Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line

Border Transits

Critical Approaches to Ethnic American Literature No 2

General Editors: Jesús Benito Sánchez (Universidad de Valladolid) Ana Mª Manzanas (Universidad de Salamanca) Editorial Board: Carmen Flys Junquera (Universidad de Alcalá) Aitor Ibarrola (Universidad de Deusto) Paul Lauter (Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut) Shirley Lim (U. California, Santa Barbara) Begoña Simal (Universidade da Coruña) Santiago Vaquera (Penn State University)

Border Transits Literature and Culture across the Line

Edited by

Ana Mª Manzanas

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence". ISBN: 978-90-420-2249-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction Border Dynamics: From Terminus to Terminator Ana Mª Manzanas

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Part I: (B)orders and Lines: A Theoretical Intervention Circles and Crosses: Reconsidering Lines of Demarcation Ana Mª Manzanas

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Part II: Visions of the U.S.-Mexican Border Up against the Border: A Literary Response José Pablo Villalobos

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Dispelling the Border Myth: Zonkey Writers and the Black Legend Édgar Cota-Torres

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Border Voices: Life Writings and Self-Representation of the U.S.-Mexico Frontera Javier Durán

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Postcards from the Border: In Tijuana, Revolución is an Avenue Santiago Vaquera

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Part III: Cultural Intersections “To Hear Another Language”: Lifting the Veil between Langston Hughes and Federico García Lorca Isabel Soto

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The Brown/Mestiza Metaphor, or the Impertinence against Borders Isabel Durán

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“A Wall of Barbed Lies”: Absent Borders in María Cristina Mena’s Short Fiction Begoña Simal

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Part IV: Trans-Nations Ethnographies of Transnational Migration in Rubén Martínez’s Crossing Over (2001) Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger

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Mapping the Trans/Hispanic Atlantic: Nuyol, Miami, Tenerife, Tangier Manuel Martín-Rodríguez

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Part V: Trans-Lations Resisting through Hyphenation: The Ethics of Translating (Im)pure Texts África Vidal

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Trespassers of Body Boundaries: The Cyborg and the Construction of a Postgendered Posthuman Identity Ángel Mateos-Aparicio

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Bibliography

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Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments “There will always be time, space perhaps not,” claims Carlos Monsiváis. Yet, one may think, one needs time to think about space and the way it splits and bifurcates around us. That gift of time is precisely what the Universidad de Salamanca has granted me. Wake Forest University, for its part, has provided the right atmosphere to conduct the research for this project, and to put this volume together. The support of The Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia for the research projects “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature” (references BFF2003-07004 and HUM2006-04919), as well as the financial backing of the Junta de Castilla y León for the project “Borders, Identities and Mestizaje” (reference SA048A06) have also been instrumental for the completion of this book of essays. My colleagues and friends from SAAS (Spanish Association for American Studies), especially Constante González, Cristina Garrigós, Francisco Collado, Isabel Durán and Barbara Ozieblo, as well as the “Studies in Liminality” group, led by Manuel Aguirre, have always provided a solid rock of faith on this and other projects. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the American Embassy in Madrid. I am especially grateful to Carmen González, Ed Loo and Marti Estell. Chrissi Harris has always been generous with her time and has done a superb job as style editor. My gratitude goes to dear friends such as Mary DeShazer, Anna Tefft and Win Lee, Jerry and Bonnie Whitmire, L.D. Russell, Richard and Maria Giacoma, Paul Lauter and Anne Fitzgerald, Shirley Lim, Heinz Ickstadt, and Isabel Caldeira. Together with colleagues at the Universidad de Salamanca, they have always eased the process of putting together this collection of articles. I am most indebted to the critics who have collaborated to produce this book; over a period of two years we have been exchanging visions and revisions of the border and its multiple manifestations. This project, like the series “Critical Approaches to Ethnic American Literature,” would have never been possible without Jesús

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Benito, co-editor of CAEAL, and Editions Rodopi. Marieke Schilling, for her part, has provided her constant guidance throughout the process. And my thanks to my family, who most naturally and generously share their time with me in changing spaces.

Border Dynamics: From Terminus to Terminator Ana Mª Manzanas Let me start with a story from a Spanish newspaper: Every night, Fortuna García performs a transgression of sorts. She sings a lullaby to her daughter Carmen when her six-year-old goes to sleep in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Fortuna lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland, as an illegal immigrant, and she has not seen her daughter since she left Bolivia three years ago. Yet, each night, thanks to a phone card, she sings to Carmen till the girl falls asleep (Naím 2005). How many Fortuna Garcías, I wonder, are out there, lulling children to sleep in other countries and continents? How many lullabies dart across the night sky? Do voices get effectively “illegal” at some stage of their trajectories? Circulating in the mesh of wires between the two countries, the lullaby traverses the lines Fortuna García is not allowed to crisscross. The lullaby relaxes vigilance between temporal opposites, day and night, vigil and sleep, as it crosses spatial discontinuities between countries and continents. Fortunately, the lullaby does not care for boundaries and stop signs between mother and daughter. And the stop signs are ever growing, from the projected “iron curtain” that will separate Mexico from the United States, to the tri-dimensional wall that will divide Morocco from Ceuta and Melilla, the two Spanish autonomous cities in North Africa. This collection of articles stems precisely from the impulse to inquire into those aural and written texts that travel across borders and boundaries in visible and invisible reticulations. It also responds, in part, to John W. House’s claim that there is an urgent need both for empirical and comparative studies on border situations (in Baud and Van Schendel 1997: 212). Yet questions arise as to the possiblity of establishing this comparative field: What constitutes a border situation? How translatable and “portable” is “the border”? What are the borders of words surrounding the border? In its five sections, Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line intends to

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address these issues as it brings together visions of border dynamics from both ends of the Atlantic Ocean without losing sight of the specificity of each crossing. The volume opens with Part I: (B)orders and Lines: A Theoretical Intervention, where Ana Mª Manzanas explores the circle and the cross as spatial configurations of two contradictory urges, to separate and divide on the one hand, and to welcome and allow passage on the other. Manzanas actualizes this initial dialectics to argue that walls do not terminate communication, as Robert Frost argues in “Mending Wall” through his evocation of Terminus, the Roman god of limits. Walls and separations, rather, respond to a logic of ambiguity that allows two-way transit, as Frank Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,” Karen T. Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, and Helena Maria Viramontes’s “Neighbors” illustrate. Part II: Visions of the U.S.-Mexican Border zooms in onto the Mexican-United States border as it delves into the border transits between the two neighboring countries. José Pablo Villalobos’s “Up against the Border: A Literary Response” illustrates the stigmatization of the Mexican-US border in a variety of cultural representations ranging from Orson Welles’s classic Touch of Evil to Manu Chao’s “Welcome to Tijuana.” If the border has become the site of the abject, Villalobos counters the power of these images with what he terms “a border of representation” that draws from a concrete reality “where the private realm asserts itself.” For that purpose, the critic offers examples taken from both sides of the border, from Mexican writers such as Rafa Saavedra and Gabriel Trujillo, as well as Chicano writers such as Luis Alberto Urrea and Alberto Ríos. Édgar Cota-Torres’s “Dispelling the Border Myth: Zonkey Writers and the Black Legend” further exemplifies the negative vision of the Mexican-US border from both the vintage point of Mexico and the United States. The response to these colonizing visions, in Cota-Torres’s view, is the zonkey, the hybrid image of the border, and also the mask that is central to the resistance strategies that Cota-Torres terms “Revolutionary Zonkenism.” Javier Durán’s article, “Border Voices: Life Writings and Self-Representation of the U.S.-Mexico Frontera” can be considered as yet another literary response to the barbed wire that surrounds and conceptualizes the border region. If in “A Berlin Chronicle” Walter Benjamin wrote that he had played for years with “the idea of setting out the sphere of life—bios—graphically on a map” (1986: 5), it is possible to argue that this “topographical

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consciousness” is at the core of Alberto Ríos’s Capirotada: A Nogales M e m o i r . Ríos’s work, Javier Durán argues, is an example of “autotopography,” where space, as well as a person’s integral objects, become autobiographical matter. The “I” in Ríos’s autobiography is constructed through the spatial memories of the border, through cultural and culinary interconnections, and photographs, the props or pre-texts that set the scene for recollection. So, in the midst of these múltiple representations, the question still remains as to what the border is and how to represent it. In “Postcards from the Border: In Tijuana, Revolución is an Avenue” Santiago Vaquera welcomes the reader with three kinds of representations, a tourist postcard, an aural postcard, and a narrative postcard to argue that there is no conception of a total Tijuana; for Tijuana is a wandering city, an outpost of the Middle World that is constantly reinventing itself. But what happens when we situate the border on the cultural terrain? How well does the border travel? Part III: Cultural Intersections expands the border encounter as it deals with the different ways in which texts are encoded, registered, appropriated, mimed and transformed in other cultural texts. These literary palimpsests reflect and refract previous texts as they create a cultural liminality—a borderland—of mutual exchanges. Isabel Soto’s “‘To Hear Another Language’: Lifting the Veil between Langston Hughes and Federico García Lorca” illustrates the transcultural signifying in Hughes’s 1938 poem “August 19th,” which revises Lorca’s “Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.” Isabel Durán’s “The Brown/Mestiza Metaphor, or the Impertinence against Borders” proposes another lifting of the veil between two Chicano writers, Richard Rodriguez and Gloria Anzaldúa. Durán shows how Rodriguez’s formulation of a brown America stands close to Anzaldúa’s vision of la mestiza. Both writers, Durán argues, express their representation of identity in relation to the abject, to what in Kristeva’s words “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.” The abject thus becomes the “inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite,” and also the impure, the way out of traditional dyads. And if veils are to be lifted, Begoña Simal offers a reevaluation of Cristina Mena’s writings in ‘“A Wall of Barbed Lies’: Absent Borders in María Cristina Mena’s Short Fiction.” Simal traces the (absent) presence of the border in the writer’s supposedly “insignificant” stories. For even if Mena does not

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make use of the direct confrontational strategies of the corrido paradigm, she resorts to tricksterism and double voicing in order to transplant the border between natives and visitors to the cultural arena. In her analysis, Simal demonstrates that Mena was writing with a vision of the borderlands before it became a popular theoretical methodology. Part IV: Trans-Nations addresses instances of trans-American relations stemming from experiences of up-rooting and intercultural contacts in the context of mass-migration and migratory flows. Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger opens the section with a discussion of migrant consciousness in “Ethnographies of Transnational Migration in Rubén Martínez’s Crossing Over (2001).” Oliver-Rotger applies James Clifford’s critique to Martínez’s ethnographic practices and addresses the identitary changes taking place in the native community where prospective migrants live. Martínez initiates us into what OliverRotger calls “school of migration” as he describes a community “dwelling-in-traveling and traveling-in-dwelling,” and disrupts the hierarchy of narratives that has traditionally legitimated some and stigmatized others. Whilst Oliver-Rotger concentrates on the border between Mexico and the United States, in “Mapping the Trans/Hispanic Atlantic: Nuyol, Miami, Tenerife, Tangier” Manuel Martín-Rodríguez focuses on another insterstitial zone, the Atlantic Ocean, and the chronotope of the vessel. Focusing on Nuyol, Miami, Tenerife and Tangier as spatial demarcations, the critic fleshes out a different spatiality, a trans-state that is not affiliated to space or tradition, but to a perpetual flux, and a trans-identity that is a radical configuration of José Martí’s notion of “Nuestra América.” Nuyol, Miami, Tenerife and Tangier are, in Manuel Martín-Rodríguez’s argument, beacons of deterritorialization for the remapped space that he calls trans-Hispanic. Part V: Trans-Lations deals with the ways in which the cultural borderlands suffuse other discourses and cultural practices. África Vidal’s “Resisting through Hyphenation: The Ethics of Translating (Im)pure Texts” deals with this trans-Hispanic space in the linguistic arena, as she analyses the role of the translator of hybrid texts. For Vidal translation stands as a critical provocation that intends to open a borderland in the movement from one language to another. When we translate, she claims, we travel, we migrate, and the act of translation opens a borderland of experience that has a subversive potential. And

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what happens, Ángel Mateos-Aparicio wonders, when we project the issue of mestizaje onto a new mestiza/o, the cyborg? In “Trespassers of Body Boundaries: The Cyborg and the Construction of a Postgendered Posthuman Identity” the critic retakes Anzaldúa’s hybrid progeny, “a mutable, more malleable species,” and assesses its subversive potential in the Terminator series. If the new mestiza lives astride two cultures, Mateos-Aparicio delves into the new mestizo, the cyborg, as the crosser of cultures and body boundaries. The cyborg, from this perspective, would be the post-human mestizo/a, the border trespasser and the borderland inhabitant, whose resistance to any reductive thinking destabilizes the very bases of binary thinking. If the volume begins with Terminus, the Roman god of limits, it ends with Terminator and the sets of contradictory cultural and ideological messages it/he impersonates. As readers, we move from gods to half-humans, from Terminalia—the festival that marked the end of the Roman year—, to apparently “terminal” and Apocalyptic visions of the end of the world. Yet Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line does not “terminate” but opens a middle terrain, a spatial and narrative palimpsest where words and influences cross physical and invisible lines.

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Part I: (B)orders and Lines: A Theoretical Intervention

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Circles and Crosses: Reconsidering Lines of Demarcation1 Ana Mª Manzanas This essay explores the circle and the cross as spatial configurations of two contradictory urges, to separate and divide on the one hand, and to welcome and allow passage on the other. The discussion reconsiders the dialectics circle/wallcross from a variety of theoretical perspectives ranging from Gilbert Durand’s to Foucault’s, Lefrebvre’s, de Certeau’s and Derrida’s. Manzanas actualizes this initial dialectics to argue that walls do not terminate communication, as Robert Frost illustrates in “Mending Wall” through his evocation of Terminus, the Roman god of limits. Walls and separations, rather, respond to a logic of ambiguity that allows a two-way transit, as Frank Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,” Karen T. Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, and Helena Maria Viramontes’s “Neighbors” illustrate

The border—the magic curtain—is the beginning of one sort of life, the ending of another. It is a hard line to walk, a difficult stage to travel. It remains a meeting ground, but often of conflict and of footloose cultural contact. Thomas Torrans The Magic Curtain Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall, the Berlin Wall, the Wailing Wall, the Walls of Jericho, the Wall: It is as if History hypostasizes itself in a string of walls across time, as if it entertains a Pharaonic fantasy of permanence, as if it would stop itself, once and for all. As if it might halt the perpetual retreat that defines it. Katherine Kearns, Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and Feminist Theory What are these goddamn lines anyway? What do they connect? What do they divide? Yamashita, Tropic of Orange By definition, one always makes very little [peu de cas] of a border. Derrida. Aporias

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I: The Circle and the Cross The earliest pictorial sign for “city” in Egyptian writing systems consisted of a cross enclosed in a circle (Soja 2000: 62). The cross represented the convergence of roads and opposites, as well as the two major principles of life and fertility, namely the vertical male and horizontal female; the circle, a wall or a moat, marked the space within which the citizens cohere, and the space beyond which they need protection (Lehan 1998: 13).2 A similar dialectics obtains on the domestic sphere through the Hestia/Hermes pair. If Hestia symbolizes “the circular hearth placed in the centre of the house, the closed space of the group withdrawn into itself,” Hermes, as god of the threshold and the door, but also of crossroads and town gates, “represents movement and relations with others” (Augé 1992: 58). Like the house, the city is the site of two contradictory urges, the conjunction, the intersection and the mixing of directions implied in the cross, and the countering wall, the protection against difference and the outside. As a dividing structure the wall marks the opposition between the “inhabited territory and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it” (Eliade 1959: 29-30). The former stands as “the world” and everything outside it is some kind of “other world” or non-world; on one side there is a cosmos, on the other a chaos (Eliade 1959: 2930) that shares in the fluid and larval modality of the non-being. Yet the question is what are the chances of mixing both worlds? How do the world and the non-world relate to each other? What are the exchanges and the limits to interconnections?3 The circle and the cross, two spatial representations that relate to roots and routes, become the dialectical terms to understand collective life and travel. Yet what impulse came first? It is traditionally held, as James Clifford expresses it, that “roots always precede routes,” which in spatial terms could be translated into circles antedating crossings. Yet, it is possible to question, as Clifford does in Routes, whether the opposite might be true, that is, whether the cross—and hence routes—might be constitutive of cultural meaning, and whether circles and crosses, roots and routes might be intricately connected; put another way, whether living and leaving,4 two words that are so hard to distinguish by non-native speakers of English, might be actually part of the same dynamic relationship. The purpose of this article is

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precisely to reconsider and actualize the circle/wall-cross from a variety of theoretical perspectives ranging from Gilbert Durand’s to Foucault’s, Lefrebvre’s, de Certeau’s and Derrida’s. The article resituates the dyad within traditional anthropological structures and provides a deconstructive slant to the notion of the border before it applies the “impossible” ritual of the circle/wall to Frank Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,” the opening of Karen T. Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, and Helena Maria Viramontes’s “Neighbors.” With its spectacular and ascending coordinates, the wall visually points to schizomorphic structures, that is, to division and separation (Durand 2004: 196). In its verticality, it seems possible to argue that the wall belongs to the sets of images that Gilbert Durand clusters under “the diurnal regime of representation.”5 The diurnal regime is loaded with vertical figurations and diairetic semantics, and is illustrated by the archetypes of the scepter and the sword (2004: 194). As a representation of the vertical axis, the wall/fence stands as a crucible of power and phallicism. With the symbolic power invested upon them, walls and fences effect a partition in the imaginary horizon, and in so doing signal a will to separate and promote discontinuity between spaces and concepts. The wall, to follow Durand’s argument, becomes one manifestation of contemporary rituals of cutting and severing (2004: 175, 176). This cleaving is carried out on several levels. If the wall/fence visually partitions landscape, its verticality is inextricably associated with “axiomatic metaphors,” that is, with conceptual separations. The wall cuts, distinguishes, purifies, and contributes to the creation of what Durand terms “a metaphysics of the pure” (2004: 184) versus alien exteriorities and contaminated “Others.” Since one initially ascends in order to have the faculty of seeing, and hence separating and discerning more easily, the wall, as a dividing structure, becomes inextricably linked to what Durand qualifies as the “regime of antithesis” (2004: 185), to the order of separation and dichotomy. In Durand’s categorization of the diurnal and the nocturnal regimes of the image, the wall, as a schizomorphic construction, would naturally pertain to the diurnal regime, to the rational, to the solid and the rigid; the fluid, the elusive and the intuitive naturally escape it (Durand drawing from Minkowski 2004: 190). As a cutting structure, the wall conveys the obsessive preoccupation for distinguishing, for mapping space according to what Durand terms a “morbid geometrics” that

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erases time in favor of a spatialized and divided present (2004: 192, 193). This is the conceptual dynamics that Durand terms “the sword syndrome” (2004: 190), which we can rephrase as the “wall syndrome.” If cutting constructions such as the wall are defined by antithetic structures, the vocation to join together and attenuate differences is constitutive of what Durand calls “the nocturnal regime,” and the concept of “antiphrasis” (2004: 281). The usage of antiphrasis is linked to the refusal to stop, limit, separate, and be partitioned and severed (2004: 287). Yet both antiphrasis and antithesis are present in the wall. For if visible boundaries, such as walls or enclosures in general, give rise “to an appearance of separation between spaces” what exists, in fact, “is an ambiguous continuity” (Lefebvre 1991: 87). This continuity is predicated on the notion of convenientia and the relations of similitude stemming from spatial proximity. As Foucault argues in his systematization of similitude in The Order of Things, convenientia explains the affinities existing between and among adjacent elements. “Those things,” writes Foucault, “are ‘convenient’ which come sufficiently close to one another to be in juxtaposition” (1970: 20).6 Significantly, location becomes an intimate feature of identity and thus of the similitude between and among neighboring things; for, as Foucault explains, “their edges touch, their fringes intermingle, the extremity of the one also denotes the beginning of the other. In this way, movement, influences, passions, and properties too, are communicated. So that in this hinge between two things a resemblance appears” (1970: 20). Convenientia thus suppresses the fine shizomorphic line that presumably separates distinct identities in order to establish a broader contact zone. Instead of a boundary or partition, Foucault introduces the hinge or threshold, that is, a porous border that both separates and communicates. Foucault’s argument is relevant in that it establishes adjacency as a relation that is “the sign of a relationship, obscure though it may be” (1970: 20). Contact between and among things produces exchanges that, in turn, generate new resemblances. This natural contiguity of spaces between the outside and the inside is an indication that lines and divisions do not necessarily spring up from nature, from a territory with natural borders that evolves into maturity. In their verticality, walls and fences are the spatial expression of potentially violent power. And it is the assertion of this kind of power that is behind the artificial borders of a

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specific imagined community (cf. Lefebvre 1991: 98). This power is further predicated on the image of vertical indivisibility the border represents and reinstates. As Jacques Derrida points out, the customs, the police, the visa or passport, like the traveler’s identification, are based upon that initial premise of an indivisible line. This notion of indivisibility has two fronts, and is applicable to the peoples the border circumvents and protects, and to the line itself. As to the first stance, it is useful to recall the slippage between verticality and vertebration Bachelard has pointed out (in Durand 2004: 146). The linking of both concepts suggests that the border/fence provides the backbone of a community, as well as the metaphysics of purity that allows national or communal definition. As to the second part of the argument, it is useful to remembert that built into the fantasy of stoppage is its opposite (Kearns 1997: 1). The line itself is threatened on its double face, for the indivisibility of the line is undermined from its very tracing. The physical line, the cutting across, cannot exist but encapsulated within two ends and two sides. The border divides itself from within, fragments itself, and establishes within itself a difference within identity, an “Other” within the self, an alterity within sameness that compromises its presumed indivisibility (Derrida 1993: 11). The arrogant verticality and alleged indivisibility of walls cannot deter the different from penetrating the artificial boundary. Lehan explains that As the city was transformed according to its change of function, the center became more complex as both work and the population became diversified. Such diversity led inevitably to the ‘Other’—an urban element, usually a minority, deemed ‘outside’ the community. But in mythic-symbolic terms, an embodiment of the Other is the mysterious man from nowhere, who disrupts the city from within. (1998: 8)

As described in Lehan’s terms, the “Other” trespasses the circle surrounding the city, and accesses the cross within it. If the cross-ing is carried out within the limits of the circle, it is sanctioned as valid and productive. When it implies a “barbarian” or a foreigner, the exchange acquires a negative valence and is considered disruptive. Yet it is the presence of this “Other” that activates the conjunction implicit in the crossing, and situates the cross and the circle in a dynamic relationship: The cross-ing is only possible if the boundary ceases to be so and behaves more like a permeable membrane in a

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living organism; or like a layer of tissue that “punctured by pores and orifices … allows traffic back and forth” (Lefebvre 1991: 176). II: Neighbors, Mending Walls, and Impossible Walls Strictly from a cost-benefit analysis, instead of a manned blockade by the Border Patrol, we should build a tall, solid wall along the border, like the famous wall of China or the former Berlin wall … We can build it even cheaper and more cost effective by employing foreign labor, like we did with the bracero program. … This way we don’t have to pay Social Security, unemployment workers compensation. The wall should be Bhutanese style to match the University. Maybe it can become a tourist attraction. In two hundred years or whatever the time it takes us to find a solution to the illegal immigrant problem we can break the wall down and sell its pieces all over the world as the final triumph of open borders and the good-faith effort to engage in free trade. I can see it. This wall put El Paso on the world map—the Great Wall of El Paso. Bruno G. Romero. El Paso Times, October 12, 1993 The Great Wall of China was many walls—border fortifications built, ruined, rebuilt by different dynasties over nearly two thousand years. At times ‘China’ was defined against the north by wall-building, at other moments by commerce and diplomacy. The wall came and went. Its last and most spectacular version, constructed by the Ming in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was probably financed, in significant degree, by Peruvian silver. As much as a fifth of the production of the New World’s mines was shipped by galleon to Manila, where Chinese merchants traded luxury goods. Borders close and open, selectively. The Great Wall is a monument to failure: Ming inability to manage relations in a changing frontier zone. A twothousand-mile wall could not preserve them; the Manchus swept in. James Clifford Routes Leí, días pasados, que el hombre que ordenó la edificación de la casi infinita muralla china fue aquel primer emperador, Shih Huang Ti, que asimismo dispuso que se quemaran todos los libros anteriores a él. Jorge Luis Borges, “La muralla y los libros”

“The Great Wall of El Paso,”7 an oxymoronic construction yoking together wall and gate, is Bruno G. Romero’s modest proposal to construct a definitely terminated partition. The edifice elicits the visions of verticality, of phallocentric power and indivisibility, even if it ironically incorporates “the Other” in the very formulation and construction of the structure. Yet reading Romero’s proposal in the

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light of Clifford’s description allows us to see the monumental fence not as a potential monument to vertebration and separation, but to failure. The building of the wall, we learn from Borges, was accompanied by the burning of all books of history. Those who tried to protect the condemned volumes from the historical pyre were branded with a burning iron, and sentenced to build the wall till they died. If the wall marks the desire to reinvent and control geopolitical space (Palumbo-Liu 2003: 250), the destruction of the books reveals the desperate desire for a new beginning; a literal dead-line that imposes a ring of silence on the past. Both, the wall and the pyre, seek to control and restrain the spatial and the temporal axes. Significantly, Romero’s proposal has been approved by the Senate of the United States, which has voted overwhelmingly to extend the fence along the border with Mexico. The measure calls for an additional 370 miles of fencing and 500 miles of vehicle barriers. The Senate fence measure was embodied in an amendment offered by a Senator who invoked Robert Frost’s well-known poem. “Good fences make good neighbors,” he said, as he added his own interpretation: “Fences don’t make bad neighbors” (Hulse and Rutenberg 2006). Inevitably, the syntactic structure of Frost’s verse has been perverted in the rewriting, yet, much more has been lost in this abridged version. In a way, the senator performs his peculiar poetic pyre as he silences the complexities of “Mending Wall.” At the same time, the macaronic adaptation confirms that the poem inevitably resounds and echoes in any discussion of wall/border dynamics, perhaps because the action of mending is set in the present continuous—a stretched tense which immediately implicates the reader; also because the mending is never done with, never terminated either in the narrative plot of the poem or in the “impossible walls” it refracts and reflects. The wall in Frost’s poem, to appropriate Derrida’s vision of the border, dissociates itself, divides itself from within, fragments itself into identity and difference. Like any line or demarcation, it connects and divides in a single pulsation. This bifurcated tongue is explicit at the beginning and the end of the poem. If the narrative voice starts with “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” the neighbor will round off the poem with “Good fences make good neighbors.” According to George Montiero (1988: 126), this piece of popular wisdom can be traced to the Spanish “Una pared entre dos vezinos

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guarda mas (haze durar) la amistad,” a saying that goes back to the Middle Ages, and was translated by Vicesimus Knox for his compendium of Elegant Extracts in 1797. For his part, Jeffrey S. Cramer argues that the phrase is proverbial, and is found in the 1850 edition of Blum’s Farmer and Planter’s Almanac of Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1996: 31). Robert Frost might have encountered it in Emerson’s published journals. Repeated twice in “Mending Wall,” the phrase acts as the counterpart to the opening of the poem. Two pieces of wisdom thus encircle the poem within a wall of contradictory words. Like the fence or border, Frost’s poem speaks with a double voice. In between the two verbal constructions, Frost manages to “trip the reader foremost into the boundless” (Montiero quoting Frost 1988: 126); into a space where there are no markers or delimitations, where the wall is and is not the telos, the extreme, the finis, but rather the term where neighbors meet. In a 1944 interview Frost said that there was “no rigid separation between right and wrong.” This ambiguity permeates other Frost’s statements, such as: “I play exactly fair in it,” and “Twice I say ‘Good fences’ and twice ‘Something there is’” (Cramer 1996: 30). Frost, we might assume, was “on both sides of his poem’s wall” (Marcus 1991: 42). The poet celebrates the eternally mending wall rather than mended wall; that is, it presents the separation that “refuses to stay put, with its capitulating stones like balls, like loaves, and … also refuses to give up being a wall” (Kearns 1997: 2). Frost, for Kearns, makes it clear that it is good and necessary to rebuild the falling wall, but that it is only the safe, the beautiful, and the eternally frustrating fact of its inevitable capitulations that makes the gesture meaningful. With every Sisyphus-like attempt to raise a stone back to the top, the cycle begins again (1997: 3) And there are, in fact, no clear-cut divisions in the poem, nor a distinctive and univocal vision and voice of the wall. If the mending ritual restores the boulders to the dividing structure, it also restores neighborly balance through communication: I let my neighbor know beyond the hill, And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go.

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Montiero has rightly argued that the repetition of between is revealing and speaks of two simultaneous meanings: “between” as in separation, but also “between” as what is shared and held in common. The ritual of “mending” is therefore counterbalanced by the ritual of a natural and almost providential “unmending.” The wall/partition thus communicates and separates. The concept of the separating wall thus fissures itself; it brings together neighbors but also past and present, a temporal limen that establishes a zone of intersections. The narrative voice moves back in time to describe the neighbor as “bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top/In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed./He moves in darkness as it seems to me …” This temporal darkness the neighbor moves back into links him to ancient practices and traditions predating the Romans (Montiero 1988: 129). Like the Romans, this alleged savage, past-ridden neighbor is engaged in honoring the god of boundaries and protector of limits, Terminus. Although not invented by the Romans, Terminus became one of their paramount deities. Every year, on the 23rd of February during the festival of the Terminalia, Terminus, represented by a stone or post, was honored in a ritual that not only reaffirmed boundaries—stones or posts—but also provided the occasion for celebrating traditional festivities among neighbors. Interestingly and paradoxically, the boundary facilitated the crossing and exchange. Thus, Montiero explains, the neighbors on either side of any boundary gathered around the landmark with all their families and crowned the stone, each on his own side, with garlands. Sacrifices were also offered (1988: 129). That Frost includes Terminus into the sets of conjunctions and intersections the poem sets up is revealing. The poem reinscribes Terminus within a different context and meaning. To the initial spatial connotation of Terminus as post or landmark, the poem invests the term with a temporal valence: Terminus as extreme, as finis, as the line that stops and limits.8 In the temporal conjunction of the poem, the past is not terminated, but continues in the process suggested by the progressive tense. Similarly, stones and boundaries do not totally delimit and dead-end communication between the two neighbors; they are part of a mending or “cutting ritual” but also of a (un)mending that does not “terminate.” Rather, they are reworked into new terms, into the in-betweeness of the poem itself. The wall in the poem, like the

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Terminalia it rewrites, has a mediating role, for it both creates communication and separation. Another eloquent example of the double role of the vertical wall is Franz Fafka’s “The Great Wall of China,”9 where the narrator refers to the process of the construction of the gigantic stone border that surrounds the country. If in our imaginary the Wall stands as one of the marvels of the world, a qualitative and exponential transformation of the plain defensive wall, Kafka’s narrator challenges the reader’s expectations as he emphasizes its incompleteness. The Wall, to return to Frost’s poem, is not terminated in spatial or temporal terms. The monumentality of the Wall as an imposing and durable edifice and partition that apparently escapes time seems to be designed to assuage anxieties as to what lies beyond. The edifice is, from this perspective, a monument that replaces fears with the certitude that power—the power the Wall is an expression of—, can conquer violence and terror towards the unknown, towards difference (cf. Lefebvre 1991: 222), towards whatever fluid chaos and non-world lies beyond its gates. As a partition, it severs and separates, and becomes the active agent in a ritual of cutting, of assessing and distinguishing between us and them. Yet the impressive verticality of the Wall, we read, collides with the principle of piece-meal construction, whereby gangs of men accomplish a length, only to be transferred to different neighborhoods. This way, the narrator asserts, “many great gaps were left” (1999: 235). The idea of the solid Wall is thus replaced by an unfinished construction, by a net full of holes. These gaps were gradually filled in, often not until after the official announcement that the Wall was finished, the narrator clarifies. Kafka’s text thus posits the reasonable thesis that the Wall was never completed, thus negating its own status as impenetrable separation, and recasting the issue of the nature of the border in quite different terms. The narrator’s query “But how can a wall protect if it is not a continuous structure?” prompts other questions such as: When is a wall completed—if it can ever be completed? How can the power it is an expression of be maintained if based on fragmentation? And how can a wall succeed in establishing a regime of antithesis? If it was universally proclaimed, according to the narrator, that the Wall—like the circle in early ideogram—was “to be a protection against the peoples of the North,” then the problem is not only that such a wall can never protect, but also that it creates a breach in the ring of protection it was supposed to provide (1999: 235). The

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alleged inextricable link between verticality and vertebration of national identity thus inevitably collapses. Further, the fear of disintegration given the precarious state of the Wall is obvious, for, as the narrator assures the reader, the nomads could actually pull down the blocks left standing in deserted regions. The nomads thus represent an added danger, for they keep changing their encampment, and signify, by definition, the mobility the Wall—as a morbid geometry—encapsulates. In the story, the nomadic stands as the absolute “Other,” the negation of any stable morphology—be it a wall or a city. From this perspective, the nomads, like ghosts, demons, or foreigners are the inhabitants of the nonworld, hence the efforts throughout history to control and contain real or legendary nomadic communities such as the gypsies or the Jews (Delgado 2003: 125); hence contemporary efforts at policing migratory flows with the most advanced military devices. The primary purpose of the Wall in Kafka’s narration, as in any fence or partition, is precisely that of protection against mobility and disintegration: “Unity! Unity! Shoulder to shoulder, a ring of brothers, a current of blood no longer confined within the narrow circulation of one body” (1999: 238). The material and ideological protection the Wall provides is echoed in the ring, the perfect continuous structure that guarantees equality and continuity in brotherhood. And yet, if the Wall was to unify ring-like, this general principle contradicts the fact that the construction crews are immediately transferred once they have completed a given length. Paradoxically, the Wall creates nomads within, keeping masons constantly on the move as they wonder why they invariably have to leave their homes and families behind (1999: 241). To these processes of outer and inner disintegration, the narrator adds another major breach in the working process itself. The piecemeal construction, ineffectual as it was, was expressly ordained by what the narrator designates as the top ranks of power, “the high command.” But then the question is how to account for such a faulty, unreasonable decree that divides and separates the alleged “ring” the Wall was supposed to sustain. The narrator offers some cautionary advice: “Try with all your might to comprehend the decrees of the high command, but only up to a certain point; then avoid further meditation” (1999: 240). Paradoxically, the structure of the reasoning is designed to delimit and separate the high command from the rest of

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mortals, thus creating a chasm or partition within the brotherhood and the presumed homogeneity the Wall was supposed to create. A divided reasoning thus dismantles the principle of unity. Further contradiction is found if we examine the peoples the Wall was supposed to defend against: “Against the people of the north” (1999: 241) runs the official answer. Yet the narrator deconstructs the threat posed by this anonymous enemy: “Unwitting peoples of the north, who imagined they were the cause of it!” (1999: 242), we read. Thus the narrator builds the basis for the paradox underlying and undermining the Wall, which has become more of a threshold or membrane against the outside, and a solid border against the inside. Moreover, there are concentric lines walling the vastness of the land. The emperor himself, we learn, “is always surrounded by a brilliant and yet ambiguous throng of nobles and courtiers … who form a counterweight to the imperial power” (1999: 243). This courtly line efficaciously separates the ruler from his people, who will never know of his struggles and sufferings. The parable of the imperial message that is never delivered by the messenger is a paradigmatic example of narrative retardation. This act of disrupting what was initially thought of as immediate communication is an instance of “phasing,” to use Manuel Aguirre’s term. For this critic phasing has a “prismatic” function that diffracts events into a number of significant moments which have as a result a multiplication of thresholds (2006: 19, 23). Phasing adds a series of inner lines that disrupt the perfect ring the Wall was supposed to create. The crossing within the Wall is therefore co-opted and cancelled out within a lined community. This fallible ring of protection is described in domestic terms in Karen Tey Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange. Rafaela Cortés, house-sitting in Mexico for American journalist Gabriel Balboa, performs the morning ritual of sweeping the house, and examines the “small pile of assorted insects and tiny animals” (1997: 3) that every night carry out a trespassing of sorts. “There was no explanation for it,” Rafaela admits to herself, and “It made no difference if she closed the doors and shutters at the first sign of dusk or if she left the house unoccupied and tightly shut for several nights” (1997: 3-4). To the tiny insects, she adds more voluminous trespassers such as hummingbirds and parakeets. Yamashita situates within the well protected home the daily crossing of the undesired. This “illegal” yet

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natural crossing on the domestic premises of the house is applicable to the limits of the nation itself. Just as a closed locale, Yamashita suggests, the nation can be perfectly shut behind a tall solid wall along the border, like the one Bruno Romero “modestly” proposes, and still receive the assorted trespassers the next morning. Significantly, the fencing—the outer circle protecting Gabriel’s property—had witnessed a similar trespassing. Some cows had tramped over a fallen post and into Gabriel’s garden. For the cows, as natural trespassers, do not observe artificial barriers protecting fenced-in gardens. And this stubborn continuity between the inside and the outside, between the static and the nomad, between the self and the “Other” makes the fixing of the fence an impossible task. Like the Great Wall in Kafka’s story, the fence protecting Gabriel’s property cannot be finished/terminated. Even if a skilled and respected worker such as Rodriguez labors on it day after day, he feels he cannot finish the fence and runs off in agitation. The questions posed by Kafka’s narrator echo in Yamashita’s text: How can a wall protect if it is not a continuous structure? When is a wall completed? Can it ever be completed? To this chronic incompleteness, we have to add another disturbing aspect about the fence. Walls and separations, Henri Lefebvre argues, are meant to exhibit an arrogant verticality which introduces a phallic or phallocratic element into the visual realm; the aim of this need to impress “is to convey an impression of authority to each spectator,” given the fact that “verticality and great height have ever been the spatial expression of potentially violent power” (1991: 98). Yet the fence around Gabriel’s property does not intimidate, and hence cannot perform a ritual of cutting; for apart from its incompleteness, it seems to have a bulge, as Rafaela realizes when she looks at it through the curtain of rain: “She was not sure, but the fence was somehow curved, or maybe even longer, or stretched. That was it. The fence stretched south in a funny way, like those concave mirrors in drug stores and 4-11s in the States” (1997: 70). Yamashita counters the phallic vision of the fence with a curve, a feminine ideogram that collapses the intimidating power invested in its verticality. The reparation of the fence becomes an impossible task—never to be completed because of its very variable nature. It cannot be mended—in the sense of being repaired—, but it cannot be fixed either because of its changeable outlook and nature. For when Rodríguez returns to the wall in Arcangel’s company he sees that it is

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totally straight. Like the Great Wall in the Kafka piece, the fence oscillates between completion and incompletion; or rather it is always in the process of being completed but also transgressed—Rafaela and Rodríguez witness how a serpent manages to find its way through it. Further, the fence is never finished—cannot be terminated—for it exhibits a visual and ontological elasticity that accompanies the characters for miles. As Rafaela gets on the bus to the border, she recognizes that not only Gabriel’s land but also the unfinished wall stretched and slid along, never leaving the bus to its northern destination. The wall is mobile and unfinished, and, like the Great Wall, fails in its role to create a power-invested line designed to separate us from them. In these literary examples the wall/fence/partition becomes a threshold of unpredictable dynamics; for it lacks the ability to separate a legitimate space from what is deemed as an alien exteriority. As a formal and ideal structure that bestows abstract notions of identity and unity, domination and homogeneity, the unmended wall crumbles and leaves the inhabitants in limbo. Its paradoxical double nature is based precisely on the principle of convenientia as explored before: “[C]reated by contacts, the points of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points. Conjunction and disjunction are inseparable in them” (de Certeau 1984: 127). The wall or border is not the impenetrable ring of protection that creates a metaphysics of the pure, but the site of a constant crossing, of conjunction and disjunction. Following de Certeau’s reasoning and Frost’s representation of the wall, it is possible to argue that boundaries function as a “third element,” “a middle place, composed of interactions and inter-views, a sort of void, a narrative sym-bol of exchanges and encounters” (de Certeau 1984: 127). If we depart from the premise that the wall, like the frontier, is invested with what Louis Owens terms “a heavy burden of colonial discourse” that has crystallized in the American imaginary “as the meeting point between civilization and savagery” (1893: 545), to use Frederick Jackson Turner’s words, what we find in contemporary literary renditions is that the frontier/boundary is “conceived as a space of extreme contestation” (Owens 1998: 26). For, in Owens’s argument, the frontier is the zone of the trickster, “a shimmering, always changing zone of multifaceted contact within which every utterance is challenged and interrogated, all referents put into question” (1998:

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26), all values and signifiers crossed. The self becomes the “Other,” the “Other” becomes the self; phallic verticality turns into a curvaceous line; morbid rigidity turns into elasticity; the rituals of cutting turn into the rituals of unmending; Terminus is not terminated. Frost, Kafka, Yamashita and Owens resist the ideology of containment as implicit in the border, to emphasize its mediating role. As opposed to the more common “logic of the thin border” which cleaves nations and narratives along sharp edges (Arteaga 1997: 94), Frost, Kafka and Yamashita offer an example of what de Certeau terms a “logic of ambiguity” (1984: 128) that turns the wall into a “space in-between,” into a site of interactions between the inside and the outside. III: What Is the New Ideogram? Viramontes’s “Neighbors”—or the Lined City There are maps and there are maps and there are maps Karen T. Yamashita A rose is a rose is a rose Gertrude Stein

If the wall is not a wall, the question is what becomes of the crossing itself. Is it still a convergence of opposites or of complementary principles? Where is the cross in contemporary representations of space? Actual crossings collide with maps as spatial and national demarcations. As de Certeau has argued, there is a colonizing aspect to maps. For as “a totalizing stage” and representation of spatial relations, the map collapses elements of diverse origin onto the tableau of a “state” of geographical knowledge. Paradoxically, even if the map is the graphic representation of history, it also “pushes away into its prehistory or into its posterity … the operations of which it is the result or the necessary condition” (1984: 121). As part of a morbid geometrics the map erases time in favor of a spatialized present (Durand 2004: 193). So, as Manzanar Mukarami, a homeless character in Yamashita’s story sighs, there are maps and there are maps and there are maps. And the threefold repetition encompasses demarcations at three different levels: Some of the maps began within the very surface of the land, others encompassed all the political, class, cultural and linguistic demarcations in the city, with all the

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invisible but productive lines. Yet others reticulated the sky with a network of multiple maps and invisible world wide webs sent by a constellation of satellites, radio and electromagnetic waves dividing up a wide and endless sky. It is the on-line city. All in all, the threefold repetition provides the three-dimensional representation that is absent from the flat map. So there are maps; and the reiteration points at the difficulty of putting down all the layers and dimensions of the real map, or just the next map, as Buzzworm, another character in Yamashita’s novel, points out. What we find, then, is a reticulated space, an on-line city that has its material parallel on the lined city. One illustration of this lined city, a space striated by borders and divisions, is Viramontes’s “Neighbors.” In the story “walls separate the home and the street, stretches of highways fragment neighborhoods and tower above the poor urban neighborhoods of the vast barrio of East L.A., doors stand between distrustful neighbors” (Oliver-Rotger 2003: 226). And Viramontes provides this defensive spatiality right from the start of the narration: “Aura Rodríguez always stayed within her perimeters, both personal and otherwise, and expected the same of her neighbors” (1995: 109). There is no celebration of Terminalia in the story. Rather, Viramontes describes a “terminal” community in spatial and temporal terms. The neighbors in the story seem to have forgotten the first premise of Frost’s dialectical reasoning, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” and appear to adhere to the more static dictum “Good fences make Good neighbors.” Within the terms of that secure demarcation, “a tall wrought-iron fence,” Viramontes establishes a subtle balance between Aura and her neighbor Fierro, the only person she allows to sit on her porch. Through the pair Aura/Fierro, Viramontes posits a dialectics between the evanescent and the material, lightness and unbearable “heaviness,” the female and the male principles that converge on the cross. It can be argued that the Aura/Fierro dialectics stands as an illustration of the Hestia/Hermes dyad I referred to above. Aura’s defensive perimeter can be viewed as a revision of Hestia’s circular hearth, the closed space of the group withdrawn into itself. Fierro’s easiness to welcome the “Other,” as well as his lack of boundary markers between the past and the present, make him a descendant of Hermes as god of the threshold and the door, but also of crossroads and town gates. Like the

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Greek god, Fierro represents movement and relations with others, the conjunction Aura needs to control and police. Yet both opposites live side by side and intersect on Aura’s porch, a liminal space where the present mingles with the past as Fierro digs into his painful memories. Whatever lies outside Aura’s gate is of little importance to her. She may share the same physical space with the rest of the people on Bixby Street—the same streets and corner stores—but she is not on the same psychological geography; hers is a regime of antithesis. For Aura the barrio has become a residual space, a graveyard with people of her age dying off on the one hand, and with new actors who have had little knowledge of struggle on the other. These youngsters have replaced spatial practices with spatial occupation, and literally appropriate the street and throw empty beer cans into Aura’s yard. As they later inform Aura when she angrily asks them to go home, they are home. The youngsters have discarded the notion of a home as the site of individual dreams à la Bachelard for a communal form of voluntary homelessness. Home is nowhere yet it is everywhere. They have replaced familial ties for another set of associations, ganging together as they try to find temporary solace on power and the precarious demarcation of their territory. Within these sets of separations and boundaries between the self and the “Other,” between the past and the present, Viramontes introduces a new character, the disrupter of the dialectics, the alien who decisively enters Bixby Street. As described by the narrator, the newcomer appears as a figure of excess, whose mere presence trespasses on a well kept equilibrium: “The massive woman with a vacuous hole of a mouth entered Bixby street, a distinct scent accompanying her. She was barefooted and her feet, which were cracked, dirty, and encrusted with dry blood, were impossible to imagine once babysmall and soft” (1995: 109). In mythic-symbolic terms, the unnamed woman is an embodiment of the “Other”; she is the mysterious woman from nowhere, who is going to unbalance the delicately wrought domesticity of the Aura/Fierro pair from within. As an embodiment of the “Other” the woman trespasses the circle surrounding the home, and accesses the cross within it. For OliverRotger, “as depicted through Aura’s consciousness, the woman fits the racist stereotype of the dangerous, foreign illegal” (2003: 229). The woman stands as an unwelcome visitor; she is the homeless and

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nameless “Other” who has traversed undetermined distances, and carries her belongings in two soiled brown bags. Oliver-Rotger has rightly portrayed the woman as what Derrida would call an “absolute arrivant,” the kind of character that all of a sudden questions both Aura’s borders of identity as well as the perimeters of her home (2003: 232). As an arrivant she not only trespasses a threshold or border, but also changes the experience of the threshold itself (Derrida 1993: 33), from a schizomorphic structure to a porous membrane. Aura, who was sweeping her porch, stops to look at the woman and her confident sense of direction, and smiles. Yet, we read, her smile evaporates when the woman stops at her well-protected gate. It is tempting to compare Aura’s sweeping of her porch, that liminal space between the outside and the inside, with Rafaela Cortés and her daily ritual of sweeping the house as she examines the assortment of trespassers. Like Karen T. Yamashita, Viramontes situates within the circle of a watchful Hestia the daily crossing of the undesired. The unnamed woman becomes the ultimate example of a natural trespassing, the illegal, the unwanted, the unexpected, the non-self who appears at a well-guarded gate, and immediately questions the notion of the fence as a physical and conceptual partition. What characterizes the woman as arrivant is not that she crosses the gate between two identified places. She does not come from an identified country—she comes from the non-place bearing a non-identity. For, as Derrida explains, the absolute arrivant has no name or identity; s/he is not an invader or an occupier; s/he is not a colonizer either. S/he is not even a foreigner belonging to a foreign community (1993: 34). Interestingly, Derrida argues that the arrivant is not an intruder or invader, for invasion implies knowing the identity and origin of the aggressor. It is this absolute “Other” that Aura as Hestia halts at her gate. In so doing, Aura appears as the re-enforcer of the border within the community. For, as Pablo Vila argues, whenever we talk about the dismantling of the border, it is useful to think about a simultaneous process, that of strengthening the line between the self and the “Other” (2002: 9). What Viramontes illustrates, thus, is a border encounter between two women, separated by an active fence—should we call it a mended wall in a ritual of cutting? Aura assumes the role of the immigration official, the guardian of the gate who is endowed with the power to allow or refuse entry. Not surprisingly, the woman “becomes

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nervous under Aura’s scrutiny” (1995: 110). As if to prove her right of entry, “she began rummaging through her bags like one looking for proof of birth at a border crossing” (1995: 110). Only when she manages to produce what she was looking for, “the barely visible scribbling” of Fierro’s address, does Aura allow her entrance with a laconic “In the back.” Viramontes will never provide the identity of the character. She remains nameless, a transgressor and a trespasser. She is the ultimate “Other.” Yet within the perimeters of Aura’s fence, the unnamed woman causes an unprecedented commotion. Once she has entered the circular protection guarded by Aura, Fierro greets her at the threshold of his house. There is no delay and no need for papers to be shown this time. Rites of containment at Fierro’s threshold seem to be out of place, to Aura’s shock. If, according to Eliade, the threshold has its “guardians—gods and spirits who forbid entrance both to human enemies and to demons and the powers of pestilence” (1959: 25), Fierro allows her passage, and the woman enters “majestically” while a pigeon, as a natural guardian, welcomes her with its cooing (1995: 114). As days go by, Aura hears a faint music and watches the woman dancing in Fierro’s room. As a figure of excess the alien woman unleashes feelings that had been pent up behind the tight gates of Bixby Street: “Fierro was laughing. The laugh was an unfamiliar sound to Aura’s ears, as if a screw had loosened somewhere inside his body and began to rattle. But he continued to laugh a laugh that came from deep within and surfaced to express a genuine enjoyment of living” (1995: 117). If it was the nameless woman that disrupted the peace, and thus appeared as the alien, the “Other,” the illegal, it is now Aura that literally feels “like an intruder” (1995: 117), peering into an intimacy that excludes her behind her window blinds. Who is the self versus the “Other” in this rearrangement of roles? Who is the ultimate arrivant? Hard to say, for it is now Aura that feels like the alien, not only within the tight boundaries of her front yard, but also within the neighborhood. Deeply disturbed by the laughter and the loud music coming from the youngsters who laughed and drank and threw beer cans into her yard, she calls the police. Their arrival is described as the reinscription of other lines that divide and pitch the barrio. Not surprisingly, the police literally arrange themselves in “military formation, ready for combat” (1995: 115), positioning themselves at an invisible line that separates them from the enemy. The boys, in

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turn, are lined up, spreadeagled for the search. Only Toastie decides to break the line and seek sanctuary at Aura’s. Behind the door, Aura remains in her Hestia role. It is only days later, after being imprisoned by the rains, that she feels ready to do some gardening. Aura has to bite herself in disbelief as she witnesses another painful trespassing. Her garden was ruined, but more importantly—at least symbolically so—, the boys had sprayed her front porch with graffiti as if to demarcate their territory. She was reminded that her home came under a larger demarcation, “BIXBY BOYS RULE” (1995: 119). Her reaction is instinctive and immediate. She needs to reinforce her tight spatial perimeter—Hestia like: “She closed the door behind her, made sure all the locks were locked, unrolled the Venetian blinds, closed the drapes” (1995: 119), as she longs for her own dead-line: “I’m so glad I’m going to die soon” (1995: 119). Gun in hand, she poises herself as the guardian of the gate—whose role it is to check unwanted comers—, and readies herself to effect a ritual of cutting. The vertical figuration of the scepter or the sword is updated into the gun as a sign of division. Unlike Aura-Hestia, Fierro, like Hermes, impersonates the crossing and relations with others. Small wonder that when we meet him in the narration, on his way back from the Senior Citizen Center, he is at the “freeway on-ramp crossing,” ready to start the trek across the on-ramp while truckers and drivers honk impatiently. His yelling of “Cabrones” rather than “Bastards” implies a careful codeswitching—a language crossing that is lost on the aggressive drivers. Interestingly, Viramontes situates Fierro at the wrong crossing, at the kind of spatial juncture that has sanitized contact through ramps and lanes that never intersect. For the freeway contrasts the multi-level intersections (where no one crosses) versus the cross-roads. There is no real cross-ing at the highway, hence Fierro’s discomfort and his symbolic gesture of turning off his hearing aid. In Viramontes’s description, the freeway appears as an example of what Marc Augé terms “non-places.” If a place can be defined as “relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space that cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a nonplace” (1992: 78). The freeway stands as such a non-place, as a site that has cut off the ties with the past. Marc Augé’s analysis of nonplaces as the sites of supermodernity becomes in Viramontes’s writing the chronicle of a painful transit from place to non-place: “[Fierro]

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was suddenly amazed how things had changed and how easy it would be to forget that there were once quiet hills here, hills that he roamed until they were flattened into vacant lots where dirt paths became streets and houses became homes” (1995: 113). As if the flattening and destruction of wood houses was not enough, Fierro recalls, “huge pits were dug to make sure that no roots were left” (1995: 113). If roots connect with the notion of place as a site that can be defined in terms of relational or historical identity, the non-place requires total freedom from the past it needs to eradicate. And Viramontes provides a visual picture of the erasure: “The endless freeway paved over his sacred ruins, his secrets, his graves, his fertile soil in which all memories were seeded and waiting for the right time to flower, and he could do nothing” (1995: 113). Yet the concrete did not guarantee a hermetic non-place, and the traces of place as an indicator of identity remain. The question was how long could the place and the non-place coexist. How long would it take for the non-place to subsume the place as if the non-place was all there ever was? That was actually Fierro’s greatest fear, “that he would forget so much that he would not know whether it was like that in the first place, or whether he had made it up, or whether he had made it up so well the he began to believe it was true” (1995: 113). Poised on a temporal and spatial threshold, Fierro stands astride between the place and the non-place, the present and the past. One further illustration of this liminal position is Fierro’s relationship with the past and his dead son Chuy. It was the general consensus on Bixby that Fierro was “strangely touched” (1995: 111). And here the consensus broke, for if for some Bixby neighbors talking to a dead son was an indication of senility, others swore that he or she had seen Chuy sitting on Aura’s porch. Unable to establish rigid boundaries between the past and the present, Fierro is found talking to his dead son, whose presence and words are naturalized in the man’s daily rituals. Standing in front of the mirror, Fierro was “about to slap on some cologne when Chuy stopped him.” Once more, Viramontes places Fierro at a domestic crossing, the mirror, and its duplication of reality into infinite crossings and reflections. Chuy’s intervention can be placed at this visual and ontological refraction. It is direct, lacks preliminaries, and is presented without transition: “‘Can I do it?’” (1995: 120). Chuy’s words introduce another dimension in the commonly-known as real in the story. The past makes itself present

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without warning in the middle of a domestic scene that captures the children’s eagerness to perform the rituals of maleness. Yet the admiration is short-lived, and in a short dialogue Viramontes collapses Chuy’s admiring eyes into a defiant youngster ready to go “out” and run the streets. Chuy leaves and is killed in a street fight, not before taking a last look at his reflection in the mirror as he winks at his father. Thus Chuy is fixed at the crossroads between the past and the present, the real and the imagined, the tangible and the intangible, right at the liminal space where he can intervene and recede in and out of his father’s life. Fully immersed in Fierro’s intimacy, the alien woman brings the family scene to an end with her pounding on the door announcing breakfast was served. Her carefully articulated interruption brings Fierro back from the past with the aroma of fresh burritos. This intimacy, however, contrasts with the fact that the woman remains unknown, the unnamed “Other.” No matter how many times Fierro studied her face, “the crevices and creases, the moles and marks” in search of something that would deliver immediate recognition, he failed. Yet the woman is the only character who calls him by his name, Macario, that first name which no one on Bixby could remember. It is only when Macario Fierro is dying that he can finally name her in a flash of recognition which is drowned in silence and pain. Wailing from sorrow and disbelief, the woman runs out to find solace in Aura, the neighbor who admitted her into the domestic circle. But gun in hand, Aura is fulfilling her Hestia role as protector of the door. And as she heard running footsteps, she “held the gun high with both hands, squeezing, tightly squeezing it as she aimed at the door” (1995: 125). If Gregorio Cortez’s “with the pistol in his hand” marked Mexican American resistance against Anglo encroachment, Aura’s taking of the gun may well signify her “entrance into history” (Oliver-Rotger 2003: 231). Yet, I would like to qualify, it is a history of individual and misled resistance based on division and separation. The encounter between Aura and the unnamed woman, like her initial encounter with Fierro, is never referred to. And this narrative absence is significant in that the opposition is never actualized. It is possible to argue that the gun tightly squeezed between them points at the chasm between the self and the “Other,” the insider and the outsider, and prepares the reader for another cutting ritual. And yet it seems possible to interpret the

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encounter not as the meeting of two antithetical terms, but as part of what Gilbert Durand calls “a concentric dualism” where both parts fit into one another. This “concentric dualism” contrasts with the more common “diametrical dualism” which presides over antithetical terms (1993: 182). The circle and the cross, chaos and order, the world and the non-world thus become part of a dialectics, not of confrontation but of interaction. They are not the antithetical terms of a ritual of cutting, but of another ritual, of unmending perhaps, based on the notion that contacts and crossings across the line and within and without the circle are crucial sites to investigate and generate identities and the different manners of living and leaving, of rooting and routing.

Endnotes 1

2

3

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Ana Mª Manzanas acknowledges the support of The Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia for the research project “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature” (references BFF2003-07004 and HUM2006-04919), as well as the financial backing of the Junta de Castilla y León for the project “Borders, Identities and Mestizaje” (reference SA048A06). My gratitude to Viorica Patea and Santiago Vaquera, who provided valuable suggestions for this essay. This is the ideogram of Ur and most of the cities of the ancient world. Soja writes that the spatial structure of the quartered circle pivoting on the crossroad of four directional axes would be endlessly repeated over the next 4,000 years (2000: 62) The founding of Babylon (literally “the Gate of God”) is based on the principle of protection against scattering: “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Gen 3, 4). The wall defined the spatial and identitary limits of a community. This is Soja’s description of the walls of Jericho: “The walls concretely defined a city and the city, almost certainly, began to define an urban and regional culture as a discrete geographical, economic, political, social, and territorial unit, a unit in which the generative imprint of collective propinquity and collective synekism was added to kinship and lineage ties” (2000: 33). I am taking this idea from Theresa Cha’s suggestion in her slide projection “It is almost That,” where she implies that for any displaced person, “it is indeed one and the same ‘to live’ and ‘to leave’” (Rinder 2001: 20). In Les structures antropologiques de l’imaginaire (1992) (Spanish translation 2004), Durand distinguishes between the diurnal regime of representation, characterized by vertical figurations and diairetic semantics, and illustrated by the archetypes of the scepter and the sword (2004: 194), and the nocturnal regime of representation (2004: 194). The nocturnal regime of representation gravitates

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Ana Mª Manzanas around descending movements and valorizes the images of security and intimacy versus analytical fragmentation and separation (2004: 243). As opposed to the diurnal regime, the nocturnal regime is preoccupied with compromise, with agreement, with the finding of a common ground, and gives rise to a syncretic cosmology (2004: 275). Similarly, in Mimesis and Alterity (1993) Michael Taussig goes back to Frazer and his definition of contact or contagion as the principle which holds that “things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed” (1992: 52-53) Similarly, it is possible to argue, Spain has become the “Great Wall of Europe,” the boundary that separates countries, but also the partition which defines and secures the integrity of a continent versus other mores, cultures and economies. See Ana Mª Manzanas 2006 “Contested Passages: Migrants Crossing the Río Grande and the Mediterranean Sea.” South Atlantic Quarterly 105: 4, 759-775. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “Terminus,” the god of limits, announces the poet’s finis, and summons him to exercise an existential trimming of the self in all areas of life. See “Of Walls and Words” (Benito and Manzanas 2006) for an earlier and shorter analysis of Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China.”

Part II: Visions of the U.S.-Mexican Border

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Up against the Border: A Literary Response1 José Pablo Villalobos Though abject images of the U.S.-Mexico border abound, few places conjure as sordid an aspect of the border experience as Tijuana. These harsh depictions of la frontera, mostly alien to the quotidian border experience, have thus replaced and obliterated the private, concrete space of the everyday border. So how is the U.S.-Mexico frontera perceived from within? By using the work of authors who have had direct experience with life along the U.S.-Mexico border—Mexicans Rafa Saavedra and Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz and Chicanos Luis Alberto Urrea and Alberto Ríos—Villalobos argues that there is a change from a representation of the border (the stereotyped images conceived by a dominant other) to a border of representation which draws on a concrete reality that countermaps and thus serves to displace the public image of the border

All border towns bring out the worst in a country Ramón Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston) Touch of Evil (1958)

I: Writing against the (Other’s) Border The above stated quote, as said by the artificially dark-skinned Mexican police detective and protagonist of Orson Welles’s film noire classic Touch of Evil, reminds us that the border is where the abject abounds. Without any prescient knowledge of Julia Kristeva’s study on abjection, Ramón Miguel Vargas makes a case for the border as a place of fear,2 where the worse from both sides of the political divide amass and thrive. This image has acquired such a static position in contemporary culture that whether 1958 or 1998, as the epitome of border cities, Tijuana best exemplifies the static nature of the border sign: ‘No será difícil dar con él, vive en el basurero’ Welcome to Tijuana

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José Pablo Villalobos Tequila, Sexo, Marihuana Welcome to Tijuana Con el coyote no hay aduana. (“Welcome to Tijuana”)

While mention of the trash dump in these lines from Manu Chao’s 1998 song “Welcome to Tijuana” will become self-evident in my discussion of Luis Alberto Urrea below, from these it can be clearly gleaned that the border is conceived as the place for the illicit, the illegal, and the sordid. As Debra Castillo sums up her overview of the border’s most infamous contact zone, “Today Tijuana still has not superseded its reputation as an international flea market and sin city” (1995: 5). This has become, therefore, a very particular public image of the U.S.-Mexico border. As the prime example of all that is supposed to be wrong with border cities, most of these references point to Tijuana, the commercialized everyday Tijuana one expects to encounter when visiting the city. This is, to slightly alter Henri Lefebvre’s definition of the representation of space, a representation of the border that embodies and reproduces an “order” that “ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion” (1991: 33), a space “which is bound to graphic elements” and that “is thought by those who make use of it to be true” (1991: 361). In other words, a border that has become a set of public images that have in turn become the material inscription of a particular border reality. These mass media depictions of Tijuana have thus replaced and obliterated the private, concrete space of the everyday border by mapping an image entrenched in drugs, corruption, sex, violence, and any other sort of imaginable vice. As implied with the examples perpetuated by an Orson Welles film or a Manu Chao song, this image is more often than not found in texts or authors that are alien to that private, everyday reality. So the question arises: How is the U.S.-Mexico frontera perceived from within? As I hope to show in the cases cited below, there is a change from a representation of the border (the stereotyped images conceived by a dominant other) to a border of representation which draws from a concrete reality that countermaps and thus serves to displace the public image of the border. To quote Lefebvre, these “representational spaces” are “linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life” (1991: 33): “It is in this space that the ‘private’ realm asserts itself, albeit more or less vigorously, and always in a conflictual way, against the public one” (1991: 362).

