Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0253214920
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253214928
- Pub. Date:
- 04/04/2002
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0253214920
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253214928
- Pub. Date:
- 04/04/2002
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253214928 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2002 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Decolonial Voices
Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century
By Arturo J. Aldama, Naomi H. Quiñonez
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2002 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34014-6
CHAPTER 1
MILLENNIAL ANXIETIES: BORDERS, VIOLENCE, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CHICANA AND CHICANO SUBJECTIVITY
Arturo J. Aldama
The events of 1836 brought forth charges of Mexican depravity and violence, a theme which became pervasive once Anglos made closer contact with the state's Hispanic population following the war. In the crisis of the moment, firebrands spoke alarmingly of savage, degenerate, half-civilized, and barbarous Mexicans committing massacres and atrocities at Goliad and the Alamo.
— Arnoldo de Leon, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (1983)
We were thrown out of just about everywhere, but what really made me feel bad was when we tried to go into a restaurant or a restroom downtown, and we were told, "No you can't use it." The police would always come and say, "This is a public place, you have to get out, you're not allowed here."
— Maria Elena Lucas, Forged under the Sun / Forjada hajo el Sol (1993)
CHICANA/O BORDER studies, devoted to understanding the complex dialectics of racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid mestiza/o cultural production, is at the vanguard of historical, anthropological, literary, cultural, artistic, and theoretical inquiry. This essay is an invitation to situate the diverse practices of critical U.S.-Mexican borderland inquiry in the historical moment of 2000. We hang at the precipice of the next millennium with all of the promises and anxieties that it produces. For our inquiry, one of the most important of these anxieties is the unkept promise that ensued from the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo over 150 years ago. This treaty signed at the end of the U.S.-Mexican war resulted in the formation of the U.S.-Mexico border and the forced purchase of northern México for fifteen million dollars (California, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, and Kansas), as well as the supposed protection of property and civil, cultural, and religious rights of Chicanos and Mexican peoples. Disturbed and outraged by the continued prevalence of historical patterns of criminalization, marginalization, dispossession, civil rights violations, and torture in Chicana/o and other subaltern communities, my essay seeks to contribute to the field of critical border studies by exploring the relationship between discourses of otherization crystallized by the U.S.-México border (racial, sexual, ideological) and state-enforced acts of violence (Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS], paramilitary, and police) on the bodies of Mexicana/o and Latina/o immigrants and Chicana/o youth.
"Shifting Borders, Free Trade, and Frontier Narratives: U.S., Canada, and México" (1994), by Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, summarizes the movement of critical border studies as it responds to specific geopolitical locations. Smorkaloff considers the ways in which theorists, writers, and performance artists map transfrontier social space challenging monologic sociopolitical forces that maintain national borders: "Transfrontier writers and theorists are developing a kind of syncretism of the first and third worlds in their writing that captures not only the complex reality of the border zone, but also a more profound understanding of the contemporary US and the Latin America living within" (97).
In similar terms, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (1991) by D. Emily Hicks examines the dialectics of transfrontier identity and border writing. Hicks uses the concept of border crossings as a metaphor and a tool to analyze the heterogeneity of identity in Latin American writing. Even though the bulk of the text focuses on two major Argentinean writers, Julio Cortázar and Luisa Valenzuela, Hicks begins the study by discussing the U.S.-Mexico border region, and concludes it by returning to Chicano and Mexicano writing in the U.S.-Mexico border regions.
Hicks argues that border writing "emphasizes the differences in reference codes between two or more cultures" (xxv), expressing the "bilingual, bi-cultural, bi-conceptual reality" of border crossers. However, Hicks is emphatic in positing that border writing is about crossing cultural borders and not physical borders. This leads to her disturbing characterization of the U.S.-Mexico border as a theater of "metaphors" where "actors" — polios (undocumented border crossers), la migra (INS), and coyotes (contractors who bring undocumented people over the border) — act their daily "dramas." Hicks creates a universalizing model that moves beyond concrete historical understandings of subaltern Latina/o "border-crossers" as "real people" responding to "real" geopolitical social realities and understands their experiences as a type of carnivalesque and postmodern theater. In doing so, Hicks deracinates the individuality of people — their/our specific histories, and family and community ties — who negotiate the often violent border crossing for such reasons as poverty, hunger, political persecution, the desire to reunite with loved ones, or a simple curiosity to see life al otro lado (on the other side).
