READING CHICAN@ LIKE A QUEER
HISTORY, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY SERIES Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS)
The De-Mastery of Desire SANDRA K. SOTO
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
AUSTIN
Copyright © 2010 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2010 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Soto, Sandra K., 1968– Reading Chican@ like a queer : the de-mastery of desire / Sandra K. Soto. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (CMAS history, culture, and society series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-72174-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Mexican American authors— History and criticism. 2. Desire in literature. 3. Sex in literature. 4. Race in literature. 5. Mexican Americans in literature. 6. Mexican Americans—Race identity. I. Title. II. Title: Reading Chicana like a queer. PS153.M4S67 2010 810.9'3580896872073—dc22 2009032144
and in loving memory of Lora Romero (1960–1997), Raúl R. Salinas (1934–2008), & Monique Wittig (1935–2003)
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Acknowledgments
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0. Introduction: Chican@ Literary and Cultural Studies, Queer Theory, and the Challenge of Racialized Sexuality 1 1. Making Familia from Racialized Sexuality: Cherríe Moraga’s Memoirs, Manifestos, and Motherhood 15 2. Fixing Up the House of Race with Richard Rodriguez 3. Queering the Conquest with Ana Castillo
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4. Américo Paredes and the De-Mastery of Desire 0. Epilogue: Back to the Futuro Notes 127 References 149 Index 163
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Reading Chican@ Like a Queer has a rhizomatic formation. The metaphor of a plant’s subterranean roots—creeping this way and that, forking here and there, but always working to feed what is above ground—strikes me as the best way to index how this book is rooted in a multiplicity of radically different spaces of intellectual exchange. With a Ph.D. in English I launched a career in Women’s Studies. Working on this project in an interdisciplinary—or, at the very least, transdisciplinary—Women’s Studies context and in conversation with other Cultural Studies fellow travelers has induced me to substantiate at a moment’s notice the instructive value and material importance of literature and literary analysis. The learning curve has been nothing if not steep, maybe even precipitous, but has wonderfully complicated my understandings of subject formation, knowledge production, power circulations, and desire’s traffic—all of which provide apertures through which the function of racialized sexuality in Chican@ representational politics can be gleaned. This book began as a dissertation project at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin under the codirection of Ann Cvetkovich and José E. Limón. Even though the dissertation phase of this project now seems so long ago, both Ann and José have continued to be crucial supporters of my work in more ways than they could possibly know. My committee members Lisa Moore, Emma M. Pérez, and Darieck Scott provided substantive input and rigorous feedback. The process of writing my dissertation was enriched and enlivened by regular conversations with progressive and insightful graduate students, including the members of Ann’s dissertation group: Paige Schilt, Jennifer Bean, Gina Seising, Jennifer Mason, and Alyssa Harad. Meanwhile, and without fail, la chicanada would meet with José for happy hour at the Hole in the Wall every Friday afternoon, where we extended our discussions on Chican@ Cultural Studies deep into the night. For those conversations I raise my glass especially to Sheila Contreras, Laura Padilla, Nick Evans, Rachel Jennings, John Michael Rivera, Vicente Lozano, Juan Alonso, Dana Maya, Ralph Ro-
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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driguez, Emmet Campos, Gilberto Rosas, Olga Herrera, Patricia Perea, Jennifer Najera, and, of course, José. Finally, I cannot think of my time at Texas without thinking with deep respect of Barbara Harlow, whose transnational work on resistance literature has remained a major influence. (If this book is free of split infinitives, I must add, it is also thanks to Barbara!) An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published as “Cherríe Moraga’s Going Brown: ‘Reading Like a Queer’” in GLQ 11.2 (2005): 237–264. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as “Aztec Queens and Gypsy Kings: Reading Ana Castillo’s Eroticized Mestizaje” in Critical Essays on Chicano Studies, edited by Ramón Espejo et al. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 221–232. I thank the editors and anonymous readers for their constructive feedback on these essays. And I am most appreciative of the anonymous readers of this book and of Theresa May, who has been an incredibly supportive editor. For indispensable financial support, I would like to thank the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for a 2000–2001 Chicana Studies Dissertation Fellowship; the Latina/ Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for a 2004–2005 postdoctoral fellowship; and the University of Arizona for a 2004–2005 Research Grant and a 2005 Junior Sabbatical. In ways that I could never have anticipated, Reading Chican@ Like a Queer came to a close exactly where it began, at UT-Austin. For my spring 2008 residency fellowship with UT’s Center for Mexican American Studies, I am incredibly grateful to Richard R. Flores, associate dean for academic affairs, and, again, José E. Limón. I was warmly welcomed back to Austin by José and Richard, together with Lisa Moore, Ann Cvetkovich, Neville Hoad, Barbara Harlow, Deborah Paredez, Kimberly Alidio, Domino Pérez, and John M. González. I must also thank the staff of the Center for Mexican American Studies: Dolores García, Luis Guevara, and Johannah Hochhalter. The gratitude I wish to express to my colleagues at Arizona is not only de rigueur. The generous and unwavering mentorship of Monique Wittig (Theo) and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy has been especially crucial. Theo died just a year and a half after I met her, but in that short time she became an extraordinary friend. I am just as grateful for that as I am for the fierce politics and outspokenness with which she lit up each and every conversation. I will never forget our weekly dinners in the foothills, to which she always brought one of those old-fashioned composition notebooks, with my name in her shaky handwriting scrawled across its black and white speckled cover. Liz Kennedy and Bobbi Prebis are part of my Tucson familia. At a particularly
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
trying time, Liz took to sending me weekly heartfelt emails about why she wanted and needed me to carry on this work. Coming as they did from a model of feminist, antiracist intellectual work, those emails mattered more than she could know. For their support and camaraderie in Tucson I thank Daniel Cooper Alarcón, Laura Briggs, Meg Lota Brown, Sally Deutsch, Caryl Flinn, Adam Geary, Alisha Gibson, Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, Spike Peterson, Eliana Rivero, Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, and Dereka Rushbrook. My graduate students in Queer Theories and in Latina/o Literary and Cultural Studies—especially Shannon Randall and Lauryn Bianco—helped me think through many of this book’s ideas. Alexx Tracy-Ramirez was a superb research assistant. For their unwavering love and encouragement I thank my mother, Irma Soto, my sister, Christina Carhart, and my friends near and far: Kimberly Alidio, Maribel Alvarez, Cathy Arellano, J. B. Bean, Bret Benjamin, Lauren Berlant, Scarlet Bowen, Lisa Duggan, Anne-Marie Fortier, Laura Gutiérrez, Kathleen Kane, Stacy Macias, Dana Maya, Cynthia Pérez, Emma Pérez, Laura Pichardo, Virginia Raymond, Chela Sandoval, Deborah Vargas, and Antonio Viego. Finally, I must thank the two people who daily energize and enable my work through their honest critique, their example of committed scholarship, and their love. My dearest lifelong intimate and comrade, Louis Mendoza, has shaped this book more than he knows. And, more than anyone else, Miranda Joseph lived with me day in and day out through thick and thin, always with a café con leche at the ready.
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Introduction Chican@ Literary and Cultural Studies, Queer Theory, and the Challenge of Racialized Sexuality
We believe our racial and class backgrounds have a huge effect in determining how we perceive ourselves sexually. —AMBER HOLLIBAUGH and CHERRÍE MORAGA (“What We’re Rolling Around in Bed With”)
Indeed, some dimensions of sexuality might be tied, not to gender, but instead to differences or similarities of race or class. —EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK (Epistemology of the Closet)
HE GROWING DISSATISFACTION over the past twenty-five years with monological and monocausal approaches to subjectivity and power has motivated some of the most powerful experiential creative writings by women of color, such as those included in the edited collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1981), and, in turn, has generated some of the most enabling and robust scholarship in a range of interdisciplinary locations, including postcolonial studies, gender studies, African American Studies, and queer theory. As the epigraphs above suggest, if the identification of gender as the primary variable for investigating sexual identity forecloses a consideration of the equally meaningful place of racial formation and class relations in our “sexual” lives, then the acceptance of race and ethnicity as the defining characteristics of people of color prevents an adequate examination of the significant roles that sexual desires and sexual prohibitions play in racialization. We can now say with certainty that race and sexuality are not self-contained, discrete categories. Reading Chican@ Like a Queer stays with that certainty, even, or especially, when the analysis leads me to unpredictable terrain and de-masterful uncertainty. If racialized sexuality is one of my key terms, that is, I mean for it to do much more than stand in as a de rigueur flashpoint. This brings me to the queer work that I mean for the term “de-mastery” to perform in my subtitle. As tiny as my mere two-letter prefix may seem, I cannot begin to do justice to what its expansiveness has meant for me as a
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reader, a thinker, a writer, and a teacher. And I actually do not want to do justice to it, when to “do justice” to de-mastery—to master de-mastery—would be to discipline, to tame, to reduce, to render intelligible a structure of feeling whose force is precisely in its unintelligibility, what Raymond Williams eloquently describes as “something not yet come,” something still “at the very edge of semantic availability” (Marxism and Literature, 130, 134). In embracing de-mastery over certainty, I want to resist what the Lacanian theorist Antonio Viego describes as a “reductive and ego amplifying narrative of Latino and Chicano subjectivity,” our desire for which shows us to be problematically in thrall with the unspoken conditions of our subjugation and shows us to have become overinvested in and insufficiently critical of ego- and social psychological explanations of human subjectivity that continue to obsess over notions of subjective unity, wholeness, adaptation, adjustment to reality, “mental health,” and that definitively place in parenthesis all of the poststructuralist lessons we have learned about language and the effects of language as structure on the speaking subject. (Dead Subjects, 141)
My investment in “de-mastery” extends to the ethnic/racial signifier that I use in the book’s title and, where appropriate, within the book itself. My queer performative “Chican@” signals a conscientious departure from certainty, mastery, and wholeness, while still announcing a politicized collectivity.1 Certainly when people handwrite or keystroke the symbol for “at” as the final character in Chican@, they are expressing a certain fatigue with the clunky post-1980s gender inclusive formulations: “Chicana or Chicano,” “Chicana and Chicano,” or “Chicana/o.”2 But I want my “Chican@” to be more capacious than shorthand. I mean for it to catch our attention with its blend of letters from the alphabet on the one hand and a curly symbol on the other hand, a rasquachismo that at first sight looks perhaps like a typo and seems unpronounceable. While some people pronounce “Chican@” as “Chicana, Chicano” or “Chicana/o,” I prefer the diphthong ao. The ethnic signifiers “Chicana,” “Chicano,” and “Chicana/o” when they are used as nouns and not adjectives announce a politicized identity embraced by a man or a woman of Mexican descent who lives in the United States and who wants to forge a connection to a collective identity politics. I like the way the nonalphabetic symbol for “at” disrupts our desire for intelligibility, our desire for a quick and certain visual register of a gendered body the split
INTRODUCTION
second we see or hear the term. “Chican@” flies under or over the radar of what Monique Wittig calls “the mark of gender” (The Straight Mind). Or better yet, it does something less sneaky but more impactful: it stays within purview but refuses the norms of legibility and the burdens of visibility, thereby effecting what Angie Chabram-Dernersesian would describe as la ruptura (“‘Chicana! Rican? No, Chicana Riqueña!’” 280) or what José Esteban Muñoz might call a “disidentification” (Disidentifications). Although this study is woven from a queer, poststructuralist-oriented suspicion of mastery, it does not indiscriminately embrace “hybridity” and “intersectionality.”3 When Audre Lorde wrote her groundbreaking piece “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in 1979, she could still say as she did that feminists “have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change” (99). I would now update that assessment in order to account for the multicultural display of difference, on the one hand, and the postmodern celebration of difference, on the other.4 Referring to the latter as “the difference revolution,” Rey Chow insightfully captures its insidiousness: What is significant in this modulation is that culture itself has taken on an emancipatory function as opposed to various forms of oppression. In terms of topography, then, what is given (that is, what is oppressive) tends to be imagined in terms of the stagnant, immobile, firmly-in-place, and unchanging, whereas the opposite tends to be viewed (by hybridity theorists) as inherently liberating. (The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 131)
The standpoint epistemology within Chow’s topography depends on assuming a one-to-one correspondence between, for instance, quotidian life in the borderlands and transgressive subjectivity. It is often flagged by terms marking impure complexity: heterogeneity, fluidity, hybridity, contradiction, mobility, ambiguity, and especially intersectionality. And if the bodies of racialized subjects are often referenced through these terms, the minds of racialized subjects often feature as uniquely primed for revolutionary subjectivity, a new form of standpoint epistemology.5 What the key terms used to mark racialized difference as inherently transgressive have in common is their indelible dependence on what can only be a fantasy of a normative center inhabited by homogenous, static, racially pure, stagnant, uninteresting, and simple sovereign subjects. The celebration of hybridity not only helps reify the fantasy of a sovereign subject but also threatens to transmute marginality
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itself into a form of authenticity, only here rendered by the notion of “pure impurities,” to borrow a term from the independent scholar Dana Maya.6 It seems to me that one way to negotiate the challenges I have outlined thus far is to use the best of the tools that queer theory has to offer. My qualification in that sentence (“the best of the tools”) is meant to acknowledge that queer theory itself presents its own set of challenges. For queer theory has been slow to learn from the important work of scholars like José Quiroga, Juana María Rodríguez, José Esteban Muñoz, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano— to name a few of the people who have staged imaginative interventions over the past dozen or so years against the heteronormativity of Latin@ studies and the racialized blind spots of queer theory. Too often queer theory continues to render race, ethnicity, and nation as niches within a broader, and unremarked, white erotics. In Chapter 1 I call this rendering the “see-for-instance” endnote. Queer theorists’ engagement with queers of color, or with racial formation more broadly, is still too often contained in the tiny-font endnotes at the backs of books. These usually refer back to acknowledgments of “intersectionality” that often go something like this: “thanks to women of color we now know that we have to address the intersectionality of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.”7 Reading Like a Queer In her noted introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick traces the historical twists and turns that have led to what she calls an endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition in modern Western culture. The late-nineteenth-century crystallization of a homo/heterosexual binary, she argues, generated an ontological “world-mapping” of sexual identity through which every given person, just as he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was now considered necessarily assignable as well to a homoor a hetero-sexuality, a binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence. It was this new development that left no space in the culture exempt from the potent incoherences [sic] of homo/heterosexual definition. (2)
As a master term—no less determining and contradictory than the master terms of sex, class, and race—the homo/heterosexual definition has “primary
INTRODUCTION
importance for all modern Western identity and social organization (and not merely for homosexual identity and culture)” and is “so situated as to enable most inextricably and at the same time most differentially the filaments of other important definitional nexuses” (11). The force of Sedgwick’s framework lies in its expansive critical reach that at once underlines the wide-ranging importance of antihomophobic sexuality studies and cogently suggests that—to quote the singular declaration that perhaps has been cited more than any of Sedgwick’s—“an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition” (1; emphasis added).8 This insistence on the indelible working of the homo/heterosexual definition within seemingly remote structures of meaning, such as the binary oppositions of knowledge/ignorance or domestic/foreign, has become a cornerstone of queer theory, supporting a wide body of deconstructive work that queers nominally un(homo)sexual concepts from resolutely antinormative positions (Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 11). That work reveals the insidious pervasiveness—but also the exploitable fragility and illogic—of heteronormativity and the overdetermined elaboration of sexual discourse. As Elizabeth Freeman eloquently describes it, “To ‘queer’ something is at once to make its most pleasurable aspects gorgeously excessive, even [or, we might press, especially] to the point of causing its institutional work to fail, and to operate it against its most oppressive political results” (The Wedding Complex, xv). Here we might think of not only the spectacle of American wedding nuptials brilliantly queered by Freeman but the arias of Maria Callas (Wayne Koestenbaum), the novels of Henry James as well as the textures of physical objects (Sedgwick), and the legacy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Alicia Gaspar de Alba), to name a few.9 The certainty with which Sedgwick attributes the power of world-making to homo/heterosexual definition, however, such that “it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know,” belies the sheer difficulty of grasping the consequences and implications of the discursive impact and epistemological porosity of sexuality (Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 3). As Sedgwick herself notes, we cannot know in advance how the contradictions inherent in this definition might play themselves out in any individual moment or in any individual literary or social text, or even whether they can
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best be understood through a universalizing view or a minoritizing view.10 Moreover, Sedgwick’s framework can be easily misinterpreted as one more injunction to approach categories such as sexuality, race, and class through a lens of intersectionality, which can end up stabilizing (not to mention rendering equivalent) the discursive and material concepts brought into a single view, making it difficult not only to question their apparentness in the first place but to apprehend the dynamic transformations of power relations and epistemologies of which Sedgwick speaks. I want to think at once harder and more flexibly about Chican@ subjectivity than is possible when we use the shorthand “intersectionality” approach. As I discuss in Chapter 1, “intersectionality” is perhaps too spatially rigid and exacting a metaphor to employ when considering the ever dynamic and unending processes of subject formation. It seems to me that race, sexuality, and gender are much too complex, unsettled, porous (and I do mean to be wordy here), mutually constitutive, unpredictable, incommensurable, and dynamic, certainly too spatially and temporally contingent, ever (even if only for an instant) to travel independently of one another. But they would have to do so in order to be conceived of as intersecting, as eventually meeting one another here and there, crossing, colliding, passing, yielding, or merging. I do not want to offer a better metaphor as an answer to this problem. What I want to suggest is that we be wordy and contingent, that we not look for a shorthand for naming or understanding or footnoting the confounding manifold ways that our bodies, our work, our desires are relentlessly interpellated by unequivalent social processes. How/why/where does racialized sexuality lend itself to narratives of social relations in the United States; methods of reading, writing, and seeing; modes of being, belonging, and excluding; representations of desiring, loving, and fucking; and forms of contestation and resistance? The particular overdetermined colonial relations that continue to inscribe contemporary Chican@ subjectivity and the geopolitics of the U.S. borderlands make racialized sexuality an especially important category of analysis for us to consider. One of the first scholars to ask for an analysis attuned to the erotics of this history was the Chicana feminist historian and critical theorist Emma M. Pérez. For Pérez, what has been missing from Chicano Studies—Chicano historicism especially—is a historically grounded, psychoanalytic reading of racialized desire (akin to Frantz Fanon’s), through which we can come to a better understanding of the choices and consequences involved with contemporary cross-racial desire.
INTRODUCTION
In her 1991 essay “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes from a Chicana Survivor,” Pérez emplots onto a “conquest triangle” the white Oedipal/colonizer father, la india (the Indian woman), and the castrated mestizo/Chicano son.11 Arguing that this triangulation “dictates the sexual politics of miscegenation in the twentieth century” (168–169), Pérez claims that the Chicano male’s “anxiety is not reduced to the fear of losing it, but also the fear that his will never match the supreme power of the white man’s” (168). For Pérez, miscegenation brings a measure of racial privilege to both Chicanos and Chicanas (as well as their children, of course), though not in the same way: Chicanos . . . practice male prerogative and marry white women to defy, and collaborate with, the white father, and in having half-white children move their sons a step closer to the relations of power—the whitecolonizer father. For the Chicana who marries the white male, she embraces the white Oedipal-colonizer ambivalently, because now she has access to power theoretically, but practically she is perceived as la india once again. . . . The daughter of a white male and a Chicana has the father’s white name to carry her through racist institutions, placing her closer to power relations in society. (169)
As Antonio Viego notes in his study on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Latino Studies, Pérez must be credited for being one of the only Chican@ Studies scholars of subjectivity to employ psychoanalytic theory.12 Her work also represents a helpful alternative to Octavio Paz’s infamous essay-chapter of The Labyrinth of Solitude entitled “Sons of La Malinche,” itself offering a psychosocial cartography of colonial desires.13 While Paz would no doubt agree with Pérez’s arrangement of the dramatis personae on her colonial triangle, his model has been widely critiqued (including, of course, by Pérez herself) for its particular rendering of Hernán Cortés’s “mistress,” La Malinche, as la chingada (the fucked one). As I discuss in Chapter 3, the particular way that Paz describes La Malinche’s transgressions in the national romance can easily transmogrify into the stereotype of indigenous women as simultaneously passive and treacherous. While both Paz and Pérez suggest that neither desire nor love could ever stand outside of national and racial frameworks, her approach alleviates the burden of sexual transgression and broken loyalties that Chicanas have shouldered for 500 years. At about the same time as Pérez’s “Sexuality and Discourse,” the postcolonial theorist and African American Studies scholar Abdul R. JanMohamed
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offered up his groundbreaking 1992 essay on racialized sexuality. “Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright, and the Articulation of ‘Racialized Sexuality’” analyzes racialized sexuality through an interdisciplinary archive that bears witness to the specific history of violent miscegenation between African Americans and Anglo-Americans. JanMohamed places the term “racialized sexuality” in quotation marks, which suggests that this was still a fairly new concept in 1992, if not one that he was then coining. He describes “racialized sexuality” as a “field” that “can be defined at the point where the deployment of sexuality intersects with the deployment of race” (94). And “[w]ithin the confines of United States slave and Jim Crow societies, racialized sexuality exists at the point where the virtual powerlessness of certain subjects intersects with the massive prohibitive power of various states and civil apparatuses, power that, it must be emphasized, is always underwritten by the actual or potential use of massive coercive violence” (97). JanMohamed’s conceptualization of “racialized sexuality” is on the one hand quite literal in that he means to use it to track the (violent) crossing of a racial border between blacks and whites, particularly as that border was consolidated and enforced within slave and Jim Crow apparatuses. Racialized sexuality in this sense—as in the Pérez passage above—is literally miscegenation and results in racial hybridity (which is why the Susie Guillory Phipps case is so important in his essay). On the other hand, JanMohamed understands racialized sexuality as a discursive field of power, but one that is just outside Michel Foucault’s purview in The History of Sexuality. In fact, “Sexuality on/of the Racial Border” is largely an argument with Foucault, an effort to consider racialized sexuality through what Foucault calls the juridico-discursive. Where Foucault emphasizes that power is not contained and/or does not originate in the juridico-discursive, JanMohamed wants to argue that for racialized sexuality (in contradistinction to what he calls white bourgeois sexuality) the juridico-discursive (and its prohibitions) is precisely the location to consider: “in my view, the draconian nature of the slave code and Jim Crow laws and their systematic enforcement through violence justify the use of ‘juridico-discursive’ prohibitions as the ground for the construction of racialized sexuality. . . . Power is used in this context to institute a radical demarcation and denial of kinship between two groups while one of them intimately and brutally exploits the other” (100; my emphasis).14 The primary difference between bourgeois sexuality and the kind of racialized sexuality that JanMohamed tracks has to do with speech and silence, in that racialized sexuality deploys a “strategic rather than merely tactical”
INTRODUCTION
silence (103). In other words, “those who could speak did not want to and those who did want to speak were prevented from doing so” (105); “one is characterized by a will to knowledge and hence by an analytic discursivity, the other by a will to conceal and hence by an allegorical discursivity” (113– 114). According to JanMohamed’s arguments, then, Foucault’s critiques of the speaker’s benefit and the repressive hypothesis (which I discuss in Chapter 1) are largely inapplicable to racialized sexuality in the United States. While JanMohamed’s framework offers a useful history of the meaningfully dense silence surrounding miscegenation and a compelling critical engagement with Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, I do not approach racialized sexuality through a dominant-subaltern model, even if I necessarily engage the histories of Spanish and U.S. imperialism. Where JanMohamed’s work makes clear that the study of racialized sexuality has wide-ranging implications for how we understand African American subjectivity, representation, power, and resistance, we in Chican@ and Latin@ Studies have been much less expansive in our reach when it comes to racialized sexuality. We tend to take note of racialized sexuality primarily when it is explicitly pronounced, if not announced, in representations by Chicana feminist writers and cultural workers, especially those who proudly violate sexual norms, such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. For instance, the scholar most invested and prolific in developing a vocabulary with which to explore Chicana racialized sexuality, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, centers her discussions on texts that explicitly foreground an antiheteronormative ethos, particularly those by Moraga.15 Such acknowledgment of Chicana sex-positive representations of culturally specific and historically laden gender and sexual frameworks has been invaluable. Reading Chican@ Like a Queer builds on that important work in order to theorize racialized sexuality as a pervasive category in Chican@ cultural production more broadly. I want to examine not just the complexity of contemporary Chicana feminist discourse but the subtle ways in which a range of Chican@ thinkers have been invested in asking complex questions about the relationship between collective circumstances and individual desire, between material realities and interiority, and particularly about why we love the way we do. That is, rather than approach the insights of Chicana feminists as contemporary anomalies, this book takes those insights from a “minoritarian” to a “majoritarian” position, integrating them fully and demonstrating their relevance to a broader history of Chican@ cultural production.16 As such, my approach to racialized sexuality foregoes a priori assumptions based on the
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putative politics and identities of the individual authors, the focus of their work, or the category of racialized sexuality itself. Although my own feminist and queer political passions underwrite my readings and emphasize those representations that are most enabling of what Michael Warner calls “a queer world” (“Introduction,” xvi), my archive of primary literature necessarily includes texts that are not authored by feminists, as well as some that do not even explicitly engage sexuality. In the tradition of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, my queries take me to unlikely territory: Américo Paredes, considered the “founding father” of Chicana/o narrative for his revisionist ethnographies and fictional accounts of tejano/Anglo-Texan social relations and armed conflict in the first half of the twentieth century; and, at the other extreme, Richard Rodriguez, considered “the Mexican American that Chicanos love to hate” for his adamant criticisms of bilingual education and affirmative action.17 Likewise, this project also leads me to authors who might seem obvious: Cherríe Moraga and Ana Castillo. Their work makes it clear that contemporary Chicana subjectivity continues to be circumscribed by the heteronormative virgen/chingada (virgin/whore) sexual framework set in motion by the hegemonic deployment of miscegenation and religious conversion during the conquest of Mexico in the sixteenth century. The cogent insistence on racialized sexuality by Moraga and Castillo—as well as by the many Chicana feminist creative writers that I take up alongside them, such as Gloria Anzaldúa—was instrumental to the preliminary convictions that led to this study. However, the abundant engagement with and endorsement of Chicana feminist thought and its insights about sexuality from a number of influential literary and cultural studies scholars—especially Norma Alarcón, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, and Ramón Saldívar, whose important work I draw from throughout the book—have made it possible at last to deepen our critical engagement with that literature. Reading Chican@ Like a Queer dislodges Chicana feminist literature from its role as incipient evidence of “intersectionality” and from its register of transparent experience in order to perform a queer discursive analysis of racialized sexuality as an aperture (not an endpoint) onto the sometimes queer, at other times normative (most often, both) representations of race, desire, and intercultural and intracultural social relations. I want to emphasize as political intervention the majoritarian aspects of this project, particularly in light of a virulent sexist and homophobic backlash against Chicana feminism that has taken a new form over the past dozen
INTRODUCTION
years. I am thinking especially about two reactionary strains: the Nation of Aztlán (an organization based in Southern California), which issues calls for boycotts of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies annual meetings because of the “sick” lesbian presence found there; and the more troublesome because more sanctioned rearguard polemic by the Chicano historian Ignacio M. García. In his 1996 essay “Juncture in the Road: Chicano Studies since ‘El Plan de Santa Bárbara,’” García vehemently argues that Chicano Studies has strayed too far from its original activist blueprints largely because of Chicana feminist (particularly lesbian) theorists’ undue influence. As has been well documented, Chican@ activists agitated for the institutionalization of Chicano Studies in the late 1960s as a means of bridging the gap between the university and the “community,” making higher education meaningful for Chican@s, and holding the university accountable for supporting research on the socioeconomic factors involved in the continuing disenfranchisement of Mexican American communities. According to García, a confluence of factors has co-opted Chicano Studies: professional self-interest among Chicano scholars, for whom tenure takes higher priority than radical pedagogy; the debilitating rollbacks of the Reagan-Bush era; the wane in Chicano student activism; and the emergence of a new generation of scholars who have neither direct experience with el movimiento chicano nor adequate training in Chicano historiography. But the major threat to Chicano Studies, he argues, is Chicana feminism, particularly those scholars who take a “lesbian-feminist” approach in their scholarship. In García’s estimation, such scholarship may be stylish in the academy but completely removed from the problems facing the Chicano community and is certainly not the kind of work that was imagined by those activists who laid the groundwork for Chicano Studies: “unlike the politics of the Chicano Movement,” the work of “adversarial” feminists is “not based on what the predominantly working-class community thinks” (190). He positions lesbian feminist scholars—a group of nameless women he dubs “gender nationalists”—as an external threat to the integrity of Chicano Studies at a time when the field is particularly vulnerable: they compete with “committed” Chicano scholars for already-limited resources; they “find the lurking ‘macho’ in every Chicano scholarly work” (190); they “have even gone as far as promoting the idea that homosexuality is an integral part of Chicano culture” (190). While García’s bald expression of antipathy toward feminist thought might make his polemic seem extreme, I actually do not see it as an isolated case. And as the neoliberal corporatization of higher education continues to
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shrink the already slim resources allocated to ethnic studies units, it becomes more imperative that progressive thinkers challenge charges of feminist and queer divisiveness leveraged by those who purport to care most about social change. At the same time, while the sentiments expressed in García’s essay participate in a long history of scapegoating lesbians and feminists for the limitations of Chicano identitarian politics, I would argue that his ideas represent a newer, more insidious, blame narrative. What is remarkable about García’s polemic is his positioning of Chicana feminists as outside threats to the field, his positioning of their scholarship as completely irrelevant to the needs of Chicanos. For García, as for the Nation of Aztlán, racialized sexuality is not only a minoritarian affair but a completely misguided one. Of course, what authorizes his insider/outsider framework is his sense that Chicana feminist thought is radically irreconcilable with an earlier, narrowly oppositional Chicano scholarship designed to “empower Chicanos and Chicanas in their struggle to liberate their community from poverty, political powerlessness, and a collective identity crisis” (201). García’s understanding of Chicano politics is shaped by the same sense of oppositionality that gave rise to the criteria that have long been utilized to measure the worth and authenticity of Chican@ literature. As Juan BruceNovoa has argued, these preset criteria include a marked Chicano/Anglo binary; a strong sense of familia with machismo at the helm; a fierce antiassimilationist politics; a pronounced working-class ethos; and a rural setting (“Canonical and Non-Canonical Literature”).18 The persistence of these criteria compels a trajectory in which Chicana feminist and lesbian literature—with all of its explicit attention to sexuality—would seem to represent, at best, a new and discrete approach to subjectivity and, at worst, abject deviance. One way in which I resist that narrative is by presenting the writers discussed in this study in nonchronological order. Margins are centered, endings foregrounded. That is, rather than beginning the study with my analysis of Paredes’s work, I begin immediately with a queer consideration of what Moraga can teach us about how racialized sexuality affects and is affected by social etiquette, embodiment, shame, confession, and identity politics. Rather than point to Moraga’s work as mere evidence of queer marginality, I want to understand why/how/where the contradictions and even self-loathing that pepper her texts confound the analytic boundaries between race and sexuality. Chapter 2, “Fixing Up the House of Race with Richard Rodriguez,” offers a fresh consideration of Rodriguez’s infamously biting critiques of racial minority status. My analysis reaches beyond the explicit reasoning deployed in
INTRODUCTION
his argument that claims to a minority status are both opportunistic, because they afford a number of false privileges (most notably, affirmative action), and destructive, because they self-fulfill victimization (most notably, by “protecting” racial subjects from the necessary pain requisite to becoming public citizens). A number of scholars have already illuminated the fallacies lacing that reasoning; this chapter shows that Rodriguez’s reasoning depends on his equally vexed conception of sexuality. His portrayal of sexuality as profoundly private and individuated is the very narrative, I contend, undergirding (and thus rendering problematic) his critique of racial identity as a public and collective affair. This argument is foregrounded in the chapter in order to serve as a fulcrum for several additional lines of inquiry into Rodriguez’s stark division of public and private worlds. Chapter 3, “Queering the Conquest with Ana Castillo,” considers the tightly bound connection between Castillo’s elaboration of Chicana/mestiza sexual agency and her exploration of transcultural forms of belonging and desire. Because Castillo’s novels are set not in the Texas or California cities that are a mainstay of Chican@ literature but in the racially and nationally diverse metropoles of Chicago and New York, they at once bypass altogether the brown/white color line of explicit concern to the authors discussed in the previous chapters and unsettle the traditional conception of Aztlán (the Chican@ homeland, which although mythical is located so decidedly in the Southwest). They also bring transnationalism home, so to speak, by staging atypical border crossings that are not dependent on international travel. Importantly, however, the transnational milieus that Castillo constructs for her working-class characters are far from multicultural utopias in which travel is unconstrained and love is borderless. Rather, the cross-cultural romantic and sexual relationships—the focus of her novels—are inscribed by a double narrative of urban malaise and cultural displacement. Against her bleak portrait of failed intimacies and urban social problems, she maintains the prospect of conversion by turning to two non-Western cultural systems: mestizaje and “Gypsy” culture. Chapter 4, “Américo Paredes and the De-Mastery of Desire,” performs the first queer reading of Paredes’s works. While this reading shares with Chican@ literary and cultural studies scholars a keen investment in understanding the tejano versus Anglo-Texan conflict that drove Paredes’s lifework, it interrupts the tautological loop of redeploying its oppositional terms to read its oppositional terms. I unglue the conflation of Paredes and his work with oppositional thinking, hypermasculinity, and heroism through a reconsideration of
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the book that anchored those very traits as the field’s foundation and secured his foundational place in the field, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958). The magnitude of that work and the masculine heroism it depicts have eclipsed, I argue, Paredes’s own fiction and its subtle critiques of normative masculinity. This chapter’s analyses of Paredes’s novel George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (published in 1990, but written in the 1930s) and short story “Over the Waves Is Out” (1953) suggest that he was challenging, if not queering, tejano patriarchal and heteronormative systems ingrained in post-1915 South Texas life some fifty years before the publication of Moraga’s Loving in the War Years. Why does Paredes render racialized sexual desire such a compelling measure of both loyalty and assimilation, so that it is the mechanism through which he tells us who the protagonists are becoming? How are sexual desires constrained by race and shaped by shame and humiliation? Taking racialized sexuality from a minoritarian to a majoritarian position by arguing for its relevance to all Chican@ representations facilitates one of my central aims: rendering sexuality and, along with it, Chicana feminist insights about sexuality unexceptional. That is, I want to refuse the field’s traditional periodization, which marks the appearance of explicitly sexual work in the early 1980s as a distinctly new chapter in Chican@ literary history— whether that shift is celebrated (Ramón Saldívar), denigrated (Ignacio García), or simply taken to signify the end of Chicano Studies (Randy A. Rodríguez). While this counterintuitive move (coming, as it does, from a feminist scholar) might seem to diminish the innovation of Chicana feminism, especially where I illustrate that Paredes’s 1930s writings actually stage a prescient sex-positive and feminist ethos, it is a move that actively works against the containment of feminist insights. Indeed, this analysis expands the very definition of Chican@ cultural production as primarily a set of representations underwritten by oppositional consciousness and cultural maintenance amid the ongoing race- and class-based disenfranchisement of peoples of Mexican descent.
Making Familia from Racialized Sexuality Cherríe Moraga’s Memoirs, Manifestos, and Motherhood
Every person who comes to a queer selfunderstanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is connected with gender, the family, notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body.—MICHAEL WARNER (“Introduction,” in Fear of a Queer Planet)
What I never quite understood until this writing is that to be without a sex—to be bodiless—as I sought to be to escape the burgeoning sexuality of my adolescence, my confused early days of active heterosexuality, and later my panicked lesbianism, means also to be without a race. I never attributed my removal from physicality to have anything to do with race, only sex, only desire for women. And yet, as I grew up sexually, it was my race, along with my sex, that was being denied me at every turn. —CHERRÍE MORAGA (Loving in the War Years)
N HER SHORT PROSE PIECE entitled “The Slow Dance,” Cherríe Moraga comes as close as she has ever come to offering a “coming-out” story. The piece is a carefully crafted tribute to butch/femme desire that centers on Moraga remembering her enthrallment over watching two women slow-dancing together at some public place.1 Because the narrative is quite sparse—in fact, is devoid of even the most basic details about surroundings or music—it is animated only by the image of the two dancers, Elena and Susan. They move together “capably” without seeming to need verbal cues, “Susan’s arm around Elena’s neck. Elena’s body all leaning into the center of her pelvis” (“The Slow Dance,” 31). Their dance is as powerful and consuming for the reader, therefore, as it presumably was for the then-inexperienced Moraga, who, we learn, could only “fumble around” them. She too was only a spectator, and even as she remembers the dance from the temporal distance of Loving in the War Years she still does not write herself into the script in an active way.
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The significance of “The Slow Dance” does not end with Moraga’s clumsy initiation into lesbian public culture or with her fascination with butch/ femme desire. Its importance is in the way it stages these dramas of outsiderness and longing squarely within the fraught paradigm of her parents’ interracial relationship. After Elena and Susan take center stage in the first four paragraphs of the piece, Moraga brings us abruptly (but only very momentarily) to the present to tell us that “I move women around the floor, too— women I think enamored with me” (31). Rather than allowing Moraga to take the floor and describe her own dance as we think she finally might, however, the narrative immediately moves to a reflection on her Mexican American mother’s desire: “My mother’s words rising up from inside me—‘A real man, when he dances with you, you’ll know he’s a real man by how he holds you in the back’” (31). If we read the pieces in Loving in the War Years in the order in which they are presented, then by the time we read “The Slow Dance” we have become as familiar with the sexual(less) dynamic between Moraga’s parents as we have with their complicated interracial dynamic—which is to say that we have come to understand that race and sexuality are intimately intertwined in Moraga’s world.2 We know that the capable dancer (“the real man”) to whom her mother refers is not Moraga’s father. In fact, this recalls an earlier moment in the book when Moraga’s mother confesses that she knows what it is like to be touched by a real man and that “‘I don’t feel this with your father . . . ¿Entiendes?’” (11). And, just as Moraga momentarily envisions herself as her mother’s lover in “The Slow Dance,” here too she writes that “it takes every muscle in me, not to leave my chair, not to climb through the silence, not to clamber toward her, not to touch her the way I know she wants to be touched” (11). The unlikely components of “The Slow Dance”—the mother as lover, lesbian initiation as passive, the central place of race—are reflective of Moraga’s uncanny aptitude for resignifying language, bodies, epistemologies, politics, and the most obstinate identity categories, which she often puts to use in her otherwise unfeasible project of self-racialization. This chapter undertakes what might initially sound like a gratuitous project: a queer reading of a body of work that is organized precisely by non-normativity. Moraga’s work is already so undoubtedly queer that it might seem an unlikely candidate for an actively queer reading. One of this chapter’s aims, however, is to challenge the commonplace that queering makes most sense and is most productive when the object of analysis is in some way normative. On one hand, queering normative texts is an enormously useful project as it conscientiously
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illuminates the iterations, tautologies, and narrative devices that occlude the constructedness of—as well as the labor entailed in reproducing—normativity (for instance, in relation to citizenship, sexuality, racialization, or literary conventions). Moreover, queering can appropriate the most intractable foundations of normativity and transgressively infuse them with innovative queer meanings. Nevertheless, these approaches can unwittingly sideline explicitly queer texts, even—or especially—in the process of referencing them as evidence tout court of non-normativity. In fact, this chapter shows that, despite Moraga’s prominence as a queer Chicana writer, the rich complexity of her work has remained largely untapped. Moraga’s ongoing efforts—now spanning some twenty-five years— toward textualizing the dynamic and ever-messy relationship between racial formation and sexual identity yield a rich and expansive primary terrain for scholars invested in challenging monological approaches to identity. And yet, with few exceptions, the way her work has been taken up thus far in queer theory has been as evidence, which might explain why it often appears in what we might call the “see-for-instance” endnote.3 At the same time, and possibly holding this evidentiary use in check, there is a nagging sense that Moraga’s occasional objectification of race, reification of binary oppositions, refusal to critique models of authenticity, and modernist-inflected conceptions of power and resistance are misguided, if not flat-footed, in relation to the poststructuralist orientation of queer theory and to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick after Paul Ricoeur aptly calls a hermeneutics of suspicion. The risky frankness of Moraga’s works—particularly in relation to her confessions—makes them easy targets for charges of complicity or contradiction. Conversely, the sheer innovation of her work can invite mere celebration from its readers. In order to avoid either of these tendencies, this chapter uses the tools of reading “like a queer” to pause over and learn from the tensions, slippages, and gaps that are quite disruptive to what may otherwise appear to be a smooth teleological narrative of homecoming and enactment of racialized sexuality. Rather than pinpointing those occasions as authorial failures, I suggest that we use them to come to a more nuanced understanding of the illogic of race. What would it mean finally to read Moraga not as obvious, and thus flat, evidence of queer intersectionality but as a rich and contradictory set of ambiguous, even shame-prone, representations that warrants a queer reading in search of queer meaning? This chapter also aims, therefore, to offer a fresh approach to Moraga’s work. I am particularly interested in examining the diverse and often con-
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tradictory rhetorical strategies, together with the instructively acute selfreflexivity about race and sexuality, that are compelled by the unusual selfracialization processes organizing Moraga’s autobiographical collections: Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983), The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry (1993), and Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (1997).4 Unlike many accounts of difference, these have the peculiar distinction of embodying the processes through which the subject writes herself into a narrative of racialized difference, emerging as they do from a profound desire to be recognized and engaged as a racialized subject (“bi-racial,” Moraga routinely expresses anxiety over her “whiteness”). To that end, Moraga rearranges and reconfigures the epistemological and ontological tropes that we expect to find in accounts of difference, and— to put it rather schematically for the moment—identifies her sexuality as “brown”; explains that her ethnonationalist politics became available to her only through her public avowal of a lesbian identity; hinges her narratives of lesbian initiation and desire for butch competency on race; writes an urgent manifesto for a “queer Aztlán”; and elaborates a butch identity that is as resolutely maternal as it is masculine. Far more interesting and suggestive than accepting these remarkable processes at face value as if they were evidence of the structural porosity of imperialism, colonialism, and desire, an actively queer reading can lead to a consideration of where and how these processes are attenuated and where and how they denaturalize normativity. That is, rather than take Moraga’s obvious queerness for granted or uphold it as evidence of Chicana antiheteronormativity or intersectionality, I read it “like a queer,” to borrow—and broaden the reach of—a phrase from Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, who argues that normative texts often “require a more active or sympathetic reading: the reading of a queer, like a queer, or in search of queer meaning” (“Tomboy Tantrums and Queer Infatuations,” 60). This kind of reading in the context of Moraga’s work entails a number of critical departures: dislodging her work from the register of evidence; dehomogenizing it by noting the ways in which her meaning-making speech acts perform radically different functions at various moments; disrupting the teleological narratives and analyses that her work so easily invites; and— largely by refraining from the hermeneutics of suspicion—transvaluating its affective work of shame and propensity for confession. Reading like a queer can be especially challenging when approaching noncanonical texts that are self-consciously produced through decisive and politicized efforts to contest systems of oppression and challenge the fixity of
MAKING FAMILIA FROM RACIALIZED SEXUALITY
identity and that thus easily lend themselves to the intersectionality approach. If the transgressive force and pleasure of queer theory derive largely from a dexterous working of material that is not nominally (homo)sexual, then, ironically, texts that make explicit the queer instability of identity categories and the overdetermined importance of sexuality (as Moraga’s characteristically do) can seem flat in comparison, though good sources of evidence. My investment in dislocating Moraga’s work from the register of evidence is not because it is ineffective or uninteresting evidence but because the critical engagement that it inspires qua evidence undercuts the more exciting questions that we can ask about Moraga’s work and politics, including those that consider what might be seen as its limitations. My reading is also motivated by the work of Joan W. Scott, whose concerns about the use of experience as evidence, particularly in accounts of difference, point to a number of unintended foreclosures and reifications: “when experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built” (“The Evidence of Experience,” 399). The danger of the uncritical experience-as-evidence approach to difference is that it renders difference still more naturalized; rather than historicize the workings of ideological systems that have produced and marginalized accounts of difference in the first place, the exponents of such an approach pursue the unveiling of difference as the end goal. As Toni Cade Bambara wrote in her foreword to This Bridge Called My Back, “It takes more than the self-disclosure and the bold glimpse of each others’ life documents to make the grand resolve to fearlessly work toward potent meshings” (xli). Resisting the experience-as-evidence framework is particularly challenging when reading Moraga’s works, which not only are structured around the recounting of personal experiences but offer them up to substantiate the political stands that the writer takes and encourages others to take. While Moraga claims that “all this really is/can be—my story,” her biography is never meant to be so “auto” that it is not collective, and her narrative transformations are never so individual that they are not components of a manifesto (Loving, vii). Further, the complex mixture of genres and speech acts that Moraga’s writings stage places tremendous pressure on the autobiographical “I,” even as they are based in personal experience. Indeed, it is precisely the politicized orientation of her representation of personal experiences (what she calls “the poet’s permission”: Loving, iv) that can make it so difficult to dislodge her work from the register of evidence.
