Everywhere the wind moaned
with the name of their homeland. They sat with old caciques who told the
stories of the past, and always the four directions were pointed out, and in
the center stood Aztlán. They moved north, and there Aztlán was a woman fringed
with snow and ice; they moved west, and there she was a mermaid singing by the
sea; and always, beneath the form in the vision they heard the soft throbbing
of her heart. They walked to the land where the sun rises, and there by the
side of the sea where the morning star and the sun played upon the waves before
day entered, they found new signs, and the signs pointed them back to the
center, back to Aztlán.[1]
I. Searching for Other Stories
As I drove my tiny rental
car through the desert Southwest during the hottest, driest part of the summer
of 1999, I received many odd looks when, asked where I was headed, I replied,
“I’m searching for Aztlán.” For everyone who knows of Aztlán knows that it is a
bit like The Land of Oz: a magical place that does not necessarily appear on
maps. Rather, to seek Aztlán is to seek a spiritual reality, where one
ultimately finds not a geographic destination but instead circles back to a
rooted and renewed sense of self, community, and nation. Writes Luis Leal: “whosoever wants to find Aztlán, let him
look for it, not on the maps, but in the most intimate part of his being”.[2]
Aztlán is both old and new.
In classic Mexican mythology, it is a region of whiteness, of herons, the
mythic place of seven caves from which the ancient Aztec peoples of Mexico
emerged and moved southward to the central highland valleys of Mexico to
conquer established indigenous populations and to found the grand city of
Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City) in 1325. Though the geographic location of
ancient Aztlán is the subject of much debate, it is generally thought to have
been located somewhere to the north of Tenochtitlán. Discovering the precise
geographic location of Aztlán has been the subject of much inquiry throughout
history, and it has been variously placed in the modern-day Mexican state of
Nayarit (on the Pacific coast about 400 miles northwest of Mexico City), in the
contemporary United States of Wisconsin, Florida, New Mexico, or California,
and as far away as China.[3]
In the more-recent Chicano
nationalist discourse of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, the idea of
Aztlán was recovered and proposed as the contemporary homeland of the Chicano
people.[4] Its geographic location was firmly
conceptualized as that territory ceded to the United States by Mexico via the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 – nearly
half of Mexico’s national territory at the time – now located in the
Southwestern United States. The mythic idea of Aztlán as a place of origin was
utilized as a contemporary political strategy, to geographically ground a
homeland for Chicanos as rightfully located within the United States. Without
Aztlán, note Chicano scholars Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí:
…we would be contemporary
displaced nomads, suffering the diaspora in our own land, and at the mercy of
other social forces. Aztlán allows us to come full circle with our communal
background as well as to maintain ourselves as fully integrated individuals.[5]
Aztlán is a story. It illustrates the mytho-poetic invention of
nation whose spirit, and methods, variously contested the Anglo-American
version of the national story. Chicano
nationalists consciously sought to rewrite the tale of belonging and exclusion
as it was written in the nineteenth century.
As Paul Routledge reminds us in his analysis of song as contestatory
strategy in India’s Baliapal movement, it is important to keep in mind that
political dissent is frequently conceptualized and enacted culturally.[6] Such a geopoetics of resistance, notes
Routledge, works across several, intertwined conceptualizations of space: material space, imagined space, and spatial
practice.[7] As with Chicano nationalists, the Baliapal
residents’ resistance to the proposed construction of a test base for missiles
in their rich farmlands used song, theater, and stories as ways to establish
and legitimate their a priori claims to the land. To discount the mytho-poetic dimensions of resistance would be,
in both the Chicano and Baliapal examples, to present an anemic and distort
picture.
Yet the story of Chicano
nationalists is, in important ways, a parallel narrative to that of
Anglo-American expansionists nearly a century earlier. For both tales are ultimately nationalist
tales, and despite its apparently radical stance, the Chicano version shared
the same exclusions that modern nationalisms everywhere contain. And in this, both tales are in turn
consistent with the Baliapal case, leading Routledge to warn of the dangers of
over-romanticizing the poetic dimensions of resistance:
A geopoetics of resistance discerns that articulations of collective
identity can themselves be abstractions that efface differences and
inequalities within particular places and within the movements themselves. Place is a heterogeneous social construct, a
dynamic locus of community, which frequently involves a variety of exclusions …
as well as inclusions …. While celebrating the poetic imaginaries of
resistance, it thus behooves academics and activists to remain grounded in the
material spaces and spatial practices of those who resist.[8]
Many contemporary Chicana/o scholars and writers
have become disenchanted with what, and whom, Aztlán left out. Unresolved
tensions of race, gender, and sexuality have imploded the idea of Aztlán, much
in the way that Chicanos of the 1960s and 1970s had hoped to implode the
hegemonic Anglo myths and practices that have historically oppressed Chicanos.
Ultimately, Aztlán was a utopic idea that rested on an uncritically romantic
gesture of reversal, rather than a re-invention, of oppressive power
structures.
In this chapter, Aztlán is
approached as not simply opposing Anglo-American hegemony, but as also sharing
important axes with it. In particular,
both are narratives which turn on the oscillation between debordering and
rebordering. Both are border(ed)
stories. Although contemporary
Chicana/o scholars have explored the exclusions of Aztlán and its declining significance
as a unifying concept, the analysis has yet to be set within a larger context
of the longstanding narratives of border conflict that have so profoundly
shaped the landscape of the Southwest.
‘The West’ of the Anglo-American geo-imaginary and Aztlán of the Chicano
nationalist geo-imaginary constituted attempts to root collective belonging to
the land, and metonymically, to the nation, through the use of symbol and
myth. Both turned on a
debordering. In the Anglo-American
account, told so well by Turner, the empty landscape allowed White Americans to
flow over the land, possessing and marking it with their violently bordered
nationalism. In the Chicano nationalist
counter-narrative, it is both the geopolitical boundary between Mexico and the
United States that is challenged, as well as the internal, racialized borders
erected in the supposedly smooth space of Anglo-Nation. Yet both narratives of belonging were also
narratives of exclusion, they erected borders within their supposedly smoothed
spaces.
Furthermore, the
significance of Aztlán as an explicitly spatialized tool of resistance
has not yet been adequately explored.
With the geo-imaginary concept of Aztlán, Chicano nationalists set their
sights on the same arid expanse of the Southwestern United States as
Anglo-Americans had claimed for their version of desti-nation in the previous
century. Chicano nationalists
envisioned an entirely different landscape, albeit still a nationalist
landscape, from that of the Anglo-Americans whose vision, and reality, they
were challenging. The freshly extended
storyline of contemporary Aztlán legitimated the presence of Chicanos in what
was now an alien Anglo-nation as part of a longstanding entitlement to the land
through historic origins. Rather than constituting an ‘invasion,’ the growing
Chicano presence in the US Southwest thusly understood constituted instead a
reverse diaspora of sorts, a rightful return to a historic homeland that
completed a necessary step in the destiny of the Chicano nation. Aztlán, because of (not despite) being a
story, was deployed in a carefully, powerfully strategic fashion to contest the
dominant Anglo-American narration of the United States of America. Aztlán as a mythic idea was consciously
projected onto the desert terrain of the US Southwest as a way to legitimate,
root, and define the presence of Mexican-descended peoples residing in that
region. The Chicano nationalist recovery of Aztlán as a precisely-located
geographic entity telescoped and focused the fuzzy geography of ancient
homelands to serve a concrete political agenda. Aztlán illustrates well my claim that place stories can be
powerfully real and really powerful.
