Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary

Latino Dreams Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary

Portada Hispánica 14 Consejo de dirección Patrick Collard (Universidad de Gante) Hub. Hermans (Universidad de Groninga) Francisco Lasarte (Universidad de Utrecht) Maarten Steenmeijer (Universidad de Nimega) Rina Walthaus (Universidad de Groninga)

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2002

Latino Dreams Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary

Paul Allatson

Cover Photo: “Marissa con buganvilla”. Susana and Etienne J. ChávezSilverman. Cover design: Peggy Vogel The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-0804-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2002 Printed in The Netherlands

Latino Dreams Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary This book is dedicated to my father, who died half-way through my research. I can only imagine him turning these pages. And because I will see her turning these pages, it is also dedicated to my mother.

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Contents Acknowledgements

9

Introduction

11

Chapter 1. The transcultural contours of Latino U.S.A. 1.1. The contours of Latino belonging 1.2. Transcultural discourse, genealogy, and traffic 1.3. The subaltern conundrum in transcultural discourse 1.4. Transculturation and Latino cultures 1.5. The Latino narrative “scenario”

23 23 32 38 45 53

Chapter 2. Rosario Ferré’s trans-“American” fantasy, or subalternizing the self 2.1. Writing without tartamudear 2.2. Epigraphs of a Creole national fantasy 2.3. The greenback family tree 2.4. Rival scenarios of textual authority 2.5. The conflagrations of feminist traffic 2.6. Women’s bodies in the national imagination 2.7. Ambivalent rewordings of lyrical capital 2.8. Transcultural bridge or fantasy?

59 60 68 75 81 85 90 95 101

Chapter 3. Abraham Rodriguez’s boy-zone romance of “American” escape 3.1. The taxonomic trouble of barrio subalternity 3.2. Puerto Rican shadows in the barrio 3.3. Disputing a Nuyorican critical imagination 3.4. Crossing over into imagined elsewheres 3.5. The frontiers of a crack dream 3.6. A macho boy’s bodily frontiers 3.7. Disposable commodities, redemptive resources 3.8. Walking away from a disposable constituency

109 110 115 120 124 131 140 146 152

Chapter 4. Cuban memory, “American” mobility, and Achy Obejas’s lesbian way 4.1. Cuban kinship networks and states in excess

159 161

4.2. Staging the “lesbian” within 4.3. Becoming “infeliz” 4.4. Cubanas unmanned 4.5. A Latino dialectic of antipathy 4.6. Petit-bourgeois mobility and subaltern proximities 4.7. The other border logic

167 173 176 184 192 201

Chapter 5. Coming out of the “American” nightmare with Benjamin Alire Sáenz 5.1. Terrestrial border logics at El Paso/Juárez 5.2. The epistemological conjunction of border and closet 5.3. Sensational allusions and generic passings 5.4. Attacking the houses of patriarchy and nation 5.5. Class crimes, poetic wholeness, and passing testimony 5.6. Paradise split between rival places of “whiteness” 5.7. Coming out with a “disrespect for borders”

235 239 245

Chapter 6. Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and “American” cannibal reveries 6.1. Cannibalization and the circuits of desire 6.2. The limits of cannibal revisionism 6.3. Inhabiting the stereotype 6.4. A patriarchal appetite for subalterns 6.5. The New World cannibal revisionary 6.6. The new Gómez-Peña world centre 6.7. The U.S.A.’s cannibalizing resilience

253 255 264 267 278 288 296 299

7. Afterword: Notes on transcultural traffic from across el charco pacífico

307

Bibliography

321

Index

349

8

209 211 215 222 230

Acknowledgements

My gratitude is due, above all others, to Roslyn Jolly and Diana Palaversich, whose insights and inputs are everywhere apparent. Without their support, encouragement, and attention to detail, I know this study would have been imaginary always. A Susana Chávez-Silverman, por nuestras largas conversaciones en ‘el internido’ y, más reciente en Califas, cara a cara, acerca de los temas en que este estudio trata de intervenir, a pesar de la distancia aquí abajo en las antípodas: mil gracias. Mil gracias are also due to Benjamin Alire Sáenz, for his tejana generosidad y hospitalidad, for showing me Diego’s steps that lead to nowhere, and for our discussions on and at la frontera. Deep thanks go to Debra Castillo for her insightful comments, astute advice, and generous cybertime; Stephen Gregory and Alex Longhurst for invaluable suggestions regarding an early version of Chapter 2; and, Silvia Spitta and Peter Hulme for their engagement and comments. To Trish Hill, Cooper Wilson, Lynne Cook, Kate Barclay, Laura Gutiérrez, Scott Butler, Rod Marsh, and Pierre Rainville, for their critical comments, assistance, or support: my appreciation is immense. Special thanks are due to Jenny Noble, Julia Martin, Anthony Finn, Ian Collinson, Michael Lozinsky, Dominic FitzSimmons, Andrew Gorman-Murray, Luisa Webb, and, above all, Bruce Johnson and Olaf Reinhardt, for sustaining and fostering a vigorous postgraduate community in the Schools of English and Modern Languages at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) when I was stationed there; thanks as well go to Shirley Webster, Christine McBrearty, Louise Da Silva, and María Oujo, the administrative staff in those Schools, for their support and kindness.

