas beyond the nation’s borders. Mexico, in particular, became a concrete object of expansionist desires. Although the border between the provinces acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the then Spanish colony of Mexico had been stipulated in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, in the subsequent decades until the U.S.-Mexican War, the United States made several attempts to buy parts of Mexico. While nationalist discourses increasingly drew on U.S. American history, nature, and culture to establish a national identity, rendering pre-Columbian societies less necessary and less attractive as parts of this tradition, expansionist frontier rhetoric depended on a narrativization of the border as the parting line between savagery and civilization. Donald Pease has pointed to the link between the coherence-creating myths of a nation that constructed itself as “nature’s nation”—of a national subject (American Adam) in a representative national landscape (Virgin Land), endowed with an exemplary national motif (Errand into the Wilderness)—and the exclusionist mechanisms toward populations that were seen as not belonging to the national community. As he argues, the American national narrative developed through and depended on the exclusions of subjected peoples (“women, blacks, ‘foreigners,’ the homeless”).4 In this process, the representation of Mexico and Mexicans increasingly followed a binary pattern within which they emerged as figures of otherness. At the same time, as expansionist projects became more concrete, Mexico, in the fiction of the period, became a site of imperial desire. Timothy Flint’s Francis Berrian: Or, The Mexican Patriot (Boston 1826), the first North American novel set in Mexico, can be seen as the first fictional text to start this representational tradition. Flint, one of the most popular writers of the 1820s, never traveled to Mexico himself; he was a pastor of a Congregational church in Massachusetts, and later did missionary work in the Midwest, specifically Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, before he started a writing career. Francis Berrian was his most popular text, being republished twice in 1834, in Philadelphia and London. The novel is dedicated to Henry Bullard, a former fellow student of Flint at Harvard, who had spent several years in Mexico and who provided Flint with the descriptive details about the country.


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The plot of Francis Berrian is interesting for its rendering of AngloAmericans and Mexicans at a time when the representational patterns for these groups had not yet stabilized in the ways they did in the 1830s and 1840s. The hero of the novel, Francis Berrian—an ideal American who is good-looking, brave, enterprising, and enlightened—rescues Martha, a woman of the Mexican nobility, first from an Indian captor, later from her unloved Mexican fiancé, and, most importantly of all, from cultural illiteracy by teaching her his language, Western philosophy, and the ideals of Republicanism.5 Moreover, in truly republican fashion, he helps liberate Mexico from the yoke of Spanish colonialism and later from the tyrannous ruler Iturbide. The novel was written in a period when the ideal of Republican manhood—the ideal of the virtuous, self-reliant, educated American male—was celebrated in many fictional texts. As Dana Nelson has pointed out, the image of selfhood and citizenship in the early nation was largely based on the concept of Republican manliness. Qualities such as self-control, discipline, the striving for self-improvement, independence, and fortitude were regarded essential in a Republican male. At the same time, as Nelson makes clear, the idea of civilized white national manhood was based on the white American man’s difference from others within (and, one may add, without) the republic—women, nonwhites, poor immigrants, criminals, etc., who were constructed as lacking essential elements of this republican ideal (1998, 13, 18). In Francis Berrian, Republican manhood is linked to the national expansionist venture. Significantly, in this text, Mexico is “won” for the republican project by a love plot that links the protagonist to a “Spanish” woman. As the novel proceeds, Martha is educated by Berrian into a model Republican who in the end renounces “wealth and hereditary honors” to become the wife of “a simple citizen of the United States” (Flint 1826, 331). Martha’s marriage to Francis Berrian signals the beginning of a discursive tradition that presents Mexico as backward, uncivilized, and in need of Anglo-American “guidance” while at the same time exploring the possibilities of acquisition by peaceful means, that is, by marriage (Streeby 2002). Clearly, Martha assimilates into Francis Berrian’s culture and not vice versa. That Republicanism is linked to the more stalwart pecuniary interests of Americans in Mexico becomes evident in the novel when, at the beginning of the second volume, Berrian describes a party of Americans who, like him, want to help in the liberation of Mexico from colonial oppression. They are described as



[m]any gallant and high-minded men, to whom no career was open in the United States, who disdained oppression, and under that generous feeling, probably concealed from themselves dawning ambition, and a cupidity


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fired with the prospect of the Mexican mines, united west of the Sabine. Their avowed object was to aid the Patriot natives in communicating to this oppressed and beautiful country, the entire freedom of their own.

While Martha becomes an eager supporter of Republicanism, Berrian has increasing doubts about the possibility of winning Mexico for the Republican cause. Early in the novel, the protagonist describes his experiences at the frontier as a journey back in history: I had occasion to experiment the truth of the remark, that in traveling toward the frontier, the decreasing scale of civilization and improvement exhibits an accurate illustration of inverted history. Improvements decrease in the order of distance, as they have increased in the order of time. We traveled down six centuries in as many days. First, we lost sight of handsome and commodious houses, residences of builders, who often saw good models. We gradually lost sight of the mansions of the opulent cotton-planters, who are noted for their hospitality. We lost sight of men dressed in articles of imported fabric. Then we traversed the belt of vachers and shepherds, with their blanket-capotes and their comfortable, but rustic log establishments. Then we traversed the region of the half savage white inhabitants, the intermediate race between savage and civilized man. On the Kiamesia we passed the American garrison, and saw the cheering sight of the spiritstirring stars and stripes, waving above the rude fortress and the comfortable quarters, three hundred leagues from the compact population of the country. We joined to admire the genius of a country yet so young, and that has thus early learned to stretch her maternal arms to these remote deserts, in token of efficient protection to the frontier people from the terrors of the ruthless savages. (Flint 1826, 39–40)

As the passage demonstrates, Mexico is regarded as being on an inferior civilizational stage. The American garrison provides the only sign of civilization with its “comfortable quarters.” Moreover, the notion of the United States stretching “her maternal arms to these remote deserts” casts the garrison as a sign of protection rather than of U.S. expansionism. Just as Berrian brings enlightenment and education to the benighted Mexicans, the garrison functions as a symbol of U.S. civilizational superiority. Significantly, Flint also has Berrian encounter strong resistance to his republican ideals from the patriarchal elite of the country, embodied in Martha’s father (a Spanish count), the Catholic priest, and Martha’s fiancé. These men, who stubbornly persist in defending the colonial status of Mexico, are strongly opposed to the idea of liberation. In addition, the savage state of


(Flint 1826, 5)



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The people in this country are so wild, ignorant, and uneducated, and at the present moment we are surrounded by so many enemies, visible and invisible, so many dangers of every sort, rebellion, treason, discord, the savages, that you can hardly conjecture how my confidence goes out toward a young man, educated, principled, high-minded, and, to use Bryan’s expression, ‘as true as steel.’ Indeed, we hope you will go with us. (Flint 1826, 135)

Francis Berrian sets the stage for texts about “Spanish America” that no longer circle around the past, but focus on contemporary Americans who explore territories beyond the nation’s shifting borders. The dime novel conventions already visible in this text would find their full expression in the period after the U.S.-Mexican War when “Spanish women” and international romance become much more present in American popular literature. But already in this early novel about Mexico, the romance between an elite “Spanish” woman and an Anglo-American suggests what Shelley Streeby has called “a benign form of imperial conquest”—a way “to conquer Mexico by whitening it through transnational heterosexual unions” (Streeby 2002, 115; see Robinson 1977; de León 1983). Latin America, both in the early years of the Republic as well as in its later, more openly expansionist phase, thus provided a site that encouraged imaginary scenarios of interest for the United States—either as a storehouse of past glories or as a promising El Dorado of future riches. In contrast, the Caribbean remained, with few exceptions, a discursive lacuna in early national identity discourses. An important reason for this is that the Caribbean, from the beginning, was embedded in a different set of discourses than Latin America—discourses that were difficult to harmonize with the narrative of national glory. One of these discourses was slavery. The West Indies was the first region where slavery was perfected into an important economic factor, at a time when the slave industry began to flourish in the emerging American nation as well. As a result, the Caribbean constantly reminded the advocators of American political nationalism of the racial and social hierarchies at home, hierarchies that collided with the republican claim to equality and liberty. Another discourse privileged the Caribbean’s reputation as the origin of social and racial unrest. As many historians have pointed out, the West Indies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were considered the source of the violent revolts that threatened the order of the slave holding colonies and the early republic (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000; Hunt 1988; Trouillot


the majority of Mexicans (as contrasted with the civilized Americans) is a constant theme in the novel. As Martha’s mother proclaims:



1995). Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker speak of a “cycle of rebellion” that shook the West Indies in the 1730s to the 1760s (193). These rebellions were often described in terms of epidemic diseases spreading across the country through imported slaves. Moreover, the Caribbean was associated with the pejorative association “Creole”: there were traditional European assumptions that people living in the Caribbean “tropics” with its mixings of cultures, languages, peoples, and races led to a “degeneracy” from the European “norm.” While the Caribbean was thus avoided by many writers of the early national period, it became a site of empowerment for one group in the young nation that was disenfranchised from citizen’s rights— African Americans, particularly after the Haitian Revolution that toppled the French colonial regime and abolished slavery on St. Domingue. African Americans, as many other groups, had regarded the American Revolution as a moment of promise (Sale 1997, 11). The egalitarian potential of the Revolution appealed to them as it proclaimed, in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” In the beginning, this promise seemed to come true at least for some black men. The spirit of the Revolution, coupled with black military service during the Revolution, inspired a wave of manumission laws that freed several thousand blacks. However, the position of the black population within the new nation was a contested issue. Slavery collided with democratic ideals, and free African Americans were an equally uncomfortable presence because they jeopardized the racial hierarchies based on the “natural” superiority of whites. In many Republican texts about liberty, justice, and equality, blacks remained invisible. When they did become part of public utterances, they were framed as essentially different “others” who did not belong to the national collective. As African Americans looked beyond the nation’s borders, they found the promise of liberty realized in revolutionary movements elsewhere—in the Haitian Revolution on St. Domingue that started in 1791, as well as in the emancipation of slaves in the former Spanish colonies that became independent in the 1820s. Early activist African American texts used Haiti and the Latin American republics to comment on the oppression of blacks in the United States from a hemispheric perspective and to construct an empowering transnational historical narrative for black people. One key medium for the distribution of black thought in this early period was Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper published in the United States, which was coedited by John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish. As I will point out, early African American activist texts in this newspaper employed events in the Caribbean and Latin America in their revisionist endeavors to question stereotypical constructions of blackness from a transnational viewpoint, rewriting these regions into sites of empowerment.


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Freedom’s Journal appeared on a regular weekly basis between March 16, 1827, and March 28, 1829. It provided international, national, and regional information on current events and contained editorials declaiming slavery, lynching, and other injustices. In the brief two-year period of its existence, the journal published an extensive number of articles on Haiti, most of them celebrating the Haitian Revolution as empowering for African Americans. It also frequently referred to the newly founded Latin American states. In the newspaper’s inaugural editorial, Russwurm and Cornish positioned African American activism within a trans-American, hemispheric framework. They pointed out that their efforts to speak for black people and to forward their cause were inspired by “the establishment of the Republic of Hayti” as well as by “the advancement of liberal ideas in South America, where despotism has given place to free governments, and where many of our brethren now fill important civil and military stations” (Russwurm and Cornish 1827, 1). They refer, of course, to Latin American independence movements that were accompanied by the abolition of slavery or by declarations of intention to do so. Many of these republics also announced—at least in terms of the law—the abolishment of the racial caste system, making them a point of reference and of comparison for free blacks in the United States. References to the West Indies and to Latin America continue to emerge in the subsequent issues. On April 20, 1827, an undisclosed New York author informs the readers under the headline “The Revolt in Texas” about the Fredonian Rebellion: in December of 1826, Anglo-American settlers in the Mexican province of Texas founded the Republic of Fredonia in an attempt to declare independence from Mexico. The author of the article links the revolt to a new Mexican law that prohibited the importation of slaves into Texas after the country’s independence from Spain. The incident is used by the author to remind readers of the promise of liberty contained in the Declaration of Independence and the clash between this promise and the reality in the United States: The truth is, the new Republics of North and South America have set us an example on the subject of slavery, which we should do well to imitate, under such modifications as our peculiar circumstances render necessary. If we remember right, the last slave in Colombia is to be emancipated within the present year. Peru has essentially lightened the burdens that for centuries has oppressed the poor Indians; and Mexico evinces, by her decision in enforcing the law in behalf of enslaved Africans, that she is determined not to be behind her sister Republics in this cause of justice, humanity and religion. Meanwhile the United States, where the torch of liberty was first kindled—the United States, who claim to be the freest and happiest people




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on the face of the earth, are cherishing in their bosom nearly 3,000,000 of wretched slaves, and as a nation, are doing nothing to mitigate the evil!

Repeatedly the situation in the West Indies and in Latin America is linked to slavery in the United States. “[W]hat will be the case, when the slaves in the West Indies and the Spanish states, become all free citizens?” asks the author of an article of the Christian Spectator, reprinted in Freedom’s Journal on April 6, 1827. The author, of course, points to the fact that the liberation of slaves in Latin America, Haiti, and (potentially) in other parts of the West Indies did not pass unnoticed with free and enslaved blacks in the United States. In a similar vein, and in a later issue, the same author— whose name is given as “S.F.D.”—warns slave holders that “to go on in the present course is certain ruin to the whole,” continuing: I appeal then to Sierra Leone, to Hayti, to Colombia, and say that slaves have been liberated, in so great numbers as to form the mass of the population, particularly in Hayti, and that the difficulties and dangers of the process have always arisen, not from the turbulence and disorder of the liberated slaves, but from the vexatious, unreasonable conduct of their masters, struggling to retain or recover their power to oppress. (Anon. 1827c)

Moreover, on June 10, in a text reprinted from the Alexandria Gazette, the issue of Florida’s statehood is raised as a question essentially concerning slaves. If Florida is included in the Union as a slave state, the article author warns, then its proximity to Cuba might instigate violent revolts there. The unsettled state of Cuba will make it highly possible that the island will soon “fall into other hands”—possibly into those of Great Britain or the South American Republics. In either case, slavery would be abolished there, and then “nothing less than a large standing army will keep the slaves [in Florida] in subjection” (Anon. 1827d). The menace of uprising slaves is also a key issue in a series of articles about Haiti written by a pseudonymous author who calls himself “Africanus.” The essays by “Africanus” celebrate Haiti as a source of empowerment for black people and clearly announce what will happen to those who continue to tolerate slavery. In “Hayti, No. II: From the Scrapbook of Africanus” (Freedom’s Journal April 27, 1827), the author works with images of natural violence to indicate that the liberation process cannot be stopped and issues a warning against those who continue to side with slaveholders: “We may delay the evils of insurrections and revolutions; but


(Anon. 1827b)


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like the eruptions of Vesuvius, they will burst forth more awfully amid the horrors of midnight and wo [sic] to every hand within the reach of its lava, wherever Slavery is tolerated!” (Africanus 1827a, 2). Using the image of the volcano, which was conventionally associated with the unpredictability and force of nature and humans in the tropics, the pseudonymous text by “Africanus” puts a notable emphasis on the consequences of the revolutionary process in Haiti for the supporters of slavery. In an article published on October 12, 1827, “Africanus” combines his representation of Haiti as an example of the pride and the capabilities of people of African descent with an explicit warning against their tormentors in the United States and elsewhere: [T]he republic of Hayti exhibits a spectacle hitherto unseen in these modern and degenerate days: it is now demonstrated that the descendants of Africa are capable of self-government: the plea so often urged by the adherents of slavery, “the poor creatures, should we free them, will starve to death,” will now be but sounding brass in the opinion of every reasonable man. I trust also that the lesson inculcated by the Haytiens will be a warning where man is held in bondage and degradation by his fellow—whenever he is denied the unalienable rights of nature. It will teach petty despots, that in oppression the chain has a certain length which should they undertake to stretch, may snap—and bring death to the oppressor, and liberty to the captive. (Africanus 1827c, 123)

In the texts of early African American activism, Haiti functions as a device by which African Americans could make a strong argument for black agency and self-esteem. The support of the Haitian Revolution in Freedom’s Journal also included a revised image of its famed leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture. Whereas textual representations of Toussaint in other print materials often depicted him as a sanguinary and sadistic creature, in early black activist texts he emerges as a hero, posited as an example for the intellectual and spiritual capabilities of blacks. The May 4, 1827, issue of Freedom’s Journal contains an article on Toussaint L’Ouverture in which the black revolutionary leader is presented as an example for the “splendor of native and original greatnesse” (Africanus 1827b, 30) of the black people of St. Domingue. L’Ouverture is called “one of the most extraordinary men of his age” and a “Spartacus.” The article writer takes pains to construct him as a character “marked by sedateness and patience of temper” (Africanus 1827b, 30) and as a model of discipline, thus rejecting the image of Toussaint L’Ouverture as a bloodthirsty and violent black rebel. Through this image of L’Ouverture, the article creates the leader of the Haitian Revolution as a hero of the black community who gives proof





of the dignity and heroism as well as of the intellectual capabilities of black people. Using the black leader as a model of virtue, the author counters the suggestion of blacks as creatures lacking humanity and intellect. “The transactions in that Island,” he suggests, “have presented the most incontestible [sic] proofs, that the negro is not, in general, wanting in the higher qualifications of the mind” (Africanus 1827b, 30). L’Ouverture, called by some of his black contemporaries “the Washington of St. Domingue,” stood as a model of black manhood and self-determination for African Americans (Kachun 2006, 252). The late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writers discussed in this essay employ Latin America and the Caribbean for various purposes, revealing the importance of non-European points of reference in the construction of identities in the early national period. At the same time, the different uses these writers make of extranational territories also gives evidence of the instability and vagueness of early national identity concepts between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century and of their heterogeneity. While Republicanism was an omnipresent idea in this period, it was less a coherent political and philosophical concept than a flexible cultural signifier that was interpreted in different ways by writers, depending on their respective situations and on the concrete contexts of their writing. Freneau and Barlow—authors who represented the white literary elite of the young nation—strove to create an historical epic of foundational proportions. William Dunlap, in an attempt to both secure his theater’s survival and enhance his patriotic visions of national character, uses Kotzebue’s play to provide a romantic spectacle of pre-Conquest Peruvians as both innocent and virtuous children of nature. As the American imperial project takes shape at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Latin America and particularly Mexico are increasingly framed as sites of expansionist desires. Flint’s Francis Berrian can be seen as a conquest narrative that reveals how Anglo-Americans no longer mine the territories south of the national border for foundational myths but consider them exploratory territories for more material riches. Disenfranchised groups within the new nation, such as African Americans, looked beyond the border toward the Caribbean and Latin America for the liberating potential of political revolts such as the Haitian Revolution and the Latin American independence movements. Their concrete point of reference was the status of blacks in these countries. In Freedom’s Journal, both Haiti and the Latin American republics became symbols of liberty and progress at a time when these regions, in dominant nationalist narratives, were framed as sites of corruption and backwardness. The study of these and other early hemispheric writings reveals that transnational perspectives are by no means a phenomenon linked to the modern and postmodern


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era, but have accompanied the construction of American identities from its beginnings.

1. The 1771 version of the poem differs slightly from the second version. For a closer inspection of the differences, see Wertheimer 1999, 17–52. 2. “Ist das Blutmaaß eurer Grausamkeiten noch nicht voll? Diese Kinder frommer Unschuld, die euch gastfrei aufnahmen, wann haben sie genug gelitten? . . . Als Götter wurdet ihr empfangen, als Teufel kamt ihr unter sie!” (von Kotzebue 1826, 20). 3. “Pizarro: Was du erzählst, trifft nicht uns. Was kümmern mich die Grausamkeiten eines Columbus, eines Ovando? / Las Casas: Steht Ihr nicht im Begriff, sie zu erneuern? / Valverde: Und wäre es auch, noch ist es kaum entschieden, ob diese Indianer Menschen, oder Affen sind. / Las Casas: Wehe Euch! Daß der Vater Pabst erst eine Bulle geben musste, um euch Menschen kennen zu lehren. / Valverde: Er hat uns die neue Welt geschenkt, um sie zu unterjochen, mit Hülfe der göttlichen Gnade” (von Kotzebue 1826, 22). 4. “When understood from within the context of the construction of an imagined national community, the negative class, race, and gender categories of these subject peoples were not a historical aberration but a structural necessity for the construction of a national narrative whose coherence depended upon the internal opposition between Nature’s Nation and peoples understood to be constructed of a ‘different nature’” (Pease 1994, 4). 5. Republicanism was the distinctive political consciousness of the entire Revolutionary generation. It was based on a set of principles that included civic virtue, honor, freedom, sovereignty, inalienable rights, and liberalism. American republicanism was based on English models as well as Roman and European ideas.

References Anon. 1827a. Freedom’s Journal, April 6. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/ libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/index.asp. ———. 1827b. Freedom’s Journal, April 20.http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/ libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/index.asp. ———. 1827c. Freedom’s Journal, April 27.http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/ libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/index.asp. ———. 1827d. On the Political Tendency of Slavery in the United States. Freedom’s Journal, June 10. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/ index.asp. Africanus. 1827a. Hayti, No. II: From the Scrap-Book of Africanus. Freedom’s Journal, April 27. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/index.asp. ———. 1827b. Hayti, No. III: From the Scrap-Book of Africanus. Freedom’s Journal, May 4. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/index.asp.


Notes



———. 1827c. Hayti, No. VI: From the Scrap-Book of Africanus. Freedom’s Journal, October 12. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/index. asp. Barlow, Joel. 1787/1992. The Vision of Columbus, ed. Fredo Arias. Mexico: Frente de Afirmación Hispanista, A.C. Bauer, Ralph. 1995. Colonial Discourse and Early American Literary History. Early American Literature 30.3: 203–232. Brickhouse, Anna. 2001. The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond. American Literary History 13.3: 407–444. ———. 2004. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth Century Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conger, Danielle E. 1999. Toward a Native American Nationalism: Joel Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus. New England Quarterly 72.4: 558–576. De León, Arnoldo. 1983. They Called Them Greasers. Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900. Austin: University of Texas Press. Drexler, Michael Jacob. 2003. Vernacular Columbia: The Practice of Community in Post-Revolutionary American Literature. PhD. Diss. Providence: Brown University. Dunlap, William. 1800. Pizarro in Peru; or, The Death of Rolla. A Play, in Five Acts. From the German of Augustus Von Kotzebue. With Notes Marking the Variations from the Original. New York: G. F. Hopkins. Elliott, Emory. 2007. Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What Does It Mean When American Studies Is Transnational? American Quarterly 59.1: 1–22. Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley. 2005. Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004. American Quarterly 57.1: 17–57. Flint, Timothy 1826. Francis Berrian; or, The Mexican Patriot. Boston: Cummings, Hilliard & Co. http://etext.virginia.edu/eaf/eafindex.htm. Freneau, Philip. 1786. The Poems of Philip Freneau. Written Chiefly During the Late War. Philadelphia. Early American Imprints. Series I: Evans, 1639–1800. Goudie, Sean X. 2006. Creole America. The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. 2002. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hunt, Alfred. 1988. Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Kachun, Mitch. 2006. Antebellum African Americans, Public Commemoration, and the Haitian Revolution: A Problem of Historical Mythmaking. Journal of the Early Republic 26.2: 249–273. Kelleter, Frank. 2007. Transnationalism: The American Challenge. Review of International American Studies 2.3: 29–34. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press. Nelson, Dana. 1998. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham: Duke University Press.


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Pease, Donald. 1994. National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives. In National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, ed. Donald Pease, 1–13. Durham: Duke University Press. Rinehart, Lucy. 2001. “Manly Exercises”: Post-Revolutionary Performances of Authority on the Theatrical Career of William Dunlap. Early American Literature 36.2: 263–293. Robinson, Cecil. 1977. Mexico and the Hispanic Southwest in American Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Russwurm, John Browne, and Samuel Cornish. 1827. To Our Patrons. Freedom’s Journal, March 16. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aanp/ freedom/index.asp. Sale, Maggie Montesinos. 1997. The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Silverman, Kenneth. 1976. A Cultural History of the American Revolution. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co. Streeby, Shelley. 2002. American Sensations. Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strohschänk, Johannes. 1992. William Dunlap und August von Kotzebue: Deutsches Drama in New York um 1800. Stuttgart: Heinz. Trouillot, Michel Rolphe. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. von Kotzebue, August. 1826. Die Spanier in Peru oder Rollas Tod. Ein romantisches Trauerspiel in fünf Akten. Leipzig: Paul Gotthelf Kummer. Wertheimer, Eric. 1999. Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771–1876. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.







Slammin’ in Transnational Heterotopia: Words Being Spoken at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Harald Zapf

Pourtant je crois qu’il y a—et ceci dans toute société—des utopies qui ont un lieu précis et réel, un lieu qu’on peut situer sur une carte; des utopies qui ont un temps déterminé, un temps qu’on peut fixer et mesurer selon le calendrier de tous les jours. (Michel Foucault, “Les Hétérotopies”)

I

n this chapter I will focus on the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and zoom in on two poetry anthologies of writers associated with it. Both collections were coedited by Miguel Algarín, a Nuyorriqueño, who is one of the founders of the Poets Cafe. In 1975, he and cofounder Miguel Piñero, also known as the “Philosopher of the Criminal Mind” (Algarín 1994, 507), published the collection Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. Almost twenty years later, in 1994, Algarín teamed up with the Anglo-American poetry slam host Bob Holman; together they brought out the American Book Award−winning anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. The publication dates of these two anthologies mark a period in American cultural history when the importance of ethnic nationalism in poetry had begun to wane and when transethnic performance poetry already was at its peak. In 1975, the most influential cultural nationalist poet, the African American writer Amiri Baraka, a close ally of the


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Nuyorican Poets Cafe, had just distanced himself from his nationalist attitude and entered his transnational Third World Marxist Period. The year 1994 saw the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s slam heyday with Bob Holman: from the Cafe’s first poetry slam on November 3, 1989, until the triumph of Saul Williams as Grand Slam Champion in 1996, Holman was “volunteer Slam Host” from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. on Fridays (Stratton 1998, 134, 131). During these seven years, when “the total number of poetry readings” in the United States—especially the “percentage of nonacademic readings”—increased dramatically, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe was most instrumental in popularizing poetry (Stratton 1998, 134). In his “Slam Diaries” Bob Holman says, with a certain amount of self-praise and a sense of countercultural, noncommercial self-importance, that the reopening of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 1989 was “a more potent benchmark” for the “rise in poetry’s status” than MTV’s Spoken Word: Unplugged shows in 1992 and 1994 (Stratton 1998, 136). If we look back at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe from 1975 to 1994, we can see, on the one hand, a place of ethnic awareness, with certain remnants of a necessary but somewhat belated (Latino) cultural nationalism, and, on the other hand, a venue with an orientation—right from the beginning—toward oral poetry, which makes it a forerunner, in 1975, and a protagonist, in 1994, of what is now called spoken-word and performance poetry. In inter-American and transnational verse culture, ethnicity, and performance are inextricably linked with the Nuyorican. “Nuyorican” is a hybrid word, a mixture of “New York” and “Puerto Rican,” that signifies an inter-American “New World Border” (Guillermo Gómez-Peña).1 According to Ilan Stavans’ 2003 dictionary of Spanglish, “Nuyorican” refers to a “Puerto Rican person in the mainland” (181). Compared to the different shades of meaning given to the term by Miguel Algarín in his introductions to the two anthologies, this definition sounds rather neutral and imprecise. In 1975, Algarín followed a more politicized, typical minority discourse-strategy: he used “Nuyorican,” which had originally been a negative term, in a positive and affirmative way. Village Voice contributor Ed Morales writes that, according to Algarín, the term “was coined by islanders as a way of distancing themselves from what they considered to be inferior versions of Puerto Rican-ness. Nuyoricans speak too much English, have forgotten the great cultural heroes of the island, and . . . are uninvolved in its politics” (Morales 2002, 212). Algarín’s 1975 introduction to the first anthology was oriented around class-consciousness, ethnocentricity, the Puerto Rican community in New York and—like much of today’s so-called underground rap music—around local authenticity and street credibility: “Nuyorican” was supposed to refer to “the experience of Puerto Ricans on the streets of New York” (Algarín and Piñero 1975,


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15). The term also had an overt socioeconomic meaning, which implicitly questioned the American capitalist system and accused the middle- and upper-class strata of American society of internal colonization: “The Nuyorican is a slave class that trades hours for dollars at the lowest rung of the earning scale” (Algarín and Piñero 1975, 15). In Marxist terms we can say that Algarín’s 1994 definition of “Nuyorican” is less concerned with the economic base of society; it is less overtly political, more inclusive and culture-oriented. In his introduction to Aloud, Algarín gives a definition in four parts. The first two are still very much in tune with the traditional meaning of “Nuyorican”; part three and four, however, clearly transgress the older semantic bounds of the term. Part one and two evoke the 1960s and 70s, the era of different ethnic movements; these two parts of the definition are concerned with constituting a distinctive identity of “la raza” and therefore stress origins, language, aesthetics, and appearance. Part one of the definition of “Nuyorican” is: “Originally Puerto Rican epithet for those of Puerto Rican heritage born in New York: their Spanish was different (Spanglish), their way of dress and look were different. They were a stateless people (like most U.S. poets) until the Cafe became their homeland” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 5); and part two reads: “After Algarín and Piñero, a proud poet speaking New York Puerto Rican” (5). The end of part one, Algarín’s statement “They were a stateless people . . . until the Cafe became their homeland,” invites us to consider the Cafe a transnational heterotopia and/or to associate Nuyoricans with Chicanos and their homeland Aztlán, with the Jewish diaspora and Israel, or with postcolonial diasporas and migrants in general. The comparison “like most U.S. poets” in part one already hints at the transethnic expansion of the term “Nuyorican” in part three of the definition. Here, in part three, “Nuyorican” refers to “a denizen of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe” (5). So any person that is found in this particular place, anybody who “inhabits,” “resides in,” or simply frequents the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, is called “Nuyorican,” without ethnic qualifications. Presence is the criterion, not descent: “It ain’t where you from, it’s where you at.”2 Part four of Algarín’s definition—“New York’s riches”—takes us back to the economic base of the term, but with an ironic twist (5). By identifying “Nuyorican” with “abundant wealth,” with “large amounts of money,” or with “beautiful,” “valuable”, or “precious possessions,” Algarín gives the term a hybrid, a double-voiced meaning in Bakhtin’s sense, because it combines two or more perspectives and worldviews (Bakhtin 1981, 429): one of the possible readings is that if you are economically poor you can still be culturally rich. No matter how we interpret this short part of the definition, we see the common ethnic minority strategy that I already mentioned above: a term that originally had negative connotations is now used in a positive way.


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Another term with positive connotations of ethnic consciousness and self-confidence is “Loisaida,” a Nuyorican Spanglish word that refers to Loiza, “a town in Puerto Rico that is widely acknowledged as the heart of African culture on the island” (Morales 2002, 101), and especially to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which became a Puerto Rican ghetto in the 1950s. “Loisaida” supposedly is “a creation of Bimbo Rivas” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 26). In Aloud’s “Notes on the Poets,” Rivas, who died in 1992, is presented as the one who “laid down the laws of Nuyorican aesthetics for Theater and Poetry” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 507). Among his works are a Loisaida-mural on Avenue C between 5th and 6th street and an apostrophic lyric poem titled “Loisaida.” If we follow Jonathan Culler’s definition of apostrophe and lyric poetry, we start out from the idea “that lyrics, unlike novels, are also spoken by the reader” and assume that apostrophe “produces a fictive, discursive event” instead of representing an event (2002, xv, 153). So when we read a lyric like Rivas’ “Loisaida,” “aloud or silently, we utter the words, we temporarily occupy the position” of the bilingual speaker (xv), so that we, too, engage in the “act of addressing” Loisaida; in the “apostrophic now” we express the following (xv, 153): “Loisaida, I love you!” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 361). As we also see in Rivas’ poem, when he talks about “una gente . . . de todas rasas” (361), the Lower East Side is not, and has never been, a purely Puerto Rican neighborhood; Algarín calls it “the eternally transitional neighborhood” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 26). The Lower East Side has always been a transnational, multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual area; after the Second World War, Loisaida also became a truly inter-American zone.3 Here, in a section known as “Alphabet City,” the Nuyorican Poets Cafe is located. On the Nuyorican Poets Cafe homepage, in the “about us” section, we are told that the Cafe was founded circa 1973 and that it “began as a living room salon in the East Village apartment” of Miguel Algarín. By 1974 or 1975 it obviously “became clear that there were many poets and too much energy for Algarín’s living room.” In Leon Ichaso’s 2001 film Piñero, a biopic about the fast life of the now defunct Miguel Piñero, we get the same impression: Algarín founded the Cafe because he wanted to get all those poets out of his living room. This might not be the gospel truth, but regardless, after deconstruction we know that every origin is only a trace. The living room story is as good as any other mythical narrative of origins and it probably serves its purpose well, because it fosters the idea of Nuyorican poetry as a homemade cultural product coming directly from the people, from the border between art and life. The story supports Joseph Beuys’ egalitarian avant-garde dictum “Every man is an artist.” In 1974 or 1975, we learn from the Cafe’s homepage, Algarín rented a little


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Irish bar, the Sunshine Cafe on East 6th Street between Avenue A and B, which was christened “The Nuyorican Poets Café.” In 1980, it moved to a building at 236 East 3rd Street, between Avenues B and C, “in the heart of Midtown Loisaida” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 2), and closed in 1982. It opened up again in 1989. The moment that led to this event is related to us by Algarín in the first part of his introduction to the Aloud anthology, a pathos-ridden account covering the time from the last days of Miguel “Miky” Piñero to his wake in 1988. According to Algarín, it was Bob Holman who took the initiative to reopen the Cafe; Holman says, he “had been traveling around, getting into the rap-is-poetry modality” and “wanted to start a club” (Kane 2003, 206). Algarín writes that Holman approached him at Piñero’s wake saying, “‘Miguel, it’s time to reopen the Cafe. This is the moment, you know, and Miky is insisting on it, and we are ready. Let’s move on it, let’s open the Nuyorican Poets Cafe again’” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 8). After reopening the Cafe in 1989, Holman and Algarín worked together till 1996, when Holman left, apparently after a bad quarrel with Algarín. In his book Poetic Culture, Christopher Beach follows a Village Voice article from October 7, 1997, entitled “Grand Slam: The Last Word at the Nuyorican” by Ed Morales, and attributes the split to a clash between Algarín’s desire to preserve the Latino roots of the cafe and Holman’s desire to bring the Nuyorican to a wider and more multicultural audience. Holman’s slogan—“We are all Nuyoricans”—does not seem to have convinced some members of the Latino community, supposedly including Algarín, who may feel that the original idea of the cafe has been co-opted by Holman and a slicker, more MTV-oriented group of poets. (Beach 1999, 216)

If all that is true, Algarín’s personal opinion is contrary to parts of his public and published depiction of the Cafe and its goals. In Algarín’s definition of “Nuyorican,” which I quoted and analyzed above, we can see that the slogan “We are all Nuyoricans” was not only spread by Holman but also by Algarín himself. And when we visit the Nuyorican website today, which lists Algarín first among the “Board of Directors” as “Founding President” without even mentioning Holman’s name, we get the paradoxical impression that Holman withdrew although he had won the battle. In the “about us” section of the webpage we do not find any statement stressing the importance of preserving Puerto Rican Latino roots; instead we read: “The mission of the Cafe is to create a multi-cultural venue that both nurtures artists and exhibits a variety of artistic works. Without limitation, we are dedicated to providing a stage for the arts with access for the widest




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public.” In 1999, in his book Poetic Culture, Christopher Beach wrote that any given night at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe “might bring out aspiring teenage poets, students from New York University, and Beat-generation bards; the audience will include middle-class whites from Queens and Bensonhurst, Latinos from the Lower East Side, blacks from uptown, and visitors who have come to this mecca of slam poetry from Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, or Dublin” (119). Judging from the Cafe’s dense, almost daily program and broad range of activities in the present, we can assume that it still succeeds in attracting a socially and ethnically diverse crowd. Today, the nonprofit organization “Nuyorican Poets Cafe” mainly is a forum for the performing arts, for music, film and video, comedy and theater, poetry and prose readings, slam and performance poetry, and Hip Hop. It is not surprising that Hip Hop is one of the most integrative program sections of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, because Hip Hop, an immensely hybridized and multilingual art form,4 is the most important cultural matrix for many performing artists today, especially for young slam and performance poets. Even if some of them, like Paul Beatty or Saul Williams, refuse to be called “Rap Poets,” they grew up with Hip Hop culture and were influenced more by rap than by conventional written poetry. In his “invocation” to the Aloud anthology, Bob Holman also stresses the rap-connection: RAP IS POETRY—and its spoken essence is central to the popularization of poetry. Rap is taking its place, aloud, as a new poetic form, with ancient griot roots. Hip hop is a cultural throughline for the Oral Tradition. Word goes public! Poetry has found a way to drill through the wax that had been collecting for decades! Poetry is no longer an exhibit in a Dust Museum. Poetry is alive; poetry is allowed. (Algarín and Holman 1994, 1–2)

Rap and performance or slam poetry are closely intertwined, especially at the Nuyorican, which became famous for its Poetry Slam program. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe presents over ninety Slams and elects somebody “Nuyorican Grand Slam Champion” every year. A “Poetry Slam” can be defined as an event that “involves a group of poets” performing “their work to an audience—members of this audience then score the poet’s poem and performance” (Kane 2003, 203). This makes slam poetry—in contrast to any other form of literary “communication,” even to poetry readings where the audience remains quiet—an interactive event in the strict sociological sense of the term where presence is a sine qua non. The weekly Poetry Slams at the Nuyorican are mock-Olympic contests “judged


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by people selected at random from the audience,” it says in the “about us” section of the Cafe’s homepage; the judges, Algarín explains in Aloud, “will rate the poem from zero (‘a poem that should never have been written’) to ten (‘mutual simultaneous orgasm’) using the ‘Dewey decimal rating system’ to avoid ties” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 16). The main event every week is the “Friday Night Slam.” Right after the Slam every Friday night, there is an event called “The Open Room” where anyone can bring a poem and read. A way of qualifying for Friday is the “Open Slam” every Wednesday: winners of a Wednesday Night Open are then allowed to slam on Friday night. In his introduction to the Aloud anthology, Algarín says that these Open Nights have become “the trial ground for ‘slammers’ to practice away from the blinding spotlight of the Friday night Poetry Slams. . . The Open Room is where a ‘virgin’ poet takes the first steps to becoming a performing poet” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 26–27). According to Algarín, the “Open Room” is one of the founding ideas that was there right from the beginning of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 1974: “In the early days of the Cafe (1974–1982), the hosts of the room were mainly Miguel ‘Lobo’ Loperena and Lois Griffith. At the end of the bar, Lobo or I would stand with a ledger and a pencil and simply enter the names of the people who came to perform in order of arrival, so that a famous poet dropping in for the evening could be preceded by a first-time poet” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 23). I infer from this narrative that the Nuyorican Poets Cafe has always greatly contributed to the democratization of verse culture, which is certainly true: it has always been open to commonality and has always fostered equality. Democratization has been a constant at the Cafe, which also becomes evident in the two poetry anthologies from 1975 and 1994. Before I deal with some changes that occurred in the time between these two dates of publication, and before I discuss some poetic texts that illustrate the changes, I would like to mention two other constants, both of them less political than aesthetic. These two constants revolve around presence and conventionality. When we read Algarín’s texts about Nuyorican poetry and the Poets Cafe, we discern that there has always been an orientation toward an aesthetics of presence; and when we read poems from either of the two anthologies, we notice their poetic conventionality. What has changed is the “lyric I” of this conventional poetry; and this change has to do with the shift of focus from ethnicity to performance, a shift that becomes very obvious once we look into the anthologies from 1975 and 1994. The constants I mentioned are just as interrelated as the changes. If poet and audience try to interact within the framework of an aesthetics of presence, the poetic text, in order to be perceived as pleasing, should not be too unconventional and complicated but rather instantly accessible—here




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and now. By saying “pleasing,” I intend to imply, with the widest possible slam audience in mind, something beautiful that gives one a feeling of pleasure. Think of Algarín’s definition of a perfect ten: “mutual simultaneous orgasm.” Very often, spoken-word poems are not exactly cerebral or heavily tropological; instead, they are written “with the intent to get the point across,” says Crystal Williams, a young African-American slam poet and member of the New York slam team (Beach 1999, 215). In general, performance poets do not provide their listeners with riddles to ponder. If they do, I call them sublime performance poets, because they are aweinspiring through difficulty; they show up “a relation to what exceeds human capabilities of understanding” (Culler 2000, 76); they overwhelm their audience—here and now. One might think of the film Slam (1998) in this context, where, in the central sequence, the Saul Williams character Raymond Joshua performs a poem and then leaves his listeners, warring gang members, completely baffled and puzzled in the prison yard. Like Saul Williams, some of these sublime performance poets tend to work out of surreal and/or Hip Hop traditions. In Hip Hop, especially avant-garde rap, where outdoing others in an unconventional and hermetic way is held in high esteem, the listener is often perplexed by the verbal complexity of the text presented. In his book Production of Presence, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht writes “that every human contact with the things of the world contains both a meaning- and a presence-component, and that the situation of aesthetic experience is specific inasmuch as it allows us to live both these components in their tension” (2004, 109); considering this, I am inclined to say that in the two forms of aesthetic experience just described as the beautiful and the sublime one, the meaning-component dominates the presence-component. Even when we listen to a performed text, is it not mainly the meaning-dimension that determines our aesthetic experience? When we are listening to or watching someone performing a text, the presence-component is certainly stronger than when we are reading a text, but it probably is still weaker than the meaning-component. Seen from this theoretical perspective, the Nuyorican movement toward an aesthetics of presence has always already been limited. Nevertheless, one can see an obsession with presence in Algarín’s writing; he conjures it up with great verve. There is phonocentricity: “speech comes first,” Algarín writes in his introduction to the 1975 anthology (19). He also puts emphasis on physicality, on body contact, and aggression when he says, “the Nuyorican poet is to the people what the street fighter is to the crowd. The crowd stops to look, to listen and admire his performance. . . The Nuyorican poet fights with words” (Algarín and Piñero 1975, 23). The most significant statements for the development of an aesthetics of presence can be found


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The poems in this anthology are in the dance of the moment. . . To cut into the immediate moment and deliver an image of what is going on and then move on so that the next image is fresh and alert to the ever-changing present is the business of the poet. . . Once the common ground and action of the poem are established, then what the poem becomes is the event of itself. The poem makes you pay attention, and makes you care. It is the moment that imprints a cultural presence upon the world. Nuyorican poetry is the talk of the ongoing. It is the event of the moment. (Algarín and Piñero 1975, 181–82)

