Spatial Hybridities and Transnational Identities in Chicano Culture

SPATIAL HYBRIDITIES AND TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES

IN CHICANO CULTURE

Rafael Pérez-Torres – UCLA

Movement across borders: the persistent trope struck in the formation of Chicana and Chicano cultural identities. Ours is a practice formed in the tension between movement and placement, between the construction of place – in a climate that does not afford any easy national identification – and the drive to move geographically and/or socially ever “upward”. In this respect, the articulation of Chicano cultural identity resonates with an interest in transnational cultures and identity formation.

A singular connection between transnationalism and Chicano/a cultural identification centers on considerations of the space through which our mestizo sojourners travel. Although there have been movements within Chicano projects of affirmation that reflect a quintessential nationalism – Reies Tijerina and the Alianza Federal de Mercedes primary among them – the more recent movements toward cultural identification include a shift toward a sense of transnational consciousness. This consciousness is most often conceived in terms of border consciousness, located in that overly vexed (some would argue overly tired) term “borderlands”.

It is in this transnational site of the borderlands where critics have placed the mestizo formation of Chicano culture. This culture has served to reveal the value and vexation be found in discourses that recialize and nationalize the body. In the discussion that follows, I pursue four goals: to trace the theoretical contours of that oft over-used term “the borderlands”; to sketch the significance of the mestizo/a body within this liminal terrain; to examine the way the mestiza body can be used to replicate nationalist discourses; and finally to discuss some of the ways in which the mestiza body helps articulate a transnational identity bound in history yet speaking about a world that has yet to exist.

Not a homeland, not a perpetuation of origin, the borderlands allude to an illimitable terrain marked by dreams and disruptions, marked by history and the hope of what history may be. The borderlands have served to represent the multiplicity and dynamism of Chicana/o experiences. They form a terrain in which Mexicans, Chicanos, and mestizos live among the various worlds comprising their cultural and political landscapes: Euro-American and Mexican, pre-Columbian and contemporary indigenous, barrio and suburb, city and country, field and kitchen.

Viewing the borderlands as an interstitial site suggests a type of liminality. The betweenness leads to a becoming, a sense of cultural and personal identity that highlights flux and fluidity that is connected to a strong memory of (a discredited) history and (a devalued) heritage. The body – the mestizo and mestiza body – serves as a site where identity, history and heritage converge. The ways Chicano/a literature conceives (and conceives of) this body make plain its multiple connections to and contestations of power. As Chicana/o literature articulates the makeup of anti-imperial subjectivities, it helps map our postmodern geographies and helps locate sites and strategies by which to negotiate those geographies. Before turning to some literary examples that help illustrate the uses of mestizaje, let me first consider the ways in which concepts of the transnational borderlands resonates with considerations of a transracial and transcultural mestizo and mestiza consciousness. What is the relation between transnational identity and Chicano hybridity?

Chicana/o mestizaje represents the trace of a historical material process, a violent racial/colonial encounter. In fact, this type of encounter characterizes the general socio-cultural dynamics of the Americas as a whole since first contact with Europe. Chicano mestizaje derives from a complex history involving both a sense of dispossession and empowerment, a simultaneous devaluation and estimation of indigenous ancestry. Needless to say, the formation of a mestizo Chicano consciousness is complicated and elaborate.

Mestizaje is validated by the nationalist discourse of post- revolutionary Mexico, and – to the degree that it affirms connection to indigenous cultures and racial identification – mestizaje is also validated within Chicano nationalist discourse. However, the transformative qualities of mestizaje – both north and south of the border – can all too easily be seen as assimilative. From this view, mestizaje is integrally related to issues of passivity, melancholy and docility.

These issues are indexed within a Mexican nationalist discourse in the figure of Malintzín or La Malinche, the native translator and ostensible mistress of Hernán Cortes. Octavio Paz famously discusses the sense of violation inherent to mestizo identity in The Labyrinth of Solitude: “The Chingada is the Mother forcibly opened, violated or deceived. The hijo de la Chingada is the offspring of violation, of abduction or deceit. If we compare this expression with the Spanish hijo de puta (son of a whore), the difference is immediately obvious. To the Spaniard, dishonor consists in being the son of a woman who voluntarily surrenders herself: a prostitute. To the Mexican it consists in being the fruit of violation” (79-80). That is, despite the Mexican affirmation of the indigenous and the official demonization of the Spanish, mestizo identity in a Mexican context still carries with it the stigma of having emerged from a history of rape, violence, and sexual violation.