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In her 2000 foreword to the second edition of Loving, for instance, Moraga writes: 20
And what are these essays, these stories and poems, other than just shovel, hoe and pickaxe “digging up the dirt” in an attempt to uncover a buried Xicana/o history, both personal and political. I am ever-grateful to feminism for teaching me this, that political oppression is always experienced personally by someone. This feminist tenet, the personal is political, has provided me the poet’s permission to use my own life as evidence of what I believe to be true about us and them. Us and them: that binary that binds us in its ever-shifting shapes of body and thought. (iv)
Where the personal-is-political slogan was used by second-wave feminists to develop a collective political analysis based on a recognition that apparently personal, private experiences were really shared (hence the importance of consciousness-raising groups at that historical moment), and that these shared experiences were shaped as much by social relations as by individual familial relations, Moraga presses the slogan in a slightly different direction. The personal seems political only insofar as oppression (represented here as always launched from the “public” realm) acts on individuals (in the “private” realm) in a fairly straightforward, unidirectional way. The ensuing personal knowledge about power—the evidence produced by the personal experience of political oppression—can be circumscribed only by the “us”/“them” binary, where “us” is the oppressed and “them” is the oppressor. Racial Etiquette As a trilogy, Loving, Generation, and Wings can be seen as representing, if not enacting, a dialectical double-narrative of outsiderness and what we can call, after Lora Romero, “homecoming.”5 Thus one aspect of Moraga’s work that distinguishes it from other accounts of difference is its elaboration of what it means to be Other, not in the usual relation to dominant society but in relation to the racialized group that is the very subject of difference (itself Other in relation to dominant society). Certainly, many accounts of difference, particularly those written in the 1980s by women of color (often lesbians), call attention to the myriad ways in which exclusions are necessarily produced along the monological party lines of hegemonic feminism, nationalism, and
MAKING FAMILIA FROM RACIALIZED SEXUALITY
middle-class lesbigay rights groups, as encapsulated by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s groundbreaking work, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Those accounts place pressure on the homogenization of various movements and communities and help call into question the often claustrophobic structures and strictures of identity politics. But it is precisely their intimate personal experiences in these families, communities, and political organizations that lend force and authority to their critiques. Were it not for the certainty with which Gloria Anzaldúa could refer to Chican@s and Mexicanos as “my people,” for instance, her reversal of the charges against Chicana lesbians of being agringada (gringoized), so that “not me sold out my people but they me,” would be much less potent and logical (Borderlands, 21). As Moraga describes it in Loving, her mixed-race parentage (Mexican American mother, Anglo-American father), her light complexion, her lack of fluency in Spanish, her solidly middle-class education, and, of course, her lesbian desire have all placed her outside Chican@s’ circuits of exchange at various moments, particularly during the heyday of el movimiento, which, she tells us, she “merely watched from the sidelines” (104). Although working against her outsiderness by “trying to bulldoze my way back into a people” (Loving, 87) does not preclude her from “exposing the soft underbelly of ethnic nationalism” (Romero, “‘When Something Goes Queer,’” 122), Moraga is surprisingly uninterested in critiquing models of authenticity, even in her later works, where we could easily imagine her critically reflecting on the ways in which her felt outsiderness and the attendant shame were symptomatic of the exclusionary practices of ethnonationalism. Instead, she points again and again to the value of chicanada and displays her determination to embody its traditional principles, even as she calls attention to some of their sexist and homophobic underpinnings. Since in Moraga’s recent writings she despairs over what she sees more broadly as the gradual disappearance of those principles among Mexican Americans through cultural, linguistic, and biological assimilation (hence her title The Last Generation), her own process of racial identification assumes larger and more urgent political meaning. In this sense, her work can seem much more closely aligned with the radical positions of the masculine veteranos (early participants in el movimiento who espoused heteronormative views) of the 1960s and 1970s than with the feminist critiques launched in response to them by women of color in the 1980s. This irony is not lost on Moraga,
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who admits that “I am the worst and best of those macho Chicano nationalists. I picked a man [as sperm donor] for his brains and dark beauty. And the race continues” (Wings, 39). Were we to deploy a spatial metaphor (akin to the intersectionality approach I have described and discounted) to gauge Moraga’s dialectical narrative of outsiderness and homecoming by plotting each of the three books on a graph (with one axis for “homecoming progress” and one for the passage of time) we would have a teleological mapping, neatly and steadily rising toward a “my people” resolution, as the sperm-donor quotation suggests. For the same reasons that I have offered in describing the limits of intersectional approaches to identity categories and social processes, however, this graphing, tempting though it is, could never adequately account for the contradictions, anxieties, and especially the affective shame that underwrite and disrupt the narrative. It would get us no closer to understanding the webs of signification that structure queer racialization than, for instance, Milton Gordon’s sociotemporal formula for immigrant assimilation could ever teach us about dynamic forms of loss, belonging, and desire. Such a teleology would also, of course, privilege biology and genetics by heavily weighing the birth of Moraga’s Chicano child as “progress.” That is, one can easily read the racialized and fully embodied processes of insemination, pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, as Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano does, as “a logical outgrowth of Moraga’s fear of being ‘the last generation’ in her family” (The Wounded Heart, 143). Moraga means “the last generation” to signify the cultural and biological loss not just in her own nuclear family (as evidenced by her nieces’ and nephews’ “pale blue [eyes] in a flurry of light lashes”) but in the broader Chican@ community, “a disappearing tribe” (Generation, 9, 2). After the long, painful work of homecoming and the subsequent bewilderment of loss and loneliness that are represented and enacted in Loving and Generation—Moraga comes home to find that her family members and other Chican@s have been all the while moving in the opposite direction—the queer motherhood of Wings seems to offer a welcome remedy. Such is Yarbro-Bejarano’s reading of Wings, which she interprets as representing a “radical redefinition of motherhood in lesbian terms” and a “‘queering’ [of] the privileged categories of heterosexual female experience” (The Wounded Heart, 140, 141). Emphasizing the “irreparable alteration” created by the embodied but also discursive combination of the categories “butch,” “lesbian,” and “mother,” Yarbro-Bejarano argues that Moraga’s writing process, her textualization of these irreconcilable categories, stages “a path to the new
MAKING FAMILIA FROM RACIALIZED SEXUALITY
self” (132). For instance, “the verbal echo of authenticity when Moraga affirms that she is ‘bona fide pregnant’ . . . redresses the previous lack (of authentic motherhood, of legitimate fatherhood) and mirrors how the act of conception brings together previously warring parts of herself” (133). Referred to now as stuff of the past, the “previously warring” tensions, contradictions, and anxieties expressed in Moraga’s earlier works are, for Yarbro-Bejarano, by necessity worked through when Moraga must now make legible a life, a body, and a family that are illegible according to both heteronormative and homonormative logics of motherhood and womanhood. If Yarbro-Bejarano follows Moraga in positioning the “act of conception” as a “logical outgrowth” in making familia from scratch, Romero’s treatment of Loving in “‘When Something Goes Queer’” similarly but more critically tracks Moraga’s homecoming along a model of progression. For Romero, Loving marks a “return home after a prolonged self-exile,” a homecoming that makes it “clear that Moraga will never again stand on the sidelines when her brothers and sisters take to the streets” (122). While she acknowledges that Moraga’s reversal of the ethnic intellectual’s movement away from home and community “would seem to challenge traditional configurations of the intellectual” (123), Romero ultimately reads Loving as overdetermined by the haunting figure of the traditional intellectual, which, according to Romero, Moraga unfortunately comes to embody. As her use of the term “self-exile” rather than the more neutral “outsiderness” suggests, Romero means to underline Moraga’s agency in relation to her former distance from things Chicano and frame the chosen distance as what Moraga implies was requisite for her critical feminist assessment of Chicano ethnonationalism: “She interprets the growing estrangement from la familia Chicana that she felt as a young adult as precisely what gives her the authority to write about Chicano culture” (125). That is, the problem for Romero is that Moraga—like Richard Rodriguez (and a long line of thinkers in the literary professions, most notably Herman Melville, as well as a range of difference critics, including Donna Haraway)—“assumes that community inhibits intellectual mastery” (126). While Romero’s compelling reading shows the ease with which Loving seems to present Chican@s as an undifferentiated, unthinking mass next to which the unique, thinking, “self-exiled” individual stands out, it rests largely on a unidirectional, unicausal view of what is actually a nonlinear, even contradictory, narrative. When Romero writes that “Moraga’s dedication—as a lesbian and a feminist—to exposing the soft underbelly of ethnic nationalism led her away from both her family and the Chicano movement” (122),
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she oversimplifies the drama of outsiderness and homecoming in Moraga’s work. The question of agency in Moraga’s double narrative of outsiderness and homecoming is necessarily more vexed and spatially contingent than Romero allows. Indeed, from the vantage point of Loving, the narrative’s agentive force rests less with Moraga, even if she ultimately chooses her exile or outsiderness, than with the social codes that lead others, both intimates and strangers, to misrecognize and prejudge her by her outward appearance and ways of moving through the world. If, as I am arguing, her outsiderness is more complicated than the traditional intellectual’s largely linear move away from community, then her conceptions of that outsiderness must also be so. Indeed, although they represent one of the most confounding features of Moraga’s writings, the frequent depictions of her felt outsiderness—laced always with acute shame and punctuated with a profound desire to “darken”— provide an unusually rich perspective on the social codes that generate and are generated by racialization. Moraga’s frustration with these codes, which inscribe her as white regardless of her own desires, lies in her inability to arrest them: There is no denying that this güera-face has often secured my safe passage through the minefields of Amerikan racism. If my thoughts could color my flesh, how dark I would turn. But people can’t read your mind, they read your color, they read your womanhood, they read the women you’re with. They read your walk and talk. And then the privileges [of passing] begin to wane and the choices become more limited, more evident. (Generation, 126)
That is, Moraga’s outsiderness is circumscribed by what Michael Omi and Howard Winant describe as a system of “racial etiquette” that pervades quotidian life in the United States. Racial etiquette—whether it involves strangers, intimates, or, as it often does with Moraga, the self—not only leads us to assign people to different races but determines our expectations of people and our interactions with them: “We expect people to act out their apparent racial identities” in ways that shape “our confidence and trust in others . . . our sexual preferences and romantic images, our tastes in music, films, dance, or sports, and our very ways of talking, walking, eating, and dreaming” (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 59–60). As Moraga’s work attests, the interpretive codes of racial etiquette are difficult to challenge precisely because they depend on superficial traits:
MAKING FAMILIA FROM RACIALIZED SEXUALITY
One of the first things we notice about people when we meet them (along with their sex) is their race. We utilize race to provide clues about who a person is. This fact is made painfully obvious when we encounter someone whom we cannot conveniently racially categorize—someone who is, for example, racially “mixed” or of an ethnic/racial group we are not familiar with. Such an encounter becomes a source of discomfort and momentarily a crisis of meaning. (59)6
Moraga’s disclosures of outsiderness not only support Omi and Winant’s theory but extend it to the point of suggesting that the transitory nature of the term “etiquette” may render it misleading. Where Omi and Winant mean to refer to the beholder when they describe the crises of meaning and the discomforts produced when racial etiquette fails, Moraga illustrates that those crises can extend just as potently, if not more potently, to the misrecognized. Similarly, where Omi and Winant characterize these crises as “momentary,” Moraga, like other Chican@ writers, broadens and deepens their scope from temporary discomfort to enduring shame. In Chican@ literature, racial etiquette is often the microconduit through which the broad history of racism is represented. This narrative frequently assumes the form of a child’s socialization into (interpellation by) racial etiquette through a nexus of confusing and shame-prone experiences pertaining to his or her racial visibility in public places.7 Richard Rodriguez, for instance, notes that the cumulative effect of witnessing Anglo-Americans’ responses to his childhood body (as well as to his parents’ bodies) generated in him a deep sense of bodily shame, so that he tried in vain to lighten his skin by shaving the hair from his arms. This scene of complex witnessing is so recurrent in this literature as to be a trope that provides important insight into the insidiousness of racism and constitutes an incisive response to those conservative pundits who, in their attempts to dismantle social redress programs such as affirmative action, argue that America is a color-blind society. (In spite of himself, even Rodriguez provides moving evidence of the harmful long-term effects of everyday racial etiquette.) So too is racial etiquette multidirectional, not just because of this complex witnessing but because those who are subjected to it use it themselves. Much as Moraga laments her interpellation by it, she too practices it as she reads (and writes) others and, significantly, as she reads (and writes) herself:
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I can’t write of pink-nippled breasts how I’ve looked so harshly at my own, how I grow in the delight of their darkening how once a black-nippled Mexican lover threw up my shirt exposed my nipples and they all laughed at their pathetic rose-colored softness they all laughed and I grew dark in my anger and resolve (Generation, 118–119)
The profound bodily shame expressed in this poem (which I have quoted in its entirety) is so thick—even more so than in Rodriguez’s arm-shaving confession—that Moraga’s ability to write about it actually does seem to depend on her inability to write about her “pink-nippled breasts.” That is, as this poem opens a section in Generation about Moraga’s fixation on the brown features of several Latina and Latin American lovers, I take her first line to mean that she cannot render “pink-nippled breasts” sexually arousing. That the rest of the poem is all about her “pink-nippled breasts,” therefore, does not contradict the first line’s caveat but underlines her shame. Although Moraga knows that her outward appearance could never transparently reflect her psychic life, or vice versa (“If my thoughts could color my flesh, how dark I would turn”), she continues to conflate surface with depth in her representations of embodied race. This can be seen most clearly when she articulates her dark-skin fantasies through the figurative language of depth. In one of the many dreams recounted in Loving about this fantasy of racialization, for instance, she writes: “I am having my face made up, especially my eyes, by a very beautiful Chicana. The makeup artist changes me entirely for only five dollars. I think this is a very low price for how deep and dark she makes me look” (Loving, 87). Immediately after recounting this dream, Moraga writes: When I was growing up, I looked forward to the days when I hoped my skin would toast to match my cousins’, their skin turning pure black in the creases. I never could catch up, but my skin did turn smooth like theirs, oily brown—like my mama’s, holding depth, density, the possibility of infinite provision. Mi abuela raised the darkest cousins herself, she never wanting us the way she molded and managed them. (Loving, 87)8
MAKING FAMILIA FROM RACIALIZED SEXUALITY
As in the makeover dream, what begins as ordinary curiosity about experimenting with her outward appearance becomes overdetermined with qualities of depth, capability, and provision. Of course, although the suntan and makeover temporarily relieve Moraga’s anxiety about her light skin, their impermanence cannot sustain the dark quality of “infinite provision.” Meanwhile, the implicit contrast between Moraga’s grandmother’s biases and the unconditional love and coddling typically associated with grandmothers in both Anglo-American and Chicano popular imaginations brings into sharper relief Moraga’s shame and, with it, the difficulty of signifying Chicananess through visible signs when they are always already conflated with depth and permanence. Arresting Race Because Moraga does not—or cannot—take her Chicananess for granted but is resolutely determined to claim it, her works contain an unusual objectification of racialization. That is, unlike many ethnic or racial autobiographies in which racialization is so integral to the narrative and to the author that it can be taken for granted even as its effects may be called into question, in Moraga’s narrative race is something had or not had, such that it can actually make sense for her to claim that “as I grew up sexually, it was my race, along with my sex, that was being denied me at every turn” (Loving, 116). The idea that race can be “denied”—which is also the idea that race can be “granted,” “owed,” “earned,” or “exchanged”—is based on an unlikely conception that likens race to a commodity, alienable and possessable. This conception can be seen even more clearly in Wings, where Moraga’s description of her process for choosing a sperm donor assumes the quality of a transaction based on the desire to endow her child with race. “There is no denying,” she writes, “that I had this baby that he might be a Mexican, for him to know and learn of mexicanismo, for him to feel that fuego, that llama, that riqueza I call lo mexicano” (Wings, 91). This objectification of race and the subsequent attempts to handle it are, not incidentally, deeply resonant with the traditional conception of power as something that can be apprehended, arrested, and seized through sheer determination, force, or law, which is to say, through individual agency. Since for Moraga power, in the form of empowerment and agency, and racial identity are strongly linked, their shared features in her work are perhaps
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unremarkable. By keeping in mind, however, the shared contours of these closely related concepts, and by noting with Foucault the limitations inherent in the traditional conception of power, we come closer to understanding how and why agency becomes so contingent and tenuous in Moraga’s work. As Foucault argues in his critique of the traditional model of power in its variations in liberal and Marxist philosophies, power (and, I will add here, race) is polymorphous rather than “something that one holds on to or allows to slip away,” and individual agency in relation to power (and race) is necessarily limited when “power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective” (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 94).9 Similarly, Moraga’s particular objectification of race (like the objectification of power in the juridical model) does not actually do justice to the far more complex ways that she portrays agency operating in her texts. For all of its fierce determination, her self-racialization process belies what Neil Hertz calls “the pathos of uncertain agency,” which inadvertently but productively unsettles some of the most common assumptions about racial formation in the United States (quoted in Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 76). At times, Moraga’s double narrative of outsiderness and homecoming suggests that Chican@s have unfairly prejudged and excluded her; at other times, she confesses to exploiting her ability to pass as Anglo. Most often, however, these two explanations are much less discrete and present the predictable impasse of an aporia: “I feel at times I am trying to bulldoze my way back into a people who forced me to leave them in the first place, who taught me to take my whiteness and run with it” (Loving, 87). Here the abrupt shifting of subject-agent from the author to Chican@s and back to the author, framed by two equally competing and unending processes of identification, illustrates the slippery drama of agency when race is apprehended as something that can be denied, granted, or “taken and run with.” Complicating matters further, this particular conception of race—as a discrete thing that could be denied Moraga or granted to her child or, for that matter, rejected at will by her brother—does not preclude the more common conception of race as an inalienable part of personhood, as suggested by the earlier discussion of the conflation of surface and depth. In fact, Moraga’s ability to objectify race, to desire it fiercely, only makes her more insistent on her right to it and on its inseparability from her self: as the legal scholar Margaret Jane Radin explains, “The more something takes on the indicia of an attribute or characteristic of the self, or at least the self as the person herself would wish, the more problematic it seems to alienate it, and the stronger the
MAKING FAMILIA FROM RACIALIZED SEXUALITY
inclination toward some form of inalienability” (Contested Commodities, 60). Herein lies a central contradiction of Moraga’s work. On the one hand, race is alienable insofar as Moraga’s self-racialization depends on the idea that even if one’s formative socialization did not include the daily experiences and negotiations of being seen and treated by dominant society as racially different and, importantly, racially inferior (the long-term cumulative effects of which presumably could never be alienable), one can grasp the singular concept of race well enough at the theoretical and historical levels to incorporate it decisively into one’s personhood as an adult.10 On the other hand, race is never so alienable for Moraga—even when it is being “denied” her—that it is detachable from the terrain of biology, genetics, and collective memory. We are to know, for instance, that as much as she faults her brother for assimilating, the assimilation can only fail or be incomplete, just as we are to know, conversely, that as much as she credits her Anglo lover “Ella” for being multiculturally fluent, Ella’s capabilities are always “equivocal” when it comes to providing Moraga’s son with the Chicano home and socialization that Moraga so desperately wants him to have (Wings, 91). To the extent that Moraga essentializes race and produces a hierarchy of authenticity, she opens herself, unsurprisingly, to accusations of inauthenticity. For instance, the Chicana historian Deena J. González calls into question the relationship between Moraga’s proclaimed Chicana identity and her lived experiences by contrasting her to Emma M. Pérez, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba. For González, the “Chicana identities [of these three authors] are lodged in lo Mexicano,” largely because Pérez and Anzaldúa “hail from villages in Texas” and Gaspar de Alba “is a fronteriza who traversed with agility the U.S.-Mexico border” (“Chicana Identity Matters,” 134). Unlike them, writes González, “Moraga grew up in Los Angeles in a household with different borders, but decidedly not with sustained geographic proximity to Mexico,” and her work “patterns outward, from a dominant urban, First World existence (as she says in Loving in the War Years, a ‘passing,’ male-centric yet fatherless household/family, and importantly, an English-dominant domain)” (134–135). For González, these differing lived experiences—imbricated by specific geopolitical and cultural contexts—determine the historical and geographic breadth of the works of these writers as well as the narrative voices in which they are written: “The lesbian memoirs of Anzaldúa and Pérez—more than Moraga’s—locate their identity formulations across several centuries, Gaspar de Alba across two countries; theirs, I would argue, is in keeping with historical memory,” and therefore “their work exhibits the
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tendency to assert a ‘we,’ of family, community, or ethnicity, to speak of an historical ‘us’; far less evident is the focused ‘I,’ a tone detectable in many of Moraga’s pieces” (135). Where the three tejana writers have the (unchosen) lived experience that González appears to deem necessary for being “in keeping with historical memory,” Moraga’s identity “stems from a differently assumed identity based on something chosen—either/or white or Chicana” (“Chicana Identity Matters,” 134). Here González recognizes the contradiction of Moraga’s rendering Chicananess a choice, on the one hand, and an essential category based on biology, on the other: Moraga (1993) claimed her mother’s race, her brother claimed their (white) father’s. Chicana, to this way of thinking, is racialized as blood (genetic) and not ethnicity or identity, something less true in Anzaldúa (1987) and Pérez (1991) who both have Mexican parents and see Chicana embracing mestiza pasts, more blurring rather than less; in Gaspar de Alba’s (1989, 1993) poetry and reflections, Chicana becomes an identity assumed around linguistic borders because “English was forbidden at home and Spanish was forbidden” in her Catholic girls’ school. Moraga privileges the color/blood connection, casting her choice in the direction of Chicana, whereas Anzaldúa, Pérez, and Gaspar de Alba search for and construct an ethnicity of the borderlands, the Rio Grande, and ultimately, Mexico. (133–134)
In these examples, the three tejana writers claim Chicana identities less through biological inheritance from one of their parents and more through the daily (though historically laden) experiences of negotiating linguistic, class-based, and racist hegemony—experiences that cannot (and likely would not) be chosen. Although González’s critique seems to be concerned with Moraga’s essentialism, however, it actually rests on the claim that lived experience and geographical location are more appropriate measures of authenticity than biology. What we can learn from González’s historical and spatial critique of Moraga’s chosen self-racialization process and from Omi and Winant’s insistence on the intractable and insidious pervasiveness of racial etiquette is that, as long as Moraga’s self-racialization is staged through the essentialist terms of authenticity and racial etiquette, it can only be a failed effort, circumscribed as it is by the illogic of racism.
MAKING FAMILIA FROM RACIALIZED SEXUALITY
Going Brown Yet this is only part of the story. For if Moraga’s physical body can never “catch up” to her perception of authentic Chicana embodiment, and if she is largely uninterested in challenging models of authenticity, she deploys a performative rhetorical strategy to imagine and enact an altogether different kind of body—not one simply darkened by the sun or by cosmetics but radically reconfigured through discursive resignification. To be sure, her constative utterances continue to describe the facts of her felt outsiderness; but all the while, her queer performative speech relentlessly picks up where racial etiquette necessarily fails her: “I am a white girl gone brown to the blood color of my mother speaking to her through the unnamed part of the mouth the wide-arched muzzle of brown women.” This unpunctuated and italicized line opens the poem “For the Color of My Mother” and is repeated in slightly different form twice more throughout the poem, each time set off from the rest of the text by italics: “I am a white girl gone brown to the blood color of my mother speaking for her” (Loving, 52, 53). In no way can these peculiar utterances be read as simple, matterof-fact declarations. Instead, and in contrast to the speech acts constituting the attenuated dark-skin fantasies, these utterances frame and enact “going brown” as an ongoing discursive process performed at a number of levels, not the least of which is the writing or illocution itself, as the utterances perform the very action they describe. That is, Moraga not only describes a certain kind of speaking to and for her mother (here rendered symbolic of Chicana and Mexicana women) that enables her to “go brown” but uses this kind of speech—indeed, repeats it again and again—to speak/write to us, her readers. As J. L. Austin explains, “The uttering of the words [that make up a performative statement] is, indeed, usually a, or even the, leading incident in the performance of the act (of betting or whatnot), the performance of which is also the object of the utterance.” He goes on, however, to acknowledge that the utterance itself is “far from being usually, even if it is ever, the sole thing necessary if the act is to be deemed to have been performed” (How to Do Things with Words, 8). Even in what Sedgwick calls “explicit performatives” (e.g., “I do take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife”), for the utterance to perform what it also describes, “it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be in some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is very commonly necessary that either the speaker himself or other persons should also perform certain other actions, whether ‘physical’ or ‘mental’ ac-
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tions or even acts of uttering further words” (How to Do Things with Words, 8).11 The work that wedding vows perform depends on the presence of other parties to bear witness to the vows, as well as on the recognized authority of the speakers; Moraga’s utterance (which ends with “speaking to”) likewise emphasizes that she is able to “go brown” only by having an interlocutor to hear and accept being “spoken to” and, further, by having a readership that is able to witness and comprehend her description of going brown. Of course, Moraga’s queer pronouncement of going brown is a long way from solemn and sanctified wedding vows. Her performative is meaningful and powerful not because it is easily recognizable to those who hear or read it but precisely because it depends on a reconfiguration of the body and the capabilities of its parts—namely, rendering the vagina and mouth indistinguishable through the salient metaphor of the “wide-arched muzzle.” The work required of her interlocutors involves more than bearing witness; reading or hearing Moraga’s imaginative self-representations requires just the productive suspension of identitarian logics that can provide the apertures for illuminating what Foucault calls “the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure,” that is, a queer reading (The History of Sexuality, 11). Like écriture féminine (gendered women’s writing), this mouthpiece generates a feminine, fluid, and sensuous speech/writing that does not (could not) abide by the unitary phallogocentric logic of lack, or by the truncated language of intersection. When the brown vagina is the mode and means of all communication (not just the sexual), sexuality does not here and there meet up with or travel alongside what are considered other categories but is fully constitutive of those processes. Racialized sexuality is not a frozen commodity but queerly flexible. I hasten to add, however, that it is not so flexible as to be free floating. Still grounded in Chicano/Mexicano cultural registers, it allows for cultural specificity in a way that écriture féminine (in which all women are inherently different from all men for the same universal embodied reasons) does not. The apt metaphor “wide-arched muzzle” not only sexualizes the mouthpiece from the beginning (as “muzzle” is popularly used as slang for vagina) but situates it as double-edged: “muzzle” evokes not only an uninhibited mouth (the muzzle of an animal) but a restrained mouth (a human-made muzzle used to prevent wild biting or unauthorized speaking). Magnifying and culturally contextualizing the latter implication of repression, Moraga’s description of the muzzle as “wide-arched” recalls not just the seductive curves of the female body but the symbolic architecture of the Mexican Catholic church, the institution that, according to José E. Limón, continues to organize life in Greater Mexico primarily through the repression of sexuality.12
MAKING FAMILIA FROM RACIALIZED SEXUALITY
While speaking/writing against this prohibitive force automatically brings the repressive hypothesis into play, Moraga queerly manages not to reify it. Thus far I have framed my readings of Moraga’s dialectical narrative of outsiderness and homecoming through my efforts to avoid either taking that narrative as evidence or teleologically mapping it. But my readings also depend on a reconception of confession and shame. What is important to consider is not the evidentiary content of Moraga’s confessions but their sheer preponderance and the cumulative sense of shame that adheres therein. Fessing Up As I have been suggesting throughout, Moraga’s style of writing and particular take on the personal-is-political tenet place a high premium on the public elaboration of private feelings of anxiety, guilt, and fear. Noting her writerly investment in fear as a conduit for both individual and political transformation, Moraga confesses: I’m scared all the time and when I am not scared, there is no chance for change. In me. That’s how I teach writing. “Go toward the fear,” I tell my students. “Feel its pulse. Let it speak to you.” Bravest in my writing. But that’s not the same as action, only that writing can sometimes force action in yourself and others. Sometimes. Sometimes you read or write works you got to live up to. Never know what it’s going to dig up. Dig up the dirt of memory, the dirt of land. Make you want some for us. Make you fight to have it. (Loving, 185)
In itself, the lesson that Moraga teaches her writing students is unremarkable. The notion that voicing one’s fear can be therapeutic has been a mainstay of psychoanalysis and self-help programs. And, in literary studies, many consider one mark of a good writer to be the ability to write honestly from his or her own truth as a human being, the implication being that this form of creativity will generate something of universal value to which others can relate; the particularities of a writer’s stories are less important than the emotional truths through which they are elaborated (such is the motivation of much of Richard Rodriguez’s writings, as shown in Chapter 2). But Moraga’s lesson to her students is no self-help healing regimen; nor is it a call to put forth universal truths about the shared pain of being human. Rather, as the double-play on “dirt” in this passage reminds us, Moraga’s personal revelation and ethnonationalist commitments are strongly intertwined. Dirt here
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works both figuratively as dirty laundry and literally as land; the more affective and visceral the experience or desire recounted, the more meaningful and tangible the political result. If Moraga builds her case for queer ethnonationalist politics less through didacticism and more through an elaboration of the ways in which her personal experiences and desires have been relentlessly circumscribed by racial etiquette, sexism, and homophobia, then her writing appears to be everywhere about fessing up. Family romances are messy, desires vexed, and nostalgia conflicted. To name a few of her more provocative moments of selfdisclosure, Moraga eroticizes her relationship with her mother through an (equally surprising) queering of her father; acknowledges in the barest terms that DNA and “blood quantum” are central to her “queer” family making; expresses misgivings about the pleasurable sex that can emerge from translating colonialist histories into “private” fantasies of power and submission; expresses the occasional longing to be topped by a butch lover; and admits the difficulties of cross-racial relationships not just for the obvious ChicanaAnglo configuration but also for the Chicana–African American one.13 The stakes of Moraga’s self-disclosures seem particularly high when considering the formidable repression they work against, as suggested by the overdetermined subtitle of her first experimental autobiography (lo que nunca pasó por sus labios),14 as well as the double-edged implications of the “widearched muzzle.” More than any other Chican@ writer, therefore, Moraga would seem to embody Foucault’s hypothetical subject who dares—apparently against all repressive odds—not only to transgress sexual normalcy but to make her transgressions known: If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberated transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom. This explains the solemnity with which one speaks of sex nowadays. . . . we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we are making. Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression. . . . Tomorrow sex will be good again. (The History of Sexuality, 6–7)
MAKING FAMILIA FROM RACIALIZED SEXUALITY
Of course, Foucault means to call this “speaker’s benefit” into question, to expose it as a ruse that, far from liberating the speaking subject, only disciplines that subject further by placing her squarely within the insidious economy of the repressive hypothesis. In fact, taken as an axiom in queer theory, Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis may be an additional reason why so much of the work generated under that rubric entails queering things unqueer. The more subtle or unintentional queer speech acts and cultural productions can seem, ironically, far more complex and subversive than those that explicitly (and thus perhaps naively) see themselves as speaking out against repression. Moraga’s works, which stage this latter kind of performance again and again, can seem nothing if not complicit, giving in to an incitement to sexual speech that—given her status as a Chicana feminist lesbian spokesperson— would also be the inherited problem of the range of scholars, readers, students, and activists who identify with her work, using it as a set of tools for speaking back to power. For, as Yarbro-Bejarano notes, “In writing about her most intimate experiences, Moraga has created a public voice for Chicana lesbian identity politics, making demands for entitlement as ‘citizens’ in multiple social arenas of historical exclusion and marginalization: U.S. mainstream society, Chicano nationalism, white middle-class feminism, and the gay/lesbian movement” (The Wounded Heart, 128). I want to suggest, however, that, although they would seem to mirror each other perfectly, Moraga’s confessions are not of the same order as those held suspect by Foucault, not least of all because of their differing social contexts. In the context of Greater Mexico, which (as I mentioned earlier by way of Limón) is largely still influenced by the Mexican Catholic church and in which there is not the same proliferation of sexual discourse as Foucault identifies in what he broadly calls “the Western world,” Moraga’s speech is still the exception, not the rule.15 But even aside from these differing sociohistorical contexts, or perhaps because of them, Moraga’s frank elaborations of sexual transgression—the speech emanating from the “wide-arched muzzle”—surprisingly echo Foucault’s larger critique of the repressive hypothesis, positioning as they do traditional Mexican and Chicano/Mexicano heteronormative institutions—from the Catholic church to Aztlán—as the generative force of her sexual desires, even as they are simultaneously prohibitive. The prelude to what is perhaps her most famous essay, “A Long Line of Vendidas,” makes this eloquently clear:
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During the long difficult night that sent my lover and I to separate beds, I dreamed of church and chocha. I put it this way because that is how it came to me. The suffering and the thick musty mysticism of the catholic church fused with the sensation of entering the vagina—like that of a colored woman’s—dark, rica, full-bodied. The heavy sensation of complexity. A journey I must unravel, work out for myself. I long to enter you like a temple. (Loving, 82)16
Here, as elsewhere, the church neither prohibits Moraga’s lesbian desire nor solicits its confession. Instead, church and lesbian desire are “fused.” Finally, in addition to the differing cultural contexts and the emphasis on interpellation rather than repression, Moraga’s confessions are actually shrouded in shame more than in solemn, deliberated transgression. Any number of the passages quoted from Moraga’s work in the present chapter attest to the importance of shame to her project, whether in relation to her “pink-nippled breasts” or to her confession of being “the worst and best of those macho Chicano nationalists.” Significantly, this propensity for confessing and for the shame left in its wake does not, as we might expect, lead to a weakening of the narrative or to the idea that she is debilitated by angst. Rather than portray shame as dysfunctional—as something that must be overcome or healed—Moraga suggests that it can be recuperated and, in fact, like the performative speech of the “wide-arched muzzle,” can be empowering. In this sense, Moraga’s works provide a rich source of queer material for imagining, with Ann Cvetkovich, how “a queer healing practice would turn negative affect or trauma on its head, but by embracing rather than refusing it. . . . such a healing practice would challenge the repressive hypothesis so central to self-help and therapeutic discourses” (An Archive of Feelings, 88–89). Sharing Cvetkovich’s commitment to rethinking the affective work that shame can productively perform, Sedgwick notes that shame “is now often considered the affect that most defines the space wherein a sense of self will develop (‘Shame is to self psychology what anxiety is to ego psychology— the keystone affect.’ . . .) Which I take to mean, not at all that it is the place where identity is most securely attached to essences, but rather that it is the place where the question of identity arises most originarily and most relationally” (Touching Feeling, 37). In the same way that Cvetkovich and Sedgwick emphasize the nonessentialist possibilities of recuperating shame to reorient studies and narratives of trauma and identity formation, and to approach shame as “a strategy for the production of meaning and being” (Touching Feel-
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ing, 61), Moraga suggests that the numerous routes she takes in her enactment of the dialectical narrative of outsiderness and homecoming can best be told through the most threatening moments of disavowal (self-disavowal as well as the disavowal of others). Conclusion This chapter began with an unusual question: what would it mean to read Moraga’s work not as obvious evidence of intersectionality or antiheteronormativity but as a rich, sometimes confounding terrain comprising contradictory modes of self-racialization? Having worked on this question for a number of years from different angles, I can finally think of no better way of carrying through such a reading than with the critical tools and insights of queer theory. I especially want to emphasize that point for two overlapping reasons: first, as this chapter’s focus is largely on race, I hope that it exemplifies the broad usefulness of queer theory; second, I hope that this chapter can challenge in however small a way a certain loss of optimism that is circulating both as a fear that queer theory was a fad whose time has passed and as a critique that queer theory is not capable of offering an incisive analysis in the current historical moment. At the same time, I have attempted to interrupt what I consider an overassociation between “queering,” or “reading like a queer,” and normativity by illustrating that queer texts need not throw those active and dexterous readings into crisis. When we read Moraga’s self-racialization process, including its disavowals, like a queer—which is to say, when we dislodge it from the realm of evidence; refuse the rather inviting temptation to map it teleologically; pause over the different forms that Moraga’s queer racialization assumes, from the limiting conflation of surface and depth to the more promising queer performatives; and consider the pressure that her works place on the speaker’s benefit—such disavowals do not prove the existence of an originary, nonthreatening existence of racial identity. Far from making Moraga exceptional, that is, the contradictions, shame, aporias, and even self-loathing that underwrite her narrative of outsiderness and homecoming bring into sharper relief the very illogic of racialization and racism.