The Aztec people migrated
from the north around the 9th or 10th Century A.D. They
arrived when Mexico’s Central Valley was already densely populated, and no-one
wished to take them in. Relegated to a bit of rocky, marginal land known as
Tizaapan, they were understood to be lowly Chichimecas (“sons of dogs”),[9]
called the people without a face,[10]
and often asked to work as mercenaries because of their reputation for
fierceness. Yet they flourished, and assimilated the dominant Toltec culture.
By the mid-15th Century, they had largely conquered and controlled
the densely-settled Central Valley lake region of Mexico.
The ancestors of these
pessimistic warriors had been compelled to leave their homeland. Michael Pina
speculates that this migration may have arisen from a conflict in leadership
between two male heirs upon the death of their father.[11]
Doris Heyden’s notes to Spanish Friar Diego Durán’s account from the late 16th
Century suggest that this group left Aztlán because they were subjugated to
other Aztecs. Rather than accepting ongoing humiliation and subjugation, they
decided to emigrate.[12]
Most accounts of the pilgrimage also hold that the warrior sun god
Huitzilpochtli had promised the Aztec people a triumphant destiny in the south
as rulers of a new empire, conquering and receiving tribute. To move southward
was thus a chapter in their destiny as chosen people. “He wishes to extol his
own name and raise the Aztec nation to the heavens. He will make us lords of
gold and silver and of all metals, of splendid feathers of many colors, and of
precious stones of great value”.[13]
Along their trek south, the Aztecs, under the guidance of Huitzilpochtli,
received technology and knowledge (bows and arrows, spear throwers, and nets
for hunting and fishing), and were imbued with a sacred authority to rule over
others.[14]
“Within this context the Aztec journey from Aztlán does not correspond to an
escape from disgrace, nor a nomadic wandering, but rather assumes the sacred
aura of a pilgrimage directed by a supernatural being”.[15]
The northern region from
which they originated was the subject of much curiosity for Moctezuma
Ilhuicamina (Moctezuma the First), ruler of the Aztec empire from 1440-1469.
According to Durán’s account, Moctezuma Ilhuicamina sent sixty of his most
powerful sorcerers northward in search of this homeland, Aztlán, desiring to
know the land that their ancestors had left behind, and to greet Coatlicue, the
mother of Huitzilpochtli, if she still lived. According to their accounts, they
used magic to turn themselves into animals and quickly cover the vast distance
to Aztlán. Upon the wizards’ return, Moctezuma Ilhuicamina listened to wondrous
tales of a mountain rising up from surrounding waters, with caves or grottos in
its side. Aztlán was described as a paradisiacal pre-Colombian Garden of Eden
with abundant food crops, birds, enormous and beautiful fish, and the
refreshing shade of many trees. In Aztlán, there was no sickness, strife,
suffering, poverty, old age, or death.
Encountering Coatlicue, the
priests were given a demonstration of how this magical place worked.
Coatlicue’s servant, an old man, began to descend the hill. Before the
astonished eyes of Moctezuma Ilhuicamina’s priests, he grew younger and younger
as he descended:
When he reached the Aztecs,
he appeared to be about twenty years old. Said he …. “Behold, my sons, the
virtue of this hill: the old person who seeks youth can climb to the point on
the hill that he wishes and there he will acquire the age that he seeks.”[16]
Importantly, the myth of
Aztlán is inextricably entwined with the mythic enterprise of historical
recovery. Upon conquest in the early sixteenth century, the vast majority of
indigenous peoples and their constructions were destroyed in a sweeping attempt
to stamp out the pagan profile of the Indians of the New World. Spaniards
slaughtered Indians by the hundreds of thousands, tore down their temples, and
burned pictorial records of indigenous history. Thus only a precious few
pre-conquest codices (pictorial accounts painted on deerskin or bark) survived
the Spanish immolations. Other ‘eyewitness’ records were written shortly after
conquest, often by Spanish clergy in tandem with indigenous peoples.[17]
Furthermore, the Aztecs themselves may have earlier burned their own historical
records in 1433, shortly after their decisive conquest of the Tepanecas of
Azcapotzalco (part of the lake system in Mexico’s Central Valley). This allowed
the Aztecs to re-write history and put forth a new version, one more favorable
to the imperial power that the Aztecs were swiftly becoming.[18]
Finally, tales of a glorious land ‘to the north’ could well have been
embellished, even wholly invented, by indigenous peoples anxious to rid
themselves of meddlesome 16th Century Spanish explorers. The legends
of Cíbola and the Seven Cities of Silver, of an island of gold called
California and ruled by an Amazon queen, and of a golden land called Quivira,
beckoned in the minds of Spaniards as a receding horizon of fantasy, drawing
them ever-northward in search of riches. As John Chávez explains,
A fabulously rich Quivira
had probably never been part of the local Indian conception of the plains area,
but had been invented purely for the imaginations of the Spaniards. Since the
Spanish had conquered and brutally occupied the Pueblo villages, the Indians
most likely fabricated the urban wealth of Quivira in order to lure Coronado
into a wilderness from which they hoped he would never return.[19]
Thus, the ‘true story’ of Aztlán has been subject to
recovery, partiality, and political strategization since pre-Conquest times.
The Chicano utilization of Aztlán, then, can be seen as part of an ongoing
re-invention of this mythic place for diverse political ends.
[T]he appropriation from the
elitelore of ancient Mexico of such a seminal emblematic device as Aztlán was
the most brilliant political maneuver of the Chicano cultural nationalists.
Nothing their critics have done has managed to surpass or equal this feat of
organizational strategy. Under no other sign or concept, derived from the left,
center, or right, were as many Chicanos mobilized and as much enthusiasm
galvanized into political action – except for the concept of Chicanismo itself.
