Threshold Time: Passage of Crisis in Chicano Literature. (Costerus New Series)

Threshold Time

Passage of Crisis in Chicano Literature

Costerus New Series 173 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper

Threshold Time Passage of Crisis in Chicano Literature

Lene M. Johannessen

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2008

Cover photo: Emma N. Johannessen Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2332-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

To the memory of Kåre Johannessen

Table of Contents Acknowledgements

9

Introduction: The Open Totality of Thresholds

11

I. A History of Borderland Routes

23

II. A Literary Blossoming

47

III. Disillusion and Defiance in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don

61

IV. The Appropriate(d) Hero: Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez

81

V. Exercises in Liminality: Tomás Rivera’s …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him

101

VI. The Dialogic Mind: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

125

VII. Memories of Landscape 1. The Meaning of Place in Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus

147

2: The Threshold – Benjamin Alire Sáenz’ Carry Me Like Water

161

VIII. The Aesthetics of Time in Chicano Literature

167

Bibliography

189

Index

199

Acknowledgments Various institutions made longer and shorter research stays in the U. S. possible: The Faculty of Arts and the English department, University of Bergen; the Fulbright Foundation and Duke University; the Norway-America Association, Center for Chicano Studies, UCSB; Arte Público Press, and “Recovering the U.S.-Hispanic Literary Heritage Project,” University of Houston, Tx. all made this financially and practically possible. A number of people gave advise to and supported my work, and I would like to thank friends and colleagues who generously have shared their time and research, and in various ways helped me complete this book. In the U.S.: Lynn and Rodolfo Cortina, Houston; Francisco Lomelí, Santa Barbara; Richard Rodriguez, San Francisco, and Helena María Viramontes, Ithaca. In Norway: colleagues and friends at the University of Bergen, especially Diego Valle for magical Mac solutions, and Ella Ystebø for making bureaucracy manageable. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Prof. Orm Øverland for his mentorship and friendship, generosity and unfailing critical advice, and for seeing the project through. I would also like to thank Cedric Barfoot at Rodopi for his editorial patience and advice. My gratitude goes also to friends and family for helping in various ways with the logistics of raising a family and finishing the dissertation this book comes out of. And, long before I knew what a dissertation was, my father taught me “How to read Donald Duck,” a lesson never forgotten. To you, Kevin, my love, for unexpected and marvelous routes. Finally, to my daughters and my son: Vilde, Emma, Sofie and Paul, for putting up with it all, for making it all make sense. Parts of Chapter IV was published in Identities and Masks: Colo nial and Postcolonial Studies, eds. Jacob Lothe, Anne Holden Rønning and Peter Young, Kr.sand: Høyskoleforlaget, 2001; an earlier version of chapter VII 1 appeared in Holding Their Own: Perspectives on the Mulit-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, eds. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2000.

INTRODUCTION

The Open Totality of Thresholds [A] dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched.1

Along the California coast, between San Diego in the south and Sonoma in the north, we find twenty-one mission stations. They were built by Spanish and Mexican missionaries and Native Americans between 1769 and 1823. Most of them are still in use. The distance between each mission is the same, a distance that corresponds to one day’s travel on horseback on El Camino Real, the King’s Highway. It runs parallel to the haste on the modern highway, which, oblivious of this other route clips the distances between the missions into mere minutes. Immobile and silent, the missions measure the Pacific coast according to their own understanding of time and space, as serene reminders of a temporality that exists beneath the rush of the present. The texts in this book can also be said to measure time. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez, Tomás Rivera’s ... And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Richard Rodriguez´s Hunger of Memory, Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus and Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Carry Me Like Water engage the Borderland and its complex temporality from various locations and periods, generating a series of dramatic encounters. Over the several years that I have spent time with and enjoyed Mexican American and Chicano literature, two distinc-

1

Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

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Threshold Time

tive but related features have crystallized as particularly noteworthy.2 One is the metaphorization of the Border as a constituted and constituting trope. The second is the way this metaphorization is both borne of and bears forth the memory of the border-trope and its challenged, bruised, and at times almost broken temporal continuity. It is this continuity that interests me the most. The traces and manifestations of the trope and its temporal quality can be excavated in the literary works I discuss in this book, and central here is the function of memory. I have in mind the way certain forms of memory take hold in the cultural sphere, and how the aesthetic representation in turn enters into constant dialogues and negotiations with these forms of memory. I read these dialogues as contributing to and in an aesthetic of time peculiar to the Mexican American Borderland. The dialogues are also conversations about the interplay between the historical vectors that constitute the Borderland, what James Clifford’s conceptualizes as the various intersections of routes.3 By that I mean social, cultural, and political trajectories set in motion in and by particular moments in history. Such moments are often constituted by encounters between formerly discreet cultural domains and traditions. They are sometimes ambiguous moments, in that they may simultaneously mark the end and origin of past and future routes respectively. Indeed, the word route is already pregnant with this ambiguity. While it speaks of temporality, emphasizing direction and movement, its homonym “root” signals spatiality, accentuating what is place-based and originary. In the case of the Borderland, encounters between such distinct historical vectors and the ensuing routes that were set in motion form an extraordinary complex space.

2

Throughout this book I use “Mexican American” and “Chicano” somewhat interchangeably. The term Chicano did not come into use until the 1960s with the civil rights movement, and, technically speaking, it therefore makes more sense to use Mexican American about literature written before that time. However, the ideological significance embedded in the term Chicano also embraces movements and forms of resistance that existed namelessly long before the 1960s. In some contexts it is therefore appropriate to use Chicano in relation to ideology and cultural contexts and conflicts. When I discuss phenomena that are of a purely general character, such as for instance demographics, I use Mexican American. All in all, context will make clear why one or the other term is being used 3 See James Clifford’s discussions of travelling cultures in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

Introduction

13

Let me briefly illustrate the above with what Richard Rodriguez calls “brown”.4 In his explorations of different strains in American history the category of “brown” stands for a gradual erasure of formerly stable and discreet categories. In the examples he uses “brown” pertains to political and quotidian life, skin color and sexual preference, and to geographical vision and aesthetic production. One trajectory of “brown” as a historical vector, or route, was activated the moment Cortez sat foot on Mexican land and asked for assistance to find Moctezuma. We could look further back and suggest that it was activated already the moment Columbus finally got Isabel’s blessing to go west in order to rescue Spain from her alarming budget deficit. We could go even further back; obviously a point of original and absolute beginning is in one sense impossible to locate. In retrospect, however, the particular quality of “brown” signifies the complex and to put it simply, messy twists and turns cultural and social history in the Americas has undergone. One meaning of “brown” is biologically defined and located to that moment when the Spaniard and the Indian met. In a broader context “brown” is the result of the encounter between two other, simultaneous and more comprehensive historical vectors, namely the discoveries of the New World and the consolidation and peak of the Aztec empire respectively. The confrontation between these two culturally and politically separate historical trajectories gave birth to a new, until then unheard of historical route, namely what Rodriguez calls “brown.” “Brown” is consequently the figurative offspring of other, larger but already fading routes. From its inception it was imbued with the future, in the sense that it was already carrying a complex register of legacies aspiring to produce new routes. As centuries went by they would become activated in encounters with other and new traditions and domains. Such moments of historical activation from which new cognitive cultural frameworks come into being can be conceived of as what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as the “threshold chronotope.” This is first and foremost a literary concept in his work, but as I think we will see it also lends itself well to a cultural context. The threshold chronotope is a time-space principle that denotes crisis, meeting, rupture and the like. What is particularly interesting to us here is its temporal dimension, which is instantaneous and hence non-chronological; its “time,” 4

Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America, New York: Viking, 2002, xi-xv.

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Threshold Time

so to speak, is at once open-ended and bound by the nature of the crisis. The threshold chronotope is consequently a moment in time that is simultaneously unique and ubiquitous. As a point of origin it also carries in it what we may think of as a futurizing potential, a potential for rehearsal (but not replication) that extends beyond its instance as concrete and once-occurring event. Every culture finds its own way to represent for itself and other cultures its characteristics, the ideas it retains of its own self. Art and aesthetics serve vital functions in this process. They form the chronicles, not so much of changes that happen suddenly, but of the deep time that suffuse cultural meta-discourses. While the larger cultural domain of the United States has its own cultural meta-discourse about itself in relation to other domains, it is itself constituted by a multitude of thresholds, each with their own moments and routes set in motion. All these cultural spaces – including here those of the original English colonists – are activated by encounters between various and more or less discreet historical routes. These activations in turn develop into cultural spheres with ideas peculiar to their specific circumstances and corresponding aesthetic reflections. Such reflections, or cultural metadiscourses in turn aspire to ascendancy in the multifaceted simultaneity that is collapsed in the idea as well as the fact of the United States. Clearly then, reading thresholds and reading from thresholds can be applied to other cultural domains and other literatures, as well. One could, for instance, imagine positing Little Havana as a figure in the cultural genealogy of “Cuban-America,” and explore the representation of Cuban exile in relation to the particular memory borne of the threshold which 1959 and the revolution activated. Or, one could look at Southern literature and examine how the constituted and constituting trope of “the Peculiar Institution,” already charged with defeat, has figured as point of motivation and orientation for self-narration. The theoretical framework for conceptualizing a reading from and of thresholds rests on key ideas borrowed from Bakhtin. As I have already indicated, these ideas pertain to a predominantly aesthetic context, and the transposition from the literary to the cultural sphere needs further explication and elaboration. The starting point is a principle in Bakhtin which is not always acknowledged as fully as it perhaps should be. It permeates all relations of communication, between author and hero, genres or structure, and cultures. This principle can roughly be summed up as the emphasis on point of view.

Introduction

15

We speak always from a particular place in time, from our situation, circumscribed and more or less determined by socio-political, cultural, ideological, psychological, historical factors. The particular constellation of these elements serves to constitute our point of view, our situation in the world, as distinctive and unique. This obviously cannot be conceived of outside the categories of time and space. The combination of the spatial and the temporal and their affect in relation to our singular uniqueness in the world is in Bakhtin tied into the chronotope. It is a time-space connection that functions as a kind of organizing principle for our narrative, and always in relation to other, unique points of view and discourses – there can be no utterance without orientation. In this simultaneity and coexistence of a plurality of voices our discourses (narrative) attain significance. They become ideas about ourselves and the worlds we carry with us and test against the ideas of others.5 In that meeting, or event, they may gain their full potential and can grow. This does not detract from the uniqueness of each point of view, quite the contrary; this is precisely what allows for the event of being to exist in “open totality:” [A] dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched.6

The reciprocity is brought out in the Russian word for event, cobytie (sobitié). Shift the accent slightly, to cobytié (sobitió) and the word means co-existence. As several critics have noted, the self in Bakhtin’s world view is not configured into being by the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am,” but rather by the dialogical “You are, therefore I am.”7 Let us bear these preliminary reflections in mind as we turn to the cultural sphere. The Borderland, conceived of as a cultural “point of view” has a particular genesis, constituted by the confrontations and engagements between discreet historical and cultural routes. Culture arises after the fact, very often as the result of meetings, ruptures, cri5

Idea is used here in the sense of ideational rather than ideological. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 7. 7 See for instance Jostein Børtnes, “Om de kappadokiske fedre og russisk dialogtenking hos Dostojevskij og Bakhtin,” http://www.hf.uib.no/i/ russisk/jostein/Skjervheim.html (cited 02.02.06). 6

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Threshold Time

ses, and the like. In the case of the geographical territory we refer to as the United States-Mexico Borderland, the central political and cultural origin is the year when the war between two sovereign states ended. The rupture of 1848 can be understood as a threshold chronotope, literally as well as symbolically. In Bakhtin’s usage, the literary artistic chronotope denotes the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.” It is more specifically where: spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thoughtout, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.8

The threshold chronotope, Bakhtin adds, “can be combined with the motif of encounter, but its most fundamental instance is as the chronotope of crisis and break in a life.”9 It is also related to other chronotopes, such as the stairway and the corridor, as well as the outside counterparts, for instance the street and the square. These are, Bakhtin argues with reference to Dostoevsky’s work, “the main places of action in his works, places where crisis events occur, the falls, resurrections, renewals, epiphanies, decisions that determine the whole life of a man.” In a footnote in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics he adds, “In Dostoevsky a person is always depicted on the threshold, or, in other words, in a state of crisis.”10 The property of decisive influence is linked with temporal duration in a paradoxical knot: Since the threshold chronotope “has no duration and falls out of the normal course of biographical time,”11 the moment of crisis endures on a level beyond the logics of chronology. Its temporality, so to speak, is at once open-ended and bound by the nature of the crisis. The threshold chronotope is consequently a moment simultaneously unique and ubiquitous. As a point of origin it therefore carries in what we may think of as a futurizing potential, a potential for self-rehearsal (but not

8

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, 84. 9 Ibid., 248. 10 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and transl. Caryl Emerson, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, 292. 11 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 248.

Introduction

17

replication) that extends beyond its instance as concrete and onceoccurring event. It is nevertheless a literary term, and one that Bakhtin only briefly discusses toward the end of his main treatise on chronotopes, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” He returns, however, to the notion of the threshold other places in his works, often in the “Notes” and “Appendixes.” In “Appendix II” to Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, for instance, he writes: Not that which takes place within, but that which takes place on the boundary between one’s own and someone else’s consciousness, on the threshold. And everything internal gravitates not toward itself but is turned to the outside and dialogized, every internal experience ends up on the boundary, encounters another, and in this tension-filled encounter lies its entire essence.12

This is an important passage, and leads into another central and intimately related concern in Bakhtin, namely the problem of the boundary. For now, however, let us stay with the threshold as it designates the categories of inside and outside simultaneously. Does this mean the term can be used as a tool for cultural analyses? The emphasis on the dialogism of every act and being, which fundamentally suffuses all of Bakhtin’s thinking, does seem to point in this direction. Consider for instance the following passage: The problem of any particular domain of culture taken as a whole, whether it be cognition, ethics, or art, can be understood as the problem of this domain’s boundaries …. Every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries, and it derives its seriousness and significance from this fact. Separated by abstraction from these boundaries, it loses the ground of its being and becomes vacuous, arrogant, it degenerates and dies.13

For this comment to bear meaningfully on the concept of culture, cul12

Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 287. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, eds Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, 274. In “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” Bakhtin expresses the same idea: “It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly (but not maximally fully, because there will be cultures that see and understand even more)” (Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 7). 13

18

Threshold Time

ture must be understood as a cultural act in and of itself. In the passage above Bakhtin speaks of sub-categories of the cultural domain, but culture comprises a vast register of components. This inference is not taken out of thin air; there are references in Bakhtin that clearly imply that he considers the cultural domain to be configured much the same way as point of view and situated-ness. In “From Notes Made in 1970-71,” for instance, we find this observation: The study of culture (or some area of it) at the level of system and at the higher level of organic unity: open, becoming, unresolved and unpredetermined, capable of death and renewal, transcending itself, that is, exceeding its own boundaries.14

The description here of the dynamics of inside and outside, orchestrated by and on the boundary as an ongoing dialogue echoes the idea of “open totalities.” If we can posit the analogy between the sphere of culture and that of consciousness we may also be able to approach culture in terms of its situation as a point of view. This means to engage culture on a level that echoes Jurij Lotman’s analysis, with whom Bakhtin is often compared. In Lotman we read: Culture, taken as a whole, not only has a special apparatus for collective memory but also has procedures for producing messages that are in principle new in languages, i.e. it can create new ideas. The combination of these qualities makes it possible to regard culture as a collective intellect.

In Lotman’s view culture understood as intellect is furthermore also a “polyglot apparatus” which, as it reaches structural “maturity” will develop a “need for self-description, for the creation of that culture’s own model of itself.” “Self-description,” he continues, “demands the creation of a metalanguage for the given culture. On the basis of the metalanguage there arises the metalevel on which the culture constructs its ideal self-portrait.”15 Some of Lotman’s detailed observations fit very well into what we perhaps must call an implicit rather than an explicit cultural theory in 14

Bahktin, Speech Genres, 135. Jurij Lotman, “Culture as Collective Intellect and the Problems of Artificial Intelligence,” in Russian Poetics in Translation, eds L.M. O’Toole and Ann Shukman, Oxford: Holdan Books, 1979, 84, 88, and 92. 15

Introduction

19

Bakhtin’s work. In Lotman’s writing the opposition between Bakhtin’s inside and outside is substituted for that between culture and non-culture (sometimes also organization/non-organization). The problem of the boundary is in other words a shared concern in both thinkers, and so is by extension also the ambiguity embedded in the threshold chronotope. According to Lotman the point of view of a given culture perceives what exists beyond its boundaries as non-culture, or as extra-cultural space. The inside is engaged in continuous negotiation with this space, and from the vantage point of representing organization. This distinction between culture and non-culture as organization versus nonorganization is a crucial point, as we shall see when we apply this way of thinking to the history of the Borderland.16 A culture’s metalanguage, that is to say the discourse it uses to describe itself in relation to others, invariably responds to its perceived “outsides,” or what Lotman above calls non-cultural space. Of particular interest is also what he says about the dynamics of cultural self-representation. One of the ways in which culture describes itself, he argues in “On the Metalanguage of a Typological description of Culture,” is by distributing cultural texts. These present “the most abstract model of reality from the position of a given culture. For this reason it can be defined as the world view of a given culture.”17 In “Theses on The Semiotic Study of Culture” Lotman more specifically suggests that: If we regard the collective as a more complexly organized individual, culture may be understood by analogy with the individual mechanism of memory as a certain collective mechanism for the storage and processing of information.18

This passage more explicitly posits an analogy between the individual consciousness and the collective, which in turn is linked to the concept of culture. The function of memory enables storage, processing and representation, and it is the same function that allows the analogy in 16

Jurij M. Lotman, B.A. Uspenskij, V.V. Ivanov, V.N. Toporov and A.M. Pjatigorskij, “Theses on the Semiotic Study of Culture,” in The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, Lisse: The Peter de Ridder Press, 1975, 57-84. 17 Jurij Lotman, “On the Metalanguage of a Typological Description of Culture,” Semiotica, XIV/2 (1975), 97–123. 18 Lotman et al., “Theses on the Semiotic Study of Culture,” 73.

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Threshold Time

the first place. This approach to culture is echoed in Bakhtin, only on a more abstract level and in somewhat more general terms. Consider the following passage: Cultural and literary traditions (including the most ancient) are preserved and continue to live not in the individual subjective memory of a single individual and not in some kind of collective “psyche,” but rather in the objective forms that culture itself assumes (including the forms of language and spoken speech), and in this sense they are intersubjective and inter-individual (and consequently social); from there they enter literary works, sometimes almost completely bypassing the subjective individual memory of their creators.19

This is a rather complex passage, but its essence goes to the question of what Lotman calls metalanguage, or the discourse a given culture carries about itself in relation to other discourses. An important qualification is Bakhtin’s emphasis on “the objective forms that culture itself assumes,” which at first glance seems to deny culture its potential for agency. It is important, however, that we recognize the meaning of the dialogic principle here as everywhere else in Bakhtin’s work. The external refraction of culture as “intellect” is really only configured into existence on the boundary. It may be useful here to recapitulate a key phrase from a previously quoted passage, namely that, “everything internal gravitates not toward itself but is turned to the outside and dialogized, every internal experience ends up on the boundary, encounters another, and in this tension-filled encounter lies its entire essence.”20 Since encounters and boundaries are in constant flux, however, so are the “objective forms” that culture produces. Their origin and trajectories can consequently be highly unpredictable, and their exact form may become evident only long after the fact of encounter, so to speak, to the point that they may not even be immediately recognizable. Whether we use Lotman’s dichotomy of culture/non-culture or Bakhtin’s inside/outside to understand how culture behaves, we end up with the function of memory. This returns us to narrative and discourse as two of memory’s main vehicles. The distribution of memory does not take place in a vacuum, and the process is choreographed 19 20

Bahktin, Dialogic Imagination, 249, n.17 Bakhtin, Ibid., 248.

Introduction

21

according to certain organizing principles. This is where the threshold chronotope has its place, namely as a point of gravitation for discourse. It could be said to breathe life into constellations of elements and details. These may be personal, cultural, social or political; hitherto distanced from each other but then violently collapsed into a moment of encounter. While this collapse and crisis end temporally, the memory of them is already engaged in memorizing for future dialogues. Culture remembers and distributes its memories according to certain structural gravitation points. The thresholds provide it with such points, and in the case of the Borderland, the most dramatic one is marked by the year 1848 and the American annexation of Mexico’s northern territory. This particular crisis, however, was already embedded in the threshold of 1492 and the associated potential for future rehearsal and reverberations peculiar to this moment. One is henceforth also reminded that each threshold carries in it the potential for other thresholds. There are in this sense no absolute beginnings, nor ends. It also seems that the more dramatic or violent the threshold is the stronger is its potential for memorization and futurization. If we return to Rodriguez’s notion of “brown” as the name of a historical route or vector, we realize that it is a dominant and powerful one. It holds in it the realizations of the potential rooted in encounters and moments that happened a long time ago, and whose register for rehearsal is far from exhausted. It moreover illustrates not only the roots of routes, so to speak, it also makes clear how the route in itself is an ongoing event of being, in constant negotiation and dialogue, drawing in some cases the entire world into its fold. As far as “brown” is concerned, it tells about the constant erasure of cultural discourses and their boundaries, and about their resurfacing and reconfigurations in new contexts.

CHAPTER I

A History of Borderland Routes

By tracing some of the events and trajectories that created the Borderland as we think of it today, this opening chapter will attempt to flesh out the theoretical framework outlined in the Introduction; this will also help us see how the Borderland, like all cultural spaces, is involved in a constant process of becoming, carrying in it the memories and legacies of past times and of other earlier processes of becoming. How these changes affect the region and the spaces associated with it is evident to anyone who spends time in the areas concerned. Marc Zimmerman observes in relation to present day California: An area marked by thousands of years of indigenous evolution, subjected then to Spanish control and then taken over for a brief historical period from the 1840s to the early 21st century by EuroAmerican settlers, California experiences a growing Spanish-mestizoIndian absorption, joined by still newer Asian streams; and the recently arrived Euro-American descendants complain about these “newcomers” who have been coming and going, forced to come, forced to go but who are here and won’t go away no matter what those “non-colored” recent arrivals might believe or want. In the schools, Mexican and Guatemalan indigenous groups turn bilingual education into a trilingual problem.1

The passage gestures toward the possible contours of the everbecoming Borderland, and brings out how the complexities of past 1

Marc Zimmerman, “Latinos and Migrational Identities in the New Transnational [Dis]Order,” in Genealogies of Displacement: Diaspora/Exile/Migration and Chicana/oLatina/o Latin American/Peninsular Literary and Cultural Studies, Nuevo Texto Critico, 29-32, Stanford University, 2003, 199.

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routes recur in what is at once new and familiar contexts. The return of the Indian to the land that was once theirs represents an historical irony whose implications we only see the beginnings of. For now, however, let us begin a tentative delineation of past routes with the moment the U.S.-Mexican border came into existence. After two years of fighting and several decades of border conflicts, the war between Mexico and the United States ended in February of 1848. Delegates from Mexico and the United States met in the small village of Guadalupe Hidalgo outside Mexico City. Two months later the Americans left the table with what is roughly today California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, half of Colorado, and half of Utah; in other words, one third of Mexico’s territory. If we add Texas, which had been lost after the rebellion in 1836 and admitted into the United States in 1845, Mexico all in all lost close to half of her territory. The political transformation of what is today the American Southwest was motivated both by general Western European ideologies and a particular American cultural and historical manifestation of these. The desire for more and new land originated in the decades well before the actual outbreak of the Mexican-American war in 1846. Nineteenth-century American appropriation of the territories to the South and West along with its inhabitants could be said to have been a local version of the general conquests and settlements of the world that originated in fifteenth-century Europe. The ideological and cultural incentives behind these ventures were various, but their moral and political justifications were pretty much the same. A central rationale in this respect has to do with a dichotomous world-view and cultural meta-language that ordered and divided the world into civilization and wilderness respectively. There is nothing strange in this per se, for after all this is how the human mind tends to orient itself – that which is not familiar and the same is more often than not perceived as threatening. It is when we fill in the exact nature of what civilization and order as opposed to wilderness and chaos may mean that it becomes interesting. Therefore, when the English settlers who came to the new world in the early seventeenth century gradually developed a metalanguage to describe their ordered cultural space in relation to the perceived chaos of the outside, this language was firmly anchored in the conviction people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had of

Borderland Routes

25

a white, Christian, civilized, technological supremacy. As the philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze explains: During the two centuries prior to the European Enlightenment, an enormous amount of exploration and voyages around the world had produced numerous published accounts of distant lands and peoples as well as the great expansion of European wealth. These popular travel writings contributed significantly to the perception of Europe as familiar “civilized,” living in the Age of Light, while the peoples of other lands (Asia, Africa, America) were of “strange” habits and mores.2

As the English colonies were consolidated into a cultural fact the need to ideologically explain and justify the colonial creation and existence also evolved. Given that a central and original incitement was to escape religious persecution in England, the foundation for such an ideological narrative was already partly in place; what remained was a process of refining and elaboration. On one level this process took place according to what Lotman calls the organization of a cultural space: after consolidating the perceived truths that define a given culture’s self-image, there is a corresponding exclusion of what is perceived as anti-truths or non-truths. He consequently contends that, “each historically given type of culture has its own type of non-culture peculiar to itself.”3 This is the chaotic and disorganized sphere that culture, as the ordered and organized sphere, must continuously negotiate, a process virtually without end. Lotman further explains that, “although culture by extending its limits seeks completely to usurp the whole of extra-cultural space, to assimilate it to itself, from the position of an outside description the expansion of the sphere of organization leads to the expansion of the sphere of non-organization.”4 This reciprocity is strictly nonaxiological, but in the colonial situation the expansion of chaos that the outside also perceives is more than just unorganized, it is very often systematically lethal. The important element in this description is how the dynamics makes it tempting for one of the insides to end 2

Introduction, in Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997, 1-9. 3 Lotman, “Semiotic Study,” 58. 4 Ibid., 59.

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the constant shifting and negotiation by completely subduing the other. The colonial project rests on this ability to quickly order and subdue what is disorganized, and the most efficient method to attain this goal is by convincing the members of extra-cultural space that theirs is indeed a chaotic space that needs ordering. Lotman’s model of culture and its perceived non-culture is helpful to our understanding of the early Puritan colonists’ responses in their particular context in Massachusetts Bay. The New England colony was surrounded by non-culture, and was wedged in between the two most powerful Catholic nations in the world. The European colonies in New Spain and New England as well as the young nations that evolved from these carried with them an Old World heritage of mutual suspicion where each party perceived the other as non-culture. To a significant extent the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that had their origin in fifteenth-century Europe also defined the relationship between England and Spain in the New World. In New Spain and later in Mexico Protestants were feared and hated. In accordance with Spanish custom, the Mexican constitution of 1824 rejected religions other than Catholicism, and demanded that all immigrants convert to the established form of Christianity.5 Protestant attitudes toward Catholics were informed by slightly more complex histories. In addition to theological differences and political rivalry both in Europe and in the New World, the concept of race entered into Protestant perceptions of Spain and of Catholicism. Spain’s longstanding relations with the Moors of Northern Africa had resulted in inter-racial marriages, and from Elizabethan England’s point of view this was already a sign of lesser worth. They associated black with evil, night and uncleanness, white with goodness, daylight and purity, and the darker Spaniards were therefore inherently suspect and inferior. The consequences these racial overtones had to the different paths the North and South of the Americas would take are significant. While racism permeated and continues to permeate cultures both south and north of the border, the history of this particular kind of Puritanism would prevent mixing between races and 5

“Back to the Future: Racism and National Culture in U.S.-Mexican Relations,” in Common Borders, Uncommon Paths: Race, Culture, and National Identity in U.S.Mexican Relations, eds Jaime E.O. Rodríguez and Kathryn Vincent, Wilmington: SR Books, 1997, 2.

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promote the exclusion of other peoples from New England institutional civic life. In the long run this history would also contribute to the development of a racism that is somewhat peculiar to the United States. While Spain was by no means free of racism it did incorporate natives into the newly established civic societies. That being said, we should also note that these colonies were founded on very detailed hierarchies of the different races.6 The differences in attitudes to the original inhabitants of the New World, however, form part of ideological frameworks that later molded the relationship between the United States and Mexico, and in turn that between Mexican Americans and Anglo-Americans in the U.S. The English Protestant position versus Spain and Catholicism was moreover sufficiently consistent and systematized later to have merited the name “The Black Legend.”7 The term denotes a system of beliefs and prejudices against all things Spanish as being “more ignorant, fanatical, cruel, sadistic, depraved, filthy, lazy, and evil than the people of any other nation or society.”8 The depictions of what went on in the Inquisition were central to the rise of the legend, but it was also significantly informed by the Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas’ book The Spanish Colonie (Brevísima relación de la Destryción de las Indias occidentales). As we understand from the Preface to the English translation (possibly written by the translator 6

By the nineteenth century Mexico was already a mestizo nation, i.e. a nation of people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood. Interracial connections existed from the very beginning. Cortez himself married Moctezuma’s daughter, a marriage whose later offspring in turn married explorer Juan de Oñate who “discovered” what is today New Mexico. The racial hierarchy in New Spain was clear, though, and society was sharply divided according to skin color and degree of Spanishness (divisions within the ruling class in the colonial era favored the Isleños [Islanders = Spaniards] over the Peninsulares or Criollos, those born in the New World). The Spanish colonial system and, later, Mexican society did, however, allow for certain mobility across racial divisions. Thus, for instance, Benito Juarez, a full-blooded Indian from Oahaxa, held the Presidency of Mexico between 1867 and 1876. This is not to say that Mexico today is a non-racist nation. The hostility toward indigenous people in Mexico has definite racial overtones. 7 The Spanish historian Julián Juderiás coined this phrase in La Leyenda Negra: Estudios acerca del Concepto de España en el Extranjero (1914), Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1997. 8 Rodriguez and Vincent, “Back to the Future,” 4.

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James Alligrodo), The Spanish Colonie was well suited to boosting anti-Spanish sentiments in England: “such torments have they [the Spaniards] invented, yea so great and excessive have their trecherie been, that the posteritie shall hardly thinke that ever so barbarous or cruell a nation have bin in the worlde.”9 Published in English in 1583, Bartolomé de las Casas’ depiction of Spanish abuse of the Indians corroborated already existing prejudices toward Spain as a nation of extraordinary cruel and inferior people.10 De las Casas wrote the book in 1539 in order to persuade King Philip of Spain to enforce regulations on how the Indians should be treated, and his arguments were heard. He is consequently credited for being instrumental in the implementation of the New Laws of the Indies in 1542. These longstanding conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in Europe provided one set of conditions for the initial cultural meeting between the early New England settlers and what was considered to be their chaotic, non-cultural sphere of wilderness and Catholics.11 An additional and closely related dichotomy further circumscribed and defined the immediate cultural context. The Puritan settlers’ project of creating a New Jerusalem, a “City Upon a Hill” as exemplar for the rest of the world projected Christian moral and ethical norms as contrast and corrective to what all non-culture was lacking. The New England colony was politically and culturally organized precisely 9

Bartolomé de las Casas, The Spanish Colonie, March of American Facsimile Series, Ann Arbor University Microfilms, 1966 [1583]. 10 Cotton Mather decided to defeat the Catholics through direct mission and the spreading of the Puritan Version of Protestantism. He taught himself Spanish and in 1699 published La Fe del Christiano, the first book to be published in Spanish in what is now the United States. Another leading citizen of Puritan New England, Samuel Sewall, had similar projects. His dreams were grander than Mather’s, and at the heart of his hopes for Spanish America lie his belief that Mexico City would become a new Jerusalem. We sense his determination to make this happen in a letter to the Society for the Propogation of the Gospel in London: “It would be well if you could set on foot the printing of the Spanish Bible in a fair Octavo, Ten Thousand Copies; and then you might attempt the bombing of Santa Domingo the Havanna, Porto Rico, and Mexico itself. I would willingly give five pounds toward the charge of it” (Sewall, quoted in Raymund Paredes, The Image of the Mexican in American Literature, Austin: University of Texas, 1973, 43). For a detailed account of both Mather and Samuel Sewall’s counter-Catholic projects, see Paredes, Chapter 2.

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according to this binary perspective, and the space of perceived heretics extended not only to the Native Americans and Papists, but also to members of religious groups other than puritan Calvinism. Several critics have commented on the intimate relationship between colonialism and Christian ideology, among them Aime Césaire: The chief culprit in this domain [of colonization] is Christian pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equations Christianity – civilization, paganism – savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist and racist consequences, whose victims were to be the Indians, the yellow people and the Negroes.12

The colonialist depends on maintaining definite distinctions between self as order/inside and other as chaos/outside, and upholding this difference needs constant attention. As Césaire also notes, colonization is a “bridgehead in a campaign to civilize barbarism, from which there may emerge at any moment the negation of civilization, pure and simple.”13 The balancing act of keeping up the division between Christians and savages, saints and sinners, insiders and outsiders requires substantial technological, financial and political efforts. These are useless, however, without a sustained and sustainable ideological framework, a belief in a fundamentally rightful purpose. The colonialist cultural narrative therefore makes systematic use of rhetorical tropes in order to perpetuate itself beyond questioning. As what Edward Said calls “a structure of attitude and reference,” the imperial narrative draws on tropes of inside versus outside in a highly complex manner where the ultimate goal is that of consumption.14 By designing the wilderness of the outside as a void waiting to be informed by the rightful inheritors, colonial discourse legitimizes conquest for those who, as J.M. Coetzee puts it, “deserve to inherit the

12

Aimé Césaire, “From Discourse on Colonialism,” in Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, eds Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, New York: Colombia University Press, 1994, 172-80. 13 Ibid., 176. 14 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books, 1994, xxiii.

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earth [because they] make the best use of it.”15 To consolidate this inheritance the original inhabitants are typically cast as unproductive, unsuccessful and retrograde as opposed to the progressive agency of the colonizer himself. Coetzee discusses early colonial discourse in relation to European imperialism in South Africa, but his emphasis on the significance of post-Reformation doctrines of work and discipline as divine edict is also highly relevant to our discussion here: To be idle was to defy the edict; to be improvident – to depend on God’s providence to save one from starving … was an aggravating offence, a provocative tempting of God …. Mankind was widely held to be so weak that without the discipline of continual work it was bound to relapse into sin.16

Confronted with work patterns different from their own, whether of Hottentots in South Africa or Mexicans and Native Americans in what is today the United States, Europeans translated them as signs of idleness, indolence and blasphemy. We find illustrations of this in early writing on and from the United States as well, and two works in particular propagated this kind of worldview.17 Both were written by Europeans, but were widely read in the United States and contributed significantly to Americans’ perception of their southern neighbors. The Scottish historian William Robertson’s History of America was first published in 1777, and I quote at some length from his description of the Indians in the Americas since it reflects the ideological tenets of progress versus idleness: Such is their aversion to labour that neither the hope of future good nor the apprehension of future evil can surmount it. They appear 15

J.M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988, 2. 16 Ibid., 20. 17 For a detailed and documented discussion of the development of anti-Mexican attitudes in the United States, see Paredes, The Image of the Mexican in American Literature. See also Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Rethinking the Borderlands. Between Chicano Discourse and Legal Discourse, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; David J. Weber, Myth and the History of the Hispanic Southwest, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988; and Arnoldo de León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.

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equally indifferent to both, discovering little solicitude and taking no precautions to avoid the one or secure the other. The cravings of hunger may rouse them; but as they devour, with little distinction, whatever will appease its instinctive demands, the exertion which these occasion are of short duration. Destitute of ardour, as well as variety of desire, they feel not the force of those powerful springs which give vigour to the movements of the mind, and urge the patient hand of industry to persevere in its efforts. Man, in some parts of America, appears in a form so rude that we can discover no effects of his activity, and the principle of understanding, which should direct it, seems hardly to be unfolded. Like the other animals, he has no fixed residence; he has erected no habitation to shelter him from the inclemency of the weather; he has taken no measures for securing certain subsistence; he neither sows nor reaps; but roams about as led in search of the plants and fruits which the earth brings forth in succession; and in quest for the game which he kills in the forest, or of the fish he catches in the rivers.18

It seems that to Robertson Mexican Indians were particularly depraved, and this view rather surprised many American readers who thought of the descendants of the advanced cultures of the Aztecs and Mayas as being quite sophisticated. However, the religious practices of human sacrifice led Robertson to infer that this had created a general degradation of the Mexican character: The spirit of the Mexicans was accordingly unfeeling; and the genius of their religion so far counterbalanced the influence of policy and arts that notwithstanding their progress in both, their manners, instead of softening, became more fierce. To what circumstances it was owing that superstition assumed such a dreadful form among the Mexicans we have not sufficient knowledge of their history to determine. But its influence is visible, and produced an effect that is singular in the history of the human species. The manners of the people in the New World, who had made the greatest progress in the arts of policy, were, in several respects, the most ferocious, and the barbarity of some of their customs exceeded even those of the savage state.19

18

William Robertson, The History of America (1798), in Early American Imprints, Series I: no 36237, Readex: Archive of Americana, http://www.readex.com/readex/ [accessed 31.06.06], Book IV, 344-345. 19 Robertson, History of America, Book VII, 308.

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Another widely read survey was Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, based on five years of extensive travel in Mexico and a great collection of material. Most of the Political Essay consists in observations regarding geography and demography, road systems, agriculture and commerce, revenues from export and so on, but we also find descriptions regarding the Indian character such as the following: I know of no race of men who appear more destitute of imagination. When an Indian attains a certain degree of civilization, he displays a great facility of apprehension, a judicious mind, a natural logic, and a particular disposition to subtilize or seize the finest differences in the comparison of objects. He reasons coolly and orderly, but he never manifests that versatility of imagination, that glow of sentiment, and that creative and animating art which characterizes the nations of the South of Europe, and several tribes of African Negroes20

Humboldt adds, however, that the foreigner must always be cautious in judging the area under surveillance, and that slavery and oppression invariably produce the deplorable conditions he has found among the Mexicans. There is a certain ambiguity in this case with respect to whom he identifies as the oppressor, but it seems likely that Humboldt here was thinking of the Aztec culture rather than the Spanish conquistadors. Whoever he had in mind, the attitude reflects another dichotomy characteristic of colonial discourse, knowledge versus ignorance, a binary pair closely related to that of civilized/white/order/inside on the one hand and savages/colored /chaos/outside on the other: Western power, especially the power to enter and examine other countries at will, enables the production of knowledge about other cultures. Such knowledge in turn enables (legitimates, underwrites) the deployment of Western power in those other countries.21

20

Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), transl. John Black, New York: AMS Press, 1966, I, 170. 21 Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, “Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: An Introduction,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, 8.