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Fixing Up the House of Race with Richard Rodriguez
N A 1999 INTERVIEW with Timothy S. Sedore, the powerful Mexican American public intellectual Richard Rodriguez makes an unlikely confession. Radically departing from the calculated indifference with which he customarily responds to critics of his controversial autobiography, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), he tells Sedore that he too shares some reservations about that autobiography’s persona: I must tell you that I am not sure that I would like Richard Rodriguez were I not he. At some very simple level I can tell you that I don’t like the voice. I don’t even like the tenderness of Hunger of Memory; frankly, it’s too soft for men. It’s not Latino enough, it’s a little too feminine, a little too American. He looks like Bambi on the cover. I’m not sure I like this guy. He whimpers too much. He’s too soft. He’s not what I want. (Rodriguez, “Violating the Boundaries,” 426)
In this passage, Rodriguez’s expressions of self-doubt fork into a complete detachment between the Rodriguez of Hunger of Memory and the Rodriguez of the interview and finally culminate in the surprising declaration that “[h]e’s not what I want” (“Violating the Boundaries,” 426).1 Invoking the heated critiques elicited by Hunger’s positions on bilingual education and affirmative action, indeed assuming the voice of his critics, Rodriguez suddenly claims that his work is “not Latino enough” and in fact is “too American.” Of course, any follower of Rodriguez’s work will recognize his ironic tone and will know from his second and third books, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992) and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002), as well as from his ongoing print journalism and Public Broadcasting System (PBS) NewsHour essays, that he generally stands by the conservative positions
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outlined in Hunger. In this light, his self-mockery can be seen as a biting rhetorical maneuver for mocking his Chican@ critics, a technique that becomes clearer when he continues his performance: “I think to myself, if I’m a Chicano and all of my life I’ve been stuck with losers, then I want somebody who’s tough. I want somebody who represents us as a contender” (426). Bringing us full-circle to the passage’s first sentence, which carefully predicates his “self-doubt” on his not being Richard Rodriguez (“I am not sure that I would like Richard Rodriguez were I not he”), he finally names the identity of the not-Rodriguez voice as “Chicano.” For Rodriguez, to identify as a Chicano is automatically to identify as a victim or “loser” and foolishly compensate for this self-imposed marginality with bravado. I open this chapter with this 1999 interview not simply to introduce Rodriguez’s ridicule of Chicano identity politics (although that in itself is worth noting) but to foreground the central issues at stake in the discussion to follow: namely, the role that gender and sexuality play in Rodriguez’s political commentaries on race. What I find most interesting about the interview is that Rodriguez mimics the voice of his critics in order to keep them honest, in order to force them to say, finally, what he feels they have been censoring all along—that inextricably linked to their criticisms of his politics is their unspoken machista discomfort with his effeminacy (down to his “Bambi”-like appearance). For if Rodriguez, in the voice of his critics, disparages himself as too American, he also complains that he is too tender, too soft, and too feminine. With this listing of effeminate traits, Rodriguez—in a way that he had not done before and in a manner that ironically evokes the vocal post-1980s Chicana feminist critique—calls attention to, and emphasizes his rejection of, the masculinist ethos of Chicano identity politics. He has no desire to be a tough, macho contender because he has no desire to be a Chicano and, perhaps, vice versa. Rodriguez’s scathing rejection of all things Chicano—together with his adamant critiques of bilingual education and affirmative action—has earned him the label of “the Mexican American that Chicanos love to hate” (Rubén Martínez). Some of the published counterarguments (of which there is no shortage) charge him with false consciousness, if not a colonized mentality. Ramón Saldívar, for instance, suggests that “Rodriguez chooses to assimilate without ever considering whether he acted by will or merely submitted to an unquestioned grander scheme of political ideology” (Chicano Narrative, 158). To this day, it is not uncommon for Rodriguez to find Chican@ students lining up outside university lecture halls to protest his talks.2 In the past I have
FIXING UP THE HOUSE OF RACE WITH RICHARD RODRIGUEZ
wanted to say that in their mutual dislike there is no love lost between Rodriguez and Chican@s. But where so much energy is expended in disliking, of course love, loss, and desire must surely be nearby. My own position in the “Rodriguez wars” is neither to love to hate Rodriguez nor to hate to love him. Instead I want to think about how Rodriguez’s conceptions of racial self-identification (as variously opportunistic and selfdefeating) and of race-based programs (as inhibiting intellectual mastery and public citizenship) are actually generated through his conception of sexuality as a profoundly private and individuated affair. As this chapter shows, the narrative paths that Rodriguez constructs in the process of separating the public from the private are riddled with if not woven from anxiety about racialized gender and racialized sexuality, though it is a much different sort of anxiety than Moraga’s. If Moraga uses her personal experiences to consider the intimate relationship of homophobia, sexism, and racism, Rodriguez works through his to try to disassociate sexuality from ethnicity altogether. Indeed, one of the central arguments of this chapter is that Rodriguez privileges sexuality as an extremely private form of individuality to such an extent that he tries to make it stand against public and collective narratives of racialization. I also argue, however, that as much as he seeks to “privatize” his sexuality, his sexual desires cannot finally stand outside of the burdens of racialization. As Norma Alarcón astutely puts it, “the hidden episteme in Rodriguez’s pastoral is the rage at our embodied history, for while his wit may pass muster, his face does not” (“Tropology of Hunger,” 150). That representations of racialized sexuality can take such radically different meanings and political functions illustrates that we would need to approach all such representations without a priori definitions and expectations in order to avoid reproducing totalizing narratives that lend themselves to prescriptive ways of reading and interpreting. This seems a rather obvious point but one nonetheless worth making, given that the concept of “racialized sexuality” in and of itself has gained something of a positive valence in queer theory as a corrective to the racial elisions so often found there. And, likewise, because Chicana feminists have so compellingly argued (pace Ignacio García) that homophobia and sexism are primary causes of the Chicano movement’s failure to sustain itself, the post-1980s explicit articulation of racialized sexual identity in Chican@ cultural production and critical thought is largely understood (from a feminist point of view at least) as a forwardlooking, proactive commitment to redressing and revitalizing Chican@ radical politics. Rodriguez’s work offers a useful caveat to the popular and
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optimistic idea that any articulation of personal experiences with racialized sexuality necessarily enacts resistance to social norms and/or to blind spots in progressive politics. My aim in this chapter is both to help push Rodriguez criticism beyond its preoccupations with affirmative action and bilingual education and to attest to the value of foregrounding sexuality (not in addition to, but constitutive with, racialization) in our critical analyses. Such an approach to Rodriguez is possible in large part because of the fresh conversation initiated with the essays in the 1998 special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language (TSLL) on innovative Rodriguez criticism. In his introduction to that issue, guest editor José E. Limón suggests that the Rodriguez wars have run their course and that a new approach to Rodriguez is now possible:3 The publication of Days of Obligation; the passage of time for extended reflection on Hunger of Memory; the appearance of new critics and new forms of criticism such as queer theory and postcolonial thought; the opportunity for a Chicano intellectual [Randy A. Rodríguez] to interview Rodriguez (something not easily conceivable in the more heated times past)—all of these together make the present moment propitious for a reconsideration of his art and thought. (393)
The scholar who has done the most to utilize this moment, indeed who has helped to create it, is Randy A. Rodríguez (no relation).4 In “Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered: Queering the Sissy (Ethnic) Subject” (published in the TSLL special issue) and in a 1996 interview essay entitled “A Conversation with Richard Rodriguez,” R. A. Rodríguez draws from queer theory to challenge the traditional interpretations of Rodriguez’s work and to expose what he sees as the heterosexist foundations of those interpretations. Given the sheer lack of critical attention to cultural production about Chicano gay male desire relative to the abundant scholarship on Chicana lesbian representation, R. A. Rodríguez’s essays represent a crucial contribution to the field.5 In addition to what they tell us about Rodriguez, they allow us more generally to assess the emergence of explicit attention to Chicano male sexuality and to consider how that criticism might negotiate the strengths and limitations of both Chican@ Studies and queer theory. I will pick up R. A. Rodríguez’s thread again shortly and show that, while our critical approaches overlap to some extent, my point of departure is his desire to siphon the sexual from the racial. Before turning to that discussion, let me briefly touch upon Ro-
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driguez’s critiques of affirmative action, bilingual education, and curriculum reform in order to foreground his dichotomous construction of private and public realms. Although these issues have already been discussed at length in numerous essays,6 they are worth revisiting here to help contextualize my argument that Rodriguez’s sexual politics help shape the public/private binary undergirding his positions on race-based programs and racial subjectivity. One Yellow House In Hunger Rodriguez situates his individual experiences with education (in the broadest sense of the word) in such a way as to evince the supposed dissonance between private and public selves and to expose what he sees as the fallacious logic behind affirmative action and bilingual education. From his primary Catholic schooling led by Irish nuns insistent on his swift mastery of English, to his undergraduate years at Stanford, to his elite graduate training in Renaissance studies at Columbia and Berkeley (with visits, not incidentally, to the British Museum), Rodriguez charts his growing alienation from his Mexican American immigrant parents. While not without nostalgia, Rodriguez never explicitly wavers from his insistence that the benefits he identifies with becoming a “public man” far outweigh the costly loss of familial intimacy, the maintenance of which would preclude public autonomy. As such, Hunger hinges on a firm division between—indeed on a mutually exclusive conception of—public and private realms. Bilingual education, he argues, prevents Spanish-speaking children from developing into empowered and self-sufficient “public citizens” because they are not forced to undergo the necessary experience of detaching from the familiarity and intimacy of their (working-class) families and fully absorbing the language of public culture: standard, middle-class English.7 Likewise, he argues that affirmative action helps those who least need it—middle-class people of color like himself who have already managed to construct public personas—rather than those who are truly disenfranchised by poverty and who have not had the requisite contact with public culture (as public citizens) to make it to (or through) college. This contradiction, he claims, was so personally unbearable that he declined a prestigious job offer from Yale and left academia altogether. Over the past twenty-five years Rodriguez has stood by these positions, recasting them in accordance with the shifting public debates about diversity and education reform.8 He now argues not only that early schooling should require children to leave the private, familiar language of their families at
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home but that educators have a social and moral obligation to return to a traditional canonical curriculum: “American history has become a pageant of exemplary slaves and black educators. Gay studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies—the new curriculum ensures that education will be flattering. But I submit that America is not a tale for sentimentalists” (Days, 169). Like his arguments against bilingual education, his position on the culture/canon wars rests on his twofold insistence that success in the United States (read: public identity) entails an absorption of specific cultural capital (read: national culture) and that intellectual mastery should be emotionally and rigorously unsettling to the child. That is, Rodriguez believes that in order to become “public citizens” with public voices, racialized subjects not only must separate from the private worlds of their communities and families but must experience firsthand the psychic pain entailed in that process. For although Rodriguez’s “classroom will tell us that we belong to a culture” (Days, 167), it will also undo the very sense of private individuality that the child has enjoyed through her (private) family life.9 According to Rodriguez, the counterargument that curriculum should be diversified in order to incorporate the elided literatures and histories of U.S. minorities unwittingly precipitates ethnic children’s internalization of marginality by keeping them “apart from the national whole” (“Conversation with Richard Rodriguez,” 46) and by “sentimentally” shielding them from the necessary trauma of defamiliarization.10 A good way to contextualize Rodriguez’s public/private framework is to consider how it features in his response to the charge that his work is ahistorical and individualistic. Defending his individual right to present his “personal” life story, he insists that Hunger has been erroneously read as sociology: I gather that some readers suppose I am trying to describe “the MexicanAmerican experience.” . . . When I rehearse my life, I describe one life only, my own. Richard Rodriguez, not even his brother, not his sisters. One childhood: that summer in 1955. August. One street in Sacramento, California, Thirty-ninth Street near “J.” One yellow house. One solitude. (“An American Writer,” 12)
Quite suggestively, the gradated funnel of representational fields in this passage finally tapers at the singular levels of “one yellow house” and “one solitude”—levels that would render questions of accountability posed by anyone other than the author himself unfeasible, if not petty. Unlike the initial “Mexican American experience,” these levels would appear unburdened
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and unmarked by race, history, sexuality, or even embodiment, even though they get more and more exacting. The symbolic logic of “one yellow house” leveraged by Rodriguez to protect the autobiographical integrity of his work is also that which underwrites his particular conception of citizenship. As such, his partitioning of the private (aptly symbolized by the quintessential symbol of domesticity and private property) falls in line with the neoconservative Right’s efforts to create a national system in which Americans view their citizenship as private, abstracted, and future-oriented, rather than grounded, embodied, and immediate. As Lauren Berlant writes in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997), the desire to “inhabit a secure space liberated from identities and structures that seem to constrain what a person can do in history” (4) is one of the many intended effects of the neoconservative Right’s privatization of American citizenship. This type of abstracted citizenship, fashioned during the Reagan-Bush era, upholds the fantasy of a core national culture and “generates images of collective decay” in order to demonize embodied publics: We see it happening in the right-wing and neoliberal loathing of a cluster of seemingly disparate national scenes: public urban spaces and populations; sexualities and affective existences that do not follow the privacy logic of the patriarchal family form; collectivities of the poor, whether of inner-city gangs or workers at the bottom of the class structure; . . . and racially marked subjects who do not seem to aspire to or identify with the privacy/property norms of the ostensibly core national culture. (The Queen of America, 179)
Against those scenes of public bodily traffic, the private household assumes extraordinary weight in national culture making and is literally sanctioned as a protected “zone of privacy” (The Queen of America, 59). It is this type of protection that Rodriguez invokes with the representational funnel that takes him away from “the Mexican American experience” to “that summer in 1955” to “August” to “Thirty-ninth Street” and finally to “one yellow house.” But if this “zone of privacy” lends itself to Rodriguez’s insistence on autobiographical integrity, we also learn that it was the very same structure that so effectively disciplined him in sexual and social normalcy, and not because it was a Mexican American household, as R. A. Rodriguez would have it, but precisely because it was understood by Rodríguez as a private, unadulterated space. Although it is with the specific aim of pronouncing his distance from the embodied “Mexican American experience,” Rodriguez’s recourse to “one yel-
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low house”—indeed his more general tendency to privilege the private even when insisting on the value of “public” citizenship—reifies, ironically, the heteronormative fantasies crucial to the national project of private citizenship discussed by Berlant. The domestic framework that Rodriguez employs as the symbol of his American autonomy is, at the very same time, that which imposes against his will a set of rigid expectations about masculinity and sexuality. As such, Rodriguez’s recourse to one yellow house presents a double bind: the protections afforded the “zone of privacy” only apply when pertaining to “the irreducible heterosexuality of the national bedroom.” Meanwhile, “homosexuality has no constitutionally supported privacy protections in the United States” (Berlant, The Queen of America, 59).11 Under these conditions, Rodriguez’s queerness slams up against his childhood home. Rodriguez does not, however, pause over the contradictions inherent in his self-protective recourse to a sense of private domesticity that is fully bound up with the troubling fiction of national heterosexuality. Perhaps this is why he moves, in that funnel of representations, to the final level of “one solitude.” While the funnel gets more and more exacting and particular, “one solitude” at once moves back to the general (as solitude, unlike a street address, is a disembodied state of being) and continues the work of the passage, the number “one” maintaining a measure of privacy.12 In “Late Victorians,” Rodriguez writes: “To grow up homosexual is to live with secrets and within secrets. In no other place are those secrets more closely guarded than within the family home” (Days, 30). In his estimation, the secrecy required of the gay child assumes the ontological weight of his very existence. Secrecy is not simply a mechanism for survival but the permanent condition of living; it is not simply a routine practice of “keeping” secrets but the condition of living within the secrets themselves. Rodriguez’s aim is not to challenge this heterosexist conditioning but to elevate it to the metaphysical plane of “one solitude” and to do so always against the image of a racially marked public. The sexual undertones of Rodriguez’s dichotomous construction of private and public realms are easy to miss precisely because of his predisposition toward secrecy. It is not until the recent appearance of R. A. Rodríguez’s works that we begin to unravel some of these dynamics. Unfortunately, however, R. A. Rodríguez so completely foregrounds sexuality and so uncritically accepts Rodriguez’s binaries that his analysis only mirrors the logic through which, on the one hand, Chicanos come to represent unthinking tough contenders and, on the other, (homo)sexuality is quintessentially American in its individuality.
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Randy A. Rodríguez’s Hermeneutics of Suspicion R. A. Rodríguez argues that the large body of Chicano criticism on Rodriguez’s work (from Norma Alarcón’s to Rosaura Sánchez’s and everything in between) is really a symptom of homophobic paranoia and repressed desire, stirred up and agitated by Rodriguez’s feminine and queer sensibility. As a modern-day “El Malinche,” Rodriguez poses an unbearable threat to any unified sense of Chicano oppositional consciousness.13 Therefore, argues R. A. Rodríguez, the vehement Chicano critique of Rodriguez’s assimilationist politics is actually a defensive strategy (however conscious) for containing his queerness, as Rodriguez himself suggests in the Sedore interview quoted at the beginning of this chapter. R. A. Rodríguez reaches beneath and around the words of Chican@ critics and stages a sexualized drama of exposure. Chican@s play the part of insecure bullies taunting Rodriguez as “the sissy—soft and penetrable—pathological in his mental colonization and self-deception, ripe for continued penetration by the Anglo colonizer, and, subsequently, the selfish agent performing (his) lies and deception” (“Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered,” 397). Once R. A. Rodríguez adds this queer layer to the Rodriguez wars, he turns them topsy-turvy. Whereas Rodriguez and his work are usually considered powerful—for their strong critiques of identity politics; for their sheer elegance and urbane and rhetorical seductiveness; and for their wide circulation through and accreditation from the elite channels of a U.S. intelligentsia— R. A. Rodríguez situates them as feminized, disempowered, marginalized, and vulnerable: Chain Rodriguez—contain him in our understanding of him as a conservative Hispanic and he will not threaten our radical, progressive, ethnic selfconception. Expel Rodriguez—define him and the content and style of his writing as nonconforming (as inauthentic, fabrication, tainted, calculated, fluff) in order to maintain our authentic cultural identities free from contamination, and most importantly, as inapplicable to our lives. To see (any part of) ourselves reflected in his tragic visage would be to view our own repressed desire and self-knowledge, and challenge our sacred cultural and ideological beliefs of authentic, organic, integrated communities. (“Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered,” 406)
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R. A. Rodríguez thus frames (in every sense of that word) all Chican@ critiques of Rodriguez as one collective identitarian project forcefully, if not violently, effecting containment and suppression, chaining, expelling, and silencing. One of the problems with this particular framing, however, is that it simply homogenizes, generalizes, and empties of meaning any and all critiques authored by
[email protected] That is, if “Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered” does provide an important survey of Rodriguez criticism, as José E. Limón attests in the introduction to the TSLL special issue on Rodriguez, then it nonetheless fails to build a compelling case against it. Any critical position on Rodriguez is attributed to heteronormative disciplining. Even when the scholars in question have a reputable history of feminist and sexpositive scholarship—such as Norma Alarcón, for instance—they are only “follow[ing] male literary critics in describing Rodriguez as little more than a reactionary Hispanic literary agent provocateur against historically and scientifically objective scholarship and progressive social and political movements” (407–408). Queer theory—to which R. A. Rodríguez turns in order to give Rodriguez a fair and intelligent reading—becomes the sophisticated corrective to what can only be seen in this context as provincial, homophobic, and paranoid underpinnings of Chicana/o Studies.15 Moreover, the upshot of R. A. Rodríguez’s queer reading is to position Rodriguez as a radical transgressor whose narratives display, formally and ideologically, an acute “trickster-like” aptitude for survival and mobility that, in its subversive queerness, radically defies both hegemonic constructions of marginality and antiquated narratives of cultural maintenance. The key to this reading is in R. A. Rodríguez’s insistence that Rodriguez’s assimilation is not a rejection of Mexican American culture per se but an acceptance of queerness. Following a line of queer theory that links the practice of reading to emergent non-normative desires, R. A. Rodríguez suggests that Hunger’s inclusion of childhood scenes of the young Rodriguez reading books (always in private) makes that work as much a coded coming-out story as an assimilationist narrative. Or, rather, he fully sexualizes the assimilationist ethos of Hunger. Rodriguez’s “mastery of English and education in American/queer-culture was not readily available in his Mexican American community and Spanish language experience. He (re)imagined himself by transgressing, crossing the border into the landscape of forbidden possibilities in queer ‘America’” (411). Central to his interpretation of Hunger, then, is the notion that Mexican American/Chicano culture repressed Rodriguez’s queer imagination and
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that he therefore turned to Euro-American literature as a viable and seductive source of a sexual imagined community. For, in the tradition of Walt Whitman, “[t]o be American is to be queer” (David Bergman, quoted in Rodríguez, “Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered” 410). While I find R. A. Rodríguez’s reconsideration of Rodriguez provocative, I ultimately part ways with it, not least because it posits the United States as quintessentially queer and Mexican America as always already queerless. But R. A. Rodríguez also chooses not to read Rodriguez’s homosexuality as a discursive set of dynamic textual representations and instead approaches “it” as a given condition that is more or less tolerated by communities and more or less disclosed by the author. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in situating Rodriguez as transgressively “queer,” R. A. Rodríguez seems to miss one of the crucial insights of queer theory: in Lauren Berlant and Beth Freeman’s words, “Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public” (“Queer Nationality,” 154). Rodriguez’s adamant belief in a singular public sphere is such that he has little if any patience for counterpublics,16 which is why he describes Chicanos as “exist[ing] as this border people, independent in their own imagination—like a cloud in a Swiftian parody, a cloud above the desert. They participate in nothing” and thus “have no significance to the world” (“Violating the Boundaries,” 438, 439). Complex Complexions Rather than rifle through Hunger for evidence of a gay sensibility in order to unveil a “coded personal gay manifesto” (“Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered,” 410) that makes its way against the heteronormative conditioning of Mexican American culture, as R. A. Rodríguez would have, I want to think about the intimate place of race in two separate passages representing relatively explicit representations of sexual desire. In both of these passages (the first from Hunger, the second from Days) Rodriguez recounts memories of his childhood at age seven that were formative to his racialized sexual development. The chapter of Hunger aptly entitled “Complexion” showcases an incredibly moving and instructive passage depicting a fully racialized primal scene experienced by Rodriguez. Because it provides a rare moment in which Rodriguez’s firm convictions about separating the public from the private are unsettled by his own narrative, it assumes extraordinary weight in Hunger and hence is cited in its entirety:
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Complexion. My first conscious experience of sexual excitement concerns my complexion. One summer weekend, when I was around seven years old, I was at a public swimming pool with the whole family. I remember sitting on the damp pavement next to the pool and seeing my mother, in the spectators’ bleachers, holding my younger sister on her lap. My mother, I noticed, was watching my father as he stood on a diving board, waving to her. I watched her wave back. Then saw her radiant, bashful, astonishing smile. In that second I sensed that my mother and father had a relationship I knew nothing about. A nervous excitement encircled my stomach as I saw my mother’s eyes follow my father’s figure curving into the water. A second or two later, he emerged. I heard him call out. Smiling, his voice sounded, buoyant, calling me to swim to him. But turning to see him, I caught my mother’s eye. I heard her shout over to me. In Spanish she called through the crowd: “Put a towel on over your shoulders.” In public, she didn’t want to say why. I knew. (123–124)
Public and private worlds merge here. The Rodriguez family unit comes out of its domestic sanctuary not for a necessary errand but for an afternoon of leisure. The shared social space of the public pool uniquely affords a measure of relief from the burdens of social decorum, especially so in Rodriguez’s 1950s suburban childhood. Children and adults alike put their semiclad bodies on display, next to anonymous others, exercising in ways that would seem ludic in any other setting. Here even Rodriguez’s customarily highly reserved parents temporarily become unguarded enough to impart a primal scene, albeit unwittingly. This is the first time that Rodriguez consciously witnesses erotic exchange between his parents: even in the privacy of their home, their sexual acts are carefully kept from their children’s view. But no matter how liberating the public setting of the pool might be, it nonetheless continues to be fully imbricated by the racist social codes governing the Anglo/Mexican American social relations of the day. Because it intimately involves the body, the swimming pool, like the barbershop, is incredibly fraught with racist anxieties and loathing, which is one reason why it occupies such a salient space in Mexican American folklore about racial conflict.17 The fight to enforce racial segregation—so often depending on a discourse of “hygiene”—barred “the dirty Mexican” from access to some municipal pools as late as the mid-1970s (Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 285–286; De León, Mexican Americans in Texas, 82, 112). The equally potent stereotype of Mexican and Mexican American boys and men as oversexed machos no doubt
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inflamed racist fears about their access to swim-suited Anglo-American girls and women. This history—unsurprisingly omitted from Rodriguez’s narrative—helps contextualize the multilayered complexity of the primal scene. Although many readers will be familiar with the importance of the municipal pool within the history of racial segregation and will therefore be able to understand why the sight of Rodriguez’s body interrupts the primal scene so abruptly, its absence from the story has the effect of demarcating what is actually a collective history of systemic racial discrimination as a private internal family drama. The primal scene at once stimulates the young Rodriguez’s own sexual desire as he voyeuristically observes his parents’ flirtation, and crystallizes for him the racialized dynamics of that encounter to the extent that “my first conscious experience of sexual excitement concerns my complexion” (123). The “radiant, bashful, astonishing” pleasure that Rodriguez’s mother visibly experiences as she watches her husband’s body and meets his gaze is completely shut down the moment she catches sight of her son’s body browning further. With the barrier between public and private once again erected, she switches to the “private language” as she orders Rodriguez to “[p]ut a towel on over your shoulders.” Even in Spanish she says no more than that: “In public, she didn’t want to say why.” What the young Rodriguez knew, of course, was that his mother’s ongoing censorious assessment of his dark complexion had something fundamental to do with the sexual. But what he had apparently not known until this swimming-pool moment was how her judgment was somehow intimately, yet inversely, connected to her attraction to her husband’s fair-skinned body. Importantly, that scene also brings into sharp relief the distinction between his parents’ heteronormative relationship (in terms of both conjugal heterosexuality and racial etiquette), which can circulate in public spaces, and his own sexual desires, which are always already bound up with his racialized alterity and relegated to and regulated through a private register. If the swimming-pool story casts the seven-year-old Rodriguez as desirous spectator, then a second passage from Days depicts him in the more active role of desiring subject: One summer my uncle was beautiful. His skin was darker than Mexico. His skin wore shade. It was blue. It was black. When I was seven years old, my girl cousins threw me into the lake at Lodi and, with several islands to choose from, I swam toward the island of my uncle. His eyes were black and so wide with surprise they reflected the
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humor of the water. His nipples were blue and wet black fur dripped down his front and floated in the water at his waist. In the family album, Raj yet lifts me upside down by my legs. I am confident in my abandon as the trees whirl by. My aunt backs away from the camera, regret blurring from her eyes. “Don’t . . . Please. Put him down now, Raj.” (229)
This passage, like the earlier one, dramatizes sexual desire through the language of racial embodiment, except that here the highly erotic description of Raj’s darkness reverses Rodriguez’s mother’s shame-filled and shameinducing anxiety over dark skin. In a way that is surprisingly evocative of Cherríe Moraga’s racialized pleasure, the child Rodriguez finds Raj’s body beautiful precisely because it is blue and black, “darker than Mexico.” As with the earlier swimming-pool scene, a female family member issues an austere command that not only shuts down the sensual pleasure and temporary abandon but formally and abruptly closes the passage. The sight of Raj twirling Rodriguez by the legs is so disconcerting as to cause “regret” and compel the curt but inexplicable plea that the play stop. We cannot know why Raj would be so surprised at the sight of Rodriguez swimming toward him or, for that matter, whether the photograph being spoken of was taken at Lodi or at some other time and place. This suggests that Rodriguez wants to retain the sense of mystery that clearly impressed him as he had the experiences. What is certainly not mysterious either in the two passages cited above or in any of the others that depict Rodriguez being prevented from embodied delight is that women are at the helm of the prohibition. That is, where R. A. Rodríguez claims that Rodriguez favors the women in his family, we can actually see that women are made to carry the burden of responsibility for racial shame. He shows time and time again that it is women who taught him to be self-conscious about his complexion: “since the women in my family had been the ones who discussed it in such worried tones, I felt my dark skin made me unattractive to women”; “[t]he normal, extraordinary, animal excitement of feeling my body alive—riding shirtless on a bicycle in the warm wind created by furious self-propelled motion—the sensations that first had excited in me a sense of my maleness, I denied” (Hunger, 125–126). What makes the two passages examined in this section so indelibly powerful and moving is that they describe a child’s painful, confusing, and shameinducing internalization of the harsh gendered and sexualized codes govern-
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ing racial etiquette. Indeed, Rodriguez’s wrenching narratives of wanting, as a child, “to forget that I had a body because I had a brown body” (Hunger, 126) threaten to turn his life story into that which he is so actively working against: an account that portrays people of color as victims. He eventually insists, therefore, on his willful ability to control his self-presentation by erecting and maintaining barriers between the public and private and by framing racialized shame not as a systemic component of racism but as a private family drama created by his female relatives’ personal preferences. The snag in Rodriguez’s otherwise smooth American success story makes it all the more imperative that he emphasize his strategic divide of public and private worlds. Each time his desire to transcend racialization is challenged by a society overly invested in racial etiquette, he proclaims the irrefutability of his individual determination while scoffing at the duped “losers” who view their subjectivity in collective terms. But, in the end, his final declaration that “[m]y skin, in itself, means nothing” (Hunger, 137) has no force. One Victorian House As discussed earlier, Rodriguez conjures up and leans heavily upon the symbolic logic of “one yellow house” in order to insist on the autobiographical integrity of Hunger and, more generally, to mark his conception of citizenship. But, as Lauren Berlant makes clear, because the neoconservative privatization of citizenship “emphasizes sexuality as the fundamental index of a person’s political legitimacy” (The Queen of America, 58) and endorses heterosexual “images of a normal, familial America” (3), the suburban yellow house of Rodriguez’s childhood at once prohibits non-normative sexual desires and encourages the private internalization of sexualized and gendered shame associated with racial embodiment. It is not until he writes about the architecture of his adult house in his essay “Late Victorians” that he begins to question, if only indirectly and fleetingly, the politics and burdens of maintaining the home as a zone of privacy. “Late Victorians” first appeared as the prominently placed and widely discussed cover story of a 1990 issue of Harper’s Magazine and was reissued in revised form in Days of Obligation.18 “Late Victorians” is, on the one hand, a tribute to the vibrancy of post-1970s queer San Francisco and, on the other, a melancholic, if not funereal, meditation on mortality and loss. These two narratives are positioned in dialectical tension, with Rodriguez ensnared in its fold. The tribute to queer San Francisco centers on a fascinating discus-
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sion about the history of, and sheer irony produced by, the gay male appropriation of Victorian houses beginning in the 1970s, particularly in the Castro district.19 The remodeling of the Victorian house into queer space is particularly disidentificatory, for, as Rodriguez notes, “no other architecture in the American imagination is more evocative of family than the Victorian house” (Days, 30). In fact, the San Francisco Victorian is so imbued with queer meaning that Rodriguez “comes out” simply by announcing in the essay that he himself lives in a Victorian quadruplex: “I live in a tall Victorian house that has been converted to four apartments; four single men” (30). Unlike his childhood home, in which he literally hid in closets and underneath his bed when reading in order to avoid being teased for being too feminine, he has full command of his Victorian apartment. As such, much of what we learn about his domestic space in “Late Victorians” pertains to his ability to reconstruct and rearrange it: he hires a painter to redo his shutters in a weathered Manet green; he doubles his bedroom as the visitor’s room; he uses the public room as his private writing room. Throughout, he inventories and pauses over particular architectural remnants that once had utilitarian value for the intended residents but have long since lost their function: “This must have been the hinge of a gate that kept infants upstairs so many years ago” (31). The cultural debris of past generations, coupled with the decorative objects of contemporary queer “artifice” (plumage, lampshades, and lacquer), lends “Late Victorians” a sense of physicality that stands in stark contrast to the childhood home of Hunger, “one solitude.” Indeed, we seem to be a long way from one yellow house. For if “Late Victorians” transforms the quintessentially private space of the bourgeois home into a public exhibit of old artifacts and queer remodels, it also curates that home as part of a collective exhibit.20 Rodriguez’s apartment is remarkable not because it is unique and private but because its intelligibility derives from being one of many queer Victorians in San Francisco. The two photographs that accompany “Late Victorians” in Harper’s Magazine help emphasize this point. One photograph, for instance, is shot from enough distance to take in an even row of seven multistory Victorians. In contrast to the richly textured downtown skyline of architecturally unique buildings (also rendered in sharp focus), the Victorians are more or less uniform in their size and shape. The effect of the spatial distance and the uniformity it achieves is a frustration of our longing for visual access to the interior of Rodriguez’s individual unit; this longing is only heightened by the text that surrounds this image, which
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lovingly describes his remodeling plans in minute detail. We see the Victorians as a collection that presumably continues in the same regular fashion beyond the edges of the frame. Rodriguez’s Victorian is part of a public collection that denaturalizes the very foundation of the American Dream even while still evoking heteronormative familism (or perhaps precisely because of those origins). As such, these Victorians are rife with queer possibility and the type of disidentification described by José Esteban Muñoz in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999). Muñoz uses the term “disidentification” to describe “the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (Disidentifications, 4). Like the gay male appropriation of the Victorian home, which enacts a rebellion “against the expectations of nature” (Days, 32) in order “to challenge the foundations of domesticity” (Days, 30), the force of Muñoz’s survival strategies is in their disidentificatory appropriations: Disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (Disidentifications, 31)
In a sense, Rodriguez’s tribute to queer San Francisco in itself can be read as a momentary disidentification with his very own insistence on dividing private and public worlds. However, just as the multilayered disidentifications become most legible and promising in and through Rodriguez’s architectural tour of queerified domestic space, he re-erects his bifurcation between the public and private, this time by way of his particular melancholic lament over the effects of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. The double play of the essay’s title, “Late Victorians,” at once references the comedic appropriation of domestic architecture and, at the same time, marks the tragic loss of so many of the men who have enlivened that architecture. Bringing the AIDS epidemic into sharper relief, the descriptions of queer disidentifica-
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tion are replaced in the second half of “Late Victorians” with alternating fragments of obituaries and lists of names (presumably of those who have AIDS or have died of AIDS-related illnesses). Set off from the rest of the text in italics, these fragments interrupt the narrative flow and are no doubt intended to jar the reader. He was a dancer. He settled into the interior-design department of Gump’s, where he worked until his illness. He was a teacher. (Days, 42)
The dialectic tension lending “Late Victorians” its force is built not only through the pointed juxtapositioning of the facts of nature against queer disidentification, but through Rodriguez’s own complex self-positioning. In Bob Satuloff’s estimation of “Late Victorians,” “Rodriguez paints himself as a self-denying literary vampire, sucking in his friends’ ‘real’ lives and disgorging them onto paper with pained artistry, paying the artist’s price for his own non-engagement in life” (“Harper’s Baroque,” 10). Describing his position in queer San Francisco as “curator of earthly paradise” and “barren skeptic,” Rodriguez’s narrative voice approximates that of a detached tour guide. The paradise he describes is always already secondhand—the first gay pride parade that he observed and followed out of curiosity but did not join; the “leisure”-based origins of the gay rights movement that he has read about in “accounts”; and the bathhouses and public sex that he learns about from his worldly friend César. As the vibrant foil to the barren skeptic, César not only “saw revolution” in San Francisco but “embraced it” (Days, 28). Of course, just as Rodriguez is able to reveal that he is gay by announcing that he lives in a quartered Victorian, it comes as no surprise that César’s rebellion and sensuality make him one of those “recalled to nature” (Days, 45). When he lay on his deathbed, César said everyone else he knew might get AIDS and die. He said I would be the only one spared—“spared” was supposed to have been chased with irony, I knew, but his voice was too weak to do the job. “You are too circumspect,” he said then, wagging his finger upon the coverlet. So I was going to live to see that the garden of earthly delights was, after all, only wallpaper—was that it, César? Hadn’t I always said so? It was then I saw the greater sin against heaven was my unwillingness to embrace life. (Days, 42–43)
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“Late Victorians” contains its fair share of such moments in which Rodriguez allows us to glimpse him questioning his self-imposed limitations. But the dialectical proximity of the two narratives—the vibrant physicality of queer irony and the epidemic’s tragic erosion of physical bodies—undoes queer disidentification. Or, rather, it is undone because Rodriguez situates these two narratives as inevitable in their ironic proximity, such that “[m]en who sought the aesthetic ordering of existence were recalled to nature. Men who aspired to the mock-angelic settled for the shirt of hair” (45), “the slow beating of the blood had found its bay” (41). That is, rather than seizing on the opportunity for innovation by leveraging the “quintessential ‘private’ idioms of domesticity . . . as springboards for public activity” (Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 115)—such as, in this case, offering a much needed critique of the government’s paltry public response to the AIDS pandemic— Rodriguez at best concludes that the facts of nature overpower disidentification and at worst suggests that the pandemic is an inevitable consequence of queer promiscuity, “the garden of earthly delights.” As Ann Cvetkovich points out, “In order for the battle against AIDS to become an organized collective struggle . . . the target of anger must shift from the biological fact of the disease to the social institutions and ideologies that hasten its course” (Mixed Feelings, 3). Echoing Cvetkovich, Muñoz emphasizes the necessity of moving AIDS discourse beyond “individual identities” by creating “counterpublicity” that borrows from Foucault’s “care of the self” or “a working on the self for others” that “emphasizes an ethics around nourishing and sustaining a self within civil society” (Disidentifications, 144). This call for counterpublics by Cvetkovich and Muñoz cannot be heard by Rodriguez. And by the end of “Late Victorians” we are necessarily back to “one solitude,” “one house,” “one private mourner.”
As more Chican@ Studies scholars become influenced by queer theory and gay and lesbian studies, Rodriguez’s work will continue to be reinterpreted. R. A. Rodríguez deserves much credit for opening up some space to do that work. We need to consider, however, what his interventions imply about Chican@ literary studies more generally. Rather than suggesting that his reconsideration of Rodriguez will open new avenues for reconsiderations of other Chican@ literature, R. A. Rodríguez instead positions Rodriguez as the exceptional, the extraordinary, the queer, the complicated, the exile, the stranger, the suppressed (because secretly desired and envied). The term “Chicano”
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becomes absolutely predicated on a masculine, heterosexual framework, rendering masculine any attempt to maintain a critical view of assimilation. Furthermore, setting up Rodriguez and his work as queer, effeminate victims of Chican@ homophobia and sexism leaves intact the popular idea (now very much center stage in Chican@ Studies) that pre-1980s Chicano literature (e.g., Américo Paredes, Tomás Rivera, Oscar Zeta Acosta) was always heterosexist, masculine, and uncomplicated in its linearity.
