/ O A UTOBI OGRAPHY : A P REFACE
My interest in Chicana/o literature began at age 16, when I discovered, quite by chance, one of the quintessential poems of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement, “I am Joaquín.” The poem was powerful and the call for freedom resonated deeply with some of my own struggles. Autobiographical expression became an important question for me when, later, I discovered that the author of the poem “I am Joaquín” was Corky Gonzales, and that Joaquín was and was not a real person, was both fictional and autobiographical. Obviously, the poem was based on the corrido of Joaquín Murrieta, but the question deepened when I tried to match Gonzales’s life with Joaquín’s narrative of resistance. I realized I was not able to say that “Joaquín” was a completely invented entity. In fact, many Chicanas/os identified strongly with the character to the point that Joaquín was a part of their very identity. On the other hand, I wondered, what was it, specifically, that millions of people have in common with the narrative voice in the poem? My question remained: What is this “I” that, through a poem, mobilized thousands of Chicanas/os during the Civil Rights Movement? What is the secret of writing a life experience? This book has been written with two goals in mind. The title indicates my first goal. By using the first part of the title, collective identity, I explore the explicit tension created by the open-ended quality of a “self” constructed with a different autobiographical effect in mind, that is, a construction always unfolding, and wrestling with personal and communal representation. Also, by acknowledging the second part of the title, cultural resistance, I emphasize the realities and experiences embedded in the
vii
unique autobiographical mode that defines the construction of the “I” in contemporary Chicana/o autobiography.
Another goal is also implicit in the title. The notion of Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography is open enough (I analyze twentieth- and twenty-first-century works) to suggest that this is the beginning of a muchneeded conversation. As I finish this book we are about to enter another presidential campaign. The candidate ahead of the polls, Donald Trump, is making the argument that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best, they’re sending people that have lots of problems … They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Given the pressures of this election year, it is important to open a conversation that makes clear the contributions of the most demographically influential group among Latinos in the USA. Through the examination of some texts in visual arts and literature, the aim of this book is to theorize and to analyze the space for self-expression, whose 53-year development, between 1959 and 2012, created a new paradigm in Chicana/o autobiography. That there is no book-length focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chicana/o autobiographical literature is not only surprising, it underlines the long-needed examination of a genre which, deeply embedded in Chicana/o arts and culture, has always been ignored by critics and the media alike. By exploring the relationships between “home” and identity, citizenship and borders, familia and writing, I show the expansive and varied group of themes and techniques involved in the project of self-representation. With this diverse body of work, I wish to reveal the different strategies used in the creation of practices of resistance within US culture, and analyze the shifting paradigms involved in the construction of collective notions of the “I.” I offer this book, then, as a first step toward a conversation on the “autobiographical value” of Chicana/o writing and the arts, and its specific mode of representation, which uses the open-ended quality of the constructed “I” to speak not only of personal experiences but to create voices that speak for the collective experience of the “imagined” community.
Three main issues need to be fleshed out to discern some of the complexities involved in those goals. First, my interest lies less in a theory of Mexican-American writing than in a theory of Chicana/o selfrepresentation. Rather than attempting to create a canon of traditional “memoirs,” what is distinctive about this project is the selection of a group of writers and artists whose current politics and artistic choices— autobiography instead of and in relation to other genres, including
viii WHY CHICANA/O AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A PREFACE
semiautobiographical fiction, documentaries, children’s books, autobioethnography, essays, and journal writing—are involved in active processes that transform the genre and the way it is understood in autobiography studies. How do I use the term “autobiography” then? I use this term interchangeably from “lifewriting,” “personal essay,” or “creative nonfiction.” I reserve the term “memoir” for nineteenth-century constructions of self in Mexican-American works, but I agree with Fred White in his appreciation that “these terms do not convey the purpose of such writing, which is to entertain and edify readers with stories about your experiences, or the experiences of others through your eyes” (6). By including a wide range of technologies of self-representation, and the representation of other’s experiences, I made the decision to incorporate filmmakers, artists, and essayists who show the distinct and multiple strategies of selfrepresentation in what I define as the unique “value” of automitografía. The need for the inclusion of hybrid genres is attested to in I Am Aztlán: The Personal Essay in Chicano Studies. In the introduction, Chon A. Noriega and Wendy Belcher recognize how they “focus on the process of self-naming—the ubiquitous “I am … ”—because it is found not just in early Chicano literary, performing, and visual arts, but in Chicano scholarship as well” (v). In this context, and because we have such a various and large tradition of works to choose from, some important writers and genres, including new technologies of autobiography such as blogging, had to be left out of the mix. In fact this was one of my most difficult challenges. At an early stage in my research I realized the impossibility of integrating all the texts I would have liked to see in this book. I had to start this conversation but without the pretense that I was writing the final text on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chicana/o autobiography. I decided to write about works within a 53-year period after the publication of the first mainstream Chicano literary work of the twentieth century, José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959), and end in the second decade of the twenty-first century with Reyna Grande’s book, The Distance between Us: A Memoir, published in 2012. Among the most difficult decisions I made was leaving out poets such as Alurista, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, and semiautobiographical fiction such as that by Rudy Anaya, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and Sandra Cisneros. I also had to cut the analysis of traditional autobiographies by authors like Ron Arias, Mary Helen Ponce, and Alberto Alvaro Ríos. My goal was to offer the beginning of a dialogue on automitografía, while going beyond the canonical, well-known texts, keeping a balance between men and women, and also
WHY CHICANA/O AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A PREFACE ix
being sure that I was making space to show the “value” embedded in these works of art and non-literary culture. Ultimately, through the examination of visual arts and literature, the aim of this book is to analyze the technologies of self-expression that created a new paradigm in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chicana/o autobiography. By opening the scope and variety of the works studied in the book, this project not only gains an understanding of a wide sample of texts that have been ignored in autobiography studies, but I also show the complex picture of self-fashioning and self-story in the Mexican-American context. I use the Spanish word, automitografía, to move away from the traditional memoirs as the only source of autobiographical value and, instead, describe a process of creation that points to a continuity of strategies used in Chicana/o literary and visual arts.