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Metropolitan culture’s surveillance of another and foreign culture fosters knowledge in a double sense: knowledge is extended to explaining the other culture from its very origins, and in the process becomes the official version. This version is in turn stereotyped, as the metropolitan as well as the colonized cultures internalize the truth about the culture. The process ultimately serves the purpose of making the colonizer’s presence legitimate, and this is perhaps one of the more sinister aspects of colonization. In effectively undermining the historical, ideological and cultural heritage of the locale in question, the colonizer deprives a people of their right, not only to their past, but also to their future. As Said puts it, “to have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority means for ‘us’ to deny autonomy to ‘it’ – the Oriental country – since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.”22 The observation also applies to the correlation between reporting and the authority of knowledge. In his detailed analyses of how journalism and literature historically have worked toward the same end in the colonial project, David Spurr echoes Said when he says that: Colonial discourse takes over as it takes cover. It implicitly claims the territory surveyed as the colonizer’s own; the colonizer speaks as an inheritor whose very vision is charged with racial ambition. Simultaneously, however, this proprietary vision covers itself. It effaces its own mark of appropriation by transforming it into the response to a putative appeal on the part of the colonized land and people. This appeal may take the form of chaos that calls for restoration of order, of absence that calls for affirming presence, of natural abundance that awaits the creative hand of technology. Colonial discourse thus transfers the locus of desire onto the colonized object itself. It appropriates territory, while it also appropriates the means by which such acts of appropriation are to be understood.23

An excellent example of these dynamics is one of the events that preceded the war between the United States and Mexico in 1846, and which would give a name to an impulse informed by all of the sentiments, belief systems, and axiological dichotomies so far 22

Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979, 32. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration, Durham: Duke University Press, 1994, 28. 23

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Threshold Time

mentioned, and to a phenomenon we continue to associate with the American manifestation of empire. In December 1845 the journalist John O’Sullivan wrote in his newspaper New York Morning News that it was “the right of [the Americans’] manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the great experiment of liberty.”24 The rhetorical genius of the trope of “manifest destiny” is that it affirms a cultural and political space in which contestations are superfluous. Presenting itself as predestined and given, “manifest destiny” exemplifies how colonial discourse solidifies language around a concept, as Spurr notes, “whose substance is presented as already known and therefore beyond contestations.”25 “Manifest destiny” was in addition divinely preordained and hence for no man to dispute. The significance and impact of the phrase and what it represented in the national imagination of the United States during the 1840s and 1850s should also be seen in relation to the racial use of the term “Anglo-Saxon” in roughly the same period, which was evoked more and more frequently in the late 1830s and 1840s to denote a kind of inevitability of the spreading of a superior race that would not and could not be stopped.26 Its usage significantly proliferated due to the massive Irish immigration in the period, which also made it desirable to distinguish within the fast growing group of people previously referred to as “white.” The concept of “Anglo-Saxon” drew lines between other, white and European groups such as the Slavs, the Irish, the Italians and as, Frye Jacobson remarks, those “‘truly fit for selfgovernment’ in the good old Anglo-Saxon sense.”27 The relationship between the United States and Mexico was already strained by the time O’Sullivan coined the phrase “manifest destiny.” Texas had declared independence from Mexico in 1836, and border troubles erupted with increasing frequency. In the years 24

Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, 220. 25 Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire, 31. 26 For a well-documented discussion of the relation between the term Anglo Saxon and the ideological content of Manifest Destiny, see Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 27 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 8.

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between the turn of the century and the outbreak of war in 1846 the border-region was scene of countless conflicts and skirmishes. They were often provoked by American explorers who ignored Spanish and Mexican territorial autonomy, or, in some cases, self-appointed liberators on a mission for republican freedom started the troubles. During these years the American government maintained a politically neutral position in relation to the Spanish and Mexican authorities, but its passivity was in effect a sanctioning of the border transgressions. So when James Long and his followers attempted to “free” Texas in June 1819, American authorities did not interfere. Spain for her part had long recognized the challenges the vast northern territories presented; in fact, both California and Texas were colonized and settled as buffer zones against Russia and France respectively. The distances between the central government in Mexico City and these regions, along with the domestic political conflicts in the years before the Mexican revolt against the Spanish crown made the northern territories highly vulnerable to threats from the outside. In 1821 the new Republic of Mexico inherited all of these problems, and took immediate measures to strengthen national integration. One such was to encourage settlement and commerce, and Mexico in fact offered an empresario land grant to Stephen Austin if he in return would bring with him a number of three hundred AngloAmerican settlers into the area.28 The conditions for getting this free land was that the settlers must be of good moral character, they must be Catholics, and they must swear allegiance to Mexico. Although Austin himself upheld these provisions, the fourteen other empresarios who later received similar land grants largely ignored them, and already in 1826 a minor revolt broke out. Austin and his colonists sided with the Mexicans on this occasion; Austin, however, because he clearly had his own plans for Texas: “My object, the sole and only desire of my ambitions since I first saw Texas, was to redeem it from the wilderness – to settle it with an intelligent honorable and enterprising people.” Austin would later reformulate his wish of redeeming Texas from the wilderness by stating that he 28

Empresario refers to a “land grantee who was required to recruit a specified number of settlers in order to validate his grant” (Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Ribeira, Mexican Americans/American Mexicans: From Conquistadores to Chicanos, New York: Hill and Wang, 1993, 280).

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intended to “Americanize Texas.”29 As the 1840s progressed, it was only a matter of time before open war would break out between the United States and Mexico. The antagonisms between Anglos and Mexicans in Texas intensified after the Texas rebellion and declaration of independence in 1836, and skirmishes between Anglos and the Mexican army trying to regain control over Texas were frequent. When the United States approved Texas’ application for statehood in 1845, Mexico protested by breaking off all diplomatic ties, and a year later the war broke out. All of the resentments and biases over the past decades came together in what was not just a struggle over land. As Meier and Ribeira observe: “Both sides saw the conflict as not just a fight for territory but as a struggle between two ‘races,’ cultures and religions.”30 The public discourse in the United States on westward expansion at the expense of another sovereign nation was not without nuances. Thoreau, perhaps the best known among the opponent of war withdrew from public life in disgust at his country’s imperialism. However, skepticism to armed invasion was sometimes rather ambiguously motivated. South Carolinian senator John Calhoun, for instance, articulated his reluctance with the following question: “‘Can we really incorporate a people so dissimilar to us in every respect,’ he asked, ‘so little qualified for free and popular government without certain destruction to our own political institutions?’”31 His fellow senator, Lewis Cass of Michigan argued along similar lines, but where Calhoun urged to abandon the project, Cass was convinced that the undesirable population in the territories would simply dissolve: “We do not want the people of Mexico, either as citizens or subjects,” he said, and added that: “All we want is a portion of territory, which they nominally hold, generally uninhabited, or, where at all, sparsely so, and with a population, which would soon recede, or identify itself with ours.”32 Formulations like these refracted the essence of an enterprise that 29

De León, They Called Them Greasers, 3. For a comprehensive summary of the history of the northern regions both under Spanish and Mexican rule, see Chapters 1-5 in Meier and Ribeira, Mexican Americans/American Mexicans. 30 Meier and Ribeira, Mexican Americans/American Mexicans, 62. 31 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 241. 32 Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 16.

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was now carried out under the flag of “manifest destiny”. The project was moreover taking a more recognizable, colonial form where, as cultures everywhere have experienced in the face of Empire: “the domination imposed by a foreign minority, ‘racially’ and culturally different, over a materially weaker indigenous majority in the name of a racial (or ethnic) and cultural ‘superiority’ [places] a set of relations into place between two different cultures: one fast-moving, technologically advanced, and economically powerful; the other slowmoving and without advanced technology or a complex economy.” 33 In this particular case the “portion of territory” that the Americans wanted was both poor and “slow-moving,” and to annex and appropriate the land was seen as an obligation and a fulfilling of the young nation’s predestined fate. All of this comes together in what George J. Sánchez describes as the myopic vision of the American Frontier, a westward movement that merely extends the movement from Old to New world, with the East looking West, civilization looking toward chaos, Europe looking toward the rest of the world. It casts the Euro-American as conqueror of both nature and foreign peoples, sometimes depicted as “savages,” and speaks to the belief that the young American country would know no bounds in fulfilling its destiny to become the world’s leading nation.34

During the negotiations after the war one of the most pressing concern for Mexico was to secure her former citizens’ future, should they choose to stay in what was now the U.S. A great many refused to leave, for political as well economical reasons, and Articles VIII and IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were specifically aimed at addressed the former Mexican nationals who chose to remain on their properties as new American citizens, stating (in Article VIII) that those who shall remain in the said territories after the expiration of that year [within which they would have to chose citizenship], without having declared their intention to retain the character of Mexican, shall be considered to have elected to become citizens of the United States. In the said territories, property of every kind, now belonging to 33 34

Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire, 6. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 38.

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Threshold Time Mexicans not established there, shall be inviolably respected. The present owners, the heirs of these, and all Mexicans who may hereafter acquire said property by contract, shall enjoy with respect to it guarantees equally ample as if the same belonged to citizens of the United States.

And in Article IX that The Mexicans who, in the territories aforesaid shall not preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican Republic, conformably with what is stipulated in the preceding article, shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States, and be admitted at the proper time (to be judged of by the Congress of the United States) to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States, according to the principles of the Constitution; and in the mean time, shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction. (Article IX) 35

Despite these provisions the new American citizens had no reason to be optimistic. Anglo-American actions and attitudes toward Mexicans in the past had made it abundantly clear that Treaty or no Treaty, the new population was not welcome even if their land was. A couple of decades after the annexation, Mexican Americans had lost most of their political, economical and social influence and positions as well as the land they owned. Massive Anglo immigration into the Southwest pushed the Mexican-American community to the fringes of civic society, and, Gurierrez notes, “with few exceptions, Mexican Americans had been relegated to a stigmatized, subordinate position in the social and political hierarchies.”36 Attracted by the discovery of gold in California two weeks after the Treaty of Guadalupe was signed and by the prospects of cheap land, Anglo-Americans poured into the formerly Mexican areas. An estimated 300,000 immigrants came westward between 1840 and 1860, reducing virtually overnight the original Mexican population to

35

From Monterey County Historical http://users.dedot.com/mchs/treaty.html 36 Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, 21.

Society,

“Local

History

Website:”

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a minority of fifteen percent.37 Already few in number in Texas as a consequence of the rebellion of 1836, Mexican Americans here were forced off their former lands and referred to the southern part of the state. With the battles of Alamo and Goliad fresh in mind, AngloTexan hatred of Mexicans during the late nineteenth century received its own vehicle in the Texas Rangers. This paramilitary corps generally took it upon themselves to “do to Mexicans in the name of the law what others did extra-legally.”38 In her first novel Who Would Have Thought It? from 1872, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton gives voice to the prevailing attitudes of the times when she lets one character, a Northern pro-abolitionist woman say: “To me they are all alike, – Indians, Mexicans, Californians, – they are all just horrid. – as soon as we take their lands from them they will never be heard of any more, and then the Americans, with God’s help, will have all the land that was so righteously acquired through a just war.”39 A similar illustration of white American prejudice toward Mexicans in the latter half of the nineteenth century is in the following letter, which the Norwegian immigrant Jacob Hanson Hilton sent home to his father from New Mexico: I am now among Indians and Mexicans and Spaniards, which all 3 nations are equal in appearance as well as equally dangerous, but white people are entering rapidly now since the Railroad came here. It was built last year and these mountains and valleys are now swarming with white people, where before only these lazy, useless people lived like wild animals. 40

Sentiments like those just quoted were extended first and foremost to the lower Mexican classes. Mexicans of Castilian descent were looked more favorably upon, since, after all, they were of European heritage and ran huge farms; hence they were not perceived as quite as 37

David E. Lorey, The U.S.- Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century, Wilmington: SR Books, 1999, 32. 38 Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, 26. 39 María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would have Thought It? (1872), Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995, 73. 40 Jacob Hanson Hilton, 17 April 1881 (translation my own). I am grateful to Professor Orm Øverland for bringing Hilton’s letters to my attention. This one is included in his Fra Amerika til Norge IV: Norske Utvandrerbrev 1875-1884, Oslo, 2001, 349.

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Threshold Time

culturally foreign as the mestizo population. When possible Mexicans responded by emphasizing their European heritage, a strategy that would become known as the Fantasy Heritage. This was a mythologization of a presumably pure European bloodline that could be traced back prior to 1848, and intended to counter Anglo-American racial hostility and improve economic and political relations (see more on this in chapter III). If Anglo-American prejudice did not entirely discard the upper classes of the new Americans, everyone else was looked upon as hopelessly degenerate: “Whether it be the California cholos, the Arizona poor or New Mexican villagers, Anglos saw in the Mexican physiognomy, in leisure habits and manners of living, the stamps of an inferior people.”41 Such attitudes also prevailed in popular literature, as in George Frederick Ruxton’s adventure and travel writings. His two books, Life in the Far West (serialized in 1848 and published as a book in 1849) and Adventures in Mexico (1849) were widely read. I quote at some length from the Author’s Preface to the latter since it reflects how the variety of historically contingent biases we have so far discussed came together in the popular imagination of the period: Faults the Americans have – and who have not? But they are, I maintain, failings of the head and not the heart, which nowhere beats warmer, or in a more genuine spirit of kindness and affection, than in the bosom of a citizen of the United States. Would I could say as much of the sister people. From south to north I traversed the whole of the Republic of Mexico, a distance of nearly two thousands miles, and was thrown amongst the people of every rank, class, and station; and I regret to say that I cannot remember to have observed one single commendable trait in the character of the Mexican; always excepting from this sweeping clause the women of the country, who, for kindness of heart and many sterling qualities, are an ornament to their sex, and to any nation. If the Mexican possess one single virtue, as I hope he does, he must keep it so closely hidden in some secret fold of his sarape as to have escaped my humble sight, although I traveled through his country with eyes open, and for conviction ripe and ready. I trust, for his sake, that he will speedily withdraw from the bushel the solitary light of his concealed virtues, lest before long it be absorbed 41

Richard Griswold del Castillo and Arnoldo de León, North to Aztlán: A History of Mexican Americans in the United States, New York: Twayn, 1996, 30.

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in the more potent flame which the Anglo-Saxon seems just now disposed to shed over benighted Mexico.42

The ideological and cultural biases that suffuse this passage are made the more poignant by the editor, who in the introductory remarks asserts that “Ruxton wrote without prejudice, except where Spanish priests were concerned, yet his picture of the average Mexican character is a sombre one.”43 Ruxton’s low opinion of Mexicans did not, however, extend to women, and this brings us to a different aspect of colonial discourse in general, and Anglo-American prejudice against Mexicans in particular. In his most popular book, Life in the Far West, Ruxton elaborates on the exceptional beauty of the Mexican women and their contrast to the lethargic and debased male. What stands out here is the connection he establishes between Mexican women and Anglo men: the belles of Nuevo Mejico [are] to [the mountaineers] the ne plus ultra of female perfection. The ladies ... do not hesitate to leave the paternal abodes, and eternal tortilla-making, to share the perils and privations of the American mountaineers in the distant wilderness. Utterly despising their own countrymen, whom they are used to contrast with the dashing white hunters who swagger in all the pride of fringe and leather through their towns.44

Ruxton hit on a snag many Anglo males encountered. They may have found Mexican women attractive, but this meant that the issue of race had to be somehow negotiated and rendered a non-issue. During initial Anglo-Mexican contact, the light-skinned women of Castilian or Isleña origin were considered a feasible match to the white ideal. These women were, however, much fewer in numbers than their darker mestiza sisters, and for single Anglo settlers this presented a tricky dilemma of maneuvering between what de León describes as 42

George Frederick Augustus Ruxton, Adventures in Mexico: From Vera Cruz to Chihuahua in the Days of the Mexican War (1849), ed. Horace Kephart, Oyster Bay NY: Nelson Doubleday, 1915, 13-14. 43 Ibid., Editor’s Preface, 8. 44 George Frederick Augustus Ruxton, Life in the Far West (1849), Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951, 182.

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Threshold Time

“desire and aversion, between the sexual drive and the fastidious psyche.”45 The conflict was often worked out within complex parameters of immorality and redemption. Anglo-American intolerance of miscegenation was based not only in convictions of racial purity; racial mixing in itself suggested immorality and promiscuity. Mexican women’s manner of dressing and of passing their spare time (the fandango in particular was held to indicate lax morals) was in the Anglo imagination moreover turned into the idea that these women “lured white men across the racial line.”46 The challenge of reconciling sexual desire with moral righteousness was consequently resolved according to a rationale where Anglo men merely “yielded” to temptations and demands, which they by virtue of nature itself could not be held responsible for: “If Mexican women craved their intimacy, it was inevitable that they (the Anglos) should yield to the urges of nature.”47 In this case, what Spurr refers to as the transference of “the locus of desire onto the colonized object itself” worked very effectively to meet the colonizer’s need for both justification and satisfaction.48 The foundations for a Mexican-American sense of cultural self were steeped in complex ideological and cultural trajectories that long anticipated the actual creation of Mexican Americans as an American minority in 1848. Interestingly, although not uncommon when a new enemy presents himself, the new situation of being what Ramón Saldívar calls an “ethnic minority in a conquered homeland” to some extent worked to erase internal cultural differences.49 For the new American citizens did not constitute a homogenous group. Whether mestizos or Españoles, the Mexicans of the northern regions had not even referred to themselves as Mexicans until 1848. Instead they conceived of themselves as members of la patria chica (“the little father country”) with a distinct sense of local place. As Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla point out, 45

De León, They Called Them Greasers, 40. Ibid., 43. 47 Ibid., 44. 48 Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire, 28. 49 Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, 13. 46

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by the early 1800s one sees the Tejanos proclaiming their uniqueness. The Californios revelling about their pastoral ways. The Tucsonenses (of Tucson) describing the aridity of their terrain. The Nuevo Mexicanos celebrating their long residence in America and the very distinct regional culture they have created.50

Before 1848, Mexicans of the northern areas were united primarily by language, religion and a somewhat vague notion of a shared Mexican cultural heritage. However, in response to the political and cultural encroachment of the dominant Anglo-American culture a sense of community developed across cultural, racial and social divides. A sense of ethnie gradually developed which, on the level of dominated versus dominant culture, transcended racial and regional fractions and often even class differences. In his book on early Mexican-American autobiographies and testimonios, My History, Not Yours, Genaro Padilla shows how this is brought out in personal life stories. He argues that such accounts “articulate an interregional and even classless sense of individual and communal disjuncture.”51 (As we see in the next chapter, this development is quite central in Ruiz de Burton’s early romance The Squatter and the Don.) Another essential component in the gradually emerging sense of ethnic identity was the strange ambiguity of being simultaneously a conquered minority and immigrants. Not unexpectedly, this ambiguity carried over into the practice and perception of migration across the new border, and as Lorey notes, “the U.S.-Mexican border was a vaguely defined territory in which sparse populations, separated by an international boundary, came into uncertain contact.”52 Border controls in the sense we think of it today did not exist until the twentieth century; prior to this few AngloAmericans were really paying attention to the areas on the fringes of their society. This allowed for movement not so much between cultures, as within one and the same. When immigration from Mexico to the United States increased, first when the Mexican railroad was 50

Introduction, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol I, eds Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla, Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993, 17-25, 20. 51 Genaro M.Padilla, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, 10. 52 Lorey, The U.S.- Mexican Border, 1.

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connected to the Southern Pacific railroad in the United States in the 1880s, and later with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the differences that existed became more accentuated. In the changing Borderland the complex meetings between Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Americans, and Asians gave rise to a heightened awareness also of certain cultural distinctions within the MexicanAmerican group. It furthermore augmented the awareness of AngloAmericans that the hitherto inconsequential population was in fact rapidly growing. David Gutiérrez describes the situation as follows: “With hundreds of thousands of immigrants settling in or near the existing Mexican American communities after the turn of the century, the culture, the language, and customs most Americans believed had disappeared in the United States experienced a new flowering in Mexico’s former territories.”53 As is the case today, Mexican immigrants contributed significantly to the economic development of the Southwest. This was particularly true in agriculture, mining industry and railroad construction, but when the recession hit in the early 1920s they were the first to be laid off.54 As work was getting increasingly hard to find, anti-Mexican propaganda flourished in newspapers all throughout the Southwest. A careful estimate suggests that close to half-a-million Mexicans were repatriated as the result of the Depression.55 This oscillation between the United States’ demand for immigrant labor and the rejection of these workers when the economy failed happened again in connection with World War II. The “Mexican-United States Program of the Loan of Laborers,” better known as the Bracero program, was implemented in 1942 to supply labor for agricultural industries in dire need of workers. The terms of the program included a guarantee that the workers be exempted from U.S. military service, that “they would be provided certain wage levels, working conditions, food, housing, living expenses, and travel back to Mexico upon the expiration of their

53

Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, 65-66. Daniel Venegas’ satirical novel The Adventures of Don Chipote, or, When Parrots Breast-Feed (1928), Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000, depicts the conditions of the Mexican braceros. The book was serialized in 1926 in the Los Angeles Spanish language newspaper El Heraldo de México, but was lost until The Recovery Project in Houston retrieved it. 55 Meier and Ribeira, Mexican Americans/American Mexicans, 154-55. 54

Borderland Routes

45

contracts.”56 The Bracero program underwent several phases according to factors such as technological shifts in agricultural production and heightened demand for labor in connection with the Korean War. When the program was terminated in 1964, approximately five million Mexicans had entered the United States as contract workers. When this bilateral agreement came to an end, the contracting of labor for the growing corporate agricultural industry fell on individual employers. This also meant that the guarantees in the Bracero program were left up to people generally more concerned with profit than with workers’ welfare. As one commentator remarks, “contractors could disregard any obligation to guarantee even the most elementary labor rights for Mexican workers.”57 The steadily growing MexicanAmerican communities throughout the Southwest now contributed to Anglo-American resentment toward Mexicans. The conditions migrant farm workers were subjected to and the general experience of racial and cultural discrimination laid the foundations for the 1960s’ Chicano Movement. Perhaps best known among the many civil rights leaders who emerged during this period is Cesar Chávez. Modeling his activism on non-violence and civil disobedience, he succeeded in organizing the farm workers (United Farm Workers) and organized and led numerous strikes throughout the 1960s and 70s. The Delano grape strike in 1970 received national and international attention, and stands as a symbol of Chicano victory. The more militant Reies López Tijerina spearheaded attempts at legally winning back land grants belonging to the Nuevomexicanos (New Mexicans). The appeals he brought to the courts failed, however, and he and the Allianza Federal eventually seized the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, which set off a shoot-out between occupants and local authorities. Other important figures in this period are Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and José Angel Gutiérrez, who both 56

Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, 134. At the time of writing (May 2006) the debates concerning new immigration laws in the U.S. are again raging, and several demonstrations and walkouts have taken place. The echoes from the era of the Bracerprogram are evident, but it is too early to say how the conflict will be resolved this time around. 57 John Mraz, “Los Hermanos Mayo: Photographing the Braceros,” in Uprooted: Braceros in the Hermanos Mayo Lens, eds John Mraz and Jaime Vélez Storey, Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996, 51.

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Threshold Time

targeted the younger generations of Chicanos in urban areas, and who had a significant impact on the shaping of Chicano politics. The spirit of the era also spread to the academe. In October of 1969 one hundred scholars and students from twenty-nine California campuses and Chicano activist communities met at the University of California Santa Barbara to formulate a Chicano master plan called “El Plán de Santa Barbara.” The document that came out of this meeting proposed a strategy for the institutionalization of Chicano studies in the universities. Starting from scratch, the field of Chicano Studies now developed quickly and spread to campuses in other parts of the nation, and in other parts of the world. Like disciplines such as African American Studies and Women Studies before it, the establishment of a field dedicated to the needs and interests of the Mexican American cultural space attracted and recruited scholars and students who found an academic home. The processes in the academe happened alongside the evolving Chicano Movement, and were significantly informed, ideologically and culturally by the concept of Aztlán. Aztlán names the mythical region of Aztec origin, and came to symbolize the original homeland, a Mesoamerica that transcends the border of 1848. In the following chapter we will see how literature and art would engage Aztlán and the cultural politics of the movement into a gradually evolving Chicano aesthetic, and how this aesthetic has developed up until our own day into a multifaceted field reflecting the complex reality it represents.

CHAPTER II

A Literary Blossoming

Mexican Americans in the Unites States make up approximately 65% of the larger Hispanic group that constitutes roughly forty-one million people (14% of the population). In other words, Mexican Americans are the most numerous component of the largest and fastest growing minority in the United States.1 For their numbers alone, one would think that Mexican Americans would be a palpable presence in the American multicultural imagination. As Marco Portales notes, however, this is far from the case: Seldom recognized or addressed by the mainstream literary establishment, Chicano literature today remains quite unknown to the larger American public. The best evidence of this is the fact that, outside of academe, where small coteries of writers and critics work and discuss Chicano progress, Chicano literature hardly exists. Many mainstream Americans, to be sure, do not seem to have noticed the absence of Latinos in the cultural life of American society. As a result, whereas we might now have a healthier relationship between Chicano life, Chicano literature, and the larger American community, we instead have only a few associations and foundations on which to build a healthy discourse that should have been occurring during the last thirty years.2

Despite the minority’s size, and despite the awakening to political and cultural life during the 1960s and 70s, Mexican Americans continue to be shrouded in relative silence. The group has been called the “sleeping giant,” mainly because of their electoral potential, but this phrase implies a passivity that is misleading. The borderland may be a liminal area, a contact zone (or a combat zone) not quite belonging to this nor that country, but it is not a passive space. Nowhere is this more evi1

All figures are according to the 2004 statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau. Marco Portales, Crowding out Latinos: Mexican Americans in the Public Consciousness, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000, 11-12. 2

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dent than in the arts Early Mexican-American literature for the most part consisted in individuals’ attempts to inscribe for themselves a place in their conflicting and ambiguous contexts. Historical and personal narratives, deeply influenced by past and contemporary circumstances served, as Raymund Paredes says, “to preserve the memory of momentous and frequently heroic events” and “to locate … participation within these experiences.”3 One important vehicle for this was the popular corridos, a ballad form that emerged in the border regions, and whose origin dates back to the Spanish romance of the fifteenth century with influences from Arabic traditions. These narrative ballads flourished in the latter half of the nineteenth century and served an important informational function in the communities. They were musical-literary chronicles of actual heroes and deeds, and as folklorist and novelist Américo Paredes observes: [the corrido] is never the same in all its details, nor does it always correspond to fact, but it carries the real man along with it and transforms him into the hero. The hero is always the peaceful man, finally goaded into violence by the rinches 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.4

One of the most popular corridos is titled “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez,” and celebrates this ranch hand’s courage on the day in 1901 when Sheriff Morris of Karnes Country unexpectedly showed up to inquire the Cortez brothers about some missing horses. Because of a mistranslation, the sheriff was led to believe that they were indeed the horse-thieves, and also that they refused to be arrested by a white man. The sheriff then shot Gregorio’s brother, and Gregorio killed the sheriff and his deputy in self-defense. I quote Paredes’ English translation of one version of the corrido here to give the reader an idea of these 3

Paredes, The Image of the Mexican in American Literature, 31. Américo Paredes, With His Pistol In His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, 149. The word rinche is an old Mexican term for ranger, more specifically the Texas Ranger. Paredes’ contributions to the preservation of and study of the folklore traditions in the Borderland are invaluable. See also his Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Both are seminal works in Southwestern cultural ethnography. 4

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49

early manifestations of this oral literary tradition of Chicano resistance: In the county of El Carmen A great misfortune befell; The Major Sheriff is dead; Who killed him no one can tell. At two in the afternoon, In half an hour or less, They knew that the man who Killed him Had been Gregorio Cortez. They let loose the bloodhound Dogs; They followed him from afar. But trying to catch Cortez Was like following a star. All the rangers of the county Were flying, they rode so hard; What they wanted was to get The thousand-dollar reward. And in the county of Kiansis They cornered him after all: Though they were more than three Hundred he leaped out of their corral. Then the Major Sheriff said, As if he was going to cry, “Cortez, hand over your weapons; We want to take you alive.” Then said Gregorio Cortez, And his voice was like a bell, “You will never get my weapons Till you put me in a cell.” Then said Gregorio Cortez, With his pistol in his hand, “Ah, so many mounted Rangers Just to take one Mexican!”5

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The ballad reflects the heroism of the one individual, and even if the final outcome of Cortez’s courage is his death, the significance of the corrido lies in its commemoration of one person’s determination not to be overrun by Anglo-American injustice. The emergence of Mexican-American literature was characterized by narratives which in one way or another mediated between a public and a private space, between the collectivity and the individual, and finally, between the past and the present. Most importantly, the narration of self had to take place within the general parameters of colonization. In Frantz Fanon’s words: “Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country.”6 The novel I discuss in the next chapter exemplifies this. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s historical romance The Squatter and the Don undertakes a complicated negotiation between the fast disappearing Californio pastoral culture and a rapidly progressing Anglo-American industrialized one, between the past and the future. The attempt to create a space for the conquered Mexicans in the geography of the lost land occurs in a pedagogical subtext, where Don Mariano represents reconciliation in a struggle against capitalist and cultural forces that he sees cannot be won. Moreover, The Squatter and the Don illustrates the trajectory of early Mexican-American literary production and distribution. Both this and Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? were published in limited editions with the help of private funding and contacts in the publishing world. Both texts were lost until “The Recovery Project” in Houston and the publishing house Arte Público Press rediscovered and republished them in 1992 and 1995 respectively. Mainstream society’s hostility and contempt towards Mexican Americans made it next to impossible to publish anything outside the local communities. The novel I discuss in chapter III, Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez was written in the 1930s, but no publisher at the time considered its subject matter, the life story of a Mexican American worth publishing. Consequently it fell on locally run newspapers

5

6

Paredes, With His Pistol In His Hand, appendix. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967, 18.

Literary Blossoming

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and presses throughout the Southwest to disseminate literary production. They printed poetry, essays, narratives, occasionally a serialized novel, and sometimes a limited number of a longer piece. More often than not these works were left behind in attics and basements of private homes, and no one knows how many are still awaiting recovery from their dusty repositories. Several of the personal narratives have been collected in library holdings, most notably in the Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley. The early texts frequently represent local culture’s need to describe itself in relation to its originality and to what Fanon above calls the “language of the civilizing nation.” This process changes according to shifts in the cultural context, and the oscillation has been and continues to be mirrored in Chicano literature.7 As is the case with other American minority literatures, insight into the rich and complex Mexican American literary history has become available to readers and critics only quite recently. Already in 1917 the Spanish critic Miguel Romero-Navarra noted and commented bitingly on the negligence in American literary histories as far as this literature went: The history and exposition of the Hispanic literary tradition in North America are yet to be written. Not even a single study has been dedicated to it, be it comprehensive or superficial, popular or erudite.8

Similarly, John Macy’s American Writers on American Literature (1931) included Native-, African-American and Yiddish literature, but not Hispanic. In his Introduction Macy’s only comment regarding this is that: Strict history is in duty bound to consider many persons whom literary criticism can cheerfully forget. In our view, completeness is neither attainable nor desirable.9

7

For an excellent study of early Mexican American narratives, see Padilla, My History Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography. 8 Francisco A Lomelí, “Introduction: Hispanic Arts and Letters: An Artistic Legacy in the Limelight,” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art, gen. eds Francicso Lomelí, Nicolás Kanellos and Claudio Esteva-Fabregat, Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993, 13. 9 John Macy, American Writers on American Literature: By Thirty-Seven Contemporary Writers, ed. John Macy, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1931, xvii.

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Even the chapter in Macy’s collection titled “Literature on the Pacific Coast” mentions the Mexican-American presence only with a brief reference to the “Castilian past.”10 If we move ahead in time we see the influential literary history by Robert Spiller, Willard Thorp, Thomas H. Johnson, and Henry Seidel Canby making allusions to the Hispanic past and its literature. This is, however, generally dismissed as quaint and inconsequential, since the “Spanish civilization of the Pacific Coast was too thin in population, too indolent, to make a concerted stand against the Anglo-Saxon.”11 The chapter called “The Mingling of Tongues” discusses in varying detail the emergence of German, French, Scandinavian, and Jewish literatures in the United States, but refers only scantily to the SpanishAmerican heritage. When the editors reach twentieth-century American literature, they simply state that “Spanish-American culture, both early and contemporary, furnished material to such American-born novelists as Gertrude Altherton, Willa Cather, Harvey Fergusson and John Steinbeck.”12 Since the Mexican-American communities were left to publish their work in isolation, there is of course some truth to this claim. It is also true that whatever role Mexican Americans played in American literature it was precisely as stereotyped props. Helen Hunt Jackson’s wildly popular Ramona is a case in point. Published in 1884, only a year before The Squatter and the Don, Ramona was quickly ranked with Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “one of the two great ethical novels of the century.”13 The romance no doubt served to soften public prejudice toward the Indians much the same way Beecher Stowe’ did with respect to African Americans. The portrayals of the original Californios, however, created an image of a people already of the past, and anticipated how California came to figure in the AngloAmerican literary imagination. Consider for instance the following passage:

10

Ibid., 417. Robert Spiller, Willard Thorp, Thomas H. Johnson, and Henry Seidel Canby, Literary History of the United States, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948, 657. 12 Literary History of the United States, 688. In the chapter on Folklore there is no reference to the corrido whatsoever. Spiller et al. mention Spanish romances, ballads that the authors claim are the only oral tradition found in the Southwest (706). 13 Michael Dorris, Introduction to Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona (1884), New York: Signet Classic, 1988, v-xviii, v. 11

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[Life in California before 1848] was a picturesque life, with more sentiment and gayety in it, more also that was truly dramatic, more romance, than will ever be seen again on those sunny shores. The aroma of it all lingers there still; industries and inventions have not yet slain it; it will last out its century, – in fact, it can never be quite lost, so long as there is left standing one such house as Señora Moreno’s.14

While the author elsewhere in the book expresses regret at the Californios’ fate and even criticizes the Anglo-Americans for not understanding their suffering, there seems to be little doubt in her mind that the dispossessed Mexicans will fade once and for all. Even as she believes that the “aroma” of the past will endure, this is with reference to architecture rather than to an actual living community. Such romanticizing of California life served to relegate MexicanAmerican culture to a mythological place in the past, and this aesthetization has paradoxically figured alongside the more traditional racial and cultural prejudices in much of Anglo-American writing up till our own days. When authors portrayed Mexicans and Mexican Americans in their works, images of innocence and simplicity were often what came across.15 Moreover the mythologizing of Mexican-American culture erases present agency by inscribing the magic of the past. The result, however sweet, is similar to how Ramona fixed the Californio community as faded and lost. For a long time in the movie industry the more frequent image of Mexican Americans was of course that of bandido, traitor and coward in Western movies. Even if this situation 14

Jackson, Ramona, 12. An interesting example of this is Robert Redford’s movie Milagro: The Beanfield War from 1988. Tales of the fantastic frame this story about a small MexicanAmerican community in its struggle over water rights against corporate enterprise in New Mexico. Ultimately perseverance and cultural survival is pinned on the figure of a quaint ghost. A sharp contrast to this glossing over of histories and cultural politics is John Sayles’ Lone Star (1996). In a masterly well-balanced narrative the complexities and heritages of Mexican, Texan and American history as well as Native American and African American history are brought out as they affect a small Texan community on the border. A more recent and quite brilliant but subtler depiction of a similar dynamics is Tommy Lee Jones’ 2005 movie The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Another and very different movie rehearses the Renaissance code of color. In Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000) colored lenses oddly re-cast the old dialectic of white as innocence and black as guilty as that of blue versus a brownish yellow. In the shots south of the border everything and everyone look dark and yellowish. Conversely, everything and everyone north of the border is shrouded in a bluish (and sanitized) light. 15

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has changed over the past years, especially in TV series where Latinos are cast “representatively,” residues still remain. In the history of Anglo-American stereotyping and attitudes we also find a general failure of distinguishing between Mexicans and Mexican Americans: both have remained fundamentally Other. The exception is the relationships to and perception of Mexico as neighbor and nation. The spatial distance and tangible difference renders Mexico as less intimidating because it is on the other side. As Norma Klahn puts it, “as soon as a boundary is established, the other side becomes desirable, the threshold to cross into the unknown, the yetunexplored landscape where the ‘self’ is discovered and the other is ‘invented’.” Klahn shows how the different strands of racial and cultural prejudice converge with this mythologizing and distancing view into an Anglo-American aesthetics she coins “South of the Borderism.” With reference to a number of writers as different as Ambrose Bierce and Willa Cather, Stephen Crane and Jack Kerouac, she demonstrates how [the] trope of difference becomes the figure most utilized by travelers and novelists writing about their adventures “south of the border.” This trope, established from the initial moment of encounter and still prevalent today, opposes U.S. “civilization” to Mexican “barbarism.” … the attraction to a regenerative vitality conceived as present within “barbarism” continues to seduce the traveler to the point of demarcation …16

Anglo-American conception of Mexicans south of the border does not extend to Mexicans north of the border, since the collapse of distance also collapses the comfort zone of a definite and safe difference. The persistent emphasis on this difference with respect to “South of Borderism” is nowhere more evident than when it is absurdly echoed by Mexican-American voices. In Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, the protagonist in his search for self ends up in Ciudad Juárez: “With fiery tequila and Country Joe and the Fish, with colored lights dancing in my brain, with more beautiful, voluptuous women at my disposal than I could have imagined in a month, I felt like a man 16

Norma Klahn, “Writing the Border: The Languages and Limits of Representation,” in Common Border, Uncommon Paths: Race, Culture, and National Identity in U.S.Mexican Relations, eds Jaime E. Rodriguez O., and Kathryn Vincent, Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1997, 125.

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should feel when he’s on the lam, on the loose in search of his fuckedup identity.”17 The scenes are the same as repeated every day by those who ritualistically cross the border for instance in a “search for self,” and who comfortably cross north again once the identity of the “other” – and hence self has been firmly established. In Acosta’s case, however, he already is at home; he is at once self and other. In a cruel twist, the Mexican judge sends him back across the border after he is caught with prostitutes: “Why don’t you go home and learn to speak your father’s language?”18 The disintegration of distance, the conflation of self and other, and of South and North obfuscates the border and reveals the fragile and artificial nature of the line that separates Anglo America from Mexican America. The lesson Acosta and other writers conveyed to an AngloAmerican reading public was that this literature and culture did not exist in an a-historical vacuum. Rather, as Francisco Lomelí notes, they “intimately share with others the formation, evolution and underpinnings of American history and culture.”19 Emerging in tandem with and inspired by the Chicano Movement, literary production virtually exploded in the 1960s and 70s. The arts were a vehicle for representing to the Mexican-American and Chicano audience as well as the general American audience the heritage of a fast growing minority that claimed a cultural and historical homeland within United States’ borders. This space was given the name of Aztlán, the ancient Aztec name for the mythical place of origin to the north, and commonly located to an area roughly corresponding to the present Southwest. At the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver in 1969 a cultural manifesto called “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” was presented. It was drafted by the poet Alurista (Alberto Baltasar Urista), and declared Chicanos a nation. Its content came to circumscribe the cultural nationalist ideology that informed el Florecimiento, or the Blossoming in the arts: the plan declares a Chicano homeland, and in a move opposed to U.S. and Mexican nationalist perspectives, it renders the Chicano nondeport-

17

Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), New York: Vintage Books, 1989, 190. 18 Ibid., 194. 19 Lomelí, “Hispanic Arts and Letters,” 87.

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Threshold Time able. Aztlán is the home where Chicanos are indigenous; it is the land of forefathers and a gringo invasion.20

Numerous writers and artists contributed to the consolidation of Chicano identity. In his epic poem, “Yo Soy Joaquín/I am Joaquin,” Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales in 1967 captured the determination to honor and make use of the immense complexity of cultural routes and identities that preceded the cultural resurrection: I am the masses of my people and I refuse to be absorbed. I am Joaquín, The odds are great but my spirit is strong, my faith unbreakable, my blood is pure. I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ. I SHALL ENDURE! 21 I WILL ENDURE!