In a MELUS article from 1981, one year after the Cafe had moved to its new location and one year before it closed again, Algarín evoked a very community-oriented presence: he talked about carrying on the oral tradition, “the tradition of expressing self in front of the tribe, in front of the family” (90); but in that article he already proclaimed the performativity of Nuyorican culture: “The future will be procured by what we do that is cultural in the present, so that we are not so much chasing the tradition of a culture as we are putting it down” (90). The 1994 anthology begins with Holman’s “invocation,” where he defines poetry as an art of presence: “poetry is a contact sport!” he says (1). In his introduction, Algarín then talks about the “theatricalization of poetry” and about the “interactive art” of slam poetry (19), the “interactive relationship between the poet expressing and the listener absorbing and actively responding” (15, 18). The quoted passages show that in Nuyorican poetry the meaningcomponent and the meaning/presence-tension are more complex than I roughly outlined above. Let me take Algarín’s comparison of the poet with the street fighter as an example: “The crowd stops to look, to listen and admire his performance,” Algarín says. What becomes evident here is Christopher Beach’s point that performed poetry “needs to be analyzed according to a social and cultural semiotics that takes into account” not only the oral and written poetic text, but also “the visual context provided by the text’s performance” (1999, 134). In Algarín’s poet/street fighter analogy, the relative weight of the two components is almost equal; and as far as the visual context is concerned, the presence-component clearly dominates the meaning-component. So, for an aesthetics of presence there are also other values to be considered, other than complexity with regard to textual form and content, of course. Following Richard Middleton’s book Studying Popular Music, Christopher Beach provides a six-value-model that is also useful for the


in Algarín’s “Afterword” to the first anthology, where he stresses the eventcharacter of Nuyorican poetry:


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analysis of Nuyorican oral, spoken word, and performance poetry, the kind of art that Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno always warned us about. Some of the values that Beach mentions can also be found in the presenceevoking statements by Algarín just quoted: there are positional values, “the way in which individual tastes and values intersect with group norms”; ritual values, the way in which the poem, reading, or performance “creates solidarity or constitutes a special world for both performer and audience”; and erotic values, “how the poem or performance involves, energizes, or structures the body.” What is also important, especially in early, bilingual, and monoethnically based Nuyorican poetry are political values, “how the poem mobilizes explicit political content,” orientation, or even action. The last two values that Beach mentions intersect with the constant of conventionality that can be seen in Nuyorican poetry from the 1970s until today: communicative values, “the way in which the poem ‘says something’ that can be seen by its audience as understandable, interesting, appropriate, relevant, or adequate”; and technical values, “how successfully the poem makes reference to familiar codes, norms, and standards” (Beach 1999, 134). All this has to be taken into account when we deal with the integration of art and everyday environments, with art as embodiment of a whole life context, “Kunst als Verkörperung eines ganzen Lebenszusammenhangs,” the coeditor of the journal Musik & Ästhetik, Richard Klein says, referring to popular music and John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics (2004, 340). At the Nuyorican, “lebensweltliche,” physical, and performative contexts have to be taken into consideration (340): for example, show, ambience, body images, performer/audience relationship, and the crowd’s affective excitement or even arousal caused by the live situation are at least as important as the text presented. Work from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe must not be reduced to what can be written down. Nuyorican poetic endeavor should not only be judged by textual and formal criteria; reproaching it for its literary conventionality falls short of its complex aesthetics. Nevertheless, in regard to literary history, interpretive expectations, and Adorno’s position “einer kategorialen Immanenz des Materials,” one cannot fail to notice the conventionality of Nuyorican poetry (Klein 2004, 339). This is also partially intended, though, as one could see in some of Algarín’s and Holman’s statements above, the Nuyorican Poets community defines itself, to a certain extent, “in opposition to . . . the mainstream academic community and the avant-garde or experimental community,” which Christopher Beach says about the slam community in general (1999, 149). Thinking of the avant-garde community from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, especially of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-movement,5 I see more of a clash than a “fortunate fusion of avant-garde sensibilities” and Nuyorican “populist sympathies” (Beach 1999, 125), but with the


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mainstream academic community Nuyorican poets share a lot of conventions. They write poetry that corresponds to certain sets of interpretive conventions and expectations that are questioned neither by mainstream academic nor pop-cultural nonacademic audiences. Nuyorican Poets encourage, most of them not deliberately, I suppose, “the approach to the lyric expounded and exemplified by the New Criticism,” which probably still is “the only theory of the lyric to gain wide currency and influence” (Culler 1985, 38). In Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, we read that the lyric is “preeminently the utterance that is overheard” (1957/1990, 249); this definition goes back to an article titled “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties” (1833), in which John Stuart Mill aphoristically distinguishes between poetry and eloquence: “Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” (Mill 2002, 57). In M. H. Abrams’ classic Glossary of Literary Terms, “lyric” is defined as “any fairly short poem, consisting of the utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought, and feeling” (1993, 108). This makes one think of the subtitle of the 1975 Nuyorican Poetry anthology: it is called An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. A lot of Nuyorican poetry conforms to what Jonathan Culler calls the conventions of speaker and context reconstruction, unity and autonomy, and the convention of significance: when it comes to Nuyorican texts, it is a quite rewarding approach to “imagine or reconstruct a speaker and a context,” to “infer the posture, situations, concerns, and attitudes of a speaker (sometimes coinciding with what we know of the author, but often not)”; to read the poem “as if it were an aesthetic whole,” so that all the parts “fit together harmoniously,” and to treat the poem as if it was “about something important” (Culler 2000, 74–80). These analytical conventions go together with certain immanent conventions, which have also contributed to the popularization of Nuyorican poetry:6 Nuyorican texts generally do not require a very high level of literary competence; they are formally and semantically accessible; their transparent and “natural” language is often instantly understandable; most often, Nuyorican poems still adhere to the poetic norm of the 1960s—free verse and the confessional mode. This, Phillip Mehne rightly says in his article “Making It Strange,” includes an orientation to spoken language, to speaking as a physical act (Olson), and to an accusatory and denunciatory voice (Ginsberg, “Howl”), which is, as Mehne also mentions, the kind of orientation that some avant-garde communities opposed, especially the so-called Language poets in the 1970s and 80s, for example Lyn Hejinian (2003, 540–41). In “Barbarism,” the paper that she gave in Australia in 1995, one year after the publication of Aloud, the second Nuyorican anthology, Hejinian explains that what




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she and other Language poets had challenged and called into question was “the poetry of the self,” “the romantic, unitary, expressive self, the ‘I’ of the lyric poem” (2000, 330, 329). This “I” is immensely important in Nuyorican poetry, which is basically a poetry of the self, where poetic voice is a central aspect but also a rather complex issue connected with lingual and vocal diversity, performativity, ethnicity, race, class, and gender, as I will show in the following partial readings of paradigmatic poems taken from Nuyorican Poetry and Aloud. From the first to the second anthology the Nuyorican “I” changed and developed. All in all it can be said that there was a shift of emphasis from ethnicity to performance, from bilingualism as an ethnic feature to bilingualism as a matter of genuinely free choice, from bilingualism to monolingualism, and from monovocalism to multivocalism. In the first anthology, in Miguel Algarín’s poem “Mongo Affair,” the speaker is a particular ethnic “I” that closely resembles the bilingual Nuyorican poet of Puerto Rican descent. The impression of a straightforward case of autobiographical self-expression is evoked by the identification of the “I” with the first name of the poet. Even the poet’s friends and the cofounders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe are explicitly addressed: Miguel “Miguelito” Piñero, Lucky Cienfuegos, and Bimbo Rivas. With its three bilingual addressees and its genealogical dimension, the poem creates group solidarity and therefore stresses its positional and ritual values. The fourth addressee of the poem is “a black Puerto Rican” from the Island, a “viejo negro africano” (Algarín and Piñero 1975, 53). So three participants in the poem’s discourse—the poet, the speaker, and the addressees—belong to an almost completely homogeneous group, as far as Puerto Rican descent and origin are concerned. Only the fourth participant, the reader or listener of the poem, could also be non-Puerto Rican, for example Anglo-American. The ability of an English-Only reader or listener to understand what the speaker says would be somewhat limited, of course, but with its communicative and political values, the poem has something important to say also to the dominant Anglo section of American society, for example about the postcolonial social condition of lower-class Puerto Rican males. With its Puerto Rican Spanglish speaker and poet, the poem implies a one-to-one correlation between bilingualism and a people. This changes in the second anthology, where the idea of a “new internationalism,” a truly postethnic inter-American verse culture, supersedes the cultural nationalism of the first anthology (Algarín and Holman 1994, 20). In his introduction to Aloud, Algarín states that “Nuyorican language is no longer the property of Puerto Ricans speaking in a blend of English and Spanish” (20). He praises the bold “multilingual expressiveness” of non−Puerto Rican U.S.-American artists who are “confronting languages


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in their willingness to stand before live audiences and speak in Spanish. They speak their feelings in Spanish. . . . They are . . . attempting complex intense communications in the Spanish language and are fearless about accents or mispronunciation. They are intent on diving into the endless possibility of multilingual expressiveness. . . Gone are the days when English would remain the only means of expression for North American artists. (Algarín and Holman 1994, 20)

An artist in the anthology who in her poetic performance uses a language that is usually not associated with her ethnic identity is the African American female poet Tracie Morris, the 1992 Nuyorican Grand Slam champion and the 1993 National Haiku Slam champion. By performing as an African American speaker of English who uses some Spanish, Morris questions—verbally and visually, certainly in a more impressive way than on the page—the set of attributes ascribed to different ethnic groups. Her Spanglish poem “Morenita,” which offers a transnational, global view of “blackness,” ends with the words “Morenita of the world” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 106). Another African American poet who sometimes uses Spanish in his performance work is Reg E. Gaines; apparently he can, from memory, recite some of the most important Spanish and bilingual poems by Lucky Cienfuegos and Miguel Piñero from the mid-1970s (Algarín and Holman 1994, 20). The Gaines poem I will discuss is monolingual, but the issue of poetic voice is more complex and performative than in the texts by Algarín and Morris. “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans” got into Aloud’s first section (“Poetry into the Twenty-First Century”) and came out on CD in the same year, in 1994. With his poem and performance, Gaines makes reference to several familiar codes, to a particular tradition and style, and to certain intertexts. If we follow Shira Wolosky’s elucidating analysis of “poetic voice” and assume that the “first-person ‘I’ is always, in some sense, a seduction,” that “any use of a first-person voice initiates . . . an identification” of the reader, viewer, or listener with the “I” who speaks (2001, 111), we can say that this effect is supposed to be amplified on Gaines’ CD by the rhythmic “cool brother” oral presentation, the diction, and the musical accompaniment that evokes 1970s blaxploitation soundtracks and strong, streetwise figures. For an audience that knows the black vernacular tradition, the text’s form also reinforces this effect of identification: “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans” is in the tradition of secular rhymes, songs,


other than English and involving themselves in the exploration of selfexpression in other forms of speech” (20). “They are daring,” Algarín says enthusiastically, daring


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and ballads. With its rhyming couplets and strophic organization—the four-line stanza—it refers to one of the most popular ballads in AfricanAmerican culture, the “Sinking of the Titanic.” Shine, the protagonist of this ballad, who survives all the upper-class white people on the ship, is a paradigmatic character in this tradition, in which one can find praise songs to heroes such as him, John Henry, The Signifying Monkey, or Stackolee. In the headnotes to the section “Secular Rhymes and Songs, Ballads, Work Songs, and Songs of Social Change” of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, these heroes are described like this: most of the heroic ballad figures are “fast-talking” male characters “of action and, if necessary, violence,” black badman figures who can outsmart white authority—“The Man”—but can peel his cap back, too, “with an oversize gun”; these positive hero and badman forms “have had a strong impact on the blues,” and, of course, “on rap music” (Gates and McKay 2004, 26). In Gaines’ “rap-meets-poetry” text we have a negative antihero, though. If we think of (black) kids who often seem to be victims of the fashion label industry, we can clearly see the poem’s communicative value and pedagogical function. Gaines stages a persona with whom he criticizes materialism and a transnational “urban consumer and fashion culture” (Kane 2003, 204). So the issue of poetic voice is quite complex and orchestrated here. What we have to deal with are different voices, different stances, positions, or points of view. The persona’s voice and the poet’s voice work against each other: what the character asserts, the poet subverts (Wolosky 2001, 111). In the case of “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans,” the result for the reader, listener, or viewer indeed is—as Shira Wolosky says about “the four-part construction,” including poet, speaker, auditor, and reader—“a mixed experience of critical detachment and judgment, on the one hand, against the speaker; and yet also of being implicated in the speaker’s presentation” (111). There are multifarious ways of reception: according to Wolosky, the reader’s experience can be described as “shifting between” the poet’s and the speaker’s voice “in varying degrees of identification and detachment” (111), which also depend on ethnic, class, gender, and age affiliations, of course. Gaines stages a voice whose realness and authenticity of self-expression are not questioned. This is different in the last two poems from the Aloud anthology that I am going to discuss. In “Well?” a text from the “Open Room” section, the Jamaican dub-poet Everton Sylvester makes his character question the seriousness of his utterance. In the poem that I want to discuss before, “Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere,” the Latina poet and performer Maggie Estep stages a voice that is—unlike the one of Gaines’ speaker—not only performative to the extent that it performs “actions of stating and describing,” as Jonathan Culler says


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about constative utterances, but that it brings into being the thing that it names publicly, in front of the addressee and the audience (Culler 2000, 96): the performer enacts a performative voice that brings into being the speaker’s identity. Here, the “I” is further de-essentialized. We are far away now from the honesty, seriousness, and fullness of Algarín’s bilingual but monovocal ethnic “I” in “Mongo Affair.” Estep’s poem “Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere” is a paradigmatic example of the development of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe from an ethnically centered location of (oral) literature to a transethnic performance venue. The speaker points to her own performative rhetorical operations that bring her identity as “sex goddess” into being. She is bold enough to not even claim that the constative utterance “I am the Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere” “represents what is,” that it names things that are already there (Culler 2000, 100−101). Instead of implicitly claiming that, she says: “I am / if only for the fact that I have / the unabashed gall / to call / myself a SEX GODDESS” (Algarín and Holman 1994, 63). These lines of the text illustrate what Erika FischerLichte says about the performative act: it is non-referential, which means that it does not refer to something given, a substance or an essence that could be expressed; there is no such thing, Fischer-Lichte writes, as an expressible, a fixed and stable identity. In this sense, she continues, expressiveness is diametrically opposed to performativity (2004, 37). “I am if only for the fact that I have the unabashed gall to call myself a Sex Goddess.” The political value of this sentence is that it is uttered by a female speaker and that it implicitly criticizes male-dominated discourses that conceal their performativity and often claim to represent things as they are. With her female speaker, Estep also acts against traditional female role expectations and violates inherited norms. In her exploration of “Gender and Poetic Voice,” Shira Wolosky writes that, “through the ages,” modesty has been “asserted as a specific, and defining, female norm. Again and again in poetry by women, modesty serves as a central mode of selfrepresentation. It may even be called a specific (and specifically feminized) topos, the modesty topos” (2001, 121). Maggie Estep does not adhere to this topos. She did not construct her speaker with restraint; her female poetic voice is not “pointedly humble, woven of concession, apology, and self-deprecation” at all (Wolosky 2001, 124)—quite the opposite in fact: it is decidedly immodest. Estep’s female speaker is impolite, rude, and not shy about attracting sexual interest. On the CD, these attributes are backed up by punkish music, where rebellious attitudes and postures like Estep’s are part of the conventional role expectations. Estep’s text and her vocal performance on CD also remind us of important conventions in African American and transnational Hip Hop culture: the aggressive performative acts of bragging and boasting.




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The last poem I am going to discuss is an excellent example of another performative speech act we know from Hip Hop: dissing. To “diss” someone means to disrespect him or her. Everton Sylvester’s “Well?” can make us believe in Bob Holman’s statement that “poetry is a contact sport”; it perfectly illustrates what it means to get words in your face. “Well?” is a dramatic monologue, a poem of resentment which seems to be a speech taken from some dramatic encounter between a rich but otherwise socially underprivileged character and someone he addresses, a person who has more symbolic and cultural capital than the speaker. From the outset, there are two points of view inscribed into the poem: the speaker’s and the addressee’s. Poetic voice is dominated by the class dimension, the diction of the speaker, and the performative act of dissing. Although the poem is from the Aloud anthology, from its “Open Room” section, it could, because of its lower-class bias, also fit into the 1975 anthology of Nuyorican poetry. What does not really come to the fore, though, is the issue of ethnic identity, which seems to have been forced back by the class-motivated performative act of injurious speech, of hate speech. In Judith Butler’s book Excitable Speech we read that hate speech constitutes its addressee at the moment of its utterance; it does not describe an injury or produce one as a consequence; it is, in the very speaking of such speech, the performance of the injury itself, where the injury is understood as social subordination. What hate speech does, then, is to constitute the subject in a subordinate position. (Butler 1997, 18)

In Everton Sylvester’s poem, a persona from the dominated classes enacts domination with speech, and thereby assumes agency and gains a temporary position of power. But maybe, he says, he’s just joking. What’s the difference? In conclusion, I would like to draw a distinction between two different tendencies in transnational Nuyorican poetry: some of it—mostly early Nuyorican work such as Bimbo Rivas’ “Loisaida” and Miguel Algarín’s “Mongo Affair”—is based on serious monovocal expressiveness and the idea of a given ethnic and lingual identity reaching beyond Puerto Rico to the U.S. mainland and to Africa; and some of it, such as the more contemporary Nuyorican work by African American and Latino performers like Reg E. Gaines, Maggie Estep, Jamaican dub-artist Everton Sylvester, and Tracie Morris, de-essentializes transnationalism and playfully brings up the issues of multivocalism (“Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans”), performativity (“Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere,” “Well?”), and of ethnic and lingual identity as performance (“Morenita”).


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1. Gómez-Peña’s performance piece “The New World Border” refers to the U.S.Mexican border, but I think that the term is also an apt one for referring to the Nuyorican cultural space, because the word “border” can be used in a more figurative way. See, for example, Ed Morales’ “Spanglish Manifesto,” the introduction to his book Living in Spanglish: “There is, of course, the border, the literal region of the Rio Grande, where Mexico blurs into the United States and vice versa. At the border, an obvious and often awkward mixing of cultures takes place that makes up the superficial idea of Spanglish. But the border also exists deep within the territory of North America, now more than ever, in its major cities; it is an imported border that is expressed through a dynamic, continuing recombination of cultures. That is the Spanglish way . . . Spanglish is the ultimate space where the in-betweenness of being neither Latin American nor North American is negotiated. When we speak in Spanglish we are expressing not ambivalence, but a new region of discourse that has the possibility of redefining ourselves and the mainstream, as well as negating the conventional wisdom of assimilation and American-ness” (Morales 2002, 4, 95). 2. “It ain’t where you from, it’s where you at” is a quotation of non-Nuyorican origin. It is a line from “In the Ghetto,” a text by the African American rapper Rakim. “In the Ghetto” is on the album Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em, which came out in 1990 when Rakim still formed a Hip Hop group together with Eric B. 3. In Graham Hodges’ article about the Lower East Side, which “comprehends the East Village, Chinatown, Little Italy, Tompkins Square, Astor Place, and the housing development Knickerbocker Village,” we learn that “some of the first settlers in the area were free black farmers who moved to the Bouwerie . . . The first tenements in the city were erected near Corlear’s Hook in 1833, and Irish immigrants settled in the northern section along the Bowery. Kleindeutschland developed north of Houston Street in the 1840s. The 1880s saw an influx of Italians, Jews from eastern Europe, Russians, Romanians, Hungarians, Ukranians, Slovaks, Greeks, and Poles. One of the largest ethnic enclaves was a Jewish one that in 1920 had a population of 400,000 . . . The neighborhood became the first racially integrated section of the city after the Second World War, when thousands of blacks and Puerto Ricans moved there . . . Poets, writers, and musicians found social tolerance and cheap food and housing in the northern section, which became the center of the beat movement; 4th Avenue was soon the site of many secondhand bookstores. By the 1960s most Jewish and eastern European residents had moved out of the neighborhood, which in the following decade was beset by persistent poverty, crime, drugs, and the abandonment of housing. The area stabilized to some degree in the 1980s, and its inexpensive housing attracted venturesome students and members of the middle class, as well as immigrants from China, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, Poland, Japan, Korea, India, and Bangladesh. In its southern reaches the Lower East Side is heavily Chinese” (Hodges 1995, 697). 4. Think of RZA’s CD The World According to RZA, for example, which documents the multilingual dimension of transnational Hip Hop culture by featuring


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artists rapping in Scandinavian and African languages, in Turkish, Italian, English, French, and German. In the booklet of his CD, the African American producer and rapper RZA says that he “seeks to prove that there is no boundaries or barriers in Hip Hop.” 5. Coincidentally, the publication dates of the seminal anthologies Nuyorican Poetry and Aloud, 1975 and 1994, almost exactly mark the period of the development of “Language writing,” which began around 1976 with Barrett Watten’s This magazine; from 1978 to 1981 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine was published; Bruce Andrews’ and Charles Bernstein’s L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book came out in 1984, ten years before the second Nuyorican anthology; in 1995, Lyn Hejinian gave a retrospective paper on Language writing titled “Barbarism,” which also got published in The Language of Inquiry (2000), Lyn Hejinian’s important collection of essays. 6. The popular and conventional status of Nuyorican poetry raises up the old undecidable questions about pop culture in capitalist societies: is it vernacular folk culture, the free “expression of the people,” or is it mass culture (Culler 2000, 44), the expression of people who cannot or do not want to free themselves from certain commodity conventions? Neither nor but both, I would say.

References Abrams, M. H. 1993. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 6th ed. Forth Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. Acosta-Belén, Edna. 1988. The Literature of the Puerto Rican Migration in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography. ADE Bulletin 91: 56–62. ———. 1992. Beyond Island Boundaries: Ethnicity, Gender, and Cultural Revitalization in Nuyorican Literature. Callaloo 15.4: 979–998. Algarín, Miguel. 1981. Nuyorican Literature. MELUS 8.2: 89–92. Algarín, Miguel, and Lois Griffith, eds. 1997. Action: The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Theater Festival. New York: Touchstone. Algarín, Miguel, and Bob Holman, eds. 1994. Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. New York: Henry Holt. Algarín, Miguel, and Miguel Piñero, eds. 1975. Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. New York: William Morrow & Company. Aparicio, Frances R. 1988. La Vida Es un Spanglish Disparatero: Bilingualism in Nuyorican Poetry. In European Perspectives on Hispanic Literature of the United States, ed. Genviève Fabre, 147–160. Houston: Arte Público Press. Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Beach, Christopher. 1999. Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry between Community and Institution. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Bezner, Kevin. 1995. From Black Mountain College to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe: Lineage, Tradition, and Community in Postmodern Poetry. Cincinnati Poetry Review 26: 77–86.


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Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo. 1988. Teaching Puerto Rican Authors: Identity and Modernization in Nuyorican Texts. ADE Bulletin 91: 45–51. Culler, Jonathan. 1985. Changes in the Study of the Lyric. In Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker, 38–54. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2000. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2002. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Den Tandt, Catherine. 1995. Tracing a Comparative American Project: The Case of Québec and Puerto Rico. diacritics 25.1: 46–62. Eric B. & Rakim. 1990. Let the Rhythm Hit’Em. LP. MCA. Estep, Maggie. 1994. No More Mister Nice Girl. CD. NuYo Records. Estéves, Sandra María. 1987. Ambivalence or Activism from the Nuyorican Perspective in Poetry. In Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Two World Contexts, ed. Asela Rodríguez de Laguna, 164–170. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2004. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Flores, Juan. 1998. Puerto Rican Literature in the United States: Stages and Perspectives. ADE Bulletin 91: 39–44. Foster, Edward Halsey. 1993. Bob Holman, Performance Poetry, and the Nuyorican Poets Café. Multicultural Review 2.2: 46–48. Foucault, Michel. 2005. Die Heterotopien/Les hétérotopies, Der utopische Körper/Le corps utopique: Zwei Radiovorträge. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Frye, Northrop. 1957/1990. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gaines, Reg E. 1994. Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans. CD. Mercury. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. 2004. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. New York: Norton. Golding, Alan. 2002. Recent American Poetry Anthologies and the Idea of the “Mainstream.” In Poetry and Contemporary Culture, ed. Andrew Michael Roberts and Jonathan Allison, 123–140. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Grandjeat, Yves-Charles. 1987. De l’Aliénation à la Dissidence: Les Poètes Nuyoricains. In Les Etats-Unis: Conformismes de Dissidences, ed. Jean Pierre Martin, 59–75. Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hejinian, Lyn. 2000. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Herms, Dieter. 1988. Chicano and Nuyorican Literature—Elements of a Democratic and Socialist Culture in the U.S. of A.? In European Perspectives on Hispanic




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Literature of the United States, ed. Genviève Fabre, 118–129. Houston: Arte Público Press. Hodges, Graham. 1995. Lower East Side. In The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson, 696–697. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kane, Daniel. 2003. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kieserling, André. 1999. Kommunikation unter Anwesenden: Studien über Interaktionssysteme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Klein, Richard. 2004. Der Ort der Popmusik im Leben. Merkur 58: 338–344. Mehne, Phillip. 2003. “Making It Strange”: Bewusstsein, Erfahrung und Sprache bei Gertrude Stein und Lyn Hejinian. Amerikastudien/American Studies 48: 537–561. Mill, John Stuart. 2002. Dissertations and Discussions. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific. Morales, Ed. 2002. Living in Spanglish: The Search for a Latino Identity in America. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Morton, Carlos. 1976. Nuyorican Theatre. The Drama Review 20.1: 43–49. Nuyorican Poets Cafe. http://www.nuyorican.org. Piñero. 2003. Dir. Leon Ichaso. Perf. Benjamin Bratt. 2001. DVD. Highlight. Pousada, Alicia. 1989. Los de Allá: Linguistic Resources of the “Nuyoricans” or Return Migrants. Revista/Review Interamericana 19.3–4: 50–61. Rauline, Véronique, and Tato Laviera. 1998. Tato Laviera’s Nuyorican Poetry: The Choice of Bilingualism. In Strategies of Difference in Modern Poetry, ed. Pierre Lagayette, 146–163. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. RZA. 2003. The World According to RZA. CD. Virgin. Slam. 1998. Dir. Marc Levin. Perf. Saul Williams. DVD. Trimark. Stavans, Ilan. 2003. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. New York: HarperCollins. Stratton, Richard, and Kim Wozencraft, eds. 1998. Slam. New York: Grove Press. Wolosky, Shira. 2001. The Art of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press.


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“A Broader and Wiser Revolution”: Refiguring Chicano Nationalist Politics in Latin American Consciousness in Post-Movement Literature Tim Libretti

I

n a 1999 essay addressing Chicano politics and society in the late twentieth century, Martín Sanchez Jankowski asks, “Where have all the nationalists gone?” This article will explore how the contemporary postmovimiento Chicano/a literary productions of Rolando Hinojosa, Graciela Limón, Helena María Viramontes, and Cherríe Moraga have effectively answered that question by developing narratives of political consciousness and struggle that do not discard the Chicano nationalist politics of self-determination and decolonization but rather reassert the urgency and necessity of those politics by elaborating and resituating those politics in both an international context and in the context of a diversifying Latino/a culture and identity in the United States. Part of the social and historical context in which I will study these works is that articulated by Juan Gómez-Quiñones when he writes,


8

[I]n 1980 the Mexican was only one group among a growing Latin American population in the United States, a population which now comprises all Latin American nationalities. The ‘Mexican de Afuera’ became part of the phenomenon of “America Latina de Afuera.” For better or for worse, this phenomenon impacts to what extent Mexicans can pursue strictly Mexican interests. Ironically, the political coming together of ‘La Raza Cósmica’ is


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occurring in the United States, but the immediate result in public discourse has been to diminish adamant Mexican or Chicano assertion.

In looking at this “political coming together,” however, I will suggest that at the literary level the Chicano assertion has not been diminished but rather that these authors reassert Chicano politics. Indeed, it is precisely the diversity of Latin American populations in the United States that makes more urgent an awareness of the national conditions that have nurtured the particular experiences, consciousnesses, and political interests, issues, and needs of each group. Moreover, I will argue, one objective of postmovement Chicano/a literature, in grappling with the internationalization of Latino identity, is precisely to foster a national consciousness that can properly comprehend and resist the international conditions of neoimperialism euphemistically referred to as “globalization.” Graciela Limón, for example, in her novel Erased Faces (2001) treats the Zapatista national liberation movement not to undermine nationalist politics in favor of a simplistic or facile transnationalism but to highlight relationships between the national and the transnational, the individual and historical global conditions. In her works The Day of the Moon (1999) and In Search of Bernabé (1993), she explores the importance of understanding the content of a displaced Latino/a or Latin American consciousness in the United States in international terms by remembering the specific national context in which that consciousness and experience were nurtured. Likewise, Viramontes undertakes a similar project in her collection The Moths (1985), particularly in the way her tale “The Cariboo Café,” which explores displaced Latino/as in the United States, relates to other stories that depict the waning or aftermath of the Chicano movement. In these works, as in Cherríe Moraga’s 1992 manifesto “Queer Aztlán,” we see an assertion and reinvigoration of anti-colonial nationalist politics in relationship to other national movements around the globe taking on persistent imperialist assaults in the name of what Moraga calls “a broader and wiser revolution.” In this essay, I will begin by looking at Moraga’s writing in order to outline and emphasize what I see as the political evolution of movement politics in post-movement literature and then somewhat more schematically suggest ways we see those politics narratively encoded in the works of Hinojosa, Limón, and Viramontes. In developing the framework of what she sees as the “broader and wiser revolution,” Moraga reaffirms the nationalist politics informing the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, situating her argument for the necessity and continuing utility of anti-imperialist nationalist


(Gómez-Quiñones 1990, 195)


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politics in the context of transnational relationships and politics. Moraga conceptualizes nationalism, internationalism, and transnationalism not as informing exclusive or contradictory political visions but rather as necessarily complementary, demonstrating the indispensability of the category of the nation for its ability, in fact, to center a transnationalist political vision—particularly an indigenous one—and to comprehend the complex dialectical mediations between race, class, sexuality, and gender within the racial patriarchal capitalist world system. Indeed, in response to Jankowski’s question “Where have all the nationalists gone?” Moraga admits to a waning, or rather more of a deformation, of the Chicano nationalist movement but denies its complete disappearance, challenging prevalent sociological narratives, such as we see in Earl Shorris’ Latinos, that proclaim premature obituaries for the Chicano Movement.1 “For me,” Moraga writes, “‘El Movimiento’ has never been a thing of the past, it has retreated into subterranean uncontaminated soils awaiting resurrection in a ‘queerer,’ more feminist generation” (148). What threatened the Chicano Movement, Moraga argues, were the twinned and linked forces of heterosexism and assimilation, or what she refers to as “Hispanicization,” by which she means the elision of a specifically Chicano identity into an overarching and all-encompassing category that identifies and includes Latino peoples of all national backgrounds, erasing the specific and meaningful material differences in these various groups’ historical experiences, material situations, cultural forms and values, and hence specific political interests and exigencies. Thus, against that analysis offered by Gómez-Quiñones above in which he constructs a political historical narrative of the diminishing possibilities for a specifically Chicano assertion in public discourse precisely because of the growth of a Latino population comprised of all Latin American nationalities, Moraga argues strenuously for the viability and necessity of reinvigorating the Chicano Movement and its nationalist politics grounded in a historical comprehension of the specific socioeconomic circumstances conditioning the Chicano experience. Indeed, throughout “Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe,” Moraga insists that any decolonization movement “must be culturally and sexually specific” (149), which is why she holds fast to the necessity of nationalist politics. She explains,


REFIGURING CHICANO NATIONALIST POLITICS

Chicanos are an occupied nation within a nation, and women and women’s sexuality are occupied within Chicano nation. If women’s bodies and those of men who transgress their gender roles have been historically regarded as territories to be conquered, they are also territories to be liberated. Feminism has taught us this. The nationalism I seek is one that decolonizes


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the brown and female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth. It is a new nationalism in which la Chicana Indígena stands at the center, and heterosexism and homophobia are no longer the cultural order of the day. I cling to the word “nation” because without the specific naming of the nation, the nation will be lost (as when feminism is reduced to humanism, the woman is subsumed). Let us retain our radical naming but expand it to meet a broader and wiser revolution. (Moraga 1993, 150)

Moraga here reasserts the viability, utility, and necessity of the nation as a radical political subject of decolonization to counter her implicit worry that dismissing the nation as a political category or subject of resistance to colonialism would, if not totally erase, certainly severely diminish the meaningful tradition of political action in U.S. history and on the U.S. terrain that nationalism has been. She is unwilling to scrap wholesale the politics of nationalism because to do so would leave one without a language or category for signifying the racial oppression Chicanos experience as an internally colonized nation. Moreover, it needs to be highlighted that one reason Moraga clings so tenaciously to Chicano nationalism is precisely because, against many contemporary theoretical developments such as postcolonial theory, Moraga understands Chicanos as an internally colonized nation within the U.S. nation-state. (As we will see later, it is precisely the theory of internal colonialism that endows nationalist politics with a transnational consciousness.) The point to be stressed here, though, is that just as she is opposed to reducing feminism to humanism because then the specific concerns of women’s political interests are elided, it seems equally and implicitly true, though she does not directly state it, that subsuming Chicanos into the broader category of Latino or Latin American would be similarly reductive, eliding the specific and place-bound political concerns of Chicanos, that is, she does make reference to “the benign cultural imperialism of the Latin American Solidarity Movement” (Moraga 1993, 146). Indeed, it is precisely because of the diminishing possibilities for a Chicano assertion that Gómez-Quiñones identifies which necessitate the reinvigoration of Chicano nationalism. For Moraga, it is important to note, the politics of nationalism as a vehicle for challenging and resisting the conditions of colonization or imperialist assault are neither ineffective nor obsolete. Chicanos as well as many other peoples around the globe, particularly indigenous populations, still, in her analysis, suffer under conditions of occupation. In this era of postcolonial theory, nationalism has been under attack from even putatively radical theorists such as Paul Gilroy and, of special relevance to my concerns here, from the Chicana feminist activist writer Ana Castillo.2 Each


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of these writers sees the nation as an exclusive and chauvinist entity, isolating their vision of nationalist politics to the regressive patriotisms based on conceptions of racial purity that have resulted in such practices as the genocidal processes of “ethnic cleansing.” They ignore nationalism’s progressive manifestations in national liberation movements against ongoing and contemporary imperialist and colonialist assaults. Ignoring meaningful Third World movements in the United States and abroad both historically and in their contemporary manifestations, such as the Zapatista National Liberation Movements in Chiapas, both Gilroy and Castillo, whom I see as exemplars of prevalent and even dominant tendencies in contemporary postcolonial theoretical approaches to nationalism, see nationalism as exclusive and constraining in terms of defining political agency.3 Moraga, however, does not see nationalism itself as regressive, but rather sees the meaningful politics of nationalism as a vehicle for decolonization movements as contaminated by or rendered ineffective and regressive by sexist and heterosexist politics that undermine nationalism’s liberatory objective of radical democratic self-determination. She insists, for example, that, El Movimiento did not die out in the seventies, as most of its critics claim; it was only deformed by the machismo and homophobia of that era and co-opted by ‘Hispanicization’ of the eighties. In reaction against AngloAmerica’s emasculation of Chicano men, the male-dominated Chicano Movement embraced the most patriarchal aspects of its Mexican heritage. For a generation, nationalist leaders used a kind of ‘selective memory,’ drawing exclusively from those aspects of Mexican and Native cultures that served the interests of the male heterosexuals. (Moraga 1993, 156)

In the context of contemporary theoretical developments that tend to valorize globalization and internationalism over and against nationalism, Moraga’s defense of nationalism’s relevance and her insistent analysis that imperialism and colonization are still ongoing and contemporary practices that require resistance stands out. It is not by dismissing nationalism that, for Moraga, we will achieve internationalism or transnationalism but rather by reinvigorating nationalism with a queer feminist political consciousness that we can foster a “broader and wiser revolution” to challenge oppressive and exploitative processes of globalization, which we used to call, less euphemistically, imperialism. Moraga’s theoretical stance and her positioning of herself as an intellectual, then, very much echo and are in line with Frantz Fanon’s positioning of the intellectual working under colonial conditions when he writes that “the most urgent




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thing for the intellectual is to build up his nation . . . It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source of all culture” (Fanon 1963, 222). With this comparison, I want to stress that Moraga’s vision, again, does not figure nationalism, internationalism, or transnationalism as mutually exclusive politics or categories but rather as necessarily complementary. Having said that, however, we must consider how exactly Moraga sees these politics complementing one another. She is acutely aware in her writings of a growing and diverse Latino population in the United States, as she writes, for example, in her essay “Art in América con Acento,” that “[i]ronically, the United States’ gradual consumption of Latin America and the Caribbean is bringing the people of the Americas together. What was once largely a chicano/mexicano population in California is now guatemalteco, salvadoreño, nicaraguense” (Moraga 1993, 55). Yet while the gathering of these Latino populations and other “Third World” populations from places such as Vietnam and Cambodia—in addition to other places, in Moraga’s analysis, that U.S. military invasions have displaced and resulted in orphan populations—might create conditions for broader Third World or transnational alliances, she hesitates to celebrate prematurely the emergence of La Raza Cósmica, that is, of a unified pan-Latin American cultural identity or political constituency.4 Latinos, she suggests, represent far too diverse a set of political identities, historical experiences, and cultural groups to define in any rigorously, or even casually, coherent way a cohesive population or political group. She does not see “the political coming together” that Gómez-Quiñones postulates, as indicated in his quotation earlier. Instead, she asserts, Latinos in the United States do not represent a homogenous group. Some of us are native born, whose ancestors precede not only the arrival of the Anglo-American but also of the Spaniard. Most of us are immigrants, economic refugees coming to the United States in search of work. Some of us are political refugees, fleeing death squads and imprisonment; others fleeing revolution and the loss of wealth. Finally, some have simply landed here very tired of war. And in all cases, our children had no choice in the matter. U.S. Latinos represent the whole spectrum of color and class and political position, including those who firmly believe they can integrate into the mainstream of North American life. The more European the heritage and the higher the class status, the more closely Latinos identify with the powers that be. They vote Republican. They stand under the U.S. flag and applaud George Bush for bringing “peace” to Nicaragua. They hope one day he’ll do the same for Cuba, so they can return to their Patria and live a “North American-style” consumer life. Because they know in the United States they


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will never have it all, they will always remain “spics,” “greasers,” “beaners,” and “foreigners” in Anglo-America.

Because of these divisions and differences, which challenge the viability and strain the political meaningfulness of a pan-Latin American identity, Moraga identifies herself with a particular international Latin American political constituency at the same time that she asserts her specifically Chicana political identity. What needs to be stressed here is that she identifies with both constituencies in decidedly political terms, not in general racial, ethnic, geographical, cultural, or national terms, thus narrowing and specifying the constituency with which she identifies. She emphasizes that she calls herself a Chicana writer as opposed to a Mexican American, Hispanic, or half-breed writer, as she explains, “To be a Chicana is not merely to name one’s racial/cultural identity, but also to name a politic, a politic that refuses assimilation into the U.S. mainstream” (Moraga 1993, 56). Similarly, just as her being a Chicana entails her alignment with a particular anti-imperialist nationalist politics, so her Latin American internationalism is limited to an alignment with anti-imperialist politics in the Latin American context. Thus, she begins the essay lamenting “the death of the Nicaraguan revolution” (52) brought about by the U.S. government’s imperialist policies and practices. As a Latina writer in the United States, she feels the need to address the issue and dis-identify from the nationstate and its government that invade Latin American land. Her allegiances and identifications with an international Latin American community domestically and abroad and with a Chicana nationalism are clear in this essay and are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually reinforcing, as internationalist politics, she suggests, depend upon nationalist politics. To put it more succinctly perhaps, Moraga’s transnationalist political perspective is one that imagines a solidarity of nationalisms in a way that harkens back to, or simply remains connected to and informed by, the Third World movements in the United States in the 1960s. While the Third World movements in the 1960s were predominantly defined by nationalist politics, they were not at all narrowly construed movements organized around isolated racial identities. Rather, we saw as never before the adumbration of a racial internationalism and solidarity as people of color in the United States, defining themselves as an internal Third World, united under the broader rubric of “Third Worldism.” The movements had a global resonance, identifying themselves as Third World movements in order to highlight and articulate their connections with Third World nations abroad also enduring colonization at the hands of U.S. and European nation-states.


(Moraga 1993, 56)


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The racial experience in the United States, the internal colonialism model demonstrated, was an experience of colonization that needed crucially to be distinguished from the experience of European ethnic immigrant minorities. It was a function of the operations and deployments of “race” on a global scale within the capitalist world system characterized by imperialism (what Lenin declared to be the highest stage of capitalism). Thus, the Third World political consciousness developed out of these 1960s movements was distinctly international and global in dimension and comprehension and hardly narrowly separatist or culturally and politically isolated. In fact, the Third World movements and their concomitant rich corpus of literary and cultural production suggest themselves as not only viable but as crucial forerunners of and models for the development of a contemporary international culture and consciousness—but one that emerges from and recognizes the specificity of national experiences and the need for the achievement of national sovereignty through national liberation and decolonization. Thus, in Moraga’s writing, we see clearly this type of analytical understanding of the relationship between nationalism and transnationalism, as she is able to speak of both in the same breath, seeing nationalism, particularly of the indigenist variety, as the primary vehicle of resistance to capitalist globalization. She writes, for example, in “Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe,” The primary struggle for Native peoples across the globe is the struggle for land. In 1992, 500 years after the arrival of Columbus, on the heels of the Gulf War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the entire world is reconstructing itself. No longer frozen into the Soviet/Yanqui paradigm of a “Cold” and invented “War,” Indigenous peoples are responding en masse to the threat of a global capitalist “mono-culture” defended by the “hired guns” of the U.S. military. Five hundred years after Columbus’ arrival, they are spearheading an international movement with the goal of sovereignty for all Indigenous nations. Increasingly, the struggles on this planet are not for “nation-states,” but for nations of people, bound together by spirit, land, language, history, and blood. This is evident from the intifada of the Palestinians residing within Israel’s stolen borders and the resistance of the Cree and Inuit Indians in Northern Quebec. The Kurds of the Persian Gulf region understand this, as do the Ukrainians of what was once the Soviet Union. Chicanos are also a nation of people, internally colonized within the borders of the U.S. nation-state.