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My approach to the texts I will mention in what follows is twofold. On the one hand, if as Michel de Certeau reminds us, “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others” (1984: xii), what I am establishing by referencing the images of the border prefaced above, is that there is a particular border image that is owned, reproduced, and marketed by a set of others that are alien to the situations they describe and/or promote. One aspect I will highlight towards the end of this essay is what, either as willing or unwilling consumers of these cultural products, border dwellers “make” or “do”—to continue with de Certeau’s language— with these images (1984: xii). Secondly, the notion of “poaching” from the border that has become the property of others allows me to consider that what the authors I will be discussing partake of is not a “writing the border” as performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña or novelist Carlos Fuentes undertake in their representations of the region,3 but a “writing against the border” that counters the generalized views that pertain to the border. If, as anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod argues, when writing about culture one tends towards essentialist generalizations which favor a coherent, bounded and discrete subject (1991: 146), to write against culture implies a turn towards the particular which “allows for the possibility of recognizing within a social group the play of multiple, shifting, and competing statements with practical effects” that “work against the assumption of boundedness . . . [found in] the culture concept” (1991: 148). In my work, Abu-Lughod’s position against culture is mirrored in what I argue is happening with cultural production along the border in response to a “border concept” perpetuated in certain media that tends towards homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness (1991: 152). While it is certainly impossible and in my opinion undesirable to obliterate the sordid reality that does indeed exist along the border, in the examples I will discuss below there is what might be considered a clear attempt at disturbing the border concept repeated since the border has been the border. When I speak of writing against the border, therefore, I am implying two things. First, the writing which takes an opposing or contrary position towards the impersonal and distant writing of the border, and second, that the texts I study are products of those writers whose creative process actually takes place in the adjoining location of the U.S.-Mexico border region. In other words, to write against the

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border signals both a subtle although at times defiant stance in defense of that region as well as physical proximity to the Mexico-U.S. border. The writers whose work I will focus on, Mexicans Rafa Saavedra and Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz and Chicanos Luis Alberto Urrea and Alberto Ríos, all offer different approaches to the border but nonetheless take a stand against the border as written by others. II: Retaking the Border Image: Rafa Saavedra In 1997 Tijuana writer Luis Humberto Crosthwaite launched what could be perceived as an affront to Mexico’s historically centralized publishing tendencies: Editorial Yoremito. In doing so, Crosthwaite’s project responded to the need for a venue to publish and promote writers at the fringes of mainstream Mexican presses that operate from and for the center. As he declares in his satire against this normative centralism, “If for any reason Federico Campbell had stayed in Tijuana,”4 if Tijuana-born Campbell had not moved to Mexico City—as many Mexican border writers often do—he would have been forced to publish with local university presses that have little funds for publicity, distribution and other promotional means, eventually succumbing to producing self-edited books on photocopy machines at local neighborhood print shops. Yoremito, then, begins with a strategically chauvinistic approach to its selection process, as established by the clear parameters set forth as guidelines for whom and what it will publish. With an editorial policy staunchly guided by a geographic principal—publish works by authors residing in Northern Mexico, with the caveat that these texts reflect “the dynamics of the North” (Rodríguez Lozano 1997: 51, n.1)—Yoremito inserts itself in the discussion of what the border’s literature and culture can or should be.5 As I see it, Yoremito and its editor, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, directly engage the notion of “border writing” and “border culture.” While in subsequent publications the theater of action strays into Monterrey and Saltillo, cities belonging to Northern Mexico but of dubious relationship to the actual border, the first book published by Yoremito is decidedly about Tijuana and, indirectly, about writing against the border. Buten Smileys (1997), the second collection of short stories published by Tijuana native and local subculture pop-star Rafa Saavedra, exemplifies the transbordering culture of his birthplace and

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gives narrative space to the younger population of his city.6 Against the grain of the U.S. held stereotypical images of life along the Mexican side of border, Buten Smileys takes to task the border experience from a generational stance aligned with the U.S. notion of Generation X. As such, the concrete border region Saavedra uses as backdrop for his stories is more in tune with Douglas Coupland’s depiction of the “accelerated culture” described in his 1991 novel Generation X. No longer a “backward,” desolate landscape that permits the imagined promises of escape so desired by “Middle America,” Saavedra’s border reality proves to be the contrary.7 While arguably denied by Mexican critics,8 the notion of Generation X has a firm grounding in Tijuana’s youth culture. In 1998 the editorial project Espina Dorsal published a virtual collection of essays and stories by various Tijuana artists titled “La generación X mejicana.” In Rafa Saavedra’s contribution, he wavers between playful rejection and ironic acceptance of the term. His text, titled “Mi generación no es una X (‘search and destroy’ remix, 1996),” follows suit by doubting yet in some way admitting inclusion in the Generation X category: I am not an expert in grunge, I don’t understand Japanese comics, drugs bore me, I hate Lollapalooza, I have never read any book by Douglas Coupland. I could be anti-stereotype of the X generation ... but at the same time, I belong to part of a generation that was born in the late sixties and that was educated by television: children of modernly disfunctional families with vcrs and computers who see the idea of getting a job with complete disdain while they pig out on pizza. ... Quite a case for Generation X, right? (1996: n.p.)

His reluctance, as he later makes clear, comes forth in his discomfort with the generalization it implies: while the X term serves as a point of reference, it reduces any grade of proposed particularism into a mass which imprisons everyone, including those who wish to be left out. It is this desire to transcend the imposed label, while unable to shake it off completely, which follows through in Saavedra’s fiction. In what follows, I will briefly outline this dual admission and rejection with regards to his city, Tijuana, and to the border in general, in what amounts to his writing against the border. Well aware of the legendary image of his hometown, Saavedra takes on this mythical Tijuana as is depicted in movies such as Losing It (1983) and Born in East LA (1987), novels such as Miguel Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974), and songs such as already

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quoted “Welcome to Tijuana.” Ironically, Buten Smileys begins by offering a familiar image of the Tijuana we all know. “Where’s the Donkey Show, Mr. Mariachi?,” the first of the thirteen stories that make up the collection, follows a group of young U.S. marines out on a weekend pass who cross the border in search of all they have been told about Tijuana: They were told about semi-naked girls walking down the interminable main drag. They were told of surfing through clubs and bars, of mythical drinking binges with the flavor of blue Hawaiians, margaritas, long islands, tequila and beer. They whispered in their ears that old trap-astupid-gringo legend of the donkey show and, as good children of Middle America ... they believed every word and excitedly arrived at the city after practicing how to ask for ‘one cerveza.’ (1997: 7)

The expectations are to a point fulfilled and the young marines effortlessly encounter some aspects of the mythical Tijuana. But if Saavedra gives in to the popular image of Tijuana at the onset of Buten Smileys, it is merely a trap which ensnares the reader much like the young American soldiers are trapped by their expectations of a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. The image afforded by this story is complemented by others in the collection, where Tijuana’s night life, drug culture, and violence rear their face. The negative images of the city however, are forcefully rejected by Saavedra in other stories collected in Buten Smileys. The last piece, aptly titled “Tijuana for Beginners (Bonus Track),” reads like a monologue that offers a more complete version of Tijuana than the one offered in the previously cited story. Not quite shedding the stereotypes of the city, the narrator seems to follow through with the idea that Tijuana has both defects and virtues. “My city,” he begins, “isn’t just a street filled with stupid gringos living an eternal summer and with indians selling paper mache flowers, with striped donkeys made to look like zebras and cheap jewelry ... with foreign journalists in search of a black legend ....” (1997: 73). More than that, the narrator admits to the duality of Tijuana: “My city is a girl of today, desire and passion overflowing, semi-daring like one of the porn movies at the Gran Cinema and semi-virtuous like a Franciscan nun, brilliant like the neon sign for a cola drink and dark like any street from the barrio” (1997: 73).

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It is in this opening up of Tijuana where it becomes apparent that the static “black legend” of the city alternates with a dynamic culture that transcends the myth. The tension exhibited by the duality that makes up Tijuana, however, implies a questioning of images and stereotypes that denigrate the city and the lives of its inhabitants. The image of the future, though described as a dystopia, is still one of resistance in the science fiction story “TJ2020.HTML.” Written in the form of an email dated December 28, 2020, the story imagines a Tijuana of the future in which much remains the same, and in which there is still the need to write against the imposed label of the city: “Despite the situation, some of the acts of resistance have not been in vain, the Separatist Front—made up mainly from ex NGO members—ferociously fights the image hunters with its tecnovisual weaponry, those savages in the game of brutal illusions that can habitually ... misreport the actual state of things to all the world outside. Unfortunately, the global mass-media has already poured its mortal venom and once again, unjustly, the city becomes the Black Legend” (1997: 44-45). It is technology, therefore, and the massmedia in particular, which suppress but redeem as well. Fighting fire with fire, the story implies, the image of the city can be altered, not in a chauvinistic one-sided way, but in one that admits the faults of the city as well. Herein lies Saavedra’s narrative stance towards his city and towards the border. The already mentioned radical wing of the Separatist Front in his futuristic Tijuana seeks to establish cultural and political autonomy, but it is uncertain from whom or what. What is evident is the desire to “abolish the city’s traditionally servile position” (1997: 47). Subservient toward centralist Mexico or the United States? The answer is never clearly stated, but the implication is that resistance must be aimed at both North and South. Much like the Generation X moniker Saavedra is caught up in and tries to deny, Tijuana cannot escape the imposition of the “black legend” label. As much as this characterization is rejected, there still remains some semblance of its existence. My point though, is that Rafa Saavedra’s fiction allows for a re-mapped Tijuana restored to an ambiguity that serves to disturb the homogenized, coherent, and timeless frontera most often conjured up when considering the U.S.-Mexico border.

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III: Re/turn to the Ugly: Luis Alberto Urrea Much like in Saavedra’s depiction of a youth driven Tijuana, Luis Alberto Urrea’s border is also determined by personal experience and contact with another subset of the border populace: the residents who live amid extreme abject poverty in the Tijuana municipal garbage dump. The author of Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993) and By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border (1996) among others, Urrea is a Chicano of mixed descent—Anglo mother and Mexican father—who grew up in Tijuana amid relative comfort. It is only as an adult that he encounters an underside of Tijuana that, in his own words, “no tourist will ever see” (1993: 2). Written more in accordance with normative border discourse, Urrea’s intended goal with Across the Wire—as he describes it—is to counter “Tijuana’s boosters [who] always maximize the many wonders of the Borderlands: industry, tourism, bullfights, jai alai, mega-tech discos, duty-free shopping, charming trinkets and baubles, friendly people, even nice beaches on the coast” (1993: 2). Rather than take aim at the cultural establishment that writes the border, Urrea’s punches are meant to take out city leaders who gloat at the economic wonders resulting from the local tourism industry. What initially becomes apparent in Urrea’s first forays into border writing is his near-total disregard for the already tarnished image of Tijuana. Setting it neatly aside, he adds insult to injury with his admittedly biased rendition of border life that refuses to shortchange “the most celebrated bastion of chaos on the border … a city of famed vice: cascades of liquor, prostitution, child porn, [and] drugs” (1993: 112). Unlike Saavedra’s fictional texts, Urrea’s are reportage essays that tend toward a sociological approach based on interviews and his own life experience. Like Saavedra, Urrea seeks to depict life as he sees it thus creating a space through which “the voice of the border” can be heard (1996: 4, 21). But whereas Saavedra’s gives voice to a mostly middle-class youth, in Urrea these voices belong to the downtrodden, to the marginal “outcasts of an outcast region” (1993: 19). Now if—as I am proposing—there is a difference in how the border is perceived from within, how can we account for a description of the border like Urrea’s that both fuels and feeds the desire for the

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abject? After the success of his first book brought attention to the hard life of those living in and off the Tijuana dump, Urrea inadvertently became a guide on “mini-safaris to the southland’s favorite representation of hell” (1996: 37), where, as he notes, “If there aren’t a million gulls, some living-dead pit-bull mongrel bitches, or overwhelming stenches rising in the eye-watering clouds, the tourists feel cheated and blue. But the sight of an open and festering wound, say, on a garbage-picker’s hand . . . well! That sends them right over the moon. Pus Polaroids for the apocalypse scrapbook” (1996: 37). Both his texts and Urrea-turned tour guide, at least superficially, appear to undo and re-ignite what the work of someone like Saavedra does with his. In other words, at least at first glance, Urrea takes us back to the ugly, back to a representation of the public border that rather than poach on the property of others, seems to confirm it. This apparent writing of the border, however, is countered progressively in light of the chronological publication of the texts here mentioned. Much like Saavedra’s book first inveigles the reader by satisfying his/her expectations for donkey shows only to later force us into a different appreciation of Tijuana, Urrea’s Across the Wire first lures and then confirms round-trip passage for the reader-turnedtourist both literally and metaphorically on board a “mini-safari” headed straight to border “hell” and back. I will remind us of the already quoted phrase Urrea uses when discussing the side of the border he describes: a Tijuana he claims “no tourist will ever see” (1993: 2). Establishing this grotesque, almost carnival-like atmosphere of poverty, hunger and violence, the effect is to attract tourist-readers to his second book, but also to attract actual tourists to Tijuana. Like the civic leaders he conjures up when establishing his reasons for pursuing the topic of poverty along the border, Urrea too attracts tourists to the sites he puts on the border map for all to see. My take on this however, is that while bringing to light a new attraction in the border tourist imaginary, Urrea also—perhaps unintentionally—lays a trap for his reader. Sticking purely to the textual and read in sequence, his second book, By the Lake of Sleeping Children, serves to de-emphasize the generalized descriptions of the border as abject by turning this description away from a local regional specificity and applying it to a more far reaching transnational sense of poverty. Notice how the local

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sky becomes a shared space among many, both near and distant places: The sky above was yet another perfect southern California blue. The blue of a stained glass window. Clouds as bright as electric signs over our heads. And that same sky, spreading farther than any of us can know, shading different colors in different places, covered the garbage dump in Mexico City, the garbage dump in Manila, the garbage dumps in El Salvador, Guatemala, Zaire, Rwanda, Honduras, Mexicali, Matamoros, Juárez, Belize, Ho Chi Minh City, Patpong, Calcutta, Sarajevo, Tripoli, New Jersey, and Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania. (1996: 46)

It is here then, that Urrea, while speaking of the border as abject, both writes the border and writes against the border by refuting the idea that it is only here that poverty and its ensuing chaos take place. Indeed, poverty is the common denominator that displaces the concrete U.S.-Mexico border for other, more or less equally troubled spots around the globe. Briefly, to conclude this section on Urrea, I would like to point out that the sole focus on the ugly side of the Tijuana found in his first two books is further called into question in his collection of essays titled Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998). It is here that Urrea, while not wholly retreating from his position, allows for further contemplation of another border that is entirely different from the sordid one he portrays in earlier texts. It is in the preface to his essay “Tijuana Wonderland”—in which there is no irony or sarcasm to the title—that he admits to another image of Tijuana, as if he were pulling it from under the table where he knowingly kept it hidden from his readers in the previous two books: “Along with several other writers, I have made a certain career lately of exploring the demonic side of Tijuana. But what I never told you about the place is that it was also a Wonderland—my favorite town on earth” (1998: 66). The death and despair, the drugs and prostitution, the corruption and impunity all of a sudden are set aside in an essay that speaks of his Tijuana neighborhood as “a place of magic and wonder, a place of dusty gardens laden with fruit, of pretty women, dogs, food, music. Everywhere you looked, there were secrets and astonishments. And everyone was laughing” (1998: 66). While this essay serves as memoir for a childhood long gone, in its final passage there is an admission that the space of which Urrea speaks, amid social changes and modernization, remains in some form or fashion “invisible as its

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ghosts” (1998: 87). However invisible it might be, the Tijuana wonderland remains textually to counter the “Tijuana ugly” that otherwise remains uncontested in Urrea’s earlier work. IV: Displacing the Border Sign: Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz Leaving Tijuana aside and moving east about 100 miles, at least to show how my argument also applies to other parts of the border, we find another series of texts with a similar tension between writing the border and writing against it. Born and raised in Mexicali, the capital of the state of Baja California, narrator and poet Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz is also one of the more active scholars on border cultural studies as they pertain to the Mexican Northwest and he has published countless books on the subject. To go hand in hand with his marginal geographic positioning, Trujillo is also more of a scribe of detective, fantasy, and science fiction genres. Setting aside his narrative depictions of genetic aberrations, apocalyptic dystopias, and Lord of the Rings-like fantasy worlds, I’ll briefly comment on two of his short detective fictions: “Descuartizamientos” (1999) and “Lucky Strike” (1987/1996).9 Though originally published more than 10 years apart, these stories are both situated in a Mexicali where violence and corruption reign supreme and where the backdrop of the border provides easy access for crime to both come and go, regardless of crossing guards or border patrol. “Descuartizamientos” or “dismemberments” is one of three stories compiled in Tijuana City Blues where private investigator Miguel Angel Morgado is brought in from Mexico City to investigate a crime that local authorities are either reluctant to untangle or incapable of solving for lack of ingenuity. In this case, the city of Mexicali is being terrorized by a brutal serial killer with a particular knack for dismembering his victims—but not before drinking their blood and raping their cadavers. To make a long story short, the killer is under the employ of a heartless woman who, while dressed as an indigenous beggar, lures unsuspecting children to a clinic where American doctors remove whichever vital organs they already have a customer for on the U.S. side of the border. Once sutured and emptied of his/her much needed organs, the woman in charge hands the child over to her henchman who then finishes the job by having his way with the cadaver, eventually dismembering the body into an

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unrecognizable mass of flesh. Miguel Angel Morgado, as one would expect, solves the crime and in the end both the actual killer and the woman meet separate, but equally dismembering deaths. Following the exigencies of the hard-boiled detective genre, it is not surprising to encounter the abject in this story. However, though this could be an exception to the thesis I am proposing for writing against the border, this story plays into my position—much like Urrea with his own turn to the ugly—by acceding while at the same time deflecting the specificity of such abjectness away from the border proper. Before I explain how this story of dismemberments disjoints the ugly border image, I must take us back to the story “Lucky Strike.” This is a tale of an unnamed hit man brought to Mexicali by a local mobster-type businessman to assassinate the leader of a strike who is threatening his financial empire. Betrayal and murder dictate the turn of events, and in the end, the only one left standing, after completing his job and even taking out the man who hired him, is the hit man. Again, we are back to the image of the border as the worse of possible worlds, where impunity and disorder abound. Putting this story next to “Descuartizamientos,” however, we get a clearer picture of what, despite the hard-boiled’s formulaic needs for greed, violence, and corruption, Trujillo Muñoz does to write against the border. In both tales, published more than ten years apart, there is one commonality as striking as the ugliness they share: an attempt to dislodge the border sign’s exclusive grasp on the notion of violence. Note how, in the following exchange in which the mobster attempts to inquire about the hit man’s paste experience, both men agree on one thing: –Do you have any references with regard to previous jobs? … –None. But I suppose you do. . . . –Well. … I’ve heard some things. Rumors, of course, that you took care of business in Los Angeles. … a strike. … –I do what I can. –We got something similar going on here. … –It’s the same everywhere. The man nodded his head in agreement. (1996: 86-87)

While initially the assertion is that labor issues abound here as everywhere else, at the end of the story and on his way out of town, the anonymous hit man looks back and claims, as if passing judgment on his Mexicali experience, that the border is not unique. In other words, like with Miguel Angel Morgado in “Descuartizamientos,”

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both the detective and the hit man state the same telling sign in reference to what they have witnessed at the border: “here and there, same as everywhere” (1999: 166) says Morgado, and “Like everywhere else” (1996: 90) claims the hit man.10 Much like the blue California sky described by Urrea extends itself to cover the ugliness of poverty found elsewhere in the world, Trujillo’s sordid telling of the border breaks with the essentialist view that seeks to make it an inherent characteristic of border life. Like Saavedra in his description of a double encoded Tijuana that struggles between darkness and light, between virtue and vice, Trujillo dismembers the notion that vice has its home exclusively along the U.S.-Mexico border. V: The Invisible and Unaccounted or Where Jeeps Cannot Go: Alberto Ríos Heading further east and leaving the Californias behind, we find another series of texts with a perhaps less marked tension between writing the border and writing against it. Nevertheless, in Alberto Ríos’s lyrical depictions of border life there is a metaphoric claim that can serve to denounce the ugliness of the border. Born and raised in Nogales, Arizona to a British mother and a Mexican father, poet and narrator Alberto Ríos makes for an odd border writer when one looks at his poetic renditions of the everyday life of the Sonora/Arizona border. Though the stories in his 1995 collection Pig Cookies are set in a 1940s Nogales, Sonora, much is never made out of this geographic location. Indeed, in the “Author’s Note” that prefaces the stories, Ríos makes clear that his border is more than just a place on a map. After describing Nogales as a city at the edge of two countries, Ríos removes it entirely from spatial confines: “This was the border, what we call ‘the line.’ It is not, finally, an external, physical line, as maps and the border patrol and immigration would have. The line is, more cleverly, inside, where jeeps cannot go. This is the true line” (1995: xiii). Later, in the fourth story in the collection, “The Great Gardens of Lamberto Diaz,” there is a return to this notion of physical displacement when describing the uncharted terrain of the gardens in question: “It was not predictable land, nor was it measurable, so that the town surveyor had paid it slight attention. On the first of several maps of the town, before the gardens, and even long afterward, this

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area did not exist. The town’s surveyor more or less stretched the edges of the surrounding flat land that he had in fact been able to measure, so that these edges joined, leaving this area invisible and unaccounted for” (1995: 44). Despite being described as “ugly” by one of the story’s characters, the gardens become property of the townsfolk who contribute to their making by adding seeds and then pots, until it becomes a “convenient place to discard even those things that were not flora” (1995: 47). What we can then call a dump—especially when reading this story in light of Alberto Urrea’s writings on the ugly, invisible side of Tijuana’s own trash sites—becomes Nogales’s secret garden; a place hidden from government surveyors, unseen on maps, and invisible to outsiders. The notion of the secret garden can be read as an extension of what for Ríos becomes a “secret border”; what we can here call a border of the intimate kind. In his autobiographical text titled Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (1999), Ríos further brings this secretive aspect of the border out in the open, as the subtitle admits, by describing the geography, the people, and the historical markers that define the Nogales of the 1940s through the 1990s: everything ranging from his own family, the local church, the local bums, the Woolworth’s, Newberry’s and S.H. Kress stores, almost as if driving by, street by street, down a memory lane with names that shift as you go from one part of town to another. It is precisely this shifting, a resistance to a stagnant border sign, that comprises his contribution to writing against the border. First of all, as Ríos sketches out the expanse of Nogales at the onset of his memoir, once he tells of the arroyo, the VFW, and other such places, he comes to the geographic limits of the U.S. and states: “And of course we’ve also got the border wall, which gets all the attention anyway” (1999: 8). Immediately after stating this, there is a break in the narrative, marked by double line spacing on the page which signals the end of this part of the chapter. Though it reappears a few pages later, Ríos ends this part of his description of Nogales and moves on to tell of another part of town. Initially the border itself is dismissed, clearly signaling that his intent is not to dwell on the border itself: there is more to Nogales and border life than the fence that divides the U.S. and Mexico. What “gets all the attention,” however, is what is out in the open while little is said of the secret, intimate border experience that is left unseen. When he does return to “the

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physical border with its tremendous fence-now-wall” he again seeks to redefine its presence in Nogales by wondering if “It is a neat fence along somebody’s huge yard, or is it bad scarring on the land, a badly healed appendix incision” only to conclude that “Maybe there is something of both those things” (1999: 12).11 Again, rather than write the border as it has come to be known, Ríos opens the possibility that the border is more than any one image can capture. The implication, however, is that one needs to look carefully in order to actually perceive of all that the border experience includes. Though referring to shelves filled with “thousands of knickknacks” at the local Kress store, Ríos indirectly speaks of the way one must see the border to appreciate what comprises its everyday realities: “To the untrained eye everything might have seemed to blend together, but that wasn’t true. This was a place not of generalities but of particulars, even if one had to do a little bit of digging” (1999: 43). And, whether speaking of holidays, specific recipes for traditional foods, or the border itself, Ríos lets the reader know these particularities are intimate and that they vary from place to place and person to person. Briefly, with regard to holidays Ríos places prose and verse together to explain his family’s particular take on official calendar festivities along the border. The poem “Day of the Refugios” leaves no doubt that while seemingly celebrating the Fourth of July as dictated by U.S. standards, his family privately celebrated what by Mexico’s calendar is “The saint’s day of people named Refugio” (1999: 71). Caught amid two traditions, and with at least three Refugios in his own family, Ríos divulges his family’s secret appropriation of the U.S. national holiday. The exact meaning of the merriment and fireworks held that day is thus set apart from the external displays of patriotism that could otherwise be attributed to the Ríos family celebration: Still, we were in the United States now, And the Fourth of July, Well, it was the Fourth of July. But just what that meant, In this border place and time, It was a matter of opinion in my family. (1999: 72)12

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In a similar vein, Ríos offers his personal take on May 5th, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Day of the Dead. Restating the intimacy of the last of these, Ríos points out that “The day of the dead, in truth, means not just all dead, but the day of our dead, and more personally, the day of my dead. I remember the lives inside my life. … And that’s where holidays ultimately reside—inside” (1999: 83). Taking stock of his own experience, the secret border represented here by Alberto Ríos clearly transcends the public, stagnant images that “get all the attention.” His text therefore draws us into his own private borderlands, to experience an alternate rendition that goes against the grain of the border sign. One last example of this unaccounted border is that which is referenced by Ríos when addressing his father. Towards the end of Capirotada, the text discusses the elder Ríos’s struggle with diabetes and his eventual passing away. It is here that Ríos reflects upon how, after a lifetime of shared experience, he and his father “never really talked very much about him, not about the inside him. We looked at his architecture, but not who lived in it” (1999: 124). Familiar with “the outside him, the structure, the public him” (1999: 124), Ríos now struggles to make sense of what lies beneath the exterior. While not demeaning the personal grief this represents for Ríos, it is here that the connection to the intimate border surfaces anew: “Watching my father now I am too much reminded of this place my parents, my brother, and I have lived these many years, of its quieter and more secret underside, an underside one would only know by living here and paying attention” (1999: 125). Much like the gardens of Lamberto Diaz that do not appear on any town map, this border that Ríos depicts remains at the margins of what we are accustomed to when approaching the border image. Again, though referring to his father, one can make the obvious connection to that other border in the following statement: “Like that, my father too has been hard to explain. I can’t say that my father was a father the way fathers are fathers, the way they are in books, in movies, even in songs –that’s way too much father” (1999: 131). Similarly, the border is hard to explain, especially when the border as experienced by many is not as it is often depicted in books, movies, and even in songs.

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VI: Remapping the Border Image Towards the beginning of this essay I mentioned something about the consumption of the border image by border writers. What I have tried to present by way of the Mexican and Chicano writers here mentioned is a study of that consumption, of “what the cultural consumer ‘makes’ or ‘does’ ... with these images” (de Certeau 1984: xii). In the cases I have cited, the literary representations of the border amount to a re-appropriation of the border image constructed and perpetuated by others. This strategy of consumption serves to add a political dimension to the practice of border literature (de Certeau 1984: xvii, xix), particularly in how a text depicts life along the border. The proposal for writing against the border that I find in Rafa Saavedra, Luis Alberto Urrea, Gabriel Trujillo, and Alberto Ríos is also evident in the works of other writers whose place of origin or locus of operations trace both sides of the 2,000 mile long political border between the U.S. and Mexico: Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Regina Swain, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Ramón Betancourt, Rosario Sanmiguel, and Norma Elia Cantú, among others. Beyond literature, the notion of writing against the border also holds true for the music that is now produced locally. The status of the corrido genre as the exclusive border music form, has now been put into question by other forms such as punk and electronic formats.13 Writing, performing, recording, and creating, all up against the border.

Endnotes 1

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This essay was written due to the support of the Faculty Release Fellowship awarded by the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. I wish to thank James Rosenheim, Colin Allen, Mary Ann O’Farrell and Cynthia Werner for their comments and companionship during the research and writing of this essay. The notion of the border as a place of fear (and desire) with regard to A Touch of Evil is developed by Rolando Romero in his essay “Border of Fear / Border of Desire” (58-60). Building on Homi Bhabha’s reference to the film’s use of colonial discourse vis-à-vis border stereotypes (“The Other Question” 68-69), Romero highlights the film’s depiction of the border as a rhetorical space of communion. To sum up, note how Castillo and Tabuenca interpret Gómez-Peña’s presence in border discourse: “Guillermo Gómez-Peña is perhaps one of the most well-known

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José Pablo Villalobos U.S.-based artists whose primary stock-in-trade has been his status as the authentic border subject-cum-postmodern native informant. Yet, Gómez-Peña creates precisely this sense of generalized, deracinated borderness in his performances, and local referents are excluded ...” (2002: 12). Not surprisingly, local border artists reject Gómez-Peña’s border and the same can be said for Carlos Fuentes’s depictions of the border in his 1995 collection of stories The Crystal Frontier. The translation is mine. The “dynamics of the North” are not limited to Mexico and necessarily include cross-border traffic. The second book published by Yoremito, Yízus the man y los kiosko boys (1997) by Juan Antonio Di Bella, takes place mostly on the California side of the U.S.-Mexico border. The amount of visibility Saavedra has in Tijuana is evinced by his presence in periodicals (such as Bitácora and Frontera) and fan-zines (such as Acamonchi, Abracadáver, Planeta X). As a music critic, he is a key figure in the Nortec movement as well as a visible figure in Tijuana’s music scene. The concept of desolate landscape is meant here not simply in terms of geography, but also adhering to the stereotype that depicts Northern Mexico as a “cultural desert” (Zúñiga 1995: 18). In the words of Carlos Monsiváis, “La Generación X, que describe a jóvenes sin sentido del porvenir y enorme fastidio ante el presente, no consigue implantarse en América Latina. Tanta desilusión vital no convence en países donde la economía, no el tedium vitae, suele responsabilizarse de las frustraciones” (2000: 109). “Lucky Strike” was originally published in 1987 with the title “Como en todas partes.” See Tierra natal, the anthology of short stories compiled by Sergio Gómez Montero (México: INBA-UNAM-ISSTE). My point is made even more evident when considering that the original title for “Lucky Strike,” under which it was first published in 1987, was “Como en todas partes” or “Like everywhere else.” The reference to scars and incisions is a possible reference to Gloria Anzaldúa’s characterization of the border as a bleeding wound. See Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinster/Aunt Lute Press, 1987. For a more comprehensive look at how Ríos addresses the border in his poetry, see Joseph Deters, “Fireworks on the Borderlands: A Blending of Cultures in the Poetry of Alberto Ríos.” Confluencia 15.2 (Spring 2000): 28-35. For more on border music, see my “Mapping Border Music: Sonic Representations of la frontera.” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 23 (2004): 69-82.

Dispelling the Border Myth: Zonkey Writers and the Black Legend Édgar Cota-Torres

This article studies the negative discourses associated with cultural and literary representations of Mexico’s northern border. Mexican border cities such as Mexicali and Tijuana are often equated with sin, corruption, political and social negligence, and lawlessness as portrayed by the American media. These images, deeply imprinted in the social imagination of Mexico’s northern neighbor, have created what is known in the border region as la leyenda negra. At the same time, a similar negative narration arises in Mexico about its northern frontier: the border has been perceived as a weakened first line of defense against the threatening influence of the United States. Cota-Torres counters these negative stereotypes with what he terms “Revolutionary Zonkeism.” As a discursive practice, Revolutionary Zonkenism puts into question la leyenda negra by employing those same negative stereotypes in an ironic refashioning or inversion

The border shared by Mexico and the United States has been a site of exchange as well as of conflict resulting in the emergence of a new culture, not purely Mexican, nor exclusively American. This inbetween border space is made up of many spaces cut by a line like a “crack between two worlds” (García Canclini 1995: 238). An “open wound” in the formulation by Gloria Anzaldúa, the border is not one space but many, a heterotopia at the limit of two nations. While some may agree with Néstor García Canclini that “all cultures are border cultures” (1995: 261), the border zone of Northern Mexico stands out marked by the wound of its history and by the cultural imaginary that emerged from a negative narration about the border. For the media in the United States, Mexican border cities such as Mexicali, Tijuana, and Ciudad Juárez are cities often equated with sin, corruption, political and social negligence, and lawlessness. These images, deeply imprinted in the social imagination of Mexico’s northern neighbor,

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have created what is known in the border region as la leyenda negra. At the same time, a similar negative narration arises in Mexico about its northern frontier: the border has been perceived as a weakened first line of defense against the threatening influence of the United States, an idea born out of the Mexican American war, and later reinforced during the Mexican Revolution, and subsequent historical conflicts between both countries.1 As a counter to these negative pressures from the north and the south, northern Mexican border culture has responded through what Sergio Gómez Montero has referred to as a culture of resistance, a culture that in recent years has produced a wide array of artistic representations: “[T]his region is being pressed from both sides of the border by a pathogenic centralism as much as by hegemonizing and discriminatory artistic practices. Hence, artists and intellectuals are beginning to construct a discourse of creation and reflection” (1994: 99). Participants involved in this resistance culture are local border writers, such as Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Rosina Conde, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, among others, who use the negative stereotypes of the border to expose the discourses that form the Black Legend.2 In what follows, I will propose a metaphor for understanding how these writers construct their border realities to expose the negative representations of the border, and then I will place this resistance culture against the history of violence that leads to l a leyenda negra of the US/Mexico border. I: The Curious Case of the Border Zebra The complicity of the United States in the physical and imaginary construction of the Border and its Black Legend—in which Mexico is considered the victim of this hyperbolic myth—does not exonerate Mexico as a complicit partner. It is important to remember that in the border area the coexistence of the United States and Mexico is based on mutual benefits. Mexico provides souvenirs and attractions, and the United States the consumers. In this game of give and take Mexicans benefit monetarily while the tourists from the North acquire souvenirs and “services” that not only continue the existing myths but also further confirm the Black Legend. Border cities have created a modified and exotic Mexico that exploits an indigenous Mexican past absent to this area, while constructing an image of its own out of its

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realities and necessities that complement those associated with la leyenda negra. Examples of such constructions appear in the curio (curious) shops in border towns that offer a wide variety of Mexican souvenirs that include ceramic figures and paintings depicting indigenous motifs, such as pyramids, Aztec calendars, chieftains, Aztec gods and maidens, as well as t-shirts and souvenirs depicting alcohol use and other adult motifs. Tourists may purchase miniature replicas of pyramids, cathedrals and historical sites that do not exist in the border areas as in other regions of the country. There is also the peculiar case of Avenida Revolución in Tijuana, the main tourist strip, where donkeys painted as zebras—“zonkeys” [z(ebra) (d)onkey] (Yépez 2005: 50)—wait to pose for a picture with tourists. These “zonkeys” are often shown pulling a colorful cart decorated with Mexican scenes. The zonkey masks the donkey, in much the same way that the trinkets and colorful objects representing Mexico mask the border. Mexico is “performed” for the tourists, the zonkey carts become a mimetic device, a theatrical stage upon which the country is diplayed.3 García Canclini writes that: The simulacrum comes to be a central category of culture. … The obvious, ostentatious illusions—like the zebras everyone knows are fake or the hiding games of illegal immigrants that are ‘tolerated’ by the United States police—become a resource for defining identity and communicating with others. (1995: 237)

These Border attractions—the “trinketization” of Mexico—with time have come to define Mexican northern border cities and have molded traditional Mexican border tourist experiences. The mask and the farce become the inscription of cultural identity, as they create an ambiguous zone of dynamic alterities. While the farcical zonkey defines the carnival image of the border, the indigenous paraphernalia—popular in tourist areas in the central part of Mexico—serves two basic purposes: first, it satisfies foreign tourists’ expectations of what to see in Mexico;4 second, for Mexicans, it spurs a nationalistic pride in an Aztec past that is associated with abundance and power. As Benedict Anderson points out in Imagined Communities, “Spanish-speaking mestizo Mexicans trace their ancestries, not to Castilian conquistadors, but to halfobliterated Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs and Zapotecs” (1991:154). This reference to a grand past has bolstered Mexican nationalist pride since

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the nineteenth century. The trinkets found in the curio shops—the Aztec representations and the objects depicting vice—can be read as elements of a “borderism” trope that has been identified by Norma Klahn and by Socorro Tabuenca. This trope comes in two parts—“South of the Borderism” in Klahn’s version, and “North of the Borderism,” in Tabuenca’s (working off Klahn’s earlier work)—and functions to create meaning about the US/Mexico border. On the one hand, the use of nationalistic imagery could very well be a partial response to Tabuenca’s “North of the Borderism” (1997: 186), and refers to a disdainful gaze from the interior of Mexico to the northern border cities. In general, this centralist vision consists of viewing this area as an Americanized region. On the other, the souvenirs depicting vices reinforce what Klahn has identified as “South of the Borderism.” This refers to the way that the United States seeks to impose meaning on its southern neighbor, culturally constructing the Mexican as “everything the Anglo was not” (1997: 123). These souvenirs are also mercantile constructions based on the expectations and demands placed by tourists. Images like the painted donkeys were crafted by Mexican businesses intending to represent a Mexico that does not exist in this area, thus inventing Mexico as a zone crafted to and by the circumstances that emerged during Prohibition. Nevertheless, the “zonkey” has become the classic postcard of a visit to Tijuana’s Avenida Revolución while, at the same time, this hybrid image may be interpreted as retaliation to both “North of the Borderism” and “South of the Borderism.” The zonkey offers at least two meanings: it denotes the exotic in its representation of a zebra—referencing an exotic “Other” that can be had in Mexico—and denotes trinket/kitsch/toy in its obvious representation of a donkey painted as a zebra. The zonkey is a disguised border creation, its painted stripes attempting to cover the donkey beneath. Yet it is a poor likeness, a simulacrum of a zebra that subverts its exotic referent in favor of its “trinketized” self: a donkey painted with stripes. The zonkey masks the donkey. Its painted lines are a type of gesture of resistance to the colonizing “eye” of the tourists who cross the border seeking to colonize the exotic “Other.” As a hybrid figure, the zonkey is central to what I have termed “Revolutionary Zonkeism.”

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“Revolutionary Zonkeism” is a form of border resistance that counters the negative stereotypes that central Mexico and the United States convey about their shared border. As a discursive practice, it puts into question la leyenda negra by employing those same negative stereotypes in an ironic refashioning or inversion to expose the underlying codes that attempt to place meaning upon the border. In other words, “Revolutionary Zonkeism” refers to a strategy of deterritorialization and reterritorialization: deterritorialize centripetal discursive forces from power centers (Mexico City, Washington DC) that attempt to place limits on the border and reterritorialize those discourses on a perspective coming from the border. This functions to discredit external negative border discourse in order to dispel the border myths hyperbolized and sustained by “North of the Borderism” and “South of the Borderism.” “Zonkey writers,” like Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, demonstrate in their narratives how people who circulate and consume the stereotypical image of the border are dominated by that image—the zonkey’s stripes—and in doing so emphasize that there is more to the border than just the artificial stripes. Crosthwaite’s stories reconstruct the Mexican northern border from the gaze of el fronterizo—the border native—and also counter-create, as Said indicates in Culture and Imperialism, another memory and regional language with which to write border conditions and realities in the nation’s life and memory: “from slogans to pamphlets and newspapers, from folktales and heroes to epic poetry, novels and drama—the language is inert; national culture organizes and sustains communal memory” (1994: 215). A memory which functions in the border would be to disarticulate hegemonic discourses in order to grant justice to subjugated peoples. It is in the counter-creation that Crosthwaite proposes from the multiple perspectives and events that compose the Mexican northern border as a complex Mexican community, a northern border that is “imagined” by el fronterizo from his/her own experiences and necessities. II: A History of Violence: La Leyenda Negra The political demarcation between the United States and Mexico is a line that does not define cultural differences. What is today the dividing line between both countries was arbitrarily created as a result of the war between the two nations. The border carries the echo of this

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violence through its negative narration as a geographical and cultural space of unleashed trafficking, alcoholism, prostitution, gambling, drugs, and endemic corruption promulgated in political discourse from both sides of the border. Impending controversies, such as illegal immigration, continue to nurture this bad reputation and stigmatize border cities in northern Mexico. The majority of studies on this region conclude that the derogatory image of this region begins with the Prohibition (Berumen 2003), which emerged from the Eighteenth Amendment of 1917. Border cities such as Tijuana and Mexicali in the state of Baja California and Ciudad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua flourished thanks to Prohibition and the immense flow of American tourism and investments in bars, brothels and casinos from 1919 to 1933. The image of the border that takes form during these years and comes to be associated with the Black Legend was popularized thanks to the deeply rooted hegemonic and stereotypical association of the Mexican Border region, and revived with each political tension between both countries. One of these conflicts was the Mexican Revolution, creating bi-national conflicts that directly affected the border region and are still felt today. Violence increased dramatically during the second half of 1915, and especially in the beginning of 1916 due in part to Pancho Villa’s incursions across the border.5 During these revolutionary times, the image of the Mexican as a barbarian, unable to solve his own problems became the standard stereotype that informed discourses on everything associated with the border. In that play of supremacy and stereotypes, what is today known as the Black Legend of the northern Mexican Border was constructed. “Mexican inferiority” versus the “military and economic superiority” of the Anglo Saxon society to the North played an important role as an advertising mechanism that worked satisfactorily to the United States favor, not only during moments of conflict but throughout the twentieth century. This frontier’s historical coexistence is rigidly hegemonic, but at the same time ever-changing and repetitive. In The Location of Culture Homi Bhabha argues that supremacy between groups “requires iteration and alterity to be effective” (2002: 29). As history shows, this hegemony was established by repeated violent occurrences between the two countries,6 and by the construction of a derogatory image of the other. One manifestation of the manufacturing of such an image is Tijuana, a city that because of its “bad” reputation became a symbol for border

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life: a place where all the elements that make up the Black Legend can be found. As Humberto Félix Berumen observes in his book Tijuana la horrible, Tijuana became “el patio trasero para el desenfreno moral” (2003: 61-2).7 During Prohibition, illicit activities in the United States took place on the other side of the border on a grand scale, and the border, Tijuana especially, became the escape valve for American Puritanism. What was considered immoral and illegal in the United States was commonplace on the Mexican border. Border cities, like Tijuana, Mexicali and Ciudad Juárez prospered as a result of American tourism and, in spite of American criticism, the tourists and the investors of illegal trade profited from the border’s negative reputation. The border not only delineated the division between two countries but also a cultural and economic exchange based on demand and consumption illegal to the North American consumer. That other geographic side where Mexican border cities flourished economically became a space outside the law. With the influx of tourism, Tijuana and Mexicali evolved into urban spaces, engendered by the necessities of the North. “Revolutionay Zonkeism” contests this history of violence by claiming that the actual events, the history that is being created at the border, is rooted, to an extent, in a construction that was partially built by the United States. In other words, exterior approaches to the Mexican border region often times do not consider the foundational events, such as the Mexican American war, the demarcation of the border between both nations and the Prohibition era that originated the border’s negative reputation. III: Y con esto me despido: The Zonkey Writer Border writers, “Zonkey writers,” employ the Black Legend as a means to expose the ideologies behind the negative representations of the border. As a metaphor, the “zonkey” serves to present an exotic image for an unsuspecting spectator ready to believe that zebras could exist south of the border. At the same time the fact that the animal is obviously a painted donkey puts into question those very expectations: things are not what they seem. Zonkey writers propose the location of a more humane border culture, through, as Sergio Gómez Montero suggests, the beginning and continuation of a “discourse of creation and reflection” (1994: 99). Behind the “zonkey’s” stripes, there is a local border life that once again goes to “the beach at ‘the line’ where

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‘fragmented families’” can gather for Sunday picnics (García Canclini 1995: 236). A recreation of this kind of culture, another border space, created out of the human complexities and border cultural hybridity, will contribute to dispel, to rewrite another story that is different from its myths, but integrated to the many border elements, transnational needs and realities; the same as, but different from the history and the economic necessities that has reinvented that imaginary space, although too real, that is the border zone of Northern Mexico.

Endnotes 1

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For a discussion on these negative narrations, see the articles by Zúñiga and Vaquera. See also Vaquera’s article in this volume for a discussion on the ways that local artists have used the physical border as an element in their works to “claim” the border as their own. Ramón Eduardo Ruiz points out something similar in his book On the Rim of México. Encounters of the Rich and Poor. The purpose of this Mexican Disneyland is to please outsiders, especially the tall and blond. To cite David Nicholson-Lord, an English author, all of this adds up to what he refers to as “airport art” and the “trinketization of cultures.” In diverse ways, tourism, he argues, “changes tradition,” and “particularly in the Third World,” where one must situate the Mexican border, “that change looks and feels like degradation.” That bit of wisdom strikes you with startling clarity when you wait in your auto at international gates to enter the United States; on one side, there is row after row of wooden stalls (“the last chance to buy”) displaying vulgar statues, grotesque clay pigs, and gaudy blankets and, on the other, vendors on foot hawking identical merchandise. Obviously, what Americans purchase determines what is made and sold. You wonder about the taste of the Americans who buy these eyesores, and if you are of Mexican descent, you feel ashamed for what has befallen the country of your parents (1998: 57). Canclini observes that for some people “it also refers to the myth that North Americans bring with them, that it has something to do with crossing the border into the past, into the wilderness, into the idea of being able to ride horseback” (1995: 236). These conflicts were resolved diplomatically and culminated in what is known as the Punitive Expedition. This act involved the entrance of U.S. troops into Mexico with the sole goal of finding and capturing Villa. As could be expected, the Mexican people were against such an action and consequently tensions increased even further between the two nations. This situation is reminiscent of Edward W. Said in Orientalism when he refers to the relationship between Europe and the Orient and much later between the United States and the Orient (1994: 94-95, 321) “A playground for the absence of moral restraints.”

Border Voices: Life Writings and Self-Representation of the U.S.-Mexico Frontera Javier Durán The aim of this paper is to look at how the border region and its cultural and spatial manifestations impact on writings concerned with memory, the personal, and the self. Durán concentrates on Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir, written by Alberto Ríos.1 His reading gravitates around the role of the narrating “I” as the family ethnographer or as the re-collector of “cultural artifacts,” in this case, anecdotes, stories, pictures, and food recipes of those family members who “do not write.” In what follows, Durán specifically discusses how identity is constructed as a relational process in life writings. There are three aspects in this discussion: first, the role and meaning of particular objects and images in the construction of spatial memories; second, the title of the text and its cultural and culinary interconnections with family and regional traditions; and third, the role of photographs in the making of a personal and a collective spatial identity through the memoir 2 A Ricardo, in memoriam

I: Border Places and Spaces: Re-Mapping the Familiar A memoir is a life narrative mode that historically situates the subject in a social environment as both, observer or participant. Autobiography critics Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson note that memoirs tend to direct attention more toward the lives and actions of others than to the narrator (2001: 198). They also observe that memoirs promote an “I” that is explicitly formed in the reports of the utterances and proceedings of others. Many times, the “I” or subjectivity produced in memoirs is externalized and dialogical. For Nancy Miller, memoir is “fashionably postmodern since it hesitates to define the boundaries between public and private, subject and object.” The etymological root of the word in the double act of recalling and recording is central for its functioning: “To record means literally to call to mind, to call up from the heart. At the same time, record means

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to set down in writing, to make official. What resides in the province of the heart is also exhibited in the public space of the world” (Miller 1994: 43). This double act of recalling and recording is prominent in Ríos’s Capirotada. The narrating “I” creates through his narration the elements to set a recalling mechanism: association of words with images, photographs, foods, and places. These recollections are then recorded in the stories told by and through the narrating “I.”3 In his introduction to Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, William Zinsser states that “Objects suggest narrative.” Zinsser’s remark alludes to Ian Frazier’s autobiographic work Family, a literary re-construction of Frazier’s family’s cultural memory based on a careful recollection of objects and other mementos left after his parent’s death. Reflecting on his own writing process, Frazier observed: “My method in writing this memoir was to look for artifacts that suggested narrative … physical objects—things like the programs of plays my mother was in as a girl. … To understand what you have in the way of ephemera you have to be ready to do a whole bunch of different things to invest them with meaning” (Zinsser, 1998: 168169). In Capirotada, the materiality of Ríos’s narrative is not only reflected by the inclusion of photographs, but also by the strong connections that emerge between the space of the border, his working class origins, and the overall place of material goods in border culture. First published in 1999, Capirotada incorporates a series of family photographs related to Ríos’s experiences and family associations with both sides of the border. The author develops a series of short narratives and vignettes, some of them previously published, that frame his family relations bounding them strongly with the spatial and topographical border surroundings. The text also includes two previously published poems, “Uncle Christmas” and “Day of the Refugios,” and a long excerpt in first person, narrated by Ríos’s mother which seemed to have been recorded by the author himself. The border is further featured in the vignette entitled “A Rough Handshake,” where the narrator takes the reader on a detailed journey across the Arizona-Sonora boundary. This segment becomes a detailed road map and a meta-commentary on the history of the region. The narrator becomes a sort of tour guide who expertly describes, explains and evokes names of places and their significance and relation to his memory and experience. Ríos’s mnemonic spatialization of Nogales in his text seems to fall under what critic

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Jennifer González’s calls autotopography. González sees autotopography as a way to study how a person’s integral objects become, over time, so intrinsic to the person’s “psychic body” that they serve as autobiographical matter. Personal objects such as clothing or furniture could be considered as autotopographical, but also objects that represent physical extensions of the mind such as photographs, places and iconographies are also valid. Nostalgia is also a strong element that accompanies and surrounds objects and places, but its role in the construction of memory is rather idealizing. If history demands a single, specific identity from a given object, memory allows such an object to have changing and multiple meanings, González tells us. In this context, nostalgia is seen to contribute to memory but not to history. Thus autotopography becomes powerful “evidence” in autobiographical discourse by linking time, space, and event in a material manifestation of the self since the representation of an identity is also a representation negotiated between fiction and history, and between past and present. This past and present “can thus be relocated in a tangible space of icons, souvenirs, and other collected objects, each referring to specific sites and moments, psychic states and symbolic relations” (1995: 147). As González explains: “These personal objects can be seen to form a syntagmatic array of physic signs in a spatial representation of identity” (1995: 133). Autotopographies can also be a space of utopian identification and mythic history, idealizing the subjectivity that is recreated through the material evidence of artifacts. Moreover, an autotopography may be considered a “counter-site” to both resist and converse with mass-media images. It draws from life events and cultural identity to build a self-representation as a material and tactical act of personal reflection (1995: 147). In Ríos’s narration, the narrator’s topographical memory of Nogales, the family photos, and its regional cultural appendices become this counter-site, this autotopography, recreated through memory and image. If twentieth century media and art have constructed and represented U.S.-Mexico border spaces as sites of corruption and illegality, Ríos’s text offers a positive counter-site of the region: according to his stories it was a good place to grow up. This tactic, an act of personal reflection, intends to validate a specific site surrounded by negativity and historical controversy. In this context, I would like to suggest that “A Rough Handshake” is a good

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example of a spatial kind of autotopography. Ríos guides the reader through a panoramic and, at times, detailed view of border places and spaces: Nogales in the earliest years I can remember had a smell of wood smoke in the evenings. The town itself, which is where I grew up, was separated into two parts, the American and the Mexican, by a ten-foot-high wire fence. We lived on the American side, in Arizona, but my father’s family had lived on the Mexican side as well. I’m not sure what year the fence was put up, but my family could remember the time before it, and still lived as if it didn’t exist. They were not alone. (1999: 2)

A few lines later, the narrator begins to give a more specific view of the surroundings. By imagining driving from Tucson south on highway I-19 the narrator shares with the reader some of his own experiences and viewpoints about the physical characteristics of his border town. Ríos’s autotopography reveals then a border region, or rather, a border corridor that extends from Tucson in the north to Guaymas, Sonora in the south: “The stretch of land reaching from Guaymas, Mexico, on the Sea of Cortes, to Tucson, Arizona, comprises an ancient region known as Pimería Alta. It is an old trading route, and people who had families in one part of this region also had relatives in the other parts” (1999: 2). This autotopographical narrative strategy anchors his family past in the region and also blurs the physical demarcations of the conventional geopolitical divide between the two nations. Two pictures of the author’s parents open Part Four. The photos portray his parents during their honeymoon in 1951. Each parent seems to have taken a photo of one another. Ríos combines both photos and faces them off in the text as if they were looking at each other. The caption under the pictures reads: “My parents on their honeymoon in Guaymas, Mexico. It is a desert beach, spare and cool at the end of October, 1951, each of my parents taking turns at the camera, looking at each other in all the ways they could” (1999: 69). By virtue of the frozen image framed in the photo, Guaymas becomes then part of his autotopographical landscape even before he is born. The geographical border space becomes then an expansion to the south. His family sense of place included a territory claim by the collective and visual memory of his ancestors. Collective memories seem to transcend again and again time and space in Ríos’s narration.

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II: Border Re-Collections: Private Stories, Local Memories In Capirotada, Ríos appears to follow Genaro Padilla’s observations about Chicana/o autobiography in his My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography: Traditional genre constraints have been exclusionary and must be renegotiated, wedged open to alternate forms of selfrepresentation—historiography, cultural ethnography, folkloristic narratives—that do not focus exclusively on the development of individual personality so much as on the formation, and transformation, of the individual within a community. (1993: 30)

In this context, Ríos becomes the unofficial family ethnographer and the collector of those materials that have contributed to the collective identity of his ancestry. If the materiality of culture is closely connected with acts of collection and consumption, gathering materials must have a concrete objective. In the materiality of border culture, the relationship between food and culture is vital. In Capirotada, food preparation becomes a textual strategy to convey and narrate Ríos’s cultural identity and its ties to a mixed ancestry. Ríos’s cultural identity renders homage to both of his heritages. On the one hand, he tells the reader of the cultural geography of his father’s Mexican family in several vignettes. On the other, he traces his mother’s British cultural influence. But there is also a sharp contrast between both of them. As part of growing up during the 1930s and 1940s in a culture where rationing was a fact of everyday life, scarcity acts as a motif in his mother’s anecdotes and stories. In contrast, abundance seems to mark his father’s family referents at all times. In the fragment “From Nogales to Nogales” the narrating “I” cedes the narrative space to his mother Agnes’s voice where she narrates her voyage from England to Nogales after her future husband is ordered to return to the U.S. with the rest of the troops stationed in her home town. Agnes’s narration follows a somewhat chronological line beginning with her travel from her hometown in England to Salt Lake City, Utah, where she was to meet her fiancé, and then her trip to Nogales. The second part of her story deals with their marriage. Agnes

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comments on the communication barriers that she faced since she didn’t speak Spanish at the time and most of Alberto’s family (specially the women) spoke only Spanish. In the next section she begins to establish comparisons to explain her process of acculturation to the border area. She describes the first meal she made: “The very first dinner I cooked for your father was roast beef, potatoes, green beans and salad. We bought it all at Puchi’s Downtown Grocery Story” (101). Agnes contrasts this with her previous life experience: In England we ate a lot of meat and potato pies, and French fries on the side. It’s all we had. And rabbit pie. You buy the rabbit frozen and then put so much water with a little salt on to boil. Cut the rabbit into pieces and boil for an hour. Add vegetables and let that cook for another halfhour. Put a pastry on top, and let it brown. You had this when you were little, but I don’t think you remember. Your father, he liked the pastry things. I used to make hot pot that way, too. (101)

Her years of rationing during the war also become cultural markers in her narration. As she tells in the story: “You know, I used to put butter on the bread and then scrapped it all off. You got to eat whatever stayed on. I did this because I couldn’t get used to things not being rationed. I think that is why I started making so many things … This was my first year [in Nogales]” (102). There are several other food recipes that Agnes discusses in detail in her narration. The incorporation of the recipes seems to respond to a very general linear narrative order, or rather to a process of association where names of people and places seem to invoke the order in which she learned how to make certain foods. For instance, she mentions that chilaquiles, a popular Mexican dish made of small cut, fried tortillas, chiles and spices was her husband’s favorite meal. She confides in the narration that a week before passing away, Alvaro asked her to cook something different for him, since his illness, a severe case of diabetes, precluded him from eating salty and spicy foods containing chile. Agnes complies with his request, fully aware of the risks involved, but this is all in the past. In her narration, she seemed to feel a little guilty by doing this, yet she also conveys a strong sense of complicity and love in her actions. She knew that for Alvaro, chilaquiles were a prohibited dish. Nonetheless, she complies with his request honoring one of his last wishes, a last supper for a

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dying man indeed. After Alvaro’s death the making of chilaquiles became associated with his living memory. As Nancy Miller reminded us, memory involves a dual process of recalling and documenting the past into the present. Recalling and recording also seems to inscribe Ríos’s text in a tradition of personal narratives by ethnic American writers, mostly women, and mostly anonymous, who developed works centered on oral histories, cooking and health practices (1999: 123). In her work Take My Word. Autobiographical Innovations of Ethnic American Working Women, critic Anne Goldman shows how these writings not only transgress the boundaries of the literary canon, but also tend to rest outside of what is considered “literature.” Goldman mentions the writings of a number of “ethnic” women, including Chicana and Mexican authors, who have managed to integrate the above practices as textual strategies in their work: Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca, Cleofas Jaramillo, Laura Esquivel, Cherríe Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Goldman’s project looks into the “literary qualities of extra literary texts to explore how the desire to speak autobiographically is negotiated in narratives that simultaneously write the self and represent the culture(s) within which that self takes shape” (1996: x). Similarly, Ríos’s text takes advantage of this long tradition and inserts cooking and food recipes as rhetorical strategies of inclusion for a number of characters in his narration. Food preparation acts then as an important cultural artifact and literary motif that helps the reader to gain access to the narrator’s world. Chicana critic Tey Diana Rebolledo suggests that the passing of recipes became a sophisticated way to communicate more than culinary ideas among women. Recipes were many times highly embedded discourse akin to literary discourse (in Goldman 1996: 6). This language practice has been seen by many critics as gendered inflected. But as Goldman proposes, we should read the embedded discourse of the cookbook not as an archetypically feminine language but rather as a form of writing which, if gender-coded, is also a culturally contingent production (1996: 7). My argument here, following Goldman, is that the act of passing down recipes from mother to daughter (or in this case from grandmother or mother, or mother in-law to a son), not only provides an apt metaphor for the reproduction of culture across generations but also creates a figurative home space from where the “I” can begin the process of selfarticulation (1996: 9).

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Capirotada is the Spanish word for a Mexican dessert, a baked, sweet mix of bread, fruits, and sugar cane syrup. It is a typical lent and Easter dessert, a mix, a mosaic of flavors, and traditions.4 Capirotada is also a synonym in the northern state of Sonora for a mix involving many ingredients, a “revoltijo” [a sort of chaotic mixture], or for the combination of very different or dissimilar elements into one. This image of the border as a revoltijo, as a site of disarray, as a place without law and order, has been historically prevalent in both sides of the divide. Yet, Ríos’s narrative avoids conforming to this negative vision: in his experience, the border was a good place to grow up. That is perhaps why the dessert Capirotada is a good metaphor for Ríos’s border experience: “Menudo and tamales and buñuelos belong to Christmas and New Year’s and there other food for other times. But my favorite not because I liked the taste of it but because of its P.T. Barnum scale of production, was always capirotada, and always at Lent—at Lent because as a bread pudding it had no meat” (1999: 84). If places and spaces are important in Ríos’ narrative, so are names. One of those names is Refugio since several women in his family are thus named. And, it is precisely Refugio Barrón, his mother in-law, one of those Refugios5 who tells the narrator the secrets of capirotada: “But telling and talking about making it, buying all the ingredients, and so on—this was fun. Everything in it was precious, almost jewellike in its discussion and placement in the recipe, but actually the thing itself was another story altogether. … Still the nature of this food is in keeping with the extremity of Lent. Capirotada looks garish at first, so much food, all together, without a break or a breath. But the excess is the point: It’s the far side of good” (1999: 85). At another level, in Ríos’s work the dessert becomes a pre-text, and its making an important metaphor and a good way to talk about the nature and symbolism of the narrator’s border identity: “Well, capirotada was revolting. But the stories, the whole process of making capirotada, this was pure elegance in all the rules that had to be followed. The ingredients for capirotada had to be gathered from across the line, in Nogales, Sonora, or else certainly in Mexico—and this is one of the things that defined its making. It was not from here” (19999: 85).6 Capirotada “was not from here,” just as many people from Nogales were not really from there. Yet their identities have a strong sense of place, and of “rootedness.” Border identity is then constructed from elements from many other places, not just from

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“here,” but from both Nogales, Arizona and Sonora. The border is then represented as a polyvalent space. Self articulation in this memoir relies heavily on these oral tales, passed from generation to generation in the kitchen, through holidays, in days with names by people with real names. Ríos includes these people with names in his memoir making them protagonists of its own stories and traditions, sharing narrative space with them and creating a sense of collaboration in the building of his/their memoria/memory/memoir. Ríos also recalls and records some of the intrinsic elements of border culinary culture, taking this to a symbolic level where they, in turn, represented a collective view of life. Capirotada, a metaphor for border life, also represents the diversity of Ríos’s cultural ancestry and the multiple possibilities of the present. As his mother in-law Refugio Barrón explains to the narrator: “This is a Sonoran capirotada. In the south, they add pineapple and banana. But this is a Sonoran dish, fixed this way, like carne machaca and menudo and flour tortillas and deer meat” (1999: 87). The food’s rich and varied ingredients seem to be all inclusive. To make capirotada you have to be knowledgeable in the local cultural and culinary idioms that each ingredient contained: The peanuts had to be raw, the panocha and the sugar had to be unrefined and coarse, the cheese had to be just the right farmer cheese. And in Mexico, you didn’t buy these ingredients by any label fit neatly on a package. You bought them instead by description and by narrative: ‘Please give two kilos of cheese, for capirotada.’ That got you a nod of the head and the right cheese, and was completely different from simply naming the ingredient. You didn’t just buy the food—you earned it. You had to know its story. This was a test. (1999: 85-86)

Earning the food acts as a direct allusion to his working class and immigrant origins. Passing knowledge about different foods and their particular stories becomes a familial way to transmit culture through the told and re-told recipes, through the making year after year of the same dishes. Each food contains precise characteristics and represents a concrete set of values. Each dish prepared for a distinct occasion and specific gathering. Each recipe, like each story told in the text, is meaningful to a particular group of relatives and family members. By recalling and recording the culinary and oral stories of his family within the context of a hometown memoir, Alberto Ríos re-creates an autotopography that links the materiality of food to an extended commemorative experience. He re-establishes a sense of place by

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making textual relations between his own life experiences and those of a collectivity, connecting his own individual identity to a border community that he can call his own, not yours, not mine, as Padilla suggested, but his very own border intra-history. III: Framing Nostalgia: Photographs and Memories Ríos’s stories take the reader to a number of places in both Nogales giving the impression that the border was a connected community.7 Capirotada is not about criminals, narcos (drug traffickers) or famous heroes. It is instead about life in the middle, which is the real component of life itself. In contrast with the, some times, conflictive view of the border portrayed in the work of other authors such as Luis Alberto Urrea, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rosina Conde, and Arturo Islas, Ríos’s view of the border is romanticized and reified by attempting to conciliate memory and desire. The narrating “I” of the stories recreates and highlights a strong relationship with both of his parents. Ríos’s memories re-construct a locus ameonus where his childhood experience bridges his adulthood. Contemporary border writing shows that life narratives and autobiographical texts are functional vehicles that allow readers to explore the complex negotiations involved in border identity positioning. In fact, Capirotada seems to bear a resemblance to Norma Cantú’s selfdefined “fictional auto-ethnobiography” Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995). When Cantú, also a border writer, was asked to comment about the relationship between actual photographs and her “fictionalized memoir,” she replied: “my book is about memory, and photos are one way of freezing memories just like words are one way of freezing thoughts—and yet both are tenuous and fleeting. … I work with the ideas of memory and writing –but all in a cultural context of the border which itself is fleeting and fluid (Adams 2000: 19). Cantu’s response seems at first glance to describe perfectly Ríos’s effort to spatially locate his memories on the border. Although Ríos’s memoir seems to correspond to a similar writing project to validate his fronterizo identity, his life experiences in the border have produced a distinct narrative work. Capirotada is divided in a prologue and five parts. At the beginning of each part, there is a photograph and a caption. There is no direct textual reference in any of the vignettes or poems to any of the photos included in the

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published book. Most of the photos feature either the author in his childhood; himself, his brother and his parents; or all of them together. Exceptions are the photo in Part Five which features his paternal grandparents during their wedding day and the very last photo of the text which features his father solo. Capirotada also represents the border as a good place where to begin anew. The Prologue “The Lemon Story” is framed by a photograph of his younger parents standing in front of their house in Nogales, Arizona. The photograph’s caption reads: “My mother and my father in the 1950’s in front of our new adobe house. Just outside the photograph is the Plymouth [their automobile], also new. Everything was new” (1999: xii). “New” seems to be the guiding motif of this introductory section. New life, new beginnings, the narrator genesis, a new start for his Mexican father and his English mother, survivors both of the European front during War World II, and reunited across an ocean by love and marriage. As Annette Kuhn reminds us: “Family photographs are supposed to show not so much that we were once there, as how we once were: to evoke memories which might have little or nothing to do with what is actually in the picture. The photograph is a prop, a prompt, a pre-text; it sets the scene for recollection” (in Adams 2000: 62). And this is precisely what Ríos does with the photos using them to frame his recollections rather than to precise the images’ details. As both of his parents pose for the camera outside their new home, the Prologue also sets the tone of the narration by stressing the complexities of border life and making his parents protagonists of their own story: My mother, when asked what color she wanted the kitchen said to the workers who were all Mexican, and who spoke very little English, limón. She said it both because she wanted the kitchen to be yellow and because she wanted to start learning Spanish. The workers nodded yes. But when we came back the next day, the kitchen was painted bright green, like a small jungle. Mexican limones, my mother found out, are small and green, that color exactly, no mistake. So that’s the color that wall stayed for the next fourteen years. … She said it was a reminder to us all that there was a great deal to learn in the world. You might laugh at first, but after fourteen years you start to think about it. (1999: xii)

Ríos establishes a dialogue between his parents’ tales, his own narration and his collection of photos and memories. Moreover, this dialogical encounter draws on elements of every day life to point at

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how his family develops a sense of connection with several identities that surround their life experience in Nogales. If in his first narrative and poetic works, Ríos attempts to indirectly link his narrative writings through autobiographical tactics, Capirotada emerges as a systematic and organized interpellation of the bordered “I” as well as an apostrophe that interrogates that “I” and its final circumstance: death. In his theoretical epitaph Memoires for Paul de Man (1986), Derrida proposes that apostrophe and prosopopoeia constitute those tropes of interpellation that seem to nourish autobiography assuming death as a process and within this process the possibility of memory. In this theoretical eulogy, Derrida privileges the place of mourning as that prosopopoeic process that substitutes death since death can only exist through the absence and the memory of that other, of the name of the other that is not here with us, maybe only in us, in our memory. That is why perhaps we use the expression “in memoriam,” rather than use “with memoriam” (although we commemorate the memory of those who are no longer among us, “los con-memoramos,” but that is a different, more festive, process). The expression sends us then to an interpellation, to an apostrophe to interrogate or establish contact with that other not present. The other, materially and literally absent, who is invoked when we evoke his/her memory. And through this memory is when we refer to his/her presence through his/her absence. How then is this memory materialized or textualized? Derrida suggests that one way to do this is through the notion of the epitaph. The epitaph becomes the last textual trace of that other no longer with us. The epitaph connects memory, death, absence, and evokes the name of that other. The epitaph also acts as the literal inscription that allows us to invoke, from our own materiality, that other who is permanently absent of such materiality. We thus interrogate death through the other, through the memory of the other that is. Capirotada becomes then for Ríos a visual and textual epitaph which he interrogates in order to invoke and remember the memory of his past and present ancestry. By recurring to the materiality of memory, Ríos is able to interrogate not only his family past, but also the cultural space of the border where he grew up. The fragment “El pésame,” in Part Five, echoes closely the function of the apostrophic in the mourning process suggested by

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Derrida in his work. Here, Ríos reflects about the ways people in the border deal with the loss of loved ones: Along the border, when a person dies there are many rituals. … At a wake, one takes the opportunity to go over to the widow and give her the pésame, as it were a thing—el pésame, ‘the’ pésame. … This is a ritual seen all over Mexico and Latin America, but on the border the pésame is not just an understanding and recognition that death has come. It’s also an understanding of life itself between two places. ‘I understand,’ someone might say. But on the border, this means: I understand where you came from, I know the ranchito, or I know the pueblito. I know what it took to get here, the immigration and so many tears so many times. I know that your husband has been taken away, but I know what you know: It’s not just your husband, but this whole story that has been taken away. This is what the pésame is on the border. (1999: 132-133)

Ríos’s narrative attempts to make sense of the loss. This understanding of life through death, through the pésame, reflects on the process of mourning. To mourn someone on the border is not an isolated, individualistic ritual, but rather, a collective practice of reflection, remembering, and understanding. For Ríos, writing becomes part of this process. Memory and evocation act as catalysts to re-member. Remembering is then to make again this person a “member” of society, by bringing him back to life albeit metaphorically. Capirotada becomes thus an extended written mourning in which Alberto Ríos intends to understand and honor the memory of his father and recognize the nature of border lives, always in between, in the hyphen, en el guión. Ríos re-writes his own guión, his own script, the life script not only of his own experience, but of the main cast of life as a play: his parents and his family. Towards the end of the text, he narrating “I” engages with the stories surrounding his father’s illness and eventual death. His father’s death precipitates a flow of remembrances that become narrated through several instances. Loss and mourning are represented by cultural practices and surrounded by a strong sense of nostalgia. This last part of Capirotada deals with his father’s death and his own son’s growing up process. At the very end of the work, there is a photograph of his father Alvaro Alberto Ríos dressed in a formal black suit. Mr. Ríos is smiling and waving at the camera. The photo was taken at a family celebration; it seems like a wedding, his own perhaps? Ríos’s father appears to be waving, as perhaps saying good-bye to the world.