Queering the Conquest with Ana Castillo There was a lot more to the Conquest of Mexico, as I was learning, than extracting Indian recipes. It was a story of love and betrayal, like all those paperback romances sold in grocery stores promise. A story of two great men, one lived and one died. And one very great although misunderstood woman. High
drama. I couldn’t take it. I’d pick up my fat library edition at bedtime, read a few pages, cry myself to sleep, then pick it up again the next night. My copy was overdue. —ANA CASTILLO (Peel My Love Like an Onion, spoken by Carmen la Coja)
N A LETTER WRITTEN to Ana Castillo on 1 January 1979, Nicolás Kanellos, then editor of the Revista Chicano-Riqueña, provided critical feedback on her manuscript of erotic poetry and prose pieces that would be published later that year as The Invitation.1 “The book looks very good,” he wrote. “I am very pleased with what you have done and I think that I can write a fitting preface if you still want me to do so.”2 After offering substantive feedback on each of the ten pieces in the collection, Kanellos closed his letter by asking, “[W]ould you be interested in us publishing this through our new publishing house, Arte Público Press?”3 As it turns out, although Castillo apparently did heed some of Kanellos’s editorial suggestions on her writing, she declined not only his publishing offer but the use of a preface he drafted for The Invitation in October 1979. In fact, Kanellos’s preface may very well have been the reason why Castillo chose to publish the book on her own (as a low-budget chapbook), even though Arte Público’s resources would have spared her the labor and time of fund-raising and would have ensured a larger first run than the two hundred copies she managed to produce.4 Kanellos’s unpublished one-page preface (now housed, along with the related correspondence, in the Ana Castillo Papers in the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives [CEMA] at the University of California at Santa Barbara) apparently met with the author’s disapproval. Kanellos’s attempt to write a preface “fitting” for the manuscript ultimately resulted in a preface rife with sexual innuendo:
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October 6, 1979 The Invitation By: Ana Castillo Introduction by Nicolás Kanellos, Editor, Revista Chicano-Riqueña Dear Reader, The Invitation takes pleasure in requesting your presence at an affair, black tie is not required. Let’s make no bones about it. The book is a bold attempt to seduce you, to consumate [sic] a carnal union, to abnegate your self, blending your soul, eyes and ears into the rhythmic sinews of Ana Castillo’s poesis. In honor of this event, Castillo has lowered the bridge, drained the moats, and tended banners from her turrets. The layers of medieval innocence have crumbled. The once-barred windows have been breached. The walls of the inner sanctum sensuously embrace a new-found heat which illuminates us, as it teases and titillates our every nerve-ending. No R.S.V.P. is necessary. You are only requested to let down your guard. Ana Castillo’s second book will not harm you. Please leave your inhibitions under your pillow, her tongue will caress you [sic] ears. Her words, dry and direct, will urge you to come, come . . . become a guest of this creative process. Respectfully yours, Nicolás Kanellos, Editor Revista Chicano-Riqueña5
Foregoing a somber academic introduction, Kanellos instead chooses to play off of the book’s title and mirror the eroticism of its contents by composing the preface in the form of an invitation to a sexual event described through figurative metaphors for sexual repression and female seduction: archaic images of man-made prohibitive structures used to keep enemies at bay (moats, bars, and turrets) contrast with inviting, Rapunzel-like bridges and banners. As clever as these figurative devices may have been, however, Castillo was clearly less than impressed. Although the Ana Castillo Papers includes only the correspondence written by Kanellos (and not, unfortunately, copies of Castillo’s replies), and I do not want to go too far in attempting to guess what her position was, a second letter (dated 31 October 1979) from Kanellos to Castillo suggests that she took offense at the sexual innuendo and overall playfulness of the preface:
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Dear Ana, Your rationale, as per your letter, for writing The Invitation is one that is basically defensive and negative, that of women being “subordinate,” “objectified,” “subjected to injustices,” that of reaction to Church and Latin culture. On the other hand, your work is completely positive and takes the offensive. It is aggressive, not defensive and not reactionary; it is confident and strong. Maybe you don’t realize this. And my introduction is more in line with the tenor of your work than your shy, demure desire for an academic explication of your text. The only thing that I shall concede is that “come . . [sic] come” may be too strong and obvious and should be changed. Otherwise, let the rest stand or eliminate it. I don’t mind. I was glad to help you out with the editing. It does not matter to me if the introduction accompanies the text. . . . And finally, you should not rely on someone’s introduction to keep your work from being misinterpreted. Your work should speak for itself. Unfortunately, this is your worse lack of confidence. No estoy decepcionado contigo, ni desilusionado, sólo un poco inpaciente con tu falta de confianza. [I am not disappointed with you, nor disillusioned, only a little impatient with your lack of confidence.]6
I open this chapter on Castillo’s sexualized border transgressions with this archival anecdote for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it economically and saliently foregrounds the political and feminist commitments that have long shaped Castillo’s writerly sensibility, even in relation to those works that might seem most removed from politics. As such, the putative boundary between the personal and political—which Richard Rodriguez works so hard to erect and protect—is productively unsettled by Castillo’s work, as it is by the works of Moraga and Paredes. Moreover, the disagreement between Castillo and Kanellos over how best to situate and characterize her collection—what Castillo must have understood to have been a trivialization of her feminist project and, conversely, what Kanellos interpreted as a demure lack of self-confidence—helps to illustrate the sheer difficulty of classifying her unconventional work. While not discounting Castillo’s apparent desire that her work be contextualized as an important sex-positive, feminist intervention against patriarchal policing of women’s sexual agency, Kanellos’s preface itself should be read contextually, particularly since it was written at a time when there was no precedent for introducing a book that might be classified as Chicana erotica.7
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The Invitation was exceptional not only because its poetry and prose pieces—interspersed with Marina Gutiérrez’s pencil drawings of nude bodies in various states of ravishment—lingered over the most explicit sexual details but because it unapologetically featured a range of unconventional sexual acts, including a woman masturbating in a semipublic space, intergenerational sex (in which a woman, not a man, is the older party), and sex between women. Where these subjects are hardly shocking in today’s Chicana literature, in 1979 they presented a marked point of departure from the concerns explicitly taken up in Chican@ protest poetry (then the dominant form), including those found in Castillo’s earlier work, published in the 1977 chapbook Otro Canto. As Juan Bruce-Novoa has argued, Chicano literature produced from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s was expected to conform to highly constraining preset criteria, including “a process of historical review carried out through an ideology of nation building which stressed several key points: retrieval of family and ethnic tradition, identification with the working class, struggle against assimilation, and the dire results if these efforts were not continued” (Retrospace, 134). Castillo herself would explain in a 1991 interview: “I knew I was going to be under fire [for The Invitation]. At that time, for a woman to speak about sexuality was to betray the collective cause, which was about economics and racism and so forth, and which was defined by men. If you talked about sex as a woman we knew that was to trivialize yourself, to make yourself out to be a wanton woman” (“Interview with Ana Castillo,” 116).8 But The Invitation—and, interestingly, Kanellos’s preface—breaks with yet another convention: grounding Chican@ poetics within topoi with a decidedly Aztlán slant. Kanellos’s unexpected cultural referent of the medieval castle, rather than the more familiar Tenochtitlan pyramids, unwittingly presages the book’s surprising absence of Mexican and Chican@ cultural markers. Unlike Otro Canto, The Invitation includes no references to Mexico, Chican@s, or cultural markers thereof. Instead, Castillo evokes exotic images of “the Eastern wind,” the Jordan River, the Latin jazz of Gato Barbieri, and the Argentine tango. Kanellos’s preface and his editorial feedback, however, do not seem to consider what his own medieval castle seems to gloss: the relationship between Castillo’s unconventional erotics and her equally unconventional use of this diverse set of cultural markers not typically associated with quotidian Chican@ life. That relationship has become even more salient over the past twenty-five years. In the following discussion, I examine three of Castillo’s novels—The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Sapogonia (1990), and Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999)—
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to consider the tight bond between Castillo’s particular elaboration of Chicana/mestiza sexual agency and her exploration of transcultural forms of belonging and desire. I see this connection as the defining characteristic of her work, which radically distinguishes it from other Chican@ literature. Unlike many of the representations of racialized sexuality examined in preceding chapters, for instance, Castillo’s do not hinge on an Anglo/Chican@ binary. And, in contrast to the family romances that spatially and temporally ground many of the figures—real or fictional—discussed earlier, Castillo’s sharp irreverence for borders of all kinds means that her characters are constantly negotiating various forms of travel: outward journeys that move her characters across literal and figurative time, space, and sometimes even dimension. Moreover, because Castillo’s central characters reside not in the Texas or California cities that are a mainstay of Chican@ literature but in the innercities of Chicago and New York, they fully inhabit what Rosaura Sánchez describes as the multiethnic and multilingual borderlands.9 Castillo at once generates a different set of border crossings (not dependent on international travel but available in the everyday cross-cultural contact zones confronted by her characters) and productively unsettles the bounds of our traditional conception of Aztlán, the mythical Chican@ homeland, located so decidedly in the Southwest. In “Mapping the Spanish Language along a Multiethnic and Multilingual Border,” Sánchez observes that “until two decades ago it was easy for the majority Latino population of Mexican origin to identify strictly on the basis of national origin (as Chicanos, Mexican Americans, or Mexicanos) rather than on the basis of the larger ethnic collectivity (as Latinos), given their superiority in numbers and concentration as the sole Latino minority in some areas of the Southwest” (111). She argues that the internationalization of capital and subsequent diasporas from developing countries to the United States render ineffective the bilingual and bicultural frameworks that have traditionally configured the identity formation and political ideology of Mexican Americans. Within the Los Angeles Unified School District alone, she notes, “80 languages other than English are spoken by 44 percent of the 641,000 students” (108). But the relevance of Sánchez’s assessment that bicultural and bilingual frameworks are outdated extends far beyond California and Texas and indeed entails a reconfiguration of the way that we define the U.S./Mexican borderlands. Sánchez, ever the materialist, rejects what she refers to as the postmodern “trendy” application of the borderlands metaphor in cultural and literary studies (perhaps referring to Gloria Anzaldúa’s prominent defi-
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nition of the borderlands as any social space where two unlikely individuals rub up against one another). Sánchez redefines the borderlands as extending from the 2,000-mile physical border to the urban sites of the San Francisco Bay Area, Houston, Chicago, and New York, where Mexican immigrants are increasingly finding work, establishing roots, and, importantly, living not only among a diverse range of Latin@s but among other racial and ethnic minorities and immigrant communities.10 Like Sánchez, Castillo is invested in considering the economic and cultural impacts of transnational capitalism. In some important ways, Castillo takes care not to romanticize the extended borderlands as multicultural utopias in which people’s mobility is as unconstrained as capital. Her central working-class Chicana characters struggle hard to make ends meet in the context of economic restructuring. While much of what we learn about these women involves their cross-cultural romantic and sexual relationships, those relations are circumscribed by a double narrative of urban malaise and cultural displacement. Sex, love, and intimacy in these worlds are saturated with psychical and physical violence, relentlessly fraught with macrohistories of colonialism and diaspora together with the contemporary exigencies of navigating transnational exploitation in its various forms: Immigration and Naturalization Service raids, factory closings, gentrification, unemployment, and urban poverty, to name a few. But having paid my respects to Castillo’s rich transcultural and transnational imagination—as well as her implicit critique of transnational capitalism—I now want to offer a critical reading of the particular way in which she executes that vision. Against her bleak portrait of failed intimacies and urban social problems, she maintains the prospect of conversion by turning to mestizaje and “Gypsy” culture and, more specifically, to the riveting racialized sexual encounters between them.11 In a 2000 interview in El Andar, Castillo was asked about her interest in flamenco: I’ve got friends who are Gypsy, one who’s quite a character himself in Chicago. I used to recite poetry—I had an ensemble—and we did poetry like García Lorca and Miguel Hernández.12 We’ve been friends all this time, and when my book of poems “My Father Was a Toltec” came out a few years ago, he said to me one day . . . “When are you going to write ‘My Brother Was a Gypsy’?” As a Chicana, as a mestiza in this society, you feel marginalized by virtue of your color and features all the time. I’m very fascinated by people who are
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even more marginalized, because you tend to get wrapped up in your experience and see the world from that experience. My Gypsy friend would say things like, “You know you think you people got problems. At least they’ve got you on the census.”13
While the representational strategy of exploring mestiza/“Gypsy” relationships lends itself to a fascinating and innovative intersection of cultural forms, it also lends itself to a peculiar double bind for the characters who embody them. On one hand, Chicanas/mestizas and “Gypsies” stand in as wondrously resilient and refreshingly antiheteronormative alternatives to the surrounding cast of characters, who represent either the normative dominant class (what José Esteban Muñoz calls, after Jack Smith, “pasty normals”) or the downtrodden working class and underclasses. On the other hand, the upshot of positioning mestiza (women) and “Gypsy” (men) in this way is not only that they are predictably exoticized (particularly because their cultural traits are rendered meaningful largely in the context of their cross-cultural sexual relations with each other) but that the cultural traits that make them seductive in Castillo’s worlds are ironically the very effects of the violent colonial histories in which they are inscribed. This leaves little room for considering how the “Gypsy” male lovers’ adept ability to “be free of” national and material constraints, for instance, is related to the historical displacement and dispossession of Rom peoples or how the superior feminine spiritual aptitude of the mestiza characters is imbricated in the violent miscegenation under Spanish colonial rule. Meanwhile, this representational strategy necessarily reifies the abjection of the surrounding (non-mestiza, non-“Gypsy”) urban working-class characters who come to exemplify par excellence Cornel West’s notion of urban nihilism, which he sees as permeating the lives of urban black men.14 As suggested by my gendered references (“Gypsy men,” “mestizas”) and the discussion in the next section, Castillo’s strategy also rests on a curious enforcement of strict gender assignation: the politics of conversion promised by mestizaje is always embodied by women and “Gypsy” culture by men. Mestiza Standpoint Epistemology If Aztlán was a crucial symbol in the late 1960s for inspiring and “grounding” an ethnonationalist movement that did not have recourse to an actual homeland, in the 1980s the “new mestiza” became an important feminist metaphor
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for an identity politics predicated on neither an actual homeland nor a masculinist Aztlán. Just as the earlier appeal of Aztlán rested both on its ties to actual history and on the elusiveness and thus permeability of that history, the concept of the new mestiza takes its force both from the historical reality of mestizaje (the miscegenation of indigenous and Spanish peoples during— and as a part of—the conquest of Mexico) and from the cultural and ethnic fluidity that it evokes.15 As a palimpsest, mestizaje contains many layers of historically laden symbolism that lends itself to the national romance of Mexico and all of the gendered and sexual components therein. Therefore mestizaje not only recalls the conquest but also evokes the notorious coupling of the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés and the indigenous translator Malintzin Tenepal, known also as La Malinche, the allegorical mother of the mestizo people. In Octavio Paz’s infamous description, she represents “the Indian women who were fascinated, violated or seduced by the Spaniards” and thus represents the quintessential chingada (fucked one), because her “passivity is abject: she does not resist violence, but is an inert heap of bones, blood and dust” (“The Labyrinth of Solitude,” 86). Castillo’s feminization of mestizaje is far from unique: it continues a long line of Chicana revisionist scholarship and creative writing that recuperates Malinche (“the native woman”) from a feminist and sex-positive vantage point in order to, in Norma Alarcón’s words, “put flesh back on the object” (“Chicana’s Feminist Literature,” 182).16 In the process of recuperating La Malinche and deconstructing her legacy of passive treachery, Chicana feminists have refashioned the meaning of mestizaje; while it still connotes racial hybridity, it now privileges a deeply indigenous and feminine ethos and always manifests itself in the female embodied form. The exemplary case of feminizing and (ironically) “indigenizing” mestizaje can be seen in Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera, which propelled the new mestiza into Chicana feminist discourse in a way that significantly opposed Paz’s characterization and reversed the status of Malinche/mestizas from “the sacrificial goat to . . . the officiating priestess at the crossroads” (80). At times Anzaldúa suggests that the characteristics of the new mestiza stem from her lived experiences as a cultural hybrid who has no singular recourse to a unitary national narrative: In a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways, la mestiza is a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another. Being tricultural, monolingual, bilingual,
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or multilingual, speaking a patois, and in a state of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does the daughter of a darkskinned mother listen to? (78)
Living under this constant cultural and linguistic uncertainty, and being pulled by conflicting loyalties, Anzaldúa’s new mestiza is forced to acquire exceptional resilience and flexibility. This fluid subjectivity is one of the features that make the new mestiza so appealing to poststructuralist feminist thinkers from Chela Sandoval to Donna Haraway. As Anzaldúa describes it, however, the aptitude of the new mestiza originates not just from experiential knowledge but from a more innate connection to the natural: Indigenous like corn, like corn, the mestiza is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation under a variety of conditions. Like an ear of corn—a female seed-bearing organ—the mestiza is tenacious, tightly wrapped in the husks of her culture. Like kernels she clings to the cob; with thick stalks and strong brace roots, she holds tight to the earth—she will survive the crossroads. (81)
Here the new mestiza’s aptitude and resilience are situated less as learned traits and more as racially, if not genetically, predetermined ones. Like genetically altered corn, the mestiza is a biological hybrid whose a priori traits are superior. Over the past ten years Chicana feminists and Chican@ scholars more broadly have slowly begun to have the courage to question the commanding new mestiza model, particularly for the way that it privileges (and in the process comes dangerously close to fetishizing) the indigenous while claiming to embrace hybridity; is built in part from biological and genetic material; glosses over the violent history of colonial miscegenation; and suggests that Chicanas have an inherent handle on mestiza consciousness, to name only a few of its features. In response to Castillo’s collection of essays Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994),17 for instance, Rosaura Sánchez writes: For Castillo, the fundamental and pressing problem is the cultural survival of Chicana mestizas . . . long spiritually and sexually repressed. Given this point of departure, Castillo posits that solutions lie within; they are cultural (textualist) and spiritual; they require the construction of a discrete mestiza
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identity in literature and the reformulation of “spirituality” from a feminine indigenous perspective. Clearly, Castillo sees herself as a priestess with a vision that extends backward and forward. (362)18
Like Anzaldúa, that is, Castillo defines mestizaje as a racial category (paradoxically both hybrid and fundamentally indigenous); as a form of consciousness that is highly spiritual, sexual, and feminine; and as an organic characteristic of Chicanas. As such, Castillo upholds mestizaje as a utopic model for the intertwined possibilities of self-love and peaceful love relations—both of which she considers requisite to radical societal transformation. In her interview with Elsa Saeta, for instance, Castillo explains that “[m]y projection of our future is that it’s not so much for us [mestizas] to assimilate and be accepted by society, but for us to bring society to the fold, bring the dominant society, bring men of all backgrounds, to our way of thinking because we have in our psyches, and in our bodies, and in our memories, and in our histories . . . everything possible to make a different world” (“A MELUS Interview,” 148). Clearly, in Castillo’s assessment, as in Anzaldúa’s, the mestizo/indigenous man is not a priori privileged with such genetic and mental aptitude. When the Chicana feminist narrative of mestizaje is faithful as such to the dramatis personae of the conquest—which is to say, when mestizaje is stubbornly affixed to the union of Cortés and Malinche down to the sex of each figure—then the indigenous man is necessarily erased and the figure of the mestizo remains in the hands of Paz as the brutally violent chingón. For Paz, “[t]he chingón is the macho, the male; he rips open the chingada, the female, who is pure passivity, defenseless against the exterior world” (“The Labyrinth of Solitude,” 77). Castillo’s works take a detour from the way in which mestizaje is usually figured by Chicana feminists in their positioning of Spain. Largely bypassing a critique of Cortés himself or of Spanish imperialism in general, Castillo works at producing male characters who have some relation to Spain but whose lives as enigmatic “Gypsies” immediately trouble that relation. If the hard, working-class, urban realities lived by Teresa and Alicia in The Mixquiahuala Letters, Pastora and Perla in Sapogonia, and Carmen La Coja in Peel My Love Like an Onion make (Castillo’s conception of) mestizaje into a personal cultural salve, then they also make (Castillo’s conception of) “Gypsy” men into a welcome respite as seductive and exotic lovers. The national romance is refigured in each of these novels, but never by fully recuperating either the figure of Cortés or the mestizo/indigenous man. Let us turn to an examination of
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how this quasi-revisionist national romance manifests itself in The Mixquiahuala Letters, which, like Sapogonia and Peel My Love Like an Onion, is a story of a strong-willed Chicana whose attempts to exert sexual and feminist agency are relentlessly thwarted by the patriarchal enforcement of the Virgen/Malinche framework.19 Letters from a Young Poet The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) is an epistolary novel of a friendship between two women—Teresa, a Chicana creative writer from Chicago who authors each of the novel’s forty letters, and Alicia, a visual artist from New York who is of mixed-race “Gypsy” heritage and to whom each of the letters is addressed.20 Whereas many epistolary novels incorporate in the text occasional letters and/or descriptions of characters writing the letters in order to offer alternative depictions of the same events already narrated and/or to provide readers with less mediated access to a character’s private thoughts, The Mixquiahuala Letters consists wholly of letters.21 Castillo takes the epistolary technique to its extreme and offers un-narrated access to Teresa’s deeply private letters to Alicia, thereby placing the reader in the position of voyeur. Amplifying the novel’s epistolary form, Castillo presents even the table of contents in the form of a letter, from herself to the reader. “Dear Reader,” she writes. “It is the author’s duty to alert the reader that this is not a book to be read in the usual sequence. All letters are numbered to aid in following any one of the author’s proposed options” (no pagination). At this point Castillo offers three different reading sequences for different types of readers: the conformist, the cynical, and the quixotic.22 Each of the three sequences omits between six and eleven of the forty letters and presents them out of numerical order. Castillo closes her three-page letter/table of contents by adding: “For the reader committed to nothing but short fiction, all the letters read as separate entities. Good luck whichever journey you choose! A. C.” (no pagination). The multiple reading sequences immediately frustrate expectations of a traditional linear narrative, as does the absence of a narrator. Because the novel consists only of the letters, we must rely completely on Teresa’s point of view, which is itself quite demanding. Her letter-writing style has no truck with linearity, specificity, or signposting and instead produces frequent and unexpected experimental shifts in tense, person, and even genre. That is, even if we select the “conformist” reading sequence, the letters in and of themselves are often labyrinthian—meant as they no doubt are to reflect
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Teresa’s own hybridity and complex subjectivity. Moreover, as past-tense documents—they recall past events and we have access to them only after they are written—we have very few clues to their scene of inscription. All of this unsettling only intensifies the bewildering disarray of Teresa and Alicia’s sexual experiences and romantic relationships with unfaithful, abusive, opportunistic, and potentially dangerous men as recounted in many of the letters. In her essay “The Sardonic Powers of the Erotic in the Work of Ana Castillo,” Norma Alarcón situates Teresa and Alicia’s “quest for romantic/erotic bliss” within a heteropatriarchal ideology of the erotic popularized by romance novels and fotonovelas (photonovels). As much as Teresa attempts to express and practice sexual agency, Alarcón argues, she is always already bound by “an overly determined script in which she takes part,” and thus her experiences illustrate “that an appropriation of the erotic in a heterosexist society may only end up being revealed as a misappropriation” (105). According to Alarcón, the erotic quest threatens the very subjectivity of Teresa and Alicia: As Janice A. Radway has told us in Reading the Romance, romantic/erotic bliss is the salient promise that Western patriarchy holds out to women, a bliss that constantly eludes our hapless heroines. Why? I can only conjecture that, while both Tere and Alicia are quite adept at posing as the object of desire, they find it impossible to carry through the subsequent social actualization of that objectification, primarily because it is not an option at all. It spells the death of their subjectivity. Ironically, that is their nearunconscious discovery. The patriarchal promise of romantic/erotic bliss, represented in all manner of popular literature, is an ideological maneuver to kill their subjectivity and any further exploration of their own desire. (104)
Alarcón’s characterization of Teresa and Alicia’s erotic quests and her reminder of the close proximity of love and death are a provocative feminist entry into the novel because they insist on a much larger structural context for understanding what might seem like fully “personal” and random romantic encounters. But as the next section shows, a more nuanced understanding of the novel depends on a consideration of the way in which the erotic quest is racialized through and through. When Alarcón suggests that it is “the erotic quest that holds Teresa and Alicia’s friendship together” (103), we fail to notice that the friendship is simultaneously based on shared experiences of (racial/ethnic) hybridity and an equally pressing quest for origin narratives.
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At times this quest for origins intersects with the erotic quest; at others it interrupts it; but the two can never be fully separated. TERESA’S TRAVELS
Although Teresa’s hometown of Chicago is precisely the kind of metropolis cited by Sánchez as the extended borderlands, it is far removed from the Toltec ruins, Aztec pyramids, and indigenous villages to which Teresa is repeatedly drawn and in which she so desperately desires self-recognition. If, as Alarcón suggests, Castillo deliberately constructs Teresa’s erotic quest as a series of failures in order to represent the insidiousness of heterosexism, Castillo appears less invested in exposing the romanticized quality of Teresa’s quest for racial recognition, particularly as that quest depends on international travel.23 The spurious North American–sponsored summer culture and language program in Mexico City, where Teresa and Alicia first meet at the age of twenty, becomes an opposing referent in the novel for Teresa’s authenticity. Teresa is indignant to learn that, despite its “heavy Aztec name,” the program was just a notch above fraudulent status. My shock bored a 3 inch hole into my native spirit expecting to study with and under brothers and sisters only to find California blonds and eastern WASPS, instructors who didn’t speak Spanish. Is it grazi or gracia? All this made worse by the general attitude that no one had any objective but to undergo an existential summer of exotic experiences. (18)
Teresa is just as troubled to find that she is misrecognized at the program as “another gringa” despite her “Indian-marked face, fluent use of the language, undeniably Spanish name” (19). If not for the novel’s repeated testament to Teresa’s “native spirit,” we might consider her indignation at her classmates’ desire for “an existential summer of exotic experiences” and their misrecognition of her as one of them to be chased with Castillo’s irony. Yet, even if irony is Castillo’s trademark, as Alarcón contends (94), and even if the reader might characterize Teresa’s own travels in Mexico as not radically unlike those of a tourist in search of exotic experiences, Castillo’s desire to imprint native authenticity on Teresa’s identity and physical features is clear. Indeed, the novel repeatedly attempts to impress Teresa’s cultural authenticity upon the reader, not simply through Teresa’s own solemn pronouncements, her obvious background as a working-class Chicana, or her clear political
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commitment as a creative writer but through the particular aesthetics of her epistolary form: the code-switching, the genre-switching, the lowercase “i,” and the oral quality of her letters. Set against the ersatz summer program is Teresa and Alicia’s discovery of Mixquiahuala: “Among the highlights that faraway summer of our fledgling womanhood while we studied with gringo instructors who looked for meaning in life outside a commune in Idaho, and a Mexican artisan at a contemporary market geared to attract tourists with dollars—was a weekend in Mixquiahuala, a pre-Columbian village of obscurity, neglectful of progress” (19). While the elite family that hosts their visit in Mixquiahuala represents “colonial repression,” most of the inhabitants are indigenous (“native women washed, beat clothes against polished stones; indian children with streaks of blond hair bathed and splashed carefree” [20]) and thus represent the legitimacy that Teresa initially expected of the summer program. And if Teresa is misrecognized as “another gringa” at the program, she recognizes herself, with Alicia’s help, in the people of Mixquiahuala: “For years afterward you enjoyed telling people that i was from Mixquiahuala. It explained the exotic tinge of yellow and red in my complexion, the hint of an accent in my baroque speech, and most of all, the undiscernible [sic] origin of my being” (20). Importantly, while—or, rather, because—Mixquiahuala functions as a potent location of cultural authentication for Teresa and as a testament to the local native women’s survival amid colonial repression and miscegenation, it cannot meanwhile function as a setting for her erotic quest. Unlike Teresa’s sexual encounters with men in more urban places in Mexico (men who are surprisingly faithful to Paz’s characterization of the Mexican macho, whose violent national origins result in chingaderas [violent acts] [81]), the only kind of romance or desire on Teresa’s radar in the village of Mixquiahuala involves her identification as mestiza/indígena. Insofar as Teresa’s quest for origins depends on the Chicana revisionist fantasy of the new mestiza described earlier, there is simply no heterosexual love object in a village like Mixquiahuala. The Spanish male archetype is at best a haunting presence; mestizo men are not mentioned; all that matters in this space are the native women. Of course, Mixquiahuala, and all that it represents, works overtime as it functions in the book’s title as the sole descriptor of the letters. The pastoral quality of villages like Mixquiahuala brings into sharp relief the corruption, elitism, Anglo tourism, and machismo that Teresa and Alicia encounter in urban Mexico. In this Mexico, Teresa and Alicia’s apparent disregard of patriarchally enforced decorum is recognized by locals as distinctly
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U.S. Here they find that the stereotype of the sexually available gringa tourist works with the intrigue over the exotic Other to inscribe them as enigmatically promiscuous. In a sense, Castillo turns topsy-turvy the Paz scene of seduction, which posits native women as utterly enthralled by conquistadors; here Mexican men are under the seductive spell of the female foreign Other and “wondered what it would be like to make love to the infamous North American white woman so transcendental” that their own Mexican wives seem by contrast “inconsequential” (27). Teresa and Alicia, at once duplicitous and disempowered in this reenactment, are finally rendered unsuitable for and unworthy of the kind of emotionally committed relationship they so desperately seek: Mexico. Melancholy, profoundly right and wrong, it embraces as it strangulates. . . . The reason it was so blatantly painful, to the point that it made you cringe at the sound of the male voice, was that we had abruptly appeared in Mexico as two snags in its pattern. Society could do no more than snip us out. How revolting we were, susceptible to ridicule, abuse, disrespect. We would have hoped for respect as human beings, but the only respect granted a woman is that which a gentleman bestows upon a lady. Clearly, we were no ladies. (59)
Indeed, their incessant objectification and manipulation by the Mexican men they encounter shapes the representation of Mexico with layer after layer of violence, which climaxes when Alicia is held at gunpoint in an attempted rape. If Mexico never offers the racialized heterosexual romance that Teresa so desperately seeks, however, then neither does the United States. Sustained monogamous relationships there are illusory, not only because the “patriarchal promise of romantic/erotic bliss . . . is an ideological maneuver to kill their [women’s] subjectivity,” as Alarcón would have it, but because the poverty, racism, and violence in Teresa’s Chicago and Alicia’s New York permeate the erotic through and through. Castillo renders urban men of color through a cyclical and claustrophobic culture of poverty narrative, as crystallized in the abjection and ultimate suicide of Abdel, Alicia’s lover. As if taken from an Oscar Lewis page complete with absentee father, Abdel “had vestiges of Caribbean blood, a man without a surname, born and raised in New York, a
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product of its streets” (106). Although he is initially attracted to Alicia’s “firm convictions, your courage to stand on your own, to be able to leave love and sex on the wayside because your work was easily as important as it could be to any man” (106), his pathologies (those problematic features of Lewis’s culture of poverty narrative) unsurprisingly lead him to abuse Alicia physically and emotionally and, finally, to end his own life, leaving behind “a self-portrait of such macabre perversity” (131). As Teresa recounts in letter 40 (not incidentally, the novel’s final piece if read in numerical order): “Abdel was a weak man, Alicia, and he had already sucked you dry of more than what a child can demand of its mother. Unlike the child, the man never wanted to grow independent. On the contrary, his dependency became greater, the demands, the pathetic sulking when he didn’t have his way more frequent” (129). What is important to underline here is that where Abdel’s social unintelligibility is the very root of his self-annihilation, Teresa and Alicia’s “undiscernible origin[s]” make them exotic, independent, and resilient; where Abdel’s lack of origin narrative makes him pathological, Teresa and Alicia’s racial hybridity is “spine-tingling.” You told me once, we were on a palm strewn beach in Puerto Rico, i believe, (i recall the gold-tooth peddlers and the old men weaving pajas) that you were taken to Spain when you were a small girl. Your grandmother, on your father’s side, was from Andalucía and part gypsy. She sang, with a spine-tingling gutteral [sic] voice, lyrics you never understood but felt just the same. . . . You told me that gypsies are an oppressed dark people who nevertheless live celebrating death through life. That was all you knew about gypsies. . . . Your parents had never wanted anything to do with that mongrel race, the lost tribe, and fought in America for American ideals and the American way of life. (25)
Alicia’s hazy “Gypsy” roots no doubt help energize and fortify her friendship with the equally enigmatic Teresa, which, again, requires us to flesh out Alarcón’s assertion that the glue holding the friendship together across space and time is the heterosexual erotic quest. Because Teresa and Alicia mirror each other so well, each helps fill in the blanks where the other’s origin quest becomes most challenging. Moreover, the settings for this mutual recognition and grounding are a Puerto Rican beach and, as discussed earlier, a Mexican “pre-Columbian village” (and decisively not New York and Chicago),
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which makes travel a significant criterion in the quest for origins. The more pastoral the setting and the less adulterated the local Others, the better the self-recognition and hence “self-love.” Were it not for the heterosexual contours of Teresa’s national narrative and thus her own erotic/origin quest, we might even expect Teresa and Alicia to fall in love, replaying the Spanish/ indigenous union with a queer “Gypsy” twist. The only male lovers who do not become ensnared in either the culture of poverty narrative or constraining national narratives are the “Gypsies,” Alexis and El Gallo. Alexis had crossed the ocean with his friend, El Gallo, and that entire week we were four inseparable lovers, of life, art, music, and passion. Most of all passion. My first night with Alexis taught me that i was a virgin. i was a virgin and i had never given myself to a man before, nor had any man given himself to me. High above the trash-ridden streets of Manhattan, the hornblowers, and double parkers, the winos, derelicts, pushers and pimps, the spicy aroma of cumin and garlic, curry, and fried plantains, burning tenements, stench of urined and vomited halls, blasting screech of subway trains, the winding and unwinding of life in all its naked forms, we were snuggled and safe within the tight arms of men who knew how to possess women. Nights were twenty-four hours long and the mattress flung on your kitchen floor served as our marriage bed. i was pliable clay to be molded and defined, to envelop him, suit his proportions until a pillow was placed over the mouth to stifle a cry of insatiable hunger. Behind the closed door to your room, time was measured by Argentine tangos and South American boleros on the record player. A bathroom door occasionally opened and closed quietly, not to disrupt a rhythm, bath water ran. Now and then someone went out for Chinese food or brought back fresh vegetables and eggs. The tea kettle whistled, cigarette smoke hazed the apartment’s atmosphere. You took a deep drag from a joint and stared at the watercolor tacked on the far wall, two phantom figures by the Atlantic seashore. . . . We licked our wounds with the underside of penises and applied semen to our tender bellies and breasts like Tiger’s balm. (99–100)24
Importantly, the bohemian ambience that lends force to this scene is (literally) elevated from those who would conform to nine-to-five jobs (the
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hornblowers and double parkers) and those who are trapped in an alternative framework of abject poverty (the winos, derelicts, pushers, and pimps). The soothing, romantic music of South America covers over the catalogue of urban traffic, trash, and burning tenements. Most importantly, of course, Alexis and El Gallo’s erotic mastery is such that it can provide the highly experienced Teresa and Alicia with both sexual initiation (“Alexis taught me that i was a virgin”), and a punctum (or intense defamiliarization from the everyday) opening onto a different relation to time and space. Perhaps the best way to underline this scene of suspended sexual ravishment is to note that it so moved Cherríe Moraga that she apparently told Castillo that she had “never read a more tantalizing portrayal of heterosexual sex” (“Interview with Ana Castillo,” 127). Just as Teresa’s mestizaje apparently prevents her from sinking into the kind of nihilistic despair described by Cornel West, Alexis and El Gallo’s rejection of Western values and their adept physical mobility enable them to outwit the material forms of oppression that African American and Latino men in urban settings cannot escape. While Castillo does not go much further than this to develop the characters of Alexis and El Gallo—in fact, while Castillo writes their exits just as abruptly as their appearances—they offer the only respite from the novel’s relentless heterosexual violence. They embody what Isabel Fonseca in Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (1995) refers to as “the romantic stereotype of the Romany free spirit” (16), the very “definition of rootlessness and freedom” (175).25 And it is versions of these men that will reappear (but also enigmatically disappear) in different forms in Sapogonia and Peel My Love Like an Onion as “Gypsy” lovers who finally know how to “possess” Chicanas/mestizas. Sapogonia The mestiza/Gypsy connection flirted with in The Mixquiahuala Letters becomes the central drama in Castillo’s novel Sapogonia (An Anti-Romance in 3/8 Meter) (1990).26 Like Letters and Peel My Love Like an Onion, Sapogonia explores the residual effects of colonial histories by foregrounding difficult sexual and romantic relationships between racialized people who symbolize particular aspects or figures of those histories. If we were to situate these three novels as a trilogy, we could say that they collectively display Castillo’s ongoing attempt to write a revisionist history of racialized sexuality that follows Chicana feminist historian Emma M. Pérez’s argument: “To trace desire to mem-
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ories of origin is a way of tracking it historically. Tracking desire historically invokes the site of fantasy where resistance is possible, perhaps even making revolution possible” (The Decolonial Imaginary, 110). The central relationship of Sapogonia is between Pastora Velásquez Aké, a Chicana/mestiza from Chicago, and Máximo Madrigal, a mestizo born and raised in “Sapogonia,” the novel’s fictitious titular country set somewhere in the Americas. Although the novel is vague about Sapogonia’s colonial histories, Castillo tells us in the prologue that the “Sapogón is besieged by a history of slavery, genocide, immigration, and civil uprising, all of which have left their marks on the genetic make-up of the generation following such periods as well as the border outline of its territory” (5). Whereas he [the Sapogón] may, by affectation, acquire the mannerisms and the idioms of the North American with the intent of assimilation, his genetic make-up immediately sets him apart, for his European ancestry, which may be either Spanish or French with the invariable contribution of indigenous blood, makes him shorter in stature with dark features not characteristic of the Aryan or Anglo. . . . Any acknowledgement of indigenous American ancestry causes him almost immediately to be relegated to the world of Sapogonia. (5–6)
This prologue description of the Sapogón’s complex relation to nation, ethnicity, and race foreshadows the identity crisis that will plague Máximo throughout the novel—a crisis that is only confounded by the fact that his (absentee) father is a gitano or Spanish “Gypsy.” From the opening pages of Sapogonia, we find Castillo in characteristic form mocking generic conventions. Where the multiple scramble of letters offered in the irreverent table of contents in Letters calls attention to the nontraditional qualities of that narrative, Sapogonia opens immediately with two boundary-transgressing notes. The first note explains: “This is the story of make-believe people in a real world; or, if you like, the story of real people in a make-believe world” (no pagination). The second note is in the form of a dictionary entry, complete with pronunciation, and is credited not to the author or to a dictionary but to the novel’s protagonist: anti-hero (ant-ˉe-hˉe-rˉo) n., pl. -roes. 1. In mythology and legend, a man who celebrates his own strength and bold exploits.
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2. Any man who notes his special achievements. 3. The principal male character in a novel, poem, or dramatic work. —as defined by Pastora Velásquez Aké (no pagination)
Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, author and character, reality and fantasy (indeed, between hero and antihero), Pastora spills over into the prenarrative space reserved for the author (the pages that precede the formal beginning of a novel’s first chapter) just as the fictitious Sapogonia in the first note and again a few pages later in the prologue is situated as a (possible) real place, “a distinct place in the Americas where all mestizos reside, regardless of nationality, individual racial composition, or legal residential status—or, perhaps, because of all of these” (5). One of the most disarming techniques of the novel is its postmodern traffic in narrators and multiple points of view. Although there is something of a primary, omniscient narrator who speaks largely in the third person, that voice shifts abruptly and frequently to the second person and sometimes completely to Máximo’s point of view.27 Interrupting that omniscient narrator altogether (often in midsentence), Máximo himself sometimes picks up as first-person narrator. And we also have a singular reflexive address to the reader that, like the prefatory material, uncannily blurs boundaries: “Máximo put down his guitar and wondered why you didn’t turn to the next page” (108). Complicating matters still further, we are provided with ample reason to doubt not only the validity of Pastora’s inexplicable actions (many of which simply could not realistically have taken place as described) but her very humanness. That is, Máximo’s obsession with Pastora is so extreme that we—and even he—sometimes wonder if she is not a fiction of his own imagination. The violent turbulence of the love affair between Máximo and Pastora is so potent that it bleeds into the formal elements of the text. It is as if the unusual narrative features are created by a fierce competition between Máximo and Pastora for narrative space, for lead role in the novel. To follow Castillo’s own reflections as stated in an interview: “Obviously Máximo Madrigal, being the arrogant, pompous ass that he is, wasn’t satisfied with a couple of poems. . . . It was so painful for me to be in that voice, to be under Máximo Madrigal’s skin that, without any plan, I introduced Pastora. It was supposed to be his story, and she was supposed to be this objectified creation that he would create and destroy over and over” (“Interview with Ana Castillo,” 128–129).
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MESTIZO ANTIHERO
The colonial macrohistory of Sapogonia structures Máximo’s family romance such that the union of his maternal grandparents replays the violent miscegenation of criollo (man) and Indian (woman), complete with rape and prohibition of indigenous cultural practices:28 My tata, el señor Máximo Mireles y Macías, forbade his Mayan bride, whom he took from her home [after raping her] in Santa Agueda Quetzaltenango at the age of thirteen, to wear her native costumes, except, of course, when she went home on visits. She was not allowed to pray to her rows of clay statues. He made certain his diminutive wife was a God-fearing Roman Catholic, and built a shrine in the garden for a life-size statue of the Virgen de los Remedios, where my Mamá Grande was permitted to go for solace and meditation daily. It was the only place outside that my Mamá Grande was ever permitted to go alone. Even though it was just in the back of the house, I think the privilege meant a great deal to Mamá Grande. (11)
The patriarch’s actions repeat the stages of what Tzvetan Todorov calls “religious conquest,” the well-documented Spanish colonial prohibition of indigenous spiritual practices and enforced conversion to Roman Catholicism. As Hernán Cortés himself recounted, “The most important of these [indigenous] idols and the ones in which they have most faith I had taken from their places and thrown down the steps; and I ordered those chapels where they had been to be cleaned, for they were full of the blood of sacrifices; and I had images of Our Lady and of other saints put there” (quoted in Todorov, Conquest of America, 60). Of course, Castillo’s feminist project of “putting flesh back on the object” entails making Mamá Grande agentive and resilient. Therefore, just as the “Indians manage to insert segments of their old religion into the very heart of Christian religious practices” (Todorov, Conquest of America, 205), so too does Mamá Grande “place all of her statues alongside and at the foot of the statue of the Virgen” (Sapogonia, 12). Máximo’s mother also plays a part in this national narrative, not only because her own birth literally enacts mestizaje but because of her brief affair with Máximo’s father, Pío Madrigal, whom she meets during his travels to Sapogonia in search of gold. Unlike Máximo’s maternal grandfather, Papá Grande, whose patriarchal commitments to nation and family bind him to
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Sapogonia, Máximo’s father is staged as the “dandy gallego,” “unscrupulous Spaniard,” and “roaming gypsy” (75, 100, 250), predictably disappearing as quickly as he appears (like El Gallo and Alexis in Letters). In sharp contrast to the conservative Papá Grande—“a man with great stamina, superhuman strength and abilities,” who “aside from having married an Indian . . . had followed to the letter the norms of his class” (95), including stepping up as surrogate father to Máximo from the time of his birth—Pío is free to pursue whatever individual interests might move him regardless of their impact on others, whether that means traveling at whim, seducing multiple women, abandoning his children, or breaking the law. When the adult Máximo meets his father during his travels through Spain for the first time (in a shared jail cell in Madrid), he is simultaneously disappointed to learn that his father enjoys none of the material wealth that he had associated with Spain and intrigued by his unsurpassed flair as a flamenco musician: While Pío Madrigal turned out to be impoverished, he had already let me know that there was a thing or two about life that he could tell me. He showed me up on the guitar, my newly found passion. His voice, gravelly as it was from alcohol and cigarettes, was better than mine. Perhaps what I needed was to drink and smoke more, I speculated, to get that effect so desired by flamenco singers. (62)
But as much as Máximo attempts to pursue the individual freedom and bohemian artistry of his father’s world (much to the dismay of his grandfather, who hopes that he will return to Sapogonia and assume the duties of patrón [landowner]), he can never get enough distance from the haunting figure of “the native woman” to be truly free. As a highly ambitious quick study, Máximo adeptly acquires cultural capital along the routes of his European travels; and as “the Cortés of every vagina he crossed” (124), he artfully manipulates women for material gain. He is no match, however, for the indigenous spiritual prowess of both his wise Mayan grandmother who haunts his dreams and his mestiza lover Pastora or, as he calls her, Coatlicue.29 THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED
As a new mestiza, Pastora represents something of an anachronism for Máximo, embodying as she does his grandmother’s cultural traits and values. Where Máximo customarily seeks out women who possess the kind of cultur-
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al and economic capital he can exploit, Pastora struggles to make ends meet as a protest musician in the tradition of Violeta Parra. She is the daughter of factory workers, which not only determines her class position but makes her acutely sensitive to the exploitation of the marginalized. Her political commitments lead her to underground sanctuary work (including transporting Sapogón “illegal” immigrants who are fleeing a brutal civil war), for which she is incarcerated. The granddaughter of a Yaqui, Pastora is spiritually and culturally committed to indigeneity, down to her “hand-woven Huichol costume” (23) and “the collection of figurines in deliberate arrangement on the bureau” (159). Pastora’s resemblance to Teresa in The Mixquiahuala Letters is striking, not only because she too lives in Chicago but because of her homoerotic friendship with Perla (mirroring that of Teresa and Alicia), her “terrific aloofness” (25) and “reserve of a queen” (69), and, despite her propensity for “unhealthy” relationships with men, her mestiza investment in “self-love” (“She could not pretend to care about the salvation of humanity and care nothing about herself” [23]). Indeed, if we did not learn by way of cameo appearances by Teresa and Alicia in Sapogonia that Teresa is Pastora’s acquaintance, we might speculate that she and Pastora are one composite character. Even though Pastora and Teresa are literally different characters, the distinct traits that they share are clearly fundamental to Castillo’s conception and rendering of the new mestiza: she is enigmatic and haughty, feminine, irresistible to both men and women but decidedly heterosexual, physically attractive, unconventional in every way, culturally and spiritually indigenous, wounded but resilient, strong-willed, and artistic. Of course, because Castillo is interested in exploring from a racialized-sexual vantage point what Emma M. Pérez calls “history’s imprints upon the colonial body” (The Decolonial Imaginary, 99), her rendering of the new mestiza in Letters, Sapogonia, and Peel My Love Like an Onion (see the discussion below) cannot be understood fully without a consideration of the way in which desiring subjects feature in Castillo’s modern-day colonial script. As I have been suggesting, what is so fascinating and perplexing about Castillo’s script is her persistent sexual coupling of mestizas and gitanos (Spanish “Gypsies”). Importantly, Máximo’s affair with Pastora begins only after his contact with his “Gypsy” father and initiation into the world of flamenco and thus signifies a different Spanish/indígena point of contact than that represented by Mamá and Papá Grande. If Teresa and Alicia find in Alexis and El Gallo men who finally “know how to possess women,” Máximo goes out of his way to seduce Pastora with his flamenco flair and accoutrements, from his os-
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tentatious palmas (hand-clapping) down to his “pointed-toe snakeskin boots” (131). And at one point in the novel Pastora herself is likened to a “Gypsy”: “Her gypsy heart had gone up to the yearning for music, for more wine, for laughter, for Máximo’s kisses” (154). Pastora’s bohemian verve—her love of smoking, drinking, dancing, singing, art, and freedom—resembles all that Máximo immediately finds so captivating about his father’s way of life. At the same time, Pastora signifies for Máximo the unavoidable return of the repressed, all that he fails to honor—but somehow fundamentally knows (or viscerally feels) he should honor—in his Mayan grandmother’s ways. Indeed, it is precisely Pastora’s indigenous-inflected mestizaje that seems to enthrall Máximo, even if—or especially because—his own cosmopolitan self-definition and narcissistic individualism actively deny any ties to the indigenous. As Roland Walter rightly points out, “Castillo uses [Máximo] and his experience to render an image of the border subject’s estrangement from his natural roots, from a wholesome cosmic relation to nature and reality” (“Cultural Politics of Dislocation and Relocation in the Novels of Ana Castillo,” 85). Pastora’s handwoven indigenous clothes, her resemblance to Coatlicue, her uncanny ability to come to Máximo in dreams so vividly that evidence of her appearance is left the next morning, her inexplicable spiritual connection to his own Mayan grandmother (Pastora’s spirit guide)—all of these ethereal features stand in the novel as evidence of Máximo’s ultimate failure to repress his own indigeneity. Pastora Aké. Aghh! . . . Pastora was a witch, an unequivocal bruja who’d undoubtedly used her wicked powers to hex him; a drop of spitballed wax on the back of his neck one night, his hairs left on her pillow, pulled from his chest the moment he’d drifted into a heavy sleep after coming. Somehow, she had managed to take something so vital and potent from his being, like the umbilical cord his grandmother had severed with her teeth the dawn he was born; the remains, shriveled ten days later, wrapped and hidden away to protect his soul. (172)
Because Máximo does not learn to honor the feminine/indigenous—even if he fails to repress it permanently—he remains locked into the position of “antihero” through the novel’s end, at which point he is left still haunted with the fantasy of “the tremendous couple we would have made, one to surpass all artistic couples in history. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo? Virginia and Leonard Woolf?” (295). The hero of the novel is finally Pastora and all that she represents.