For a movement hungry for symbols that could both distinguish it from other
movements and unite it under one banner, Aztlán was perfect. So perfect, in
fact, that almost two decades after it was unfurled it is still the single most
distinguishing metaphor for Chicano activism.[20]
The Chicano Movement, or El
Movimiento, arose in the United States in the mid-1960s, inspired in great
part by the African-American civil rights struggles occurring at that time.[21]
The Chicano Movement was focused in those states bordering Mexico: California,
Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas; though there were also active Chicano
communities in Colorado and the city of Chicago. El Movimiento was
broad-based, encompassing rural farmworkers and Chicano youth in urban barrios
(neighborhoods) and universities. Chicanos fought for political, educational,
linguistic, labor, and cultural reforms that would elevate and dignify the
status of people of Mexican descent dwelling in the United States.[22]
To call oneself a Chicano
was (and is still) not simply to underscore one’s Mexican heritage; many people
of Mexican descent in the United States chose to call themselves
‘Mexican-Americans’ rather than Chicanos. To be a Chicano also entailed a
profound political statement. Chicanos agitated for radical social and
political change, based in an ethos of self-help and solidarity understood in
racialized terms. Chicanos argued that decades of pressure to assimilate into
the Anglo-mainstream of the United States had wrongly devalued the long, proud
history, culture, and values of Mexican-Americans. This had in turn impeded
economic progress for Mexican-Americans and resulted in a sort of cultural self-destruction.[23]
To call oneself a Chicano thus indicated a rejection of earlier liberal,
assimilationist, or accomodationist agendas vis-ŕ-vis the Anglo-dominated
social, economic, political, and cultural milieu.[24]
Finally, the term ‘Chicano’ was also closely associated with the working class
and identification with one’s indigenous heritage.[25]
Some leaders, particularly
during the early years of El Movimiento, were political nationalists who
advocated the secession of the Southwest from the Anglo-republic of the United
States of America, if not fully, at least locally with regard to Chicano
self-determination in local governance, education, and means of production.[26]
Inspired by Cuban and Vietnamese nationalist struggles at the time, many
Chicano nationalists used a model of internal colonialism to understand the
situation of an indigenous population (as they saw themselves) annexed by the
expansionist US hegemon and dispossessed of their land and capacity for
self-determination. For example, Rodolfo Acuńa, author of the canonical Chicano
studies text Occupied America,[27]
drew on the core-periphery thinking of Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, and
Immanuel Wallerstein to argue that the annexation and exploitation of the
indigenous land and labor of the Southwest had provided the wealth necessary
for the economic expansion of Anglo-dominated United States.[28]
Most Chicano nationalists did not express the extreme desire for secession from
the United States. Yet for some Chicano nationalists, like Alianza Federal
de Mercedes (Federal Land Grant Alliance) leader Reies López Tijerina, the
only viable solution was to fully repossess the Southwest: culturally,
economically, and politically. During the Alianza’s occupation of New
Mexico’s Echo Amphitheater in 1966, López Tijerina stated: “Fidel Castro has
what he has because of his guts …. Castro put the gringos off his island and we
can do the same”.[29]
Aztlán itself re-surfaced in
the Chicano movement in the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (Spiritual Plan of
Aztlán), a document written in Denver at the First Chicano National Youth
Conference in 1969.[30]
The Plan Espiritual constituted the ideological framework of the Chicano
Movement, emphasizing nationalism and self-determination. Importantly, the
first sentence of this key document states the fundamental Chicano nationalist
goal of reclaiming Aztlán as the land of the Chicano forbearers and as such the
rightful homeland of the Chicanos, land which was brutally and wrongfully
invaded by the ‘gringos.’ Writer Rudolfo Anaya views the claiming of Aztlán as
a naming ceremony, and as such it constituted “…one of the most important acts
a community performs.”[31]
Indeed, Aztlán became a key organizing concept for El Movimiento:
Chicanos interpreted their
nationalist cause as more than a political movement; they were involved in the
regeneration of sacred time and space, as the ultimate concern of Chicano
nationalism sought to transcend the existent temporal and spatial barriers and
establish a homeland patterned after the primordial homeland from which the
Aztecs originated. This would be a spiritual nation rooted in a sacred
landscape charged with the power of an indigenous spirituality and justified by
the validity of their national liberation struggle.[32]
The spiritual and political
homeland of Chicano nationalists was clearly designated as those lands annexed
by Texas in 1845 and ceded by Mexico in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
(including the contemporary US states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and
Oklahoma). According to Chicano nationalists, this ‘lost land’ had been
colonized time and again: by Spain, France, The Lone Star Republic of Texas,
the California Republic, the Confederacy, and the United States of America. Yet,
by virtue of an understood blood relationship to the indigenous inhabitants of
this region, Chicanos claimed that these lands were in fact their historical
birthright. By identifying a fixed geographic homeland Chicanos were making a
powerful claim to space, to legitimacy, and to an identity culturally and
politically independent of Anglo-America. The power exercised by
Anglo-Americans was thus illegitimate, “Because in reality, if you were born in
Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, or Colorado, you were not born in the
United States of America, but in occupied Mexico”.[33]
Chicano nationalists had made an important reversal: the invaders were in fact
the invaded; Anglo-Americans, who have no blood ties to the land or its
indigenous inhabitants, were both alien and illegitimate. In taking back the
Southwest, Chicanos sought restitution of their land, and the identity that
they perceived to be fundamentally tied to this place.
The mythic dimensions of
Aztlán were not stripped away by contemporary Chicanos, particularly those who
considered themselves cultural nationalists. They were instead utilized as
unifying factors, in an attempt to create a smooth space (albeit a far
different sort of smooth space than that envisioned by Anglo-Americans in the
nineteenth century). Aztlán was
proposed as the site for building a utopic future, built on ‘brown power’ and
newly-revitalized pride in the indigenous culture, values, and social structure
understood by Chicanos to be at the root of their identity. Though more materialist-inspired
Chicanos found the paradisiacal hopes for Aztlán too fanciful,[34]
many envisioned Aztlán as “a social, political, economic, and cultural utopia,
free of liberal politicians, welfare programs, police brutality,
discrimination, poverty, and identity crises”.[35] Chicano nationalists in the United States
saw Aztlán as a common ground for Chicanos who, geographically, politically,
and spiritually, existed in diaspora. One of the crucial gestures of claiming
Aztlán involved the perceived need to overlook differences amongst Chicanos, in
favor of the greater good arising from unity. Concepts of unity were central to
understanding the Chicano movement, and notions of the Chicano Movement as one
large family (‘La Familia Cósmica’ or ‘La Familia de La Raza’),
carnalismo (brotherhood), and La Raza (‘the race,’ ‘the people,’
or ‘The Bronze Race’ in the Plan Espiritual). Ralph ‘El Duke’ Peterson
understood the Chicano Movement to be like a stone, in that it was formed of
diverse particles, yet these were “welded together by years of outside pressure
and tempered in the fires of slavery and oppression.”[36]
Utopias are by their very nature smooth spaces. Indeed, their impossibility derives from the inadmissibility of
striation.