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He is not really posing. He looks as if he was surprised by the photographer. We do not know who took the picture. He is on a table and there are photographs scattered all around him. He could have been looking at photographs before his own photograph was taken. He was caught in the act of looking at photographs, re-creating memories, looking at frozen images, memories put in motion by remembrance and nostalgia. Ríos’s father photograph closes the text. It is the last page of the book. There is no more narration after that, only the silence of the last two white pages that end the book. This textual silence, the end of the book also seems to refer to the “understanding” by the narrating “I” mentioned in “El pésame”: “Between life and death, between two countries, just always in between. It’s this life, of having come from so far and having worked so hard to get here. It’s this life and it is so much bigger than the body that lies in the coffin in front of us” (1999: 133). By re-collecting his family memories and artifacts, Ríos, the family’s voice, transcends the immediacy of cultural practices, taking to a textual level where they can be part of a broader collectivity that permeates his border upbringing. If Derrida mourns and pays homage to Paul de Man’s memory through an attempt to theorize some of his own work, in his essay “Life as Fiction, Fiction as Life,” the late border writer and critic Ricardo Aguilar engages in a solid critic of de Man’s allegedly narrow view of autobiography: “I feel that autobiography is at the very core of art. Cognition, in the case of autobiography: Specular Cognition, develops from life experience and is then transformed into art forms. These forms may then take any of a myriad of modes of expression, including the ‘imaginative’ or ‘inventive’ process” (Aguilar n.d.: 1). Aguilar’s notion of specular cognition in border autobiographical writing is also an invitation to reflect on a process of auto-re-cognition which seems to instigate a tension with traditional notions of representation that could perhaps lead us to a deeper exploration of aesthetics of self-recognition in border writing. Moreover, this “autore-conocimiento”8 (auto-re-knowledge) reminds us of what Derrida has called the “memory of remembrance” which is possible to imagine as point of convergence of several possibilities of the autobiographical “I” in memory; and as Aguilar reminds us: Human memory is a kind of fiction. It transforms ‘lived’ reality, which is so vast that it would be impossible to write down in its entirety, into a collage/montage of reality clips which are then ordered according to the

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writer’s choice. It is a method for the presentation of the whole through (a number of) its parts. (It is) the use of metonymy for the creation of a metaphor, an extended metaphor. Autobiography is then a metaphor for life experience, a fiction. (n.d.: 1)

And this is precisely what Ríos does in his memoir: he crystallizes his life experience through the written word by making ambos Nogales his own loci of enunciation, rescuing many of the family’s traditions and paying homage to the memory of his parents. IV: (In)conclusions It is difficult to offer definite conclusions at this point. Rather, I want to reiterate some of the points made in the paper and suggest a few avenues of inquiry. What I tried to do in this exercise was to highlight the many ways in which Alberto Ríos constructs and manages his view of memory and place. By using a memoir as a textual vehicle, Ríos is able to create a narrative representation that fuses his personal experience within a collective identity negotiation and a very strong sense of place. Moreover, Capirotada becomes a modern memoir by flexing the traditional limits of the genre and thus allowing the narrating “I” to share personal and private events within an open and demarcated spatial parameter. The term “capirotada” also becomes in this work an extended allegory of the border region which becomes that reified space where private tales and local histories mingle and interact bringing at the same time a nostalgic turn to the narration. In this context, the border is represented as a polyvalent entity that emerges in the materiality of culture. By resorting to narrating the effect of objects, places, foods, and photographs, Ríos assumes that memory is not a mythical or a fictitious act, but rather, a process that keeps us linked to the real world regardless of how much we miss from it. Here, loss and absences are replaced by evocation and material evidence under which we establish contact with those important characters and events that remain forever present in the power of words. Finally, this paper attempted to locate the place of the border and its people as a vital locus of enunciation in contemporary cultural and literary studies. If the border has been in many instances “hijacked” by politicians, and social scientists, and converted into something that it is really not, it is important to pay attention to other manifestations of human presence that make this unique, contested

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and ever changing space a source of learning and hope for our future. I want to end with a valuable thought about the border from El Paso critic Fernando García Nuñez: The border is the meeting place for the images that one nation creates about another yet do not result in identification with either. Again, this ambiguous situation necessarily leads to continuous deception or simulation, for the permanent confluence of opposites on the border prevent the setting of any limits or definitions of being: existence on the border implies continuous change. (in Aguilar n. d.: 4)

Endnotes 1

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Alberto Álvaro Ríos, born in 1952 in Nogales, Arizona, is the author of nine books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir. His books of poems include, most recently, The Theater of Night (2006) along with The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (2002) a finalist for the National Book Award, Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses (1990) The Lime Orchard Woman (1988) The Warrington Poems (1989) Five Indiscretions (1985) and Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982). His three collections of short stories are, most recently, The Curtain of Trees (1999) along with Pig Cookies (1995) and The Iguana Killer (1984). Capirotada won the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award. Ríos is the recipient of the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction, and inclusion in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, as well as over 200 other national and international literary anthologies. His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music. Ríos is a Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University, where he has taught for 25 years and where he holds the further distinction of the Katharine C. Turner Endowed Chair in English. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Ricardo Aguilar, friend, teacher, colleague, mentor, professor at New Mexico State University, and border writer who passed away in El Paso, Texas in September of 2004. For a productive revision of the notion of memoir see Canadian critic Helen Buss’s Introduction to her book Repossessing the Word. Reading Memoir by Contemporary Women. Buss places memoirs within the context of life writing discourse and effectively argues the unique place that memoirs keep in contemporary autobiographical writing by women. Moreover, rather than privileging genre as the defining force, she contends that memoirs follow a number of strategies that convey and present a multiplicity of subject and personal positions in life writing discourse, just as I argue that Ríos does in Capirotada.

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Horacio Sobarzo in his Vocabulario sonorense defines capirotada as: “1. Postre sonorense que se usa en la cuaresma. Se hace con pan, queso, azúcar moscabado, algunas frutas secas y yerbas aromáticas como cilantro. 2. Revoltijo, conjunto desordenado de muchas cosas. Alude al postre que da la impresión de una mezcla improvisada” (52). In the fragment “Days with Names” there is a poem “Day of Refugios,” a poetic reflection on the author’s origins and his ancestry. Here the poetic voice states “I come from a family of people with names, Real names, not afraid names, with colors.” The poetic voice then refers to the name Refugio, to the fourth of July, an American holiday, and to Refugio, the saint celebrated on the fourth of July in Mexico. “Refugio,” is the name of his grandmother and of his great-grandmother: My grandmother’s name—here it comes— Her name was Refugio, And my great-grandmother’s name was Refugio, And my mother-in-law’s name now, It’s another Refugio, Refugios everywhere, Refugios and shrimp cocktails and sodas. Fourth of July was a birthday party For all the women in my family Going way back, a party These women were me, What I was before me. (1999: 72)

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Recalling his female ancestor’s names and recording them in a poem become textual acts that mark both the poetic voice and the narrator’s words into the memoir. Recalling and recording converge to contribute to a genealogical act. Refugio (a Spanish word literally meaning “refuge” and direct reference to the catholic character Our Lady of the Refuge) becomes a motif and a catalyst for the narrator’s relational identity. The textual voice takes sanctuary in a name and in the memory invoked by days, names and holidays, which in the Mexican context are really Holy-Days, literally translated as “días santos.” It is also impossible not to recognize the sense of security and protection that the word Refugio conveys as the border space of the narrator signifies that idea of a place of safety. Nogales became a refuge, a safe place for his parents after the war. The border, his border, is a safe place after all. In his story “El Hoyo,” Chicano writer Mario Suarez uses the making and consuming of capirotada as an analogy to explain the nature of his Tucson barrio El Hoyo and its people: Perhaps El Hoyo, its inhabitants, and its essence can best be explained by telling you a little bit about a dish called capirotada. Its origin is uncertain. But it is made of old, new, stale and hard bread. It is sprinkled with water and then it is cooked with raisins, olives, tomatoes, peanuts, cheese, and general leftovers of that which is good and bad. It is seasoned with salt, sugar, pepper, and sometimes chili or tomato sauce. It is fired with tequila or sherry wine. It is served hot, cold, or just “on the weather” as they say in El Hoyo. The Garcia’s like it one way, the Quevedos

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Javier Durán another. While in general appearance it does not differ much from one home to another it tastes different everywhere. Nevertheless, it is still capirotada. And so it is with El Hoyo’s Chicanos. While many seem to the undiscerning eye to be alike it is only because collectively they are referred to as Chicanos. But like capirotada, fixed in a thousand ways and served on a thousand tables, which can only be evaluated by individual taste, the Chicanos must be so distinguished (in Paredes 1972: 98)

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Suarez like Alberto Ríos uses capirotada, a Mexican food, a multifaceted and diverse dish to explain and illustrate the complexities of their culture. Suarez’s plea to show the diversity and multiplicity of the Chicano community echoes Ríos’s effort to locate and trace his own cultural family history. Nogales, Arizona in the U.S. and Nogales, Sonora in Mexico have been selfidentified traditionally as “Ambos Nogales.” Locally, both cities have historically maintained their status as a kind of “sister or twin” cities. For an illustrating cultural and historical view of the region’s development see Tinker Salas (2001). For a geo-historical approach to spatial changes in both Nogales see Arreola (2001). I want to mention my debt with my colleague Laura Gutierrez who brought this term to my attention from a different context. Gracias Laura.

Postcards from the Border: In Tijuana, Revolución is an Avenue Santiago Vaquera Working from the “Middle World” metaphor by Breyten Breytenbach, this chapter examines the landscape of Tijuana, through three “postcard” representations of Avenida Revolución, Tijuana’s tourist strip. This paper is a theoretical/autobiographical inquiry into the representation of Tijuana, and the consequences of such narrations. Tijuana delights not in the totalizing gaze of a singular reading but rather in the multiple answers it presents to questions posed by those who practice it. As a site of representation Tijuana is a palimpsest of routes, histories, and images. Conceptualizing this city as one that is always peripheral, Tijuana can be read as an outpost in the Middle World between the first and the third, a liminal space where “truths no longer fit snugly and certainties do not overlap”

si usted es un sureño en busca de trabajo y camina cabizbajo por calles de anuncios y ofertas con un morral de colores chillantes y bolsillas rotos, perseguido por ser ilegal, encarcelado por ser ilegal condenado por ser ilegal, pásele, pásele Roberto Castillo, “La última función del mago de los espejos”

I: Tijuana Postcards: Güelcome to Tijuana Tijuana: City of more than a million on the most crossed border in the world. Tijuana: postmodern city, caught in the cultural crossfire from Mexico and the United States. Tijuana: Dog races, beaches, Avenida Revolución, tourists, cheap liquor, flashy discos, maquiladoras, neighborhoods of cardboard houses, American armed servicemen on weekend leave, the Border Patrol, narco-politics, drug killings, Colosio. Tijuana is the laboratory of postmodernity; so says Néstor

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García Canclini. Every city looks like Tijuana on a Saturday night, so says Guillermo Gómez Peña. Tijuana looks towards the future, so says Richard Rodriguez. Tijuana is the “mecca of syncretism,” so says Juan Villoro. Tijuana reinvents Mexico, so says Heriberto Yépez. Tijuana is the center of the universe, so says Luis Humberto Crosthwaite. Tijuana in postcards. The metaphor of the postcard employed here is similar to that of the “Establishing shot” as used by Claire Fox in her excellent study, The Fence and the River. Briefly, she refers to “a two to three second take of a building exterior or landscape that is inserted at the beginning of a scene … meant to be unobtrusive keys that help the viewer to locate action within a larger space” (1999: 46). The postcard, as used here, functions in a similar way. Postcards are meant to be unobtrusive objects passed around, sent to friends, fitted in an album. Often, they reduce the complex realities of a place to a set of markers, creating a further distancing between the object viewed and the viewer. They establish, or fix, a place in time and space. It is in this aspect that I argue for an approach that is similar to what Fox aims for in her study of the US/Mexico border. At the same time that the postcard situates a place—much like an establishing shot in film—they also serve as foundation for approaching that place. The postcard creates a narrative that can remind us that, as Patricia Price argues, “place … is a processual, polyvocal, always-becoming entity” (2004: 1). In the second half of this paper I will focus on “postcards” that operate on a metaphorical level. That is, I will be discussing objects that are not necessarily postcards but serve in the establishment of a particular place, in this case Tijuana’s main tourist drag, Avenida Revolución. The first image will be a tourist postcard, the second an aural postcard, and the third, a narrative postcard. I will begin by telling a story about Tijuana and its cultural representations, rendering the city not as a global city, but rather an anti-global middle world outpost. It merits emphasizing that Tijuana is different things to different people; it is—like the border itself—not easily contained within one dominant gaze. It calls for a tangential approach. Thus this paper necessarily moves through various—postcard—(re)presentations of the city, interrogating the types of imaginative geographies that are constructed out of the space of the city. The guiding principal is that a work that focuses on Tijuana is not “telling it like it is,” that is, simply reflecting a mirrored

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reality of the topography, but rather, it is “telling it like we are,” in the words of Trevor Barnes and James Duncan. Writing about a place “reveals as much about ourselves as it does about the worlds represented” (1992: 3). Güelcome to Tijuana. II: The Anti-Global City Border city founded at the end of the nineteenth century, Tijuana’s identity owes much to movement. To arrive in Tijuana, as is the case for other major urban centers, is to be preceded by others.1 The types of border crossers and people in the city include: •Tourists who cross the border to “know” Mexico, or at least an idea of a fictional Mexico. They search for Mexico in Tijuana’s principal avenues and in its black velvet Elvises, Bart Simpson piggy banks, and painted donkey carts. Looking, according to Mexican border writer Rubén Vizcaíno, “for their identity. … They see Third World poverty—the skinny dogs, the people begging, the indígenas kneeling before them—and they prove to themselves that they are great” (Martínez 1993a: 92). •The American military and underage college students who cross by night guided by the magnet of the Avenida Revolución where they can get lost in the bars and the gigantic discoteques. •Writers and the artists who come to carnival Tijuana to partake in the culture clash of the border. •The millions who cross back and forth, the waves who use Tijuana as a way station, working in the maquilas or shopping in its stores. The millions who migrate from south to north, hoping to cross, standing at the line and waiting for that opportunity to leap across. Some go, some return, and many wait. In this city, affirms Martín de la Rosa, “we are all immigrants. The only difference is that some came earlier and others later” (in Castillo 1989: 199). It is in these crossings that Tijuana becomes a city of imagined cities that are written in the wanderings through the streets of the city. Cities captured in postcards, Greetings from Tijuana, images of Avenida Revolución, the beaches, the tower of Agua Caliente, the giant Mexican flag waving over the border. Tijuana sits on multiple borderlines. It is the meeting of the Californias, the point of union and division between Mexico and the United States, and the juncture where the Pacific Ocean meets North

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America. It is also a city in which Mexican and American cultures meet, clash, and mix. It is—literally and figuratively—in the cultural crossfire between Mexico and the United States. It is a mirror that reflects back on both Mexico and the United States by subverting Mexican national identity and offering up a vision of global mixing. In this respect, Tijuana, and the northern border in general, threatens the monolithic national image that the central power, Mexico City, wants to project over the country. Despite the celebrated phrase by the Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gómez Peña, Tijuana cannot be considered a global city. At least not as proposed by Saskia Sassen, where she defines these types of cities as “centers for the servicing and financing of international trade, investment, and headquarter operations” (2001: xxiii). Tijuana is, literally and figuratively, a peripheral city, situated by its history and location on the margins. However, given this peripheral standing, Tijuana, Mexico’s northern frontier in general, is a participant in a global economy and forms a part of a global corridor, bridging global cities as Los Angeles and Mexico City. Conceptualizing this city as one that is always peripheral, Tijuana can be seen as an Anti-Global City, or as an outpost in the middle world. This term, borrowed from Breyten Breytenbach, refers to a world between the first and the third, a liminal space where “truths no longer fit snugly and certainties do not overlap” (2001: 13). He emphasizes that though the Middle World is everywhere, “belonging and not belonging,” it is not “of the Center … since it is by definition and vocation peripheral; it is other, living in the margins, the live edges” (2001: 14). To further clarify we might turn to Edward Soja and his definition for the Postmetropolis. He argues that the changes in contemporary urban spaces have been: [S]o dramatic that we can no longer simply add our new knowledge to the old. There are too many incompatibilities, contradictions, disruptions. We must instead radically rethink and perhaps deeply restructure—that is, deconstruct and reconstitute—our inherited forms of urban analysis to meet the practical, political and theoretical challenges presented by the postmetropolis. (1997: 21)

To understand postmodern urban spaces he proposes a perspective in which both a localized—the “view from below” epitomized by the

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walker in the city and championed in much contemporary cultural studies—and a macro perspective—the overall structure of the city—are combined (Soja 1997: 22). In a way, to take in such cities is analogous to reading a text or as a network of texts each corresponding to different urban needs and concerns: the text of the city becomes unraveled in walking the tangle of streets and buildings (de Certeau 1988). Michel Butor has written of cities “que tienen un peso literario enorme”2 in that they are often written about. These textual cities impact not only on a purely literary level, they are also containers of other texts: graffitti, street signs, billboards, and advertisements. Butor promotes a textual metaphor for the city in which straying emphasizes chance and uncertainty, foregrounding the incidental, indefinite flows of people, cultures, and texts of postmodern urban metropolises. The type of flâneur in the postmodern city that is implied in his reading would have to accept the possibility of never arriving at a complete knowledge of the city; he must instead seek out the ephemeral and the transitory.3 III: The Wandering City A city like Tijuana, an outpost in the middle world, delights not in the totalizing gaze of a singular reading but rather in the multiple answers it presents to questions posed by those who practice it. As a site of representation, Tijuana, “la casa de toda la gente” in the words of García Canclini, is a palimpsest of routes, histories, and images. Because, as geographers as James Duncan and Jonathan Smith have noted, places are intertextual sites.4 In the meetings of cultures that exist at the US/Mexico Borderlands, one notices the itinerant, or what I have referred to in other works as a poetics of wandering. It merits emphazising that I am not referring to aimlessness, or to being lost. To get lost, as Walter Benjamin writes, “requires ignorance—nothing more” (1986: 8). What is at issue is rather, a straying, a wandering in which the walker is guided by the city, in which “signboards and street names, passersby, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer” (Benjamin 1986: 9). These all form part of the text that is inscribed within the city and the text that is read and written by the city walker. To wander, stray, in the city, then, is to experience it for oneself, to write one’s

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story with one’s footsteps, to construct a city within the city. At the same time, the overall structure of the city is constantly changing, in a continual process of reinvention. Wandering is at once both deterritorializing and reterritorializing. Both forces are apparent in the northern Mexican border region. There is a deterritorializing of hegemonic notions of nation, and a reterritorialization of a border identity that is, at one level, forged by a condition of liminality. As Lauro Zavala defines it, this refers to: [T]he paradoxical and potentially productive condition of being situated between two locations. These locations may be physical locations, languages, literary genres, cultural traditions, or stages of development. The concept of liminality erases hierarchical separations. (1997: 9)

Liminality, as an expression of Wandering, implies hybridity. The Mexican cultural critic Sergio Gómez Montero proposes four structural axes—or dimensions—for studying border cultural production: borderization, intertextuality, vanguardism, and biculturalism-bilingualism (1993: 96-98). As culturally specific strategies produced by marginalized communities they express “express the need to distance themselves from the tradition inherited from their predecessors while encoding that preceding discourse in an ironical, double-voiced way” (Zavala 1997: 10). Each one of these structural axes can be analyzed separately as a line of flight to study a text, and each one can be a study in itself; not all of them will always be present in a border text. Belonging to various regions, liminal texts express hybrid narrative strategies that can be related to liminal communities. That is to say that hybrid strategies—for example code-switching, ironic forms of writing, transcultural forms—lend themselves, according to Zavala, to “the expression of liminal, hybrid, transitional and paradoxical historical conditions…these writing strategies express the cultural need for new languages not yet created, especially those of emerging communities” (1997: 10). Cultural liminality opens up an interstitial space that transforms , paraphrasing Iain Chambers, the myth of a single temporal order (be it “Modernity,” “Progress” “United States”) into multiple orders and histories. It merits noting that recurring to liminality or to Wandering is not simply a celebration of hybridity: this would greatly reduce the complexity of the borderlands. Hybridity is but one tool that could be

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used to approach the border. Lavie and Swedenburg note that hybridity is the result of a long history of “confrontations between unequal cultures and forces, in which the stronger culture struggles to control, remake, or eliminate the subordinate partner” (1996: 9). At asymmetrical borders, like the one between Mexico and the United States, the inhabitants of who find themselves in a subordinate position “have frequently managed to divert the cultural elements they were forced to adopt and have rearranged them for their own sly purposes within a new ensemble” (Lavie and Swedenburg 1996: 9). An example of this can be seen in the ways that the physical border on the Mexican side has often become a canvas upon which border citizens express themselves: through graffiti; through artistic installations, such as those set up during the In/Site festivals, and since the creation of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, the wall on the beach of Tijuana has been filled with the names of those who have died attempting to cross; and, for a while in the 1980’s, through the pickup volleyball games that were played, with the old chain link fence serving as the net. To use the border—an institutional barrier constructed to delimit the line between two nations—in these ways illustrate the ways in which the local community attempts to subvert controls by national centers that would attempt to lay claim to a region. In effect, punch holes through the border, create openings through the Middle World. As Breytenbach notes, Middle Worlders, paradoxically, have a sharpened awareness of place … as with the nomads the environment may be constantly changing and you do not possess it, but it is always a potentially dangerous framework with which you must interact, and therefore they will know cloud and well and star and fire better than sedentary citizens do. (2001: 19)

Tijuana, viewed as a wandering city, is marked in the itineraries of the people who use it. It is a wandering city not because of its migrant communities, but because of its constantly changing character. Tijuana outpost posits a cardinal rule for the Middle World: “you can only survive and move forward by continuing to invent yourself.” (Breytenbach 2001: 19). Wandering implies movement from one position to another. By focusing on Wandering, notions of a point of departure, or of arrival, become less important: what matters is the journey.

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What needs to be noted is that Wandering does not imply aimlessness, but rather a process of becoming; a journeying along multiple trajectories. More specifically, we can focus on Wandering as a deterritorializing strategy. That is, to wander is to change the emphasis on identity as being rooted in a place but also being built on movement, on routes. The identity that arises is not one based on territory, rather, the border identity that is proclaimed is forged between national cultures, in a migrant movement that is situated in an intervening space. IV: Revolution is a Street in Tijuana (or All Roads Lead to La Revu) Tijuana, as a peripheral city, can be viewed—for a particular segment of the population—, as a nomadic city that is created in its practice—in its use—, in the itineraries of the people who walk/move/use it. For many, the introduction to the city is through its main tourist drag, Revolution Avenue. In Mexico, the naming of streets after important Mexican historical events, heroes, and places, serves to unite a national narrative literally at street level. Every urban area has a street named Niños Heroes, or Revolución, or 16 de septiembre. This naming functions within a project of national unification, all urban areas partake in the nation of Mexico, but these meanings often become lost as new significations are ascribed to the streets by those who walk them.5 In Tijuana, Avenida Revolución serves for many an introduction to “Mexico.” But it is a Mexico that responds to the perception of the viewer: arriving in Tijuana is to be preceded by the imagination of others, as well as by the multiple narratives that have been told about it. If Avenida Revolución constructs a fictional Mexico, it does so through an appropriation of styles from all over the world. In a fragmented text that reads less like an essay and more like a collection of one-liners (or a zapping of television stations, in keeping with a fragmented narrative of the border), Yépez writes, “Space Invaders could easily define Tijuana. It is a city of ‘anarchitecture,’ a city of self-destruction. … its official architecture is pure simulacrum, pure kitsch. Tijuana existed long before Baudrillard” (2005: 46-9). Avenida Revolución, “la Revu,” is a site of contact, of meeting, where, in a sense, all roads lead. In regards to its urban architecture, it

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is a mish mash of styles. It unfolds for the walker as a stream of consciousness; its mash up of architectural styles brings us into a sense of heightened perception. Juan Villoro notes that its landscape “cambia como si respondiera al zapping de la televisión” (2000: 16).6 Anchored—if it can be called that—on one end by the Frontón Jai Alai, a large structure with a vague Moorish air, it ends—if it can be called that—at a small triangular plaza where the Mariachis meet, across from the zona norte, Tijuana’s red light district. In between these two zones: mega-discos; open markets—with the air of a bazaar—that sell a dizzying number of items (sign over one: “Cheap Liquor. Public Bathroom. Welcome to Mexico. Want to buy a blanket?”); liquor stores; curio shops; restaurants (Cesar’s the birthplace of the Caeser salad in a large vaguely Art Deco palace); donkey carts. There is a sense of placelessness, as there seems to be no architectural unity. While there are markers that evoke Mexico—a plaza where mariachis meet, the signs that welcome you to Mexico, the images on the donkey carts—at the same time the visitor is placed in a zone that evokes Mexico and a lot of other places. As Lawrence Herzog states, “Revolution is carnival—buildings decorated like zebras or Moorish castles, flags and colorful blimps floating overhead” (1999: 208). Reminding us, too, that in Tijuana, Revolution is an avenue. V: Tijuana Postcards: The Border is … In the following “postcards,” I focus on the narratives that they generate about a place, in this case Tijuana. These narratives—the tropes that they construct—can be positive or, as they often are, negative. Norma Klahn has written of a “South of the Borderism” trope in US/Mexico relations, which refers to the ways that the United States culturally constructs its southern neighbor: often, the Mexican becomes “everything the Anglo was not” (1997: 123). A similar process has taken place in Mexico, in what Socorro Tabuenca has called a “North of the Borderism” (1997). In each case, this cultural “othering” becomes self-serving, affirming national identities and generating meaning about the neighbor. In the case of the United States, South of the Borderism justifies the myth of manifest destiny and the continued militarization of the border; while for Mexico, North of the Borderism vindicates cultural nationalist projects to

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combat the spread of American culture. These two tropes—stating what “the border is”—also shape the most common negative stereotypes about the border as a zone of danger or of vice. In political discourse, not only from Mexico City but also from Washington DC, Tijuana, as also the rest of the border, is a danger zone. On the US side of the fence there exists a type of border machine that attempts to set limits to the border. Border Patrol operations, as Operation Hold the Line or Gate Keeper, not only militarize the border but also function as strategies to maintain the line, protect the nation from its southern Other. On the Mexican side, federal practices to inscribe the north into a national narrative—through the creation of writers’ programs for example—function in a similar way, to maintain the homogeneity of the nation, to keep the Other back, to protect the border.7 As stated, these tropes attempt to ascribe meaning to a particular region: they instill a narrative on a landscape. But landscape also generates narrative. As Price reminds us, “[l]andscapes are scripts that discursively construct particular understandings of place” (2004: 23). Much of the negative tropes that arise from North/South of the Borderism comes from outside the border region, in what follows I will focus on “postcards” (narratives) from the border. VI: Tijuana Postcard: Tourist Photo Years ago, living in Texas, I constructed an altar of sorts to connect with my California home. It consisted of photos tacked to a wall in my office at the university. There were posters for bands, flyers for events, photos that I had taken of my family. In the center was an old black and white photo of tourists partaking in one of the emblematic images of Tijuana, having their photo taken on one of the donkey carts. In the photo there is a pregnant young woman with a two-yearold child in front. They are both seated on a donkey painted as a zebra (what Yépez calls the “zonkey”) in front of a cart. The zonkey riders, the young woman and the child, both wear sombreros. His, “Cisco Kid,” hers, “Tijuana.” Despite the fact that the photo is in black and white, I know that the carreta is painted with bright colors and features a large bucolic image. A woman in a huipil, a traditional dress, does laundry by the side of a river in a tropical jungle setting. She is looking (approvingly?) up at a man seated on a horse and

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dressed in full charro regalia. It is an image that represents México, the kind seen: in Mexico’s golden age of film—it’s cine de oro—as captured by the likes of Gabriel Figueroa; in that of the national tourist agency promoting Mexico in the travel sections of major newspapers in the United States; in that of the national myth. In that of “México, rrrrrrrrrooooommmmaaaaanntiiiiccc México,” as the border brujo Guillermo Gómez Peña would sing. In Passport Photos, Amitava Kumar asks why readers of newspapers so readily accept photographs as truthful representations; “why do we so drastically reduce the immense complexity of reality, its wide heterogeneity and scope of dissent, by what we so quickly accept as the singular truth represented in the shallow frame of an image?” (2000: 45). In this old photo we only see tourism in Tijuana. It is also one of the most common images from Tijuana, tourists on a holiday: hopping across the border to experience Mexico. Yet, the imaginative geography that constructs this Mexican postcard is complex. This is Mexico, romantic Mexico. Smiling tourists, tropical jungles, women contentedly washing by the side of the river, and men on horseback looking as if they should be backed by a full mariachi complement. The representation of Mexico painted on the donkey cart contrasts with the region where the photo was taken: Baja California, northern Mexico, a region that is largely arid. In Tijuana, the only tropical forests are the ones painted on the donkey carts. I was almost two when the photo was taken, my mom and me, at the end of spring, spending time with my grandparents on the border. That would be the last time that it would just be us, my father would come to take us back to California, my sister would be born in a couple of months. There would also be a change in the history of the country, but this was beyond our comprehension as we sat for the photo. Beneath the bucolic image painted on the donkey cart was painted the words, “Tijuana 1968 México.” The many zonkeys that are posed for photographs on Avenida Revolución lead carts that are usually adorned with the imagery of “traditional” Mexico: images of volcanoes, pre-Columbian cultures, and the national symbol of the serpent and eagle on the cactus—imagery that has very little do with the reality of Baja California. A tijuanense states, “ante la falta de otro tipo de cosas, como en el sur, que hay pirámides, aquí no hay nada de eso … como que algo hay que inventarle a los gringos” (García Canclini 1989:

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28)8. The result is a city covered by the texts of a Mexico that never existed in that region, an atopical Mexico superimposed in a city crossed by itinerants. In covering the city with these hybrid cultural texts there is not only the invention of a history for the tourists, but the inscription of the city, and the Mexican border region, into a national narrative. Tijuana becomes, then, a mirror that reflects the whole country, marking out the differences between this and that side of the border.9 Avenida Revolución, as a fragment of the mirror creates an idealized Mexico: [A] fanstasy land that is a caricature of what Americans might think Mexico is (land of bullfights, sombreros, burros, and mission-style churches), insulated from the real Mexico, but with just a touch of a veiled sense of mystery and foreign intrigue. (Herzog 1999: 210)

It is the marketing of Mexico through its history (pre-Columbian imagery) and culture (the bucolic pre-modern countryside that offers a respite from the chaos of modern urbanism). And the marketing of culture, as Arlene Dávila reminds us, “is central to tourism” (2004: 97). Tourism demands difference, which are what the zonkey carts and the many curio shops on Avenida Revolución offer. At the same time, it has to be made safe, comfortable, and entertaining for the tourist. La Revu encompasses Mexico in a few blocks, but it is a represented Mexico, a narrative that corresponds to what a tourist hopes to find on “the other side.” At the same time, the zonkey carts offer up a counter-narrative: while the imagery that they represent serves to affirm notions of nation, the zonkey itself—a hybrid creation made in the meeting between donkey and black paint—erodes that meaning. The zonkey, more precisely, its painted hide, affirms that Tijuana is different, from Mexico and from the United States. By injecting this difference into the landscape, the zonkey, like Tijuana, resists narrativization. VII: Tijuana Postcard #2: “… it had to happen in Tijuana” It all began, if the story is to be believed, with audio scraps in a recording studio in Tijuana. A techno musician who went by the name Bostich sampled those scraps, bits of norteño music, with some beats of his own. That mashup of Mexican regional norteño with electronica

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laid the groundwork for the Nortec sound: a sound that reflects and creates the soundclash of the border. Alongside the zonkey, and its visual representation of a border, there is this: the border is sound. This soundscape is in the sounds of the cars waiting to cross; in the crowds; in the mix of sounds from the mega dance clubs and the honky-tonks steps away from each other in the border cities. Cruising Revolution Avenue in Tijuana on a Saturday is a trip across a varied aural landscape. The urban sounds connect distinct places. By disrupting notions of national homogeneity (if such a thing ever existed), the mixed sounds and languages coming from the megaDiscos, nightclubs, and the stereos of passing cars negate the physical material border instituted by nations trying to impose border controls. The soundscape of Tijuana, of the border. The electronica collective known as Nortec map out musical geographies that unite disparate places. Through the use of tape loops of northern Mexican banda mixed with European techno, the collective constructs a soundtrack for another type of migrant passing through the Middle World: the migrant that follows the global flows of electronic music. There are various narrative tropes that the groups that form the collective, including Fussible, Bostich, Hiperboreal, Panóptica, and Clorofila.10 Touch upon: Tijuana as a city of vice, Tijuana as a city of drugs, Tijuana as a rave scene. Above all, they reflect the image of Tijuana as hybrid. As an outpost in the middle world, its various elements come together in exciting ways. As the tijuanense cultural critic, José Manuel Valenzuela states, “Tijuana’s status as a sort of intermediate location, neither here nor there, allowed it to create nortec” (2004: 57). Their second production, Tijuana Sessions, Vol 3—the first was Tijuana Sessions, Vol 1, there was no volume 2—constructs a musical geography that touches upon the various representations of the city. The opening track, “Tengo la voz” by Bostich, sets the tone for a record that showcases more norteño rhythms than in the previous Tijuana Sessions. Fusing a beat that is composed of tuba, accordion, a Herb Alpert Tijuana Brass style trumpet, laid over a drum-n-bass beat, the only sampled dialogue in the song states, “Tengo la voz.” The opening serves to guide the listener into the hybrid urban soundscape that the collective mines for musical references. The second track, and possibly the most commercial song, Fussible’s “Tijuana Makes Me Happy,” also fuses various musical elements—an accordion being the

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most obvious element—into a lighter, more pop beat. Over this joyful beat, an anonymous guest singer sings—in English—: Some people call it the happiest place on earth. Others says it’s a dangerous place. It has been the city of sin. But you know I don’t care. What I care about is to see you again. And to dance that song. From the record that I love so much. Tijuana makes me happy.

While alluding to the negative reputation of the city—despite the quote from the Simpson’s Krusty the Klown who once called Tijuana “the happiest place on earth”—the song reflects the positive fusing of sound and place. Criticized for being the most commercial track on the album, it could also be argued that this overt use of commercialism—slick pop beats, smooth vocals—is ironic. This homage to Tijuana undercuts the negative representation of the city and belies its image as loud, brash, and violent. The following tracks flow along these hybrid rhythms, creating an aural soundscape layered over/under/in-between the urban landscape and constructing what Josh Kun refers to as an audiotopia that are: sonic spaces of utopian longings where several sites normally deemed incompatible are brought together not only in the space of a particular piece of music itself, but in the production of social space and mapping of geographical space that music makes possible as well. (2000: 6)

It is in this kind of soundscape that connections can be made between the hybrid social scene of this border city and a larger globalized music scene. That the Nortec collective is an homage to Tijuana and what one might consider its soundclash—street mariachis performing alongside bandas norteñas while hip hop, punk, and pop music blare from passing cars—is further strengthened by the titles of songs on their latest album, “Dandy del Sur,” “Bar Infierno,” and “El Fracaso.” These titles are also the names of three bars in the zona norte, Tijuana’s red light district. The Mexico that the collective connects with is diverse, crossed and recrossed by sounds and images from all over the world. That it

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all comes together in this border city makes sense for its musicians, especially since the city has been a musical center in Mexico for decades. Nortec reflects the Tijuana of the 21st century. Uniting Mexican regional rhythms with European electronic music, they lay bare the connections across borders, and align themselves with histories of migration, both northern and southern. What the Nortec collective does is cut up not just the musical DNA but scramble and reconfigure it to show off the borderlands aural landscape: they remind us that the border is sound. VIII: Tijuana Postcard #3: You Only Say You Love Me When You’re Drunk In Luis Humberto Crosthwaite’s story, “Where have you gone, Juan Escutia,” the border is presented as a wall of protection against the invading north. This subverts one of the perceptions from the center of the country: Mexico’s north is not really “Mexico,” because it has been overrun by the US. Significantly, the story is structured against one of the founding national myths, that of the Niños Héroes: during the US invasion of Mexico City in 1848, while the US forces led by Winfield Scott advance upon the military academy in the Castillo de Chapultepec, six young military cadets chose to leap off a cliff wrapped in the Mexican flag rather than have their flag—and the nation’s sovereignty—captured. Of course, the academy was taken, and the US flag was hoisted over the capital of Mexico signaling the end of the war and the creation of the US/Mexico border. The story is preceded by a note from the author who talks about how unimportant September 13 was for his school group. That date commemorates the Niños Héroes. But for the narrator’s school, that day meant that “nos ponían de pie por estatura y todos formaditos entonábamos el ciña oh patria de la misma manera” (1988: 25).11 In other words, the historical account is erased and replaced with a meaningless—for these children—ritual. Until. “Uno de los maestros de historia, el más despiadado, nos puso frente a frente con la realidad (ah, ¿qué no lo sabían?): los niños héroes fueron derrotados en aquella famosa batalla, los gringos los hicieron caca. Seis años de asambleas y jamás lo habían dicho” (1988: 25).12 The children felt deceived. They were 13 years old and they felt

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that they had been beaten. 13 becomes an important age for this story, because it was not only the age of one of the child heroes, Juan Escutia, it also marks an important turning point in the lives of the protagonists. Three soldiers on military leave decide to cross to hit the bars and revel in the vices that Tijuana offers. They cross like the conquerors they believe themselves to be, “como Winfield Scott en busca de los niños héroes, seguros de lo que hacen”13 (1988: 27). Walking along Revolution Avenue, they are on their way to its logical end: the zona norte. At a bar they hatch out schemes of taking a prostitute without paying. Their plans of invasion are foiled as the one thing they had not counted on conquers them: Mexican beer. The next morning they find themselves shirtless and penniless on the street. Defeated and in retreat they return across the border to San Diego, vanquished. Early in the story, the narrator states: Si Winfield Scott, general en jefe del ejército invasor, hubiera entrado por estos rumbos, en lugar de hacerlo por Tamaulipas o Veracruz, tal vez el Castillo de Chapultepec no fuera tan visitado o el xalapeño Santa Anna, fundador de la frontera norte, todavía estuviera en la presidencia (pierna de palo sustituida por biónico, made in Japan), hablando sobre el clima capitalino, gozando de salud perfecta. (1988: 28)14

In “Where have you gone, Juan Escutia” we note various parodic levels. At one, there is the parody of the historical narrative of the niños héroes. Hutcheon stresses that “parody’s ‘target’ text is always another work of art or, more generally, another form of coded discourse” (1985: 16). I would argue that what is being parodied in this particular story by Crosthwaite is not so much the historical event as the historical telling, or re-inscription. The account of the niños héroes has become one of the narratives that has helped form the national identity, just as other narratives have done: the Revolution, the Pre-Columbian past, etc. These “boy heroes” were recodified long before Crosthwaite wrote his parody. They were molded into one unit, their lives erased. The six boys, last names of De la Barrera, Márquez, Suárez, Montes de Oca, Melgar, and Escutia, have become simply, “los niños héroes.” Crosthwaite comments on this by focusing on the youngest, Juan Escutia. The title of the story presents then a series of readings. It refers to the erasing of the historical identities into one, and it refers to a note from the

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narrator where he writes about how as a child a series of commemorative stamps to Mexican history were released. He goes on to note how amongst him and his friends abounded stamps to Aldama, Maximilian, and Obregón, but not a single one to Juan Escutia. The narrator asks, “¿Sería otra nefasta idea del presidente Echeverría o alguna conjura siniestra de la CIA para apoderarse de la juventud mexicana?” (1988: 29).15 The boy hero, Juan Escutia, represents, then, the youthful idealism that is lost. The book of historical stamps is filled with dictators, but no Juan Escutia. Mexico loses the battle to General Scott at Chapultepec castle, the boy heroes are beaten. The narrator and his friends feel themselves beaten at the age of 13 when they discover the truth about the niños héroes. By parodying the account in the story, Crosthwaite recontextualizes and places into question the narratives that give rise to the national identity: he subverts the tropes of North and South of the Borderism. The story short circuits different mythologies; the niños héroes, the construction of national identity, Tijuana as playground in which everything can be had for cheap or for free, and the border as region ripe for conquest. References abound to the niños héroes throughout the text, and what begins as an all-too familiar scene of the American military on weekend leave in Mexico, is reconfigured into an ironic inversion of a national myth of identity through a wandering story that continually disrupts its own narrative.16 The object here is not so much the myth, but the way that the narrative shapes the nation. By parodying the account in the story, Crosthwaite recontextualizes and places into question the narratives that give rise to the national identity. At the same time, he praises Tijuana, precisely for its image as a city of vice, in the process, subverting another conception of the border. IX: “Ain’t this the life”: Tijuana in Postcards As a large ever-expanding city, the image of Tijuana that arises from these three representations is one of fragmentation: there is no conception of a total Tijuana. In this sense, Tijuana is known, but only in passing, never as a unit. The tijuanenses reflect and constitute their urban and borderland existence. Tijuana, as viewed through the narrative postcards discussed here is separated from its historical moment—blasted out of the continuum of history in the Benjaminian

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sense—, or that ephemeral event which caused its constructions, and displaces its history to become an empty sign within which other significations can be added. The city is an empty sign, not because it has been drained by the evanescent, the saying; it is empty because it is oversignified, the multiplicity of texts which cover it are meaningless cyphers, partial snapshots in a box full of photographs. A box of postcards, each telling a different story. To read Tijuana as a wandering city, an outpost in the Middle World, is to be in a city that is constantly reinventing itself: Tijuana as a palimpsest, as a space of transition, a city filled with texts that invite the visitor, the inhabitant, or the reader to act out on its urban stage, as in Roberto Castillo Udiarte’s poem, “La ultima función del mago de los espejos” in which a tijuanense barker, invites the different urban identities at play in Tijuana to “step right up,” to partake in an upcoming show in which they themselves are put on display. How best to represent Tijuana? Tijuanense writers offer theirs, the tourists passing along Revolución offer others, and the migrants who come waiting to cross offer still others. To see it this way, then, Tijuana is known by passing through it, becoming a player in the border show. If you are a scholar of the oh so trendy Border Studies, and walk among the bordos culturales pondering the image of Tijuana and its multiple representations, photographed on a donkey painted as zebra, caught in the lights of la Revu, lost in the stellar nights of La Estrella, pásele, pásele.

Endnotes 1

2

The history of Tijuana is based on the waves of migration from the South to the North. These first began in the years following the Mexican Revolution and the subsequent Cristero revolt and then the lure of the US Bracero program of the 1940’s. The massive deportation of Mexicans from the United States caused the migration to turn back southward. In 1950, Tijuana’s population was 60,000. In the mid-60’s there was another influx of migration from the south as the government established the maquiladora system, creating new jobs in the border cities. Compounding the number of people seeking jobs there is also the fact that the city has been used by millions as a conduit for entering the United States. By the end of the 1980’s, the population had exploded to more than a million people. For a more detailed history of the rise of Tijuana, see Herzog 1990. “that bear a heavy literary weight” [translation mine].

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John Lechte writes, “the flâneur’s trajectory leads nowhere and comes from nowhere. It is a trajectory without fixed spatial coordinates…the flâneur is an entity without identity: an entity of contingency and indeterminacy” (1995: 103). For the flâneur, then, the postmodern city, covered in texts and itineraries that fragment it, presents a plurality of entrances and exits, a multiplicity of gazes. See for example; the introduction to Writing Worlds. Discourse Text & Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape; “Sites of Representation,” by Duncan; and “The Lie that Blinds,” by Smith. Michel de Certeau points out, that as the original signification of the name of a street is worn away and inscribed with another signification. “They [the streets] become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning” (1988: 105). “changes as if it were responding to the zapping of a television” [translation mine]. For an extended discussion of these tropes, work of Tabuenca, as well as Vaquera and Insley. “because of the need for certain types of objects—like in the south where there are pyramids, we don’t have anything like that here—… it’s as if we need to invent something for the gringos” [translation mine]. But it is a poor likeness since—as Baudrillard states of a simulacrum—“it bears no relation to any reality whatever” (1983: 11). Tijuana subverts, then, both national narrativization and the border. Originally, there were two other bands in the scene, Plankton Man and Terrestre. By the release of the collective’s second record, the groups had been narrowed down to five. “We were forced to stand according to height and then all lined up we had to intone el ‘ciña oh patria’ in that way” [translation mine]. “One of our history teachers, the cruelest one, forced us to face the truth—what you didn’t know? the child heroes were defeated in that famous battle, the gringos flattened them. Six years of school assemblies and nobody had ever told us this” [translation mine]. “Like Winfield Scott in search of the child heroes, filled with purpose” [translation mine]. “If Winfield Scott, chief general of the invading army, had entered through these parts, instead of through Tamaulipas or Veracruz, maybe Chapultepec castle wouldn’t be so visited or our man from Xalapa, Santa Anna, founder of the northern border, would still be president (wooden leg substituted by a bionic one, made in Japan) and talking about the weather in the capital and enjoying perfect health” [translation mine]. “Could it be another of president Echeverría’s nefarious ideas or some sinister plot by the CIA to take over our Mexican youth?” [translation mine]. For an extended discussion of this type of story, see Vaquera (1996) and Zavala.

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Part III: Cultural Intersections

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“To Hear Another Language”: Lifting the Veil between Langston Hughes and Federico García Lorca1 Isabel Soto This essay extends the critical theories of such African American scholars as Robert B. Stepto and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who argue in favour of a demonstrable tradition of black-on-black signifying. The article proposes that the African American literary canon also practices a transcultural signifying, as evidenced in the Langston Hughes’s 1938 poem “August 19th,” which revisits the four-part poem by Federico García Lorca “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” (1938). The essay appeals to the work of such wide-ranging critics as Mikhail Bakhtin and Paul Gilroy, who defend a dialogic, anti-essentialist, and diasporic theory of cultural production. Following Du Bois’s suggestive metaphor, it also proposes that Hughes lifts the veil or, in terms more appropriate to the present collection, breaches the border, that lies between himself and Lorca

Those familiar with African American letters will have no difficulty in recognizing the source of the “veil” reference in the title to this essay. Threading its way through W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Forethought” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), it is an apt metaphor for a number of reasons. Firstly, thanks to Du Bois, it has great suggestive power with regard to black American racial consciousness and black-white American relations; secondly, as my title further declares, there was indeed a lifting of the veil between Hughes and Lorca, at least as far as literary production was concerned; thirdly, the veil is appropriate in a discussion about poems centred on death and mourning such as presented in the closing section of this paper. Ultimately, for the purposes of the central thematic concern of the present collection, one is inevitably struck by Du Bois’ss prescience in invoking the border—“the veil,” also “the color-line”2—as a defining feature of adjacent and co-existing communities. This essay will propose that the veil is congruent with the border in African American letters, functioning—as borders invariably do—both as a line of demarcation

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as well as a point of access and movement between two systems. The veil metaphor thus subtends my argument regarding the exchange and cooperation among literary discourses, an inevitable—as I argue—process in which the veil is “lifted” in order that a writer “may view faintly [the] deeper recesses” (Du Bois 1903: 5) of another. The metaphor of the border is implicitly harboured in James Baldwin’s words—“To hear another language”—which inspired the first half of my title. He uttered them in 1978 in the course of a conversation with Alvin Ailey, Albert Murray and Romare Bearden. Recorded for the documentary Bearden Plays Bearden directed by Nelson E. Breen, an edited version of the conversation appeared in the journal Callaloo in 1989. The dialogue centres on the respective experiences of Murray, Bearden and Baldwin in Paris in the 1950s, at a time when Baldwin was working on his first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain. “I lived in a real silence, a real vacuum,” says Baldwin. But ... in that silence I began to hear another language; began to hear French and I began to decipher it, in a way, which allowed me to go back … to hear my father and behind my father, my grandmother and the church I came out of and the pulpit I had just left. (1989: 437)

This account of the paradoxical process whereby one accesses one’s own tongue and is able to give it shape through another tongue is remarkably similar to a childhood experience invoked by Langston Hughes in The Big Sea (1940). Hughes’s early reading of Guy de Maupassant in French disclosed for him not just the possibility of creative expression in another language but the possibility of creative expression in his own (Hughes 1940: 33-34). It was another language, in short, that awakened him to his literary vocation. That receptiveness to alterity, in combination with certain facts and events surrounding his life, probably made his literary relationship with Spanish writer Federico García Lorca inevitable. Relatively little scholarly work has been devoted to Hughes’s multiple connections with Spain, let alone his literary relationship with Lorca. Interesting in and of themselves for their sheer biographical import, these connections deserve further expoloration for the rich light they shed on Hughes’s aesthetic practice. This essay promotes a reading of Hughes as a writer who excelled in an “intercultural positionality” (Gilroy 1993: 6), Paul Gilroy’s definition of black Atlantic cultural practice sitting well with a writer who is

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perhaps remembered chiefly for his endorsement and pursuance of racially particular forms in his art. Particularity or specificity, however, have no difficulty in accommodating an intercultural positionality, as I argue below. Indeed, Gilroy’s transatlanticist and aggressively non-essentializing reading of western modernity, in which he stresses forms and practices of interaction among European colonizers and forcibly displaced Africans (albeit in “radically asymmetrical relations of power,” in Mary Louise Pratt’s phrase [1995: 7]), provides an enriching extension of earlier theories of intracultural or black-on-black signifying, as promoted by Robert B. Stepto and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., both of whom provide the critical models for much of my arguments below. Intercultural positionality, the acknowledging of a language alongside one’s own, are practices which naturally complement the conviction that underpins this essay, namely, that discourse is essentially and inevitably impure; that there is no discourse as such, only discourses, though they may be mediated by a (merely seemingly) self-contained or unitary language, voice or opus. Hence in what follows I will be exploring a “single” work by Langston Hughes, his 1938 poem “August 19th” and arguing that the work engages other discourses and texts, or rather, one other text in particular. The critical models which principally inform my thesis, are Robert B. Stepto’s advocacy of call and response as a paradigm for relations between (African American) texts, advanced in his pioneering From Behind the Veil (1979); and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s compelling theory of “signifying” in his similarly influential The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), in which he postulates the practice of discursive or literary signifying, whereby African American texts establish a relation to other African American texts. Signifying for Gates is above all a strategy of linguistic revision which demonstrably exists among literary texts in the African American tradition. Langston Hughes both endorses and enriches Stepto’s and Gates’s readings in that he is, on the one hand, an exemplar of the black American writer who draws on multiple sources of his own ethnic expressive cultural tradition and, simultaneously, performs as all writers by borrowing and appropriating from others, including those who lie beyond African American practice proper. His discursive relationship with the doomed Spanish writer, Federico García Lorca, is axiomatic here.

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Indeed, the period which provides the historical context for the texts discussed in this essay, the 1930s, was remarkable for the degree to which writers across the color line engaged in an internationalist discourse of intellectual, ideological and artistic exchange. Langston Hughes was no exception.3 It was Bakhtin who memorably problematised the notion of utterance as a thing finished, or discourse as monologic, asserting instead the way in which alternative discourses may be unleashed through language, disrupting and contesting the dominant discourse. He famously articulated the by now classic distinction between the monologic novel (as typified by Tolstoy: the author’s voice subsumes all other voices), and the polyphonic or dialogic model (as typified by Dostoevsky, where voice or voices are unfettered by authorial arrangement or unification). The emphasis on the plurality or multivocality of literary textual production is central to the arguments presented here. Call and response, signifying, multivocality … these are terms that will be used more or less interchangeably to explicate what I believe to be a stunning example of how one text appropriates, revises, converses with another text in order to constitute itself. I will be discussing Langston Hughes’s “August 19th” and the way or ways in which this work signifies upon, or establishes a call and response relationship with, “La cogida y la muerte” (“Goring and Death”), the first section of Federico García Lorca’s famous 1935 four-part poem Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. Alternatively put, this intertextual dynamic exemplifies a literary breaching of the veil/border. I will explore chiefly what I consider to be the most salient aspect of “August 19th,” that is, Hughes’s formal appropriation and revision of the Lorca work, and suggest ways in which Hughes shadows the broader concerns contained in the Spanish poem, namely, those relevant to the elegiac tradition. In this, the last part of my discussion, I will be referencing Jahan Ramazani’s The Poetry of Mourning (1994), in particular his discussion of how, and to what degree, Hughes appropriates and revises a genre more often associated with a European tradition. Firstly, some background germane to this essay: Hughes’s awareness of Spain and Spanish culture blossoms in late adolescence through two visits to his father’s ranch in Toluca, Mexico, and continues to the end of his life; he was corresponding with Spanish

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writer Carlos Murciano, for example, in 1965. Hughes died in 1967. His most prolonged contact with Spain came in 1937, where he was posted for nearly six months as correspondent for the Baltimore AfroAmerican to cover black participation in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, which was almost exclusively in support of the beleaguered Spanish Republic. Hughes’s receptiveness to Spain and Spanish culture yielded a significant literary output in the form of poems, essays, articles, broadcasts and a large part of his autobiography. Not the least intriguing aspect of this life-long connection was his appropriation and translation of works by Spanish writer and civil war victim Federico García Lorca. He translated Lorca’s 1933 play Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding 1938) and fifteen of his eighteen ballads from the 1921 Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads 1951). He also planned to translate the section El Rey de Harlem from Poeta en Nueva York (1929-30, 1940).4 My focus here is not the translations themselves but the use Hughes makes of the Lorcan lyrical idiom in his own poetry, that is to say, the manner in which Hughes signifies upon Lorca. Hughes and Lorca coincided in New York for several months, from September 1929 to February 1930, when Lorca was living in upper west Manhattan at Columbia’s John Jay Hall of Residence, and Hughes in New Jersey. We know that Lorca was familiar with many Harlem haunts (Small’s Paradise, for instance) and was privileged with having bi-racial Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen as his guide, who certainly knew Hughes. Hughes travelled to Cuba soon after, leaving Havana on March 7th, 1930, the very day that Lorca sailed in. All these facts are documented in the respective biographies on the two men.5 There were strong ideological affinities between Hughes and Lorca: an identification with the disenfranchised together with a love of the vernacular idioms of their speech and music, idioms that found their way into their writings. Both supported the loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War, a position which cost Lorca his life. Federico García Lorca was known to be homosexual and, despite Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad’s coyness here, Langston Hughes is widely acknowledged to have been so also.6 There is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that Hughes and Lorca probably met, evidence that emerges most forcefully in the four-part conversation between Alvin Ailey, James Baldwin, Albert

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Murray and Romare Bearden that provides the title to this essay. At one point Bearden states that during his stay in New York Lorca was very friendly with Langston Hughes, and he came [to visit Bearden] with Langston Hughes, and this was before he went back to Spain. ... I met him with Langston because Harlem was so small that when you gave a party everybody knew it and Lorca, Federico García Lorca, was a friend of Langston’s and Langston squired Lorca around Harlem, just like he did 7 Mao Tse Tung. (Breen 1989: 446)

While it is certainly the case that Bearden’s comments need to be checked against other sources, it is undeniable that Lorca provided both an implicit and acknowledged referent for Hughes. Long after Lorca’s assassination in August 1936, Hughes continued to invoke him as a model of political and literary inspiration. He includes “La cogida y la muerte,” the first part of Lorca’s “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” alongside such acknowledged mentors as Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman, and peers Richard Wright and James Weldon Johnson, as part of a creative writing course he taught at Atlanta University in 1947 (Rampersad 1986-1988: Vol. II: 128). And in a 1951 letter from Carl Van Vechten to Hughes, the former acknowledges receiving a copy of Hughes’s translation of Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads, adding this suggestive comment: “They (the ballads) are beautiful and gipsies [sic] have always fascinated me: I think there is something allied to Pushkin in these verses” (Bernard 2001: 27). Four years later, Hughes sent a reading list of Lorca works to Van Vechten, who had requested them. The existence or otherwise of a Hughes-Lorca meeting or friendship perhaps remains an irrelevance in the light of the significant degree of aesthetic or formal complicity evidenced in Hughes’s works, a complicity which I contend is almost certainly spontaneous in the 1920s (before it can be established that he had read Lorca) and conscious in the 1930s and later. While some work has been done on that spontaneous affinity and Hughes’s translations, notably by African American scholars Wilfred Cartey and John Matheus, and Lorca scholar Paul Julian Smith,8 the conscious appropriation and rewriting by Hughes of Lorca, and the inflection of his poetry by Lorcan aesthetics and motifs, has drawn little or no critical attention that I know of.9

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“August 19th” was published in the leftist organ the Daily Worker on June 28, 1938, shortly after Hughes’s return from the Spanish Civil War front in January 1938. The piece is dedicated to Clarence Norris who was sentenced to die by execution on August 19th, 1938, as one of the nine Scottsboro Boys accused and convicted of raping two white women in 1931. Spain is a major intra- and extratextual referent, made explicit towards the end of the work by invoking “the leeches/ … /That drop their bombs on China and Spain”; Hughes also included the poem in an unpublished manuscript dated 1941 of his poems inspired by Spain’s civil conflict and bearing the title Spain.10 The background to the Lorca poem is briefly as follows: Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a renowned bullfighter of the 1920s and 1930s, was also a playwright and an important member of Lorca’s coterie. He died from gangrene produced by a goring in the Manzanares bullring south of Madrid in 1934. As Xon de Ros points out in an excellent article on Llanto, Lorca and his literary peers, known as the Generation of ‘27, elevated bullfighting as never before (or since, one might add) as a subject fit for poetry: “no generation of writers has ever been so manifestly partial to bullfighting as the group of ‘27” (2000: 116), she writes, noting further “its proliferation” among that group of poets. The Scottsboro case on the one hand, the death of a bullfighter on the other, both events profoundly connected to their respective local cultures. Specificity or rootedness never stopped Hughes from forging connections, however; on the contrary, his most arresting comparisons derive from bringing together seemingly unconnected experiences, such as when he compares in The Big Sea the thrill of riding the Harlem subway for the first time to the thrill of bullfighting (Hughes 1956: 81). Forging connections among life experiences, and between life and text, is of course what a writer does. The same endeavour on the part of the reader is potentially hazardous, if not downright treacherous. Yet in this particular case—as, indeed, in the dates of Hughes’s and Lorca’s respective trips to Havana—certain facts are sufficiently and startlingly synchronous to warrant a mention, if nothing else: August 19th, 1938 was the planned date of Norris’s execution; Sánchez Mejías, whom Hughes greatly admired and saw bullfight in Mexico in the 1920s (and may well have provided the seed for the Harlem subway metaphor) died on August 13th, 1934; Ian Gibson, Lorca’s biographer, notes that Lorca’s assassination is

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generally held to have occurred on the night between August 18-19th, 1936. Conjectural though such matters must remain, one can still speculate that such synchronicity was not lost on Hughes and may have provided the kernel of impulse to write his own version of Llanto. I will be focusing primarily, as stated earlier, on the formal or, more precisely, the visual or typographical equivalences between “August 19th” and “La cogida y la muerte.” A large part of the two poems’ visual aspect rests on an obsessively repeated refrain which in the Hughes poem provides the title and, in the case of the Lorca poem, surely stands as one of the most oft-quoted lines in Spanish verse: a las cinco de la tarde (“at five in the afternoon”). What are the referents here, what is scheduled to take place on August 19th or a las cinco de la tarde? In the first instance, someone’s death: Clarence Norris’s through execution on the one hand, Ignacio Sánchez Mejías’s as a result of a goring, on the other. Death at the service of form, as in the elegy, is discussed briefly in the closing section of this essay, but death on its own is too ubiquitous a theme in literature to establish a meaningful connection here. However, if we ask how the moment of death is presented and articulated in the poems, then I believe a highly persuasive case can be made to support the contention that Hughes was “viewing faintly the deeper recesses” in Lorca, with the ensuing intercultural signifying that produced “August 19th.” Here are juxtaposed extracts of the poems: Are you free? August 19th is the date. [ ... … …] Thunder in the sky. In Alabama A young black boy will die. August 19th is the date. Judges in high places Still preserve their dignity And dispose of cases. August 19th is the date. (Collected Poems 1994: 204)

A las cinco de la tarde. Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde. Un niño trajo la blanca sabana a las cinco de la tarde. Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida a las cinco de la tarde. Lo demás era muerte y solo muerte a las cinco de la tarde. (Obras Completas I 1986: 551)

One need not speak a word of English or Spanish in order to grasp that the extracts look similar on the page, a similarity that is sustained throughout the Hughes poem and “La cogida y la muerte.”