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(Moraga 1993, 168–9)

Indeed, the international struggle is for sovereignty for indigenous nations. Moraga’s transnational imagination is rooted in a recognition of the situated nature or place-boundedness of political struggle and the specificity of political and specifically national interests. 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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Thus, we see in Moraga’s post-movimiento writings not a dismissal of the movement and its politics but a recontextualization of them in transnational political movements in a way that reinvigorates and reaffirms them in the midst of a dizzying barrage of theoretical projections of transnationalism, diasporic identities, and cosmopolitanism that often obscure and simplistically dismiss nationalism. Moraga’s essay provides us with a cultural and political logic that moves beyond what Sau-Ling Wong has identified as a postmodernist diaspora model of denationalization based on an unwarranted optimism about the equalizing prospects of globalization and the concomitant notion that “identity formation is not correlated with a sense of belonging to any geographical or political entity” (Wong 1995, 13) but rather with the development of a cosmopolitan, equally shared, and accessible world culture and economy. Moraga is quite clear about the rootedness of identity and historical consciousness in a geographical entity and about the need for reclaiming land in order to experience self-determination. Freedom is rooted in and requires a material space, Moraga suggests. As a Chicana, her interests lie firmly in the United States, in reclaiming occupied territory, as she writes, “I cannot flee the United States, my land resides beneath its borders. We stand on a land that was once the country of Mexico. And before any conquistadors staked out political boundaries, this was Indian land and in the deepest sense remains just that: a land sin fronteras. Chicanos with memory like our Indian counterparts recognize that we are a nation within a nation. An internal nation whose existence defies borders of language, geography, race” (Moraga 1993, 54). To be clear, this land “sin fronteras” is not one that Moraga imagines as the end of nations in favor of a boundless cosmopolitan identity. Rather, this phrase needs to be understood as a refusal to respect the borders of nation-states and the authority of a state that has colonized and suppressed a people. The phrase invokes the original manifesto of the Chicano movement, which she quotes in “Queer Aztlán”: “Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent” (Moraga 1993, 159). Claiming, or reclaiming, freedom in the forms of national sovereignty and self-determination requires reclaiming a specific territory that does not necessarily any longer correspond with the “capricious” geopolitical borders of the U.S. nation-state or any other nation-state. Thus, the nations she imagines may very well be, in the context of contemporary geopolitical demarcations, transnational. We can see, then, the importance of the distinction between “nations” and “nation-states” that Moraga articulates above when she asserts that “the struggles on this planet are not for ‘nation-states,’ but for nations




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of people, bound together by spirit, land, language, history, and blood” (168–9). This conception of national identity—one that may be transnational in contemporary contexts—is one that informs a specifically Chicano, as distinct from a more broadly Latino, political consciousness. Rolando Hinojosa’s border fiction, for example, gives form to a national, even transnational, identity that links the U.S. Third World with the Third World abroad through the continual reenactment in storytelling of moments of Mexican revolutionary uprising from 1848 through the 1930s. The national consciousness Hinojosa’s work fosters through historical recovery and cultural memory is one that crosses capricious borders, as we see in the following storytelling episode from his novel The Valley (1983): Those old men, and I’ll mention but three . . . were all born here, in the United States, but they too fought in the 1910 revolution as did the Mexican mexicanos. The parents of these men were also born in this country, as were their grandparents; this goes back to 1765 and earlier, 1749. It may be curious for some, but it’s all perfectly understandable and natural for lower Rio Grande borderers, as is the lay of the land on both sides of the border; and if one discounts the Anglo Texans, well, the Texas Mexicans—or mexicanos— and the Mexican Americans—the nacionales—not only think alike more often than not, but they are also blood related as they have and had been for one hundred years before the Americans had that war between themselves in the 1860s; the river is a jurisdictional barrier, but that’s about it. (Hinojosa 1983, 78)

This provocative passage reveals two elements centering the narration of the nation. First, the passage portrays the incommensurability of the jurisdictional or geopolitical boundaries of the nation-state, which demarcate and signify the history of imperialist assault and colonization, with a people’s common cultural, historical, and even territorial experience of nationhood. The Texas Mexicans and Mexico Mexicans, Hinojosa suggests, are bound together as a nation or national identity by the distinct and differential cultural ethos and historical experience that defy geopolitical markers and inform a national consciousness that does not correspond to that of the U.S. dominant culture. While the U.S. citizens of European descent might identify the “American” revolution against Britain or the Civil War as important moments in the birth and development of the U.S. nation-state, these dates are rather meaningless for the Texas Mexicans, as Hinojosa represents them in the passage above referring to the Civil War as the war the Americans had “between themselves in the 1860s.” The historical moments that are meaningful are dates such as 1749 and 1848 when “Americans” encroached upon the Mexican


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people and annexed their lands in the name of Manifest Destiny. For the Texas Mexicans to forget this history would be to gloss over their very mode of entry into the dominant U.S. socioeconomic system as a subordinated and colonized people already viewed as unequal. In this example from Hinojosa’s fiction, then, we see the literary effort to foster a Chicano national consciousness, based in a specific history and place, to inform a struggle for “nations of people” against the U.S. nation-state. Even in the context of a diversifying Latino population in the United States, we see in both Moraga and Hinojosa, at the literary level of political struggle, the reassertion of Chicano national identity as opposed to its dissolution in a conception of pan-Latin American identity, such as La Raza Cósmica. Indeed, precisely because, in Moraga’s words, “the material basis of every nationalist movement is land” (170), the political consciousness developed must have a national dimension constituted organically through a collective historical experience and cultural orientation. For Moraga, in particular, it is these national struggles, especially indigenous ones, that represent the most effective assault on the global imperialist order. It is precisely a recognition of the international effects of global capitalism that inspires and informs Moraga’s support of decolonizing national liberation movements around the globe. Likewise, I will suggest, if we look at other examples of post-movimiento Chicano literature such as the fiction of Graciela Limón and Helena María Viramontes, we see examples of an aesthetic that grapples much more “cosmopolitically” than earlier Chicano literature with Latin American national experiences and politics in relation to the United States government and peoples, particularly Chicanos. While this fiction arguably works in part to foster a transnational anti-imperialist political solidarity, it also highlights the need to understand experiences and challenge oppressive and exploitive political and socioeconomic structures on a national scale while contextualizing them and understanding them in the dynamics of global political economies. In this sense, Limón’s and Viramontes’ fiction drives us back to the necessity of nationalist politics as a means of resisting and challenging neocolonial practices in global capitalism and thus also works effectively as a call for the reinvigoration of a Chicano nationalism, much as Moraga did in her manifesto “Queer Aztlán.” Much of Limon’s fiction features settings outside of the United States, focusing in particular on Central America and Mexico, at the same time that this fiction, particularly the novels In Search of Bernabé, The Day of the Moon, and Erased Faces, also involves characters crossing borders between such countries as El Salvador, Mexico, and the United States. While in the first two novels we see El Salvadoran and Mexican characters migrating to the United States, representing a diversifying Latin American




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population in the United States, Limón underscores in her representation of these experiences the necessity of performing a cognitive mapping that not only retraces these characters’ histories and global migrations but also resituates their histories and experiences in specifically national contexts in order to comprehend that character and the formation of that character’s consciousness. Limón’s narratives suggest the need to comprehend the specific national dimensions that nurture experience and consciousness and to distinguish between those specifically national experiences as they inform different Latin American constituencies in the United States. The differences in these national experiences, albeit conditioned perhaps by the same system of global capitalism and by the similar behaviors of U.S. imperialism, create populations whose specific political interests, psychological orientations and needs, and social issues require a specific understanding, diagnosis, and mode of address such that dissolving Latin Americans of different national backgrounds into a singular category of La Raza Cósmica becomes counterproductive to or at least premature for cultural and political transformation. Thus, while Limón produces Chicana narratives that are international in scope, they emphasize the need to highlight the national dimensions that condition historical experience and consciousness in order to grasp important transnational relationships in their totality. Indeed, the transnational scope underscores the importance of a nation-based politics and consciousness. Likewise, in Erased Faces, just as Moraga wants to reinvigorate Chicano nationalism, so Limón, I believe, writing as a Chicana in the post-movimiento context, invokes the Zapatista struggle in part to highlight an actually existing national liberation movement of an internally colonized nation in order to remind Chicanos of the persisting need to fight against the forces of internal colonization. This is why the novel features an American woman of Mexican descent, Adriana Mora, connecting with the Zapatista Movement in a way that motivates her confrontation with both the past, the history of imperialist practice, and the present, its ongoing practice and the ongoing resistance to it. Moreover, just as we see in In Search of Bernabé and The Day of the Moon, the main character Adriana, in working out her individual psychological issues, must finally confront and deal with both personal and larger historical issues through a decolonization that requires participating as an agent in a national liberation struggle. Thus, psychotherapy, in these cases psychotherapeutic processes of decolonization and disalienation (as Fanon writes about), involves not just a talking cure but a political participation in social and cultural transformation. In a sense, then, like Moraga, Limón underscores that the nationalist politics of decolonization are not obsolete or ineffective but that the conditions that gave rise to them for Chicanos in the 1960s are still present in a way


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that necessitates a nationalist political response, for which the Zapatista Movement can provide a model. In both In Search of Bernabé and The Day of the Moon, Limón’s stories emphasize the need of comprehending the national experiences of characters as a way of highlighting the complexities of Latino experiences in the United States. In each work, she seems to indicate that a “return to the source” is in order to understand the psyches and experiences of different Latin American characters in the United States. One subplot of In Search of Bernabé features Luz Delcano coming to the United States from El Salvador in a desperate and somewhat disoriented search for her son Bernabé, from whom she had become separated during the unrest following the assassination of Archbishop Romero in 1980. While living in Los Angeles with Arturo, a young man whom Luz effectively adopts on her journey through Mexico to the United States, the two experience an assault in their apartment by five masked men. They break Arturo’s bones and then shred him with machine gun fire. While the event remains obscure, the implication in the novel is that this murder is committed by El Salvadoran governmental death squads. Limón’s purpose in leaving this moment obscure, though, seems precisely to highlight the inability to comprehend this Latino experience as one conditioned by national conditions within, or at least solely within, the U.S. borders. She writes, When the police entered Luz’s apartment, it was difficult for them to process what had taken place. Rounds of machine gun bullets were extracted from the walls, ceiling and floor, but investigators were unable to come up with logical reasons for the brutality or to understand why the man had been senselessly slaughtered while the woman had gone unharmed. Their questions remained unanswered, and the police were left to decipher the evidence on their own: a room ripped to shreds by gun fire, the body of a young man nearly dismembered, and the enigma of a bloody hand print plastered on the wall. (Limón 1993, 85)

As we later learn, “The crime was officially recorded as gang related and designated to be pursued by normal channels” (86). The suggestion here is that the investigators cannot come up with “logical reasons” and the slaughter looks “senseless” because the logic and sense used to comprehend the murder are too local and uninformed by the specific national context of El Salvador’s sociopolitical dynamics. Thus we see that this Latino experience cannot be understood solely in U.S. national terms or that in order to understand this particular Latino experience in the United States, we must possess a logic that comprehends not just a larger




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international context but a specific national context. The dialectical implication of this assertion is also that a Chicano political understanding must also be rooted in its specific national dimensions. We see a similar displacement of consciousness and experience in The Day of the Moon, as the novel opens in Los Angeles, introducing us to the aged and dying Flavio Betancourt, whose body is the United States but whose consciousness is in Mexico. She begins the novel, writing, Don Flavio Betancourt sat in the armchair, staring through the lace curtains of his bedroom. His gaze was vacant as his eyes scanned the rainy landscape; he was vaguely aware of the swishing sound each time a car drove past his house. His mind, however, was somewhere else. It had escaped, as it did nearly all the time now. The old man’s thoughts ran away from him, skipping west, skittering over rooftops, dashing upward, spiraling over the Sixth Street Bridge, then turning south and rushing headlong toward Mexico. (Limón 1999, 3)

The rest of the novel takes us back through the history of Don Flavio and his family in Mexico. This history features Don Flavio’s rejection of his mother and her Indian ancestry, his rise to the status of landed gentry through a card game, and the punishment and repression of his daughter Isadora for loving an Indian of the Rarámuri tribe. Indeed, he finally commits her to an asylum because of his own shame and his own sense of injured social reputation and humiliation. This humiliation is exacerbated by the fact that his wife Vela is the lover of his sister Brígida, who later, on the basis of her own socially proscribed love relationship, encourages Isadora in her romantic choices. Later, after the family has moved to Los Angeles, Brígida, racked with guilt because she believes she encouraged Isadora in the behavior that led to her effective imprisonment, represses this history and is unable and unwilling to discuss the sexual and racial history of the family with Alondra, the daughter of Isadora and el Rarámuri. This repression of the past, a function of Brígida’s sudden enforcement of the heterosexist and racist ideologies that inform the patriarchal class system Limón represents as the legacy of Spanish colonization, has damaging consequences psychologically for Alondra. She is dysfunctional and cannot hold a job, and Limón represents this dysfunction as a symptom of her lack of a clear identity and historical consciousness. It is the housekeeper Ursula, a Rarámuri who came with the family to Los Angeles, who finally reveals the true family history to Alondra. To heal, Alondra returns to Mexico and to the indigenous Rarámuri tribe and regains psychic health as she undergoes, effectively, a psychotherapeutic decolonization as she reconnects with an indigenous culture that represents for Limón a


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harmonious cultural alternative to the racial patriarchal heterosexist colonial class system that damages all characters in the novel, even Don Flavio who dies miserable, having sacrificed every meaningful relationship in his life. At the end, Alondra remains in Mexico, unsure as to whether she will return to the United States. Thus, to be stressed here, is that Limón’s narration brings Alondra back to a specific place, the national context, that informs her history, consciousness, and psychology. To reclaim her identity in all its historical and psychological dimensions entails a kind of physical revisiting, even a kind of reclamation, of a national space. In the United States, she constituted a kind of displaced consciousness that, I think Limon’s narrative suggests, cannot find wholeness through an assimilation into a broad multinational Latino constituency in the United States but that must confront the national historical and place-bound dimensions of its formation. Thus, Limón’s novel can be understood as a narrative realization of Moraga’s political vision in “Queer Aztlán,” as she highlights the need for Latino populations to develop an anti-colonial national consciousness informed and indeed reinvigorated by, in Moraga’s terms, a queer and feminist perspective. Erased Faces substantiates this perspective as well, as part of Adriana Mora’s initial attraction to the Zapatista Movement is her initially unwitting romantic attraction to Juana Galvan, a member of the Zapatista national liberation army. The two end up having an intense erotic and loving relationship that Limón represents as an important component of liberation—the reconnection with and expression of our libidinal and erotic selves. Galvan herself was drawn to the movement because of its anti-patriarchal politics in part. Finally, in this novel, Adriana Mora returns to the United States, which is her home, her national context, having brought with her the experiential model of a queer and feminist anticolonial national liberation movement to inform her political behavior in the United States. Again, to be stressed is that the narrative of politicization Limón creates drives characters back to specific national contexts, such that while her works have an international scope and feature transnational border-crossings, the intent is not at this point narratively to transcend nationalism but to insist upon its necessity as a component of any kind of political transnationalism. Similarly, Helena María Viramontes’ collection of stories The Moths represents an example of post-movement Chicano literature that deals with broader Latin American experiences and issues in connection with Chicano issues in a way that still, in its representations, insists on the importance of national contexts for grounding and understanding experiences and for developing political identities. Just as Limón represents displaced consciousnesses, in her 1985 story “The Cariboo Café,” Viramontes




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represents the experiences of undocumented Latinos in the United States as “displaced people” (65). The basic plot of the story involves two undocumented children, Sonya and Mackey, who end up in the Cariboo Café one day when Sonya loses her house key so that she cannot bring her little brother home after school. Feeling unsafe in the world because their parents constantly warn them of the dangers of La Migra, they seek haven in the first place they can find. The cook and owner of the café, who bears his own scars from having lost his son in the Vietnam War and his own frustrations with his work life, is one who at once feels sympathy for other downtrodden like undocumented workers and also tries not to get involved in others’ problems even though he alerts la Migra to undocumented workers who seek refuge in his restroom. Nonetheless he treats the children kindly and looks somewhat suspiciously on a woman who, behaving strangely, approaches the children and leaves with them. He later sees a news bulletin about the missing children and realizes they have been kidnapped by the woman. When she later returns with the children to the café, he calls the police after much internal conflict. When the police arrive, the woman resists and the police shoot her because she will not let go of the children. The form of the story is such, however, that the behaviors of the characters and their disorientation are confusing to the reader until, as the story progresses, we learn the history of the characters, particularly that of the displaced woman, and learn of the national contexts and experiences that motivate their migrations to the United States and inform their movements in a U.S. world hostile to undocumented people. As the story unfolds, Viramontes narratively charts connections between exploitive, terroristic, and otherwise oppressive experiences in El Salvador or El Salvador-like Latin American nations (the nation treated is not specifically identified in the story), which are enabled by U.S. political and economic policies, and the treatment of people of color, undocumented or otherwise, in the United States. In section three of the story, we learn that the woman has likely lost her five-year-old son Geraldo to murderous right-wing death squads who terrorize the population, labeling people at will as contras or spies. Viramontes portrays the woman visiting detention camps where she witnesses imprisoned children being used as forced labor to sort through body parts. It is this woman who, obviously having migrated to the United States, “kidnaps” the children out of the traumainspired delusional belief that young Mackey is Geraldo. When the police come, she “mistakes” them for the death squads and refuses to let them take her children. Of course, it is through this “mistake” that Viramontes suggests the similarities between the Latin American experience abroad at the hands of U.S. imperialism and the experience of U.S. imperialism at home. In


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both nations, the experience of the Latino is one of terror and colonization. Both Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Ellen McCracken similarly identify this connection. Saldívar-Hull, for example, suggests that Viramontes’s story “unravels her internationalist vision” and “propels feminism on the border into its transnational trajectory by showing the emergence of Los Angeles as a U.S. Third World city” (2000, 127). McCracken interprets “the woman’s struggle against the police in Los Angeles as structurally homologous to other struggles in Latin American against oppressive military regimes” such that her struggle “links Latinos in the United States to those in Latin America” (1999, 51). While both of these readings highlight the international and transnational dimensions of Viramontes’ vision, neither asserts the simultaneous concrete national—and nationalist—groundings of the story. McCracken even subsumes the specificities of the Chicano/a national experience under the broader rubric of “Latino.” I would like to suggest comprehending the narrative as analytically recalling the internal colonialism model discussed earlier, which was a hallmark of the political analysis informing Chicano nationalism. Like Moraga, Viramontes does not depart from the politics of anti-colonial nationalism but rather underscores their necessity through the international scope of the story that highlights the need for us as readers to grasp the specific national contexts that have nurtured characters’ experiences and consciousness in order for us to understand them. Thus, in the writings I have studied in this chapter, I hope to have pointed to ways in which post-movement Chicano literature sustains the category of nation and the politics of nationalism as a mode of mediation in a dialectical or dialogic process, such that nationalism is not opposed to but is rather an avenue toward imagining transnationalism. In the intellectual tradition of Third World thinkers like Fanon, nationalism is a way of opening up communication. As Fanon wrote, “The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee” (1963, 247). Indeed, for the Chicana/o writers I have studied, transnationalism depends upon anti-colonial nationalisms, not upon the disappearance of anti-colonial national political subjects. To conclude with Fanon’s profound words, “And now it is time to denounce certain Pharisees. National claims, it is here and there stated, are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the day of great concerted actions, and retarded nationalists ought in consequence to set their mistakes aright. We however consider that the mistake, which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip the national period” (247). While, as Moraga compellingly suggests, national claims require a “queer” feminist revision, they are alive and well in contemporary Chicana/o literature.




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1. Moraga provides the following quotation from Shorris: “The Chicano generation began in the late 1960s and lasted about six or eight years, dying slowly through the seventies” (1993, 148). 2. Castillo, for example, writes, “Nationalism throughout the history of civilization excludes certain groups that will inevitably feel intimidated and react in like manner. Through territorial invasions, ethnic divisions, racist contempt for others, and ongoing oppression of women, nationalism always finds its justification for manipulation for power” (1995, 239). 3. For a more extensive discussion of the tendencies Gilroy and Castillo represent, see Libretti 2002. 4. For a discussion of the concept of the cosmic race, see Vasconcelos 1948; Miller 2004.

References Blauner, Robert. 1972. Racial Oppression in America. New York: Harper and Row. Castillo, Ana. 1995. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. New York: Penguin. Churchill, Ward. 1993. Struggle for Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide, and Expropriation in Contemporary North America. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Gómez-Quiñones, Juan. 1990. Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940–1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Hinojosa, Rolando. 1983. The Valley. Houston: Arte Público Press. Juraga, Dubravka, and M. Keith Booker, eds. 2002. Rereading Global Socialist Cultures After the Cold War: The Reassessment of a Tradition. Westport, CT: Praeger. Libretti, Tim. 2002. Against Premature Internationalism: Reasserting the Necessity of Nationalism for Socialist Liberation in the Age of Post-Theory. In Rereading Global Socialist Cultures After the Cold War: The Reassessment of a Tradition, ed. Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker, 27–54. Westport, CT: Praeger. Limón, Graciela. 1993. In Search of Bernabé. Houston: Arte Público Press. ———. 1999. The Day of the Moon. Houston: Arte Público Press. ———. 2001. Erased Faces. Houston: Arte Público Press. McCracken, Ellen. 1999. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Miller, Marilyn Grace. 2004. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Moraga, Cherríe. 1993. The Last Generation. Boston: South End Press. Muñoz, Carlos. 1989. Youth, Identity, and Power: The Chicano Movement. New York: Verso. Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. 2000. Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press.


Notes


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Sanchez Jankowski, Martín. 1999. Where Have All the Nationalists Gone? Change and Persistence in Radical Political Attitudes Among Chicanos, 1976–1986. In Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. David Montejano, 201–33. Austin: University of Texas Press. Vasconselos, José. 1948. La Raza Cósmica. Mexico D.F.: Espasa Calpe, S.A. Viramontes, Helena María. 1985. The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Público Press. Wei, William. 1993. The Asian American Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wong, Sau-Ling. 1995. Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads. Amerasia Journal 21, nos. 1–2: 11–32.







With Bertolt Brecht and the Aztecs Toward an Imagined Transnation: A Literary Case Study Karin Ikas

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he turn of the twenty-first century is characterized, among other things, by an emergence of nontraditional group configurations associated with multiplicity, transnational as well as transcultural clusters and networks, and mostly shaped by the challenging, dismantling, and remaking of public identities, such as Ulf Hannerz’s notion of the “global ecumene.”1 All this piles on the pressure upon modern nation-states whose traditional demarcations and boundaries these formations transcend.2 As Saskia Sassen writes in her evocatively entitled essay “When National Territory is Home to the Global: Old Borders to Novel Borderings,” “the changes under way are shifting the meaning of borders, even when the actual geographic lines that demarcate territories have not been altered” (2005, 523). These changes come to pass in many countries worldwide. Yet especially those countries bear a particular sociological and culturalscientific relevance in which cultural heterogeneity has developed such an explosive force that it might even thwart the idea of national identity and lead to separatism or at least the formulation of challenging counternarratives of collective identity that put the nation-state into a crisis. The United States of America is such a country. Latest figures and statistics show that we can certainly speak of a latinization of the United States in the third millennium as of the over 296.4 million people who resided in the United States as of July 1, 2005, more than 14.4 percent are Hispanics.3 This


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makes people of Hispanic origin, also called U.S. Latinos/as, which, in turn, acts as an umbrella term for all the numerous Hispanic subgroups in the United States and of which Mexican Americans make up the by far biggest subgroup (65 percent), the largest ethnic/race minority in the United States and one that continues to be significantly on the rise. Latest population estimates expect the projected Hispanic population of the United States as of July 1, 2050, to be about 102.6 million; in other words, U.S. Latinos/as would constitute about 24 percent of the nation’s total population on that date. Given all these striking numbers, it is little surprising to find that today, more than a decade after America had observed the quincentennial commemoration of the encounter between the Old and the New Worlds, also known as the Discovery of America, its so-called dominating political, economic, and intellectual elite has made a new discovery: The Coming of Mexifornia. If Victor David Hanson is right, “Mexifornia”—a state in the making that is “not quite Mexico and not quite America either” (2007)—is currently emerging within the geopolitical borders of the United States. Right now, Mexifornia is most likely equated with America’s most populated state, California, where Hispanics make up more than a third of the population today (approx. 12.4 million Hispanics). Yet, for Hanson as well as Samuel Huntington, the author of the highly criticized and much debated Who Are We? America’s Great Debate (2004), California and other states in the U.S. Southwest bordering Mexico are not the only ones that are currently on the verge of transforming into a primarily Spanish-speaking Mexifornia; the United States as a whole may be following the trend. They put forward that skyrocketing (un)documented Mexican and Latino/a immigration rates and an increasing failure of the dominant elite’s intellectuals to integrate the subjugated groups of the U.S.-Latino/a and Hispanic people into mainstream America by instilling the traditional U.S.-American notion of national identity into them efficiently has already produced a social and civic debacle in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that is about to swamp the whole nation. Briefly put, Mexiamerica or Mexamerica as the United States’ new state of becoming is just around the corner because a longtime constraint for minority people is not only gaining a numerical superiority but also finding the vigor and strength to formulate a counternarrative of nation that casts a shadow over the traditional self-image of the U.S. nation. An important issue that gains prominence here is the question of segregation. More precisely, does this rapidly growing group of U.S. Latino/as in general and of Mexican Americans, respectively Chicano/as in particular, follow in the footsteps of their forefathers, the rather militant Chicano activists of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and also call for a separate nation, the so-called nation of Aztlán, as Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzales and others did at the First National Chicano Liberation Youth


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Conference in Denver in 1969 where El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán was passed (see McWilliams and Meier; Alford 1973)? Well, not really. This is because hardly any Mexican American today truly believes in the realization of a manifesto that calls for expelling Anglo-Americans and for forming Aztlán as a separate and autonomous though primarily patriarchal and heterosexual Chicano nation north of the Rio Grande. Rather than being a battle cry to violence and segregation, Aztlán is nowadays generally understood as a spiritual vision of a desired new society of mixed-race people. Moreover, it is a symbol of cultural pride and an inspiration that keeps many Chicano/as going to gain justice and equality for their own people after their homeland had been seized by the United States in the mid 1850s (De Leon and Del Castillo 2006). In contemporary discourse, arts, and literature, all this is usually depicted in two ways. Firstly, the space adjoining the U.S.-Mexico border is perceived as a danger zone and this affects both dominant ethnic groups residing here: (il)legal Mexican American (im)migrants for whom the Dialectics of Difference (Saldívar 1990) does not give rise to assimilation, synthesis, and resolution but to conflicts; and Anglo-Americans who feel increasingly threatened by their sway of power coupled with the never-ending influx of Spanish-speaking Latino/a immigrants and the subsequent transformation of the U.S.-Mexican border region into what they suspiciously call Mexifornia, as has been illustrated above. Secondly, and most interestingly though, the border is increasingly perceived as a hybrid site of mobile crossings (Bandau and Priewe 2006) and cross-fertilizations where a complex process of inter- and transcultural relations comes to pass (cf. Ikas and Wagner 2009; Oliver-Rotger 2003; Kaup 2001; Lomelí and Ikas 2000). Borrowing Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the “contact zone” (1992, 4), José David Saldívar, for instance, perceives the two-thousand-mile-long border between the United States and Mexico as a paradigm for a “Transfrontera contact zone” (1997, 13). For him this means a “social space of subaltern encounters, the Janus-faced border line in which peoples geopolitically forced to separate themselves now negotiate with one another and manufacture new relations, hybrid cultures, and multiple-voiced aesthetics” (13–14). Even more pointedly than José David Saldívar, Bill Ashcroft acknowledges the U.S.-Mexican borderlands as a case in point for an alternative space where the communication between cultures and the negotiation of identities assumes new dimensions and what he recently conceptualized in theory as a “Chicano transnation” and in a more general frame as a “transnation.” The latter he explains as follows:


TOWARD AN IMAGINED TRANSNATION

By the term “transnation” I mean something more than “the international,” or the “transnational,” terms that might be conceived as denoting a relation of a crossing between states. Transnation is the fluid, metaphorically


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The transnation, then, is a metaphor for an unconventional or rather other space that is emerging, once subjects characterized by in-betweenness negotiate and transgress manifold boundaries, especially between self and other as well as real sites and utopias, which, for Ashcroft are “placeless places strongly imbued with the idea of the sacred.” Obviously, the concept is not fixated on a real site or object in a political space but it is an imaginary construct. It emerges in multicultural and heterogeneous discourses as an empowered “way of talking about subjects in their ordinary lives, subjects who live in-between the categories by which subjectivity is normally constituted.” Although the term transnation does not particularly connote a real political space as such, it has a strong political and postcolonial momentum nevertheless. Ashcroft sums it up as follows: “If we think of the transnation as an unbounded site, a “smooth space” but a real site, a site of extension rather than enclosure, we can see how disruptive its potential may be to state structures and its socially designated sites” (in this collection). To what extent all this is enacted in The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea (2001), Chicana lesbian playwright Cherríe Moraga’s iconoclastic play about identity construction in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, is the subject of the following analytical section. Here I will examine the way in which Moraga applies strategies from Bertold Brecht’s epic theatre and integrates elements from Aztec and European mythology to transgress a plethora of borders in an endeavor to actively codesign and negotiate a new conception of in-betweenness that might be comparable to Bill Ashcroft’s theoretical concept of the transnation as a performed possibility as well as a fluid and unbound site. 1. Cherríe Moraga’s In-Betweenness and the Struggle for Meaning in the Borderlands Cherríe Moraga is an internationally acclaimed and multiply awarded Mexican American lesbian playwright, poet, essayist, political activist, and teacher. Born in Los Angeles in 1952 to an Anglo father and a secondgeneration Mexican mother, she became a central figure in women-of-color, feminism, lesbian, Chicana, and American literature when she started publishing her work in the 1980s. Increasingly, her multiethnic heritage, her lesbianism, and her political activism became a driving force for her writing, which is intensely personal, eloquently honest, and highly politicized. Repeatedly in her personal accounts (cf. This Bridge Called My Back 1983) and her semiautobiographical writings like The Last Generation (1993) and


migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation. (in this collection; emphasis original)


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Waiting in the Wings (1997), she points at the various forms of discrimination that she experienced throughout the first three decades of her life and that made her become a writer. In short, in her formative years, she was either too white to be accepted by her Mexican mother’s ethnic group, too brown to fully belong to her Anglo father’s ethnic community, too unwomanly a woman as a lesbian and, after becoming a queer mother of a heterosexual son, too much a mother and hence un-homosexually woman to be a real lesbian. To this very day, her in-betweenness, or rather the fact that neither one of the conventional single “categories of identity” in itself could ever suffice to capture her distinctive self, is stimulating, in Moraga’s own words, an insatiable “artist’s hunger to create” within her (1997, 19, 22). A most significant artistic outlet for her is playwriting, whereby for her the stage is not primarily an arena of lighthearted entertainment but it serves a didactic and world improvement purpose. In an interview she describes this as follows: [F]or me writing theatre is somehow a bit like writing a novel. The characters are talking to you, and you have to listen to them. If you try to superimpose your ideology of that time, the work gets very flat. So I never am concerned about how the audience is going to respond. I never censor anything based on who the audience is. I write for my ideal audience that is probably made up of people who are not homophobic, not racist, people who are open-minded. So if you assume your audience is open-minded, and you write well and with enough depth, then whoever is in the audience— white person, person of color, whatever—will be able to see the other-maybe for the first time in their life-just as humans. (Ikas 2002, 162–163)

To achieve this effect and at the same time remind the spectator in the audience that her plays are just a representation of reality and not reality itself, Moraga often employs elements from the epic theatre outlined by Bertolt Brecht in his Little Organum for the Theater (1948/1951; cf. Brecht 1938/1953; Brecht 1957/1964). These techniques adopted from the epic theatre to “force the spectators to look at the play’s situations from an angle that they necessarily became subject to its criticism” (Brecht 1964, 121) consist of unnatural stage lighting, exaggerated costumes and masks, songs, a chorus, and fictional representations and tellings of semihistorical as well as mythical archetypes and events. Implementing her idea of myth as “an opening into the past, told in character and image, that can provide a kind of road map to our future” (Moraga 2001b, IX–X), Moraga recovers these myths, yet presents them not in pure but rather mixed respectively hybrid forms in a milieu of in-betweenness on the stage where a new notion of borderlands identity is then performed. All this can be seen well




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in Moraga’s challenging play The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea where this in-betweenness is performed through a multiplicity of characters and images that carry several concurrent meanings, echoing with various cultures, myths, and identifications. If Moraga moves thereby toward Bill Ashcroft’s projected transnation in the end is one of the subjects to be answered in the course of the following analytical section. 2. The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea Cherríe Moraga’s “The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea” was first performed at the Border Festival at The Magic Theatre of San Francisco in December 2000 and published a year later in Moraga’s third volume of plays The Hungry Woman. The rather apocalyptic play is set in a postrevolutionary space somewhere in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It is rich in contrast and integrates, besides English and Spanish code switching, numerous indigenous spiritual practices in the altogether two acts and eighteen scenes that make up the play. More precisely, Moraga draws from the Greek Medea, the Aztec creation myth of The Hungry Woman, and turns to pre-Columbian Aztec deities from Mesoamerican mythology, all of which she enhances with a critique of Chicano nationalism and contemporary political tensions to portray the protagonist Medea as a darkskinned exiled woman, who was once the wife of the Mexican macho man Jason and a mother of their son Chac-Mool, and now, after her coming out as a lesbian, appears to be a woman gone mad between her longing for her lesbian lover Luna and for a kind of indigenous nation that is denied her and that makes her increasingly move toward a rather utopian notion of in-betweenness in her imagination. The most striking epic theatrical element that Moraga uses in the play is a chorus of four Chihuatateos, who are according to Aztec mythology female incarnations of the divine spirit thought to transport the soul of women lost in childbirth to the sun and who accompany Medea throughout the play through their dances. Already in the play’s opening scene, Moraga leaves no doubt that Medea is an outsider and victim of asymmetrical power relations and multiple forms of betrayals. All these came about during a series of revolutions that resulted from ethnic hatred and economic turmoil and that eventually divided the U.S. nation-state into a rather disparate ensemble of four imagined states, namely Aztlán, Gringolandia, Phoenix, also known as Tamoanchán, and a mythical realm inhabited by a spirit chorus of Aztec warrior women. Although most people “look lousy in” this increasingly disparate, crazy, and ominous world, Medea’s position is particularly problematic: as an indígena Mexicana Medea she would have had the “blood quantum” required for citizenship in Aztlán (Moraga 2001a, 72) and as a wife of a highly-respected


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Chicano leader also the family status requirements to be a proper woman in this Mechicano country. Nonetheless, her eventual outing as a brown activist lesbian lover and mother, whereby she conducts a serious breach of the prescribed etiquette, puts her into exile. Her exile is a lunatic asylum in an in-between country also known as “‘Tamoanchán,’ which means ‘we seek our home’” (Moraga 2001a, 24). It is something like a “gypsy ghetto” place where “the seeking itself became home,” “[after] los homos became peregrinos . . . como nomads, just like our Aztec ancestors a thousand years ago” (24; cf. conversation between Savannah, one of Medea’s warden nurses who also acts as the Aztec mythic character Mama Sal, and Medea’s son Chac-Mool). For Moraga, the link between mythical transformation, liberation, and identity formation is seminal. It is the trigger to finally open an alternative space that goes beyond the numerous confinements that mark the postrevolutionary states within her imagined borderlands. We can see this in scene eight when Luna, Medea’s lesbian lover, explicitly refers to the Hungry Woman creation myth as follows: Creation Myth. In the place where the spirits live, there was once a woman who cried constantly for food. She had mouths everywhere. In her wrists, elbows, ankles, knees . . . And every mouth was hungry y bien gritona. To comfort la pobre, the spirits flew down and began to make grass and flowers from the dirt-brown of her skin. From her greñas, they made forests. From those ojos negros, pools and springs. And from the slopes of her shoulders and seños, they made mountains y valles. At last she will be satisfied, they thought. Pero, just like before, her mouths were everywhere, biting and moaning . . . opening and snapping shut. They would never be filled. Sometimes por la noche, when the wind blows, you can hear her crying for food. (Moraga 2001a, 44–45)

This passage, from which Moraga draws on John Bierhorst’s critical account of The Hungry Woman: Myths and Legends of the Aztecs (1984), clearly shows that a borderlands spatiality cannot be considered apart from a performance of an in-betweenness, which, in turn is triggered off by desire and shaped by memory. The following scene serves as an excellent example: MEDEA: I do miss my Luna. NURSE: Why don’t you tell her that when you see her? You never talk to her. MEDEA: No. I only want to be an Indian, a Woman, an Animal in the Divine Ecosystem. The jaguar, the bear, the eagle. ... LUNA: Medea hid from the light. She always slept in the shadows, the windowless side of the bed, the shades drawn day or night. She slept with ear plugs, blindfolds.




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MEDEA: I think it’s the alcohol that sucks out all your juices, leaves you dry and black-eyed . . . The god’s downfall and my own. ... NURSE: What’s to know? MEDEA: During the day when Jason was at work, I would lay my head down on the pillow . . . I could hear Chac-Mool outside talking the stonemason. It was paradise. NURSE: The stonemason? MEDEA: Yes. The woman, the migrant worker my husband Jasón hired to put in the garden patio . . . [LUNA and CHAC-MOOL appear in MEDEA’s memory] LUNA: You should plant corn. CHAC-MOOL: My mom didn’t say nothing about no corn. LUNA: What’s a garden without corn? CHAC-MOOL: She’s gonna plant medicine. LUNA: Your mom makes medicine? CHAC-MOOL: Yeah, she learned from my Bisabuela. LUNA: Plant corn. A single corn plant can produce enough grain to feed a person for a day. MEDEA: And the stonemason’s voice entered me like medicine. Medicine for my brokenness. (Moraga 2001a, 12–13)

Here the ancient knowledge of the Bisabuela, who is Medea’s Spanish named grandmother, and the stonemason, who is the migrant laborer in the Borderlands, is deployed to cultivate, in a metaphorical sense, the garden at the edges of contact and carry out the cultural work of in-betweenness in the borderlands. To pull out the weeds of neocolonial power relations, assimilative technologies, and notorious claims to authenticity is once again the most tedious and difficult part of the job as Jasón’s behavior illustrates. Earlier in the play we have learnt that his problems of life at the borders emerge from the fact that he lacks “the blood quantum” (Moraga 2001a, 72) requested for citizenship in the new Chicano/a country of Aztlán after it had been reestablished along the lines of a presumed indigenous authenticity. And, what is even more, Jasón also lacks the insights and sensibility to utilize his resources and cross into an alternative space attuned to hybridity “from which something begins its presencing” instead (Bhabha 2004, 1). Without the ability to recognize the potential of his and other people’s in-betweenness, he is practically living life like a blind man who careens toward an existence where his only possibility to satisfy his recurrent need for power is to participate in what has always occurred in hierarchically structured societies all along: to kick at those perceived as weaker and more disadvantaged members


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of society in order to seize a share of power. This is evoked in the scene quoted above when Jasón pushes the colored female stonemason back into her postcolonial former status quo by recognizing her first and foremost as a subjugated brown migrant woman laborer employed to do the dirty manual work. The themes of postcoloniality, transgression, and mythical transformation are underscored in the final scenes of the play where the stories of Medea, the Hungry Woman, and the Cihuatateo intersect with the Mesoamerican rite of making sacrifices (Miller and Taube 1997; LeónPortillo 1990) and the Christian devotional theme of “Our Lady of Sorrows,” also known as the pieta motif. The latter found its most famous artistic expression in Michelangelo’s marble Pietà sculpture (1499) in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The critical stage is reached here when Medea, who remains very much caught up in the web of intracultural oppressions based on gender and sexuality in the final analysis, kills her son Chac-Mool right before his time of puberty begins. With this infanticide, she literally goes beyond good and evil in her endeavor to save the people residing in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands from what she pictures as the dawning continuation of a primarily unilateral, patriarchal, and homophobic era. Interestingly enough, however, this does not give rise to an instant of triumph over the presumed effacement of an antagonistic system. Rather, it brings about a moment of extraordinary devotion and lamentation for which Moraga employs the pieta motif in the following way: He [=CHAC-MOOL] passes out. It is a pieta image, MEDEA holding him limp within her arms. Then, with much effort, she tries to drag CHAC-MOOL’s body into the small field of corn. She is unable to. The CIHUATATEO enter, dressed in the traditional Aztec. They lift CHAC-MOOL and take him into the center of the field. Meanwhile, piling them into a mound higher and higher. She becomes frenzied, a frightening image, her white nightgown flowing in the sudden wind. The pile of blue corn stalks have formed a kind of altar. The CIHUATATEO heave CHAC-MOOL’s body on top of it. (Moraga 2001a, 91)

Apparently, this is very much designed along the lines of the ancient Aztecs’ belief that welfare and survival of humankind depends first of all on the offering of blood to the divine deity. Nonetheless, with the explicit reference to the pieta and the iconoclastic transformation of it to a rather profane lesbian and brown-colored mother and defeated warrior gestalt that supports the body of the indigenous-named messiah-son Chac-Mool just shortly before the divine and noble Cihuatateo take over, the scene quickly turns from the original act and emotion of great love and loss




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MEDEA: Why have you come here? CHAC-MOOL: To take you away. MEDEA: Away . . . where? CHAC-MOOL: Home. MEDEA: Home. ... MEDEA: How will I get there? CHAC-MOOL: I am taking you. [He leads her by the hand back to the bed. He holds a handful of powdered herbs and puts them into a small paper cup of water.] MEDEA: Mijo? CHAC-MOOL: Here, drink this. It’ll help you sleep. [CHAC-MOOL holds MEDEA’s head while she drinks. She is instantly drowsy. CHAC-MOOL gathers her into his arms as she falls into a deep sleep. It is a piety image. The lights gradually fade. Only the shimmering moon remains, and the figure of the four CIHUATATEO dancing silently in its light.] End of Play (Moraga 2001a, 98–99).