The poetics that “I am Joaqúin” helped inaugurate did not, however, signify artistic uniformity. The literary voices displayed great diversity, from Rudolfo Anaya’s sensitive New Mexico magical realism to Rolando Hinojosa’s cynically astute and original portrayals from the Río Grande Valley, to Alejandro Morales’ historical narratives, and Acosta’s furious and remarkable writing. In 1971 Tomás Rivera had published … y no se lo tragó la tierra (…and the Earth Did Not Devour Him) and won the first Quinto Sol National Literary Award. All of these writers approached the conglomerate of topics that constitute the Chicano condition from different angles, but la Raza (the race) was a significant and underlying motif. In the 1980s two tendencies crystallized in Chicano literature as what Tomás Ybarra-Frausto calls respectively “subversion and incorporation”: On the one hand, patterns of consensus were undermined by subversive forms of representation. On the other hand, there was an option 20

Arteaga, Chicano Poetics, 13. Rodolfo Gonzales, I am Joaquín/Yo soy Joaquín (1967), New York: Bantam Books, 1972, 100. 21

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toward an exchange and partnership with mainstream cultural institutions.22

The political and cultural nationalist focus in 1960s and 70s yielded to an increasingly expanding and inclusive literary agenda of truly diverse representations of the Chicano experience as an American experience. Richard Rodriguez’s 1982 work Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez possibly went furthest in this respect. He firmly established himself outside the politics of the Chicano cultural nationalist agenda and claimed that his story was an American story first and last. The turn in literature was echoed in criticism. In 1978 Juan BruceNovoa formulated what for a while became the modus operandi for Chicano literary and cultural criticism: we [the Chicanos] are the space (not the hyphen) between [Mexican and American], the intercultural nothingness of that space. For those reluctant to accept this sense of nothing, I offer a compromise: Read the above as “the intercultural possibilities of that space.” … Neither Mexico nor the U.S.A. is monolithic. Each is pluricultural. Thus the synthesis is multiple and plurivalent, not bipolar at all. This means that we are not simply bicultural, but intercultural.23

The notion of a space of intercultural possibilities underscores multitemporality and multi-spatiality as characteristics of Chicano cultural production. The last couple of decades have witnessed a flow of texts that exemplify this, not least those that deal with urban modernity. No longer a primarily rural population, the majority of Americans of Mexican descent live in inner cities, mainly still in the Southwest but rapidly spreading to cities all across the United States.24 Agriculture in North and South Carolina, for instance, increasingly depend on Mexican labor force. Authors such as Richard Rodriguez, Luis Rodriguez and Benjamin 22

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “Interview with Tomás Ybarra-Frausto: The Chicano Movement in a Multicultural/Multinational Society,” in On Edge: the Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, eds George Yúdice, Juan Flores, and Jean Franco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, 210. 23 Juan Bruce-Novoa, Retrospace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature, Theory and History, Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990, 98. 24 The march on 1 May 2006 (“a Day without Immigrants”) gathered as many participants in Chicago as it did in Los Angeles (c. 400,000).

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Alire Sáenz all engage the complexities of this redirection in demography. So do Luis Urrea, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Rubén Martínez, who more specifically engage the multifaceted aesthetic forms of “borderism” and the postmodern border-urbanity of the twin cities along the border. While women writers were few in numbers only some years ago, they are today responsible for a remarkable production of poetry and prose. The novelists Sandra Cisneros, Helena María Viramontes, Ana Castillo, and Denise Chávez, the poets Pat Mora, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Lorna Dee Cervantes are but a few names. As their male colleagues, they span a wide range of aesthetic and culturalpolitical concerns, and in a relatively recent and interesting twist we see these writers as well as critics actively engaging their Mexican colleagues in what Klahn calls the “Mexican social imaginary.”25 This latest development is a step away from the grouping of Chicano or Mexican American and even Latino, and a move towards a truly panAmerican field of aesthetics. What I have said so far in this overview provides a basis, albeit a hasty one, for an understanding of where Chicano literature comes from, literally as well as ideologically and aesthetically. Does this mean we can infer a theoretical framework within which this literature can henceforth be understood? It certainly does not. I think what this chapter makes clear is that the space of Chicano literature is far too complex and multi-faceted for uniform conceptualizations. The various strains that inform the cultural space of the Borderland must be taken into account in ways that accommodate the dialectics of difference in its constantly changing articulations. The threshold of 1848 opened up a conglomerate space of different worlds and temporalities that all underlie the Borderland and its aesthetics. It may be true, as Marco Portales argues, that, “the creation of a Chicano literature has occurred and continues to develop in what he characterizes as a social vacuum,”26 but this “vacuum” in reality names the phenomenon of existing alongside, or on the periphery of dominant society and culture. If this condition has constituted a permanent threat to Chicano intellectual and cultural life in the United States public sphere, and in many areas still does, marginality also endows Chicano literature and culture with a particular kind of agency 25

Norma Klahn, “Chicano and Mexicana Feminist Practices,” in Genealogies of Displacement, 168. 26 Portales, Crowding out Latinos, 11.

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and potential that stem from this very same fact. This is informed by the very multiplicity it comprises, and with the resistance to becoming lost in that very multiplicity. “Chicano culture,” as Pérez-Torres observes: moves through both the gaps and across the bridges between numerous cultural sites: the United States, Mexico, Texas, California, the rural, the urban, the folkloric, the postmodern, the popular, the elite, the traditional, the tendentious, the avant-garde. Chicano culture moves against and with these diverse sites. It variously participates in the practices inherent to those sites while positing critiques of those selfsame practices. This complicitous critique … emerges from cultural practices adept at transformation and adaptation, from a self-identity that knows itself as simultaneously self and other.27

In the chapters that follow we will see how diversely these critiques and practices are manifested and launched. From various locations and points in time, the dialectics of self and other, and the specificities of the complexity peculiar to the Borderland engage in continuous dialogues with the larger domain of the U.S. to which they belong. The narratives in the six chapters allow us a glimpse into what these dialogues have looked like in different periods, how changes in American cultural and political life have affected the telling of the Borderland, and how the narration of the Borderland itself secures it as an event ceaselessly coming into being.

27

Pérez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry, 3.

CHAPTER III

Disillusion and Defiance in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don You know I am not vindictive but I am and I was born hispano. To contradict those who slander is not vengeance, it is regaining a loss.1

The northern Mexican regions felt the change in nationhood differently. The variations depended on factors such as the extent of a local landholding elite’s presence, the influence and tradition of a local political infrastructure, and the rate of post-war Anglo-American settlement. In New Mexico, for instance, the combination of wellestablished communities and relatively low immigration enabled the Mexican Americans there to retain more of their political influence than was the case in Texas and California. Rapid demographic changes quickly relegated Mexican Americans in those two states to the peripheries of political life. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885) tells the story of a Californio family in its struggle for cultural and political perseverance two and a half decades after the war, but the story was not uncommon one. The Squatter and Don can consequently be read, not only as a romance, but also as a document of early, local California history. To fully appreciate the narrative in its own time and place, however, we need to briefly consider how local and state politics and legislature affected California in the decades after the war. Although, as we saw, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo decreed that the new Americans’ properties should be “inviolably respected” and “protected,” former Mexican land properties were in reality extremely vulnerable. In California it was particularly the high number of Anglo newcomers after gold was discovering in 1849 that caused 1

Don Mariano D. Vallejo, letter to his son, 1874, in Padilla, My History, Not Yours, 102.

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problems. They settled on the most desirable land, often under the auspices that since America won the war, Americans should settle the land. Such settlement on what was in reality Native American or Mexican land became easier after the Pre-emption Act of 1841, the Gwin Land Act of 1851 and the Homestead Act of 1862. The Preemption and the Homestead Act aimed at encouraging settlement by opening up for purchase of public land. The first offered land for $1.25 an acre to whomever located on vacant public lands, the second said that any citizen could claim up to 160 acres of public land for 10$, and after five years of working the land (and for an additional fee) receive legal title. Both these acts made migration from the east to the west attractive, and the ambiguity of the terms “public” and “vacant” opened up for a range of interpretations that left few Mexican or Native American land holdings safe. Conflicts between landholders in California and settlers and squatters who came west in search for land intensified toward the end of the 1840s. In the words of Meier and Ribeira, “pressure from increasing numbers of United States immigrants motivated some Anglo politicians to seek a solution to the squatter problem by questioning the validity of all land titles and then seeking legal means to vacate as many as possible.”2 The American authorities’ response to the innumerable disputes between settlers on so-called “public” land and the actual owners, as well as to the increasing demand from immigrants that these lands be released, was the 1851 Gwin Land Act.3 It demanded that all original landholders must appear before a Board of Land Commissioners within two years to show proof of their titles. If owners failed to do so, the land holdings were opened up to settlements. Endless problems followed. For one thing, transfers of land grants under Spanish and later Mexican rule were frequently ratified by an honor code based on how long someone had used and stayed on the land. As David Gutierrez comments, the tradition of respect and authority made it “not at all uncommon to mark property boundaries with cow sculls, rocks, trees, and other such ephemeral landmarks.”4 The United States’ demands for legal written documents to prove landholdings consequently posed 2

Meier and Ribeira, Mexican Americans/American Mexicans, 73. Violent riots in Sacramento in 1850 over land disputes spelled out to the United States government the urgent need to find a solution to these conflicts. 4 Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, 23. 3

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serious obstacles to the process of legitimizing claims. Even if written documentation could be obtained from the central government in Mexico City, departmental bureaucracy and slowness was such that the two years were not enough. Lorey writes that in New Mexico only “6% of the claims were settled in favor of Mexican-era landowners.” He continues to say that, In most conflicts between Mexican and U.S. landholders over titles, U.S. courts ruled against petitioners of Mexican descent. The Mexican government protested, demanding compensation for damages. Responses to such complaints were ad hoc and limited in scope. The biggest winners in the land grab were U.S.- owned corporations and the federal government.5

Even when the American Court of Land Claims ruled in favor of the Mexican grantees, the slowness of the legal system combined with the tremendous costs of litigation and legal defense more often than not forced the Californio landowners to mortgage their lands while they were waiting for the court’s ruling. On average the process of litigation took seventeen years, and many owners were bankrupt by the time they received their titles. To further complicate the situation, lawsuits and counter-appeals from the squatters at times congested the court system. The Gwin Land Act, a new taxation system, and massive migration to California after the gold rush of 1849, which in turn collapsed the traditional livestock market, inevitably undermined the new American citizens. Already by 1850, the original Mexican inhabitants in California had been reduced to 15% of the population; their social, political and economical position was weakened accordingly. María Amparo Ruiz (1832-1889) was one of the many Californios who experienced the effects of these rapid transformations. She came from one of the prestigious Lower Californio families (her grandfather was former commander and then governor of Baja California), whose wealth was tied up with political influence as much as with financial standing. She was related by blood or marriage to such renowned criollo families of Upper California as the Vallejos and the Picos. The Ruizes were among the 480 Lower Californios who came to Upper California during the fall of 1848 and who remained there after the war ended. Here the young María Amparo Ruiz met and married the 5

Lorey, The U.S.-Mexican Border, 31-32.

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United States Army Captain Henry S. Burton in what, because of the obvious differences in terms of nationality, religion, language and age, was later to be described as “the union of natural enemies.”6 The couple lived in Monterey and San Diego until the dawn of the Civil War, when Henry Burton was ordered east to join the Union Army. During the campaigns in the South he contracted malaria and died only a few years after the war had ended. His widow returned to San Diego, where she would spend much of the rest of her life battling for the validation of a land title the Burtons had bought in the 1850s from Pío Pico, the last Mexican governor of California. In 1875 the court finally ruled in Ruiz de Burton’s favor, but by then she had mortgaged the land so heavily that she saw no other option but to petition for a homestead. This was granted two years later but then contested again, and only in 1889 did the court finally validate the claim. The process Ruiz de Burton personally saw through exemplifies how the litigation system generally worked, and gave her first hand knowledge of the issues she were to describe in The Squatter and the Don (1885).7 The novel is a romance “descriptive,” as the subtitle reads, “of contemporary occurrences in California” and is set in Southern California between 1872 and 1876. As the title indicates, the story revolves around the conflict between a native Californio, Don Mariano Alamar, and the Anglo newcomers settling on his land, William Darrell and his family.8 The novel opens with William Darrel informing his wife that 6

For a detailed account of Ruiz de Burton’s life, see Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, Introduction to Maria Amparo Ruix de Burton, The Squatter and the Don, Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992, 5-51, 375-81. All page references for the novel will be to this edition. 7 The Squatter and the Don was not María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s first novel. In 1872 J.B. Lippincott in Philadelphia published Who Would Have Thought It?, a satirical novel about the Civil War and the hypocrisy of well-meaning Northern abolitionists. For understandable reasons Ruiz de Burton chose to publish the book anonymously under the pseudonym C. Loyal (Ciudado Loyal = loyal citizen). The novel offers an alternative reading of United States history at the mid-nineteenth century. See Sánchez and Pita, Introduction, 1992, 11. 8 It is reasonable to assume that Ruiz de Burton modelled this character on Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, whom she knew well. Vallejo belonged to one of the oldest European families in the Americas (his ancestors had sailed with Columbus and fought with Cortez), and was one of the wealthiest men in the Californias when the war started. When he died in 1890 he had almost nothing left and had witnessed the dispossession of his people and his culture: “If the Californios could all gather together to breathe a lament, it would reach heaven as a moving sigh which would cause fear and misery in the Universe” (Vallejo quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, The West: An Illus-

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he intends to locate land on the Alamar grant in Southern California. His wife wants him to negotiate directly with the owner rather than occupy land that is under litigation, and Mr Darrell promises her to do so. Simultaneously, Don Mariano Alamar is worried about the increasing number of squatters on his land. They not only ignore his legal ownership, but also undermine his cattle farming by capturing and/or killing cattle that graze on land they cultivate. Paralyzed by the Land Commission’s tardiness, the Don and his family are forced to watch while Anglo-American newcomers appropriate their land. Weaving in and out of this narrative is the romance between Don Mariano’s youngest daughter, Mercedes, and Mr Darrell’s son Clarence. While Mr Darrell blindly trusts the United States Government and the Land Commission, Clarence questions the ethical aspects of a process which so clearly denies the rightful landowners justice, and which openly violates the Treaty of Guadalupe. Clarence sides with the Don and offers to pay for the land his father has taken. During his first visit to the Don’s residence Clarence meets the youngest daughter, Mercedes, and they fall in love. However, while the complicated relationship between Mercedes and Clarence is finally resolved and they are united in marriage (a union “of natural enemies” not so unlike that of María Ruiz de Burton’s own), the conflict between the squatters and the Don remains unsettled. Repeated lawsuits from the squatters, a failed plan to connect the San Diego region with the transcontinental railroad, and ill-placed investments to save the ranch from mortgage eventually crush Don Mariano. He dies exhausted from the battle against not only squatters, but also the emergent monopolies of the Gilded Age. Since its rediscovery in 1992 The Squatter and the Don has received considerable attention, both for literary and culturalhistoriographic reasons. The novel speaks about a point in time that radically transformed the United States, and from a point of view on Western American history that has generally remained little known. Articulating the grievances of the dispossessed Californios, Ruiz de Burton represents political and cultural perspectives that were unacknowledged in her own time as well as in ours. The narrative structure of the romance between Mercedes and Clarence not only sustains the conflict between their fathers over land rights, but also provides the

trated History, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996, 393).

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framework wherein other dialectics and discourses have their place. On a regional level at least three sub-sets of dialectics are played out, namely that between Californios and Indians, Californios and Anglos, and between Californios/Anglos and monopoly capitalism. The conflict between, on the one hand, Californios and Anglos and, on the other, monopoly capitalism is also carried over into a transnational context, where an early manifestation of economic globalization processes stands in stark contrast to the struggle of local cultures and practices. To Don Mariano the Californios are a homogenous SpanoAmerican group, but the novel represents sharp divisions based on class and race within this category.9 When the Don first appears in the narrative he is described as having “mild and beautiful blue eyes” (64), and when Clarence first sees the Don and his sons he thinks they look like “gentlemen” “like Englishmen.” Indeed, one settler observes that Victoriano “is so light he looks more like a German”(89). The frequent descriptions throughout the novel of the Alamar family as European-looking aim at eliminating the Anglo American racial biases toward Mexicans, and illustrates what is known as the Spanish fantasy heritage. The mythologizing a pure European bloodline had its origin prior to 1848, when both Anglo-Americans and Californios (and Tejanos and Nuevomexicanos) recognized the value of establishing a connection between the landed elite of the Mexican communities and the Anglos who came into contact with them. Their motivation, however, was not the same. The Anglo-Americans were interested in relations with the ruling Mexican elite because it would help them in local politics. The Mexicans who emphasized their European-ness did so fully aware that this was a chance to escape general Anglo contempt towards all things Mexican, and identifying with Europe implied a distancing from the mestizo working class. This re-casting of self was also informed by the emergence of an Anglo-American nostalgia for the Spanish past of California, so well illustrated by Helen Hunt Jack9

For a detailed discussion of this aspect in the novel, see Sánchez and Pita´s Introduction to The Squatter and the Don, in particular the section “Discourses of Ethnicity and Class.” See also John M. González, “Romancing Hegemony: Constructing Racialized Citizenship in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton´s The Squatter and the Don,” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. II, eds Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and Chuck Tatum, Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996.

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son’s Ramona. The longing for an un-spoilt and pastoral garden was a reaction to the rapid industrialization of the West, the closing of the frontier, and the general rush of modernity to which the quiet life, especially in California and New Mexico, provided a sentimental antidote.10 Toward the end of the nineteenth century the efforts of Mexicans to identify themselves with Spain and Europe was becoming almost comical, since the vast majority of Mexicans residing in the Southwest were of mestizo origin.11 In The Squatter and the Don the emphasis on cultural identification between Anglos and Mexicans serves both as a political and cultural strategy and as a response to the romantic anticipations of an Anglo-American readership. At the same time, however, the approximation of ethnicity to class across cultural divisions highlights the stratifications that existed within the native Californio population. By emphasizing the Don and his family’s blue eyes and white skin, the narrative also articulates white-ness’ negation, namely the Indians and the mestizos, the very backbone of Californio economy. We must not lose sight of the fact that The Squatter and the Don is written from and about the point of view of a social elite, and it would be thoroughly unhistorical to conflate the working-class population consisting of mestizos and Native Americans with the landed aristocracy. In the novel the workers on the ranch are Indians, whom the Don himself at one point refers to as “stupid” and “lazy” (260). When Gabriel Alamar toward the end of the novel is forced to work as a mason, it is only after careful consideration and with much pain that he lowers himself to do menial labor. When he decides to become a hod-carrier it is, as he tells his wife, in part to defy the general opinion that the Spanish are “indolent, unwilling to work” (343). It is consequently on the level of internal, Mexican cultural identity that the Alamar family’s dissociation from the lower classes is most evident. In relation to the Anglo squatters, however, the Don signals a sense of cultural identity that shifts the above internal cultural diversification toward a more inclusive and coherent cultural unity. This is brought 10

F. Arturo Rosales offers a good summary of the Fantasy Heritage’s origin and trajectory in “‘Fantasy Heritage’ Reexamined: Race and Class in the Writings of the Bandinio Family Authors and Other Californios, 1828 – 1965,” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. II, 81-104. 11 As we will see in chapter IV, the affectation of the Spanish fantasy heritage plays a role also in Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez.

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out for instance in his conversation with Leland Stanford about San Diego’s future. In an attempt to alleviate the Don’s grievances, Stanford says that at least Don Mariano has plenty of cows left to secure his livelihood. The following dialogue ensues: ‘ … the squatters at my rancho shot and killed my cattle, so that I was obliged to send off those that I had left, and in doing this a snow-storm overtook us, and nearly all my animals perished then. The Indians will finish those which survived the snow.’ ‘Those Indians are great thieves, I suppose?’ ‘Yes, sir; but not so bad to me as the squatters. The Indians kill my cattle to eat them, whereas the squatters do so to ruin me.’ (317)

The episode illustrates a sense of ethnic identity across the divisions of class, race, and region that gradually emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century. Confronted with the encroachments of the external culture (what in Lotman’s terminology would be extracultural space, the Anglo outside), internal differences within the Mexican-American group slowly gave way to processes where a cultural internal space was consolidated. As one historian describes the tendency: some began to articulate a sense of identity that represented a conscious attempt to meld their Mexican/Spanish colonial heritage with their new political status as American citizens .… Local attachments and loyalties continued to exert a strong influence on the social identity of Mexican Americans in the Southwest, but the transfer of sovereignty over their homelands stimulated a strong tendency ‘to move from particular allegiances toward a more general group solidarity.’12

Such gradual consolidation was a response to the external, dominant culture’s pressure. Don Mariano and the segment he represents may have felt superior to the Indian and mestizo ranch hands; this, however, did not matter much in the face of Anglo-Americans’ conceptions of the new citizens – Spaniards, mestizos and Indians, all lumped together. If, from the Anglo squatters’ point of view, class and social status place Don Mariano above them, the racial biases of the period in the end relegate him to the same space the Indians and mestizos occupy. Already when Mr Darrell travels to San Diego to locate 12

Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, 33.

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his claim, his fellow travelers make derogatory comments about the original inhabitants in the San Diego area: ‘Those greasers ain’t half crushed yet. We have to tame them like they do their mustangs, or shoot them, as we shoot their cattle,’ said Matthews. ‘Oh no. No such violent means are necessary. All we have to do is to take their lands, and finish their cattle,’ said Hughes. (72)13

The Don proposes that the squatters begin raising cattle, which he offers to give to them in order to secure the future of all parties (the squatters want to plant grain, but the soil is too arid). The squatters make no effort to conceal their contempt: “I don’t want any cattle. I ain’t no ‘vaquero’ to go ‘busquering’ around and lassoing cattle” (94), one of them says, and only Mr Darrell is willing to consider the Don’s offer. Mr Darrell at first refrains from participating in the discriminatory practices his fellow squatters engage in, but only until the situation between him and the Don comes to a head in the chapter called “The Squatter and the Don.” When Mr Darrell discovers that his son Clarence has legally bought the land his father has taken from the Don, he is infuriated and accuses Clarence of having become “too greasy” to live under the same roof as himself (269): “All I want before I leave here is to give your greaser father-in-law a sound thrashing and another to that puppy, Gabriel, who is so airy and proud, and such an exquisite, that it will be delightful to spoil his beauty” (268). This representation of Anglo-American contempt for the new citizens is, however, slightly thwarted by a trace of envy that sneaks into the discourse. Mr Darrell’s hints to Gabriel’s appearances destabilize the severity of his threats, and only make more obvious his unreasonable claim. Even though the gap between native Californios and Anglo settlers and squatters may seem unbridgeable, they are brought together in the face of what Ruiz de Burton calls the “hydra-headed monster.” The monster is the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California, owned by the so-called “Big Four”: Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. Their monopoly gave them near complete control of transportation lines, intra- as well as inter-state, and thus effectively also the control with the economic development 13

Note how this passage resonates with both Austin’s rationalization concerning the future of Texas, and with Cass’s argument for expansion discussed in Chapter I.

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of the West. The railroad plays a crucial role in the novel, for squatters and dons alike, and Ruiz de Burton consequently anticipates the concerns Frank Norris gave voice to in his California novel The Octopus (1901). Both novels focus on how corporate business (in the shape of the railroad companies) exploits the land, and its near unlimited power to do so.14 In blocking all plans to connect San Diego to the intra-state network, the “Big Four” in effect lay the San Diego area barren. Ruiz de Burton describes the consequences of emergent monopoly capitalism for the region, and the powerlessness of the individual in this situation with references to and documentation of historical episodes of corruption and fraud. Eventually, Don Mariano’s downfall is not only the squatters’ fault; the railroad company’s denying the entire region a future has a significant role, as well. The accumulation of power in a few hands, the influence of corrupt politicians, and, finally, the monopolies’ ability to manipulate laws and local governments are all, as Don Mariano sees it, a result of the United States government’s failure to fulfill its duties and promises. The squatters, he says, are at times like ourselves, victims of a wrong legislation which unintentionally cuts both ways. They were set loose upon us, but a law without equity recoils upon them more cruelly. Then we are all sufferers, all victims of a defective legislation and subverted moral principles. (77)

The two sets of conflict, Don versus squatters and monopolies versus Don and squatters, represent two tropes that run through the text in quite complex ways: the local and national concern is both separate from and at the same time interconnected with the transnational. The fate of the Don and the squatters, who all suffer from the brutality of the Big Four, allegorizes the plight of small farmers and entrepreneurs 14

The Octopus more specifically revolves around the Mussel Slough incident, a shoot-out between officials acting on behalf of the Southern Pacific and homesteaders who had settled on the land under the agreement that the Southern Pacific sell the land to them after a certain number of years. The incident took place in the central San Joaquin Valley, and the sad irony, of course, is that the disputed land was most likely neither of the parties’ to claim. Read against The Squatter and the Don, The Octopus reveals the utter silence and indifference Mexican Americans were treated with. In The Octopus the original inhabitants are only mentioned within the rhetorical framework of the Fantasy Heritage.

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both inside and outside the United States. As José David Saldívar has suggested, Ruiz de Burton offers a “cultural critique of the Alta California 1848 [and] her engagement with the manifold cultural anxieties of the Gilded Age … may be described through two far-reaching projects and events – one internal, local, and literary historical, the other external, worldly, and transnational.”15 In the last chapter, called “Out with the Invader!,” the narrator attacks the transnationalization of economy and political power by criticizing the Railroad Company’s projects south of the Mexican border. The same people who invested in railroad construction in the United States Southwest were also heavily involved in similar projects in Mexico’s Northwest and further south in Central America. Ruiz de Burton’s critique henceforth also anticipates the processes of American economic imperialism in the region in the twentieth century. The victimization of squatters and dons alike in the face of a common enemy shifts the focus away from the dialectics of Anglos versus Californios and Indians versus Californio landholders. This reorientation can moreover be read as part of the textual configurations that aspire toward what we may call Ruiz de Burton’s project of cultural unification in a post-1848 reality. In addition to the representation of Anglos and Californios struggling against the monopolies, we also find various cross-ethnic liaisons that counteract cultural and racial schisms. Don Mariano’s close friend and business partner, Mr Mechlin is Anglo-American, and one of the Don’s daughters marries the latter’s son. When Mercedes travels with this couple to the East, the two sisters are depicted as being greatly admired in the Anglo world. In the Darrell household Mr Darrell’s hostilities are balanced by his wife’s sympathies and understanding of the Californios’ situation. Most notable, of course, is the marriage between Clarence and Mercedes, which only after innumerable and – in line with genre conventions – at times farcical complications and prolongations is finally arranged. Their marriage moreover takes place at a time when the Alamar family is on the verge of ruin. Don Mariano is dead, and so is Mr Mechlin. Victoriano Alamar has been crippled by an accident, his older brother Gabriel has suffered a severe fall in his job as a hodcarrier, and Doña Josefa sees herself forced to leave the rancho. 15

Saldívar, Border Matters, 170.

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All in all, matters could not be much worse when Clarence, after a long stay abroad finally comes home to be “reunited at last” (as the chapter is titled) with Mercedes. In the process he buys the Alamar ranch, sets the Alamar brothers and George Mechlin up with a banking project in San Francisco, reconciles with his own father, and generally performs in the role of redeemer. Taken together, these impulses seem to suggest that Ruiz de Burton wanted to point toward a future where the conflicts she described were buried, and the ethnic groups would find a way to coexist and prosper. John Gonzáles has noted that the novel unites united declining Californio elite with “the old Northwestern mercantile and financial capital (the Mechlins) and the newly ascendant Western immigrant entrepreneurial capital (Clarence Darrell) in an imaginary solution to the irresolvable historical question of the proletarization of the Californios ….”16 He also suggests that the romance in this way attempts to resolve antagonistic historical contingencies and map out a future of regional and national coherency. The focus on what Ruiz de Burton in the last chapter refers to as the “white slaves of California” (372) moreover also aspires to the creation of a space of inter-ethnic solidarity against the increasing power of the trusts. It is not only on a thematic level that The Squatter and the Don can be read as a project of cultural reconciliation. The text discursively negotiates toward this goal on other levels, as well. Manuel M. Martín Rodriguez, for instance, has suggested the possibility that Ruiz de Burton wrote her novel with two different agendas in mind: for the Anglo-American reader, she carefully constructs a plot that lets her narrator explain the abuses against the Californios in order to induce sympathy; for a Californio readership, she encodes her narrative with the historical reminders that provide the informed audience with a second level of meaning …17

Rodriguez points out that The Squatter and the Don comprises a subtext encoded by the use of specific dates, names and events familiar to a Hispanic audience, but not necessarily to Anglo-Americans. As examples he mentions Mercedes’ date of birth, 5th of May, which 16

Gonzáles, “Romancing Hegemony,” 36. Manuel M. Martín Rodríguez, “Textual and Land Reclamations: The Critical Reception of Early Chicano/a Literature,” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, 45. 17

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is the Mexican holiday celebrating victory over the French, and the initial wedding date, 16th of September, which is the Mexican day of independence.18 By catering to a double audience Ruiz de Burton acknowledges the space of both a Mexican and an Anglo-American readership, an acknowledgement that can be read as an attempt to establish solidarity between the two groups in their common cause against corporate capitalism. There is, however, more to this aspect of the novel than mere dates. Not only does Ruiz de Burton structure the text so as to explain the abuse of the new American citizens to her Anglo-American audience, she also more explicitly invites to a dialogue through pedagogical strategy. A subtle discourse that targets the Anglo-American audience runs alongside the narration of the romance and the historical conflicts, and functions as what I we can think of as a pedagogical subtext. I have in mind here the situations that specifically open up for inter-ethnic and political insight and awareness. The most striking of such passages in the novel are constructed around tropes of inquiry, explanation and, finally, forgiveness and absolution. Consider, for instance, the following passage. Don Mariano’s future son-in-law George has just questioned the legislative practices, which permit injustices to be committed against the Californios. When Don Mariano explains the circumstances, his dignified resignation cannot conceal the bitterness and helplessness he feels at the loss, and I quote the passage at length: upon mature reflection, I saw that Mexico did as much as could have been reasonably expected at the time [of the signing of the Treaty]. In the very preamble of the treaty the spirit of peace and friendship, which animated both nations, was carefully made manifest. That spirit was to be the foundation of the relations between the conqueror and conquered. How could Mexico have foreseen then that ‘when scarcely half a dozen years should have elapsed the trusted conquerors would, ‘In Congress Assembled,’ pass laws which were to be retroactive upon the defenseless, helpless, conquered people, in order to despoil them? The treaty said that our rights would be the same as those enjoyed by all other American citizens, But, you see, Congress takes very good care not to enact retroactive laws for Americans; laws to take away from American citizens the property which they hold now, already, with a recognized title. No, indeed. But they do so quickly enough 18

Ibid., 44-45.

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As we see here, Don Mariano lays out his frustrations as the result of betrayed trust, not by individuals, but by a nation. By directing his criticism toward the impersonal institution of Congress rather than individuals, he effectively absolves the individual American, and this rhetorical maneuver serves to eliminate sentiments of defensiveness that might preclude the addressee’s understanding. However, the generosity embedded in the Don’s forgiveness by the same token anticipates a response from the other side. George not only meets this expectation, he also confirms his own and the individual AngloAmerican reader’s ignorance and innocence, when he says, “I never knew much about the treaty with Mexico, but I never knew we had acted so badly.” Don Mariano here responds that he thinks “but few Americans know,” but adds that the Congress had not anticipated the effects of its legislation. In this scene the Don comes across as a benevolent father figure whose knowledge, insight and tolerance invite George, and by analogy the Anglo-American reader to an intercultural dialogue. The pattern is repeated on several occasions throughout the novel; indeed, the chapter called “Spanish Land Grants Viewed Retrospectively,” approximately in the middle of the novel, is structured almost entirely as a dialogue between inquirer and explicator. Here it is Clarence who acts on behalf of the innocent and uninformed audience, and again the Don functions as explicator. In this particular chapter they discuss not only the contemporary situation of the Californios, but also the cultural and historical heritage of the region. The Don explains the original idea behind the large land grants given first by Spanish, then by Mexican governments to individuals (176), and Clarence, testifying that he never knew any of this, is much impressed by what he calls a “wise plan.” Clarence proceeds to assure Don Mariano that “not one American in a million knows of this outrage. If they did, they would denounce it in the bitterest language; they would not tolerate it.” Therefore Clarence voices the same excuse as George did earlier – that neither he nor the American people knew. This time, however, Don Mariano is less willing to offer ”absolution,” and answers that “they would denounce it perhaps, but they would tolerate

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it” (177). In the course of this conversation Don Mariano also employs the most common stereotypes in Anglo-American prejudice against Mexicans. Explaining to Clarence the background for the legislative practices the Californios are falling prey to, he says: Then the cry was raised that our land grants were too large; that a few lazy, thriftless, ignorant natives, holding such large tracts of land, would be a hindrance to the prosperity of the State, because such lazy people would never cultivate their lands, and were even too sluggish to sell them. The cry was taken up and became popular. It was so easy to upbraid, to deride, to despise the conquered race! (175).

We recognize here the essential rationales of colonial discourse, as well as an ideological stance that was particularly assumed in relation at the populations to the south of the United States. When they are sarcastically voiced in Don Mariano’s discourse, the stereotypes come across as monstrous and nonsensical, and this, no doubt, was also Ruiz de Burton’s intention.19 Shortly after this passage Don Mariano again returns to the limited influence ordinary citizens have on legislative matters, and he blames Anglo-American social and political indifference on the fact that the Mexicans in the region were too few to make an impact. So, after carefully making sure that Clarence has understood the trajectories by which the Californios’ predicament has come about, Don Mariano again invites to dialogue by pinning the issue of guilt on institutions rather than on people. Having elaborated for Clarence his people’s proud past, the Don says with great resignation: I am afraid there is no help for us native Californios. We must sadly fade and pass away. The weak and the helpless are always trampled in the throng. We must sink, go under, never to rise. If the Americans had been friendly toward us, and helped us with good, protective laws, our fate would have been different. But to legislate us into poverty is to legislate us into our graves. Their very contact is deadly to us.

19

There is, to my knowledge, no record of readers’ reception of The Squatter and the Don at the time it appeared, but it would be interesting to know how an AngloAmerican audience responded to these stereotypes within the construct of Don Mariano’s educated and sophisticated discourse.

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The monologue deeply affects Clarence: “And yet you do not hate us,” is his response. Not only does Don Mariano prove that he is willing to forgive the American people, he also makes clear that cultural and national unification will not be hampered by old grudges on the Californios part. Indeed, he even claims that he feels a “great attraction toward the American people,” and that he knows that only the “very mean and narrow-minded have harsh feelings” against his race (177). Therefore a pedagogical subtext imbues The Squatter and the Don with an ideological rationale that enforces the romantic closure at the end of the novel. The text gravitates toward resolution and reconciliation of the many dichotomies of race, ethnicity and politics, and in so doing points toward an appeasement of national and regional antagonisms that would coincide with the resolution of the romance itself and offer a space for new beginnings. At the end of the novel, however, all drives toward closure are reversed. The shift takes place on a structural rather than a textual level, and re-orients the narrative of reconciliation into a narrative of disruption. After the marriage between Clarence and Mercedes and the sorting out of financial affairs, it is decided that Doña Josefa, her two daughters Carlota and Rosario, and her youngest son Victoriano shall come to live with the newlyweds in their home in San Francisco. As Doña Josefa sits in her new rooms contemplating the wrongdoings that brought her husband to his grave, she receives a visit from an old friend who, having heard of Clarence’s financial position, “suddenly remembers” that she used to know the Alamares. Doña Josefa speaks of her grief and resentment, upon which the friend tells her that she “cannot speak against such rich people; San Francisco society will turn against” her. “Then it is a crime to speak of the wrongs we have suffered, but it is not a crime to commit those wrongs,” Doña Josefa replies. “I don’t know. I am not a moralist,” the friend says, after which Doña Josefa concludes: “Oh, very well, let it be so. Let the guilty rejoice and go unpunished, and the innocent suffer ruin and desolation. I slander no one, but shall speak the truth” (364). Even if there is another chapter following this, Doña Josefa is, in effect, the last of the characters to speak. The last chapter, “Out with the Invader,” stands outside the actual narrative plot and functions more as a political commentary by the author-narrator than as an integral part of the novel. Structured as a political statement and a warning against the national and international development of monopoly capi-

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talism, ”Out with the Invader” addresses the contemporary politics that led to the Alamar family’s downfall. The critique of accumulated power is central: Not infamy, but honor and wealth, is the portion of the men who corrupt and ruin and debase this country. Honor and wealth for the Napoleons of this land, whose power the sons of California can neither check, nor thwart, nor escape, nor withstand. (365)

On the level of narrative plot The Squatter and the Don therefore concludes on a note of defiance that contradicts the discourse of reconciliation. Doña Josefa’s defiant statement contests the Don’s pedagogical strategy and overturns it by emphasizing dispossession and loss rather than reconstruction and hope. Indeed, her very last words, “I slander no one, but shall speak the truth,” sound a note of determination and even of threat that forms a sharp contrast to the novel’s aspiration toward settlement and compromise. This new emphasis moreover conflates the construction of squatters and don as both being victimized by the monopoly, and reinstalls the Californios as different and other and occupying a distinct and particular space of divestment. Consequently the dichotomy the narrative initially establishes, and then seeks to eradicate between Californios and Anglos, is here reinscribed. The double typification of the Californios as simultaneously same (Anglo-Americans) and other (ethnic Californios) signals the author-narrator’s sensitivity to post-1848 cultural identity and the formative contexts within which this must be negotiated. This particular aspect of the novel moreover illustrates the culturological trauma that colonized people are often faced with. Stuart Hall argues that identity is production “which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.”20 The Squatter and the Don represents the internal cultural space after rupture, which both text and the reality it describes have a conflicted relationship to. This generates an ambivalent orientation toward the surrounding world, which underlies and informs The Squatter and the Don’s dissonant discourses. I have in mind here the way the novel gravitates toward cultural unification by attempting to 20

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader (1990), eds Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, New York: Colombia University Press, 1994, 392.

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reconcile the numerous dialectics of difference, and yet how the discourse of loss and dispossession surfaces alongside as defiance. The double-voiced discourse of simultaneous same and other refracts the inevitable ambiguity Hall describes as the inside of representation, an ambiguity that is further intensified by the novel’s temporal proximity to 1848. In order to apprehend the relationship between the double-voiced representations that ensue and what they represent, it is useful to read these discourses as constituting a culturological voice that refracts the conflicted and conflicting perceptions of its own internal reality.21 From this perspective The Squatter and the Don can be considered as a point of view, and functioning similarly to how Bakhtin describes the literary hero as a point of view: “the hero interests Dostoevsky as a particular point of view on the world and on oneself, as the position enabling a person to interpret and evaluate his own self and his surrounding reality.”22 Seeing The Squatter and the Don as a cultural embodiment of voice in a manner analogous to a literary character invites a reading that allows us to hear and appreciate the novel’s double-voiced or, rather, polyphonic quality. The analogy between the text as a voice refracting its own reality and the hero in literature refracting his can be further deepened: The polyphonic project is incompatible with a mono-ideational framework of the ordinary sort. …Dostoevsky’s hero is not only a discourse about himself and his immediate environment, but also a discourse about the world… This merging of the hero’s discourse about himself with his ideological discourse about the world greatly increases the direct signifying power of self-utterance, strengthens its internal resistance to all sorts of external finalization.23

21

I use the term “culturological” here to emphasize an approach to culture as diverse and dialogic, as what Bakhtin calls an “organic unity” with the capacity of “transcending itself, that is, exceeding its own boundaries” (Speech Genres, 135). This has implications for methodology, in that the idea of culture remains descriptive rather than normative, multivalent rather than polyvalent in its application. For a history and overview of the discipline of Culturology, see Ellen N. Berry and Mikhail N. Epstein, Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication, New York: St Martin's Press, 1999. 22 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 47. 23 Ibid., 78-79.