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Two kinds of typeface alternate within both texts: in “August 19th” the highlighted script alternates with standard script; in the second half of the poem the typeface varies, but the principle remains: alternation between italicized and capitalized script, while the latter dominates at the very end. In Lorca’s “La cogida y la muerte,” the alternation is between standard and italicized script, with standard winning out at the end of the section. It hardly needs pointing out that the way a poem looks, form understood in its crudest sense as how text is arranged on the page, is critical to how a poem conveys meaning. In both instances the moment of death is presented in nonstandard typeface, sufficient to draw attention to itself. Lorca’s refrain—a las cinco de la tarde—by the end of “La cogida y la muerte” in fact moves to the foreground, displacing the main narrative typographically and textually: The last three lines articulate the chronological moment of death to the exclusion of all else, and are in standard script. Hughes replicates the pattern, by calling exclusive attention to August 19th as the moment of death in the last five lines of his poem, and while not in standard script, the capitalization supplants and prevails retroactively over the standard script elsewhere in the poem. Throughout the two poems, then, the moment of death is juxtaposed to, is in counterpoint with, standard script. Its contrapuntal repetition gives the poems an obsessive quality and a certain nonliterary structure. Counterpoint suggests musical form; it also suggests a response, a conversation between two parties. Thus the obsessive refrain marking the moment of death enters into dialogue with the main narrative level. A dialogic or polyphonic text indeed. The central, though never stated event of the Lorca poem, the cessation of life, is yoked to a moment in time: five o’clock.11 The time-death elision is not unique to Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías; Lorca yokes time and death elsewhere, notably for my purposes in the fifteenth Gypsy Ballad, “Ballad of the Civil Guard.” That ballad revolves around a violent night raid by the Civil Guard on a gypsy community, the destruction of which is starkly and simply evoked in terms of the absence of human time: “los relojes se pararon” (1986: 428): “the clocks stopped.” Xon de Ros notes that the obsessive and hypnotic repetition of a las cinco de la tarde in “La cogida y la muerte,” the section’s outstanding structural feature, together with the implied fixing of time in the line “a las cinco en punto de la tarde,”

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both preclude temporal progression (2000: 118). In Llanto. Lorca once more “stops the clocks” to denote death. It can surely be no accident that the yoking of arrested time and death, a recurring motif of Hughes’s poetry of the late 30s and 40s, directly related or not to Spain, coincides historically with his translations of Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads commenced in 1937. For example, a strong poem from Hughes’s Civil War canon, “Madrid1937” (1938), is preceded by the following epigraph, which evokes in turn his own war dispatches: “Damaged by shells, many of the clocks on the public buildings in Madrid have stopped. At night, the streets are pitch dark.” This opening image is elaborated to become a sustained meditation on death, yielding the poem’s memorable opening lines: Put out the lights and stop the clocks. Let time stand still … Stupidity of hours that do not move Because all clocks are stopped. (1944: 614)

A somewhat later poem “End,” from the 1947 collection Fields of Wonder similarly prompts the reader to infer death from the lines “There are/No clocks on the wall,/And no time, …” (1994: 328). Jahan Ramazani notes that in this poem “negation is the equivalent for death” (1994: 165).12 I believe, on the basis of the evidence thus far presented, that Hughes consciously appropriated and re-wrote the first part of Llanto in “August 19th.” Rhetorically, typographically, thematically, the parallels are undeniable. A significantly harder question to answer is why Hughes chose to revisit this particular work. Memories of having seen Sánchez Mejías in Mexico as well as his love of bullfighting, eloquently expressed in The Big Sea, may very possibly have influenced his decision, as I suggested earlier, never mind his strong connection to Lorca, whether literary or otherwise. I propose, however, that given the formal affinity between the two works, Hughes was drawn to Llanto for aesthetic reasons, in response above all to the poem’s patterns of doubleness. The doubleness is present, as I have noted, typographically and structurally, in the contrapuntal relationship between non-standard and standard script; it is present in the way the central event—death—is articulated through a refrain which alternates with the dominant textual level. What I am

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describing is the textual equivalent of antiphony or call and response. Clearly, both poems exploit the intratextual structures and rhythms of call and response, but Hughes’s shadowing of Lorca is furthermore indicative of the robust intertextual dynamic between the two poems, evidencing an intercultural signifying which draws attention to the African American tradition even as it enriches it. The dialogue between the two textual levels present in both poems is furthermore suggestive of the call and response paradigm at the heart of African American discourse, whether literary, idiomatic or musical. I will score no points for originality if I note the equivalences between African American musical idioms such as the blues, and Spanish flamenco,13 which also relies heavily on call and response structures. Hughes himself was aware of it, as he repeatedly tells us in I Wonder As I Wander. Master of the blues idiom in his poetry (though he couldn’t hold a tune, he confesses), he was naturally receptive to an art form that also engages call and response. The following passage evokes a performance in war-torn Madrid by La Niña de los Peines, who remained loyal to the Republican cause: La Niña de los Peines, Pastora Pavón. She was clapping her hands with the others, but someone else was singing when I sat down. Shortly, without any introduction or fanfare, she herself sat up very straight in her chair and, after a series of quavering little cries, began to half-speak, halfsing a solea (sic)—to moan, intone and cry in a Gypsy Spanish I did not understand, a kind of raw heartbreak rising to a crescendo that made half the audience cry aloud with her after the rise and fall of each phrase. The guitars played behind her, but you forgot the guitars and heard only her voice rising hard and harsh, wild, lonlely and bitter-sweet from the bare stage of the theater with the unshaded house lights on full. This plain old woman could make the hair rise on your head, could do to your insides what the moan of an air-raid siren did, could rip your soul-case with her voice. I went to hear La Niña many times. I found the strange, high, wild crying of her flamenco in some ways much like the primitive Negro blues of the deep South. The words and music were filled heartbreak, yet vibrant with resistance to defeat, and hard with the will to savor life in spite of its vicissitudes. The poor of Madrid adored La Niña de los Peines—this old Girl with the Combs—who refused to leave her besieged city, and whose voice became part of the strength of Madrid’s stubborn resistance under the long-range guns, a few miles away. (1993: 332-333)

Hughes forges here an equivalence between his own vernacular form—“the primitive blues of the deep South”—and the flamenco (more accurately, cante jondo) performance given by La Niña de los

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Peines. He exposes a common inspirational source: “the words and music … were vibrant with resistance to defeat, and hard with the will to savor life in spite of its vicissitudes.” At the same time he renders vividly the call and response pattern inherent to cante jondo and flamenco: “she was clapping her hands with the others, but someone else was singing … half the audience cr[ied] out with her after the rise and fall of each phrase.” It is not really remarkable, after all, that comparable experiences of collective oppression—slavery and racism, on the one hand, persecution of the gypsies, on the other, and the diaspora overall—should generate comparable expressive idioms such as the blues, spirituals and flamenco. What is remarkable is the centrality of the call and response pattern to those musical idioms, the mutual authorization of performer and audience, single and communal voice. Ultimately, call and response must be considered in both these African American and Spanish vernacular forms “as a dialogue in and of community … the cry of one voice eliciting the legitimating reply of others” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 35). Hughes reveals a profound understanding of this communal form when he writes: “The poor of Madrid adored La Niña de los Peines … whose voice became part of the strength of Madrid’s stubborn resistance.” The speaker/voice enables and is underwritten by the collective response. Both Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Robert B. Stepto insist on the ideological function of voice (a recurring rhetorical feature in African American discourse) inherent to signifying, and call and response as a strategy of empowerment and authorization, quite literally of making African American voices heard within and in response to a racist environment. This response, as Lawrence W. Levine reminds us, was facilitated by the call and response pattern which Negroes brought with them from Africa and which … placed the individual in continual dialogue with his community. … slave music … [is] evidence … that, however seriously the slave system may have diminished the central communality that had bound African societies together, it was never able to destroy it totally or to leave the individual atomized and psychically defenseless before his white masters. (1977: 33)

Similarly, as Barbara Bowen notes in her insightful reading of Cane, “Untroubled Voice: Call and Response in Cane,” the African

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American poet “seeks authority by trying to recover an exiled continuity of speaker and listener […] Cane is the […] drama of finding authority through communal voice” (1990: 197). Is it really necessary to point out that the central drama of “August 19th” is the drama of an oppressed collective, African Americans, which Hughes converts into collective oppression? August 19th is the date which potentially marks the death of all oppressed peoples and is articulated, by the end, in a voice that is no longer unitary or non-standard, but collective and dominant. The ideological component of call and response is not coincidentally siezed upon by Hughes in his retelling of the performance of La Niña de los Peines. The preceding discussion focuses above all on the formal congruence between “August 19th” and “La cogida y la muerte.” If any substantive or thematic congruence has emerged then it is of course the death-centredness of the two works: not a solipsistic deathcentredness such as in Hughes’s poem “End,” but one that engages a discourse of mourning appropriate to bereavement. Both works mourn the death of a human being—a death consummated in the case of Lorca’s poem, an imminent (while in reality never consummated) death in the case of Hughes. Despite this latter variant, I would nevertheless categorize both works as elegies. Jahan Ramazani’s persuasive readings of African American elegy, a tradition the commencement of which he identifies in Phillis Wheatley and traces down through Amiri Baraka, inscribe Hughes as a seminal practitioner within this tradition. Ramazani usefully observes that in appropriating an essentially European-centred tradition, Hughes “make[s] it new. … rebels against generic norms but reclaims them through rebellion” (1994: 2). In not so many words, Ramazani tells us, Hughes signifies upon the European elegy in general through his blues poems, his monologues on mortality, and his lynch poems, providing further testimony of Hughes’s practice of transcultural signifying. Hughes’s signifying upon the Lorca elegy Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías in “August 19th” is consistent with his general practice of signifying upon the European elegy. Not coincidentally, Ramazani says much that might legitimately accommodate the Lorca poem as when he notes how modern elegists “enact the work not of normative but of ‘melancholic mourning’” (1994: 4). The term is adapted from Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” a work which “distinguish[es] mourning that is unresolved, violent, and

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ambivalent … ‘melancholic’ in [its] fierce resistance to solace” (1994: 4). The section which follows “La cogida y la muerte,” “La sangre derramada” (“Spilt blood”) has its own obsessive refrain in reference to the slain bullfighter’s blood: ¡que no quiero verla! (I will not see it!). The speaker’s wrenching denial of the evidence of death indeed denotes a mourning which is “unresolved, violent, and ambivalent” (1994: 4). Hughes, too, repudiates the solace through transcendence of the traditional elegy not by rejecting death but paradoxically by thrusting death in the reader’s face, so to speak. He brings his work to an end, while determinedly not to closure, by all but eliding theme with refrain: AUGUST 19th IS THE DATE. Just a poor boy doomed to go. AUGUST 19th IS THE DATE. AUGUST 19th IS THE DATE. Can you make death wait? AUGUST 19th IS THE DATE. Will you let me die? AUGUST 19th IS THE DATE. Can we make death wait? AUGUST 19th IS THE DATE. Will you let me die? AUGUST 19th IS THE DATE. AUGUST 19th IS THE DATE. AUGUST 19th … AUGUST 19th … AUGUST 19th … AUGUST 19th … AUGUST 19th… (1994: 206)

I have stated elsewhere that Hughes’s poetics of reciprocity with regard to Lorca—his appropriation and revision of Lorcan motifs, and his translations of Lorca in particular—should be inscribed within a certain gay poetic practice.14 Thus it is probably no accident that Hughes’s most accomplished translations of Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads are those which invoke a resplendant male physicality. Paul Julian Smith likewise applauds Hughes’s translation of Lorca’s Blood Wedding for “discreetly reasserting [its] homoeroticism” (1996: 23). And let us not forget that both Lorca and Hughes lament the death, consummated or otherwise, of a young man. Again, Ramazani is instructive here, when he uses the term “homolinguistic imitation” to

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describe a part of W.H.Auden’s elegiac canon. “Homolinguistic signifying” might be one way to describe Hughes’s re-writing of Lorca. This essay thus proposes that Langston Hughes’s “August 19th” resonates formally and thematically with “La cogida y la muerte,” the result of Hughes’s recognition of a kindred expressiveness, even while articulated through “another language.” The veil is indeed lifted between the two writers, enabling Llanto por Ignacio Sánzhez Mejías to call to and engage a response from “August 19th” in ways similar to Lorca’s call to and response from Hughes throughout the latter’s writing career. Stepto’s formulation of call and response legitimizes this reading of the relationship of “August 19th” to “La cogida y la muerte”: A response is fundamentally an artistic act of closure performed upon a formal unit that already possesses substantial coherence. There can be no one response, no one and final closure; there can only be appropriate and inappropriate responses, and what is appropriate is defined by the prefiguring call that has come before. (1991: xvii)

We must end as we began, by upholding discourse as a site where there are no homogeneous, let alone primary narratives, a site where finally, to quote Spanish poet and scholar Esteban Pujals, “there is no meaning outside precedent, outside tradition, outside language” (2000: 62).

Endnotes 1

2

3

This essay grew out of a working paper presented in June 2000 at the Dartmouth College Summer Institute and a lecture given in April 2001 as part of the “Horizons of Knowledge” program hosted by Indiana University (Bloomington). The full and equally famous reference reads: “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” (Gates and Oliver 5). In a footnote the editors add that the statement was first made by Du Bois “in his address, ‘To the Nations of the World,’ in London at the first Pan-African conference, July 1900” (ibid.). Numerous recent critical works testify to this internationalist discourse and to the increasing recognition of the African American presence within literary modernism, regarded traditionally as a white, Anglo-American phenomenon. See the works of, among others, Laura Doyle (1994), Brent Hayes Edwards (2003,

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Isabel Soto 2004), Paul Gilroy (1993), George Hutchinson (1997), William J. Maxwell (1999), Toni Morrison (1992), Brenda Gayle Plummer (1996). Michel Fabre’s work—too extensive to cite—is central here. Hughes was himself made aware of the existence of geographical borders during his six months in civil-war-torn Spain in the second half of 1937. Crossing from Spain into France just before Christmas 1937, he writes in I Wonder as I Wander: “What a difference a border makes: on one side of an invisible line, food; on the other side, none. On one side peace, on the other side, war” (399). He implicitly acknowledges here that a border can only function as a barrier (rather than porous site of exchange, as in his own literary practice), if it is enforced through violence. Two years after his return from the Spanish Civil War front, and following the victory of General Francisco Franco’s fascist forces in 1939, Rampersad notes that “Spain was a pressing topic for Hughes” (I, 370). At the same time, eager to start work on his autobiography, Hughes “Cut […] back on his social engagements, [and] also postponed one literary task he was anxious to begin—a translation, recently authorized by the poet’s estate, of García Lorca’s El Poeta en Nueva York [sic]” (I 370). See Ian Gibson’s Federico García Lorca. A Life (1989) and Arnold Rampersad’s two-volume The Life of Langston Hughes (1988-89). Coyness notwithstanding, Rampersad reproduces an autobiographical fragment by Hughes detailing an early homosexual ecounter (I 77). Bearden himself was inspired by Lorca’s poem to produce a suite of twenty-one works in 1946 of nine watercolors and twelve oil paintings, known as the Lorca Series, with titles taken directly from Llanto. William Cartey, “Four Shadows of Harlem” (1969). J. Matheus, “Langston Hughes as Translator” (1971). P.J.Smith. “Black Wedding: García Lorca, Langston Hughes and the Translation of Introjection” (1996). See however Soto, “Crossing Over: Langston Hughes and Lorca.” In A Place That is Not A Place (2000). James Weldon Johnson Collection. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University. Box 257-296, folder 258. “It was a few minutes before five o’clock when Granadino [the bull who killed Sánchez Mejías] leaped into the ring “ (García-Ramos 264. My translation). According to García-Ramos, the goring occurred at the third charge. My thanks to Nancy Bredendick López-Aranguren for drawing García-Ramos’s book, Ignacio Sánchez Mejías: Dentro y Fuera del Ruedo (Ignacio Sánchez Mejías: Inside and Outside the Ring) to my attention. There are obvious parallels here with Auden’s well-known elegiac love poem, Song IX from Twelve Songs (?1935-January 1938), which commences famously with “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.” Such a discussion lies beyond the scope of this essay. For a detailed analysis of Hughes’s translations of Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads, see Soto, “Crossing Over. “ See in this regard María Frías’s recent article “Nights of Flamenco and Blues in Spain: From Sorrow Songs to Soleá and Back” (2004). Also Soto, “Langston Hughes: the Empowerment of Dislocation.” To appear in Montage of a Dream: Essays on the Art and Life of Langston Hughes. See Soto, 128.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Permission to cite archival material has been granted by Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

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The Brown/Mestiza Metaphor, or the Impertinence against Borders Isabel Durán The essay explores different ways in which Hispanic autobiographers revise and reconceptualize the concept of the border. In order to illustrate their theorization of la frontera as a vehicle to describe a positively hybrid self, Durán focuses on Richard Rodriguez’s Brown: the Last Discovery of America (2002), and on Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). The article shows how, in spite of ideological differences, the use of the “brown” metaphor in Rodriguez’s text has many points in common with Anzaldúa’s mestiza metaphor. Both articulations, in Durán’s analysis, stand as yet another powerful instance of inclusive thinking

I: Introduction To talk about autobiography is to talk about the self. But when postmodernist skepticism concerning the unified self launched a major attack on the remains of Enlightenment thinking, it appeared as if autobiography, at least in its traditional form as the presentation of a Self, would perhaps retreat into obscurity as an outdated literary form; clearly invalid, and needing to be discarded. Reality, however, has proved otherwise. Autobiography has, paradoxically, been re-centered as a subject worth of critical investigation. Needless to say, the traditional autobiographical form, for which Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Rousseau’s Confessions and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography stand paradigmatically, has basically disappeared from the literary scene. Instead, as we shall see below, new textual forms have appeared that often acknowledge the fictive character of any narrative description of personal experience, and reveal the illusory nature of narrative continuity and of a coherent, stable selfhood, as constructed by traditional autobiographies (Hornung 1997: 221). Still, even if they set aside the idea of an integrated self, American autobiographers continue to affirm identity as a primary category of experience. Because, by definition,

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autobiography asserts that human life has or can be made to have meaning, that our actions count for something worth being remembered, that we are conscious agents of time (Buttelfield 1974: 1). I have always thought it is paramount to maintain a diachronic perspective in our critical approaches, so as not to be blinded by what seems to be “new.” So, let us not think that this dissolution of a unitary self is all a postmodern invention. Against the questionable and fashionable view that nothing changed until poststructuralism came to guide us or rescue us from naïve perspectives, and to bring a focus to our literary studies, let us remember that the American classics of modernity were also telling a similar story. As Boelhower (1991: 133) reminds us, the conceptual scheme Henry Adams used in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams in 1907, for example, already embodies the shift from American unity to ethnicAmerican multiplicity. A quintessential American Adams defined himself at the beginning of the 20th century as “a weary Titan of Unity” (1995: 455), as an apostle of “Unity, Continuity, Purpose, Order, Law, Truth, the Universe, God” and, thus, had to try with all his might to cope with the opposites, “Multiplicity, Diversity, Complexity, Anarchy, Chaos” (1995: 431). But Adams concludes his autobiography by understanding that his “American Self” was no more than a manikin, a shell, a mere ectoplasm. Because the child born in 1900, Adams asserts, would be born “into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiplicity.” And he finds himself in a land where “order was an accidental ... an artificial compulsion imposed on motion, against which every free energy of the universe revolted and which ... resolved itself back into anarchy at last” (1995: 433). Henry James, for his part, expressed “a sense of dispossession” in The American Scene, when he notes that in the Yiddish quarter of the East Side of New York, multiplication was the dominant note. For Adams, as for Henry James, the old order and the old pattern of identities were dead and, as a result, both turned their attention to a study of American relations. So, by the first decade of the 21st century it must have become evident to the guardians of the Republic that any new inventory of American identity and of its literature has to follow the two Henries, James and Adams, in their attempt to grasp the totally unpredictable consequences implied in the huge urban accumulation of new immigrants and exiles. A reality that, of course,

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was also implicitly suggested in the illustrated values of Washington, Jefferson or Hamilton, the founders of America. In fact, Henry James himself reflected that literary change by converting Hawthorne’s allegorical “house of the seven gables” into a new cosmopolitan house of modern fiction, built to accommodate the incoming multitudes “the effect of which is so to multiply the possibilities, so to open, by the million, contingent doors, and windows” (Hsu 2003: 240). Those new doors and windows can be added to the house of American Autobiography too. Because, as a genre, Ethnic Autobiography is constantly undoing and redoing the so-called American self, by creating new, hybrid American types and new, hybrid narrative perspectives. II: Ethnic Identities, Intercultural Selves and Frontiers Contemporary autobiographers seem to recognize that the dichotomy of self versus society is too simple, and, just as literary and cultural critics have raised the issues of multiculturalism and identity politics, these “minority” writers have embraced the perplexing question of identity—of how group identities contribute to the self an essential quality, a crucial part of self-definition. So, group-based identity becomes a key term in recent autobiography, and in ethnic identity in particular. For those who wish to stress ethnic identity, a shared group history becomes a pertinent topic in their autobiographies. Although some of the authors I shall be discussing, Gloria Anzaldúa, Richard Rodriguez or Gustavo Pérez Firmat tell of their individual histories, their stories are also balanced by a story of group identity. We only have to listen to what Cuban-American writer and critic Pérez Firmat says in his autobiography of exile, Next Year in Cuba: The Portrait is also a group picture. … Although the narrative relies on the circumstances of my life in a foreign and familiar land, I share these circumstances with countless other immigrants. I can’t presume to speak for all Hispanic Americans, or even for all the Cuban-Americans; yet it would be disingenuous for me to think that my words, my feelings, my experiences, are mine alone … they emerge from a choral or communal setting and resonate with shared experiences and expectations. (1995: 13)

That is, it seems that ethnic writers feel the responsibility of telling about group history as part of their personal histories. James Olney explains

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how, if we look at African autobiography, we shall not find “autoautography,” the kind of text that features a Rousseaunian “Moi, moi seul”; but what he calls autophylography. This can be expanded to most ethnic autobiography, where what we shall find is not a portrait where the subject makes a claim of absolute uniqueness and imagines that his experience is unrepeated and unrepeatable—à la Rousseau; instead, the ethnic autobiographer executes a synechdoquic portrait of “we, all of us”; or what François Lionnet has termed autoethnography.1 On the other hand, the so-called “pastiche personality” becomes an empowering vision of the self, instead of a danger or a threat in the hands of these autobiographers. The idea of a “real identity” disappears giving way to an ever-changing self that bases its identity on its changing relationships with the other language and the other culture that constitutes “life on the hyphen.” A case in point would be Pérez Firmat again, who expresses this idea of the dual identity of every CubanAmerican in this linguistically playful manner: Where am I most me? Which of these two locales that I have described is my true place? … Miami or North Carolina? Cuba or America? This book grows out of my need to find an answer to these questions, or at least to understand more completely why I cannot answer them. ... I write to become who I am, even if I’m more than one, even if I’m yo and you and tú and two. (1995: 8)

Similarly, Gloria Anzaldúa’s autobiographical text Borderlands: La Frontera features not only a bilingual subject that jumps from English into Spanish at its own, random will without providing justifications for it, but which is also a collective, dual self described as a paradoxically self-enhancing “zero”: We don’t identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don’t totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nadie. Pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy.2 (1999: 85)

These manifestations clearly show how in an age of increasingly intercultural experience, writers face the new problem of expressing the self as a conjuncture between languages and cultures. Exiled, immigrant or ethnic autobiographers live side by side with one another in the

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America of the 21st century, in which there is no longer a central ethos, or a social ideal to seek or emulate, but the blessings and terrors of multiplicity; a culture that splinters, fragments into multiple perspectives, identities, voices, and discourses. And so, ethnic autobiographers write as this conjunction of cultures, working from their in-betweenness where their different languages and cultural ideologies of self overlap, for it is there that identity must be discovered and a compromise negotiated (cf. Hokenson 1995). Yet there are other voices contesting this increasingly fragmented sense of self, especially when it involves national identity. In his 2004 essay “The Hispanic Challenge,” Samuel Huntington talks about the threat that Hispanics present to the “essence” of America, and I am sure voices very similar to his will be heard in the near future in Spain.3 In his widely discussed article Huntington warns America about the threat that Hispanics pose to the Anglo-Protestant culture and identity in the US. His is a posture very much in line with the old WASP prejudices that in the past affected the Irish immigrants for being papists, or the Italian ones for being Catholic; it is also at the root of the set of prejudices that triggered the American Civil War, with the African slaves that were brought to America as the heart of the dispute. According to Huntington, the “national identity” of the United States—protestant, individualist and English-speaking—is being threatened by the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants. However, his thesis, to my view, is false: simply because I do not think such an essence exists. Uncle Sam’s family is plural; and the famous “melting pot” has always had many unmixed ingredients. One only has to look back in history: the first settlers in America were only a minority of English people, and a majority of Scottish, Dutch, Irish, Germans, and, above all, Africans. Since the 19th century, the predominant migrations came from Italy and refugees from the Russian Empire. Today, there are enormous communities of immigrants from Vietnam, Korea, China and Japan. And, thanks to the enormous affluence of Indians and Pakistanis in several areas, today one can see cricket clubs next to baseball stadiums in the US. In other words, Huntington’s case offers evidence in support of Robert Lewis’ idea that that ethnogenesis is not so much a product of “objective” traits and “real” characteristics, such as religion, race, ancestry, language, place of birth, history and so on, but people’s belief or perception that they

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form a distinct ethnic group, or the desire to do so, even if the component elements of that belief are only imagined or invented (Van Minnen 2004: 21). As a matter of fact, if an American “essence” did exist it would be neither protestant, nor individualist. Because the most practiced religion in the United States is Catholicism—not the one brought by Latinos, but the one brought by the Germans, the Italians and the Irish in the past century. And what about the famous “American individualism”? In my view, Americans are, on the contrary, very much prone to the spirit of community, and of cooperativism and solidarity, as the existence of clubs, societies, associations, congregations, civic acts, university brotherhoods and so on, endlessly prove.4 The myth of the solitary cowboy, who defended a society without belonging to it, is nothing but fiction; a very influential one, from Hollywood films to President Bush, but not to be taken literally.5 I will return to Huntington at the end of this essay. But let me now refer to the topic that informs this volume: the issue of frontiers and fronteras. When I was a student of American Literature at a Spanish University in the early eighties, the frontier was said to be one of the central themes of American Literature, and in many ways it has remained a potent image in the national consciousness. Frontiers, walls, fences, borders, and other images of boundary, actual or metaphorical, pervade the American imagination and its literature. The central idea was that American culture and the United States as a nation-state developed over generations, out of the historical experience of constantly struggling to master a natural, untamed wilderness on successive frontiers that moved further and further westwards across the continent, which is non other that Frederick Jackson Turner’s traditional view of the frontier (Van Minnen 2004: 5). The actual frontier marked the push westward, by which the wilderness was gradually incorporated into the dominant culture centered in the East, a process that continued up to 1890, when the census officially declared the frontier closed. Frontier life, so we were taught, offered a return to primal nature, an escape from civilization and a recovery of the lost Eden. It promoted the virtues of individualism, the sense of freedom and self-sufficiency and, moreover, it bred a new American hero: the frontiersman of the Leatherstocking Tales; the Daniel Boones and Buffalo Bills that have been recreated again and again in American popular fiction and film.

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Fiction and film, let me remark again (Americans are awfully good at creating enabling myths they have never lived up to). Since the frontier has always been associated with lawlessness as well as freedom, hardship as well as opportunity, danger as well as democracy, it has always aroused ambivalent feelings: If for the Puritan values of William Bradford the wilderness was a place of bestial evil, chaos and night, for Cooper and the Thoreau of Walden however, it was the source of renewal. Similarly, in Huckleberry Finn, the only way Huck can preserve his innocence is to “light out of the territory” away from Widow Douglass’s efforts to civilize him. But advancing to some early 20th century works, the pioneer world exists as a powerful memory. Let us remember that, in fact, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is a re-enactment of the early pioneers’ trek to find in the West, not the promised land, but vicious exploitation and bitter disappointment (Americans are also amazingly skilled at denouncing their imperfections). Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby also reverses the movement from East to West and has his characters converge in the cities of the East in pursuit of their dreams. And Hemingway’s heroes, after fighting in the Old World’s wars, return to a simple, natural life of hunting and fishing. Still, nobody in Spain in the eighties mentioned the MexicanAmerican War of 1848, in which Mexico lost half of its territory to what is today the South-western United States. Nobody mentioned that since then, the concepts of territory, border, frontier and boundary have suffered a series of changes in the United States. Nobody mentioned that Hispanics are remapping America itself.6 Because if the Western conquest and the discovery of gold in California were world-historic moments in the development of capitalism in the US, just as important to the history of the United States has been its colonization and imperial role in Latin America (Rosado 2005). From the moment that colonization started, Americans have seen the United States in terms of a latitudinal vector, a South/North binarism. This vector, rather than the old East/West one, is precisely what Rodriguez refers to when he says that “Hispanics are introducing a new plane into the American experiment, one that maps the US (from within) as el Norte.” And since that new latitudinal vector exists, the frontier in America is no longer understood as an ideal, but, on the contrary, as a nightmare.

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William Langewiesche describes the border as a war zone, emphasizing daily killings, rapes, and robberies. Actually, the image of a “war zone” is evoked in border representations suggesting that “it is America itself, or rather the notion of America, that’s under attack” (in Velasco 2004: 315) Moreover, in the case of the US/Mexico border region, many Americans project onto this liminal territory their fears, through the criminalization of hybrid identities. As a result, the use of the border as a code for war, conflict, and evil, with its multiple representations, is an important one in frontier studies. One could even offer a panorama of the various metaphors that engage the border in some way or another; for example, if Gloria Anzaldúa has described the border as an open wound, Carlos Fuentes has depicted it as a scar. As Rolando Romero summarizes, “the border has been drawn as a zipper and characterized as a sore. It has been called a ‘tortilla curtain’ and a geological fault line. It has been allegorised as a scrimmage line and, more currently, has been portrayed as a two thousand mile Love Canal and garbage dump” (in Velasco 2004: 315). But these are not the borders I am interested in here. My focus will be on the other metaphorical borders produced by Hispanic autobiographers with the intention of turning upside down something as apparently abject as a border. As Velasco explains, “Border studies,” as an autonomous discipline, was founded in the 1950’s by social scientists Julian Samora, Gilbert Cárdenas and Charles Loomis. Their works were mostly anthropological, though. The border in such studies was geographically situated between the United States and Mexico. However, recent theories of the border or of borderlands have altered the mainstream use of these concepts, so that the signifiers that once referred to clearly identifiable signifieds are now described in highly abstract terms which no longer refer to a mapped or mappable area. Since the 1960s the general celebration of cultural diversity has had a huge impact on the way historians study frontiers; so much so that there is a strong tendency now to define the frontier concept with such phrases as meeting place, contact point, and middle ground; in sum, as a contested territory in which cultural interaction takes place. Moreover, Hispanic theoreticians of the border like Juan de Castro (2001) or José David Saldívar (1997) have reconfigured previous conceptualisations of the borderlands by discovering in the fluid hybridity characteristic of the area’s population and culture a

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paradigm with which to interpret America and even the world (de Castro 2001: 116). So, in order to distinguish one from another, we could, perhaps, establish the difference between the notions of “frontier” and “la frontera,” according to postcolonial and ethnic criticism. Frontier is the space that separates the zone of civilization from that which is beyond,7 while the Spanish word La Frontera, as used by Hispanic writers, conveys the idea of the Borderlands as a positive, enriching zone of cross-cultures, contact and interaction. I like to romanticize with the idea that this is so perhaps because, as most Spanish historiography and some comparative studies have underscored, in contrast with Angloamerican frontiers that tended to dispossess and displace indigenous peoples, Spanish frontiers in North America attempted to integrate them. This difference has led a number of scholars to contrast the Spanish “frontiers of inclusion” with the Angloamerican “frontiers of exclusion” (Van Minnen 2004: 11). In order to illustrate this type of re-theorization of la frontera as something positive rather than negative, as a vehicle to describe a positively hybrid self, I will center my analysis on Chicano writer Richard Rodriguez, and the use of the “brown” metaphor in his autobiography, and on Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa and her use of the mestiza metaphor in her now classic work Borderlands/La Frontera. Rodriguez’s Brown: The Last Discovery of America was published in 2002, whereas Borderlands was written in 1987. A risky attempt, to start with, that of comparing a man’s and a woman’s work in these days of ghettoisation of literature. So, if I dare to undertake the comparison of these two Chicanos it is because the use of the “brown” metaphor in Rodriguez’s text has so many points in common with Anzaldúa’s mestiza metaphor that it almost comes as a surprise if one compares how far away these two writers stand ideologically. Because if the Rodriguez of Hunger of Memory is well known for his stand against bilingual education and affirmative action as well as for his promotion of so called minorities’ cultural assimilation to the hegemonic order, Gloria Anzaldúa was well known for defending bilingualism and for being a stern defender of the political agenda of la raza. Because if Rodriguez has been accused of being a “coconut” (black outside, white inside) and a traitor to his people by some Chicano intellectuals, Anzaldúa has been frequently blessed as the

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spokesperson of such radicalism. Because if Rodriguez is despised and even trashed by Chicano critics, Anzaldúa is usually the favourite of those same critics. And yet, their idealistic, even utopian project as portrayed in their two experimental autobiographies has given me enough grounds to venture on this joint analysis.8 But it is not only their project that critically interests me, but also their eclectic form. We no longer have the traditional conception of a classical autobiography as a life-journey, with a climactic moment of conversion and a confessional tone. For both works are a compilation of essays, digressions, soliloquies and disquisitions private and historical which do not have a narrative continuity, in which, if Rodriguez tries to formulate how Hispanics are browning an America that has always defined itself as black or white, Anzaldúa also tries to discover the nature of the mestiza, and the process of mestizaje that she and her kinfolk embody within the US.9 Moreover, the reason why these two disparate Chicano authors and their “brown” or mestizo memoirs can be studied together is that both of them narrate experiences of trauma and recovery moved by a cathartic necessity to speak out; to interrupt an imposed silence about disrupted, unwanted, or rejected psyches and bodies that has doomed them, and many others in alike situations, to self-torture, closeted darkness, and feelings of exile, guilt, inferiority and alienation. In my essay I will partly examine their representations of identity in relation to the abject. The concept of abjection grows out of characteristics which variously define a person as Other in relation to the normative healthy, white, heterosexual subject. We could use Kristeva’s idea of abjection as that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (1982: 4); or Judith Butler’s notion of the subject, whose concept of the Other creates an “abjected outside” against which to form one’s notion of self (Kimmich 1998: 224), because what is undeniable is that Anzaldúa’s and Rodriguez’s race, skin color, Indian traces, and gay identity mark them as outsiders. Moreover, they are the “in-between,” since both authors proclaim that they are neither Mexican nor Anglo-American; that they have to decide for themselves what it means to be a Chicano or a Chicana; that they must create for themselves a racial identity that is neither white nor black; but brown or mestiza. It must be said at this point that, as Sonia Saldívar-Hull explains, Chicana feminism rejects “the dominant European feminism” (1998: 205) in

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general, and Kristeva’s “deconstruction of the metaphysical constitution of masculine and feminine” in particular because “they offer few solutions to the issues that concern border feminists” (1998: 210). And yet, if we continue reading Saldívar-Hull’s explanation of Anzaldúa’s “bridge feminism” as that feminism which resides in a space not acknowledged by hegemonic culture; whose inhabitants are what Anzaldúa describes as los atravesados (the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’), it is not difficult to create links between Anzaldúa’s atravesados and Kristeva’s categorization of the abject. Having justified my theoretical approach, Anzaldúa’s and Rodriguez’s presentation of ethnic identity in terms of a metaphorically brown or mestiza in-betweenness is what, from my point of view, creates a bridge between these two texts. Because, as Ramón Saldívar (1990) has said of other Chicano autobiographers, in the act of defining themselves they create a space of difference, an intercultural synthesis between dialectical forces, be they United States vs. Mexico; Mexican vs. Indian; English vs. Spanish, gay vs. straight, Catholic vs. Protestant, or black vs. white. Therefore, their autobiographies propose a brown or mestiza alternative, an “inter” space for a new ethnic and cultural identity to exist (Bruce Novoa 1990: 31). III: Richard Rodriguez “I write of a color that is not a single color. … I write of blood that is blended. … I write about race in America,” writes Richard Rodriguez in Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002: xi). And, while writing about race, he in fact undermines the notion of race and proclaims the idea of a “brown”—blended, impure, mestiza, and contradictory—America. Moreover, he places at the core of the book an assessment of the meaning of Hispanics to the life of America: that Hispanics are browning “an America that traditionally has chosen to describe itself as black-and-white” (2002: xii). In this book—the third volume of his autobiographical trilogy— as in some parts of his first memoir, the now classic Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez explores the very materiality of his skin as a source of his political consciousness. Although his brown skin only occupies one chapter in Hunger of Memory (“Complexion”) it becomes the leitmotiv, the trope, and the

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analytical point of departure for the concluding part of his trilogy,10 Brown. Now, what does Rodriguez mean by “brown”? Being brown and thinking brown is, basically, being tolerant, open, on the move, inbetween. Richard is neither black nor white racially; neither Mexican nor American ethnically; moreover, he is neither man nor woman sexually … so he defines himself as brown. But brown is not a single color. It is a blend of several different ones, a shade created by desire—evidence of the erotic history of America. That is why he proclaimed in a recent interview that in actual fact he considers himself brown—of all colors. “Brown,” he qualifies, “is not a singular color; it is the metaphor of impurity. By saying that I’m brown I’m saying that I’m Chinese, that I’m Irish, and I have to mean that I’m African” (Hansen 2002: 5). Let us now return to Kristeva’s Powers of Horror . A category of Kristeva’s abject is that of the deject; an exile who asks “Where am I?” instead of “Who am I?” For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, and foldable. The deject, a deviser of territories, and languages, never stops demarcating his/her universe whose fluid confines constantly question his solidity. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray; “and the more he strays, the more he is saved” (Kristeva 1982: 8). This is the category of the abject in which I would include Richard Rodriguez. Being “a queer Catholic Indian Spaniard at home in a temperate Chinese city in a fading blond state in a postProtestant nation” (Rodriguez 2002: 35), as he describes himself, when he undertook the writing of Brown he was, as the Kristevan deject, “looking for the precedent that made (him) possible. … Looking for physical inclusion in the world” (Rodriguez 2002: 209). Why does he feel somehow displaced in the United States? Because, as he has expressed in another interview, whereas in the Americas—with the story of mestizaje in Mexico, of miscegenation in Brazil, or of the birth of mulattos in the US—, they proclaim their brownness with pride, “United States has never spoken of such matters” (Rodriguez 2003: 70). That is, brown does not exist in America; it is not spoken of because historically the condition of being a mulatto was plain evidence of white male desire, and of his ties to nature: “Brown the color of consort, of illicit passion; brown the stench of rape and of shame, sin, slippage, birth” (Rodriguez 2002: 133). That is: brown, the abject.

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Rodriguez also uses his skin color to shoot some darts against several American institutions and customs. One of them affects us very closely as literary critics and teachers of literature, since it refers to the “ghettoisation of literature” (Chapter One). “The price of being a published brown author,” proclaims Rodriguez, “is that one cannot be shelved near those one has loved. The price is segregation” (Rodriguez 2002: 26). Indeed, Rodriguez feels at best ambivalent about those Hispanic anthologies where he ends up the Hispanic; about shelves at the bookstore where he looks for himself and finds himself. “How a society orders its bookshelves is as telling as the books a society writes and reads,” adds Rodriguez in his always politically incorrect voice. And, in his view, “American bookshelves of the 21st century describe fractiousness, reduction, hurt. Books are isolated from one another … lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse” (Rodriguez 2002: 11). Rodriguez here is, of course, advocating for the hybridization of literary studies in the US, but what he is implicitly discussing too is the theme that has occupied him in many other essays, lectures and interviews: the illusion of ethnic purity and authenticity. One of the main intentions of the use of the brown skin color as a metaphor is, as I said above, to undermine race and to go against obsessive ethnic essentialisms. As Sollors reminds us, ethnic groups are typically imagined as if they were natural, real, eternal, stable and static units. As a subject of study, each group yields an essential continuum of certain myths and traits, or of human capital. The focus is on the group’s preservation and survival, which appear threatened. The ethnogenetic studies that result from such premises typically lead to an isolationist, group-by group approach that emphasizes “authenticity” and cultural heritage within the individual, somewhat idealized group—at the expense of dynamic interaction and syncretism (Sollors 1989: xiv). After reading proclamations as the one provided by Samuel Huntington above, one welcomes even more Rodriguez’s challenging de-romantization of ethnic identity. Because one could say that brown is the child of a Spanish conquistador who raped an Indian; or of an African-American and an Indian who made love. Brown is also a gay relationship. Brown is a proclamation against orthodoxy; brown is diversity; brown is an exciting mixture of thoughts, cultures and races, neither black nor white and always changing. Rodriguez seems to state that it is not any a priori cultural

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difference that makes ethnicity, when he emphasizes his polyethnic Spanish-Indian-African background. And his version of Chicano identity, far from claiming any racial “purity” or any immediate access to “Mexican” identity, may be seen as the vanguard of a future American melting-pot identity, which he calls brown. But there is more to brown. Brown is also a metaphor of the refiguring and shattering of old borders in a world in which global capital further penetrates and undermines established norms. Brown is a space in which Rodriguez deals more directly with some of the new paradigms of this postmodern era. His old beliefs, as expressed in Hunger of Memory, are radically changed by a new brown outlook of society. For example, his outlook on language is very different from the past. The strict division that Rodriguez used to maintain between the “public language” (English) and the “private language” spoken at home (Spanish) has been erased. In fact, Rodriguez notes in Brown that “the best English novelist in the world is not British at all, but a Mahogany who lives in snowy Toronto and writes of Bombay” (2002: 40). Contrary to most Chicano authors, Rodriguez is not bilingual, for he lost his Spanish when he was a child, in his efforts to assimilate to American mainstream culture. And yet, he admits that the codeswitching he hardly uses, epitomized in his sentence “Soy Hispanic” is the best example of a “brown assertion” (2002: 110-11). Moreover, Rodriguez devotes part of his book to discussing issues about the very “brownness” of the English language. For example, he says that the “African slaves stealing the language, learning to read against the law” were the transforming agents of “English language into the American tongue” (2002: 31). That is, Rodriguez proposes a countergenealogy of the hegemonic language by defining it in terms of a creative encounter between two cultures, where the subjugated culture transforms the hegemonic one. His own autobiographical idiom also produces a hybrid genre in so far as what is at stake in writing “brownly” is the creation of new possibilities of autobiographical expression which does not coincide with the traditional, linear, conversional bildungsroman. In short, Brown can be read not only as a celebration of mestizaje as anti-essentialist, but also as an extension of the wider Latin American movement which affirms that “le monde se créolise.”11 In fact, Rodriguez finds in José Vasconcelos’s concept of “la raza cósmica” the necessary conceptual framework with which to understand today’s changing America.12

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I wish to finish the discussion of Rodriguez’s texts with one last reference to the issue of his homosexuality. It is well known that Rodriguez has been the target of Chicano critics for his controversial views on affirmative action and assimilationism. If the Chicano critics disavowed Hunger of Memory because its author does not comply with the agenda of Chicano politics, the gay critics disavow it because Rodriguez does not use its pages to come out of the closet. In his book Gay Lives, Paul Robinson laments not having been able to include Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, and concludes that, because Rodriguez is gay, he “owes us a gay autobiography” (Robinson 1999: 403). I am afraid Rodriguez will not satisfy the reader who goes to Brown looking for that “gay autobiography” that he supposedly owes us, even though it is very much a discussion of eroticism, and even though this time its author does openly state that he is gay. And the anger of the homosexual man’s voice falls upon the criticism of the Catholic Church vis à vis homosexuality. “What if one ‘I’ is Roman Catholic and one ‘I’ is gay?” (2002: 224), Rodriguez asks himself at one point in his disquisitions. And he replies to this question by sadly admitting that his Church does not acknowledge love between two men; and, thus, by sadly admitting that being gay and a Catholic is his “brown paradox”13: My brown paradox: The Church that taught me to understand love, the church that taught me well to believe love breathes—also tells me it is not love I feel, at four in the morning, in the dark, even before the birds cry. (2002: 230)

He is Catholic and yet he loves a man; he feels an American and yet he is neither white nor black; his books are inevitably shelved with the Hispanic writers, and yet Chicano critics exclude him from their ethnically-oriented canon. It is no wonder, then, that in one of the chapters he calls himself “the third man” (Chapter six), and that, adopting what he calls the arrogant “so what?” attitude that comes with middle age, he can deconstruct ethnic essentialisms in one blow: By telling you these things, I do not betray “my people.” I think of the nation entire—all Americans—as my people. Though I call myself Hispanic, I see myself within the history of African Americans and Irish Catholics and American Jews and the Chinese of California. (2002: 128)

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As we shall see, this transnational, transracial sense of identity is also evident in Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetic description of what it means to live in the Borderlands: To live in the Borderlands means you Are neither hispana indígena negra española Ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half breed Caught in the crossfire between camps While carrying all five races on your back. (Anzaldúa 1987: 216)

If in the past Rodriguez hated the abjectedness of his brown color, and grew up wanting to be white for “the freedom of being nothing, the confidence of it, the arrogance” (2002: 141), in his mature age, and having reached the end of his journey through brownness, he may not have come to terms with his own “brown paradox” and the un-brown paradoxes of America, but feels confident enough to close his book proclaiming, with a Whitmanian brown assertion: “Of every hue and caste am I” (2002: 230). Indeed, Whitman, in his “I celebrate myself and sing myself/And what I assume you shall assume/For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you,” identifies himself with the whole of America, if only more exultantly than Rodriguez. Why can’t a Hispanic do the same? Rodriguez seems to wonder. “In the symptom,” Kristeva states, “the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation, I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime” (1982: 11). Let us translate this thought in the context of Rodriguez’s invocation of brownness. If, against the cultural backdrop of a white America, the little Ricardo of Hunger of Memory grew up hating his brown body because it refused to conform to the normative ideal, the Richard Rodriguez of Brown undergoes a transformation process through his autobiographical journey at the end of which he does choose to sublimate his symptom, his brownness, and to proclaim it with pride and even arrogance. In other words, through his daring autobiographical experiment, he transforms the debilitating effects of physical and psychic doubt into political action. The cathartic effect of autobiography, as “scriptotherapy” (Henke 1998: xii), has been achieved, as he declared in a recent interview: Brown has allowed me to reconcile myself to myself, that is, to allow for the unevenness of my life, to allow for its contradictions, to not have to figure everything out in my life, to see it as whole rather than as partial …

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I realize now that life is uneven, that I will always be Catholic as inevitably as I will always be a homosexual, that I will always be at odds with my identity, that I will always belong in some odd way to Latin America and that I will always belong to this other place, this country that is not at all like Latin America. That I will have all of those identities and that I will live with them in a brown way. For a man who has struggled with this and has sort of turned his life into an odd exercise in selflaceration, it comes with some great peace, almost as though I don’t need to write anymore. (Hansen 2002)

IV: Gloria Anzaldúa By this stage, it is probably clear to all of us that Chicana/o autobiography is a political weapon. Seen in this way, the literary text assumes the position of an intermediate space that articulates political and social demands, justifies individual experience, and at the same time, connects these elements with a Chicana/o community and its representative figures. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera is probably the first contemporary Chicana autobiography to offer a response to earlier representations of border identity and cultural hybridism. Anzaldúa’s “entry point” to the Chicana’s experience of the border emphasizes the capacity of autobiographical writing to provide a distinctive voice. In this context, personal memory becomes a political intervention when the metaphors of hybridity, border crossings, transculturation, and mestizaje become the space from which the Chicana experience negotiates the reconstruction of the “self.” In a very historical first chapter, that sounds strikingly similar to Rodriguez’s explanation of his metaphor of brownness, Anzaldúa explains how, after the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 16th century, a new race was born, el mestizo (people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood). So, Chicanos and Mexican-Americans are the offspring of those first matings. Later on, Indians and mestizos from central Mexico intermarried with North American Indians. As a consequence, the continual intermarriage between Mexican and American Indians and Spaniards formed an even greater mestizaje (Anzaldúa 1999: 27). In her outlook on mestizaje, Anzaldúa seems to endorse the view that all culture is by definition dynamic, and constantly changing. Therefore, the notion that people “lose” their “own” culture as a function of “gaining” aspects of a foreign culture, contradicts the concept of culture as a non-quantifiable aspect of

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humanity which is always evolving (Paul Otto in Van Minnen 2004: 17). From this point of historical departure and explanation, always linking personal experience, self-identity, sexuality, historiography and regionality, Anzaldúa expands the autobiographical genre by also integrating poetry and prose in her text. Her stated intention in writing this book is to raise what she calls a mestiza consciousness, one that enables her to reject all those binary oppositions or frontiers between black/white, American/Mexican, man/woman, English/Spanish that she sees as simplistic products of Western thought. And, as a lesbian Chicana, she also feels—just like Richard Rodriguez—like the homeless Kristevan deject who has to find her own race in an amalgam identity that she calls mestiza: As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races. (1999: 102)

In what she calls her “autohistoria,” the “lost land” she rediscovers is always grounded in a specific material history of what was once Northern Mexico, before the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty of 1848, which created a new US minority: American citizens of Mexican descent. So, her testimonio-like pedagogy offers information that the American schools tend to erase, and tells of the appropriation of land by Anglo-Americans who did more than take territory: they imposed white supremacy over native Mexicans (cf. Quintana 1996). But her book chronicles much more than the history of the old Northern Mexico. It proposes the existence of a “third country” that she calls Borderlands; a space where there is no room for either Anglo-centric nationalisms or Chicano male dominance over women. Indeed, as a feminist text, her testimonio relates the limitations placed on Chicana women under the rule of the fathers, as much as the cultural tyranny placed on Chicanos in general under the rule of American imperialism. So, not only does she denounce imperialist America. Her rage is launched also against her own people, for denying the Indian in the Chicano, and moreover, for what she calls a sexist “betrayal” of Chicano men against Chicanas. Anzaldúa’s feminist response is to re-read old myths and give them new interpretations, such as when she rewrites the stories of Mexican ancestral women such as La Malinche, La Llorona and La Virgen de

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Guadalupe. In this gesture, the author strategically reclaims a space for Mexican female historical presence, further exemplified when she uncovers the names and powers of these three female model figures whose identities have been submerged in Mexican memory. And by reclaiming and reinventing Guadalupe, la Malinche and la Llorona, Anzaldúa elaborates the constantly shifting identity formation of the Chicana/mestiza feminist. Indeed, in the chapter entitled “Entering into the serpent,” Anzaldúa emphasizes hybridity by weaving an analysis of Mexican popular Catholicism and pre-Columbian religious practices that emerges from her rendition of La Virgen de Guadalupe, as the descendant of the Aztec Goddess Coatlicue, who “is the incarnation of cosmic processes” and who “represents duality in life, a synthesis of duality”: Today, la Virgen de Guadalupe is the single most potent religious, political and cultural image of Chicano/mexicano. She, like my race, is a synthesis of the old world and the new, of the religion and culture of the two races in our psyche, the conquerors and the conquered. She is the symbol of the mestizo. (1999: 52).

Consequently, the new space that she identifies as Borderlands integrates ancient and modern cultural beliefs; and it is a terrain that recovers a lost tradition that valued and honored femaleness. That is why the starting point for her text is the land, la tierra. Grounding her personal narrative in the earth from which she and her people evolved, enables Anzaldúa to trace backwards its cultural history evoking the Texas/Mexico border as her central metaphor (Quintana 1996: 128), but also allows the Chicana writer to describe the artificial sexual and spiritual boundaries inscribed in the concept of “Borderland,” as she states in her preface: The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-US, Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between individuals shrinks with intimacy. (1999: preface)

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Anzaldúa’s provocative border metaphor has generated much critical attention and stimulated interest in Latino diasporic studies beyond the Southwest. So much so, that one of her analysts, José Saldívar (1997), considers that Anzaldúa’s national-border allegory parallels her experimentation with literary genre. Again, because her prose conveys comfort and competence with history, mythology, and the languages of the border (Spanish, English, and Nahuatl), we are no longer in a prototypical conversion/confession autobiographical mode, but in a sort of historical and “critical ritual,” as Quintana (1996: 129) has named this hybrid text. Indeed, her language is the code-switching language of the Borderlands, a wet surface where several languages overlap, and this is why at the beginning of this autobiographical manifesto she defies the monolingual reader and warns him that she will leave those languages intentionally untranslated. That is, her writing epitomizes both racial and aesthetic mestizaje, just as Rodriguez’s narrative, as I said above, epitomizes racial and aesthetic brownness: The switching of ‘codes’ in this book from English to Castilian Spanish to the North Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling of Nahuatl to a mixture of all of these, reflects my language, a new language—the language of the Borderlands. … Presently this infant language, this bastard language, Chicano Spanish, is not approved by any society. But we Chicanos no longer feel the need to beg entrance, that we need always to make the first overture—to translate to Anglos, Mexicans and Latinos, apology blurting out of our mouths with every step. Today we ask to be met halfway. This book is our invitation to you—from the new mestizas. (1999: preface)

“La Conciencia de la Mestiza” summarizes all the partial ideas she proclaims in the preceding chapters. The mestiza, she claims, faces the dilemma of the mixed breed. So, she has discovered that she cannot hold concepts or ideas within rigid boundaries. The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are, she says, “the enemy within” (1999: 101), because “rigidity means death.” So, the mestiza has to move away from set patterns and goals towards a more complete or unified perspective, one than includes rather than excludes. Because the new mestiza learns to develop a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity and ambivalence; she learns to “be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view” (1999: 101). Her utopian prediction is really a

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proclamation against dividing hyphens, against paradigms, against borders: En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. … The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. (1999: 102)

If Rodriguez defined the impossible marriage between his homosexuality and his Catholicism as his brown “paradox,” Anzaldúa is much more daring in the proclamation of her lesbianism as a liberating force, and even comes to elevate homosexuality to the category of the quintessential hybrid condition. Moreover, she gives those that share her sexual orientation the enviable task of acting as transcultural, transracial, transhistorical bridges or “crossers of cultures” for the human, and even the post-human race: Being the supreme crossers of cultures, homosexuals have strong bonds with the queer white, black, Asian, Native American, Latino, and with the queer in Italy, Australia and the rest of the planet. We come from all colors, all classes, all races, all time periods. Our role is to link people with each other—the Blacks with the Jews with Indians with Asians with white with extraterrestrials. (1999: 106-7)

Again, Anzaldúa’s “border feminism” does not seem to me to be so far away from the third phase of feminism that Kristeva endorses in “Women’s Time” (Moi 1986: 188-213) since, in her view, this current phase of feminism seeks to reconceive of identity and difference and their relationship, and refuses to choose identity over difference or vice versa. Rather, like Anzaldúa’s feminism, it seeks to explore multiple identities, including multiple sexual identities. As a category of the abject, Gloria Anzaldúa spent the first years of her life subject to the moral imperatives of the American ideology of success, internalising the qualities that marked her as Other. But, like Rodriguez, by the end of her autobiographical journey, she presents a self that has decided to become a polyphonic subject, ready to name all her names; a composite self which is a synthesis of many splitting identities:

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This New Mestiza is now able to open up a space for herself and her kind in that utopian Borderlands which will not allow for the abjectedness of frontiers: To survive the Borderland You must live sin fronteras Be a crossroads. (1999: 217)

V: Conclusion In a recent interview, Tzvetan Todorov (Moradiellos 2003: 9), probably the best individual exponent of the so-called contemporary critical humanism, is asked what dangers he foresees in the Western world of the 21st century, once the totalitarian threats to democracy (namely, nazism and communism) have been discarded. His reply goes in two directions that somehow could be connected with the issues I am discussing here. The first danger he predicts is what he calls the “identity drift,” which would question the democratic State if the demand for a collective identity tries to prevail over the individual rights of the members that integrate that group. The second danger is the “moralizing drift,” which would feel tempted to reduce pluralism and individual freedom in benefit of what is stipulated as morally or politically correct. If I mention this interview it is because I am afraid these dangers could invade the arena of literary criticism too, if it allows itself to drift towards reductionist conceptions of group identity (including the so-called “American Identity”), or towards prescriptions of what is/is not politically correct to write or to talk about.14 Let us not forget that the sense of belonging to one group and of differing from others might be based on race and ethnicity, but also on gender, kinship, social class, professional group, religious persuasion, language, ideology, and many other elements that contribute to the definition of individual and collective identities, and of course, on combinations thereof, all of which, in addition, might fluctuate over time or according to circumstances (cf. Van Minnen 2004: 1).

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According to Huntington, again, there are “several cultural Hispanic identity traits” that hold Latinos back, and that are incompatible with the national Anglo-Protestant “creed” of the US. These identity traits of the homo hispanicus, according to Huntington, are: (1) mistrust of people outside the family; (2) lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition; and (3) acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven.15 It is not hard to contest Huntington’s pronouncements.16 Point 1: “Hispanics mistrust people outside their family.” Yes, that is why they migrate, leave their families behind, get together with strangers, and build up strong communities. Point 2: they lack initiative, and the ethics of work; but they are the ones who have transformed Miami into an economic emporium and the ones who work twelve hours a day doing the jobs that the Anglos do not want to do. Point 3: they accept poverty stoically, but risk their lives searching for a better fortune by migrating to the affluent North. And, about accepting poverty as a means of gaining a space in heaven, the migratory phenomenon itself towards the “American dream” is the most incontestable refutation to such a short-sighted, essentialist assertion. But one can also refute his idea of the “Hispanic challenge” by referring to the two texts I have just analysed. If autobiography is an expression of personal, but also of racial and ethnic identity, we have to come to the conclusion, after reading Rodriguez and Anzaldúa, that there is no such thing as a “Hispanic identity.” Because Hispanics consider themselves brown, or mestizos, or hybrid; they consider themselves intercultural, a mixture of races, and therefore, of identities. If Rodriguez feels as Hispanic as he feels American, Asian or even African, Anzaldúa feels strong bonds with Mexican Indians, but also with Australians or Italians of her queer condition. In other words, their life experience brings to their work a sort of existentialism which has echoes of Sartre’s, not in the sense that life is a useless passion, but in the other sense, that which affirms that existence precedes essence; or even that “residence” precedes both, as Pérez Firmat says in his much quoted sentence “residence precedes essence” (Alonso Gallo 2004: 206). Actually, Pérez Firmat expresses a similar anti-frontier idea to that defended by Rodriguez and Anzaldúa in his use of the metaphor of the hyphen that separates his two nationalities as a Cuban exiled in America. The hyphen, although graphically a “minus” sign, does not represent subtraction for him, but

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addition; he feels it as a “plus” sign which indicates the mixture of two cultures. “That hyphenation,” he declares, “is not a minus sign but a plus, a sign of life, a vital sign. For us, hyphenation is oxygenation; a breath of fresh air into a dusty and musty casa” (Pérez Firmat 1987: 7). It is clear that Rodriguez’s, Anzaldúa’s and Firmat’s agendas are yet another powerful demonstration of the way a process of “both/and” inclusive thinking (both Hispanic and American) is key in our analysis of Hispanic art, as opposed to the Manichean “either/or” logic (either Hispanic or American) which is at the core of much of the racialization found in cultural critiques.17 Moreover, as my analysis has proved, I strongly believe that those who reclaim and pay homage to their ancestry, their heritage, and their mother tongue in America (as does Gloria Anzaldúa) are also self-critical and wish also to be recognized as part of American territory, culture, and history.18 And it seems to me that any fight against the threat of “losing one’s national identity” is not to denigrate those who, like Chicanos, are to a degree already integrated into that national identity. As Anzaldúa´s and Rodriguez´s work shows, Chicanos and other cultural groups are firmly part of the American national imagination without their having to lose perspective of their origins and their language. Their work illustrates that the solution to the question of integration and American national identity lies in understanding and accepting that America is, as we all are, brown. One could find Rodriguez’s and Anzaldúa’s concept of the brown/mestizo naïvely utopian, just like José Vasconcelos’s concept of the “cosmic race,” since, in their breaking down of Manichean binary oppositions, they may be underestimating real-life historical conditions (de Castro 2001: 112). But I would rather be utopian than apocalyptic. I would rather not see immigrants in America, or elsewhere, as thieves of national identities and cultures, or as Calibans to their Prosperos—as Rodriguez sees himself in Hunger of Memory (1982: 3), but as contributors to making those identities and cultures richer and more varied. In any case, our two authors have brought text, history, intersubjectivity, political thought and power into tension, they have narrativized ethics; they have affirmed the reality that things do not fit into neat packages of personal identity, national identity, or cultural identity; they have proved that the border is often a metaphorical line that hurts; and, in the process, they have shown

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how life-writing is also a field sin fronteras that cannot be restricted to rigid, conventional generic boundaries. Or, as Richard Rodriguez would light-heartedly put it: To be really brown is to be impure. It is to change your name to Ricky Martin. It is to dye your hair. It is to be gay singing about heterosexual love. That’s real brown. Because he’s absolutely an impertinence against borders. That’s what I mean by brown.” (Torres 2003: 11) (My italics)

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Autoethnography is a term employed in recent postcolonial and multicultural theorizing for hybrid texts that combine autobiographical and ethnographic writing practices. It situates the writer in a social milieu, or ethnos, that is irreducibly tied to the subject it constructs. (cf. Smith 1998: 83). “Sometimes I’m nothing and no-one. But even when I’m not, I am.” (My translation) As a Spaniard, it is right at this point that I wish to bring into the panorama of my discussion a recent political proclamation whereby the Spanish Government has opened a wide door to the legalization of immigrants. This policy was initiated by the Spanish Socialist Government in January, 2005. I owe much of this reasoning to Felipe Fernández Armesto. “El peligro inexistente.” ABC Cultural. Abril, 2004. As a matter of fact, the solitary cowboy is part of the Myth of the frontier in Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier thesis (cf. Van Minnen 2004: 1-26) The founder of Spanish borderlands historiography in the United States, Herbert Eugene Bolton, was the first scholar to affirm from the 1920s that U.S. history cannot be fully understood without reference to Spanish colonialism, Latin America, and inter-American relations (Van Minnen 2004: 11). Jackson Turner’s well-known 1893 definition of the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” should be brought to mind here. But if Turner, in his nineteenth-century, idealized vision of the frontier believes that “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization,” because “the wilderness masters the colonist,” who, “little by little [he] transforms the wilderness,” having “a new product that is American” as the outcome of this transformation, no such possibility of adaptation or transformation seems to be granted today to the crossers or the inhabitants of the North/South frontier. (cf. Turner’s chapter “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History) It must be noted, however, that Chicano critics are also beginning to perceive how Rodriguez’s intellectual trajectory has led him to positions that resemble those of prominent mainstream Chicano authors and critics, like Gloria Anzaldúa or José David Saldívar, so that today Rodriguez could even be classified as a theorist of the borderlands (cf. de Castro 2001: 102)

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Isabel Durán If my analysis of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands is, in a way, an in-memoriam homage to that great Chicana who passed away recently, it is also my intention to prove how the 21st century Rodriguez, who also problematizes notions of ethnicity, requires a just re-evaluation and full inclusion into the broadening canon of Chicano literature. Because it seems to me that they are not so far away from each other in their conception of ethnic identity, as their use of similar metaphors will prove; and because I’m afraid many Chicano critics have discussed Rodriguez’s works in terms of their own political stances and/or in terms of the writer’s life itinerary, and not in terms of the books themselves. Or, as Bruce-Novoa would put it (1990:13), they have often done a pre-judgement instead of a post-analysis of his works. The second volume being Days of Obligation: an Argument with my Mexican Father Juan de Castro expresses a similar opinion when he writes that “Rodriguez’s emphasis on miscegenation as a force changing American identity may remind the reader to the Latin American discourse of mestizaje (the celebration of miscegenation as the foundation of national identity). … In fact, it is possible to see in Rodriguez’s essays … the surprising application of the Latin American discourse of mestizaje to analysis of the problems facing the United States today” (de Castro 2001: 107). Vasconcelo’s 1925 essay La raza cósmica is a utopian extension of the discourse of mestizaje. He discovered in Spanish America the beginning of a process of miscegenation that would lead to a post-national and even post-racial utopia. For Vasconcelos, though, Latin America is the privileged location where the utopian cosmic race will develop and flourish (de Castro 2001: 108). It is interesting to note that Maxine Hong Kingston also feels that she has to reconcile paradoxes when the narrator of The Woman Warrior says “I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.” Indeed, reconciling cultural paradoxes is what the Chinese-American author is seeking by writing The Woman Warrior (cf “White Tigers.” Kingston 1977: 2363) I am very well aware that, were I a Chicana scholar, I would think it twice before daring to do a joint analysis of Rodriguez and Anzaldúa, and putting forward some of the arguments I am making here. It would not be considered politically correct by some of my colleagues. But, as Anzaldúa herself put it, I “no longer feel the need to beg entrance. … Apology blurting out of our mouths with every step” (1999: iv). Huntington is quoting Sosa here. As does James D. Fernández. “El desafío angloprotestante” ABC Cultural. April, 2004. Toni Morrison expressed this idea brilliantly it in her book Playing in the Dark (1993). De Castro has a different opinion in as much as he declares that Anzaldúa’s “mestiza is not the equivalent of Rodriguez’s brown American” for, whereas her concept of the mestiza consciousness is imagined as the internalization of the contradictions between cultures, his analysis discovers a process of cultural interaction that is developing a homogeneous United States. I do not see such conceptual difference in my reading. In particular, I do not see Anzaldúa’s vision

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of mestizaje as the “development of a new heterogeneous consciousness” (de Castro 2001: 117). If there is a difference, it would concern sexual orientation, not ethnic identity: whereas Anzaldúa states that she is “all races because there is the queer of me in all races,” Rodriguez does not reduce the universalization of his identity to his gay condition, but to his broader, humanistic outlook of himself as a hybrid being: “I think of the nation entire—all Americans—as my people,” he claims (Rodriguez 2002: 128).