According to Christian beliefs, many of the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled in the mission, death, and resurrection of Christ, the one and only savior, who repeatedly referred to himself in the New Testament as “Son of Man” (cf. Mark 14:61b–62; Luke 22:66–70) and will therefore return to make the rest of the messianic prophecy come true on doomsday. In the above-quoted epilogue, this role of the messiah is, as expected, also taken over by the son, namely Chac-Mool. More surprising in this context, however, is the son’s pre-Columbian name Chac-Mool as it refers to a Mesoamerican religious character that is more used to offering human sacrifices to the gods than being sacrificed himself. Yet, a closer look at this prehistoric Chac-Mool reveals that he was not only involved in the Mesoamerican religious practices of human sacrifices but also perceived as an intermediary between human beings and the Gods of rain, water, and fertility in a more general sense (Lawrence 2001; Miller 1985; Graulich 1984). And this surely is the connecting line to Jesus, the Christian God’s son who, as Son of Man, is a mediator between the divine and the earthly as well. Hence, Moraga’s Chac-Mool incarnate holds especially two offices


together with a revering fear of a divine act of control into a transcultural and transnational field of redemption and transgression. In the play’s final tableau this line of thought is fully developed when Moraga has the Christian concept of the messiah step in so that a resurrected Chac-Mool can return to the scene and act in the following way:


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in these final scenes: he is an avenging angel and a savior. After his miraculous resurrection, he murders his own mother Medea in the same manner that he had been murdered by her before: death by poisoning. Through this matricide, the former infanticide is avenged. Moreover, through her physical death Medea is redeemed from any form of eternal sin that she and others have inscribed on her body during her lonesome wandering through the postrevolutionary borderlands sites. The apparent replacement of the Christian notion of redemptive sacrifice, which centers upon the belief that Jesus died an innocent death to redeem mankind from all sins, with the Mesoamerican concept of human expiatory sacrifice hints at the implications for affirming the indigenous and migratory people’s presence in the contemporary U.S.-Mexican borderlands: the core of the debate here is that non-Western religious concepts, myths, and cultural traditions infiltrate the Western ones and transform the dominant system from within through dissemination, yet eventually also move beyond cultural and national restraints toward a new possibility of being where the spiritual, even sacred, intermingle with the secular, profane, and political. All of this is couched in the final tableau’s iconoclastic depiction of a reversed and multiple-twisted pieta motif. Moraga’s second pieta composition consists of the messiah-like messenger-son and matricide Chac-Mool, who is mourning over his dead lesbian mother and infanticide Medea, whose spirit is already on the move to an interstitial space. On this journey to a home beyond the confinements of the real world, her spirit is accompanied by the four Cihuatateos dancing silently in the moon’s light. With this adumbration of a space floating in-between this world and the other where people living in-between culturally and ethnically defined dualisms can betake themselves to at last, Moraga’s play comes to a close. Conclusion As we have seen from all the aspects examined above, thanks to The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea, Cherríe Moraga broadens the issue of Mexican American identity (re-)construction to an imagined transnational, transmythical, and a spiritual one. She uses the place of the lunatic asylum as a metaphor for the borderlands and explains—in an iconoclastic dramatic move—why neither Mexifornia nor Aztlán can ever be the longed-for refuge or haven for the people residing in borderlands. It is because both imaginary spatial concepts do not help to initiate an innovative and positive process of negotiating an in-betweenness of identity that suffices the purposes of multiethnic residents in the borderlands of the third millennium, of which the U.S.-Mexican border region provide one striking example. What is needed instead in the latter context is an unsettling of the dominant




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Anglo-American national discourse as well as of the reactionary nativist Chicano pathos of a new Aztlán that appears to be nothing else but the old wine of an asymmetrically structured patriarchal system in the new bottle of a pseudo-authentic and blood-rooted Chicano nation. While the lack of tolerance for sexual diversity and the myopic vision of many fundamentalist groups on either side—the Euro-American and the Mexican American one—is largely held responsible for the chaos and troubled life in her projected postrevolutionary future of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands where the colored, the homosexual, and the female migrant others are pushed to the margins, it is exactly the exiled position from where a development toward a new notion of in-betweenness emerges. In exile, Moraga’s brown-colored lesbian Chicana heroine mother gets down to construct an alternative and rather mythopoeic narrative of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands “that is new, neither the one nor the other but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both” (Bhabha 1994, 28). In-betweenness is acknowledged as the most viable subject position from which to negotiate and represent a condition of transcultural or rather transmythical mobility here, of people on the move within but also beyond the borderlands and the nation-states. In other words, people, who, as Homi Bhabha aptly notes, “will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant discourse, but are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation” (1994, 164). Moreover, as we have seen, Moraga moves beyond Bhabha’s proclaimed alienating of the frontiers of the nation-state in that she suggests a disruption of these boundaries. Here she approaches Bill Ashcroft’s notion of transnation. Like in Ashcroft’s critical conception for Moraga in her stage performance of a new identity construction of in-betweenness in The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea “exile begins within the nation” or rather the nations in her projected postrevolutionary borderlands. Yet, it eventually moves as well beyond any political and geographic margins and zonings to become an unbounded site where not only a “powerful fusion of the mythic and the political, the sacred and nation” comes to pass but an imagined futuristic space is thinkable “in which national and cultural affiliations are superseded, in which binaries of centre and periphery, national self and other are dissolved” (Ashcroft, in this collection) within and through literature and theatrical performance.


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Notes 1. Cultural anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, in his Transnational Connections, introduced the term “global ecumene” to capture the network character of the so-called landscape of modernity, which he views as constituted by interacting and intertwined transnational connections and cultural relations. For a detailed discussion of


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Hannerz’s concept and how it can be applied to contemporary literary analysis in transnational and transcultural contexts, see Schulze-Engler 2000. 2. See, for instance, Shih and Lionnet 2005; Smith 2003; Pries 2001; McIntyreMillis 2000. For the ongoing debate about local and global transcultural communities, see also the biannual journal Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings. http://www.movingworlds.net/. 3. This and other cited data are taken from the latest U.S. Census survey findings. The estimate quoted here does not include the 3.9 million residents of the dominion of Puerto Rico. See http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/.

References Alford, Harold J. 1973. The Proud People: The Heritage and Culture of SpanishSpeaking Peoples in the United States. New York: David McKay Co. Anaya, Rudolfo, and Francisco A. Lomelí, eds. 1991. Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bandau, Anja, and Marc Priewe, eds. 2006. Mobile Crossings: Representations of Chicana/o Cultures. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Bhabha, Homi K. 2004. The Location of Culture. With a new preface by the author. Abingdon, New York: Routledge Classics [first published by Routledge in London and New York in 1994]. Bierhorst, John, ed. 1993. The Hungry Woman: Myths and Legends of the Aztecs. New York: Quill and William Morrow. Brady, Mary Pat. 2002. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space. Durham: Duke University Press. Brecht, Bertolt. 1938/1964. The Street Scene: A Basic Model for an Epic Theatre. In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. and ed. John Willett, 121–129. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. 1948/1951. A Little Organum for the Theater, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb, ed. Kerker Quinn and Charles Sattuck. Accent 11.1: 13–40. ———. 1957/1964. Bertolt Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. and ed. John Willett. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. De Leon, Arnoldo, and Richard Griswold Del Castillo. 2006. North to Aztlán: A History of Mexican Americans in the United States. Wheeling: Harlan Davidson. Graulich, Michael. 1984. Quelques observations sur les sculptures Mesoamericaines dites “Chac Mool.” Annales Jaarboek 51–72. Hanson, Victor Davis. 2007. Mexifornia, Five Years Later. City Journal. http://www. city-journal.org/html/17_1_mexifornia.html. Huntington, Samuel. 2005. Who We Are? America’s Great Debate. New York: Free Press. Ikas, Karin. 2000. Die zeitgenössische Chicana-Literatur: Eine interkulturelle Untersuchung. Heidelberg: Winter. ———. 2002. Cherríe Moraga in an interview with Karin Ikas. In Chicana Ways: Conversations With Ten Chicana Writers, 153–172. Reno: University of Nevada Press.




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Ikas, Karin, and Gerhard Wagner, eds. 2009. Communicating in the Third Space. London, New York: Routledge. Kaup, Monika. 2001. Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Lawrence, G. Desmond. 2001. Chacmool. In Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures, Vol. 1, ed. David Carrasco, 168–169. New York: Oxford University Press. Lomelí, Francisco A., and Karin Ikas, eds. 2000. U.S. Latino Literatures and Cultures: Transnational Perspectives. Heidelberg: Winter. McIntyre-Millis, Janet J. 2000. Global Citizenship and Social Movements: Creating Transcultural Webs of Meaning for the New Millennium. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. McWilliams, Carey, and Matt S. Meier. 1990. North of Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States. Westport: Praeger Publishers. Miller, Mary Ellen. 1985. A Re-examination of the Mesoamerican Chacmool. The Art Bulletin 67.1: 7–17. Miller, Mary, and Karl Taube, eds. 1997. An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya. London: Thames and Hudson. Moraga, Cherríe. 1993. The Last Generation: Poetry and Prose. Boston: South End Press. ———. 1997. Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. Ihaca: Firebrand. ———. 2001a. The Hungry Woman. Albuquerque: West End Press. ———. 2001b. Hungry for God. Foreword to The Hungry Woman. VII–X. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Pries, Ludger, ed. 2001. New Transnational Social Spaces. London: Routledge. Robertson, Ronald. 1995. “Glocalization”: Time-Space and HomogeneityHeterogeneity. In Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Ronald Robertson, 25–44. London: Sage. Saldívar, José David. 1997. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Saldívar, Ramón. 1990. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Shi, Shu-mei, and Françoise Lionnet, eds. 2005. Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Smith, Michael Peter. 2003. Transnationalism, the state and the extraterritorial citizen. Politics and Society 31.4: 467–501. Schulze-Engler, Frank. 2000. Literature in the Global Ecumene of Modernity: Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason and In an Antique Land. In English Literatures in International Contexts, ed. Heinz Antor and Klaus Stierstorfer, 373–396. Heidelberg: Winter.


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Travel, Autoethnography, and Oppositional Consciousness in Juan Felipe Herrera’s Mayan Drifter Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger

I use the word “Chicano” with irony too. Here I claim it again; it is a halfstep between Ladino1 and Indian, a jump start from apathy into commitment. (Juan Felipe Herrera, Mayan Drifter).

T

he prolific poet, essayist, and dramatist Juan Felipe Herrera belongs to a generation of writers who came of age during or in the aftermath of Civil Rights Chicano activism (late 1960s and early 1970s) and adopted an indigenista (indigenist) aesthetics as a strategy of cultural affirmation and opposition to the Anglo mainstream. Herrera straddles generations in that, although the indigenous continues to be a major concern in his work, he has gradually grown out of the claim of a Chicano identity linked to an indigenous past and has become critical with the romantic emphasis on pre-Columbian roots of previous movimiento (Chicano movement) days. He is now one of the main voices of a “post-movement” literature produced during and after the 1980s that does not hold up cultural nationalism and often focuses on the place of Mexican Americans in a trans-American context. These authors continue to claim the label “Chicano” as an act of commitment to the struggle for social justice and understand the present, the past, and the future of Mexican Americans and Latinos in the United States in the wider frameworks of U.S.-Mexican relations and U.S.-Latin


10


MARIA ANTÒNIA OLIVER-ROTGER

American relations.2 The limited scholarly work on Herrera’s writings may be due to his unconventional approach to chicanismo (chicano nationalism) or perhaps to the unconventional elements of his poetics and artistic practice outlined by Lauro Flores: the difficulty to catalog him as an artist; the syncretism of artistic forms; the constant questioning of the limits imposed by literary classification; and the frequent mixture in his works of the strange and the everyday, the primitive and the modern, and the mythical and the real (Flores 1990, 172–179).3 The title of the work, Mayan Drifter, suggests crucial elements in Herrera’s poetics, appealing, on the one hand, to place-based communities and historical origins, and, on the other, to a constant rootless wandering. Besides evoking a physical journey, the title bespeaks a metaphysical state of restlessness, as Herrera is involved in the exploration of the innerborderlands territory of his Mexican American identity. The occasion for this book is Herrera’s second journey to the Mexican border region of Chiapas in 1993. Herrera’s first encounter with Mexican culture took place in the 1970s and began as a cultural, anthropological investigation into the “way of life” of his ancestors. Eventually, it became a “radical life connection” with “the bastard daughters and sons unclaimed by official Mexico” (Herrera 1997, 27). Written after a second journey to the region to “reunite with my other family” (27), Mayan Drifter is a “spiritual practice where I meditate upon my being and place in the world in relationship to the people sharing the same space” (5, my emphasis). Herrera engages in a conversation about America that is about “the complex of my identities as Chicano, Latino, mestizo, Indian, American” (13), the “dark-skinned powerlessness in the frayed edges of America” (14), the “multiple fissures of America” (15), and a Mexico “broken and splintered by complex socioeconomic disparities and interventions” (17). Since the Zapatista uprising in Mexico breaks out as Herrera is writing his travelogue,4 the work offers retrospection or reflection on how the interaction of local and global realities may have spurred a new revolutionary consciousness across the Americas. Following his customary tendency outlined by Flores whereby “todo se mezcla y se entreteje [Everything is mixed and intertwined]” (1990, 173), Herrera takes advantage of a genre that allows for heterogeneity to blend together travel anecdote, prose poem, personal testimonial commentary, introspection, ethnographic description, and sociological analysis5 in an effort to represent the effect of global politics in the Americas and the role of the Chicano writer in this context. Considering that the travelogue has been an instrumental genre in the consolidation of empire, the binary Western self/non-Western other upon which the colonial enterprise was based,6 in this essay I want to address the way in which Mayan Drifter


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inscribes colonialism while it also resists an entirely colonial vision through a self-reflexive narrative voice aware of his dual fragmented heritage from the colonizer and the colonized. This voice shows a utopian longing for wholeness, but is confronted with the disjointed remnants of modern history. As the narrator uncovers a history of unequal development and disadvantage in which he is ambivalently involved, he engages in the complexity of self-other dynamics both at the rhetorical and historical levels, thus foregrounding his ethical, ideological position, and voicing a sense of answerability to others (Lisle 2006, 263–265). 1. Travel Writing, Colonial Discourse, and the Ethics of Difference In her essay titled The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, Debbie Lisle analyzes the revitalization of travel writing in global times in terms of the tension between two coexisting strategies. On the one hand, there is a continuation of a “colonial tradition,” which reproduces the viewpoint of a privileged Western traveler who assumes the superiority of his cultures and values and who bolsters this superiority by judging and labeling the so-called less-civilized areas of the world. Lisle contends that although there is a tendency to mimic the old colonialist style of writing, in the present-day context of globalization, the simple logic of dominance/ subordination produces anxieties and insecurities in travel writers. Thus, the travel writer’s colonial heritage is resisted through the simultaneous strategy that Lisle calls the “cosmopolitan vision.” Through this vision, contemporary travel writing creates a distance from the ideology of empire and presents the encounters with other peoples and cultures in terms of mutual understanding, recognition of difference, and hope in the emancipatory possibilities of a global community. Lisle finds that most contemporary travel writing displays a liberal empathy for the social struggles of the dispossessed. Her study focuses on the symbiotic relationship between these two strategies and explores the extent to which the values of empathy and equality of the cosmopolitan vision coexist with a colonial mentality and the extent to which they can actually foster alternative views that are not tainted by colonial assumptions of Western superiority (Lisle 2006, 5–6). Together with Lisle, previous contributions to the field of travel writing, such as those by Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Steve Clark, and Casey Blanton, have looked into the ways in which travelogues or travel books resist the simple exercise of imperial power by examining the textual mechanisms that expose the vulnerability of the usually masculine speaker, foreground his conditioning as a member of a Western culture, and articulate “a more benign ethics of alterity” (Clark 1999, 4). In this essay I want to explore the ethics of alterity or “ethics of difference” (Lisle 2006, 260) in the


TRAVEL, AUTOETHNOGRAPHY, & OPPOSITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS



light of the textual inscription of a diasporic, differential, oppositional consciousness shaped by displacement and colonization. This consciousness or mode of perception—which critics have respectively termed “borderlands” or “mestiza” consciousness (Anzaldúa 1987), “border thinking” (Mignolo 2003), “postcolonial mestizaje” (Pérez-Torres 2000), and “oppositional consciousness” (Sandoval 2000)—transmits resistance to notions of national belonging, articulates the alienation of modernity, and seeks to find a place within a broad postcolonial, transnational history. Chela Sandoval explains the origins of this consciousness as follows: “Under conditions of colonialization, poverty, racism, gender or sexual subordination, dominated populations are often held away from the comforts of the dominant ideology or ripped out of legitimized social narratives, in a process of power that places such constituencies in a very different position from which to view objects-in-reality than other kinds of citizen-subjects” (2000, 105). My contention is that Mayan Drifter incorporates this consciousness and offers an alternative committed perception of history and global politics. In doing so, this travelogue resists the generic codes of travel writing and interrogates the epistemological position of the traveler/narrator through the deliberate engagement with and emphasis on self-other dynamics that Lisle deems necessary for the transformation of the genre (2006, 263–265).

2. The Political Self-Reflexive Subject Steve Clark has argued that “the traveler has no inside”: the very status conferred upon him by the separation from his usual environment and family turns him into a proleptic heroic being that represents society and precludes introspection. The “robustness” of the genre of travel writing is a result of the transfer of previous cultural information onto a witnessing experience with little or no display of personal neurosis (Clark 1999, 13–14). Yet, the concern with otherness that is part of contemporary critical debates as well as the growing interest for life writing have shifted the critical focus on travel writing as one of the ways of writing the self, as a “subspecies of autobiography” (17). Herrera’s text lends itself to such an analysis, for it combines the selfreferential elements of autobiography and the concern with representation of ethnographic and anthropological critique. Michael Fischer (1986), James Clifford (1988), and Mary Louise Pratt (1992) have contended that the texts by minority writers contain a critique of ethnography and anthropology through reflexivity and metacriticism in that they draw on the fictional character of representation, fashioning a self that is authorized to represent its culture but that also shows awareness of the mechanisms


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of textual authority. This critique by the autoethnographic voice is in tune with developments in ethnographic and autobiographical theory over the last three decades. Ethnographic theory, often under the influence of methods of literary criticism, has stressed subjective and imaginative elements in the apparently objective documentation of another culture. No longer an objective form of representation, ethnography, just as literature, has become a “limited way of seeing the world” that mediates between a subjective, interpretive discourse and an objective discourse (Quintana 1992, 72). In turn, studies in autobiography have deeply interrogated the univocality, stability, and coherence of the self, looking instead at its contradictions, discontinuities, and multiple voices.7 A large body of Latino/a literature consists of hybrid self-referential works, which often involve, following Charles Tatum’s observation, autocritical reflections and processes of self-understanding.8 Besides being autobiographical, these texts are autoethnographic in that minoritized subjects dialogue with former representations of themselves (Pratt 1992, 1–15). Mayan Drifter is inspired by the largely autoethnographic testimonio of the Quiché Maya activist and poet Rigoberta Menchú titled I, Rigoberta Menchú. Recalling the anti-indigenista proclamations9 of Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos,10 Herrera proposes Menchú as a model of the “new American writer,” who, far from giving a mystifying view of being Indian, outlines what for Herrera is the role of the new American writer in the late twentieth century: “stare back at chaos disaster and death, be fearless in the face of relentless oppression, learn the languages of the marginalized as well as of the oppressor, remember to assist in organizing exploited communities, remember to break through assigned borders, always fight and always forgive—remember the secrets” (Herrera 1997, 9). In her elaboration on the lack of self-reflexivity in travel writing (chapters 2, 3, and 6 of her book), Lisle looks at how what Derrida has called the “Law of Genre” (the generic limits between genres, and, in particular, the distinction between fact and fiction) generally prevents travel narratives from confronting the conditionings and assumptions of the writing subject in the way that fiction and autobiography do. On the one hand, the genre has usually claimed objective truthful representation, as opposed to the imagination of fiction as representational strategies; on the other, it has consolidated the authority and superiority of the generally masculine Western subject through his encounter with difference. Mayan Drifter challenges this authority by navigating through dominant and dominated consciousness and discourses as they manifest themselves in the inner realm of the personal and in the outer realm of politics, economy, and culture. Not accidentally, the Chicano author begins his book by openly declaring where he stands in relation to the United States, Mexico, academia, the institution





of anthropology, and the institution of literature. In “American Prelude(s),” the first chapter of the work, Herrera dedicates his book to “Mexico’s Indian peoples and all those who want to think about and reimagine America” (1997, 7). Here, the three main objectives of his book are outlined: “to rethink America, to rethink myself, to rethink American writing” (8). This triple socioeconomic, personal, and literary investigation is one that necessarily has to address complex issues of cultural and historical representation where language and discourse organize the world according to hierarchies that reflect power dynamics: “I want to tackle concepts of nation, symbols of ethnicity, practices for cultural knowledge, systems of literary order, questions of the margin and the center, the border work between the observer and the observed, between loss and recovery, suffering and liberation, between the language of America and for America” (Herrera 1997, 8). Herrera’s travelogue is very much in tune with scholarly streams of work that explore how cultural practices inscribe identity, power, and privilege, but most importantly, the author contends with how he is involved as a writer, a poet, and an intellectual in the continuity or in the contestation of those hierarchies: “I cannot question the place of and for America if I do not question my own position” (7). As Gayatri Spivak has remarked, no intellectual claiming to generate revolutionary, resisting, or oppositional writing, can elide how one’s own writing is affected by the dangerous convergence between the celebration of diversity by the powers that be, and the vindication of a “differential” perspective that counters hegemonic technologies of power and representation. As Lisle cogently demonstrates, in contemporary travel writing, this convergence may result in the cosmopolitan celebration of cultural difference in romantic terms: “others should be valued because they are closer to the mysteries of nature, spirituality and the universe” (Lisle 2006, 86). Although Herrera’s text is not exempt from nostalgic romanticization, it also goes beyond the cosmopolitan vision by probing into several ways in which the self, travel, and writing are enmeshed in colonial and neocolonial relations. The writer contends with the difficulty of writing about Indian America as an intellectual who has swallowed the “master’s conquest language” (Herrera 1997, 13–17) while he also claims affinities between distant people affected by the global socioeconomic tensions at Mexico’s northern and southern borders: between his American family’s migratory displacements and the uprooting of the Lacandón Mayas, between the death, destitution, and struggle of clandestine migrant workers in the United States and Mayan Indians in Mexico (4). Yet, he has to admit this is a “fictive kinship system” (7), for his status as a writer “prospering in the ganglia of a superpower” (6) and his biases as a “man from El Norte” distance him from the Lacandón Mayas and make it difficult for him to


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3. Drifting as the Chicano Poet’s Existential Metaphor Where other travel writers may have been “notoriously bad at saying why” (Clark 1999, 14), Herrera is notoriously good at self-explanation. The Chicano author uses autobiographical discourse to explore his reasons for traveling and to inquire into elements of his experience that make him close to and distant from Mexico and America. Alluding to Gloria Anzaldúa’s well-known autobiographical text, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Herrera uses the concept of the borderlands as a metaphysical category to explain the multiple layers of his Chicano identity and his ethnopoetics (1997, 7). Following other Latino/a testimonial, autobiographical, and autoethnographic practices,11 the text explicitly alludes to the sources of enunciation of the narrated self and to the personal, economic, and political events that have shaped the narrator’s subjectivity, tracing his migratory, unstable, hybrid identity back to his own family history and to his privileged position as an intellectual from the United States. The section “Júarez Gypsies,” included in the ethnographic chapter “Gathering a Mayan Repertoir,” inquires into his own “metaphysics of restlessness” (Holland and Huggan 2000, 14), and into the life baggage he takes with him as a Chicano to the Lacandón jungle. As he drives to San Cristóbal, memories of his parents’ deaths, especially the most recent death of his mother, are reminders of his loneliness as well as of a pain that he has not yet come to terms with. Herrera’s physical journey is internalized as a journey toward “unraveling [his] personal history” and seeking, as an orphan, to connect with other selves (1997, 28). Recalling his parents’ migrant itineraries, the family’s permanent movement, his father’s absences from home, and his parents’ deferral of hopes for a better life, Herrera provides an account of his “politics of location” and “subject position” based on his experience of movement, marginalization, and in-betweenness.12 While his uncle Beto’s radio program in Juárez, “El Barco de la Ilusión” (“The Ship of Hope”), figures the possibility of dreams fulfilled through mobility and migration, the Mexican neighborhood where his family stems from, “El Niño Perdido” (“The lost child”), figures loss and inner fragmentation. In a characteristic language that brings together the old and the new, tradition and modernity, Herrera describes his own cultural struggle in the postmodern age—the “corrido of the Colonial Culture Extractor” or “the postmodern chicano road warrior . . . holding on to the Goddess of fracture” (Herrera 1997, 32)—and inserts


hold a “third conversation” with America beyond the “romantic jumble” or nostalgic longing for the Indian origins of Chicano nationalism, the patronizing colonialist representation of the Indian of the West, and a glum invocation of postmodern fracture and disintegration.



his search for home and self in a collective project of resistance including Chicanos and other colonized subjects. The wandering or drifting as existential metaphor of the Chicano writer is only tangentially related to the imaginative site of the nomad or the migrant as claimed by travel writers like Bruce Chatwin or critics like Ian Chambers. For the latter, migrancy “calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation. Always in transit, the promise of a homecoming—completing the story, domesticating the detour—becomes an impossibility” (Chambers 1994, 139). The escapist metaphors of nomadism and migrancy represent the condition of the postmodern, cosmopolitan traveler enmeshed in a complex referential system where national identities and cultural homogeneity are no longer stable (Holland and Huggan 2000, 166–169). Tim Youngs regrets that this use of the label “nomad” removes from it “the economic realities of the existence of those to whom it properly belongs” (1994, 174). Although Herrera’s work deals with the cultural dilemmas of postmodernity, the reference to drifting or nomadic travel is much more than a rhetorical representation of global mobility and heterogeneous identities, as it stands for several cultural, existential, and political predicaments. Herrera partakes in and is aware of processes of mixture and hybridization in an increasingly globalized world, but deems it necessary, as an overture to social action and commitment, to situate the reader in distinct diasporic experiences with particular histories of colonial, class, gender, and race relations. In his text, “drifting,” like one of the current critical uses of diaspora, “articulates both generalized migrancy or nomadism as well as a strenuous call for particularized histories of specific sites of hybridity” (Kaplan 1996, 139). Consequently, the poet’s second journey to the Mexican region of Chiapas in 1993 is a physical, metaphysical, and epistemological journey through several instances of dislocation, migration, and dispossession brought about by the multiple and variegated power imbalances of colonization and globalization. As will be seen, drifting identities, economies, and individuals are shown to differ in the context of those imbalances, for there is no collapsing of the Mayan peoples’ experience of physical and cultural displacement and the poet’s existential rootlessness into one single decontextualized metaphor.


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4. Transnational Coalitions and the Ethics of Alterity The ethical affiliation with the people in Chiapas is made possible through the retrieval of memories of the writer’s significant others and the identification of a “common ground” of subordination and marginalization between the past experiences of his family and the present conditions of Mayan Indians 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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(Sandoval 2000, 53). Relationality, a characteristic of autobiographical discourse (Smith and Watson 2001, 64–67), is here used to express coalitions across lines of racial, ethnic, national, or physical difference (Sandoval 2000, 71). The experience of Herrera’s mother and aunts, who worked as maids in the United States, are mobilized as the writer meditates on how the subservience and solicitous smiles of Mayan and Ladina maids at the hotel and research center, Na Bolom, encourage the historically and culturally established superior position of the American traveler and tourist: I recognized their accents, the pleasing voices, the entertaining conversations, the laughter, carefree and jubilant; the nervousness was familiar too . . . Recognized their waiting, their pauses, waiting for me to inflate myself into an American, as most visitors do, especially the male residents at Na Bolom . . . ; and as I “grew” during the brief exchange, they in turn would diminish as the sí’s sputtered from their mouths. (Herrera 1997, 64).

A similar moment of recognition of the self in others happens as Herrera travels by bus through the colonias on La Ruta Maya. The lonely man with a machete sitting next to him suddenly makes him think of the migrant past of his father, of his search for a better livelihood for his family. If private autobiographical details serve as a point of connection, the author’s public involvement as a Chicano is also crucial to establish transnational linkages between the political and social realities of the dispossessed of the south and the north in the 1970s and the 1990s. In “Indian Corridos for Justice” Herrera equates the Mexican deaths in Río Portugal in Chiapas during a military attack against a movement for labor and human rights to deaths of migrants crossing the Río Grande into the United States. Herrera associates the ongoing struggle of Indian communities, aggravated by the privatization of land in the 1990s, to the 1960s and 1970s U.S. migrant worker protests under the Zapatista cry for “tierra and libertad.” During his first 1970 visit to Chiapas to become attuned to indigenous culture and apply its artistic principles to Chicano writing, he heard of the incident where police opened fire on Chicano anti–Vietnam War demonstrators. This event, together with the Indian campesino struggle he witnessed in San Cristóbal, made it impossible for the writer to relish his “Indio euphoria” (Herrera 1997, 68). As he establishes links between the north and south, he becomes aware of his own divided loyalties: “[B]etween the squalor and abuse of Mexican Indians and the onslaughts against working class mexicanos in California . . . [B]etween my own Amerindian utopias, the socioeconomic wedges of class between Zinacantecos and Chamulas, and the cruel sniper work in urban America” (69).





In “Na Bolom: Histories and Fragments” the writer contrasts the statistics on Mexico’s growth, gross national product, and oil output to upsetting data about displaced ladinos working in oil development areas, the devastation of most of the Lacandón jungle found by the founders of Na Bolom, Chiapas’ families hunger and dire living conditions, and the lack of sewage and infrastructure in Indian villages (Herrera 1997, 56). Before the bleak figures, Herrera confesses his impotence—“What was I, a comfortable Americano going to do with these numbers and tables?” (58)—and wonders about other missing figures: nonexistent data on women sexually abused by landowners, worker exploitation, child labor, and “master-Indian offspring working out their Indian parents’ plantation debts” (58). The official “rhetoric of Indian unity” of the Mexican contrasts with the resisting, oppositional language of Indian communities in their protest march before Ladino dominant groups and authorities in San Cristóbal in 1993; their banners, signs, and flyers—sometimes also written in English with the hopes their message will reach Anglo tourists and perhaps will spur some action—contain a language of loss, pain, and protest that Herrera transcribes and, when necessary, translates for the monolingual English reader: claims against labor abuse, the privatization of land, violence, rape, homophobic murders, and unjustified arrests and incarceration. Here, the writer wonders about the effectiveness of a “united front,” a single “collective echo” of the voices that result from interconnected power networks (Herrera 1997, 69), a “dissident transnational coalitional consciousness” made possible by a “a postempire transnational citizenship” (Sandoval 2000, 79, 174): “East Los, Simojovel, Las Margaritas, Chiapas, the Southwest, Tzotziles, Chicanos, Tzeltales, Mexicanos, students, campesinos, dogooder Ladinos. Could the symbols mesh? Virgen de Guadalupe flags, United Farmworkers eagle motifs, Tzotzil corridos, and Chicano power chants, mexicanos, Ladinos, brown-skin American in between brown skins” (Herrera 1997, 69). In the subsequent section, “Red Rebozos for Rigoberta Menchú,” the author appeals to a resisting transnational citizenship and consciousness by invoking the Guatemalan activist and writer and connecting her struggle, grief, and resistance with that of the Mayan female collectives protesting around the zócalo for those raped and killed. The protesting women from the nearby village of Chenalhó, whose tightly braided hair holds terrible pictures of the attrocities, “were Rigoberta Menchú with crossed arms and staunch hearts . . . They were the braided spirits of Doña Petrona Chona, whose body was machete-cut into twenty-five pieces by the bodyguard of a landowner in Guatemala, pieces that Rigoberta Menchú’s father placed in a basket.


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Petrona shredded into pieces (Herrera 1997, 73)

Through the metaphors of braiding and waving, Herrera turns Petrona, whose story appears in Menchú’s testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchú, into an icon of cross-border Indian suffering and resistance:13 “Petrona, in pieces, came back to us this afternoon . . . Her legs and thighs. Her belly and her breasts. She was woven back, through stone, through national borders and border-guard time; she had come back through the valley of machetes, broken galeras and fincas and was present in this multitude, calling out for justice” (Herrera 1997, 74). Before the group of Indian protesters, the writer characteristically wonders about “us,” “the onlookers, the note takers, the accountants, bookkeepers, and anthropological shadows” (Herrera 1997, 74), and describes himself as a distant observer of the scene, remaining “at the back,” sitting down and smoking. Finally, he walks up closer as the whole plaza is mourning the dead in tears: “I let my crying take me to their crying and envelop me in their weeping; this was one thing I could do. It came up without question or analysis, without notes or reflections; I was singing with my Indian sisters and brothers, I was singing for the dead and wounded and for their transformation into fullness and freedom” (75). The last passage of the chapter, narrated in the second person and present tense, is a deeply poetic, moving address to the protesting, mourning Indians whose suffering the writer takes in as the ground for an inner spiritual and ideological transformation. The passage, which deserves being quoted at length, emblematizes what Chela Sandoval, drawing on Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1978), describes as a “drift” beyond language and words “into a third differential zone” (Sandoval 2000, 143). The drift requires an escape from oneself, from “that which is tamed and known,” releasing consciousness from “its grounding in dominant language and narrative to experience the meanings that lie in the zero degree of power,” dissociating oneself from dominant forms of knowledge, ideology, and power (146–147):


congealed”

I clutch you without language, without a text for my transformation. You are changing before my eyes, and my skin; you with the same burrs and loud scarves and scars as my mother, with the same crooked elbow as my father . . . I would have stayed and remained alone, inside the city bank, inside the



fashion fair prowls of my metropolitan euphorias . . . I would have stayed back there, in my comfort and in my high-rise grape-picking valley, in California, or in my open desert floodwater volcanic Midwest stone, in the land of Lincoln, next door to Dorothy’s flight to Oz; I would have kept all my fine flared writing pens, my self-made quills, and tall proud movimiento [sic] notebooks and looked elsewhere for my rain. I would have looked elsewhere, somewhere between fanciful Americanness and brown-skinned oblivion . . . I took a second or two and ran into you, by mistake . . . I receive you without any words; I am still unformed, I am changing with you as you go to your uncombed triumph, held up by the women of the villages, to continue to remember that you continue. (Herrera 1997, 77)

5. Herrera’s Oppositional Technologies Herrera’s personalization of the political, his sensitivity and drifting toward difference, together with the impulse toward a more democratic, egalitarian society, enable practices of opposition or “technologies” such as semiotics or sign-reading, deconstruction, and metaideologizing that, in Chela Sandoval’s words, constitute a “methodology of the oppressed.” The metanarrative strategies at work in Mayan Drifter decipher and contest the idioms of global neocolonial power, but also demonstrate a postmodern awareness of the textual status of the travel book (Holland and Huggan 2000, 158), calling attention to writing as an act of violence and deconstructing the position of the travel writer as a superior, indisputable authority. These technologies, to which I would add self-irony, call attention to the formal properties of travel writing and establish a connection between the genre and its complicity with global power. The (Un)authorized Writer Very much in the documentary spirit of other travel writings, Mayan Drifter resorts to the facts necessary for the author’s sociological analysis and interpretation, but it also makes strong statements about the contingency of knowledge, the subjective involvement in its production, and its use with different purposes and objectives. Although the book includes a list of selected readings at the end, they are not cited in the main body of the text as sources, but rather appropriated by the author for his own interpretation of events. Hence, his apology in the preface for his personal use of academic sources. There is here no aspiration to an essential truth, no claims that the travel writer is telling us the true version of the story.


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In other instances, however, Mayan Drifter inevitably inscribes the position of a Western more-knowledgeable, informed subject, a kind of elder brother to the Mexican. In the section “Kassandra and the Descrambler,” the travel writer does not for a minute doubt his knowledge and interpretation of the political and economic relation between Mexico and the United States and assumes the information he has is too complex to be shared with his Mayan interlocutors. Nonetheless, the writer’s awareness of his involvement in larger representational structures, essential to his concept of writing, is illustrated in the second section of the Prelude, “The Third Conversation.” Here Herrera shifts to third person and narrates the internal debates of a character, Juan, a figuration of the Chicano writer himself. Upon his return from Chiapas, Juan dwells on the ethics of representation of the native other, pondering on the kind of language he is to use before he begins an account of his travels. If, as Lisle puts it, “travel writing is an important part of the narration of global politics” (2006, 33), Herrera sees himself as one of the subjects who produce that narration. Third person narration allows for a detached metareflection on the contingency of the position of the Chicano travel writer and poet within the global reality. Juan’s concern for Lacandones is mocked by his partner, Maga, a female voice that previously appeared in one of his poetic short stories “Para siempre, Maga” (“For ever, Maga”). In Mayan Drifter, as in the previous work, Maga is the voice of the poet’s conscience, scornfully underscoring the championing, well-intentioned concerns of a middle-class Chicano for the Mexican poor and blatantly exposing his paternalism and his idealized, victimizing notions of the native. Maga says that after this second trip Juan “[hasn’t] changed” at all: he talks about Mexico in the same tragic, romantic but really uninvolved and distant tone he used to, as if to a little, defenseless sparrow he did not really want to save (Herrera 1997, 16). Through this conversation between Maga and Juan, Herrera addresses one of the main concerns of the book: the inevitable imbrication of the Chicano writer in “imperialist nostalgia”14 as a privileged Western subject despite his commitment to social justice. Herrera is thus no different from the well-meaning progressive revolutionary tourists and anthropologists. All of them are tightly woven into a vast web of corporate, neocolonial global power, in which, as Maga suggests, the Mexican national revival of the “authentic” native patrimony is involved. This exercise at self-distancing is a characteristic of the above-mentioned “postmodern ethnic autobiography” or “autoethnography” as the author presents himself as an object of ethnographic inquiry, looking at himself with the detachment of irony and examining his image as fictional and constituted by structures of authority.




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Besides rewriting America through silenced voices and facts, Mayan Drifter brings forward oppositional discourses that read into the mechanisms of global corporate language and governmental indigenismo.15 Images of the native Indian frozen into the past are shown to be contemporary versions of colonialism promoted by “Madrid-Gortary-Zedillo party technocrats” and the “new class of Mexican billionaire families.” They draw on them to attract tourism, while at the same time claiming to modernize and develop southern Mexico economically through a trade agreement that destroys their way of life: “Note how they kneel at the foot of the temples. ‘Let us honor our indigenous culture’, they say. They say this the way they say ‘oil, power and profit’ when they promote NAFTA—with the erotic power fix of a rapist” (Herrera 1997, 125). The travelogue offers an elaborate analysis and critique of the workings of what Barthes would have termed the “mythology” of institutionalized indigenismo through a decoding method or deconstructive semiotics that highlights the tight imbrications of former colonialism, Mexican state nationalism, ethnography, national and international economic interests, travel, and global tourism. The apparently conservationist yet condescending and rapacious attitudes of the Mexican government toward Indian peoples are equated to the language used by Mexican and foreign ethnographers, such as the Danish founders of Na Bolom, Frans and Trudy Blom, in the 1940s. Both silence Indians’ multiple displacements and social subordination through what John Frow calls a “semiotics of nostalgia.” For the narrator, Na Bolom—the hotel, museum, and research center—becomes emblematic of the instrumentalization of ethnographic research for the sake of global and national interests in the tourist industry. Na Bolom now appeals to its residents’ and visitors’ “ethical or ecological tourism” (Lisle 2006, 82) and contemporary conservationist nostalgia through a sham reforestation donation box whose contents are never used with that purpose. Meanwhile, PEMEX (Petróleos Mexicanos) buys Lacandones’s conformity with money it “dumps” in the area (Herrera 1997, 37), which people like K’ayum Ma’ax use to buy televisions, VCRs, satellite dishes, and water heaters (123–124). Described as a “Mayan museum machine” (3), a “tourist trap disguised by a politically correct Indianism and facile environmental platitudes” (54), Na Bolom displays local Indians as native objects of study and desire (55), as “‘folk’ fodder for tourist consumption rather than as subjects with wills of their own” and a brutal history of dispossession (33). While both Na Bolom and the government speak in the name of the Indian through indigenismo, they encourage their dependence and subordination. In the author’s view, both the dark young women


Sign-Reading: The Presence of Empire in Travel and Ethnography


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kneeling over tapestries exposed to the tourists’ view and the old Indian maids that are hidden from them become “a key symbol” of this dependence “in the social structure and consciousness of the nation” (55). Herrera is very much aware of the postmodern questioning of ethnographic premises, the suspicion that apparently objective ethnographic representations are influenced by imperial or colonial images of the other, the damage of anthropology when it places its subjects back in time, and the ethnographer’s and the traveler’s involvement in global economic power networks. Beyond their significantly different motivations and discourses, travel and ethnography have long partaken of the logic of empire and the relationship of authority it establishes with the other (Holland and Huggan 2000, 11–12; Lisle 2006, 270). Travelers’ reports have been instrumental in propagating the alleged superiority of Western civilization through conceptualizations of the distant lands and peoples as “not yet civilized” and “back in time” (Lisle 2006, 40–44). Likewise, ethnographers and their apparently objective investigation of the foreign culture have often projected Western values onto the valorization of the other as inferior and backward (Clifford 1988, 63, 65). In Mayan Drifter, travel, tourism, the ethnographic “discovery of the native,” and empire are connected to language as an instrument of colonization and silencing of others. This is the language that the Chicano writer has “swallowed” (Herrera 1997, 15) as a descendant from the Anglo colonizer and as a former student of anthropology, an ethnographic language which becomes a “foreign poetics of self ” when adopted by the natives themselves as they often become— like Concepción, the Chamula with a PhD—tour guides into their own villages (65). The volume breaks down the travel/tourist binary often present in contemporary travelogues whereby the traveler is the keen observer who engages with “the authentic” and the tourist is a pathetic product of globalization (Lisle 2006, 77–83; Frow 1991, 127). Herrera thus underscores that tourism and ethnography are two sides of the same coin, contributing to the business that has long reaped profit from the natives: “How can I speak of and for America if my entry is through the Na Bolom center in San Cristóbal de las Casas, a museum for research on the Lacandón Maya that has profited in many ways by the Othering of these people for almost half a century?” (Herrera 1997, 4). Debbie Lisle’s dispute of travel writers’ entitlement to the representation of others parallels Herrera’s own misgivings as a traveler and writer: “Indeed, what right do travel writers have to speak for and represent others? Aren’t they in the same ethico-political conundrum as contemporary anthropologists, who, as Clifford Geertz rightly argues, can only ever represent others in the language of established power?” (Lisle 2006, 270). In his “Ode to the Traveling Men,” significantly titled “Nothing





Is Taken that Is not Given,” Herrera sees himself as following in the footsteps of a long list of Western colonial predecessors—missionary colonizers, archeologists, and travelers such as Don Diego de Vera Ordóñez de Villaquiran, Fray Diego de Landa, John Lloyd Stephens, and Frans Blom whose “language thefts for the sake of an enlightened Europe and ‘High’ America” (Herrera 1997, 105) have turned Mayans into “silent” rather than “speaking subjects” (108). Even cultural translation is a predatory act with colonial antecedents, “an arrow-shaped incision into the native” pervaded by layers of linguistic and cultural colonization (127). Deconstruction and Resignification: The Autoethnography of “El Próspero” In the wake of the recent theoretical postcolonial debate and its ample terminology for inquiring into subversion, mimicry, and hybridity, autoethnography has been applied to writings resisting neocolonial domination. Mary Louise Pratt defines “autoethnography” as follows: “If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations” (Pratt 1992, 7). Pratt’s term refers broadly to moments in which “colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms” (7). It is Herrera’s standpoint as a “colonized” subject and his affiliation with the Indian that allows him to resignify or “meta-ideologize” (Sandoval 2000, 111), that is, to move in, through and out of ideologies generating ironic, denunciatory narratives where governmental and corporate rhetoric silence the natives, or where they demean and paralyze them with stereotypes. The journey into Chiapas is, in part, what Fredric Jameson would term a “cognitive mapping,” a search for the tracks of the disappeared, disguised America,16 for a “hole with a past to it.”17 The writer combines history, socioeconomic analysis, contrasted data and statistics, expressionistic snapshots of local life, and the transcription of the texts of local protest groups, so that the brief sections in each chapter of his travelogue piece together a geopolitical idea of Chiapas as a different place with a multifaceted social and cultural reality connected to the global world through conquest, capital, and social action. Extensive research and the ironic appropriation of reality from what Foucault calls a “subjugated standpoint” (Sandoval 2000, 173) result in an alternative translation of the complex, hybrid, and faltering reality of the place. The title of one of his sections, “Tuxla Oil Float,” ironically evokes the impact of the Mexican oil assets in the global stock market on local Indians who have been forced into movement since the government’s oil and energy


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development of the area since 1970. As he tries to identify details of Indian culture he remembers from his previous journey, he finds a “new kind of indio” seeking new opportunities, and reshaped by the “global political and economic impulse for energy resources” (Herrera 1997, 22). Herrera displays here an environmental consciousness through a language that points at the violence, pillage, and exploitation of the land by contemporary capitalism: the “ever diminishing rain forests” and the “land shrinking to the size of a dollar bill” are caused by cables of power plants that cut “at the yellow roots” and “eat away at the tiny reddish oval cells of the breathing body that sustains us all,” “pushing out” and “knocking out” campesinos, leaving “Indian communities sliced” as they move away from their villages to find jobs in the developing energy industry (Herrera 1997, 22–23). Were it not for the critical self-mockery of his own quest for an Indian paradise that this essay explores subsequently, this nostalgia could be aligned with what Holland and Huggan have called “ecotopias” in contemporary travel writing (2000, 178).18 In Part II, titled “Welcome to El Próspero,” Herrera appropriately chooses the colonial name of the area and in the neocolonial context of twenty-first-century global capitalism. “El Próspero,” “a Spanish version of the Mayan Cibola” (Herrera 1997, 87) was the name that would be attributed to the kingdom or province of the northern border of Guatemala (the areas of the Chol and the Lacandón) once it had been subjugated in the seventeenth century. In the first section of this chapter, “The Desolations of Ocosingo,” relating his arrival at the jungle outpost, Herrera describes his impressions on the coexistence and collision of divergent economic and cultural structures and their effects on the local peoples and landscape. The pessimistic tone of the section is foreshadowed with an epigraph quoting Sub-Comandante Marcos’s ominous words to former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo: “Welcome to the nightmare.” The legacy of colonial relations in the past is as ineludible as the presence of international market forces in Ocosingo: both Ladinos and Lacandón Mayas are caught in “the tilt between the fincas [“haciendas” where Indians are cheap workforce] and the city.” Herrera’s description of the scrambled landscape includes “boards, laminated roofing and brick shanties” and “the brown-green jungle desert” (1997, 86); women selling tortillas and men in tin booths selling Fantas and chips (87); and archeological sites connected by roads, used by tourists where Indians from the fincas sell goods, and refugees from Guatemala look for “the Great Mexican Last Chance” in commercial tourist centers (87). The name of “El Próspero” is charged with the irony of present and past conquests. Herrera deconstructs its meaning in the conqueror’s idiom by evoking the consequences of “prosperous” colonization: the demise of a knowledgeable civilization,





a long history of tribute, forced labor, and land encroachment, imported diseases, displacement, and the swollen bellies of children he sees as he passes through devastated villages and forests. In the heading of the following section, “La Ruta Maya,” Herrera once again uses deconstruction to collapse under one single title several sides of the same local reality in a global context: the comfortable mobility of tourists along the route through archeological ruins, the forced migration of Mayan economic refugees searching for work, and the influx of capital and Western commodities into the area through “combis” (small vans) along the roads of the ruta (route). The writer describes a land despoiled of its natural resources “in the name of the new Indian America” and oil (Herrera 1997, 88), but reminds the reader of a former history of Indian labor and dispossession in the hands of hacienda owners by highlighting the names of some of many abandoned campesino settlements, which are detached from the main body of the text and vertically disposed on the page. The Insecure Travel Writer and the Rite of Passage that “Cannot Occur” Patterning his book as a narration of discovery, Herrera draws on the recurrent structural leitmotif of the journey as internalized spiritual quest or rite of passage (Clark 1999, 11). However, in the process of telling, Herrera casts suspicion and doubt on the equation between linear physical movement and interior self-knowledge or Bildung—the totalizing illusions that one returns a “new man” from one’s travels. Mayan Drifter undermines the Chicano nationalist myth of the journey into the depths of indigenous cultures as a sacralization of the pre-Columbian origins of Chicanos.19 The journey does not offer the Chicano traveler the possibility of spiritual self-transformation through the discovery of “a universal and automatic bond among Mexican, Chicano, Latino and Indian peoples” and the ultimate knowledge of “‘who we [Chicanos, Americans, Indians] are’” (Herrera 1997, 5): A rite of passage into Chicano and American being cannot occur: The instructions are missing or the sacred songs of the shaman woman are absent, and the proper language and materials for the ordeal have been subverted; the full-bodied realizations cannot be accomplished. The self is severed from the community; the world is a fragment.