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The fact that The Squatter and the Don achieves both unification and reconciliation through the romance’s closure and at the same time maintains a position of resistance reflects the ambivalent time-space in which the text as voice originates. The merging of these conflicting discourses and the world from which they arise can be heard as a culturological self-utterance, a statement that signifies as a point of view. Indeed, it would be impossible to imagine a novel borne out of The Squatter and the Don’s time and space within what Bakhtin above calls “a mono-ideational framework.” The influence of the moment of rupture and crisis is such that the novel practically speaks from within crisis. This may furthermore account for the double-voicedness, the simultaneous representation of reconciliation and defiance in one and the same discourse. This is brought out more clearly when we also factor in what Bakhtin says about the relationship between the hero’s discourse and his surrounding world: “For it must be emphasized that in Dostoevsky’s world even agreement retains its dialogic character, that is, it never leads to a merging of voices and truths in a single impersonal truth, as occurs in the monologic world.”24 The passage bears on the architectonics of the cultural space that The Squatter and the Don speaks from. In the novel the emergence of an awareness of a MexicanAmerican cultural identity is informed by ideological conflicts of self and other that do not and cannot merge. Instead, the conflict is allowed space and is heard as the culturological voice’s discourse on what cultural awareness means. The Squatter and the Don can consequently be read as a mediator between several distinct strains of histories and ideologies at a point in time when these had been violently collapsed. The attempt to reconcile the established polarities of race and class, the pedagogical subtext’s invitation to inter-ethnic dialogue, and Dona Josefa’s defiance in the concluding paragraph all underscore the ambiguities and complexities involved in the production of cultural identity from within the new cultural construct. The fact that the structural as well as the ideological narration of this perplexing space is multi-directional and double-voiced furthermore illustrates the complicated processes of early Mexican-American cultural formation. By allowing the various discourses and dichotomies to be heard, Ruiz de Burton can be said to represent the budding 24

Ibid., 95.

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awareness of a Mexican-American cultural presence, one that, as I will return to throughout this book, is characterized precisely by ambiguities in relation to self as simultaneously same and other.

CHAPTER IV

The Appropriate(d) Hero: Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other.1

Apart from their differences of time and place, an important distinction between The Squatter and the Don and Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez is their political orientation. We saw how Ruiz de Burton portrayed the downfall of the landholding Californio elite during the last decades of the nineteenth century. George Washington Gómez focuses on the conditions of the lower working classes in the Texas Lower Rio Grande region at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both novels, however, rehearse the historical experience of dislocation and dispossession, on the individual as well as the communal level, and both represent historical events that shaped their regions and communities. In The Squatter and the Don historical circumstances are given plot significance in so far as the characters’ trajectories are inextricably tied into those of contemporary historical particularities. This is also very much the case in George Washington Gómez. As has been duly pointed out since the belated publication of George Washington Gómez, the novel provides insight into a period in Mexican-American history that may have been shrouded in even more obscurity than the early period after the annexation. Since Paredes did not revise the text after he originally wrote it in the latter part of the 1930s, the 1990 publication comes down to us “historically intact,” so to speak. The novel has been read as a modernist conceptualization of the self in a post-colonial world; as a commentary to acculturation under American imperialism; as a pre-Chicano working class novel and a re-statement of the corrido and its traditional hero figure; and as 1

Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 23-24.

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a response of resistance to historical-discursive practices.2 My own analysis of Paredes’ novel draws on much of this research, but I would like to focus more specifically on the structural and thematic relationship between the classical Bildungsroman genre and George Washington Gómez. I propose to read it as structurally assimilating its own time and place in such a way that it paradoxically generates integration of self and world in a context where disintegration is the main characteristic of both individual and communal existence. Paredes’ representation of history can fruitfully be read as a rather frightening aesthetization of processes of cultural assimilation. George Washington Gómez is commonly referred to as a Bildungsroman. Its actual relationship to the genre, however, is rarely problematized. This is not unique to this particular novel, but rather reflects a prevailing attitude to a large body of literary works we loosely refer to as novels of “formation.” Our understanding of the Bildungsroman genre and its emphasis on formal stringency has changed with historical and ideological changes concerning the role of the individual. Altered conceptions of what the self is, what its relationship to the society is, and even what such concepts as formation and maturity mean, have turned the focus toward theme rather than form. Some critics consequently not only question whether an ideal Bildungsroman formula exists today, but whether it ever

2

See Saldívar, Border Matters; Tim Libretti, “‘We can starve too’: Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez and the Proletarian Corrido,” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. II, 118-30; Leticia M. Garza-Falcon, “Américo Paredes’s Narratives of Resistance: Property, Labor, Education, Gender, and Class Relations,” in Gente Decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998, 156-97; and Ramón Saldívar, “Looking for a Master Plan: Faulker, Paredes, and the Colonial and Postcolonial Subject,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Philip M. Weinstein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 96-121. Saldívar’s discussion of George Washington Gómez’s place in the formation of American identity and ethnicity examines how Absalom, Absalom! and George Washington Gómez are both “involved in a modernist project of situating American identities within the local and hemispheric economies of personal and social praxis” (118). Where Faulkner addresses issues of subject formation within the parameters of racial and social ideologies and a de-colonizing world, Paredes tells a similar story of subject formation from the point of view of the internally colonized Mexican American (97). Both writers’ projects, Saldívar argues, are “linked to problematic notions of national ideology, and failed American identity patterns inherently linked to class and racial categories, and “stand as archetypal modern American fictions” (119-20).

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really existed at all.3 For all practical purposes, however, my discussion here assumes that there is a classical Bildungsroman tradition based in certain formal as well ideological factors, some of which do remain. These are determined by what Fritz Martini describes as “prerequisites that have to do with content, theme, and ideology and with its intended effect and function.”4 A more recent definition of the Bildungsroman has been offered by wa Nyatetu-Waigwa: “In the conventional Bildungsroman, Bildung is the process by which the world plays the role of moulder, marking and maturing the protagonist to the point where he can finally make a personal choice out of what is available to him, adopting an individual attitude towards life.”5 This description applies to George Washington Gómez, but then, which novel does it not apply to? I will argue that Paredes’ novel more specifically approximates the classical Bildungsroman formula as it was brought out in the period of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre. A striking paradox results, however. The classical Bildungsroman derives its structural and narrative meaning from an ideology of self that by the time George Washington Gómez was written had largely dissolved. One of the most important elements in that respect is in the genre’s traditional anticipation of a seamless convergence between the aspirations of self and those of society. The idea of such convergence was of course something modernity and modernism did away with, and the self is since then increasingly framed in terms of unique and unconstrained individualism. In the following I want to explore how these contradicting ideologies of self in relation to the world both surface in Paredes’s novel. Quite specific ideologies pertaining to a specific time in American history converge structurally and ideologically in the novel, and this assimilation of what Bakhtin calls real time is the most striking feature of George Washington Gómez as a Bildungsroman. The story of George Washington Gómez and his development from childhood through adolescence to adulthood is told in five parts. It takes place during the years between the outbreak of World War I and the dawn of World War II in the fictitious border town Jonesville-on3

For a discussion of this see, for instance, Marc Redfield, in Phantom Formation: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. 4 Fritz Martini, “Bildungsroman – Term and Theory,” in Reflection and Action, ed. James Hardin, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991, 24. 5 Wangari wa Nyatetu-Waigwa, The Liminal Novel, Berlin: Peter Lang, 1996, 1.

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the-Grande, Texas. These are also the years of the last uprisings on the United States – Mexican border, as well as of the Depression. One characteristic feature of the classical Bildungsroman was its premise that ”the biography of a young individual was the most meaningful viewpoint for the understanding and the evolution of history.”6 This is also true of George Washington Gómez. The ambiguity of the Borderland and the competing ideological trajectories of the time of the narrative are filtered through the protagonist’s story. Even as the baby boy receives his name the conflicts facing the community and its individual members are dramatized. After several suggestions, such as the grandmother’s José Angel (“It would ruin him for life,” protested Feliciano [the maternal uncle]), and Feliciano’s Venustiano (“Like that cabron of a Caranza?” exclaimed the grandmother), María, the baby’s mother, eventually expresses her own preference: “I would like my son…” she began. She faltered and reddened. “I would like him to have a great man’s name. Because he is going to grow up to be a great man who will help his people.” “My son,” said Gumersindo [the father] playfully, “he is going to be a great man among the Gringos.” (15-16)7

The discussion ends when Gumersindo recalls “the great North American, he who was a general and fought the soldiers of the king … Wachinton. Jorge Wachinton” (16) To the grandmother, however, the foreign-sounding name comes across as “Guálinto, Guálinto Gómez.” The name they eventually choose for the newborn boy is George Washington Gómez. All through his childhood and adolescence, however, he will only use the grandmother’s mispronunciation, the Mexican-Indian sounding Guálinto. The naming of the child frames the locus of the protagonist’s Bildung and stakes out the course for a formative journey through the ambiguous space of the various identities it comprises and that are also embedded in his name. As Walter Sokel puts it, “Bildung proceeds by interchange with other characters, by exposure to varying locales and social milieus.”8 The purpose of this is first and last to 6

Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, London: Verso, 1987, 227. 7 All subsequent page references are to Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez, Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990. 8 Walter Sokel, “The Blackening of the Breast: The Narrative of Existential Education

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confront the protagonist with his potential. In George Washington Gómez this is most evidently brought out in Gualinto’s experience in school, which is also very appropriate in relation to genre conventions. Since the protagonist of the classical Bildungsroman must eventually reconcile himself with society, society’s institutionalized systems such as school carry the function of steering the protagonist into a proper self-perception. As a major disseminator of societal standards, the school in George Washington Gómez provides Guálinto with the accepted norms for his continuous and strenuous maneuvering between identities. In first grade Guálinto quickly realizes that public space has no room for his Mexican self-identity other than his Anglo sounding name. School teaches him to be an American, but “at home and on the playground he was a Mexican”: It would be several years before he fully realized that there was not one single Guálinto Gómez. That in fact there were many Guálinto Gómezes, each of them double like the images reflected on the two glass surfaces of a show window. (147)

In his own, private world the Mexican Guálinto Gómez thrives: at home he listens to his uncle Feliciano’s friends tell stories in Spanish about the border troubles and about Mexico, and he often daydreams of becoming a hero like for instance Gregorio Cortéz. In school his loyalty lies with the little group of fellow Mexicans in his class. At the same time, however, he also envies the Americans: “George Washington Gómez secretly desired to be a full-fledged, complete American without the shameful encumberment of his Mexican race” (148). The ideological parameters for the Bildungsroman’s narration are consequently defined by a similar dialectics we saw being played out in The Squatter and the Don, that of self as simultaneously same and other. The narration of the individual’s negotiation of the dichotomy between autonomy and socialization that is so central to the Bildungsroman genre is therefore a complicated undertaking in George Washington Gómez. Moretti argues that the Bildung process in the classical tradition of the genre comes about when “one’s and R.M. Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Brigge,” in Reflection and Action, ed. James Hardin, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991, 332.

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formation as an individual in and for oneself coincides without rifts with one’s social integration as a simple part of the whole.”9 In other words, it is possible only when what Sokel calls the “utopian synthesis of individuality and socialization” can be brought to fruition.10 Given the time-space of George Washington Gómez, where disunity extends to the protagonist’s interior as well as to the exterior world (the individual as well as the community), such synthesis of self with society seems impossible. And yet, despite the antithetical nature of these premises, Paredes’ novel displays a number of features that are part of a journey precisely toward this goal. I have in mind for instance the repertoire of novelistic episodes designed to give the protagonist learning and experience; how the protagonist grows up under the influence of a “promise”; how maturity, accomplished through a contract with society is sealed with marriage; and, finally, how the narrative ending coincides with final meaning: destiny coinciding with design. The ambiguity in Guálinto’s sense of identity early in the novel echoes the ambivalence of his name, and while he remains loyal to “his people,” his secret attraction to what is American is reflected in his long-standing infatuation with a girl who differs from the other Mexicans in his class by being Spanish: “[Her grandfather] was no longer a Mexican. He was now a Spaniard. And as a Spaniard the grandfather amassed a great fortune …” (138). We see here an illustration of the function and ideology behind the Fantasy heritage I commented on in chapter I. As historian David Gutiérrez explains, “By referring to themselves as Spanish in their dealings with AngloAmericans, members of the indigenous elite hoped to escape the prejudice exhibited toward Mexicans in the Southwest.”11 In the case of María Elena and her family, this is precisely the underlying rationale. A slightly ironic tone sneaks into Paredes’ description of this Spanish family, however, because clearly there is little to distinguish María Elena from the other Mexicans in her class. In senior high school she and Guálinto become sweethearts, but the relationship ends when the class go to a club for their school Christmas party, ironically enough a place called La Casa Mexicana. The bouncers refuse to let Mexicans inside, and for the first time in his 9

Moretti, Way of the World, 17. Sokel, “Blackening of the Breast,” 332. 11 Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, 32-33. 10

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life Guálinto is directly confronted with a choice between identities. He approaches the door with María Elena on his arm, Japanese and Anglo kids in front of them walking unhindered through the door: “Are you Mexican?” [the bouncer] asked. “I am,” Guálinto said. “He’s not,” María Elena said, tugging at his arm. “He’s a Spaniard. Can’t you see he’s white?” “I’m a Mexican,” Guálinto said. María Elena released his arm. The bouncer smiled sardonically. “Come on,” he said. “Make up your mind.” (173)

Guálinto decides to stay with the other three Mexicans in his class and lets María Elena go inside without him. The incident enhances his awareness of the divides he must negotiate in order to find a place in the Borderland. The narrative consequently gravitates around the issue of identity in a manner typical of the Bildungsroman formula, consistently revolving around the final resolution of the individual’s position in relation to his world. The main function of the above episode is to test the protagonist. In the classical Bildungsroman incidents like this figure in the narrative as episodes of potential meaning: “The novelistic episode is almost never meaningful in itself. It becomes so because someone – in the Bildungsroman usually the protagonist – gives it meaning.”12 These are encounters with the surrounding world that potentially and often eventually constitute the protagonist’s Bildung. Their significance is revealed only in the fullness of time, since the choices the protagonist makes will become meaningful when the journey toward maturity and completion is brought together with the protagonist’s resolution of self versus the surrounding world. The process stands in intimate relation to the moment of crisis in the narrative. This is where events, conversations and experiences converge and are given meaning, and the protagonist comes to realize what way he must chose – without suffering a debilitation of self. Such, in effect, is the essence of Sokel’s utopian synthesis. Yet, as George Washington Gómez’s Bildung progresses, the prospect of such painless convergence of self and world does not seem all that utopian. The novelistic episodes of potential meaning, major and minor ones, are thematically centered on a politics of identity where the dichotomy of Mexican versus American are continuously 12

Moretti, Way of the World, 45.

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played out. The synthesis of individuality and socialization consequently hinges on the protagonist’s successful resolution of the question of who he is, which can be answered only when he recognizes where he belongs. This narrative pattern in George Washington Gómez is closely connected to another characteristic feature of the classical Bildungsroman, namely the fulfillment of a promise planted in early childhood. We recall the naming process in the beginning of the novel, where the mother says that she wants her son to become a great man among his people. This promise, or legacy, which is perhaps a more suitable term in this case, provides a powerful ideological stance for Guálinto’s childhood and adolescence: His mother, his uncle, and even Carmen had come to take it for granted that he would grow up to be a great man as his dead father had wished. A great man who would help and lead his people to a better kind of life. … Sometimes they thought he would be a great lawyer who would get back the lands they had lost. At other times they were certain he would become a great orator who would convince even the greatest of their enemies of the rightness of their cause. (125)

Indeed, as time passes this conviction assumes an almost religious intensity; “a momentousness that grew with the years, as time made the memory of Gumersindo Gómez more nebulous and therefore more heroic” (155). Another promise, however, has been made, one that affects Guálinto only indirectly as he grows up. When Texas Rangers killed his father Gumersindo, he made Feliciano swear that he would never tell the son how his father died: “My son. Mustn’t know. Ever. No hate, no hate” (21). Even if Feliciano believes that it is Guálinto’s right to know, he keeps his promise until the boy is grown. As we will see, the full implications of his father’s legacy are brought out toward the end of Guálinto’s Bildung. Throughout George Washington Gómez occasions invested with potential meaning all seem to prepare the protagonist for the anticipated position as leader of his people. One such occasion is when he embraces the idea of registering in school as Guálinto Gómez rather than George Washington Gómez, thus signaling the prioritizing of his ethnic heritage. Another such occasion is his choice of his Mexican friends over María Elena; yet another when he fiercely demands that they should be taught the Mexican version of Texan

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history in class (150). One of the most significant episodes, however, is the encounter with the Mexican girl Mercedes, whom he decides to marry and live with “the real people he belonged with” (247). Guálinto is invited to Mercedes’ fifteenth birthday party by chance, and he is overwhelmed by how welcome he is made to feel in her home. That his odd-sounding name is recognized for the Aztec semblance it reflects (Guatémoc) is a novel and reassuring experience. As for Mercedes herself, “she was pretty. Very dark but very pretty, in a way quite different from María Elena’s white-skinned beauty … Pretty, but not for him, he thought” (243). His feelings for Mercedes are not the reverential ones he has nourished for María Elena (“the love he had felt for María Elena was of a different kind” [254]), but rather of a more direct and sexual nature. In his comparison of the two women we hear the faint echo of colonial discourse’s dichotomous conception of sexuality and race/color. The light-skinned Spanish girl is associated with purity and dignity, with civilization and decency, whereas the dark Mercedes elicits attraction for the exotic and objectified other, the dark and adventurous. The juxtaposition of Mercedes with María Elena is also a reflection of Guálinto’s double consciousness, and it underlines the complex ambiguities involved in his search for his proper place in the world. At the night of the birthday party Guálinto comes to feel that he belongs and is acknowledged, and as he leaves he promises Mercedes that he will see her again: Yes, he would go back to her. These were his people, the real people he belonged with. His place was among them, not the ‘Spaniards’ like the Osunas. He would marry Mercedes and live on the farm. He would go back. Tomorrow night he would go back. (247)

But he never does. Circumstances force him into a new episodic occasion, this time with implications that turn the episode into a moment of crisis, the point in the Bildungsroman where the protagonist understands how he must chose in order to successfully complete his journey. The critical moment occurs the same night Guálinto returns from Mercedes. His life is already turbulent; graduation day is fast approaching and he is ill prepared because the Depression has forced him to take extra work. Memories of María Elena still plague him, and on his way home from Mercedes he kills in self defense a man he perceives as threatening him. The man turns out

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to be an uncle he has never met, and the event forces Feliciano to finally tell the truth about Gumersindo’s death. When Guálinto asks Feliciano where he was when Rangers killed his father, Feliciano chooses not to tell his nephew about his close connections to the Mexican rebels, since these are still crimes for which he can be prosecuted. Guálinto consequently assumes that Feliciano must have been a coward, a man who let his father die while he himself was hiding, and the image of the man he has so greatly admired is shattered. All of this comes together in a moment of profound doubt regarding the purpose of his life. To punish his uncle, Guálinto turns against him on the issue he knows matters most to Feliciano: “I’m not going to be a great man. I’ll just be another Mexican with the seat of his pants torn and patched up. That’s all I’ll ever be. And I don’t want to help my people. Help my people? What for? Let them help themselves, the whole lot of ragged, dirty pelados …” (265)

So he challenges the entire ideological framework he has been brought up with. A little later, however, Guálinto is made to understand that Feliciano was, indeed, a border-hero, but that he had to leave in order to take care of Guálinto and his mother and sisters after Gumersindo died. The fourth and the penultimate parts of the novel ends with Feliciano and Guálinto reconciling, and with the latter getting ready to go off to college. Everything he has so far been prepared for attains a unified purpose he agrees to accept. In what Ramón Saldívar has called the pursuit of a “singularly authentic ethnicity,” Guálinto at this point stakes out a route of internal as well as external consistency.13 Rebellious adolescence yields to mature and adult consent, and he is ready to become, as has been expected of him, a great man among his people: socialization converges with individuality, meaning with purpose. As the penultimate part of the book ends we consequently have the impression that the process of Guálinto’s socialization is being wrapped up. The end of his formative journey illustrates the intimate connection between the ultimate self-realization and acceptance of society’s claims that follow the moment of crisis in the Bildung narrative. The happy resolution with its “triumph of meaning over 13

Saldívar, “Looking for a Master Plan,” 118.

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time” underlines not only the meaningfulness of former encounters with the world but, as Moretti notes, that, “the ending and the aim of the narration coincide. The story ends as soon as an intentional design has been realized: a design which involves the protagonist and determines the overall meaning of events.”14 In Guálinto’s case the parameters of his life has been laid down by a promise of greatness among his people, re-iterated and confirmed by the choices he has made along the path toward maturity. When the fourth part of the book ends, the road seems open for the final consumption of Guálinto’s Bildung, marriage. For in the classical tradition, the Bildung process is not entirely complete, nor the ending entirely happy without marriage. An unsurpassed “metaphor for the social contract” in the Bildungsroman tradition, marriage stands for far more than the agreement to bond between two individuals; it is also the ultimate contract between the individual and the world. Commenting on Ivan Ilych’s marriage in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilytch, Sokel notes that, “He chose the woman he was to marry because he thought this choice the proper one in the opinion of his superiors.”15 The closure that marriage represents in the Bildungprocess is the final reconciliation of the individual with the expectations society has placed on him. Since the mediation of the socialization process is central in the tradition of the genre, Bildung is unthinkable without a pedagogical lesson. The acceptance through marriage of certain responsibilities in and to society underlines this lesson: unhampered individualism and freedom are suppressed so that the communally controlling forces can bring the individual into acquiescence and recognition of his proper place. The content of this concluding ritual in the classical Bildungsroman is rarely entirely unexpected, since the protagonist’s negotiation of the many episodes that have led to the moment of crisis has already indicated the nature of the future resolution. Therefore, in George Washington Gómez, the social contract we anticipate is, firstly, Guálinto’s acceptance of his responsibilities to his community and, secondly, his marrying a woman such as Mercedes in order to sanction the negotiation of an autonomous (and proper) identity. However, marriage as sanctioning and celebratory ritual in George Washington Gómez transforms this narrative into a mocking tale of 14 15

Moretti, Way of the World, 55. Sokel, “Blackening of the Breast,” 334.

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meaning’s triumph over time. In the fifth and final part of the novel, “Leader of His People,” several years have passed. Guálinto is an educated lawyer working for a Washington company and has returned to Jonesville on a job assignment with his wife Ellen. She is an AngloAmerican sociologist doing research on Mexican labor in central Texas. Her father is a former Texas Ranger, but Ellen assures Guálinto that “he never killed any – anybody” (283). We learn that on their first visit to her parents in Colorado the father has made amply clear how he feels about the relationship: “So you’re Ellen’s Meskin,” he said, without getting up from his easy chair .… “You look white but you’re a goddamn Meskin. And what does your mother do but give you a nigger name. George Washington Go-maize.” (284)

After this, Guálinto changes his name to George G. Gómez, the G for Garcia, his mother’s maiden name. The narrative has all along anticipated an ending where Guálinto/George will find a place that fulfills his destiny of becoming a great man who will help his people. But this is only one part of the promise. The real significance of Gumersindo’s joking comment when the boy was given his name, that he become “a great man among the Gringos,” emerges in the final part of the novel as the real determinant of the design behind Guálinto’s Bildung. As it turns out, George G. Gómez is not simply a lawyer; he is a first lieutenant in counterintelligence. His assignment in Jonesville is to “watch for sabotage and infiltration by German or Japanese agents” (299). In a sudden reversal of all anticipations, the utopian synthesis between individual and society is paradoxically completed within parameters that join the disintegrated time-space of George Washington Gómez with the integration that the Bildungsroman genre insists on. The protagonist decides to accept society’s claims, and thus makes the schoolteacher’s word come true: “We are all Americans now” (150). Through his choice, however, George Washington Gómez relinquishes the private and Mexican part of his individuality. Only then is his Bildung brought to successful completion, with his marriage to an Anglo-American woman as the emblem of his success. This is consistent within the ironic context of the moment he received his name, and revives Gumersindo’s wish on his deathbed that his son must not hate. There can no longer be negotiations and insecurities of

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identities, nor conflicting orientations that result from being at once same and other: Guálinto has been thoroughly disassociated from George in an act of integration that satisfies the genre’s structural and thematic purpose. George renounces everything Guálinto stands for, even the innocence of his childhood. George G. Gómez’s self seems to emerge without rifts, even if in the last part he still has to fight off some memories of the past. As he wakes up the first morning on assignment in Jonesville, he has the same dream he used to have as a child, where he leads his forces in battle against the Anglo-American intruders and, not only defeats them, but re-conquers “all the territory west of the Mississippi River and recovers Florida as well.” He wakes up annoyed and asks himself: “Why do I keep on fighting battles that were won and lost a long time ago? Lost by me and won by me too? They have no meaning now” (282). This disavowal of the past extends also to his future, in that he will never return to live in Jonesville, nor pass his Mexican heritage on to his children. He also renounces all claims to his uncle’s farmland, and in so doing disclaims his forefathers’ inheritance. And so the journey has come to an end, a closure that illustrates another characteristic feature of the classical Bildungsroman: in order for Bildung to be truly Bildung, narrative time must stop. Moretti reflects on this as follows: For the plot sequence to stop, therefore, a ‘merging’ of the protagonist with his new world is necessary. It is a further variant of the metaphorical field of ‘closure’; the happy acceptance of bonds; ‘meaningful’ life as a tightly-closed ring; the stability of the social connections as the foundation of the text’s meaning.16

When George reaches maturity within the framework of his father’s ironic remark, narrative time stops in a double sense. Firstly, the plot sequence as such comes to a halt because the protagonist has reached the goal of his journey. Secondly, the direction the Bildung process has taken terminates the cultural homeland and its spatial temporality. The affirmation of the self that goes by the name of George Gómez implies a negation of Guálinto, and this is how it must be. George’s rejection of his old homeland brings structure and subject matter together. We may ask if this would not also be the case 16

Moretti, Way of the World, 26.

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had he chosen the anticipated completion of becoming a great man among his people. To this I will suggest that within the generic framework that presupposes eventual integration between self and world, this would not be possible. In order for the Bildung-process to be resolved harmoniously, experience of self cannot suffer from a fraught perception of self as simultaneously same and other. The genre requires denouement, and the legacy of greatness can be fulfilled only when the protagonist chooses between private (internal) and public (external) worlds and in so doing resolves the conflict between structural unification and thematic disintegration. A second look at the relationship between George Washington Gómez and the corrido tradition may serve to throw some light on the novel’s hero problematic rejections and renunciations. References in the novel to the corrido are first and foremost related to Guálinto himself. We recall the ambitious dream in childhood of becoming the one who avenges all injustices: “Just wait till I’m a man! I’ll get our land back. I’ll be like Gregorio Cortez and Cheno Cortinas and all of them.” … Feliciano watched the boy thoughtfully. “I’ll kill all the Gringos and the rinches, too, and drive them away from here.” (103)

As we saw, the adult George G. Gómez still dreams, but only in his sleep, and he dismisses these betrayals of the subconscious as annoying and meaningless residues of a past that is no longer his. In a thwarted way, however, his life trajectory adheres to that of the classical corrido hero. He is typically a common, peaceful working man who finds himself in an uncommon situation where cultural and historical forces are beyond his control. The corrido hero is forced to give up his natural way of life in order to defend his home, his family, and his community. In struggling to achieve social justice, his concern for his own personal life and his own solitary fate must be put aside for the sake of the collective life of his social group.17 The corrido and the Bildungsroman converge in that they both demand that the hero/protagonist subject his “unfettered” individuality to the demands placed on him by the community. George G. Gómez, however, reverses the ideological content of both corrido and community and 17

For more on the corrido tradition, see Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand, and also chapter 2 in Saldívar, Chicano Narrative.

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emerges instead as a new and monstrous kind of border hero. In José David Saldívar’s words, “George Washington Gómez reexamines – ironically as the title suggests – the decline of the corrido’s heroic age and the rise of ethnogenesis on the border.”18 The exact nature of this reinvention of self brings us to a structural problem in George Washington Gómez, a rupture – literally – in the Bildungsroman pattern. The protagonist’s choice between worlds is made in complete silence; that is to say, there are no indications in the text of what prompted the radical re-orientation in his journey. Between the end of the second last part of the novel, where Guálinto leaves for college, and the beginning of the last, where he has returned as George Gómez, there is a narrative void. This is an unexpected complication in an otherwise stringent narrative, and the reader’s immediate impulse may simply be to read into the rift a missing novelistic episode of critical momentum. One could argue that the narrative gap breaks with the Bildungsroman’s strong educational incentive, where it is crucial that what prompts the protagonist’s realization of self is imparted on the reader. However, instead I propose that the gap of silence in George Washington Gómez constitutes the ultimate moment of crisis in and by itself. The silence, which so completely enshrouds the protagonist, is essential to the textual as well as the contextual integrity of the novel’s structure. The rupture in George Washington Gómez is not simply empty, dead space, it is dynamic and acts in a very specific way and for very specific purposes pertaining to the text’s temporal grounding: it negates. The silence can be read as the negation of memory and of the past; it expresses a monologism that seeks to conform and acculturate simply by silencing those aspects of the protagonist’s existence that do not belong. More than that, silence here is of a double kind. It is silencing and it is silence – action and reaction. Silencing is the moment of crisis in the protagonist’s Bildung, and silence is his response. The rift is consequently the narrative visualization of how hegemonic discourse obtains the individual’s consent within the ideological parameters of dominant culture. By the same token the gap of silence is also the representation of the protagonist’s response: he has suppressed and voluntarily forgotten the private components of his individuality, his

18

Saldívar, Border Matters, 43.

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Mexican cultural heritage. I deliberately use the word “voluntarily” here. The individual’s voluntary acceptance of social laws is the ultimate aim of the Bildung-process because this, and only this, testifies to a higher level of understanding in relation to the world. When George briefly returns to his homeland we witness his consent as response. Seeing but all too clearly the political and ideological implications of his nephew’s choice in general and his job in particular, Feliciano says ironically: “I hope you’re smart enough not to mistake a slant-eyed Indian from southern Mexico for a Japanese agent. That has been done before, you know” (299). “The leader for his people,” Feliciano ironically comments, to which George responds that he has had a meeting with the “people,” a “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.” And then, in a final act of repudiation of both his past and his father, he says: “Mexicans will always be Mexicans. A few of them, like some of those would-be politicos, could make something of themselves if they would just do like I did. Get out of this filthy Delta, as far away as they can, and get rid of their Mexican Greaser attitudes.” (300)

George’s words not only speak for the legitimization of his own choice, but also for the pedagogical lesson others can draw from it. His father’s legacy of cultural reconciliation, as it were, attains new meanings as the son reaches the end of his journey. The following exchange between George and Feliciano ensues: “I’ll tell you,” his uncle said. “This is one of those times when I wish I believed in another life after death.” “It is?” “Yes. Then I could look forward to seeing your father in purgatory or limbo or wherever it is that Mexican yokels go. We could sit down and have a good long talk about you.” George smiled. “I didn’t know you had a sense of humor,” he said. “I don’t, “ his uncle said.” (302)

The silent gap as a moment of crisis in Guálinto/George’s Bildung takes on narrative as well as structural agency. Silence here performs a role Foucault describes as an “element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all

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strategies.”19 The discursive gap of silencing and silence functions precisely as part of such over-all strategies, and it is inextricably linked to the particular space-time of the narrative. In this capacity George Washington Gómez transgresses its novelistic boundaries and moves into the context of its historical-political moment. The way the narrative refracts its own temporality and engages with strategies of political and cultural discursive practices can be read up against how Bakhtin describes the assimilation of time in the Bildungsroman In “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism” he analyses post-nineteenth century Bildungsroman from the point of view of how the image of man in literature gradually is immersed in his actual time-space. The Bildungsroman hero assumes plot significance in and for himself, and rather than walking “untouched” through the world he internalizes it and refracts its implications by and for himself: he assimilates “real historical time.”20 The following passage bears significantly on the protagonist in George Washington Gómez, and I quote it at length: He [the hero] emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him. He is forced to become a new, unprecedented type of human being. What is happening here is precisely the emergence of a new man. The organizing force held by the future is therefore extremely great here – and this is not, of course, the private biographical future, but the historical future .… The image of the emerging man begins to surmount its private nature (within certain limits, of course) and enters into a completely new, spatial sphere of historical existence.21

The Bildung of Guálinto/George and the contradictions and limitations of his pursuit of identity can be seen as resulting from the “historical emergence of the world itself” and the “organizing force” of the future. The contradictions lie in conflicting temporalities, in the collision between two different epochs, each with its own immense 19

Michel Foucault, An Introduction: The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books, 1978, I, 27. 20 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 21. 21 Ibid., 23-24.

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reserves of meanings. The Guálinto who leaves for college with the implied aim of becoming a great man among his people belongs to a space defined by his ethnic membership in a traditionally Mexican community, a space that also poses cultural and political resistance to Americanization and acculturation. The George who emerges an educated lawyer, however, belongs to an entirely different space circumscribed by the ideological perimeters of modern capitalism and a correspondingly individualized conception of self. From the minute he was born, these two spheres have co-existed in George Washington Gómez’s consciousness. Engaged in a continuous dialogue he has, indeed, lived “on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to another.” The new George emerges alongside the emergence of a new, assimilated, and assimilating world of cultural Americanization. 22 The negation of one temporality with its “boundless masses of (forgotten) contextual meanings” is compellingly brought forth in the novel’s structural faithfulness to its own moment, and is an analogy of the historical repression of Mexican culture in the Southwest.23 The silencing of Guálinto can be read as the ideological silencing of a whole culture and the memories it harbors. This tale of the loss of memory consequently illustrates the essence of the colonizing ideology’s predatory nature: the ultimate measure of success is the extent to which the colonized can be made to forget his origin. Here George Washington Gómez’s relationship to the classical Bildungsroman is also at its most poignant, because, as Wulf Koepke has pointed out, the Bildung-process is to a “high degree a process of acculturation, of adapting to existing societal structures.”24 The insistence on integration and unification in a time and a place that structurally and ideologically resist acculturated unity is furthermore the result of a need to accommodate to what Bakhtin in the quote above calls a “new, spatial sphere of historical existence.” 22

When Paredes was once asked why he let story end this way, he said that he intended it to be a warning against forces coming from among “one’s own.” I do not think we need his words to see such a message clearly inscribed in his text. Paredes’ commentary was brought to my attention at a conference in Houston in December of 2000. 23 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 170. 24 Wulf Koepke, “Bildung and the Transformation of Society: Jean Paul’s Titan and Flegeljahre,” in Reflection and Action, ed. James Hardin, Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1991, 231.

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This is a sphere where the individual’s success hinges on his ability to conform to, in this case, dominant society’s demand for assimilation. What better way for a narrative so deeply rooted in its temporal moment of writing than to relate the process of assimilation as the story of cultural appropriation? Appropriation, that is, of the individual into recognizing his proper place by Foucault’s over-all strategies and Bakhtin’s forces of historical future. Unification is brought to its completion not only by George Washington/G. Gómez’s acceptance of dominant society’s demands, but also by his internalizing them. Indeed, by appropriating them as his own, the protagonist upholds his end of the classical Bildungsroman contract: It is also necessary that, as a ‘free individual’, not as a fearful subject but as a convinced citizen, one perceives the social norms as one’s own. One must internalize them and fuse external compulsion and internal impulses into a new unity until the former is no longer distinguishable from the latter.25

On both sides of the silence in George Washington Gómez we locate appropriation as act and reaction, which turns the novel into a tale whose literary structure parallels and intersects its ideologicalhistorical structure. This generates not only a tightly woven image of a certain time-space in Mexican-American cultural and literary history, but also an astute criticism of cultural hegemony. Here the aforementioned dream George has toward the end of the novel is significant. It is the only thing left of Guálinto, and it persists as a reminder of his cultural past. Since the appropriate(d) protagonist of George Washington Gómez is unable to eradicate these memories from his sleeping consciousness, they remain a kernel of hope in an otherwise profoundly pessimistic tale of cultural destruction.

25

Moretti, Way of the World, 16.

CHAPTER V

Exercises in Liminality: Tomás Rivera’s … And the Earth Did not Devour Him

Few texts are as emblematic of the Chicano Florecimiento (the Blossoming) as Tomás Rivera’s …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (…y no se lo trago la tierra). It was published in Spanish in 1971, and immediately carved out a place for itself in Mexican-American and Chicano literary history where it stands as a unique testimony to the plight and endurance of Mexican-American farm workers, and to the rise and consolidation of a Chicano cultural consciousness. Moreover, the powerful account cannot be separated from its author’s own, personal experience and first-hand knowledge of the conditions which the farm workers were and are subjected to.1 The merits of … And the Earth Did Not Devour Him does not, however, lie with its subject matter alone; indeed, it is impossible to begin a discussion of this work without a note on the formal challenges it poses to its readers and critics. Structural fragmentation and temporal disjuncture permeate tierra on all levels.2 The text begins with an introductory story entitled “The Lost Year,” continues with thirteen untitled vignettes and twelve titled stories in alternation, and ends with the story “Under the House.” The first and last stories frame the book as distinctly introductory and concluding narratives, and are the only instances where one can 1

Rivera writes: “These people [the migrant workers] were and perhaps may be worse off than slaves. The slave is an investment and is protected. The migrant worker never had any protection because he was really not an investment for the exploiter and thus worker under the conditions of slavery without the most rudimentary benefits” (Tomas Rivera, “Remembering, Discovery and Volition in the Literary Imaginative Process,” in Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works (1975), ed. Julián Olivares, Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995, 365). Rivera’s observation should also be seen in relation to the termination of the Bracero program in 1964, when what little guarantees the migrant farm workers had were taken away. 2 Following the tradition in Rivera scholarship, I refer to the book as tierra.

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positively assert the identity of the same narrator-protagonist. The vignettes read for the most part like brief fragments of thoughts or conversations, sometimes explicitly related to the stories preceding or following, at other times only by conjecture or, indeed, not at all. The stories are generally longer than the vignettes, and range from firstperson and third-person narratives to monologues and dialogues. The narrative voices in the book are not one, but many, sometimes heard as a chorus. Some critics consequently argue that tierra is a short story collection, others that it is a short story composite, or a collage, but most read it as a novel.3 The novelistic readings take a variety of approaches and arguments into account; all, however, rely on varying degrees of conjecture. For instance, a common approach is that the stories represent the twelve months of a year, real or allegorical, which the (or a) protagonist throughout the text remembers and recaptures.4 This view is difficult to argue consistently, though, since the stories and vignettes appear in chronological disorder, and their thematic agendas are incompatible with a narrative temporal movement or a fixed narrative point of view. Since tierra’s first story indicates the beginning of a narrative told by one narrator-protagonist, the reader anticipates a structural continuation. There are, however, a number of narrative-logistical hurdles to overcome in order to make such a linear reading plausible. One is the actual structural disorganization of the text, which disrupts the correspondence between themes and temporal narrative movement. However, the diffuse identity of the narrator/protagonist and his uncertain function in the text is by far the most difficult challenge to a novelistic reading of tierra, and it undermines theories that simultaneously try to preserve the fragmentary nature of the text. Nevertheless, one of the most rewarding readings of tierra is as a novel of formation. Despite some conceptual problems, some very 3

Some critics have categorized the stories and vignettes according to themes, others according to the various genres that are represented in order to show that tierra is not a novel. See for instance Eliud Martínez, “Tomás Rivera: Witness and Storyteller,” in International Studies in Honor of Tomás Rivera, ed. Julián Olivares, Houston: Arte Público Press, 1986, 39-52, and Julian Olivares, Introduction, in Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works, Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992, 13-46. 4 In a footnote Julián Olivares quotes Rolando Hinojosa as having related to him that “in the original manuscript for tierra the twelve stories had the months for titles” (Julian Olivares, “The Search for Being, Identity and Form in the Work of Tomás Rivera,” in International Studies in Honor of Tomás Rivera, 79).