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Peel My Love Like an Onion Flamenco music and dancing—together with conflicts between “Gypsy” and gadjo (non-“Gypsy”) cultural values—take center stage in Castillo’s novel Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999), also set in Chicago.30 Here the central character (also the first-person narrator) is a working-class Chicana whose nickname, Carmen la Coja (the Gimp), refers to the physical disability she has lived with ever since she was stricken with polio at age six.31 As she describes it, “My left foot was and still is like this: bald and featherless, a limp dead heron fallen from its nest. Are herons hatched in trees? I don’t know, I only know that my dead heron foot had no hope at all. My left leg was even more pathetic, a dead gnarled limb, thin and crooked” (12–13). Although Carmen lives with chronic pain and constrained mobility, at times using crutches and a brace, and suffers a second bout of polio at age forty, she becomes a noted flamenco dancer through the mentorship of—and turbulent triangulated love affair with— two “Gypsies,” Agustín (el Gachupín) and his godson Manolo (el Negro). The novel centers on Carmen’s unlikely entry into the vibrant world of gitano culture and flamenco dancing (becoming a legend even in Spain) and her ongoing attempts to achieve “self-love” and loving heterosexual relationships against a bleak backdrop of bodily pain, immobility, drug addiction, and disease as well as transnational capitalism, poverty, gentrification, underemployment, and other “inner-city horrors” (93). Where The Mixquiahuala Letters and Sapogonia focus largely on the challenges of the protagonists, Peel My Love Like an Onion adds additional layers by representing in depth the difficulties of Carmen’s family and friends. We see the toll that racism and poverty take on Carmen’s parents: her father, a mechanic, is confined to living in the basement of the family home with his adult son, Abel, a newsstand vendor and elotero (roasted-corn street vender); and her mother, who suffers from diabetes and heart problems, is constantly trying to make ends meet with a range of odd jobs, including the tedious piecework she takes up in sweatshops and in the home. (We are also told that the life-threatening severity of the polio’s effect on Carmen’s physical mobility was exacerbated because the Santos family could not afford immediate quality health care.) In addition to Abel, Carmen has two other brothers: Joseph, a yuppie who has very little to do with the family; and Negrito, a drug addict and drifter. Meanwhile, Carmen’s good friend and confidante Chichi—who works as a prostitute to earn money for male-to-female gender-reassignment surgery—is brutally murdered and found in the hallway of the downtrodden Hollywood Hotel,
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where she and Carmen both temporarily live. Finally, Carmen’s first love and childhood friend, Virgil, is dying of AIDS, “a Lazarus among the living” (189). In an interview with the Spanish scholars Jesús Lerate and María Angeles Toda Iglesia, Castillo describes wanting to depict Carmen as “chronically disadvantaged” but not a victim: So the idea of Carmen la Coja is, she’s brown, coja [lame], extremely poor, extremely marginalized: she’s got everything going against her, except her unwillingness to be a victim, and what she decides she wants to do with her life is to be a dancer. So she realizes this objective, by working with these gipsy flamenco artists coming from Chicago. So mostly it was about that, I was looking at it again from the perspective of someone who was chronically disadvantaged, but doesn’t see herself as disadvantaged; in fact, Carmen la Coja sees herself as having been loved like the most beautiful woman in the world. (“Entrevista con Ana Castillo,” 31)32
Just as Teresa and Alicia in The Mixquiahuala Letters are drawn to El Gallo and Alexis as exotic respites from the suffering that surrounds them, Carmen is immediately magnetized by the mobility and freedom represented by Agustín and Manolo. Not only do these lovers transform Carmen from “la Coja” into “the most beautiful woman in the world,” as Castillo noted above, but they also “protected me from what otherwise defined society as I had known it, getting up to go to a job everyday, working like a fool for someone else, killing yourself to buy things you had no use for, thinking you could really own anything in this life” (Peel My Love Like an Onion, 30–31). That is, Agustín and Manolo signify a hopeful escape from the entrapment of consumer capitalism, which has ensnared Carmen’s parents for all of their lives and which depends on, even as it wears out, “able-bodied” labor. Carmen pines not only for the romantic attention of her “Gypsy” lovers but for the related instruction in the ingrained survival tactics that allow them to outwit the burdens of citizenship. Of course, the philosophy of hereone-minute-gone-the-next which undergirds their survival is the very same thing that makes them such elusive lovers. It is really Manolo—“simply the best flamenco dancer in the world” (11), “my black Moor” (10)—that Carmen longs for the most, even though his “Gypsy”-inflected loyalty to his godfather, Agustín, makes him the most unobtainable of her lovers, “the alley cat” (83), “slipp[ing] away as smoothly as a silk shawl over bare shoulders” (74).
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I wanted him—that Byzantine finger-snapping boy. My Muslim-Christian-Jewish saint of sacrilegious yearnings, Indo-Pakistani with at least one line of maybe Otomí American blood going through his throbbing veins. My gypsy gazelle sleepy-eyed dreamer whom if I could dream I would have dreamed up—I wanted all of him. (84)
Even Sapogonia’s Máximo Madrigal, who makes cameo appearances in the novel (we learn in passing that he had been Carmen’s lover), appears in one flash and is gone in the next: “Voila! He’d appear at my door at the Hollywood Hotel. Voila! He’d be gone again, back and forth making his rounds, and before I knew it the steamy city summer would be gone” (179). And Carmen’s on-and-off love affair with Agustín is strained from the beginning, largely because he returns to Spain every summer to visit his wife, Inmaculada, whom Carmen can only imagine as “a faraway fairy-tale woman, Sleeping Beauty’s stepmother as far as I was concerned” (35), “a ghost wife in Spain” (151). That is, and in keeping with The Mixquiahuala Letters and Sapogonia, while “Gypsy” men serve a crucial function in Peel My Love Like an Onion, “Gypsy” women are no more than a present absence. While the male “Gypsy” lovers are mobile and independent, moreover, their wives are temporally and spatially anchored. Thus, just as the promise of mestizaje will always be contained in the body of the new mestiza—that is, the Mexican American woman—the promise of her “Gypsy” lover will always be rendered in a male body. Of course this predetermined gender assignation results in heteronormative relations. Conclusion In Methodology of the Oppressed, cultural theorist Chela Sandoval draws from the work of Roland Barthes to suggest that love and lovers’ discourse can revolutionize social relations from the ground up: The language of lovers can puncture through the everyday narratives that tie us to social time and space to the descriptions, recitals, and plots that dull and order our senses insofar as such social narratives are tied to the law. The act of falling in love can thus function as a “punctum,” that which breaks
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through social narratives to permit a bleeding, meanings unanchored and moving away from their traditional moorings. . . . Romantic love provides one kind of entry to a form of being that breaks the citizen-subject free from the ties that bind being, to thus enter the differential mode of consciousness, or to enter what Barthes perhaps better describes as “the gentleness of the abyss.” (140–141)
On one hand, Castillo seems to be working toward creating a revolutionary and decolonizing punctum in each of the three novels discussed in this chapter. On the other hand, her investment in mestiza standpoint epistemology together with her particular rendition of the masculine, mobile “Gypsy” counterpart—her attempts to queer the conquest in a manner that honors the indigenous female figure and replaces the conquistador with the male “Gypsy”—a priori shapes her lovers’ discourse through and through. It is constrained by a “colonial imaginary,” in which “the colonial remains the inhibiting trace, accepting power relations as they are, perhaps confronting them, but not reconfiguring them” (Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary, 110). The figure of the “Gypsy” functions for Castillo in highly contradictory ways. (Male) “Gypsies” function as a heuristic for thinking through the position of Chican@s, for whom communities are mobile, border crossings are routine, homelands are unattainable, and group solidarity and cultural maintenance are desirable. If “Gypsies” function to author a sense of borderless mobility, however, then that mobility easily lends itself to the gendered, clichéd, and stereotyped representation of the “Gypsy” as enigmatic, illegible, homeless, and wondrous. As such, Castillo’s romanticization of Aztec queens and “Gypsy” kings finally prevents her from articulating a pan-ethnic Latino and cross-cultural vision of social change and cultural aesthetics.
Américo Paredes and the De-Mastery of Desire [F]rom the perspective of feminist thought in the late 1980s, Paredes’s work now appears dated in its idealization of a primordial patriarchy. —RENATO ROSALDO, “Changing Chicano Narratives”
HIS CHAPTER MOVES BACK in time to reconsider, from the vantage point of post-1980s Chicana feminist and queer imaginaries, the work of a Chicano writer who is widely considered to be the “father” of Chicano letters, the late “Don” Américo Paredes (1915–1999). Although my epigraph suggests that such a reconsideration would automatically take the form of feminist critique of the warrior hero and “primordial patriarchy” celebrated (and embodied) by Paredes, I am actually more interested in clearing a space for approaching Paredes and his work through a less predictable set of questions. If Chapter 1’s reading (like a queer) of Moraga’s work hinged on the disruption of teleological narratives, both her own and those she invites from her readers, this chapter goes a step further: it performs a queer transvaluation of Paredes’s work to place pressure on the very presuppositions of Chican@ literary and cultural studies. The history generated by those presuppositions—and, tautologically, the presuppositions that continue to be sustained through that history—is enmeshed with the cultural and political mobilization of Chican@s as an oppositional group beginning in the mid-1960s. We thus continue to view Chican@ literary texts through an oppositional lens shaped by the particular strategies used for politicizing Mexican Americans into Chican@s and encouraging their active participation in the decisively ethnonationalist movimiento.1 As Juan Bruce-Novoa has argued, these strategies revolve around and solidify a number of preset criteria for delineating the bounds of, and evaluating, Chicano poetics: an us-vs.-them
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(Chicano-vs.-Anglo) binary; an ethnonationalist ethos symbolized by Aztlán and the politically charged signifier “Chicano,” both of which, of course, invoke the indigenous; fierce resistance to assimilation; preservation of mexicano traditions, particularly all things relating to familia; and a strong identification with the working class (“Dialogical Strategies, Monological Goals”). Clearly, the comments of both Renato Rosaldo (author of the epigraph above) and Bruce-Novoa have been shaped largely in response to the proliferation of Chicana feminist critiques of the overabundance of masculinist and heterosexist characters at center stage of el movimiento and within the related Chicano literary renaissance. Because of the marginalization of women (never mind sexual Others) within chicanismo as well as their elision from the most foundational texts and histories, Chicana feminist scholars such as Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Norma Alarcón, and Emma M. Pérez have worked diligently over the past thirty years to center Chicanas and sexuality in their work, just as creative writers such as Cherríe Moraga and Ana Castillo have given us a rich primary archive of feminist and sexpositive poetry, essays, short stories, and novels. Rendering Chicanas visible has been a crucial step in challenging the foundational bedrock of Chican@ literary and cultural studies. Given the strength of that foundation and the many people who are deeply invested in maintaining it,2 however, it is hardly surprising that some (certainly not all) of these feminist interventions are apprehended as, at best, radically “new” and confounding detours in the field (Ramón Saldívar) or, at worst, markers of “the end of Chicano literary studies” (Randy A. Rodríguez).3 The quest for Chicana visibility can only take us so far. We need more broad-based, substantive, and innovative techniques and methods in order to interrupt the inherently limiting and strongly gendered bifurcation between old and new, political and sexual, authentic and ersatz, thought and feeling, and revolutionary and bourgeois. When we queer our feminist strategies— finally letting go of those a priori criteria discussed by Bruce-Novoa, which is also to say letting go of our reliance on mastery—we can even read like a queer the most commanding figure in Chican@ Studies. A Border Man The Texas Rangers’ reign of terror; the brave resistance of corrido heroes; the 1915 sedicioso uprising; Jim Crow segregation and lynching; Anglo encroachment in the first half of the twentieth century; dramatic and violent altera-
AMÉRICO PAREDES AND THE DE-MASTERY OF DESIRE
tions of the natural, political, and economic landscape of South Texas—all of these subjects of Paredes’s work are at some remove from Moraga’s widearched muzzles, queer family making, and personal (as political) shameprone confessions. These two writers would seem to exemplify par excellence a gendered bifurcation of public and private, collective and individual, political and sexual—the perfect evidence for all that Ignacío M. García claims has been lost over the past thirty years of Chicana feminism. But when insisting on some breathing room and reading Paredes outside of the dominant racebased oppositional paradigm—ironically, the very paradigm he had a large hand in creating—the apparent gulf between Paredes and post-1980s Chicana feminism begins to shrink in surprising ways. My readings of Paredes’s short story “Over the Waves Is Out” (1953) and George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (published in 1990, but written in the 1930s) suggest that some fifty years before the publication of Loving in the War Years Paredes was challenging, if not himself queering, tejano patriarchal and heteronormative systems entrenched in post-1915 South Texas life. In addition to offering a fresh approach to Paredes, this chapter seeks to call into question the prevailing view in Chican@ literary history that antiheteronormative elaborations of sexuality and gender are a distinctly new (post-1980s) phenomenon. I hasten to add that this approach does not seek to diminish the importance and innovation of contemporary feminist interventions; it is precisely because of them that I am able to read Paredes against the grain. Before going any further, however, I must first situate my readings of his fiction in relation to the book that anchored Paredes’s foundational status in the field, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. I discuss this text at length, given its importance to Paredes and to the scholarly field that he helped to create. This discussion also provides the sociohistorical context for my subsequent treatments of Paredes’s fiction, particularly in relation to tejano masculinity. More than any other Mexican American writer, Paredes inspires a degree of esteem and respect that can only be called reverential, as evidenced by the title “Don” which frequently precedes his name.4 The anachronistic use of “Don”—particularly as it is used by unlikely speakers (Chicano nationalists who reject things of Spain; Chicana feminists who reject things patriarchal; and Anglo-American scholars not prone to using such gendered and classinflected titles of veneration for elders)—only underscores the unusual status of Paredes.5 While a number of factors could be cited to help explain this reverence—most of them having to do with origins and foundations—the
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one that carries the most weight is clearly Paredes’s groundbreaking 1958 study “With His Pistol in His Hand.” Drawing on his wide-ranging expertise (as an anthropologist, folklorist, literary scholar, journalist, musician, creative writer, and, significantly, long-time border inhabitant himself), Paredes’s exceptional interdisciplinary aptitude and notably effective use of irony and sarcasm converge seamlessly. He creates an eloquent, humorous, multifaceted sociohistorical account and in-depth analysis of the corrido art form, from its variations across time and space, to the Anglo-Texan/tejano border conflict and tejano heroism that it narrates, to the quotidian dimensions of patriarchal “Border Mexican” life from which it emerged. As Paredes notes in the opening sentences of his introduction, This book began as the study of a ballad; it developed into the story of a ballad hero. Thus it became two books in one. It is an account of the life of a man, of the way that songs and legends grew up about his name, and of the people who produced the songs, the legends, and the man. It is also the story of a ballad, El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez, of its development out of actual events, and of the folk traditions from which it sprang. (no pagination)
While Paredes’s introductory lines foreground the interdisciplinarity and multifacetedness of the study, his brief introduction—characteristically understated and modest—does not do justice to the various levels of resistance described in and enacted by the study. These include not only the resistant corrido itself but also Paredes’s own persistent resistance to the vociferously guarded official histories of the border, Anglo expansion, and the Texas Rangers. The hostile racist climate in which corridos and their heroes emerged in the first half of the twentieth century not only is recounted in Paredes’s study but was still the order of the day, if less overtly, as he wrote and published it. In a widely cited and historically instructive anecdote, José E. Limón explains that in the late 1950s the chief editor of the University of Texas Press refuses to publish With His Pistol in His Hand unless Paredes deletes all critical references to Walter Prescott Webb, J. Frank Dobie, and the Texas Rangers. Paredes refuses to do so, and the editor finally relents. When the book does appear, a former Texas Ranger tries to get Paredes’s address from the Press so that he can “pistol whip the sonofabitch who wrote that book.” (Mexican Ballads, 88)
AMÉRICO PAREDES AND THE DE-MASTERY OF DESIRE
Hence, even as the text of With His Pistol in His Hand provided the powerfully mediated influence of the precursory corrido to a new generation, the author of the text did so as well. When people in the Chicano movement gathered and the conversation turned to the subject of Américo Paredes, one could often detect the gradual emergence of an unsung proto-ballad of Américo Paredes. (Mexican Ballads, 88)
Indeed, one of the ways in which Paredes was honored at his 1999 memorial service at the University of Texas was through a live performance of a corrido aptly titled “Con Su Pluma En Su Mano” (With His Pen in His Hand), written for and about him by local songwriter and singer Tish Hinojosa. Containing many of the formal features of the traditional corrido, “Con Su Pluma En Su Mano” begins with an explicit address to the audience (“Con su permiso quiero cantarles / Aquí un corrido sin tristeza ni maldad”), narrates Paredes’s birth, depicts his resistance, and closes with another explicit address to the audience, all the while focusing on his bravery without bravado: Con pluma firme muy fronterizo Sin miedo nos forjo nuevo pensar ................ Con su pluma en su mano Corazonde [sic] fiel chicano Mexico-americano Muchos cuentos fue a cambiar Con su pluma en su mano Con paciencia y sin temor Escribio [sic] muchas verdades Y respeto nos gano [sic] . . . (http://www.mundotish.com/livelyr.html)
The lyrics underline the widely held assessment that, by effectively contesting the racist representations of Chicanos and Mexican Americans in official histories and popular accounts, Paredes and his life’s work “respeto nos gano” (won respect for us). More importantly, “Con Su Pluma en Su Mano” credits Paredes for clearing epistemological ground for “nuevo pensar,” a new way of thinking.6
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If Hinojosa’s corrido and the many obituaries and commentaries that followed Paredes’s death hold him in the highest regard, he was also honored during his lifetime. Indeed, as the Limón passage cited above suggests, Paredes was considered instrumental to Chicano poetics and resistance long before his death. For Ramón Saldívar, who devotes a chapter (significantly titled “The Folk Base of Chicano Narrative”) to Paredes’s study in his important book Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), “With His Pistol in His Hand” is no less than the precursor to and wellspring of contemporary Chican@ narrative: With impeccable scholarship and imaginative subtlety, Paredes’ study of the border ballads . . . may be said to have invented the very possibility of a narrative community, a complete and legitimate Mexican American persona, whose life of struggle and discord was worthy of being told. . . . Paredes’ study is crucial in historical, aesthetic, and theoretical terms for the contemporary development of Chicano prose fiction because it stands as the primary formulation of the expressive reproductions of the sociocultural order imposed on and resisted by the Mexican American community in the twentieth century. (26–27)7
According to Paredes, the border corrido emerged in 1836 and continued as a popular folk form until the onset of World War II, a time “of profound and violent changes for the old Spanish province of Nuevo Santander” (132) and a time when “cultural homogeneity, isolation, and a patriarchal, traditional way of life made the existence of a native folk balladry possible” (241). While “Indian raids” and humans battling nature were sometimes the topics of border corridos, the dominant themes involved border conflict and, more specifically, the plight of the tejano border hero: “always the peaceful man, finally goaded into violence by the rinches [Texas Rangers] and rising in his wrath to kill great numbers of his enemy. His defeat is assured; at the best he can escape across the border, and often he is killed or captured. But whatever his fate, he has stood up for his right” (149).8 When Gregorio Cortez heroically and brilliantly evaded capture by the Texas Rangers for ten days in 1901 after killing the sheriff of Karnes County (who had just shot and killed his brother during a misunderstanding about a horse trade, resulting from poor translation on the part of a supposedly bilingual Anglo deputy), he became the prototypical corrido hero. While Pistol focuses largely on Gregorio Cortez, it also necessarily engages with the 1915–1917 border troubles—the sedicioso (seditious) uprising—during
AMÉRICO PAREDES AND THE DE-MASTERY OF DESIRE
which a small but determined cadre of tejanos took up arms to oppose “Yankee tyranny” in South Texas (the Valley). In response the Texas Rangers stepped up their indiscriminate harassment of and violence toward all Mexican Texans, killing (often by lynching) hundreds of tejanos, many of them not involved with the uprising (Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 117–125). Historian David Montejano describes this uprising as “one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the Southwest . . . [as it] turned the Valley into a virtual war zone during 1915–1917” (117). During the uprising, Montejano explains, the Valley was halted in its economic development, hundreds of people were killed, thousands were dislocated, and property worth millions of dollars was destroyed. Although the troubles were generally seen as outlaw banditry . . . almost all of the serious raiding stemmed from an irredentist program known as the Plan de San Diego (so named because the plan was signed in San Diego, Texas). The major provisions of the plan proclaimed independence from “Yankee tyranny”; called for an uprising on February 20, 1915, by the “Liberating Army for Races and People” (to be composed of Mexicans, blacks, Japanese, and Indians); and proposed the creation of an independent republic to consist of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California. . . . Groups of from twenty-five to a hundred men, organized in quasi-military companies, raided the Valley over widely separated points, in actions that included train derailments, bridge burnings, and sabotage of irrigation pumping plants. (117)
Montejano situates this uprising at the crux of the 1910–1920 agricultural revolution in Texas, which displaced the centuries-old ranching economy. As developments in irrigation and transportation made the farm colonization of the arid Southwest possible and financially lucrative, a new commercial farming economy was ushered into South Texas and, with it, large numbers of northern and midwestern Anglo-American speculators.9 Paredes’s study of El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez, together with his accounts of “the legend” and “the man” on which it is based (both of which it, in turn, helps to create), thus offered a much needed revision to the official histories of border conflict written by well-respected Anglo-Texans of the day. Folklorist J. Frank Dobie and historian Walter Prescott Webb have been deemed apologists for the Texas Rangers’ brutality, even as they are seen as partly responsible for creating the heroic legends of the Rangers’ bravery. Unlike their received narratives of border conflict, Paredes’s study exposed the reign
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of terror or “orgy of bloodshed” (27) created by the Rangers’ shoot-first-asklater policy (according to which “a man was killed if he did not defend himself, or was tried for murder and hanged if he did” [93]) and the more insidious effects of westward expansion. Paredes dryly notes the irony: “the white Southerner took slave women as concubines and then created an image of the male Negro as a sex fiend. In the same way he appears to have taken the Mexican’s property and then made him out a thief” (20).10 Significantly, Paredes’s own rhetorical strategy is to expose the Rangers as at once brutal and cowardly, for, as he notes humorously and scathingly, “If all the books written about the Rangers were put one on top of the other, the resulting pile would be almost as tall as some of the tales that they contain” (23). On the one hand, Paredes documents the material violence and terror inflected by Rangers against tejanos (seen in the official histories as an efficacious pacification of the Wild West). On the other, he actually challenges the hyperbolic legends of the Rangers’ swift and successful killings of outlaw Mexicans (even questioning what he considers an inflated number of killings). The unlikely balance that he strikes depends on his convictions about and representations of manhood. While Paredes represents the Rangers as a fearful group who can only kill Mexican men by shooting them in the back, by sneaking up on them when they are asleep, or by far outnumbering them, he represents Cortez first and foremost as “a man.” His manness frames and structures, for instance, the paragraph in which Paredes first offers a detailed description of Cortez, in a chapter entitled “The Legend”: from its first sentence (“He was a man, a Border man” [34]), to its middle point (“He was a man, very much of a man; and he was a Border man” [34]), through its final lines (“and short or tall, dark or fair, it’s the man that counts. And that’s what he was, a man” [34]). The other details about Cortez’s physical features and biography that fill in this paragraph are all shown to be contradictory in the legend (“Some say he was short and some say he was tall; some say he was Indian brown and some say he was blond like a newborn cockroach” [34]), which underlines still further the certainty of his manness. The remainder of “The Legend” chapter continues in this vein and offers not only an account of the legend of Cortez but (nostalgic) commentary on the gradual disappearance of what we might call corrido masculinity. Cortez is as much a stand-in for machismo (in the positive sense of that term) as a specific, historical figure who battled the Rangers: “He was a peaceful man, a hard-working man like you and me. . . . A man who never raised his voice to
AMÉRICO PAREDES AND THE DE-MASTERY OF DESIRE
parent or elder brother, and never disobeyed. That was Gregorio Cortez, and that was the way men were in the country along the river” (34–35), unlike “the young men of today, loudmouthed and discontented” (36). No man has killed more sheriffs than did Gregorio Cortez, and he always fought alone. For that is the way the real men fight, always on their own. There are young men around here today, who think that they are brave. Dangerous men they call themselves, and it takes five or six of them to jump a fellow and slash him in the arm. Or they hide in the brush and fill him full of buckshot as he goes by. They are not men. But that was not the way with Gregorio Cortez, for he was a real man. (51)
Here the tejano “young men of today,” who postdate corrido masculinity, ironically assume the “cowardly” features of the duplicitous Rangers. As suggested by the nonscholarly style of writing in “The Legend” passages cited above, Paredes meant to write that particular chapter from the point of view of a collective tejano sensibility and in a style mirroring the actual legend. As he explains in a later chapter (Chapter 4, “The Hero’s Progress”), “The legend as it appears in Chapter II is my own creation. I have put together those parts that seemed to me the farthest removed from fact and the most revealing of folk attitudes” (109). While the emphasis on manness and the nostalgia over its loss are thus to be understood as belonging to the folk and not necessarily to the author, they carry over, though more subtly, into the remainder of the book, including Chapter 3, “The Man” (as its title suggests), written from Paredes’s scholarly point of view. Meanwhile, Paredes gives scant attention to the experiences and roles of women in Cortez’s world, in which, he acknowledges in passing, “there was a domestic hierarchy in which the representative of God on earth was the father” (11). Many Chicana feminists have commented on the gendered implications of the corrido (notwithstanding María Herrera-Sobek’s compelling argument that female archetypes are embedded throughout the corrido, the hero and the corridista are almost always male, and the symbolic force of both is generated through a narrowly defined type of masculine resistance) as well as the virtual absence of women in Paredes’s study.11 Sonia Saldívar-Hull sees this problem as symptomatic of the impossibility of articulating the (unspeakable) violence against tejanas through anything less than a committed and hybrid feminist methodology, namely “Anzaldúan Chicana theory,” which she describes as providing “a methodology for a new
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consciousness based on recovering history and women’s place in that erased history” (Feminism on the Border, 63). 96
While Chicano (male) historians have done much to expose the realities of violent acts against the Tejanos, they have, to a great extent, been reluctant to voice the perhaps unspeakable violence against Tejanas. Even Américo Paredes (considered the dean of border studies) in his breakthrough text With His Pistol in His Hand cannot articulate the violence that Gregorio Cortez’s wife, Leonor Díaz Cortez, must have suffered in the four months she spent in a Texas jail, incarcerated for her husband’s alleged crime. (75)
Saldívar-Hull’s concern about the erasure of women in the text is (as her parenthetical reminder of Paredes’s status as “dean” suggests) made more acute by his foundational role in the field, the “Don”-inspiring respect for him, and, indeed, his standing as a border hero. If Paredes, as “dean” of border studies and hero of Chicano Studies, celebrates the patriarchal world of Cortez, then border studies and Chicano Studies themselves are underwritten by masculinity, as suggested by Ramón Saldívar: “The link between the corrido and Chicano narrative forms helps explain the widely recognized malecentered themes and values of many of the Chicano novels, short stories, and autobiographies of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s” (Chicano Narrative, 39). Paredes himself, moreover, can seem (and for many does seem) to take on the appearance of the border hero and, with it, all of the gendered connotations of corrido masculinity. Much of the homage paid to Paredes in the obituaries, feature stories, and memorial services of 1999 (including, of course, “Con Su Pluma en Su Mano”) focuses on Paredes’s heroism and/or corrido masculinity. In the Texas Observer’s “Remembrance of Américo Paredes,” for example, Chicano historian David Montejano notes that Paredes “was a caballero—a true gentleman—from a border society that has largely passed away.” The pithy title of the feature story in the San Antonio Express-News is simply “Border Man,” thus invoking Paredes’s own description of Cortez. It is precisely this aspect that is so troubling to Juan Bruce-Novoa, who argues not just that women are elided in the study but that the exaltation of Paredes as corrido hero and his book as “cult object” renders both “exempt from objective critical study” (“Dialogical Strategies, Monological Goals,” 230). As I suggested earlier, however, the feminist critique of foundations and origins should make it possible not only to foreground nonmasculinist forms of chicanada (as Saldívar-Hull compellingly attests) but also to revisit—now
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from feminist and queer vantage points—the very foundational texts and themes from which they seem to depart. While Paredes’s study gives us very little information about women’s lives in Cortez’s world, it actually gives us a good deal of rich material about the construction, maintenance, and dissolution of corrido masculinity, which is to say that it gives masculinity historicity, largely (and significantly) by showing how the “fact” of manness actually has to be repeated again and again in the legend of Cortez. When we miss that point and take corrido masculinity as anything other than a set of performative acts, we miss the chance to note those fissures pressed open by performance with a difference: we allow the sheer magnitude and masculine ethos of Pistol to circumscribe not only our readings of contemporary literature but our readings of Paredes’s own work. When our skills of perception are shaped by corrido masculinity as bedrock, then “Over the Waves Is Out” and George Washington Gómez appear to replay through fiction the apparently normative terms of Pistol, albeit with a twist of intergenerational strife. In finding a way out of those claustrophobic reading habits, however, we find that there is much more to Paredes’s vision than nostalgia over the dissolution of corrido masculinity. The Return of El Cid Five years before the appearance of Pistol, the New Mexican Review published “Over the Waves Is Out” (1953).12 Thanks to the work of Paredes scholars such as Ramón Saldívar and the publishing house Arte Público Press, this story and others were republished in the important collection The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories (1994), making them accessible to a younger generation of scholars and readers. Like Pistol, “Over the Waves Is Out” is set in the Lower Rio Grande border region and revolves around charged and competing meanings of music, particularly as those meanings are inscribed by their relation to what I have been calling corrido masculinity.13 Two important differences between Pistol and “Waves” need foregrounding, however: “Waves” is set in the post-sedicioso era, a time in which armed resistance against the local Anglo machinery is becoming less and less possible; hence the explicit music at play in “Waves” is not the collective corrido celebrating subversive tejanos (although any follower of Paredes will understand that the corrido is an absent presence in the story).14 Indeed, the musical aspirations so lovingly described in “Waves” mark a strong departure from the kind of “homespun” music long celebrated in Chicano ethnomusicology.
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Paredes’s insistence on the cultural authenticity and geopolitical specificity of the corrido tradition of the Lower Rio Grande border takes a number of forms in Pistol, as well as in his many published essays on the corrido. One of his most consistent lines of argumentation in this respect involves challenging “fantasy-heritage” accounts that trace the origins of the Greater Mexican corrido form to the romances viejos (old romances) of Spain.15 In his 1958 essay “The Mexican Corrido: Its Rise and Fall,” for instance, he explains that “the obvious romance ancestry of the corrido led students to overestimate the antiquity of the Mexican form, as well as its predominance as a uniform ballad type. At first an unbroken line was seen between the romances of epic themes and the heroic corridos of the Mexican Revolution” (129).16 Almost twenty years later, he goes further: A romantic idea related to the “captains from Castile” syndrome is that the conquistadores arrived in Mexico singing the old epics about the wars against the Moors, and that ever after down through the centuries the people of New Spain sang about the exploits of El Cid, Fernán González, and all the other heroes of the romances viejos. The conquistadores probably did sing the old romances. But the new people who developed in what was to become Mexico were interested in their own heroes and their own historical events. It was the Spanish ballads with universal themes that struck deep roots among the people of Mexican culture, ballads in which people are simply people rather than historical characters identified with a specific place and time. (A Texas-Mexican Cancionero, 5)
If Paredes takes pains to distinguish the corrido forms of Greater Mexico from the Spanish romances viejos and the Spanish ballads with universal themes, he likewise is adamant about instructing us on the distinctness (if not complete innovation) of the corrido of the Lower Rio Grande border. Largely by grounding this form in the specific historical, political, and economic processes that led to and maintained fraught Anglo-Texan/tejano social relations, he sets it apart from other musical forms of the same region as well as from other corrido forms of Greater Mexico and Latin America. In his preface to A Texas-Mexican Cancionero, for instance, he explains that the sixty-six songs included in the study deliberately exclude any “songs that have been universal throughout the Greater Mexican area and that have no particular ties with Lower Border history or attitudes” (xiii). Echoing this emphasis on an organic and symbiotic relation between the people of the border and their particular
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musical forms, the ethnomusicologist Manuel Peña writes in his “Foreword” to A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Music is a form of cultural communication, but only in specific social contexts . . . particularly . . . when it is created and performed close to the ground, so to speak—when the music and its makers retain organic links to the communities that sustain them. In such grounded contexts music speaks symbolically to a community’s most profound sense of collective identity and its everyday life-rhythms. Moreover, when music and linguistic text are combined, the resulting musico-literary forms can become powerful vehicles for communicating particular ideologies that those who subscribe to the musical message consider to be appropriate guides for social action. (xxv)17
El Cid, the key figure of the Spanish “fantasy-heritage” and the hero celebrated in many romances viejos of Spain, makes an appearance in Paredes’s 1953 short story “Over the Waves Is Out,” even if only as a hazy reference in the central character’s musical fantasies. That referent is immediately overdetermined with political and cultural meaning, with historically laden tension between the universal and the particular, the Spanish fantasy-heritage and tejano/mexicano allegiance, minstrel music performed for royalty and homespun music sung “close to the ground.” It is tempting to conclude therefore that the character who identifies with El Cid’s world is simply a foil—an embodiment of the problematic fantasy-heritage. “Waves” is the story of a young boy’s zealous desire to become a classical pianist and composer, the conflict that ensues between him and his prohibitive father (who is, not incidentally, also a town deputy), and the final devastating annihilation of the boy’s musical fantasies. As if to mirror its clunky title, “Over the Waves Is Out” opens immediately with an abrupt and odd declaration that provides a narrative hook: “He had always wanted to be a musician, but his father would not let him, because his father had once known the man who composed ‘Over the Waves’” (10). This busy yet streamlined opening sentence contains at once so much and so little information: a tangle of male pronouns; a reference to a son’s musical aspirations (apparently lifelong), which are already formed and which we only “come upon” in medias res; his father’s prohibition; and the composer of a famous waltz, a man mysteriously yet decisively tied to the father’s prohibition.18 As peculiar as this opening sentence is, however, it is consistent with both the form and content of the story. If the main story line of the boy’s desire to become a
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musician is something that we only come upon in the first sentence, the remainder of the story tells us little else about how and why this central part of the story came to be. An important part of my reading is what is not said and what is underdescribed. The fecundity of the story lies in its very stillness. When we think carefully about the story’s form, the way it is narrated, who speaks and when, we come to understand the significance of hesitated speech and unknowingness. To begin we should consider the way in which the narrator describes events, social interactions, inner thoughts, fantasies, and bodily pleasures. We have little access to the boy’s interior thoughts and feelings. Moreover, the third-person narration is largely scenic, an objective account of the action interspersed with incredibly tight, streamlined, uninterrupted dialogue, itself quite spare. We get sparse physical description of the characters and the boy’s house, where most of the story is set. It is as if we as readers can only come upon things—the boy’s desires, the father’s prohibition, the family house, the family members—in the most limited of ways. We learn, for instance, that the boy’s grandfather violently breaks the father’s guitar when he comes upon his son (the boy’s father) playing at a funeral but are given no information about why (this reaction to him playing at a cantina, say, would make some semblance of sense). Nor do we know why or how the boy has come to fixate on a piano (where did he first learn of El Cid Campeador? where did he first see an image of—or an actual—black, shiny, three-legged piano?). We do not know why the sheriff so suddenly and decisively decides to give the boy’s family a player piano. Indeed, we do not bear witness to the story’s climax—an acordeonista shooting a pistol at a radio—just as we do not see the “culprit” or “hero” (depending on where one stands on mechanical reproduction), the acordeonista. The register of the story is auditory more than verbal or visual. But it is aural insofar as we eavesdrop throughout, in medias res. We pick up cryptic fragments here and there. We have little visual access to the surroundings, except for four pieces of household furniture: a kitchen table, a living room chair, that chair’s side table, and the boy’s bed. All of these appear at least twice in the story and confine our access to the domestic space to three rooms. This arrangement, reminiscent of a spare stage set of simple props, frees us to concentrate on the music, while drawing indisputably clear spatial demarcations that bring into relief the gendered relations between—and the individual status of—each of the family members. The boy’s mother and sister only appear together (and even then only twice) and only at the kitchen table; we see the
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father both in the kitchen and in his living room chair, where he retires to daydream and read about heroic, resistant men in books with titles such as The Life and Times of Pancho Villa or God, Grand Architect of the Universe. His pistol in its cartridge belt and his cowboy hat—those quintessential accoutrements (if I can use such a feminine signifier in this context)—rest inanimately upon the table by his side. The boy moves between the women in the kitchen, his father in the living room, his bedroom, and the yard outside the house. Much of what we come to understand about the boy’s musical desires is told in the negative. The father is clearly—even if not confidently—the disciplinarian of the house and the person we see reacting most intensely to the boy’s musical aspirations and thus carries considerable weight in the narrative.19 At the beginning of the story we learn from the narrator that each time the boy begs his father to buy him a piano, the father repeats the same response: he once knew “the man who composed ‘Over the Waves.’” Not only did that composer lead a life of abject vice, ultimately resulting in a destitute death, but we learn that the boy’s father had done his own share of unseemly experimenting with music in the past. For both of these reasons the father now seems to assume that all musicians necessarily lead drunken and licentious lives: “His father knew about the evils of drink and women, having investigated them in his youth. It was dangerous, besides being unnecessary, for the boy to do any exploring of his own. Besides, he was a delicate boy. That girl face of his wouldn’t go well in a brothel. And that was the place for musicians, his father said” (10). The recurrence of the wordy phrase “the man who composed ‘Over the Waves’” (which appears five times verbatim and another three times in slightly different form in this thirteen-page story) serves several functions. Certainly it mimics a musical refrain, mirroring the subject of the story. If its recurrence throughout the story as the shorthand for the father’s musical prohibition mystifies rather than illuminates his unwillingness to yield to his son’s desires, it also serves to foreground the son’s indisputably disempowered position relative to the law of the father, whose status as town deputy only underscores his patriarchal power. The recurrence also drains the power from the phrase, for, as Roland Barthes notes, “to repeat excessively is to enter into loss, into the zero of the signified” (The Pleasure of the Text, 41).20 The awkward repetition of “the man who composed ‘Over the Waves’” keys us to the irrationality and insecurity, if not childishness, of the father’s prohibition. As Theodor Adorno notes in his essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (written just one decade before the
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young Paredes sat down to write his story about pianist fantasies): “There is actually a neurotic mechanism of stupidity in listening, too; the arrogantly ignorant rejection of everything unfamiliar is its sure sign. Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served” (290). For the father in the story, that one dish is clearly “Over the Waves.” Homogenizing all musicians according to his own lived experiences—to use Joan W. Scott’s terms, taking experience as transparent evidence—the father does not have the capacity to see his son’s desires as anything other than opening onto a rogue form of masculinity. The father’s uncritical use of experience as evidence might also help explain why he so naturally expects desire and physical appearance (or, to recall the terms of the first chapter, psychic life and physical embodiment) to mirror one another transparently. Ironically, the father reasons that, on the one hand, the boy cannot be a musician because he does not want him to take up the kind of life that would make him a frequent visitor to brothels; and, on the other, the boy cannot be a musician because he would not “do well” in a brothel. The sheer dissonance between the father’s and the boy’s conceptions of music making, as well as the father’s remarkable incomprehension of his son’s imaginative life, is brought into sharp relief. Far from containing any of the stuff of brothels, the boy’s musical fantasies—at least in the beginning of the story—consist of lying “on the grass of afternoons and dream[ing] he was a minstrel in the Court of El Cid Campeador” and lying “awake in the dark, imagining he was a pianist with wild hair and evening clothes” (10, 12). Paredes thus weaves a complex web of sexuality, gender, class, and nation in order to expose fissures in the reproduction of masculinity within the home, that fraught domestic space that Wayne Koestenbaum calls “the bootcamp for gender” (The Queen’s Throat, 47). And Paredes’s choice of music as his platform for such a project actually resonates less with the descriptions of “homespun” music discussed earlier and more with the way that music is apprehended in queer musicology. The founder of that field, Philip Brett, describes music as: a perfect field for the display of emotion. It is particularly accommodating to those who have difficulty in expressing feelings in day-to-day life, because the emotion is unspecified and unattached. The piano, let us say for example, will thus become an important means for the attempt at expression, disclosure, or communication on the part of those children who have difficulties of various kinds with one or both parents. To gay children, who often
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experience a shutdown of all feelings as the result of sensing their parents’ and society’s disapproval of a basic part of their sentient life, music appears as a veritable lifeline. (“Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,” 17)21
I want to emphasize that Paredes (and his narrator) meaningfully leaves it to us as readers to decide how to apprehend the incommensurable gulf between the father’s fear of the dangerous moral failings and impoverishment that he associates with musicians, on the one hand, and the son’s pleasure in imagining himself an esteemed virtuoso masterfully creating sublime art for admiring audiences in gilded castles or elite concert halls, on the other hand. It is no doubt right to notice—as Ramón Saldívar does—that “Waves” stages that familiar subject of much of Paredes’s fiction: the father-son intergenerational conflict exacerbated by the great sociohistorical shifts taking place in South Texas during the post-sedicioso period, “the decline of the heroic age of direct action and revolutionary resistance, . . . two ages and two cultures” (“Introduction,” xxii). Indeed, Saldívar’s introduction to The Hammon and the Beans characterizes the stories (including “Waves”) as “look[ing] forward to the beginning of a new stage of Mexican American resistance to Anglo American control of the Southwest, in the realm of culture and ideology. The stories represent brilliantly the difficult dialectic between a Mexican past and an American future for Texas Mexicans living on the border at the margin of modernity and modernization” (xvi). Many of the stories collected in The Hammon and the Beans revolve around conflicts and misunderstandings between children and parents, which further suggests that these stories are very much about social, historical, political, and economic ruptures between an older way of life and a new uncertain way of life. Saldívar’s intergenerational account seems even more germane when we bring in yet another daydreamy aspect of “Waves”: the father’s nostalgia for his revolutionary past. To be sure, the story conveys the alienation between father and son not only by depicting the father’s prohibition of music making but by depicting the father as narrowly preoccupied with his own obsession with revolutionary action. That nostalgia takes the form of habitually “reading The Life and Times of Pancho Villa or God, Grand Architect of the Universe” and steering each of the conversations initiated by his son away from music and toward yet another “colorful account of how [he] and Villa took Chihuahua City” (11, 12). The intergenerational conflict of “Waves,” however, can be overstated. When we focus on the generational form of the conflict, taking corrido masculinity as the yardstick against which the boy, his actions, and his thoughts
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are measured, we not only reduce music from its multilayered functions in the story to a mere literary trope but reduce the boy to a dialectical antithesis, all the while accepting the father and all that he represents as the norm. In spite of his palpable nostalgia, the father turns out to be much less resistant to change and modernization than his son is. When the boy is offered other routes to music (the phonograph, the radio, or even the player piano), we find that he wants nothing to do with these modern machines. His musical fantasies might very well represent or even embody a decisive rejection of all that the father represents, but not because they reflect a fast-changing present or because they look forward to an untried future. They are at a marked distance from the father’s world partially—though not only—because they take the boy deep into the past: temporally, spatially, nationally, all the way back to the medieval Spanish court of El Cid. As discussed earlier, Paredes’s critique of the Spanish fantasy-heritage’s skewed effect on our understanding of the corrido tradition included discounting the “romantic idea related to the ‘captains from Castile’ syndrome,” in which “the conquistadores arrived in Mexico singing the old epics about the wars against the Moors, and that ever after down through the centuries the people of New Spain sang about the exploits of El Cid” (A Texas-Mexican Cancionero, 5).22 We might automatically assume, therefore, that the boy’s fantasizing about El Cid’s world makes him something of a foil in the story and that our sympathy is meant to veer more toward the father’s aspirations toward corrido masculinity, particularly as that gendered form signals a homespun commitment to a collective resistance against domination. To a large extent, Saldívar encourages such a reading by steadily employing a language of loss and lack to introduce us to the post-sedicioso generation in The Hammon and the Beans: “mere pathos and diminished possibility” (“Introduction,” xvii); “diminished heroic quality” (xvii); resistance “fading into the hazy, and unhistoricized, past” (xvii); the “reduced nature of present reality” (xxii); “the degeneration of the heroic revolutionary past” (xxii). I want to resist assigning the boy the role of foil, however, just as I want to look beyond the intergenerational thrust of the plot (which is not to say that I want to discount it altogether). Saldívar’s introduction to The Hammon and the Beans and his essay on George Washington Gómez (“The Borderlands of Culture”) help us to fill in the spaces opened up in Pistol for considering the sociohistorical developments that generated social protest in the form of the corrido as well as the transformations that later displaced the corrido. But that is also to say that Saldívar’s
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readings are largely underwritten by the oppositional resistance described in Pistol; it is within this oppositional framework that generational/familial discord and new imaginaries are noticed and analyzed. In Saldívar’s readings, that is, nostalgic male elders attempt to reconcile their revolutionary pasts with their present lives as peaceful citizens and uncomprehending sons largely fail in their attempts to make sense of their fathers’ nostalgia. In the next section, I wrest the story from the imposing grip of the generational paradigm.23 I offer a queer reading of the boy’s visceral and affective fixation on mastering the piano (an instrument which in fact he has never played), his eventual complete identification with the piano (such that he actually comes to believe that piano music radiates from within his body), and the devastating losses he accumulates along the way. By reading the boy’s relation to music as something other than a generational foil, I push beyond what is explicitly given to us by the narrator (as well as by Saldívar) and argue that the boy’s fantasies are eroticized through and through. Paredes opens a series of unanswerable questions that queer the norms of embodiment, masculinity, and mastery which he himself would seem to have established in Pistol. This story asks: Why is masturbation shrouded in cultural taboos and codes of silence? Who gets to control one’s relation to one’s body? In what parts of the home and where outside the home is sexual self-fulfillment possible? At what time of day or night? Can one share its rapture with familial intimates? If so, through what language? Or does it produce a kind of individuation that creates a painful separation from those intimates, a sense of alienation due to their inability to understand, their own lack of knowing? What are the social dictates not only of Anglo hegemony but of corrido masculinity—and why do we privilege (or, for that matter, attempt to separate) the first question from the second? What can we learn about the place of loss in relation to subjectivization? That Paredes does not offer coherent answers to these questions is only one more indication of the queerness of the questions themselves. As Phillip Brian Harper has eloquently noted, the promise of queer practice entails recognizing that “its reach will necessarily always exceed its grasp” (“Gay Male Identities, Personal Privacy, and Relations of Public Exchange,” 26), or, in Laura Kipnis’s punchy words, “we will be insufficient to our object” (“Adultery,” 16). A PIANO IS BEING PLAYED
To impress upon us the depth of the boy’s obsession with the piano or even to impress upon us the intensity of the conflict between the boy and his fa-
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ther, as Saldívar would have it, Paredes could easily have let the plot rest on the daydreamy maestro fantasies and their clash with revolutionary nostalgia. He chose to go much further. Paredes renders the boy’s musical fantasies so viscerally and immediately felt that, over time, the boy comes to believe that he hears—and takes great pleasure in—music emanating from within his body, but only when he is alone in bed and only at night, when the rest of his family sleeps. Our narrator—from whom we have come to expect the most streamlined sentences and unsentimental ethos—recounts in great detail and moving figurative language three of these nighttime experiences. Because these passages are crafted so intricately and are integral to my analysis, I quote each in its entirety and in the order in which it appears. The first experience: And one night it happened. Softly, so softly he could barely hear it, there came a sound of piano music. He sat up in bed. The house and the street were silent, still the piano sounds ran faintly on. The music was coming from inside him! He lay back, breathless, and closed his eyes. His hands ran over an imaginary keyboard. Now he could distinguish the tripping runs, the trills, and the beautiful, anxious chords. He wanted to shout, to sob; he didn’t know which. But he did neither. He just lay quiet, very quiet. Something inside him grew and grew. He was lifted up in a sea of piano music which continued to pour out of him, churning and eddying about him in glowing spirals, slowly burying him in a glittering shower until he fell asleep. Next morning he awoke with a feeling that the day was a holiday. Then he remembered and he smiled secretly. He tried to put away the memory in a corner of his mind, tuck it away where no one else might get at it. But as he dressed he kept trying to remember the music. It was there, in some cranny of his mind, where he could just barely touch it. It seemed that if he tried hard enough, reached down far enough, he could grasp it, a whole handful of it, and bring it shimmering into the light. But when he tried to do so it would slip away, just out of reach. He went in to breakfast, full of his rich warm secret. (12–13)
And, on the very next night, the second experience: Night came at last, and he lay in bed waiting for the house to be dark and still so the music would come again. And finally it came, faintly at first, then more distinctly, though never loud, splashing and whirling about, twisting in
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intricate eddies of chords and bright waterfalls of melody, or falling in separate notes into the night like drops of quicksilver, rolling, glimmering. (14) 107
The final experience: ✣✣✣ He was lying in bed, looking out his window at the sky, and listening to the music. He was hovering between sleep and wakefulness, floating about on the beautiful sounds, when all of a sudden he was wide-awake. There had been a dull, thudding noise, as though a distant door had been slammed shut. (16–17)
Let me begin my discussion of these three nighttime experiences by calling attention to my reproduction of the three ornamental symbols (✣✣✣) which precede the third passage, the boy’s final experience. I include these symbols as they appear in the story in order to underline the strong break in the narrative, significantly the only such break in the story.24 That break signifies an indeterminate duration of elapsed time (a weekend? five years?). If we cannot know how much time has gone missing from the narrative frame, neither can we know how many nighttime body-as-music experiences the boy has enjoyed during that time. In spite of not having access to what transpires in the temporal space of “✣✣✣,” or perhaps precisely because we have no access to it, I read the strong visual break to be just as meaningful as the words that follow immediately on its heels—the final experience. And here again is one of my departures from Saldívar’s reading of the story; for in neglecting the strong break altogether, he accidentally reads the final experience as happening on the “the next [third] evening,” inadvertently minimizing the boy’s attachments to his nighttime experiences. Although we cannot know how much time has lapsed in the space of “✣✣✣,” we can and should notice how the varying verbal registers meaningfully differentiate the three experiences. That is, while each of the three passages begins like the other (by situating the boy and the reader in the private domain of the boy’s bedroom at night), the narrative shifts (between the simple past and the past progressive) themselves tell a piece of the story. 1. “And one night it happened. Softly, so softly he could barely hear it, there came a sound of piano music. He sat up in bed. The house and the street were silent.” 2. “Night came at last, and he lay in bed waiting for the house to be dark.”