Inventing a myth of a golden
past can have the effect of lulling the group into inaction and a false
understanding of its own history. It may lead to worship of ancestors who, in
their own society, were as oppressive as the current enemy.[37]
One cannot assert the
wholeness of a Chicano subject when the very discourses that go into its
identity formation – be they discourses surrounding the mutability of gender
identity, sexuality, class and cultural identification, linguistic and ethnic
association – are incommensurably contradictory.[38]
Aztlán has been used to
obscure and elide important issues surrounding Chicano identity, in particular
the significance of intracultural differences, despite the admitted failure of
social scientists and historians who have attempted to create models of Chicano
ethnicity based on ethnic commonalities.[39]
In geographically affixing the floating
homeland of Aztlán for a concrete political purpose, Chicano nationalists
attempted to reverse what they understood to be a fundamentally race-based
apartheid lived by Chicanos in the Anglo-dominated Southwest. Yet the views of
Chicano nationalists from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s reflected the largely
male, working class, and mestizo background of the majority of Chicano
nationalist activists and scholars.[40]
This particular positionality led to exclusions that would eventually undermine
the integrity seen as necessary and desirable to maintain a unified Chicano
vision of home. Race, gender, and sexuality constituted cracks in the (counter-)
hegemonic discourse of unified Chicano struggle. Native Americans in the
Southwest had also long claimed the desert Southwest as their homeland, yet
they were included only rhetorically by Chicanos anxious to invoke a genealogy
that tied them to this land. Chicana feminists and queer Chicanas/os, who did
not fit comfortably (or at all) into the patriarchal family model proposed as
the template for Aztlán, were in a sense left homeless. These pressures led,
ultimately, to an implosion of Aztlán.
4.1 AlterNative
An important distinction
between Anglo-American and Chicano nationalism was that the latter explicitly
included Native Americans, while the former chose to dichotomize space through
the imposition of a geopolitical border between the Mexico and the United
States, effectively silencing autonomous claims to space on the part of Native
Americans. By contrast, indigenism was
at the heart of the Chicano Movement in its early years. El Movimiento’s
valorization of a glorious indigenous past as constituting a purity of
historical origin which was subsequently corrupted though colonization is drawn
directly from the post-Revolutionary Mexican indigenist movement. In the 1920s,
as Mexico began to reconstruct its economic, political, and social structures after
the devastation of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), a form of cultural
nationalism known as indigenismo arose whereby “Mexico’s revolutionary
elites asserted their commitment to the moral and economic elevation of the
Indian, who they claimed was central to the national experience”.[41]
Yet in both the Mexican
national reconstruction, and the US Chicano Movement of a half-century later,
‘the Indian’ operated in a highly problematic fashion, one which reworked, but
did not eliminate, the deep anti-indigenous racism of the dominant Mestizo
groups in question.[42]
For Chicano nationalists of
the 1960s and ‘70s, a central political gesture involved explicit territorial
claims to the US Southwest as their lost homeland. Yet these claims squarely
overlapped the claims of Native American nations to the same lands.
Furthermore, the ‘real’ Aztlán of Aztec myth probably, unromantically, lay far
to the south of the contemporary US Southwest, somewhere in the Mexican state
of Nayarit. In order to skirt these thorny issues, Chicano historians such as
John Chávez constructed what Daniel Cooper Alarcón has termed an “odd”
argument, one that “tries to shore up the Chicano claim to that region by
rewriting Chicano genealogy and linking it to the ancient Cochise civilization”
in the US Southwest.[43]
Similarly, Native American scholar Jack Forbes, who considers Chicanos to be
‘our lost brothers,’ argued that Chicanos, or Aztecas del norte (Northern
Aztecs), constituted “the largest single tribe or nation of Anishinabeg
(Indians) found in the United States today”.[44]
Chávez went so far as to make the dubious claim that “Since Chicanos are
racially 70 to 80 percent Indian, they do indeed have much in common with
Native Americans …”.[45]
Modern-day Aztecs (Chicanos) are, according to Chicano scholars anxious to
emphasize their ties to Native Americans, undeniably linked to Southwest Native
Americans through language and shared cultures of food, folklore, and values.[46] Long before the arrival of Europeans,
American Indians in the present-day United States Southwest were influenced by
Central Mexican ceramics-making, maize cultivation, language, and blood
exchange, spread by extensive trading networks. These cultural, historical, and
blood alliances, it was argued, naturally united the Native American and
Chicano in their claims to the Anglo-dominated Southwest.
Yet Native Americans made solely cameo
appearances in Chicano nationalist discourse. Critiquing John Chávez’s Lost
Land specifically, Alarcón notes how “Native Americans are not included in
his discussion about the region, except when he requires their presence in
order to legitimate Chicano claims to the Southwest”.[47]
Native Americans cast only blurry shadow-figures, functioning as a
“dehistoricized fetish” that gave “a veneer of ‘origin’ and ‘authenticity’” to
Chicano nationalist discourse.[48]
Chicano nationalist discourse suffered from a
related lack of specificity regarding the hugely varied Native American
populations of the Southwest, as well the historical, geographic, racial, and class
diversity amongst Chicanos themselves. In this lack of specificity, real claims
to space, and identity, were erased on all sides. Some Mexican- Americans
didn’t consider themselves to be Chicanos, or to have Mexican ancestry, or to
be indigenous in the slightest. New Mexican hispanos, for example,
viewed their heritage as predating Mexican immigration to the Southwest and
harkening directly back to a centuries-old lineage of Spanish conquistadors.
Sizeable groups of Chicanos living outside of the Southwest borderlands proper
(for example, in Chicago) saw their potential claims to space silenced through
the insistence on the Southwest as homeland. Most Native Americans in the
Southwest did not consider themselves to be modern-day Aztecs, Chicanos, or Mexican-Americans.
Discussion did not even begin to mention Asian- and African-Americans, who
could also potentially assert historical claims to the region.
The simultaneous invocation of a glorious
indigenous past, and the erasure of specific Native American claims to the
Southwest, points to the incredibly fraught relationship to the Indian in the
American imaginary more generally. As Michael Taussig has written, “Going to
the Indians for their healing power and killing them for their wildness are not
so far apart”.[49] The
reinscription of the Indian-as-other into the very heart of Chicano nationalist
discourse was ironic, since the ‘nation within a nation’ internal colonial
model was the framework through which Chicanos understood their own
subordination in Anglo society. Yet Chicano mestizos by definition were
themselves also colonizers, if history were allowed to reel backward prior to
1848 (and it wasn’t, in foundational Chicano nationalist texts) and to speak of
mestizaje as involving both Spaniard and Native American. The Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán does not deal with this discomforting role-reversal in
which colonized becomes colonizer in the historical long view. Neither does The
Plan explore the realities of Aztec expansionism and their own brutally
colonial presence in Mexico’s central valley prior to Cortez’s arrival.
The prospect of thinking
about Spanish-speaking men dominating Native Americans simply muddies the
picture of Anglo-Mexicano relations too much for the internal colonial model to
embrace. Internal colonialism, in fact, has never been able to satisfactorily
explain how to deal with the complex problem of mestizaje between Spaniards and
Native Mexicanos. By picking up the story in 1848, internal colonialism avoids
the problem and can simply label all the inhabitants of the recently conquered
territory as Mexicans.[50]
The racialized
borders were to be maintained starkly dichotomous. Truly considering Native Americans and their claims to land as
viable and different from those of Chicano nationalists threatened to
destabilize what was, ironically, a deeply bordered narrative of belonging and
exclusion.