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useful literary as well as cultural perspectives result. The typical tripartite structure of the Bildungsroman, that is, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, along with the discernible path of nascent awareness that runs through it can no doubt be delineated in tierra. The question is, whose path are we tracing? Some interpretations avoid this dilemma by positing the narrator-protagonist as a centre of consciousness, which proposes to conceive of the protagonist as a kind of structuring principle. In some ways this reading resolves the problem of the protagonist’s identity versus subject formation by rendering him a non-person, a textual medium through which the unspecificity of the communal is negotiated. Ramón Saldívar suggests along these lines that the narrator-protagonist functions as a chronotopic point around “which the collective subjective experiences of Rivera’s Texas-Mexican farm workers coalesce, forming a communal oral history.”5 To what extent this approach actually settles the structural and temporal disorganization is arguable, but it opens up for some interesting theoretical possibilities with respect to the narration of formation itself – quite apart from the issue of the protagonist’s identity. These are related to how tierra distributes its emphasis on the three main constituent parts in the formative process: where the Bildungsroman typically underlines – at least pedagogically – the moment of crisis and the ensuing and concluding realization of the self in relation to the world (as we saw in the previous chapter), tierra expounds a structural and thematic emphasis on the “adolescent,” middle phase. In tierra the Bildung-narrative’s paradigmatic moment of crisis and understanding of self are both contained in the concluding narrative, which in turn leaves almost the entire text to represent a period of trials and tests. This emphasis on the middle phase yields a discourse fraught with crisis and open-endedness, an oscillation and uncertain progression towards a resolution that on closer inspection turns out to be a resolution deferred. The ambiguity brings to mind certain aspects of crisis and crisisdiscourse, which Bakhtin elaborates on in relation to Dostoevsky’s works. He suggests that, “the great dialogue in Dostoevsky is organized as an unenclosed whole of life itself, life poised on the threshold.”6 The same idea is echoed in “Form and Time in the 5 6

Saldívar, Chicano Narrative, 75. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 63.

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Chronotope,” where Bakhtin refers to the threshold chronotope as a narrative principle that is grounded in the inherently unfinalized and open-ended nature of the threshold image itself.7 The temporal aspect of the threshold is in this sense absolved from the constraints of biographical (and chronological) time, and retains a quality of crisis time that has duration beyond an actual and definite point in time. The property of threshold time as defined by crisis is perhaps better grasped if we turn to how this image works in Dostoevsky, where action primarily occurs at the following points: “up, down, the stairway, the threshold, the foyer, the landing take on the meaning of a ‘point’ where crisis, radical change, an unexpected turn of fate takes place, where decisions are made, where the forbidden line is overstepped, where one is renewed or perishes.”8 Action, then, takes place on borders – at a safe distance from the absolutes of conceptual centers.9 All of this bear on tierra not only in terms of the actual setting of the Borderland, but rather on the relationship between this ambiguous geography and the adolescent middle phase the book focuses on. I will propose that these two landscapes, the geographical and the psychological, converge in a state of suspension, a threshold state. This is also tierra’s main thematic concern, and a reading that weights suspension in and of itself also allows a reception that resolves the formal and structural complexities. To make such a reading possible I want to borrow some anthropological concepts that pertain to the ritual passage. For the exposition of the period of adolescent crisis in tierra has interesting structural correlations with the phase in ritual passages referred to as the liminal, which of course also means threshold (Lat. limen). The liminal pertains to all rituals “that accompany transitions from one situation to another and from one cosmic or social order to another qualify as rites de passage.”10 The transitional process in rituals is then 7

Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 248. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 169. 9 Nowhere is such discourse from and on the threshold more masterly represented than in Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, where the protagonist speaks the obscurities of his mind from the “dismal, squalid” corner that is his room, located at “the very edge of town” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground [1864], New York: Bantam Classic, 1989, 4). 10 Victor and Edith Turner, “Religious Celebrations,” in Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual, ed. Victor Turner, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982, 202. 8

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further divided into the three phases of separation, liminality, and reaggregation. The initiation into a state of maturity or adulthood in the ritual process can thus be said to be the real world’s performance of what the Bildungsroman represents in text. The relevance of this to the reading of tierra as a novel of formation has been noted and discussed by a few other critics, notably Thomas Vallejos and Lupe Cárdenas. Both have explored tierra according to how it reflects the passage from childhood to manhood, and both posit the protagonist as the center of narration (similar to Saldívar’s chronotopic point), focusing on the elements of separation and re-aggregation. This leads Vallejos to read the stories and vignettes as disclosing “the discovery and affirmation of self and community.”11 Cardenas in a similar vein argues that through stories and vignettes there is a steadfast progression from separation through transition into reintroduction, which illustrate how “the adolescent Chicano, as seen through the eyes of the adult writer, wants to liberate himself from the taboos of the traditional values imposed by his culture.”12 Neither of these two, however, pays much attention to the liminal phase in the ritual process, the phase that corresponds to the period of trials and tests in the Bildungsroman. Yet tierra’s insistent orientation toward what is located between calls for an approach that takes this particular aspect into account. For several reasons Victor Turner’s theories of liminality are therefore particularly relevant. In his development of Arnold Van Gennep’s original model of the ritual passage he proposes a thesis of the liminal as “existing autonomously, an independent and sometimes enduring category of people who are ‘betwixt and between.”13 One of Turner’s central theses is the potential of liminality in and for itself: “One finds in liminality both positive and active qualities, especially where that ‘threshold’ is protracted and becomes a ‘tunnel,’ when the ‘liminal’ becomes the ‘cunicular.’”14 11

Thomas Vallejos, “Ritual Process and the Family in the Chicano Novel,” MELUS, X/4 (1983), 15. 12 Lupe Cárdenas, “Growing up Chicano – Crisis Time in Three Contemporary Chicano Novels,” Confluencia: Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura, III/1 (1987), 129. 13 Barbara Myerhoff, “Rites of Passage: Process and Paradox,” in Celebration, 117. 14 Victor Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” in Play, Games and Sports in Cultural Contexts, ed. Janet

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Approaching tierra as a narrative rehearsal of liminality has several implications. For instance, it resolves the contradictions of generic ambiguity since the various voices, including those in the first and last stories, are not and should not be interpreted as one, but as multiple discourses pertaining to the liminal personae. The participants in the liminal phase in the rite of passage are subject to anonymity and non-subjectivity, and henceforth the phase itself renders the idea of individuality irrelevant and even antithetical to the ritual’s objective. Paradoxically, such a reading consequently proposes that novelistic unity is accomplished precisely by the absence of a protagonist and by the presence of a unifying ritual whereby tierra itself becomes the protagonist of its own narration. I will come back to this later. Even if tierra is not a ritual in the sense that it celebrates a particular seasonal or life change or event in an anthropological sense, it nevertheless represents a ritual of cultural impact. When, in this chapter, I initially referred to tierra as a foundational text, this is in part what I had in mind. The rituality of the text is embedded in its momentousness as a cultural statement, as a right of passage and as a “write” of passage. For tierra is both a representation of the assimilation processes into American culture, and a meta-narrative that inscribes a cultural self’s coming into being. “Writing the passage” moreover bridges this reading of tierra and Rivera’s own statement that: I wrote tierra because I was a Chicano and am a Chicano. This can never be denied, obliterated or reneged from now on. I chose to create and yet I had no idea of the effect of that creation.15

Committed throughout his life to the political struggle of the Chicano movement, Rivera saw his own work as a vehicle for representing the undocumented and unheard voices of migratory farm workers in the Southwest. So as exercises in narrative liminality tierra can be said to reflect the very real liminal space that migratory labor occupies within the structure of American society and economy. Liminality can only follow once there has been separation, and in C. Harris and Roberta J. Park. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers, 1983, 144. 15 Quoted in Olivares, “The Search for Being, Identity and Form,” 73.

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tierra this phase occurs in the opening story, “The Lost Year” (I quote it in full): That year was lost to him. At times he tried to remember and, just about when he thought everything was clearing up some, he would be at a loss for words. It almost always began with a dream in which he would suddenly awaken and then realize that he was really asleep. Then he wouldn’t know whether what he was thinking had happened or not. It always began when he would hear someone calling him by his name but when he turned his head to see who was calling, he would make a complete turn and there he would end up – in the same place. This was why he never could discover who was calling him nor why. And then he even forgot the name he had been called. One time he stopped at mid-turn and fear suddenly set in. He realized that he had called himself. And thus the lost year began. He tried to figure out when that time he had come to call “year” had started. He became aware that he was always thinking and thinking and from this there was no way out. Then he started thinking about how he never thought and this was when his mind would go blank and he would fall asleep. But before falling asleep he saw and heard many things …16

Despite its brevity, the story exhibits in remarkable detail the characteristics of separation in the ritual passage as Turner describes it: “The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic action signifying the detachment of the individual or group from an earlier fixed point in the social structure or from a set of cultural conditions, or both.”17 Separation is further described as including “symbolic behavior – especially symbols of reversal or inversion of secular things, relationships, and processes – which represents the detachment of the ritual subjects (novices, candidates, neophytes, or ‘initiands’) from their previous social statuses.” In “The Lost Year” the protagonist-neophyte is depicted at the very moment that he retreats from regular time and space. His falling asleep marks the severing of the bonds between the neophyte and society, and the withdrawal from what Turner calls “the earlier fixed 16

Tomás Rivera, …y no se lo tragó la tierra/ …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992, 83 (all subsequent references in the text). 17 Turner, “Religious Celebrations,” 202.

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point.” We may say that he is removed, if not explicitly and physically, then psychologically from his normal state of being. He is furthermore taken out of time in a manner that is characteristic of the ritual passage. As Turner explains, “there must be in addition a rite which changes the quality of time also, or constructs a cultural realism which is defined as ‘out of time,’ that is, beyond or outside the time which measures secular processes and routines.”18 The quality of “out of time” as liberation from chronological linearity is important here, because the temporal confusion in tierra is a property that occurs only after the initial phase of separation. By falling asleep and removing himself from linear time, the neophyte in “The Lost Year” enters not only a liminal phase, but also a liminal place. Re-aggregation (re-entering) occurs in the concluding narrative “Under the House,” which picks up where the “Lost Year” ends. This story also contains a multitude of fragmented and blurred references to the space lying between it and “The Lost Year.” In “Under the House” present time and the protagonist’s cognition of himself in the actual world is written in plain style. The references to what I call his liminal state, however, are in italics. The story is too long to quote in full, so what follows below are the passages that most clearly describe the quality of re-aggregation or post-liminality: The fleas made him move. He was under a house. He had been there for several hours, or it seemed so to him .… I wonder how long I’ve been here now. The kids came out of the house to play some time ago. It seems I’ve been here for a good while .… He had even forgotten all about the fleas and even that he was under the house. He could think very clearly in the dark. He didn’t need to close his eyes .… He became aware of the present when he heard one of the children yelling and at the same time felt a blow to his leg. They were throwing rocks at him under the house. “Mami, mami, there’s a man under the house! 18

Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid,” 127. My discussion of the relationship between the liminal phase in the ritual passage as it is configured in anthropology and the function of liminality in tierra is for the most part based on these two essays by Turner. I have chosen to use the term “neophyte” rather than “initiand,” “novice” or “candidate,” since “neophyte,” from Greek “newly planted” refers to the more general meaning of someone newly initiated into (religious) groups. The OED also lists the word’s botanical meaning, “a plant found in an area in which it has not been found before.” Moreover the two connotations of “newly planted” and “transplanted” echo the constitution of the Borderlands in general, and of “tierra” (Spanish for “earth”) in particular.

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Mami, mami, mami, hurry, come here, there’s a man here, there’s a man here!” … ”Who could it be?” He had to come out. Everyone was surprised that it was him. He didn’t say anything to them, just walked away .… Smiling, he walked down the chuckhole-ridden street leading to his house. He immediately felt happy because, as he thought over what the woman had said he realized that in reality he hadn’t lost anything. He had made a discovery. To discover and rediscover and piece everything together. This to this, that to that, all with all. That was it. That was everything. He was thrilled. (151-52)

Re-aggregation here takes place as the neophyte is readmitted into the world he has been isolated from in his dreamlike state in what, in fact, also turns out to be a liminal place. The reference to the dark place under a house also clarifies the indeterminacy of location in “The Lost Year.” Indeed, one of the italicized references in “Under the House” speaks directly to this question: “I like it right here because I can think about anything I please. Only by being alone can you bring everybody together. That’s what I needed to do, hide, so that I could come to understand a lot of things” (151). Actual physical location, however, is not what matters most here. What we should note is how the neophyte has been in the dark and is now, literally as well as metaphorically, pulled out from that state of obscurity. His re-aggregation into community and awareness of time and place sharply contrasts with the previous blurring of both. We see this re-entry described as the discovery of a world around him that he is able to make sense of and “piece together,” very different from the confusion in “The Lost Year,” where the neophyte is disorientated. Finally, re-aggregation is also an act of retrieval: “The lost year” is restored.19 In Turner’s discussion of re-aggregation, several aspects and circumstances bear directly on the quoted passages from “Under the House,” for instance as symbolic phenomena and actions which represent the return of the subjects to their new, relatively stable, well-defined position in the total society .… The passage from one social status to another is often accompanied by a parallel passage in space, a geographical movement from one place to another. This may take the form of a mere opening 19

“Under the House” was originally titled “El año encontrado,” or “The Retrieved Year.”

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The actual physical movement in “Under the House” coincides with the neophyte’s transition from confusion to clarity, from obscurity to awareness. This transition is further emphasized by the community’s reference to “a man.” Even if there are no indications of the neophyteprotagonist’s age in “The Lost Year,” the vignette that follows “Under the House” suggests that the voice in the first narrative belongs to a boy, and is the same voice as in “The Lost Year.” The vignette reads as follows: What his mother never knew was that every night he would drink the glass of water that she left under the bed for the spirits. She always believed that they drank the water and so she continued doing her duty. Once he was going to tell her but then he thought that he’d wait and tell her when he was grown up. (85)

Whether or not the neophyte develops physically from boyhood to manhood is in my opinion somewhat irrelevant in the present context; what matters is the process of growth and maturation, a transition from confusion and amnesia to order and presence in time. Between “The Lost Year” and “Under the House” we encounter a bewildering space of liminal exercises, but nowhere more superbly represented than in “The Lost Year” itself. The story portrays the neophyte in a betwixt and between state, in what Turner describes as the “blurring and merging of distinctions.” Disorientation and disjunction are here brought to their extremes as the neophyte is outside time and place. He does not know whether he is awake or asleep; he has no sense of where he is; he cannot speak, and, finally, he has no sense of who he is. The very words he uses to describe his cognitive frame of mind underline the emphatic ambiguity of his condition – “he was always thinking and thinking” – and then, “he never thought.” As what he calls the “lost year” begins, the protagonist is essentially in a state of effacement and oblivion. Again, the relationship between the representation of this state of being in tierra and Turner’s anthropological description is remarkably close: 20

Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid,” 128.

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Hence, in many societies the liminal initiands are often considered to be dark, invisible, like a planet in eclipse or the moon between phases; they are stripped of names and clothing, smeared with the common earth rendered indistinguishable from animals. They are also associated with life and death, male and female, food and excrement, simultaneously, since they are at once dying from or dead to their former status and life, and being born and growing into new ones .… In mid-transition the initiands are pushed as far toward uniformity, structural invisibility, and anonymity as possible.21

These observations bear crucially on the much-debated question of the identity of the protagonist in tierra, and offer a potential resolution of the question. Conceived of as ritual passage, tierra does not and cannot have one single identifiable narrator-protagonist: the very condition of liminality refutes such insignia of subjectivity. The main characteristics of the neophyte are precisely anonymity and diffusion, the effacement and the obliteration of the self. On this background the stories and vignettes can be read as multiple, associated manifestations of effacement and oblivion. As expositions of the betwixt and between they can be further explored according to the three sub-categories that exist within the liminal, namely what Turner lists as the communication of sacra, the encouragement of ludic re-combinations, and finally the fostering of communitas. The communication of sacra refers to the mediation of sacred things, “symbolic objects and actions representing religious mysteries, frequently referring to myths about how the world and society, nature and culture, came into being.”22 This part of the liminal phase is at the very heart of the matter, so to speak, since it implies a return to basic myths and narratives and consequently revisits the culture’s discourse about itself, its meta-narratives. In tierra this re-visitation occurs on several levels and very frequently slides over into the second category Turner mentions, ludic recombination. This is defined as “the analysis of culture into factors and their free, playful recombination in any and every possible pattern however deviant, grotesque, unconventional, or outrageous.”23 In tierra the instruction and testing of fundamental belief systems tend to incite a negation of those meta-narratives that 21

Ibid., 129. Turner, “Religious Celebrations,” 202. 23 Ibid., 204. 22

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are based in precisely some “outrageous” or “unconventional” ludic recombination of elements pertaining to the sacred sphere. Such negation of cultural myths and beliefs instead generates new knowledge, which in turn, as we will see, brings a new dimension of liminality into the already liminal. A good illustration of this is the story “First Communion,” where the neophyte recounts his preparations for this religious ritual, an initiation in its own right. The neophyte’s major incentive prior to receiving his first communion is that he wants “salvation from all evil, that was all [he] could think of” (114). To make sure that he obtains his goal, he lies awake the night before trying to count all the sins he has ever committed, especially the sins of the flesh. When he arrives at the church the next morning he hears loud laughter and moans, and discovers two people in an intimate moment in the cleaners’ room next to the church. He is transfixed by what he is witnessing, and only when they yell at him is he able to tear away. As he goes to confession, he realizes that he will not be able to communicate what he has seen, which by now has been internalized to the extent that he feels as if he has committed the sin himself. He consequently goes through the ritual of first communion on false premises and commits sacrilege. Later in the day, however, he reflects that: I even forgot that I had lied to the priest. And then I felt the same as I once had when I had heard a missionary speak about the grace of God. I felt like knowing more about everything. And then it occurred to me that maybe everything was the same (117).

It is not that he takes committing sacrilege lightly, but rather than having a sense of damnation he experiences a calm even if uncanny awareness of “knowing more.” The newly acquired knowledge is a liberating one, and rather than bringing the neophyte back to an acknowledgment of the truth of cultural beliefs (in this context the sinfulness of certain acts and the subsequent damnation), it yields a new form of security beyond these beliefs. Within the framework of the little story the liminal remains liminal, and so does the neophyte. This cognitive process is more clearly brought out in other stories, notably in the title story, “And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.” It relates the inhumane conditions farm workers are forced to live under, and the neophyte’s indignation and despair at the fact that his family

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and community blindly trust God for their wellbeing and survival. One after the other, members of his family get sick, and at this point in the story his youngest brother has just collapsed in the field: It seemed [the brother] was having cramps all over his little body. He lifted him and carried him by himself and, again, he began asking himself why? … Each step he took towards the house resounded with the question, why? About halfway to the house he began to get furious. Then he started crying out of rage .… Then he started cursing. And without realizing it, he said what he had been wanting to say for a long time. He cursed God. Upon doing this he felt that fear instilled in him by the years and by his parents. For a second he saw the earth opening up to devour him, Then he felt his footsteps against the earth, compact, more solid than ever. (111)

Negation in this story is very fundamental. The factors that are at play and recombined, as it were, are the axiomatic mores belonging both to the neophyte’s cultural structural world and to his liminal and liberated self. This exemplifies an additional condition of liminality in the ritual passage, namely that “[liminality] also liberates [the initiands] from structural obligations.”24 The outcome in “First Communion” as well as in “And the Earth Did Not Devour Him” is precisely self-liberation, which further accentuates the neophyte’s status as liminal. In both stories the newly acquired awareness and insight represent the neophyte’s remaking of himself and his relationship to the truths he has so far put his trust in. As communication of sacra the stories thus interestingly fail, since in these cases the neophytes decline the re-visitation of cultural myths. Instead, his response to the re-visitation of established truths and mores suggests a beginning of permanent liminality, a state that does not anticipate re-aggregation into society. I will return to this later in the chapter. Such rejection is even more explicit in “A Silvery Night,” where the neophyte – in what is moreover a classic ritualistic manner – sets out to challenge the Devil. It is a night with a full moon and the child waits until midnight before he slips out of the house to summon the forces of darkness. Terrified, he first calls the Devil by several names, and then, when nothing appears and nothing happens, he curses him. 24

Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid,” 130.

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Finally he returns home, disillusioned and nauseated: Before falling asleep he thought for a good while. There is no devil, there is nothing .… Now he understood everything. Those who summoned the devil went crazy, not because the devil appeared, but just the opposite, because he didn’t appear. He fell asleep gazing at the moon as it jumped through the clouds and the trees, as if it were extremely content about something. (106)

Disillusion with and disappointment in the world and the norms of what is presumably the sacred sphere (be it the religious or the cultural “establishment”) also prevails in the two vignettes “One afternoon a minister …” and “Before people left for up north …” In both instances the church, represented by corrupt representatives, betrays the people it is supposed to protect. The narrative point of view in the two vignettes is that of a chorus who relate and comment on circumstances where meaning indeed is suspended.25 In contrast to the classical chorus’ mediation of traditional ethical values, however, this chorus echoes moral destruction. When Turner describes the participants in a ritual passage he says that they typically exhibit a behavior that is “passive or humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without complaint.”26 The collective’s response to their in-between state in the two vignettes is consequently radically different from that of the neophytes in the other stories we have looked at so far. In “First Communion,” “And the Earth Did Not Devour Him,” and “A Silvery Night” the result of communication of sacra is not passive submission, but active repudiation of the truths and myths held by the structural world existing outside the liminal place. So liminality as performed in these stories takes on a meaning in and for itself, and the neophytes attain something akin to subjective autonomy. The liminal state of being as we encounter it in tierra, is therefore different from the condition of the liminal subject in what Wangari wa Nyatetu Waigwa has called the liminal novel. Examining a selection of Francophone-African novels, she appropriates Turner’s theses and 25

Nicolás Kanellos refers to this collectivity as “the anonymous chroniclers of Chicano life” (see “Language and Dialog in …y no se lo tragó la tierra,” in International Studies in Honor of Tomás Rivera, 55). 26 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Chicago: Aldine, 1969, 95.

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argues for a tendency in the protagonists of these texts to remain suspended in the middle-phase of the ritual process. She focuses on the absence of re-aggregation as this corresponds to maturation and assimilation into the “group” in the Bildungroman. As the novels she examines end, she argues, “the protagonist is still in the middle of the quest, either still moving towards what supposedly constitutes the final stage in that quest or having consciously suspended the adoption of a final stance.”27 Her discussion sheds light on the narration of marginalization as an ongoing process of narrating the self in-between worlds, for as she goes on to suggest, “the protagonist of each novel is portrayed in a ‘betwixt and between’ relationship with the worlds he has inhabited only marginally, and … the question of his belonging to any world has become provisionally unresolvable.”28 This view provides an interesting contrast to the present discussion of tierra, underscoring how liminality in this case has its own agency: liminality not as a condition of stasis, but subtle subversion. The neophytes in tierra are not merely left suspended in their uncertain status. Instead a gradually emerging awareness elevates them to a place where the liminal condition becomes a point of departure for change. The playful and unconventional re-assembling of cultural factors into new and at times unrecognizable entities in tierra is not, however, quite the innocent and childlike playfulness we find in Turner. In liminality, he says, “ritual participants … are confronted by masks, images, contraptions, costumes, and the like, which represent the playful recombination of cultural traits or constituents in unusual, even bizarre and monstrous configurations unknown to secular experience.”29 The expositions of the playful in tierra may initially draw on what is “childlike and innocent,” but in the course of the narrative this is transformed into grotesque and distorted reflections of reality. I especially have in mind here the stories “The Children Couldn’t Wait,” “It’s That It Hurts,” and “The Little Burnt Victims.” The neophytes are all young children who maneuver in their worlds with the ingenuousness and simplicity intrinsic to childhood. In their naive confrontations with the world they fall sadly short, however, and all stories end in tragedies. 27

wa Nyatetu-Waigwa, The Liminal Novel, 3. Ibid., 10. 29 Turner, “Religious Celebrations,” 202. 28

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In “The Children Couldn’t Wait” the child finds a way to drink water from the cattle water tank behind the foreman’s back. By way of “trickery” he confronts the white man, and the interchange of distinctly different structural worlds that follows becomes a monstrous distortion: What [the boss] set out to do and what he did were two different things. He shot at him once to scare him but when he pulled the trigger he saw the boy with a hole in his head. And the child didn’t even jump like a deer does. He just stayed in the water like a dirty rag and the water began to turn bloody. (87)

Turner makes a point in relation to the purposes of the ritual process that has bearing on this incident in tierra. The recombinations of cultural factors, he argues, are generally aimed at encouraging the neophytes to ponder and reflect on their circumstance: For when elements are withdrawn from their usual settings and recombined in totally unique configurations … those exposed to them are startled into thinking anew about persons, objects, relationships, social roles, and features of their environment hitherto taken for granted. Previous habits of thought, feeling, and action are disrupted.30

In “The Children Couldn’t Wait,” however, the reaction from the other neophytes – a chorus of neophytes – is the following: … “And then after they tried him and he got off free, they say he jumped off a tree ‘cause he wanted to kill himself.” “But he didn’t kill himself, did he?” “Well, no.” “Well, there you have it.” “Well, I’ll tell you, compadre, I think he did go crazy. You’ve seen the likes of him nowadays. He looks like a beggar.” “Sure, but that’s because he doesn’t have any more money.” “Well…that’s true.” (87)

Given the nature of the event that anticipates this exchange, the dialogue itself is a performance of the grotesque rather than a rethinking of or reflection on the existing order. Nothing here gives rise 30

Ibid., 205.

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to new conceptualizations of societal power relationships and social roles, quite the contrary. The absurdity of the dialogue between anonymous voices, where emphasis is oddly directed at the boss’s wellbeing, only maintains already existing habits of thought and action. Equally important, the lack of reference to the murdering of a child transforms the exchange itself into a rehearsal of liminality. The chorus’ response suggests a lack of understanding of the factors that make up their cultural environment, and hence no recombination of factors into new insight occurs. The same response or, rather, the lack of response occurs in “It’s That It Hurts” and “The Little Burnt Victims.” A schoolboy narrates the first in a mixture of stream of consciousness and inner dialogue. Here the practices of Anglo teachers and the English language itself are played around with in a way that the boy cannot make sense of. After having got into a fight with an Anglo boy in school, he is expelled, or at least this is what he believes: “Maybe they didn’t expel me from school. Maybe it ain’t so after all. Maybe it’s not. Sure it is!” (92). Since he doesn’t understand the language of the world he must relate to during the day, this neophyte is also prevented from fully participating in it. The narrative represents liminality through a recombination of factors that pertain to intrinsically alien and unavailable surroundings, and the boy’s anguish is most poignantly heard in his fear that he may now not become a telephone operator after all: “What will you be, son?” “A telephone operator.” “Is that so?” “Yes, compadre, he’s very determined, you know that? Every time we ask him he says he wants to be an operator. I think they pay well. I told the boss the other day and he laughed. I don’t think he believes my son can do it, but that’s `cause he doesn’t know him. He’s smarter than anything. I just pray God helps him finish school so he can become an operator.” (95)

There is something almost comical about this reading of the rungs of mainstream America’s career paths, and the dialogue only repeats and enhances the already established estrangement from the structure of the socio-economic surroundings. Similar sentiments and perhaps even more tragic-comic relations to

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the components that make up the migrant workers’ world are refracted in the vignette quoted below. Liminality here exceeds the boundaries of ideological and cultural comprehension; it also extends to the geographical realm in which the neophytes are orienting themselves: “Comadre, do you all plan to go to Utah?” “No, compadre. I tell you, we don’t trust the man that’s contracting people to go work in – how do you say it?” “Utah. Why, comadre?” “Because we don’t think there’s such a state. You tell me, when’ve you ever heard of that place? “Well, there’s so many states. And this is the first time that they’ve contracted for work in those parts.” “Yeah, but tell me, where is it?” “Well, we’ve never been there but I hear it’s somewhere close to Japan.” (91)

The anonymous voices here reflect the gap that exists between their liminality and the world they inhabit. Their blurred conceptions of the geographical space they travel in enhance and make quite literal their position on the fringes of American society, In the story “The Little Burnt Victims,” play with cultural factors and ludic recombinations take a more disturbing turn. Since the foreman does not allow parents to bring their children along to the fields (it may be distracting), the Garcías are forced to leave their three little kids at home. Inspired by a movie they have recently seen, the father has bought the children a pair of boxing gloves, hoping that boxing will one day point a way out of farm labor. One morning the workers in the fields see smoke rising from the direction where the García’s chicken shack is. Rushing to see what is going on, the parents find the shack burnt to the ground, and with it the five-year-old girl and the six-year-old boy. The oldest had staged a boxing match between his sister and brother, and rubbed alcohol on their little chests like they did in the movie. When he was later frying eggs, the children caught on fire and the kerosene tank exploded. The tragedy is the horrible result of a combination of the structural world’s (the employer’s) demands and the neophytes’ attempts to comply with and work around them. The desire to secure a better future through the emblematic American sport of boxing fails, for in order to fulfill the American myth of rags to riches so integral to

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champions’ stories, one needs intimate knowledge of certain cultural factors. The lack in this case of both kinds of knowledge is brought out in the chorus’ laconic interchange following the accident, curiously focused on the fact that the gloves did not burn: “And you know what?” “What?” “The only thing that didn’t get burnt up was the pair of gloves. They say they found the little girl all burnt up and with the gloves on.” “But I wonder why the gloves didn’t get burned up?” “Well, you know how those people can make things so good. Not even fire can destroy them.” (122)

The inability to decipher the constituent factors of the structural world is also painfully brought out in “The Night Before Christmas.” Here the rift between normal and liminal space generates an image of pathological inertia. In this we meet a mother whose desire to get her children a present for Christmas supersedes her fear of public spaces. The foreignness of the store surroundings makes her feel dizzy, and in a moment of utter confusion she takes a few items and leaves without paying for them. Once outside, security stops her: “Here she is … these damn people, always stealing something, stealing, I’ve been watching you all along. Let’s have that bag.” (133)

In this case, the neophyte’s lack of understanding and mastering the components that constitute mainstream society is taken to an extreme, and her limininal condition transgresses into a manifestation of complete alienation. The barriers between the liminal persona and the cultural and societal factors surrounding her transcend the transitory quality of the liminal phase, and are instead solidified as marking the woman’s place on the outside. “The Night before Christmas” can therefore be said to hint at an order of circumstances that borders on alienation and estrangement as a permanent rather than a transient state of being. In several other vignettes and stories similar patterns recur until the condition of betwixt and between is petrified into what Turner calls a tunnel. The expositions of protracted crisis are both individual and collective representations of liminality, and each neophytic response bears witness to the complexities, ambiguities, and paradoxes that this threshold existence entails. The anonymity of the

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testimonies emphasizes how meaning has become suspended, and how arbitrarily the participants attach significance to cultural artifacts. In a word, the representations come together in a condition of structural collapse. In Turner’s analyses liminality is also characterized as the scene of disease, despair, death. Suicide, the breakdown without compensatory replacement of normative, well-defined social ties and bonds. It may be anomie, alienation, angst, the three fatal ‘alpha’ sisters of many modern myths.31

This description bears significantly on tierra’s penultimate story, “When We Arrive.” Up until this point the narratives are all largely isolated from each other; in “When We Arrive,” however, this changes. Here we hear a number of neophytes speaking from the same point in time and place, yet not as the liminal chorus we have heard in other stories. Instead liminality is articulated on a level of despair and anomie, which culminates in a choral reiteration of the individual reflections. “When We Arrive” moreover reads like a condensed version of tierra, with a third-person introduction to the thoughts of thirteen different personae, a brief appearance of the chorus, and a conclusion featuring a third person voice. Stuck in a truck on their way to new crops in the north, a group of people voices their frustrations in a momentous, almost symphonic collage of weary reflections: “Good thing the truck stopped here. My stomach’s been hurting a lot for some time but I would’ve had to wake up a lot of people to get to the window and ask them to stop” … “We’ve been on the road over twenty-four hours. We should be close to Des Moines. Sure wish I could sit down for just a little while at least.” … “This is the last fuckin’ year I come out here. As soon as we get to the farm I’m getting the hell out. I’ll look for a job in Minneapolis. I’ll be damned if I go back to Texas.” … “If things go well this year, maybe we’ll buy us a car so we won’t 31

Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid,” 150.

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have to travel this way, like cattle. The girls are pretty big now and I know they feel embarrassed.” … “Fuckin’ life, this goddamn fuckin’ life! This fuckin’ sonofabitchin’ life for being pendejo! pendejo! pendejo! We’re nothing but a bunch of stupid, goddamn asses!” … “Just hope we don’t end up in a chicken coop like last year, with that cement floor. Even though you cover it with straw, once the cold season sets in you just can’t stand it.” (143-45)

The various thoughts rise toward the night sky as reverberations of the hopelessness refracted by so many of tierra’s other voices. The thirteenth and last thought painfully fuses the sense of passage evoked by the journey with the content of the neophytes’ own passing through the night: “When we arrive, when we arrive, the real truth is that I’m tired of arriving. Arriving and leaving, it’s the same thing because we no sooner arrive and … the real truth of the matter … I’m tired of arriving. I really should say when we don’t arrive because that’s the real truth. We never arrive.”

A chorus is then heard, chanting almost mockingly “When we arrive, when we arrive …” (145). Finally a third-person narrative voice takes over, describing how dawn gradually breaks and “the people were becoming people. They began getting out of the trailer and they huddled around and commenced to talk about what they would do when they arrived” (146). The transition from obscure isolation in the dark of the night to recognition and communication as daylight breaks bears a strong resemblance to what Turner calls the “fostering of communitas.” This is the component of the liminal phase where the participants “share common trials and eat and sleep in common, a group unity is experienced, a kind of generic bond outside the constraints of social structure, akin to Martin Buber’s ‘flowing from I to Thou’.”32 Communitas in the rite of passage is an inherently transient phenomenon, since the nature of the ritual itself cannot be sustained. At the heart lies the quality of flow that, however momentarily it is 32

Turner, “Religious Celebrations,” 205.

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experienced, brings the liminal participants together. In the ritual passage this phase is “treated as a means of purifying, redefining, and revitalizing a social structure which is itself regarded as of divine origin and to which no alternative form is proposed.”33 In “When We Arrive” we can hardly talk about redefinition and revitalization of social structures. The liminal state seems instead to replicate the neophytes’ already hopeless and intermediary existence. While there certainly is a sense of community, it remains within the confines of liminality, not as passage but as permanence. Bakhtin’s notions of threshold and crisis come to mind again, and their temporal aspect seems particularly poignant in the case of this story: “on the threshold and on the square the only time possible is crisis time, in which a moment is equal to years, decades, even to a ‘billion years’” (170). When the last individual voice laments that the real truth is that they “don’t arrive,” this is a way of saying that in threshold time, or in liminal time, there really is no time, and hence no end-point. To these participants their condition is suspended and has become a state of being defined by a temporality that is at once lasting and instantaneous – and strictly within the liminal. The relationship between “When We Arrive” and communitas as it figures in the ritual passage hinges on the element of shared lives and fates. As tierra nears its conclusion with the last vignette, however, the process of liminal performances is unexpectedly imbued with a sense of purpose and continuity. Redefinition and revitalization in the phase of communitas occur as the poet Bartolo passes through the liminal space. This vignette is important (I quote it in full): Bartolo passed through town every December when he knew that most of the people had returned from work up north. He always came by selling his poems. By the end of the first day, they were almost sold out because the names of the people of the town appeared in the poems. And when he read them aloud it was something emotional and serious. I recall that one time he told the people to read the poems out loud because the spoken word was the seed of love in the darkness. (147)

The short piece redeems the preceding stories and vignettes, and in particular offers relief to the weary soliloquies in “When We Arrive.” 33

Ibid., 206.

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First of all, by listing the names of the people, Bartolo the poet brings identity to anonymity. Secondly, his appeal to the people to read the poems with their names out loud gives voice to the silent thoughts of “When We Arrive,” and redeems the obscurity of a passage through the night by offering rays of light (“seed of love in the darkness”). Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, Bartolo the poet gathers tierra’s thoughts and dialogues into a chronicle of endurance, not transience. Thus communitas, the “flow from I to Thou,” transgresses its passing quality and becomes instead a lasting, recorded form of liminality. This is also the point in tierra where the concept and function of liminality takes on a new meaning. Bartolo the poet, the chronicler, becomes inaugurator and guardian of a redefined and revitalized space where the space of betwixt and between is given full attention. Indeed, it acquires status as existing in and of itself, defined by its own structures and its own order. Bartolo the poet therefore anticipates the neophyte in “Under the House,” who discovers and rediscovers and pieces things together: “This to this, that to that, all with all.” This participant’s emergence from “under the house,” from obscurity, literally and metaphorically, can be read as the enactment of the poet’s appeal that his poems be read out loud. Crawling out from darkened silence, the neophyte finds himself present in time and space, connected to his fellow neophytes. These are in turn heard throughout the last story as blurred reminders of the liminal quality that prevails in tierra. They take on the shape of a massive chorus; they speak as a stream of the collective unconscious from a point in the past as well as the present, and constitute the backdrop against which the neophyte finds himself again in an imagined other: When he got home he went straight to the tree that was in the yard. He climbed it. He saw a palm tree on the horizon. He imagined someone perched on top, gazing at him. He even raised one arm and waved it back and forth so that the other could see that he knew he was there. (152)

Now the liminal becomes a point of departure from which “new symbols and cultural meanings” in truth are generated. Re-aggregation as it comes to pass in the last story does not entail a return of the neophytes to their former structural world of normality; they are already outside such normality. Re-aggregation instead confirms

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liminality as a condition of being, inseparable from the time-space that generates the narrative itself. The protraction of an in-between existence as this is represented in tierra offers the threshold as a space of what Turner in the ritual passage calls “positive and active qualities.”34 The “new symbols and meanings” that surface in this story/phase of re-aggregation consolidate a sense of community and appropriate and re-appropriate the structure and order that pertain to the threshold, to limen. Tierra does not and cannot represent subjectivity and individuality. Instead all the nondescript and unknown neophyte voices come together in a work that ultimately creates itself as its own protagonist. Rivera said himself that: I emphasized remembering, discovery and the expression of the will .… Remembering reveals of life, an imagination and is thus still a type of incubation period …. In my work, I dealt with preparation, incubation, illumination and, finally, discovery.35

The cultural impact of his epic lies precisely in retrieving voices from obscurity and oblivion into presence and awareness. The narration of this retrieval, with emphasis on multiplicity, anonymity, and on the middle phase of trials and tests, produces a narrative whole that not only stays true structurally and thematically to its subject matter, but which also bridges the aesthetic and the cultural. The synthesis between cultural rites of passage, the principles of Bildung, and its narrative constitute tierra as an icon of the Chicano cultural revival. Indeed, tierra becomes itself a participant in a rite of passage, in the initiation into maturation and participation in the larger structural society, analogizing how the Borderland out of its threshold circumstance constructs new symbols and new cultural meanings.

34 35

Turner, “Religious Celebrations,” 144. Rivera, “Remembering, Discovery and Volition,” 365-66.