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(Herrera 1997, 7)

Telling, a process of internal and external discovery, is inscribed as drifting, a constant but often failed attempt to reach a destination in terms of 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe


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Do not let words like search or quest fool you . . . I wanted to leave and possibly arrive, that is all—to leave my station in the United States and arrive at another in a demarcated limbo called Mexico. My existential motion and puzzle through and around these two wavering points provide the opening for this writing in and for America. One of the things I fear is the voice that says: “You never left.” Another says “You never arrived.” (Herrera 1997, 6)

Hence, Herrera views his book as “the unfinished poem of a desire,” “a möbius-shaped trek backward and forward to a shattered realm of Indian campesino villages and bodies, to an unsettled mestizaje that at every turn aims to subvert itself ” (Herrera 1997, 6). In one of the poetic introspective sections punctuating his descriptions the writer equates his gradual immersion into the jungle to the search for his Indian bones and soul: “What I left behind, many lives ago . . . without the rumble and rubble of colonists missionaries, without monteros and chicleros,20 without PEMEX, Mexican techno-billionaires and their petrochemical jaws” (Herrera 1997, 91). What he finds are “wary campesinos against the cables and glass,” bulldozers, digging, refugees, while “A Zapatista glyph forms / as campesinos face the rubble” (93). Indeed, historical severances have turned America into a composite of fragments and the subject who writes cannot identify a single Indian culture to absorb, exalt, or identify with. Later on, in the village of Nahá, he sees that “fracture was omnipresent” (146): he himself, the anthropology students, Viejo Chan K’in, and all those he meets are related to each other by fragments (147). The Mayan body Herrera wants to grasp is multiple: “Was it the body of powerlessness, of spiritual resurrection, of petrochemical encroachment, of genocide, revolution?”(147). As he describes the effect of environment and travel upon his own subjectivity (“I pass through you and you pass through me” [Herrera 1997, 91]), the author becomes aware of his own colonialist biases, his intrusion into the life of others, and his embarrassment and confusion before his lack of touch with “Indianness.” “Tumbo,” the name of the last village of the bus route, a wood-felling station in the jungle, may in this context stand also for a metaphor of Herrera’s own “stumbling” as a traveler and a narrator.21 If travel “foregrounds conditioning” and “status” (Clark 1999, 14), Herrera’s “gringo” origins, his severance from his Mexican Indian


meaning and understanding. The sense of wholeness or completion that may be the culmination of the allegorical rite of passage is, in Herrera’s case, impossible, as he questions the progression from an old to a new self and his actual leaving or arriving anywhere:



heritage is here consciously and self-mockingly brought into view. While feeling apart from the people he sees because he has lost his “Indianness,” Herrera perceptively points at the first irony of his “rite de passage” toward his own origins: as an American from the North he distrusts these unfamiliar surroundings, while, in turn, his own appearance and rigidity cause him to be distrusted by those with whom he is seeking to connect. The second ironic moment leads to an epiphany about the elusive object of his personal and ethnographic quest and about his “colonial” guilt. We see Herrera as a fallible speaker as his errors as translator and interpreter are exposed. Memory fails him and causes him to misapply names to peoples and places he encountered in his previous journey in the 1970s. The visitor’s partial remembrance and knowledge of the place leads him to mistake a village (Nahá) for another (Lacanjá); a man (K’ayum) for another (K’ayum Ma’ax). Herrera’s goal and claim of “reuniting” with an “old friend” become ludicrous at best when he realizes these factual errors. In an over-compensatory gesture he gives his host, the new K’ayum, the tape recorder (“my memory maker, my voice taker, my history recorder”) that was never intended as a gift but as an ethnographic tool. Herrera thus relinquishes the main objective of his trip, his “ethnographic intentions,” which, given his incompetence, are closer to the “stumbling . . . typical of the tourist” and the “jumble in the folly of Chicano ‘ancestor’ searches” (Herrera 1997, 111) than to serious anthropological work. By equating himself to the tourist, Herrera once again undoes the tourist/traveler binary while showing his involvement in neocolonial globalization by interpreting his sudden “generous” impulse as an exchange that reproduces Western relations of domination on the Mayas. Western guilt hides behind this exchange of Western technology by an “authentic experience” among the “Savage”: “I was one more visitor dumping guilt and technology, proffering an exchange between the Modern and the Savage. Without realizing it, I had replayed the dependence drama that the Bloms and Na Bolom had set off in the forties” (112). The individualistic dimension of the rite of passage is addressed in the description of the journey to la selva (the jungle) as a delving of the writer into his own personal pain (the separation from his father, the neglect of his children from previous marriages) that, as he himself acknowledges, detaches him from the reality of the people he visits (Herrera 1997, 140). The author also addresses the traveler’s involvement in “imperialist nostalgia,” the appropriation of the other for his own spiritual self-fulfillment, his involvement in rampant U.S. consumer culture, and the commodification of Mexico in the United States. Before these multiple appropriations he wonders whether, deep inside, he did not selfishly want Mexico to be filled with a new corporate consciousness, so he could politely but self-righteously


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lament the plight of the Indian: “Maybe I was the one who wanted to own the last tracts of moist land and the oil derricks and cubicle housing so I could return and kneel on the raw gravel of la Ruta Maya and cry out my sadness. Maybe I wanted things to stay the same so I could blow my own rhetoric and feel worthy” (Herrera 1997, 256). Herrera alludes here to a postmodern apocalyptic rhetoric of environmental extinction and danger that, as Holland and Huggan maintain, may often be egotistic and selfcongratulatory (2000, 178–183). Ethics and the Drift between Discourse Genres22 In the landmark study Culture and Truth (1989) Renato Rosaldo observes that “objectivity” and “impartiality” were used to refer to positions with great institutional authority that are now being interrogated by “the objects of analysis,” the former ethnographic subjects that now speak. Subjects such as Juan Felipe Herrera who stand between cultures and nations may be seen as seeking to provide alternative knowledge through alternative forms. The conception of travel writing that privileges “non-fiction authority (i.e., truth) over imaginative endeavor (i.e., the art of fictionalizing)” (Lisle 2006, 266) is here replaced by a generic hybrid that self-consciously merges history, poetry, sociology, autobiography, and drama. The descriptive, analytical, reflexive style of the first two chapters of the book, set in late 1992 and 1993, dialogue with two chapters in which the author dwells on previous and later events in Mexico’s history. The poem “Anáhuak Vortex” (Chapter 4) centers around a Mexican history characterized by the PRI’s (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) power monopoly and the violent crushing of students’ and indigenous peoples’ political protests, and of alternative reforming voices such as Bishop Samuel Ruiz’s. The poem also deals with the emergence of the Zapatista Revolution and the impact of a new globalized economy on indigenous peoples. “Anáhuak Vortex” brings together the poet’s own vital anxiety and search for origins (“always in search, my Llorona / in Chicano accents”) and multiple images referring to Mexico’s fragmented and variegated national reality, which he is at pains to find a language to describe: “half in slime / half in the sky, half in music, half in scream / half in tenderness, half in a terrible twist of accidents” (Herrera 1997, 234); “centuries escape me, images tumble / w/o text, on their own / without relation” (239). In his final letter to K’ayum Ma’ax, whose whereabouts he does not know and with whom he encourages the reader to identify, Herrera presents his book as a flower offering23 to the northern and southern borders and inquires on how the recent political and economic events such as the assassination of Luis Donaldo





Colosio, NAFTA, and the rise of the Zapatista movement will affect the country’s future. The overall quizzical tone of the book, responding to the poet’s perplexity before Mexico’s turbulent past and before an uncertain future combines with the practical, didactic function of Jaguar Hotel, the play that constitutes the entire third chapter of the volume. In Herrera’s words, Jaguar Hotel is meant to make readers “get up and act up the book,” to visualize a reality that “is barely visible to us on this side of ‘high’ America” (1997, 10). In this play, drama is a consciousness-raising tool in line with the didactic premises of Chicano teatro campesino, although it differs from the limited scope of the Chicano genre in that it places a local reality within a transnational web of relations that involve Mexicans, Chicanos, Europeans, and Anglo-Americans. Written and published in English but translated into Spanish, the text is meant to transcend the boundaries of the English-speaking world and travel across the globalized Americas, whose various facets within the script of global power are enacted by Herrera’s fictional characters. The roles include the well-meaning Greta, an old European researcher and ethnographer assaulted by colonial guilt; Lionel, the Chicano academic tourist; Margarita, a Chicana activist who embraces Zapatismo; a U.S. corporate entrepreneur; the soldiers, Pacheco and Rosario, representing Mexico’s state violence; and the Mexican anthropology student advocating developmental nationalism. Local Indians and Ladinos voice multiple positions Herrera explores in other sections of the travel book: Nelly, a Ladina servant at the hotel, scorns the mask of philanthropy worn by a money-making hotel and research center; Maruch, an educated Indian, earns a living as an ethnographic researcher in the service of Europeans; Canek, a Lacandón Maya, sells out to timber companies; his father, the old Chan Ma’ax, personifies traditional ways of life and wisdom in the face of the “abandonment of the earth” (Herrera 1997, 180). In her call for a generic renewal of the travelogue that brings forward the more political and resisting potentialities of the genre, Debbie Lisle says that “contemporary travel writing is at its best when it acknowledges the constraints of traditional history telling, and takes seriously the difficulties of thinking critically about the linear march of time” (2006, 259). Lisle also suggests that travel writing, in order to be critical and political, needs to imbibe the resistance that creative writing expresses “at the level of myth, imagination, and storytelling” (278). In terms of discourse genres, Mayan Drifter avoids strict linear storytelling by moving, like a möbius strip (to use Herrera’s own metaphor), from sociocultural analysis to selfintrospection, literary exercise, and back outside with a renewed awareness that calls attention to an often ignored side of America while questioning the institutionalized knowledge and language (the language of America)


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that purports to represent it. To break with this language and the authority of the Western self, he blurs the boundaries of autobiography, travel account, and sociological investigation and complements his vision with a language for America, which involves hermeneutics or sign-reading, deconstruction, language play, metanarrative reflection, autoethnography, and the fictional representation of the several voices involved in the drama of the Americas. Yet it is not in the mixture of genres that the subversion lies, but in the ways in which Herrera sets these discourses against each other critically to produce a kind of knowledge that cannot be contained by established categories of classification. As Amitava Kumar argues, “in putting ‘literary’ and ‘evidential’ [and “subjective,” we could add]” forms of narrative together, the writer is drawing attention to “their dialectical relationship to common historical and social processes” (2000, 225). In response to Edward Said’s call to diffuse “a different form of history, a new kind of sociology, a new cultural awareness,” Kumar suggests that the task of writers and intellectuals is to provide alternative readings and to contextualize texts and events with critical contexts, acting as translators who contest, with a political perspective, what otherwise would be seen as natural (138). Herrera’s democratic impulse “to speak, to act” (1997, 18) provides the groundings of an interpretation of the lesser known side of America, an alternative hermeneutics, and a hybrid, revolutionary poetics that transgresses the conventions of the travel book. Mayan Drifter queries the literary, ethnographic, and political discursive practices that appropriate, domesticate, and ultimately silence the voice of a hidden America. The ethico-political dimension of Herrera’s “methodology of the oppressed” consists in metanarrative, signreading, and deconstructive strategies that, together with self-irony, display any encounter with others—be it in travel and tourism, or in writing and representation—as involving authority and containment.

Notes 1. In México and in Guatemala, the term “ladino” defines mixed-blood people of Hispanic and Mayan origin. The word appeared in the first stages of colonial America to designate Indians proficient in Castilian Spanish. For the Indians, being fluent in Spanish was an instrument of privilege, as those who spoke it could escape encomienda (“commendation” this was a trusteeship labor system instituted by the Spanish Crown during the colonization of the Americas and the Philippines under which the Spanish consolidated their conquests; under this system a soldier or colonist was granted a tract of land or a village together with its Indian inhabitants) and enforced labor. Today it is often applied to any non-Indian and defined in negative terms—by what one is not. Ladinos may




2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.


have some degree of Indian culture in their background, but have turned away from it to seek a new, non-Indian, national, and urban cultural identity. “Post-movement” writers include those from an earlier generation such as Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Helena Viramontes, Ray González, and Demetria Martínez, and those of a later generation such as Rubén Martínez, Luis Rodríguez, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Michele Serros. Michele Serros, however, stands apart from these writers for her often more frivolous parody of identity politics, perhaps addressed to a younger middleclass generation of readers that may no longer share the spirit of social commitment of the early movimiento days. Herrera is the author of twenty-four books to date. His latest publication is the poetic anthology 187 Reasons Why Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (2007). Some of his previous anthologies include Rebozos of Love (1974), Exiles of Desire (1985), Akrílika (1989), The Roots of a Thousand Embraces (1994), Love after the Riots (1996), Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (1999), Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de Rayos (2000), and Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler (2002). CrashBoom Love (2000) and Cinnamon Love (2005) are two novels in verse where he bridges young adult literature, adult themes, and sophisticated writing. Alfred Arteaga and Rafael Pérez-Torres have examined the work of Herrera in their respective books Chicano Poetics (1997) and Movements in Chicano Poetry (1995). To corroborate Flores’s view of Herrera as an eclectic and constantly innovating poet, Francisco Lomelí describes him as “the inimitable synthesizer, a factory of hybridity and a maelstrom of non-conforming productiveness . . . [H]e does not represent only one literary movement, but a rainbow of many tendencies” (2007, 2). Following Jan Borm, in this essay I take the travel book or travelogue to be a predominantly nonfictional first-person narrative of a journey that the reader presumes to have taken place, while assuming that the author and main character are identical (1994, 17–19). In his discussion on the definition of “Travel Writing,” “Travel Book,” and “Travelogue,” Jan Born says that the travel book is a mosaic that may oftentimes juxtapose texts of radically different tone, voice, vocabulary, and style, and that it may combine several genres such as the diary, the memoir, and the letter in one single text (1994, 20–21). Some of the representative studies that have dealt with this relationship are Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters (1986), Sara Mill’s Discourses of Difference (1993), Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992), and Steve Clark’s Travel Writing and Empire (1999). For an excellent overview of the state of the art in studies on life writing, see Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, Reading Autobiography (2001). Charles Tatum’s lecture on Chicano autobiography at the V Congreso Internacional de Literatura Chicana (Alcalá de Henares, May 2006). By indigenista Herrera is here referring to literary representations, abundant in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, which often idealize the Indian and present them as exotic and enigmatic. These representations have often been reinforced by official state discourse and ideology. See note 18.


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10. “Indians do not seem mysterious or poetic to me. What happens is that they live in atrocious poverty” (Herrera 1997, 9). 11. Texts such as Hunger of Memory (1982) by Richard Rodríguez, Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983) by Cherríe Moraga, House on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) by Gloria Anzaldúa, Canícula (1991) by Norma Cantú, House of Houses (1997) by Pat Mora, or Memory Fever (1999) by Ray González. 12. As Adrienne Rich has put it in her essay “Notes towards a Politics of Location” in Love, Bread and Poetry, “a place on the map is also a place in history” (1987, 212), so that the position one occupies in time and space [and language, we could also add], has to do with patterns of social, “racial,” and colonial inequality, power, and privilege. In Foucault’s words, a “subject position” is that number of enunciative modalities that a subject “can occupy or be given when making a discourse,” the “discontinuities of the planes from which he [/she] speaks” (Foucault 1972, 54–55). Judith Butler’s more recent notion of “performativity” suggests that individuals do not necessarily fill subject positions determined by technologies of power. The discursive norm and its production or performance are never identical (Butler 1992, 14–15). 13. Herrera uses this very same metaphor in his bilingual poetry sequence Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de Rayos (2000). The collection pays tribute to the villagers killed by paramilitary agents in Acteal in 1997 by inserting the reader into the minds and voices of four women from one family. 14. In Culture and Truth Renato Rosaldo defines “imperialist nostalgia” as the yearning by the agents of colonialism “for the colonized culture as it was ‘traditionally’ (that is as they first encountered it). The peculiarity of their yearning is that agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed” (Rosaldo 1989, 68–69). In “Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia” (1991), John Frow has shed further light on the role of nostalgia in the contemporary tourist industry, where, as he sees it, the commodification of otherness extends the inequality between the First and the Third Worlds, and developed and undeveloped regions. Under the guise of taking modernity and development to underdeveloped regions, tourism holds back development through the international control of capital. The very lack of development of certain areas is the appealing element for visitors. 15. Indigenista ideology is generally understood to be a complex, interrelated, and extensive set of governmental actions, declarations, and policies addressed toward indigenous peoples and communities. It is the ideological, legal, and economic relationship that the state has maintained with the indigenous populations, which it considers subordinate and has sought to integrate in national life since the 1940s (Sámano Renteria 2004, 141). Since its early stages, indigenismo has relied on paradoxical premises: on the one hand, it views indigenous cultures as part of the historical national heritage of Mexico, and therefore deserving of preservation and documentation; on the other, it assumes that indigenous peoples need to be “Westernized,” acculturated and assimilated into a Westernized Mexico, and thus eventually become “Mexicanized.”





16. Questioning the idea that America was discovered, in “El descubrimiento de América que todavía no fue,” the Uruguayan thinker and journalist Eduardo Galeano says that the Spanish colonial enterprise was not a discovery (“descubrimiento”), but instead a cover or a disguise (“encubrimiento”): “But we could say that America was not discovered in 1492 because those who invaded it, did not know, or could not see her. Gonzalo Guerrero, the conqueror, did see it. Some prophets, like Bartolomé de las Casas, Vasco de Quiroga or Bernardino de Sahagún, did see it, and because they saw it they loved it and were condemned to loneliness. But the warriors, notaries, and merchants who came in search of swift fortune and who imposed their religion and culture as the only, obligatory truth, did not see America” (Galeano 1991, 120) (my translation). 17. In his epigraph to the “Tuxla Oil Float” Herrera quotes the lines from Lorna Dee Cervantes’s poem “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” from her collection Emplumada. 18. The critics define “ecotopias” as those travel narratives that bring together a commercialized fascination with worlds and customs that are disappearing and a reverence for an endangered nature, which is also commodified as a site of spiritual regeneration and alternative lifestyle. 19. For more detailed accounts of indigenista discourse in Chicano/a cultural politics, see Jorge Klor de Alva’s “California Chicano Literature and Pre-Columbian Motifs: Foil and Fetish” (1986) and Daniel Cooper-Alarcón’s The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination (1997). 20. “Chicleros,” who have worked for generations on the extraction of latex and the manufacture of chewing gum, migrated to the Lacandón region in the 1930s and 1940s. “Monteros” refers to those who worked in conditions of semislavery in the cedar wood-cutting industry that developed in the nineteenth century in the area. 21. Coincidentally, in Spanish, “dar tumbos” means to lurch, to move slowly, unsteadily, and abruptly. 22. By “discourse genres” or “genres of discourse” John Frow understands different conventions and registers within the text as well as the positions and voices that are suitable for a variety of speakers, including the narrator in a novel, the main speaker in an autobiography, or the characters in a play. All of them (legal, literary, colloquial, and scientific registers) are determined by certain knowledge conditions (1986, 158). 23. Understanding flowers as words is in tune with the Náhuatl notion of “flower and song” (“flor y canto”) where the poem is a form of prayer or divine offering. Chicano poets like Alurista adopted this idea in the late 1960s and 1970s to link their work to the pre-Columbian poems of Mesoamerica.


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References Alarcón, Daniel Cooper. 1997. The Aztec Palimpsest. Mexico in the Modern Imagination. Tucson: Arizona University Press.


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Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Arteaga, Alfred. 1997. Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1990. The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha. In Identity, Community, Culture and Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, 207–221. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Blades, Ruben. 1984. Buscando America. New York: Elektra Entertainment. Blanton, Casey. 1997. Travel Writing: The Self and the World. New York: Twayne Publishers. Borm, Jan. 1994. On the Travel Book, Travel Writing, and Terminology. In Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, 13–26. London: Ashgate. Butler, Judith. 1992. Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism.” In Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 3–21. New York: Routledge. Cervantes, Lorna Dee. 1981. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Chambers, Iain. 1994. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge. Clark, Steve. 1999. Introduction. In Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. Steve Clark, 1–28. London: Zed Books. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cooper Alarcón, Daniel. 1997. The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1980. The Law of Genre. Glyph 7: 202–232. Fischer, Michael M. J. 1986. Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. 195–233. Berkeley: University of California Press. Flores, Lauro. 1990. Auto/referencialidad y subversión: Observaciones (con)textuales sobre la poesía de Juan Felipe Herrera. Crítica 2.2: 172–181. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. Frow, John. 1986. Marxism and Literary History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1991. Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia. October 57: 123–151. Galeano, Eduardo. 1991. El descubrimiento de América que todavía no fue y otros escritos. Caracas: Alfadil. Herrera, Juan Felipe. 1984. Para siempre, Maga. In Cuentos chicanos: A Short Story Anthology, ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya and Antonio Márquez, 100–105. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ———. 1997. Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ———. 2000. Tejedoras de Rayos/Thunderweavers. Tucson: Arizona University Press.





Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. 2000. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Hulme, Peter. 1989. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492– 1797. London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1988. Cognitive Mapping. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 347–360. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kaplan, Caren. 1996. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke University Press. Klor de Alva, Jorge. 1986. California Chicano Literature and Pre-Columbian Motifs: Foil and Fetish. Confluencia 1: 18–26. Kumar, Amitava. 2000. Passport Photos. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lisle, Debbie. 2006. The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lomelí, Francisco. 2007. Foreword. In Half of the World in Light. New and Selected Poems, by Juan Felipe Herrera. Tucson: Arizona University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2003. Historias Locales, Diseños Globales: Colonialidad, conocimientos subalternos y pensamiento fronterizo. Madrid: Akal ediciones. Mills, Sarah. 1993. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism. London: Routledge. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. 1995. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. Ethnicity, Ethics, and Latino Aesthetics. Journal of American Literary History 12.3: 534–553. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Quintana, Alvina E. 1992. Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters: The Novelist as Ethnographer. In Criticism in the Borderlands, ed. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar, 72–83. Durham: Duke University Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1987. Love, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–85. London: Virago. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Sámano Rentería, Miguel Ángel. 2004. El indigenismo institucionalizado en México (1936– 2000): Un análisis. In La construcción del Estado nacional: democracia, justicia, paz y Estado de derecho. XII Jornadas Lascasianas., ed. José Emilio Rolando Ordoñez Cifuentes, 141–158. México: Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2001. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1987. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London: Routledge. Taracena Arriola, Arturo. 2006. Contribución al estudio del vocablo “ladino” en Guatemala (siglo XVI–XIX). Boletín N° 25. AFEHC. Asociación para el Fomento


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de los Estudios en Centroamérica.“Mestizaje, Raza y Nación en Centroamérica: identidades tras conceptos, 1524–1950” 25: 1–11. Torres, Hector A. 2000. The Ethnographic Component of Chicano/a Literary Discourse. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 25.1: 151–166. Youngs, Tim. 1994. Where Are We Going: Crossborder Approaches to Travel Writing. In Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, 167–179. London: Ashgate.







¿Dónde estás vos/z?: Performing Salvadoreñidades in Washington, DC Ana Patricia Rodríguez

R

ecent discussions about the Salvadoran diaspora have focused primarily on the transnational movement of migrants from El Salvador to various locations in the United States (Sánchez Molina 2005; BakerCristales 2004; Hamilton and Stoltz Chinchilla 2001; Menjívar 2000; Cadaval 1998; Mahler 1995a, 1995b; Repak 1995). Salvadoran labor migration and the production of material and cultural capital associated with it have been routinely traced from El Salvador to divergent locations, and from these sites back to El Salvador (Mahler 2000). People, money, media, communication, and various material and cultural goods would seem to travel on transnational routes between determined points of departure and arrival. There are sending and receiving cities, poles of expulsion and attraction, and sites of dislocation and relocation in places such as Chirilandría, a housing complex (a la Salvadoran colonia [neighborhood] style) in northern Virginia duly named after the town of Chirilagua located in eastern El Salvador, and streets in Intipucá City, El Salvador, renamed after streets in Washington, DC (Pedersen 2002, 1995). There are “hermanos lejanos,” or Salvadoran immigrants, said to be yearning to return to their “homeland,” a diasporic province called “Departamento 15” that extends virtually across the world, and Salvadoran cultural satellites all seemingly linking up to an imaginary national control center that is El Salvador.1 Registering these comings and goings of Salvadoreños/ as, this essay explores the production and performance of Salvadoran identities, or Salvadoreñidades, in translocal contexts, particularly that


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ANA PATRICIA RODRÍGUEZ

of Washington, DC, where a vibrant Salvadoran diasporic community is finding its place and voice in the Nation’s Capital. Through a study of Washington, DC−based performance texts by Quique Avilés, Culture Clash (CC), and Lilo González and los de la Mount Pleasant, I examine Salvadoran cultural identity construction under the particular strain of transmigration, interlingualism, and racialization in the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area (i.e., Washington, DC, Maryland, and northern Virginia). In this chapter, I focus, in particular, on the uses and disuses of the colloquial Salvadoran speech act of vosear (the informal second person singular pronoun “you”) in the production of Salvadoran American voces (voices) and the hybridization of U.S. Salvadoran identities. Animated by a set of cultural interrogatives, I ask: ¿Dónde estás vos/z? Where are you, vos, Salvadoreño/a, in the subjective sense of the question? Indeed, where and how are Salvadoran voces and voices being articulated in the diasporic locations that Salvadorans occupy? Exploring the dis/use of the Salvadoran colloquial form of speech, the informal voseo characteristically associated with national Salvadoran identity and the performance of voz (voice) and cultural identity, I resituate the discussion of Salvadoran transnational migration wherein the Salvadoran diaspora is defined almost exclusively and unilaterally in relation to El Salvador as its center and core. Rather, I explore the production and performance of Salvadoran identities, or Salvadoreñidades, in translocal contexts, or interlinked locations extending across diasporic sites such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Long Island, Melbourne, San José de Costa Rica, and Washington, DC, the focus of this chapter. Indeed, as local DC Salvadoran poet and performance artist Quique Avilés recounts in his poem titled “El Salvador At-A-Glance” (2003), “El Salvador’s major cities [are presently]: San Salvador / San Miguel / Santa Ana / Los Angeles / San Wachinton, D.C.” (11; my emphasis). Avilés’s cultural geography of the Salvadoran nation widens to include and recognize the Salvadoran diaspora residing outside of the geopolitical borders of the country yet within its extended geocultural reaches. In “El Salvador At-A-Glance,” Avilés explores the reconfiguration of El Salvador according to a transnational logic and global economic system, by which El Salvador’s “major exports” include “coffee, sugar, city builders, busboys, waiters, poets” (10). In this logic, immigrants are both producers and products, generating socioeconomic and cultural remittances that are greatly transforming El Salvador and Salvadoran society as a whole. Both used by and using the transnational economy for the purposes of producing remittances, as Avilés claims, El Salvador lies, for the diaspora, just beneath the skin like a “[l]ittle question mark that begins to itch” and to disturb those who “were supposed to clean carpets / not ask for time out and dialogue” (10).


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Implied, though not explicitly articulated, Avilés’s poem, thus, begs the question: What is it like to be Salvadoran outside of El Salvador in Washington, DC, “in the strangest moments / in the strangest cities / under the strangest circumstances” (11)? In the context of DC and along with local cultural producers like Avilés, I explore the artistic production and representation of a vibrant Salvadoran community, which is articulating a locally inflected and homegrown voz in the Nation’s Capital, one that is no longer singularly Salvadoran but part of a range of diasporic Salvadoreñidades. More specifically, I ponder Salvadoran identity construction in the United States under the creative strain of transnational immigration, transculturation, interlingualism, and what I call interracialization, all processes serving as points of contact between different ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural, and other groups in the United States beyond the primary contact with the Salvadoran nation. Indeed, we are no longer in El Salvador, vos, but we are producing new Salvadoreñidades in other contexts and with other linguistic, cultural, and historical materials. Thus, I explore how at a distance, apart and in their own right, Salvadorans in different translocal sites are producing vos and voz, diasporic subjectivities, identities, cultures, and languages. The production and performance of Salvadoreñidades can be found in the greater Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area, just as in the greater Los Angeles region and the San Francisco Bay Area, each representing translocal sites that can be examined in their own right and in relation to one another, larger global trends, and specific local developments as is the case of Salvadoran performances and cultural texts produced in Washington, DC. 1. Culture Clash in the District Home to possibly over 600,000 Salvadorans in some counts,2 the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area attracted the attention of the wellknown Latino theater/comedy troupe, Culture Clash (CC). In 2000, Culture Clash came to the area to conduct research on DC’s multiethnic and multiracial communities, including the Salvadoran diaspora in the Nation’s Capital. Interviewing and working with local Salvadoran American poet and performer Quique Avilés and other community artists and activists in the fall of 2002, in the midst of the DC sniper rampage, CC produced and performed Anthems: Culture Clash in the District at the Arena Stage. Anthems presented not only the “multicultural story” of an often culturally, racially, and socioeconomically stratified Washington, DC, but also the transnational narrative of Salvadorans in the District in the post-9/11 context. Specializing in the production of what might be called translocal


PERFORMING SALVADOREÑIDADES IN WASHINGTON, DC



theater, or theater produced in interlinked local sites (e.g., Mission Magic Mystery Tour set in San Francisco; Chavez Ravine, in Los Angeles; Nuyorican Stories, in New York City; Miami Mambo, in Miami), Culture Clash now produced Anthems in and for the District (to the best of my knowledge, the play has not been produced and performed in its entirety outside of Washington, DC). CC’s Richard Montoya and Ric Salinas (without Salvadoran Chicano third member Herbert Siguenza) appeared to take a special interest in the Salvadoran community in the District, and made it the focus of two significant scenes in the production. One year prior to the performance, the Arena Stage had commissioned CC to produce a “site-specific” piece on Washington, DC. The product turned out to be a collage of scenes, characters, and events based on interviews that CC conducted with people in the District. According to Molly Smith, the Artistic Director of the Arena Stage, Anthems gave “us an entirely unofficial and unauthorized tour of the city—shot through the lens of Culture Clash’s wild comic imagination” (2003, 155). In an effort to write “anthems,” or narratives of this city, at once the Nation’s Capital and local home to District residents, the main character and narrator of the play—a writer, performed by Montoya—walked in and out of the lives of loosely disguised characters of the District. CC represented famous politicians and socialites, black and white “native Washingtonians,” and people from various local diasporic communities, including African American residents, Muslim refugees, and Salvadoran immigrants. Even Tian Tian, one of the émigré pandas at the National Zoo, made several cameo appearances, offering metareflections on the city, as when he says: “D.C. can be a real jungle and you people can be animals sometimes” (Culture Clash 2003, 158), and, “Look at me I’m a black-and-white panda bear in a mostly black-and-white town . . . Black patches, white patches, together, apart, slightly segregated, but in the same general area” (159). Indeed, Culture Clash in Anthems stood up to the challenge of critically representing Washington, DC’s most hidden faces, facets, and issues. As Smith claims, in CC’s Anthems, “we see some familiar faces and places, but mostly we encounter ordinary, everyday people we rarely see or hear on stage” (155). In CC’s montage of the District, the audience catches fleeting glimpses of immigrant Salvadoran life. In one brief scene titled “The Ballad of Douglas Martínez,” Ric Salinas—the Salvadoran American member of the Clash team—pantomimed the movements of a civil war refugee fleeing La Union, El Salvador, in 1984. In wordless action, Martínez is shown dodging bullets in his country, running across the U.S.-Mexican border, and crossing the Potomac River in a symbolic reenactment of George Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware River, all the while


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searching for his destination—the Lincoln Memorial, “a dream com[e] true” (Culture Clash 2003, 200). In Washington, DC, Martínez is seen again noiselessly caught in another crossfire and battleground. This time, however, it is not the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992), but rather the Mount Pleasant Riots, which exploded in a Salvadoran neighborhood of Washington, DC, on May 5, 1991. At the end of the scene, Douglas is seen silently dying in the streets of Prince George’s County, Maryland, while walking home from work one evening. In a stage voice-over, the audience hears a live DC news telecast: “The first reported black on Latino murder occurred tonight in Prince George’s County” (200). The silent representation of Douglas Martínez’s death in the streets of Prince George’s County is chilling, for it brings to center stage the plight of many Salvadoran immigrants in the Nation’s Capital, many of whom have been made nearly invisible and silenced by what Lauren Berlant calls the “national culture industry” (2002, 185). In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (2002), Berlant calls attention to a “national culture industry” engaged in the production, commodification, and consumption of acceptable “native citizens” as well as unacceptable noncitizens, immigrants, and others in the cultural imaginary of the United States (175–220). Through readings of various mass-media texts including a volume of Time Magazine, Berlant identifies normative “native citizens” as “implicitly native-born, white, [heterosexual] male salaried citizens” (193) and “infantilized citizens” as those necessarily made “anesthetized, complacent, unimaginative” by a hegemonic ethos and politics (199). Subject to, unquestioning of, and often supportive of a U.S. world order, the ideal citizens of the United States, according to Berlant, embody an “infantile citizenship” shaped by patriotism, individualism, and (almost blind) “faith in the nation” (27) and “the state’s commitment to representing the best interests of ordinary people” (27–28). This citizen ideal looms large over would-be citizens, including foreigners, immigrants, minorities, and other unincorporated, marginalized, and/or excluded communities (185), who are called to have “faith in the nation” in order to assume their place in U.S. society. As Berlant explains, for all their negative and ambivalent representation by the “national culture industry,” immigrants not only revitalize the United States with their labor and cultural contributions, but moreover serve as “symbolic evidence for the ongoing power of American democratic ideals” (195). In their desire for incorporation into the U.S. nation, immigrants assume, to various degrees, the “faith in the nation” held by “native citizens” at large. In the education of immigrants, Berlant underscores the role of the “national culture industry [which] seeks to stipulate that only certain kinds





of people, practices, and property that are, at core, ‘American,’ deserve juridical and social legitimation” (185). Films and mass-media texts of various genres such as Forrest Gump, The Pelican Brief, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and the parodic episode of The Simpsons, “Mr. Lisa goes to Washington,” in Berlant’s analysis, serve to highlight how the figure of the “infantile citizen” and the trope of the pilgrimage to Washington, DC, reproduce the monumental yet empty signifiers of American patriotism. These texts, as Berlant suggests, serve to reify modes of inclusion and exclusion in the nation, especially for immigrants. In regard to the significance of immigrants’ narratives, Berlant writes, “Their [immigrant portraits and stories] importance is in the ways they express how completely generic immigrant hopes and dreams might unfold from particular bodies, and they tell a secret story about a specific migrant’s odds for survival—by which Time means successful Americanization” (197). Living in the shadow of monumental signifiers and experiencing “citizenship” on more disenfranchised terms, Salvadoran and other immigrant and minority communities in the greater Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area, I posit here, offer significant revisions of the vacuous citizenship narrative, albeit on symbolic and cultural terms rather than legal and political ones. A great number of Salvadoran immigrants in the region, after all, remain marginalized and disenfranchised labor citizens of the Metropolitan Area, often working and living without legal residency and much less U.S. political citizenship and representation. Along with Berlant and other critics of an exclusive “national culture industry,” I seek to understand how Salvadoran immigrants are inscribing themselves into the national and local narratives of Washington, DC, while at the same time producing new modes of cultural citizenship. In Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space and Rights (1997), Flores and Benmayor suggest that for many Latinos/as in the United States cultural citizenship embodies a significant set of social practices. They explain: In this way, immigrants who might not be citizens in the legal sense or who might not even be in this country legally, but who labor and contribute to the economic and cultural wealth of the country, would be recognized as legitimate political subjects claiming rights for themselves and their children, and in that sense as citizens. (11)


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The term and practice of “cultural citizenship” is particularly significant for Central Americans, who have been historically and indiscriminately denied legal immigrant and resident status in the United States. In the geopolitical context of the 1980s, people fleeing the armed conflict in the isthmus were generally classified as economic rather than political refugees, 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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and many were deported to their deaths in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. In more recent times, Central American migrants have been subject to a politically ambiguous and restrictive condition produced by their migratory “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS), which makes it possible for undocumented immigrants to work indefinitely in the United States without legal residency. For many undocumented Central Americans, living in a prolonged state of legal indeterminacy creates a sense of instability and disempowerment. While Central Americans continue to struggle to acquire full legal and political citizenship status in the United States, “cultural citizenship” might provide a venue for political action and agency in the here and now, especially when their prolonged TPS and undocumented condition threaten to foreclose all possibility of political organizing. I ask, then, how do Salvadoran transmigrants produce and perform a “cultural citizenship” of their own in the United States?

2. Where are the Americans? In their performance of Anthems, CC tapped into the nearly invisible narrative of the transmigration of Salvadorans to the Washington, DC, region, which in itself is a highly dynamic contact zone of diverse racial, ethnic, and inter/national groups. In this context, U.S. Salvadoran identity is being transformed not only in proximity and in contact with U.S. mainstream and Latino American identities, but moreover by African American identities. In a second Anthems scene featuring Salvadoran characters, titled “Salvadoran Jungle Fever/Fiebre de la Selva,” Noe Ramírez, a fortysomething Salvadoran immigrant father, recalls the shock experienced by his family when they resettled in DC in the 1980s. He explains that U.S.made TV programs broadcast in El Salvador and U.S. imperialist goodwill messengers (all part of an exported U.S. “national culture industry” consumed in Latin America) did not prepare the family for what they would encounter in their transmigration. He says, We came to Washington, D.C., in 1984, and landed on 14th and Irving. I said “Puta! This look more like Good Times.” We didn’t know the capital of the United States was Africa! Puta! Where were the gringos? Where were the tall, blond, blue-eyed guys from the Peace Corps that I met in El Salvador?