By paying attention to the Chicana/o artists who have kept the same active process of transformation of the genre, I do not advocate, however, for the consolidation of a single theory for all. The concept, derived from Luis Valdez’s notion of mito and Gloria Anzaldúa’s total Self, points to an unfolding space for cultural identity, and a site of struggle filled with the ambivalence and contradictions of communal claim and selfrepresentation. Thus, I introduce the idea of automitografía as a model of self-expression where multiple interactions between autobiography and fiction occur, and which allows for both individual self-expression and a voice of resistance for the community.
Second, it was my fascination with those autobiographical “effects” that drove me to the concepts of mito and the total Self, and the investigation of those technologies, its tradition, and its complexities. In reading those elements in the works, I also saw a logical way of imagining some patterns that might guide the diverse volume of works, genres, and authors that could’ve been included. Furthermore, this approach is not a vague or random structure imagined to fit the needs of this book, but a solid continuation of previous theoretical work (that of Genaro Padilla among many others) engaged in discerning a distinct pattern of resistance located in Chicana/o arts and literature. While Mexican-American autobiographies are distinctly personal and should be envisioned as open, they also carry the seeds of a rich, innovative, complex Mexican-Americanness that is always in flux. Thus, the analysis of hybrid cultural productions calls attention to the ways in which the constructions of the individual “bio” become a voice for the changing elements of the community, and also how
x WHY CHICANA/O AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A PREFACE
those two aspects show critical links to the mito, the narrative unfolding a culture of resistance—and the violence of attempting to separate the three.
The concept of automitografía facilitates the understanding of Chicana/o autobiography as a discourse of identity that challenges dualistic notions of the personal and the communal, but also what previous texts have regarded as “hope” versus “loss” concerning the issue of the land and the 1848 Mexican–American War. As an example of this dichotomy, we would only have to look at the nineteenth-century philosopher Josiah Royce, who imagined California as a community of expectation, a “community of hope.” Richard Rodriguez, another Californian, paraphrases Royce, asserting that maybe “some epic opportunity had been given [to] California—the chance to reconcile the culture of the Catholic south and the Protestant north. California had the chance to heal the sixteenth century tear of Europe.” But Rodriguez adds that the Catholic, the Mexican “opportunity was lost” (Days xvi). Although most of Rodriguez’s work is focused on a particular form of loss that goes beyond the issue of culture and the land, my point is that neither hope nor loss defines the Chicana/o cultural realities of the second part of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twentieth-first century. Automitografía breaks away from the fixed binary cage of the American Dream versus the “hunger” of memories of those assimilated into “loss.” For example, the physical and cultural crossings of Elva Treviño Hart, Frances Esquibel Tywoniak, and Francisco Jiménez reveal the experience of undocumented workers and the struggle of child farmworkers as a “breakthrough” in a process of expanding cultural citizenship, radical identities, and transnation. Self-representation in these works is more interested in the process of transformation as a source of personal and communal self-empowerment. By transcending the binary cage, Chicana/o poets, essayists, filmmakers, painters, and novelists go beyond hope and loss into the rebirth of a Mexican-Americanness that connects the visions and nightmares of its people to the experiences and the landscapes of lands inhabited by beauty and not separated by borders. Even though a sole focus on agency and contributions might cover over the conditions of exploitation that also render Mexican-Americans so central and necessary to the economy of the state and the nation, it is this very instinct for survival, transformation, and change that took Chicana/o literature and arts to the political Renaissance of the 1960s and beyond. These artists see themselves in relation to a history that involves the empowerment of self and community through the aesthetics of creation. Thus it is necessary to start with the first mainstream Chicano
WHY CHICANA/O AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A PREFACE xi
literary work of the twentieth century (and a prelude to the Civil Rights Movement), Pocho, and move from there to twentieth-first-century writers like Rigoberto González and Reyna Grande.
One last word about the works chosen for the analysis: rather than referring to a canonical list of well-known authors engaged on the repetition of traditional “memoirs,” what is incisive about this project is the selection of writers and artists whose current politics and literary choices are involved in transforming the genre. This focus is to show the distinct envisioning of a collective self, while emphasizing the autobiographical value as much in fiction (and the visual arts) as it is characteristic and peculiar to other genres. This book rightfully acknowledges those contributions, and includes some of its more powerful voices—figures like Ernesto Galarza, Jose Antonio Villarreal, Norma E. Cantú, Carmen Lomas Garza, Lourdes Portillo, Ana Castillo, and Gloria Anzaldúa, and other voices as well, such as Francisco Jiménez, Rigoberto González, Elva Treviño Hart, and Reyna Grande.