CHAPTER VI

The Dialogic Mind: The Education of Richard Rodriguez I have taken Caliban’s advice. I have stolen their books. I will have some run of this isle.1

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982) illustrates the shift away from an emphasis on certain ideological and political themes toward a focus on the individual and the emergent composite nature of Chicano literature. The tendency has been described as follows: “Chicano writers in the last two decades have opted to create new themes and blur boundaries instead of targeting the unbridled political passions of the previous decade. The objective seems to be a greater introspection – more vertical than horizontal – into a wider array of manifestations that document Chicano social spheres.”2 Hunger of Memory’s narration of self pursues an agenda that goes far beyond parameters of race and ethnicity, and one of its notable features is precisely introspection. Few works written by a Mexican-American writer have received more notice on the American national literary arena than this book, favorable as well as unfavorable. The controversy revolved (and continues to revolve) around Rodriguez’s refusal to carry the responsibility of representing an entire ethnic group, as well as the views he presented on such contested political issues as affirmative action and bilingual education. His story, he repeats throughout the book, is an American story:

1

Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, New York: Bantam Books, 1982, 3. All subsequent references are to this edition. 2 Francisco Lomelí, Teresa Márquez, and María Herrera-Sobek, “Trends and Themes in Chicano/a Writings in Postmodern Times,” in Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Cultural Trends, eds David R. Maciel, Isidro D. Ortiz, and María Herrera-Sobek, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000, 285-6.

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The title, Hunger of Memory, may hint at the yearning for continuity and context, but the book engages disassociation and dislocation on several and often very subtle levels. In all instances they are, however, intimately related to questions of language and voice as the defining measures of private and public subjectivity. Not surprisingly, Tomás Rivera in his review of Hunger of Memory focused precisely on what he perceived as a disturbing absence of the cultural and the communal. Even if, as he said, he found it “an exceptionally wellwritten book,” the contrast between Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and the hunger for community that Chicano writers such as himself had worked hard to still, left Rodriguez’s voice lonely and lost: The Chicano writers I have in mind were hungry for community. The manner of establishing that community was through remembrance and rediscovery of commonalities of the culture plus the need to accept the community in all its heterogeneity – that is, with its virtues, with all its flaws, with all its energy, with all its apathy. It was important to recognize and develop the basic elements of our community.3

Rivera’s more specific criticism was directed at Rodriguez’s rejection of the Spanish language, and by implication the rejection of Mexican-American cultural history: “Underlined throughout the text [there is] a negation of what is fundamentally the central element of the human being – the cultural root, the native tongue.”4 From the point of view of writers and intellectuals like Rivera, who had dedicated their lives to the formidable task of establishing and having a Mexican-American and Chicano literature and culture recognized, their discouragement with Hunger of Memory is not hard to understand. What seemed a blunt disregard of the shaping forces of ethnicity and race came across as an offence, especially coming from someone who, like Rodriguez, had greatly benefited from affirmative action programs. He, however, was on a very different path:

3

Tomás Rivera, “Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory as Humanistic Antithesis,” MELUS, XI/4 (1984), 12. 4 Ibid., 6.

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Now it exists – a weight in my hand. Let the bookstore clerk puzzle over where it should be placed. (Rodriguez? Rodriguez?) Probably he will shelve it alongside specimens of that exotic new genre, ‘ethnic literature.’ Mistaken, the gullible reader will – in sympathy or in anger – take it that I intend to model my life as the typical HispanicAmerican life. But I write of one life only. My own. If my story is true, I trust it will resonate with significance for other lives. Finally, my history deserves public notice as no more than this: a parable for the life of its reader. Here is the life of a middle-class man. (7)

To many Mexican-American and other ethnic-American critics Hunger of Memory seemed to play right into the hands of a Reagan decade where liberal programs such as affirmative action and bilingual education were already threatened. Raymund Paredes, for instance, lamented that: Rodriguez quickly emerged as the designated ‘Hispanic’ intellectual of the 1980s. In a national climate turning chilly towards minorities, Rodriguez eloquently justified, from the dominant point of view at least, a retreat from the national agenda to address minority concerns.5

The situation was not made better by the fact that an AngloAmerican audience, driven by an at times uncritical celebration of difference and ethnicity in the Eighties and Nineties, embraced Hunger of Memory. As the ironic reference to the imagined bookstore clerk above demonstrates, however, Rodriguez was well aware of this potential reaction. This and other statements he makes in the book, ironic and not so ironic, are in fact harsh critiques of tendencies that to this day inform much of the debate concerning minority politics, and academic curricula. The passage just quoted, for instance, is in reality a frontal attack on a disposition in the audience, regardless of its ethnic origin, to anticipate and consume certain stories on the basis of the name on the book-cover. Such aesthetics of reading operates on complex levels, as Linda Browder has shown in Slippery Characters. She examines a selection of what she coins “ethnic impersonator autobiographies,” works written by authors who forged their ethnicity back5

Raymund A. Paredes, “Autobiography and Ethnic Politics: Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory,” in Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives, ed. James Robert Payne, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992, 280.

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grounds for their explorations of self-formation.6 Moreover, the characterization designates a point of convergence between the American tradition of self-construction that Benjamin Franklin stands for and the ethnic autobiography’s long-standing convention of offering “the authentic voice of a minority group to a reading audience composed primarily of white, middle-class Americans.”7 Hunger of Memory represents the reverse of what Browder describes: rather than constructing ethnicity as the overriding determinant, Rodriguez de-constructs a background already in place. By downplaying the role of ethnicity in his own life Rodriguez recasts himself in terms that defy the expectations his Spanish name places on him and his relationship to the audience. Rodriguez’s disassociation from a communal specific, from a cultural nation to which by virtue of his birth-name he belongs complicates notions of identity, cultural nationalism, ethnicity, and self-representation in a way that is no less relevant today, some twenty five years after the book was first published. However, as the history of its reception shows, Hunger of Memory is perhaps a greater challenge to its audience than Browder’s impersonators may have been to theirs. Looking beyond stereotypes is considerably harder than complying with them. Some critics were aware of these aspects of Hunger of Memory, and also pointed out that Rodriguez’s venturing outside the trodden paths was a sign that Mexican-American literature was coming of age. Antonio C. Márquez, praising the book for its craft and style, concluded that: Specifically, Hunger of Memory is a notable attempt to bridge autobiography and literature and to form a ‘poetics of experience.’ …. In these respects Rodriguez’s book is a valuable contribution to Chicano 8 literature.

Márquez’s article, I would like to add, was one of the few contemporary reviews that focused on the act rather than the responsibility of self-representation. Moreover, by conceptualizing the work as a for6

Linda Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000, 2. 7 Ibid., 4. 8 Antonio C. Márquez, “Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and the Poetics of Experience,” Arizona Quarterly, 40 (1984), 141.

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mulation of poetics of experience, he liberates Hunger of Memory from the constraints of fixed preconceptions and political criticism. This is important because Rodriguez’s representation of experience in and of itself deserves far more attention than it has so far been granted. Its indisputable position as a remarkable work should be traced to stylistics and narrative rather than to polemics. Hunger of Memory is more than a valuable contribution to American and Chicano literature; its accomplishment lies in its resonance for other lives, indeed, as a “parable for the life of its reader.” Of course, the autobiographical genre is not entirely unproblematic, and one snag is the very postulation of a gap between autobiography and literature that Marquez indicates. Discussions of the genre reflect how the problem with clear-cut distinctions of this kind hinges on the temporal and spatial lapse that gets in the way of a complete convergence between auto and bios in the moment of creation. In his seminal essay “Autobiography as De-Facement” Paul de Man argues that precisely because of the reflective and exchangeable nature of the writing subject and the written subject “any book with a readable title page is, to some extent, autobiographical.”9 Bakhtin makes a similar observation: The personal coincidence “in life” of the person spoken of and the person speaking does not nullify the distinctness of these constituents within the artistic whole. After all, it is still possible to ask “how do I image myself?” as opposed to the question “who am I?”10

In addition there are a number of other and perhaps more pragmatic concerns to factor in. For instance, how do we read works such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, where Alex Haley worked together with Malcolm X on his story of self? What do we make of works that were so clearly created for the needs of a specific audience that one has to wonder whether author and hero coincide just because the names do. And, as we have already mentioned, what about autobiographies that years after their publications prove to be outright charades, the authors turning out not to be who they had claimed they were. One may indeed wonder whether it is helpful, as Paul Jay does, 9

Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” MLN, XCIV/5 (1979), 922. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, eds Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, 151. 10

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to categorize works as “autobiographical” at all.11 Given all these uncertainties and limitations, it may make more sense to focus on how the literary attempt at self-representation and analysis resolves, as Jay puts it, the ongoing problem of “how to use one medium – language – to represent another medium – being.”12 This complex of language and being is perhaps precisely what underlies Márquez’s identification of Hunger of Memory as a “quest for a metaphor of self,” a pursuit originating in the appropriation of language and knowledge.13 Ultimately, he argues, the “central metaphor is the emergence from darkness to some form of self-knowledge,” and, he goes on, the “means to achieve this illumination are the imaginative resources of language and literature.”14 Márquez here refers to an understanding of the process by which language individualizes. As we will see below Rodriguez’s “quest for a metaphor of self” has its origin in his early childhood, more specifically as a decisive moment in the first grade of school depicted in his first chapter, “Aria.” Here we are told about Richard’s early school years, from the day he walked into the classroom in a white middle-class neighborhood understanding some fifty words in English, to the crucial lesson of attaining a public voice in English. The transition from speaking and being comfortable only with Spanish to commanding the language of the outside world is not a voluntary one, but rather one that the Catholic teachers and his parents force on him. The change itself is depicted as a dramatic turning point in the boy’s life: Weeks after it happened: One day in school I raised my hand to volunteer an answer. I spoke out in a loud voice. And I did not think it remarkable when the entire class understood. That day, I moved very far from being the disadvantaged child I had been only days earlier. The belief, the calming reassurance that I belonged in public, had at last taken hold. (22)

The passage introduces a series of reflections on what language means and how it relates to our sense of private and public individuality. The rest of the chapters in the book, it seems to me, go on to approach the 11

Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984, 14. 12 Ibid., 21. 13 Márquez, “Hunger of Memory and the Poetics of Experience,” 134. 14 Ibid., 138.

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same question from different angles and perspectives. “Aria” revolves around the original moment, as it were, probing into the exact nature of what it means to acquire the public language, English, and, in effect, lose the private, Spanish. The sense of security and comfort which home with its Spanish sounds represents to Richard gives way, first to silence, and then to a newfound recognition of safety and intimacy in English. The transition is not only one of spheres, however, it is also one of names: the Spanish Ricardo is substituted for Richard, “Rich-heard Road-ree-guess” (4). Sifting through the memories of childhood, Rodriguez carefully analyzes how this linguistic transition worked: “This boy became a man. In private now, alone, I brood over language and intimacy – the great themes of my past” (32). If the moment in school when he crosses over into the public domain marks a moment of loss, it also points toward the acquisition of a new kind of identity that was not dependent on a separate realm of “home.” At this point Rodriguez also launches his first criticism against bilingual education. Encouraging children who have a mother tongue other than English to use their own language in school is, he argues, a serious misunderstanding of the function of language: “It is not possible for a child – any child – to use his family’s language in school. Not to understand this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling and to trivialize the nature of intimate life – a family’s ‘language’” (12). In other words, to Rodriguez the private, intimate utterance is accomplished through context, and if the public takes over the right to use what is inherently a private language this runs the risk of losing the power to signify intimately. He uses the appropriation of black slang as an example, saying that: As it becomes a public expression, the ghetto idiom looses its sound – its message of public separateness and strident intimacy. It becomes with public repetition a series of words, increasingly lifeless. (36)

Herein lies one important reason why Rodriguez initially claims his as an American story; it is a story of the immigrants’ inevitable loss of the old culture, manifested more than anything else in the loss of the old language. In a broader sense, however, it is also the story of the child, any child who leaves home for public society, and it discloses, as Rodriguez puts it, ”an essential myth of childhood – inevitable pain” (27).

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If the loss and pain of this recognition constitute the core of what Marquez calls the quest for a metaphor of self, this does not in and of itself generate Hunger of Memory’s poetics of experience. The compelling reading Hunger of Memory offers is due rather to a balance in the text that stems from a dialogic tension between autobiographical types of discourse and subject matter. The conceptualization of Hunger of Memory as refracting a poetics of experience may be further strengthened in the context of its formal intricacies as autobiographical discourse. By focusing on the relationship between what is said and how it is said we may get a richer and more complete sense of what constitutes Hunger of Memory’s poetics. In the following I want to explore this aspect by considering the text’s thematic focus in relation to the shifts in what I for now will simply call tone of voice. I then want to explore themes that are related to these narrative complexities, in particular the allusion to Caliban in the Prologue and the perspectives on American culture Rodriguez implicates when he summons to life this highly symbolically charged character. Tone of voice in Hunger of Memory oscillates between being very private, at times even secretive, and being political and polemical. This fluctuation generates a striking temporal movement. Typically we think of the autobiography as a chronological narrative that focuses on the autobiographical subject’s development in light of the influence of events, people, and surroundings. Even if the seven chapters or essays in Hunger of Memory deal consecutively with childhood, adolescence and adulthood, the chronological flow is continually, albeit subtly interrupted. What results is perhaps best described in Rodriguez’s own words in the Prologue: Writing this manuscript. Essays impersonating autobiography; six chapters in sad, fuguelike repetition. (7)

What is being rehearsed is introduced in “Aria,” and throughout the book the “fuguelike repetitions” grow increasingly complex. In the second chapter, “The Achievement of Desire,” Rodriguez elaborates further on his theme when he refers to his school years all the way through graduate school as those of a “scholarship boy.” He borrows the term from Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy as a characterization that expresses his own predicament. A “scholarship boy” denotes a student for whom the educational process pertains to a sphere

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thoroughly severed from that of home and family and, consequently pertains to a student who increasingly belongs to two worlds placed at cultural extremes: “good student, troubled son.” “Here is a boy,” Rodriguez writes, “who cannot forget that his academic success distances him from a life he loved, even from his own memory of himself” (48). The divide that opens up between home and school is only widening as the boy grows older, and as the teachers gradually assume the role of parental authorities. This displacement of parent figures produces further estrangement from the home-sphere, leaving the student (Richard) acutely aware of how much he has changed and is changing. In this sense the process of education described in “The Achievement of Desire” merely extends the significance of the original moment in first grade. In a different way, though, the elaboration on the theme of the “scholarship boy” evokes unpleasant associations with a character whose capacity for copying and lack of originality defines his accomplishment as a public individual. Against the sense of a newly acquired and public subjectivity celebrated in “Aria,” the reflections on this achieved identity in “The Achievement of Desire” sound less convincingly exultant. And this is perhaps only appropriate, since the passage of the child from a working class background into a sphere associated with a middle-class education is an unnerving one, and not easily forgotten. The cultural change it involves brings with it an acute awareness that the change is not a natural one, but one appropriated and hence to be watched over.15 Several critics and scholars have explored the parallel between George Washington Gómez and Hunger of Memory, first and foremost in light of the equation that both texts seem to expound between education and Americanization. Certainly, they both bear witness to the pain and loss that Americanization and assimilation involves, but Hunger of Memory is not about the rejection of cultural roots, as some critics claim. In a 15

The emphasis in Hunger of Memory on the “passage” of the working class child into higher education is one of the most important reasons why the book continues to be read and loved across ethnic or cultural divides. Especially white Americans are drawn to this aspect, and one explanation may be that the category of class in the American social fabric remains shrouded in considerable silence, and perhaps especially so in the sphere of higher education. For some very perceptive discussions of this personal and very often emotional complex, see Irvin Peckham, “The Stories We Tell,” and Vivyan Adair, “U.S. Poverty Class/Working Class Divides: The Missing Story of Ourselves,” in Considering Class: Essay on the Discourse of the American Dream, eds Kevin Cahill and Lene Johannessen, Berlin-London: LitVerlag, 2007.

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discussion of Anthony Quinn’s autobiography Marco Portales sweepingly states that, “unlike Guálinto or Richard Rodriguez, who choose to anglicize themselves and reject their cultural roots, Anthony Quinn uncomfortably seeks to maintain his heritage within his successful adult self.”16 While Américo Paredes’ protagonist may be guilty as charged, Rodriguez’s story does not lend itself to such categorical assessments. I have used the phrase the “original moment” about Rodriguez’s experience in first grade, and the instant when Richard makes the transition described in “Aria” from Ricardo to Rich-heard functions as a threshold chronotope in Hunger of Memory. Its peculiar characteristic of being “the chronotope of crisis and break in a life” makes the temporality of this time-space “knot” “essentially instantaneous; it is as if it has no duration and falls out of the normal course of biographical time.”17 The repetitions and rehearsals that haunt Hunger of Memory are also significantly informed by the impact of this original moment. Even if there is distinct chronological progression, there is at the same time a thematic circularity that pulls Rodriguez’s narrative focus back to his initial recognition in the first-grade classroom. This feature resembles what Jay with reference to Augustine’s Confessions describes as a “double preoccupation,” reflected in what he calls the “retrospective process of introspection.”18 Jay’s observation draws on the Freudian process of the talking cure in psychoanalysis, but it can also be brought to bear on the narrative process of self-analysis in Hunger of Memory. The gravitational pull of the threshold chronotope suggests crisis as a structuring principle for the complex narration of self, to be told again and again until, maybe, eventually, the story need not be rehearsed anymore. Perhaps because language more explicitly frames institutional ideology, the rehearsal of private and public languages in the third chapter, “Credo,” is more clearly defined. Talking about the Catholic Church and the role of religion in his life, notions of loss and gain are here brought to life with more intensity. Already on the first page Rodriguez postulates a divide between his family and others: “When I was a boy, anyone not a Catholic was defined by that fact and the term 16

Marco Portales, Crowding out Latinos: Mexican Americans in the Public Consciousness, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000, 117. 17 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 248. 18 Jay, Being in the Text, 24-25.

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non-Catholic” (77). Being a Catholic, and a Mexican Catholic at that, strengthens the sense of a private and enclosed home sphere that is significantly different from the non-Catholic outside world. The absolute separation is somewhat modified, however, when Richard begins in a Catholic school, which, even if it is Irish-Catholic and therefore has slightly different practices, nevertheless forms a link between inside and outside. The connection is enforced by liturgical rituals that to some extent bridge this gap between the public and the private: The mass mystified me for being a public and a private event. We prayed here, each of us, much as we prayed on our pillows – most privately – all alone before God. And yet the great public prayer of the mass would go on. No one ever forgot where they were. (96)

As this chapter progresses, however, an attitude toward the nature of public individuality surfaces in the text that is different from the more polemical stances of “Ariel” and “The Achievement of Desire.” In talking about how the church has changed since his boyhood (the liturgical change implemented by the Second Vatican Council), the autobiographical discourse concerning the nature of public individuality sounds a little less assured, as if loss now surfaces as the more real determinant. Paradoxically, the liturgical shift from the Latin Credo previously spoken by the priest, to the “We believe” uttered by priest and congregation complicates the balance Rodriguez has drawn between private and public: “At the old mass,” he says, the priest’s credo (I believe) complexly reminded the congregation of the fact that each person stands before God as an individual, implying at the same time – because the priest could join all the voices in his – the union of believers, the consolation of communal faith. The listener was assured of his membership in the Church; he was not alone before God. (The Church would assist him.) By translating credo into the English first person plural, we believe, the Church no longer reminds the listener that he is alone. ‘We believe,’ the congregation is encouraged to say, celebrating community – but only that fact. (105-106)

If, as Rodriguez proposes in “Aria,” transferring one’s discourse of a private individuality onto the public sphere deprives the former of its power to mean, then the passage above paradoxically re-iterates this. When nothing is left of the singular subject as distinct from all other subjects in a common orientation towards the same, something is lost:

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“celebrating community – but only that fact.” The new liturgy, Rodriguez reflects, is consequently one well suited to people who are mostly alone in their faith in the “secular city,” not to people for whom an assured sense of community is already in place (107). Can the communally circumscribed rites of faith accommodate intimacy of faith in a public context the way intimacy travels through language in other contexts? To Rodriguez this does not seem as obviously unquestionable as when he dismisses the significance of a private language in the public spheres elsewhere. Between descriptions of the changes that the church of his childhood has gone through there are also regrets of the blandness that results from this transformation of the unique into an experience of all. The sentence, “celebrating community – but only that fact,” echoes in tone as well as content Søren Kierkegaard’s disillusion a century and a half earlier with what he called the gnawing reflection of his own day and age: “if the age is reflective, devoid of passion, obliterating everything that is concrete, the public becomes the entity that is supposed to include everything.”19 When the times are calculating and reflecting, as opposed to revolutionary and passionate, every phenomenon is absorbed by what Kierkegaard calls “the spirit of leveling, a monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage – and this is the public.”20 The public is a non-entity that does not belong to any thing or any idea, and prohibits the singular from emerging simply by being everywhere and nowhere at the same time: “once again this situation is the very expression of the fact that the single individual is assigned to himself.”21 The individual’s loneliness and his despair at this very loneliness becomes the greater, because it cannot be given words and agency. As soon as it is spoken it loses its power to signify; as statement it is abstracted by the public and leveled to nothingness. It seems to me that it is a very similar phenomenon Rodriguez laments in “Credo,” except his concern is directed more at a postcapitalist modernity and its emphasis on the self as an entity confirmed only by and within its public parameters. The liturgical change 19

Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review (1846), eds and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, 91. 20 Ibid., 90. 21 Ibid., 91.

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from the individual’s confirmation of his singular relationship to God spoken together with others with an equally singular relationship is lost in “We believe.” But the change was necessary because the singular presupposes a sense of self in place and time which the detached reflection of post-capitalism seeks to erase, replacing instead the essential and singular with an all-embracing sense of public that exists everywhere and nowhere: this is Kierkegaard’s “monstrous abstraction.” Rodriguez’s argument against bilingual education, that incorporating the private language of home into the public uses of school ultimately trivializes the private, ties in with the process of leveling he regrets in the Church. There is no contradiction here; rather, as rehearsals of the “threshold chronotope” they complement each other. “Credo” fills in the void left after the loss of the Spanish, private language by articulating and recognizing loss itself. The loss of a sense of belonging as one individual believer among many eventually blends into the loss of the old faith itself: “I will be uneasy knowing that the old faith was lost as much as by choice as it was inevitably lost” (107). Resonating with the thematic notes of the initial loss, the lament rises in intensity as, to borrow a phrase from Elisabeth de Mijolla, “rebellious memory vies with mimesis”: More or less consciously, autobiographers compromise between mimesis and memory. Mimesis, traditionally, is orderly, given to the historical and the communicable. Memory is achronological, afigural, and individually disorderly.22

In “Credo” communicable order is intercepted by the echoes of the threshold chronotope, brought out with a heightened sense of vulnerability: “Yet in a traditional autobiographical tale (of conversion, pilgrimage, and voyage to wisdom) the fit of moment, memory, or reverie may slip, loosing unruliness in the structure of the narrative.”23 From beneath Rodriguez’s lament over the conflation between the public and private aspects of the specific ceremonies of the mass, a note of fear rises at the prospect of losing even what is left of faith: I would cry into the void …. If I should lose my faith in God, I would

22

Elisabeth De Mijolla, Autobiographical Quests: Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Wordsworth, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994, 1. 23 Ibid., 8.

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The passage is one of the instances in the book where the authorial voice slips into a mode different from that heard elsewhere in the book. I am tempted to say that this is because the voice here is so painfully sincere. Given the immensely personal nature of the topic this is perhaps also the case. It comes, therefore, as no surprise when Rodriguez goes on to say that, “there was a time in my life when it would never have occurred to me to make a confession like this one” (109). As readers we sense being present at a confession before we are told that we are. Yet what, we may ask, makes this confessional? Is it that we as readers are invited into a secret, listening to what no one has listened to before in a special relationship with the author? The confessional mode is subtle, far more difficult to describe than for instance the apologia; both, however, are commonly defined according to incentive rather than formal or narrative characteristics. The apologia is a fairly straightforward mode to assess, namely as the author’s explication of his position in matters of a political, ethical, moral, in short, public nature. It presupposes an environment or background against which the author places himself, and one that he assumes is known to the reader. The apologia consequently distinguishes itself from the confession, John Goodwin notes, because “as a literary form [it] implies no admission of guilt on the part of its author.”24 Hunger of Memory abounds in instances of the apologia, and this is of course most evident where Rodriguez turns to political issues. I quote a longer passage which I think illustrates this, and which in turn can provide a useful background for understanding the characteristics of the confessional mode:

24

James Goodwin, Autobiography: The Self Made Text, New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993, 5.

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Remarkably, affirmative action passed as a program of the Left. In fact, its supporters ignored the most fundamental assumptions of the classical Left by disregarding the importance of class and by assuming that the disadvantages of the lower class would necessarily be ameliorated by the creation of an elite society. The movement that began so nobly in the South, in the North came to parody social reform. Those least disadvantaged were helped first, advanced because so many others of their race were more disadvantaged. The strategy of affirmative action did not take seriously the educational dilemma of disadvantaged students. They need good early schooling! …. But the opportunity passed. The guardians of institutional America in Washington were able to ignore the need for fundamental social changes. College and university administrators could proudly claim that their institutions had yielded, were open to minority groups. (There was a proof in the handful of numbers computed each fall.) So less thought had to be given to the procession of teenagers who leave ghetto high schools disadvantaged, badly taught, unable to find a decent job. (151-52)

It is worth bearing in mind here that parts of Hunger of Memory had previously been published as essays in journals and newspapers, and Rodriguez was already a noted voice in public debate. That this passage conforms to the rationale of the apologia is appropriate, since the writer of the apologia typically seeks to explain the “origins of ideas and opinions behind actions, [in order to] rectify inaccurate and unfair judgment over his or her conduct.”25 One should also note that Rodriguez’s critique here targets both defenders and adversaries of affirmative action, and that his position is far more radical than any affirmative action program. Ultimately his argument ties in with the questions of public and private individuality, on the personal as well as the cultural level: isolation enhances alienation, and in the context of minority politics isolation runs the risk of undermining the right to exercise basic civic rights. The way the above passage differs from the confessional mode in the passage quoted from “Credo” earlier is fairly obvious to the reader, and yet, if asked to explain how, we grasp for terms beyond those referring to mere sensibility. I think there are two main reasons why the answer eludes us. One is the inherently personal nature of autobiography, where the subject trying to resolve the challenges of self-representation as truthfully as possible ultimately finds him- or 25

Ibid., 5.

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herself forced to invent a form that accords with the content he or she seeks to convey. (One cannot imagine a formal strategy that would somehow apply to all acts of self-representation across time and space.) The other reason is that the confessional mode fundamentally sense seeks its description in what it confesses. It is in other words a self-referential mode where the reader’s experience of what the writer confesses ultimately hinges on a relationship of trust that originates within the isolated time-space of the narrative. Consider, for instance, the passage below from the chapter “Profession.” It is a reflection on affirmative action and Rodriguez’s own position as a minority student within that program: I wish as I write these things that I could be angry at those who mislabeled me. I wish I could enjoy the luxury of self-pity and cast myself as a kind of ‘invisible man.’ But guilt is not disposed of so easily. The fact is that I complied with affirmative action. I permitted myself to be prized. Even after publicly voicing objections to affirmative action, I accepted its benefits. (152)

The barely perceptible confessional aspect of this paragraph stands as a prelude to the more direct act of confession we encounter a page later: You who read this act of contrition should know that by writing it I seek a kind of forgiveness – not yours. The forgiveness, rather, of those many persons whose absence from higher education permitted me to be classed a minority student – I wish that they would read this. I doubt they ever will. (153)

This illustrates an important aspect concerning both the relationship between the autobiographical writer and his reader, and that between “confessant” and “confessor”.26 The autobiographical pact between writer and reader is founded in the confidence that what is being told is true and verifiable with reference to persons, incidents, and places etc. in the real world outside the text. In the passage above, however, this pact is violated. While the truths told are technically speaking still 26

I use these terms as Peter Brooks uses them in his Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. The “confessant” denotes the one who confesses, the “confessor” the one who receives the confession.

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available, the narrating voice is oriented towards an exclusive reader other than “us.” At this point we may more specifically address confessional discourse as it transpires in Hunger of Memory. If the principle of trust in the autobiographical pact can be said to fall on the reader, then that of the confessional pact falls on the writer. In the passage just quoted Rodriguez’s designated reader (one who may not read the book) is privy to the confession that is being made, and only this reader is in a position to acknowledge and accept or reject. Other readers are excluded from this relationship, not by their own choice, but the writer’s. The situation raises the question of whether this specific authorial discursive orientation suggests a basis for positing a narrative distinction between the confessional and the autobiographical discourse. Given the self-referentiality of the confessional mode, such a distinction may not have general validity. Some formal distinctions, however, may be made concerning the internal relationship between the two types of discourse within one narrative. In Confession and Complicity in the Narrative Dennis Foster makes an observation on the confessor’s performance that may prove helpful (although in Foster “confessor” denotes the one who confesses): Still confessors speak of wine and women, hatred and greed as if they were the cause of conscience’s pain, while the mysterious loss suffered in sinning remains unrelieved. At best, the sufferer can articulate this sense of loss and thereby enjoy the small comfort of recognizing himself as lost.27

This bears on the architectonics of the confessional discourse. If, as I suggested earlier, confession seeks its description in what it confesses, then Hunger of Memory’s confessional passages find their description, not in the essential experience of loss itself as much as in the memory and recognition of it. The recognition of loss re-orients the account of self, made in and for the public to that of an account made for a private reader. For we cannot perceive of a confession without a confessor: the confessant must have an audience, man or God. The confession consequently has a particular orientation, and even if this orientation is known only to the confessant himself the awareness of 27

Dennis Foster, Confession and Complicity in Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 3.

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this fact nevertheless influences his or her speech. I think this is what we perceive in Rodriguez’s occasional confessional turns, a barely perceptible presence of an other consciousness to whom Rodriguez speaks of the hunger for a memory that is located prior to the great change in his life. The memory of crossing the threshold between the private and the public in early childhood travels through the narrative and surfaces alternately as public and private representations. Interestingly, in his last chapter, “Mr. Secrets,” Rodriguez reflects: “Somehow I knew, however, that my words were meant for a public reader” (187). His audience is on a different occasion identified as “those whom my mother refers to as the gringos” (177). And yet, the confessional turns are not intended for the “gringo” audience, they are directed toward a consciousness capable of recognizing the memory of loss – and acknowledging the writer’s own recognition. While the story of becoming a public individual through schooling and education has a universal appeal and a universal orientation, Rodriguez nevertheless reserves parts of the telling of this story for someone other than the public reader. And if these segments of storying are not, as he says, meant for this reader, then they are directed toward a private reader – one who by implication is still, as it were, on the other side of the threshold. The text consequently operates on a double level in its discursive orientation, which complexly corresponds to the autobiography’s main thematic concern: a private versus a public configuration of the self. In the meeting between subject matter and narrative representation the authorial voice sounds doubly, as if the confessional discourse makes itself heard alongside the autobiographical whole of the text. This feature is nowhere more prevalent than in the Prologue entitled “MiddleClass Pastoral,” where the ironic introductory remarks introduce a series of complex confessional passages. This is how the autobiography begins: I have taken Caliban’s advice. I have stolen their books. I will have some run of this isle. Once upon a time I was a ‘socially disadvantaged’ child. An enchantedly happy child. Mine was a childhood of intense family closeness. And extreme public alienation. Thirty years later I write this book as a middle-class American man. Assimilated. (3)

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One may well ask how this can be perceived as confessional discourse at all. It is certainly far removed from confession understood as unconditional self-revelation, to God or to man, as the confessant strives for acceptance and deliverance. Instead, the deeply ironic account of self generates an unstable image of the autobiographical subject, an image that defies assessment and evaluation. By taking into its own account the possible judgments of others, the confessional discourse here anticipates and absorbs into itself what Bakhtin calls transgredient axiological moments, that is, the normative evaluations of another consciousness that passes into the self’s imaging of himself. The structure of this other is also complex, but I will leave this aspect aside for now. Suffice it at this point to say that the discursive orientation in the Prologue is far more ambivalent than in the other confessional passages in the book; here it is directed at both a public and private audience. In “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” Bakhtin proposes a categorization that may be helpful in understanding the dynamics and function of the rather remarkable tone of voice that prevails in Rodriguez’s Prologue: “An element of theomacy and anthropomacy is possible in confessional self-accounting, that is, the refusal to accept a possible judgment by God or by man, and as a result tones of resentment, distrust, cynicism, irony, defiance appear.”28 In the Caliban passage just quoted the three last terms – “cynicism”, “irony” and “defiance” – prevail most, and most striking to the reader is the evocation of Caliban. In a book about the functions and power of language, the allusion to this figure associated with linguistic emasculation and the state of colonization is at best odd. As the passage continues, this image takes on even more disturbing characteristics: Assimilated. Dark-skinned. To be seen at a Belgravia dinner party. Or in New York. Exotic in a tuxedo. My face is drawn to severe Indian features which would pass notice on the page of a National Geographic, but at a cocktail party somebody wonders: ‘Have you ever thought of doing any high-fashion modeling? Take this card.’ (In Beverly Hills will this monster make a man. (3)

The elaboration on notions of masking and typecasting enhances the anthropomachic character of this narration of self. The confessant 28

Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 146.

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in the passages we have looked at is not present here; rather, as subject of his autobiographical discourse Rodriguez retreats behind both figurative and linguistic masks. If we now consider this in relation to what Bakhtin suggests about the nature of true confessional discourse, we may come closer to comprehending the particular type of confession we encounter in Hunger of Memory: Confession as an encounter of the deepest I with another and with others (with the folk), as an encounter of I and other on the highest level or in the ultimate instance. But the I in this encounter must be the pure, deep I from within oneself, without any admixture of presumed and forced or naively assimilated points of view and evaluations from another, that is, without any visualization of the self through the eyes of another. Without a mask (an external profile for another, the shaping forces of the self not from within but from without, and this also refers to any speech or stylistic mask), without loopholes, without a false ultimate word, that is, without all that is externalizing and false.29

These notes serve to describe what the passage from the Prologue is not. Rodriguez’s self-account is permeated with evaluations that have penetrated his words about himself. Consequently Bakhtin’s focus on precisely masking is interesting in this context. Assuming a mask that the external world expects, or suspects the subject to wear, the subject is aware of the evaluations that are potentially at play and counters them by voicing them in advance, and this is perhaps exactly what Rodriguez as the autobiographical subject of and in his book does. He anticipates the finalizing word of others about himself, about what Bakhtin calls transgredient axiological moments, and side steps their potential to consume him, to finalize him. The strategy cleverly discloses and invalidates the audience’s anticipations, as indeed the following remark reveals: There are those in White America who would anoint me to play out for them some drama of ancestral reconciliation. Perhaps because I am marked by indelible color they easily assume that I am unchanged by social mobility, that I can claim unbroken ties with my past. The possibility! At a time when many middle-class children and parents grow distant, apart, no longer speak, romantic solutions appeal. But I reject the role. (Caliban won’t ferry a TV crew back to his island, there to recover his roots.) (5) 29

Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 294.

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The text deconstructs the imagined anticipations of both white American and Mexican-American audiences, and yet critics have insisted on taking the reference to Caliban as an indication that Rodriguez’s projection of the well-adjusted middle-class American is in reality false. This charge misses the point, I think. The entire Prologue must be seen precisely in the context of the processes of stereotyping that Rodriguez problematizes elsewhere. I have suggested that not only does the peculiar confessional element in the Prologue destabilize the autobiographical subject; it also complicates the structure of the reader-audience. A possible answer to why the confessional aspect in the Prologue is what Bakhtin calls anthropomachic is intimately connected to the orientation toward a readership. The allusions to Caliban and masking are directed towards a referential point that neither the “public” and English-speaking nor the “private” and Spanish-speaking audiences’ evaluations can reach. For Rodriguez’s repudiation of evaluative assessments from both positions ultimately converges in the assessment of a third subjectivity, an ideologically appropriated third space with its own parameters for individuality. We can appreciate this more easily when we consider what Rodriguez says a little further on in the Prologue: Consider me, if you choose, a comic victim of two cultures. This is my situation: writing these pages, surrounded in the room I am in by volumes of Montaigne and Shakespeare and Lawrence. They are mine now. (5)

A perceptive reader will refrain from seeing Rodriguez as a comedian or a victim. The third space that lies between the “two cultures” is in many ways the same space Bruce-Novoa has called the “intercultural possibilities” of the space between Mexican and American, but with one important difference. Where scholars such as BruceNovoa and Ramón Saldívar restrict their reflections to a specifically ethnic context, Rodriguez’s evocation of Caliban and a third subjectivity finds its echoes in the expanding spaces of the broader postcolonial situation. At the same time, while post-colonial literatures and theorists often continue to ground their narratives and arguments in dichotomies, Rodriguez’s defiance and assertion of a third subjec-

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tivity calls for a far more inclusive and comprehensive understanding. His self-account signals precisely the rejection of axiological positions that seek to accommodate him as a subject belonging to one or the other culture. Instead he seeks to assert a space for himself and millions of others who, like himself, inhabit a space somewhere inbetween, or rather, beyond the established parameters of racial and ethnic dichotomies. The status of Rodriguez’s autobiography in the American literary and cultural landscape is inextricably connected to the narrative representation of its themes. The complexity of Hunger of Memory and its subtle alterations in discursive orientation accomplish the task of representing being in language. The passing of childhood, innocence, of what was once felt as private and unique, resonates beyond a discourse of ethnicity.

CHAPTER VII

Memories of Landscape 1: The Meaning of Place in Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus To live the Borderlands You must live sin fronteras Be a crossroads.1

Approximately twenty-five years after tierra had chronicled the lives of Mexican-American migrant laborers, Helena María Viramontes published Under the Feet of Jesus. Both novels share the focus on the situation of the migrant farm laborers, but Viramontes restricts her depiction to the story of a family’s hopes and dreams in a reality that allows little space for either. The novel directs attention toward social and political issues that are in many ways as pressing today as when tierra was published, but where tierra structurally and thematically narrates the assertion and consolidation of the cultural self, Under the Feet of Jesus precariously balances hope and desperation. The story in tierra that most closely resembles Under the Feet of Jesus is the title story, “And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.” In both narratives the main characters are adolescents, and in both the conflict between communally held truths and norms, and the individual’s aspirations are central. More important, though, is the different role the land itself plays in these two narratives. Where the geography and the landscape in Rivera’s story ultimately support the protagonist in his quest for knowledge and self-assertion, the land in Under the Feet of Jesus is far more uncertain. Under the Feet of Jesus is first and foremost narrated through the 1

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, San Francisco: Aunt Lupe Press, 1999, 217.

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young girl Estrella, who in the course of the novel makes the transition from girlhood to womanhood. She functions as the little group’s spokesperson in relation to the surrounding world, not only because she is more fluent in English than the others, but also because she emerges as a person who literally as well as figuratively is strong enough to support and sustain the others. The novel can consequently be read as a conventional Bildungsroman, following the typical trajectory toward the protagonist’s realization of self and her place in the world. However, there are other aspects and readings of Under the Feet of Jesus that may be more rewarding. The novel begins on the road, with the family transporting themselves and their belongings in familiar, all-American style: “They were seven altogether – their belongings weighed down an old Chevy Capri station wagon, the clouds above them ready to burst like cotton plants.”2 This is our introduction to some of the characters: Estrella, her four siblings, her mother Petra and the “man who was not her father,” Perfecto Flores. They are traveling through a California landscape of stunning beauty and natural richness: “Sunlight weaved in and out of the clouds. Wisps of wind ruffled the orange and avocado and peach trees which rolled and tumbled as far back as the etched horizon of the mountain range” (3). The imagery evokes associations of a playful and exotic garden, a Promised Land. The image is however abruptly shattered by the appearance in the field of vision of a “cluster of amputated trees [that] marked the entrance of the side road. The mother said Aquí, and the man whom they called Perfecto slowed down and turned.” The lush and abundant landscape is distorted by a figure that conjures up associations of violence and decay. To the traveling family the side road marked by the stunted trees indicates the end of their journey, yet only until the time comes to find new fields and new harvests, because, “it was always a question of work, and work depended on the harvest, the car running, their health, the conditions of the road, how long the money held out, and the weather, which meant they could depend on nothing” (4). The ordeals the characters must endure and survive – or not – form the backdrop against which a larger narrative is told. For Under the Feet of Jesus also scripts the imagination of the Borderland in a tale of geographical significations. In the struggle over sites and their 2

Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus, New York: Dutton Signet, 1995, 3. All subsequent references are to this edition.