Across the border, within the conflicted and complex history of Chicanos in the United States, the issue of a cultural mestizaje or hybridity can become dangerously elided with an accusation of assimilation. As Lisa Lowe discusses in her analysis of Asian American cultural politics, “a politics based on racial, cultural, or ethnic identity facilitates the displacement of intercommunity differences [...] into a false opposition of ‘nationalism’ and assimilation’” (71). Mestizaje, despite emerging from a Mexican nationalist discourse, can within a Chicano context be placed in a false opposition to cultural nationalist concerns.

In order to understand the uses of cultural mestizaje, it is useful to turn to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on linguistic hybridity. As Robert Young observes in his book Colonial Desires, postcolonial and diasporic critics from Homi Bhabha to Stuart Hall rely upon a Bakhtinian model to understand the contesting quality of hybrid cultures. These critics model their analyses on the dialogical processes by which organic and intentional hybridities emerge simultaneously and diasporic cultures. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin asks:

What is hybridization? It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousness, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor (358).

The genius of the novel, as Bakhtin’s argument goes, is its ability to put these social languages into dialogue against each other in a strategy meant to subvert authoritative discourse.

This type of intentional hybridity Bakhtin opposes to an unintentional (or organic) hybridity, the process by which languages change and grow through their historical development:

Unintentional, unconscious hybridization is one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages. We may even say that language and languages change historically primarily by hybridization (358).

An intentional versus an organic hybridization characterizes the various uses to which language is put. One emerges from the ingenuity of culture as it unveils contradictions inherent to the uses and abuses of power within any given social system. The other emerges from the ingenuity of the community giving birth to forms of linguistic innovations that do not necessarily contest authoritative power.

Keeping in mind the dialogic uses of the term “hybridity”, I do not want to displace either its organic or intentional uses. Similarly, I do not want to discard the significance of the term “mestizaje”. As Nestór Canclini reminds us in his book Hybrid Cultures, mestizaje within a Mexican context yet refers mainly to racial mixture (11 n. 1). In part, because I want to invoke and displace the historical, juridical, and sociopolitical uses to which the term mestizo has been put, I have used both the idea of mestizaje and the double notion of hybridity in developing this talk. While arguing that we cannot view mestizaje as the loophole that will ensure a transcendence of binarity or secure the liberatory potential of a transnational consciousness, I do take up the line of argument that values mestizaje as a racial fact, a discursive tactic, and a potentially resistant cultural practice.

It is worth remembering that to draw up the mestizo is only potentially resistant act. Oscar “Zeta” Acosta’s semi-autobiographical novel The Revolt of the Cockroach Ppeople (1973), for example, represents the mestizo in quite a complicated light. The book treats Acosta’s coming to terms with the political exigencies of the Chicano Movement and his own desires to escape into a world of writing and recreational drugs. The book thus represents the mestizo as the articulating subject of political agency and discursive opposition. The mestizo speaks contesting and alternate systems of meaning. This counterhegemonic position carries with it contradictions all its own.

At one point in the narration, Acosta participates in a three-day fast protesting the arrest of 21 Chicano demonstrators in Los Angeles. He is approached by three teenage Chicanas who crawl into his tent and under his blanket. Soon political solidarity turns to something else:

I caress a leg and it holds still, waiting for my hand. It is firm and soft and warm. I reach for a soft arm. It comes into mine easily. There is no hesitation. And then a moist lip to my ear [...] I reach for a breast. It is small. Wonderfully small and firm. It fits into my palm. A brown pear in my hand. God Almighty! This is the revolution. (87)

The reclamation of the mestizo (more significantly, mestiza) body initiates a simultaneous process of liberation and containment.