I want to make a clarification regarding the temporal context of this book. To see the continuity and disruptions of these technologies of selfrepresentation, it is necessary to not only account for the early attempts at redefining cultural Chicano space during the Civil Rights Movement, but also to understand how they are rewritten during the 1980s and 1990s, and in the twentieth-first century, toward intersectional forms of identity—specially through the new mestiza approach of Gloria Anzaldúa, the fictional autobioethnographies of Norma E. Cantú, and the Xicanisma approach of Ana Castillo. Their view of Mexican-Americanness, and their new feminist Chicana approach regarding mestizaje, helped to transcend weak forms of multiculturalism by developing intersectional views of identity in the USA that render impossible dualistic thinking, and become inclusive of gender, race, and sexuality. Guided mainly by feminist critics, those projects reclaim the interrelationality of cultures, their multiple crossings, their tensions, and address Chicana/o self-representation as a complex net that goes beyond loss and hope to show the wide range of experiences created by history and culture. Those works also show the urgency and significance of rescuing Las Américas as part of the rich cultural and literary heritage that make up Chicana/o history.
Third, any book that tries to bring some pattern to the study of a volume of literature and visual arts so vast has only two options. It could become encyclopedic; my first draft of the book was almost 600 pages. Or it could be perceived as flawed because of the need to pick and choose
xii WHY CHICANA/O AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A PREFACE
different works that will best address the autobiographical volume of literature, filmmaking, and visual art presently published. So, it is my hope to offer an example of how those devices work, show a diverse sample of selfrepresentation, and attend to the vision of identity offered by these artists—a vision of interconnectedness in a web of communal possibilities. In this context, I show how automitografía, by proposing a desire for wholeness and the total Self, produces a sense of identity, closer to the image of a rotating wheel of interconnecting opposites—fractured and scarred, but moving and transforming, rather than a static Mexican-Americanness. By integrating a sense of the total Self in automitografía, Chicana/o art ists have used remember as a way of reclaiming multiple experiences and identities. Thus, I think of automitografía as healing performance going beyond the hunger of memories, as much as an opportunity to envision a space where multiple notions of self, identity, and culture come together in the potential for new social activism and change. Through this space of self-representation, it is possible to rebuild a collective mito, trace the steps of survival and personal dreams, and search for a source of selfempowerment and well-being under the radiant sky.
This is what I learned, decades later, after reading “I am Joaquín” with a different lens; whether envisioned by activist poets, child farmwork ers, Chicana filmmakers, mothers, daughters, visual artists, or educators, their diverse narratives or “parabolas” (as Valdez describes the mito) corroborate the image of an ever-evolving community where creations diagram not only disappointments and struggles, but also dream images and words—the words, strangely enough, that also trace the individual steps taken by so many men and women, the lives of the familias that make up these stories and histories. This book assembles the many stories created by the Chicana/o writers, painters, and filmmakers of this land, the many roads that mito takes, the many ways Mexican-Americanness interact and travel, the way history casts fruitful unions or causes irremediable conflict, and the ways in which the decisions of the past inform the collective future.
I owe my gratitude to Amy Shachter, Senior Associate Provost for Research and Faculty Affairs at Santa Clara University, and to the Ignatian Center, for the support; my research would not have been completed without the generous Postdoctoral position at the Chicano/a Studies Research Center at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I owe my gratitude to colleagues in the field who have made great contributions to this book; among them are Justo Alarcón, Norma E. Cantú, Mario García,
WHY CHICANA/O AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A PREFACE xiii
Leigh Gilmore, María Herrera-Sobek, Francisco Jiménez, AnaLouise Keating, Genaro Padilla, Raymund Paredes, and Ramon Saldívar.
I am deeply grateful to the Department of English at Santa Clara University for supporting my project since my arrival and for providing the support that enabled me to write this book. Along with my great colleagues, Terry Beers, Michelle Burnham, Juliana Chang, Judy Dunbar, Eileen Elrod, and Anna Sampaio, the students at Santa Clara University (SCU) have influenced my thinking about the book in a profound manner. The anonymous first reader at Palgrave Macmillan has my gratitude for suggestions that improved this book. I am grateful to Zach Milkis for his wonderful editing abilities and to Mary Hashman for her work with the manuscript. I requested permission to draw on earlier versions of previously published articles: “Teaching Richard Rodriguez,” in Latino/a Literature In The Classroom, published by Routledge, 2015; “Making Evil: Crime Thrillers and Chicana Cinema,” in Denver University Law Review 78.2 (2001); “Using Queer Chicana/o Autobiography to Teach Courses on Identity and Solidarity,” in Expanding the Circle, published by SUNY press, 2015; and “Automitografías: The Border Paradigm and Chicana/o Autobiography,” which appeared in Biography 27.2 (Spring 2004). I gratefully acknowledge the extensive research trajectory and the support of other presses here.
My parents and mi familia at Programa Velasco will not be able to read this book unless it is translated into Spanish, but it is the result of the work and effort of those who always encouraged my commitment to social justice through education, and who allowed me to become the first PhD in my family. Gracias.