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3. “He was lying in bed, looking out his window at the sky, and listening to the music.” 108
Where the first two openings use the simple past, the third opening is in the past progressive, which is to say that we come upon the action being described there when it is already well underway. The space of “✣✣✣” therefore signifies that somewhere, sometime, somehow the boy’s affective responses to his experiences have moved from initial shock to anxious anticipation and, finally, to habitual languor.25 Going back now to the first of these three passages—the first wondrous night—I want to consider how the music can initially be objectified as music: the narrator tells us that after a few moments the boy “could distinguish the tripping runs, the trills, and the beautiful, anxious chords.” And the boy’s conscious bodily responses were likewise initially distinct: he sat up in bed upon first discerning music, he lay back down, his “hands ran over an imaginary keyboard.” But there comes a point in this passage at which the boy relinquishes control over his body’s movements, its capacities, just as the narrator no longer describes the music in its objectified technical terms. Body and music are fused and become, at least for this reader, a thinly veiled representation of masturbation: “Something inside him grew and grew. He was lifted up in a sea of piano music which continued to pour out of him.”26 The boy here is no longer imagining himself in the faraway settings of medieval castles or elite concert halls, which further heightens the sense that his body and the music are simply—and without the slightest stretch of the imagination—one. The background setting (real or imagined) disappears altogether. All is cathected—by the boy, by the narrator, by the reader— through the wondrous erotic pleasure of the boy’s body-as-piano, body-asmusic. This does not mean that the narrative language becomes even sparer. In fact, and in sharp contrast to the “ungenerous” narrator’s usual frugality, this body-as-music description overflows with figurative excess. The stubborn, choppy, and unimaginative refrain used by the father to discipline the boy’s desires (“he once knew the man who composed ‘Over the Waves’”) is eloquently covered over by inchoate, unpredictable, and fluid imagery. The boy plays his piano/his body in this way for at least three nights. And when he is flooded with the desire to share his secret, confessing to his mother and sister that he has been hearing music at night, he is interrogated and scolded by his father: “You’re playing a sort of game with yourself every night, I hear. . . . You make believe you hear music. . . . You mustn’t do things
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like that . . . think of your mother” (15–16). Much of the first half of the story is thus devoted to describing in the most sensual and erotic terms the boy’s nighttime experiences and the sheer delight he takes in them, on the one hand, and the father’s awkward attempts to punish the boy for having (or believing that he has had) those experiences, on the other hand. This back-and-forth aspect of the narrative takes an abrupt turn, however, when it is intercut with what initially seems like an unrelated plot line: late one night the boy’s embodied music is abruptly halted by the piercing sound of a nearby gunshot. The boy and his father-as-deputy follow the sound to a nearby bakery, the scene of the crime, where they learn that a disgruntled acordeonista has fired a pistol at the new bakery radio. Of course, it does not take long for the father to surmise, to his great relief, that the radio had been all along the literal, external source of the boy’s nighttime music. By the end of the story, the boy has lost all hope of his music ever returning, even after the sheriff has offered him the gift of a player piano. Not only is the boy uninterested in mechanically reproduced music, but his father immediately co-opts the gift, deciding that he will try the player piano himself and will buy the roll for “Over the Waves,” the very song used to police the boy’s desires. The boy does not find solace in knowing that he can perhaps gain some measure of control over the music he feels/hears at night by obtaining his own radio or player piano—or, for that matter, listening to recorded piano music on the phonograph which we know he already owns. He is not consoled by knowing that mechanical reproduction (together with the technologies of the phonograph, player piano, and radio) “can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself . . . enabl[ing] the original to meet the beholder halfway” (Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 220–221). Instead he becomes resigned to never hearing the music again: “It won’t come back again, I know” (20). It won’t come back either because the boy actually does come to believe that it has been coming from a mere “box”—that mechanism that Adorno described as reducing music to “prepared material ready to be switched on” (“On the Fetish Character in Music,” 298)—or because he is finally worn out by his father’s ongoing attempts to quash his fantasies.27 When the boy learns that the player piano needs no real player (certainly not a composer with evening clothes and wild hair), simply the standardized pumping of the foot-treadles and the mechanical procession of the perforated roll of purchased paper, his embodied musical fantasies are finally annihilated.
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The acordeonista never makes an actual appearance in the story and is something of a mysterious phantom even though he is the actor who provides the climax, indeed is one of the only characters who actually acts on his desires (the other is the Anglo sheriff). We have no way of knowing what his music meant to him, other than by his remarkably violent reaction to the radio and the revelation that he was accustomed to playing his accordion in exchange for coffee, bread, and food at the bakery. Implicitly, although they never meet one another, the boy and the disgruntled acordeonista are intimately conjoined in their hatred, fear, and violent responses to the radio. Although the radio is a technological invention that serves to extend and amplify music—which is to say that the radio democratizes, in a sense, the very thing that provides meaning, pleasure, and even sustenance to both the acordeonista and the boy—it ultimately threatens their ability to enjoy full ownership and mastery of their own music. The use-value of the acordeonista’s playing—together with the informal economy it entailed—diminishes in the space of the bakery, replaced by the radio/commodity. Meanwhile, the baker’s anger about the damage done to his radio, to his private property, emphasizes the commodity’s exchange value: “‘It cost me a lot of money . . . and I want to see him pay for it’” (19). In A Texas-Mexican Cancionero, Paredes credits the radio with “reaffirming lo mexicano in the Mexican-American” (especially in the 1930s), but definitely not after the 1950s, when television “contributed to the rapid process of acculturation of Mexican-Americans,” especially for those who “had become convinced of the wonders and rewards of the Melting Pot” (156–157). Adorno is predictably scathing about the radio, which “both wears out music and overexposes it,” reducing it to “prepared material ready to be switched on” (“On the Fetish Character in Music,” 298). Even the radio ham, for Adorno, suffers from fetishization of the activity itself: the content of the program does not matter, just the ability to alter the physical radio. It also matters that the radio becomes personified in Paredes’s story—though with a superhuman, almost monstrous twist—at the scene of the crime. On the one hand, it loses “face.” On the other, it resiliently and stubbornly continues to function even after being shot and disfigured. If we take the story at face value and assume that the boy is simply (over) hearing music from some external source at night, or even if we assume that he is “innocently” make-believing that he is playing the piano, his sheer sadness over the radio discovery and piano-player “gift” is as implausible as the
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father’s prohibitions. But, of course, when we recognize the boy’s nighttime musical experiences as (thinly veiled) descriptions of masturbation, his parents’ otherwise inexplicable concern (“You mustn’t do things like that . . . think of your mother”) becomes legible as part of a tradition. Beginning in the eighteenth century, children’s autoeroticism was viewed as “precarious, dangerous, to be watched over constantly,” resulting in “a sexual misery of childhood and adolescence from which our generations have still not recovered” (Foucault, “The End of the Monarchy of Sex,” 141).28 Foucault helps us understand the ways in which loss in the case of Paredes’s little boy is generated by the sexual disciplining in his home, exacerbated by the dictates of corrido masculinity. Such a queer reading of “Waves” illuminates a form of loss whose narration significantly exceeds the terms which have long organized the oppositional brown/white color line in Chican@ literature. “Over the Waves Is Out” is not only Paredes’s most poignant account of life in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands—and that is already saying a lot—but one of the richest and queerest Chicano feminist stories every published. To make this claim is to disagree again with Saldívar that the story is about “the consolidation of male solidarity” (“Introduction,” xxii), a reading that is based on his own decisive insistence on joining the father in believing that the boy had not really experienced the music and had been merely hearing the radio all along and that this final mastering of the mystery of the boy’s desire represents an end to intergenerational conflict. The temptation to read the boy’s desires as false, foolish, or distorted, as unconnected to the real world of material social processes (the world of the physical radio playing in the physical bakery down the physical block), is thickened by the barely muted sexual undertones of the story. That the “sexual” in this story is precisely also the unknowable thwarts us in our Chican@ reading habits, which so strongly presuppose the knowable: we have been taught to expect a reflection of the material social processes that racialize the brown body. To insist on the knowable in the story is to fail to understand that “for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed for there to be sites where meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest these sites with fascination and love” (Sedgwick, Tendencies, 3). Thus, rather than being predicated on a more culturally sanctioned and masculine
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instrument (such as the corrido’s guitar, the polka’s accordion, or the military’s time-marking bugle), the boy’s fantasy represents a more feminized mode of music and one not imbricated in working-class tejano society. This story is all about unknowing, unspeakable loss, uncertainty, lack of origin (of the music), which might compel us to ask not “What is the true/ real experience that the boy had?” or “What is the origin of the music that the boy thinks is his?” but “What can be gleaned here about how the boy comes to conceive of himself as a subject?” It may be an unanswerable question—in contrast to an empirical account—but it is the kind of question that I would argue has been missing from Chican@ Studies. What is important here is that we not assume that the boy’s experiences and estrangement from his father are simply a reflection of the dissolution of the corrido period, that the boy is a bourgeois foil to the father’s revolutionary nostalgia or to Paredes’s own commitment to the authenticity of the revolutionary corrido (against fantasyheritage accounts). Likewise, I want to resist the temptation to read the boy’s experiences as personal ones (against the sociohistorical experiences of the collective). I want instead to read the boy’s struggle to understand/enjoy/control his latent sexual desires as emergent/pre-emergent of something “not yet come,” something still “at the very edge of semantic availability” (Williams, Marxism and Literature, 130, 134). This is to say that I read the boy’s desires as what Raymond Williams calls structures of feeling, which allow us to be concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt. . . . We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feelings against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a “structure”: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. (132)29
Williams offers an incredibly enabling vocabulary for apprehending feelings as a present-tense process, before they have solidified (if they ever will) into something explicit and more easily recognizable. As a crucial component of the larger argument for cultural materialism (which is Williams’s
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aim in Marxism and Literature), structures of feelings also offer a much needed suturing of feeling and thought, interiority and exteriority, and, most significantly, art/literature and materialism. “Over the Waves Is Out”—with its in medias res opening hook through its vibrant, present-tense, metaphor-ridden attempts to reach around for/at something not yet come—demands precisely this kind of de-masterful vocabulary and suturing. George Washington Gómez When he was still a teenager, Paredes began writing a historical novel about a tejano family living in the Lower Rio Grande Valley during the first half of the twentieth century. George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (1990) would take four years to complete and another fifty to be published. This lends the novel and its subject matter a quality that Ramón Saldívar aptly describes as polytemporal: “set at the beginning of the century, written near mid-century, but published at the end of the century, Paredes’s novel addresses as a curiously polytemporal text the central social issues of our era” as it “pulls from the residual elements of traditional culture the patterns that conceive the subject and interrogates those patterns in the light of its dominant, modern formation to suggest other, as yet untried, designs for imagining a new ethnic consciousness” (“The Borderlands of Culture,” 274).30 This unusual temporal sequence in relation to both the novel’s production and the social and political conflicts of the plot (conflicts based in actual Texas history, yet presciently opening onto, as Saldívar notes, suggestive, because untried, forms of social relations and ethnic identities) makes George Washington Gómez a historically rich and imaginative contribution to Chican@ literary studies. Most treatments of the novel focus on the racialized socialization of the titular protagonist George Washington (Guálinto) Gómez as it is circumscribed by the Anglo-Texan/tejano conflict. It is certainly the case that Paredes goes to great lengths to dramatize the agonizing effects of this racial conflict as the central problem in Guálinto’s life and thus the central problem of the novel. From at least the time of his birth, Guálinto is pulled in diametrically opposed directions. At one extreme are the racist institutions which Guálinto must daily negotiate, from the official histories and public schooling that denigrate the history of tejanos along the lines of Walter Prescott Webb to the local political machinery that disenfranchises, while exploiting, the tejano population. At the other extreme are the equally powerful tejano oppositional frameworks used to contest that racism and preserve tejano/mexicano
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cultural systems, from the resistant cultural productions such as the corrido to the cathectic (over)investment in Guálinto as his local community and family prepare him to be “a leader of his people.” The force of this tug-of-war is such that it is set in motion even before Guálinto’s birth, as the narrator remarks: “Born a foreigner in his native land, he was fated to a life controlled by others. At that very moment [as a newborn] his life was being shaped, people were already running his affairs, but he did not know it. Nobody considered whether he might like being baptized or not. Nobody had asked him whether he, a Mexican, had wanted to be born in Texas, or whether he had wanted to be born at all” (15). Providing the ground on which Paredes experiments with tejano identity and politics, then, Guálinto’s overdetermined negotiation of these relentlessly opposing forms of interpellation becomes the focal point of the narrative. In relation to the characters who surround him (whether Anglo or tejano), Guálinto is the exceptional character, the test case for conflicting forms of hailing, in the Althusserian sense. As Louis Gerard Mendoza notes, George Washington Gómez “anticipates what is to become an enduring problem for Americans of Mexican descent: how to negotiate the tension between individual and collective identity, individual aspirations and group goals, allegiance to self-improvement versus group empowerment” (Historia, 144). The suspenseful question that escalates in the novel is whether Guálinto will eventually give in to the racist ideology and become a “good subject” in relation to the state, or, conversely, whether he will fulfill the expectations of his tejano family and community to become “a leader of his people,” adopting a corrido masculinity, if armed with an education rather than with a pistol in his hand. Importantly, however, the presentation of these possibilities as polar opposites does not preclude Paredes from positioning them in a complex, dynamic relationship. Throughout the novel we come to understand Guálinto’s thoughts and actions in relation to the Anglo-Texas/tejano conflict as continuously unpredictable and ambivalent: “[h]ating the Gringo one moment with an unreasoning hatred, admiring his literature, his music, his material goods the next. Loving the Mexican with a blind fierceness, then almost despising him for his slow progress in the world” (150). Likewise, although the concluding part of the novel would seem to close what had been an open question by presenting (in near caricature form) an apparently assimilated “George” as quintessential antihero (not unlike Sapogonia’s Máximo Madrigal), Paredes writes enough anxiety into Guálinto’s dreams to trouble this denouement. The novel consists of five parts, each of which (except the last) is titled according to some aspect of the sociohistorical context that informs Guálinto’s
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development. Part I (“Los Sediciosos”), for instance, situates Guálinto’s birth amid regional violence and foregrounds the acute importance of the border troubles for the Gómez family—Gumersindo and María (Guálinto’s parents), Feliciano and Lupe (his maternal uncles), Maruca and Carmen (his two elder sisters), and his maternal grandmother.31 The sedicioso uprising will have ongoing importance for Guálinto not only because it coincides with his birth but because his own father, Gumersindo, is one of its casualties. Gumersindo—a fuereño (immigrant from Mexico) believer in the American Dream to the very end—had been critical of and uninvolved with the sedicioso uprising, which makes his death a particularly emphatic marker of the Rangers’ reign of terror, their shoot-first-ask-later policy, and their undifferentiated view of all tejanos as bandits. Remarkably, even as he lies dying after being shot by a rinche, Gumersindo stubbornly maintains faith in the possibility of the peaceful coexistence of tejanos and Anglo-Texans. His dying words contain no vengefulness, no desire for justice; instead he pleads with Feliciano never to tell Guálinto the true circumstances of his death: “Don’t tell him,” he mumbled through bruised lips. “Who?” asked Feliciano, attempting to wipe the blood and dust off Gumersindo’s swollen face. “My son. Mustn’t know. Ever. No hate, no hate.” Feliciano was shocked. “He must know. It is his right to know.” Gumersindo made an attempt to shake his head. “No,” he said in a whisper that was more like a hiss. “Promise. Please promise.” “I promise,” Feliciano said. Gumersindo smiled and closed his eyes. (21)
This dying wish is momentous for several reasons. It effectively builds suspense for the reader; as with all meaningful secrets, we expect this one to be revealed eventually and to have a determining effect on Guálinto’s relationship with his family and community. It of course symbolizes most potently the burden that the revolutionary Feliciano must carry as he steps in as surrogate father to Guálinto and his sisters after Gumersindo’s death. But (as discussed below) the secret is also crucial for what it does not do. The secret is neither guarded from nor divulged to Maruca and Carmen, which is to say that Guálinto’s sisters inhabit neither the position of knowing nor the position of unknowing (itself an epistemologically rich position). While Guálinto’s loyalty to his family and community is sorely tested for most of the novel, at the end of Part IV Guálinto finally learns the truth of his father’s death and comes to appreciate the sacrifices that Feliciano has made
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on his behalf. Predictably, the knowledge that his father was killed by Rangers transforms Guálinto’s ambivalence into fierce determination to become a leader of his people. At the end of Part IV the formerly reluctant Guálinto agrees to attend college in Austin in order to arm himself with a solid education that will make him an effective community leader back in Jonesville. Importantly, however, there is a temporal gap of about seven years between Parts IV and V (the novel’s conclusion, ironically entitled “Leader of His People”), leaving us with no access to Guálinto’s experiences in Austin, except for a few details recounted in Part V. Part V recounts George’s visit from Washington, D.C., to his hometown of Jonesville, not to take up residence as a leader of his people (now armed with a J.D.) but to gather counterintelligence covertly for the U.S. government. “My job is border security. That’s why I must wear civilian clothes and keep my work a secret” (299), he finally confesses to Feliciano when pressed for the truth about his job. The concluding pages of the novel, consisting of strained dialogue between Guálinto/George and Feliciano, follow from this rather blasé confession and refer back to an earlier encounter between Guálinto/ George and his old tejano friends who are organizing—and expect him to help organize—a campaign to elect local tejano officials to office in Jonesville. “The leader of his people,” Feliciano said. “What do you mean?” “That was what you were going to be, have you forgotten? The Prietos will be disappointed when they hear you have changed your mind.” His nephew snorted disdainfully. “I had a meeting with them before I came out here. They’re a bunch of clowns playing at politics. And they’re trying to organize yokels who don’t know anything but getting drunk and yelling and fighting.” (300)
Not only has Guálinto officially changed his name to George G. Gómez and obtained an army job involving counterintelligence on the U.S.-Mexican border, but he has also married an Anglo woman—the daughter, no less, of a former Texas Ranger. We learn as well that he hopes that the baby they are expecting will inherit his wife’s blue eyes and blonde hair. In attempting to understand what leads the groomed and finally determined Guálinto astray, it is tempting to pinpoint his education—both his Jonesville primary schooling and his later training at the University of Texas at Austin (that gap between Parts IV and V). Mendoza notes: “The decisive moment in the formation of the subject—who henceforth has experienced
AMÉRICO PAREDES AND THE DE-MASTERY OF DESIRE
life with a dual identity according to his assumption or rejection of race privilege—is his university experience, to which readers are not made privy. This period of his formation is conspicuous by its absence from the story and its apparent constitutive force on George’s identity” (Historia, 149). He adds: George’s tragic flaw, his pursuit of knowledge from institutions of higher learning as a quest for social power and his subsequent development as an antihero of his community of origin, is not his individual failure but a result of a social system that failed to recognize the role of the university in reproducing stratified social relations. . . . The community’s belief that formal education alone would make George a leader of his people is shortsighted, for they are unable to foresee the consequences of his development away from his community of origin. (154–155)
Echoing Mendoza, Leticia Garza-Falcón argues that the Gómez family, in its desire for Guálinto to be a great man and leader of his people, “is not equipped to withstand the socializing forces disguised as education, those forces that denigrate rather than validate the learning he brings to the school from his family and community” (“Américo Paredes’s Narratives of Resistance,” 185). Referring to the school system’s discriminatory treatment of Mexican children, she offers a compelling reading of Guálinto’s primaryschool years to show how he struggles to reconcile the “official” history lessons he learns at school (Davy Crockett as hero) with the oral stories and corridos he hears from his tejano family (Davy Crockett as coward). Garza-Falcón presumes that Guálinto’s familial and communal socialization could have enabled him to be a leader of his people, had it not been overpowered by racist formal schooling. This is a persuasive explanation because Paredes takes care to make sure we understand that Jonesville schools are blatantly racist. Furthermore, even though Paredes gives us no access to Guálinto’s experiences at the University of Texas, we know that in the 1930s Guálinto would have been in an almost all-Anglo, openly hostile, and segregated environment. Guálinto is determined to be a leader of his people just before he heads off to college (at the end of Part IV). When we next meet him, however, he has finished college but wants nothing more than to assimilate. Thus the reader cannot help but think that his college experiences must have led him astray. This is why an Althusserian analysis of Guálinto’s experiences with formal education seems apt. As Garza-Falcón and Mendoza (and Paredes) help us to see, there is nothing inherent in formal education institutions to facilitate the development
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of organic intellectuals. But, I want to add, “community of origin” is not necessarily a better site for such facilitation, even—or perhaps especially— when that community/family is doing everything possible to create a leader of the people. In order to understand George’s identity, desires, and politics, we need to examine (and de-romanticize, as I think Paredes would want us to) the kind of learning and socialization that he receives not just from his schooling but from his community and family. In that context, Maruca and Carmen “did not enter into [Feliciano’s] plans. They would grow up and marry like all girls did. But for the little boy Feliciano worked and hoped. Guálinto would have to be a learned man in order to help his people. How he would help them Feliciano had no idea, but he knew he must give the boy as much education as he could” (49). “THERE IS NONE SO BEAUTIFUL AS THE LATINO MALE”
Paredes wastes no time in making it clear that the reason why Guálinto signifies so much hope for his family is that he is a boy. As Feliciano joyfully remarks immediately after Guálinto is born, “It’s like the Gringo game where you have strike one, then strike two, and the third time you hit the ball” (13). If any scene drives home the importance of Guálinto’s male birthright, it is the one in which his parents, together with the grandmother and Feliciano, confer at length about what to name him. The discussion over various suggested and refuted names not only helps introduce the reader to the political and religious differences among the family members, especially between Feliciano and Gumersindo; it presages the gendered magnitude of Guálinto’s very existence. When Feliciano finally asks María whether she has any names to suggest, she timidly offers: “I would like him to have a great man’s name. Because he’s going to grow up to be a great man who will help his people” (16). Gumersindo immediately adds that his son will “be a great man among the Gringos” and should be named after “the great North American,” George Washington (16). (The boy is thereafter nicknamed “Guálinto” based on his grandmother’s mispronunciation of “Washington.”) This overdetermined naming is unsurprisingly one of the most analyzed scenes of the novel, for, as Mendoza puts it, “In the final choice of the protagonist’s name is a duplicity that anticipates the impossibility of his being the ideal hero” (Historia, 138). But the debate about what to name the baby, like Gumersindo’s dying wish, also has much to tell us about Guálinto’s sisters, if only by implication. Toward the end of the naming discussion, we are suddenly reminded that the girls exist:
AMÉRICO PAREDES AND THE DE-MASTERY OF DESIRE
“Papa,” said Carmen from the bed, “Maruca’s pinching me.” “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t,” said Maruca. “Hush, both of you,” said Gumersindo. “You should be asleep.” “Guálinto,” said the grandmother. “What a funny name.” (16–17)
Until this point, the girls have carried none of the novel’s action or dialogue. They “speak” from the (spatial and temporal) periphery of the naming, only to be silenced quickly, which foreshadows their inferior positions relative to Guálinto and their sheer exclusion from the narrative of hopefulness for a better future. Indeed, one of the ways in which we are constantly reminded of the grooming that Guálinto receives to be “a leader of his people” is through the contrasting treatment of his sisters, which Paredes weaves, more and less subtly, through the entire novel. One of the most dramatic representations of the gendered dimensions of Guálinto’s privilege takes place immediately after a doctor has ordered two months of bedrest for María to recover from a broken leg. The family discussion about how to cope with María’s inability to perform domestic labor reverses the earlier family discussion about what to name the newborn boy. That is, here Guálinto is completely unnamed in the discussion: “I’ll take care of you, Mama,” Carmen said in a small voice. There was a short silence, and then Feliciano said, “She could do it, with Maruca’s help when she needs it. She’s gentle and careful.” “But she would have to leave school,” said María. “She wants to graduate from high school.” “She already has more education than any woman needs,” Feliciano said. “I don’t mind, Mama,” Carmen said softly. “Really I don’t,” she added and went into the kitchen. (154)
Carmen’s sacrifice is especially poignant because by this point in the novel we know how much she values education and wants to graduate from high school: “She was very smart and worked harder than Guálinto. She loved to study, to read and to know” (152). What is interesting here is not so much that Carmen would be expected to sacrifice her education for the sake of the family’s welfare (which in the 1920s would have been hardly out of the ordinary) but the way in which Paredes describes the moments following this decision. Immediately after María and Feliciano have agreed that Carmen must drop
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out of school, Guálinto approaches Carmen, tells her that he is sorry, and promises to share his schoolbooks with her. This section ends with Carmen’s silence: “Carmen looked as if she was going to cry. But she just swallowed hard and nodded. Suddenly she planted a kiss on Guálinto’s forehead and turned toward the stove” (154). What begins as Guálinto’s awkward attempt to comfort his sister quickly reverses to the point that Guálinto must be comforted, freed of any guilt he might feel. Carmen’s bodily gestures underscore her inability to express her own grief verbally, because her only definitive actions are to kiss her brother and, significantly, turn to the stove. What each of the examples above suggests is that Paredes wants us to understand that Guálinto’s grooming has been at the expense of girls and according to an incredibly narrow definition of leadership and mastery. In a sense, these representations are in direct opposition to Richard Rodriguez’s gendered processes of intellectual mastery. As discussed in Chapter 2, time and time again Rodriguez positions the women in his life as erecting the roadblocks that he must negotiate in his quest to become an independent “public citizen” who is not ashamed of his racialized body. The difference is that Paredes deliberately invites critique, whether by creating incredibly dramatic scenes about the maintenance of gender norms or simply by making sure that those norms are always implicit on the page. That is, Paredes’s representation of home as “the bootcamp of gender” (to recall Koestenbaum again) is much the same as Moraga’s own description in Loving in the War Years of the preferential treatment for sons in mexicano families: “There is none so beautiful as the Latino male,” she writes. “The daughter must constantly earn the mother’s love, prove her fidelity to her. The son—he gets her love for free” (101–102). From the vantage point of the early 1980s, when Moraga wrote Loving in the War Years, the explicit feminist critique of Chican@ gender norms had become fairly common. But when the teenaged Paredes wrote George Washington Gómez in 1930s South Texas, he obviously did not have access to that collective critique. Therefore it is quite remarkable that he goes to such lengths to illustrate how the girls and women in Guálinto’s life are marginalized. But Paredes does much more than document gender norms; his particular way of depicting Guálinto as near antihero by the end of the novel is an indelibly feminist move. Guálinto finally fails at becoming “a leader of his people” precisely because his grooming to be a leader is diametrical to the subjectification of Maruca and Carmen.
Epilogue Back to the Futuro
OTABLY ABSENT IN THE preceding chapters is a stable, masterful definition of racialized sexuality. I have attempted instead to emphasize the unpredictable, polymorphous, and often contradictory representations of the mutual constitution of racialization and sexuality. Although organized as a series of chapters on individual authors, this book also resists the impulse to assign a particular model of racialized sexuality to each author. The alternative methodology of attempting to arrest the dynamic representations of racialized sexuality in order to create a framework of categories that can then be used to indicate a subject’s political investments, commitments to certain ethnic groups, or sexual object choices only returns us to the very monocausal paradigms that works like This Bridge Called My Back sought to challenge in the first place. Conversely, I have found it crucial not to let the readily available biographical information about the authors overly influence my examinations of their works. That is, I had to begin this project by suspending as much as possible my own conditioned expectations of how the apparent political investments and sexual identities of each author might compel certain representations of desire. This is not to say that I chose to divest the works of their sociopolitical contexts, only that I found it efficacious to approach racialized sexuality from a position of unpredictability. As Darieck Scott persuasively argues, “sexual desire cannot be fully apprehended as existing in a fixed frame, as a settled point always and forever directed at one object”; thus, “when the potential fluidity of desire is no longer recognized and is actively denied, there trouble lies” (“Jungle Fever?” 302). Maintaining this flexibility was especially challenging when discussing the autobiographical work of Cherríe Moraga. Her decisive articulation of
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a radical Chicana lesbian identity clearly hinges on the variable of racialized sexuality, thus lending that variable a commonsensical, factual, if not ontological quality whose depictions suggest a near one-to-one correspondence between lived experience and representations of such. The textual excavation of racialized sexuality in Chapter 1 depends on a critical engagement not just with Moraga’s consistent pronouncements of her sexual desires for other Chicanas, then, but with her conflicting representations of her racial hybridity, her relationship with her Anglo father, and her interracial relationship with Ella. All of these complicate and attest to the textual construction of the otherwise clear testaments to her racialized desires. Related to my attempts to avoid predicting, pinpointing, assigning, or valuing “types” of racialized sexuality are my efforts toward de-romanticizing intracultural love and sexual desire (whether normative or non-normative), which continue to be portrayed as natural markers of authenticity and loyalty in Chican@ activism, literature, and popular discourse. Unlike the popular and literary depictions of interracial desire, such as the doomed relationship between Pilar and Sam, who quite literally cannot “forget the Alamo” in John Sayles’s film Lone Star, intracultural sexual desire often appears to transcend problematic racialization processes, because those processes are largely assumed to be generated and enforced in the “outside” realm of dominant society. Darieck Scott’s essay “Jungle Fever?: Black Gay Identity Politics, White Dick, and the Utopian Bedroom” (1994) offers an important history of and challenge to these types of depictions in the context of black/white gay male desire. Aiming to “shine a harsh light on this particularly tender spot,” Scott notes that the hostility toward black/white desire held by some black men is largely predicated on the illusion that “perfect, free-of-history desire is desire for black men: the revolutionary choice, the untainted choice, the innocent choice” in which “race is no longer potent except as the definitive marker of the perfect match” (307). If attention to racialized sexuality—whether in the context of intra- or interracial desire—can help us to interrupt the essentialisms described by Scott, it might also help us think through the vexed relationship between Chican@ Studies and Latin@ Studies. That is, because representations of racialized sexuality can help us to interrogate “the prisonhouse of nationalism” (Chabram-Dernersesian, “‘Chicana! Rican? No, Chicana Riqueña!’” 270) while destabilizing the Chican@/Anglo binary that continues to operate in Chican@ Studies, they may very well offer some traction for leveraging a paradigm shift that attends to transnational capitalism.