Another sort of rebordering
was enacted by Chicano nationalists, one that involved the minds, bodies, and
labor of Chicana women and queer Chicanas/os. Aztlán was understood by Chicano
nationalists to be modeled on the ideal(ized) Chicano family structure, with
male leadership, carnalismo (literally, brotherhood, “nationalist yet
blatantly patriarchal in practice”)[51],
and the respect of elders providing a hierarchical, patriarchal leadership
structure as the basic organizing principle of the Chicano political
collective. Thus, the Chicano utopia would be a decidedly male utopia, with the
Chicano male’s privilege and power over Chicana women intact. For example,
Armando Rendón, the author of the Chicano Manifesto, clearly connected
his personal sense of honor and masculinity with a nationalist discourse: “The
essence of machismo, of being macho, is as much a symbolic principle for the
Chicano revolt as it is a guideline for family life ….Macho, in other words,
can no longer relate merely to manhood but must relate to nationhood as well.”[52]
It would also be a heterosexual place, with the family-based father-mother reproductive
dyad providing the fundamental moral foundation of the Chicano community and
political movement. To question the patriarchal family or heterosexuality as an
organizing principle of the Chicano Movement constituted a betrayal, not only
of the Chicano nation (La Raza) as conceived by its founding fathers,
but also of the Chicano family, traditional gender roles, and heterosexuality
themselves as the understood moral backbone of the larger political movement.[53]
As feminist scholars have
recently argued, nationalism tends to draw upon stereotyped and limiting views
of women (and men), often rooted (and legitimated) in heterosexual, patriarchal
family structures.[54] Patriarchal families are rarely comfortable
or even safe sites for women, children, or non-heterosexuals. In this, Chicano nationalism of the 1960s
and 1970s was no exception. For critic and writer Cherríe Moraga, the
heterosexuality enforced in Chicano families and the control of Chicana women
are tightly bound together, and this is what has made the critique of power
relationships nurtured within Chicano families such an untouchable topic:
We believe the more severely
we protect the sex roles within the family, the stronger we will be as a unit
in opposition to the anglo threat …. [yet the Chicano] too, like any other man,
wants to be able to determine how, when, and with whom his women – mother,
wife, and daughter – are sexual. For without male imposed social and legal
control of our reproductive function, reinforced by the Catholic Church, and
the social institutionalization of our roles as sexual and domestic servants to
men, Chicanas might very freely ‘choose’ to do otherwise, including being
sexually independent from and/or with men. In fact, the forced
‘choice’ of the gender of our sexual/love partner seems to precede the forced
‘choice’ of the form (marriage and family) that partnership might take. The
control of women begins through the institution of heterosexuality. (italics
in original)[55]
Elizabeth Martínez states
that “Aztlán has always been set forth in ferociously macho imagery,” an
imagery that buttresses the material practices of patriarchy and homophobia in
Chicano nationalism.[56]
Alluding to the huge paste-on wall murals that lurk in Mexican restaurants in
the United States, Martínez describes the kitsch scene of the Aztec warrior
holding the swooning Azteca princess in his arms as he gazes off into the
horizon, as a landscape of sexualized possession that holds an enduring appeal
to the secret fantasies of “the average Chicano”.[57]
The idolization of male iconic figures of resistance – Che Guevara, Fidel
Castro, Pancho Villa, and Emiliano Zapata – have likewise legitimated the
masculine heroism of El Movimiento’s political agents.[58]
These strengthened the already deeply-rooted suspicion that Chicana women were
fundamentally apolitical, and should be concerned foremost with the private
(feminine) space of the home and not the public (male) space of politics.
Within El Movimiento, a women’s ‘place’ was understood to be parallel to
her place within the patriarchal Chicano family: to selflessly serve men.
“[M]ujeres [women] in the Movimiento were indeed sin nombre [nameless],
anonymous workers and theorists pushed to the background, kept in their places
…”.[59]
Like leftist movements more
generally, questions of gender subordination within the Chicano movement were
seen by the Movement’s leaders to be non-existent at best, divisive at worst.
Gender concerns constituted a sort of false consciousness, one that could be
reduced to the class – and for Chicano nationalists, race – oppression that
drove the oppression of all Chicanos, male and female. Once class and race
divisions were overcome, gender inequalities would naturally melt away because
they were secondary oppressions, derived from the fundamental inequalities of
race and class.[60] The surface
of struggle was smoothed of gender through silencing these concerns. Insisting on gender as intrinsically
important was seen by the leaders of El Movimiento as unnecessarily
dividing Chicanos, sapping the strength-in-unity represented by Aztlán.[61]
To question the masculinism of the Chicano Movement was to question one’s
loyalty to Chicano men, and to risk being seen as a betrayer of El
Movimiento. “You are a traitor to your race if you do not put the man
first”.[62]
However, the infinite delay of coming to
terms with what many Chicanas saw as illegitimate gender-based inequalities in
the workplace, home, and El Movimiento became a source of intense border
conflict.[63] “[T]he
predominantly male-centered authoritative discourses … promised to include
Chicanas in the cultural record of the practices of ethnic resistance if they
accepted their exclusion as female subjects and dwelled only on their ethnic
similarities with Chicano males …. these promises rarely materialized”.[64]
For many Chicanas who grew weary of seeing their intellectual and physical
labor on behalf of El Movimiento remain un(der)-valued, and their
concerns silenced, the notion of Aztlán-as-home was soured. The home was lived
as a source of profound ambivalence: as both “a genuine bastion of Raza
self-defense against a hostile society”,[65]
and at the same time, as a persistent locus of female subservience to the
political concerns and careers of Chicano men.[66]
For lesbian and gay
Chicanas/os, the idealized notion of home held dear by Chicano nationalists was
arguably even more profoundly alienating than it was for straight Chicana
feminists. For in the heterosexual home, there was no place at all for the
queer Chicana/o. In her hugely important Borderlands=la frontera: the new
mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa centers her discussion on the evolution of her
identity as a Chicana lesbian feminist, the physical and spiritual exile that
this evolution required, and her longing to return home. She writes of homecoming
in terms of homophobia: “Fear of going home. And of not being taken in.
We’re afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, La Raza, for
being unacceptable, faulty, damaged.”[67]
As Sonia Saldívar-Hull has commented in her review of Anzaldúa’s work, choosing
to be queer in the borderlands constitutes “the ultimate exile”,[68]
while Anzaldúa herself refers to the repercussions of her choices as an
“intimate terrorism”.[69]
Lesbianism, in particular,
was perceived to deeply threaten La Familia. Refusing to go along with
traditional gender roles was seen to strike at the root of the male privilege
sown and nurtured within the hetero-patriarchal Chicano family, to potentially
contribute to the genocide of La Raza through a perceived refusal of
heterosexual reproduction (regardless of whether Chicana lesbians chose to have
children or not), and to blaspheme against the teachings of the Catholic
Church.[70]
Queerness had the potential to rip open the foundation of Chicano nationalism –
the individual Chicano family, as well as “La Familia de La Raza” – from
the inside. Woman-identification and queerness were viewed not just as
betrayals, but also as a sabotages, of Chicano identity, culture, and politics.