Juan Velasco Santa Clara, CA
xiv WHY CHICANA/O AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A PREFACE
xv 1 Introduction: Beyond the Hunger of Memories 1 2 Automitografía 17 3 Crossings 39 4 Culture as Resistance 69 5 Making Familia from Scratch 113 6 The New Mestizas 145 7 Canicular Consciousness 175 8 Conclusion: Interrelationality 193 References 207 Index 221 C ONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Beyond the Hunger of Memories
Already in the 1970s, in an article published in Aztlan, Arturo MadridBarela reflected on the painful theme of healing and memory:
Why, someone might ask, should we dig back into our painful memories? Why should we recall the anguish of our Pocho past? Because what we are is inseparable from what we were. Because only by knowing where we have been can we determine where we shall go. (61)
The fact that I opened this chapter with Madrid-Barela’s wish for a communal reworking of memory is a sign of the many difficulties this project faced while determining the structures that define the notion of “self,” and while locating a certain set of experiences (“our Pocho past”) at the very heart of the autobiographical act. What the aforementioned quote suggests is that autobiographies not only relate episodes of a life told in first person, but that the genre produces artifacts destined to feed the desire for visibility of an experience often filtered through the particular lens of the “I.” Moreover, as Madrid-Barela points out, the intentions and desired effects of autobiography involve healing, constructing, and organizing the discourses of identity, culture, memory, and writing. In the light of these assumptions, the task of autobiography is no simple achievement. The autobiographer searches for a construction that involves the writer’s sense of personhood, together with politically and personally
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Velasco, Collective Identity and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59540-9_1
1
charged notions of community and nation. Furthermore, not only the past, but also the present and future are involved, built by reconstructed notions of self and culture. In that case, for both reader and autobiographer, what is at stake is not only the nature of the “I” as it unfolds in the writing, but also the emerging nature of a collective sense of history itself as it is reflected in the text.
I want to emphasize the ambivalent aspects of automitografía, a mode of representation that is open enough to include tensions, and introduces different political interventions regarding its autobiographical effects. But my objective is to uncover the technologies of self-representation by which artists address those concerns and show the disruptions and tensions embedded in that task. Thus, this book is making at least two key interventions. The first relates to Chicana/o automitografía’s critique of Western individualism and its understanding of the person as an individual separable from the communal. Indeed, this is a project designed to uncover the workings of those coexisting paradoxical terms (communal wholeness and the particularity of the personal), describe the interaction of both categories—autobiography as a genre disturbed by the personal, and the role of culture as an ever-unfolding communal project filtered through the “I”—and show the diversity of technologies of representation that inhabit this particular expression of American life.
The second intervention, to which I briefly alluded in the Preface, is a critique of a poststructuralist understanding of autobiography, specifically in relation to the dichotomy of the presence and absence of an “I” in the writing, therefore refusing language as simply loss or “hunger.” This is increasingly relevant if we realize that previous works on contemporary Chicana/o autobiography have been treated only in isolated articles or book chapters and have been dominated by the single figure of Richard Rodriguez.1 However, the overwhelming attention dedicated to a single book, 1982’s Hunger of Memory, can easily obscure the analysis of the genre. As mentioned by Lene M. Johannessen, “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” (125). Richard Rodriguez does not occupy a central role in this study for several reasons. First, there is already a large body of work on his writing that is available to anyone interested. My goal is, instead, to establish a much longer, deeper, and richer literary and cultural history of the genre. Also, Rodriguez’s books diverge from the pattern, present in so many other Chicana/o autobiographies, of a self
2 J. VELASCO
that is both personal and communal, and the search for an intersectional space of identity. Those elements are especially pertinent to this book since I argue for a specific mode of autobiography that not only speaks of personal experience but also creates voices that intervene into the dialogue for an “imagined” community, and the specific “effect” of cultural resistance. Madrid-Barela argues that memory is not so much a tool for individual recollection, as it is (through “our Pocho past”) a way of exploring issues of citizenship and familia, writing and home, aiming at the reclaiming of all the dimensions of cultural survival beyond the hunger of memories. The authors of automitografías see their product as destined not to reproduce the hunger for memories but to address its visibility and the boundaries of the desire created by a genre promising to take care of those needs.
My intent here is neither to undermine the legitimacy of Rodriguez’s experience, nor to dismiss the value of his contribution to autobiography. Rodriguez solidified his position as a skillful writer and innovative storyteller with the widely successful autobiography Hunger of Memory, a haunting exploration into his experience as a gay Mexican-American man. The narrative, however, concludes in a moment of profound loneliness and despair, as Rodriguez silently stares at his Mexican father—the chasm of alienating “difference” insurmountable.
This notion of difference is in clear contrast with Madrid-Barela’s recollection of “painful memories” as healing, since, for Rodriguez, “memory” is merely the trace of Spanish sounds slowly fading into the silence of his assimilation and his secrets. This is relevant since the “silence and silencing of people begins with the dominating enforcement of linguistic conventions, the resistance to relational dialogues, as well as the disenablement of peoples by outlawing their forms of speech” (Alarcón “Theoretical” 36).
The absence of language and words and the “loss” of culture and family define Rodriguez’s identity. Hunger of Memory reveals what can go wrong when loss, silencing, and assimilation define “difference” as simply absence. He reactivates the most pessimistic and desolate perspective of identity by relating loss to “hunger” as well. His text advances the idea of loss as a set of painful memories that lack meaning or structure. It is a story that functions as an empty and floating sign, a faint echo of a voice sinking slowly into the world of his assimilation. This text is a warning to the kind of intense pain available to those unable to transcend the dualistic division of experience (hope or loss), or detect any “presence” in the fainting void of sexual and cultural assimilation. Thus, his story translates the emptiness
INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE HUNGER OF MEMORIES 3
(the loss) into an insatiable hunger—this is the pain of a hungry ghost lost in a world of empty words.