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“A Wall of Barbed Lies”: Absent Borders in María Cristina Mena’s Short Fiction Begoña Simal This essay engages in a critical reading of María Cristina Mena’s early fiction as an unorthodox example of “border writing.” In some of her early stories, the apparently absent border assumes the shape of the conflict between two characters, a Mexican “native” and an American visitor. Through a detailed analysis of the author’s narrative strategies in “The Gold Vanity Set” (1913) and “The Education of Popo” (1914), the article reaches the conclusion that these stories, often construed as reinforcing demeaning stereotypes of the Mexicans, can actually be read against the grain, that is, as constituting one of the first examples of oblique resistance in Mexican American literature. Facing a double audience, Mena engages in strategies of double-coding such as dramatic irony and hyperbolic citations, which can be described as techniques of “dissimulation” or “tricksterly” ruses. As a result, these seemingly quaint, “harmless” stories are eventually endowed with a clear oppositional potential that can no longer be ignored

Y estás: en el vacío y en la ausencia presente. Ernestina de Champourcín, “Estás”

Elusive absences can be more powerfully felt than obvious presences. There are insidious absences that call attention to themselves, texts whose gaps are open wounds requiring urgent tending. The border is one of those recurrently absent presences. Meaningfully, the border(line) does not exist as a physical entity, but lingers in one’s unconscious as that which is neither one thing nor the other. The juxtaposition of two non-identities renders problematic the very presence of the border. The border’s “essence” is that self-same slippery ungraspability. On the one hand, I would argue, border discourse underlies María Cristina Mena’s narrative strategies in the

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stories chosen for this essay. On the other, Mena’s pioneer work in border literature remains paradoxical, since the writer never broaches the subject in a direct way. Nevertheless, as I hope to convincingly argue throughout this essay, oblique explorations of the border such as hers can prove rather more fruitful than brainy cogitations on the notion. Mena’s apparently “insignificant” stories perform a tricksterly oppositional act, as we shall shortly see. The two short stories I discuss in this article let us glimpse at the manner in which the invisible border permeates a given discourse when it is not apparently “there” for all to see. The physical border in these stories undergoes a transmutation which will soon become commonplace in border writing: the border is transplanted into the social and cultural disjunctures encountered between the “native” and the “intruder,” be it a tourist, a visitor, or an invader. The existence of these “microcosmic clashes” in terms of language, cultural patterns or sanctioned behavior bespeaks of the larger conflict between the “two sides of the border,” or, as Mena would put it, “este lado y el otro lado.”1 The other powerfully felt absence is that of the text’s destination: the reader. The very fact that Mena was writing for a double audience subtends her texts and my particular reading of those texts. The absent addressee’s expectations are very much present there, most openly, in the editors’ demands from the young writer and in Mena’s narrative strategies. In between the fiction and the reader, however, not only mediates the broad background of social, cultural and political discourses, but, most importantly, the critical reception. It is here that the absence of Mena’s fiction or its less than humble presence in Chicano/Mexican American anthologies and literary history becomes most notorious. Both her absence and her slight(ed) presence have conditioned most interpretations of her work. Let us start by seeing the ways in which Mena has been (un)consciously relegated to the borderlands of the Chicano canon. I: In the Borderlands of the Chicano Canon You insult me When you say I’m Schizophrenic. My divisions are Infinite. Bernice Zamora, “So Not to Be Mottled”

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María Cristina Mena Chambers, a Chicana writer avant-la-lettre, inaugurated the tradition of short fiction among Mexican Americans in the first decades of the 20th century.2 And yet, despite her pioneer work as a practitioner of short story writing, Mena has only recently started to receive critical attention. It was in 1997, more than three decades after her death, that Mena’s stories were finally collected and published by Arte Público Press. Since then, there have appeared some scholarly pieces on Mena’s unjustly neglected work. This essay also attempts to contribute to this process of literary “redemption” (Chow 1993: 141) or “recovery work” (Kilcup 2000: 36). In order to do so, I should start by contextualizing Cristina Mena’s ficition. For most early literary historians Guadalupe-Hidalgo marks the very beginning of Chicano literature (Castañeda Shular, YbarraFrausto and Sommers 1972; Leal and Barrón 1982), while later critics, such as Villar Raso and Herrera-Sobek, consider the 1848-1945 period as the second stage (2001: 19)—the colonial period being the first one—and still, for others, Chicano literature proper would not start until the 1960s, after the publication of Villareal’s Pocho or even after the Aztlán manifesto. Following the annexation first of Texas and then of the rest of the Southwest, the cultural life in the new US territories gradually started to change. The folk oral tradition survived in romances and in what Ramón Saldívar calls “songs of cultural resistance,” that is, the corridos. Simultaneously, a few writers tried to continue the Mexican American literary tradition in the late 19th century, although very few chose the short story as their genre, and if they did publish short fiction at all, it was mostly in regional Spanishlanguage newspapers (Paredes 1987: 1087-89). Thus, it was only in the early 20th century that a few stories written by Mexican Americans found their way into English-language periodicals. Cristina Mena would be the first Mexican American to gain access to and publish in prestigious “mainstream” magazines. María Cristina Mena had been sent to New York by her affluent parents when she was still fourteen, in an attempt to shield her from the agitated times in turn-of-the-century Mexico. Born in 1893, astride two centuries, she had been raised in Mexico City and had attended prestigious elite schools there, before she moved to the US in 1907, just three years prior to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. As

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Edward Simmen notes, there was an important migratory movement from Mexico to the US during these conflict-ridden first decades: “The period between 1900 and 1930 saw a great influx of Mexicans into the United States, many of them, like Mena, fleeting [sic] the turmoil of the Mexican revolution that began in 1910. During those early years in New York and even later, Mena dedicated herself to giving American readers vivid and true portraits of the many faces of the many Mexicos” (1997: 147-48). In 1913, when she was only twenty-one, Mena started publishing short stories in American “mainstream” periodicals such as The Century Magazine and T h e American Magazine, and she would continue doing so for the following decades, until, following her husband’s death in 1935, she turned to writing children’s books (Doherty 1997: xvi).3 From this biographical introduction we gather that, from the very outset, María Cristina Mena inhabits a certain taxonomic limbo in Chicano literary history. Not only is she absent from most pre-1990s literary histories, as we have mentioned, but she also poses basic taxonomic problems. As Tiffany Ana López puts it, the Mexican American writer defies categorizations (1998: 62). In Nicolás Kanellos’ simple but useful classification of “natives,” “immigrants” and “exiles,” Mena does not altogether fit into any of the three pigeonholes for Hispanic writers in the US. In actual fact, Kanellos problematically lists Mena as a member of a group on “immigrant authors and refugees” (2002: 10). Although we are initially inclined to label her as a political “exile,” Mena migrated when she was still very young, and spent all of her adult life in the United States; therefore, she also partakes of many of the features that characterize “native” writers. Also, as regional allegiances go, Mena, by settling in New York, evades the Southwestern labels (Texan, Californian, neomexicana…) that typically accrue to early Mexican American writers. Moreover, Mena does not have the sociological profile of “an ethnic working-class minority” that many critics associate with Chicano writers (Saldívar 1990: 10), since she came from an upperclass Mexican family and moved in an artistic and intellectual milieu, a literary circle that included writers such as D.H. Lawrence or Aldous Huxley.4 As a result, Mena’s position vis-à-vis “canonical” classifications of Chicano writers is rather slippery and, fittingly, she remains in the taxonomic borderlands.

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Nowhere is Mena’s uncomfortable presence more conspicuous than in traditional approaches to Chicano literary history. Since the advent of chicanismo in the sixties and seventies, and until very recently, the corrido master narrative has come to dominate the scholarship on Chicano literary history and criticism. Mena’s work, appearing as it did at the height of the corrido tradition, has not traditionally fared well in most scholarly surveys of Mexican American literature. As Manuel Martín-Rodríguez notes, the overwhelming presence of the oral tradition in Chicano studies has “obscured the Chicano literary past” and eclipsed the concomitant written tradition of Mexican Americans (2001: 8). As Jesse Aleman argues, the corrido has indeed become the “Ur-narrative” of Chicano literature (1998: 49). What has taken place over the last decades of the 20th century is a process of “canon calcification” (Kilcup 2000: 48), whereby the critical paradigm of the corrido has been extrapolated and, as it were, essentialized in order to account for all Mexican American writings. As a consequence, those texts, such as Mena’s, that do not feature the overt oppositional strategies that characterize corridos, do not seem to fit into the Chicano literary canon. My reading of Mena’s border status in this canon, however, is far from pessimistic. I want to argue that Mena, while apparently assuming and even reinforcing certain stereotypical images, is actually engaging in covert and oblique acts of resistance. Furthermore, by escaping the master narrative of overt confrontation, what Jesse Aleman terms “Chicano/Anglo antagonism” (Aleman 1998: 51), Mena actually opens up a canon that risks getting calcified or, even, fossilized. I agree with Aleman that the very nature of Chicano literature, “unfinalizable” and “hybrid,” undercuts any attempt to subsume it under a single critical paradigm (1998: 52). One way, he suggests, of doing so, is dialogizing the very concept of the corrido, which, under careful perusal, can be said to resemble Bakhtinian novelness. Like the novel, the corrido can be read as “an open-ended form of multiple voices interacting with each other in a dialogic process,” a form that “resists becoming a monologic social allegory as its discourses slip through a variety of social functions” (Aleman 1998: 55). Mena’s work, as we shall now see, dialogizes the corrido paradigm in a sophisticated way. Her fiction is addressed to a double readership, plays with the expectations of such a bifurcated audience

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and does so by employing a strategy of double—or, as Bernice Zamora would put it, infinite-voicing. II: “Wounded Love” or a Mock-Shakespearean Reading of “The Education of Popo” One thing I’ve demonstrated … and that is that the summer flirtation of our happy land simply cannot be acclimated south of the Rio Grande. Alicia Cherry, in “The Education of Popo” (1914)

Although, as mentioned above, Mena published fiction well into the 1950s, it is her earlier production, mostly short stories, that interests us here. In most of Mena’s short fiction dating from this early period (1913-1916), the physical frontier between Mexico and the US is hardly ever mentioned. And yet, at the same time, the frontier between the two worlds permeates these early stories. The border is glimpsed or intuited through occasional references to “el otro lado,” to “tourists de los Estados Unidos” (“The Emotions of María Concepción” 45); through the evocation of a mythic past, as the lurking presence of Aztlán mythology in “The Birth of the God of War” shows; also, by the disruption of Mexican life after what Amy Doherty describes as “the infiltration of U.S. ideals” (1997: xxxi) or the importation of US technology (the water-pumping device, literally “the machine in the garden,” in “John of God, the Water-Carrier,” or plastic surgery in “Marriage by Miracle”5); and, last but not least, by the very intrusion of those “americanos” and “American señoritas” in the Mexican context (“The Gold Vanity Set” or “The Education of Popo”)6. Although, as we can see, the absent presence of the border could be traced in several of Mena’s stories, I have chosen to concentrate on just two of them: “The Gold Vanity Set,” published in 1913, and “The Education of Popo,” published in 1914. The US-Mexico border is conspicuously embodied in the space, both physical and metaphorical, that temporarily joins but ultimately separates the American señoritas and the Mexican characters in both stories. The first one is, as one would expect, the tale of a boy’s éducation sentimentale in romancestyle.7 When the story starts, the wealthy and influential Arriola family are expecting the visit of an American senator, his wife and his daughter, Alicia Cherry. The Arriolas have to meet the challenge of entertaining the “ladies Cherry” (1997: 47), echoing one of Mena’s

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frequent intended malapropisms. In order to please the Americans and give the right impression of a “civilized Mexico,” Governor Fernando Arriola “y señora” try to imitate what they think are typical US comforts, foods and beverages. For this end, they import “exotic commodities”8 such as ice (1997: 47). Throughout this description Mena’s narrator laughs not only at the Arriola’s stupidity, but also at their pompous, high-flown style. We are told how ice was soon “delivered in various stages of dissolution, to be installed with solicitude in cool places, and kept refreshed with a continual agitation of fans in the hands of superfluous servants” (1997: 47). The reason for Arriola’s excessive obsequiousness becomes clear when we learn of the economic and political interests that link Governor Arriola and Senator Cherry. These ladies are no less than the “wife and daughter of that admirable Señor Montague Cherry of the United States, who was manipulating the extension of certain important concessions in the State of which Don Fernando was governor, and with whose operations his Excellency found his own private interests to be pleasantly involved…” (1997: 47; emphasis mine). The hints at the political corruption and the unbalanced distribution of wealth in Mexico could not be more poignant. The exaggerated concern for the affluent foreign visitors lies in sheer contrast with the indifference shown by caciques such at the one in “The Gold Vanity Set.” Indeed, read side by side with this and other stories about “humble” Mexican peasants, Mena’s description in “The Education of Popo” constitutes a sharp lampoon at the excessive wealth accumulated in a few families in Mexico during Porfirio Díaz’s regime. Governor Arriola’s son, Próspero (or Popo, as he is familiarly called), happens to be the only person in the family who can speak English, so Alicia naturally spends most of her time with him. Almost half-jokingly, the American woman starts flirting with young Popo. The fourteen-year-old boy has actually become “the man of the hour” (1997: 48), the official translator at the Arriolas’ hacienda: “Separately and in council the rest of the family impressed upon Popo that the honor of the house of Arriola, not to mention that his native land, reposed in his hand” (1997: 48). Popo’s go-between role echoes that of the Malinche, and, like her, he establishes a sexual/romantic relationship with the foreign visitor. This time, however, the

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mediation involves a different “enemy”: the cultural invaders do not come from Spain, but from across the US border. Apart from the Malinchista interpretations, to which I will come back later, I now want to argue for a postcolonially-informed Shakespearean reading of “The Education of Popo.” I would contend that Mena consciously pushes us to read this story through Shakespeare’s works. The story is actually a mock love tragedy inspired in the classic Romeo and Juliet. In this case Quixotic Popo mistakes Alicia’s flirting for genuine love and envisions an amorous— and eventually tragic—relationship with the neighboring but (culturally) inimical Montagues, one of the rivaling houses in Romeo and Juliet. We can already breathe the boy’s sentimental brand of romanticism in his flamboyant declaration of love at the cañoncito. Popo’s “high-flown rhetoric” (Rich 2001: 211) does only make the parody even more visible. But it is the “too dignified” speech he addresses to her mother that best illustrates this point: ‘But consider, little Mama,’ he cried, ‘that very soon I shall have fifteen years. Since the last day of my saint I have shaved the face scrupulously on alternate mornings; but that no longer suffices, for my maturing beard now asks for the razor every day, laughing to scorn these legs, which continue to lack the investment of dignity. Mother of my soul, for the honor of our family in the eyes of the foreign ladies, I supplicate thy consent that I should be of long pantaloons.’ (1997: 48; emphasis mine) 9

Naturally, since he has been asked to behave like a grown-up, Popo wants to look like one, but he conveys his wish in such mockheroic terms that the reader cannot but smile. The narrator further pokes fun at the boy by ceremoniously concluding that his mother finally consented to the rite of passage and “Popo was promoted to trousers” (1997: 48) just before the American ladies “disembark.” Right from her arrival, it is obvious that Alicia yearns for the company and attention of “gentlemen,” and, “seeing no other young man thereabout, proceed[s] methodically to attach the governor’s handsome little son to herself” (1997: 49). Popo soon falls head-overheels in love with her and he appropriately couches his vision of her beloved in clichéd phrases: “Never before had he seen a living woman with hair like daffodils, eyes like violets, and a complexion of coral and porcelain” (1997: 49). Such is Popo’s infatuation with Alicia that he not only erases her possible flaws, but raises her to the status of a

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goddess, a “blonde Venus” (1997: 57, 53), or the Virgin of Guadalupe herself: “It seemed to him that some precious image of the Virgin had been changed into a creature of sweet flesh and capricious impulses, animate with a fearless urbanity far beyond the dreams of the darkeyed, demure, and now despised damsels of his own race” (1997: 49).10 Willingly engaging in this quasi-mystical adoration, Popo presents her goddess with metaphorical offerings: “His dark eyes kept his divinity faithfully informed of his anguish and his worship, and her blue ones discreetly accepted the offering” (1997: 54).11 And yet, Mena’s use of religious imagery in order to convey romantic love is far from conventional. While keeping Popo’s pompous phrasing in a half-joking way, she so tunes her narration to suggest much more than a “spiritual” adoration: In his ribs he still treasured the warmth of her … Small enough, those tender contacts; yet by such is the life force unchained: Popo found himself looking into a seething volcano, which was his own manhood. That discovery, conflicting as it did with the religious quality of his love, disturbed him mightily. Sublimely he invoked all his spiritual strength to subdue the volcano. And his travail was richly rewarded. The volcano became transformed magically into a fount of pellucid purity in which, bathing his exhausted soul, young Popo became a saint. He was living the spiritual life with rigorous intensity, a victim of the eternal mandate that those fountains of purity into which idealism has power to transform the most troublesome of volcanoes should be of a temperature little short of the boiling-point. (1997: 54; emphasis mine)

Any attentive reader is aware of the potent sexual image underlying the apparently devout meditation above. Here, Mena is intelligently describing the incipient sexual arousal and physical excitement of a teenager, who can hardly control his erections when imagining his “beloved” Alicia and finally “bath[es] his exhausted soul” in that “fount of pellucid purity.”12 The effect is even more successful because, through Popo’s recurrent (ab)use of religious imagery, Mena has been preparing the reader for this description full of sexual innuendo.13 The attraction, however, is reciprocal.14 Alicia is not altogether unaware of Popo’s “exotic” appeal, although she takes the flirting as summer entertainment or, at best, as a “beautiful” masquerade. She openly praises Popo as “an amazingly cute little cavalier” (1997: 62, 61, 51) and elsewhere speaks admiringly of the boy, especially to her

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mother. On one such conversation Popo overhears Alicia referring to him as a “perfect darling” (1997: 51). The misunderstanding that follows signifies the larger cultural misconstructions that abound in this and other stories by Mena: Prospero spent a great part of the night over his English dictionary. Again and again he conned the Spanish equivalents listed against that word ‘darling.’ A significant word, it seemed, heart-agitating, sky-transporting. He had not dreamed that the harsh, baffling English language could contain in seven letters a treasure so rare. Predilecto, querido, favorito, amado—which translation should he accept as defining his relation to Mees [sic] Cherry, avowed by her own lips? The patient compiler of that useful book could never have foreseen the ecstasy it would one day bring to a Mexican boy’s heart. (1997: 53)15

Popo’s real name, Prospero, and his literal link with a powerful book, the dictionary, suggest another Shakespearean interpretation for the story, this time modeled after a postcolonial reading of T h e Tempest.16 Thanks to the magic dictionary, Popo believes, he can translate/control Alicia, and through her, the culture she stands for. Popo/Prospero, as the only bilingual member of the household, a genuine borderman, should be the master of the words, the owner of the (Western) book (Manzanas and Benito 2003: 11-44) and, hence, the ruler of the island, in this case the Mexican borderlands. But, as befits a criollo, Popo is both Prospero and Caliban. The United States has appropriated the claim to a higher civilization vis-à-vis the Mexicans. Thus, Popo is regarded as one of the savage Others, a quaint and tamer version of Caliban. It is not only the age—Alicia is eleven years his senior—and cultural disparities,17 but especially the Americans’ patronizing attitude that turn the romance between Señor Montague Cherry’s daughter and Prospero Arriola into a mocktragedy. The Americans’ unabashed sense of superiority shows in the careless way Alicia treats Popo, as well as in her own ex-husband’s comments. When Alicia tells her ex-husband, Edward Winterbottom, of her apparently harmless flirting with young Popo, she uses endearing terms to emphasize the boy’s “darling” quaintness; but Edward himself eventually reacts to her description of the boy in an even more patronizing manner, by conceding that Popo is indeed “worthy of being an American” (1997: 62). Alicia, who the narrator has insinuated is a flirtatious and superficial woman,18 is ironically viewed by Popo/Caliban as the

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unattainable virginal Miranda. Instead of telling Popo of her divorce and dissuading him, she actually builds up his hopes. When he confesses his love for her in theatrical fashion, Alicia feels flattered and only regrets “Old Ned” (her ex-husband Edward) and her friends are not there to see her triumph: ‘Alicia mine, for thee this place has waited long –for thee, thou adored image of all beauty, queen of my heart, object of my prayers, whose purity has sanctified my life.’ Alicia, a confirmed matinee girl, wished that all her woman friends might have seen her at that moment (she had on a sweet frock and a perfectly darling hat), and that they might have heard the speech that had just been addressed to her by the leading man. He was a thorough juvenile, to be sure, but he had lovely, adoring eyes and delightfully passionate tones in his voice; and, anyhow, it was simply delicious to be made love to in a foreign language. (1997: 56; emphasis mine)19

As we would expect, when her wealthy ex-husband appears on the scene, Alicia soon forgets Popo—now turned Caliban—and her promise to dance with him. Dejected, the boy runs away, thus depriving the Arriolas from their only go-between, the only valid interpreter of the magic book. Despite Alicia’s “betrayal” of Popo’s “real love,” the closing scene enacts a reversal and a final revenge from Popo, thus implying the confrontational edge of the story as a border narrative in its own right, as I intend to show. When looking for vanished Popo, Alicia and Edward go in search of him and head towards his cañoncito, the boy’s particular locus amoenus. She feels at once guilty of the situation and apprehensive of its final outcome, since Popo seems a very determined boy, capable of taking his own life in romantic fashion. However, this fear does not deter her from her intention of using the occasion to arouse Edward’s jealousy and to “illuminate” Popo for his adult life. Alicia has now changed her mind and is willing to forgive “Old Ned” and re-admit him as his “prince charming”: “in the prostration of remorse and desire in which he now presented himself to Alicia he seemed to offer timber capable of being made over into a prince of lifelong protectors … [and] Alicia had come to feel that she needed a protector, chiefly from herself” (1997: 58). On the way to Popo’s hiding place, Alicia explains the situation to Edward, who finds it difficult to conceal his jealousy. The young woman consciously stirs this rivalry between her lovers in order to recover her ex-husband’s attention. While keeping

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an apparent “air of detachment” (1997: 60) which does not fool anyone, Edward inquires how far the flirting between Alicia and Popo has gone. When he learns that, though she has not even kissed the boy, she intends to do so when she next meets him, the jealous ex-husband cannot help but warn that kissing would only “add fuel to the flame” (1997: 60). In a similar way, Alicia’s good intentions to restore the boy’s “self-respect” by kissing him barely hide the fact that her real aim is none other than satisfying her own desires while igniting Old Ned’s “fire.” However, the ensuing events fail to live up to her expectations. After patiently, but apprehensively waiting for Alicia’s return from her tête-a-tête encounter with Popo, Edward finally sees her emerge from the hidden cañoncito, she explains that Popo is fine. After some more dallying comments, Edward musters the courage to inquire after the favors she had vowed to offer Popo. Nonchalantly, Alicia recounts how she had told Popo that her “hair had been an elegant mouse-drab before [she had] started touching it up” and how she had expounded on her “exact status as an ex-wife in process of being courted by her divorced husband” (1997: 61). At that point, Popo answers in a righteous tone and starts to “hand [her] out a line of missionary talk,” urging Alicia to remarry Edward, to the latter’s delight. ‘He must have splendid instincts, after all. So of course you didn’t kiss him?’ ‘And finally, Ned, I put it to him that I was anxious to do the square thing, and if he considered himself entitled to a few kisses while you were waiting, he could help himself.’ ‘And he?’ Mr. Winterbottom inquired with a pinched look. ‘He looked so cute that I could have hugged him. But he nobly declined.’ ‘That young fellow,’ said Mr. Winterbottom, taking off his hat and wiping his brow, ‘is worthy of being an American.’ (1997: 61-62)

Edward may dry his brow in relief, but we can easily discern Alicia’s hurt feelings in her retort: “Why, that was his Indian revenge, the little monkey! But he was tempted, Ned” (1997: 62; emphasis added). In the rejection scene, dejected Popo articulately and—once more—po(m)pously denounces Alicia’s “iniquity” and “the treacherous falseness residing as ashes in the Dead Sea fruit of [her] beauty” (1997: 61). His grand-style resentment against Alicia contrasts with his earlier blind devotion for her. Alicia’s mere “touch”

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had once been enough to “fell” the boy “to the earth, where he [had] groveled with tears and broken words and kisses for her little shoes, damp from the spongy soil” (1997: 56). Whereas he had previously demeaned himself to “grovel” and implore for Alicia’s love, Popo’s final dignified rejection of her kisses enacts his subtle, but, as she herself realizes, effective “Indian revenge” on the supposed superior colonizer. As Doherty rightly claims, Alicia and Popo’s relationship can aptly be described as “exploitative” (1997: xxxii) since the young American woman has just pursued the Mexican boy “for the pleasure of foreign conquest” (2001: 174-175). Read in this way, the story “symbolizes American imperialism south of the border” (Doherty 2001: 174) and the “conquest” becomes a metaphor for the larger neocolonial and exploitative relationship between Mexico and the US. In this context, then, Popo’s refusal to kiss Alicia implies her final defeat. Popo’s sutble revenge signifies Mexican resistance to US economic, political, and cultural encroachment. I agree with Rich that, although Mena does laugh at the boy’s (understandable) gullibility, she lampoons Alicia’s callous arrogance in a more severe and relentless way (2001: 211). The final reversal leaves the “moral victory” at Popo’s, not Alicia’s, feet. In the end, it is the boy that gets the upper hand, subtly spites the American woman and exposes her shallowness, while at the same time preserving his own “wounded” dignity. III: Narrative Tricks(ters) in “The Gold Vanity Set” Then he clapped his hands for Petra, who came in from the back with oblique looks. “The Gold Vanity Set” Traición y lealtad, crimen y amor, se agazapan en el fondo de nuestra mirada. Atraemos y repelemos. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad

If in “The Education of Popo” the tension between American and Mexican values was eloquently articulated around the clash of two worldviews embodied by the American divorcée Alicia Cherry and the romantic Popo, the teenager son from a Mexican criollo upper class, in its twin story, “The Gold Vanity Set,” Mena uses a complementary approach. This time it will be an apparently “simple”

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mestiza girl, Petra, who will become the foil for the “modern,” independent American woman, Miss Young, thus providing a different gender, “race” and class perspective. The story, one of Mena’s first pieces, only apparently features some concessions to American mainstream prejudices regarding Mexicans and Mexican Americans. More importantly, “The Gold Vanity Set” also includes one of her most successful “tricksterly” strategies. In “The Gold Vanity Set” we witness the confrontation of Petra, a poor Mexican mestiza, and an American tourist, Miss Young, over a stolen gold vanity set. This Anglo-Mexican conflict is at the core of Chicano literature (Paredes 1987: 1082). When modern Miss Young and the other American tourists cross the Texan border to visit Petra’s pueblo, they are led by Don Ramón, the cacique, who shows them what he wants them to see and the way he wants them to see it. Through a decidedly exoticizing and reifying gaze, the Americans delight in Petra and the other “quaint Inditos,” a term that Mena purposefully uses when she lets Don Ramón speak: ‘The ways of the Indito are past conjecture, except that he is always governed by emotion. … You may observe that we always speak of them as Inditos, never as Indios. … We use the diminutive because we love them. With their passion, their melancholy, their music and their superstition they have passed without transition from the feudalism of the Aztecs into the world of today.’ (1997: 10)

At first glance, this is paternalistic racism in its most crystalline form. Don Ramón’s discourse not only naturalizes, essentializes the “quaintness” of Inditos like Petra, but also reinforces the already prejudiced opinions on the part of the American visitors, as shown in Miss Young’s patronizing interjection that “it’s great fun to run into the twelfth or some other old century one day out from Austin” (1997: 10). However, what we are doing here is reading the story from only one of the (at least) double perspective that Mena’s texts are endowed with. We are reading Miss Young’s words as many affluent Anglo readers of the Century and the American magazines would read at the time, with a self-sufficient assumption that Miss Young’s comments are right. However, the matter was not so simple. As MartínRodríguez maintains, “developing strategies for reaching a double audience was a leading concern” not just “for colonial writers,” but especially for “nineteenth-century Mexican Americans, who had two

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languages to call their own and thus a broader readership to reach” (1997: 11). Although the critic does not mention Cristina Mena, we could easily extrapolate his comments to the 20th century writer. By publishing her stories in US mainstream periodicals, Mena is conscious of writing for a double audience, primarily for a nonChicano English-speaking audience from the upper classes, but also for her fellow expatriates and other Mexican Americans. Many Anglo readers, therefore, should initially identify themselves with Miss Young and even understand or sympathize with the Patrón’s views. And yet, a sufficiently clever reader, be (s)he Anglo or non-Anglo, would soon discern that Mena’s depiction of Miss Young as arrogant undercuts her own words. Likewise, the narrator’s portrayal of Don Ramón as a despicable cacique clearly disqualifies him for uttering credible and morally-sound declarations about the “Inditos” he simultaneously patronizes and exploits. When “escorting” the American tourists, he talks of them as possessions: “‘These are tenants of mine,’ he said with an indifferent gesture” (1997: 3; emphasis mine). This excerpt not only exemplifies the planter’s possessive attitude towards the whole pueblo, but also indicates his absolute lack of concern for his tenants as human beings. The peones, in their turn, are obliged to acquiesce and bend their wills to that of the cacique, and accordingly act as “marionettes pulled by one string” (1997: 8). When Don Ramón appears with the group of tourists, they enact a pantomime to show the subservience expected of them: “Immediately the inn was invaded, the men following the women. Manuelo, his father, and the peons in the place formed two welcoming ranks, and the Patrón’s entrance was hailed with a respectful: ‘Viva Don Ramón!’” (1997: 3). Manuelo even sings an “improvised” panegyric in order to ingratiate himself with the cacique. Likewise, when the Patrón departs, the peones once more engage in a display of submissiveness: “Don Ramón gave the innkeeper a careless handful of coins and followed his guests, while the innkeeper and his customers ceremoniously pursued him for some distance down the street, with repeated bows and voluble ‘Gracias’ and ‘Benediciones’ [sic] over the Patrón, his wife, his children, his house, his crops and all his goods” (4; emphasis mine, except for Spanish words). Mena’s censure of this situation is conspicuous and her ironic references to the Patrón’s “sacrifices”—his siesta—only emphasize this (1997: 8). The planter’s capitalist ideology and racist attitudes, of course, are not

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necessarily Mena’s. The writer is just ventriloquizing Don Ramón and reproducing the cacique’s opinions, when in actual fact she holds the opposite views. By exposing the planter’s utter indifference for his peones and his contempt for all “Inditos”—only partly hidden under an apparent paternalistic benevolence—, Mena is actually disqualifying this very discourse. Similarly, most stereotypical references to Petra appear when the narrative focalization turns to Miss Young and the narration temporarily submits to her exoticizing colonial gaze, as was the case with Alicia Cherry in “The Education of Popo.” However, in “The Gold Vanity Set” the young Mexican girl does much more than present a useful foil to Miss Young’s modernity. Reading between the lines, we soon realize that, in apparently reinforcing the stereotypes of the mestiza mejicana and the gringa, 20 Mena at the same time undermines them through oblique oppositional strategies. Petra is first described as a self-sufficient fourteen-year-old girl. The description of this mestiza girl,21 significantly “strong as wire,” opens the story: When Petra was too big to be carried on her mother’s back she was put on the ground, and soon taught herself to walk. In time she learned to fetch water from the public fountain and to grind the boiled com for the tortillas which her mother made every day, and later to carry her father his dinner —a task which required great intelligence, for her father was a donkeydriver and one never knew at what corner he might be lolling in the shade while awaiting a whistle from someone who might require a service … (1997: 1)

Granted, the image of the sombreroed Mexican sleeping in the shade perpetuates the image of lazy mexicanos, and the reference to Petra’s intelligence can first be interpreted as a tongue-in-cheek comment; however, the overall image is that of an alert child who has to grow up very quickly and soon learns to fend for herself. In Petra’s description, again, Mena resorts to some of the clichés that American readers would be expecting in such a situation. We do encounter the adjectives mysterious, barbaric, wonderful, or adorable, “Indian melancholy” or even some reference to the “passionate Spanish” language. These concessions, however, are not so common in Mena’s stories as some critics would make us believe, and, I would argue, increasingly acquire the nature of ironic statements in later stories, as we have seen in “The Education of Popo.” In “The Highly Original

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Country of the Yanquis,” Charlotte Rich backs up this line of reasoning and maintains that Petra’s description in clichéd phrases only superficially complies with the editor’s demands for “exotic” portrayals: On the surface, these comments suggest an attempt to align the narrator with white American audiences who would read this story, dialogically adding another voice to that which speaks from the perspective of the Mexicans. However, the stereotypical, reductive nature of these remarks is undermined by the sympathy with which Petra’s character is developed, as well as by Mena’s representation of the tourists as ignorant and unthinking. Thus, her narrative subverts the expectations raised by such stereotypes. (2001: 209)

As we have seen in “The Education of Popo,” Mena is very adept at shifting points of view and modulates the stereotypical attitudes according to the character whose “eyes” she is using at each particular point. Thus, in “The Gold Vanity Set” the narrative is also focalized alternately through Petra and Miss Young.22 In the first part of the story, for instance, we witness the sexist violence that Petra undergoes through the young girl’s very eyes. Mena makes it sadly credible that Petra should accept her husband’s beatings resignedly, as a matter-offact behavior: “Her last memory going to sleep was sometimes a blow, ‘Because he is my husband,’ as she explained it to herself, and sometimes a kiss, ‘Because he loves me’” (1997: 2). In showing how Petra internalizes patriarchal injunctions to submit to the husband’s ruthless dominance, Mena denounces the male violence and machismo prevalent not only in rural Mexico at the time, but also within the Mexican American community. In this, too, Mena is a pioneer. Miss Young, Petra’s foil, is accordingly introduced and described as a “young, decisive,” independent American woman who, very revealingly, leads the group of tourists from the United States. When she first appears, she carries a camera and a guidebook. Both elements acquire symbolic resonance in the spare narrative of “The Gold Vanity Set.” The American tourist repeatedly exclaims that she wants to take Petra’s picture, but the Mexican girl is adamant in her decision not to be photographed: “the matter was not so simple. Petra rebelled with the dumb obstinacy of the Indian, even to weeping and sitting on the floor. Manuelo [Petra’s husband], scandalized at such contumacy before the Patron, pulled her to her feet and gave her a push which sent her against the wall” (1997: 4). Possibly read as a superstitious or

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infantile tantrum by most contemporary readers, this scene should be interpreted from the perspective of postcolonial theory. Through the strange “black instrument,” Miss Young wants to fix, and thus tame, the Otherness in Petra. The unheard-of photographic device thus embodies the colonial gaze. “Mena’s initial description of Miss Young,” Rich contends, “suggests the desire of the tourists, and by extension that of Americans in general, to consume Mexico as an exotic product” (2001: 207). Miss Young’s instant wish for Petra’s picture is indicative of the former’s need “to frame what she perceives as Petra’s colorful attractions within her photographer’s lens, viewing her as an object to be captured on film, rather than as an individual whose feelings about being photographed should be considered” (Rich 2001: 207). I agree with Rich that we should ultimately read young Petra’s refusal as an act of resistance against the outsiders’ attempt to manipulate and control her, a reading that is consistent with my interpretation of the story’s ending. The other object associated with Miss Young and, by extension, with the American visitors, is the book she carries and eventually forgets at the cantina. As we have seen in “The Education of Popo,” books are never “innocent” in these texts, but function as objective correlates of linguistic, cultural and political control. Foucauldian knowledge, we know, is power. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Petra finds her treasure in the book Miss Young inadvertently leaves at the inn: “Miss Young had left her guide book on the table, and Petra pounced upon it as a kitten upon a leaf. Some object in the midst of its pages held it partly open. It was a beautiful thing of gold …” (1997: 4). Gold conjures up material wealth and here, more than in Popo’s story, the colonizer’s controlling book signifies economic power and exploitation, directly or through the cacique. Prospero’s magical and intellectual control of the “island” turns into the economic control over colonized Mexico. Not even the cacique escapes this dependence on American money and influence. It is noteworthy that Don Ramón, who is there to lead the tourists and show them the village, finds “himself patiently bringing up the rear of the procession” (3).23 The capitalist planter’s subservience to the wealthy Americans also reminds us of “the affiliation of the elite class of Mexicans with wealthy Americans during the Porfiriato” (Rich 2001: 207), a dubious connection that we had also glimpsed in “The Education of Popo.”

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Ultimately, however, although Caliban/Petra steals Prospero’s book, she prefers the beautiful and valuable vanity set to the taming pages of the tourist guidebook.24 As Petra gradually discovers, the lost vanity set contains three small golden boxes. The first casket has a tiny mirror inside, the second contains some kind of “ivory tint” and the last one is full of a certain “red paste.” The three treasures within the treasure signify and elaborate on the colonial intrusion, with its lures and temptations. The powder Petra applies on her hands and arms bespeaks the temptations of “whitening” oneself, thus internalizing aesthetic and cultural models from the colonizer. The rouge that Petra finally rubs on her cheeks expands on the issue of an externally-imposed (Western/Northern) canon of beauty: “A red paste. It reddened the tip of her nose when she sniffed its delicate perfume. She rubbed the spot off with her finger and transferred it to one cheek, then rouged a large patch on that cheek, then one on the other, with a nice discretion partly influenced by her memory of the brilliant cheeks of the American señorita …” (1997: 5).25 At the same time, the content of this box also helps Mena elaborate on the topic of the girl’s unconditional love for her husband Manuelo, whose songs always featured red-cheeked heroines, “some of whom even had cheeks like poppies” (1997: 4). Finally, the mirror brings into play the power of knowledge. Through the self-reflection so long denied her, Petra gradually gains a certain degree of self-knowledge, and, consequently, self-representation (Doherty 1997: xlvi). This is, indeed, the “secret of the vanity set” that Petra discovers. Equally instrumental for the plot of the story is the “dimly symbolic and religious” aura that the vanity set acquires. Initially described as a “trinity of delicate caskets” (1997: 4), adjectives such as “holy,” “blessed” or “sacred” will soon accrue to the golden treasure. Not only is Mena’s educational background present here; more significantly, the whole scene is realistically focalized through Petra’s religiosity, thus making it believable that she may later interpret a mere coincidence as a miracle in its own right. Once she has made up her face, Petra elicits the rarely-exhibited tenderness on the part of Manuelo, whose attentions are welcome by Petra, meaningfully described as “a spaniel too seldom petted” (1997: 6). Manuelo’s father is equally glad to witness the reconciliation of the couple and his son’s vow to mend his ways: “I promise our blessed Mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe, that I will never again maltreat my

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Petrita and if I keep not this promise may she send a thunder to fall on me!” (1997: 7). At that very moment, the house-shaking thunder reinforces the dramatic relevance of the scene in Petra’s eyes. Such sentimentality is only understandable and palatable when we consider that the narrative focalization of this episode corresponds to Petra. For the young girl, Manuelo’s promise is everything she hoped for and the rumbling thunder is indeed a miracle. When Miss Young finally finds out about the vanity set, Petra begs for it in a parallel scene to that we encountered in “The education of Popo.” We find both Mexican teenagers, Petra and Popo, groveling at the feet of American women (“The Gold Vanity Set” 9, “The education of Popo” 56). And yet, in both cases, this apparently demeaning scene precedes its reversal, since it is the young, and apparently naïve Mexicans that eventually get the upper hand. In “The Gold Vanity Set,” the “mock-pilgrimage” in search for the golden treasure momentarily subverts the social hierarchy of the village, since we find “Petra leading the way on the back of the burro” (1997: 10). To Miss Young’s surprise—but rather appropriately for a real pilgrimage—, the “procession” ends in the village church, where Petra shows the “pilgrims” to the shrine of the Virgen de Guadalupe, where, glittering at the statue’s breast and “most splendid of her ornaments” (1997: 11), hung the golden caskets from the vanity set. Petra’s extreme religiosity apparently only serves to reinforce Mexican stereotypes. However, although we may continue to believe that the girl’s devotion to the Virgen de Guadalupe is genuine, we can also entertain doubts as to whether there is more to it than meets the eye. Certainly, placing the golden treasure next to the Virgin’s statue not only secures it against theft, but finally forces the American visitor to yield and leave the gold vanity set in Mexican land—and, we should note, within easy reach of Petra’s hands. Thus, Don Ramón’s patronizing comments about the inscrutable sentiment-governed “Inditos,” uttered as they are just when they reach the church, are undercut by Petra’s clever stratagem that both keeps her husband in awe and allows her not to lose the golden treasure. Hers are the tricksters’ tricks. Paredes describes Chicano tricksterism (a tricksterism that, by the way, he fails to observe in Mena) as follows: Anglo and Mexican American are locked in conflict. The Anglo … disdains his[/her] opponent and so takes the contest lightly. The MexicanAmerican (or Mexican), on the other hand, plans carefully, plays on

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his[/her] foe’s prejudices and beats him[/her], often through the use of trickery. … [D]eprived of material goods and sophisticated technology, [(s)he] relies on his[/her] wits to survive in an oppressive society. His[/her] key advantage over his adversary is greater understanding. The trickster knows his[/her] enemy intimately, while the oppressor, thinking in stereotypes, knows little of his[/hers].” (1987: 1082; gender inclusion added)

As we can see, Petra’s strategy is that of the minority trickster. Read as tricksterism, then, Petra’s move becomes an intelligent ruse that, by invoking the very set of cultural assumptions and racist prejudices imposed on Mexican “Inditos” (such as an extremely superstitious nature and inherent “brute” barbarity), and feeding such a stereotype to the gullible gringa and cacique, ultimately beats them at their own game. And Miss Young’s words, especially her vain protest about losing her gold “danglums” for such a superstition, further intimate Mena’s awareness of and preference for this counter-hegemonic interpretation.26 Miss Young cannot do much against the Mexican national and religious icon, the Virgen de Guadalupe, nor against Petra’s tricksterly use of the icon, so her last condescending comments can be interpreted not so much as an example of genuine concern for Petra but as the uneasy camouflage of her ultimate defeat in this po(k/w)er game. IV: Reassessing Mena as a Cultural Translator [Ts’ai Yen] brought her songs back from the savage lands, and one of the three that has been passed down to us is ‘Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,’ a song that Chinese sing to their own instruments. It translated well. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

In her analysis of Mena’s fiction, Charlotte Rich maintains that the critical reception of the time missed Mena’s narrative irony and simply read the story “as a quaint, humorous” example of “local color” fiction (2001: 209). And yet, even more recent appraisals of Mena’s work continue to voice similar concerns. Most contemporary assessments of early Mexican American literature fail to find any critical edge in Mena’s stories, but object instead to her supposedly condescending and obsequious tone. In “The Evolution of Chicano

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Literature” Raymund Paredes acknowledges Mena’s pioneering work, which “signalled the possibility that a new generation of MexicanAmerican writers would reach a larger audience” (1982: 50). However, in other examples of his scholarly work on the topic he offers a rather negative image of Mena’s fiction. For instance, in “Mexican American Authors and the American Dream,” Paredes criticizes Mena’s acceptance and use of stereotypes about Mexicans, such as “stoical peones and fiery señoritas,” and reads her decision to do so as yielding to her Anglo audience’s expectations (1981: 74). In “Early Mexican-American Literature” Paredes devotes more pages to his assessment of the writer. However, he again argues that Mena’s short stories usually fall into the stereotypical trap and she does not dare to go beyond “the boundaries of conventional American attitudes about Mexico” (1987: 1089). As a result, he continues, the author’s depiction of Mexicans is “ultimately demeaning” (1987: 1090). In a similar vein, Charles Tatum contends that Mena’s skills were “undermined by her tendency to create obsequious Mexican characters who fit comfortably within the American reader’s expectations” (1982: 33). Martín-Rodríguez claims that this ingratiating spirit is nothing but the natural outcome of her decision to publish in mainstream US periodicals. The critic cogently argues that, in order to gain this privileged access, Mena had to sacrifice some of her “cultural representation and agency”; as a result, the choice of setting for her fiction was circumscribed to the “safe” Mexican locale, while “accounts of life in the Southwest either were silenced or became the targets of co-optation” (2001: 14). There are, of course, dissenting voices as regards Mena’s value as a writer, but these are quite recent. Most of these positive appraisals belong to feminist critics who are participating in the “redemptive” or “recovery” work I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Thus, the first positive assessment of Mena’s stories appears in Gloria Velásquez Treviño’s “Cultural Ambivalence in Early Chicana Literature” (1988). For Treviño, Mena “incorporates an element of resistance with expresses the desire to change the Mexican woman’s inferior social position” (in Rebolledo 1995: 24). In Conflicting Stories (1991), Elizabeth Ammons not only acknowledges the value of Mena’s fiction, she also engages in an unprecedented analysis of one of her early stories, “The Vine-Leaf.” The story is revisited by Tiffany Ann López, who compares Mena’s tale with famous precursors such

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as Hawthorne’s “The Birth-mark” and Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” In both of her articles on the writer, López celebrates Mena’s pioneer work as a Chicana writer with specific gender concerns. For López, Mena consciously set about providing images “that would visibly and proudly revise previous [mis]representations” (1998: 67; see 1994: 28). Mena’s implicit use of La Malinche and La Llorona myths, López argues, are aimed at endowing the audiences with “tales of cultural survival that take into account the importance of women’s roles in the survival of culture and community” (1994: 23; see Doherty 1997: xxxviii). Amy Doherty’s introduction to Mena’s collected fiction proves essential for its useful historical introduction, her cogent reading of several stories, and, above all, her documented study of the writer’s correspondence with The Century Magazine editors. Doherty praises Mena’s skills at subtly challenging the prevailing stereotypes of Mexicans in her times, “while still maintaining her audience” (1997: xi). In a later article, “Redefining the Borders of Local Color Fiction” (2001), Doherty concedes that some of Mena’s stories may suggest stereotypes hardly palatable to today’s readers, but adds that the young author manages to depict “a diversity among the Mexican people otherwise absent” in the publications of her time (172; see López 1998: 68). In her insightful analysis of Mena’s fiction, “The Highly Original Country of the Yanquis” (2001), Charlotte Rich voices her distrust of a surface reading of the short-story writer. Those superficial readings, she argues, fail to acknowledge Mena’s ironic and even “sardonic tone” (2001: 210). For Rich, Mena’s particular brand of dramatic irony should be interpreted as Bakhtinian doublevoicing, in its ability to undercut the blatantly racist and patronizing remarks we encounter in her fiction: The stereotypical notions about Mexicans expressed by the narrators in these three stories might suggest Mena’s capitulation to marketplace demands of the early twentieth century in order to publish her fiction, but a careful reading of them does not allow us to take such narratorial asides at face value. Instead, the dramatic irony Mena develops throughout each of these texts concerning insensitive, acquisitive Anglo-Americans shows such references to be the discursive technique of double-voicing, unmasking the limitations of those views. (2001: 214)

Rich concludes that, under the local-color—or rather regionalist27—cloak Mena’s work in fact “critically interrogates

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American tourism and cultural imperialism in Mexico, as well as the behaviors of ‘modern’ young Anglo-American women in the years just before World War I” (2001: 209). In addition, “through her representations of relations between the peasantry and the landowning class,” Mena also “criticizes class stratification within Mexican society” (Rich 2001: 209). And all of this Mena does thanks to dramatic irony, a narrative strategy which eventually turns her apparently co-opted “local color” writing into literature of resistance (Rich 2001: 205). Throughout the essay, I have tried to emphasize the ways in which Mena questions the very stereotypes she is apparently reinscribing. In both “The Gold Vanity Set” and “The Education of Popo,” it is the American visitors who disrupt everyday life for the Mexican characters, be they a humble mestiza girl or an upper-class white boy. Petra’s ultimate victory over self-assured Miss Young and Popo’s dignified revenge on Alicia’s presumption constitute a deeply counter-hegemonic strategy.28 And yet, at first glance, this is an almost imperceptible act of resistance, which explains the rather unfair simplifications of Mena’s work as “trivial” (Paredes 1987: 1089; 1982: 33), “co-opted” (Martin-Rodríguez 14), or even treacherously “condescending” (Paredes 1987: 1089; Tatum 1982: 33). For Raymund Paredes, Mena is a cultural “traitor” in that she gives the Anglo readers what they desire: “primitive, colorful and, most of all, unthreatening” Mexicans (1981: 74). What has misled these and other critics is the fact that, instead of using the direct confrontational strategies of the corrido critical paradigm, Mena had to resort to indirect strategies such as tricksterism and double-voicing. However, I would like to argue that, just as during the late 19th and early 20th centuries the corridos were the quintessential examples of “residual” counter-hegemonic practices in Mexican American oral tradition, Mena’s stories could likewise be construed as playing such a role, albeit in a less confrontational way, in the Mexican American written tradition. As Rich, López and Doherty maintain, Mena’s is not an overt opposition, but covert resistance. And yet, whereas indirect tactics of resistance such as Mena’s have occasionally been perceived in stories by later Chicano writers such as Americo Paredes himself,29 they have not been equally acknowledged in the early author’s short fiction.

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Mena’s accumulation of clichéd images of Mexicans in some of her stories is such that, instead of complying with the editors’ insistence on their presence, as she apparently does, Mena is purposely engaging in performative excess, in what Judith Butler terms “hyperbolic citation.” In discussing gender performativity in Bodies that Matter, Butler explains “hyperbolic citations” in the following way: “the subject who is ‘queered’ into public discourse through homophobic interpellations of various kinds takes up or cites that very term as the discursive basis for an opposition. This kind of citation will emerge as theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses” (1993: 232; emphasis in the original). One example of Mena’s use of this technique can be found in Alicia’s exoticizing perception of Mexico in “The Education of Popo”: With a deep breath she expelled everything disagreeable from her mind, and gave up her spirit to the enjoyment of finding herself for a little while among a warmer, wilder people, with gallant gestures and languorous smiles. And the aromatic air, the tantalizing music, the watchful fire that glanced from under the sombreros of the peons squatting in colorful lines between the benches—all the ardor and mystery of that unknown life caused a sudden fluttering in her breast… (1997: 51; emphasis mine, except for the Spanish words, which are in italics in the original)

The hyperbolic nature of the description undoes its apparent inscription. “Totalizing notions” such as this, Rich maintains, are metaphorically “bracketed with implied quotation marks, and Mena’s dialogic narration exposes the inadequacies of such perspectives” (2001: 212). As befits irony, Mena just means the opposite of what she conveys through Alicia’s perspective (on this occasion the narrative focalization falls on the American visitor). There are those who might object to reading the quotation above as a tongue-in-cheek statement, or who might never interpret the ending in “The Gold Vanity Set” as the result of trickster Petra’s witty stratagem, as I have previously done. They might argue that Mena (and also Petra, the character) is too young to be consciously engaging in counter-hegemonic practices. At this we could easily retort that the author’s correspondence to the editors proves otherwise. Mena wanted to exercise total control over her creative process and, when she had to submit to editorial requirements, she always found the backdoor of irony. In view of her documented political views, we cannot believe

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Mena sympathizes with the cacique and his patronizing discourse in “The Gold Vanity Set.” Likewise, we cannot but see the irony underlying the speech and the narrative sections where the American tourists become the focalizers. As we have seen, this narrative irony can take the shape of either Bakhtinian double-voicing (Rich 2001), which “highlight[s] the competing forms of social discussion in the narrative” (Aleman 1998: 54), as literary tricksterism (López: 1998) or as Bhabha’s postcolonial mimicry, that is, imitation with a difference, imitation with a sabotaging supplement. I would add a fourth mode of resistance that inheres in Mena’s stories: Butler’s concept of “hyperbolic citation” (1993: 232-33). In my opinion, the coexistence of submission and opposition in Mena’s work can best be conjured up by Butler’s device: hyperbolic citations re-inscribe a concept or truism in such an exaggerated way that their very arbitrariness is exposed. In voicing exaggerated stereotypes through Don Ramon’s hyperbolic citations, for instance, Mena does not reinforce the essentialistic discourse of the Inditos, but points at its constructedness. Hyperbolic citations such as this, however, often run the risk of being misinterpreted or co-opted, that is, read as mere reiterations of normative notions. This would explain how some critics have misconstrued Mena’s short fiction as perpetuating the very racist prejudices that it attempts to deconstruct. As I hope to have sufficiently proved, María Cristina Mena did master difficult literary techniques, such as dramatic irony, hyperbolic citation and skillful shifts in focalization. From the outset, she had to resort to double-voicing as her only means of encoding a cultural critique in her apparently harmless stories.30 As Tiffany López notes, the writer’s “insider” knowledge “literally placed Mena in the role of cultural translator” (1998: 64). When the editors of Century Magazine hired her to write some stories about Mexico and the Mexicans, Mena found herself “implicated in this system of service for the pleasure of Anglo viewers” in her role as a commissioned “authentic” Mexican voice (López 1994: 28). Once a writer is regarded as a cultural translator, she comes under immediate scrutiny and suspicion: traduttora, traditora. In the Mexican cultural imaginary, it was La Malinche who came to be perceived as a traitor-translator. Like Popo in the homonymous story, Mena herself becomes a new version of the Malinche go-between that needs to navigate between two allegiances. Hers is a double position, both within and without. As a cultural

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translator, Mena also has to contend with a double audience, albeit to a lesser extent than her predecessors. As we have seen, Mena’s way out of this conundrum is dramatic irony: double audiences require double-voicing. Therefore, many would read Mena’s tactics of “dissimulation” as treachery. It is no coincidence that “The Gold Vanity Set” opens with a coded mention of the “dissimulation lurking in that low voice and those melting eyes,” that is, polite “dissimulation” is ascribed to Mexicans’ inherent nature, in contrast with the Spaniards’ uncouth frankness (1997: 1). As a Mexican (American) herself, Mena is here hinting at her own narrative strategies, the oblique oppositional tactics of trickster border discourse. It is no coincidence, either, that Petra’s looks in the story take on the epithet of “oblique” (1997: 3). This very “dissimulation” is one of the Mexican features Octavio Paz discusses in El laberinto de la soledad (1950). In “Los hijos de la Malinche,” the Mexican writer goes back to the legend of the “insondable” or inscrutable Mexicans (1993: 65), “enigmatic not only to strangers but also to [them]selves” (1993: 70). Paz explains the “servant mentality” that usually accrues to the image of the Mexican: Suspicion, dissimulation, irony, the courtesy that shuts us away from the stranger, all of the psychic oscillations with which, in eluding a strange glance, we elude ourselves, are traits of a subjected people who tremble and disguise themselves in the presence of the master … Only when they are alone, during the great moments of life, do they dare to show themselves as they really are. All their relationships are poisoned by fear and suspicion: fear of the master and suspicion of their equals. Each keeps watch over the other because every companion could also be a traitor. To escape from himself the servant must leap walls, get drunk, forget his condition to be himself only in solitude. (1993: 70-71; emphasis added)

While conjuring up some disturbing stereotypes and despite his essentialist penchant, Paz intelligently contextualizes the roots of Mexican “dissimulation”: the “fear of the master.” The masters, in Mena’s case, were the mainstream editors who required she submit to a predetermined pattern. As we have seen, Mena’s techniques of “dissimulation” (hyperbolic citations, double-voicing, irony) were finally successful.

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V: Conclusion: Mena’s Border Discourse The border is a wall of barbed lies, a sigh of chains, a pounding heart, a fresh wound on an old cut. Gina Valdés, “The Border”

As the preceding analyses of “The Gold Vanity Set” and “The Education of Popo” have taught us, we need to read against the obvious. We need to read in between lines. We need to read these stories through the absent presence of the borderlands, through the dialectics of difference that Ramón Saldívar argues for in Chicano Narrative. The border is explicitly implicit in Mena’s stories. Both “The Gold Vanity Set” and “The Education of Popo” pivot around the presence of people from “the other side,” the border lurking in between the Mexican teenager and the foreign woman. As Doherty cogently puts it, Mena was ahead of her times: She “was writing a vision of the borderlands, a site of definition, confrontation, and difference, before it became a popular theoretical methodology” (1997: xxix). Mena’s own biographical circumstances turned her into a “border writer”: Her “own experiences of cultural plurality may have inspired her preoccupation with border-crossing and cultural contact.” (Rich 2001: 206; cf. Doherty 2001: 169, 173). Her inbetweenness was given by the pressing need to deal with a double audience. And in trying metaphorically to signify “the tension between the domestic and the foreign during a period of increased conflict over national borders,” Mena was actually voicing borderlands concerns (Doherty 2001: 167). Hers, like Popo’s, is the borderland position of the cultural translator. Hers, like Petra, is also the site of border tricksterism. If Petra’s “wall of barbed lies” sheltered her in “The Gold Vanity Set,” the same “wall of barbed li(v)es” sheltered Mena in her oblique reinventions of the border.

Endnotes 1

Furthermore, these apparently trivial frictions in our chosen spatial microcosm resonate with temporal significance. Time and space coalesce in a nuanced reading of the (non)absent border in Mena’s fiction. Although this topic would

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deserve a separate study in its own right, let me just simplify my argument by saying that the spatial clash/clasp encountered in Mena’s fiction conjures up a temporal confrontation, that of “old times” (Mexico) and “modernity” (the US). Though I am aware that the term “Mexican American” is more neutral and less ideologically-charged, throughout the article I will use both terms in order to refer to Mena’s work and the literary tradition in which it can be inscribed. For a more detailed account of Mena’s life, see Simmen’s article and Doherty’s “Introduction” to her collected stories. Her marriage to an (Anglo) Australian writer also complicates matters. For an excellent analysis of this story, see Rich 2001: 212-214. In some stories from this early period, “The Soul of Hilda Brunel” (1916), Mena prefers to deal exclusively with Anglo-American characters and make no reference to Mexico or Mexican America. The romance was a popular genre among the magazines’ readers and consequently became a useful lure for Mena at the beginning of her literary career: “Mena drew upon those narrative forms such as romance and travel stories already familiar to the Century audience in order to win readers over and then push them toward a position of cultural critique” (López 1998: 68). Note Mena’s interesting reversal of the exoticizing gaze. See Footnote 7. More worryingly, at one point in the narrative even Alicia starts believing she actually deserves Popo’s worship: “Perhaps, after all, she was a saint” (56). Popo’s religious-romantic language also permeates his perception of the landscape. Thus, in his cañoncito, we can see a waterfall that “baptized the tall tree-ferns that climbed in disorderly rivalry for its kisses” (55; emphasis mine). This reading contradicts Raymund Paredes’ contention that Mena’ stories are too “genteel” to be able to “warm the reader’s blood” (1987: 1089). Stories such as “The Vine-Leaf,” which revolves around the very theme of sexual desire, also prove him wrong. Furthermore, Mena’s supposed prudery does not prevent her from openly supporting her friend D.H. Lawrence after the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Doherty 1997: xiv). Needless to say, this scene, couched in different terms, would not have met the editors’ requirements and censorship. In her introduction to Mena’s stories, Amy Doherty reads Popo and Alicia as mirroring each other’s expectations. For a discussion of mirror images in Mena’s fiction, see Doherty 1997: xlvi-l. See Footnote 7. It should be noted that the same scene is cleverly shown first from Alicia’s perspective and then from Popo’s. Mena’s skillful shift in focalization is surely one of her trademarks. For a general introduction of post-colonial rewritings of The Tempest, see Ashcrof et al.’s The Empire Writes Back. For more recent appraisals, see Loomba and Orkin’s Postcolonial Shakespeares and “The Cultural Encounter and the Western Book,” the first chapter in Manzanas and Benito’s Intercultural Mediations. Popo is specially scandalized by the American women’s astonishing independence and by the “revolutionary arrangement” between Alicia and her mother, who seem more like sisters to him (49). The best illustrations of Alicia’s vain and shallow character can be found Mena’s descriptions of the “angelic señorita” during the serenata and the later ball thrown

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Begoña Simal by the Governor: “To be the only blonde at a Mexican ball is to be reconciled for a few hours to the fate of being a woman” (57). As we can see, Alicia’s exoticizing gaze goes hand in hand with a patronizing attitude that Mena skillfully ascribes to the American’s point of view. Thus, although the narration is punctuated by stereotypes of inscrutable, indolent and passionate Mexicans, these references do occur only when the narrative is focalized through Alicia. For an interesting contrast between Mena’s “ugly American tourists” (Doherty 2001: 176) and contemporary gringas (and Chicanas) travelling in Mexico, see Castillo’s Mixquiahuala Letters. I thank Prof. Manzanas for calling my attention to this novel. Her physical description presumably emphasizes that she and the peones that inhabit this Mexican village have “Indian blood” in them, as Don Ramón’s racist interjections emphasize. It remains doubtful whether he himself, criollo though he may be, is not a child of literal mestizaje, and thus his own internal doubts about his racial status are projected onto the racialized Other, the “Inditos.” For an excellent discussion of this psychological process within the critical framework of the literary Doppelgänger, see Sau-ling Wong’s chapter on the “racial shadow” in her seminal Reading Asian American Literature (1993). My interpretation differs from that voiced by Charlotte Rich in her perceptive analysis of the story. For her, the narrative focalization is exclusively Petra’s and, by extension, the villagers’. Although Rich’s interpretation of the opening scenes from this perspective is rather convincing, I do not believe we can extrapolate it to the whole story. Miss Young only temporarily accepts “male” privileges as a compromise when she visits Petra in order to recover her vanity set: “Taking a leaf from Mexican tactics, Miss Young allowed the Patrón to precede her…” (8). That Manuelo should not discard the book, but keep it for its likely “occult” powers (8), only reinforces a postcolonial interpretation. As Charlotte Rich rightly argues, the girl’s initial appreciation for Miss Young is undermined by Mena’s narrative strategies: “Despite Petra’s admiration for Miss Young, the Anglo woman’s cultural insensitivity and superficiality are revealed through Mena’s use of dramatic irony and double-voicing Petra, gaudily decorated with Miss Young’s rouge and powder and lilies from the nearby stream as she eagerly goes to awaken her” (207). For a comparative critique of Miss Cherry’s and Miss Young’s arrogance and “bossiness,” see Rich 2001: 210. On Miss Young’s ignorant (she calls the Virgin of Guadalupe “a saint”) and insensitive remarks on Petra’s Catholic faith, see Rich 208. Mena also precedes Chicanas’ use of Guadalupe/Coatlicue as a cultural and feminist icon signifying and encoding borderland/mestiza identities (cf. Anzaldúa or Rebolledo). Doherty interprets the Virgen de Guadalupe as “a figure of mediation” (1997: xxiv). For a different reading of “The Gold Vanity Set,” see López’s (1998: 68-69). See Doherty 2001 for a study of local color and its differences with regionalism and costumbrismo, as these apply to Mena’s work. Some other readings, such as López’s 1998,” see Popo as “gregarious” and Miss Young’s attitude towards Petra as genuinely sympathetic (68). Petra’s trickster strategies are not mentioned by any writer. On the contrary, she is generally described and perceived as a “subservient” character (cf. Doherty 1997: xxxix).