(Culture Clash 2003, 201)

Unprepared to face a multiracial, multiethnic, and multilingual United States, Noe tells of machete-armed fights with African American youths in high school, a story that Quique Avilés also describes in his own life 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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We were the new immigrants on the block, it was tough . . . There was a lot of violence, people getting stabbed. And so, we started to fight back: “La ley del machete.” We would take machetes to school. Los Negros started getting hurt, people getting cut. It was nasty. Then word got out, “Don’t mess with the Salvadorans, the ‘migos,’ cause they got the big knives.” We had to fight or die—survival. Finally, the black community said, “OK, these people are here to stay, so we’re gonna have to deal with them.” (201)

Through the character of Noe, CC taps into one of the least publicly aired subjects in the District—race relations beyond the white-and-black and, more distinctively, involving African Americans, Africans, Muslims, Haitians, Latin Americans, Salvadorans, and other groups. Indeed, the subject of how Latino immigration, particularly Salvadoran immigration, is creating a new ethnoracial and cultural “borderlands” of sorts, south of the historic racial boundary that is the Mason-Dixon Line, is rarely if ever openly acknowledged and discussed in Washington, DC. Over the last decades, the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area has become home to one of the fastest growing and most diverse Latino/a populations in the United States. In 2000, the population of the District of Columbia was calculated at 572,059 persons, of whom approximately 60 percent were African Americans, 30 percent non-Hispanic whites, 8 percent Latinos, 3 percent Asians, 0.3 percent Native Americans, 0.1 percent Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders, 4 percent other races, and almost 2 percent multiracial. The U.S. Census Bureau also estimated that over 44,953 Latinos/as lived in the District of Columbia, amid a majority population of African Americans and others. According to the Census 2000, the percentage of Latinos/as was 4.7 percent in Virginia and 4.3 percent in Maryland. These figures, however, do not take into account the even larger number of undocumented Latino/a immigrants (many of whom are Central Americans, especially Salvadorans) in the region, who comprise a great part of the labor force not only in the District but in the entire region as well. It is not surprising, then, that Salvadorans are a significant socioeconomic force in the region and that Salvadoran cultural markers (e.g., restaurants, grocery stores, celebrations, Spanish language variants, etc.) have become the most visible and audible signs of Latinidad in the region. In contrast to California and the Southwest, where the majority of Latinos/as are of Mexican heritage, Salvadorans in the DC area are identified as the primary Latino/a population (Singer et al. 2001, Singer 2003).3


experiences and performances, and that partially provides the ethnographic basis for CC’s representation in this scene. Noe explains,


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Calling the District of Columbia his home as his family acculturates to their surroundings, Noe Ramírez of CC’s Anthems is shocked one day to find that his U.S.-raised Salvadoran son has become a “stranger in my house” (2003, 202). This son no longer speaks Spanish, but rather a variant of hybridized hip-hop languages, with a sampling of informal heritage Spanish, street English, and African American popular idioms. When Noe tells or rather orders young Enrique to “Hey, speak English! . . . Hablá Inglés . . . [vos]” (202), Noe is using an imperative speech act, “hablá,” in the informal voseo, which Enrique apparently does not use or understand. Enrique and his father, thus, engender not only a generation gap but a cultural and linguistic one as well. While Noe attempts to speak in Salvadoran Spanish to his son, Enrique appears no longer able to vosear, manifesting a lack that might be taken as a breach or break with Salvadoran national identity. Instead, Enrique answers in a language beyond his father’s comprehension: “I’m speaking English, doggy-dog” (202). To the father’s greater surprise, it is Enrique’s African American girlfriend, Lashanda, who greets him saying, “How you doing, Mr. Ramirez? Oh—como estas?” (no accent marks, 202). In this contact zone of sorts, Salvadoran Americans and African Americans are not only mixing and dating but also producing transcultural interethnic identities, or what Montoya in his “Afterword” to Anthems calls “mixed and remixed living histories.” According to Montoya, Latinos/as are also learning about and recuperating their “Negritude,” or African cultural and racial identities (Culture Clash 2003, 224). In his monologue, Noe reveals what are perhaps the greatest lessons learned from living in DC. He says, There are no black people in El Salvador, so we never knew any, we never had contact. Salvadorans are very prejudiced people. But we [Salvadorans and African Americans] have a lot in common. Oh si, we’re both jinchos, country folk, we are both family-oriented, go to church, we work side by side, we like greasy-ass food, we like to swear a lot, por la gran puta—we’re in the same boat. (201)

Alluding to Salvadorans’ often uninterrogated biases, blatant racisms, and internalized colonialisms, papá Noe inadvertently suggests the possibility of building alliances, solidarities, and interracial and interethnic relations, especially with African Americans in the District. After all, as residents of the District, “we’re in the same boat,” living side-by-side in places like Mount Pleasant, Columbia Heights, Anacostia, and elsewhere. Moreover, Latinos/as and African Americans share an extended history of exclusion in the United States. Among groups with shared disenfranchised histories and social positions, alliances could be built around issues of living wages,





affordable housing, proper healthcare, and access to education, immigration, and other rights. These are issues that affect a great number of disenfranchised communities—including African Americans and Latinos/ as—in the District of Columbia and elsewhere as manifested in the 2006 multiethnic mobilizations and marches for immigrant civil rights in the United States. Along these lines, DC Salvadoran singer, composer, and community activist, Lilo González suggests the possibilities of transnational coalition building among Latinos/as and African Americans in his musical composition titled “Las historias prohibidas de Pedro y Tyrone” (The Forbidden Tales of Pedro and Tyrone) from his CD A quien corresponda . . . (1994).4 Invoking in the song’s title Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton’s Historias prohibidas del pulgarcito (The Prohibited Stories of El Salvador—The Tom Thumb of Central America, as the country is known for its small geographic territory), Lilo González and his musical group los de la Mount Pleasant chronicle young Pedro’s immigration to DC from El Salvador, including his separation from his parents, his life in the streets, his search for day jobs, his consumption of drugs, and his general disillusion and disempowerment as a noncitizen or disenfranchised subject of the United States. Pedro’s exclusion from the “native citizenry,” as Berlant might posit, is mirrored in the telling of Tyrone’s life in Washington, DC. As González tells us, Pedro and Tyrone, both of whom are young, male, and poor, live in the “shadow of the White House” and amidst social, economic, and racial violence. In the 1991 Mount Pleasant Riots, Latinos/ as and African Americans (personified in the song by Pedro and Tyrone) retaliated against institutional forms of economic, political, and social disenfranchisement in their communities. Like in many U.S. cities, African American and Latino/a youths in the District of Columbia live in neighborhoods adversely affected by lack of employment, education, housing, and opportunities (Jennings and Lusane 1994). González’s song, which is set to reggae, tells of “Negro matando a negro, / negro matando a Latino, / Latino matando a negro, / Latino matando a Latino” (Black killing Black, / Black killing Latino, / Latino killing Black, / Latino killing Latino). But, as the song suggests, that narrative must be transformed and revised, if not altogether rewritten. A product of the 1980s immigration of Salvadorans to the area, the lyrical Pedro is orphaned, homeless, and addicted to crack. At six years of age, he emigrated from his war-torn country, but in DC he has grown prematurely old and hopeless: “Llegó buscando a estas tierras, / la estatua de la libertad, / pero ella estaba muy alta, / me dijo, no la pude yo alcanzar” (He came to this land in search of, / the Statue of Liberty, / but she was much too high, / he told me, I wasn’t able to reach her). The Statue of Liberty,


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symbolizing U.S. opportunity, freedom, and justice, does not extend her hand to these new immigrants from Central America. Instead, the statue represents the denial of (unalienable) refugee rights to a people who were assaulted in its own land by the economic and military forces of the United States during the Cold War era and in the present stages of globalization. The song seems to ask: Do Salvadorans not have the right to seek refuge in the United States? Caught shorthanded in the middle of two cultures without the material and creative means to use his social capital, Pedro learns to think and live in the present and to survive by his own wits: “[s] iempre piensa en el presente / suspira por el pasado, / conociendo nuestra historia, / Pedro, el futuro es tu regalo” (He always thinks in the present, / he always longs for the past, / but if you know your own history, / Pedro, the future shall be your reward). Pedro’s counterpart, Tyrone, also lives in the margins, in the shadow of the White House, overwhelmed by power, poverty, and oppression. Underscoring the parallels in Pedro and Tyrone’s lives, González’s song leads to the conclusion that Pedro and Tyrone equally lack access to education, employment, personal security, and affirmation of their human potential. Both are overcome by a sense of entrapment, alienation, and disenfranchisement, and contorted into “infantile citizens” denied the ideals of the American dream. Both youths, the song suggests, have internalized the capitalist imperative and consumption narrative, “que ser y tener, es igual” (that what you have is what you are). And if you have nothing, you are nothing. The lyrics to the song, however, challenge the materialist American ideals so heavily tied to free enterprise, consumption, and commodification, asserting to Pedro and Tyrone that “you are . . . no matter what car you drive.” In its final appeal, the song calls the youths to creative intervention and uprising in their lives, despite their experiences of civil and urban warfare. In an indictment of Tyrone and Pedro’s disenfranchisement (what Berlant calls “infantilizing”) by greater economic and material forces, González’s song imagines the possibility of forging alliances between ethnic, racial, and diasporic communities: “¿Por qué no se ponen en onda, / luchando por el pueblo de Sudáfrica, / ¿por qué no se ponen en onda, / luchando por la paz en América” (Why don’t you get high, / supporting the people of South Africa, / why don’t you get high, / struggling for peace in America?). Ultimately, Lilo González and los de la Mount Pleasant produce a discourse that is highly critical of the racial, ethnic, and class hierarchies that structure the barrios and neighborhoods of many U.S. cities, divide Latinos/as, African Americans, and other groups from one another, and “infantilize” its less-than citizenry. Moreover, González and los de la Mount Pleasant sketch a narrative of the highly neglected and excluded Salvadoran immigrant citizenry, as Pedro struggles to survive in the streets




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3. What Languages Does Your Salvadoreñidad Speak? It is to this transmigrated, transculturated, and often irreversibly transformed Salvadoreñidad that Quique Avilés turns in his collection of poems titled The Immigrant Museum (2003).5 Avilés reminds us that the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area is now home to upward of 400,000 “Wachintonian Salvadoreans” (Avilés, “El Salvador At-A-Glance,” 10–11), giving the city new tongue-twisting contours and mixed voces. In his poem, “Latinhood” (8–10), Avilés explores a DC “Latinhood” as sensed, shaped, and heard in the streets of the District of Columbia. The echoes of this Salvadoran Latinidad elicit from the poet a poignant line of questioning, when he asks, “What does it feel like inside? / what color is this latinhood? / how does it do what it does? . . . What language does it like to speak? cachitquel / spanish / nahuatl / creole / or english” (8–9)? What does this Salvadoran Latinidad speak when the Salvadoran diaspora is spread widely across the United States, Mexico, Europe, Asia, and Australia, among other places? “How do you know that you are a latin? / that you are not a russian impostor with a peruvian accent,” Avilés ironically asks those who would seem to think and argue that the key identifier of Latino/Hispanic identity is the Spanish language (Avilés 2003, 9; García Bedolla 2003). Instead, Avilés suggests in the same poem that U.S. Salvadoran identity has more to do with the ability to masticate or domesticate multiple languages into new hybrid articulations or code-switching practices such as those performed by Chicano, Nuyorican, and other U.S. Latino/a communities. For Avilés, a local Latinhood or Latinidad, or Salvadoreñidad is “the simple ability / to swallow the world at birth / keeping it / learning to chew at it / letting it grow / letting it grow inside” (2003, 9), invariably incorporating local histories, experiences, and languages and speaking in creative mixes that have been more technically defined as linguistic and cultural codeswitching. What CC, Quique Avilés, Lilo González and los de la Mount Pleasant, and other Salvadoran-focused cultural producers, such as the Los Angeles and San Francisco-based young writers’ collective that published its work in the groundbreaking anthology, Izote Vos: A Collection of Salvadoran American Writing and Visual Arts (2000), have in common, I suggest here, is the articulation of U.S.-made Salvadoran hybridized identities,


of Washington, DC, reaching for memories, dreams, and prospects. “Sí se puede” [Yes we can], the song seems to say, plaintively calling out to the Pedros and Tyrones of DC: “Why don’t you get high, / struggling for peace in America.” America, in this case, is the Américas, produced in the contact zones of urban interethnic and interracial communities such as DC.


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or Salvadoreñidades made in the United States. In speaking local variants of Spanish—California Chicanoized Salvadoran Spanish or English, or “Wachintonian” African Americanized Hip Hop Salvadoran Spanglish— U.S.-raised Salvadorans are articulating their own homebred experiences, transnational migration histories, translocal settlement patterns, generational identity shifts, and transcreative languages (Flores and Yúdice 1990). These greater sociocultural transformations are encoded in the mixed languages spoken especially by young generations of Salvadoran Americans, “Salvis” as some California youths call themselves, or “Wachintonians” as Quique Avilés calls his cohort of Salvadorans in the Washington, DC, region. When, for example, U.S.-born or raised Salvadorans use, or do not use in their daily idioms the informal second person singular pronoun vos, a most significant speech act and dis/claiming of cultural identity is in progress. As sociolinguists explain, the use of vos, tú, and usted in Latin American Spanish variants are markers of solidarity, intimacy, distance or deference, and power, among other things (Vaquero de Ramírez 1998; Quesada Pacheco 2000). For various historical reasons, the voseo is not used in most of Mexico and the Hispanophone Caribbean, but it is used widely in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay; parts of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and the states of Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico; and in almost all of Central America with the exception of Panama (Stewart 1999, 123–124; Quesada Pacheco 2000, 86–89). But as Miranda Stewart, citing the work of John Lipski, explains, “In El Salvador a three-way system appears to be developing amongst the educated urban classes . . . , where vos and Ud. [usted] occupy the extremes of intimacy on the one hand and respect on the other, with tú occupying an intermediate position, signifying familiarity but not intimacy” (Stewart 1999, 126). To speak in vos or to vosear, hence, is to claim an intimate colloquial subjectivity, for the voseo in El Salvador (and most of Central America) is used in daily communication, in informal and intimate relationships and cultural exchanges, among equals and loved ones, and in the formation of a popular national idiom and imaginary. It is worth emphasizing that as Stewart explains, tú in El Salvador signifies “familiarity but not intimacy,” while vos implies intimacy and belonging. As Salvadorans, Central Americans, and others of the voseo linguistic region absorb the media-generated standard Spanish of the United States, they may substitute tú for vos, or eliminate the use of vos altogether. The negotiation of the intimate colloquial vos, I suggest here, is significant, for it may signify a breach or distance from (or on the other hand, a desire for) Salvadoran culture, traditions, and community, among other things. Fully aware of the signifying potential of vos/voz, the editors of Izote Vos explain that the title of their anthology not only refers to the flor de izote, the





edible national flower of El Salvador, but also to something greater. In their introduction, they write: “Vos in Salvadoran Spanish means ‘you,’ but also conjures images of ‘voz . . . voice’” (Kim et al. 2000, 2). For Salvadorans, to talk in voseo, then, is a marker of cultural identity, belonging, and community, even across their transnational migrations to the United States and elsewhere. The use or disuse of vos in Salvadoran American cultures may be read consequently as a desire for and sign of belonging to, or of no longer strictly and exclusively identifying with the national group because of migration, distance, or transculturation processes. When used by Salvadoran Americans, the voseo often serves as a badge of cultural and linguistic belonging and indigeneity, or reclaiming of Salvadoran cultural identity. In CC’s Anthems, Noe commands his son Enrique to speak at least a proper form of English since he appears not to speak Spanish: “Hablá inglés [vos].” Voseando to this son, Noe implicitly hopes that Enrique will identify and understand Salvadoran idiomatic and cultural nuances (202). Papá Noe, thus, attempts to make an appeal lost on Enrique, who apparently has lost the ability (or refuses) to vosear and to speak in the colloquial variant of Salvadoran Spanish. Indeed, many one-and-half and second generation Salvadoran Americans negotiate their use of the vos, signifying thus the production of more hybridized languages and cultural identities in the United States (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). Growing up in the United States among English speakers and Spanish speakers from other nations where the form tú or usted predominates, or in families where the tú and usted are used to express respect, there is often little opportunity for generations raised in the United States to use the vos form and to conjugate verbs for that familiar second-person singular pronoun. The loss or disuse of vos for some Salvadoran Americans is very particular to the experience of Salvadorans and other Central Americans and, perhaps, some South Americans growing up in the United States. In my Salvadoran family, for example, children always address their parents and elders in the respectful usted. Communication in Spanish with other Latino/a peers, especially Mexicans, usually requires the use of tú. Thus, my siblings and I, like other one-and-half and successive generation Salvadorans, did not learn to vosear in our daily communication. In this context I ponder if the disuse of the Central American vos signifies a loss of Salvadoran identity, culture, language, and homeland sensibilities and solidarity, as some would claim. Does the disuse of vos mean that we are no longer Salvadoreños and Salvadoreñas, but Salvadoran Americans who are losing the most essential markers of Salvadoran identity, including Salvadoran customs, traditions, and other forms of national identification? Or, does it signify the transnationalization of Salvadoran cultural identity into U.S. Latino/a identities,


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or what Flores and Yúdice (1990) call the transcreation of Latino/a languages and identities in the U.S. context? Further, does the negotiation of vos/z announce the construction of hybridized Salvadoran identities made possible outside of the national territory of El Salvador? In concluding my line of interrogation, I ask why must this creative process of producing new Salvadoreñidades in translocal sites outside of El Salvador be branded as a loss rather than as a gain for El Salvador and the United States? Conclusion: “Wachintonian” Salvadoran Bilingual Arts Indeed, for some time now, Latino/a scholars have been arguing that Spanish language maintenance under the weight of U.S. hegemonic culture and the uneasy transculturation of Spanish and English have generated some of the most creative and ambidextrous practices in the cultural history of Latinos/as in the United States. Ed Morales (2002), Ana Celia Zentella (1997), Rosaura Sánchez (1983), Fernando Peñalosa (1981), and other scholars have posited that the hybridized Spanish spoken in the United States breaks with linguistic rules and confines, and in its many forms expresses a range of hybrid Latinidades. U.S. Latino/a writing that comes out of this space of code-switching and cultural contact has produced what Doris Sommer, in her book titled Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations (2003), has called the “art of code-switching” by bilingual artists and writers “overloaded” and overflowing with linguistic and cultural codes (1). Latino/a cultural producers like Tato Laviera (1985; 2008) and Ed Morales, the artists affiliated with the Nuyorican Poets Café and the Central American Epicentro spoken-word movements, and Chicana writers like Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas (1985) have expressed themselves in the mixed language of Latino/a AmeRíca, the greater Borderlands, and the transnationalized world. Speaking further about the use of Spanish in his own U.S. Latino writings, the U.S.-Guatemalan writer Francisco Goldman points out that the Spanish language may not be the primary marker of “Latino/a” identity, especially for those living in between languages, cultures, and traditions. He notes that “Spanish mixed with English is for many of us the language of our homes, of our most exuberant and eloquent friendships and loves, the language of the streets and many workplaces—not a separatist conceit, but like it or not, a living, breathing, ever-evolving new American vernacular” (Goldman 1999, 8). Along these lines, Goldman, Avilés, and others (including this writer) question whether speaking Spanish, or not, makes you any more or less Latino/a in the United States. Who is Latino/a or Hispanic, and what languages do Latinos/as speak? I would further ask: How do we go beyond a classification system that reductively





identifies Latinos/as as “Spanish-speaking communities” or as extensions of “Spanish-speaking countries,” as official demographic discourse stipulates in the United States? Finally, I ask: Is Spanish the de facto language and essential marker of U.S. Latinos/as, be they of Dominican, Guatemalan, Uruguayan, Salvadoran, Garifuna, Maya, or Aymara descent? Or is Spanish just one of the many possible languages spoken by Salvadorans and other Latinos/as in translocal sites such as Washington, DC? In closing, Salvadoran American poet, Quique Avilés, master of bilingual arts in the District of Columbia, must have the last word. In his poem titled “Spanglish Morongon” (2003, 16–17), Avilés’s narrator speaks through omniscient Wachintonian espanglish voces that reverberate across the (Latino) American city, otherwise known as Washington, DC. In the figurative mobile space of a bus (the location of enunciation of his poem), we hear the hybrid voices of people who are going places, thinking about their day, and expressing personal concerns about their insurance, Medicaid, employment, laundry, family, school, and the Saturday night date. One bus rider ruminates, “Me subi en el bus que va para downtown / pedi un transfer / sonrei con el bus driver / me sente all the way in the back / el pinche bus iba full / lleno de gente llendo al part time / medio mundo hablando sobre insurance / los complaints y el medicaid” (16–17; notice the code-switching, the lack of accent marks, and the use of “llendo”). The in-transit and transient bus serves as a metaphor for the transnational city in transformation. Changing at the rapid pace of the “transmigrations” of peoples, the transnational city of Washington, DC, thus resonates with uniquely “Wachingtonian” Salvadoran voices and identities produced outside of El Salvador and in translocal sites across the United States and elsewhere.

Notes 1. For a discussion of Salvadoran immigration and the geocultural and imaginary configuration of the Salvadoran diaspora as “Departamento 15,” see Rodríguez (2005). 2. Central American population counts in the United States vary widely. See PCT 19, Place of Birth for the Foreign-Born Population [126], Data Set: Census 2000 Summary File 3 (SF3), http://www.census.gov/ (accessed September, 20, 2002). In January 2001, the Ministry of Exterior Relations in El Salvador reported large numbers of Salvadoran immigrants: 800,000 Salvadorans in the Los Angeles region, 450,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area, and 150,000 in the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area, http://www.rree.gob.sv/website/index.html (accessed September, 20, 2002).


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3. In Waiting on Washington: Central American Workers in the Nation’s Capital (1995), Terry A. Repak explains that Central American (Salvadoran) female domestic workers and child-care providers, sponsored by diplomats, government employees, and international agencies, “pioneered the [Central American] migration in the 1960s and 1970s, when the city still lacked a substantial Latin American community and an international labor force” (2). In the 1980s and 1990s, the boom in regional construction, restaurant and hospitality businesses, cleaning subcontractors, and other industries opened new labor markets holding steadfast into the new century. David E. Pedersen (1995) links the 1980s’ rise in service sector jobs and immigrant laborers in the region to the expansion of the “U.S. military industrial complex” engaged in procuring and facilitating services in defense, research and development, telecommunication, transportation, international trade, finance, and legal and political work. The availability of employment and the demand for a low-wage labor force have historically drawn to the region a large number of immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere but particularly from Central America and El Salvador. Throughout the 1980s, Central American immigrants fleeing civil wars in their countries were attracted to the area by personal contacts, social networks, immigrant service agencies, employment opportunities, affordable housing, and relatively easy access to jobs in the District of Columbia and its suburbs. Subsequently the Salvadoran/Latino population in DC grew, exacerbating tensions in an already racially stratified and economically depressed city. On May 5, 1991, race riots broke out in the Latino neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, causing great damage to property and injury to people (Jennings and Lusane 1994). In the aftermath of the riots, businesses reopened, churches, community centers, public clinics, and service providers attended to immigrants’ needs, and a Latino festival was hosted as well in the ethnically diverse Adams Morgan district. In Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation’s Capital: The Latino Festival (1998), Olivia Cadaval discusses the emergence of a “multiethnic Latino community in Washington, D.C.,” in the wake of the race riots of the 1960s and 1990s, the civil rights movement, and the severe urban decline and renewal of DC. Migration to the suburbs in northern Virginia and Maryland has since greatly expanded the reach of Latinos into the greater Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area (Singer 2001; Singer et al. 2003). Salvadoran and others from Latin America continue to gravitate to the region. 4. Lilo González y los de la Mount Pleasant compose and perform songs that chronicle the lives and events of Latinos/as in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, DC. Born in Armenia, El Salvador, González immigrated to the United States in 1981, arriving in the Washington, DC, area, or, to be more exact, the Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods, after which the group “Lilo González y los de la Mount Pleasant” is named. González and his musical group have worked with the Latino community in Washington, DC, playing a hybrid mix of folk music, cumbia, salsa, tango, and reggae at local fund-raising events in the United States and El Salvador. 5. Quique Avilés is a local Washington, DC, Salvadoran poet, performance artist, and community activist, who emigrated from El Salvador to Washington, DC,





as a child and grew up and attended schools in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. In the late 1980s, Avilés cofounded and directed the theater collective LatiNegro, which recruited local Latino and African American youths to perform in theaters, schools, prisons, universities, and communities. In 1999, he cofounded Sol & Soul, a nonprofit arts organization, which continues the work of LatiNegro in conducting workshops with young performers in the District of Columbia, collaborating with community groups, and organizing theater events in the District for local and visiting actors. Avilés continues to perform his mixed-media work on and off stage, most recently writing, producing, and acting in a piece called Caminata, a travel narrative about the immigrant life of Salvadorans, Russians, Africans, Iraqis, and others whose lives intersect in Washington, DC. Addressing issues of race, class, gender, and identity, among other things, his performance pieces and poetry often incorporate life narratives, voices, and experiences of immigrants and everyday folk from the local neighborhoods of Washington, DC.

References Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunte Lute Press. Avilés, Quique. 2003. The Immigrant Museum. México, D.F.: PinStudio & Raíces de Papel. Baker-Cristales, Beth. 2004. Salvadoran Migration to Southern California: Redefining El Hermano Lejano. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Berlant, Lauren. 2002. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essay on Sex and Citizenship. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Cadaval, Olivia. 1998. Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation’s Capital: The Latino Festival. New York and London: Garland Publishing. Cota-Cárdenas, Margarita. 1985. Puppet: A Chicano Novella. Austin: Relampago Books Press. Culture Clash. 2003. Anthems: Culture Clash in the District. In Culture Clash in Americca: Four Plays, 151–221. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc. Dalton, Roque. 1974/2000. Poema de amor. Las historias prohibidas del pulgarcito. San Salvador, ES: Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas Editores. Flores, Juan, and George Yúdice. 1990. Living Borders/Buscando América: Language of Latino Self-formation. Social Text 8.24: 57–84. Flores, William V., and Rina Benmayor, eds. 1997. Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights. Boston: Beacon Press. García Bedolla, Lisa. 2003. The Identity Paradox: Latino Language, Politics and Selective Dissociation. Latino Studies 1.2: 264–283. Goldman, Francisco. 1999. State of the Art: Latino Writers. The Washington Post, February 28, Book World, 1, 8–10. González, Lilo y los de la Mt. Pleasant. 1994. Las historias prohibidas de Pedro y Tyrone. A quien corresponda . . . [CD]. Washington, DC: LGP Records, LML2741.


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Hamilton, Nora, and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla. 2001. Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Jennings, Keith, and Clarence Lusane. 1994. The State and Future of Black/Latino Relations in Washington, D.C.: A Bridge in Need of Repair. In Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in Urban America: Status and Prospects for Politics and Activism, ed. James Jennings, 57–77. Westport, CT: Praeger. Kim, Katherine Cowy, Alfonso Serrano F., Leda Ramos, and Rick Rocamora, eds. 2000. Izote Vos: A Collection of Salvadoran American Writing and Visual Art. San Francisco: Pacific News Service. Laviera, Tato. 1985. AmeRícan. Houston: Arte Público Press. ———. 2008. Mixturao. Houston: Arte Público Press. Mahler, Sarah J. 1995a. American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1995b. Salvadorans in Suburbia: Symbiosis and Conflict. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ———. 2000. Migration and Transnational Issues: Recent Trends and Prospects for 2020. http://ca2020.fiu.edu/Themes/Sarah_Mahler/Mahler.htm. Accessed July 8, 2009. Mar-Molinero, Clare. 2000. The Politics of Language in the Spanish-Speaking World. London and New York: Routledge. Menjívar, Cecilia. 2000. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Morales, Ed. 2002. Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Pedersen, David E. 1995. States of Memory and Desire: The Meaning of City and Nation for Transnational Migrants in Washington, D.C. and El Salvador. Amerikastudien/American Studies 40.3: 415–442. ———. 2002. The Storm We Call Dollars: Determining Value and Belief in El Salvador and the United States. Cultural Anthropology 17.3: 431–459. Peñalosa, Fernando. 1981. Some Issues in Chicano Sociolinguistics. In Latino Language and Communicative Behavior, ed. Richard P. Durán, 3–18. Norwood, NJ: ABLEX. Portes, Alejandro, and Rubén G. Rumbaut. 2001. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quesada Pacheco, Miguel Ángel. 2000. El español de América. Cartago: Editorial Tecnológica de Costa Rica. Repak, Terry A. 1995. Waiting on Washington: Central American Workers in the Nation’s Capital. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rodríguez, Ana Patricia. 2005. “Departamento 15”: Cultural Narratives of Salvadoran Transnational Migration. Latino Studies 3.1: 19–41. Sánchez, Rosaura. 1983. Chicano Discourse: Socio-historic Perspectives. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers. Sánchez Molina, Raúl. 2005. “Mandar a traer”: Antropología, migraciones y transnacionalismo: Salvadoreños en Washington. Madrid: Editorial Universitas.





Singer, Audrey. 2003. At Home in the Nation’s Capital: Immigrant Trends in Metropolitan Washington. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. http://www. brookings.edu/es/urban/gwrp/publinks/2003/immigration.pdf. Accessed July 8, 2009. Singer, Audrey, et al. 2001. The World in a Zip Code: Greater Washington, D.C. as a New Region of Immigration. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. http:// www.brookings.edu/es/urban/immigration/immigration.pdf. Accessed July 8, 2009. Smith, Molly. 2003. Introduction to Anthems: Culture Clash in the District. In Culture Clash in Americca: Four Plays, 153–155. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc. Sommer, Doris. 2003. Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations. London: Palgrave. Stewart, Miranda. 1999. The Spanish Language Today. London and New York: Routledge. U.S. Census Bureau. http://factfinder.census.gov/home/en/pldata.html. Vaquero de Ramírez, María. 1998. El español de América II: Morfosintaxis y Léxico. Madrid: Arco Libros. Zentella, Ana Celia. 1997. Growing Up Bilingual. Malden: Blackwell.


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The Final Frontier: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s The Great Mojado Invasion Catherine Leen

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uillermo Gómez-Peña, who has been described as “without question the best-known Latino, Chicano, Mexican performance artist in the United States, Latin America, and the art world of the North Atlantic corridor,” is a transnational figure in terms of his biography and his work (Mendieta 2003, 539). Gómez-Peña has forged a composite identity as a Mexican-born artist who resides mainly in the United States and who describes himself as a “Mexican in the process of Chicanoization” (2000, 21). His writings, performances, and filmic works, especially The Great Mojado Invasion (The 2nd US-Mexico War [2001]), which will be the focus of this chapter, seamlessly blend high and pop culture as he interrogates notions of cultural belonging and exclusion. Together with his long-term collaborators, Pocha Nostra, Gómez-Peña joins forces with performance artists and activists across the globe, producing works that create new spaces and communities through performances and Internet projects that transcend easy categorization in terms of race, gender, and even species. Given the fact that his own life has involved movements across borders of different kinds that are mirrored in his artistic practice, transnationalism provides a useful framework for the analysis of his work. The use of the term transnationalism in close conjunction with globalization and internationalism means that it can be difficult to pinpoint its meaning. Paul Hopper notes that although religious beliefs, trade links, and diaspora communities predate globalization, transnationalism can be seen as both a consequence of globalization and a tool that can be used to study it, as


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it addresses “the formation of new social spaces and new types of community and forms of human interaction, as well as the adaptations to these developments that are taking place within specific contexts” (2007, 52). Conversely, Saskia Sassen sees “economic, political, and cultural globalization as transnational processes” (2007, 1). Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc have defined transnationalism as “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multistranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement, and through which they create transnational social fields that cross national borders” (qtd. in Kelly 2003, 210). The definition of transnationalism is taken further by Wuthnow and Offutt, who argue that border crossings are not a prerequisite for experiencing transnationalism: People who are not themselves recent immigrants or located in diasporic border towns are also influenced by globalization. They watch CNN, travel, visit friends and relatives in other countries, work for multinational corporations, and purchase goods from abroad. They live in a world in which transnationalism is very much present. If they are not themselves immigrants, they are increasingly involved in an economy based on transnational flows of labor and capital. (Wuthnow and Offutt 2008, 210)

Gómez-Peña’s work involves literal and metaphorical border crossings. His exploration of transnationalism takes into account the interactions between diverse communities that predate the nation-state era mentioned by Mendieta, most notably through the use of language and religion as metaphors of cultural exchange and transformation. The media through which he constructs his works are also very significant. He uses video and film, which have traditionally been the tools of a mainstream entertainment industry centred in the United States, and the Internet, which provides the type of virtual transnational space mentioned by Kelly. The use of the combination of these media in The Great Mojado Invasion is not incidental, for Néstor García Canclini has noted that: Donde se ve más efectiva la globalización es en el mundo audiovisual: música, cine, televisión e informática están siendo reordenados . . . para ser difundidos a todo el planeta. El sistema multimedia que parcialmente integra estos cuatro campos ofrece posibilidades inéditas de expansión transnacional aun en las culturas periféricas.


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(García Canclini 2005, 15).1

This collision of mass-market global forces with the independent and even anarchic possibilities of cyberspace was highlighted in a truly 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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unprecedented manner in 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in Mexico. This trade agreement between the United States and Mexico followed the pattern of other such global alliances by subsuming Mexico’s economy, including its film industry, to North American multinationals. What was unique about the formal implementation of the agreement was that it coincided with a deliberately timed protest by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which underscored the gulf between those who sought to profit from globalization and a subaltern sector of Mexican society that had been neglected and oppressed for decades so that the “Mexican past had again become the present” (Suchlicki 2008, 148). Not only was the Internet crucial in spreading the word of the Zapatista uprising but it was used to great effect by Subcomandante Marcos to outline the group’s demands and philosophy. Moreover, the government was powerless to contain the constant updates on the struggle, which could be accessed from all over the world (Green 1997, 102). Gómez-Peña’s 1990 work, Border Brujo, featured a transnational culture clash similar to that between the premodern social position the Zapatistas were forced into and the contemporary globalized world represented by NAFTA. This video of a performance piece, made in collaboration with filmmaker Isaac Artenstein, casts Gómez-Peña as a postmodern shaman who has the power to conjure a vertiginous range of identities, both through changes in his own costume, voice, and attitudes and through the kaleidoscopic cultural symbols that adorn his chaotic altar. Claire F. Fox notes that the video marked an important development in the artists’ work by moving away from conceiving the border as a particular physical space to a “re-casting of the border as a global and temporal zone” (1999, 130). What is most striking about the piece is the constant shifting between not just Spanish and English but between languages as diverse as French and Náhuatl and even the simulated speaking in tongues. The work is also notable for the direct and at times confrontational engagement with the audience, which challenges them to consider their own prejudices, stereotypical views, and fears about the Other. Fox also points out that “Gómez-Peña is not out to destroy differences so much as he attempts to effect abrupt collisions among various ‘subject positions,’ and to compel his audience to perform a similar kind of ‘border crossing’” (1996, 233–234). The conflation of so many different visual images and voices amounts to a deconstruction of the idea of a dominant culture, as all are given equal space and at times even overlap. This inclusive approach also rejects clearly differentiated boundaries between Mexican indigenous and Western cultures, creating a hybrid transnational space where unexpected juxtapositions of disparate cultural symbols begin to seem mundane.


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The artist’s more recent filmic work, The Great Mojado Invasion, made in collaboration with the filmmaker Gustavo Vasquez, is to some extent a more straightforward piece in that it purports to be a documentary about Chicano history. It is decidedly more narrative-driven than Border Brujo, but its revisionist view of history leads to an imagined scenario in which the Latino population dominates the United States. Furthermore, the film’s use of clips from both mainstream and what could generously be categorized as B-movies, predominantly low-budget Mexican sciencefiction movies, implicitly calls into question the sources on which any historical account is based. “Space: The Final Frontier,” the famous opening line of the voiceover from the Star Trek series, could serve as an introduction to Gómez-Peña’s frequent recourse to the science-fiction genre as a vehicle for exploring racial conflicts in The Great Mojado Invasion. The artist has used sciencefiction characters on many occasions to communicate the sense of dislocation and marginalization he felt when he first came to live in California: “We were the undisputed backbone of the economy and the omnipresent bogeyman in the Anglo imagination. We were California’s romantic backdrop and favourite food, and at the same time we were its epic fear: a gallant mariachi morphing back and forth into Godzilla” (Gómez-Peña n.d.). Doubtlessly, the marginal position of science fiction as a form that has often been viewed as less than tasteful or acceptable as art would also have appealed strongly to him. William Johnson observes that “although science fiction writing has gained enormously in popularity and critical attention in recent years, it is still not fully respectable,” and adds that “screen science fiction is in an even more dubious position” (1972, 1). If science fiction is considered a less than highbrow genre, paradoxically, it has occupied a notable role in reflecting the fears and tensions of the societies it depicts: Critical works have focused on the way in which SF and horror films articulate an anxiety about progress, as well as social and cultural concerns contemporary to the text, such as Cold-War narratives, race and gender issues, and also the changing conception of humanness in a technological environment. (Wood 2002, 13–14)


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Science-fiction films essentially mirror the concerns of contemporary society, most often in terms of threats from other nations that are played out in Outer Space or through tales of unwelcome invasions, but they also articulate concerns closer to home, particularly racial ones. Charles Ramírez Berg, in his study of the place of Hispanics in science-fiction films, asserts that the stereotyping of Hispanics since the era of silent 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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cinema has led to a perceived need in contemporary cinema to eliminate aliens either by returning them to their own planets or by destroying them (2002, 158). The strong association between Mexicans and aliens has led numerous Chicano/a artists to explore the possibilities the stereotype offers. In their 1998 play Bordertown, theatre collective Culture Clash presents a scenario in which heated discussions of the racial tensions between Mexicans and Anglos are interrupted by the arrival of “an intense Bald Man wearing a purple cosmic gown and Nike sneakers” (2003, 17). This figure exhorts the humans he encounters to leave behind the physical and metaphorical borders that separate them and encourages them to start a new life in a “borderless cosmos, where race, creed and religion does not matter” (18). The play concludes, after much fraught negotiation of identity politics between a diverse cast of characters, with the reemergence of the Bald Man, whose speech explicitly links Aztec cosmology with the promise of an escape from ethnic divisions: The New millennium marked the close of a major cycle and will initiate a spiritual renaissance of logic and reason. The end of the millennium is also the end of the Dark Ages, what the Aztecs call “El Quinto Sol.” As we enter this new era, we must leave behind the negative feelings of our lower self. The hatred, the fear, the unresolved conflicts. Our ancestors know of a place, a place where there are no borders, only infinitesimal possibilities. (Culture Clash 2003, 63)

The use of the present tense “know” in the final sentence is significant, for it underlines the fact that Aztec wisdom is not something confined to history, but a living philosophy that illuminates a way forward by transcending racial boundaries and embracing the possibilities of the entire universe through space travel. Space in this work is thus constructed as a utopian alternative locale where borders are replaced by possibilities. On a far less optimistic and frequently acerbic note, Los Angeles-based cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz has made use of images of aliens to highlight the marginalization of Latino/as in U.S. society. A typical strip, titled “Alienated,” features images of an extraterrestrial accompanied by the caption: “I don’t get it. The government denies I exist . . . Hollywood vilifies me . . . Businesses exploit me for profit . . . You’d think I was Latino!” (Alcaraz 2004, 81). What is notable about Alcaraz’s work is his frequent use of the alienimmigrant association to underscore and question the strong link between these terms that has largely been created by Hollywood filmmakers. One such example is Barry Sonnenfeld’s 2002 Men in Black, which features a scene where an extraterrestrial villain attempts to enter the United States


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The narrative trajectory of the . . . Superman series allows us, then, to see a crucial immigrant/native trade-off. America will drop its isolationist barrier to get something uniquely valuable. The Alien, in exchange for their acceptance, must do what generations of aliens have been called on to do for centuries—assimilate. (Ramírez Berg 2002, 167)

Gómez-Peña is at the forefront of artists who have long recognized the potency of stereotypical visual representations of Latinos as aliens and used them to great effect to examine the complexities and conflicts resulting from transnationalism. The diasporic communities described in neutral terms by theorists of transnationalism literally mutate in his work, as Mexican Americans become threatening extraterrestrials or part-cyborg creatures who threaten U.S. security and civilization, while at the same time having an undeniable exotic appeal. Similarly, the calm discussion of globalization and the media is problematized in his writings, films, and performances by the questioning of hierarchies of film genres, with kitsch Mexican B-movies being afforded the same authority as slick Hollywood productions or earnest art films in The Great Mojado Invasion. This unveiling of the manipulative power of the mass media is accompanied by an extremely inventive use of Internet-based media creations, so that the globalization of the media is presented simultaneously as a hegemonic force of global capitalism and a tool for protest and the presentation of alternative perspectives. Moreover, the very presentation of transnational processes in a seemingly detached, academic manner is parodied by his use of popular culture, particularly science fiction, combined with an acerbic sense of humour. In his 1996 book Friendly Cannibals, Gómez-Peña presents Superman, joined in one case by Captain America, repelling foreign invaders in the form of Mexican pre-Columbian deities, thus conflating a U.S. popularculture icon with a pre-nation-state figure that represents an ancient and profoundly religious culture. A similar image in the same book follows Ramírez Berg’s description of the acceptable alien as Superman, clad in cowboy garb, faces off against another pre-Columbian God. In both cases, Superman, who in the second instance is made all the more human by his cowboy outfit, is the defender of the U.S. nation against a far more


disguised as an undocumented Mexican. Ramírez Berg comments further on this association is his discussion of Superman, whom he designates as one of the few exceptions to the rule that aliens must be expelled from the United States because of his exceptional talents, which benefit U.S. society and thus allow him to be welcomed and naturalized:


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pernicious alien threat than he himself represents, thus becoming a supernatural cowboy defeating marauding Indians. Gómez-Peña has also created his own range of half-human, half-robot characters, which blend features from famous science-fiction characters with Mexican traits. In Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back, he introduces one such character, the Mexterminator or El Mad Mex: Features: Illegal border crosser and cultural invader, defender of immigrants’ rights, drug and jalapeño pusher, practices boxing, Tex Mex rock and narcoshamanism, seduces gueras [blondes] and abducts innocent Anglo children. Sponsored by the Gulf Cartel and the Zapatista movement. Wanted by the DEA, the FBI, the INS and the Smithsonian Institution. Indestructible! (Gómez-Peña 2000, 44)

The Mexterminator is a futuristic, cyber creation who nonetheless conforms to the timeworn stereotype of a criminal Mexican, who crosses borders illegally, pushes drugs, and preys on Anglo women and children. Yet he is also of interest to cultural historians and anthropologists, thus he clearly has a desirable exoticism. Notably, he is explicitly linked to the Zapatistas, thus suggesting the political power that can be channelled through the use of the Internet. Most chilling from the point of view of mainstream society is his unstoppable drive to disrupt U.S. social order, which is indicated not only by his association with a drug cartel but through the superhuman attributes his half-human, half-cyborg identity imply. His ruthlessness and superhuman powers distinguish him from the usual derogatory but essentially unthreatening stereotypes of Mexicans: En Estados Unidos los estereotipos pasivos del “sleepy Mexcan,” el “greaser” y la “border señorita” se descongelaron en la década de los ochenta. A partir de la implementación (aún ilegal) de la propuesta 187 y la nueva fiebre antiinmigrante surge el Nuevo estereotipo del Mexican: el recién nacido robo-Mexican encarna los temores xenofóbicos de una sociedad exprimermundista (en proceso de tercermundización) y viene a reeemplazar al formidable enemigo soviético debutando en la pantalla grande y en el Super Nintendo II: Se trata del Mexterminator, alias el Mad Mex . . . Su siniestra misión es ni más ni menos que la reconquista del suroeste de gringolandia; y ni Stallone, ni Schwarzennegger, ni Pete Wilson lo pueden detener.