Indeed, Hunger of Memory is an important autobiography filled with secrets and silences. Secrets permeate every word. Even language, manifesting the silence between him and his father, erases the signs of memory and his familial connections. In the chapter titled “The Achievement of Desire,” Rodriguez reaffirms as inexorable not only the distancing from his family, but also the loss of any memories of himself, the inevitable price for gaining success through assimilation: “Here is a child who cannot forget that his academic success distances him from a life he loved, even from his own memory of himself” (Hunger 48).
Rodriguez, through his process of assimilation, experiences not only negation of his parents’ language, but also negation of his own physical self. This connection between erasure of culture and language and the erasure of body is illustrated in a moment where he takes a razor to his own skin, attempting to cut away any remainder of his race. “I wanted to forget that I had a body because I had a brown body,” Rodriguez writes (Hunger 126). In a manner similar to his presentation of ethnicity, family, and language, homosexuality appears merely in terms of its negation. Rodriguez’s act of writing is solely an act of nostalgia, his sexuality remaining closeted to the very end.
In this sense, as opposed to the other automitografías that I will explore here, Hunger of Memory represents the rejection of a common mito. As Rodriguez understands his experience to be “queer” in the eyes of Joaquín (the warrior symbol of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement), Hunger of Memory can be interpreted as the inability to carve out a space for queerness inside the confines of the Chicano Movement. Furthermore, through hunger, Rodriguez constructs his identity as alienated, while refusing to rewrite his homosexuality as a challenge to heteropatriarchal conceptions of cultural nationalism. Ultimately, his hunger pervades as it is manifested in the text as secrets, silence, or journey toward assimilation. The desire, “the hunger” for what is inevitably lost, becomes the only mark of difference. Loss is the manifestation of an empty being, and only the hunger remains.
Rodriguez’s negation of the Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement translates into a no-man’s land, an emptiness that turns into the nostalgia of memory lacking meaning and significance—a place where even the body becomes an empty and floating sign. In further works, Rodriguez’s hunger renders memory into a place of loss that rewrites the self as “craving,”
4 J. VELASCO
an impulse lost and pushed back. In Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992), the Catholic—the Mexican—impulse “was pushed back” (xvi). In Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2003), he states that “I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America” (xi). In Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013), he tells the story of a saint who lived in craving: “St. Sabas desired the taste of an apple. The craving was sweeter to him than the thought of God. From that moment Sabas forswore apples. The desire for apples was the taste of God” (47). Again, he links the desert God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to a divinity that “demands acknowledgment within emptiness” (35). It is not surprising that he is interested in the desert religions and this ecology. “The desert remains an absence” (49), Rodriguez writes, and his last book is an exploration of this elusive, incomprehensible emptiness.
I will discuss this perception of autobiography later, which was anticipated in Memories for Paul de Man, where Jacques Derrida defines the term prosopopeia (from the Greek expression “face making”) as the tropology of memory and “autobiographical discourse as epitaph” (25). However, the cultural and sexual anxiety conferred upon autobiography is transcended by a different way of understanding the dialectics of loss (absence) and hope (presence) in the automitografías created by the writers I will analyze later. The text, as epitaph or as a space of loss, is rewritten by Gloria Anzaldúa through what she calls the act of “making faces.” From Anzaldúa’s point of view, autobiography is not so much the signature of the epitaph (loss), as described by poststructuralists, as it is the setting for “making faces.” Self-restoration is delivered through narratives as the act of haciendo caras, a way to recreate the voices to break away from loss. Other writers, like Cherrie Moraga, will use the notion of “making familia from scratch” to envision an alternative community (her lesbian familia) against heteropatriarchy and narrow versions of cultural nationalism. The alternatives offered through the works of Anzaldúa and Moraga transcend the binary discourse offered by the readings of hunger and craving, silence and loss as “absence,” in the context of Rodriguez’s multiple autobiographies. Since the book focuses on Chicana/o autobiographical works, my intent is to include different strategies used by artists that reclaim this act of “making faces.” Investigating new as well as foundational texts, I explore the nature of this kind of self-representation, and its relationship to self-restoration based on theories of identity in transition. Moreover, by including visual and literary production, I align my project with
INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE HUNGER OF MEMORIES 5
contemporary work in American and border studies, and engage with earlier studies on the creation of cross-border communities (Sonia SaldívarHull, José David Saldívar, José Limón, Donna Kabalen de Bichara, and Héctor Calderón), the liberatory dimensions of cultural survival (María Josefina Saldana-Portillo, Genaro Padilla, and Ramón Saldívar), and the reclaiming of new feminist subjects (Norma Alarcón, Angie ChabramDernersesian, Paula Moya, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, and Chela Sandoval) fashioned against the mechanisms of violence that Mexican-Americans have endured. It is my belief that a focus on identity, culture, and the politics of this unique mode of representation will give us a clearer vision to distinct notions of cultural citizenship that are expanding the notion of “America” into Las Américas. I pay critical attention to Naoki Sakai’s notion of “translation” in the border as the “unfamiliar in transition,” and José David Saldívar’s notion of “trans-Americanity” to address notions of identity formation and its relationship with the physical and cultural space of Las Américas
The creation of this unique space challenges fixed locations of language, citizenship, and identity within the USA. The crossings in this space move our perspective then, from “loss” or “illegality” to a transAmericanity point of view, and frames the importance of culture (José Limón’s “Greater Mexico”) as the existence of a trans-Mexican space that connects both sides of the border. Within such a theoretical framework, this project examines the constitution of a unique, but ever unfolding, transnation in the USA, which questions colonizing conditions and serves as a category that defines political awareness within self-representation.