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See Ramón Saldívar’s insightful analysis of Chonita’s resisting parody in Paredes’ “The Hammon and the Beans” (48-60). In this sense, Mena is not very different from her 19th century literary predecessors. Like them, Mena’s double voice “cannot be dissociated from her need to speak both from a historically situated hegemonic class position … and from the contestatory space opened up by her … social displacement” (MartínRodríguez 2001: 11).

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Part IV: Trans-Nations

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Ethnographies of Transnational Migration in Rubén Martínez’s Crossing Over (2001)1 Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger This discussion of Rubén Martínez’s moving chronicle of displacement, poverty, exploitation, and forced liminality inquires into the ways in which a “post movement” Chicano “migrant” or “diasporic” consciousness can, on the one hand, establish a transnational connection, attachment or affiliation between different forms of migration, displacement, and cultural hybridization and, on the other, adopt the contemporary reality of Mexican migrant experience in the service of a cultural, political, or personal agenda. It is in this sense, then, that “the U.S.-Mexico border cuts both ways” as, in this case, it remains a dividing line that Mexicans and Chicanos cross in opposite directions with different purposes and from different socio-economic and cultural locations. The fundamental questions this essay addresses have to do with the ways in which differences in gender, cultural perception, economics, and mobility may pull against claims to a universal or transnational migrant consciousness in the representation of distinctive Mexican-American experiences

The border is a marketplace. The invisible hand of the powerful governs the crossings. Amitava Kumar, Passport Photos

I: Chicano Studies and Diaspora The emphasis on binational and transnational relations in Chicano Studies in the last two decades2 has coincided with important thematic changes in the post-movement3 literature by US writers of Mexican origin. In the 1990s and 2000s, autobiographical works by Juan Felipe Herrera, Michele Serros, and Norma Elia Cantú, the journalistic chronicles4 of Rubén Martínez and Luis Alberto Urrea, the fiction of Sandra Cisneros, Paul S. Flores, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Demetria Martínez, as well as the performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña have exposed instances of uprooting, intercultural contact, violence, and

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exploitation in a wide context of trans-American relations.5 Many of these writers continue to claim the label “Chicano” for themselves as a sign of intellectual commitment to the struggle for social justice of citizens and non-citizens of Mexican origin. However, for these Chicano or Chicana authors, the relationship between the US and Mexico, between the US and Latin America is not only part of the past, but also part of the present and the most immediate future of Latinos in the United States. These writers’ experiences of physical and cultural mobility as Chicanos and Chicanas certainly constitute a springboard to understand other instances of dislocation that may not be identical to their own, but that are equally rooted in power imbalances between the First and the Third World. We may say, therefore, that these authors partake of a diasporic consciousness, if, following the theoretical work of James Clifford and Stuart Hall, “diaspora” refers to the voluntary and involuntary migrations and movements resulting from shifting power structures and to the new subjectivities and cultural practices within multiple forms of global mobility. Initially, one feels reluctant to apply the concept of diaspora to a Mexican American experience such as the one narrated in Rubén Martínez’s chronicle Crossing Over. Transnational Mexican workers have not definitely abandoned their land, nor is this land distant and remote as the term “diaspora” implies. Since seasonal work causes migrant workers to go back and forth from one country to another, they do return to Mexico, although often not at their own will. Thus, when we apply the notion of diaspora to these migrants’ constant contact with the place of origin, we are doing it in a new sense that differs from the one often assigned to the Jewish or African diasporas.6 Within the shift from cultural nationalism to American transhemispheric relations, the Chicano “mestizo/a,” “migrant,” or “diasporic” consciousness necessarily faces the challenge of coming to grips with the disparate nature of transnational conflicts. The socioeconomic divisions between the Third and the First World that the border metaphorically represents can be felt both in the North and in the South with different degrees of intensity and with site-specific dynamics that cannot be overlooked. We should consider, quoting Lora Romero, that “the border cuts both ways” (1997: 247), and that it cuts differently depending on which side we find ourselves.

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Thus, in crossing over into Latin America, the Chicano writer will have to grapple with the representation of those who live south of the border and may want to cross legally or illegally in the opposite direction with purposes and socio-cultural backgrounds that differ considerably from hers or his. A discussion of the representation of turn-of-the-century transnational migration by a second-generation Chicano like Ruben Martínez, will always be tied to issues of otherness, for the interaction between the Mexican and the Chicano will bring to the fore responses in accordance with the writer’s cultural, gender, class, and racial position north and south of the border. As Amitava Kumar observes, post-colonial writing acquires a preeminent critical potential when an experience of migration and travel is used to dwell on a global condition of displacement, but it is also then that this writing reveals its shortcomings at representing those whose voice is often silenced (2000: 10). In Crossing Over, Rubén Martínez engages with the power structures that shape transnational migration and displacement and writes an ethnographic account of a “multi-locale community” that is forced to move between Mexico and the United States. In doing so, he uses the tropes of migrancy and nomadism to relate his Chicano family history and personal experience both to the experience of the Mexican migrants from Cherán and to other instances of mobility within and towards the Americas. As he gives content to these tropes through reports on lives of the Mexican migrants and his own personal commentaries, Martínez reveals his political and social commitment as a Chicano, as well as a celebration of new identities and forms of citizenship resulting from cultural mixing, mestizaje, and hybridity.7 Besides engaging the merits of Martínez’s text as a chronicle of the often-silenced experiences of the migrants, my discussion also explores the risks of applying the tropes of mestizaje and nomadism to clearly disparate histories of mobility and displacement in the Americas. II: On the Road: Mexican and Chicano Crossovers Rubén Martínez, a middle-class Chicano Angeleno, is the son of a Mexican American man and a Salvadoran woman. He has worked as contributor and editor of the L.A. Weekly, a major alternative newspaper of Los Angeles, and as an associate editor at Pacific News

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Service, appearing as a commentator on CNN, Frontline, Nightline, and All Things Considered. His writings are based on his own existential and physical border crossings: his cultural affiliations to Mexico, El Salvador, and the US, as well as on his travels across the Americas to explore its diverse Latino/a socio-cultural realities. In particular, he inquires into the transformative power of those border cultures produced by racial, ethnic, and economic minorities that mix several discourses and transgress hegemonic practices and discourses of citizenship. In his chronicle Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (2001) he displays the intercultural, mestizo subjectivity that is also present in his previous collection of chronicles The Other Side (1993b). Resulting also from his work as an investigative journalist, the collection looks into the multiple forms of inbetweenness lived by Chicanos and Latinos across various geopolitical spaces—United States, Tijuana, Ciudad de México, Cuba, and El Salvador—through an analysis of culture, history and politics. In particular, Martínez focuses on Latinos as the producers of a language and a culture of dissent. He describes himself as someone inbetween worlds in a language that brings to mind many of the passages of Borderlands, by Gloria Anzaldúa, where she voices the desire for a mestiza consciousness. Like this Chicana feminist, Martínez defines himself as a mediator. His traveling through the Americas is entirely imbricated in the development of a political consciousness committed to healing through writing. But much more so than Anzaldúa, Martínez admits to the frustration and sadness that permeate the difficult if not impossible path towards intercultural utopia, to the yearning for a home that is not quite anywhere: I told myself that by the time I was thirty, I would be a world traveler, healing the wounds between cultures, between ideologies, between selves and others, and sign treaties with my various selves—Mexican, Salvadoran, middle-class Angeleno, barrio dweller, poet, journalist, et cetera. As I take stock, I admit that whatever treaties were signed over the years were fragile, perhaps artificial. The rage I speak of—the frustration that lies between the ideal and the awareness of its impossibility—lashes out to destroy every dream I’ve begun. (Martínez 1993b: 4)

Like The Other Side, Crossing Over is written in the spirit of one who searches for a home, one who “must be much more than two. … North and South in the North and in the South…” (Martínez 1993b:

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3). The title of his latest chronicle, spanning the years 1996 and 2001, refers both to the crossings of the migrants toward different destinations in the US, and back home to Mexico, and to the author’s own crossings and journeys with them. Its prologue begins in the Southern Californian town of Temecula, which the author visits in 2001. Mexican farm laborers and nannies serve white retirees living comfortably in the midst of Spanish local color, barely a few miles away from Indian landscape and from the “battle of the border” (Martínez 2001: 3). This was the scenario of the tragic events triggering Martínez’s account. In 1996, three brothers, Benjamín, Jaime, and Salvador, original from Cherán, a town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, died in a dangerous Border Patrol high-speed chase as they were being driven into the country by an intoxicated coyote.8 The book is a long flashback. In the first chapter, the report takes us back to 1996 when Martínez began a series of trips to follow and document the causes of migration and its economic and cultural impact on the Chávez family and on the whole town of Cherán. From Mexico City to the Chávez’s Mexican home, then to the Arizona border—where he visits those living literally on the border: the gangs of young kids who subsist in the underground drainage in Ambos Nogales, and Native Americans such as the O’odhams—and to the Midwest, where many Cheranes earn a living for low wages, and back to Southern California. The circular structure of his narrative mirrors the movement of the migrants: back and forth from the US to Mexico, driven by the transnational labor circuit that shapes their lives, sometimes with relative success, others with tragic consequences; back and forth from the past to the future in a supple juggling of the ancient and the modern. The chapter organization also mirrors Martínez’s own freedom of mobility across the border in both directions. As an investigative journalist, he leaves and returns to his home safely like the tourist, the traveler, or the CEO of a transnational corporation. III: The Journalist as Ethnographer Martínez’s role is very much like that of the ethnographer: a participant-observer, a “mini-immigrant,” in the words of Clifford, whose work includes work and growth, the development of both

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personal and “cultural” competence, and traveling in order to “stay and dig in (for a time)” (1997: 22).9 Clifford says that normative ethnography has involved “duration of dwelling,” that is, staying at a place for a considerable time. Martínez participates in a new kind of ethnography devoted to the history and current emergence of transnational cultures. His story offers a “multi-locale ethnography,” one that involves two linked sites but maintains the notion of a single mobile community (1997: 57). Through these terms Clifford theorizes concrete mediations between movement and permanence or “staying” (1997: 24). The movements to and away from home give rise to connected cosmopolitanisms. These movements need not be literal, as subjects may be “in their place” and be important agents in these cosmopolitanisms through other outside influences. When looked at through the lens of movement and displacement, culture, Clifford says, stops being a rooted body that lives, dies, and so on. To look at culture from the point of view of mobility and historical displacement is not so much a question of substituting the figure of the cosmopolitan traveler for the figure of the native, but of looking at the culturally, historically specific intersections between the two (1997: 26). In this case, the hybrid practices, cultures and identities of this mobile community will be defined and conditioned by the dynamics of a “transnational migrant circuit” (Rouse 1990: 14), by “America’s labor economy” (Martínez 2001: 4), and by the geopolitical US border, separating two territories connected by “legal” and “illegal” crossings and communication. Martínez’s discourse, like ethnography, mediates between objectivity and subjective interpretation. The techniques of New Journalism allow the author to embed this reality in his own subjective perception of the world. Objective data on US-Mexico relations and immigration policies, and the testimonial accounts of the migrants merge with his autobiographical reflections and individual impressions as a writer. In the preface of the book his sympathy for the migrants is obvious. More blood is always spilt on the Mexican side in this battle; immigrants are treated brutally when they fall in the hands of the Border Patrol; anonymous dead bodies that will never be found lie scattered in the desert and in the river. The writer testifies to the increasing militarization of the border and the advanced technology used for that purpose, the immigrants’ dependence on the coyote business brought about by the legal enforcement of the border,

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the dangerous routes across a desert and the river, and the authorities’ useless evocation of immigrants’ deaths to discourage crossing. Besides reporting, the journalist also interprets the US’s selective law enforcement and state practices upon immigrants into a cynical message from paradise to its cheap reserve army of labor: “We have a job for you but you’ll have more trouble getting across the line” (Martínez 2001: 9). At times, however, the chronicle seems to be reproducing an epistemological framework through which Mexico has been represented or perceived. A section of Crossing Over relies on a view of the native reproducing the binary opposition between the “static” or “local” and the “cosmopolitan” or the “dynamic.” While Martínez’s chronicle and analysis of cross-border dynamics unsettles this dichotomy in subsequent chapters, this epistemology is clearly present at the beginning of Martínez’s journey. The stress placed by the writer on the essential modernity of migrancy in the context of global economy, implies a contrast between the past and the future, the old and the new: The old being a traditional Mexico that is perceived as frozen in time and space; the new being the Mexico that Martínez sees being transformed through migrant labor. Through poetic license and impressionistic interpretation, the writer takes advantage of the temporal coincidence of the Chávez brothers’ death with the celebration of the Easter Passion in Mexico to differentiate the Mexico that he sees coping with the crisis through ritual and ceremony from the modern Mexican subjectivity that he feels is looking to the North and changing through ongoing waves of migration. Martínez depicts the hopelessness, poverty, delinquency, and violence among wide sectors of Mexican society since the economic crisis that hit the country in 1994. In his view, Mexicans find an outlet, a collective liberation from oppression in the celebration of several forms of public ritual, characterized by company, friendship, parties, and the expression of devotion through the mortification of the flesh. The practice of abstinence during Lent is presented as Mexicans’ physical representation of the very effects of the economic crisis. In the description of the Passion at Iztapalapa, a syncretic ritual performed since colonial times, a Mexico that Martínez characterizes as mestizo or “of mixed blood and culture” is represented as assuming tragedy with resignation and preparing itself to “to nail itself to the cross” (2001: 12), in order to tell itself once again that hope is at hand,

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and to invoke resurrection (2001: 10). Martínez signifies a “fallen” Mexico of “fervent Indian Catholics” (2001: 14) that is accepting of ills such as the all-pervasive crisis. In this vein, the Easter Passion celebration in Iztapalapa becomes a figurative representation of what Martínez sees as the assumed suffering, sacrifice and victimization of the national subjectivity, a metonymy of the attitude he presumes the country to have towards its own predicament. This chronicle of Mexico’s alleged collective catharsis bears echoes of Richard Rodriguez’s view of Mexico as “a country of tragedy” that sees life from the vantage point of death (1992: xvi). If we apply Clifford’s critique of ethnographic practice to Martínez’s account of the passion, we may say that the account uses Iztapalapa as a manageable unit, a synecdoche through which he can render the Mexican cultural whole (Clifford 1997: 21). Thus, the object of his account is not seen through the lens of diaspora as historically complex, enmeshed in intercultural relations, and having also to negotiate discourses in his local context. Rather, Martínez’s representation in this episode downplays, for example, the ways in which the Passion at Iztapalapa is also the cyclical exercise of a longstanding practice that, in merging elements of the conqueror and the conquered, might be symbolically related to existence of indigenous cultures and groups that have survived despite colonial domination. Martínez contrasts a “traditional” Indian, pre-Columbian “essence” (2001: 13) with the “modern” “[contamination] by the germ of restlessness” from the North. By doing so, in this episode he seems to be oblivious of the “contamination” by European, Western influences that indigenous cultures have suffered since the conquest. Hybridity, syncretism, and multiple identities are present in many Catholic rituals in acts of indigenous resistance in the context of historical colonial genocide and ecocide, of native opposition and affirmation. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla has argued that syncretism is indeed among the chief survival and resistance tools of indigenous peoples, and definitely not only a thing of the present, but of their whole past. The elements appropriated by indigenous peoples from the colonial Western civilizational matrix are imbued with a different meaning from their original one (1996: 127-139). By way of contrast with what he represents as a “traditional” side of the Mexican character, associated with Catholicism and tragedy, the author brings in the Mexican migrants’ modern dream that a better

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future is possible through will power. He describes the Americanization of the ideals of the Mexicans who decide to migrate in terms of the Anglo-American foundational myth of the Promised Land. Mexican migrants embarking on this other pilgrimage to America are “penitentes marching out of barrios like Iztapalapa and out of provincial towns … heading north, fleeing Egypt for the Canaan just across the Río Grande” in pursuit of their “Mexican Manifest Destiny to be won on streets paved with gold” (Martínez 2001: 17). To US readers, this Biblical imagery bears echoes of the utopian and redemptive ideals present in the writings by the Puritan English settlers of New England such as William Bradford, Cotton Mather, John Winthrop, and Thomas Morton, as well as of the exceptionalist doctrine of American Manifest Destiny. The migrants’ hopes of promise and success are explained as signs of an “American [US] ideal,” already entrenched in the indigenous community of Cherán (Martínez 2001: 58): the construction of a past that reflects “your own will rather than a past imposed by history” (Martínez 2001: 59). To round off this imagery of the American dream, the car, the utmost symbol of American dream and economic upward mobility, becomes one of the main leitmotifs throughout his chronicle and, as we will see, an indicator of the economic status of his Mexican informants. But Martínez’s evocation of American Dream mythology becomes tragically ironic in light of the migrants’ disenfranchisement in the US, the high stakes of their journey, and their ambivalence towards migration. The glaring contradictions between the migrants’ expectations and their thorny social reality, between the supposedly strict laws against illegal employment and their dubious implementation, between allegedly universal discourses of citizenship and the social exclusion and oppression of migrants, knock off balance any utopian narratives about “illegals” economic success in the United States.10 At the same time, the writer reports on the development of mixed forms of citizenship, identities, and cultural practices that result from communal membership across two countries. These new expressions of belonging strike at the foundations of a nativist, anti-immigrant discourse based on the threat the migrants pose to US economic and social stability, and on the opposition between the irreconcilable identities and characters of Mexicans and Anglo-Saxons.11

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The language of material promise and redemption is at odds with the reality of the migrants as they settle in the United States. Martínez shows the migrants as disposable labor generated by the pressures of a capital that knows no geographical or ethical borders, a concern that is also echoed in the first of the three epigraphs to the book: Black markets flourish everywhere there are restrictions. Like connecting vessels, they equalize pressure between supply and demand without regards for laws, regulations, and ethical norms. … Market forces seek and find the smallest gap, the tiniest crack, and eventually slip through every barrier.

The workings of the black market of illegal labor from Mexico are widely explored through a careful report of the Mexican migrants’ socio-economic situation during the author’s visit to Warren (Arkansas), Norwalk (Wisconsin), and St. Louis (Missouri). Martínez’s technique is based on the constant contrast of multiple and often divergent points of view. The declarations of the migrants’ employers testify to the logic of a market that will go to any lengths for the sake of maximum profit, satisfaction of market demands, and reduction of labor costs. One of his informants, Rhonda Powell, the personnel director of a meat plant, justifies her workers’ more than seventy hours a week during peak months, and under hazardous conditions, on the grounds that the “Spanish” “love the overtime” while “the locals whine about having to work” (Martíenz 2001: 246). However, another local informant suggests that beneath the “motivation” of these workers lies a deep social disenfranchisement and powerlessness: “Immigration only comes when the boys are reported for getting in trouble. … [The Mexican boys] are just too scared. Hell if those boys tried to get together and tell Rhonda off they’d be gone in a minute. All she’d have to do is report them to Immigration” (2001: 258). This report confirms sociologists’ claims that the migrants’ criminalization reinforces their diligence at work, since they are easily intimidated and less likely to stand up for their labor rights (Huspek 2001: 59-60; Brownell 2001: 80-81). Illegal immigrants may be subject at any time to the state’s disciplinary apparatus, which is selective and very often favors US employers by becoming more efficient at the end of the working season (Martínez 2001: 9). The migrants’ fear of deportation, the disposability of their jobs if they become political scapegoats, and the

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racism and violence they suffer in the hands of citizens and authorities, lay bare their marginality within the labor market and within state networks that grant security, social services, and rights to those it considers legitimate citizens. In highlighting the complicity of the state’s disciplinary apparatus with the global economy governing migrants’ lives Crossing Over plays a key role in informing the general American public that cheap, legal or illegal Mexican labor is subsidizing US industries, and that the barriers and risks that exist for people do not exist for capital. As the local priest in Cherán Father Melesio says, this is a global chain for which the many sides that benefit from it are responsible—the coyotes, the farmers in America, the families and the government in Mexico— (Martínez 2001: 43). IV: The North in the South; the South in the North: Binational Cultures of Citizenship Within this global network, significant identitary changes take place. Martínez’s book upsets the apparently irresoluble antithesis between two allegedly distinct cultural ethoi (Mexican and Anglo-Saxon) by drawing attention to the hybrid forms of cultural identity and citizenship developed both by the migrants and by United States citizens. In Crossing Over there are migrants who “leave home precisely because [they] have to return” to make a better living with American dollars. There are others who, having already settled in the United States, are still nostalgic about Cherán: they “return because [they] have to leave” (Martínez 2001: 128). In both cases, the future and the past blur in a new sense of cultural identification that is very close to James Clifford’s “dwelling-in-traveling and traveling-indwelling” (1997: 2). The Purépecha are what James Clifford would call “a multilocale diaspora culture” (1997: 246) that maintains and reinvents a sense of identity through the constant interaction with other cultures (1997: 26). As Roger Rouse has pointed out, the mobile tactics of these Third World migrants who live in uncertain conditions both at home an in the US but with access to faster forms of communication and transportation, “have ensured a considerable amount of movement back and forth and a concomitant growth in their own role as conduits for the further flow of money, goods, information, images and ideas across the boundaries of the state” (Rouse 1995: 367).

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Martínez explores how “multilocale diaspora cultures” such as the Purépecha destabilize nation-state discourses where the nation is sovereign and finite. Crossing Over firmly, and at times also romantically, describes the Indian migrants as the prophets of the future of Mexico and the most active agent of cosmopolitanism in the country. National transformation no longer lies in the capital, but in the provinces. The Indians maintain their customs, language, and rituals, but they are constantly on the move and more in tune with the world than Mexican Europeanized elites (Martínez 2001: 22). For the author, the official images of the native are dated when compared to the ways in which the Indians from poor peripheral regions have integrated global culture in their lifestyle. Despite the changes brought about by conquest and globalization, the people in Cherán continue to claim Purépecha as their identity, which, for the moment, reconciles pre-columbian customs, language, and prayers, Catholic rituals, Iberian Spanish, satellite dishes, hip-hop, and MTV (Martínez 2001: 30). Martínez sees the Cheranes as “wanting” to be part of the transnational movement of “commerce, culture and people” (2001: 46) that connects peoples in the planet. “Indianness,” the emblematic concept of Mexican official nationalism throughout the twentieth century, also becomes transgressively imbricated in national processes of change. In Cherán, Purépecha rockeros resist domestication by making music an oppositional tool to governmental cultural politics and by proclaiming the cultural autonomy of indigenous peoples. One of the local D.J.’s, Cerano, is reported talking about Purépecha resistance to the culture of the conqueror in what might be an example of Clifford’s “dwelling in traveling”: in spite of the material improvement of the Purépechas through migration, their collectivism and solidarity survive in certain rituals and customs. Migration is portrayed as a kind of rebellion in that, through it, Purépechas redo and transform their culture by picking out what remains of their heritage and appropriating elements of the conqueror’s culture (Martínez 2001: 132). Traditions such as herbal medicine or curanderismo remain the same even if they coexist with Western medicine, but the curandera’s traditional counsel travels over to the US through long-distance calls, thus perpetuating the local cultural cohesion and sense of community across borders. In the US, several manifestations of “cultural citizenship” testify to the mixed identities developed by the migrants. Citizenship is often

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understood as a legal status within the nation-state. Yet, as Renato Rosaldo has pointed out, citizenship also entails a struggle over the meaning of a community and its potential members. His notion of “cultural citizenship” addresses the exclusions of dominant claims of universal citizenship, which fails to apply the principle of equality to all areas of social life: “Cultural citizenship attends, not only to dominant exclusions and marginalizations, but also to subordinate aspirations for and definitions of enfranchisement” (Rosaldo 1999: 260). It “refers to the right to be different and to belong, in a democratic, participatory sense” and takes the form of practices of social integration through which migrants maneuver between their participation in the state their and local cultural competencies (Rosaldo 1994: 243). Martínez’s text lets us know about new forms of belonging and cultural citizenship that have developed among mixed Mexican and Anglo neighborhoods. Mexicans and Anglos occasionally gather in neighborly parties, such as the baptism following by pig slaughter and roast organized by the Enríquezes in Norwalk (Wisconsin). They date each other and eventually marry. At the same time, however, Mexican forms of familial organization and belonging are preserved. The Enríquezes, a successful family of norteños, work at a meat plant in Norwalk and enjoy an economic mobility that levels them with any middle-class US family. Yet, the family’s patriarchal resource management differs considerably from the dynamics of most American middle class families: the Enríquezes live together under the same roof, bring together all their money, and leave all important financial decisions to the father (Martínez 2001: 115). Besides reporting on cultural cross-polinization, Martínez adeptly shows the impact of migration on the socio-economic divisions prevalent in Cherán. Border crossing determines the degree of social power according to the economic and legal status Mexicans have in the United States. The border cuts through the Cheranes in accordance to hegemonic notions of citizenship in the United States. The Cheranes who are legal in the north, show obvious signs of opulence, and shuttle easily between the two countries—referred to as the norteños (Martínez 2001: 67)—have a higher status than the undocumented or the ones who have stayed back. Clothing style and car models bear witness the norteño’s “Americanization”: Selena style for the “chic migrant women” and expensive NBA team jackets for

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the men (Martínez 2001: 86-87); the Enríquezes’ Chevy Silverado Trucks, the coyotes’ late-model Dodge sedan, and José Izquierdo’s Camaro contrast with the aging Plymouths of the local taxi drivers. Migration is also shown to affect gender relations and identities for the Cheranes who migrate and those who stay home. Crossing Over corroborates Clifford’s observation that “diasporic experiences are always gendered” and that they may reinforce or loosen gender subordination (1997: 25). Older women like María Helena, the Chávez brothers’ mother, speak of men’s persistent violence against women (Martínez 2001: 69): rape and sexual abuse, enforced motherhood, drunken beatings, and abandonment. The younger women are also subject to male authority and subordination, which, paradoxically, is aggravated if they are not allowed to go north with their husbands (Martínez 2001: 105). Men’s migration leaves them to face alone the responsibility of parenthood and economic survival (Martínez 2001: 88). As one of Martínez’s male informants confesses with surprising honesty, men’s priority is to “escape” life in Cherán under the pretext of sending money back home (Martínez 2001: 109). Those women obligated to stay in Mexico are described as forced into an enduring, passive position that is brought about by a combination of traditional patriarchy, poverty, and the tragedies of migration: “Waiting. Waiting for word from Wense and waiting, six moths after burying Benjamín, Jaime and Salvador, for the stonecutter from Morelia to make good on his promise of tombstones for the dead” (Martínez 2001: 105). Most important, however, is that in giving voice to these women Martínez is allowing their “private” and often silenced experience of violence and domination to reach the public sphere. Crossing Over lays bare the “naturalization of violence against women” (Fregoso 2003: 34) in this Mexican context, a violence that is supported both by Mexican traditional values and by Mexico’s regulatory judicial system (Fregoso 2003: 17). It is worth noticing here that, as Rosa Linda Fregoso states, Mexico, together with many other Latin American countries, lacks legislation against violence in the private sphere: “Violence against women and sexual assault are typified in law as crimes against the honor of the family, rather than as crimes against the personal, physical integrity and human rights of the woman victim” (2003: 18). It is not only that these issues hidden from public view, but also that, as Martínez points out, “[they] are rarely spoken

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about in Mexican families” (2001: 244). Fregoso says that this communal silence about domestic violence is usually accompanied by a discourse that portrays the public sphere as “dangerous” for women, both of which prevent the politization of domestic violence and reinforces their subordination (2003: 18). In Crossing Over women do not merely remain passive victims of male oppression. Those women who migrate have an unprecedented chance to escape their subordination and deprivation in a male dominated society. While some may not abandon their traditional role as homemakers and usually travel to face a double day as workers inside and outside the home, their improvement has to do with significant changes in gender roles and with the possibility of attaining more independence and civil liberties and rights: Up there, they have an apartment of their own, with hot and cold running water, an indoor bathroom, a sofa, and electric stove. Wense acts differently up there; he even helps with the dishes. She can probably convince him to teach her to drive the white Buick he recently bought and left behind in the care of a friend. (Martínez 2001: 149)

As another woman puts it, it is not only a matter of material improvement, but of freedom from male domination: “Back home, the man will hit you, and what can you do? … But here, they’ll go to jail. Maybe that’s why they think they’re not free up here, ha!” (Martínez 2001: 244). The gender practices of these women, which mix Mexican family life with US assertion of rights, reveal a “culture of citizenship where rights and belonging have to go beyond uninational visions of citizenship” (Castañeda 2004: 86). Besides bearing witness to women’s subordination in Cherán and their performance of citizenship in the United States, Crossing Over also reports extensively on the violence inflicted against Mexican masculinity through a combination of the racist social stratification of the Mexican state and the dehumanizing power of US-ruled capitalist global market. In a patriarchal society where masculinity is measured by the degree of power one has in US society, Martínez is respected as a man from the North. He has access to the exclusively male world of cantinas from which women are excluded: he blends in with the men, hears their stories, and becomes privy to their most intimate frustrations. His closer friend and informant, Wense, a very darkskinned Purépecha, epitomizes the effects of this damaged

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masculinity. In contrast with norteño glamor, his darker skin, drunken habits, and failed attempts to make it in the North, turn the young Purépecha into a case of resentful failure, frustration, and shame (Martínez 2001: 65). In this context, the migrants’ masculine pride is asserted through a wide repertoire of “tales of conquering the northern frontier” (Martínez 2001: 91), of challenging US rules, of confronting abusive patrones [bosses], of making it big by pushing drugs. But men’s bragging and bravado typically goes hand in hand with tragedy, desolation, and self-pity. José Izquierdo, an admired and feared drug-pushing cholo,12 is, for all his economic success in the North, trapped in the US drug-pushing business, subject to his American boss’s dictates, traumatized by an experience in jail, and devastated by his fiancée’s marriage to someone else. Underscoring the pathos of these stories, Martínez reports at length on masculine vulnerability, and on the ensuing escapist alcoholism that, as we know from the women’s reports, often leads to domestic violence. By magnifying emasculation, Martínez is implicitly presenting violence against women as a necessary consequence of the denial of male power in other spheres. The intensification of men’s frustrated ambitions, self-deprecation and self-pity, gives prominence to globalization, the economy, and the market as the main causes of the overall privations and victimization of men and women. V: The Limits of Transnational Affiliations As a Chicano informant or chronicler sensitive to hybrid cultural realities, Martínez finds a connection and familiarity between his background as a Latino in the United States and the current cultural transformation effected by the migrants. He sees Cherán as a “more radical version” of the mixture between the Old World and the New that he lived in Los Angeles as he was growing up (Martínez 2001: 30). Cultural mestizaje is present in the mix of bloods and cultures within his own family: “My grandfather looked like an Indian—wide nose, bronze skin, short stature. But my grandfather also sang opera and drove a Cadillac in Los Angeles in the late 1950s” (Martínez 2001: 31). He concludes “it’s in the mix that the connection lies—and in the fact that I, too, am on the road” (Martínez 2001: 31). The Purépechas are tenacious border crossers like himself, their very ethnic name alluding to mobility: “The very word purépecha means,

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loosely, ‘a people who travel,’ a pre-Columbian tribute to an indigenous people that long before the arrival of the Europeans, exhibited what the Mexicans call patas de perro (literally, dog’s feet)” (Martínez 2001: 31-32). The migratory history of Purépechas is also emphasized through a reference to their descent from the nomadic Chichimecas and to pre-Columbian inter-hemispheric migrations. Martínez highlights this migrant past in the third epigraph of his book, a passage from the Relación de Michoacán, an account of the Purépecha origins and the effects of the Spanish conquest possibly written by a Franciscan missionary: “Han de ir por todos los fines de la tierra, a la mano derecha, y a la mano izquierda, y de todo en todo irán hasta la ribera del mar, y pasarán adelante.” (“They will go to the furthest confines of the earth, to the right and to the left, and they will finally reach the sea shore, and they will move on” [my translation]) The analogy between the travels of the bicultural Chicano journalist and the mobility of migrant Indian population emphasizes a transnational connection between culturally hybrid peoples of Mexican origin at a time of global diaspora. The movement of capital and people leads to the creation of identities linked to more than one cultural tradition and consequently, to the redrawing of the cultural geographies of Mexico and the United States. Mexican migrants are doing to Mexico what Chicanos did to the United States: wearing out the image of a homogeneous national culture. Martínez’s grandfather’s unfulfilled dream to go back to Mexico provides a referent to understand the migrants’ nostalgia for home (Martínez 2001: 23-24). His father’s ambivalence toward Mexico and the US are an indicator of the identity dilemmas of many Mexicans in America: “We cannot love ourselves without hating ourselves; we cannot inhabit one territory without forsaking the other; we cannot be one, must always be two and more than two: the sum of our parts will always be greater than the whole” (Martínez 2001: 223). Martínez also highlights divergent experiences of mobility and cultural ambivalence across generations within his own family. The writer, very much like his father, travels cross-country on a Chevy Blazer—a Sport Utility Vehicle emblematizing middle class American prosperity—with the same romantic, adventurous spirit of his father (2001: 24). In an interview given in 2000 he voices the special appeal that the American myth of being on the road has had for him and his parents:

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I was attracted to the beats with their road imagery. Somehow, it speaks to my dad’s stories. … My father being on the road...and my father being like a Mexican James Dean with a little convertible. A metallic green MG... […] My father’s parents were both opera singers. And they were on the road because after they didn’t go very far in opera. … And my mother traveling from El Salvador … all these stories are the bedrock of my family. I grew up loving American road culture because it’s a really cool culture and because it’s part of my family’s culture.

But for Martínez’s grandparents, first generation immigrants, being “on the road” must have been “less cool” and “much sadder,” since they were torn between the emotional attachment to the “Old Country” and economic need (Martínez 2001: 24). Likewise, the Cheranes’ future away from the homeland does not hold only prosperity, but also pain and longing. “Shuttling between the two [countries]” (Martínez 2001: 10) is only easy for the few who live legally in the United States. James Clifford warns that we should beware of the difference between the traveler and the migrant: The political disciplines and economic pressures that control migrantlabor regimes pull very strongly against any overly sanguine view of the mobility of poor, usually nonwhite, people who must leave home in order to survive. The traveler, by definition, is someone who has the security and privilege to move about in relatively unconstrained ways. (1997: 34)

It is this difference that makes the relationship between the Cheranes and the middle-class journalist “on the road” in the fashion of Jack Kerouac as an uneasy, problematic one. Although at times Martínez seems to blithely celebrate migration and movement, he is not oblivious to that breach. During his stay in Cherán, the Chávez brothers’ younger sister Rosa and her husband Wense decide to migrate to the US. Initially, Martínez’s idea is to accompany Wense and Rosa in their crossing because “it is the writerly thing to do” (2001: 99). He is however immediately faced with the immense gap between his comfortable, privileged status as a gringo and the economic need that drives his informant and friend, Wense: “[A]t thirty-six, I am neither married nor a father. At nineteen, Wense is dealing with far more responsibility than I ever had. We are both

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nomads, but there is a vast gulf between us. My road is essentially middle-class; I travel because I can. Wense and his migrant brothers and sisters travel because they must” (Martínez 2001: 63). As someone with supposedly more knowledge and more power from the point of view of the Cheranes, Martínez suspects he might be held responsible for the lives of the Cheranes and the success or failure of the crossing. The irony, however, is that, while Wense looks up to him as an “older brother and adviser” with knowledge of the intricacies of border vigilance (2001: 63), Martínez is ignorant of the technicalities of crossing that are necessary for survival. In the eyes of the coyotes, Martínez is immediately suspicious as a possible gringo turncoat (2001: 100). For the coyotes and the migrants the border has a material, legal dimension that Martínez will never experience. Migration, unlike travel, is conditioned by poverty and the possibility of an improvement that is not always guaranteed and for the sake of which one risks one’s life. In contrast with the migrants, the reporter can choose to go back into the US at will, as he does at Christmas time to visit his family, missing the chance to accompany Rosa in her nightmarish, clandestine crossing. Besides invoking the bi-cultural, bi-national past of his family and other Mexican migrants, the writer connects the life-stories of these twenty-first-century migrants to multiple histories of migration and mobility. These range from the transatlantic journey from Europe leading to the conquest of the Americas, through inter-hemispheric movement within the Americas, to the multiple histories of migration of United States citizens. The second epigraph of the book quotes the popular country singer and bard of the dustbowl migrant, Woody Guthrie, who would talk about “the art and science of migratin’” as “a school so big you can’t even get out of it.” In Martínez’s narrative, the experience of the Okies during the depression is compared to that of Mexicans, who, in a clear reference to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, he addresses as “Indian Joads” fleeing the “Mexican dustbowl” (2001: 9). American history is one of multiple displacements that are placed side by side as constituent ingredients of the cultural transformation of the continent. As he says at the beginning, those who may resent the migrants’ presence, such as the rich white retirees living in quaint neighborhoods with Spanish names in the border city of Temecula, were perhaps once migrants themselves (Martínez 2001: 2). In relating the reality of the current migrants to the story of his

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family and people, and to the multiple migrant waves across and toward the Americas, Martínez intends to initiate us in the “school of migration” and to rewrite America as a land of multiple intercultural contacts. Several histories of forced or voluntary migration are related as resulting from what, in Martínez’s view, seem to be different, but equally legitimate dreams. Martínez thus disrupts the hierarchy of narratives that has justified some migrations, especially those coming from Europe, and demonized others, such as the current migrations from Latin America.13 Nonetheless, assembling divergent histories of mobility under the single label of migration entails certain dangers. Martínez likes to envisage Mexican migrants in the US as following “the footsteps” of the sixteenth-century explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and “seeking their own version of the Seven Cities” (2001: 198). This parallelism strikes the post-colonial reader as unfortunate, given the different historical contingencies behind the two instances of movement. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s story exemplifies the Spanish exploration and brutal colonization and settlement of the New World. When his expedition reached the village of Tiguex, above Albuquerque in 1540, and discovered that the Seven Cities of Gold were in fact mud villages, Coronado “laid the foundation for most of the subsequent troubles of Spain in the borderlands by burning two hundred Indians at the stake—an ‘incident’ which the Indians never forgot and for which they never forgave the Spaniards” (McWilliams 1990: 23). VI: The Unheard Voices of Globalization Martínez’s Crossing Over rescues from anonymity and invisibility the lives affected by a forced dislocation in which mobility is coerced, dangerous and caused, in Roger Rouse’s words by “transnationally organized capital, labor, and communications intersect[ing] with one another as much as with ‘local’ ways of life” (1990: 16). As a politically and ethically committed text, it succeeds in explaining the causes and mechanics of transnational migration and in showing the complicity of United States’ government and businesses in the infringement of migrants’ rights. Besides offering a faithful, sympathetic testimony to the violent impact of neocolonial relations and the free circulation of capital on

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the population of Mexican origin both in Mexico and in the United States, Martínez also reports on the transformation of the social and cultural landscapes of the United States and Mexico. The intercultural practices and forms of citizenship developed by the migrants are viewed as a challenge to official univocal discourses of national belonging. “In the end,” the author says optimistically, “the joke will be on both the gringo and the Mexican guardians of reified notions of culture. The kids [of these migrants] will be neither Mexican nor gringo, but both, and more than both, they will be the New Americans, imbibing cultures from all over the globe” (Martínez 2001: 191). As a descendant of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants and as someone who has lived in-between cultures, Martínez looks for a common language that relates and integrates his family’s history of immigration and travel, the contemporary migrant experience of the Cheranes, and various instances of mobility, travel and conquest that have shaped the history of the Americas. In doing so, he both confronts and glosses over a series of socio-economic divides that make evident the impossibility of bringing together clearly disparate histories of mobility under the universalizing trope of migration. Martínez is aware of the gap between himself and his informants, but in his emphasis on the transnational migration from Mexico as a modern phenomenon carried out mostly by Americanized Indian populations, he creates a distinction between what we may call traditional, immobile natives and modern, cosmopolitan natives. In some episodes, this fascination with the migrant Indian who is in tune with globalization underscores the stereotype of “local” Indian population of Mexico as resigned and acquiescing. In other occasional instances, the celebration of migration leads him to overlook the divergent historical, political, and cultural motivations behind distinct instances of mobility to and within the Americas. But Crossing Over is far from transforming migration into an existential fetish, for it constantly points to the material dimension of border crossing for the Cheranes. The text contributes to returning the metaphor of the border “to the material reality of barbed-wire fences, entrenched prejudice, and powerful economic interests that regulate the flow of human bodies across national boundaries” (Kumar 2000: x). Hence, Martínez’s work powerfully reinforces the transnational dimension of Chicano/a political consciousness at a time in which the

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cultures and economies of the Americas remain inequitably but tightly entangled and interdependent.

Endnotes 1

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Grateful acknowledgement is made to MELUS for permission to reprint this essay. The essay appeared in issue 32.1 (Summer 2006). I thank the anonymous referees and MELUS general editor, Veronica Makowsky, for their comments on an early version of this work. I am also grateful to the Fulbright Commission and the Generalitat de Catalunya for the Post-doctoral funds that enabled part of the research conducted for this project in 2003. The work of Chabram, Fregoso, Pérez Torres, and Saldívar testifies to the shift from cultural nationalism to transnationalism. “Post-movement” Chicano/a literature is that literature produced in the 1980s and after, which distances itself from cultural nationalism and often focuses on the place of Mexican Americans in the larger history of the Americas. The chronicle is one of the forms of modern journalism. As defined by Gonzalo Martín Vivaldi and Walt Harrington, chronicles, often written in first person, are narratives that include both information and subjective commentary or valuation on what has been narrated. In this context the symbolic land of Aztlán no longer represents a lost land but a “construction tied to [several] histories of power and dispossession” (Pérez Torres 1997: 36). Ramón Grosfoguel designates the political economy behind many of these histories with the term coloniality: “Coloniality refers to the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations. Coloniality of power refers to a crucial structuring process in the modern/colonial worldsystem that articulates peripheral locations in the international division of labor, subaltern group political strategies, and Third World migrants’ inscription in the racial/ethnic hierarchy of metropolitan global cities” (2002: 205). For Gayatry Spivak, the “old diasporas” were caused by religious oppression, war, slavery, trade, and conquest. The “new” diasporas involve “the new scattering of the seeds of developing nations, so that they can take root on developed ground … Eurocentric migration, labour export both male and female, border crossings, the seeking of political asylum …” (1993b: 245). Both Clifford and Hall apply the term “diaspora” metaphorically to the effects of displacement, mobility, and uprooting on subjectivity and cultural identity. may defines diasporic identity as one that lives with and through difference and hybridity (1995: 235). For his part, Clifford proposes a critical space for those communities and identities that, immersed in global transnational circuits, maintain a double coexistence with movement and permanence. For Clifford, today’s diasporic communities negotiate and resist the social realities of poverty, violence, racism, and political and economic inequality by articulating alternative public spheres that combine tradition and modernity (1997: 261). Given the popularity of the term, Kaplan warns that it may lead to a generalized appraisal of global or cosmopolitan hybrid identities that obfuscates distinct, uneven histories of displacement (1996: 135136).

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In the work of cultural theorists (Anzaldúa; Bhabha; García Canclini) the concept of mestizaje, and related ones such as “hybridization” or “creolization,” refer to cultural mixing in contexts of rigid ethnic and racial identifications and boundaries. Hybrid, mestizo/a identities allegedly destabilize identities based on fixed national, racial, and ethnic boundaries. Someone who smuggles migrants from Mexico into the United States for quite substantial sums of money. Literary theory has influenced anthropologists by its use of hermeneutic and deconstructive methodologies for the critique of classical ethnography. The anthropologists deploying these methodologies intend to unveil the rhetorical strategies of traditional anthropology that are hidden by its claims to scientific authority. Their task is similar to the way in which a literary critic exposes the silences and gaps of a literary text. Clifford’s Routes is part of recent developments in ethnographic theory that have viewed the documentation of another culture as subjective and imaginative. See also Clifford and Marcus eds. Writing Culture, and Rosaldo Culture and Truth. The discourse of immigrant success is exemplified in a recent Businessweek article “Embracing Illegals” (2005). The article takes up migrants’ stories of economic success and the American (United States) companies’ interest in “granting them letigimacy” as consumers, as verification that the American dream is now also accessible to “illegals.” Anti-immigrant panic, legally embodied by proposition 187 in California, and by the 1996 US immigration law and Welfare Reform legislation (Castañeda 2004: 70-89), has a scholarly exponent in Samuel Huntington’s recent essay “The Hispanic Challenge” (2004), where he sustains that Hispanics pose a cultural, religious, and racial threat to an allegedly homogeneous Anglo-protestant ethos. See Isabel Durán’s article in this collection. A cholo is term implying a Latino male who typically dresses in chinos (khahki pants), a sleeveless teeshirt or a flannel shirt with only the top buttoned, a hairnet, or with a bandana around the forehead, usually halfway down over the eyes. Cholos often have black ink tattoos, commonly involving Catholic imagery, or calligraphy messages, or family names. As stated above, these disapproving views of Latino migration have been made manifest at the turn of the century by legal measures and by nativist discourses such as Samuel Huntington’s.

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Mapping the Trans/Hispanic Atlantic: Nuyol, Miami, Tenerife, Tangier Manuel Martín-Rodríguez This article contributes to the study of the Hispanic Atlantic by exploring the literature associated with diaspora, travel and migratory processes that have connected territories across the ocean. Martín Rodríguez focuses on the ship, the makeshift raft, and la patera as cultural signifiers of a different (and différant, in the Derridean sense) Trans/Hispanic world. The article proposes the term Trans/Hispanic to account for the cultural reconfigurations that arise from the crossings of the Atlantic and which are not only, not just, or no longer identifiable as (exclusively) Hispanic. The geographic references in the title, therefore, are not used as signifiers for enclaves of national/regional filiations but as transitory points of departure and/or arrival, and as both imaginary and physical figurations of a remapped space that projects a desired/undesired cartography and a sense of being t/here (i.e., both “here” and “there,” rather than just in any particular place articulated as “home” or “Hawai”)

What if seas where shifted from the margins to the center of academic vision? What new processes and relationships would become apparent if littorals on opposite sides of a given ocean or sea were grouped under a single rubric? Kären Wigen, and Jessica Harland-Jacobs, “Guest Editors’ Introduction.” The Geographical Review

Historically, the field of Hispanic Studies has been marked by a tendency to concentrate on national traditions (e.g. Mexican literature, Spanish literature), on the continental divide (Peninsular vs. Latin American literature), or in area studies (e.g. the Andean region, the Southern Cone, etc.). This territorializing impulse, which Mignolo has partly summarized as a result of the conflation of language and territory (Mignolo 2000: 235), is still quite visible in job advertisements, academic appointments, and professional vitas of scholars in the field. But a growing urge to deterritorialize Hispanic

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Studies, and to focus not on areas, nations, or empires, but on routes, diasporas, and “instertitial zones and supraregional processes” (Lewis and Wigen 1999: 164) is already visibly transforming the field. Much of the impulse behind this deterritorialization comes from postcolonial and cultural studies scholars, and it focuses on exploring discontinuities and ruptures. As summarized by Ileana Rodríguez, “[i]nterest in space as culture has been the province of colonial and postcolonial scholars: the former are interested in documenting the continuity of Europe in America, the latter in underscoring its ruptures” (Rodríguez 2004: xi). As far as the Hispanic world is concerned, this new trend is evident in efforts toward reinscribing the Atlantic as a space of signification, as in Joseba Gabilondo’s introduction to a special section on “The Hispanic Atlantic” in the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies. For Gabilondo, “[a]s the original space of Spanish imperialist expansion into the Americas, the Atlantic is a foundational space and yet, perhaps because of globalization, it is making a new appearance with a (post) historical—and theoretical—synergy that we are only now beginning to feel, grasp, and analyze” (Gabilondo 2001: 93). Gabilondo’s endeavor is especially welcome, since previous Atlantic-based studies had sidestepped the Hispanic world, including Paul Gilroy’s seminal work in The Black Atlantic, and the Atlantic Studies Group at Duke University’s Ocean Connect Initiative (Lewis and Wigen 1999: 167). This chapter will continue such a deterritorialization, as it proposes to consider the Hispanic (cultural) world not from the point of view of those traditional elements mentioned above (nation, region, area), but from the destabilizing space of the Atlantic Ocean, and from the equally unstable chronotope of the vessel. Thus, instead of concentrating on such topics as the fictions of nationality, la novela de la tierra, civilization and barbarism, or “Our America,” I will focus on the ship, the makeshift raft, and la patera as cultural signifiers of a different (and différant, in the Derridean sense) Trans/Hispanic world.1 The geographic references in my title, therefore, are not to be taken as enclaves of national/regional filiations but as transitory points of departure and/or arrival; that is, as both imaginary and physical figurations of a remapped space that projects a desired/undesired cartography and a sense of being t/here (i.e., both “here” and “there,” rather than just in any particular place articulated as “home” or

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“away”). Moreover, each of these ports and cities is used in this chapter in an almost metonymical fashion, standing not for their respective countries, but as one of many examples of other such points of departure/arrival (e.g. El Aaiun, Havana, Veracruz, Tarifa, Nuadibú) that have played a major historical role in configuring the Trans/Hispanic Atlantic.2 A final clarification: I am proposing the term Trans/Hispanic to account for that which is not only, not just, or no longer identifiable as (exclusively) Hispanic (e.g., Latino/a identities that embrace both the indigenous American root and the Anglo American present, the literature of the African immigration in Spain, among others) but retains nonetheless a claim on hispanismo. With this coined word I also intend to advance in the disciplinary shift from traditional Hispanism to a more flexible definition that recognizes the mangrovelike rhizomatic configuration of the field and of the cultural productions it studies. I: Nuyol The Hispanicized/Caribbeanized spelling (and pronunciation) of New York that I will use for this section is an emblematic sign of what I am calling Trans/Hispanic. Nuyol is the site where Trans/Hispanic différance manifests itself most clearly as both a signifier of the feeling of being t/here (with its attendant connotations of spatial and temporal deferral and differentiation) and as a no-longer-regional route that reconfigures and challenges the roots of the human groups that embrace it. For the Trans/Hispanic Caribbean, this continuous remaking of mutable identities that Nuyol symbolizes has resulted in a somewhat paradoxical feeling that I have termed elsewhere a sense of (dis)place(ment) (Martín-Rodríguez 1999: 262); that is, on the one hand Trans/Hispanic Caribbean writers reveal strong ties to their “homeland” in any of the Caribbean islands and/or in any one of the “ethnic” enclaves in the mainland United States. On the other, they are equally aware of the power of the diasporic experience in shaping their identities. Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera’s works offer excellent examples of this twofold feeling. Laviera’s first published volume, La Carreta Made a U-Turn, was a literary and political response to fellow Puerto Rican René Marqués’ influential play, La carreta, in which the latter

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had advocated for a return of the displaced Puerto Ricans to the island. Laviera, on the other hand, problematized the notions of return and of the homeland by proudly stating “we are/beautiful anywhere, you dig?” (Laviera 1980: 16), as he sang of the harsh realities of Loisaida, the home of a new rumbón.3 In his second book, Laviera further deterritorialized the Puerto Rican/Nuyorican experience by foregrounding language and by emphasizing the bilingual, the homophonous, and the polysemic, and thus the notion of “becoming” rather than “being.”4 Laviera gave that book a title that is awkward to pronounce, since Enclave may be read in either Spanish or English as a term that refers to both a land and a people surrounded by a larger mass of land or by a larger group of people.5 Semantically, Laviera’s title is further complicated by the fact that it could also be read (in Spanish) as “en clave” (meaning “in code” or “in [musical] key”), among other possibilities.6 Much as the clave (the musical instrument) marks the syncopated rhythms of Nuyorican salsa, this literature in code appears likewise to signify a new, syncopated Puerto Rican identity that transcends Hispanism while also eroding the dominant language and culture from within. Of interest for this ongoing deterritorialization of the dominant English language is also the title of Laviera’s third book, AmeRícan, in which the poet once more plays with polysemic and bilingual syncretism, what Doris Sommers—in a comparable bilingual fashion—has called the “Spanglish mot juste” (Sommers 2004: 10), and thus Laviera’s coined word can be read as, at least, “I am a Rican,” “American/Rican,” and even “Love Rican,” not to mention the fact that he imposes a Spanish orthography (via the accent mark) onto an English word. While the effect of these linguistic (and cultural) blendings has an “add-on effect” and a taste of “alter-nation” for the dominant society that enclaves the smaller group, as Sommers has noted (Sommers 2004: 10 and 164), for the enclaved transnational group it also signals a point of no return, a no-longer being there and, most certainly, a not-entirely being here, a trans- state that is bound neither to space nor tradition, but subject to the perpetual flux of being t/here.76 For the Trans/Hispanic Caribbean diaspora Nuyol does not entail a one-way movement from the ancestral home to the new environment. Rather, the process reveals itself to be a back and forth movement between the old world and the new, complemented in some

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cases by further deterritorializing deracinations. Suspended in mid-air over the Atlantic, for example, the characters in Luis Rafael Sánchez’s short story “La guagua aérea” [The Airborne Bus] include “una mujer … que brinca mensualmente el charco y se olvidó de en qué lado del charco es que vive” (Sánchez 1985: 25) [a lady … who crosses the pond on a monthly basis, and who has forgotten on which side of the ocean she lives], among several others who live with one foot in New York and the other in Puerto Rico (Sánchez 1985: 26).8 But, more importantly, toward the end of the story they also include another lady who replies to the narrator’s question “¿De dónde es usted?” [Where are you from?] by simply stating “De Puerto Rico” [from Puerto Rico], which prompts the narrator to further inquire about the particular village of her birth. Her answer this time is more startling, as she simply says, “de Nueva York” [From New York]. The fact, as the narrator concludes, is that Puerto Rico is “una nación flotante entre dos puertos de contrabandear esperanzas” (Sánchez 1985: 30) [a floating nation between two hope-smuggling ports]. II: Miami A similar notion of floating identities is at the core of Ana Lydia Vega’s story “Encancaranublado,” in which a small boat serves as a metaphoric chronotope for the Caribbean diaspora. A trilingual story, written predominantly in Spanish, “Encancaranublado” features a Haitian, a Dominican, and a Cuban who briefly share the space of a small bote (whose sail is a guayabera) and who even more briefly establish personal, linguistic, and cultural alliances among themselves. Eventually, a dispute between the three protagonists sinks the boat, and their journey to Miami and hope encounters an unexpected twist onboard the United States ship that rescues them in high seas. In this much larger vessel, a black Puerto Rican worker dampens their spirits by revealing that hard labor conditions would be all that would await them in the United States, while the narrator comments on racism against people of Caribbean descent in that country. As suggested by Emmanuelli-Huertas, the story may be interpreted against the background of José Martí’s writings, most particularly “Nuestra América,” and it could be analyzed as part of an intertextual discourse that reads not only Martí but those other texts “read” by Martí in his essays (Emmanuelli-Huertas 1987: 101). At the

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end of the nineteenth century, Martí (an exiled/diasporic writer himself) emphasized cultural cohesiveness and criollismo in order to subvert the Latin American postcolonial status quo that had granted political independence to most of the territory (although not to Cuba and Puerto Rico) but had left Europeans in control of political and cultural affairs, and he emphasized the need for personal sacrifice and dedication to the struggle of true independence. In that sense, Emmanuelli-Huertas interprets the constant fighting between the three characters in Vega’s story as a sign of their lack of commitment to create the Spanish American unity that Martí desired (Emmanuelli-Huertas 1987: 104), an element Emmanuelli-Huertas construes as implicit criticism from Vega as well. This interpretation, not unlike René Marqués’ conclusion in La Carreta, explicitly favors the return of the characters to their islands of origin, where they could start building Martí’s dreamed unity by reclaiming their respective autochthonous identities and by gaining a better knowledge and understanding of one another. But, Emmanuelli-Huertas’s analysis imposes a certain hermeneutic violence on the story, for it erases the central element in the text, the sea (a no-man’s land and, certainly, a no-land), while privileging a (nineteenth-century) territorial understanding of America. The fact that at the end of Vega’s story the characters remain at sea, floating onboard the United States ship, clearly puts the emphasis more on the deterritorialized process of identity (trans)formation than on its (territorializing) results and “Encancaranublado,” in that sense, does not seem to be a plea for the unity of la América española (Martí’s term), as Emmanuelli-Huertas suggests, but a bemused commentary on the Trans/Hispanic América that twentieth-century diasporas have created, as its characters acknowledge in referring to kin and compatriots who are now residing abroad. III: Nuyol/Miami/Africa While similar stories at sea or in flight are common in Caribbean diasporic literatures,9 there is another kind of travel that entails a deeper type of de-essentializing movement. I refer to that journey which occurs either across the Atlantic or along one of its coasts, and in which the characters encounter unexpected alternatives to cherished myths about their own identities. One such instance occurs in Piri

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Thomas’s autobiographical novel Down These Mean Streets. His travels as a merchant marine allow young Piri to reformulate his selfidentification, to the point that he no longer thinks of himself as a Puerto Rican in the United States but, rather, as a black American of Puerto Rican descent. Equally distressing for traditional identity notions is the trip to Africa evoked by Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera in La Carreta Made a U-Turn. In a poem dedicated to fellow Nuyorican writer Felipe Luciano, Laviera states: “i wish you were here with me, hermano,/… / creating definitions that redefine/blackness again and again and all over again” (Laviera 1980: 55), while in the next poem of the collection he pokes fun at what he ironically terms the “sin of blending” (Laviera 1980: 57) that has Caribbean peoples playing music of African origins, while Africans “love electric guitars clearly mis-/understanding they are the root” (Laviera 1980: 57). The transatlantic perspective that Laviera and others bring to this understanding of ethnic identity, culture, and race is a radical reconfiguration of Martí’s notion of “Nuestra America,” particularly as further developed by his fellow Cuban Roberto Fernández Retamar, who refined the polarity our/their America by reclaiming with pride the figure of Caliban, in whom he saw the ultimate symbol of a history of “orientalism” that had relegated the native inhabitants of the Americas to the status of primitive brutes to be ruled by the “prosperous” Europeans.10 The most radical element of the contribution of diasporic, Caribbean writers such as Laviera, Thomas, and others to this intellectual history is that they move beyond the us versus them identitary debate. Rather, they seem intent on problematizing the very notion of a shared collective identity one could call “us/our,” and they do so from multiple parameters that complicate and undermine the notion of origin as the sole factor for determining a sense of belonging to a certain collectivity. In the case of Laviera and Thomas, race and ethnicity (understood as relative positionalities) are two of those new factors; but there are many other aspects one could trace and document, such as religion (in the work of Aurora and Rosario Levins Morales, for instance, and even in that of Nicholasa Mohr), gender (particularly as it relates to cultural and societal roles, and here the well-known debate between Sandra María Esteves and Luz María Umpierre is most relevant),11 class (omnipresent in all Latino/a literatures, including Cuban American

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letters, in which we see an obsession with the newly acquired working class status of formerly wealthy Cubans),12 and others. Regardless of what factor(s) a particular writer decides to emphasize, Trans/Hispanic Caribbean diasporic authors no longer do so in order to define an identity but, rather, to search beyond identity or, in the words of Cuban American writer Coco Fusco, to move away from “the fictions of identity imparted to us by our symbolic fathers” (Fusco 1995: 7). Moving beyond the Ariel/Caliban dichotomy, Fusco—for one—chooses to concentrate on the figure of Miranda (also from Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and to emphasize travel as the key metaphor for a shifting identity: It was traveling to another place that allowed the original Miranda to understand her identity as different from the fiction that had been propagated by her symbolic father. The Mirandas of the present, myself among them, continue to undertake these journeys, straying far from the fictions of identity imparted to us by our symbolic fathers. (Fusco 1995: 7)

As this quote suggests, even if Hispanic Caribbean nationalistic discourses of identity have been at times marked by the kind of essentialism that relies on folkloric detail and on the exaltation of local color and difference, what we see upon rereading Trans/Hispanic Caribbean literatures is that there are many (if not more) texts such as those briefly explored in this section that cease to idealize the homeland in nostalgic and monological terms. It should come as no surprise to note that many of these texts are written and produced from the margins of national(istic) discourses, quite often by women, gay and lesbian, black, and mestizo writers. Their emphasis on the diasporic, the interlingual, and on the chronotope of the vessel are to be understood as heterotopic reconfigurations of cultural allegiances. For these writers, the floating signifiers of identity are much more important than the dichotomous oppositions between the mainland and the island of origin, Europe and Africa, and the like. As a consequence, they move beyond the facile idealization of the homeland noticed and analyzed by Barradas (Barradas 1979: 55), at the same time that they avoid total identification with the new country. Instead, they seem to embrace the freedom of (and the problems brought along by) a transnational, hybrid identity that allows (and forces) them to continue to move beyond borders, across languages

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and traditions, while engaging in newer reformulations of their cultural and literary heritage. IV: Tangier Though the figures related to African immigration into Spain change daily (as this migratory flux continues), some more or less recent data reports may serve to contextualize this section. On November 14, 2003, for instance, the Spanish daily El Mundo published an article on the new policies on migration of the Moroccan government. According to the report, which also provided information on police activity to curb migration, 709 people were detained in Tangier alone in the previous two months while trying to gain access to Europe. Many more have died at sea while trying, while yet many others have succeeded in making it to ports and beaches in southern Spain and the Canary Islands. In fact, just in the Canary Islands, in the period from 1999 to August, 2004, the Spanish Government reported the arrival of 1,737 pateras with an estimate of 30,684 immigrants onboard (Pardellas 2004: 129).13 In just a few decades, Spain has ceased to be a country that sent thousands of emigrants to Europe and to the Americas, becoming instead a coveted destiny for the new immigrants, who see that country as “the door to Europe” or, as Mohamed El Gerhyb puts it, as an entrance into the great movie theatre that the European Community has become. Para Abdesalam, Europa le ha dado a España la llave de la puerta de entrada, la ha convertido en el portero que corta las entradas del cine en tecnicolor que es para los marroquíes la Comunidad Europea. ‘Los emigrantes que regresan de vacaciones cuentan a sus compatriotas, en la euforia de su nueva situación, cuánto ganan y cómo es la vida allá. Y éstos imaginan, además de lo que les cuentan, lo que ven diariamente en las televisiones europeas.’ (Moreno Torregrosa and El Gherhyb 1994: 39)14 [According to Abdesalam, Europe has given Spain the entrance key, it has turned Spain into the usher who checks the tickets for the technicolor movie theatre that the European Community is for Moroccans. ‘When they return for the holidays, the emigrants—euphoric because of their new situation—tell their compatriots how much money they make, and how life is there. The latter envision not only what they are told, but also what they see on a daily basis in European television stations.’]