On the one hand, this is the revolution in that Acosta’s exclamations of appreciation for the mestiza body represent a transformation of sexual desire. The mestiza body serves as a site of longing. He thus rejects the U.S. nationalist discourse on racialized sexuality where blond hair and blue eyes form the apotheosis of desire. On the other hand, the reclamation of the dark mestiza body becomes one of simple objectification. The narrative itself highlights the dissembled body parts that comprise Acosta’s objects of desire: a leg, an arm, a lip, a breast. And the reclamation represents not just an objectification but a reinscription of delimited social roles, and not just in terms of the stereotypes that equate the Latina body with sexual heat. As the night wears on, Acosta’s thoughts turn from the revolutionary to the sexual to, finally, the domestic. In the end, all he wants to know from these three Chicana protesters is not the nature of their political commitment but whether they can cook and clean. As a result, after the fast, the three join him to set up house in his small apartment on Sixth Street. Acosta remains the revolutionary fighting the battles for Chicano nationalism and the three teenagers become Adelitas, cooking for their revolutionary warrior and providing physical solace.

While the mestizo body becomes in many Chicano texts a text itself, a site of ideological struggle, there is an easy elision of the body with culture, the body as political practice, the body as a signifier of alterity and resistance. As Acosta’s narratives reveal, the affirmation of mestizo bodies too easily becomes the whole of the revolution, a revolution where long-rehearsed and repressive social scripts replay themselves. However, mestizaje of its own, on either a cultural or a racial level, does not guarantee liberation. Only a critical and constantly questioning deployment of mestizaje as a contesting strategy can enable a move beyond what Acosta’s embrace of the mestiza body represents. This critical tactic leads to the common and quite mistaken perception that Chicanos are on a paradigmatic quest for self-definition, searching for the articulation of a yet to be discovered site of absolute difference. This raises a key problematic in discussing cultural mestizaje. There is a drive, most often found in an imperious and imperial strain of poststructural thinking, to value mestizo bodies and transnational cultures as signs of pure alterity.

Ada Savin, in her analysis of Lorna Dee Cervantes’s poetry, argues that Bakhtin’s notion of dialogized discourse allows us to explore more fully the “whole field of bi-or interlingual (Chicano) literature” (215). In bilingual Chicano poetry, Savin asserts, “The alternate use of Spanish and English [...] is indicative of a process of identity search through a dialogization of the two cultures” (217). Thus the multilingualism of Chicano literature “is necessarily of the existential kind; their poetry acts out the living contact between the cultures in contact and their respective languages” (217). And, because of this contact between the Mexican and American, Cervantes “is confronted day after day with an ambivalent reality which throws her identity into permanent question. The historico-political context is burdensome, the cultural conflict is painfully alive” (218). The devaluation of the Mexican by the American, the rejection of the “foreign” by the “familiar” creates a sense of loss. As such, Savin suggests, all that Cervantes’s poetry can mark is an endlessly interstitial condition of estrangement from self and other.

In this model, the equation of the mestizo body with a cultural mestizaje is premised upon a lack: the mestizo is neither Mexican nor American, neither Spanish nor English, neither Indian nor European. I think it fair to argue that the mestizo body does not mark a site of absence but, on the contrary, one of over-determination. There are too many discourses attempting to claim the significance/meaning/function of the mestizo.

As a literary example of this over-determination, I (as does Ada Savin) quote from Cervantes’s poem “Refugee Ship” found in the 1981 collection Emplumada:

Mama raised me without language.

I’m orphaned from my Spanish name.

The words are foreign, stumbling

on my tongue. I see in the mirror

my reflection: bronzed skin, black hair.

I feel I am a captive

aboard the refugee ship.

The ship that will never dock.

El barco que nunca atraca. (41)

The bronzed body, the dark hair should mark a connection to the Spanish name, the Spanish language, though (As Savin argues) there appears to be an estrangement between signifier (the mestiza body) and signified (mestizo culture). This estrangement on closer inspection proves more complex than Savin’s analysis lets on. Significantly, this is the only poem of the collection that Cervantes has translated into Spanish. Thus, while Savin suggests the poem marks a feeling of “overwhelming estrangement from one’s essential identity markers; name, physical appearance, and language” (218), the two poems – one written in Spanish, the other in English – taken together suggest something else. While not necessarily presenting the reader with a sense of wholeness and completion, the poems do indicate that something more dynamic, more empowered, and more deliberate is taking place besides an essential estrangement. The body marks a site where linguistic, familial, racial and cultural vectors overlap. And as the body is an over-determined signifier, the cultural text needs to be understood as a complex system of signification. The double-voiced text is not simply, as Savin argues, undermining “the offcial authoritative discourse, whether mainstream American or Mexican” (217). That is, it is not only suspended between two worlds to which it does not belong and which it seeks to dissolve. The double voice is, rather, an articulation of transnational consciouness that reveals the difficult struggle anti-imperial identities undertake in understanding themselves as moving between points of oppression and liberation.