In order to address the key interventions and the interests I have mentioned earlier, I shift simultaneously within two critical discourses: Chicana/o cultural studies and autobiography studies. Let me start with the need for the first one, which points at how these works go beyond dualistic alternatives regarding cultural space, and are marked neither by presence nor absence but rather by the act of crossings within the context of Las Américas. The subversive nature of a cultural space that transcends dualistic thinking regarding citizenship, identity, or even geographical territory has been a point of special focus by Chicano/a critics. Going back to some of the pioneers of Chicana/o criticism, the issue was already being discussed in Philip D. Ortego’s “The Chicano Renaissance” (1971), Carlota Cárdenas de Dwyer’s “Chicano Literature: An Introduction” (1975), and especially in Ramón Saldívar’s “A Dialectic of Difference: Toward a Theory of the Chicano Novel” (1979).2
6 J. VELASCO
When researching earlier Chicana/o literary and cultural history, even those from different theoretical perspectives, we can see that a major contribution of those works is the idea that the Chicana/o writer is able to create a response to the “threat of erasure” through the creation of a unique cultural “space,” which is able to extend citizenship and identity beyond nationality or birthplace. Luis Leal explains the intertwined, continuous aspect of this literature in sociological terms by stating that “if immigration from Mexico stopped, then perhaps Chicano literature in time would cease to exist because it might be integrated fully into American literature. However, this is not the case now and probably not into the foreseeable future. As long as Mexico is next door and immigrants continue to come in, there will be something like Chicano literature” (Leal Auto/Biography 114–15). José David Saldívar addresses this phenomena as he states Americanity as a concept, which “might also serve as a crucial document for any comparative project that attempts to foreground the transnational and post-disciplinary impulses related to Chicano/a studies, Latin American studies, and American studies as interdisciplinary fields” (J.D. Saldívar Trans-Americanity x).
Notions of trans-Americanity, as well as its crossings, are critical elements to be addressed, as the notion of culture itself is affected by this fluidity, coloniality, and power. From this perspective, then, we should not look at just another attempt at redefining some cultural essences of which literature would be a mere manifestation. Instead, we should look for ways of analyzing how the autobiographical impulse is interested in grappling with this complex net of fluid, changing, and diverse transnational impulses invested in the reshaping of a culture of resistance. María Herrera-Sobek describes how this impulse as “the production of specific cultural ‘products’ deviating from those established ones or encapsulating a new message within accepted cultural constructs [is] in response to perceived threats to the survival of a group or a people” (Herrera-Sobek and Maciel 8). Scholar Mario García, referring to his work with Frances Esquibel Tywoniak, states that “there are no monolithic or essentialist or ‘authentic’ cultures in this exchange, either from a subaltern or postcolonial perspective or from a colonial or neocolonial one. Individual as well as collective identity is always in a state of flux, constantly being reinvented and always open and fluid” (Tywoniak and García xvi). Generalizations about the nature of those cultural experiences and strategies are almost impossible to sustain since every story offered in these works must be defined historically. By identifying distinctive individual characteristics
INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE HUNGER OF MEMORIES 7
regarding cultural space, and placing them in relation to each other, we can have access, however, to the changing character of the process of identity creation.
Part of the discussion involves the ways we need to explore how the authors’ strategies can be analyzed and classified to give us insight into how they have been produced, in what context, and for what reasons. How experience is materialized into an autobiographical “effect,” and in which ways that aspect is specific to each work, also provide a framework to understand the “I” as a complex technology, intertwined with the construction of a cultural space for Chicano/a expression, and defined by the outlines of representation that give way to the establishment of new notions of identity within the USA.
The way those technologies of autobiography affect the expressions of the cultural discourse demands also to engage constructively with the critical discourse of autobiography studies. The ambiguous margins of the genre have been explored in The Limits of Autobiography (2001) by Leigh Gilmore who considers how “for many writers, autobiography’s domain of first-person particularities and peculiarities offers an opportunity to describe their lives and their thoughts about it … some writers, however, are more interested in the constitutive vagaries of autobiography, in how its weirder expansiveness lets them question whether and how ‘I’ can be ‘here or there’, what the self is that it could be the subject of its own representation, what the truth is that one person could tell it” (9). This statement presents not only the “limits” of autobiography, but also the critical tension that inhabits the genre itself; some writers conceive of the self as a coherent and separate entity formed outside the dominant culture that is able to bring light into history (Wilhelm Dilthey), while others understand autobiography as a textualized identity pressured by the indeterminacy and nonhierarchical conceptualizations of the genre (Françoise Lionnet). Even though both are perfectly valid for the ways writers engage the genre, the first position creates the danger of emphasizing universal values and the erasure of the rhetorical nature of a heavily gendered, sexualized, and racialized genre.