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A destination, or a necessary stop in transit, Spain has undergone a deep transformation produced by the constant arrival of these African immigrants (as well as of Latin American immigrants, whom I will not discuss here).15 Even in literature, the routes of the North African diaspora are beginning to subvert the roots of a deep hatred of the Moor as a despicable/orientalized Other, splendidly documented by Eloy Martín Corrales. Thus, we now have novels such as Josep Lorman’s La aventura de Saíd [The Adventure of Said], already in its fourteenth printing, in which the Moroccan immigrant protagonist is portrayed with a great dose of understanding and sympathy, while the bigotry of the skinheads in Catalonia is firmly denounced.16 In fact the cover of the S/M edition promotes this book with the sentence “¡Echa abajo los prejuicios racistas!” [Bring down racist prejudices], and the Círculo de Lectores edition adds an appendix entitled “Luchemos contra el racismo” [Let’s fight against racism] that includes texts, photographs, and addresses for SOS Racismo, a national organization against racism.17 But, even more important for my purposes here is the fact that Saíd thematizes the possibility of reconfigured identities both for the North African protagonist and for his Spanish girlfriend, as the novel plays with the idea of a desire for the Other and for “othering” oneself,18 an idea that Lorman further develops in an unpublished manuscript entitled “En favor de Saïd: Reflexions sobre la immigració, el racisme i la xenofòbia” [For Saïd: Some Thoughts on Immigration, Racism, and Xenophobia], where he summarizes his thoughts on these issues, as well as the insights gained in discussions with Spanish high-schoolers. In the essay’s conclusion, Lorman affirms what is also a key idea in Saíd: “Som en una tessitura en què naturals i nouvinguts ens hem d’adaptar, i tota adaptació demana concessions i renúncies per ambdues parts en un sa exercici d’intel·ligència i humilitat” (Lorman, n.d.: n.p.) [We are in a situation in which both the natives and the new arrivals need to learn how to adapt, and every process of adaptation requires concessions and sacrifices from both parts, in a healthy exercise of intelligence and humility]. This optimism, certainly understandable and appropriate in a book for young-adult readers, contrasts with the much darker assessment found in Ahmed Daoudi’s El Diablo de Yudis [The Devil from Yudis], even if both texts share a similar (and quite familiar)

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ending: deportation. In fact, for the protagonist of El Diablo, there are several deportations, as he tries to gain entrance into Spain a number of times and, consequently, Daoudi’s novel is inevitably richer in the exploration of the symbolic value I find in the notion of transit, and in the chronotope of the vessel. Of all the types of ships the protagonist of El Diablo uses to travel to Spain, the patera is by far the most significant, as it has been the vehicle most commonly used by clandestine immigrants traveling to Spain from the north of Africa; in fact, the patera has become such a socio-symbolicly charged signifier that it now stands as the key metaphor for immigration in daily life and in titles of books of both fiction and non-fiction, including Mahi Binebine’s Cannibales (translated into Spanish as La patera), and Mario Gastañaga’s Náufragos: Pateras en el estrecho, among many others. Most dramatically, the symbolism appears linked to ritual sacrifice (by connecting the term with the “pátera,” a dish used in religious ceremonies) in Andrés Sorel’s Las voces del estrecho (Sorel 2000: 83). As for El Diablo de Yudis, Daoudi’s artistry and social commentary is perhaps at its best when he describes the encounter of a small patera with a huge merchant ship in the deep waters of the international channel in the strait of Gibraltar. A sort of Moby Dick of globalization, the merchant ship is described as “una montaña que flotaba hacia el otro lado de la orilla en busca de otras raíces, un buque comercial que recorría el Mediterráneo en uno de sus viajes rutinarios” (Daoudi 1994: 96) [a mountain, floating toward the other shore in search of other roots, a commercial ship that traversed the Mediterranean in one of its routine trips]. Dwarfed by such a monster, the patera becomes a charged signifier of the counter-hegemonic reclamation of freedom of movement. In that light, the paragraph quoted above may be interpreted as a challenge to the notion that certain vessels (read: subjects) are free to pursue new routes and roots, while others are barred from doing so by restrictive im/migration policies. In the end, Daoudi’s novel is as paradoxical a comment on migration, transculturation, and return, as Daniel Venegas’ 1928 Las aventuras de Don Chipote [The Adventures of Don Chipote] was for a Mexican-Chicano/a context. In both texts, the disenchanted protagonist is back in his native land at the end, apparently

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reintegrated to traditional ways of life (Don Chipote goes back to farming, while Daoudi’s protagonist becomes a storyteller). But, in both cases, the memory and the experience of a life lived as “Other” serve as destabilizing factors for what are otherwise apparently fixed identities.19 Moreover, the fact that El Diablo was written in Spanish, and that it was published in Spain, suggests that Daoudi needs to be read as a representative of this Trans/Hispanic world I am analyzing, and not (or no longer/not just) as a North African writer. In this sense, the Tangier that so keenly appears in his novel as the point of departure for immigrants (and as the locale for those who assist them—and prey on them—one way or another) must also be read as a t/here space where not yet/no longer forces of desire and need combine to signify a différant Trans/Hispanic identity. V: Tenerife If Tangier is clearly recognized in public discourses as a major locus of migration, Tenerife—alongside the rest of the Canary Islands, Fuerteventura in particular—becomes a complementary mass-media Atlantic referent for the arrival of undocumented immigrants. As such, Canary Islands officials are often quoted in the news decrying the massive influx of immigrants for which, they claim, the Islands are ill-prepared, and in 2005 the autonomous government of the Islands started a controversial program by which it charters planes to fly groups of immigrants to cities in mainland Spain. Ironically, as Enzensberger has noted, U.N. demographic projections indicate that the great migratory waves are yet to occur (Enzensberger 2002: 27). Oddly enough, in thus portraying immigration as a one-way phenomenon that brings immigrants into the Canary Islands, the media chooses to forget that large groups of canarios or isleños left their islands in droves to settle in Cuba, Venezuela, and the United States (where their descendants are numerous in states like Texas and Louisiana), among other countries. Therefore, any discussion of migratory fluxes related to the Canary Islands must necessarily start with a reconstruction of the multi-directional grid of traveling routes that have crossed at one point or another its coasts.20 To that end, I will turn to a brief analysis of the Diario de un emigrante clandestino [The Diary of a Clandestine Emigrant], written

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by José Ana San Blas Lorenzo, and recently released in a facsimile and transcribed edition of the manuscript by the Excelentísimo Ayuntamiento de San Cristóbal de La Laguna. The D i a r i o , particularly as published in a 2001 context, may serve to correct hegemonic one-sided views on immigration by reclaiming the canario or isleño identity as that of a migrant, diasporic subject. San Blas Lorenzo tells the story of the clandestine trip of the ship Delfina Noya from Santa Cruz de Tenerife to La Guaira, Venezuela, in 1950.21 The journey is full of travails not unlike those later told by patera occupants. But, more important for my purposes here are the feelings recorded by the diarist upon arrival. San Blas Lorenzo feels a combination of elation at the prospect of a new life, and despair in seeing how they are received in Venezuela. The travelers of his story experience both the solidarity of certain villagers and the rejection of the press and the authorities. Pages 45-46 of the diary, for instance, are devoted to refuting what he describes as false allegations in the Venezuelan press about the expedition, while accusing local journalists of xenophobia. The text ends two pages later with an account of the diverse fate of the voyagers. Some of them, in possession of passports and entry visas, are allowed in the country after a period of over a month onboard the anchored ship. Others, we are told, disappeared from the docked ship at one point or another, fearing detention and (quite likely) deportation (San Blas Lorenzo 2001: 48). All the while, there are references to transculturated relatives and friends already established in Venezuela, who visit those onboard, and who provide them with a virtual network of unofficial support in order to help with their relocation. An older text, Francisco González Díaz’s Un canario en Cuba [A Canary Islander in Cuba] (1916) is even richer in its documentation and interpretation of the Canary Islander as a diasporic subject, but the book has no recent reprints and its historical insights are not well known today, a circumstance I will try to mitigate with some more or less extensive quotes from the original.22 González Díaz begins by narrating his experiences onboard the steamship Balmes in 1914, an inevitable choice as World War I precluded him from using a more luxurious vessel for his journey to Cuba. The circumstance allows the author to witness (and to convey to us) the plight of a massive group of emigrants who traveled out of Spain with third class tickets, lodged in the belly of the ship. As if the steamboat were a gigantic patera

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(avant la lettre), the description of its human cargo could rival any of those found in newspapers reports’ on the arrival of immigrants to Europe today: Ví [sic] crecer constantemente la masa oscura, seres vivos con apariencia de monstruosas larvas, hatillos misérrimos, harapos y pingajos, bultos informes, seres y cosas de pesadilla, sobre los cuales derramábase una gran sombra de dolor y tristeza. Eran las legiones semi-desnudas de nuestro éxodo americano . … Eran los canarios que se van a América para volver y arrastran su cadena en la fuga. … No buscan en Cuba ni en la Argentina el vellocino de oro: … lo que buscan es emplear sus brazos en las faenas agrícolas de la cosecha y obtener, a cambio de su trabajo honrado, intenso, penoso, un estipendio del cual con fatigas y privaciones van retirando alguna economía que les asegura el regreso. Y vuelven; y después, consumidos los escasos ahorros, tornan a emigrar. (González Díaz 1916: 8-9)23 [I saw the dark mass get bigger with human beings that resembled monstrous larvae, extremely ragged knapsacks, torn and tattered rags, shapeless bundles, nightmarish things and beings, all of them covered by a shadow of pain and sadness. These were the half-naked legions of our American exodus. … These were the Canary Islanders that leave for America to return, and in their flight they drag their chains with them. … They do not look for the Golden Fleece in Cuba or in Argentina: … what they want is to employ their arms in farm work labor to obtain, in return for their honest, intense, painful work, a stipend out of which—through pains and deprivations—they manage to save just enough to ensure their return. And they return; and later, once the savings are gone, they emigrate again]

Despite temporal and material circumstances, these “swallow” immigrants, as González Díaz calls them (González Díaz 1916: 8), are not entirely unlike the Puerto Rican characters depicted by Sánchez in “La guagua aérea” nor unlike Daoudi’s protagonists in El Diablo de Yudis. In fact, much like the latter (and like Don Chipote) those Canary Islanders marked by the migratory cycle that González Díaz describes are said to be unable to fully readjust to life back “home.” The transformation, according to the author, starts “there” (in Cuba or Argentina): El bracero canario en la emigración multiplica sus capacidades laboriosas y afina su sensibilidad: desde todos los aspectos vale mucho más de lo que valía en las islas, porque se reconoce libre y porque el patriotismo, actuando sobre él como insuperable depurador, le ensancha la vida y la conciencia. (González Díaz 1916: 11)

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[The bracero from the Canary Islands multiplies his work capacity and refines his sensibility in the migration: in all aspects, he is much better than he was in the Islands, because he sees himself as a free man and because patriotism—acting on him as a great purifying element—broadens his conscience and his views on life]

Then, when the bracero returns “home” the inevitable feeling of being t/here sinks in: Vuelve a la tierra de dónde [sic] salió para continuar dormido, sometido y … callado. Le acompaña la visión luminosa de la naturaleza en los trópicos. … y cuando se reconcentra en la memoria le pasa por los ojos un deslumbramiento. Quiere volver a sentirse poseído por aquella magia abrumadora y dulce, y está cantando siempre las bellezas de Cuba. (González Díaz 1916: 14) [He returns to the land that saw him leave only to keep on dormant, submissive and… silent. He brings with him the luminous vision of nature in the Tropics. … and when he dwells in the memory, a brightness takes hold of his eyes. He longs to be possessed again by that sweet, overpowering magic, and he sings forever the beauties of Cuba]

González Díaz, who traveled in first class and whose own mind suggests a closer alliance with an enlightened nineteenth-century nationalism, does not go as far as claiming—as I do—that the returned emigrant is now a trans/Hispanic subject. In fact, he is almost of the opposite mind, as he proposes that only those who stay in America are truly changed by the experience (González Díaz 1916: 14). His understanding of the telluric forces at play during maritime migrations is indeed remarkable, and he devotes several pages (20, and 24-27) to describing that pull, going as far as declaring the ocean to be his own personal enemy (González Díaz 1916: 24), sensing perhaps the beginnings of his own transformation. But his perceptive account of the working classes’ experience of the journey gives us enough information nonetheless to question the author’s conclusion and to align the Canary Islander braceros with the Don Chipotes, the Nuyoricans, and the Maghrebian immigrants of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Alongside the other texts explored in this essay, Un canario en Cuba is a keen reminder that the Atlantic has served throughout the history of navigation as a laboratory for deterritorialized routes and identities that subvert traditional images of Hispanic-rooted essentialisms. In their stead, a deterritorialized reconceptualization of this cultural and geographical space as

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Trans/Hispanic, that is, as the space of a no longer/not yet being t/here I explored throughout this essay, may better describe the fluid identities that the vessel and the ocean historically create. Whether one studies Caribbean dwellers traveling to and from New York and Miami, U.S. Latinos/as or Caribbean people traveling back and forth to Africa, North African and Sub-Saharan immigrants en route to Spain, or Spaniards traveling back and forth to Africa or to the Americas, the picture that emerges is of the process by which the Hispanic world ceases to be Hispanic and becomes (in a Deleuzian sense) Trans/Hispanic. Nuyol, Miami, Tangier, and Tenerife, therefore, serve as beacons of deterritorialization for this remapped space that I am calling Trans/Hispanic, a space that may be one of the major keys for mapping multiculturalism in the twenty-first century.

Endnotes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

This essay also limits itself to the twentieth century. The major role of the Atlantic in shaping the Hispanic world in the period from 1492 to 1900, extensively analyzed by others, falls outside its parameters. As Goytisolo and Naïr have noted, migrations affect both the social structures of the countries of origin and the national configuration of the receiving nations (Goytisolo and Nair 2000: 39); I would add that the national structures of the countries of origin is likewise affected by the process, hence my separating these ports from their respective nation/alities. Loisaida is Laviera’s—and many other Nuyoricans’—term for the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “El Arrabal: Nuevo Rumbón” [the slum, a new rhumba] is the title of the third and final section of La Carreta Made a U-Turn. For these notions, particularly as they refer to language, I am building on Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas on how major languages become deterritorialized. For these critics, “[t]he problem is not the distinction between major and minor language; it is one of a becoming. It is a question not of reterritorializing oneself on a dialect or a patois but of deterritorializing the major language” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 104). For what is worth, it could be added that “enclave” also admits an etymologicallybased French pronunciation, as noted in the Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (597). Such as “enclave” as a verb transitive, in English, meaning “to surround or enclose (a place or country) with the territories of another country” (Webster’s 597), which in the case of Puerto Rico adds an interesting political nuance to this title. In this, I disagree with Aparicio, for whom the bilingual process leads to a permanent reconciliation of dualities in writing (Aparicio 1988: 158). Quite to the

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11 12

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contrary, my analysis suggests that there cannot be such thing as a permanent resolution of dualities (nor a desire to do so, for that matter). “yo vivo con una pata en Nueva York y la otra en Puerto Rico,” (Sánchez 1985: 26, italics in original) says another character in the same story. See Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets, Roberto G. Fernández’s Raining Backwards, Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Line of the Sun, Enrique J. Ventura’s “Pancho Canoa,” and Jesús Colón’s A Puerto Rican in New York, among many other texts with varied references to the ship, the raft, or the plane trip. For a more recent turn in the history of the “Our America” notion, this time applied to U.S. Latino/a identities, see Saldívar 1991, especially 182-83. See Azize Vargas 1989: 157-59. An excellent artistic rendition of this topic is found in Roberto G. Fernández’s Holy Radishes!. Even more recently, African ports further south (in Mauritania and Senegal) have become significant points of departure for emigrants who try to reach the Canary Islands in their cayucos, a longer vessel than the patera. Juan Goytisolo, one of the first and most insightful analysts of migratory processes in and out of Spain, has repeatedly denounced the false images transmitted via satellite television from Europe to North Africa and other poorer areas, and he advocates for a daily dose of social reporting on poverty conditions in European countries as a way to combat those other images (Goytisolo 2003: 24). For more on those groups, see Tornos (1997), and Pérez Herrero (1988). In 2006, immigrants account for 8.5% of the population (source: El Pais, 11-6-2006: 37). The success of Lorman’s novel resulted in a film version, Saíd (1998), directed by Lorenzo Soler, with a script by Lorman (signed under pseudonym; J. Lorman, personal interview, 12 March, 2005). In a personal interview (12 March 2005), Lorman explained that on his frequent visits to Spanish schools, he prefers to discuss issues of racism and xenophobia rather than the novel itself. A more radical Othering process is manifiested in the Islamic conversions that became more noticeable shortly after Andalusia became an autonomous community in 1981. An experimental narrative chronicle of the experience is found in Cabrera’s Párrafos de moro nuevo [Paragraphs by a New Moor], especially pp. i-ix, 32-33, and 343. Rachid Nini’s concept of “patria portátil” [portable homeland] (Nini 2000: 65) may also serve to account for this deterritorialized understanding of transnational identity. As I finished reviewing this chapter in the summer of 2006, the Fundación Francisco Largo Caballero announced the opening of the exhibit “De la España que emigra a la España que acoge,” whose purpose is to document that shift with testimonials and memorabilia. The story told by San Blas Lorenzo is not unique. For a comparable journey, see Bárbulo (2001). I would like to thank Eugenio Padorno Navarro for bringing this text to my attention, and for sharing a copy with me. The unexpected choice of vessel, and the ensuing enlightening discoveries onboard the Balmes, result in the authors’ profound moral indignation with the

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Manuel Martín-Rodríguez authorities, whom he accuses of breaking their own immigration laws (González Díaz 1916: 6 and 17). At one point, González Díaz is so upset that he qualifies contemporary immigration practices as more proper of the slave trade (González Díaz 1916: 7).

Part V: Trans-Lations

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Resisting through Hyphenation: The Ethics of Translating (Im)pure Texts África Vidal Maps and languages do not coincide. Today cultural purity is nothing but a nostalgic fantasy of mainstream culture, and authors who reside in the inbetween travel through translation to claim that maps are not territories, and to remind us that imperialism is an act of geographical violence. Travelling and translation make us think about what is strange, as we move forward to another place, of powerlessness and of loss. The main aim of this essay is to exemplify these ideas with a number of postcolonial plurilingual texts that exclude the monolingual, and demand of their readers to place themselves “in between.” In these cases, when we consider the hybridization of languages to be enriching, language and translation try to show the existence of the Other without reducing it to an Other homogenized by the Same

[T]o write is, of course, to travel. It is to enter a space, a zone, a territory, sometimes sign-posted by generic indicators (travel writing, autobiography, anthropology, history ...), but everywhere characterised by movement: the passage of words, the caravan of thought. … Here to write (and read) … entails and attempt to extend, disrupt and rework it. … [W]riting opens up a space that invites movement, migration, a journey. It involves putting a certain distance between ourselves and the contexts that define our identity. To write, therefore, although seemingly an imperialist gesture, for it is engaged in an attempt to establish a path, a trajectory, a, however limited and transitory, territory and dominion of perception, power and knowledge, can also involve a repudiation of domination and be invoked as a transitory trace. Ian Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity Because exile … is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. They generally do not have armies or states, although they are often in search of them. Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people. The crucial thing is that a

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África Vidal state of exile free from this triumphant ideology—designed to reassemble an exile’s broken history into a new whole—is virtually unbearable, and virtually impossible in today’s world. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile”

I: Hyphenated Travelling In “Travelling Cultures” James Clifford (1992: 101) points out that the concept of travelling is fundamental to rethinking culture. Travelling, migration, hybridity and the melting of cultures will undoubtedly be considered as the most important features of the twenty-first century. As a direct consequence of these processes “the concept and reality of the unified homogeneous nation-state and national culture become highly contested terrains.” And, as Fusco also points out, we have to bear in mind “that advances in technology have disrupted geographical, political, and cultural boundaries forever” (1995: 25). Whether the “First” World likes it or not, it is being invaded by the “Third” World in an often desperate attempt on the part of the latter to escape from poverty and improve living conditions, but without renouncing its roots or ending up banished in that perilous territory of not-belonging (Said 1990a: 359). In a similar line of thought Theodor Adorno observes (1974) that travelling is a state which allows us not to be at home in one’s home; it is a state which reminds us that everything is provisional and that the intellectual’s task is to remove borders and binary oppositions, to be responsive “to the traveller rather than to the potentate, to the provisional and risky rather than to the habitual” (Said 1996: 64). Travelling stands in direct opposition to the realities presumably confined within maps. Travelling trespasses lines and demarcations, as well as totalizing visions of reality. As we travel, we enter different cultures and languages. Yet the idea that maps and languages may coincide is as naive as it is unreal (Lambert 1995: 98; Snell-Hornby 1997: 285). Today cultural purity is no more than “a nostalgic fantasy” (Fusco 1995: 26) of mainstream culture, leading to symbolic representations which are potentially doubleedged swords, since they signal “both the exercising of control over cultural difference through the presentation of static models of diversity and the potential opportunity to transform the stereotypes that emerge with the imposition of control” (Fusco 1995: 27-28). Travelling, therefore, constitutes both a claim that maps are not

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territories, and also a reminder that imperialism “is an act of geographical violence through which every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control” (Said 1990b: 77). Literature and language are always a reflection of the social changes taking place in the world. There are authors who, because of their particular cultural situation, are always travelling, both literally and metaphorically, and, therefore, their work always resides in the inbetween—between two cultures, between two languages, between two ways of seeing life; these writers consider that doubleness to be enriching. They conceive dwelling “as a mobile habitat, as a mode of inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and closed structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an opening whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of the languages that constitute our sense of identity, place and belonging” (Chambers 1994: 4). The aim is to move backwards and forwards between two cultures in a continual coming and going that is not necessarily synonymous with synthesis. In this state of constant flux, translation is simply another reading to aid text interpretation, as well as a fundamental part of the reading experience (Mehrez 1992: 122): By drawing on more than one culture, more than one language, more than one world experience, within the confines of the same text, postcolonial anglophone and francophone literature very often defies our notions of an ‘original’ work and its translation. Hence, in many ways these postcolonial plurilingual texts in their own right resist and ultimately exclude the monolingual and demand of their readers to be like themselves: `in between’, at once capable of reading and translating, where translation becomes an integral part of the reading experience. (Mehrez 1992: 137)

That is why, according to Mehrez, it is fundamental that we should all become “perpetual translators in our reading of a plurilingual world” (1992: 137). The hyphen that characterises these writers is essentially a mark of vitality. These authors have renewed the literary canon through a process which bears witness to the existence of unequal and irregular forces within cultural representations struggling for political and social power. The so-called “hyphenated writers” (Aaron 1964) are the result of the desire on the part of so called minorities affected by geopolitical north/south east/west divisions to stand up for their rights and differences, those very differences which enlightened discourse aims to

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“standardize” and “rationalize.” These writers refuse to gather around the dominant discourse and prefer to create emancipation strategies. That is why they argue that the question to be asked is “Who should speak?” rather than “Who will listen?”; they seek to be taken seriously and not with the benevolent smile of imperialism (Spivak 1990: 59-60). They aim to show the existence of the Other without reducing it to an Other homogenized by the Same. If we fashion ourselves on models which are not our own, we run the risk of becoming dislocations of an alien and alienating discourse (Said 1986: 140). On the other hand, if the margins are accepted, the dominant discourse may just appear to be very subtly giving shape to voices which can reproduce the type of discourse against which they had risen in the first place (Spivak 1987). It is a question of finding a historicity which is “decentred,” “counterpoint,” “interruptive”—in the words of Jameson (1991), Said (1994) and Spivak (1993a) respectively—at the heart of a world (or at least part of it) which questions to what extent classifications are ethical (Álvarez and Vidal 1995: 75). Many of these writers are not totally cut off from their places of origin, but live in the imprecise space of the in-between as described by Said: with the many reminders that you are in exile, that your home is not in fact so far away, andthat the normal traffic of everyday contemporary life keeps you in constant but tantalizing and unfulfilled touch with the old place. Exile therefore consists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another.” (Said 1996: 49)

Writers such as Moniza Alvi, Mahasweta Devi, Julia Álvarez, Cristina García, Rosario Ferré, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Óscar Hijuelos, Tino Villanueva, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, among many others, come to mind. Their common feature is that, although coming from very different backgrounds, they depart from an intercultural experience that bestows on them a double allegiance, as they do not belong anywhere and belong to two or three cultures at the same time. They know, like Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), that “To survive the Borderlands/you must live sin fronteras/be a crossroads.” Precisely, the concept of border crossing leads us to those of hybridity and struggle, policing and transgression. The experience of living on the border is inextricably linked to this double allegiance, to belonging and not belonging at the same time. For

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James Clifford, the border experience produces powerful political visions and has a potential for subverting binaries. What is fascinating for Clifford is to what extent this act/metaphor of crossing is translatable. It is my contention in this essay that translation stands for an opening, one of those practical borderlands which in Clifford’s words stand for “sites of regulated and subversive travel” (Clifford 1997: 37). When we translate, we travel, we migrate, and the act of translation opens a borderland of experience that has a subversive potential. Similarly, the writers I deal with in this paper are constantly translating their experience from one culture into another. Writers such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Gloria Anzaldúa, Renato Rosaldo, Esmeralda Santiago, Graciela Limón, among many others, consider themselves to be, above all, travellers/translators whose mission is not to protect a single space and defend its boundaries, but to cross territories, and abandon predetermined positions. The image of the traveller is contingent on movement, on the will to enter different worlds, use different languages, and understand a range of different masks. Thus equipped, the traveller may escape routine and become immersed in new rhythms and rituals (Said 1991 [1978]). And after every trip, every new encounter, it is necessary to redefine the world, the words of the world, the concepts, by means of language, for all narratives are translations (Estrella de Diego 2001). Travelling itself is not proof of modification, but at the same time constitutes a space for invisible transformations, like a kind of territory or borderland that opens itself up for translation. This identity in motion is constructed on the basis of how we shape our desire for recognition, on the search for visibility in spatial and temporal circumstances that are not a result of our choosing. Travelling also makes us think about what is strange, a term which is normally associated with all that is not familiar, with things that are not pleasing and, often, upset us. However, Heidegger (1990: 38) points out that the true meaning of “strange” is that of moving forward to another place, on the way to. What is strange moves forward but it does not lack determination, and seeks the place where it can remain as it moves forward. Chambers explains this interstitial state in the following terms: To come from elsewhere, from ‘there’ and not ‘here,’ and hence to be simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the situation at hand, is to live at the intersections of histories and memories, experiencing both their preliminary dispersal and their subsequent translation into new, more

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II: Travelling South to Defy English These feelings of strangeness, of encountering powerlessness, and of loss which have been central for thinkers such as Chambers or Heidegger, among others, can be seen in the works of many writers who find themselves in a similar quandary. Here I would like to discuss the type of literature I referred to in the previous section and which I consider to be particularly enlightening, since it involves women writers whose fate is to travel, both in a literal and metaphorical sense, given the hyphenated position in which they find themselves. But I would also like to look at translation, because these writers are in-between two languages representing two identities—or more—which they are not willing to give up. In all these cases, the writer knows that language is much more than a means of communication, “it is, above all, a means of cultural construction in which our very selves and sense are constituted. There is no clear or obvious ‘message,’ no language that is not punctuated by its contexts, by our bodies, by our selves, just as there is no neutral means of representation” (Chambers 1994: 22). The language we choose to represent ourselves entails much more than a language choice. Since until fairly recently the literary establishment was making the claim that good literature was not political and was not ideologically charged (Jehlen 1991: 1-20), the issue is whether these “minority” literatures will always be ideologically suspect, and to what extent their influence will change the contours of the literary establishment. It seems obvious by now that the unstoppable advance of these plurilingual literatures and of the peoples they represent “are bound to challenge and redefine many accepted notions in translation theory which continue to be debated and elaborated within the longstanding traditions of western ‘humanism’ and ‘universalism’” (Mehrez 1992: 121). Similarly, we may question how these literary representations will fit in the house of literature. Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 17)

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point out that one of the characteristics of “minor” literatures is that everything in them is political and that they are constructed with the language of power, yet, nevertheless, remain “outside the territory” and are “affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1990: 59). The issue, then, is how to think of these deterritorialized literatures. Some proposals advocate trying to think the Other, to interiorize it and incorporate it. But from the moment we think the Other, the Other is no longer Other but becomes the Same. It enters the space of what can be thought and it loses its strangeness. So the real question is: Can there be Otherness? Does the West accept Otherness or does it reduce it to the Hegelian space that does nothing but dialeticize, annul, cancel, or incorporate it? (Cixous 1992: 90). In fact, there is no neutral representation, and least of all verbal representations. That is why many Latina writers, forced at school to choose a particular language—English—if they wanted to be successful in life, prefer the hyphen, the in-between. Gloria Anzaldúa, for example, remembers how her English teacher would rap her knuckles if she was caught speaking Spanish, and also how her mother kept telling her that if she wanted to get somewhere in life she had to speak the language of power correctly: I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess—that was good for three links on the knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the corner of the classroom for “talking back” to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. ‘If you want to be American, speak American. If you don’t like it, go back to Mexico, where you belong.’ ‘I want you to speak in English. Pa’ hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el inglés bien. Qué vale toda tu educación si todavía hablas inglés con un ‘accent,’ my mother would say, mortified that I spoke English like a Mexican. At Pan American University, I, and all Chicano students were required to take two speech classes. Their purpose: to get rid of our accents (Anzaldúa 1990: 203).

Something very similar happened to the writer Graciela Limón, who grew up in Los Angeles “always hearing the voices of teachers who on a daily basis pushed me into giving up the language spoken in my home by my family who were Mexican immigrants.” These writers, however, consider the hybridization of languages to be enriching, unlike the previous generations who were more traditional and

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obsessed with being accepted by a power which advised against mixing English and Spanish: [B]ilingualism is what prevails; one language influenced by the other, a process which has resulted in a hybrid form of expression, a mixture of Spanish and English, a wide corpus of communication that could be considered as a trilingual form of expression. Now, in the south-western part of the United States in particular, English has been enriched with words and phrases which have come directly from Spanish. We can see this in names of cities, streets, surnames, names of foods, clothes, sports and, especially, in literature written and published by Hispanic writers who are natives of the United States. And the same thing can be said about the Spanish which is being spoken nowadays in these places and has taken a wealth of terms and rhythms from English.1

Along these same lines we can find other women novelists like Pat Mora or Ana Castillo, and also visual artists such as Coco Fusco, caught between two worlds, and immersed in what Coco Fusco calls “pura bicultura” (1995: x). Broadly speaking, having to choose a language is a painful process, as we can see in the story “No Speak English” in Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street. Mamacita is afraid to go out, perhaps because she cannot speak English. She stays shut up in a house she does not consider to be her home, observing, horrified, her son sing along to a Pepsi advertisement in English. For Mamacita, language and home coalesce to create safety: Ay, she says, she is sad. Oh, he says, not again. ¿Cuándo, cuándo, cuándo? she asks. ¡Ay, Caray! We are home. This is home. Here I am and here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ! ¡Ay! Mamacita, who does not belong, every once in a while lets out a cry, hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country. And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy who has begun to talk starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on T.V. No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no as if she can’t believe her ears. (Cisneros 1992: 78)

Language is thus territorialized on both sides of a door, the dividing line between the outside and the inside, but also, between two different languages and experiences.

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Language is the reflection of a specific form of understanding the world, which is why the annulling of a language at the hands of English, the “Esperanto of commerce,” as it has been called, is a real massacre, since it dissolves a whole culture. For this reason Steiner is afraid that one day monolingualism will reign under the economic domination of English: Nowadays English is the language used by a Korean airline pilot to address air traffic controllers at a Greek airport. This is something strangely similar to the disappearance of climates, of animal species or flora, a true massacre of the marvellous diversity of this planet and its conditions of existence. … A language which we do not know seems to me to be one of the greatest gifts destiny can offer us, whispering in our ears: ‘Here is a new cosmos, a new world. Open up your hand, try to come in.’ (Steiner 2001-2002: 64, 65)

English is, in fact, the language of Power for these women writers, and that is why they approach it using different strategies. One very well-known example is Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), where Anzaldúa uses a very particular language which is a mixture of English, Spanish, Tex-Mex, and Nahuatl. All these inflections reflect what she calls the border language and result in a political polyphonic manifesto. For Anzaldúa, the border is a place of contact between the dominant culture and non-dominant cultures, but it is also a place of reflection on one’s own culture, on the very border situation of the Chicana woman, marginalized by the machismo of the Chicano men. So, don’t give me your tenets and your laws. Don’t give me your lukewarm gods. What I want is an accounting with all three cultures—white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture. (1987: 21-22)

Whoever faces the task of translating these hyphenated works is faced with a significant ethical problem, because the works are situated in the third space (Bhabha 1994: 172), where hybridization is only a sign of richness. Thus, in the prologue of her own translation of Cuando era puertorriqueña, Esmeralda Santiago gives us advice on how to translate espanglés,

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Anzaldúa, like Santiago, points at the fact that no one is only one thing (Said 1993: 407-408). Translating these hyphenated writers involves working with difference, without trying at any time to identify with the Other, making the strange familiar while maintaining Otherness, without sacrificing difference or making it one’s own (Dingwaney and Maier 1995: 304). Translating these plurilingual literatures implies, to go back to Heidegger, moving to another place on the way to. Ferré expresses this constant travelling in the following terms: Being a writer … one has to learn to live by letting go, by renouncing the reaching of this or that shore, but to let oneself become the meeting place of both … both left-handed and right-handed, masculine and feminine, because my destiny was to live by the word. In fact, a woman writer (and a man writer), must live travelling constantly between two very different cultures (much more so than English and Spanish), two very different worlds which are often at each other’s throats: the world of women and the world of men. (1995: 40-41, 48-49)

Well aware of the fact that translating implies travelling (and vice versa), Ferré translates her own work from Spanish into English. Similarly, Esmeralda Santiago translates from English into Spanish, the Dominican-American Julia Álvarez and the Cuban Cristina García go back and forth from one language to the other. Even if their mother tongue is Spanish, they write in English because it is the language in which they are most fluent, and in which they have been (re)created. The Chilean Cecilia Vicuña, who considers herself to be a mixture of different ethnic groups, writes poetry in a mixture of three languages: Quechua, Spanish and English. In all these cases, simple dualisms are abandoned as it is recognised that any stereotype collapses beneath the weight of complexity (Chambers 1994: 14). All these writers know that to translate is to travel, to open up a space or borderland that invites movement, migration, a journey, and a repudiation of domination (Chambers 1994: 10). Translating should be invoked as the gesture of an offer, where the point of arrival

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becomes the point of departure. Translating is a travelogue which instead of promoting colonial interests becomes, as in the case of Albalucía Angel, a different riposte to centuries of domination (Lindsay 2003: 108). Translating becomes “a constant journeying across the threshold between event and narration, between authority and dispersal, between repression and representation, between powerless and power” (Chambers 1994: 11). Translating is invoked as an activity which pays attention “to those conditions of dialogue in which powers, histories, limits and languages that permit the process of ‘othering’ to occur are inscribed. This draws us into an endless journey between cultures, languages, and complex configuration of meaning and power” (Chambers 1994: 12). Translation becomes a “reactive agent” which forces us to ask ourselves what is translated, who translates, why, for whom, in what circumstances and following what strategies, because “it is not indifferent who translates whom, when and how” (Polezzi 2001: 4, 105). III: Translating (Im)pure Texts Travelling involves an accumulation of experiences, as well as the crossing and interaction of many common assumptions about culture. During the trip, the reconstruction of identities is carried out in contact zones. The notion of “contact” is key in as much as it dismantles the notion of a homogeneous reality based on a linguistic utopia. This language utopia is tantamount to the conception of a central language around which a number of marginal, insignificant worlds cluster. These contact zones are “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (Pratt 1992: 4). Contact linguistics is no longer based on a harmonic community ideal where the principle of cooperation prevails and where whatever is different constitutes a breaking of these rules of cooperation, but is rather principled on the notion that language becomes a diverse and unequal scenario, a scenario of differentiation, and plurality without a centre. Ideally, linguistics would decentre the community, adopt as its axis the operational ability of language by means of—but not within—the limits of social differentiation; it would also focus its attention on contact zones between dominated and dominant groups, between people of different and multiple identities, between speakers of different languages,

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highlighting the way in which these speakers constitute themselves in relation to others and among themselves by means of difference, and the way in which these differences are manifested by means of language. At the same time, however, linguistics should avoid both the utopian impulse to joyfully depict all humanity in tolerant and harmonious contact through all limits or differences, and the distopian impulse to cry over a world homogenized by the media of the West or governed only by disagreement (Pratt 1989: 69). Translators are thus faced with a challenge: how to respect difference without being cliché, or, as Theo Hermans says (2002: 18), “How can the ‘otherness’ of the other be described or represented to those who have not themselves experienced it?” This “Otherness” has diversified and expanded in the last fifty years. There are a large number of examples, such as black Africa, North Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean, that are part of a new literary geography. These new literatures are written in Spanish, French, English, and/or Dutch. The issue is how to translate these texts. The answer is not an easy one (Sengupta 1995: 159-160), but what is clear is that these “new” literatures demand a new form of translation (Sáenz 1999: 178; Ramakrishna 1997: 21). A fairly recent path-breaking essay in this regard (Chan 2002) offers several solutions for our post-Babel era in which many writers are at least bilingual and, as a result, “translators have to accept and adapt to the new linguistic environment.” Inevitably, Chan concludes, “translation theory cannot but be radically transformed” (2002: 50). There is, therefore, no single solution, but several possibilities which, in my opinion, are especially interesting. Let me start with Gayatri Spivak’s translations, particularly her translation into English of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, published in book form under the title Imaginary Maps. Spivak wrote a “Translator’s Preface” and a “Translator’s Note” which are very revealing. In the preface, Spivak says that she found the translation difficult because the book was going to be published simultaneously in countries as different as India and the United States, and therefore she was faced with two directions, two encounters with different audiences, and this conditioned her task as a translator (Spivak 1995: xxiii). She solved the problem of the binary opposition between the two countries by resorting to Derrida’s différance—the equivocal, displaced step from one thing to another, from one term of the opposition to the other—in her translation. When

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she translates, Spivak does not understand the two cultures as opposed to each other but considers that each should be the différance of the other, the different and deferred other in the economy of the same. Putting this idea into practice, she explains in her “Translator’s Note” how she went about the translation: she wrote all the English words in the original text in italics, which makes the English text difficult to read. However, this difficulty, Spivak points out, is reminiscent of the intimacy of the colonial encounter. Given that Mahasweta Devi’s stories are postcolonial, they should adopt the strategies of a history shaped by colonization and a stance against the legacy of colonialism. Spivak’s translations are based, therefore, on the idea of complicity, which always reminds us of the basic principles of deconstruction: “Persistently to critique a structure that one cannot not (wish to) inhabit is the deconstructive stance” (Spivak 1993a: 284). The deconstruction of the translated text works from the inside (Spivak 1987). That is why Derrida argues at the beginning of Grammatology that it is not a question of destroying the structures from the outside, but of inhabiting these structures, of operating necessarily from within. From this perspective, when translating, Spivak focuses on the need to reformulate the concept of ethics, starting from the problem of being between two cultures and not wanting to give up either, which is where she finds herself. And she aims to do this without false paternalism or benevolence, using différance as a bridge between the Same and the Other. In this way, the object of the ethical action would not be an object of benevolence, because there is no single victory, but several victories which are also warnings (Spivak 1995: xxv). Translation should provoke critical reflection on our history and prejudices. Translation, therefore, is an ideal territory for bringing to light a borderland of conflicts, feelings of superiority and the subsequent oppression that some languages exercise over others (Snell-Hornby 1999); because words have masters, as we are reminded in Alice in Wonderland, things become real when they can be thought and when the subjects become the masters of the discourse and the words that aim to define them; or as Pierre Bourdieu (1987) explains, the dominant always exist, whereas the dominated only exist if they mobilize or acquire instruments of representation, the latter term referring to both political and symbolic representation. “Impure” translation, therefore proposes a rhizomatic vision of language and translation which continually connects semiotic links and proposes analysis by decentring it (Deleuze and

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Guattari 1977: 18-19). This, for example, is the approach taken in the case of Cherrié Moraga y Gloria Anzaldúa’s unorthodox anthology entitled This Bridge Called my Back, which includes texts by heterosexual women and lesbians, Chicanas, Afro-Americans and AsianAmericans, among other women, whose main characteristic is that they belong to “minority” groups and live in the in-between. It is perhaps no accident that the anthology was translated by Ana Castillo and Norma Alarcón, themselves “impure” inhabitants of the in-between. As Pilar Godayol says, translating authors like these involves translating identities and commitments, struggling against simplification and neutralization. It means avoiding hierarchies and being extremely careful with one’s own evaluations of culture, because you cannot allow yourself to be guided either by arrogance, which serves to magnify the voice of the translator, or by compassion, which serves to draw attention to that of the writer. Both superiority and indulgence on the part of the translator are synonymous with a breakdown in communication (Godayol 2000: 60). Translation thus appears as the rewriting of rewritings; it becomes an act of travelling, of resistance, and a “semiotics of defiance” (Mezei 1998: 232) which aims to bring to light the Outside (Foucault), the carnivalesque (Bakhtin), the heteroglossia (Bakhtin, Kristeva), and the “remainder” (Lecercle). Translation turns into a means of fighting against exclusion without reproducing new exclusions, as it invites us to consider ourselves to be between two cultures, between two languages which slide, to use Hélène Cixous’s words, “from one ear to the other, from one continent to another” (Cixous 2000: 141). The translation of (im)pure texts is thus a transcultural journey, the main object of which is not immediacy but a will to work from difference to achieve an increasingly complex verbal transculturation (Dingwaney and Maier 1995: 304). When we approach a text, identification takes place, but there should also be, at the same time, a distancing with respect to the text. If only one of the two takes place, then there are many risks: by means of identification, according to Dingwaney and Maier, the “alien” Other is recovered in terms of the quotidian, of what is familiar to us, and this leads to our allowing ourselves to be guided by the stereotypes that one culture uses to understand and domesticate the Other. Yet, as Bhabha clarifies, “the point of intervention should shift from the identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical

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discourse” (1990: 71). On the other hand, if we only assume difference, understanding that we can never access the Other, we free the reader from the effort of reading intercultural texts. In order to solve this problem, these writers use translation as an interpreting activity. The translator becomes the subject who intervenes and mediates between one language and another. However, great care must be taken that this process does not lead to pure relativism, to readers interpreting the text according to their purely personal experience. Translating hyphenated literature or any other text which is between two cultures clearly highlights how cautious we must be when dealing with hybridity,2 a hybridity which is particularly obvious in the linguistic dimension because, in fact, there is a special urgency in translations of this type to analyse the relationship between istoria and episteme (Niranjana 1992): the need to approach political aspects of representation bearing in mind the linguistic aspects; thus, the use of language is also the locus where political and cultural asymmetries can be generated (Venuti 1998: 136). Yet the key question remains: “What does the narrative construction of minority discourses entail for the everyday existence of the Western metropolis?” (Bhabha 1994: 224). Cultural hybridization creates new spaces, new identities and new cultural practices. The time has come, according to Bhabha, for translators to intervene and inscribe heterogeneity, to warn against the myths of purity, and finally make of translation a disseminating power (Niranjana 1992: 186) which compels readers to face up to difference and question the supremacy of the dominating language (Tymoczko 1999); for, as Tymoczko claims, “translation intersects in demonstrable ways with efforts to change power structures” (2000: 25). In the process of translating/travelling, the concept of culture is transformed into something open, and above all heterogenous, where a plurality of languages coexists in an intersection. As Iuri Lotman explains in Cultura y explosión, the centre and periphery change places, but they also give way to totally new and unpredictable forms. What Lotman calls “ternary systems” are created, where the systems in collision are not completely annulled, but a complex and dynamic discussion between the values that have come into contact takes place. Translation should be, therefore, a kind of tertiary “host structure” (Duch 1997), a place for “living with,” and a site for communion and community. The bilingual writers I have referred to in this paper occupy a cultural space, a borderland which lies, at the very least, between two worlds. This interstitial living highlights

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the issue of diversity (Godayol 2000), as it questions the monolithic concept of equivalence that hegemonic cultural expressions have presented throughout the history of translation. Spivak, for example, considers herself to be bilingual, and in an interesting interview with Chicano writer Alfred Arteaga comments on the advantages and disadvantages of this situation, which she explains from the point of view of deconstruction: India is a multilingual country. I have talked a lot about the concept of enabling violation. The child of rape. Rape is something about which nothing good can be said. It’s an act of violence. On the other hand, if there is a child, that child cannot be ostracized because it’s the child of rape. To an extent, the postcolonial is that. We see there a certain kind of innate historical enablement which one mustn’t celebrate, but toward which one has a deconstructive position, as it were. In order for an all-India voice, we have had to dehegemonize English as one of the Indian languages. Yet it must be said that, as a literary medium, it is in the hands of people who are enough at home in standard English as to be able to use Indian English only as the medium of protest, as mock ery or teratology; and sometimes as no more than local color, necessarily from above. So, yes, there is an importance of writing in English, high-quality writing. (1994: 276)

In cases such as the one Spivak presents, choice is not an option, and that is the main reason why we should favour a translation along the lines of Spivak, Bhabha or Niranjana. Identity is becoming more and more elusive, as words and worlds intersect within the individual. “I’m a translator. I’m an amphibian. I can travel in both worlds,” claims Sandra Cisneros, who also uses language in a very particular way, applying the syntax of Mexican Spanish to English words, translating Mexican set phrases and sayings into English, and incorporating them into texts written in English. In this mingling of words and cultures, the borders of identity collapse, as Cisneros explains: “What I’m saying in my writing is that we can be Latino and still be American” (Godayol 2000: 67). That is why the translator has so much responsibility here: this type of (im)pure literature shows another way of seeing the determined representations of the self that Power aims to give shape to. So, it is our duty as translators to ensure that our daily task is a dialogue between equals far from any kind of disguised benevolence: The translation may domesticate its foreignness and invite us to feel safe in the conviction that others share our view of the world, or face us with irreconcilable difference and force us to reconsider our assumptions—though

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even then, there is an easy escape route: we can refuse to identify with the point of view of the text, blame its foreign author for whatever hurts us, and maintain our safety distance. Individual texts will reveal individual stories, different itineraries, alternative configurations of distance and displacement; but it is only from the close dialogue between original and translation that many significant details of those stories will emerge. (Polezzi 2001: 212-213)

Endnotes 1

2

Graciela Limón, http://cvc.cervantes.es/obref/congresos/valladolid/ponencias. My translation. Examples of this hybridity are increasing (Sales 2001): there are now Indians who write in English (Vikram Chandra, Salman Rushdie), Maghrebi who write in French (Tahar Ben Jelloun, Assia Djebar), Turks who write in German (Emine Sevgi Ozdamar), Iranians who write in Dutch (such as Kader Abdolah) or Africans who write in Spanish (Donato Ndongo, Mohamed El Gheryb).

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Trespassers of Body Boundaries: The Cyborg and the Construction of a Postgendered Posthuman Identity Ángel Mateos-Aparicio In 1985, when Donna Haraway published her acclaimed “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” the most recurrent image of the cyborg in Western retinas was still the muscular, hyper-masculine, Caucasian body of Arnold Schwarzenegger as it appears in the film The Terminator (1984). If Cameron’s first Terminator seemed to represent traditional patriarchy in association with the solidity of conventional metaphysical and oppositional thinking, Haraway emphasized the subversive qualities of cyborgs, generated by their hybrid nature and their ambiguous position in relation to binary distinctions. Seen from this perspective, cyborgs display the multiple identities that according to postcolonial criticism characterizes border trespassers and borderland inhabitants, whose resistance to fit any oppositional or reductive definition destabilizes monolithic thought structures. The main aim of this paper is thus to analyze the effects of cyborg hybrid and multiple identity in relation to traditional oppositional ideology, and to corroborate how the subversive, feminist and postmodern reading of the cyborg body led by Haraway has constantly gained ground on the cultural battlefield People accept this possibility, that there can be a blend between a human component and a machine component, and I think it’s just an aspect of our lives right now, that we’re so surrounded by machines all the time. The fact that we can accept that to me is the most amazing thing of all. James Cameron, The Making of Terminator 2: Judgment Day ‘It’s odd,’ she said, ‘being here in this … this … instead of a body. But not as odd or as alien as you might think. I’ve thought about it a lot—I’ve had plenty of time to think—and I’ve begun to realize what a tremendous force the human ego really is. I’m not sure I want to suggest it has a mystical power it can impress on mechanical things, but it does seem to have a power of some sort. It does distill its own force into inanimate objects, and they take on a personality of their own.’ C.L. Moore, “No Woman Born” There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

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I: Mestiza Meets Cyborg: Hybrid Consciousness Finds a Trans-Gendered Posthuman Body The traditional concept of national borders is based on the ideological confidence in the true value of representation, among other considerations. Maps inevitably make use of representation techniques in order to delimit territories. The separation between countries thus depended on the identification of the signifier (lines on a map) with the signified (actual national limits). The postmodern era, however, with its conflicting and simultaneous tendencies toward globalization and local emphasis, has continuously created new meanings for these map lines. Sometimes these lines represent a virtually non-existent and ghost-like separation (like state borders within the U.S.A. and the E.U. countries) while in other cases they stand for political and economic abysses, separated by apparently inextricable concrete walls and steel and barbed-wired fences (wherever the so-called First World feels threatened by the so-called Third). This increasing inconsistency between signifier and signified agrees with the revision of the notion of representation as carried out by poststructuralist philosophical thought. It also underlies the postmodernist world-view that has revealed the constructed nature of the concept of border, as well as the fact that boundaries can function as real limits only when supported by stable ideological barriers. This postmodern transition from a geographical and political description of borders to a cultural and ideological conception was essential in the establishment of the new vision of border space suggested by Gloria Anzaldúa in her acclaimed Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Although Anzaldua’s analysis focuses on the specific situation of Chicanas in the Southwestern region of the U.S., her reflections can also be applied to all those who do not fit western rationalistic and reductive dualisms. Anzaldúa proposes the transformation of the notion of borderline into the idea of borderlands/la frontera, which overcomes the image of the border as a linear (thus namely minimal or non-existent, but absolute) space and as an essential and impenetrable barrier. The borderlands are a peculiar space, a third country free from the dualisms of monologic cultures and a place for hybridity, contradiction and ambiguity. The

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inhabitants of this indeterminate ideological territory suffer from but also enjoy shifting and multiple identities, and, as the initial quotation shows, are attracted to an undefined middle position in between whichever opposing worlds dualistic thinking had created. They share what Anzaldúa calls a “mestiza consciousness,” the readiness to trespass all kinds of national, cultural, racial and gender dualistic barriers. Anzaldúa steps forward as an example of this mixed nature. She situates herself at the confluence of her Native/Hispanic racial decent, her Anglo/Spanish bilingual-bicultural upbringing, and the gender transgression of her lesbianism. Free from western constraints, the “mestiza consciousness” is portrayed as an enhanced awareness, an upgraded understanding of reality that transcends traditional boundaries of human experience. It is a kind of trance-like consciousness, where, Anzaldúa claims, “Every increment of consciousness, every step forward is a travesía, a crossing. I am again an alien in new territory. And again and again” (1999: 70). However, in contrast with the rationalistic construction of identity, which uses limits to justify and reinforce the unified subject, this hybrid consciousness is not deterred by alienation and otherness, as Anzaldúa explains metaphorically through references to visions coming from the subconscious and expressed in the mythological terms of her Indian heritage: “But I know what I want and I stamp ahead, arrogance edging my face. I tremble before the animal, the alien, the sub- or suprahuman, the me that has something in common with the wind and the trees and the rocks, that possesses a demon determination and ruthlessness beyond the human” (1999: 72). This hybrid identity does not refer exclusively to an internal state, but also to a physical condition represented by racial mixture and border trespassing. According to Anzaldúa, this combination of psychological and physical hybridity will characterize the future “raza mestiza.” Anzaldúa predicts that fusion at all levels will mark human evolution: “[T]his mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool” (1999: 99). She also envisages that

En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two of more cultures. By creating a new mythos–that is, a

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In her mythology of the “beyond the human” future development of humankind, the hybrid bodies Anzaldúa describes will be marked externally by the racial fusion, and will be defined internally by a mixed and complex identity. However, this postcolonial speculation on the features of the forthcoming (or perhaps already accomplished) human evolution seems to obviate one fundamental aspect of life in the twenty-first century: the role played by technology (especially mass media, transportation and communication) in the permeability of cultural, ideological and political borders as well as in the construction of identity (virtual self, electronic memory, artificial consciousness). Due to a search for national and cultural roots previous to western colonization, postcolonial criticism in general intends to overcome dualistic reduction by using pre-western (that is, pre-rationalistic) world-views. Yet the development of scientific and technical knowledge, originally impelled by positivistic thought itself, has provided new ways to define the human that do not fit traditional opposing concepts, thus overthrowing dualistic reduction. Bruce Mazlish, in his influential work The Fourth Discontinuity (1993), explains how science has progressively erased the binary oppositions metaphysical logic had constructed between humans and the natural world (both inanimate and animate nature; note how Anzaldúa’s enhanced awareness also refers to a privileged contact with natural elements, although expressed in pre-western mythological terms), as well as between the human rational mind and the unconscious. These three discontinuities were used to support the notion of a unified, Cartesian subject. Mazlish relates how these beliefs have lost validity due to the works of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, and identifies a fourth discontinuity which is now being dismantled: the separation between humans and machines. Surgical and cosmetic operations, medical implants, mechanical enhancement and correction devices, and genetic modification (still a threatening and controversial issue) are examples of how complete the association between science and technology has breached the barrier established between the human and the mechanical through technological control and modification of the human body.

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In this borderland space between the human and the mechanical a hybrid creature has thrived in both scientific and cultural contexts: the cyborg. Cultural and literary criticisms have not overlooked the peculiar nature of this product of technological intervention in the human body, and the cyborg has become an icon of the postmodern cultural and ideological landscape, which has provided a term for the “beyond the human” evolution in consciousness and body: posthumanity. Like the hybrid progeny Anazaldúa advocates, cyborg imagery comprises new conceptualizations and representations of the posthuman that destabilize the construction of notions such as consciousness, memory, identity and gender. Through technological manipulation, bodies may be built according to the requirements of the new hybrid identity. The hybrid bodies and minds advocated by Anzaldúa’s mestiza are closer than it seemed, because scientific knowledge allows to design, modify, construct and enjoy cyborg bodies and extended self-awareness. The posthuman representation of humankind promotes the rejection of all binaries and coincides with the feminist and postcolonial quest for the erasure of physical and mental identity limitations. Cyborgs stand as the blending of the human and the mechanical, but also of gender and racial hybrids. II: “I, Robot” Upgraded to “Us, Cyborgs”: A New Generation Substitutes Obsolete Designs The cyborg is not the only inhabitant of the third space between the human and the mechanical. Postmodern science fiction (SF), and its most acclaimed expression, cyberpunk, abounds in similar undetermined creatures. Humanoid robots, androids, sentient programs, artificial intelligence and electronic consciousness populate the cyberpunk virtual landscape, which, in its turn, rarely presents a single knowable view of reality: alternative (micro)worlds and planets, “zones,”1 decentered urban sprawls and simulated environments cannot provide an external, opposing and stable notion of reality to support the concept of a unified subject. All these digital consciousnesses and simulated realities stand for an enhancement of human perception to a consciousness no longer constructed by binary oppositions. This upgraded experience of reality is similar to an inclusive mestiza awareness. The postmodern implications of this fictional presentation of identity and reality have been identified by

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critics such as Brian McHale, who considers all these typically cyberpunk characters and settings as “literalizations” or “actualizations” of numerous poststructuralist and postmodern concepts (1992: 150). Virtual realities function as metaphors for the idea of simulation and the view of reality as a construct, and allow the exploration of the boundaries and margins of the real. Similarly, robots, androids, computer minds and cyborgs are used to test the limits of the definition of the human in fictional space. All these characters actualize the transgression of the once essential difference between human beings and machines which Mazlish calls the fourth discontinuity. Nonetheless, whereas robots, androids and conscious programs tend to abandon or replace the human body, the cyborg is the only inhabitant of the postmodern technological landscape that attempts to enhance it. Robots and androids change flesh for steel, plastic for silicone; sentient programs and artificial intelligence locate consciousness in circuitry (Bukatman 1993: 242-61); conversely, cyborgian nature is all about penetrating and modifying the flesh. In this sense, the cyborg is unique: not only does it represent the breach in the human-mechanical border, but also the demolition of other barriers associated with the body, namely gender and race, which have traditionally contributed to the construction of identity as external markers. This of course qualifies the cyborg for feminist and postcolonial criticisms. However, critical literature on the cyborg has concerned itself mainly with the implications on the question of gender, although a recent work by Thomas Foster (2005) has also included race as one of the issues raised by the ambiguous presence of cybernetic organisms. Joseba Gabilondo, however, categorically denies the possibility of postcolonial criticism of the cyborg: “There is no such thing as ‘postcolonial cyborg’” (1995: 424), he proclaims. This paper focuses on gender issues, which have been most productive in cyborg fiction criticism, but also draws attention to the potential for racial transgression of a cyborg identity that shares the hybrid disposition of Anzaldúa’s “mestiza consciousness.” One only needs to imagine, for instance, the implications of a fictional cyborg whose improved skin tissue may change hue and tint at will. Cyborg bodies stand at the confluence of the human and the mechanical, at the boundary that separates male and female genders, but also in an uncertain location between scientific and technological reality on the one hand, and fictional and cultural existence on the

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other. The cyborg personifies the flesh and cable literalization of the postmodern critique of oppositional thought, of the postcolonial search for a hybrid identity and of the feminist attack against the patriarchal construction of an “essential” gender difference. As Claudia Springer puts it, the cyborg is an “entity that makes sexuality, gender and humankind itself anachronistic” (1996: 79). Cyborgs provide a new site to address the notion of mestizaje, adding to the gender and racial issues the question of the limits between the human and the posthuman. III: “Wetwarebacks”: Elusive Trespassers of Critical and Cultural Barriers Cyborgs have been consolidated as a symbol of postmodern culture due not only to their popularity as fictional characters, but also to the fact that they appear to be a technological possibility. To give an example, in the broadest definition, somebody using a pacer could be considered a cyborg (cf. Haraway 2001: 66). However, as often happens with science fiction, cyborgs were first fictional characters that later became a scientific reality. Critics coincide that three short stories written in the 1940s introduced the idea: James Blish’s “Solar Plexus,” C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” and Henry Kuttner’s “Camouflage.” Even though these stories may be the origin of the fictional notion, the term and the concept became a reality in the scientific essay “Cyborgs and Space,” published in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline. The term was coined from “cybernetic organism,” thus providing the cyborg with a mixed and constructed nature from the beginning. Later on, cyborgs have abundantly populated films (Robocop 1 and 2, the Terminator films, Ghost in the Shell, Eve of Destruction), TV series (the Borg in Star Trek), comics (Deathlock, cf. T. Foster 2005) books (Sterling’s Schismatrix, Gibson’s Neuromancer, Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless), even pop music songs (Billy Idol’s song and video “Shock to the System,” cf. Foster 2005). Thanks to this inherently ambiguous and transgressing nature, cyborgs penetrate beyond fictional and critical limits into the scientific and cultural arena, and vice versa. Postmodern cultural and literary criticisms have emphasized this middle position between fiction and reality. For example, Donna Haraway already suggested this in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985):

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“A cyborg is … a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (cf. Grenville 2001: 65). Anne Balsamo agrees with her in this sentencing remark: “Cyborgs are a matter of fiction and a matter of lived experience” (1996: 10). Furthermore, in his analysis of cyberpunk and cyberculture, Dani Cavallaro concedes that this indeterminate nature is an essential attribute of cyborgs: “[T]he cyborg is both a creature of myth and a creature of social reality” (2000: 46). Besides, this particular ubiquity satisfies the postmodern search for the erasure of the separation between genres, high and low culture, text and image, as well as the written page and other mass media, because the cyborg appears in scientific and technological essays, fiction books, comics, films, and TV series, as we have seen. The multiplicity, elusiveness and resistance to stick to any limiting classification leaves no room for a single or an oppositional definition of the cyborg—and, consequently, of the human. Haraway stressed the fact that cyborgs resist reducing definitions: “There is no one kind of cyborg” (1995: 2). Cyborgs thus qualify as the perfect inhabitants of the indeterminate, ideological space of la frontera, here understood (as Gloria Anzaldúa does) as much more than a physical border. This radical mestiza quality is the reason why the cyborg stands out, among other postmodernist SF characters, as a fertile territory for conflicting meanings and unresolved questions, attracting profuse critical attention. The figure of the cyborg has earned an iconic, mythical presence in postmodern culture, which has grown out of its/her/his fictional and scientific birth into a virtually real existence. In this context, one particular cyborg story has enjoyed a unique success and longevity: the Terminator film series. The peculiar longstanding, iconic, mythical and pop-culture value of the Terminator movies seems to accommodate perfectly to the general postmodernist framework presented here for many reasons. Firstly, the mythical power of the character has even affected the actor’s public image and has turned Arnold Schwarzenegger into a walking, real life cyborg. Schwarzenegger’s association with the Terminator figure has gone beyond cinema screens, ostensibly actualizing the blurring of the separation between reality and fiction. In fact, following the argument that all technological interventions in the human body create cyborgs, Schwarzenegger would actually be a cyborg constructed by bodybuilding machines and muscle growing chemicals. Secondly, the

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status of the films as image-based, popular SF productions corresponds to the postmodernist quest for cultural (and consequently, ideological) meaning beyond the barriers of genre, elitist criticism and means of representation. Thirdly, the fact that cinema has been more effective than literature in the creation of this mythical figure (cf. Springer 1996: 96) seems to agree with Jameson’s statement that postmodernism is more a visual than a textual cultural phenomenon, as well as with his argument, supported by McHale (1992: 149), that SF in general and cyberpunk in particular concentrate the expression of postmodernist thematic and aesthetic principles. Fourthly, the Terminator films are not only the story of cyborgs confronting humans, but also of the struggle among different versions of the cyborg—the various Terminators. The Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger has withstood important variations in “programming,” and has dealt with very different enemies, each of which displaying an array of ideological connotations, as we will see. These fictional battles literalize extant conflicts in the contemporary cultural and critical landscape, and are extremely productive for the unresolved and contradictory interpretations postmodernism favors. In this sense, the Terminator possesses a longer and more eventful history than counterparts such as Robocop, the Borg and Data in the Star Trek television series and films, or the mecs in Sterling’s Schismatrix (1986). Finally, this long life has given the Terminator films the opportunity to develop into a more decidedly postmodern form, offering conflicting answers to cultural questions and adding features which are more salient in the third movie, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), directed by Jonathan Mostow. With a touch of irony, self-parody, and self-criticism, the movie engages in a play with the artificiality of fictional material that is very akin to postmodern aesthetic tastes. Jonathan Mostow’s film acknowledges the influence of critical reactions and commentaries raised by the two previous Terminator movies, and incorporates ironic and playful references which add up to a general impression of parody, critical recognition and connivance with the audience. Let me provide a preliminary, clarifying example. Film critic J.P. Telotte echoes other critics’ association of Schwarzenegger’s figuration of the Terminator as the militant resistance of masculine, patriarchal values and suggests that, in Terminator 2, the Terminator deprives a tough biker of his clothes and bike, imposing himself in a situation represented as “only

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for men.” In order to emphasize this suggestion, Telotte notes, the song “Bad to the Bone” is playing in the background as the Terminator leaves the bar (Telotte 1995: 177). In Terminator 3, however, the already familiar scene is repeated, but with a difference: the bar is not full of “tough guys,” but of frenzied women cheering a boy-stripper. As the Terminator exits the bar (wearing the stripper’s clothes), the soundtrack uses the song “Macho Man,” which the audience most probably associates with another popular film, In and Out (Frank Oz, 1997), a comedy that treats homosexuality in a lighthearted manner. Other details in the scene are designed to question the connection established by feminist criticism between Schwarzenegger’s image and radical hypermasculine heterosexuality. For all its hostility towards the cyborg impersonated by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” provided an influential insight into the interpretation of the Terminator films. Haraway’s approach initiated the critical line that would argue that the coming of the cyborg in the Terminator movies had an immediate shattering effect over the nuclear, two-parent, heterosexual family (Sarah Connor will form a single-parent family with her son), the traditional child-bearing role of women (defied by Sarah’s development into a warrior-mother), the construction of gender (Sarah’s own transgression, in addition to cyborgs’ sex-changes), reproduction and its anxieties (technological control over the female body) and finally, the discontinuity between humans and machines. This feminist interpretation has become dominant; the postmodern parodic pose of Terminator 3 would again reveal the elusive nature of cyborg identity and its resistance to stick to any single, prevailing reading. IV: Haraway vs. Schwarzenegger: The Trans-Gendered Body Confronts the Macho-Cyborg One of the pioneers of this interpretation of the cyborgian nature as inherently ambiguous and transgressing was Donna Haraway, who approached the cyborg mainly from a feminist point of view, focusing on the border condition of the cyborgian nature as a destabilizing tool against patriarchal and rationalistic thought in her influential essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985). Haraway proposed a mythical and cultural interpretation of the cyborg as a trans-gendered and hybrid

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creature, and emphasized its/her/his power to trespass the conceptual boundary separating humans and machines along with the artificial barriers that allow gender difference construction and preservation. She called the cyborg a “creature in a post-gendered world” (1995: 67). In Haraway’s hands, the cyborg became a powerful myth to be used against patriarchal values. Cyborgian anthropology would refute patriarchal arguments such as divine creation of a “natural order” and original sin; cyborg biology could eradicate the physical difference between male and female roles in reproduction, and it could bring masculine anxieties over reproduction control to an end. In short, the cyborg jeopardized historical male control of science and technology and seemed to finally literalize the feminist search for a non—or trans-gendered—human being. In this sense, Haraway’s emphasis on the hybrid nature of the cyborg coincides with postcolonial use of hybridity and bilingualism against the dualistic and monologic thought that characterizes colonizing cultures. In fact, Chicana critic Chela Sandoval sees the cyborg’s “mestiza consciousness” as a powerful tool to be used against the unified white male subject (1995: 409). In opposition to this subversive and feminist interpretation of the cyborg, Haraway considers one of the most popular icons of the cyborg body, Arnold Shwarzenegger’s impersonation of the Terminator, as a patriarchal and reactionary figuration. Her reading of the ideological implications of Schwarzenegger’s exaggeratedly masculine body has negative connotations, both from a feminist and from a postmodern point of view. The Terminator, she claims, “is the sign of the beast of postmodern culture, the sign of the Sacred Image of the Same” (1995: xv). Thus postmodern SF landscapes become a cultural and ideological battlefield for the encounter between two visions of the cyborg: Schwarzenegger’s violent, armored, muscular, and hypermasculine Terminator, and Haraway’s figuration of a hybrid, post-gendered and more decidedly posthuman cyborg. Haraway initiated the main critical line that would conclusively read the appropriation of cyborg representation by Schwarzenegger’s exaggerated masculine body as a sign of patriarchal resistance to feminist “threat,” that is to say, as the actualization of the unaltered and rock solid belief in a traditional metaphysical and rationalistic view of reality where the alliance between the masculine and the technological aggressively haunts women or men who do not live up to patriarchal expectations.