EPILOGUE
While calls for this type of shift have been initiated largely by nonChican@ Latin@s, Rosaura Sánchez’s essay “Mapping the Spanish Language along a Multiethnic and Multilingual Border” (1998) provides important Chican@-based reasons why the binaristic Chican@-Anglo frameworks used to examine the linguistic, cultural, and political lives of Chican@s are no longer propitious.1 Through her materialist analysis of the internationalization of capital and careful attention to contemporary patterns of immigration, Sánchez calls for nothing less than a radical reconfiguration of the U.S./ Mexican borderlands. Such a reconfiguration would have to account for the increasing number of Mexicans who move to metropolitan centers at some distance from the actual border and further would have to account for the diversity of ethnic and immigrant groups living among each other in these cities: “The border states are thus not simply bilingual and bicultural but multiethnic and multilingual” (108). We have to think innovatively and queerly about the (sometimes vexed) relations between specific Latino groups while simultaneously recognizing and respecting specific historical, economic, political, and cultural differences. In addition to the individual histories of Latin American and Caribbean countries of origin, different Latino groups also characterize their presence in the United States in specific ways—whether this characterization involves frameworks of internal colonialism, exile, diaspora, immigration, or indigenism. While scholars in pan-ethnic Latin@ Studies note the “shared legacies of colonialism, racism, displacement, and dispersion” (Acosta-Belén and Santiago, “Merging Borders,” 29) among U.S. Latin@s, other scholars remain wary, if not skeptical, about this pan-ethnic approach to a politically fragmented and heterogeneous array of Latino groups. The favored cautionary example cited by skeptics has always been the case of Cuban Americans, a community viewed in terms of being “in exile” and as upwardly mobile, politically conservative, and clannish. While the myth of a monolithic Cuban exile community does have some historical and social basis, it homogenizes all Cuban Americans in a way that overlooks the specific waves of immigration patterns from Cuba and the ideological differences between different generations of Cuban Americans and simultaneously ignores the significant presence of Afro-Cubans, for whom social mobility is more limited. Additionally, the myth of a monolithic antirevolutionary Cuban exile leaves little room for a nuanced consideration of how someone like Reinaldo Arenas—a prominent gay writer and intellectual and initially an active supporter of the revolution—left Cuba after being imprisoned as a sexual
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dissident. The case of Arenas forces us to consider the ways in which the Cuban revolution, like so many other nationalist movements, punishes and represses antiheteronormative sexualities and genders. It also forecloses a consideration of how émigrés and Cuban Americans such as Arenas, Achy Obejas, and Carmelita Tropicana have impacted and diversified the exile community’s own sexual and gendered traditions. And this leads back to the original question about recognizing and respecting the historical, social, economic, and ideological differences between different U.S. Latino groups. The desire to foreground differences between Latino groups can itself lead to a homogenization of each Latino group as well as an overreliance on national borders as fundamental markers of identity and ideology. Nevertheless, while Rosaura Sánchez calls for a reconsideration of the traditional bicultural and bilingual model, the more powerful sentiment among many scholars and students in the field of Chican@ Studies—particularly those centered in the Southern California region, which for the last decade has shown a resurgence of what Norma Alarcón calls Chicano “ethnonationalism”—is that the backlash against Chican@ Studies and Chicano communities by forces such as Ward Connerly makes it more imperative that the field maintain its institutional autonomy and its specific objects of inquiry. The Introduction discusses Ignacio M. García’s particularly disparaging treatment of Chicana feminist/lesbian scholarship on sexuality. It is no coincidence, I would argue, that he positions proponents of Pan-Latin@ Studies alongside Chicana feminist scholars as outside threats. While García does not directly link Latin@ Studies proponents to Chicana feminists, his insider/outsider paradigm ironically might help us consider how the Chicana feminist critique of ethnonationalism, explicit engagement with racialized sexuality, and proactive collaboration and dialogue with other women of color all have something important to tell us about the usefulness of Latin@ Studies and comparative ethnic studies. That is, the consideration of racialized sexuality, as it helps to destabilize the monological and monocausal definitions of Chican@ identity, politics, and communities, can segue into a broader discussion of identity that can account for the extended borderlands described by Sánchez. Ironically, finding a good place to work at these “new” directions entails looking back. So much cognitive dissonance is aroused by the ruptura involved in the project of queering Paredes. I recognize the irony produced by a feminist scholar devoting so many pages of interpretation to yet another of the male protagonists created by “Don” Américo Paredes—that imposing
EPILOGUE
father who seems nothing if not the commanding, patriarchal, masculinist, heteronormative master of Chicano Studies, author of the master-narrative. And yet it is Paredes’s work that I have come to view as so queerly enabling in its invitation to a constellation of de-mastering projects: de-mastering knowledge, de-mastering chicanada, de-mastering gender, de-mastering sexuality, and, very crucially, de-mastering masculinity. These invitations are too often missed, unseen, unaccepted, or just plain ignored. There is no doubt something useful and expedient about employing the techniques of mastery and earnestness to set the record straight, contest racist stereotypes, render visible a taken-for-granted minority, speak truth to power, perform oneup-manship. It is hard to free ourselves of the entrenched presuppositions that we have inherited from the foundational bedrock of Chicano Studies: the indelible solemnity of the master narratives of Chicano resistance issued in the late 1960s—“El Plan de Santa Bárbara,” “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” Corky González’s Yo Soy Joaquín. It is equally hard to free ourselves from our own human desires for mastery and sovereignty. Until quite recently I had not fully understand how enabling de-mastery could actually be. Or maybe I understood it as a theoretical premise but was not quite ready to let go of my own stubborn desires for control and mastery, which meant that for the life of me I could not bring closure to my reading of “Over the Waves Is Out.” This section just kept growing and growing this way and that way even though it is based on a very short and incredibly streamlined story. I mean, really, how much can one person say about thirteen pages of fiction? My slow recognition of Paredes’s invitation to de-mastery, my slower process of coming to terms with what it means to accept the invitation, and then my eventual acceptance of it mean that I have let Paredes take me to an uncertain, unsteady, and often lonely space. Going to this untried place with Paredes is to shed some (of course, not all) of the disciplining and selfsurveillance that are required of the productive, sovereign subject who follows or tries to follow the academic rules of knowledge mastery. What I have come to realize is that I have fallen in love with the little boy protagonist of “Over the Waves Is Out.” I am not being coy here. I have had an agonizing love affair with this boy since the 1990s: over the last decade I have hated him, nurtured him, dreamed about him, fantasized about him, been disloyal to him, misunderstood him, broken up with him only to go back to him the next week, talked incessantly to others about him, felt insanely protective of him, and narcissistically identified with him. He has outlasted three girl-
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friends, a dozen home address changes, and U-Hauls from Texas to California to Arizona to Illinois to Arizona to Texas and back to Arizona. I know that I will continue to want and need him to travel with me. He is my queer Chican@ cathexis, the place, the body, the set of ideas, the object in which, for better or for worse, I invest my affective intellectual energy. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick says in her lyrical memoir of psychotherapy: Oh, right, I keep forgetting, for lots and lots of people in the world, the notion of “falling in love” has (of all things) sexual connotations. . . . For me, what falling in love means is different. It’s a matter of suddenly, globally, “knowing” that another person represents your only access to some vitally transmissible truth or radiantly heightened mode of perception, and that if you lose the thread of this intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desert-like state of ontological impoverishment. (A Dialogue on Love, 168)
I know it must sound strange to hear me confess that Paredes, of all people, has offered me—a young, queer, femme, Chicana, feminist scholar—the thread of intimacy that wards off ontological impoverishment and wards off, I would add, epistemological disciplining. He has given me the gift of some breathing room with which to negotiate the claustrophobic strictures and structures of academic knowledge production as well as those identity politics that would find the study of racialized sexuality superfluous, bourgeois, or silly. This is not just my story (and the boy’s) but the story of many Chican@ scholars who are caught at a crossroads: continue working on Chican@ literature and culture or “broaden” the purview to other Latino groups living in the United States? Would the latter be more recognizably transnational? Must we literally cross borders to think transnationally? What responsibilities does the younger Chican@ scholar have to the ethnonationalist ethos of Chicano Studies as elaborated in “El Plan de Santa Bárbara” and to the feminist platforms launched in response to those foundations?
Introduction 1. For a fascinating history of the political appropriation of the term “Chicano” in the 1960s, as well as its indigenous etymology, see José E. Limón’s “The Folk Performance of Chicano and the Cultural Limits of Political Ideology.” 2. The Chican@ and Latin@ Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin has recently adopted the “@” in its title. According to its website, “The @ ending (‘a’ at the center of ‘o’) offers a simultaneous presentation of both the feminine and masculine word endings of Chicana, Chicano, Latina, and Latino and allows the reader/ speaker to choose the form she or he prefers” (http://www.chicla.wisc.edu/). In this book I use “Chicano,” “Chicana,” “Chicana/o,” and “Chicana and Chicano” as well as “Chican@,” depending on the context and the author being discussed. 3. One of the best accounts of the term “queer” can be found in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1993 collection of essays, Tendencies: “something about queer is inextinguishable. Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means across—it comes from the Indo-European root—twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart. . . . The immemorial current that queer represents is antiseparatist as it is antiassimilationist. Keenly, it is relational, and strange” (xii). I offer a full-length discussion of the term “queer” in Chapter 1. 4. There are a number of excellent critiques of multiculturalism. See especially Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Minoo Moallem and Iain A. Boal, “Multicultural Nationalism and the Poetics of Inauguration,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 243–263. See also Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, which argues that “‘Multiculturalism’ supplements abstract political citizenship where the unrealizability of the political claims to equality become [sic] apparent: it is the national cultural form that seeks to unify the diversity of the United States through the integration of differences as cultural equivalents abstracted from the histories of racial inequality unresolved in the economic and political domains” (30).
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5. See, for instance, Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991). 6. Personal conversation, February 2005. 7. The endnote might read something like this: “See, for instance, the groundbreaking works This Bridge Called My Back, the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement,” and Borderlands/La Frontera.” 8. For instance, this argument provides helpful leverage in the context of a virulent backlash against feminist, sex-positive, and queer scholarship in Chican@ Studies. See the discussion of the work of Ignacio M. García below. 9. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling; Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Sor Juana’s Second Dream. 10. Rather than attempt to reconcile the universalizing and minoritizing views, Sedgwick seeks to illustrate “the performative effects of the self-contradictory discursive field of force created by their overlap” (Epistemology of the Closet, 9). 11. See also Emma M. Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary (1999), in which she develops her psychoanalytic reading more fully, bringing it into sharper relief by positioning it against traditional Chicano historicism. I return to The Decolonial Imaginary in Chapter 3. In the context of the South Asian diaspora, Gayatri Gopinath cautions against depending too heavily on the Oedipal framework for analyzing colonial relations. She argues that this generational paradigm necessarily emphasizes father-son relations, “[f]or even when the male-male or father-son narrative is mined for its queer valences . . . the centrality of this narrative as the primary trope in imagining diaspora invariably displaces and elides female diasporic subjects” (Impossible Desires, 5). 12. See Viego’s brilliant study Dead Subjects (2007) for a fuller account of Pérez’s use of psychoanalytic theory. Viego devotes an entire chapter to Pérez in which he aptly points out that “[i]n her bold, unflinching work, Pérez unpacks the limits in historicist thinking. She reveals its inability to attend to what may get remaindered in critical, fictional, and historical narratives of Chicano subjectivity and experience that deploy an approach primarily, if not solely, attuned to (returning to Copjec’s definition of ‘historicist’) ‘the indwelling network of relations of power and knowledge’” (165–166). See also José E. Limón’s American Encounters (1998), which posits that “while the encounters and performances” examined in the book “do indeed flow out of an undeniable relationship of social inequality and domination, their articulation in idioms of sexuality, eroticism, and desire allow [sic] us to envision and experience alternative, if perhaps utopian, models of the relationship between Greater Mexico and the United States” (4). See especially Limón’s chapter entitled “Greater Mexico, African-Americans, and the Americanization of Psychoanalysis” for an incisive use of Herbert Marcuse for reading the dozens and relajo (crude jokes). 13. For Viego, Paz accepts “the problematic and reductive assumptions that inform ego psychology’s understanding of the human psyche and the related issues of
NOTES TO PAGES 8–10 how to theorize trauma, loss, adaptation, and assimilation. Unfortunately, in the critiques of this kind of work virtually no mention is made of the fact that what is passing as psychoanalytic theory in these studies is ego psychology and its particular version of Freudian theory—its ‘Americanization of psychoanalysis,’ as [José E.] Limón puts it” (Dead Subjects, 150). 14. In addition to JanMohamed, several scholars working in ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and transnational queer theory have begun to examine race and sexuality as mutually constitutive categories. See, for instance, Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire (1995). Like JanMohamed, Stoler wants to understand what traction Foucault’s work might offer those invested in considering race and sexuality together. And, again like JanMohamed, she finds that Foucault’s ideas would need to be extended in multiple directions, mainly because, “[i]n short-circuiting empire, Foucault’s history of European sexuality misses key sites in the production of [sexual] discourse, discounts the practices that racialized bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that provided the contrasts for what a ‘healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body’ was all about” (7). See also Siobhan B. Somerville’s “Sexual Aliens and the Racialized State” for a brilliant discussion of the 1952 McCarren-Walter Act’s underlying logic, by which it removed the explicit language of racial prerequisites only to insert national-origins quotas as well as introduce two sexual categories, homosexuality and adultery. For Somerville, “[j]ust as the provisions regarding homosexuality apparently respond to eugenic concerns about ‘tainted blood,’ the explicit naming of adultery registers anxieties over paternity and the transmission of property. Thus, while Congress removed overt references to race in the requirements for American citizenship, it maintained a logic of blood purification by invoking the sexualized figures of the adulterer and the homosexual” (84). See also Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires, which illuminates “the dangers of privileging antiracism as a singular political project that in effect relies on conventional articulations of gendered and sexual subjectivity” and argues that queer theory can help us to develop a more accurate understanding of diasporic cultures (46). 15. In her essay “Sexuality and Chicana/o Studies” (1999), however, Yarbro-Bejarano does suggest that the study of racialized sexuality should be fully integrated into Chicana/o Studies. 16. I borrow the terms “minoritarian” and “majoritarian,” shifting them for my context, from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In Epistemology of the Closet, she describes opposing ways of understanding the relevance of the homo/heterosexual definition: the minoritarian view perceives the definition “as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority,” and the majoritarian view perceives it “as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities” (1). 17. Rubén Martínez, “My Argument with Richard Rodriguez.”
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18. Bruce-Novoa deserves credit for repeatedly calling on Chican@ critics, publishers, and readers to question these criteria. Chican@ writers should have “complete freedom to write about anything, in any way and in any language, without cultural, regional or political prerequisites” (Retrospace, 13). Chapter 1 1. It is not surprising that Moraga’s initiation into lesbian culture entails dancing. Lesbian bars and nightclubs provide some of the only public spaces where women can be “out” without being in physical danger or subject to harassment and are therefore a commonly used setting in “coming-out” literature. In her introduction to The Persistent Desire, Joan Nestle too uses the metaphor of a dance to describe the beauty of butch/femme desire: “Flamboyance and fortitude, femme and butch—not poses, not stereotypes, but a dance between two different kinds of women, one beckoning the other into a full blaze of color, the other strengthening the fragility behind the exuberance. We who love this way are poetry and history, action and theory, flesh and spirit” (14). 2. According to Moraga, the selections are “not arranged chronologically in terms of when each piece was written” but rather reflect “a kind of emotional/political chronology” (Loving in the War Years, i). All references to Loving in the War Years are from the 2000 revised edition unless otherwise noted. 3. For example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 153n24; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 33n32; Steven Seidman, “Identity and Politics in a ‘Postmodern’ Gay Culture,” 140n30; and Martha Vicinus, “‘They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong,’” 448n12. Valuable exceptions include Ann Cvetkovich, “Untouchability and Vulnerability”; Judith Halberstam, “Lesbian Masculinity”; and Teresa de Lauretis, “The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian.” 4. Hereafter abbreviated as Loving, Generation, and Wings. 5. Lora Romero, “‘When Something Goes Queer,’” 122. 6. See also Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity for a fascinating account of the uncomfortable, yet fully productive, crisis of meaning created when butch women enter public bathrooms reserved for “women.” 7. See Tomás Rivera, Y no se lo tragó la tierra; Norma Elia Cantú, Canícula; Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez; and Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory. In these works, emblems of childhood shame range from the recurrent inspection for (and finding of) piojos (lice) in the child’s hair by an Anglo-American school nurse or teacher to the visible discomfort of Anglo-Americans on seeing a Chicano child’s body in a public swimming pool. 8. For contrasting accounts of surface/depth, see Michele Serros’s Chicana Falsa and How to Be a Chicana Role Model. See also Sedgwick’s essay “White Glasses” for an eloquent (and hopeful) account of the painful dissonance between the self as we
NOTES TO PAGES 28–34 see it and the self as others see it: “Nobody knows more fully, more fatalistically than a fat woman how unbridgeable the gap is between the self we see and the self as whom we are seen; no one, perhaps, has more practice at straining and straining to span the binocular view between; and no one can appreciate more fervently the act of magical faith by which it may be possible, at last, to assert and believe, against every social possibility, that the self we see can be made visible as if through our own eyes to the people who see us” (256). 9. Foucault adds: “If in fact [power relations] are intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that ‘explains’ them, but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject . . . the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose ‘inventors’ or decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy” (The History of Sexuality, 94–95). 10. This reading depends of course on taking Moraga at her word when she claims that she so easily passes as white. 11. Sedgwick defines explicit performatives as first-person indicative active statements in which one could insert the adverb “hereby” without changing its meaning (Touching Feeling, 67–92). 12. José E. Limón, American Encounters, 181. Limón argues that the incredible success and popular fan base of the late tejana singer/performer Selena were less a matter of her musical talent than of her noted “public and specifically Mexican erotic display[, which] permits a much needed site of discharge and expression for a still extremely repressed sexuality, for women as well as for men” (182) within the sexually charged context of “the historical and unequal engagement of Anglos and Mexicans in the United States” (178). Selena’s performance of sexuality— through her famous bustiers and skin-tight pants, her erotic dance moves, and her flirtation with her live audiences—rendered within this context of sexual repression and racial conflict interpellates her within a historical symbolic system in which “the sexuality of Mexican women in general became deeply involved in the iconography of the colonial relationship between Anglos and Mexicans in psychologically and politically complicated ways” (180–181). 13. For an extended critique of Moraga’s representation of African Americans, see Christina Sharpe’s provocative essay “Learning to Live without Black Familia.” For Sharpe, Moraga’s project of making familia from scratch is riddled with the policing of racial borders: namely, the border between Chican@s and African Americans. 14. Moraga’s translation: “that which never passed through her lips.”
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15. In “Sexuality on/of the Racial Border,” Abdul R. JanMohamed argues that Foucault’s definition of power, together with his Eurocentric focus, disallows an investigation of racialized sexuality and renders his analytics of sexuality limited for African Americans. 16. “Chocha” replaces the first edition’s “cunt” in the first sentence. Chapter 2 My chapter title is a riff on the collection of essays The House That Race Built, edited by Wahneema Lubiano. This collection contains proceedings from the Race Matters Conference held at Princeton University in 1994, organized by Lubiano, Cornel West, and other black intellectuals. In her introduction, Lubiano forcefully asks us to reconsider the way we view race and racism in the United States: “If race—and its strategic social and ideological deployment as racism—didn’t exist, the United States’ severe inequalities and betrayal of its formal commitments to social equality and social justice would be readily apparent to anyone existing on the ground” (vii). 1. Hunger of Memory is hereafter abbreviated as Hunger and Days of Obligation as Days. 2. Personal conversation with Rubén Martínez (1997). 3. Limón’s reference to the debates about Rodriguez’s work as the “Rodriguez wars” aptly captures the anger elicited by Rodriguez’s first book and also alludes to the high stakes of his work and its criticism: as a widely circulated public intellectual, Rodriguez has an expansive audience (“Introduction,” 393, 394). His work is circulated through an extensive array of forums, including The NewsHour (formerly The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) on PBS, the New York Times, Mother Jones, and American Scholar. He is a Pacific News Service editor and a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and the Sunday “Opinion” section of the Los Angeles Times. In 1998 he was one of eight participants in a round-table discussion with Bill Clinton on race relations in the United States. The “Presidential Dialogue on Race,” moderated by Jim Lehrer, aired on PBS (Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 1336). His considerable list of awards includes a 1992 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Charles Frankel Prize, presented by George Bush, Sr., for “outstanding contributions to the public’s understanding of the humanities” (http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/CharlesFrankelPrize.htm); a 1997 George Peabody Award for “outstanding achievement in broadcast and cable” for his NewsHour essays (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/entertainment /essays/essayist_rodriguez.html); and an International Journalism Award from the World Affairs Council of California. Days of Obligation was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. 4. In order to avoid confusion as I discuss Rodriguez and Rodríguez, Randy A. Rodríguez is hereafter referred to as R. A. Rodríguez.
NOTES TO PAGES 42–44 5. Of course, one reason for this gendered difference in scholarly attention is that there simply has not been as large an archive of primary materials to analyze. Thankfully, this is slowly beginning to change, as witnessed by some incredibly rich publications on Chicano/Latino gay male desire. See, for instance, Virgins, Guerrillas and Locas, edited by Jaime Cortez (1999), and santo de la pata alzada by Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano (2005). 6. See especially Ramón Saldívar’s chapter “Ideologies of the Self: Chicano Autobiography” in Chicano Narrative, Norma Alarcón’s “Tropology of Hunger,” Rosaura Sánchez’s “Calculated Musings,” Raymund Paredes’s “Autobiography and Politics,” and Lora Romero’s “‘When Something Goes Queer.’” 7. Although Rodriguez’s critiques of bilingual education are largely specific to the Spanish language, he has spoken against the Ebonics movement as well. 8. On this point I slightly disagree with José David Saldívar, who contends that “Rodriguez seems to want to put behind the earlier polemical assaults on affirmative action and bilingual education and his early 1980s support for the English-only movement” (Border Matters, 151). While Rodriguez has moved beyond these platforms, he has certainly not left them “behind,” as can be seen in recent interviews and NewsHour essays. Nonetheless, Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation does mark a shift in his conception of the lines dividing American life from Mexican life, as he explained in a 1992 interview in the San Francisco Weekly: “I don’t want to say that I’m more Mexican because that’s saying too much. . . . But I now do recognize those things that have always been Mexican in me. I realized how much of Mexico is in California. . . . Tijuana is even more American than San Diego is” (quoted in Marcelo Rodriguez, “Hunger of Reality,” 13). Perhaps Rubén Martínez captures the more recent Rodriguez best: “If Richard Rodriguez remains an ‘assimilated man,’ then the terms of assimilation—American ‘culture’ itself—have changed” (“My Argument with Richard Rodriguez,” 19). 9. Rodriguez models his ideas about a sound education on his own parochial schooling, in which “education was not about learning something new. It was about learning something old” (Rodriguez, “On Borders and Belonging,” 79). Rather than being encouraged to propose new ideas, students were taught to memorize “basic things”: historical dates, lists of popes and presidents, British poetry, multiplication tables, and state capitals (79). The process of absorbing a uniform set of tools afforded “a sense of the communal” (79). 10. See Rosaura Sánchez’s “Calculated Musings” (1995) for a lengthy critique of Rodriguez’s opposition to curriculum reform. She argues that “despite hegemonic claims for a common ‘American culture,’ concrete social configurations continue to generate discourses of social difference and nourish an emergent literature produced within the center but form the perspective of inside outsiders, ‘social exiles’ (Eagleton) within the belly of the monster (Martí)” (156). For a incisive discussion about national culture, see also The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997),
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in which Lauren Berlant argues: “In the contemporary United States it is almost always the people at the bottom of the virtue/value scale—the adult poor, the nonwhite, the unmarried, the nonheterosexual, and the nonreproductive—who are said to be creating the crisis that is mobilizing the mainstream public sphere to fight the good fight on behalf of normal national culture, while those in power are left relatively immune” (176). Interestingly, Rodriguez’s rhetorical appeal for a national culture does not demonize minorities; rather, it suggests that the truly disenfranchised are opportunistically (mis)used by middle-class educational reformers. As such, Rodriguez’s denouncement of marginality might compel a critique of liberalism and, as George Yúdice asks, “If we feel repelled by Rodriguez’s repression of marginality, how do we launch a viable counterattack? Pluralism—the ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’ acceptance of marginality—is successfully defeated . . . by Rodriguez’s justifiable refusal to be essentialized by white, bourgeois, liberal pieties (notwithstanding his eager acceptance of the economic and social rewards of that same white bourgeoisie)” (“Marginality and the Ethics of Survival,” 223). 11. As Berlant explains, “zone of privacy” was the term used in the 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized Connecticut residents’ access to birth control. Justice William O. Douglas’s opinion “designated for the first time the heterosexual act of intercourse in marital bedrooms as protected by a zone of privacy into which courts must not peer and with which they must not interfere” (The Queen of America, 59). 12. “One solitude” is no doubt also meant to evoke Octavio Paz’s infamous psychoanalytic-inflected essays on “the Mexican character” collected in The Labyrinth of Solitude. Rodriguez has said in interviews that the subtitle of his second book, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, is meant to reference not only his biological father but his cultural father, Paz. But even then it is largely sexuality that causes the solitude of the Mexican, according to Paz. 13. According to R. A. Rodríguez, Rodriguez’s sensibility is in direct contradistinction to the values endorsed by Chicano Studies, particularly “[l]inearity of thought, synthesis of dualisms, explanation of contradictions, progressive accumulation of knowledge, the empirical testing of truth claims tied to claims of objectivity, the influence of material conditions upon cultural formations and ideology, and the simultaneous deconstruction of monological historical narratives and reconstruction of repressed/neglected cultural and historical experiences” (“Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered,” 398). 14. Although R. A. Rodríguez seeks to expose the implicit homophobia, sexism, and desire underwriting the Rodriguez wars, he neglects to discuss even a single piece of criticism on Rodriguez in any depth. Instead he lumps together several critics in one long endnote. But even there we get no sense of their central arguments, only a decontextualized catalogue of the adjectives that they use to describe Ro-
NOTES TO PAGES 48–59 driguez (no less than forty-two adjectives in just the first of the three endnote paragraphs). For instance, “Nericcio calls Rodriguez alienated, tortured, skewed, ambivalent, and narcissistic (Review of Days of Obligation, 141); Candelaria asserts Rodriguez’s view as inauthentic . . . ; and Kirp describes Rodriguez as solitary (14, 35), clever, but facile (12), soulless (16), and deceptive” (“Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered,” 413). 15. R. A. Rodríguez’s strategy is thus a beautiful example of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “hermeneutics of suspicion” or “paranoid reading,” a sort of “knowledge based on exposure” (Touching Feeling, 139). See her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling. 16. My use of the term “counterpublic” follows from Nancy Fraser’s work on the public sphere, in particular her insistence that, while Jürgen Habermas wrote about and idealized a singular bourgeois public sphere, there have been and continue to be multiple counterpublics, “including nationalist publics, popular peasant publics, elite women’s publics, and working-class publics” (“Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 116). 17. See David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 for a history of Jim Crow segregation affecting tejanos. In Ozona, a town whose racial climate is typical of Texas, barber and beauty shops were segregated until 1969 and swimming pools were segregated until the mid-1970s (285–286). See also American Encounters, in which José E. Limón opens his reading of Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” by discussing his own experiences with swimming-pool segregation in 1962 (124–125). 18. All references are to the Days of Obligation version. 19. The original Harper’s version of “Late Victorians” includes photographs of Victorian houses. 20. For a brilliant reading of “Late Victorians,” see Norma Tilden’s “Word Made Flesh.” Tilden suggests that “[i]n his playful inversion of ‘public’ and ‘private’ gestures, Rodriguez almost seems to be teasing critics who have complained of the ‘dichotomy between the public and private self’” (457). Chapter 3 1. As its title suggests, Revista Chicano-Riqueña, now Americas Review, has a pan-Latin@ readership. 2. Nicolás Kanellos, letter to Ana Castillo, 1 January 1979, Box 12, Ana Castillo Papers, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA), University of California Santa Barbara. 3. Arte Público Press has become one of the most important Chicano publishing houses. It is housed at the University of Houston and is still run by Kanellos.
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4. Arte Público would later republish most of the pieces from The Invitation in Castillo’s later collection Women Are Not Roses (1984), and Castillo self-published a second run (700 copies) of The Invitation in 1986. 5. Nicolás Kanellos, “Announcement of Nicolás Kanellos for The Invitation,” 7 October 1979, Box 12, Ana Castillo Papers. 6. Nicolás Kanellos, letter to Ana Castillo, 31 October 1979, Box 12, Ana Castillo Papers. 7. In her introduction to her collection of poetry My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, Castillo explains that in writing The Invitation she “hoped to appropriate our sexuality, our own sense of sensuality, and to invite others to a celebration of self-love” (xix). Castillo has consistently and frequently advocated the concept of Chicana “self-love.” 8. See also Castillo’s collection of essays Massacre of the Dreamers (1994) for commentary on The Invitation: “There would be those, I predicted, who would dismiss me—as a result of the book—as a nymphomaniac, a lesbian (read: man hater), or a non-brain-tits-and-ass, young, hot-to-trot easy lay. Of course, my chapbook was not a personal ‘invitation’ from me to come—to me—but a tragically overdue invitation to discuss within our various communities our spiritual, political, and erotic needs as a people” (122). 9. In her written answers to a Wolfgang Binder interview now included in her archives, Castillo discusses her own upbringing in Chicago, noting “the thrust of the Chicano writers reside in the Southwest, which often makes me feel a sad sense of isolation” (Box 12, Ana Castillo Papers, “Questionnaire for Ms. Ana Castillo”/“Interview for Dr. Wolfgang Binder,” 3). She goes on to explain that she does not see Chicago as her “‘hometown.’ I do not see any place as my home. My friends tease me with the nickname ‘Ana del Aire’ because of my love of travel and the non-challant [sic] attitude I undertake it with. I may choose at some point to live in another city, another country, because as a writer I feel my spirit is everywhere” (5). 10. See also “Telling the Difference between the Border and the Borderlands” by Manuel Luis Martinez and Louis Mendoza’s blog “Journey across Our America: Observations & Reflections on the Latinoization of the U.S.” (http://journeyacrossouramerica.blogspot.com/). 11. Throughout this chapter I use the term “Gypsy” rather than “Roma” or “Gitano” because that is the term frequently used by Castillo (with the exception of her use of “Rom” in Peel My Love Like an Onion). I add quotation marks around “Gypsy” in order call attention to the problematic nature of the term. 12. Castillo’s personal papers include passing references to this ensemble: “I worked within a trio of flamenco music, the other two artists were a guitarist and singer from Seville. As part of our repertory, we also chose the works of various Spanish and Latin American poets” (Box 12, “Questionnaire for Ms. Ana Castillo”/“Interview
NOTES TO PAGES 65–69 for Dr. Wolfgang Binder,” 4). The papers also include a Day of the Dead program (undated) for an event entitled “Mexico Remembered/México Recordado” by the trio—Ana Castillo (verse), Pepe Culata (song/cante), and Tomás de Utrera (guitar/ toque)—performing as “Al-Andalus” (Box 10). De Utrera makes an appearance in Peel My Love Like an Onion (175). 13. These lines are repeated in Peel My Love Like an Onion when Carmen explains: “You think you have problems, Augustín used to tell me about my identity conflicts. At least they count you in the census. At least Mexicans have green cards. Who ever gave a gypsy a green card?” (30). 14. See my essay “Seeing through Photographs of Borderlands (Dis)Order” for an extended critique of a line of representations of racialized nihilism running from Oscar Lewis through Charles Bowden. 15. According to Curtis Marez, “the earliest known appearance of ‘mestizo’ is in a Portuguese dictionary from the 1560s, where it is treated as a synonym for ‘mulatto.’ . . . Starting in the mid-sixteenth century, ‘mestizo’ was increasingly distinguished from ‘mulatto.’ Over the next hundred years, the semantic line between the two terms would harden, so that in Spanish colonial usage ‘mulatto’ came to mean African and Indian mixes whereas ‘mestizo’ came to mean part Spanish and part Indian” (“Mestizo/a,” 156–157). The use of “mestizo/a” and “mestizaje” by Chican@s, he continues, has sometimes “led to an exclusionary nationalism in which Chicano political claims trumped those of other groups,” especially, ironically, Native Americans (158). Moreover, and echoing Rosaura Sánchez, he contends that the concept’s emphasis on culture risks making it “a free-floating signifier, abstracted from the material histories that have produced mixed peoples” (159). 16. See, for instance, Adaljiza Sosa Riddell’s untitled poem (1973), Lorna Dee Cervantes’s “You Cramp My Style, Baby” (1977), Carmen Tafolla’s “La Malinche” (1978), Sylvia Gonzales’s “I Am Chicana” (1980), Alma Villanueva’s “La Chingada” (1985), and Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years. For scholarly work on representations of La Malinche, see Norma Alarcón’s “Chicana’s Feminist Literature” and “Traddutora, Traditora,” Rita Cano Alcalá’s “From Chingada to Chingona,” Adelaida R. Del Castillo’s “Malintzín Tenépal,” Cordelia Candelaria’s “La Malinche, Feminist Prototype,” Ramón A. Gutiérrez’s “Community, Patriarchy and Individualism,” Mary Louise Pratt’s “‘YO SOY LA MALINCHE,’” and Sandra Messenger Cypess’s La Malinche in Mexican Literature, to name a few. 17. Massacre of the Dreamers served as Castillo’s dissertation at the University of Bremen in Germany, where she received a doctorate in American Studies in 1991. 18. See also Sheila Marie Contreras’s Blood Lines and Angie Chabram-Dernersesian’s “‘Chicana! Rican? No, Chicana Riqueña!’” 19. Insofar as Castillo’s novels can be read as allegorical, and thus rooted to some degree in larger, history-laden national romances, we might learn from Jean Franco
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why their female protagonists largely fail at their quests. In Plotting Women, Franco suggests that it is impossible to write a female protagonist into a Mexican novel that is framed as a national allegory: “it is simply not possible to retain verisimilitude and make women into national protagonists. Women’s attempts to plot themselves as protagonists in the national novel become a recognition of the fact that they are not in the plot at all but definitely somewhere else” (146). 20. Recipient of the American Book Award in 1987, The Mixquiahuala Letters was originally published by Bilingual Press in 1986 and reissued in 1992 by Anchor Books, making Castillo one of the first Chicana authors to attain crossover appeal. She and Sandra Cisneros continue to be the most prolific and—according to publishing standards—successful Chicana authors. 21. The novel is hereafter cited as Letters. 22. Castillo’s table of contents is clearly motivated by Julio Cortázar (to whom the novel is dedicated: “In memory of the master of the game, Julio Cortázar” [no pagination]). See Erlinda Gonzales-Berry’s essay “The [Subversive] Mixquiahuala Letters” for a psychoanalytic approach to the novel that includes an extended discussion of the epistolary form and, in particular, contrasts the novel with Cortázar’s. See also Hector A. Torres’s “Story, Telling, Voice,” which argues that Castillo’s “strategy does not make the Letters devoid of referential power. For the reader who enters the labyrinth in earnest quite the opposite is true; the letters come to have a disturbing and unsettling way of pointing to the specific acts of violence that patriarchy, with a certain interested indifference, inflicts on women” (142). Raymund Paredes is less impressed: “The letters that constitute the novel are written by Teresa to her friend and traveling companion but often rehearse the physical facts of the women’s experience together. What is not clear is why anyone would write such elaborate letters simply to retell, without analysis, what the recipient already knows” (“Review Essay,” 127–128). Norma Alarcón suggests that the complex table of contents signals the way in which Teresa “is very much trapped by a variety of ideological nexus” (“The Sardonic Powers of the Erotic in the Work of Ana Castillo,” 105). 23. Since many of the letters recount the women’s travels together, the book shares some features with the travel-writing genre, as Alvina E. Quintana has noted (“Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters,” 76). See also Quintana’s “Shades of the Indigenous Ethnographer.” In both pieces Quintana attempts to situate Letters as “indigenous ethnography,” “Chicana meta-ethnography,” and a “parody of the classical ethnographic practice” (“Shades,” 76, 80). While I ultimately disagree with her arguments, I find her project provocative. 24. Letter 28, in which this passage appears, is omitted from the “conformist” reading sequence. 25. Throughout her study, Fonseca points to the irony of these stereotypes of freedom and mobility by discussing the persecution and deracination of various Romani groups in Central and Eastern Europe. Running especially counter to the
NOTES TO PAGES 76–83 Western romantic image of freely wandering “Gypsies” is her careful research on the enslavement of “Gypsies” across four centuries: “For more than four hundred years, until 1856, Gypsies were slaves in Wallachia and Moldavia, the feudal principalities that with Transylvania now make up modern Romania” (Bury Me Standing, 177). Fonseca pointedly asks: “[A]re the Gypsies really nomadic by ‘nature,’ or have they become so because they have never been allowed to stay?” (178). “Everywhere the solution to ‘the Gypsy problem’ has at some stage included expulsion. And again the punishment engendered the crime. Kicking them out—for being outsiders—confirmed the Gypsies as vagrants and vagabonds. But they adapted, often by living in abandoned and inaccessible forests and wastelands, the countries within countries in the borderlands. . . . They hopscotched along the frontiers, camping. Thus there are and always have been concentrations of Gypsies at the edges of countries and, similarly, within national boundaries, along county lines. . . . For the stateless inhabitants, such no-man’s-lands may be cells without walls, established by mapmaking—what might be called cartographic incarceration” (218–229). See also the Open Society Institute’s 2002 report entitled “The Situation of Roma in Spain” as well as the scholarship of Ian Hancock, much of which can be found on “The Romani Archives and Documentation Center” website. Hancock is one of the leading spokespeople contesting the ongoing disenfranchisement of Romani peoples. Much of his scholarship is devoted to tracking and debunking the stereotypes of Rom as freedom-loving wanderers. 26. Sapogonia was first published by Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe in 1990 and later reissued in slightly different form by Anchor Books (1994). The revisions to the second edition include rearrangement of chapters, with a later introduction of Pastora’s character, and omission of many awkward sentences and phrases. All references are to the original publication. 27. The second edition of the novel attempts a more user-friendly reading by including a blank line between some of these narration switches. 28. My use of “family romance” is meant to underline the broad political dimensions of what might seem to be a unique and private family unit. See Rosa Linda Fregoso’s chapter “The Chicano Familia Romance” in meXicana encounters as well as Candice M. Jenkins’s book Private Lives, Proper Relations for discussions of the gendered burdens for women of color pressured to uphold racialized family romances against racist frameworks that denigrate families of color. 29. Pastora is almost always referenced in connection to nature. Indeed, her name itself (the Spanish word for shepherdess) links her to the natural, as does the related word “pastoral.” 30. Peel My Love Like an Onion was translated into Spanish under the title Carmen La Coja in 2000 (New York: Vintage Español). 31. I would like to thank Alisha Gibson for bringing to my attention the dearth of work on (dis)ability in Chican@ Studies. When Gibson was a student in my 2005 Chicana Feminist Theories class she asked me for a list of references to consult for
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representations of (dis)ability in Chican@ literature. The only text I could think of was Peel My Love Like an Onion. 32. The interview was held before a live audience at the 4th International Conference on Chicano Literature in Sevilla, Spain, in May 2004, which I was able to attend. It is now published in Critical Essays on Chicano Studies (2007). See also my essay “Aztec Queens and Gypsy Kings” in the same collection. Chapter 4 1. Two excellent histories of el movimiento chicano, both of which discuss the polemics that helped mobilize it, are Chicano Politics: Reality & Promise 1940–1990 by Juan Gómez-Quiñones and Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement by Carlos Muñoz, Jr. The latter is particularly helpful because it includes the entire “Plan de Santa Barbara,” the important and widely circulated manifesto which helped to popularize chicanismo and launch Chicano Studies. The collective that authored that document in 1969 wrote: “Chicanismo involves a crucial distinction in political consciousness between a Mexican American and a Chicano mentality. The Mexican American is a person who lacks respect for his cultural and ethnic heritage. Unsure of himself, he seeks assimilation as a way out of his ‘degraded’ social status. Consequently, he remains politically ineffective. . . . Mexican Americans must be viewed as potential Chicanos” (Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power, 194). See also Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, edited by Alma M. García, for some of the key feminist poems, articles, and essays written during and about el movimiento. 2. See the Introduction for my engagement with Ignacio M. García’s reactionary polemic “Juncture in the Road,” which claims that Chicana lesbians are the major threat to the field. The Nation of Aztlán boycotts the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies for sanctioning the creation of the Lesbian Caucus and the Joto Caucus, which they blame on the influence of “sexual perverts” and Jews. See also the Anti-Defamation League report on the Nation of Aztlán (http:// www.adl.org/learn/Aztlan/). 3. As discussed in Chapter 3, there are certainly exceptions: Gloria Anzaldúa, for instance, may be said to be refueling—traditional forms and elaborations of chicanismo. 4. To the best of my knowledge, Luis Leal is the only other Chicano academic who is regularly addressed in this fashion. “Don” has no English equivalent; even its feminine counterpart, “Doña,” marks a different type of respect, much less powerful than that invoked by “Don.” It is used to address only the most upstanding, established, and influential (gentle)men of a community. In Paredes’s novel George Washington Gómez, for instance, the young Guálinto begins to appreciate his uncle Feliciano’s awe-inspiring importance in the community by noticing the frequen-
NOTES TO PAGES 89–93 cy with which other men use “Don” when greeting him and, significantly, not vice versa: “They met many people on the street and several were Mexican men. They all seemed to know Guálinto’s uncle. It was mostly, ‘Buenos días, Don Feliciano.’ ‘Buenos días, Sóstenes.’ ‘Don Feliciano, how are you,’ ‘Well, Pedro, and how are you.’ Guálinto noticed that all the men they met called his uncle ‘Don Feliciano,’ while his uncle gave the ‘Don’ to only some of them. It made him proud to be the nephew of an important man” (108). Of course, the “Don” title can also be used sarcastically, to call attention to undeserved or duplicitous power and influence, as when Paredes explains in “With His Pistol in His Hand” that “Don Porfirio [Díaz] was committed to co-operation with the United States” (135). 5. Paredes received many prestigious awards during his lifetime, including a Guggenheim fellowship (1962), a National Endowment for the Humanities Charles Frankel Prize (in 1989, making him the first Chicano to hold this award), and the Mexican government’s Orden del Aguila Azteca (1990). 6. Indeed, Paredes’s 1960s activism on behalf of Chicano Studies was instrumental at the University of Texas at Austin, which finally agreed to open the Center for Mexican American Studies in 1970. Paredes was named its first director. 7. “With His Pistol in His Hand” is hereafter cited as Pistol. See also Limón’s analysis and history of Paredes’s corrido project and its influence on contemporary Chicano poetry in Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems. 8. According to Paredes, the corrido form also emerged as far south as Mexico City, although its content and form differed from those of the border corrido, whose themes revolved around border conflict (unlike the Mexican corrido’s emphasis on filial discord and national patriotism), whose stanza was in abcb form (rather than the Mexican’s more rigid abba) (Pistol, 183), and whose narrative form was “in a series of shifting scenes and by means of action and dialogue” (187), rather than the Mexican corrido’s “long, continuous, and detailed narrative” (187). Paredes suggests that the border corrido more closely resembles the balladry of medieval Europe (244). 9. Former tejano ranchers, dispossessed of their land through this process, became day laborers on the new Anglo-owned farms—one of several dramatic transformations during this period leading to a series of clashes (always racialized), described by Montejano as old ways versus new, cowboys versus farmers, and a patrón system versus a wage laborer system (Anglos and Mexicans, 106–116). The Texas Rangers played a crucial (and highly partisan) role in both violently suppressing the sedicioso uprising and facilitating the farm colonization of South Texas, as Emma Tenayuca makes clear: “‘Texas Rangers, in cooperation with land speculators, came into small Mexican villages in the border country, massacred hundreds of unarmed, peaceful Mexican villagers and seized their lands. Sometimes the seizures were accompanied by the formality of signing bills of sale—at the point of a gun’” (quoted in Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 127).