Perhaps in an effort to overlook the complicity of their own queer brothers and
sisters (literally, as well as their siblings in El Movimiento), some
Chicano nationalists viewed homosexuality as white society’s most formidable
tool of deception, as “his [the white man’s] disease with which he
sinisterly infects Third World people, men and women alike” (emphasis in
original).[71] Yet, many
feminist and queer Chicanas/os were acutely conscious of their transgressions
and viewed these as a deliberate critical strategy for opening the movement up
from the inside. “I made the choice to be queer….I will not glorify
those aspects of my culture which have injured me and which have injured me in
the name of protecting me” (emphasis in original).[72]
The difficult reconciliation of El Movimiento with its own homophobia
becomes imperative:
I guarantee you, there will
be no change among heterosexual men, there will be no change in heterosexual
relations, as long as the Chicano community keeps us lesbians and gay men
political prisoners among our own people. Any movement build on the fear and
loathing of anyone is a failed movement. The Chicano movement is no different.[73]
Aztlán illustrates the power
of narrative to contest political processes and the material construction of
meaning and belonging that surround the ongoing negotiation of the nation. The Aztlán of Chicano nationalists staked an
explicit claim to place, and via this claim, to an identity, presence, and
legitimacy that was not derivative of or subordinate to the Anglo-American
majority. To claim the Southwest as the rightful homeland of Chicanos was a key
gesture, one seen by many as providing the necessary grounding, understood both
literally and figuratively, for El Movimiento to unite Chicanos under
the banner of a common cause.
Yet by bounding and fixing
Aztlán geographically, and emphasizing the color line dividing Chicanos and
Anglos, El Movimiento constructed identity, and solidarity, in bordered
terms. Other differences, both exogenous and endogenous to the Movement, were
exiled from Aztlán lest they disrupt the painstakingly leveled terrain of Chicanos
Unidos against the uniform Anglo oppressor. But erasures of class, race,
gender, and sexuality were never truly buried; they were instead merely displaced,
and created a constant din of dissent from the margins.
In fact, the suppression of
internal difference by Chicano nationals brought to the forefront the fractures
amongst Chicanas/os along lines of gender and sexuality, and between Chicanos
and others claiming the same place. The pressures that these suppressions gave
rise to ultimately led to an implosion of Aztlán as a generally useful
political, spiritual, and geopolitical construct. By the late 1980s and early
1990s, many Chicanas/os felt that Aztlán had become “very much an empty symbol,”
and there was talk of a “second departure” from Aztlán.[74]
“[T]here is no turning back to racial utopias which polarize the forces of
oppression along ethnic lines and create fictitious narratives of domestic
bliss with the concept of a male-centered familialism”.[75]
Aztlán overwrote previous
Anglo-American claims to the same lands, while it intersected in problematic
ways with historic and contemporary Native American narratives centering on
this region. These accounts all tied
different human collectives to the same landscape in ways that were often in
direct confrontation with one another.
The writing, erasure, and overwriting of these collective texts of
belonging and exclusion have lent the desert Southwest a palimpsest-like
character, when viewed in light of national and proto-national (ethnic or
religious) ties. Daniel Cooper Alarcón
has theorized the concept of Aztlán itself as a palimpsest of sorts, a
multi-layered narrative that has been, since the burning of the Aztec
historical records in 1433, been written and written-over time and again as an
self-affirmative story told from the viewpoint of the group in power.[76]
If Aztlán is, in turn, seen as a chapter in the landscape history of the arid
Southwest, or Greater Mexico, it can be viewed as adding a discrete layer to
the palimpsest that is this place.
By over-writing prior
narratives, Alarcón claims, a flattening of historical texture and a
suppression of difference is inevitable.
And this is what Paul Routledge has claimed, as well, for understanding
the geopolitical dimensions of resistance based in his work in the Baliapal
movement:
But the songs also spoke for
the population of Baliapal, and they did so in an inevitably distorted
way. By selectively representing the
material and imagined spaces of Baliapal, and the associated spatial practices
of Baliapalis, the songs dissimulated the econooomic, caste, gender, and
political relations of power imbued in speaking for the movement. A singular, wealthy, male voice spoke on
behalf of the tens of thousands of (predominantly illiterate) peasants.[77]
Perhaps counter-hegemonic nationalist claims to
space, claims that must of necessity flatten the layers of historical narration
in order to present a unified voice vis-ŕ-vis the dominant nationality, are
inherently risky:
Nationalisms work through
such differentiae because they have to, caught as they are in the
conflicts of modernity and modernisation, in conditions of uneven
development that, within the spaces of colonialist domination, may yield no
resources but the geographical, ethnological and cultural peculiarities of a
region which, in the rhetorics of nationalism, become the indices of origins,
roots, hidden histories and shared heritages….Whatever momentum of
reidentification and reterritorialisation nationalisms make possible, they
always turn on their own strategy of terror:
their own interiorisation of a centre, their own essentialising of a
dominant frame of differentiation, their own pograms and expulsions.[78]
In this, the Aztlán of Chicano nationalists is in
keeping with many other minority and Third World national projects, which
typically draw on tradition and folklore, involving “a process of selecting one
of many possible sets of experiences from their history, in order to narrativize
it linearly and frame it as the ‘authentic representation.’”.[79]
As I suggest in the introduction to this book, perhaps the modern nation-state
itself is immanently unstable, even those nationalisms that are intended to be deliberately contestatory. If the modern nation-state is predicated on
bordered difference, then exclusion is always present. It cannot be otherwise. Aztlán represented an attempt to heal the
wounds left by exclusion from the Anglo-American national discourse. Yet, because Aztlán was forged on the same
template as all modern nationalisms, it too was born of difference and
exclusion. Aztlán was profoundly,
fatally, bordered.
The Chicano nationalist
story, rooted in the fabulous geographic imaginary of Aztlán, is in the end a
story of the failure of modern nationalism.
This failure is not due to external factors, but to a crisis or paradox
that is internal to the praxis of the modern nation-state. The Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s
was, at the end of the day, a nationalist movement and suffered from the same
flaws as other nationalisms. Despite a
good faith effort at contesting, and eventually displacing, hegemonic
Anglo-American nation, Aztlán did not constitute moving beyond the nation. A true alternative to the nation-state,
AlterNation, was denied.
Yet Rafael Pérez-Torres has
suggested that Aztlán has become not just an empty symbol (as Alarcón
suggests), but that Aztlán has become an empty signifier, and as such,
paradoxically saturated with meaning:
Aztlán as borderlands marks
a site that both belongs to and has never belonged to either the United States
or Mexico …. As an empty signifier, Aztlán names not that which is or has been,
but that which is ever absent: nation, unity, liberation….the term Aztlán
consistently has named that which refers to an absence, and unfulfilled reality
in response to various forms of oppression.” [80]
In Pérez-Torres’ vision, Aztlán has come to provide
a sort of ever-receding north, a contemporary Quivira that by its very
slipperiness compels constant movement.