The foundational anthology, Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, and Ideology (1991), edited by Héctor Calderón and José David Saldivar, grounds the discussion of transfrontier ideology in a concrete geopolitical zone. This anthology challenges the exclusionary practices of the American literary academy and the formation of the canon by recovering "neglected authors and texts" in the "Southwest and the American West." The work also provides a forum for diverse theoretical perspectives: "Chicano/a theory and theorists in our global borderlands: from ethnographic to post-modernist, Marxist to feminist" (6). What renders the anthology even more significant to the growth of critical border studies is the argument by its contributors that Chicano theoretical analyses can move from a regional understanding of relations of power to a global one without denying the historical specificities of each geopolitical locale.
In an earlier essay, "Limits of Cultural Studies" (1990), Saldívar articulates the cultural and border studies imperative in more detail, arguing that cultural studies must be both regional and global: "Finally, cultural studies, a border zone of conjunctures, must aspire to be regionally focused, and broadly comparative, a form of living and of travel in our global borderlands" (264). In this essay, Saldívar critiques both the subjectifying forces which inferiorize and homogenize non-Western peoples in the social relations of power and how scholarly practices replicate these forces. Saldívar shares in the British cultural studies understanding of culture as a dynamic and heterogeneous site where tensions of domination and resistance compete, linking these principles to forge a greater understanding of borders, resistance, and mestizaje. By studying the "subordinate and dominant cultures like public schoolchildren in Great Britain or low riders and cholos in East Los Angeles," Saldívar argues that cultural studies is committed to "transforming any social order which exploits people on the grounds of race, class, and gender." Cultural studies and border theory challenge "the authority of canon theory and emergent practice" and the relations of power which sustain this authority (252). After setting up his critique of monologic tendencies in anthropological practices, Saldívar surveys several key border writers, "native informants" Rolando Hinojosa, Gloria Anzaldúa, Guillermo Gómez Peña, and Renato Rosaldo. Saldívar argues that these writers offer counternarratives to the master narratives of nations that attempt to normalize identity and totalize cultural heterogeneity. Saldívar summarizes their writings as "cultural work" that "challenges the authority and even the future identity of monocultural America" (264).
Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997) by José Saldívar, a dazzling and impressive study of border writers, artists, musicians, theorists, and scholars, dramatically builds on this critique of the master-narratives that author the hegemonization of "monocultural America." Saldívar argues that
U.S. Mexico border writers and activist intellectuals have begun the work of exploring the terrains of border crossing and diaspora amid the debris of what El Vez calls our "national scar" of manifest destiny and the cultures of the U.S. imperialism. ... The history of migration, forced dispersal in the Américas as represented in the vernacular border cultures, challenges us to delve into the specific calculus of the U.S.-Mexico border crossing condition. (197)
In similar terms "Beasts and Jagged Strokes of Color: The Poetics of Hybridization on the US Mexican Border," by literary scholar and Chicano poet Alfred Arteaga (1994), addresses the multidimensional intersection of real and discursive forces along the U.S.-Mexico border — the border patrol and Tex-Mex caló, for example — by discussing the formation of the Chicana/o subject in relation to tensions produced by the border. With reference to Chicano poet Juan Felipe Herrera's "Literary Asylums," a heteroglossia of voices subjectified by and resistant to competing discourses of the nation-state, Arteaga states:
"Literary Asylums" and other Chicano poems play in a poetics of hybridization that calls to mind the quotidian cultural politics of hybridization in the material space of the frontier. What is at play is the formation of a Chicano subject coming to be amid the competing discourses of nation. (1)
Arteaga continues his discussion of Chicano poetics of hybridization or dialogic poetics by grounding the discussion in the material border. Arteaga considers the purpose of the border as intended by the nations at stake — the United States and México:
Consider the border: in the imagining of nation, it is the infinitely thin line that truly differentiates the US from México. The absolute certainty of its discrimination instills confidence in national definition, for it clearly marks the unequivocal edge of the nation. Its perceived thinness and keenness of edge are necessary for the predication of national subjectivity, which defines itself as occurring inside its border and not occurring outside. (2)
Arteaga observes how "[t]he thin borderline cleaves two national narratives, two national monologues of ideal and finalized selves" (2). Central to Arteaga's argument is the tension between the monologic tendencies of national narrative and the dialogic, interlingual, and hybridizing impulses of Chicana/o subjects and their literary expression. Arteaga locates the border zone as a site that is lived and expressed by those marginalized by nationalizing forces and who reside in the physical/discursive interstices and margins generated by the border.
The border for Arteaga is a site of power that selectively privileges and marginalizes, reinforcing social hierarchies along axes of race, class, nationality, and sexuality. He compares the experience of elite Mexican bourgeois Octavio Paz — who knows himself to be fully Mexican when crossing the border, a line that reinforces his imagined singular self — with that of Chicana-Tejana lesbian theorist and writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who argues that "[bjorders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. The prohibited and the forbidden are its inhabitants"(5).