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imports, the discourse of physical landscape meets that of mental inscape in a narrative where metaphors of geography carry the many temporalities of the Borderland into a disturbingly beautiful whole. Over the California scenery hover the dark tales of dispossession and dislocation; the Garden is scarred by the disfigurements of past and present transgressions. The “Aquí” (“Here”) in the passage above refers to the place the family will be staying while they are working in the area, but already at the outset the image of wreckage circumscribing the family’s environment could also be said to metaphorize past violation of the territory that once was home. Throughout the novel concrete place, or the material world (exteriority) are balanced in relation to the mental double, time, or inner space (interiority). Inner space should not be understood here as a space defined by internal subjective connotations, such as mindscape signals, but rather as the accumulation of the collective connotations a cultural experience expresses as codes of history. Inner space is consequently the humanly interiorized version of the constant processes of the production of space. This production ultimately hinges on the circumscription of place, which, as Doreen Massey puts it, “are processes,” not static and immobile marks that remain forever unchanged.3 Places are subject to narrativization, which in turn brings them into the fluid dynamics of history and memory. In Under the Feet of Jesus the language of place is carried over into the language of inner space through metaphor. Metaphor is the mediator of hope and despair, and of the dialogue between the diffuse and the concrete, inscape and landscape. This configuration of landscape consequently illustrates Octavio Paz’s observation: “A landscape is not the more or less accurate description of what our eyes see but rather the revelation of what is behind visible appearances. [It] always points to something else, to something beyond itself [as] a metaphysic, a religion, an idea of man and the universe.”4 In Viramontes’ story the nature of “what lies behind” is revealed in how other places and their memories (temporalities) signify alongside the time and place of the actual landscape of the moment. This collapse of several temporalities in turn gives rise to a discourse that provides a comprehensive map of the inner space of the Borderland. 3

Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 2. 4 Octavio Paz, Alternating Current, New York: Viking Press, 1973, 15.

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Without an inner, mental sounding board against which the landscape and its meanings can reverberate, the metaphorical associations to other ideas signify nothing. In this way places, in their existence as what Massey refers to as “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understanding”5 take on the function of memory’s guardians, and work toward securing what Henri Bergson called duration: “[Duration] is memory, but not personal memory, external to what it retains, distinct from a past whose preservation it assures; it is a memory within change itself, a memory that prolongs the before into the after, keeping them from being mere snapshots and appearing and disappearing in a present ceaselessly reborn.”6 The before is carried over into the after, one may add, by metaphorical images that transport the past into the continuously changing present (and future). Memory is therefore not static, but dynamic in accordance with the changing understanding of its surroundings. The configuration of landscape as guardian of past residues is perhaps particularly poignant in this respect. Consider for instance the following episode where Estrella sits down on her way home from work to watch a Little League baseball game: Two Little League teams played on the green of the lawn, behind the tall wire mesh fence. The players had just run out on the chalked boundaries. Parents and other spectators sat on lawn chairs behind the batter’s bench or scattered about on the bleachers, ice chests at arm’s reach. Estrella wished she had not surrendered her peach and thought how perfect the evening would be if she had the fruit to eat. (58)

Estrella rests her mind and eye on the display of leisure and children’s innocent play so different from the struggle of her own life. She sits on the railroad tracks overlooking the baseball diamond behind a tall wire fence. As she watches the game Estrella recalls that “her brother Arnulfo had talked about playing baseball,” wanting to take his place among the masses of American children, dreaming the same dream of heroes and future victories. As she gets on her feet to have a better view of the game, she notices how the railroad ties look like her mother’s caesarean scar, and how the railroad stretches into the 5

Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 154. Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, trans. Leon Jacobson, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999, 30. 6

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horizon as far as she can see: “To the north lay the ties and to the south of her, the same, and in between she stood, not knowing where they ended or began.” This moment of calm reflection passes, however, and explodes in a waking nightmare: She startled when the sheets of high-powered lights beamed on the playing field like headlights of cars, blinding her. The round, sharp white lights burned her eyes and she made a feeble attempt to shield them with an arm. The border patrol, she thought, and she tried to remember which side she was on and which side of the wire mesh she was safe in. The floodlights aimed at the phantoms in the field. Or were the lights directed at her? Could the spectators see her from where she stood? Where was home? A ball hit, a blunt instrument against a skull. A player ran the bases for the point. A score. Destination: home plate. Who would catch the peach, who was hungry enough to run the field in that light? The perfect target. The lushest peach. The element of surprise. A stunned deer waiting for the bullet. A few of the spectators applauded. Estrella fisted her knife and ran, her shadow fading into the approaching night. (59-60)

In a violent collapse the scene before Estrella undergoes a metamorphosis into shapes and meanings that have little to do with baseball. The lights trigger the chain of associations, and a series of distorted visions of the ball field and the elements on it spin off from the initial and sudden flash invoking the border patrol. The wire fence separating the rail ties from the field is transfigured into the wires separating one territory from another, one country from another, and one kind from another. The fence becomes the division line that Gloria Anzaldúa calls “the thin edge of barbwire,” where the “Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”7 The running after the ball becomes the running for food and the running away from the border patrol’s searchlights hunting down those who cross the wire fence. The familiar sound of baseball bats hitting the ball is now the sound of a different kind of bat hitting a human skull. In the vision that is played out before Estrella’s mind players turn into phantoms – mere reflections of the mind, targets caught in a race for home. What home? The solidity of the railroad tracks disappearing into the landscape both south and north dissolve as the discourse of other memories overrun the reality of the actual terrain. The landscape, 7

Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 25.

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initially functioning as the ground for the protagonist’s experiences and impressions, takes on a function as catalyst for a figurative landscape with a different topography. The incident described above and its narrative representation exemplifies what John Hillis Miller observes on the novel and its mapping of space: A novel is figurative mapping. The story traces out diachronically the movement of the characters from house to house and from time to time, as the crisscross of their relationships gradually creates an imaginary space. This space is based on the real landscape, charged now with the subjective meaning of the story that has been enacted within it.8

The ball field, which is imagined and mapped figuratively in the creative act of writing, is expanded into a metaphorical site inhabited by elements different from those of the ball field itself. In other words, the actual and concrete locale is given its imagined double, whose meanings are derived from memories pertaining to other locales. One could say that the images, real and imagined ones, come together to form what Bergson calls duration, a “self-sufficient flow or passage, the flow not implying a thing that flows, and the passing not presupposing states through which we pass; the thing and the state are only artificially taken snapshots of the transition; and this transition, all that is naturally experienced, is duration itself.”9 To Estrella, however, the real and the imagined are connected by memory and coexist in a singular moment. This is similar to how Hillis Miller describes the inner space of the novel: “[All] novels, even those that are least visual, create one form or another of this inner space. The topoi within this topography are powerful but sometimes unnoticed bearers of much meaning in the novel.”10 The ball field is one of several such topoi in Under the Feet of Jesus (the railroad ties, for instance, another), and emerges as one of the narrative’s most important nodes. The insistent presence of other kinds of knowledge deriving from other locales and their memories thus transcends the specific site of the ball field, and it takes on a chronotopic quality: time becomes, as Bakhtin puts it, “artistically visible” and “space becomes charged and 8

John Hillis Miller, Topographies, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, 19. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, 30. 10 Hillis Miller, Topographies, 20. 9

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responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”11 The landscape, with layers of lived practices belonging to other places and their temporalities (memories) produces in this sense metatopographies of new meanings. Literature, as Hillis Miller goes on to suggest, is a vital instrument in this process: … it has been made human in an activity of inhabitation that the writing of the novel repeats or prolongs. Causer and caused, first and second, change places in a perpetually reversing metalepsis. If the landscape is not prior to the novel and outside it, then it cannot be extratextual ground giving the novel referential reality. If it is not part of the novel and outside it, then it is irrelevant.12

The immediacy and reality of place, or site, consist in other words in the written and spoken creation of lived practices within a constantly reciprocal dialectics. Under the Feet of Jesus both repeats and prolongs the “activity of inhabitation” Hillis Miller speaks of. The ball field is at once a site outside and inside the narrative, and so, too, is the imagined other, its phantom double. This particular locale reflects and refers to an “activity of inhabitation” that lies beyond its own specific use, an “activity” that is brought out in the meta-topography we perceive in Estrella’s associations. The connotations of field, fence, and lights pertain to border crossing and migration rather than to baseball. The anguish which overwhelms Estrella, and which she identifies to her mother only as the fear of something that is out there – “someone is trying to get me” (61) – is thus recognizable only in terms of the temporality of specific histories and inner spaces connected to other actual landscapes. As Norma Klahn points out, transgressions are the rule rather than the exception: “Reflecting mirrors and headlight beams at the border ... provide an imagery of metaphoric contestation, wherein the border becomes that state of siege within the nervous system to which Michael Taussig alludes – ‘a state of emergency.’”13 In Under the Feet of Jesus the actual topos and the metaphorical topoi it brings to life respond to an acute awareness of the land as memory. The image of the cesarean scar is poignant in this context. It 11

Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84. Hillis Miller, Topographies, 21. 13 Klahn, “Writing the Border,” 140. 12

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not only configures metaphors of continuity and memory in the shape of a geographical continuum (north and south-bound railroad ties), but also literally gestures toward birth and belonging (the mother’s scar). And yet both images summon that of rupture: the rupture of a people’s past, rupture of geography, and of a child from the mother’s womb. When Estrella comes home from the baseball field the mother immediately recognizes her fear, and identifies it for her: “It’s la Migra [the immigration police]. Everybody’s feeling it” (61). For Estrella this is not enough, however, and although the associations on the ball field are clearly motivated by an acute awareness of la Migra, she maintains that it is a more elusive “something” that is “out there” (62). This enhances the quality of the ghostlike atmosphere, which the reference to “phantoms” set, and perhaps Estrella’s fear is the fear of being trapped, a “shadow” among many in a space between. In an effort to reassure and calm her daughter, Petra summons both historical and spiritual forces: Don’t run scared. You stay there and look them in the eye. Don’t let them feel you did a crime for picking the vegetables they’ll be eating for dinner. If they stop you, if they try to pull you into the green vans, you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus, just tell them. ... Tell them que tienes una madre aquí [that you have a mother here]. You are not an orphan, and she pointed a red finger to the earth, Aquí. (63; translation added)

The passage alludes to a small Jesus figure which Petra takes with her everywhere they move, and under whose base she hides her most treasured possessions, the ID-papers. The immediate association is one of indisputable grounded-ness and eternity, and by literally placing identity and life under the unwavering presence of the figure of Jesus, Petra also makes a comment on the non-negotiable fact that her children are American citizens by birth. At the same time the representation of Jesus as guardian of life is also ambiguous. The prepositional construction of the novel’s title, “under the feet,” hints at a notion of subjection and even violence that bears on the topos of the Borderland itself. By making the implicit as well as the explicit connection with the here (“Aquí”) of the earth, Petra points her finger at the Janus-faced landscape which she rightfully claims belonging to. Moreover, by locating her and hers in the here of the earth, Petra gestures not only toward the landscape, but also toward history.

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There is an echo here of the element of disinheritance and orphaning we find in Don Mariano’s words in The Squatter and the Don when he says they were “left in the lap of the American nation, or, rather, huddled at her feet like motherless, helpless children.”14 And hundred years later, a similar yet somehow reversed sentiment resounds in anthropologist Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez´ reflection on his situation: “It is only by chance that I was not born in Sonora rather than Arizona, and that happenstance is repeated literally today by thousands of others like me.”15 The accidental and the ambiguous complicate the idea of certainty and belonging, which surfaces again in the following dialogue, when Alejo is sick and needs medical care. Estrella pleads with her mother to take him to the hospital, but Petra is afraid he may not have the necessary ID-papers: – “Piénsalo, hija. Does he have papers? What if the hospital reports him?” – “He was born in Texas. His grandma was born there too and her grandma. They belong there, Mama.”(142)

The brief exchange hints at the paradoxical situation of having to prove a presence that historically precedes that of most other Americans. To Petra her belonging may be undermined by political practices, but it is affirmed by a deep knowledge that the land belongs to her. Pointing a finger and marking on the map a place of home, Petra spatializes the discourse of other temporalities that lie embedded in the landscape itself. Eventually however, the meaning of home, grounded in these metaphorical imaginations of spiritual and historical solidity related to the land disintegrates. The metaphor turns on itself when the Jesus statue falls to the ground and breaks. Petra is left with “papers and sticks and broken faith and Perfecto, and at this moment all of this seemed as weightless against the massive darkness, as the head she held” (169). Her broken faith refers not merely to the broken statue, but perhaps more so to her perception of her own situation in the circumstances she has no choice but to trust: “Petra often feared that she would die and no one would know who she was” (166). She 14

Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don, 174. Carlos G. Veléz-Ibañez, Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996, 3. 15

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shares this particular fear with both the young Alejo and her companion, Perfecto Flores. Alejo is put to work in the field next to Estrella, and gradually they develop a romantic relationship that marks Estrella’s transition from girlhood to womanhood. Alejo is there with his cousin for the season, hoping to go back to his grandmother in Texas to begin high school. He dreams of becoming a geologist: And every time he awoke to the pisca, he thought only of his last day here and his first day in high school. He planned to buy a canvas backpack to carry his books; a pencil sharpener, and Bobcat bookcovers; and planned to major in geology after graduation. He loved stones and the history of stones because he believed himself to be a solid mass of boulder thrust out of the earth and not some particle lost in infinite and cosmic space. With a simple touch of a hand and a hungry wonder of his connection to it all, he not only became a part of the earth’s history, but would exist as the boulders did, for eternity. (52).

Alejo imagines himself as a “solid mass of boulder and not as some particle lost in infinite space,” an image that elaborates on the immediacy and solidity of Petra’s Aquí, and starkly contrasts with Estrella’s sense of being a “phantom.” To Alejo not being “lost in space” significantly ties in with the idea of connecting with history. In his discourse time itself therefore becomes a topos with its own boundaries and map, and Alejo’s search for his own connection with it all is the search for and appropriation of the topography of this timespace. Sadly, his struggle to achieve his dreams is crushed when the planes spraying pesticides over the fields catch him unaware. In a glimpse he sees the very topography he wishes to own and be a part of be erased from the face of the earth: As the rotary motor of the biplane approached again, he closed his eyes and imagined sinking into the tar pits. He thought first of his feet sinking, sinking to his knee joints, swallowing his waist and torso, the pressure of tar squeezing his chest and crushing his ribs. Engulfing his skin up to his chin, his mouth, his nose, bubbled air. Black bubbles erasing him. Finally the eyes. Blankness. Thousands of bones, the bleached white marrow of bones. Splintered bone pieced together by wire to make a whole, surfaced bone. No fingerprint of history, bone.

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No lava stone. No story or family, bone. (78)

One recalls here the story that …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him takes its name from. But whereas that protagonist discovers that even though he defies God and, indeed, the earth and the world, the earth does not open to swallow him. Alejo, on the other hand, wonders if his misery is the punishment for stealing fruit, and asks God for forgiveness. He is “devoured” and sees himself and his dreams disappear into the senselessness of a history that will never be told: “no fingerprint of history.” After the accident Alejo becomes seriously ill and is eventually hospitalized, left among strangers to an unknown and uncertain destiny. His destiny is particularly tragic since he is the only character in the novel harboring and articulating definite hopes and plans for the future. Estrella, for instance, is far more vague in these matters, and when Alejo asks her if she is going to work in the fields always, she only answers that she sure hopes not (117-18). Perfecto Flores, too, has dreams, and throughout the novel his wish to return to Mexico becomes increasingly stronger. However, this “perfect” man whom they all trust to fix whatever goes wrong, is beginning to lose track of time: “He kept forgetting his hat, stumbling over his memories like a child learning to walk; as if in seventy-three years he had traveled too long a distance to keep himself steady and able and willing. What would happen if he forgot his way home?” (79). While Alejo’s terror is that of being lost in time, Perfecto Flores’ is that of losing time itself. Eventually, it seems that he resigns: “Lord, he thought, how tired he was. He wanted to rest, to lay down and never get up”(161). Both these characters share with Petra the apprehension of disappearing into oblivion, and of not leaving traces behind. This is also brought out in a scene toward the end of the novel where Petra is lying in bed with Perfecto: “She urged her hips against Perfecto’s buttocks, then ran her arm under his and let it rest over the breadth of his belly. She felt as if she held nothing, his body like a phantom of a man once made of hearty flesh” (117). The scene rehearses the image from the ball field, where the players are transformed into “phantoms in the field,” and adds withering and death to the metaphor of border crossings. The result is that the topography of time itself is becoming unfocused and blurred, and this in turn will prove fatal to all three

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characters’ sense of self and of place. The uncertainty of location is, ultimately, the uncertainty of history and the ambiguous situated-ness that stems from the genealogy of the very metaphors that describe this. Under the Feet of Jesus complicates the parameter of metaphorical belonging, which, of course, in the last instance affects the culture nation and the metaphorical genealogy of its national imagination. Homi K. Bhabha suggests that, “metaphor … transfers the meaning of home and belonging, across the ‘middle passage,’ or the central European steppes, across those distances, and cultural differences, that span the imagined community of the nationpeople.”16 Across, we might add, the territory of the Borderland, and across the beauty of a California peopled by migrants and immigrants for whom distances and cultural differences are not necessarily the defining circumstances of their imagined community. Rather, to the characters in Under the Feet of Jesus it seems that the “meaning of home and belonging” is embedded in the ambiguity of the actual landscape and the metaphorical topography of its inscape: the central metaphor already is “the middle.” The figuration of identity turns on Petra when the Jesus statue breaks; it devours Alejo in an instant of real and imagined collapse; and the figuration of time turns on Perfecto when he loses his sense of self in time. As the story nears the end after the family and Perfecto Flores have left Alejo in the hospital, Under the Feet of Jesus is redeemed, however, in gestures of retrieval and hope. Climbing to the roof of a nearby barn, Estrella has a vision that defies the desperation of the ball field images, and which restores “broken faith”: The termite-softened shakes crunched beneath her bare feet like the serpent under the feet of Jesus. No longer did she feel her blouse damp with sweat. No longer did she stumble blindly. She had to trust the soles of her feet, her hands, the shovel of her back, and the pounding bells of her heart. A breeze fluttered a few loose strands of hair on her face and nothing had ever seemed as pleasing to her as this …. Estrella remained as immobile as an angel standing on the verge of faith. Like the chiming bells of the great cathedrals, she believed her heart powerful enough to summon home all those who strayed. (17576).

16

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, 139-40.

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Estrella’s leap of faith empowers her to reclaim the authority of her mother’s broken Jesus; to call upon the solidity of the boulders to secure “Aquí” in the earth and in history and in time; she summons the power of the stars and the angels to keep her and hers from dissolving in time. The image of the one individual rising to self-assertion brings to mind the neophyte in the last story of tierra, who discovers and recovers himself as a part of history and community. However, while this character is delivered, so to speak, in a communal and political sense within the cultural parameter of a specific locale, Estrella’s ascent is of a different character. Her rising above the hopelessness of the topography she belongs to is not confirmed by anything or anyone outside her, there is no resolving resonance in the narrative of the communal. Even if the neophyte in tierra only imagines the other, that affirming mirror is still significant to the eventual consolidation of a cultural coherence. What Estrella’s ascent does do, however, is to restore the narrative’s own balance at a point when the muddled contestations of other temporalities of landscape seem to annihilate all sense of place. This can perhaps be better understood by considering how such disintegration functions in another “landscape-novel.” In Geography as Stillness geographer Brian S. Robinson makes the following observation of how landscape signifies in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano: Landscapes are things and like any-thing they can be broken down into constituent parts …. disintegrated as Lowry knew [his novel] to be, the symbolic density of the novel is maintained not as a totality but by folding in, piecemeal, other references. There is no logos, no cosmos, to cover the shattered landscape. Indeed it is essential that it remains as a decomposition because, in addition, at the human level the rape of an ancient culture is juxtaposed alongside the debris of several lives.17

Robinson further suggests that in Lowry’s book the convergence between the characters’ lives and their surroundings creates a meaningful, albeit decomposed space wherein landscape reflects individual existence. His comments bear on my discussion of 17

Brian S. Robinson, Geography as Stillness, Halifax, NS: Saint Mary’s University, 1980, 15-16.

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landscape in Under the Feet of Jesus by contrast rather than by similarity. True, the shattered landscape that Viramontes creates is a reflector of the characters’ lives, but not as a correlation in a symmetrical whole. In the totality of the novel the disintegration of landscape points beyond itself to the complex and conflicting temporalities of histories of dispossession and transgression and this, ultimately, is what gives the text its meaning. Multiplications of metaphors and meanings strive toward unification, and Estrella’s ascent in the end informs disintegration with a sense of integration. For not only does she find firm ground under her feet, despite the crumbling shakes she stands on, she also makes sense of the darkness that surrounds her: “Over the eucalyptus and behind the moon, the stars like silver pomegranates glimmered before an infinity of darkness. No wonder the angels had picked a place like this to exist” (175). She might be talking about herself. Like the stars before the receding darkness, she, too, like the star her name signifies, shines. Her own assertion of place is the restoration, however precarious, of the disintegrated discourse of the landscape she traverses.

Memories of Landscape 2: The Threshold: Benjamin Alire Sáenz’ Carry Me Like Water

Sáenz’s Carry Me Like Water came out the same year as Under the Feet of Jesus, and although it, too, revolves around the meaning of place, it extends the significance of the Borderland beyond that of the geography of the US Southwest. Over roughly five hundred pages Sáenz lays out the lives of six main characters and those of several minor ones, both Mexican and Anglo. Their stories are all intertwined in one way or other, and provide a puzzle that the reader must piece together as the story unfolds. The narrative takes place in the twin cites of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez and in the San Francisco Bay Area. In El Paso/Juárez we meet Luz and Diego, both left behind by their families; both left to survive in a space that is itself left behind. As Diego reflects: El Paso was too far away from all the places in the world that people liked to read about. Nobody would ever want to read a book about the border and the migra – it would all be too strange, too foreign, too dull and hot, too poor and desolate to be considered exotic. People liked exotic, Diego thought.1

In San Francisco a gay couple are, literally, fighting for their lives. Joaquin is facing the last stages of aids, Jacob, not yet sick, can do little but watch and wait. In addition to mourning the passing of his beloved, Jacob struggles with a childhood of abuse and of having been disowned by the parents and separated from his younger brother, Eddie. Unbeknownst to Jacob, Eddie lives only a short drive away with his wife Ellen. Neither of the brothers is aware of how close the 1

Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Carry Me Like Water, New York: HarperPerennial, 1995, 73. All subsequent references are to this edition.

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other is. Eddie’s wife Ellen, it turns out, is Diego’s sister. She has left him and everything Mexican behind years ago in search of a better life borne out of an invented identity as “Italian.” With a name change back to Maria Helena she reveals her true identity to Eddie when she decides that the child they are having must not grow up without knowing his true ancestry. Her best friend is Lizzie, who is also a nurse at the hospital where Joaquin receives treatment. It is she who eventually realizes the connection between Jacob and Eddie and brings them together. In the course of the story, Lizzie learns that her whiteness is not real; her biological parents were Mexicans whose poverty forced them to put their child up for adoption. While the narrative plot in this brief summary may sound confusing, Sáenz never loses sight of the overall framework that structures the stories. This could be said to be the characters’ journey toward reconciliation and redemption. While quite different circumstances underlie their individual struggles, they share in common that honoring and rightfully living their heritages has become near impossible. They are all trapped within the walls of their respective predicaments: Jacob cannot still the anger planted in him in childhood, an anger that makes him incapable of opening up to and thus truly loving another person, even Joaquin; his brother Eddie, suffering from the same traumas of childhood abuse, has chosen to put a lid on the past, never to speak about it again; his wife Ellen bases her life on a lie; and Lizzie, who halfway into the narrative discovers that she is not who she thought she was, is left in a personal and cultural vacuum. To Anglos and Mexican Americans alike the sense of dislocation is fundamental and painful. As one character says to Jacob: “Tell me something, why do you find it so difficult to belong?” (291). The only one who actually does have a sense of belonging is Joaquin. His calm as he approaches the end of his young life is grounded in his relationship to the desert of the Borderland: What he loved was the desert. And in his mind the desert didn’t belong to a nation. To belong to the desert was enough. If he loved America it was because it had given him Jacob who himself was as hot, as wordless, as quiet, and as untamable as the desert itself. (14546)

To Joaquin there is no U.S.A. or Mexico; there is only the vast

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desert area that comprises the Great Basin, the Mojave, the Sonoran and the Chihuahuan deserts. And it is not coincidental that these expanses provide precisely Joaquín with a sense of origins and home. His name evokes the Joaquin of Gonzales’ Yo soy Joaquin/I am Joaquin; indeed, he introduces himself to Jacob the first time they meet with that very line: “I am Joaquin.” The figure of Joaquin in Gonzales’ poem absorbs into himself the complex history of the Borderland, of the many constellations of vanquisher and vanquished, of exploiters and exploited, of religions and cultures that come and go, and co-exist. The Joaquin of Carry Me Like Water, however, does not struggle; to him the shifting space of the Borderland is home, is the habitat that he trusts and does not question. The idea of a border in the desert is meaningless to this individual who knows that just like the river carries water according to its own logic, so too does the genealogy of the Borderland have its logic. Luz, too, has a relatively balanced relationship to borders. Spending her days between Juárez and El Paso she lives literally on the border. Her reflection on how the twin cities frame her existence takes the metaphor of home and not home beyond the confines of this specific location. Here, instead, is a powerful contemplation of the fragility and, perhaps, absurdity, of any border: She could not relinquish her Juárez because her family had lived in this ragged city for generations; it was her blood, her history, her inheritance; she could not relinquish El Paso because it was the piece of dirt her mother had bequeathed to her; it, too, was her blood; it, too, was her history …. She hated El Paso because it wanted to be an allAmerican city, wanted to pretend to be the heart of a great country, but could never be anything but a city on the fringes of Gringoland because too many people like her inhabited it, worked it, worshipped it. Loved it until it disappeared into them …. And she loved it because she knew what everyone in Juárez knew, knew that El Paso belonged to them, belonged to the border, would never be like the rest of America because their faces were printed on its land as if it were a page in a book that could never be torn out by any known power, not by God, not by the Border Patrol, not by the president of either country, not by the purists who wanted to define Americans as something organic, as if they were indigenous plants. (104)

Sáenz confidently confronts the complexities of a geopolitical territory that defies easy maneuvering, and this is perhaps where the

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novel’s title accomplishes its full significance. The image of water captures the ambiguity of permanence and movement, where beginning and end, past and present are seamlessly joined in continuity, not unlike the caesarian scar and the railroad tracks in Under the Feet of Jesus. Carry Me Like Water, however, uses the landscape in a more unambiguous way than Viramontes’s book does. In the latter the landscape speaks subtly and as we saw, with utter collapse and dissolution threatening to erupt at any moment. In Carry Me Like Water the landscape of the Borderland is held out both as a concrete place of refuge as well as a space that offers healing for the shattered. The characters’ suppression of the defining circumstances of their lives, forced on them or chosen, can be relieved and re-lived only by dissolving the very boundaries that run through their lives. Redemption is perhaps not unexpectedly sought – and found – in the very space that embraces borders, in the very heart of the Borderland. For different reasons Eddie and Maria Helena, Lizzie and Jacob all decide to relocate to El Paso: Maria Helena to find her brother Diego and return to and accept the cultural home she once denounced; Eddie to find a new beginning where the pain of his childhood has no part; Lizzie to live in and occupy the space between realities she already mentally occupies; Jacob to seal the loss of Joaquin and retrieve his lost brother, and, eventually, to die in a place he finally can call home: “I have found my brother, but I have lost my Joaquin. And now I am moving toward a strange doorway, but I do not know that place.” But as he looks at the clouds, dark as anything he ha ever known, he thinks: “I have lived in a doorway all my life. Perhaps I am going home” (368). Like Under the Feet of Jesus, Carry Me Like Water upholds its narrative movement through metaphor, but here metaphors are clear, specific and unquestionable. The story gravitates around water and desert, and accomplishes a fusion between the real and the imaginary that establishes a bridge between content and form, between theme and discourse. Early on in the novel, sick with fever, Joaquin has a dream: In the distance was a river, and he ran toward it, and the river was calling, “Come.” And the river repeated his name. “Joaquin.” He kept running through the endless flames, and the river did not seem to be getting any closer. Suddenly, inexplicably, the river was in

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front of him. “Come.” He looked back one last time to see Jacob fully clothed in the distance behind him. “Come back!” Jacob yelled. Joaquin looked into the cool waters of the river – and jumped. (146-47)

Waking up, he tells Jacob about his dream and asks him “Will you carry me …. Like a river carries water?” (147-48). The image brings associations to free flow, of simultaneous motion and stillness, of continuity and life. But also to the concrete river that runs through the desert of the real Borderland. In the novel, Rio Grande is described in terms of its confinement, a wild animal held in a cage, separating El Paso and Juárez with concrete walls. The image functions as a metaphor of the unmanageability of the actual border and the flow of people crossing the water every single day. It also metaphorizes the river of people that concrete walls cannot stop; a river that follows the original course from south to north rather than that from east to west. The discourse of landscape in Carry Me Like Water thus stands as a comment on and question to the walls and borders that confine individuals as well as cultures – and the futility of these efforts. Moreover, the novel illustrates performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s claim that the borderland and its cities are “models of a new hybrid culture, full of uncertainty and vitality.”2 Carry Me Like Water offers a model of uncertainty and vitality as the source of healing for a wound that opens up where past and present temporalities converge and where histories of dispossession and violence set the daily agenda. The narrative’s metaphorical movement is essential in this respect, because by drawing together the real and the imaginary of the borderland, the book affirms a cultural space outside the limits of any authority. Since metaphor feeds on its own refractions and mediations – subsides, as it were, on the reality it describes – its aesthetics could perhaps also be said to provide a powerful resistance to cultural conflation and annihilation. The implications of such questioning of the cultural and political meanings that underlie the resolution of Carry Me Like Water are several. The perspectives that are offered on borders and “borderism” spill over into the larger context of a gradually changing America. 2

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Excerpts from Warrior for Gringostroika,” in The Late Great Mexican Border: Reports from a Disappearing Line (1993), eds Bobby Bird and Susannah Mississippi Byrd, El Paso: Cinco Puentes Press, 1996, 102.

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Richard Rodriguez hinted at this already in Hunger of Memory, when he said, “I have taken Caliban’s advice. I have stolen their books. I will have a run of this isle.” Twenty years later in his most recent book, Brown: the Last Discovery of America, Rodriguez returns to this. From a range of different perspectives he comes to the notion of brown as impurity; as that which eludes easy classifications; as that which renders aspirations toward progress and future, discarding tradition and past, in a white and black world futile; as that which challenges a “Populuxe” America intent on pursuing the promise of tomorrow.3 Consequently, in a general sense, Carry Me Like Water also assumes its place in the long tradition of criticism of Western consumer society. The final resolution of withdrawing from the city to a small community (El Paso in itself is hardly quiet, but the protagonists live outside it), however, is more than another version of Walden Pond. I think more importantly Sáenz’s book could be read as a gesture toward what Rodriguez calls “the last discovery of America.” Brown in the sense of the impure, the between echoes in Jacob’s doorway, and it is significant that it is precisely the doorway, the indeterminacy of the threshold, that offers solace to these characters whose main problem is to reconcile themselves to their respective thresholds. The space of “brown,” culturally, geographically, and psychologically is, finally, home. This, perhaps, is what the “last discovery” consists in. Carry Me Like Water and its metaphorization of the Borderland and the movements across and within it can therefore be read analogous to the vulnerability of all borders, and to the futility of insisting on “purity” where what processes of globalization really mean is the redirection and merging of rivers.

3

The word “Populuxe” is the title of Thomas Hine’s book from 1986 about the decade from 1954 to 1964 in American society, a decade that saw the emergence of an unprecedented materialism and the birth of an aesthetics of the consumerism we are surrounded by today.

CHAPTER VIII

Aesthetics of Time in Chicano Literature This unspeakable present, leaking at every seam, these sudden invasions of the past, this emotional order, the opposite of the voluntary and intellectual order that is chronological but lacking in reality, these memories, these monstrous and discontinuous obsessions, these intermittences of the heart … 1

In the discussions so far I have posited the threshold chronotope as a structural point of gravitation for the culturological discourse, but similar to how the confessional discourse is determined by what it confesses, the threshold discourse also derives its content and form from the crisis, the limen of and from which it speaks. The relationship itself between culture and crisis consequently lends itself to certain tentative generalizations: if cultures’ stories about themselves can be said to gravitate toward their genesis and genealogy, it follows that the occurrence of a crisis (or indeed, of trauma) in connection with either of these two will tend to instigate a more persistent gravitation of narrative toward that event. Therefore, in the case of the United States one could suggest that the many minority discourses tend to gravitate toward certain agendas peculiar to the circumstances of their particular moments of coming into being as minorities, all the while taking place within the framework of the major, dominant discourse of American master narrative of self-description and remembering. In all cases crisis in one form or another – and of course with varying intensity – structures the act of the culturological storytelling. For instance, already in the 1

Jean-Paul Sartre, “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of William Faulkner,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays, New York: Collier Books, 1970, 88.

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early literature of the United States we detect the founding of a new Republic as generating a certain set of issues pertaining to genesis and genealogy. The nature of crisis in this example is Janus-faced, though, looking back and looking ahead all at once. There is the trauma of leaving home, the severing of bonds with the mother country, a dramatic decision. As Rodriguez notes, “Immigrants are always criminals. They trespass borders and horrify their grandmothers.”2 Yet the crisis (in the non-axiological sense of decision or break) is also that of building a new democracy, a universal exemplar. The latter would quickly overtake the former as the more powerful timbre in American self-depiction, and in The Past Is a Foreign Country David Lowenthal describes the origin of this initial theme as follows: In severing imperial bonds, Americans discarded not only the mother country but many of its traditions. Three interrelated ideas helped justify dismissal of the past: a belief that autonomy was the birthright of each successive generation; an organic analogy that assigned America to a place of youth in history; and a faith that the new nation was divinely exempt from decay and decline.3

But not all of early American literature as a culture text contains the optimism and vigor of a youthful and innocent nation. There are already other threshold discourses in the making with distinct and different programs peculiar to a somewhat different genealogy, such as Southern literature, a contrast often neglected in our perception of the history of American ideas and culture. For a long time the gravitation towards obsessions with themes growing out of the Peculiar Institution persisted, resulting in an orientation very different from New England optimism. William Faulkner more than anyone dramatized the influence of the past, this thickening of time that Sartre in an essay on The Sound and the Fury describes as follows: The past takes on a sort of super reality; its contours are hard and clear, unchangeable. The present, nameless and fleeting, is helpless 2

Richard Rodriguez, “Pocho Pioneer,” in The Late Great Mexican Border: Reports from a Disappearing Line, eds Bobby Bird and Susannah Mississippi Byrd, El Paso: Cinco Puentes Press, 1996, 224. 3 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 105.

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before it. It is full of gaps, and through these gaps, things of the past, fixed, motionless and silent as judges or glances, come to invade it.4

Such silent “judges” and “glances” easily become sources of obsessions that in turn are brought into the space where other cultures, obsessed with other gaps, exist. More often than not the activity of remembering seeks to protect rather than work out and work through what Sartre calls the “super reality” of the past, and for this purpose certain dichotomous principles assist the process of memory selection and distribution. This bears on the formation of literary canons as records of perceptions of the culturological self. The perpetuation of consistent and convincing recordings implies that other, contestant records be ignored, relegated to what “Culture” perceives as “non-culture” (see chapter I). The suppressed discourses and their memories subsequently recede into what Bakhtin calls the “boundless masses of forgotten meanings,” but then are sooner or later “recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a new context).”5 This is one way of framing the essence of canon revisions. As one such suppressed discourse within the United States’ master narrative (the record of “Culture”), Chicano literature, along with other minority literatures, has been and to a significant extent continues to be ignored (as records of “non-culture”); their memories and their distribution do not fit the desired projection of self. The exact nature of crisis and the particularity of the threshold chronotope’s temporal and spatial properties may vary from one cultural self to another, and the particularities of circumstances provide a kind of programming device for narration. In Chicano literature, the culturological crisis of 1848 resides not only in the temporally definite fact of loss and rupture; crisis is protracted by what residency in the Borderlands signifies, ideologically as well as historically. For the Borderland itself is essentially a threshold, and crisis is replicated and rehearsed on a very real basis in the daily lives of millions of legal and illegal immigrants and citizens who can trace their origins back to pre-1848. On a methodological level, this fact is key to the paradox of the temporally definite and spatially indefinite. Precisely because of the Borderland’s unique status as a site of both immigration and homeland, the temporality borne out of the original 4 5

Sartre, “Time in the Work of William Faulkner,” 87. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 170.

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crisis is, as it were, everywhere, passing through the space that comprises the reality of its inhabitants. This is not time traveling through the year, awakening on its journey the spatialized events of Christmas, midsummer and the like. Instead, the temporality of crisis is a constant company in which past and present are collapsed in the unfixable genealogy of the culturological dialogue. I quote Bakhtin at length here: There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and boundless future). Even past meanings, that is those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) – they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future developments of the dialogue. At any moment in the development there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival. The problem of great time.6

Key to the aesthetic of time in Chicano literature are deep-seated, complex sets of meanings that were indeed “born in the dialogue of past centuries.” We perceive it, for instance, in the speech Oscar Zeta Acosta makes at the end of The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo: Ladies and gentlemen … my name is Oscar Zeta Acosta. My father is an Indian from the mountains of Durango. Although I cannot speak his language … you see, Spanish is the language of our conquerors. English is the language of our conquerors …. No one ever asked me or my brother if we wanted to be American citizens. We are all citizens by default. They stole our land and made half-slaves. They destroyed our Gods and made us bow down to a dead man who’s been strung up for 2000 years …. My single mistake has been to seek an identity with any one person or nation or with any part of history.7

Twenty years later, Acosta’s sense of the intricacies of contemplating Mexican-American identity is strangely echoed in an otherwise very different book, Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation: An Argument 6 7

Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 170. Acosta, Brown Buffalo, 198-99.