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(Gómez-Peña 2002, 104)2

Two other recurrent characters who share these superhuman qualities are Super Pocho, played by Roberto Sifuentes, and El Aztec High-Tech, who 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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appear in the performance piece the New World Border, which envisages a future where: “The U.S.-Mexico border disappears, Spanglish becomes the ‘official’ language; the hybrid state is now a political reality; and the ethnic/ social pyramid has been turned upside down” (Gómez-Peña 2002, 44). This vision of a future populated by cyber-enhanced Mexican superheroes who relegate Anglo English speakers to a subaltern class is the realization of the fears provoked by literal and virtual transnational exchanges. Gómez-Peña has pondered this role reversal between the power positions of Mexicans or Mexican Americans and North Americans on numerous occasions, but nowhere does the idea achieve such a dramatic enactment as in The Great Mojado Invasion. This frenetically paced and frequently hilarious film showcases Gómez-Peña’s unique ability to manipulate pop cultural images and ideas into his work and recast them in such a way as to make his audience consider serious issues related to transnational conflict. The film features Gómez-Peña as a narrator whose commentaries punctuate what purports to be a documentary about the second U.S.-Mexico war, which is won this time by Mexico. It is divided into seven chapters that span the period from before the arrival of the Spanish to the Americas to the late twentieth century, thus charting the decline of the Mexican people from an idyllic existence in pre-Columbian Mexico to the current disenfranchised state of their descendants. The ordered temporary progression and use of the documentary genre belie the chaos that is unleashed by the filmmakers. Dressed in a trilby hat, tie, shirt, and waistcoat, Gómez-Peña reproduces the serious and formal look of the documentary expert spokesperson, although his words could not be less measured, and he is already smoking and drinking beer. His intermingling of Spanish and English points to the transnational nature of the piece, as it presents U.S.-Mexican history from the perspective of the vanquished and in both languages, as well as through the distinctive code switching associated with Chicano/a culture. The liberal use of influences from myriad cultures is suggested immediately after this address, as the phone number 1-800-369-VATO appears on screen accompanied by jaunty Asian music and a voiceover that is not translated. This scene fades to an image of naked mariachis whose guitar playing is drowned out by a rousing science-fiction instrumental. The first real indication of how central humour will be to the film comes after this, when a title announces: “Finally, the uncensored version of the director’s cut of the Chicano sci-fi classic banned in 69 festivals.” Thus far, the standard documentary device of the authoritative commentator, the use of what is presented as archival film footage, and the language of advertising have been parodied through the lurid presentation of all of these elements in a way that highlights their artifice and undermines


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The people depicted in an “ethnographic film” are meant to be seen as exotic, as people who until only too recently were categorized by science as Savage and Primitive, of an earlier evolutionary stage in the overall history of humankind: people without history, without writing, without civilization, without technology, without archives. (Rony 1996, 7)

By taking on the role of narrator, Gómez-Peña makes it clear that his is a history of the Mexican and Chicano people told from a Mexican perspective. Moreover, his use of rarely identified, B-movie footage as his archives playfully suggests the shortcomings of this approach, which depends on the privileging of certain sources of information over others. The betterknown films he includes often feature ethnic groups seen through the eyes of Westerners, such as the infamous Dances with Wolves, whose sympathetic view of Native Americans is fundamentally undermined by the casting of Kevin Costner as a white man who becomes an accepted member of a Sioux tribe. Jon Landis’s The Three Amigos, while to some extent successful in parodying the U.S.-centered approach to Mexico embodied in the film it satirizes, The Magnificent Seven, ultimately still portrays the U.S characters as superior to the hapless Mexicans they save. Even Nicolás Echeverría’s much-praised Cabeza de Vaca does not escape parody, this time for its overly earnest anthropological approach, which despite its focus on a case where the conquerors become the conquered still has the Western characters as the protagonists. The use of documentary elements here also follows on from Third Cinema in its irreverent attitude to the genre and the use of it as a starting point for a highly inventive transnational cinematic portrayal of history in a manner akin to that described by Ana M. López: [A]lthough the New Latin American Cinema has activated almost every mode, genre and style of cinematic production, documentary realism—as transformed by different contextual pressures—has served as a springboard for the movement’s transformation and retheorizing of the cinematic apparatus and its social functions. Eschewing the traditional distinctions between documentary and fictional modes of filmmaking in its search to produce a “new” cinema with a renewed social function, the New Latin American Cinema has questioned, juxtaposed, transposed, and, ultimately


the claim of documentary to present an objective, unmediated truth. This foregrounding of the apparatus of the film also underscores the fact that all too often people of color are presented by white filmmakers as an exotic but primitive other unable to tell their own stories:


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transformed each mode so that their various ontological and epistemological claims are mediated by the forces of past and present historical contexts.

The New Latin American Cinema, itself an extremely diverse movement, was a key influence on early Chicano filmmaking in its insistence on the making of formally and thematically radical films. This influence is suggested in the fact that Francisco X. Camplis’s key early essay “Towards the Development of a Raza Cinema” cites Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s seminal essay “Toward a Third Cinema” (Camplis 1992). The films included in The Great Mojado Invasion, especially Cabeza de Vaca, emulate this formal experimentation but insistently present events from the point of view of the dominant Western culture. The first radical departure from the realism so often taken for granted as part of documentary occurs in Chapter Two, when science fiction emerges as a major element in the film. The conquistadors are introduced as Euro-Aliens by means of a shot of Spanish galleons arriving in Hispanola, which is preceded by one of Godzilla emerging from the sea. Gómez-Peña’s voiceover further emphasizes the idea of the Spanish as the original undocumented immigrants: “One day the first illegal aliens began to arrive in the tropical shores of our still unnamed country.” Chapter Five develops the science-fiction elements of the film further, adding credence to the idea that Mexicans are indeed not just outsiders but extraterrestrials. Here, the voiceover tells us that: By the early 1990s, U.S. dictator Jorge Bush began to figure it out. Yes, the art world was a cover-up for anti-American radicals. Yes, there was an occult cofradie of people of color holding undeserved positions of power and yes, there was in fact a Chicano-Mexicano conspiracy y para acabar de joder [to stop fucking around] the Mexicans were, yes, we were aliens, extra-extraterrestres. We had an extra gene with the enigmatic name of X-209.

The apparent revelation that Mexicans are creatures from another planet is intensified by the accompanying images of government agents, El Aztec High Tech, and a Mexican man and woman morphing back and forth from alien to human forms. The film goes on to conflate images of Mexican sombreros with flying saucers and to suggest that, like El Mad Mex, these creatures were predatory and dangerous and had to be targeted by a special FBI task force, as the voiceover explains: “The FBI created an especial archive strictly for cases of abduction of rural housewives by Mexican nationals. It was called ni más ni menos que (no more and no less than) the Mex files.”


(López 1990, 404)


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Gómez-Peña’s deliberately absurd rewriting of history presents as fact the idea that Mexicans are extraterrestrials infiltrating North American society and politics. It takes the science-fiction stereotype of the alien to its logical extreme—if Mexicans are indeed aliens, then they are threatening, monstrous figures who represent the fears of a society where clear-cut identities are already being erased by transnational encounters and cyberspace. By embracing this ludicrous idea of Mexicans as extraterrestrials and turning it into a pseudo-historical account, he robs it of its potency and exposes its absurdity. Despite the reversal of roles in the film, the newly dominant position of Chicano/as is not a positive development, however, for as Chapter Seven reveals, under the leader Gran Vato, the new Mexican and Chicano elite behave as badly toward Anglos as they themselves were previously treated. The voiceover explains: By late ’99, gringos had been reduced to nomadic minorities derogatively called Waspbacks. After the signing of the Guadalupe Marcos treaty, they began to cross illegally the new border . . . to work for fast-food taquerías for less than 200 pesos an hour. The civil, labor and sexual rights of these downtrodden minorities were constantly violated and there was no embassy to defend them. Those who chose to stay in the U.S. of Aztlán, meaning on this side of the border, were forced to live underground, their language, el inglés, was outlawed by the controversial PROP 69 y por debajo [and lower down].

Not only are the rights of Anglos utterly abused in this new world order, but they are misrepresented by the media and, like Mexicans and Mexican Americans before them, subjected to a derogatory stereotyping described as follows in the voiceover: “The hegemonic Chicano mass media began to portray them, Anglos, as socially impaired, culturally alienated and prone to unnecessary violence.” Ultimately, the now extremely drunk narrator is forced to acknowledge that merely swapping roles and becoming the oppressor rather than the oppressed, achieves nothing: Can you pinche believe it? Soon it became clear that the new Revolutionjunta was—¡ay, me duele decirlo! [Oh! It pains me to say it!]—reproducing the same behavior and patterns of the old order. And something had to be done. So, so many of us decided to go underground once again and form the new hybrid militia to oppose the reverse authoritarianism of the new regime.


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The hilarious montage of clips used throughout The Great Mojado Invasion ultimately leads to a cultural flattening, so that the boundaries between mainstream films, such as Dances with Wolves, and B-movies, such as unnamed Mexican vampire films, become blurred, especially as the film is punctuated by appearances from Gómez-Peña’s own science-fiction creations, El Mad Mex and El Aztec High Tech. The fact that the so-called archival footage is from Mexican, U.S., and other sources also avoids the polarization of the two nations and opens the discussion of racism and social inequality to extend beyond the either/or proposition that is seen to be the failure of the new Chicano regime, which merely replaces one hegemony with another. Finally, the manipulation of film and computer technology by the filmmakers calls into question the idea of Mexicans as a primitive, backward people while at the same time underlining the pervasive and damaging manipulation of racial issues by a sensationalist mass media. There is also a distinct echo here of the use of Internet technology by the Zapatistas to confront encroaching globalization by powerful multinational firms. The fact that the pseudo-documentary is narrated and indeed compiled by Gómez-Peña, aided by his cyber creations, points to the possibilities offered by technology as perhaps the ultimate egalitarian border-crossing device. In the end, what is most successful about the film is its ability to make thought-provoking and insightful arguments about injustice, racial stereotypes, and the abuse of power through a hybrid mix of science fiction and documentary that never ceases to be entertaining. In this acknowledgement of the power of humor, Gómez-Peña’s most important precursor is perhaps Cheech Marin, who pioneered the use of self-directed stereotyping in his Cheech and Chong films, and in the classic comedy Born in East L.A. Marin has commented on the unique potential of humor to communicate a social message in an appealing way: I believe that important subjects can be dealt with as entertainment . . . throughout film history, comedians have often been the first ones to bring issues to the public. Underneath that mask of humor, a lot of comedians are moralists, because it’s easier to get somebody to look at a problem is they can laugh first and think later. (qtd. in West and Crowdus 1988, 38)


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Gómez-Peña clearly follows this approach, and he is also acutely aware of reaching a North American public by recycling their popular cultural references in a way that may be amusing but is also unsettling. When asked by Latino philosopher Eduardo Mendieta about how he reacts to the way in which the cooption of Latino images by a global media creates stereotypes that are far removed from the reality of Latino experience, he comments 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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How do we continue raising crucial issues without scaring the audiences or without facing deportation back to the margins? My answer, for the moment, is that we must mimic mainstream culture, and when the mirror is standing between them and us, reflecting their fantasies and desires, we break it in the audience’s faces. If parts of the mirror get in their eyes, that’s their problem. (Mendieta 2003, 549)

Essentially, his use of so many transnational cultural references that would be familiar to North American audiences lulls them into a false sense of security before exposing them to a recasting of these well-known characters and scenarios in an outrageous rewriting of history that may be amusing but is also profoundly disturbing. This confrontational attitude toward the audience recalls the challenges put to the audience of Border Brujo, though The Great Mojado Invasion develops this challenge further. As Fox notes, Border Brujo is not a particularly innovative piece formally, as it “privileges documentation of Gómez-Peña’s performance over experimentation with the video medium itself ” (1999, 123). The Great Mojado Invasion mixes mainstream and low-budget films with performance and cyber characters created on the Internet so that the idea of borders between media are blurred and even erased, thus creating not only a deeply revisionist history of the place of Chicano/as in U.S. culture but also pointing to the radical transformative effects of technology and communications. This transformation will not be painless, however, as the reference to the shards of mirror in the viewers’ eyes suggests, but it will certainly force the dominant culture to address the uncomfortable aspects of the reflection it contemplates and acknowledge the presence of alternative cultures whose creative use of transnational communications devices has secured them a place beyond the margins. Notes


that the real challenge he and other artists face is reconciling the tension between reaching and alienating mainstream audiences:

1. “Globalization is most effectively seen in the audiovisual world: music, cinema, television and computers are being reordered . . . so that they are disseminated to the entire planet. The multimedia system that partially integrates these four fields offers unprecedented possibilities for transnational expansion in even peripheral cultures” (my translation). 2. “In the United States, the passive stereotypes of the sleepy Mexican, the greaser and the border vixen were defrosted in the decade of the 1980s. Since the (still


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illegal) implementation of Proposition 187 and the new anti-immigrant fever, a new stereotype of the Mexican has emerged: the recently born robo-Mexican embodies the xenophobic fears of a formerly First World society (in the process of becoming the Third World) and this new stereotype has come to replace the formidable Soviet enemy on the big screen and on Super Nintendo II. This new stereotype is the Mexterminator, alias Mad Mex . . . His sinister mission involves no more and no less than the re-conquest of the Southeast of the United States, and no one—not Stallone, not Schwarzennegger, not Pete Wilson—can stop him” (my translation).

References Alcaraz, Lalo. 2004. Migra Mouse: Political Cartoons on Immigration. New York: RDV Books. Camplis, Francisco X. 1992. Towards the Development of a Raza Cinema (1975). In Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed. Chon A. Noriega, 284–303. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Culture Clash. 2003. Bordertown. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Fox, Claire F. 1999. The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fox, Claire F. 1996. Mass Media, Site Specificity, and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Border Brujo (1988, 1990). In The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts, ed. Chon A. Noriega and Ana M. López, 228–244. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. García Canclini, Néstor. 2005. La globalización imaginada. Buenos Aires: Editorial Piadós. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. 2002. El Mexterminator: Antropología inversa de un performancero postmexicano. Mexico: Editorial Océano de México. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. 2000. Dangerous Border Crossings: The Artist Talks Back. New York: Routledge. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. n.d. On the Other Side of the Mexican Mirror. http:// www.pochanostra.com/antes/jazz_pocha2/mainpages/otherside.htm (accessed September 2, 2008). Green, Duncan. 1997. Faces of Latin America. London: Latin American Bureau. Hopper, Paul. 2007. Understanding Cultural Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Johnson, William. 1972. Focus on the Science Fiction Film. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. López, Ana M. 1990. At the Limits of Documentary: Hypertextual Transformation and the New Latin American Cinema. In The Social Documentary in Latin America, ed. Julianne Burton, 403–432. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Kelly, Philip. 2003. Canadian-Asian Transnationalism. The Canadian Geographer 3: 209–218. Mendieta, Eduardo. 2003. A Latino Philosopher Interviews a Chicano Performance Artist: Eduardo Mendieta and Gómez-Peña. Neplanta: Views from South 2.3: 539–554.


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Ramírez Berg, Charles. 2002. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion and Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rony, Fatimah Tobing. 1996. The Third Eye: Race Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press. Sassen, Saskia, ed. 2007. Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects. New York: Routledge. Suchlicki, Jaime. 2008. Mexico: From Montezuma to the Rise of the PAN. Virginia: Potomac Books. West, Dennis, and Crowdus, Gary. 1988. Cheech Cleans up His Act: An Interview with Richard ‘Cheech’ Marin. Cineaste 16.3: 34–47. Wood, Alylish. 2002. Technoscience in Contemporary American Film: Beyond Science Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wuthnow, Robert, and Offutt, Stephen. 2008. Transnational Religious Connections. Sociology of Religion 69.2: 209–232.


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Writing the Haitian Diaspora: The Transnational Contexts of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker Ricardo L. Ortíz

We are a people living through the tragedy of its survival. We’ve had to hide, we’ve had to lock ourselves up inside ourselves, we’ve had to keep ourselves to ourselves to resist the state. It is this situation, above all, that has kept us strong and kept us coherent. But, after a while, such a people understood that, if it went on locking itself up, it would die. So, it chose to leave. It was the leave-taking of a few in order to prevent the asphyxiation of all. (Yanick Lahens, quoted by Zimra, 1993, 91) I tell lies for a living. (Edwidge Danticat, Voices video series, 2004)

1. A Chronicle of a Death


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In a May 2008 investigative series published in four installments in the Washington Post, reporters Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein uncovered what they called the “unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees” scattered across the United States, and into which “[s] ome 33,000 people are crammed . . . on [any] given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay” in the country. The series of reports, which devotes considerable attention to a roster of detailed case 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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studies charting abuses of both physically and mentally ill detainees, many of whom die while in detention, purports thereby to put a human face on what it more generally calls “the human cost of increasingly strict policies in the post−September 11 United States and [the] lack of preparation for the implementation of those policies.” In the case of this network of shadowy detention centers, Priest and Goldstein suggest, the problem started with the conversion of the former federal Immigration and Naturalization Service into what we now call the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau, which in turn is now subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security. According to the reporters, detention in the system, which can often result from simple misunderstandings about a given detainee’s immigration status, can turn out to be a death sentence for anyone unlucky enough to find themselves held while also suffering from serious medical conditions that the staffs in many of the system’s facilities are neither trained nor equipped to handle. “A system set up for quick stays,” the reporters tell us, “has turned into a de facto long-term care center for the most troublesome [often mentally ill] patients, those whose countries of origin refused to take them.” One of the more prominently featured case studies in the report is the death in detention, in the fall of 2004, of Joseph Dantica, the elderly, infirm uncle of Haitian American fiction writer Edwidge Danticat. Joseph Dantica had just entered the United States through Miami with a legal visa, but his fear that his life would still be in danger if he were to return to Haiti too soon compelled him to ask for asylum, which in turn required that he surrender himself to immigration authorities at Miami’s notorious Krome Service Processing Center. At a preliminary interview with Krome authorities and his appointed attorney, Dantica began to convulse, and to vomit, likely as a result of having his prescribed medications withheld from him according to Krome policies; initially, the authorities present at the interview thought Dantica was faking his seizures, and thus delayed getting him the help he needed. Dantica died a day after this incident, at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, shackled (Priest and Goldstein recount) to a bed, and without his family around him. Alongside the series of articles, the Post website also features a collection of family photographs provided for them by Dantica’s niece Edwidge, as well as both audio files of the writer Danticat’s own account of the appalling series of events resulting in her beloved uncle’s death, and a video file of a 60 Minutes companion piece reported by Scott Pelley and also including a tearful interview with Edwidge. This collection of journalistic and documentary materials in turn follows roughly six months after the writer Danticat’s own celebrated memoir of the tragic events of that year, Brother, I’m Dying, which was published in late 2007.


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The following discussion focuses primarily on the work Danticat herself was doing in 2004, which was simultaneously and coincidentally also the year of the bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution of 1804 and the year that saw the ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide from both the presidency of Haiti, and Haitian territory itself, as the result a very badly managed and (according to varying accounts) either a U.S.-instigated, or at least U.S.tolerated, coup. In the spring of that year Danticat published The Dew Breaker, a critically acclaimed work of narrative fiction that, depending on the critic, operates either as a very disjointed but nonetheless coherentenough novel, or a loosely but significantly connected collection of stories approaching but not quite attaining the status of a novel, about the legacies of extreme political, mostly state-sponsored, violence during the Duvalier years (but especially 1967 to 2004) in both Haiti itself and in the mostly U.S.-based Haitian diaspora. In the spring of that year, Danticat also received executive producer status for The Agronomist, director Jonathan Demme’s documentary of the life and death of Jean Dominique, the Haitian radio broadcaster and political activist. And in the early summer of that year Danticat was herself the subject of an hour-long interview, broadcast then on University of California Television (UCTV) and conducted by Marlene-Racine Toussaint, the president of the Multicultural Women’s Press, and produced in conjunction with Danticat’s tenure as a Regents’ Lecturer in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. That interview is both telling and, as it concludes, rather chilling in the way that it both articulates the depth and intensity of Danticat’s sense of her own and her work’s situation in an evolving, challenging, and ever more complex transnational context, but also in the way it evinces the simultaneous and inextricable coinstantiation of the spatial and temporal dimensions of that context. While Danticat herself seems at many points in the interview acutely aware of the inextricability of the temporal and spatial coordinates of the transnational (in this case, though not exactly synonymously, diasporic) condition, what strikes any viewer watching the video is the tragic irony, especially at the interview’s concluding moments, of the writer’s not knowing then what horror would befall her family, and what challenge would be posed to her imagination, next. On the more obvious level, much of the interview is taken up with the familiar representational concerns of identitarian political and cultural theory. Toussaint, the interviewer, often regales Danticat with praise for her wellearned success as a writer, calling her at one point “one of Haiti’s most distinguished ambassadors,” to which Danticat replies that such a burden of representation feels to her like a presumptive facet of life in the diaspora; Danticat’s own mother, the writer confesses, had admonished her young


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daughter during those early years in the diaspora, “When you leave this house, you represent Haiti.” But for all these references to the more readily legible spatial qualities of transnational, diasporic displacement, Danticat herself is always quick in the interview to bring the discussion back to the matter of diasporic time, and to its rather vexed operations of rupture, elision, and vulnerable if resilient continuity. For example, when asked whom she imagines as her key audience, Danticat responds that it’s herself at fifteen, the young girl growing into her diasporic life and subjectivity, the only girl in a family of five siblings, with two brothers born in the homeland and two others born outside of it. She goes from there to invoking her recently born niece Zora (named after the African American writer Zora Neale Hurston), whom she calls her family’s “first American child.” The interview moves toward its conclusion with Danticat’s expression that the diaspora for which she’s been so forcefully interpellated to do her “ambassadorial,” diplomatic work will succeed in its function as a kind of “bridge,” as she calls it, for the homeland, and again not as a conventional bridge across spaces, but one that reaches across time, from, for example, Haiti’s storied, heroic past (marked that year by what she herself terms its “bittersweet bicentennial”) to a future that might be built in part on the commitment U.S.-based Haitians make to rebuild the home country with the wealth and skills acquired via success in the diaspora. No viewer of the 2004 videotaped interview can miss, however, the irony of what will happen just months after the taping; Toussaint concludes by asking Danticat what she expects to write next, and the writer responds with a characteristic answer about the mystery of the creative process and how for her that process depends in part on the voices (mostly Haitian, and ancestral) that guide her in the production of her imaginative work. What many readers will know from 2007 on is the tragedy of her uncle’s death in the fall following this interview, a death which Danticat herself goes on to describe in her 2007 memoir, and which Priest and Goldstein further document and contextualize in their Post series of early 2008. That series of reports also underscores in some of its language that fraught interaction between time and space in the post-9/11 transnational context. Priest and Goldstein at one point describe these detention centers generally as “way stations between life in and outside the United States,” but in the context of their larger report’s focus on the extreme failure of medical care in those centers, it is clear that they operate as meaningfully as “way stations between life and death,” and that the mechanisms of legal, political, and institutional “detention” at work in these centers result in profoundly troubling suspensions of not merely the orderly, legally sanctioned, and just movement across national spaces but also what we too often take for granted as the orderly (and not violently forced) movement


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from “this (existential) world” into “the next.” These more profound existential (some might say bio-political) dimensions and consequences of this relatively recent modification in U.S. immigration policy and practice takes on in the Post writers’ hands a kind of discursive kinship with familiar symbolic renderings of Wasteland America. These “way stations,” they tell us, “are mostly out of sight: in deserts and industrial warehouse districts, in sequestered valleys next to other prisons, or near noisy airports.”1 Miami’s Krome Center, where Joseph Dantica found himself so detained in the fall of 2004, most nearly qualifies as one of these last, a “way station” that served for him as an unwelcome threshold into his next life, but one situated in that most paradoxical of spaces, “out of sight” by virtue of its embedded location at the “noisy” heart of the post-9/11 transnational matrix, in this instance represented by that node of human, material, and symbolic transnational traffic, Miami, Florida, USA. Even before this tragic turn in the story of her family’s life, however, Danticat the writer had herself already suggested in 2004 that she was of at least two minds about the possibilities of justice in the transnational context she mostly marks as positive in the interview with Marlene Toussaint. While that interview only briefly covers the publication of The Dew Breaker that year, other interviews she conducted while on tour to promote the book suggest that she derived her inspiration to write it from a much more profoundly ambivalent, vexed sense of how life under the sign of post-9/11 transnationalism (and perhaps its subset, diaspora) compels the proliferation, and the opening, of additional questions regarding the movements of individuals and populations across national and other spaces and across moments in a temporal unfolding increasingly resistant to the law, and the authority, of neat narrative (and biographical, and historiographical) lines. The rest of this discussion will focus even more exclusively on the moment of The Dew Breaker’s appearance in the spring of 2004 and what that moment can tell us about the evolution of the simultaneously imaginative and critical deployments of diasporic, transnational life in Danticat’s major literary fiction. To this end, the discussion engages quite directly the analysis of transnationalism proferred by Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way in the Fall 2008 issue of American Quarterly. There Briggs et al. observe that, especially for scholarship that takes as its field of practice the areas where culture, politics, and economy interimplicate one another in ways that exceed and resist the conceptual and practical frame of the nation-state, “transnationalism . . . provide[s] the conceptual acid that denaturalizes all deployments” of the concept of the nation, “compelling us to acknowledge that the nation . . . is a thing contested, interrupted, and always shot through with contradiction” (627–628). That analytical “acid,” as productive as it corrosive, insists (they tell us) that “the




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nation itself has to be a question . . . an ideology that changes over time, and whose precise elaboration at any point has profound effects on wars, economies, cultures, the movement of people, and relations of domination” (628). As this opening on the topic of Joseph Dantica’s death, and as the following discussion of his niece’s imaginative project in the months before that death will both make clear, Edwidge Danticat has always been quite acutely and critically aware of at least one of the dimensions of transnational life that Briggs et al. underscore in the course of their analysis; that is, that “the family is as flexibly [and vulnerably?] transnational a space as any other” and that it, like “economics, politics [and] subjectification . . . exceed[s] the nation, and [thereby] offer[s] points of entry into transnational analysis” (642). 2. A Catalog of Atrocities It is a rather striking historical coincidence that, in the same period during which Haiti suffered its most recent set of major political upheavals, perhaps the most prominent person of Haitian descent living in the United States, the novelist Edwidge Danticat, found herself publishing (and touring to promote) her latest major work of fiction. The significance of the coincidence was certainly reinforced by the explicitly political concerns of that work; The Dew Breaker, Danticat’s third novel, tells the story of a nameless man who emigrates from Haiti to New York City to escape his own sordid past, not only as a tonton macoute in the service of François Duvalier, but as one of the Haitian dictator’s most brutal torturers of political prisoners. While much has changed in Haiti since the elder Duvalier’s 1960s-era reign of bloody domination, Danticat’s beleaguered country still seems to have bought every improvement or advance of its political system at the cost of an endless and consistently brutal cycle of vengeance against those formerly in power, or in favor, and either manipulation or intimidation of the entire populace whenever it appears on the verge of realizing any degree of genuine democratic enfranchisement. While the longevity of this cycle may perhaps be due to more than the legacy of the two Duvalier regimes, which together held Haiti in thrall from the late 1950s through the mid-1980s, nevertheless, that legacy bears much of the responsibility for it, and for this reason Danticat’s novel bears a direct relevance to events still unfolding today, both in Haiti itself and in the Haitian diaspora that has mostly concentrated itself in the United States, specifically in New York City (where the young Danticat settled with her parents, and where she has her fictional “dew breaker” go) and in Miami (where Danticat currently lives). Danticat herself was in 2004 understandably cagey, reticent even, in her most public statements concerning Haiti’s most recent unrest. “My best


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reaction [to historical events] is my fiction,” she said in another interview that year, “and that takes some time, and reflection, and nuance . . . The [current] situation is so complicated anyway, and I don’t have the luxury of declaring somebody totally evil, or . . . totally saintly . . . so I say I don’t know” (Barnes 2004). One cannot fault Danticat for refusing to comment more definitively on Haitian affairs of the moment, and it makes no sense to assign this refusal either to fear, or to bad faith, on the writer’s part. Beyond showcasing her extraordinary gifts as a writer and as a storyteller, Danticat’s previous work had already demonstrated both her fearlessness in confronting difficult issues relating to Haitian history and culture, and her very genuine concern for her people, a concern that in part drives her to have devoted all her fictional work to date to representing aspects of the Haitian experience, if primarily to an Anglophone North American reading audience that would otherwise know pathetically little (and understand even less) about Haiti, and certainly about the very complicated history that implicates the United States in almost every aspect of Haitian life, both on and off the island, well into the first decade of the twentyfirst century. Danticat, born in Haiti during the first Duvalier regime in 1969, followed her parents to New York when she was twelve, having spent most of her childhood in Haiti under the second Duvalier regime and in the care of her uncle Joseph (a minister in the Bel-Air quarter of Port-auPrince) and her aunt Denise. Her American life has been nothing short of prodigious: six years after arriving in the United States knowing almost no English, she earned admission to Barnard College in New York City, where she majored in French Literature; after earning her BA from Barnard she entered the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Brown University; while at Brown she submitted her MFA thesis, the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, to the Soho Press, which published it in 1994; thanks in part to Oprah Winfrey’s sponsorship, Breath became a bestseller, and in very quick succession Danticat published Krik? Krak! (a collection of short stories, nominated for a National Book Award) in 1996, and The Farming of Bones (her American Book Award–winning second novel, set during the 1937 massacre of Haitian sugar workers in the Dominican Republic) in 1998.2 She published no major fiction between 1998 and 2004, but she did manage to edit two published anthologies, as well as to write, and publish, both a book on the annual Carnival celebration in the southern Haitian town of Jacmel, and even a piece of young adult fiction.3 Haiti, its people, and their increasing extension into diasporic and transnational life, remain the consistent topics and themes of almost everything Danticat has published; they certainly command the attention of her three novels, each of which revolves around some particular aspect of Haitian and Haitian-diasporic life in the twentieth century, and while




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the novels vary significantly in their degrees of emphasis on the individual versus the collective (or the personal versus the political) dimensions of experience, in not one of them does Danticat fail to demonstrate how one is necessarily incomprehensible without the other. Her two earlier novels, for example, appear on the surface to divide the labor of representing personal and political life quite distinctly between them: Breath, Eyes, Memory devotes its deceptively modest narrative to the intimate ties linking four generations of women in one family, focusing primarily on young Sophie Caco’s difficult passage from Haiti to the United States, and from childhood to adulthood; The Farming of Bones takes on the seemingly far more ambitious task of rendering in fictional form the much larger, and more populated, historical tragedy of the 1937 massacre of perhaps tens of thousands of Haitians at the hands of the Dominican precursor to the Duvaliers, Rafael Trujillo. But just as Danticat’s account of the intimate lives of the Caco women in Breath resolves itself in the politically charged revelation that the brutal rape of Martine, Sophie’s mother, by a macoute in Duvalier’s Haiti results in Martine’s pregnancy with Sophie, so does her account of the very public nature of the 1937 massacre gain most of its force from Danticat’s ability to imagine it from the unique, and intimate, perspective of her beautifully drawn protagonist and narrator, the young house-servant Amabelle Désir. The Dew Breaker both extends and reinforces this complex, ongoing negotiation, on Danticat’s part, of the parallel and complementary dimensions of individual and collective Haitian and Haitian-diasporic experience, especially as they emanate from a national past whose mixed legacy obligates her to confront its violence as much as it entices her to celebrate its heroism and perseverance. This willingness to explore all qualities of this mixed legacy can, of course, prove tricky, risky even, for a writer positioned, like Danticat, not in Haiti, but in a potentially compromised diasporic location. Indeed, Danticat’s insistence on confronting so unflinchingly the legacy of Haiti’s violent past leaves her open to any number of negative, critical responses. For example, in his 1998 study, Pride Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States, immigration sociologist Alex Stepick makes a very eloquent case for the positive role that cultural promotion can play in strengthening otherwise (politically, economically) vulnerable communities, like the poorest inhabitants of Miami’s Little Haiti, in their struggles to survive in an often deeply hostile “host” culture, like non-Haitian South Florida’s. “Constantly confronted by prejudice and discrimination,” Stepick argues, “most Haitians turn to the internal strengths of their culture. They recall Haiti’s history as having the world’s only successful slave rebellion, the first free Black republic, and the second free nation in the Western Hemisphere”; the ability of especially young


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Haitian-Americans to draw positive value from their inherited homeland culture, Stepick concludes, enables them to survive “the intense struggle between pride and prejudice,” and ultimately to emerge as fully realized “multicultural individuals” in their new home (75, 118). Danticat, on the other hand, makes very few references to this heroic revolutionary past; in the course of her three novels, she only makes very brief mention of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dessalines, and Henri Christophe in The Farming of Bones, and there she only does so in the course of her protagonist Amabelle Désir’s ironic meditation on the failure of the Haitian leadership (especially of President Stenio Vincent) in the 1930s to live up to the standard of those legendary figures in protecting their people from Trujillo’s slaughter. Indeed, some might even question the propriety of her decision to publish a work as dark as The Dew Breaker in the same year that was supposed to mark the bicentennial of Haitian independence. Of course, Haitian politics did more to mar that anniversary than the publication of one unflattering novel could ever manage, and while on one level Danticat’s reticence in addressing the current political crisis reveals one facet of her relationship to her homeland, on another level her insistence on laying out as explicitly as possible the actual conditions of political and social life in late twentieth-century Haiti has everything to do with her commitment to improving the quality of life for her countrymen everywhere. In Pride Against Prejudice, Stepick traces in part the difficulty that non-Haitian Americans had in understanding why exactly Haitians began emigrating to the United States in such large numbers in the 1970s. It took until the 1980s, Stepick observes, before “the U.S. government . . . came to view the corrupt and repressive [Jean-Claude Duvalier] regime as the root cause of the Haitian refugee problem” (1998, 106), even though the country had already suffered under the brutal domination of two Duvaliers for thirty years. According to Charles Arthur, in his 2004 primer Haiti: A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture, as early as 1957 François Duvalier was forging “an alliance between the new black middle class and the black masses,” which “won [him] election as president, [after which he] moved swiftly to create his own armed power base, in the form of a presidential militia, dubbed the ‘Tontons Macoutes’” with whose help he “established a brutal dictatorship” under which “as many as 30,000 of his opponents were [eventually] killed . . . [while] tens of thousands of educated Haitians chose to go into exile—to North America, Europe, and Africa” (23). Stepick concludes, in understandably cynical terms, that “[c] orruption and repression by friendly, right-wing regimes have seldom motivated the United States government to push for a change in a foreign government” (1998, 106). This characterization of what primarily drove U.S. Cold War–era foreign policy explains both how the Duvaliers could




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exterminate 30,000 of their own people with impunity over three decades and how the majority of U.S. residents could remain blissfully ignorant of these atrocities at the same time that they could find themselves much better informed of less serious abuses in such “enemy” states as Cuba or North Vietnam. If the human cost of the violence under the two Duvaliers must remain inestimable, so must the political, social, and even cultural cost of the same violence. Arthur makes brief reference to the “tens of thousands of educated Haitians [who] chose to go into exile,” (2004, 23) but that figure cannot begin to describe the actual effect that thirty years of repression had on, say, Haiti’s intellectual life. In a 1993 interview with the Haitian literary scholar Yanick Lahens, Clarisse Zimra attempts to assess exactly what Haiti lost as a result of the Duvaliers’ specific and particularly dirty war against their country’s intellectual and creative class. According to Zimra, young Haitian writers emerging in the years following the 1986 fall of JeanClaude Duvalier found themselves challenged to “vault over thirty years of silence, aggravated exile, persecutions, disruptions” in their attempts at “birthing a vibrant national literature that [could] simultaneously give Haiti back to Haitians and the mother island back to the diaspora, as well as [to] open all Haitians . . . to world literature” (78).4 Zimra credits the thirty-year Duvalier era with opening instead “the gaping wound” at the center of Haiti’s cultural history, a wound marking “the absence of . . . those people . . . whose creativity was snuffed out by repression or pushed into alien directions by exile”; the Duvaliers, Zimra concludes, thus “strangled the historical consciousness of the first black people to shake off the imperialist yoke at a time when other colonized could only dream of doing so,” installing in the place of that consciousness “a characteristic institutional amnesia” (78). Danticat herself may therefore view the challenge that Haiti’s recent history poses for her not only through the lens of her Haitian-ness, but also and at the same time from her perspective as a writer who knows better than to take for granted her own ability to express herself freely, and fearlessly, about even the most explosive political questions and controversies. In fact, Danticat pays very explicit homage to the “lost generation” of 1960s-era Haitian writers discussed by Zimra and Lahens when she has the “dew breaker” himself muse about “one of his most famous victims, the novelist Jacques Alexis” (2004, 198) This turns out to be a rare moment when the fictional and historical elements of Danticat’s texts make direct contact; she refuses to invent just any sadistic, torturing thug, but makes him the one responsible for the torture and murder of the novelist “Jacques-Stephen Alexis” who, as Zimra tells us, “in April 1961 . . . landed on the island to lead a rebellion and was subsequently


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murdered by one of Duvalier’s goons. Alexis’s ill-fated attempt,” Zimra goes on, “unleashed the first waves of an increasingly brutal repression and the rise of the Tontons Macoutes,” and it is for this reason that, she concludes, “1961 remains a highly symbolic year in Haitian cultural history” (1993, 78). And while Alexis’s appearance in Danticat’s story is both brief and mostly a function of his murderer’s memory of him, it does allow Danticat to pay him the additional homage of a quotation from one of his own novels; Danticat has the dew breaker recall a line from Alexis’s novel Compère Soleil General, which reads, “Tu deviens un veritable gendarme, un bourreau [You are becoming a real policeman, a torturer],” and which haunts the torturer with the certitude with which it predicts that even his terrible vocation could come to seem, in the banality resulting from its routinization, “like any other job” (2004, 198, 243). In addition to Alexis, Danticat may also be said to pay an even subtler homage in the title of her text to Jacques Roumain, the defining Haitian novelist of the generation preceding Alexis’s, whose “greatest legacy,” Charles Arthur tells us, “was his novel, Masters of the Dew, published posthumously in 1945” (2004, 81). Danticat’s willingness to position her own work in such explicit relation to two of the most highly regarded novels produced in the Haiti of the last century therefore says as much about her commitment to the celebration and perseverance of Haiti’s literary legacy as it does about her own ambitions as an (admittedly, but productively) diasporically situated contributor to that legacy. It also suggests that while Danticat may on the most explicit level appear to be undertaking a thoroughgoing examination of the worst crimes committed by Haitians against other Haitians over the past half-century at least, she also and at the same time clearly means to honor positive Haitian achievements rendered that much more impressive for having so often come about under such disabling circumstances. And it is perhaps this more complex, but more honest, lesson that she hopes to impart to all her possible audiences. 3. A Confession of Crimes If Danticat’s commitment to this examination of Haiti’s troubled political past is in part fueled by her identification with some of its victims as a writer, it is at least as motivated, and perhaps more so, by her identification with another historically vulnerable Haitian population—as a woman. The Dew Breaker, in fact, departs significantly from Danticat’s previous two novels in that it focuses chiefly on a male character, and while there are references in the text to his female victims, almost all the violence described in any detail in the novel is violence he directs at other men. In her earlier fiction Danticat has traditionally walked a very fine




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line between her commitment to exposing the extraordinary challenges that life poses to Haitian, and Haitian-diasporic women in particular, and her insistence on showing those women in all their complexity; that is, not merely as victims, but as strong, resourceful survivors who can not only withstand the worst of abuses but can also emerge as the chief guarantors of their nation’s, and their culture’s, viability into the future. The macoute who rapes Martine, the young protagonist Sophie Caco’s mother in Breath, Eyes, Memory, therefore stands as a kind of precursor for the torturer so much more fully imagined in The Dew Breaker. Together these two characters suggest something of Danticat’s awareness that not all political violence takes place between men in state-run prisons, but can often take the form of rape in private homes when, say, a state-sanctioned militia can freely and with impunity terrorize populations of citizens it perceives, even under the flimsiest of pretexts, to oppose those they serve. In an article published in the Fall 1999 issue of The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, anthropologist Terry Rey makes a very convincing case for the programmatic way in which rape has been used as a weapon of political terror and control in Haiti, from as far back as prerevolutionary, colonial St. Domingue to as recently at least as the Raoul Cédras regime that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and remained in power until the U.S.-led invasion of 1994. “The problem of rape,” Rey argues, “is pervasive in Haiti, and has been especially intensive during periods of political upheaval. From day one,” he goes on, “the imposition of new power structures in Haitian history has consistently featured the rape of women who are associated with the opposition and with the vanquished” (1999, 82). These practices not only survived, but intensified at various points in the course of the twentieth century; Rey, for example, cites the “ample evidence that François Duvalier employed sexual violence and humiliation as a weapon of intimidation against the political opposition, . . . and as part of his agenda to create a black elite to counter the long-standing dominance of Haiti’s mulatto elite,” and Rey’s whole article is actually devoted to demonstrating how, by extending and expanding these practices in the early 1990s, “the Cédras regime had committed arguably the greatest crime against womankind in the Caribbean since slavery” (1999, 84, 74). It bears noting here that Breath, Eyes, Memory appeared the same year that Cédras was forcibly removed from power and that Aristide was reinstated as Haiti’s president by U.S. forces acting on behalf of the Clinton administration and with the permission of the United Nations. Ten years later, history seemed to both repeat and reverse itself, as the United States again found cause to intercede directly in Haiti’s political life, though this time to depose Aristide, and Danticat once again found herself publishing a novel on Haitian, and Haitian-diasporic, political themes just as her