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10. Significantly, the overpowering Ranger violence documented in Pistol never displaces tejanos as the study’s central actors, for it is largely through their corridos that we learn about Anglo-Texan/Mexicotexan conflict. According to the anthropologist Richard Bauman, who wrote the introduction to Paredes’s collection of essays Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border, Paredes’s scholarship in Pistol and elsewhere not only foregrounds the otherwise marginalized cultural expressions and histories of tejanos but does so while simultaneously exposing and departing from some of the most limiting and entrenched features of folklore studies. One of these departures involves the very conception of folk, which is traditionally approached as “a bounded, homogenous, unsophisticated, traditionoriented group sharing a common language and a collective body of vernacular knowledge, custom, oral tradition, and the like. The weight of emphasis in such constructions has fallen upon group-internal, shared ways of life; group homogeneity has been taken as the touchstone of folklore” (Folklore and Culture, xiii). As Bauman notes, Paredes theorizes the corrido “not in the service of systems maintenance” but as a tool in “conflict, struggle, and resistance” (xiv). 11. See María Herrera-Sobek, The Mexican Corrido. Paredes’s own dedication of Pistol presages the masculine focus of the book: “To the memory of my father, who rode a raid or two with Catarino Garza; and to all those old men who sat around on summer nights, in the days when there was a chaparral, smoking their cornhusk cigarettes and talking in low, gentle voices about violent things; while I listened” (no pagination). See also Renato Rosaldo’s “Changing Chicano Narratives” for a feminist critique of “idealization of a primordial patriarchy” (151) in Pistol and Jesse Alemán’s essay “Chicano Novelist Discourse” (1998), which provides a helpful revisionary reading of the corrido paradigm. Following the work of Chicana feminist scholars, Alemán points to the limitations inherent in accepting Pistol as a foundational master narrative and illustrates how a Bakhtinian approach to the corrido can unsettle its otherwise masculinist ideological unity and subsequently challenge “a method of literary analysis that views social resistance as the defining characteristic of Chicano literary production” (50). “Granted, social antagonism seems to be the main theme of the border corrido, but the variety of discourses that structure the corrido likewise compete for authority over the corrido’s content, creating a novelistic event that is less the progenitor of Chicano literary production and more an example of how Chicano literature always registers the sociodiscursive conflicts that inform Chicano cultural identity” (52). 12. According to Ramón Saldívar, Paredes actually wrote the story in 1948 (Chicano Narrative, 48). 13. All references to the story are to the 1994 publication, hereafter abbreviated “Waves.” 14. Paredes’s clear commitment to thinking about the importance of the relationship between music and social relations and his evident pleasure in writing music into
NOTES TO PAGES 98–99 his fiction are no doubt connected to and energized by the fact that he himself was a musician. See the following poems published in Between Two Worlds for a better understanding of his personal investment in music: “Rose Petals,” “Guitarras y mujeres,” “Guitarreros,” and “Song of the Gigolo.” 15. If Paredes is critical of this form of Spanish “fantasy-heritage” as it is deployed by some mexicanos, he could be conversely scathing about ethnonationalist Chicanos who go so far in the other direction to deny all ties to Spain: “Too many Chicanos have gone to the other extreme from their ‘Spanish-American’ elders; they see themselves exclusively as children of Cuauhtémoc, roasted feet and all. But Spain has given us many things besides part of our ancestry. It is well to remember that, whatever the genetic makeup of the settlers who moved into the frontier provinces, what welded them together into one people were the Spanish language and the Spanish culture” (A Texas-Mexican Cancionero, 5). 16. In this same essay, Paredes goes on to situate the different periods and locations of corrido traditions and productions according to shifts in the political economy, pertaining not only to periods of foreign invasion but especially to the Porfirio Díaz regime, which “drew class lines even sharper” than they already were and “committed outrages against the humble village folk” (136). “It was the men who took to the hills to escape Díaz’s repressive measures who furnished the first heroes for the Greater Mexican corrido” (136). Therefore “the Mexican corrido began not with a heroic period [as in Spain] but with a proletarian one” (137). This shifts dramatically at the beginning of the revolution, he argues, and class distinction matters less and less: Mexicans “become for two decades what the medieval Castilians [El Cid’s world] were for generations—a warring folk in whom loyalty was seen as loyalty to a personal leader and rank was something achieved by bravery rather than by influence or birth” (137), as reflected in the music of the balladeers. 17. If Paredes is the foremost scholar of the Lower Rio Grande border corrido, Peña is the most recognized scholar of conjunto music. Like Paredes, Peña wants to emphasize his chosen music’s relation to the people: “To put it in the simple words of Narciso Martínez, an early and famous exponent of conjunto music, ‘conjunto era pa’ la gente pobre, la gente de rancho; la orquesta era pa’ high society’ (‘Conjunto was for poor people, rural people; orquesta was for high society’)” (The TexasMexican Conjunto, 4). In this same vein, the Chicano historian Juan GómezQuiñones reserves a prominent place for the political function of music in the lives of Mexican Americans in his groundbreaking essay “On Culture” (1977). He writes: “Songs provide an insight into . . . cultural unity. In song, what springs from the people? Incidents of working together, narrating history, laughing, vending, smuggling, experiencing prison life, knowing about heroes that go against the law, expressing homespun philosophy, remembering special days. All are in the direct, nonfrivolous Mexican art of the people. The people in songs ridicule agringados and the name for themselves is Mexicanos” (10–11).
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18. Although the story never names him, the composer of the famous waltz “Sobre las Olas” (Over the Waves) is Juventino Rosas (b. 1868 in Mexico, d. 1894 in Cuba) and not, as some have mistakenly thought, Richard Strauss. “Sobre las Olas” was composed in the late 1880s, published in 1891, and popularized in 1951 (just two years before the publication of “Waves”) when it was sung by Mario Lanza with completely different lyrics as “The Loveliest Night of the Year” in the Hollywood film The Great Caruso. The tune can be heard often at amusement park carousel rides. Saldívar notes in Chicano Narrative that Paredes’s father knew Rosas (56). 19. According to Ramón Saldívar, “Waves” (necessarily) sidelines women: “Significantly absent from this male interchange are all of the women of the family [the boy’s mother and older sister]. And yet, in depicting the contradictory truths of patriarchal consciousness, Paredes’s story offers unconsciously an image, albeit as a negative truth, of feminist consciousness. The consolidation of male solidarity, with the acceptance of the heterogeneity of male affective response, seems necessarily to entail driving to the margins of narrative any women’s presence. Paredes’s story shows how oppositional Chicano narrative attains hegemonic patriarchal force by repressing its feminine consciousness” (“Introduction,” xxiii; my emphasis). Fully conflating sex and gender as he does, “feminine consciousness” can only exist for Saldívar in the bodies of women (the boy’s mother and sister). And, even though Saldívar is right to ask us to consider the gendered meanings produced by their being on the margins of the narrative, he fails to notice the “feminine consciousness” at stake for the (male) protagonist. Ironically, of course, his characterization of “the repression of feminine consciousness” is far more accurate than he knows. That is, the story is actually all about the disciplining of feminine consciousness, though we need not stretch to the margins of the narrative to find it, for it is front and center. 20. Likewise, for Lisa Lowe, “[r]epetition, taken to its extreme, discredits repeatability as the ‘proof’ of equivalence and correspondence”; therefore, “[w]hen the hypnosis of religious repetition is defamiliarized, repetition is revealed as cliché. Cliché betrays the arbitrariness of the sign and unsettles the authoritative discourse of equivalence” (Immigrant Acts, 149). 21. There is, of course, a wealth of scholarship and creative writing on the relation between music (pianism in particular) and sexuality. Cherríe Moraga utilizes a piano as a sexualized metaphor, remembering how as a child she envied her cousins who received weekly piano lessons from a “stranger in a dark suit” (The Last Generation, 6). Moraga participated in those lessons voyeuristically, squeezing herself “between the wall and the back of the sofa” ten feet away from the piano (6). See also Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” for a provocative discussion of the relation between music and jouissance: “There is an imaginary in music whose function is to reassure, to constitute the subject hearing it (would it be that music is dangerous—the old Platonic idea? that music is an access to jouissance, to
NOTES TO PAGES 104–109 loss, as numerous ethnographic and popular examples would tend to show?) and this imaginary immediately comes to language via the adjective” (179–180). On the association of pianism with masturbation, see Kevin Kopelson’s Beethoven’s Kiss. Kopelson differentiates between virtuoso and amateur players: “Like masturbating children—characters nineteenth-century doctors saw as homosexuals’ kissing cousins—amateurs play by, for, and with themselves. Virtuosos are public and gregarious, amateurs private and solitary. Virtuosos come to life in concert halls, amateurs in closets” (13–14). See also the anthology Queering the Pitch, edited by Philip Brett et al., and Feminine Endings by Susan McClary. 22. For a comprehensive history of El Cid (Rodrigo Díaz, b. circa 1043, d. 1099), see The Quest for El Cid by Richard Fletcher. Born in Old Castile, El Cid was a mercenary who was exiled by King Alfonso VI from 1081 through 1086 (when he lived in Zaragoza) and is celebrated for reconquering Valencia from the Moors in 1094 (Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, 93, 125). The legend of El Cid was memorialized (and of course highly embellished) in the 1961 Hollywood epic film El Cid, starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren (directed by Anthony Mann). 23. See Louis Gerard Mendoza’s Historia for an incisive critique of the elisions produced where the Chicano generational paradigm is utilized, especially in the scholarship of Chicano historians. In a different but related context, see Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires, which decisively stages a sustained critique of the patrilineal genealogical inheritance of the Oedipal frameworks (and subsequent father-son conflicts) that drive much of the scholarship and public culture on the South Asian diaspora. Under these frameworks, “the diaspora is seen in some sense as the bastard child of the nation: disavowed, illegitimate, and inauthentic” (31). 24. “Where a break stronger than a paragraph but not as strong as a subhead is required, a set of asterisks or a type ornament, or simply a blank line, may be inserted between paragraphs. Using a blank line has the disadvantage that it may be missed if the break falls at the bottom of a page” (The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., 1.79). 25. See Roland Barthes’s entry for “Love’s Languor” in A Lover’s Discourse for a compelling differentiation between desire for immediate gratification and languor, a “[s]ubtle state of amorous desire, experienced in its dearth, outside of any will-to-possess” (155). 26. My exercise of close-reading the narrator’s descriptions of the music and of the boy’s embodied responses entailed sketching them out side by side on a sheet of paper. This worked easily until I suddenly realized that what I had been recording on one side of the page under “Body” might easily have gone under the “Music” heading. 27. In either case, the boy/piano, like the acordeonista, has been replaced by a commodity; they are now fully alienated from their music and face a situation in
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which “the only choice is either to join in or to be left behind” (Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 148). While an in-depth analysis of the function of mechanical reproduction in our story is outside the scope of this chapter, I am writing a separate essay on that topic. 28. According to Stuart Elden, Foucault had planned before his death to write a volume for his history of sexuality project entitled La croisade des enfants (The Children’s Crusade) on the masturbating child, one of the project’s four constituent subjects (the others being the hysterical woman, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult). Although he did not complete this volume, his notes and lectures on the topic provide rich material on the emergence of discourse on childhood autoeroticism, which Elden helps to elaborate. For instance, according to Elden, Foucault found that the emphasis on parental blame for masturbating children “leads to what we might call the nuclear family, as opposed to the larger ‘household’ of the past; new types of familial obligations; and new health principles regulated by external medical knowledge (A [Les Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France (1974–1975)], 232–239). Foucault suggests that what he calls this ‘epistemophilic’ incest of contact, observation, and surveillance is part of the foundation of the modern family (A, 234). The crusade against masturbation—a new children’s crusade—constitutes a new apparatus or dispositif of knowledge-power: It is linked to state strategies concerning education and population control (A, 239– 243)” (“The Constitution of the Normal,” 101). See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s provocative essay “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” in Tendencies and her memoir A Dialogue on Love. In the latter, Sedgwick offers a moving account of the importance of masturbation in her childhood, which resonates with the little boy in our story. 29. Williams had been developing this notion of structures of feeling at least since 1961 when, in The Long Revolution, he can be seen interpreting the structures of feeling emerging in 1840s England (48–71). 30. Leticia Garza-Falcón suggests that one reason Paredes delayed publishing the novel was his doubt that he could find a publisher that would accept his negative portrayal of the Texas Rangers and of J. Frank Dobie (who makes a brief appearance in the novel as the thinly veiled K. Hank Harvey) (“Américo Paredes’s Narratives of Resistance,” 168). In his introduction to George Washington Gómez, Rolando Hinojosa claims that the published novel is a “first draft” and therefore is “published as written” (5–6). According to Ramón Saldívar, Paredes agreed to let Arte Público Press publish the work so long as it agreed not to edit the manuscript (“The Borderlands of Culture,” 290n5). 31. Significantly, the first characters introduced in the novel are not members of Guálinto’s family but a group of four Texas Rangers on horseback interrogating any suspicious (non-Anglo) people they come across. I must thank José E. Limón for this important insight about the novel’s opening. Guálinto’s father, Gumers-
NOTE TO PAGE 123 indo, is one of the men interrogated in the opening pages of the novel as he and a doctor are on their way to attend to Guálinto’s birth. The clear authority with which the Rangers command these interrogations, together with their pointed questions about the “Republic of the Southwest,” presages the centrality of the Anglo-Texan/tejano conflict in the story of Guálinto’s life. Epilogue 1. See also Angie Chabram-Dernersesian’s “‘Chicana! Rican? No, Chicana Riqueña!’” and my “Where in the Transnational World Are U.S. Women of Color?”
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Acosta, Oscar Zeta, 58 Acosta-Belén, Edna, 123 Adorno, Theodor, 101–102, 109, 110, 146n27 adultery, 129n14 affirmative action, 10, 13, 25, 39, 40, 42–46, 133n8 African Americans, 34, 122, 131n13 agency: Castillo and Chicana/mestiza sexual agency, 63, 69, 70; Hertz on “pathos of uncertain agency,” 28; and Moraga, 23–24, 27–28 AIDS, 55–57, 84 Alarcón, Norma: on Castillo, 66, 70, 71, 138n22; on Chicano “ethnonationalism,” 124; as feminist scholar, 10, 88; on Rodriguez, 41, 47, 48 Alemán, Jesse, 142n11 All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Smith), 21 Althusser, Louis Pierre, 114, 117 Americas Review, 135n1 Anchor Books, 138n20, 139n26 Andar, El, 64–65 Anzaldúa, Gloria: Borderlands/La Frontera by, 21, 63–64, 66–67; Chicana theory of, 95–96; and chicanismo, 140n3; lesbian identity of, 9, 21, 29–30; and racialized sexuality generally, 10 Arenas, Reinaldo, 123–124 Arte Público Press, 59, 97, 135–136nn3–4, 146n30
assimilation: of Moraga’s brother, 28, 29, 30; Rodriguez’s assimilationist politics, 43–49, 133n8 Austin, J. L., 31–32 Aztlán, 13, 35, 62, 63, 65–66, 88. See also Nation of Aztlán Bambara, Toni Cade, 19 Barthes, Roland, 101, 144n21, 145n25 Bauman, Richard, 142n10 Benjamin, Walter, 109 Bergman, David, 49 Berlant, Lauren, 45, 46, 49, 53, 133– 134nn10–11 Between Two Worlds (Paredes), 143n14 bilingual education, 10, 39, 40, 42, 43–46, 133nn7–8 Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 138n20, 139n26 Binder, Wolfgang, 136n9 borderlands, 63–64, 123–124, 136n10 Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa), 21, 63–64, 66–67 Bowden, Charles, 137n14 Brett, Philip, 102–103 Brown: The Last Discovery of America (Rodriguez), 39 Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 12, 62, 87–88, 96, 130n18
Callas, Maria, 5 Cantú, Norma Elia, 130n7
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Castillo, Ana: American Book Award for, 138n20; border crossings and travel in works by, 63; Chicago upbringing of, 136n9; and Chicana/mestiza sexual agency, 63, 69, 70; on Chicana selflove, 68, 75, 81, 83, 136n7; on Conquest of Mexico, 59; dissertation by, 137n17; feminist and sex-positive writings by, 88; and “Gypsy” culture, 13, 64–65, 68, 69, 74, 75, 77, 80–86, 136n11; and mestizaje, 13, 64–69, 76, 79–82, 85, 86; mestizo antihero of Sapogonia, 77–82, 114; and narrators and multiple points of view in Sapogonia, 78; and racialized sexuality, 62–63; and transcultural forms of belonging and desire, 13, 63, 64–65; travel by, 136n9; on urban malaise and cultural displacement, 13; and virgen/chingada (virgin/whore) sexual framework, 10, 69 —works: Invitation, 59–62, 136n4, 136nn7–8; Massacre of the Dreamers, 67–68, 136n8, 137n17; Mixquiahuala Letters, 62–63, 68–76, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 138nn20–24; My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, 136n7; Otro Canto, 62; Peel My Love Like an Onion, 59, 62–63, 68, 81, 83–85, 136–137nn11–13, 139– 140nn30–31; Sapogonia, 62–63, 68–69, 76–82, 83, 85, 114, 139nn26–29; Women Are Not Roses, 136n4 Catholic church, 32, 35–36, 79 Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie, 3, 10, 122, 137n18, 147n1 Chican@, use of “@” in term, 2–3, 127n2 Chican@ literature, criteria for, 12, 62, 87–88 Chicana/o Studies: backlash against, 124; and Chican@/Anglo binary, 122–123; and Chicana feminism, 11–12; García’s critique of, 11–12, 124, 140n2; malecentered nature of Chicano Studies, 96; and Paredes, 141n6; Paredes’s
participation in the founding of, 10, 87, 89–92, 96, 124–125; and “El Plan de Santa Bárbara,” 125, 126, 140n1; and queer theory, 57–58; relationship between Latin@ Studies and, 122–124; R. A. Rodríguez on values of, 134n13; and Richard Rodriguez, 48 chicanismo, 88, 140n1, 140n3. See also movimiento chicano, el Chicano, masculine, heterosexual framework for term, 57–58 Chicano “ethnonationalism,” 124 Chicano identity politics, 39–40, 47 Chicano Narrative (Saldívar), 92 chingada (fucked one), 66, 68 chingaderas (violent acts), 72 chingón (macho), 68, 72 Chow, Rey, 3 Cid, El, 98, 99, 102, 104, 143n16, 145n22 Cid, El (film), 145n22 Clinton, Bill, 132n3 conjunto music, 143n17 Connerly, Ward, 124 Conquest of Mexico and conquistadores, 10, 59, 66, 79, 86, 98, 104 conquest triangle, 7 “Con Su Pluma en Su Mano” (Hinojosa), 91–92 Corrido de Gregorio Cortez, El, 90, 92–97 corrido masculinity, 94–97, 103–105, 111, 114 corridos, 88, 90–98, 103–104, 112, 114, 117, 141n8, 142nn10–11, 143n16 Cortázar, Julio, 138n22 Cortés, Hernán, 7, 66, 68 Cortez, Gregorio, 90, 92–97 Cortez, Jaime, 133n5 counterpublic, 49, 135n16 Critical Essays on Chicano Studies (Espejo), 140n32 Cuban Americans, 123–124 culture/canon wars, 44 Cvetkovich, Ann, 36, 57, 130n3
INDEX dancing, 15–16, 64–65, 80–83, 130n1 Days of Obligation (Rodriguez), 39, 42, 44, 46, 51–57, 133n8, 134n12 Dead Subjects (Viego), 2, 7, 128n12, 128– 129n13 Decolonial Imaginary, The (Pérez), 76–77, 81, 86, 128n11 de-mastery, 1–3, 88, 105, 125–126 Dialogue on Love, A (Sedgwick), 126, 146n28 difference revolution, 3 disability, 83, 139–140n31 disidentification, 55–57 Disidentifications (Muñoz), 55, 57 Dobie, J. Frank, 90, 146n30 Douglas, William O., 134n11 Ebonics movement, 133n7 écriture féminine, 32 education: bilingual education, 10, 39, 40, 42, 43–46, 133nn7–8; in George Washington Gómez by Paredes, 116–118 Elden, Stuart, 146n28 “El Paso” (Robbins), 135n17 embodiment: brown body of Rodriguez, 49–53; dark body of Rodriguez’s uncle, 51–52; Moraga and bodily shame, 26, 36; Rodriguez and bodily shame, 25, 52–53; shame regarding, 25–26, 130n7; and swimming-pool story from Rodriguez’s childhood, 49–51. See also sexuality Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick), 1, 4–6, 129n16 ethnonationalism, 124, 126 experience-as-evidence approach to difference, 19, 102 explicit performatives, 31–32, 131n11 family romance, 79, 139n28 Fanon, Frantz, 6 Fear of a Queer Planet (Warner), 15 Female Masculinity (Halberstam), 130nn3,6
feminism. See specific authors flamenco music and dancing, 64–65, 80–83, 136n12 Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border (Paredes), 142n10 Fonseca, Isabel, 76, 138–139n25 “For the Color of My Mother” (Moraga), 31 fotonovelas (photonovels), 70 Foucault, Michel: JanMohamed on, 8–9; and knowledge, 32; on masturbating child, 111, 146n28; on power, 8–9, 28, 131n9, 132n15; and queer theory, 35; on sexuality, 8–9, 34–35, 111; on speaker’s benefit, 34–35; Stoler on, 129n14 Franco, Jean, 137–138n19 Fraser, Nancy, 57, 135n16 Freeman, Elizabeth, 5, 49 Fregoso, Rosa Linda, 139n28 García, Alma M., 140n1 García, Ignacio M., 11–12, 14, 89, 124, 140n2 Garza-Falcón, Leticia, 117–118, 146n30 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 5, 29–30 gay men. See homosexuality; queer theory gay rights movement, 56 gender: and corrido masculinity, 94–97, 103–105, 111, 114; in George Washington Gómez, 118–120; in Loving in the War Years by Moraga, 15–16, 120; and machismo, 68, 72–73; and mestizaje, 13, 64–69, 76, 79–82, 85, 86, 137n15; and “Over the Waves Is Out” by Paredes, 144n19; and Rodriguez’s effiminacy, 40, 47–48; and virgen/chingada (virgin/ whore) sexual framework, 10, 69; in “With His Pistol in His Hand” by Paredes, 89–98, 142n11. See also homosexuality; lesbians; queer theory George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (Paredes), 14, 89, 104, 113–120, 140–141n4, 146n30, 146–147n31 Gibson, Alisha, 139–140n31
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Gómez-Quiñones, Juan, 140n1, 143n17 Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, 138n22 González, Corky, 125 González, Deena J., 29–30 Gopinath, Gayatri, 128n11, 129n14, 145n23 Gordon, Milton, 22 Griswold v. Connecticut, 134n11 Gutiérrez, Marina, 62 “Gypsy” culture, 13, 64–65, 68, 69, 74, 75, 77, 80–86, 136n12, 138–139n25 Habermas, Jürgen, 135n16 Halberstam, Judith, 130n6 Hammon and the Beans, The (Paredes), 97, 103 Hancock, Ian, 139n25 Haraway, Donna, 23, 67 Harper’s Magazine, 53, 54, 132n3, 135n19 hermeneutics of suspicion, 17, 18, 47–49, 135n15 Herrera-Sobek, María, 95 Herrera y Lozano, Lorenzo, 133n5 Hertz, Neil, 28 Heston, Charlton, 145n22 Hinojosa, Rolando, 146n30 Hinojosa, Tish, 91–92 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 8–9, 28, 32, 34–35, 131n9 Hollibaugh, Amber, 1 homo/heterosexual definition, 4–6, 129n16 homosexuality: lack of privacy protections for, 46; and McCarren-Walter Act, 129n14; Rodriguez on secrecy and growing up homosexual, 46; Rodriguez’s homosexuality and effeminacy, 39, 40, 46, 47, 49, 54, 56; and San Francisco, 53–57; Somerville on, 129n14. See also lesbians; queer theory Horkheimer, Max, 146n27 House That Race Built, The (Lubiano), 132n0 Hull, Gloria T., 21
Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez), 39–40, 42–45, 48–51, 53, 54, 130n7 hybridity, 3–4, 8, 66–67, in The Mixquiahuala Letters by Castillo, 70, 74 immigration and immigrants, 22, 43, 64, 77, 81, 115, 123–124 Impossible Desires (Gopinath), 129n14 International Conference on Chicano Literature (2004), 140n32 intersectionality, 3, 4, 6, 10, 17, 18–19, 22 Invitation, The (Castillo), 59–62, 136n4, 136nn7–8 James, Henry, 5 JanMohamed, Abdul R., 7–9, 129n14, 132n15 Jenkins, Candice M., 139n28 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, 5 Kahlo, Frida, 82 Kanellos, Nicolás, 59–62, 135n3 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 5, 102, 120 Kopelson, Kevin, 145n21 Labyrinth of Solitude, The (Paz), 7, 66, 68, 134n12 La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence, 18 Lanza, Mario, 144n18 Last Generation, The (Moraga), 20–22, 24, 26, 144–145n21 “Late Victorians” (Rodriguez), 46, 53–57, 135n20 Latina/o Studies and Latino groups, 122–124 Leal, Luis, 140–141n4 Lerate, Jesús, 84 lesbians: Anzaldúa’s lesbian identity, 9, 21, 29–30; and dance metaphor, 15–16, 130n1; García’s disparagement of feminist/lesbian scholarship, 11–12, 124, 140n2; Moraga’s lesbian identity,
INDEX 15–16, 18, 21–24, 26, 29, 34–36, 121–122. See also homosexuality; queer theory; and specific authors Lewis, Oscar, 137n14 Limón, José E.: on Catholic church in Mexico, 32, 35; on Paredes, 90–91, 92, 146n31; on psychoanalysis, 128– 129nn12–13; on Rodriguez, 42, 48, 132n3; on Selena, 131n12; on swimming-pool segregation, 135n17 Lone Star (Sayles), 122 “Long Line of Vendidas, A” (Moraga), 35–36 Long Revolution, The (Williams), 146n29 Lorde, Audre, 3 Loren, Sophia, 145n22 Los Angeles Unified School District, 63 Loving in the War Years (Moraga), 14–16, 19–24, 26–29, 31, 33, 36, 120, 130n2, 137n16 Lowe, Lisa, 127n4, 144n20 Lubiano, Wahneema, 132n0 machismo, 68, 72–73. See also corrido masculinity majoritarian position, 9–11, 14, 129n16 Malinche, La, 7, 66, 68–69, 137n16 Mann, Anthony, 145n22 Marcuse, Herbert, 128n12 Marez, Curtis, 137n15 Martínez, Rubén, 133n8 Marxism and Literature (Williams), 2, 112–113 masculinity. See corrido masculinity; gender Massacre of the Dreamers (Castillo), 67–68, 136n8, 137n17 “Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, The” (Lorde), 3 masturbation, 62, 105, 108, 111, 145n21, 146n28 Maya, Dana, 4 McCarren-Walter Act, 129n14
Melville, Herman, 23 Mendoza, Louis Gerard, 114, 117–118, 145n23 mestizaje, 13, 64–69, 76, 79–82, 85, 86, 137n15 Methodology of the Oppressed (Sandoval), 85–86 minoritarian position, 9, 12, 14, 129n16 miscegenation, 7, 8 Mixquiahuala Letters, The (Castillo), 62–63, 68–76, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 138nn20–24 Montejano, David, 93, 135n17, 141n9 Moraga, Cherríe: on African Americans, 34, 131n13; and agency, 23–24, 27–28; and arresting race, 27–30; assimilation of brother of, 28, 29, 30; and chicanada, 21; and confession, 33–34, 36; contrasted with Paredes, 88–89; on cross-racial relationships, 34; experience-as-evidence approach to, 19–20; familia and racialized sexuality in works by, 12, 15–37, 121–122, 131n13; family background of, 16, 21, 29–31; on fear, 33; feminist and sex-positive writings by, 88; and gender in Loving in the War Years, 120; and going brown, 31–33; and homecoming in Loving in the War Years, 17, 19–20, 22–24, 28, 33, 37; lesbian identity of, 15–16, 18, 21–24, 26, 29, 34–36, 121–122; lovers of, 26, 29, 34, 36; makeover dream of, 26–27; motherhood of, 22–23, 27, 29; mother’s relationship with, 16, 34; objectification of race by, 27–30; and outsiderness and homecoming, 17, 19–25, 28, 31, 33, 37; and personalis-political slogan, 20, 33; on piano as sexualized metaphor, 144n21; poetry by, 2, 31; on power, 27–28; queer reading and queer meaning of, 17–19, 37; and racial etiquette, 24–27, 30, 31; selfdisclosures in writings by, 33–37; and
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self-racialization, 16–18, 26, 28–30, 37; on sexuality and racial and class backgrounds, 1; and shame, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24–27, 33, 36–37; and violation of sexual norms, 9; and virgen/chingada (virgin/whore) sexual framework, 10 —works: “For the Color of My Mother,” 31; Last Generation, 20–22, 24, 26, 144–145n21; “Long Line of Vendidas,” 35–36; Loving in the War Years, 14–16, 19–24, 26–29, 31, 33, 36, 120, 130n2, 137n16; “Slow Dance,” 15–16; Waiting in the Wings, 20, 21–22, 27, 29 movimiento chicano, el, 21–22, 87, 88, 140n1 multiculturalism, 127n4 Muñoz, Carlos, Jr., 140n1 Muñoz, José Esteban, 3, 4, 55, 57, 65 music: Adorno on, 101–102, 109, 110; Barthes on jouissance and, 144n21; conjunto music, 143n17; corridos, 88, 90–98, 103–104, 112, 114, 117, 141n8, 142nn10–11, 143n16; flamenco music and dancing, 64–65, 80–83, 136n12; Gómez-Quiñones on, 143n17; Kopelson on virtuoso and amateur piano players, 145n21; Moraga on piano as sexualized metaphor, 144n21; in “Over the Waves Is Out” by Paredes, 97, 99– 113; Paredes as musician, 142–143n14; queer musicology, 102–103; Spanish romances viejos (old romances) and Spanish ballads, 98–99 My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems (Castillo), 136n7 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, 11, 140n2 Nation of Aztlán, 11, 12, 140n2. See also Aztlán Nestle, Joan, 130n1 New Mexico Review, 97 nihilism, 65, 137n14
Obejas, Achy, 124 objectification of race, 27–30 Omi, Michael, 24, 25, 30 Other, 20–21, 73, 75, 88. See also outsiderness Otro Canto (Castillo), 62 outsiderness, 20–25, 28, 31, 33, 37 “Over the Waves Is Out” (Paredes), 14, 97–113, 125–126, 142n12 Pan-Latin@ Studies, 124 Paredes, Américo: association of, with heterosexist, masculine Chicano literature, 58; awards for, 141n5; on Chicanos and Spanish culture, 143n15; on childhood shame, 130n7; as corrido hero, 96; on corridos, 88, 90–98, 112, 141n8, 142nn10–11, 143n16; demastering projects in reading of, 125, 126; as director of Center for Mexican American Studies at University of Texas, 141n6; as founding “father” of Chicana/o narrative, 10, 87, 89–92, 96, 124–125; and gender in George Washington Gómez, 118–120; and legend of Gregorio Cortez, 90, 92–97; memorial service of, 91–92; Moraga contrasted with, 88–89; as musician, 142–143n14; queer reading of “Over the Waves Is Out,” 105–113, 125–126; on Spanish fantasy heritage, 98, 99, 143n15; subjects of writings by, 88–89; and tejano identity and politics in George Washington Gómez, 113–118; and tejano versus Anglo-Texan conflict, 13–14; on Texas Rangers, 88, 90, 92–94, 115–116, 141–142nn9–10, 146n30, 147n31 —works: Between Two Worlds, 143n14; Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border, 142n10; George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel, 14, 104, 113–120, 130n7, 140–141n4, 146n30, 146–147n31; Hammon and the Beans, 97, 103, 104;
INDEX “Over the Waves Is Out,” 14, 89, 97–113, 125–126, 142n12; Texas-Mexican Cancionero, 98–99, 104, 110, 143nn15–16; “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero, 13–14, 89–98, 105, 141n4, 141n8, 142nn10–11 Paredes, Raymund, 138n22 Paz, Octavio, 7, 68, 72, 73, 128–129n13, 134n12 Peel My Love Like an Onion (Castillo), 59, 62–63, 68, 81, 83–85, 136–137nn11–13, 139–140nn30–31 Peña, Manuel, 99, 143n17 Pérez, Emma M., 6–7, 29–30, 76–77, 81, 88, 128nn11–12 Persistent Desire, The (Nestle), 130n1 personal-is-political slogan, 20, 33 Plan de San Diego, 93 “Plan de Santa Bárbara, El,” 125, 126, 140n1 “Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, El,” 125 poststructuralism, 2–3, 17, 67 power: Foucault on, 8–9, 28, 131n9, 132n15; Moraga on, 27–28; traditional model of, 28 Princeton University, 132n0 private/public spheres, 13, 41, 43–46, 49, 50, 53, 57, 61, 89, 135n16, 135n20 psychoanalytic theory, 7, 128–129nn11–13, 138n22 public/private spheres, 13, 41, 43–46, 49, 50, 53, 57, 61, 89, 135n16, 135n20 Queen of America Goes to Washington City, The (Berlant), 45, 46, 53, 133–134nn10– 11 queer musicology, 102–103 queer theory: challenges of, 4; and Foucault, 35; and freedom to be public, 49; and Moraga’s writings generally, 17, 37; poststructuralist orientation of, 17; and racialized sexuality, 41–42; on Rodriguez, 48–49; and Sedgwick on term queer, 127n3; and “see-for-
instance” endnote, 4, 17. See also homosexuality; lesbians Quintana, Alvina E., 138n23 Quiroga, José, 4 race: Lubiano on, 132n; objectification of, by Moraga, 27–30; and racial etiquette, 24–27, 30, 31; Rodriguez on, 39–58; and self-racialization and Moraga, 16–18, 26, 28–30, 37; and tejano identity and politics in George Washington Gómez by Paredes, 113–118. See also racialized sexuality Race Matters Conference, 132n0 racial etiquette, 24–27, 30, 31 racialized nihilism, 65, 137n14 racialized sexuality, 1, 9–10, 14, 121–126; and black/white gay male desire, 122; in Castillo’s Mixquiahuala Letters, 69–76; in Castillo’s Peel My Love Like an Onion, 83–85; in Castillo’s Sapogonia, 76–82; and de-romanticizing intracultural love and sexual desire, 122; García on, 12; JanMohamed on, 7–9; majoritarian position on, 9–11, 14; and miscegenation, 7, 8; Moraga on familia and, 12, 15–37, 121–122, 131n13; Pérez on, 7; and queer theory, 41–42; and Rodriguez, 41–42, 49–53 Radin, Margaret Jane, 28–29 radio, 110, 111 Radway, Janice A., 70 Revista Chicano-Riqueña, 59, 135n1 Ricoeur, Paul, 17 Rivera, Diego, 82 Rivera, Tomás, 58, 130n7 Robbins, Marty, 135n17 Rodríguez, Juana María, 4 Rodríguez, Randy A., 14, 42, 45–49, 57, 88, 134–135nn13–15 Rodriguez, Richard: assimilationist politics of, 43–49, 133n8; awards for, 132n3; on bilingual education and
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affirmative action, 10, 13, 39, 40, 42, 43–46, 133nn7–8; and bodily shame, 25, 52–53; on Chicano identity politics, 39–41, 47; childhood of, 25, 46, 48–54; and community versus intellectual mastery, 23; critics of, 39–42, 47–48, 134–135n14; critiques of racial minority status by, 12–13, 39–58; and culture/canon wars, 44, 133n10; education of, 43, 133n9; family background of, 43; homosexuality and effeminacy of, 39, 40, 46, 47, 49, 54, 56; as journalist, 39, 132n3; motivation of writings by, 33; parents of, 50–51; and public/ private binary, 13, 41, 43–46, 49, 53, 57, 61, 135n20; queer theory used in interpretation of, 48–49; on race, 39–58; and racial etiquette, 25; and racialized sexuality, 41–42; R. A. Rodríguez on, 42, 45–49, 57, 134–135nn13–15; San Francisco Victorian home of, 53–57; Sedore’s interview with, 39–40, 47; on sexuality, 13, 41, 46, 49–53 —works: Brown: The Last Discovery of America, 39; Days of Obligation, 39, 42, 44, 46, 51–57, 133n8, 134n12; Hunger of Memory, 39–40, 42–45, 48–51, 53, 54, 130n7; “Late Victorians,” 46, 53–57, 135n20 romances viejos (old romances), 98–99 Romero, Lora, 20, 21, 23–24 Rosaldo, Renato, 87, 88 Rosas, Juventino, 144n18 Saeta, Elsa, 68 Saldívar, José David, 133n8 Saldívar, Ramón: on corrido masculinity, 96; on feminist scholars, 14, 88; on George Washington Gómez by Paredes, 113, 146n30; as influential scholar generally, 10; introduction to The Hammon and the Beans by, 104–105; on “Over the Waves Is Out” by Paredes, 97, 103, 107, 111, 142n12, 144n19; on Rodriguez,
40; on “With His Pistol in His Hand” by Paredes, 92 Saldívar-Hull, Sonia, 10, 88, 95–96 San Antonio Express-News, 96 Sánchez, Rosaura: on Castillo, 67–68, 71; on mestiza identity, 67–68, 137n15; on multiethnic and multilingual versus traditional bicultural and bilingual model, 63–64, 123, 124; on Rodriguez, 47, 133n10 Sandoval, Chela, 67, 85–86 San Francisco Victorian houses, 53–57 Santiago, Carlos E., 123 santo de la pata alzada (Herrera y Lozano), 133n5 Sapogonia (Castillo), 62–63, 68–69, 76–82, 83, 85, 114, 139nn26–29 Satuloff, Bob, 56 Sayles, John, 122 Scott, Darieck, 121, 122 Scott, Joan W., 19, 102 Scott, Patricia Bell, 21 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: on childhood, 111; on contrasting accounts of surface/depth, 130–131n8; on explicit performatives, 31–32, 131n11; on falling in love, 126; on hermeneutics of suspicion, 17, 135n15; on Hertz’s “uncertain agency,” 28; on homo/heterosexual definition, 4–6, 129n16; on masturbation, 146n28; on sexuality and race and class, 1; on shame, 36; on universalizing view or minoritizing view, 5–6, 128n10, 129n16 sedicioso uprising, 92–93, 115 Sedore, Timothy S., 39–40, 47 segregation, 50–51, 135n17 Selena, 131n12 self-racialization, 16–18, 26, 28–30, 37 Serros, Michele, 130n8 sexuality: in Castillo’s Invitation, 59–62; in Castillo’s Mixquiahuala Letters, 71–76; in Castillo’s Peel My Love Like an Onion,
INDEX 83–85; in Castillo’s Sapogonia, 76–82; Foucault on, 8–9, 34–35, 111; homo/ heterosexual definition, 4–6, 129n16; and masturbation, 62, 105, 108, 111, 145n21, 146n28; Paz on, 134n12; repression of, 32, 34–35, 111; Rodriguez on, 13, 41, 46, 49–53; and Scott on sexual desire, 121; of Selena, 131n12. See also homosexuality; lesbians; queer theory; racialized sexuality “Sexuality and Discourse” (Pérez), 7 “Sexuality on/of the Racial Border” (JanMohamed), 8–9 shame: bodily shame, 25–26, 130n7; Cvetkovich on, 36; and Moraga, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24–27, 33, 36–37; and Rodriguez, 25, 52–53; Sedgwick, 36 Sharpe, Christina, 131n13 “Slow Dance, The” (Moraga), 15–16 Smith, Barbara, 21 “Sobre las Olas” (Over the Waves, Rosas), 144n18 Somerville, Siobhan B., 129n14 “Sons of La Malinche” (Paz), 7 Stoler, Ann Laura, 129n14 structures of feeling, 112, 146n29 Supreme Court, U.S., 134n11 suspicion. See hermeneutics of suspicion television, 110 Tenayuca, Emma, 141n9 Tendencies (Sedgwick), 111, 127n3, 144n21, 146n28 Texas-Mexican Cancionero, A (Paredes), 98–99, 104, 110, 143nn15–16 Texas Observer, 96 Texas Rangers, 88, 90, 92–94, 115–116, 141–142nn9–10, 146n30, 146–147n31 Texas Studies in Literature and Language (TSLL), 42, 48 This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga, Anzaldúa), 1, 19, 121 Tilden, Norma, 135n20
Toda Iglesia, María Angeles, 84 Todorov, Tzvetan, 79 Torres, Hector A., 138n22 Touching Feeling (Sedgwick), 28, 36–37, 135n15 Tropicana, Carmelita, 124 TSLL. See Texas Studies in Literature and Language (TSLL) University of California at Santa Barbara, 59 University of Houston, 135n3 University of Texas at Austin, 141n6 Viego, Antonio, 2, 7, 128–129nn12–13 virgen/chingada (virgin/whore) sexual framework, 10, 69 Virgins, Guerrillas, and Locas (Cortez), 133n5 Waiting in the Wings (Moraga), 20, 21–22, 27, 29 Walter, Roland, 82 Warner, Michael, 10, 15 Webb, Walter Prescott, 90 West, Cornel, 65, 132n0 “White Glasses” (Sedgwick), 130–131n8 Whitman, Walt, 49 Williams, Raymond, 2, 112–113, 146n29 Winant, Howard, 24, 25 “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Paredes), 13–14, 89–98, 105, 141nn4,8, 142nn10–11 Wittig, Monique, 3 Women Are Not Roses (Castillo), 136n4 Woolf, Virginia and Leonard, 82 Wounded Heart, The (Yarbro-Bejarano), 22–23 Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 4, 9, 10, 22–23, 35, 88, 129n15 Yo Soy Joaquín (González), 125 Yúdice, George, 134n10
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