The second form of assessment, although carefully negotiated by the pressures of Derrida’s “differénce,” risks erasing the agency of an “I” regarded by poststructuralists as the signature of an epitaph. Whether or not, ultimately, the rendering of the “I” in writing is a futile exercise has engaged most of the critics in autobiography studies during the last few decades, including Paul John Eakin, Georg Misch, Sidonie Smith, and
8 J. VELASCO
Julia Watson. The expansiveness and the mediations faced by autobiography were already addressed in Gilmore’s “autobiographics” in women’s autobiographies, a concept that showed the careful negotiations writers engage in as they shape subject (and “difference”) positions within the constraints of genre, race, sexuality, and gender. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s work has been important to Chicana/o autobiography since they point at how “issues of positionality and the geography of identity are especially complex in autobiographical narratives of de/colonization, immigration, displacement, and exile” (215). But I find Elizabeth Bruss’s notion of “autobiographical acts” especially relevant, as she argues for performativity and emphasizes the narrative itself as a created product, with a chosen purpose or function embedded within the realm of storytelling itself. The relational aspect of this form of expression has also been elaborated by Nancy K. Miller as she argued for the dialogical shifts of the text as a model for other genres, while Lionnet’s métissage allowed for the reading of multiple voices embedded in the subjects of autobiographical narratives. Automitografía specifically emphasizes a fluid and dialectically positioned discourse, where the strategies that create the mito facilitate an ever-unfolding space, and the cultural production itself becomes a source for “making faces,” cultural resistance, and inclusive notions of collective identity. This aspect has been underlined by Kabalen de Bichara’s analysis of Chicanas’ “border autobiographies,” which asserts that those autobiographical texts stand “in opposition to the erasure of individual and collective identity” (31).
The inseparable nature of self-representation from the collective or communal, and its relationship to cultural space through transAmericanity, is an important strategy used not only in the creation of a post–civil rights performative identity, but also in the representation of an “untotalizable totality” inclusive of multiple subject positions that address a “patrón de poder in its relation between its parts” (J.D. Saldívar TransAmericanity xvii). In comparison to other mainstream American autobiographies, automitografía uses its critique of Western dualistic thinking to grapple with geographical boundaries, and with questions of positionality and performativity that result in the development of intersectional aspects of identity inclusive of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Those new subject positions became the special focus of the criticism produced during the 1980s and 1990s in works such as María Herrera-Sobek’s Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature (1981), Angie Chabram’s “Chicano Literary Criticism: Directions and Development of
INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE HUNGER OF MEMORIES 9
an Emerging Critical Discourse” (1986), Renato Rosaldo’s Culture and Truth (1989), Norma Alarcón’s “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman” (1990), Ramón Saldívar’s Chicano Narrative: Dialectics of Difference (1990), Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature: Culture and Ideology (1991) edited by Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar, José E. Limón’s autobiographical Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (1994), Carl Gutiérrez-Jones’s Rethinking the Borderlands (1995), and José David Saldívar’s The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (1991) and Border Matters: Remapping Cultural Studies (1997).
Those expansions of the autobiographical production into other fields are significant since, according to José David Saldívar, the US–Mexico border, “as a paradigm of crossing, resistance, and circulation in Chicano/a studies has contributed to the ‘worlding’ of American Studies and further helped to instill a new transnational literacy in the U.S. academy” (Border Matters xiii). From Border Matters to Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico, Saldívar has argued that part of the problem is the way American culture abstracts the concepts of space and identity, inadvertently eliding the specificity of the margins or making them invisible. The need for a larger interdisciplinary study based on José Martí’s understanding of Las Américas stands in continuity with the way Chicana/o artists rewrite the boundaries that create the situation of marginalization in the first place. Those aspects of experience are recognized in the work of Ramón Saldívar as he points at Américo Paredes’s vision for a “border story of racial and economic conflict [which] was recorded on the Mexican American side in the folk art form of corridos (ballads) and later becomes one of the subtexts for much of contemporary Chicano narrative” (Chicano Narrative 18). The rich variations on the analysis of crossings, and the aspects involving a communitarian response to the boundaries of marginalization, continue during the first decade of the twenty-first century Chicana/o criticism in works such as Methodology of the Oppressed (2000) by Chela Sandoval, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics Literature (2000) by Sonia Saldívar, Disrupting Savagism: Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant, and Native American Struggles for Self-Representation (2001) by Arturo Aldama, MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identity on the Borderlands (2003) by Rosa Linda Fregoso, The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader (2006) by Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Postethnic
10 J. VELASCO
Narrative Criticism (2003) by Frederick Luis Aldama, and Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture (2009) by Ellie D. Hernández.3
The critical theory of this project, then, engages with the key interventions mentioned before, helps to clarify the development of a critical cultural space during the last five decades, and shows the effects of these frameworks of analysis in the autobiographical context, a field that rarely engages with (and usually ignores) the specific historical experiences of Mexican-Americans. Moreover, by taking an interdisciplinary approach, and by emphasizing visual culture and literary analysis, we can also examine the performative aspects of automitografía, what self-representation reveals and conceals about its authors, and the evolving understanding of Chicano/a culture during those years. Especially in an election year, it is important to describe the ways automitografía engage with mainstream American discourses of “illegality,” and how these works establish crossborder voices for a community that expands the boundaries of experience and expression in the artistic American literary and visual landscape. By understanding these mechanisms of self-representation, it is also possible to understand certain aspects of experience in the twentieth and the twentyfirst centuries that go beyond the realm of the “American Dream”—we can expose the structural and economic violence exercised on the community, and analyze the space created by these artists as a reconfiguration of the cultural, political, and ideological boundaries of mainstream representation of the Mexican-American experience in Las Américas.