As Renato Rosaldo notes in his book Culture and Truth, Chicano culture results in “not identity confusion but play that operates within, even as it remakes, a diverse cultural repertoire. Creative processes of transculturation center themselves along literal and figurative borders where the ‘person’ is crisscrossed by multiple identities” (216). The point here: Chicano culture does not represent a paradigmatic quest for self-definition. Rather, it articulates a self-definition that is transcultural, transnational and on-going.

Cervantes’s poetry, while exploring that interstitial nether-world so sought out by many critics of Chicano literature, does more than attemp to, as Savin argues “mix elements of both [Mexican and American] cultures in a move toward a hybrid border identity” (218). The poetic imagination envisions a self that is something more than a movement toward, a desire to become. It affirms something already other but not purely other. That is, it asserts a self that has a sense of self and a sense of language neither fully foreign yet not wholly familiar. The mestizo body is not a hybrid entity holding out the possibility of what is to come. That ambitious prophetic power cannot be claimed by bodies so over-written by historical discourses that value dismiss the mixed-race self.

Instead, the mestizo body offers a vision of cultural development very much unfolding in – and so constrained by – a contradictory and complicated transnationalism. It would be unwise to cathect on that body as some locus of social transformation. Yet we are in danger of doing just that by highlighting the contesting powers of cultural mestizaje as somehow analogous to racial hybridity. Instead, and this is my final point, the mestizo body becomes a signifier whose meaning is continually dis-covered and re-covered.

In giving voice to the mestizo, in ascribing meaning to notions of mestizaje, moving from the racial to the cultural, from the body to the text, there is a wish for endless transformation. However, this transformation is bounded by the social and historical conditions in which the mestiza/o body is placed. The hybrid body serves as signifier, but not fully free-floating, not endlessly regressive, not fully transgressive. Rather, as several writers have noted, the emphasis needs be placed on the tactics of subjectivity, on the strategies of mestizaje. As is often noted, Chela Sandoval argues in her essay “U.S. Third World Feminism” that the term mestizo/mestiza serves as “a tactical subjectivity with the capacity to recenter depending upon the kinds of oppresion to be confronted” (14). The capacity for change through mestizaje is one perpetually nogotiated given the kinds of power – discursive, repressive, militarized, nationalistic, ideological – one contests. The terrain mestizos cross determines the strategies they are to undertake.

In interrogating the critical uses to which mestizaje is put, we can better form a dialogue between - and test the limits of – Chicano cultural critique and other postcolonial, poststructural and transnational projects. Neither fully fixed nor fluid, the face of the mestizo is a mask, one that appears simultaneously real and unreal. The body of the mestizo is one created and dissolved, one that changes form and function as it moves through different systems of exchange. The voice of the mestizo speaks another language, a language in creation, a language suspended between English and Spanish. But, within a Chicano context, the voice of the mestizo also sounds the depths of cultural transformation, tests the limits of social boundaries, bespeaks the formation of a hybrid culture in transition and anti-imperial subjectivities in formation. It changes register and pitch depending on where and when and why it speaks. The voice of the mestizo is that which, finally, articulates the tactical, the multiple, the anti-imperial subjectivities often denied the mestizo body.

# Works Cited:

ACOSTA, Oscar “Zeta”. The Revolt of the Cockroach People. Introduction by Hunter S. Thompson. New York: Vintage, 1989 [1973].

BAKHTIN, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

CANCLINI, Néstor García. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Foreword by Renato Rosaldo. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995 [1990].

CERVANTES, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1981.

LOWE, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

PAZ, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash, trans. New York: Grove Press, 1985 [1950].

ROSALDO, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

SANDOVAL, Chela. “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World”. Genders. 10 (1991): 1-24.

SAVIN, Ada. “Bilinguslism and Dialogism: Anther Reading of Lorna Dee Cervates’s Poetry”. An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands. Alfred Arteaga, ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 215-223.

YOUNG, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995.