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with My Mexican Father: I used to stare at the Indian in the mirror. The wide nostrils, the thick lips. Starring Paul Muni as Benito Juárez. Such a long face – such a long nose – sculpted by indifferent, blunt thumbs, and of such common clay. No one in my family had a face as dark or as Indian as mine. My face could not portray the ambition I brought to it. What could the United States of America say to me? I remember reading the ponderous conclusion of the Kerner Report in the sixties: two Americas, one white, one black – the prophecy of an eclipse too simple to account for the complexity of my face. 8

Despite their different agendas and situations Acosta and Rodriguez address the same personal experience: a cultural discomfort and relational unease with the space to which they have been consigned. In characteristic style Acosta lunges out against the misunderstandings that have blurred his vision of self. Rodriguez, equally characteristically meditates on the essential mystery of his unrecognized face. Both ponder the fact that theirs is a history and existence the United States does not accommodate, theirs is a space not accounted for. Rodriguez’s contemplation of Indian-ness and on how and what it means echoes his reflections on masking and impersonation in Hunger of Memory: this is Caliban looking at his mirrored image, wondering how his manifestation as being fits into the architectonics of the world he has come to inhabit. The perplexity expresses the complex that also essentially defines the space of Chicano culture and literature, namely the relationship between its manifestation (as formation and being) and the ideological backdrop against which this takes place. The Indian Rodriguez sees in the mirror came into existence only as modernity brought Europe to the “new world” and in this meeting created a new race. The Indian he sees bears the face of the mestizo, of what José Vasconcelos long ago boldly pronounced as the cosmic race.9 Herein lies one of the most significant contrasts between the genealogies of Mexico and the United States: while the Catholic Church deemed the indigenous peoples fit for the holy sacraments and 8

Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, New York: Penguin Books, 1992, 1. 9 José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósmica (1925), Pensamiento Mexicano I, California State University, Los Angeles: Centro de Publicaciones, 1979.

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thereby also for intermarriage, the Protestant United States frowned upon the idea of miscegenation. In addition to geographical dispossession and cultural marginalization, the Mexican-American presence in the United States has consequently historically been fundamentally antithetical to the Anglo-American pursuit of purity. As Rodriguez reflects, the insistence on racial dichotomies of black or white does not allow for that which lies in-between, which is where the Mexican American has resided for some hundred-and-fifty years. The Squatter and the Don, George Washington Gómez, …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Hunger of Memory, Under the Feet of Jesus and Carry Me Like Water are very different texts, one of the more obvious difference being that of genre. I have consequently read them according to the various headings of romance, Bildungsroman, fragmented novel and autobiography, novel of landscape. I have drawn on the theoretical and methodological frameworks that offered the best avenue to do justice to each specific text: discourse analysis, theories of the Bildungsroman and the autobiography, methodologies pertaining to social anthropology and postcolonial studies, theories derived from the field of topography. The texts have not been chosen to illustrate the value of critical versatility, but they illustrate how the composite space of Chicano literature demands a corresponding composite of theoretical approaches. However, that is not to say that these works have nothing in common. For one thing they are all literary representations of the experience of a real and imagined Borderland, trying in their various ways to make sense of the ambiguities that inform this space. In so doing they also share a temporal and spatial dynamic, which although manifested differently in each case has the same point of origin and the same structural orientation. They participate in what Bakhtin calls “the homecoming festival of the forgotten contextual meanings” by spatializing, as it were, a temporal relation to a particular point in time, broken down as “1848” as the moment of simultaneous crisis and creation. The ideological orientation in the narratives gravitates toward a complex where a temporal paradox of enduring instantaneity and spatial indefinite converge. I say “spatial indefinite” to emphasize the open-endedness that

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characterizes the space of Chicano culture.10 Dynamic and in constant flux this cannot be conceived outside its genealogy; the paradox, however, resides in the peculiar relationship between the finalized act of territorial loss and the un-finalized act of the cultural coming into being, of the chronotope’s futurizing potential, if you will. It bears repeating here that what distinguishes the Mexican-American minority from other American minorities is that, as Rodriguez puts it, “adiós was never part of the Mexican-American vocabulary.”11 The Borderland has its own logic, and it is neither that of Mexico D.F. nor Washington D.C. The tension between definite loss of land and indefinite trajectory of cultural existence within that loss constitutes a contradiction that on a fundamental level informs the space of Chicano literature, and underlying all of the literary representations we have so far looked at we find an orientation toward resolving this contradiction. The Squatter and the Don exemplifies this from a moment that makes it particularly tuned in to the extremity and severity of the threshold chronotope. Coming on the scene fairly soon after the crisis of cultural dislodging has taken place, the novel speaks from what is practically the inside of the moment of crisis. Ruiz de Burton’s depiction of the conflicted conceptualizations of self after 1848 aestheticizes this moment by collapsing two different responses within one space. This double direction is constituted by the dialogue between discourses of self and other simultaneously, and refracted in the novelistic discourse as two different points of view with different orientations. The response that strives toward and argues for resolution after the crisis is a cultural discourse informed by a conception of self that equates Anglo and Californio, because only from this vantage point is reconciliation possible. This discourse of reconciliation does, however, “leak” (to paraphrase Sartre), and the projection of self as other also surfaces: Doña Josefa’s defiance toward the end of the novel complicates and destabilizes the discourse of self as same by interjecting the discourse of self as other. 10

The characteristics of this space has been addressed by a number of critics and from several vantage points, among them are Alfred Arteaga’s Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (1997), Rafael Pérez-Torres’ Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (1995) and, of course Saldívar’s Chicano Narrative (1990). 11 Rodriguez, “Pocho Pioneer,” 217.

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By representing the implications of 1848 and at the same time trying to find a way out of the stalemate relations that followed in its wake, The Squatter and the Don illustrates how Chicano literature already from the very beginning of its existence spoke from and of the interstices. The experience of self as simultaneously self and other leads to a dialogical exploration of the possibilities available in that space. The dialogization that results can be said to artistically visualize the early contours of the Borderland, circumscribed by immediate loss from crisis on the one hand, and, on the other, (Doña Josefa’s) determination borne of crisis to resist and persist. What emerges from this discussion is how, in Massey’s terms, the conceptualization of space-time as “a configuration of social relations within which the specifically spatial may be conceived of as an inherently dynamic simultaneity.”12 The spatialization just described is also reminiscent of how Joseph Frank describes the different views of characters in Proust, as allowing “the sensibility of the reader to fuse these views into a unity; and Proust’s purpose is achieved only when these units of meaning are referred to each other reflexively in a moment of time.”13 The Squatter and the Don as a double-voiced culturological point of view accomplishes this kind of fusing within its own discourse and demonstrates in its own textual moment what crisis-time looks like. As I indicated earlier, such visualization is not instantaneous; it is not a textual image that arrests the sequential flow of chronology, where the reader glimpses time from a distance. Rather, the Squatter and the Don is immersed in the spatialized time it refracts. The contrast between the spatialization of time in The Squatter and the Don and in Paredes’ George Washington Gómez is stark. This dark tale of cultural eradication all but brings to conclusion the threat of cultural erosion depicted in The Squatter and the Don. Indeed, if we posit in Bakhtinian terms that the latter’s double-voiced discourse (in its instance as a culturological point of view) retains the final word about itself, this is more questionable in the case of George Washington Gómez. Indeed, the Bildungsroman comes close to being one of the cases where, as Bakhtin would put it, the monologic discourses succeed in their efforts toward finalization. 12

Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 3. Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968, 25. 13

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In Gumersindo’s appeal on his deathbed that his son must not hate, there is an echo of Don Mariano’s attempt to create a dialogue for reconciliation. However, Gumersindo is killed by Texas Rangers quite early on, and it falls on the protagonist’s uncle, Feliciano, to endure as the voice of contestation against the silencing discourses of the dominant culture. But throughout the narrative he remains essentially other, orienting himself toward the space of Mexico and therefore waiving agency in the actuality of the in-between space he occupies. Between these two characters we find the protagonist who is destined by name and heritage to bridge the gap between father and uncle, between the United States and Mexico. George Washington Gómez, however, with no explanation and with a name change to George G. Gómez, chooses to assimilate fully. Spatialized time in George Washington Gómez becomes a monstrosity that threatens to devour the inhabitants of the Borderland. But the correspondence between real time and the disillusion represented in its threshold discourse is not coincidental. The 1930s were years of immense pressure for assimilation, and if we add to this the general hardships of the depression and the unstable international relations, attempts toward cultural self-assertion cannot easily maneuver. The replication of the threshold chronotope turns into a disturbing reminder of how the moment of crisis of 1848 is far from over in George Washington Gómez. The struggle for cultural survival takes place in a space where the temporally finite of crisis is renewed, and where the spatially infinite of the cultural formation and being are correspondingly challenged. Consequently George Washington Gómez Paredes’ novel also spatializes the powerful demand for assimilation in the period of its writing and represents this as a cultural appropriation that threatens to finalize cultural openendedness – and almost succeeds. But against this threat we perceive a few, barely audible voices that give voice to the Borderland and its memories. The most significant of these comes in the shape of the dreams that haunt the protagonist even after he changes his name and repudiates everything Mexican. They are the same he had as a child when he would imagine himself one of the great Mexican and Mexican-American heroes fighting to retrieve the lost land. Even if the references to these dreams are scattered and rather inconsequential with respect to the eventual resolution of the protagonist’s own Bildung, they are crucial as spatial markers within

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the novel. They slip through the gaps in Sartre’s helpless present, witnesses from the cultural imagination that refuse to be silenced and forgotten. More than that, the evocation of the great heroes evoke the corridos, and by extension the times when the protagonist would listen to the voices of adults summoning the memories of their people’s past. Against dominant culture’s appropriation of the protagonist in George Washington Gómez the dreams and their implications function as reassurances – however feeble – of cultural endurance. Similar to Doña Josefa’s defiance they invest the otherwise mono-directional discourse of the text with a dialogic quality that eventually rescues the novel from completing within itself the monologic project of cultural finalization. In chapter IV I suggested that the most important factor distinguishing The Squatter and the Don from George Washington Gómez is their political orientation (that of elite versus lower class). In light of what I have just said about these novels in relation to spatialized time, however, another significant distinguishing factor may be added. What perhaps most fundamentally separates these two texts is their relationship to the threshold chronotope. Where the former carves out a place of resistance for itself within time as memory and gestures toward the futurizing potential of crisis, the latter barely escapes its own particular moment. For, if the spatial is “social relations stretched out,” then it falls on the reality of lives lived and represented to ceaselessly revise and renew this space. The possibility and ability of culturological consciousness to connect the before and the after of its formation and being undergoes continuous contextual re-conceptualizations according to the changing circumstances of its own historical moment. The engagement of The Squatter and the Don and George Washington Gómez with crisis-time must therefore be seen in relation to their own real time and place. When memory in George Washington Gómez is nearly erased and its spatialization of time dangerously borders on finalization, this only reflects the dynamics of the dialogue between the novel’s real time and crisis time. After George Washington Gómez, the cultural assertion in Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him resonates the more powerfully. If the former could be said to stand as an aesthetization of cultural assimilation wherein memory is all but erased, tierra does the exact opposite. Occupying a fleeting, non-descript migratory space outside

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the parameters of American social and economic life the characters of tierra exist on the fringes of society. Their liminal space, however, ultimately provides a ground for cultural redefinition and affirmation. While the liminal phase in the ritual process is typically a passing phase, dependent for its release of flow upon the promise of reintroduction into a state of normality, the liminal phase as exercised by the neophyte-protagonists in tierra assumes an autonomy and agency of its own. When all the lost voices of the short stories and vignettes come together in the last two, it could be said to restore the memory that was nearly lost in George Washington Gómez. The immediate time and place of this literary tour de force is the cultural blossoming and the Chicano movement. Therefore Tierra is not only a literary representation of the plight of migrant workers, since it absorbs into its narration the reality of its own time not unlike the way Bakhtin describes the phenomenon of seeing and reading time in the spatial whole of the world as it emerges in time.14 This resurrection of memories and meanings redefines crisis from that of a chasm, which leaves the Borderland inhabitants landless and lost in-between, to a space of potential and vibrancy. Tierra can consequently be seen as a culturological Bildungsroman whose rather astonishing accomplishment lies in showing within its own isolated artistic space the emergence in time of a cultural phenomenon. We find a similar depiction with respect to liminal space and the cultural dislodging of migrant workers in Under the Feet of Jesus. The narrative gravitates around the landscape and its metaphorical meanings in terms of cultural memory, but posits against this the realities of frustrated hopes and lives. Intersecting historical discourses merge into a metaphorized discourse that absorbs into itself both the actual locale and the past meanings it refracts. In a word, Under the Feet of Jesus absorbs into its narrative space the totality of crisis-time. Memory lies embedded in the very land that was once lost, and Viramontes aesthetically visualizes the unearthing of past residues into what we may think of as Bakhtin’s homecoming festival. But the homecoming is not the festive occasion it should be. Under the Feet of Jesus does not spatialize crisis time with tierra’s powerful resonance of re-definition and cultural assertion. The faith and optimism of the real time tierra absorbs can simply not be brought to 14

Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 25.

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bear on the political climate of the 1990s, and Under the Feet of Jesus mirrors this faltering as the product of its own historical time and place. The text thus responds to crisis time in terms of the renewed threat of political and social cultural finalization in American society, and responds by narrating hope and optimism on an individual rather than on a collective level. I do not mean to suggest that Under the Feet of Jesus rejects the idea of hope and optimism for the collective, because Estrella’s ascent on the roof of a barn towards the end of the novel echoes the neophyte protagonist’s ascent in tierra’s concluding passages. Her ascent is choreographed around light and darkness: “Over the eucalyptus and behind the moon, the stars like silver pomegranates glimmered before an infinity of darkness.”15 So the image arrests crisis time in a spatialization of hope and despair that embraces time both in relation to the original moment of crisis and to crisis as it is refracted in the novel. The vacillation throughout the novel between actual landscape and its metaphorical discourses creates a collapse of past and present temporalities that ends in a demonstration of selfhood and (re)inscribes the discourse in what Bakhtin calls “great time.” In Carry Me Like Water this trope is crucial and the following observation bears repeating: “At any moment in the development there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a new context).”16 What is being “recalled and invigorated” in Sáenz’s story are processes that remind us of how the purity of absolute divides cannot be indefinitely sustained: it collapses under the pressure of what Rodriguez calls “Brown,” his name for interweaving processes offset and sustained by topographical, demographical, and cultural routes. Carry Me Like Water absorbs into its narrative space the past and present meanings of complex histories and encounters, and they are renewed and offered as a discourse oriented toward the future scenario of expanding doorways.17 15

Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus, 175. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 170. 17 Rodriguez remarks on the irony embedded in the moment Nixon introduced the category “Hispanic.” He suggests that in so far as this invited a re-conceptualization of “Latin” it “extends back to our several origins and links them. At which juncture the U.S.A. becomes the place of origin for all Hispanics .… The United States has illegally crossed its own border” (Brown, 123). When, as others have pointed out, the 16

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How, then, to make sense of Hunger of Memory in relation to this space of memory? Clearly, that space is precisely what Rodriguez, in relating his story as “an American story,” wants to be liberated from. There is no spatialization of crisis-time in Hunger of Memory on a level that resonates beyond the context of one individual’s reflections on the inevitable pain of childhood, that of growing up – indeed a crisis in its own right. One could read a spatialization of the threshold chronotope of 1848 and its crisis-time into Rodriguez’s almost obsessive focus on the dichotomy of public and private individuality. His continuous rehearsals of the transition from a Spanish-speaking childhood of Mexican-ness in the privacy of his home into the English-speaking American-ness of public life could be seen as a reflection of how the collective rehearses the loss of a homeland. In the continuation of this, the parallel to George Washington Gómez and its rejection of cultural belonging would be impossible to ignore, and the discussion would ultimately end up in a polemic of ethnic belonging and group loyalty. As I indicated in chapter VI this perspective reduces Hunger of Memory as an autobiographical statement, and forces an interpretation that undermines other more relevant features. Despite Rodriguez’s insistence on the singularity of his American story, Hunger of Memory relates to the spatialization of time I have discussed in the other five texts in two particularly significant ways. One is on a strictly structural level. Within its own limited textual space Hunger of Memory mirrors the structural essence of the phenomenon of spatialized crisis-time in an individual rather than on a collective level. It reads like a lesson in how memory travels through the space of a life, manifest in the vacillation of the authorial discourse between audiences. The phenomenon resembles the doublevoiced discourse of The Squatter and the Don, but where that novel refracts crisis by voicing two simultaneous and openly contradictory responses, Hunger of Memory subtly refracts its crisis by orienting itself toward two different readers while speaking about the same concern. In its confessional moments the text gravitates toward an audience that acknowledges the very memory of the loss, and when the heart of Latin American beats in the U.S., the Borderland extending north and south illustrate the futurizing potential of the moment of crisis; the movements set in motion by the first encounter between “old” and “new” worlds.

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discourse is straightforwardly autobiographical it orients itself toward a reader that can only recognize the loss itself. The juxtaposition of orientations in effect collapses the before and the after of crisis, that moment when Ricardo became Richard. And even if the public reader cannot fully appreciate the memory of this moment the way a private reader can, the very awareness of this enables also the former to recognize its pain. Similar to how memory born out of the threshold chronotope travels through the spaces of the other five texts and draws them into a dialogue, the memory of Hunger of Memory’s own threshold underlies the peculiar temporal movement in Rodriguez’s narration of self. This double orientation characterizes Hunger of Memory’s relationship to the space of memory only in terms of structural similarity. It also finds a place within the culturological space of memory of the other five texts. For if The Squatter and the Don, George Washington Gómez, …And the Earth Did not Devour Him, Under the Feet of Jesus and Carry Me Like Water can all be said to fulfill Doña Josefa’s promise, “I slander no one, but shall speak the truth,” then Hunger of Memory, strangely, responds by making a new promise: “I will have some run of this isle.” Despite the emphasis on the singularity of his story, Rodriguez’s announcement is conceivable only in the context of crisis time. The poignancy of “I have taken Caliban’s advice. I have stolen their books” lies at the intersection between the space of memory and the space of history, where they merge powerfully and sketch the contours of a potentially new and futurizing moment. The Prologue and its evocation of Caliban ironically reverse American history. The image is the re-visitation both of the original creation of Vasconcelos’ raza cósmica, and by implication, of the emergence of Mexican America itself. Caliban’s return visualizes in ideological terms the reality lived by millions in the United States. What it mirrors is for instance the fact that one of the most noticeable differences between the east and west coasts are not just geography or weather, but rather demography; that the oldest houses in the United States are not in Massachusetts or Virginia, but in New Mexico and Florida (not counting here the ruins of habitations that predate both the Spanish and the English colonies); that there are places in the US Southwest where you are lost if you do not speak Spanish. The image Rodriguez conjures up testifies to the many small villages and towns

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along and near the border in for instance Texas and New Mexico, but increasingly also in other states, where nothing except for the roadsigns tells you that you are in the United States and not in Mexico, and to how the economy of the former is inextricably linked with Mexican and Mexican-American labor forces.18 All of this passes largely unnoticed in the public imagination, except when the rally cries over immigration politics and language learning, labor rights and voting potential are raised. Meanwhile, however, the Borderland is a living demonstration of the cultural survival of that which resides inbetween. And so texts weave in and out of the space of memory where past meanings and discourses surface as reverberations of the threshold chronotope, as manifestations and fulfillments of its futurizing potential. The result is not, however, synthesis. That would imply a sense of finalization, a sense of end-point. Neither the texts I have discussed nor the Borderland itself can be conceived of in such terms. The dialogic dynamics of the Borderland as a real and imagined threshold as well as its spatial refraction in literature is fundamentally open-ended. The passage of crisis through this space takes place both in relation to the chronotopicity of the real Borderland and in relation to the temporal and spatial movements reality gives rise to in the literary imagination. With great variation between themselves, the texts are all participants in the composite and ongoing dialogues between past and present meanings, in the event of the Borderland and the homecoming festival of forgotten meanings. The re-visitation of both history and its complex temporalities, which resulted in a new cultural creation, can therefore be perceived in terms of an aesthetics of time peculiar to Chicano literature, as the visualization of a cultural reality of practices lived and remembered. It may be particularly urgent these days to focus on the endurance 18

In his 2004 mockumentary A Day Without a Mexican, director Sergio Arau plays intelligently and humorously with these ideas (among others). For reasons pertaining to some inexplicable weather conditions, all Latinos in California suddenly disappear, and California is thrown into a state of emergency. The movie blends into this fictional scenario statistical and historical facts, especially with regard to the California economy and brings out the region’s dependency on the Latino labor force. What is left out of the movie is that this economic dependency extends far beyond California, and how, by implication, the Borderland is not “contained” in the Southwest.

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of cultures and their memories. One of the effects of processes of globalization is that our various spaces are increasingly being reduced to one, multitudinously simultaneity: economically, culturally, politically, and aesthetically. Fredric Jameson has suggested that we have reached, not only the end of history, but in a certain manner of speaking, of time itself. Reflecting on late capitalism, transnationalization and globalization, and on how these categories seem to have replaced traditional notions of both time and place and the subject’s position in relation to either, Jameson argues that the success of modernity is only a fact once the collapse into one space is a fact, with a temporal dimension that is all present. Post-modernity’s response, to quickly move beyond the end of spatiality (its understanding relies on internally heterogeneous dimensions) and toward the end of temporality, constitutes the reduction to the present that cultural globalization currently can be understood as. Jameson concludes, though, that this movement as well any attempt at describing it ultimately fails: “for if, in this illustration, ‘the lonely hour of the “last instance” never comes,’ what that shows is not that there is no last instance, but rather that, like the drive in psychoanalysis, it is ultimately never representable as such.”19 If it is true that we are left alone with our own subjectivities and presents, where nothing, whether they are TVs or trust funds, childhoods, empires, canons or memories seem to last very long, then our late-capitalist present, to the extent that it is observable, is left to the evaluation of the market. This, too, bears on literary canons, and the American canon is one illustration. I am sure many will agree that it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of which texts are included and which are excluded from one edition of anthologies to the next. And they change often. This is not necessarily only because of a genuine desire to produce representative selections of the culturological chronicles of self that sort under “American,” it also has something to do with the market. It is of course true that the revisions over the past three decades or so have created room for other literary voices – this very book is obvious evidence of that. This does not mean, however, that a certain set of culture texts do not remain as a cultural founding structure, nor does it mean that other literary voices do not remain “other”. A certain dose of skepticism towards the program of multiculturalism may therefore be healthy, 19

Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” 717.

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and I want to quote at length Pérez-Torres’ observation on these matters in relation to Chicano literature: There exists a tendency within academic communities … to celebrate Chicano culture as a component of a much needed cultural pluralism or an academic diversity. The reception of Chicano issues to the curriculum comes to resemble a blockparty. This liberal position welcoming, accommodating – is not overtly antagonistic toward a sociohistorical understanding of the literature. It does, however, severely skew the significance of that understanding. … There are factions within the academic institutions ready to embrace a multiculturalism devoid of historical and cultural specificity in favor of a celebration of difference and alterity. The rush to embrace Chicano literature is, then, from certain quarters, the results of a desire for correctness. A response of active neglect comes to be replaced by one of almost blind or reverential acceptance … a distracted (and insincere) embrace.20

Philosopher Albert Borgmann makes similar criticisms, and in a discussion of value pluralism he says that, “The theoretically tempting solution is to seek some overriding value as a bond of unity. But any such value that respects diversity will be too thin to underwrite loyalty or order, and any value thick enough to assign all others their place in an encompassing scheme will be unacceptably onerous.”21 The multicultural program can easily becomes just such an abstraction that threatens to market the specific into an accommodating and commodified universal. There is a chance then, that previous marginalization of minority groups through canonical exclusion has taken on the shape of marginalization through abstraction. For, as Borgmann further notes, “it remains that the enemy of e.g. Native American culture is not African-American or Asian-American culture but the culture of high and rising consumption that is gutting and leveling all traditional cultures.”22 In other words, the problem is that of preserving the particular without sliding over into cultural nationalism or any other kind of fundamentalist bounded-ness. Here literary canons and culturological memories face enormous 20

Pérez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry, 36. Albert Borgmann, “Theory, Practice, Reality,” Inquiry, XXXVIII/1-2 (1995), 146. I am grateful to Dr Kevin Cahill for bringing this argument to my attention. 22 Ibid., 148. 21

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challenges, since underlying commodification we find global capitalism increasingly encroaching on the spatial. Søren Kierkegaard comes to mind again. In a sinister way his essay “The Present Age,” which I discussed briefly in chapter VI resonates with these very predicaments: when the times are what Kierkegaard terms “calculating and reflecting,” as opposed to “revolutionary and passionate,” every phenomenon is absorbed by “the spirit of leveling, a monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage – and this is the public.”23 Or, we could call it the market – this truly monstrous abstraction, which does not belong to any thing, any nation or any idea, and it prohibits the singular from emerging simply by being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Globalization processes and the market relate to each other through the erasure of boundaries, for only when the spatial has been reduced to immediacy, and social relations no longer stretch out to secure insides of memories, practices and ideas, can capital and labor flow freely and profitably. When in its march across the globe the market, as Slavoj Zizek puts it, subsumes “cultural and symbolic burdens” into its own immediacy, and when “capital is the concrete universal of our historical epoch,” it is difficult to see distinctions of inside and outside, to see where the mark of difference and boundaries are located.24 Even as the particular tries to become manifest, it is often already compromised; already unified and accommodated.25 Zizek explicitly discusses the role of modern technology in this context, and observes that Modern technological domination is inextricably intertwined with the social form of capital; it can only occur within this form, and, insofar as the alternative social formations display the same ontological attitude, this merely confirms that they are, in their innermost core, mediated by capital as their concrete universality, as the particular formation that colors the entire scope of alternatives, that is, that functions as the encompassing totality mediating all other particular formations.26

23

Kierkegaard, “The Present Age,” 90. Slavoj Zizek, “The Ongoing Soft Revolution,” Critical Inquiry, XXX/2 (2004), 294. 25 Ibid., 295. 26 Ibid. 24

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The totality Zizek refers to echoes the “all-encompassing something” Kierkegaard identified as the public. The correlation between the idea and function of the market and those of the public is in large part made possible by a technology that brings the multitude of subjectivities into one and the same immediate space, hence serving the market’s desire to break down boundaries in order to control and commodify the individual as consumer, and to erase what makes possible the spatial as Massey defines it. It bears emphasizing in this context that the premise for the sustenance of any cultural phenomenon and its nurturing has everything to do with spatiality as we have explored this throughout this chapter, and here Bakhtin’s dictum is worth reminding ourselves of: The problem of any particular domain of culture taken as a whole, whether it be cognition, ethics, or art, can be understood as the problem of this domain’s boundaries .… every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries, and it derives its seriousness and significance from this fact. Separated by abstraction from these boundaries, it loses the ground of its being and becomes vacuous, arrogant, it degenerates and dies.27

This passage rehearses what Pérez-Torres called an “insincere embrace,” and of course Kierkegaard’s “monstrous abstraction,” and the concern with what these problems may mean is not limited to the sphere of culture alone. In an article titled “New Body, No Sense” the French philosopher Dany-Robert Dufour addresses a process he calls deregulation, or de-symbolization. One of the illustrations he uses is the new Euro banknotes. On the notes that were put into circulation in 2002 national symbols that mark the individual state and culture are gone. Instead we find images of doorways and bridges symbolizing crossing and transference, indicating flow between, well, perhaps economies rather than cultural centers. To Dufour there is a sinister aspect to this sort of denationalizing of the image, and he remarks that: By thus eradicating the constituting values of the community, the market is about to create another “new human being,” bereft of the power of judgment (with no principles other than maximum profit), driven to pleasure without desire (the only redemption is consume), 27

Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 274.

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Threshold Time shaped by fleeting identities (there are no longer a fixed subject, only preliminary and uncertain subject configurations), and open to all branches of the commodity.28

In this description boundaries and centers, as they are represented by the Euro notes illustrate how, as Dufour goes on to argue, “marketliberalism eradicates symbolic values.”29 They are, for all practical purposes, the same: if the goal is the dreamed-of union between the European countries, it is also that of securing the flow of capital and labor across borders. This is not in and of itself such a bad thing, but a lack of attention to how the superstructure of capital debilitates and undermines social and cultural space is a potentially highly destructive process. The singular, whether that of the individual, of location, or of culture, presupposes a sense of being situated in time and place which the detached reflection of capitalism seeks to erase, replacing instead the singular with an all-embracing sense of public that exists everywhere and nowhere. Against this some may choose the resurrection of and withdrawal to the spatially singular, a temptation fed precisely by the negation that abstraction presents, and which some will feel can only be countered by extreme opposition. There has, in other words, to be a middle road where the singular is allowed its space of cultural memory, of cultural and social space; to retain what Bakhtin refers to as “unity and open totality” in the dialogic encounter. As discourses within and alongside the broader American discourse the texts in this book insist on their own singularity and their own representation of the space they move through. By doing so they also contest the reduction to the present, the detachment of abstraction, but without retracting behind cultural and aesthetical walls. In various ways The Squatter and the Don, George Washington Gómez, …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Hunger of Memory, Under the Feet of Jesus, and Carry Me Like Water shed light on how cultures remember, rehearse and secure their memories through local practices and in constant dialogue with other memories and practices. In different ways, they demonstrate that it is possible to maneuver and 28

Dany-Robert Dufour, “Ny Kropp Uten Forstand,” Le Monde Diplomatique, Norwegian edn, April 2005, 26-27. All translations from the Norwegian version of the article are my own. 29 Ibid.

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develop where the economic and political giants feed, to create and recreate new cultural parameters and spaces in the gaps and interstices which giants always overlook.

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Index Acosta, Oscar Zeta, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 55, 170-71 A Day Without a Mexican, fn. 181 Allianza Federal, 45 Alurista, 55 American master narrative, 171; canon, 185 Anaya, Rudolfo, 56 Anglo-Saxon, 34 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 58, 147, 151 Arte Público Press, 50; “Recovering the U.S.-Hispanic Heritage Project,” 50 Augustine, 134 Austin, Stephen, 35, fn. 69 Aztlán, 46, 55-56 Bakhtin, Mikhail, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” 143; autobiography, 129; axiological moments, 143, 145; Bildungsroman, 97; boundary, 17, 185; confession, 144-45; chronotope, 15; cultural domain, 18, 185; Dostoevsky, 16, 104; event of being, 15; “Form and Time in the Chronotope,” 104; great time, 170; “homecoming festival,” 170, 172, 183; liminality, 122; moment

of crisis 16-17; open totality, 11, 15, 186; point of view, 15; threshold chronotope, 13, 16, 166, 169, 181 Bergson, Henri, 150, 152 Bildungsroman, genre, 82-83, 87, 91, 93-94 Bhabha, Homi K., 158 Black Legend, 27 Board of Land Commissioners, 62 Borderland 169, 181; metaphor, 12; trope, vector, 12, 13, 14; route, 12, 13, 14; point of view, 16 Borgmann, Albert, 183 Bracero program, 44, fn. 99 Brooks, Peter, fn. 141 Browder, Linda, 127-28 Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 57 Buber, Martin, 121 Californios, 66 Calhoun, John, 36 canon, 168, 182 Cardenas, Lupe, 105 Cass, Lewis, 36, fn. 69 Castillo, Ana, 58 Central Pacific Railroad Company, 70 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 58 Césaire, Aime, 29 Chávez, Cesar, 45

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Chávez, Denise, 58 Chicano, term, fn. 2; 12 Chicano Movement, 45 Cisneros, Sandra, 58 “City upon a Hill,” fn. 28 Clifford, James, 14 Coetzee, J.M, 29-30 colonial discourse, 29-30, 33, 32-33, 40, 75, 89; Manifest Destiny, 34 contact zone, 48 corrido, origin, 48; Américo Paredes, 48, fn. 48; “Corrido de Gregorio Cortez,” 48-50 Cortez, fn. 27 Cotton, Mather, fn. 28 culture and crisis, 167-69 culture and memory, 21 culturological discourse, 167; American, 170-71; canon, 171, 186; self, 79 culturology, def., fn. 79 “Day without Immigrants 2006,” fn. 58 Delano Grape strike, 45 de las Casas, Bartolome, 27 de Man, Paul, 129 de Mijolla, Elisabeth, 138 dialogism, 17 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 16; in Bakhtin, 16, 80; Notes from Underground, fn. 104 Dufour, Dany-Robert, 185-86; market liberalism, 185 el Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,

55 empire, 36; Manifest Destiny, 33-34; Empresario, 35, fn. 35 English colonies, 25 ethnie, 43 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, 25 fantasy heritage, 40, 66 Fanon, Frantz, 50-51 Faulkner, William, 168-69; see Sartre Florecimiento, 56, 101 Foster, Dennis, 141 Foucault, Michel, 96 Frank, Joseph, 174 Franklin, Benjamin, 128 frontier, 37, 67 futurizing potential 14, 17, 173, 176, fn. 17879 globalization, 66, 182, 184 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 58; hybrid culture, 165 Gonzales, Rodolfo (“Corky”), 45; “I am Joaquín,” 56 Goodwin, John, 139 Gutíerrez, David, 30, 43 Gutíerrez, José Angel, 45 Gutierrez, Ramón, 42 Gwin Land Act, 62 Hall, Stuart, 77 Hillis Miller, John, 152-54

Index

Hilton, Jacob Hanson, 39 Hine, Thomas, Populuxe, 166 Hinojosa, Rolando, 56 Hispanic, 47, 51-52, fn. 181; “sleeping giant” 47 Hoggart, Richard, 133 Homestead Act, 62 Humboldt, Alexander von, 32 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 34 Jackson, Helen Hunt, Ramona, 52, 53, 54, 67 Jameson, Fredric, 182 Jay, Paul, 130, 135 Jones, Tommy Lee, The Three Burials of, fn. 55 Juarez, Benito, fn. 27 Kanellos, Nicolás, fn. 114 Kierkegaard, Søren, 184-85; see Richard Rodriguez Klahn, Norma, 54, 153; “Mexcian social imaginary,” 58; “South of Borderism,” 54-55 Koepke, Wulf, 98 limen, fn. 104 liminality, see Tomás Rivera Lomelí, Francisco, 45, 55 Lorey, David E., 43, 63 Lotman, Juriij, 18; colonial project, 25; “extra-cultural space,” 25, 68; “nonculture,” 19, 169; collec-

201

tive intellect, 17; world view, 19 Lowenthal, David, 168 Macy, John, 51 Manifest Destiny, 33-34, 36 market, 184-87 Martínez, Eliud, fn. 102 Martínez, Rubén, 58 Massey, Doreen, 150, 174, 185 metropolitan culture, 33 Mexican Revolution, 43 Moctezuma, fn. 27 moment of crisis, and Bildung, 87, 91-92; novelistic episode, 90; threshold chronotope, 16; tierra, 103 monologic world, 79 mono-ideational, 79 Mora, Pat, 58 Morales, Alejandro, 56 Moretti, Franco, 84, 8, 87, 91, 93, 99 multiculturalism, 183 Mussel Slough incident, fn 70 neophyte, def. fn. 108 New England colony, 26 New Spain, 26 novelistic episode, 86-87, 88, 95 Norris, Frank, The Octopus, 70, fn. 70 Olivares, Julián, fn. 102

202

Threshold Time

O’Sullivan, John, and Manifest Destiny, 34; see Manifest Destiny Padilla, Genaro, 42 Paredes, Américo, corrido, fn. 48, 48; George Washington Gómez, assimilation, 98; Bildungsroman, 82-85, 86-88; corrido, 94; Faulkner, fn. 82; loss of memory, 99; marriage, 91-92; novelistic episode, 86-87, 90; Squatter and the Don, 81; “utopian synthesis,” 86, 88, 93 Paredes, Raymund, fn. 28, 48, 129 Paz, Octavio, 151 Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 59, 183, 185 Pío Pico, 64 Píta, Beatrice, fn. 64 Plan de Santa Barbara, 46 Portales, Marco, 47, 58, 134 Protestants and Catholics, 2628; 171-72 Pre-Emption Act, 62 Puritanism, 27 Redford, Robert, Milagro: The Beanfield War, fn. 53 rite de passage, 105, 107; communitas, 111, 122; re-aggregation, 107, 109, 124; separation, 106 Rivera, Tomás, migrant

workers, fn. 101; …And the Earth Did Not devour Him, 106; 115; Bildungsroman, 103; collage, 102; chronotopic point, 103, 105, 120; communitas, 11, 111, 122-23; crisis, 20; 105-106; liminality, 111-15, 117-24; ludic re-combination, 111-12; narrative structure, 101103; narratorprotagonist, 111; ritual process, 105; neophyte, definition, fn. 108; novel of formation, 103; reaggregation, 108-110, 116, 124; threshold chronotope, 104; separation (ritual), 107-108; short story composite, 102; Robertson, William, 30-31 Robinson, Brian S., 159 Rodriguez, Richard, 57, 168, 173; “brown,” 13, 21, 166, 172; Hispanic, fn. 178; Nixon, 178; Hunger of Memory, and affirmative action, 129, 139-41; apologia, 13940; autobiography, 12930; bilingual education, 127, 131, 137; Caliban, 132, 143-46, 165, 171, 180; class, fn 133, 140; confessant-confessor,

Index

fn. 141; confessional discourse, 138-46; controversy, 125-29; Days of Obligation, 171; ethnic autobiography, 128; George Washington Gómez, 134; liturgy, 136; metaphor of self, 130, 132; public and private language, 126, 131, 13536; reception of Hunger of Memory, 125-28; “scholarship boy,” 133; Søren Kierkegaard, 13637; threshold chronotope, 134-35, 140; Tomás Rivera, 126; tone of voice, 132, 144 Rodriguez, Manuel M. Martin, 72 romance, 64 romanticizing California life, 52-53 Romero-Navarra, Miguel, 51 Rosales, F. Arturo, fn. 67 Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo, 61, 63; Who Would Have Thought It?, 38, 50, fn. 64; The Squatter and the Don, colonial discourse, 75; cultural reconciliation, 73, 76, 79; culturological voice, 78, fn. 78; double audience, 73; double voiced discourse, 78-80; historiography, 65; pedagogical subtext 73,

203

76-78, 80; as point of view, 78; post-1848, 6164; white-ness, 67, 73 Ruxton, George Fredrick, Life in the Far West, 40-41; Adventures in Mexico; 40-41; women 42 Sáenz, Benjamin Alire, 58, 180; Carry Me Like Water, borderland, 162-65; “brown,” 168; Hunger of Memory, 165; “I Am Joaquín,” 162-63; metaphorical movement, 165; purity, 166; Under the Feet of Jesus, 163-64 Saldívar, José David, 71, 95 Saldívar, Ramón, 42, 43, 65, fn. 82, 90, 103, 105, 146 Said, Edward, 29, 33 Sayles, John, fn. 53 Sánchez, George J., 37 Sánchez, Rosaura, fn. 64 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 167; time, 168-69, 176 southern literature, 14, 168 Sokel, Walter, 84, 86, 91 space of memory, 172-181 spatialized time, 173-181 Spiller, Robert, 52 Spurr, David, 33 Stanford, Leland, 68; “Big Four,” 70 Steven Soderbergh, Traffic, fn. 54 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 52

204

Threshold Time

Texas, 1845, 36 Treaty of Guadalupe, 24, 37-38 trope, border, 12; empire, 29; “south of border,” 54 Turner, Victor, 105 Urrea, Luis, 58 U.S.-Mexican war, 24 Vallejo, Mariano D., 61, fn. 61, fn. 64-65 Vallejos, Thomas, 105 Van Gennep, Arnold, 105 Venegas, Daniel, fn. 43 Viramontes, Helena María, Under the Feet of Jesus, …And the Earth Did

Not Devour Him, 147, 159; Bildungs-roman, 148; chronotopic quality, 153; inner space, 151-52, 154; landscape, 149-59; memory, 153; topography, 152, 153, 159; topoi, 152; The Squatter and the Don, 155 Wa Nyatetu-Waigwa, Wangari, 83, 115 Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás, 57 Zimmerman, Marc, 23 Zizek, Slavoy, 184-85