Furthermore, focusing on a diverse range of cultural productions provides a natural occasion for studying the differences and tensions among particular notions of identity, nationality, and citizenship. Placing together visual and literary works, we recuperate an impulse toward representation that involves a hybridity of genres that have been lost in recent theories of borders and identity politics. Moreover, by looking at how mito is created in these works, it becomes possible to grasp the liberatory dimensions of cultural survival and discern the personal forms of self-representation that fight the perpetuation of violence imposed on Chicano/a identities. Thus, it is important to discuss hybrid genres as well, such as essays, semiautobiographical novels, autobioethnography, oral narratives, journal writing, testimonios, photography, film, and painting to comprehend the diversity and complexity of the available technologies of self-representation. These works include the first mainstream semiautobiographical novel Pocho (1959) by José Antonio Villarreal; Barrio Boy: The Story of a Boy´s Acculturation (1971), the autobiographical work of scholar and activist
INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE HUNGER OF MEMORIES 11
Ernesto Galarza; Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994) by journalist and writer Ana Castillo; La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988) and The Devil Never Sleeps/El Diablo Nunca Duerme (1994), documentaries by Lourdes Portillo; the diary Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (1997) and the first queer Chicana autobiography Loving in the War Years: Lo que Nunca Pasó por sus Labios (1983) by Cherrie Moraga; children’s book A Piece of My Heart/Pedacito de mi corazón (1991) and Family Pictures/Cuadros de familia (1990) by Carmen Lomas Garza; fictional autobioethnography Canícula: Snapshot of a Girlhood in La Frontera (1995) by Norma E. Cantú; and the famous fronterista cultural manifesto, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) by Gloria Anzaldúa. The wave of women writers of the 1980s and 1990s plays an important role in this book, as well as new stories of child farmworkers such as Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child (1999) by Elva Treviño Hart, Migrant Daughter (2000) by Frances Esquibel Tywoniak and Mario García, the bilingual trilogy The Circuit (1997), Breaking Through (2001), and Reaching Out (2008) by Francisco Jiménez, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (2006) by Rigoberto González, and The Distance Between Us: A Memoir (2012) by Reyna Grande.
As María Herrera-Sobek has noted in her previous work, feminist critical theory is crucial to the understanding of self-representation since it expands “the Chicano literary space by demystifying the external image imposed upon them” (Beyond Stereotypes 10). In examining authors and artists as diverse as Gloria Anzaldúa, Lourdes Portillo, Ana Castillo, Carmen Lomas Garza, Norma E. Cantú, Reyna Grande, Cherrie Moraga, Frances Esquibel Tywoniak, and Elva Treviño Hart, I also advance feminist and queer notions of totality and particularity, global and the local, and performativity and positionality within Chicana/o works. The significance of such an approach is that it shows how for Chicana/o artists, the connection between experience and the creation of an individual, cultural space is interrelated with the development of a performative (and ever evolving) communal space, and “cultural memory as a mechanism through which certain types of communication or texts are conserved and transmitted” (Kabalen de Bichara Telling Border Stories 7).
These artists and writers have also been influential in rejecting essentialist notions of identity in their autobiographical work, and emphasize instead the changing phenomena of self-representation within the expanding cultural space of Las Américas. These locations of identity challenge
12 J. VELASCO
the exceptionality model of American studies and contribute to new anthropological understandings of how people and culture are displaced or reinvent themselves. As mentioned at the beginning of the book, my goal in this project is to see self-representation through more complex, intersectional lenses and start a much-needed conversation on the value of Chicana/o autobiography to other fields of study. In Chap. 2, I identify the unique autobiographical mode that defines the construction of self through the concept of automitografía. This construction is explained through Valdez’s notion of mito and Anzaldúa’s notion of the total Self, and both point to identity as a site of struggle filled with the ambivalence of both individual self-expression and a voice for the community. This chapter provides a theoretical and critical framework for these tensions within Chicana/o self-representation, building on the research of Genaro Padilla, Donna Kabalen de Bichara, and others. I also explain how this mode of writing introduces new strategies of expression that recognize multiple interactions between self-representation and fiction, and allow for an open-ended notion of self that accounts for new locations of identity.
In Chap. 3, “Crossings,” I use José David Saldívar’s notion of transAmericanity and Aníbal Quijano’s Americanity in works such as Barefoot Heart by Elva Treviño Hart and Migrant Daughter by Frances Esquibel Tywoniak and Mario García; additionally, I analyze Francisco Jiménez’s bilingual trilogy The Circuit, Breaking Through, and Reaching Out. The experience of undocumented workers and the struggle of child labor engage in a critique of transnationalism that results in new ways of understanding Americanity and, what Bill Ashcroft calls, “transnation.” Jiménez’s trilogy, in particular, by creating a profound sense of empathy toward the experience of undocumented immigrants, presents the despair and difficulties of child labor and the farmworkers’ experience in search of realizing the problematic American Dream. This chapter shows also how, by challenging fixed notions of language and citizenship, these writers propose a rethinking of home, community, and nation.
In Chap. 4, “Culture as Resistance,” I discuss representations of “Mexican-Americanness” in the USA. I compare theories of mexicanidad and identity written during the Mexican Revolution to the MexicanAmericanness recreated by Chicana/o autobiographies. I start my discussion on the representation of the Mexican-American experience before the Chicana/o Movement with Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy and with José Antonio Villarreal’s autobiographical novel Pocho. In contrast to these works, I also show contemporary attempts at portraying a queer
INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE HUNGER OF MEMORIES 13