In its transversality, the paradoxical space of a refigured Aztlán very
much echoes, and is spatially superimposed upon, the West of Anglo-American
nationalism.
By the mid-1980s, a shift in
master symbol was underway, one involving the inevitable movement suggested by
Pérez-Torres, away from the Aztlán of Chicano nationalists to ‘the borderlands’
of Chicana/o writers, scholars, and artists.
This exchange of master symbol is indicative of a larger shift in
Chicana/o praxis, away from a decidedly modern, national project to a
post-nationalist, perhaps even post-modern sort of project. The borderlands posited a vision of a newly
smoothed space, on which was fractal in nature. Though it played on and around the geopolitical boundary between
Mexico and the United States, the concept of the borderlands ultimately
subverted the boundary. It was
accompanied by a parallel discourse of smooth space, one that harkened directly
to the nineteenth-century Anglo-American vision of expansionism. These contending visions of smooth futures will be explored in the next
chapter.
[1] Rudolfo Anaya, Heart of
Aztlán (Berkeley: Editorial Justa Publications, 1976), pp.129-30.
[2] P.13 in Luis Leal, ‘In
Search of Aztlán’, in Rudolfo A. Anaya and Francisco Lomelí (eds) Aztlán:
Essays on the Chicano Homeland (Albuquerque: Academia/El Norte
Publications, 1989), pp.6-13.
[3] John R. Chávez, The Lost
Land: the Chicano Image of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1984), p.8; Leal, “Aztlán”, pp.10-11.
[4] When I
write of the Chicano nationalist period, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, I
use the term Chicano purposely, as the masculine singularity implied in
the term is appropriate for the spirit of this period. Later in the paper, I
use the term Chicana/o to refer to the multiple gender and other subject
positions that can be claimed under this broadened term. See ‘A note on ethnic
labels’, in Adela de la Torre and Beatríz Pesquera, eds, Building With our
Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), pp.xiii-xiv, for further discussion and suggested
readings.
[5] P.iv in Rudolfo A. Anaya
and Francisco Lomelí, “Introduction”, in Anaya and Lomelí, Aztlán,
pp.ii-iv.
[6] Paul Routledge, “Geopoetics
of Resistance: India’s Baliapal
Movement” in Alternatives, 25(3), 2000:
375-89.
[7] Ibid, p. 385.
[8] Ibid, p. 387.
[9] Fray Diego Durán, The
History of the Indies of New Spain ed., transl., ann. Doris Heyden (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), p.12, note 2; p.19 in Michael Pina, “The
Archaic, Historical, and Mythicized Dimensions of Aztlán”, in Anaya and Lomelí
(eds), Aztlán, pp.14-45.
[10] Carlos Fuentes, The
Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World (Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992), p.99.
[11] Pina, “The Archaic,
Historical, and Mythicized Dimensions of Aztlán”, pp. 23-4.
[12] Durán, The History of
the Indies of New Spain, p.12, note 1.
[13] Ibid., p.
24. Durán was convinced that the Aztecs were a chosen people of God because of
his belief that they constituted one of the ten lost tribes of Israel.
[14] Factions of the original migrants settled and remained along the route. Those who reached the end of the journey changed their name to, variously, “Mexica,” “Mexica-Aztecs,” or “Mexicans” along their pilgrimage. Ibid., p.13, note 3, also p.25.
[15] Pina, “The Archaic,
Historical, and Mythicized Dimensions of Aztlán”, p.25.
[16] Durán, The History of
the Indies of New Spain, p.220.
[17] See especially ibid., and
Fray Bernardino Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain
(Florentine Codex), second edition, transl. and ann. Arthur J.O. Anderson
and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe, New Mexico: The School of American Research
and the University of Utah, Monographs of the School of American Research, 1978
[1970]).
[18] Pina, “The Archaic,
Historical, and Mythicized Dimensions of Aztlán”, pp.29-30; Fuentes, Buried
Mirror, p.102.
[19] Chávez, Lost Land,
p.16.
[20] P. 149 in J. Jorge Klor de
Alva, “Aztlán, Borinquen and Hispanic Nationalism in the United States”, in
Anaya and Lomelí, Aztlán, pp.135-71.
[21] Yet it is important to note
that Chicano activism (as well as the broader spectrum of Mexican-American
activism) has a long history and did not spring forth suddenly in the mid-1960s
without antecedents. There were also multiple influences on El Movimiento
besides African-American civil rights struggles, particularly anti-Vietnam War
and pro-revolutionary Cuba sentiments amongst (some) Chicanos and sectors of
the larger US population at that time. See Rodolfo Acuńa, Occupied America:
a History of Chicanos (fourth edition) (New York: Longman, 2000 [1972]);
David Montejano, ed., Chicano Politics and Society in the late Twentieth
Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999); Ignacio García, Chicanismo:
the Forging of a Militant Ethos Among Mexican Americans (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 1997); Francisco A. Rosales, Chicano! The History of the
Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996).
[22] There were diverse strands of Chicano nationalism, ranging from those more focused on cultural issues, to those inspired by a more-materialist or even Marxist agenda; those who considered themselves more nationalist or even radically separatist, to those who were less extreme in their outlook. See Rafael Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring Aztlán”, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 22(2) (1997), pp.15-41, and Klor de Alva, “Aztlán, Borinquen and Hispanic Nationalism in the United States”, for detailed discussions of political as opposed to cultural nationalists.
[23] García, Chicanismo,
p.95.
[24] See especially ibid.
[25] See Rosales, Chicano!,
and Jack Forbes, Aztecas del Norte: the Chicanos of Aztlán (Greenwich,
Connecticut: Fawcett, 1973).
[26] Chávez, Lost Land,
p.144.
[27] Acuńa, Occupied America.
[28] For a detailed discussion
of this approach, see Ramón Gutiérrez, “Chicano History: Paradigm Shifts and
Shifting Boundaries”, in Refugio I. Rochín and Dennis N. Valdés, eds, Voices
of a New Chicano History (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press,
2000), pp. 91-114.
[29] Quoted in Chávez, Lost
Land, p.140.
[30] The brief text of El
Plan Espiritual de Aztlán is reproduced in Anaya and Lomelí (eds) Aztlán,
pp.1-5.
[31] P.230 in Rudolfo Anaya,
“Aztlán: a Homeland Without Boundaries” in Anaya and Lomelí, eds, Aztlán,
pp. 230-41.
[32] Pina, “The Archaic,
Historical, and Mythicized Dimensions of Aztlán”, p.36.
[33] Quoted in Forbes, Aztecas
del Norte, p.307.
[34] Rosales, Chicano!,
p.23.
[35] García, Chicanismo,
p.18.
[36] Quoted in Forbes, Aztecas
dl Norte, pp.311-2.
[37] P.124 in Genaro M. Padilla,
“Myth and Comparative Cultural Nationalism: the Ideological Uses of Aztlán” in
Anaya and Lomelí (eds) Aztlán, pp. 111-34.