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homeland once again commanded the attention of the North American and even global media. Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Dew Breaker share a great many elements in common, not least of which is their insistence on drawing direct lines of causation between violent political repression in Haiti and the decisions of individuals variously entangled in that violence to emigrate out of their homeland either to save their lives or redeem their souls; rarely if ever does Danticat represent the act of Haitian emigration as simply or exclusively motivated by economic hardship. This suggests something concerning whom she takes some significant part of her audience to be; while one can safely assume that Danticat would welcome any and all readers with an interest in what she writes about and why, and while one can also safely assume that she hopes in part to reach her fellow Haitians both on and off the island with her work, it is also quite clear that Danticat writes to educate non-Haitian readers in the United States (and perhaps the rest of the “first” world) about her country, its history, and culture, in order to inspire more enlightened, and more sympathetic, action from them (when they vote, for example, or when they practice more direct forms of social and political activism) with respect to Haiti, and to Haitians everywhere. Danticat to her credit both eschews sentimental appeals to pity and refuses to indulge in simple nationalist cultural boosterism; she is confident enough in her appreciation of her homeland culture’s considerable strength and beauty to trust that it will be palpable in everything she writes without her having to resort to grandstanding. Instead, she leads her readers into the heart, and under the skin, of Haitian and Haitian-diasporic experience by providing them with the resources (her stories, her characters, her settings, and the words with which she animates all of them) to see, and to imagine, her people, and their increasingly transnational life, for themselves. As I have already begun to suggest above, that life, especially as Danticat presents it to her readers, affords little in the way of a titillating tropical exoticism that often characterizes what is marketed as “multicultural” fiction, and especially when produced by women writers, in first-world markets; instead, Danticat obligates her readers to undergo at least vicariously some version of the violence that so often threatens human life in the developing world, and haunts through memory the present lives of so many who manage to survive that violence by immigrating to more stable societies in the “developed” world. While there is considerable “literary” pleasure to be gained from reading Danticat’s work, it mostly, as Steven Barnes recently observed, has “the cumulative effect . . . of testimony, an accounting of crimes” (2004). This is especially true of The Dew Breaker; whereas in Breath, Eyes, Memory the macoute who rapes Martine and fathers Sophie remains an anonymous ghost haunting the margins of the




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story, The Dew Breaker’s central macoute personage commands far more significant narrative attention. He dominates both the first and the last chapters of the novel, while references to him occur in all the intervening chapters, which read like a loose collection of independent short stories until the reader realizes that they all involve people whose lives have in some way been damaged by him and his violence. Danticat also chooses to arrange the chapters so that they generally travel backward through time; while the first chapter (“The Book of the Dead”) narrates the elderly Msye Bienaimé’s confession to his grown, U.S.-born daughter Ka that in his former life in Duvalier’s Haiti her “father was the hunter, not the prey,” (20) the last and longest chapter, also titled “The Dew Breaker”(because he mostly came at dawn to drag his victims to prison, and to death) narrates in detail the events, thirty years in the past, surrounding Ka’s father’s last brutal act as a macoute, from the varied perspectives of the “hunter,” his “prey” (a protestant minister, modeled on Danticat’s own uncle, who dares criticize Duvalier from the pulpit of his church in the Bel-Air quarter of Port-au-Prince), and the woman who, in spite of being the minister’s stepsister, would join her fortunes to those of the repentant macoute and eventually have with him the baby who would grow up in diasporic Haitian American Brooklyn to become Ka Bienaimé. While at least one intervening story (“The Book of Miracles”) explicitly connects narrative threads linking the first story with the last, even without reference to it one can discern something of the coherence of a world that “The Book of the Dead” and “The Dew Breaker” together dream into being. “The Book of the Dead” takes place in contemporary Lakeland, Florida, where Brooklyn-born and -raised Ka Bienaimé and her Haitian-born, émigré father have traveled in order to deliver a sculpture Ka has made of her father and sold to Gabrielle Fonteneau, a young Haitian American actress who is enjoying some success in the United States as the star of a nationally televised situation comedy. Ka awakens the morning that they are scheduled to make the delivery to discover that her father has disappeared with their rental car and her sculpture; he only reappears many anxious hours later to confess to his daughter that he’s destroyed her work, having thrown it into what Ka calls “a man-made lake, one of those marvels of the modern tropical city, with curved stone benches surrounding a stagnant body of water.” We know already from Ka’s description that the sculpture was likely too abstract (“rough and not too detailed, minimalist at best”) for her father to fear being recognized by its likeness to him; “I’d used a piece of mahogany,” she tells us, “that was naturally flawed, with a few superficial cracks along what was now the back. I’d thought these cracks beautiful and had made no effort to sand or polish them away, as they seemed like the wood’s own scars, like the one my father had on his face” (6, 7). Her father explains his


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objections to it as instead ethical, perhaps even spiritual; “When I first saw your statue,” he tells her, “I wanted to be buried with it, to take it with me into the other world” (17). Ka understands that her father’s reaction to her work, like the very fact of her being named “Ka” (that is, “the double of the body . . . the body’s companion through life and after life, [which] guides the body through the kingdom of the dead”), stems from his longstanding fascination with the culture and religion of Ancient Egypt (17). The same religious impulse that drives his desire to take his daughter’s image of him when he dies forces him to confess, first to himself and then to her, why he can’t: “Ka, I don’t deserve a statue . . . not a whole one, at least. You see, Ka, your father was the hunter, he was not the prey” (20). And from this distinction, from this basic division of labor between, say, manjeur (eater) and manjé (eaten), issue forth a string of relevant details: “I was never in prison . . . I was working in the prison . . . It was one of the prisoners inside the prison who cut my face in this way . . . This man who cut my face, . . . I shot and killed him, like I killed many people” (21–22). This confession, along with Ka’s immediate and more protracted reactions to it, can tell us a great deal about what Danticat thinks of the responsibility that might or perhaps should accrue to Haitian writers and artists of her generation for at least the knowledge of such crimes, as both inflicted and endured, by countrymen in the generations immediately preceding their own. If before the confession the sculpture had been for Ka, as she tells us, “my favorite of all my attempted representations of my father . . . the way I had imagined him in prison” (6), one of its most significant effects for her is the loss it occasions of the defining “subject” of her art, “the prisoner father I loved as well as pitied” (30). “The Book of the Dead” ends, in fact, with Ka in an unresolved state of paralysis and suspension, unable to forgive her father for his sordid past, and unable to forgive both her parents for the conspiracy of lies they undertook together in “protecting” their daughter from the potential injury of such knowledge. And this ethical paralysis translates readily for Ka into a creative incapacitation, which she describes in the course of recounting her confrontation of her mother over the telephone: “As my mother is speaking, this feeling comes over me that I sometimes have when I’m carving, this sensation that my hands don’t belong to me at all, that something else besides my brain and muscles is moving my fingers, something bigger and stronger than myself, an invisible puppet-master over whom I have no control. I feel as though it’s this same puppet-master that now forces me to lower the phone and hang up, in mid-conversation, on my mother” (25). While there might be good reason to resist forcing too programmatic an allegorical interpretation onto this passage, and onto the narrative in which it appears, Danticat at least invites if she does not actively authorize such a reading in




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making her mouthpiece a person who shares so many qualities with herself. Danticat even opens the acknowledgments that follow the last chapter by dedicating all of The Dew Breaker to “my father, who, thank goodness, is not in this book” (243). She thus admits, in making Ka an artist who shares a number of other qualities with her creator, that she even risked inviting an even more intimately autobiographical reading, one that risked in turn casting a very dark shadow on her own father. But Ka, while not fashioned so closely on Edwidge, at least allows her creator to embody through her a set of anxieties and concerns that she clearly experiences in a very directly personal way herself. Through Ka Danticat can voice her own sense that as an artist, whether she carves wood or fashions worlds out of language, she is at times beholden to forces so much more powerful than her individual will that she finds herself forced to surrender herself to them when they are at their most insistent. 4. A Calculation of Value Danticat’s representation of Ka’s surrender of artistic agency should not, however, be taken to suggest a capitulation, on the author’s part, of a responsibly ethical relationship to the historical events that both couch and condition her fiction. Ka clearly invested the sculpture of her father with a very specific set of motivated, and motivating, associations; she personally could not, however, comprehend let alone control the circumstances (historical, political) that, as a function of her father’s association of radically different meanings to the same sculpture, sealed the piece’s doom, rendering it the occasion for a profound loss rather than the profit Ka hoped to garner from its sale to Gabrielle Fonteneau. These conditions necessarily limit the range and scope of attributions to an artwork that one can definitively assign to the artist, and the difficult lesson that Danticat has Ka learn in “The Book of the Dead” has everything to do with this necessary check to her artist ego. Danticat’s own response to questions regarding contemporary Haitian (and, increasingly, Haitian-diasporic) politics, discussed earlier in relation to the April 2004 interview by Steven Barnes, clearly emanates from her own learning of this lesson in humility, rather than from some kind of strategic public disingenuousness that would open her up to the, at best improbable, at worst disturbing, charge of acting in bad faith in her attempts to manage her audience’s reception of her work. The “time, . . . reflection . . . [and] nuance” required for the emergence of the kind of historical, political wisdom that she hopes will drive her fiction operate primarily by providing the writer with additional resources that might minimize (if not completely compensate for) the deficit under which she works, especially when she most acutely senses “something else . . . bigger


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and stronger than myself ” having its hand in the creative process, and in the resulting product, for which she alone is conventionally held answerable. In that same interview, Danticat draws a direct, suggestive parallel between this individual process of coming to historical wisdom with the collective process undergone by, say, an entire nation. In a work like The Dew Breaker, Danticat hopes to contribute, and precisely, strategically from her diasporic location, to what is now necessarily a transnational process of coming to terms with all the worst crimes committed, often in the name of the Haitian people and by institutions (like the nation-state) claiming to act for, and even as, the Haitian people, against the Haitian people. As Steven Barnes tells us in his commentary on that interview, “Haiti . . . has never had a full airing of the traumas inflicted on its people. Danticat thinks such reflection, in the manner of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is not yet possible, because such national self-analysis requires several years of internal peace and security” (2004). Danticat suggests here that the “vibrant national literature” invoked by Zimra and Lahens, and still to come from Haiti, and from Haitians anywhere they reside, could serve as both an effective public vehicle for this self-analysis, as well as a chief and flourishing by-product of the long dreamed-of “years of internal peace and security.” In the meantime, Danticat finds herself, like her alter ego, Ka, and like her nation itself (both as it persists on the island and as it establishes various afterlives across the diaspora), suspended in a state of irresolution and indeterminacy. She confesses to Steven Barnes that she herself still “could neither love nor forgive the Dew Breaker,” explaining in fairly explosive terms as she quotes Joseph Conrad, “I am of the mind of . . . exterminate the brutes.” That last phrase, from Conrad’s seminal novella Heart of Darkness, has survived the full century since its writing and reemerged in the era of postcolonial studies as the truth of the violence motivating the holocaust we know as the entire European colonial and imperial enterprise, a violence surviving to our own day through the transfer of imperial eminence from European to North American hands. It is in the context of this prevailing imperium that any question of possible justice in Haitian and Haitiandiasporic political matters must necessarily be posed, and while the context could never simply serve to exonerate or absolve fully willed, and realized, acts of atrocity, individual and collective, on anyone’s part, it does expand the scope of executable judgment to cover, and to charge, all responsible parties. The population of “brutes” whom Danticat cannot yet, if ever, bring herself to forgive, let alone love, and for whom she continues to hold out the justice of execution, necessarily includes the Duvaliers and their army of Tontons Macoutes, but it also includes any number of complicit Haitians, and a wider, more powerful set of actors in the international scene (powerful, arrogant North American nation-states included) who at least tolerated




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but more likely enabled the brutality of Haitian political life over those years. The complex interimplication of U.S. and Haitian national histories, especially in the twentieth century, seems primarily marked by the more spectacular moments of direct U.S. intercession in Haitian national affairs, from the long occupation, lasting through 1934, in the early twentieth century to the various coups and additional invasions orchestrated and conducted, respectively, from the United States in the course of the Duvalier years and certainly for most of Haiti’s more recent, post-Duvalier history. But this increasingly conjoined, and transnational, U.S./Haitian history may actually best be represented, and thereby remembered, for having produced the first large, and viable, Haitian community on American soil, even as other satellite communities (e.g., St. Lucia, Québec, Paris, Sénégal) emerged well beyond America, and together came to constitute an increasingly globalized diaspora. If U.S. foreign policy constitutes one form of ongoing “American” influence in and on Haiti, another (equally powerful) is what Charles Arthur calls the influence “on modern day Haitian society [of] those one million or so Haitians who live legally in North America . . . [who n]ot only bolster a failing economy with their remittances that total as much as US $600 million a year . . . but [who in significant number] return to Haiti at Carnival and for summer vacations” (2004, 13–14). Edwidge Danticat must be counted among the most publicly visible and celebrated members of this diaspora community, a status she does not dare to take either for granted or too lightly. That status compels her to learn, and to teach, all she can about not only the Haitian past, especially for all the ways that it helps us explain the Haitian present, but also about all the possible, and imaginable, Haitian futures, not all of which will occur exclusively on the island, or within the borders of the current Haitian state. Books like The Dew Breaker dare to raise the most disturbing and controversial questions about Haitian (but perhaps any “national”) political history because it is clear that without such a “full airing” of national “traumas,” there will be no solution forthcoming that could guarantee the nation’s (and its diasporas’) long-term survival(s) into any of a number of possible, and positive, futures, all of them free of the risks of either repeating or even just matching in degree of brutality the most explicitly remembered sins of the national past.


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5. An Indictment of Sentiment Books like The Dew Breaker also and just as courageously refuse the claim of the easiest and most conventional of narrative paradigms (e.g., innocence/ fall/redemption) to cast a utopian pall over some messy historical facts. Her father’s confession to her regarding his life in Haiti does nothing in the course of the rest of “The Book of the Dead” except to unsettle Ka, and in 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

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turn to threaten the emotional, affective, and cultural ties that bind her to her parents, and to the past, both as legacy and as history, which together they represent. “[C]onfessions,” Ka understands, “do not lighten living hearts” (33); their core function, their core value in the secular world, especially, is certainly not redemptive, not even therapeutic, but forensic; strung together they form what Ka’s mother Anne calls “a penance procession that has yet to end,” (238) whether that procession tracks an individual life story, or even the most complex and crowded history, not of a person, but of a people. Danticat’s refusal to follow or obey the logic of the Catholic rite of confession, even as she herself invokes its terminology, reinforces her claim in the Barnes interview that she cannot bring herself to imagine forgiving let alone loving anyone confessing to the crimes to which Ka’s father confesses; all she can have Ka do is pose a basic question to her mother, “Manman [mother], how do you love him?” (24, 239). There is no good answer to this question, of course, and no easy answer either. The inadequacy of all possible ethical and philosophical responses to Ka’s question keeps both mother and daughter caught in a suspended state of irresolution, a state that Anne describes as “this dread, . . . this pendulum between regret and forgiveness” a state that, for her, and perhaps for Danticat too, transforms into “a now useless cliché” even the expectation, still held in good faith among a good many people on earth, “that atonement, reparation was possible and available to everyone” (242). If conventional religion fails to offer a satisfying response to the ethical problem posed for Danticat in and by recent Haitian political history, so does the secular “religion” of an unreflective, sentimental nationalism, and it is with this point that this discussion will close. After Ka’s father confesses to his daughter, the pair face the obligation of telling their buyer, over lunch at Gabrielle Fonteneau’s parents’ Lakeland home, some acceptable version of the story of the sculpture’s destruction. At lunch, Gabrielle Fonteneau’s mother has occasion to wax patriotic about (what else?) some version of the pastoral beauty of her, her family’s, and their guests’ native Haiti, and provokes or occasions from Ka the response that follows: “‘There’s nothing like sinking your hand in sand from the beach in your own country,’ Mrs. Fonteneau is saying. ‘It’s a wonderful thing, simply wonderful.’ I imagine my father’s nightmares. Maybe he dreams of dipping his hands in the sand on a beach in his own country and finding that what he comes up with is a fistful of blood” (30).



Notes 1. Most of this passage appears in the “Day 1” segment of the report of the Post website, which corresponds with the 11 May 2008 segment of the report in the paper’s print version.


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2. Various reputable websites feature this more-or-less standard account of Danticat’s life; see, for example, http://www.ailf.org/iaa/ny2000/danticat.htm, the page from its website that the American immigration Law Foundation devotes to Danticat, whom it honored with an Immigration Achievement Award in 2000. 3. Danticat’s major bibliography preceding The Dew Beaker therefore reads as follows: Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Soho Press, 1994; novel); Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, 1995; short fiction); The Farming of Bones (New York: Soho Press, 1998; novel); The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in The United States (New York: Soho Press, 2001; edited collection); Behind the Mountain (New York: Orchard Books, 2002; young adult fiction); After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (New York: Crown Publishing, 2002; travelogue). 4. This article feels slightly dated, in part because it appeared two years before the publication of Breath, Eyes, Memory; for this reason, however, it is also a powerful indicator of just how profoundly Danticat’s appearance has transformed the Haitian literary landscape, on and off the island.

References Arthur, Charles. 2004. Haiti: Its People, Politics and Culture. New York: Interlink Books. Barnes, Steven. 2004. Tortured History: Novelist Edwidge Danticat’s Dew Breaker Raises Ghosts of Haiti’s Violent Past and Present. Times-Union of Albany, NY, April 25, http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/tu_danticat_edwidge.html (accessed on July 8, 2009). Briggs, Laura, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way. 2008. Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis. American Quarterly 60.3: 625–48. Danticat, Edwidge. 2004. The Dew Breaker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Priest, Dana, and Amy Goldstein. 2008. Careless Detention: Medical Care in Immigrant Prisons. The Washington Post, May 11–14, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/?referrer=emaillink (accessed on July 8, 2009). Rey, Terry. 1999. Junta, Rape and Religion in Haiti, 1993–1994. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 15.2: 73–100. Stepick, Alex. 1998. Pride Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Voices. 2004. University of California, Santa Barbara: Department of Black Studies. Available online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhMk6X3VBrE (accessed on January 3, 2009). Zimra, Clarisse. 1993. Haitian Literature After Duvalier: An Interview with Yanick Lahens. Callaloo 16.1: 77–93.


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Bill Ashcroft is a founding exponent of postcolonial theory, coauthor of The Empire Writes Back, the first text to examine systematically a field that is now referred to as “postcolonial studies.” He is author and coauthor of several books in the field, variously translated into six languages, including: The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995; 2nd ed. 2006); Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (1998; 2nd. ed. 2007); Edward Said (2001; 2nd ed. 2008); Post-colonial Transformation (2001); On Post-colonial Futures (2001); Caliban’s Voice (2008). He is currently Professor of English at the University of New South Wales. María Herrera-Sobek is Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Academic Policy and Professor of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the Luis Leal Endowed Chair and is the author of The Bracero Experience: Elitelore versus Folklore; The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis; Northward Bound: Mexican Immigration in Ballad and Song; and Chicano Folklore. She has edited and coedited more than fifteen books and published more than 130 articles and book chapters. In addition, her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and literary magazines, and she is one of the featured poets in Three Times a Woman. Karin Ikas is presently an Assistant Professor/Research Lecturer at the Departments for Social Sciences and English & American Studies at Frankfurt University. Homi K. Bhabha prefaced her latest book, Communicating in the Third Space (coed. with G. Wagner, 2009). Her other books include the prize-winning Ph.D. thesis Die zeitgenössische Chicana-Literatur (2000), U.S. Latino Literatures and Cultures (coed. with F. Lomelí), Chicana Ways (2002), Gender Debat/tl/ed (2003), Stories from Down Under (coed. with D. Carter), Violence and Transgression in World Minority Literatures (coed. with R. Ahrens, M. Herrera-Sobek, and F. Lomeli, 2005). Forthcoming is A Nation Forged in Fire: Canadian Literature and the Construction of National Identity. Her current research interest include Pacification Literature, Constructing Gender in the Third Space as well as Reconciliation and Literature in the Era of Sorry Politics.


Notes on Contributors

Nicolás Kanellos is the Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Literature at the University of Houston. He is founding publisher of the nation’s


NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

oldest and most esteemed Hispanic publishing house, Arte Público Press, the largest, nonprofit publisher of literature in the United States. His monograph, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (1990), received three book awards, including that of the Southwest Council on Latin American Studies. He is the author of various other award-winning books on Hispanic cultural history, including Hispanic Literature of the United States: A Comprehensive Reference (2005), which was named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice. Dr. Kanellos is the director of a major national research program, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage of the United States, whose objective is to identify, preserve, study, and make accessible tens of thousands of literary documents of those regions that have become part of the United States from the colonial period to 1960. Catherine Leen currently holds a position in the Department of Spanish at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. In 2005 she was awarded a fellowship by the Royal Irish Academy through the British Academy Research Scheme for the purpose of conducting research at the British Film Institute in London. In the same year she received an NEA-funded honorarium for the appearance of her work on Bold Caballeros and Noble Bandidas Project on the website created by the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University. In February 2007 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship. Her research interests include Chicano Cinema and Literature, Latin American Literature and Cinema, Latino Writing, U.S.Mexican Border Studies, and Translation. Tim Libretti is Professor of English, Women’s Studies, and Latino and Latin American Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. He has authored many articles and book chapters on U.S. working-class literatures, U.S. racial and ethnic literatures, Third World literatures and theory, Marxism and Cultural Studies, and gay and lesbian literature. In addition to many book chapters, his articles have appeared in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Justice Review, College English, MELUS, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Race, Gender, and Class, Amerasia Journal, Post Identity, Radical Teacher, and Against the Current, among others. He is editor of the forthcoming volume Exterminating Narratives: Identifying and Resisting the Cultural Logics of Genocide (Lexington Books) and author of The Making of an American Working-Class Literature (under contract with University of Mississippi Press).


258

Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger (Ph.D. in American Studies from the Autonomous University of Barcelona) is an Assistant Professor at Universitat 10.1057/9780230103320 - Imagined Transnationalism, Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí and Marc Priewe

259

Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, where she teaches English Language and Literature and Latino/a Cultures in the United States. She is the author of Battlegrounds and Crossroads: Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas (Rodopi, 2003) and of several essays on Latino/a authors such as Rubén Martínez, Norma Cantú, and Pat Mora, which have appeared in journals and essay collections in Europe and in the United States. She has also translated a volume of essays on Queer Studies into Spanish. Her research interests include U.S.Latino/a Literature, with an emphasis on Chicano/a Studies and gender. Ricardo L. Ortíz is Associate Professor of U.S. Latino Literature and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at Georgetown University, where he also regularly teaches in American Studies. His first book, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2007; the book received honorable mention for the 2007 Alan Bray Book Award, given in recognition of outstanding work in LGBTQ Studies by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association. His second book is tentatively entitled Testimonial Fictions: The Post-Dictatorship Mode in US Latino Literature and Culture. Prof. Ortíz’s articles and reviews on U.S. Latino and Queer topics have appeared in such journals as The Yale Journal of Criticism, Social Text, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, The Americas, and Contemporary Literature, as well as in numerous scholarly anthologies. Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez has taught at the universities of Göttingen, FU Berlin, Bielefeld, Bayreuth, and Leipzig and will join the Faculty of American Studies at the University of Groningen in 2009. She was a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley in 1998/1999 and has recently been a guest lecturer at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the cultural processes that link American culture to other cultures or that are situated in between cultures. Her current book project is concerned with the transnational contexts of national identity formation in the early United States (1776–1840) and positions the United States in a network of hemispheric and circumatlantic discursive interrelations. Ana Patricia Rodríguez is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and U.S. Latina/o Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she teaches courses in Central American and U.S. Latina/o literatures and cultures. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Professor Rodríguez’s research focuses on the cultural production of Central Americans in the isthmus and in the wider Central American diaspora. She is the author of numerous articles as well as the book Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures (University of Texas Press, 2009).





Marta E. Sánchez is currently a Professor in the Department of Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Arizona State University. Previously, she was a Professor in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature (University of California Press, 1985), the first critical analysis of poetry by Chicanas, and “Shakin’ Up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American and Chicano Narratives and Culture 1965–1995 (University of Texas Press 2005). She has published articles in PMLA, Diacritics, MELUS, SigloXX/20th Century, American Literary History, American Literature, and Genders. She is editor of the series “Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States,” published by Rutgers University Press. Claudia Sadowski-Smith is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (University of Virginia Press, 2008) and the editor of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders (Palgrave, 2002). In addition, Dr. SadowskiSmith has published several articles on immigration, border theory, literatures of the U.S.-Mexico border, and the internationalization of American Studies in such journals as American Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Comparative American Studies, Arizona Quarterly, and Diaspora. Harald Zapf, is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany), and has studied literary theory, American, Latin American, Spanish, and German literature in Erlangen and Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the author of Dekonstruktion des Reinen: Hybridität und ihre Manifestationen im Werk von Ishmael Reed and is currently working on his habilitation on performance and performativity in twentieth-century American poetic culture(s).


260


Acosta, Iván 37 super, El, 37 40 Agarwal, Bina 89 Alcaraz, Lalo 225 Alexandria Gazette 110 Alexis, Jacques 246 Algarín, Miguel 9, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131, 132 Alonso, Carlos 51–52 Alurista 37 Alvarez, Julia 40 How the García Girls Lost Their Accent 40, 55 In the Time of the Butterflies 55 Anaya, Rudolfo 27 Bless Me, Ultima 40, 55 Anzaldúa, Gloria 21–23, 68, 173, 174, 177, 215 Borderlands/La Frontera 21, 173, 174, 177 “mestiza consciousness” 173 Tortilla curtain 22 Aparicio, Frances 55 “sub-versive” narratives 55 Arau, Sergio 61, 63, 71 Arce, Julio 35 Arellano, Anselmo 54 Arenas, Reinaldo 37, 41 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 248 Arizmendi, Yareli 61, 63, 72 Arteaga, Alfred 21 Artenstein, Isaac 223 Arthur, Charles 245, 247 Masters of the Dew 247, 254 Ashcroft, Bill 5–6, 13–27, 159, 160, 168, 257 Aztlán 13–27 borderlands 20–27 Chicano nationalism 17–18

cosmopolitanism 14 Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, El 17 transnation 13–27 Utopia 16–17 autoethnography 171–93 Avilés, Quique 202, 203, 207, 212, 213, 215–16 Anthems 203, 204, 207, 208, 214 Azuela, Mariano 42 de abajo, Los 42 Baeza Ventura, Gabriela 32 Baker-Cristales, Beth 201 Bakhtin, Mikhail 119 Bandau, Anja 159 Baraka, Amiri 117 Bardales, Aída 50 Barlow, Joel 98, 99, 100 Visions of Columbus, The 100, 101, 112 Barnes, Steven 243 Barthes, Roland 181 Lover’s Discourse, A 181 Bauer, Ralph 100 Beach, Christopher 121, 122, 124, 125–26 Bearden, Michelle 50 Bencastro, Mario 36 Odisea del Norte 36, 42 Berlant, Lauren 205–6, 210, 211 Bhabha, Homi 2, 164, 168 Biemann, Ursula 75 Bierhorst, John 163 bildungsroman 42 Blanton, Casey 173 Blom, Frans and Trudy 184 Bolom, Na 184 border literature 37 “border thinking” 174 Borm, Jan 194 Bourne, Randolph 3–4


Index


INDEX

Bowden, Charles 75 Brecht, Bertolt 157, 160, 161 Little Organum for the Theater 161 Brickhouse, Anna 95, 97 Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth Century Public Sphere 97 Briggs, Laura 4, 85, 241 Bruce-Novoa, Juan 44 Butler, Judith 132 Cadaval, Olivia 201 CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) 54 Camplis, Francisco 230 Carrasco, David 69 Carrillo, Adolfo 33 Castellanos, Rosario 175 Castillo, Ana 55 Mixquiahuala Letters 55, 140, 141 Cédras, Raoul 248 Certeau, Michel de 25 Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie 78 Chambers, Iain 178 Chatwin, Bruce 178 Cheah, Pheng 89 Chicano nationalist politics 137–53 Cisneros, Sandra 40 Caramelo 40, 55 House on Mango Street, The 55 Woman Hollering Creek 55 Clark, Steve 173, 174, 177, 188, 189 Clifford, James 174, 185 Colón, Jesús 35 Conger, Danielle 101 Conrad, Joseph 253 Cooper-Alarcón, Daniel 196 Aztec Palimpsest, The 195 Cota-Cárdenas, Margarita 215 Cotto-Thorner, Guillermo 37 Trópico en Manhattan 37 Cruz, Nicky 40 Run, Baby, Run 40, 41 Culler, Jonathan 124, 127, 131, 134 cultural citizenship 206–7 Culture Clash 225 Dalton, Roque 210 Historias prohibidas del pulgarcito

Danticat, Edwidge 11 Breath, Eyes, Memory 243, 248, 249 Brother, I’m Dying 238, 244 Dew Breaker, The 237–55 Farming of Bones, The 244, 245 Krik? Krak! 243 Day Without a Mexican A, 7 De la Vega, Garcilaso 100 Comentarios Reales de los Incas 100 De las Casas, Bartolomé 100 Brevísima Relación de la destrucción de las Indias 100, 103 De León, Arnoldo 107, 159 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 24–25 Derrida, Jacques 175 diasporic transnationalism 88–90 Díaz, Junot 40 Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, The 40, 55 Drown 55 Díaz Guerra, Alirio 33 Lucas Guevara 33, 41, 44 Dorfman, Ariel 36 muerte y la doncella La, 36, 37 Drexler, Michael 96 Duarte, Stella 87–88, 89 Dunlap, William 98, 101 Pizarro in Peru 101–4 Duvalier, François 248 Duvalier, Jean-Claude 245 Echeverría, Nicolás 229 Cabeza de Vaca 229, 230 Elizondo, Father Virgilio 68 Future Is Mestizo, The 68, 69 Elizondo, Sergio 23 Elliott, Emory 95 Espinosa, Conrado 42 sol de Tejas, El 42 Esquivel, Laura 50 Como agua para chocolate 50 Estep, Maggie 131, 132 ethnic cleansing 141

210


262

Falk, Richard 3 Fanon, Frantz 4, 18, 141–42, 148, 153 Fischer, Michael 174 Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley 95 Flint, Timothy 104 Francis Berrian 104–7, 112


Flores, Juan 39, 213, 215 Divided Borders 39 Flores, Lauro 172 Flores, William 206 Foucault, Michel 26–27, 195 Fox, Claire F. 223 Fredonian Rebellion 109 Fregoso, Rosa Linda 76 Freneau, Philip 98–100, 101, 103, 112 Frow, John 184, 195 Frye, Northrop 127 Funke, Thorsten 80 Gaines, Reg 129, 130, 132 Galeani, Eduardo 196 García, Cristina 1–2 Dreaming in Cuban 1, 40, 55 García-Acevedo, María Rosa 62 García-Canclini, Néstor 222 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia 40 Sor Juana’s Second Dream 40 Desert Blood 40, 77, 78, 82–86, 88, 89 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis 130 Gilroy, Paul 15, 23, 140, 141 Glick-Schiller, Nina 2–3, 29 Goldman, Francisco 215 Goldstein, Amy 237, 238, 240 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 10–11, 118, 133, 221–33 Border Brujo 223, 224, 233 Dangerous Border Crossings 227 Friendly Cannibals 226 Great Mojado Invasion, The 222, 228–33 Gómez-Quiñones, Juan 137–38, 139, 140, 142 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky” 158 González, Leopoldo 36 Abajo Franco 36 González, Lilo 202, 210, 211, 212 González Viaña, Eduardo 41 corridor de Dante, El 41, 42 Graulich, Michael 166 Gray, Paul 33 Green, Duncan 223 Guerrero, Sergio 63, 72 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 124 Production of Presence 124 Guzzardi, Joe 71

263

Hamilton, Nora 201 Hannerz, Ulf 157 Hanson, Victor David 158 Hejinian, Lyn 127 Heredia, José María 37, 38 Hernández Cruz, Víctor 38 Herrera, Juan Felipe 171–93 Mayan Drifter 171–93 Herrera-Sobek, María 7, 61–72 Day Without a Mexican, A 7, 61–72 Northward Bound: Mexican Immigration in Ballad and Song 61, 257 transnational migrations 7 heterotopia 25–26 Hijuelos, Oscar 43, 55 Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love 55 Hinojosa, Rolando 37, 39, 137, 138, 146 Valley, The 146 Hispanicization 139, 141 Hodges, Graham 133 Holland, Patrick 173, 177, 178, 191 Holman, Bob 117–18, 121, 129, 132 Hopper, Paul 221 Huggan, Graham 173 Hulme, Peter 194 Colonial Encounters 194 Hunt, Alfred 107 Huntington, Samuel 158 Who Are We? America’s Great Debate 158 Hurston, Zora Neale 240 identificational transnationalism 78 internal colonization 20 Ikas, Karin 9–10, 157–68, 159, 161, 257 Jameson, Fredric 186 Jennings, Keith 210 Johnson, William 224 Kane, Daniel 121, 122 Kanellos, Nicolás 6, 29–44, 257–58 colonial 32–34 exile 32–34, 36 immigrant 32–34 native 32–34 textual characteristics of U.S. Hispanic literature 34 transmigrants 29 transnational literary texts 6


INDEX


INDEX

Kaplan, Caren 178 Kaup, Monika 159 Kelleter, Frank 96 Kelly, Philip 222 Kim, Katherine 214 Kiser, Karin 49, 51 Klein, Richard 126 Klor de Alva, Jorge 19, 196 Kumar, Amitava 193 künstlerroman 42 Lahens, Yanick 246, 253 Laviera, Tato 37, 38, 39, 215 Lawrence, G. Desmond 166 Leal, Luis 33, 37 Leen, Catherine 10–11, 221–34, 258 “Final Frontier, The” 10–11 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 10–11, 221–34 Lehr, Jim 52 León-Portillo, Miguel 165 Libretti, Tim 9, 137–53, 258 Limón, Graciela 55, 137, 138, 147, 148, 150, 151 Day of the Moon, The 138, 149, 150 Erased Faces 138 In Search of Bernabé 55, 138, 147, 148, 149 Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker 107–8 Lipski, John 213 Lisle, Debbie 173 “cosmopolitan vision” 173 Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, The 173, 176, 184, 185, 192 Lomelí, Francisco 159, 194 López, Ana M. 229 Lopez, Jennifer 79 Loisaida 120–21 LOTE (Language Other than English) 51 L’Ouverture, Toussaint 111 Maciel, David México de afuera, El 32, 35, 38, 62 Mahler, Sarah 201 maquilas (maquiladoras) (assembly plants) 8, 75–76, 77, 78, 87 Mariel generation 41 Marín, Cheech 232 Born in East L.A. 232 Marqués, René 33 Carreta Made a U-Turn, La 36

Martí, José 32 “Nuestra América” 32 Martínez, Douglas 204, 205 Martínez, Tomás Eloy 36 Santa Evita 36, 37, 41 McCormick, Gladys 241 McCracken, Ellen 153 Mehne, Phillip 127 Meléndez, Gabriel 54 Menchú, Rigoberta 175, 180, 181 I, Rigoberta Menchú 175, 181 Mendieta, Eduardo 232–33 Menjívar, Cecilia 201 “mestiza consciousness” 174 mestizaje 69, 17 “methodology of the oppressed” 182 Mexican Revolution 43 “Mexifornia” 158, 159 Mignolo, Walter 51 “border thinking” 174 Mill, Sara 194 Discourses of Difference 194 Miller, Mary 165 Miller, Mary Ellen 166 mockumentary 63 Mohr, Nicholasa 40 Nilda 40 Montoya, Richard 204 Moraga, Cherríe 137, 138–39, 140–45, 148, 151, 153, 160–61, 163–68 Hispanicization 139, 141 Hungry Woman, The 160, 161, 167 Last Generation, The 160 “Queer Aztlán” 138, 139, 144, 145, 147, 151 This Bridge Called My Back 160 Waiting in the Wings 161 Morales, Ed 118, 121, 133, 215 Morris, Tracie 129, 132 Morton, Carlos 37 Mujeres Unidas de Juárez (United Women of Juárez) 87


264

NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 62, 53, 54, 75–76, 81, 184, 192, 223 Nathan, Debbie 75, 82 nationness 49 Nava, Gregory 77 Bordertown 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 224 Norte, El 80, 88, 89


INDEX

Obejas, Achy 71 O’Farrill, Alberto 35 Oliver-Rotger, Maria Antònia 10, 159, 171–93, 258 Ong, Walter 36 Operation Gatekeeper 53, 54 Operation Hold-the-Line 53 “oppositional consciousness” 174 O’Reilly Herrera, Andrea 1 Ortíz, Ricardo 11 Ospina, Carmen 49 pachuco 39 Paredes, Américo 38 George Washington Gómez 39 Parra, Max 54 Pease, Donald 104 Pedersen, David 201 Pelley, Scott 238 Peñalosa, Fernando 215 Pereda, Prudencio de 43 Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo 37, 39 Pérez-Torres, Rafael 174 Piñero, Miguel 121, 125 Portes, Alejandro 214 Pisarz-Ramírez, Gabriele 8, 95–113, 259 hemispheric writing 8 Pita, Beatrice 49 Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, El 159 Pocha Nostra 221 Pope Duarte, Stella 77 femicide 86–89 If I Die in Juárez 77, 78, 86–88 Portillo, Lourdes 76 Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman) 76, 77, 82 postcolonial 19–20 postcolonial mestizaje 174 Post-Movement Literature 137–53, 194 Pratt, Mary Louise 50, 51, 159, 174, 175, 186, 194 Imperial Eyes 194 Priest, Dana 237, 238, 240

Quesada, Roberto 41 Big Banana, The 41 Nunca entres por Miami 41 Quintana, Alvina 174 Quintanilla-Pérez, Selena 79 Ramírez, Francisco 33 Ramírez Berg, Charles 224, 225 Raza Cósmica, La (The Cosmic Race) 142, 147, 148 “Rebeldes, Los” (The Rebels) 77, 82 Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project 30 Rembao, Alberto 42 Lupita 42 Repak, Terry 201 Rey, Terry 248 Rich, Adrienne 195 Rinehart, Lucy 101 Rivera, Tomás 40 Rodríguez, Ana Patricia 10, 201–20, 259 Rodríguez, José Policarpo 41 Rodríguez, Netty and Jesús 36 Me voy pa’ México 36 Una mula de tantas 36 Rodríguez, Richard 4, 42 Hunger of Memory 42 Roumain, Jacques 247 Rony, Fatimah Tobing 229 Rosaldo, Renato 191 Culture and Truth 191, 195 Russwurm, John and Samuel Cornish 108–9 Sadowski-Smith, Claudia 7–8, 75–90, 260 gender-based violence 7 maquiladoras (assembly plants) 8, 75 Saldívar, José David 159 Saldívar, Ramón 159 Dialectics of Difference 159 Saldívar-Hull, Sonia 153 Sale, Maggie Montesinos 108 Salinas, Ric 204 Salvadoreñidades 201, 202, 203, 212, 213 Sánchez, Marta 6–7, 47–58, 260 “trans-national translation” 6 Spanglish 48 Sánchez, Rosaura 37, 49, 53, 215 Sánchez Jankowski, Martín 137 Sánchez Molina, Raul 201


Negritude 209 New Frontier/La Nueva Frontera 67 new world order 118, 228 Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home) 79 Nuevo Mundo, El (The New World) 33 Nuyorican Poets Café 8–9, 117–28

265


INDEX

Sandoval, Chela 174, 179, 180, 181, 186 “methdology of the oppressed” 182 “oppositional consciousness” 174 Santiago, Esmeralda 55 Almost a Woman 55 When I Was Puerto Rican 55 Sassen, Saskia 4, 157, 222 Savin, Ada 54 Schmidt Camacho, Alicia 88 Seguín, Juan Nepumoceno 41 Sellén, Francisco 40 Hatuey 40 Shell, Marc and Werner Sollors 52, 56 Shorris, Earl 139 Siguenza, Herbert 204 Silva Gruesz, Kirsten 97 Ambassadors of Culture 97 Silverman, Kenneth 99 Singer, Audrey 208 Smith, Sidonie 178 Solano, Gustavo 40 Sangre 40 Sommer, Doris 215 Bilingual Games 215 Spanglish 48 Spivak, Gayatri 176 Stavans, Ilan 48 Stepick, Alex 244–45 Stewart, Miranda 2l3 Stratton, Richard 118 Streeby, Shelley 107 Strohschänk, Johannes 102 Suárez, Virgil 40 Going Under 40 Suchlicki, Jaime 223 Sylvester, Everton 132 Tatum, Charles 175, 194 teatro campesino 192 “third differential zone” 181 “Third Worldism” 143 Thomas, Piri 40 Down These Mean Streets 40, 55 “Toltecas, Las” 77 Tontons Macoutes 245, 247, 253 Torres, Teodoro 39 patria perdida, La 39 Tortilla curtain 22 Toussaint, Marlene-Racine 239, 240 transcultural interethnic identities 209 transculturation 215

transethnic 52 “Transfrontera contact zone” 159 translingual 52 transmigrants 29 transnation 13–27, 159–60 transnational activism 89 transnational heterotopia 8–9 transnational immigration 203 transnational logic 202 transnational matrix 241 transnational migratory movement 62 tropicalization 38 Trouillot, Michel Rolphe 107 Tyree, Andrew 122 Valdez, Luis 37, 40 Vendidos, Los 40 Zoot Suit 40 Vaquero de Ramírez, María 213 Varela, Félix 37, 41 Vasconcelos, José 17 Venegas, Daniel 33 aventuras de Don Chipote, Las 33, 36, 42 Venuti, Lawrence 56 Vigil, Evangelina 37 Villa, Daniel 50 Villarreal, José Antonio 54 Pocho 54 Viramontes, María Helena 137, 138, 147, 151, 152, 153 Moths, The, 151 Von Kotzebue, August 102, 103, 112 Voz de México, La 33 Wertheimer, Eric 100, 101 West, Dennis 232 Williams, Crystal 124 Wolosky, Shira 130, 131 Wong, Sau-Ling 145 Wood, Alylish 224 Youngs, Tim 178


266

Zapatistas 172, 178, 191, 192, 223, 227 Zapf, Harald 8–9, 37, 117–34, 260 Algarín, Miguel 9 Holman, Bob 9 Nuyorican Poets Café 8–9 transnational heterotopia 8–9 Zentella, Ana Celia 215 Zimra, Clarisse 246, 253


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