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The latest part of the Terminator film series and a possible continuation, however, do not favor such a final conclusion as Haraway’s critical line suggests. Schwarzenegger’s impersonation of the Terminator may become consolidated in Western retinas as the image of the cyborg, but it has also introduced new figurations in Schwarzenegger’s cyborg adversaries, as we will see. Besides, the popularity of the Terminator movies accounts for the appeal and embedding of the cyborg in postmodern culture, as James Cameron’s initial quotation implies. The continuing battles between Terminators and humans construct a story (in the postmodern sense) where the confrontation between the opposing ideological and cultural contents is enacted by the actual fight between the different representations of the cyborg. Nevertheless, the conflict is still unresolved, and Schwarzenegger’s patriarchal and masculinist stand does not seem to be winning. In this cultural battlefield, the metaphysical, rationalismbased, and apparently stable concepts are losing their preponderance, as the progressively weaker, more ironic and close to futile resistance of Schwarzenegger’s solid, unchanged, aging body competes against more flexible, multiple and adaptable representations of the cyborg. Critical perceptions have progressively penetrated cyborg representation in the films and have facilitated that, even in popular (and consequently, suspiciously conservative) movies like the Terminator series, the presence of cyborgs and their relationships among themselves and with humans is interpreted as a destabilizing factor for traditional ideology, due to cyborgian undefined and border nature. V: The Terminator (1984): The Threat of the Mechanical Masculine Arnold Schwarzenegger first embodied the cybernetic organism that was to become unavoidably associated with his image in 1984, when James Cameron’s first Terminator movie, The Terminator, appeared. Perhaps consistently with the subversive and secretive nature of cyborgs, the film was not released as a major Hollywood production. It was rather considered as an obscure SF movie, which may explain the dark, pessimistic (noir) atmosphere surrounding the story. However, it silently earned its place, and by the following year it was already among the 1984 and 1985 most popular pictures.2 The plot

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was accordingly gloomy and frightening. A machine from a future war between humans and machines had come back in time to kill Sarah Connor, would-be mother of John Connor, leader of the human resistance against the mechanical attack. But this cybernetic assassin was singular: it could not be detected because it was in fact part human and part machine, a cyborg. Although robots and androids were not unprecedented characters in cinema screens (the clumsy, too obviously mechanical robots of the 1950s SF movies, lovable R2D2 and C3PO in the Star Wars series, menacing and pitiable replicants and Blade Runner [Ridley Scott, 1982], for instance), this had not been the case with cyborgs, which were a relatively new concept in popular SF. In the movie, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), the soldier sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), has to hastily explain to skeptical Sarah what they are facing: “Not a robot. Cyborg. Cybernetic Organism” (chapter 13).3 Much of the latent terror of the story comes precisely from the fact that this cyborg can easily pass as human and would consequently go undetected as a different (perhaps an-Other) being. Robots had tended to impersonate mechanical perfection and to be apparently harmless to humans (thanks possibly to the popularization of Isaac Asimov’s robots subjected to the Three Laws of Robotics); however, cyborgian presence had a threatening quality from the start. Robots do not hide their mechanical nature and are classified as artificial beings at first sight, but cyborgs prefer to mislead humans, to break the established boundaries between human and mechanical nature and, consequently, to disrupt metaphysical oppositional thinking. The human qualities of the cyborg are confusing and ambiguous. Sarah rejects Reese’s explanation because she had detected a human quality in the Terminator: “But … he was bleeding,” she says (chapter 13). The reactions of the other characters coincide with Sarah’s disbelief that a blend between a human being and a machine could possibly exist. For instance, when the Terminator enters the disco nobody seems to pay attention to him, for it/he still looks human (chapter 11). But, once it/he displays its/his double nature, humans are terrified, like the truck driver’s companion in chapter 27. In this sense, the unsettling, menacing consequences of trespassing the boundary between humans and machines had been prefigured by replicants in Blade Runner and by robots such as Ash in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). Ash’s human appearance allows it to go unnoticed until late in the film. Its

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undisclosed, uncanny alliance with the monstrous extraterrestrial creature places him on the side of a monster which has been interpreted as a subversive, angry feminist contestation to the erasure of the feminine in SF (Creed 1990: 128-140). James Cameron was aware that presenting a cyborg instead of a robot would add an innovative, dangerous quality to his character, due not only to the fact that it/she/he could easily pass as human, but also to the troubling consequences of this for humans inside and outside the fiction. In fact, Cameron wanted to emphasize the cyborg’s combination of secrecy and danger by having his creation played by an actor whose physical appearance went unnoticed and would thus convey no immediate sense of menace. Lance Henriksen’s thin and seemingly weak constitution was originally planned to embody the cyborg, until Cameron had to move this actor to a secondary role in the movie (detective Traxler) when Schwarzenegger insisted on taking over the Terminator role.4 This somehow made the director’s original intention miss a point, for Schwarzenegger’s body and presence could hardly avoid attracting attention. Nevertheless, the cyborg did not seem to lose any of its/his threatening and destabilizing faculties. Most characters simply deny the possibility that Schwarzenegger’s body could be a mixture of human and machine, although, judging from the success of the film, the audiences would readily accept it. As the story moves forward, the Terminator progressively loses its/his human attributes (cf. Telotte 1995: 172). It would thus seem that the Terminator can be defeated only after it/he has been deprived of its/his human part and it/he stands only as a machine, consequently suppressing its/his transgression of rationalistic oppositional thought. Its/his survival thus apparently depends on maintaining its/his most valuable asset, secrecy, for, as viewers will learn in the second film, the villain computer company Cyberdyne Systems has kept the existence of the cyborg secret. This final image of the cyborg’s exclusively mechanical half in The Terminator ostensibly veils the subversive and threatening potential inherent to a creature that is part machine and part human, and it must be read as a reassuring move. On the one hand, showing the Terminator’s “naked” true form apparently reaffirms traditional notions of the human. When the audience can no longer mistake the cyborg for a person, the danger seems to subside. On the other hand, the association of a machine and a masculine body also restores the conventional connotations of the mechanical.5

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However, the very last scene, where pregnant Sarah heads into a developing storm that represents the forthcoming nuclear apocalypse, distills far from conservative connotations, since it denounces, in my opinion, the long standing association between male aggressive drives and technology as destructive forces conspiring against feminine lifecreating potential. At this level, the interpretation of the film would have not been very different from other productions which warn about the catastrophic effects of a reckless faith in technological development. Perhaps this was as far as Cameron’s intentions would go. But, as a main character in the story (if not the leading character), the nature of the cyborg was to multiply the interpretations of this basic terror plot. In 1985, one year after the film was released, Donna Haraway published her essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” which focused on the destabilizing meaning of cyborgian nature and launched a mythical and cultural interpretation of the cyborg as a hybrid creature, emphasizing its/her/his power to trespass the conceptual boundary separating humans and machines (already suggested timidly in The Terminator), along with the artificial barriers that allow gender difference construction and preservation, as we have seen. With the advent of Haraway’s cyborg, the critical insight into The Terminator deepened, and the cyborg acquired a new status as a complex mythical and cultural icon where conflicting meanings converged, thus surpassing its/her/his primitive role as an object of scientific speculation. Manfred Clynes, co-author of the scientific paper that launched the idea of artificially enhanced humans, implicitly recognizes this development of the cultural role of the cyborg, although he interprets it negatively due to its non-scientific approach: “[T]he cyborg gradually seemed to become more and more distorted. This recent film with this Terminator, with Schwarzenegger playing this thing—dehumanized the concept completely” (1995: 47). In a similar manner, Clynes denies the association of the cyborg with the question of gender transgression, suggesting that the sex of the person enhanced remains unvaried: “[T]he idea of the cyborg in no way implies an it. It’s a he or a she” (1995: 48). With the popularity reached by The Terminator, the cyborg had grown beyond its/her/his scientific origins and had come to signify much more as a cultural phenomenon, its/her/his ambiguous fluid, threatening presence continuously expanding and developing. In fact, by breaking the

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boundary separating humans and machines, the cyborg had already become a postmodern, cyberpunk figure, and by presenting a semiartificial mind and/or extended consciousness, it had actualized the development of posthuman identity. In addition to this, the critical line initiated by Haraway would focus on the feminist possibilities of cyborgian nature (not easily accepted by Clynes), and identify Schwarzenegger’s interpretation with patriarchal resistance. This line would conclusively read the appropriation of cyborg representation by Schwarzenegger’s exaggerated masculine body as a sign of patriarchal resistance to the feminist “threat.” This reading of Schwarzenegger’s impersonation of the cyborg as masculinist and conservative has consolidated in the critical works focusing on the cyborg figure, written by authors such as Anette Kuhn, Anne Balsamo, Claudia Springer, Chris Hables Gray and others, and has affected the overall interpretation of the movie in similar terms. However, The Terminator seems to take on a more ambiguous position in all these issues. This predominant critical approach has overlooked the fact that, for all its/his solidity, hypermasculinity and aggressive nature, the Terminator is finally destroyed by Sarah Connor—a woman and mother (Cavallaro 2000: 47). Furthermore, the already mentioned symbolical complexity of the last scene does not seem to allow a simple interpretation. In this coda to the story, pregnant Sarah appears traveling alone, but surrounded by symbols of nature’s life potential: her unborn son and a representative of animal life (the second discontinuity), a dog. This group can be read as the representation of natural and biological reproduction, which has to face the male technological atomic apocalypse predicted by the story and signified in this scene by the coming thunderstorm. Again the time-travel plot allows the audience to know the results beforehand: Sarah’s stand against the destructive association of male aggression and technology will finally succeed, and Sarah will survive the holocaust and live to prepare her son to destroy the machines. Furthermore, the identification of Schwarzenegger’s version of the cyborg with rationalistic, technological, masculinist resistance immediately loaded its/his fictional rivals with the opposite connotations. This is where the critical approach led by Haraway has been most productive. Characters fighting against the vengeance of the Terminator (representing the counterattack of the alliance of the male and the technological) were Sarah Connor, an initially careless

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young woman, and Kyle Reese, a soldier from the future who had volunteered for this mission due to a romantic idealization of Sarah. Sarah’s evolution in the film is impressive. After being introduced as a passive young woman who merely waits to be taken out by her boyfriend (chapter 7), she develops an active, soldier-like personality, which takes over when Reese’s efforts to stop the Terminator fail. In the end, she has to form a family without masculine help or intervention because the father (Reese) has not lived up to traditional fatherly expectations of strength and family protection. Nevertheless, as an independent woman, she raises her son to be a leader. Golberg describes Reese as “the sensitive type in the film” (1995: 241). His romantic inclinations are emphasized in the movie by the fact that he falls in love with a photograph, that is, with an idealized legend of Sarah’s character. He discloses his motivations in the film: “I came across time for you, Sarah” (chapter 25). His love seems unaffected by reality. Sarah doubts her legendary status and apparently apologizes to him for letting him down: “Some legend. You must be pretty disappointed” (chapter 25). But he answers with a shake of the head and a resolute “No, I’m not.” Even James Cameron was aware of this potential for romanticism. He explains that during the casting, Michael Biehn stood out because there was apparently an inherent weakness and defenselessness in his appearance.6 However, his romantic appeal seems to be in contradiction with his qualities as a good father, for, as Golberg puts it, he “vacates” the father role about just after he impregnates Sarah (1995: 242). Seen in an overall perspective, the film does not depict a successful traditional family; conversely, it is precisely the actualization of its break-up that ostensibly occurs, with male and female roles unclear, undecided and changing. Even presented in its most regressive form, the subversive, unsettling potential of the cyborg was enough to destabilize the roles traditionally attributed to male and female genders and the concepts associated with them. The exaggeratedly masculine body of Schwarzenegger did actually suffer from cyborgian destabilizing influence, because the image of muscular men in leather turned out to possess a strong homosexual appeal which has been recognized both by criticism and by Schwarzenegger himself (Goldberg 1995: 245-9), and which will later be incorporated in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.7

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VI: Terminator 2 (1991): The Reign of the Mechanical Masculine Regained The ambiguous, unsettling and subversive connotations of the first film may account for the popular and critical attention it received, but they will not be repeated in the second part. In the sequel released in 1991, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the story no longer raises questions to leave them unresolved. This film was budgeted and marketed as one Hollywood’s big productions and the script (written by James Cameron and William Wisher) recedes into a more traditional version of oppositional thinking: characters this time tend to be less ambiguous, and are more easily associated with conventional roles. Consequently, the battle they enact in the fiction represents a simplified symbolic and cultural battle, the outcome of which negates the unsolved issues raised in the first picture. In Terminator 2, the final apocalypse caused by technological male aggression is avoided, thus rehabilitating the frightening image of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator as the confluence between male and technological violence that occurs in the first film. However, the second movie continued to develop some of the issues raised in the first part (even if just to immediately shut them down), and to follow or parallel the predominant critical feminist approach. If Schwarzenegger’s cyborg encompassed masculinist connotations, its/his rival in the second film was depicted as an androgynous, mutating, hybrid and fluid cyborg, which would more readily attract critical attention. By the time Terminator 2 could be seen on cinema screens (1991), only Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” had had enough time to consolidate itself as an important critical tool to assess the cultural impact of the cyborg. Other by now classical critical works were either unpublished, or probably coincided with the script writing: Janet Bergstrom, Mary Anne Doanne Barbara Creed and Vivian Sobchak had published their papers in 1989, 1990 and 1991 (cf. Works Cited). Anne Balsamo and Claudia Springer’s influential book-size studies were still to come. It is obviously difficult to prove that there was some kind of contact between these critical works and the script, but this does not lessen the validity of any of them; on the contrary, it confirms that they belong to a similar cultural and ideological framework, whose consistency is enhanced by fictional

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and critical presence, along with audience acceptance. The T-1000 (the new cyborg impersonated by Robert Patrick and opposed to the T-101, which uses Schwarzenegger’s body) and Sarah’s appearance in Terminator 2 did approximately actualize the connotations of Haraway’s hybrid, post-gendered cyborg, and the image of a militant feminist with a worked-out body and a non-patriarchal female role, respectively. In the second film, the Sarah Connor’s character (played again by Linda Hamilton) has continued her evolution from a passive young woman adapted to her patriarchal role into an aggressive soldierly mother. Her body is the result of body-building, just as Schwarzenegger’s, although feminine body-building is interpreted as a subversive activity by patriarchy, according to Anne Balsamo (1996: 41-55). In short, Sarah has adopted the angry feminist reaction to the patriarchal and militaristic male (Springer 1996: 116). This is made evident in the film when she preaches Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the creator of the artificial intelligence that would try to exterminate humankind, over male technological enthusiasm: “Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you’re so creative. You don’t know what it’s like to really create something. To create a life and feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction” (chapter 51). Sarah is dressed in combat fatigues and gear, and she displays an advanced knowledge of martial arts, a behavior for which she has been punished: she has been interned in an asylum on the grounds that she is insane—which brings to mind reminiscences of the stereotypical image of the secluded mad woman. She has consequently failed as a single mother in the eyes of patriarchy, for she has lost John’s legal custody and, as we learn from her son, she has been continuously looking for a male figure who could teach John how to be aggressive and strong. She even harbors hopes of finally forming a happy (though post-human) family, with the T-101 cyborg (Schwarzenegger’s masculine figure) in the father role, when she says: “Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. … Of all the would-be fathers that came and went over the years, this thing, this machine was the only one who measured up” (chapter 46). Besides, in clear opposition to the first film’s open end, Terminator 2 ended more conclusively, although not with Sarah’s determination to raise her son on her own, nor with Sarah still having to face the male and

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technologically induced apocalypse. This time it is the T-101 (Schwarzenegger) the one who redeems it/himself and the patriarchal, technological position it/he represents by eliminating it/himself and the holocaust at the same time. In the same way that Sarah’s development into a feminist icon seems to have logically evolved from the first movie, the new Terminator, the T-1000, ostensibly performs better in James Cameron’s originally intended attributes for the cyborg. Robert Patrick’s physique is better adapted to undercover existence (also, he does not need to carry about heavy weaponry like the T-101), and the way it/he moves among people is in general soft-mannered and outgoing. In chapters 11 and 17 it/he speaks amicably with John Connor’s adoptive parents and with two little girls, respectively. Even with its/his policeman uniform, it is still remarkable how it/he moves unnoticed among a lot of police officers and firemen in chapters 22, 28 and 60. However, as if adhering to Springer’s argument that the advent of computers (machines with internal processes) has brought about a feminization of technology (1996: 8-10), the most impressive quality of this cyborg lies on the inside: the T-1000 is constructed in a “polymimetic alloy,”8 and can change appearance and form at will. The T-1000’s malleable body can imitate human beings as well as objects, and its/his behavior matches this adaptable nature. During the movie, the T-1000 impersonates both male and female characters and virtually disappears (in this sense, he/it displays the invisibility typically associated with Otherness), as in scene 28, famous for its computer special effects. The T-1000’s appearance may vary from John Connor’s adoptive mother to a neat police officer and even less clearly heterosexual types like the mirror-shaded police motorcyclist. This new Terminator displays the undefined, hybrid, fluid and multiple qualities that Donna Haraway proposed for her transgressing myth of the cyborg. The criticism following this approach has unanimously focused on the analysis of all the features that make the T-1000 a successfully transgressing creature. Cynthia Fuchs, for instance, contrasts this androgynous cyborg with Schwarzenegger’s “machocyborg” Terminator, as she emphasizes the T-1000’s indefinable body and describes it as “polygendered” (1995: 290). Springer calls this fluid, multi-faced cyborg the “embodiment of feminine fluidity” (1996: 112). In comparison with Schwarzenegger’s cyborg, the T-1000 “does not fight in conventional masculine ways”

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(Springer 1996: 112). Another significant moment in the misogynistic representation of the T-1000 is pointed out by Springer when commenting on the destruction of both cyborgs: while the T-101 dies “like a man,” holding his thumb up, the T-1000 dies “like a woman, squirming and shimming” (1996: 112). Scott Bukatman has also identified the T-1000’s feminine connotations and has taken them further into an association with the monstrous feminine, thus expanding the interpretative framework Barbara Creed proposed in her analysis of Alien (Bukatman 1993: 306-7). The humid, gurgling sounds that go with all the T-1000’s transformations belong to this feminine imagery. Mark Dery (1998), in turn, focuses on the sexual symbolism implicit in the fact that the T-1000 is constantly penetrated and impaled by bullets, fists, and all kinds of solid objects. Whenever this cyborg changes, it/he becomes metallic on the surface and reminds us of the metallic fluidity of mercury. Dery also points out that, according to Jungian symbolism, mercury is an element associated with the moon, the feminine, the androgynous and the hermaphrodite. Nevertheless, no total identification with the feminine is possible: the Terminator impersonated by Robert Patrick is also a master at using stabbing and penetrating objects, which suggests masculinity and homosexuality (Dery 1998; Kimball 2002: 94). Furthermore, in its/his partial victory against the T-101, it/he “terminates” its/his machocyborg rival represented by Schwarzenegger by impaling him from behind (chapter 72). In opposition to the T-1000, the T-101 reinforces everything that represents patriarchal masculinity, and eliminates even minute suggestions of anything but aggressive, solid, unvaried masculine behavior and heterosexuality. From the already mentioned fight and appropriation of the tough biker’s type (Telotte 1995: 177) to the heroic connotations of its/his death, everything about this second version of the T-101 smells of testosterone. In fact, it seems that the patriarchal resistance represented by the T-101 has come back to regain its position in the traditional, pyramidal family structure, where man’s position is at the top. The role of this Terminator as a protective and strong father is evident. When placed in comparison with romantic and idealistic but absent Kyle Reese, with John Connor’s passive, uninvolved adoptive father (chapter 8) and with all the mentioned but not seen violent, war-prone tentative partners for Sarah, the T-101 stands out as the best of all. The Terminator played by

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Schwarzenegger is such a nice father that it/he even plays with John Connor (chapters 23 and 46), never losing its/his patience or focusing attention on something else. Although the evidence of the persistence of the patriarchal father’s role seems conclusive, Larson proposed an alternative interpretation. He noted that the atypical association between the T-101, Sarah and John Connor can be read as a postmodern family one of whose members is a cyborg (1997: 61). The mere presence of cyborgs simply continues to impede absolute conclusions. The regression into the traditional patriarchal masculine figure is achieved through the victory against the T-1000. Even the obvious link between male aggression and technology in the first movie is erased from the aura of this renewed cyborg, who Friedman calls a “nice Terminator” (1994: 79). Two moments in the film mark this clearly. The first one takes place in chapter 42, when two little boys are playing with plastic guns and John Connor reflects on human aggressive instincts. The T-101 replies: “It is in your nature to destroy yourselves,” as if the mainly male, militaristic establishment were simply the elite spearhead of this human drive. The second moment is more climactic, and depicts the death of Schwarzenegger’s cyborg. Contrarily to what happens in the first film, the threat of nuclear destruction resulting from the male technological establishment ultimately disappears. Terminator 2, therefore, closes the plot and the question permanently (so it seemed), as it fits more traditional forms of narration and monologic hopes for control of meaning. The suppression of the T-1000’s various alien qualities, in addition to the destruction of the remains of the first Terminator, liquidates any ostensible threat to patriarchal control of technology and representation, coming either from sameness (the T-101’s violent revenge in the first film) or from an absolute Otherness (the T-1000). Social and political orders are reestablished with the erasure of the dystopic future, while the capitalist association of maleness and technology is recovered as a viable ideology and as a means of representation. The film is put again under the control of Hollywood’s conservative ideology.9 As a consequence, even Sarah Connor’s throes as a single mother are moved to the background and women’s issues seem to fade under the inclusive “fate of humankind.”

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VII: Terminator 3 (2003): The Final and Inevitable Rise of Female Machines Nevertheless, final definitions and finished answers do not seem to fit cyborgian nature, and what seemed a closed plot in Terminator 2 proved to be only a temporary closure when the third part of the series, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, was released in 2003. Judging from the film’s popular reception, audiences probably never accepted how Terminator 2 shuts down the numerous contemporary issues about the human raised by the presence of the cyborg, and they expected those questions to be addressed again. For all its Hollywood high budget production, Terminator 3 continues to deal with the same issues that are unavoidably linked to cyborg presence: male and female gender roles, family structure, reproduction and sexual relations in the contemporary technological context.10 The recurrence of these issues may explain the importance of the Terminator’s ironic and mythical status in postmodern culture, not only because films fulfill popular thematic expectations, but also because they correspond to the thematic implications identified by the dominant critical approach to cyborgian nature. In this sense, all cyborg fictions seem to share similar issues, although they may differ in the way the cultural conflicts are resolved. The Terminator and Robocop films are opposed to other cyborg films like Hardware (Stanley, 1990), Eve of Destruction (Gibbins, 1991) and Ghost in the Shell (Oshii, 1996), which, according to feminist cyborg criticism, depict a more favorable and progressive view of cyborgs. The situation is similar in written texts. For instance, Molly’s technological enhanced body in Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984) does not seem to live up to feminist expectations of cyborg representation, and critics tend to focus on other novels like Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991) (Balsamo 1996: 13456). Whichever the stance, cyborg appearances are inevitably associated with the themes mentioned above, which are still not settled in postmodern culture: the third coming of the Terminator and a promised fourth account for that.11 Terminator 3 (Jonathan Mostow) repeats many of the themes, formulas and conventions established by the two previous movies. This can be interpreted, on the one hand, as a sign that this third part is a mere continuation of already successful set scenes, but, on the other,

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it allows for an insight into cliché fabrication and for a sense of fictional artificiality which, in addition to a touch of irony and parody, entirely fits postmodern aesthetics. The thematic component of the story also suggests this, because the film implicitly acknowledges the critical reception, and would readily include references at the textual level of the story (by John Brancato, Michael Ferris and Tesi Sarafian) on the one hand, and at the visual level on the other: the new rival confronting Schwarzenegger’s embodiment of the Terminator, the T101, is a markedly female cyborg impersonated by Kristanna Loken.12 Considering the central position of the feminist approach in the criticism of the Terminator movies, this looks like a logical choice. However, although the cast may be slightly different (without Sarah Connor and with a female cyborg), the cultural and ideological battle will involve equivalent opposing characters and will take place in the same subject field: family, gender roles, reproduction and sex. In this third film, human protagonist John Connor (Nick Stahl) is already a grown-up solitary young man, who has no home or stable job. In this sense, he lives like an outcast or even an outlaw. As the story begins he breaks into a veterinary clinic and takes some drugs, a couple of minor offences which would automatically disqualify him as a good partner or father. Conversely, Kate Brewster’s (Claire Danes) first entrance in the film has highly familiar connotations: she is accompanied by her fiancé and is preparing her wedding. Apparently, she is a model daughter in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, as the plot develops and she becomes more involved with John Connor, her character reenacts Sarah Connor’s evolution. John would express what the audience has already realized when he tells Kate: “You remind me of my mother” (chapter 26). In her first encounter with John, she disarms, reduces, and locks him up. She is not unfamiliar with the use of weapons, she can fly a plane and does not break down when confronting danger; only the hypermasculine presence of Schwarzenegger seems to limit her to a traditional feminine role. As viewers learn from the story, she will become John’s wife and second (still second) in command, although it is significant that this time it is Kate’s and not John’s orders that the Terminator has to obey. In fact, she has control over the cyborg’s actions. Compared to her (and her evolution) John has not changed from the delinquent adolescent stage he was in in the second film. However, popular films do not seem to be able (or willing) to go beyond the traditional heterosexual couple,

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even if the female role, as happens with Kate Brewster, no longer represents the damsel in distress, or if she does so for a while, quickly overcomes it. Schwarzenegger’s masculinist pose has also suffered what may look like a slight change, but it is in fact an extremely important variation of the “endless repetition of the same,” identified by Haraway (see above). Schwarzenegger’s appearance and apparel in this third film still correspond to the solid, traditional, patriarchal macho-like depiction which causes so much feminist upheaval. Schwarzenegger continues to wear leather clothes and sunglasses, and keeps other masculinist features. He first drives a very masculine and powerful pick-up truck, then a police motorbike. He also retains an old-fashioned tactless and humorless attitude towards humans, exemplified by its/his attitude to sexual relations. In chapter 20, John Connor expresses doubts about Kate being his wife. To this the T-101 replies: “Your confusion is not rational. She’s a healthy female of breeding age.” John responds: “It takes a little more to it than that,” and Schwarzenegger’s cyborg concludes: “My data base does not encompass the dynamics of human pair-bonding.” This quasiscientific, traditional, patriarchal approach to marriage as a mere reproduction institution seems as outmoded as the Terminator’s masculinist stand itself. In fact, as it/he will recognize in scene 13: “I’m an obsolete design.” Actually, this sentence summarizes the Terminator’s condition in this third movie. On the one hand, because it refers to the T-101’s obvious metaphorical patriarchal connotations, and on the other, because the word design suggests a visual, superficial (constructed) approach, which may cause a break in the metaphysical link between appearance and essence.13 Schwarzenegger’s body may seem solid and indestructible; it may also appear to be human, but both propositions turn out to be false. In its/his confrontation with the T-X (the female cyborg embodied by Kristanna Loken), it/she is more resistant to brutal force, perhaps suggesting the fact that cyborgian nature discards the possibility of control of female behavior by violence. This fracture in the metaphysical and rationalistic ideological structure of reality is suggested and constructed throughout the T101’s depiction in the film. Despite the repetition of the leather-gear and hardware-likeness, the details which subvert its/his masculinist nature keep on appearing. First of all, the T-101’s fight with a biker

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singled out for its masculine connotations (see above) is substituted by its/his visit to a ladies’ night club where a male stripper is performing. Among all the women in the bar, the T-101 focuses its/his attention on the stripper only, a markedly homosexual male dressed in black leather, and asks him to take off his clothes—thus equalizing its/his desires with female expectations in the bar. When the T-101 finally leaves the bar in leather, there is another concession to gay audiences and a recognition of the homosexual appeal of Schwarzenegger’s embodiment of the Terminator: For a moment, the cyborg wears pink, star-shaped sunglasses, which it/he later discards and breaks. Nevertheless, the ironic suggestion has already been made, and this small breach opens some room for doubt in what had previously been an endless repetition. Later on, in the face-to-face fight between the T-101 and the T-X, both cyborgs display similar strength, for all their difference in size. In this case, Schwarzenegger’s adversary does not oppose softness to force and permeability to penetration—does not fight “like a woman.” The T-X has similar force and superior endurance. The outcome of the fight is significant.14 When the T-101 is knocked out, the T-X spares it/him, because it/she has a better plan. With a long, penetrating (phallic?) finger she sends a virus into the Terminator systems, corrupting its/his programming. Schwarzenegger’s cyborg then becomes impregnated with a new behavior and ideology. The T-101’s solid masculinity is useless against internal infection and metamorphosis. Even if its/his external appearance has not changed, the inner part can be altered, which suggests that a very masculine stand does not necessarily mean a masculinist behavior, and, even if it does, it can be changed. In a way, this distinction can be read as a break in the metaphysical barrier between appearance and essence, the physical and the psychological, the body (sex) and gender. The T-101 has to shut it/himself down and run its original program (a constructed, artificial set of beliefs) again, as if in need to refer back to traditional, patriarchal ideology. However, final victory could not go to the T-X in this film, yet the T-101 cannot help being destroyed in the process. Schwarzenegger’s cyborg puts a nuclear bomb in the TX’s mouth, virtually literalizing, in a very violent manner, the annoyance of patriarchy over continuously complaining feminists. Nevertheless, Loken’s cyborg is probably more attractive to postmodern culture and society than Schwarzenegger’s aging body

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playing the T-101. Curiously enough, the range of qualities the T-X shares with the androgynous and fluid T-1000 is precisely the same that made the T-1000 dangerously subversive as an embodiment of Otherness. Like the cyborg impersonated by Robert Patrick, the T-X is partially made of liquid metal, which means it/she can change appearance at will and be harmlessly penetrated. The T-X’s flexibility and adaptability is even greater that the T-1000’s, and so is its/her ability to go unnoticed. If Robert Patrick’s neat policeman image allowed it/him to move at ease among emergency people, the T-X can even attract human compassion and help, as in chapter 2, where it/she walks over to a car naked and the driver asks it/her whether something is wrong, confusing her femininity with weakness. Later, the T-X was able to move easily and undisturbed among policemen (chapters 9 and 10), imitate Kate Brewster’s fiancé (chapter 15), and move about a top-secret military installation in a uniform (chapter 23). In a female appearance, the T-X can be flexible when necessary, but also tough and relentless, as in its/her fight with the T-101. The T-X’s postmodern features are progressively built and emphasized from the beginning of its/her appearance in the film. The T-X travels back from the future to Beverly Hills, and it/she immediately adopts an urban and sophisticated look. Her outfit, a red leather suit (jacket, pants), and her hairstyle (hair in a bun at the back of the head), give the T-X a less feminine and more androgynous look. She drives a sports car (fast, missing traffic lights) and uses state-ofthe-art cell phones. The T-X decidedly breaks down the stereotypical prejudice that women do not understand technology. Remote control of other machines is one of the T-X’s most amazing (again, internal) abilities. Even though she can expertly drive a heavy crane truck, most times she does not even need to: cars, trucks, computers and databases follow the T-X’s orders after she has introduced some software (note here that, according to the imagery identified by Springer, the software would refer to feminine softness, internal operation and penetrability, while hardware is linked to male hardness and solidity) and inserted a virus into their systems by means of her phallic finger. In this sense, The T-X’s capabilities respond to the previous association between technology and maleness, and represent the “feminization of technology” Springer advocates (1996: 10). In a way, the T-X is responsible for the machines becoming intelligent and selfaware. After that, the extermination of the human bodies (the “meat”

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in cyberpunk terms) has to begin in order to prepare for the advent of the new cyborg race. Schwarzenegger’s T-101, in opposition to the TX, is linked to old-fashioned, even rural values: it/he turns up in the desert after traveling back through time, enters a country pub and steals a pick-up truck. Its/his manners are rough, insensitive and conspicuous. The T-101 is not only obsolete, it/he also acknowledges that the T-X is a better cyborg: “The T-X is faster, more powerful and more intelligent” (chapter 13). But what the presence of a female cyborg adds to Terminator 3 and more decidedly to cyborgian depiction is the body, the flesh, and sex. In accordance with the feminist interpretation of women’s bodies in SF film as symbols of physical sex (Creed 1990), the T-X actualized the closeness of the cyborg to sex. It/she seems to accept and adapt to male stereotypical vision and desire, and uses them for its/her own benefit. In chapter 3, the T-X grows bigger breasts when meeting a male police officer, and says in a soft, insinuating tone: “I like your gun.” The conversation is preceded by a frame of a lingerie ad, which makes reference not only to women’s accommodation to male gaze, but also to capitalist marketing of women’s bodies.15 In this scene, the T-X highly sexual connotations would actualize not only Bukatman’s association of the feminist interpretation of the cyborg with a return of the body to SF (1993: 241-96), but also Springer’s argument for the feminization of technology (1996: 10), Vivan Sobchak’s (1990) interpretation of the alien and the Other as the surfacing of femininity in SF film, and Anne Balsamo’s (1996) reading of the cyborg as a return of the body within the technological framework—as opposed to mainstream cyberpunk rejection of the body. In short, the T-X and its/her sexually suggestive behavior literalizes this idea of bringing the body back into SF. The T-X gets in the same bed with Kate Brewster’s fiancé, and spills his (virginal?) blood with a cutting, penetrating tool. Due to its/her association with the flesh, the T-X is not wary of bodily fluids. It/she analyzes victims’ blood by playfully placing a sample on her tongue; its/her reaction to finding a sample of John Connor’s blood (DNA, again references to inner body, menstruation, reproduction, coding) can be interpreted as close to an orgasm. Such human reactions (pleasure, playfulness, anger) contrast strikingly with the more machine-like behavior of the T-101 and the inexpressiveness of Schwarzenegger’s face. The T-101 lies and plays with human emotions, but it/he never shares them; when

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trying to overcome an inner fight with its/his programs in order to save John Connor, it/he states: “Desire is irrelevant. I am a machine” (chapter 27).16 With this statement, the T-101 actually denies its/his cyborgian nature, and consequently acknowledges that it/he represents oldfashioned, conservative and even regressive ideology. Schwarzenegger’s hypermasculine, ultra-heroic, god-like appearance is more readily associated with a thing of the past (like his character in Conan) than with an option for the future, to which Robert Patrick’s less markedly masculine physique and Kristanna Loken’s sophisticated female image seem to accommodate better. The film predicts the extinction of the machocyborg, not only by suggesting the obsolescence of Schwarzenegger’s masculinist pose, but also by a direct reference which occurs in chapter 24, where the T-101 changes its/his famous sentence from the first movie, “I’ll be back” (The Terminator, chapter 18) for a more appropriate “She’ll be back.” In fact, the story of the Terminators themselves seems to agree with that premonition, because the patriarchal resistance represented by Schwarzenegger’s T-101 does not conclude the cultural battle with a victory: the threat of more advanced, progressive, hybrid Terminators is always lurking, and so is the nuclear holocaust which is inevitably associated with the connection between male aggression and technology. As opposed to what happens in the second film, where nuclear war is avoided, Terminator 3 takes a more deterministic approach, expressed in the T-101’s words: “Judgment Day is inevitable” (chapter 13). This pessimistic view is reinforced by the negative representation of male thought, unable to overcome the barriers of the opposition between “us” and “them.” Chapter 23 in Terminator 3 is extremely revealing in this sense. General Brewster (David Andrews) is reluctant to activate Skynet (the computer system that acquires self-awareness and decides to exterminate humans), but military, male and hierarchic thinking overcomes his doubts and, as a result, the technological conglomerate created by male military devices finally causes human destruction. In a revision of the Greek myth, General Brewster states: “I opened Pandora’s box” (chapter 24). The female Terminator, the T-X, is seen in the process of taking control of the machines that will later produce cyborgs. Ironically, the seemingly invariable association between male aggression and the technological will eventually bring about control by computers

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(feminized machines, according to Springer) and the cyborgian takeover. And the coming of the cyborgs marks this new era when the traditional, patriarchal, rationalistic vision of man is being overcome and will be substituted by the new fluid, hybrid, post-gendered figurations of the human. It is here that Terminator 3 ends, at the precise moment when the revolution takes place and artificial intelligence begins to take over, and when those who were not ready to change have to face an anxious lack of ideological cultural reference. The last conversations in the film represent the reactions this event will cause: voices asking what is going on, no longer comprehending reality after their set of beliefs has been transformed. These questions also correspond with the anxieties of the postmodern condition, in which no major teleological ideology can claim universal validity and the future is more open than ever.17 The long story of the Terminators can thus be read as a postmodern mythical battle, fought in the cultural field, between the persistent resistance of traditional beliefs represented by Schwarzenegger’s cyborg and the innovative, different, challenging qualities attributed to cyborgian nature by avant-garde cultural and theoretical thought, which are actualized in the figure of the T-1000 and the T-X. In this sense, the Terminators’ story has acknowledged the influence of critical activity and has accordingly added material for its continuation. When criticism identified questions about the traditional family and gender roles in the first movie, the second film responded by amplifying (with a hybrid cyborg) and simultaneously contradicting them (through a closed narrative). The third part actualizes the evolution of the representation of the cyborg from a solid, mechanical, hypermasculine and heterosexual stance to a figuration based on feminized, internal, unstable, hybrid multiplicity. These new features need to be explained, interpreted and perhaps justified by the critical line initiated by Donna Haraway, which associates cyborg fiction with an innovative view of feminine roles, family and reproduction. Haraway’s myth of a hybrid, post-gendered cyborg was progressively made manifest in the androgynous, fluid, changing representation of the T-1000 in Terminator 2, and finally in the female image of Terminator 3, which marks the advent of posthuman and post-gendered representations of the human. The fact that this posthuman revolution takes place in a popular film, suspiciously associated with conservative ideology, gives more

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value to the somewhat insufficient alignment with the hybrid versions of the cyborg. Following the popular film outmoded convention of the “happy ending,” the “Terminatrix” is destroyed, although not completely obliterated, because it/she manages to initiate an entrance into the posthuman era. If the T-101’s sacrifice had stood for the continuation of traditional patriarchy, the destruction of the T-X serves to bring about the new collective vision. However, as happens in the cultural field today, the battle between traditional patriarchal ideology and the new conceptualization of the human rages on, and the possible shooting of a Terminator 4 promises yet a new twist in the conflict. Considering the winding way the plots have followed, it would be difficult to determine whether the next script will stick to an obsolete, exhausted, masculinist and mechanical cyborg or whether it will finally depict a female cyborg that helps the Connors against the mechanical threat (at last without Arnold Schwarzenegger in the leading role). Moreover, the next film could also begin exploring the latent potential of cyborgian nature for postcolonial issues if one of the cyborgs markedly contradicts or undermines the purist Aryan appearance of Schwarzenegger. If an androgynous or feminine cyborg has brought gender issues into a metaphorical conflict, it is logical to expect that a color cyborg (more specifically, a female color cyborg or even one that changes race at will) would raise numerous questions about racial identity construction, ethnic representation, national and cultural domination and power subversion. In this sense, the cyborg would become a trespasser not only of gender barriers and the separation between the human and the mechanical, but also of racial divisions, its/his/her hybrid ambiguous nature epitomizing at the same time the posthuman, the post-gendered and the post-racial. The cyborg could be a mestiza in the broad sense of the word, the hybrid inheritor of humanity that leaves behind all kinds of limiting descriptions of human identity, such as nationality, race, gender and culture, that privileges ambiguity over absolute and binary thinking, and that stands for the marginalized representatives of Otherness in opposition to a reductive discourse on the human. The Terminators’ story is not closed, and the next movie could have the key to decide whether this partial victory of the posthuman, post-gendered, and post-racial construction of identity is just a temporary concession by conservative fiction makers or a decidedly consistent option for the multiple, non-essentialist and inclusive

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representation of the human beyond stereotypical and prejudiced limits, and thus put an end to the ambiguity of John Connor’s prophetic words (threat for the powerful, hope for the powerless) in the third film (chapter 15): “The life you know, all the stuff that you take for granted; it’s not going to last.”

Endnotes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

In this context, the concept of “zone” used by Brian McHale (1992) refers to a fictional space that is ontologically opposed to conventional reality, and thus opens an ideological gap. Other terms have been applied to this notion, like Samuel Delaney’s “paraspace” (Bukatman 1993: 105-81). This is the most common interpretation of the fictional and metaphoric realities represented by elements like cyberspace and virtual reality. See “The Terminator: A Retrospective,” included in The Terminator Special Edition (2001). Contrary to Springer’s classification of both films as mainstream, only the second picture was originally conceived as a Hollywood high-budget production. Quotations from the films indicate chapter numbers as they appear in the DVD versions for quicker reference. They do not necessarily coincide with the scene division in film scripts, which are also available online (see Works Cited). See “The Terminator: A Retrospective” in The Terminator Special Edition (2001). Cameron did finally get away with it and made Lance Henriksen play an android in his sequel to Alien, Aliens (1986). Although inspired by Ash, this second android was depicted with positive connotations. Claudia Springer argues that during the late nineteenth century industrial machines were linked to the masculine body, focusing on their hardness and strength. With the advent of computers, however, machines showed internal processes which were conceptualized as feminine. Consequently, she speaks about a “feminization of the technological and culture” (1996: 10), which she advocates and defends. This conceptual position leads her to interpret hypermasculine cyborgs, such as the Terminator, as a form of radical resistance to this feminization of technology: “The hyperviolent muscular cyborg in film is one such symbol of misogynistic resistance to change” (1996: 103). See “The Terminator: A Retrospective,” in The Terminator Special Edition (2001). In general, criticism has frequently quoted Klaus Theweleit’s work, Male Fantasies, as a reference for the connection between highly muscular, apparently indestructible bodies and homoerotic desire. Those familiar with science fiction will recognize in this term the conventional tendency to introduce neologisms in the genre. As its etymology suggests, this term simply means that the metal alloy is capable of imitating many shapes. In

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10

11

12

13

14

15

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17

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short, it is just a convenient SF gimmick to clarify why the T-1000 can change appearance in the fiction, but seems to have little scientific value. The fight between the T-101 and the T-1000 has also had its political interpretation, as some authors have pointed out. Larson read it as a metaphor of the confrontation between “right-wing capitalist” rigidity and “left-wing pluralism programmed for totalitarian rule” (1997: 64), and emphasized the “democratic amorphism” of the T-1000. Dery (1988) indicates that the T-1000 flexibility and adaptability represents the strategy of those without power when confronting unyielding power structures. Donna Haraway’s list of themes specifically associated with cyborg stories contains: “questions of gender, sex, race, class, body politic , work, play” (1995: 6). See http://www.movieweb.com/movies/film/06/2706/summary.php additional information, and see http://www.killermovies.com/t/terminator4 on the possible shooting of Terminator 4. This tendency towards the feminization of robots, androids and cyborgs also occurs in another filmic popular myth with a long history. If the two first Alien pictures had depicted male androids, Ash and Bishop, the most recent Alien: Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997) incorporates a female android played by Winona Ryder. In fact, one of the cyborgian qualities that make the cyborg so appealing for Haraway’s post-gendered myth is precisely the fact that cyborgs are always constructed entities (1995: 2). In Terminator 2, the T-101 had also been partially defeated when the T-1000 penetrates it/him from behind, an attack which stops the T-101’s inner systems and from which it/he will painfully recover (see above). This scene also refers to another scene in Terminator 2 where the T-1000 is placed side to side with an aluminium mannequin. Larson attributed connotations of the capitalist commodification of bodies to this episode (1997: 68) which were included in his political and economic critical line not followed here. The association has been productive. Another scene in Terminator 3 is also similar: the moment when the T-X appears in the present occurs in a Beverly Hills women’s clothes store, and the power of the time machine melts the mannequins on the window. A very similar sentence, which may be the antecedent of this one, is pronounced by Captain Pickard when confronting the Borgs in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Borg actually said: “Freedom is irrelevant. Selfdetermination is irrelevant. Death is irrelevant,” which is echoed by Cynthia Fuchs’s article “Death Is Irrelevant: Cyborgs, Reproduction and the Future of Male Hysteria” (1993), linking it to reproduction issues. It is remarkable, though, how the sentence repeats reproduction connotations again, being uttered just after the T-101 has been “impregnated” by the T-X’s virus, and represents a violent masculinist approach to reproduction, for it eliminates feminine desire and conceptualizes the process as a mechanical activity. This ending contrasts with those in the previous movies, which range from the uncertain outcome of the battle between traditional and innovative cultural ideologies in the first film to the closed, regressive plot presented by Terminator 2. In the last part, however, the revolution has happened; the old set of beliefs no

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CONTRIBUTORS

Édgar Cota-Torres was born in Los Angeles, United States, and was raised in Mexicali, Mexico. He currently teaches Latin American and Chicano literature at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. His research interests include U.S.-Mexican border and Latino literature. He earned his Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University. Isabel Durán is Associate Professor at the Department of English Philology, Complutense University in Madrid (Spain), and the Vicedean of the School of Humanities. She’s also the Vice-president of SAAS (Spanish Association for American Studies), and member of the International Committee of ASA (American Studies Association). Her research and publication record on gender studies, literature, autobiography and ethnicity include the edition of a five-volume study of women in the English-speaking countries (Estudios de la Mujer en los países de habla inglesa), following her book Autobiography: Female Versions in 20th Century American Literature (in Spanish). She is at present working on a book about contemporary American autobiography, and is doing research on Latina/o and Chicana/o literature, as part of a research team sponsored by the New Del Amo Program, in collaboration with a team of scholars from UC. She is also the coordinator of a web site in Spanish on American Literature (http://www.Liceus.com). Javier Durán is Associate Professor of Spanish and Border Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and a specialist in cultural and literary studies along the U.S.-Mexico border. Duran’s areas of teaching and research include U.S.—Mexican border studies, Latin American women writers, and Chicana/Chicano—Latina/Latino narrative. He is the author of the book José Revueltas. Una poética de

298

Contributors

la disidencia, published by the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico, five co-edited books on Cultural Studies, and numerous articles on literary and cultural themes. Durán is currently working on two book length manuscripts dealing with border literature and culture. The first is entitled My Border, Not Yours: Local Stories, Migrant Bodies, and Transnational Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontera, and the second Border Voices: Memory and Self-Representation in Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border Writing. He is also investigating the connections between globalization, transnational identities and the Mexican and Latin. Ana Mª Manzanas is Associate professor of American Literature and Culture at the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain. Currently she is working on a comparative study of the border and in its literary reflection in the United States and Spain. Her publications include Intercultural Mediations: Mimesis and Hybridity in American Literatures (LIT Verlag 2003), with Jesús Benito, and editions of essays such as Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands (Rodopi 2002), and The Dynamics of the Threshold: Essays on Liminal Negotiations (The Gateway Press 2006). With Jesús Benito she is general editor of the Rodopi Series “Critical Approaches to Ethnic American Literature.” Manuel Martín-Rodríguez is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Merced. His publications include Life in Search of Readers: Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature (2003), Rolando Hinojosa y su “cronicón” chicano: Una novela del lector (1993), La voz urgente: Antología de literatura chicana en español (1995, 1999, and 2006), as well as numerous articles in edited volumes and journals, including PMLA, Modern Language Quarterly, The Bilingual Review, The Americas Review, La Palabra y el Hombre, Hispania, Revista Iberoamericana, Latin American Literary Review, REDEN, and Aztlán, among others. He is currently working on a book on Latinos/as in children’s movies (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan). Ángel Mateos-Aparicio is an assistant professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). His main research interests range from the analysis of the privileged critical position of science fiction

Contributors

299

literature, film and imagery in postmodern culture to the study of postmodernist criticism and literature in its attempt to grasp the many variables that constitute the posthuman condition. His Ph.D. thesis focused on the increasing use of elements coming from science fiction by some acclaimed authors beginning their careers during the 1950s and 1960s, and their significance in the wider postmodern context. He is now working on a project centered on Chaos Theory in the work of Philip K. Dick. Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger is assistant professor at the Humanities Department of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) where she teachers courses on English language and literature and on Hispanic/Latino-a cultures in the United States. She is the author of Battlegrounds and Crossroads: Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas (Rodopi: Amsterdam & New York, 2003). Her articles on Chicano/a and Latino/a culture have appeared in anthologies and journals in Europe and the U.S. Her current research focuses on the representation of Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border in Chicano/a post-movement life-writings and fiction. Begoña Simal teaches at the English Department of the University of Corunna (Galicia, Spain). She has written extensively on ethnic literature, particularly on Asian American writers (Kingston, Divakaruni, Jen, Ng, Tan, Liu). She has published several books, among them Identidad étnica y género en la narrativa de escritoras chinoamericanas (2000), and Transnational, National and Personal Voices: Asian American and Asian Diasporic Women Writers (2004), co-edited with Prof. Marino. Her articles have appeared in European and American books and journals such as Hitting Critical Mass, Amerasia Journal or MELUS. Isabel Soto teaches in the Modern Languages Department of Spain’s Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. She has been Visiting Scholar at Vassar College and Honorary Fellow of The Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture. In 2000 she co-founded the independent scholarly publisher The Gateway Press devoted to publishing work on liminality and text. Her interests lie in liminality theory and African American studies. She has published and lectured widely on Langston Hughes’s relationship with Spain. Her article

300

Contributors

“Boundaries Transgressed: Modernism and Miscegenation in Langston Hughes’s ‘Red-headed Baby,’” appeared in the April 2006 issue of Atlantic Studies. Santiago Vaquera. Unrepentant border crosser. A writer, academic, painter, and former dj, he has published work in international journals (Tinta; Los universitarios; El País; The Barcelona Review; South Atlantic Quarterly) and major anthologies dedicated to writing in the Spanish speaking Americas (Líneas aéreas, 1998; Se habla español, voces latinas en USA, 2000; El dinosaurio ilustrado, 2002; Pequeñas resistencias 4, 2005). He teaches at the University of Iowa. In 2006 he was a Fulbright Scholar in Spain. África Vidal is Professor of Translation at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her research interests include translation theory, post-structuralism, contemporary art and gender studies. She has published a number of books, anthologies and essays on these issues, including Traducción. manipulación, desconstrucción (Salamanca, Ediciones Colegio de España, 1995), El futuro de la traducción (Valencia, Alfons el Magnànim, 1998), Translation/Power/Subversion (coedited with Román Álvarez, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 1996) and En los límites de la traducción (Granada, Comares, 2006). She is a practising translator specialized in the fields of philosophy, literature and contemporary art. José Pablo Villalobos is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Texas A&M University. He was born and raised along the U.S.-Mexico border, dividing his time between the cities of Mexicali and Calexico, and received his PhD. from the University of California-Irvine. His areas of research interest are contemporary Mexican and Chicano narrative and Border Studies. He is author of La imaginación genealógica: Herencia y escritura en México (forthcoming) and has published articles on Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Carlos Fuentes, Luis Arturo Ramos, Elena Poniatowska, Miguel Méndez, Alejandro Morales, and border music. Currently, his major research project deals with cultural representations of the U.S.-Mexico border.

INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 226 Arteaga, Alfred, 23, 240 Atlantic Ocean, 2, 4, 206 Autobiography, 3, 65, 72, 74, 105, 116, 119, 120-122, 127-128, 133135, 141, 225 Autotopography, 3, 63-64, 69 Memoir, 44, 48, 61-62, 68-70, 7577, 129 Aztlán, 39, 149, 152, 202 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 101, 104, 238 Baldwin, James, 102, 105 Bhabha, Homi, 51, 58, 172, 203, 233, 238-240 Binebine, Mahi, 215 Border, 1-5, 9, 11-12, 14-15, 18, 2022, 26, 35-77, 79-82, 84-97, 101102, 104, 116, 119, 125-126, 129, 135, 137-139, 142, 147, 151-152, 154, 157, 159-160, 173-174, 181186, 193, 196, 199, 201-202, 228, 233, 243-245, 248, 250, 252, 254 Borderland, 3-4, 95, 122, 137, 174, 176, 229, 234, 237, 239, 243, 247 Circle, 2, 9-10, 13, 18, 21, 25-26, 30-31, 150 Fence, 11, 13, 15-16, 19, 21-22, 24, 26-27, 48, 64, 85, 88 Frontera, 35-36, 41, 52, 94, 119, 127, 244, 250 Frontier, 14, 22, 53-54, 58, 82, 124-127, 143, 152, 196 Wall, 1, 10-12, 14-19, 21-24, 26, 31, 48, 71, 85, 88, 93, 110, 163, 174 Bourdieu, Pierre, 237 Bracero, 14, 96, 218-219

Brown, 3, 119, 127, 129-134 Call and response, 103, 104, 111-113, 115 Cameron, James, 243, 254, 256-257, 259, 260, 262, 274 Chronotope, 4, 206, 211-212, 215 Coyote, 36, 185-186, 191, 194, 199 García Canclini, Néstor, 53, 55, 60, 80, 83, 89, 203 Cantú, Norma Elia, 51, 70, 181 Castillo, Ana, 51, 176, 228, 232, 238 Castillo, Debra, 36 Chambers, Iain, 84, 149, 225, 227, 229-230, 234 Chao, Manu, 2, 36 Chicano canon, 148 Cisneros, Sandra, 181, 228, 232, 240 City, 3, 10, 13, 19, 23-24, 31, 36, 3942, 45, 47, 58, 79-83, 85-86, 9093, 95-97, 111, 130, 199 Ciudad Juárez, 53, 58-59 Cixous, Hélène, 231, 238 Clifford, James, 4, 10, 14-15, 182, 185-186, 188, 191-192, 194, 198, 202-203, 226, 229 Coloniality, 22, 51, 149, 160, 162, 164-165, 187-188, 202, 206, 235, 23 Cross, 2, 5, 9, 10, 13, 23-25, 31, 40, 56, 81, 85, 91, 94, 96, 129, 160, 181, 183, 187, 229 Crossing, 2, 13, 17, 20, 22-23, 2629, 45, 60, 183, 187, 193, 198199, 201, 228, 235, 245 Cross-ing, 13, 28 Crosthwaite, Luis Humberto, 38, 51, 54, 57, 80, 93-95 Cyborg, 5, 243, 247, 249-250, 252-

302 258, 260-262, 264-268, 270-275 Cyberpunk, 247, 250-251, 258, 270 Posthuman, 247, 249, 253, 258, 272-273 Posthumanity, 247 Daoudi, Ahmed, 214-215, 218 De Certeau, Michel, 9, 11, 22-23, 37, 51, 83, 97 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, 220, 230, 238 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 11, 13, 15, 26, 72, 74, 236 Dialectics, 2, 9-10, 24-25, 31, 174 Dialectical, 10, 24, 129 Diaspora, 112, 181-182, 188, 191192, 197, 202, 205, 208-209, 214 Exile, 121, 128, 130, 150, 225, 228 Migrancy, 183, 187 Nomadism, 183 Durand, Gilbert, 1, 11-12, 23, 31 Ethnography, 4, 65, 143, 183, 186, 188, 203 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 211 Ferré, Rosario, 228, 234 Frost, Robert, 2, 9, 15, 17-18, 22, 24 Fuentes, Carlos, 37, 52, 126 Gabilondo, Joseba, 206, 248 García Lorca, Federico, 3, 101-110, 113-116 García, Cristina, 228, 234 Gates, Henry Louis, 101, 103, 112, 115 Gilroy, Paul, 101-102, 116, 206 Gómez Peña, Guillermo, 80, 82, 89 Hall, Stuart, 182, 202 Haraway, Donna, 243, 249-250, 252254, 257-258, 260, 262, 267, 272, 275 Heidegger, Martin, 229-230, 234 Hermes, 10, 24, 28 Hestia, 10, 24, 26, 28, 30 Hughes, Langston, 3, 101-116 Hybridity, 2, 4-5, 56, 60, 84-85, 9092, 119-120, 126-127, 130, 132, 135, 137-139, 141, 143, 145, 151, 181, 183, 186, 188, 191, 196-197,

Index 202-203, 212, 225-226, 228, 231233, 239, 241, 243-253, 267-268, 271-273, Hyphenation, 142, 225 Hyphen, 73, 122, 139, 141, 227, 231 Hyphenated, 226, 230, 233-234, 239 Jameson, Fredric, 228, 251 Kafka, Franz, 2, 9, 11, 18-19, 21, 23, 32 Kristeva, Julia, 3, 35, 128, 130, 134, 139, 238 Kumar, Amitava, 89, 181, 183, 201 Laviera, Tato, 207-208, 211, 220 Lefebvre, Henri, 12, 14, 18, 21, 36 Leyenda Negra, 2, 41, 53-54, 57-59 North of the Borderism, 56-57, 87 South of the Borderism, 56-57, 87-88, 95 Liminality, 3, 25-26, 29, 79, 82, 84, 126, 181 Limón, Graciela, 229, 231, 241 Lorman, Josep, 214, 221 Map, 2, 14, 23, 43, 47, 50, 62, 91, 244 Marqués, René, 207, 210 Martínez, Rubén, 4, 81, 116, 181-201 Mazlish, Bruce, 246, 248 McHale, Brian, 248, 251, 274 Mena, Cristina, 3, 147-156, 159-160, 162-177 Mestiza, 3, 5, 52, 119, 127-129, 134139, 140, 145, 160-162, 170, 176, 184, 233, 244-248, 250, 253, 273 Mestizaje, 5, 31, 128, 130, 132, 135, 138, 144-145, 176, 183, 196, 203, 249 Mignolo, Walter, 205 Mora, Pat, 232 Nationalism, 182, 192, 202, 219 Neighbor, 15-17, 24, 30, 53, 56, 87 Nogales, 3, 47-48, 61-66, 68, 70-71, 75-78, 185 Other, 13-14, 19, 21, 23-27, 30, 35, 51, 56, 88, 128, 139, 176, 184, 214, 216, 225, 228, 231, 234, 237238, 252, 260, 270, 274

Index Alien, 11, 22, 25, 27, 30, 35-37, 228, 238, 243, 245, 264, 270 Arrivant, 26, 27 Owens, Louis, 22 Padilla, Genaro, 65, 70 Patera, 205-206, 215, 217, 221 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 121-122, 141 Photos, 63-64, 70-71, 88 Postcard, 3, 56, 79-80, 89 Pratt, Mary Louise, 103, 235 Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 67, 168, 176 Ríos, Alberto, 2, 35, 38, 47-52, 61-65, 67-73, 75-76, 78 Rodriguez, Richard, 3, 80, 119, 121, 125, 127-135, 138-139, 141-145, 188 Rosaldo, Renato, 193, 203, 229 Saavedra, Rafa, 2, 35, 38-43, 47, 5152 Said, Edward, 57, 60, 214, 226, 228229, 234 Santiago, Esmeralda, 229, 233-234 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 243, 250, 252-254, 256-258, 260-262, 264, 266-268, 270-273 Shakespeare, 152, 154, 156, 175, 212 Prospero, 156, 164-165 Caliban, 156-157, 165, 211-212 Signifying, 3, 103-104, 108, 111-113, 115, 176 Sorel, Andrés, 215 Spivak, Gayatri, 202, 228, 236, 240 Steiner, George, 233 Stepto, Robert B., 101, 103, 112, 115 Tabuenca, Rosario, 51, 56, 87, 97 Terminator, 1, 5, 243, 249-250, 253254, 256-258, 260-268, 270-275 Terminatrix, 273 Terminus, 1-2, 5, 9, 17, 23, 32 Thomas, Piri, 9, 189, 211, 221, 248 Tijuana, 2, 35-36, 38-45, 47-48, 5253, 55-56, 58, 79-83, 85-97, 184 Todorov, Tzvetan, 140 Trans/Hispanic, 4, 205-208, 210, 212, 216, 220 Translation, 4, 116, 225, 234-235, 237, 239 Transnational, 4, 181-182, 196

303 Traveling, 4, 184, 186, 191-192, 198, 212, 215-216, 220, 225-226, 229230, 235, 258, 270 Trujillo, Gabriel, 2, 35, 38, 45-47, 51, 54 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 22, 76, 124, 143 Urrea, Luis Alberto, 2, 35-36, 38, 4244, 46-48, 51, 70, 181 Vega, Ana Lydia, 209-210 Veil, 3, 101, 104, 115 Venegas, Daniel, 215 Vicuña, Cecilia, 234 Viramontes, Helena Maria, 2, 9, 11, 23-26, 28-29 Welles, Orson, 2, 35-36 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 2, 9, 11, 20, 23, 26 Zonkey, 2, 53, 57, 59 Revolutionary Zonkenism, 2, 53 Zebra, 56, 88, 96