[38] Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring
Aztlán”, p.21.
[39] P.36 in Daniel Cooper
Alarcón, “The Aztec Palimpsest: Toward a New Understanding of Aztlán”, in Aztlán:
A Journal of Chicano Studies, v. 19(2), 1992: pp. 33-68.
[40] See Gutiérrez, “Chicano
History”, and Rosa Linda Fregoso and Angie Chabram, “Chicana/o Cultural
Representations: Reframing Alternative Critical Discourses” Cultural Studies,
v. 4, 1990, pp. 203-12.
[41] Helen Delpar, The
Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations Between the United States
and Mexico, 1920-1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992),
p.90.
[42] Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring
Aztlán”, p.30.
[43] Alarcón, “Aztec
Palimpsest”, p.57.
[44] Forbes, Aztecas del
Norte, p.13.
[45] Chávez, Lost Land,
p.4.
[46] Guillermo Lux and Maurelio
E. Vigil, “Return to Aztlán: the Chicano Rediscovers His Indian Past” in Anaya
and Lomelí, Aztlán, pp.93-110.
[47] Alarcón, “Aztec
Palimpsest”, p.59.
[48] Pérez-Torres, Movements
in Chicano Poetry, p.183.
[49] Michael Taussig, Shamanism,
Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study
in Terror and Healing (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), p.100.
[50] P.187 in María Montoya,
“Beyond Internal Colonialism: Class, Gender, and Culture as Challenges to
Chicano Identity” in Rochín and Valdés (eds) Voices of a New Chicano History,
pp. 183-95.
[51] Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Feminism
on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000), p.19.
[52] Armando B. Rendón, The
Chicano Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1971), p.105.
[53] See Gutiérrez, “Chicano
History”; Cherríe Moraga, “From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and
Feminism”, in Anne C. Hermann and Abigail J. Stewart, eds, Theorizing
Feminism, Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1994), pp.34-48; and Beatríz Pesquera and Denise Segura, “There
is no Going Back: Chicanas and Feminism”, in Norma Alarcón, Rafaela Castro,
Emma Pérez, Beatríz Pesquera, Adaljiza Sosa Riddell, and Patricia Zavella, eds,
Chicana Critical Issues (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1993), pp.95-115.
[54] See Tamar Mayer, “Gender
Ironies of Nationalism: Setting the Stage’ in Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender
Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (New York and London: Routledge,
2000), pp.1-22; Norma Alarcón, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallem, “Introduction:
Between Woman and Nation”, in Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem,
eds, Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and
the State (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp.1-16; and Nira
Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London, Thousand Oaks, and New
Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997).
[55] Moraga, “From a Long Line
of Vendidas”, pp. 40-1.
[56] P.127 in Elizabeth
Martínez, “Chingón Politics Die Hard: Reflections on the First Chicano Activist
Reunion’, in Carla Trujillo (ed) Living Chicana Theory (Berkeley: Third
Woman Press, 1998), pp.123-35.
[57] Ibid., p.127.
[58] P.47 in Angie
Chabram-Dernersesian, “And Yes … the Earth Did Part: on the Splitting of
Chicana/o Subjectivity”, in de la Torre and Pesquera (eds) Building With Our
Hands, pp.34-56.
[59] Saldívar-Hull, Feminism
on the Border, p.23.
[60] Emma Pérez, “Sexuality and
Discourse: Notes From a Chicana Survivor”, in Carla Trujillo, ed., Chicana
Lesbians: the Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Berkeley: Third Woman
Press, 1991), pp. 159-84.
[61] For a recent reiteration of
this fear, see Ignacio M. García, “Juncture in the Road: Chicano Studies Since
‘El Plan de Santa Barbara’” in David R. Maciel and Isidro D. Ortiz (eds) Chicanas/Chicanos
at the Crossroads: Social,Economic, and Political Change (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1996), pp.181-203.
[62] Moraga, “From a Long Line
of Vendidas”, p.37.
[63] See essays in Alma M.
García (ed) Chicana Feminist Thought: the Basic Historical Writings (New
York and London: Routledge, 1997).
[64] Chabram-Dernersesian, “And
Yes … the Earth Did Part”, p.40.
[65] Martínez, “Chingón Politics
Die Hard”, p.127.
[66] Chicana
feminists adopted varied stances toward the family as a source of oppression,
of strength, or of both. Cherríe Moraga (“From a Long Line of Vendidas”) and
Sonia Saldívar-Hull (Feminism on the Border), for example, provide quite
different personal accounts of their experiences with and views of family. The
numerous excerpts of key Chicana essays in Alma García (Chicana Feminist
Thought) provide a rich account of the varied Chicana feminist views of
family, the Chicano movement’s early years, and diverse stances vis-ŕ-vis
mainstream feminism in the U.S. See
also Beatríz M. Pesquera and Adela de la Torre, “Introduction”, in de la Torre
and Pesquera (eds) Building With Our Hands, pp.1-11; Beatríz M. Pesquera
and Denise Segura, “With Quill and Torch: a Chicana Perspective on the American
Women’s Movement and Feminist Theories” in Maciel and Ortiz (eds) Chicanas/
Chicanos at the Crossroads, pp.231-47; Pesquera and Segura, “There is No
Going Back”.
[67] Anzaldúa, Borderlands =
La Frontera, pp. 41-2.
[68] Saldívar-Hull, Feminism
on the Border, p.73.
[69] Anzaldúa, Borderlands =
La Frontera, p.42.
[70] Ibid.; Carla
Trujillo, “Chicana Lesbians: Fear and Loathing in the Chicano Community’, in
Alarcón, et.al. (eds) Chicana Critical Issues, pp.117-25.
[71] Moraga, “Long Line”, p.43.
[72] Anzaldúa, Borderlands,
pp.41, 44.
[73] Moraga, “From a Long Line
of Vendidas”, p.47.
[74] Alarcón, “The Aztec
Palimpsest”, p.39.
[75]
Chabram-Dernersesian, “And Yes … the Earth Did Part”, p.52. Though see Laura
Elisa Pérez, “El Desorden, Nationalism, and Chicana/o Aesthetics’, in
Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem, Between Woman and Nation, pp.19-46, who
argues that Chicana feminism was present at the birth of Aztlán, and that queer
and feminist Chicana/o thought has refigured, not imploded, the notion of
Aztlán.
[76] Alarcón, “The Aztec
Palimpsest”.
[77] Routledge, “Geopolitics of
Resistance: India’s Baliapal Movement”,
p. 386.
[78] Emphases in original. John Tagg, with Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino,
“The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide: Mobility,
Identity and Buenas Garras” in John Tagg, Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the
Discursive Field (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1992) pp. 183-202.
[79] P.11 in Smadar Lavie and
Ted Swedenburg, “Introduction: Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity”,
in Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg (eds) Displacement, Diaspora, and the
Geographies of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) pp.1-25. See
also Padilla, “Myth and Comparative Cultural Nationalism”.
[80] Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring
Aztlán”, p.37.