However, to consider the experience of Mexican immigrants or émigrés crossing the border from the south, I assert a series of propositions that add to Arteaga's discussion of the multivalent nature of the U.S.-Mexico border. At the outset, I need to clarify that these assertions on the effects of the border for Mexicans traveling north reflect the socioeconomic conditions of peoples who do not enjoy the privilege of such national subjects as Paz and other bourgeois elite who can demonstrate to the visa-granting embassy in Mexico City, Ciudad Juárez, or Tijuana, that they have sufficient economic ties to Mexico — bank accounts, businesses, and high-status occupations. As border performance artist and poet Gerardo Navarro states in his reference to the "apartheid" of the border, the Tortilla Curtain operates like "a valve that is closed or opened by the invisible hands of the market in accord with the fluctuations in Wall Street and in the global market" (1994, 4). My propositions are as follows:
1. The border serves as a "free zone" for U.S. citizens and U.S. corporations (U.S. border crossers). The free zone applies, among others, to weekend tourists crowding the bars, drinking cheap beers, and seeking male and female prostitutes, and to U.S. companies exploiting "cheap" labor and lax environmental regulation controls.
2. Contrary to the free zone where all Euro-American taboos drop, the border is also a free zone of violence, a barrier to those trying to cross from the south — as evidenced by the Border Patrol, weekend vigilantism, bandits, and coyotes who after collecting their fees rob, rape, and denounce border crossers.
3. Even though the border is selectively open to those whose class positions confirm their tourist and student status, it forces a discourse of inferiorization on Mexicans and other Latinos, especially those whose class position, ethnicity, and skin color emerges from the campesina/o and urban proletariat groups.
4. Finally, once crossed, the border is infinitely elastic and can serve as a barrier and zone of violence for the Mexican or Latino/a who is confronted by racialist and gendered obstacles — material and discursive — anywhere s/he goes in the United States. This means that the immigrant continually faces crossing the border even if s/he is in Chicago (or wherever in the United States) — a continual shifting from margin to margin.
In no way do these propositions give breadth to the infinite variety of experiences and struggles for Mexicans and other Latin American immigrants moving across and through this infinitely elastic border to the United States. The immediate questions that the border poses are these: How can we chart the multiple vectors of forced liminalities produced by the U.S.-Mexico border? Is it enough to say that "no matter where a Mexican travels or lives in the United States, he or she always inhabits an economic, racial and discursive status that is automatically secondary and perpetually liminal?"
In Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society (1992), an important study of contemporary Mexican immigration, Leo R. Chávez understands liminality as a state of living in the shadows. Chávez illustrates the liminality in concrete terms with the following description of a family trying to visit Disneyland from San Diego: "Undocumented immigrants frequently told me that because of their illegal status they were not free to enjoy life, often citing as an example the fact that they were unable to take their children to Disneyland because of the immigration checkpoint at San Clemente" (14).
On February 1, 1997, the Rocky Mountain regional conference of the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies took place in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. The event was an inspirational gathering of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, Chicana/o studies department chairs, community leaders and activists, cultural workers and students dedicated to promoting the interdisciplinary and multifaceted field of Chicana/o studies, as well as to re-igniting further consciousness regarding the marginalized and uneven status of the Chicana/o communities. My participation in this rich encuentro of scholarly and political knowledge made me question further the roles of critics and scholars dedicated to Chicana/o studies as we begin the new millennium.
Specifically, I balance the wonderful gains that the field of Chicana/o Studies has witnessed — a proliferation of interdisciplinary scholarship, an increased focus on issues of gender and sexuality, the recent establishment of the Chicana/o Studies Department at Arizona State University, an increased enrollment of Chicana/o students at all levels, and further support for Chicana/o graduate students — with the realization and recognition that there are still negative constants facing the Chicana/o community. Examples of these constants are: (1) continued economic marginalization, (2) substandard housing, schooling, and general public services, (3) extremely high incarceration rates, and (4) an increase in the sophistication and deployment of violence especially toward Chicana/o youth and Mexicana/o immigrants, including those residents and citizens of Mexican descent unfortunate enough to get caught in immigration or migra sweeps. Regarding Chicana/o youth, their style of dress, music, and art is categorically demonized and criminalized by the dominant culture, thus continuing hegemonic patterns of demonization and the concomitant violation of youth seen most dramatically during the "Zoot Suit Riots" (1940s) and the repression of Chicana/o youth believed to be associated with the Brown Berets (1970s), and in the treatment of the youth suspected of being involved in gangs (1940s-present), who are now called "urban and domestic terrorists."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Decolonial Voices by Arturo J. Aldama, Naomi H. Quiñonez. Copyright © 2002 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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