I am very grateful to the FRAC Committee at UNSW for the grant that enabled me to conduct research in some of the geocultural terrains dealt with in this book. Thank you to my chévere colleagues at the Institute for International Studies, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), for providing me with a supportive and lively environment in which to work, write and revise. And, last, but by no means least, to my editors at Rodopi Press, Marieke Schilling, and Hub. Hermans of the Portada Hispánica series, for their thoroughly agreeable and efficient collaboration, advice, and support: Dank jullie wel. *

*

*

I would also like to acknowledge the many people who enabled and participated in the publication, discussion, and worldly circulation of material included in this book. Portions of Chapter 1 appeared in ‘Travelling Theories: Transculturation and Latin American Subaltern studies,’ a paper delivered at the Transforming Cultures Seminar Series, UTS, in July 2001. Various parts of Chapter 1 and the Afterword informed two related papers delivered in early 2002: ‘The Latino Studies Imaginary: A View From Australia,’ International Relations Colloquium, Pomona College, California; and, ‘The Latino Studies Imaginary: A View From Across el charco pacífico,’ the Annual Workshop of la Universidad de Guadalajara and UTS on Regional Integration in the Pacific Rim: the Social Impact, held in Guadalajara, Mexico. A revised version of those papers will appear in the published conference proceedings with the title, ‘(U.S.) Latino Studies in the Imaginary Pacific Rim: Scenarios from Some Sides of el charco pacífico.’ A condensed version of Chapter 4 appeared with the same title in Ciberletras: Revista de crítica literaria y de cultura/Journal of Literary Criticism and Culture 7 (July 2002). Some parts of that chapter also fed into a paper delivered at the ALA Annual Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 2001, with the title ‘A Latina Dialectic of Antipathy: Latinidad in Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo.’ A shorter version of Chapter 6 was delivered at the Annual Symposium of the Institute for International Studies, UTS, in November 2000. 10

Introduction

How is the entity called the United States of America to be imagined? Cast another way, how is the U.S. base of the American Dream to be conceived? There are many possible responses to these questions. The United States may be regarded as a national monument to rugged, masculinist individualism, pioneer enterprise, and institutionalized consensus. It may be imagined as a place of ever expanding horizons, and as a space that links the ideal of unconstrained mobility to desires for individual selffashioning and socioeconomic betterment. The U.S.A. may be designated an immigrant’s paradise, figured in exclusive terms as a trans-Atlantic migrant trajectory that culminates in happy assimilation and “American” becoming. Inside and outside its borders, the United States may be upheld as the first-world’s leader, the exporter of a dynamic capitalist ethos and purported democratic principles, a function reinforced by the country’s worldwide policing service as accuser and destroyer of rogue regimes. It may be thought of as a geopolity racialized in white and black terms only. And the U.S.A. may be conceived of as a community cohered by a monocultural, monolingual, and locally generated “patrimony.” Shadowing these possible dreamscapes are two entwined epistemologies: that of the border, and that of immigration. U.S. border and migrant discourses are concerned with the production of and verifiable distinction between citizens and aliens, “legal” or “illegal.” In turn, border and immigrant discourses suggest that U.S. citizenship is popularly regarded as a right to occupy national space, and to move freely through that space. This right underscores the national cult of the automobile and is written onto the landscape with roads, freeways, underpasses, and signs of distance to be covered. Unbounded mobility on the U.S.A.’s open roads is celebrated in cultural texts from film to literature and music, and enshrined in popular imaginations of

the U.S.A., both within that state’s borders and beyond them. Literal freedom of movement represents a significant material manifestation of the American Dream, and provides a powerful and resilient metaphor of making good in the United States. Cast in these terms, issues of “American” mobility, and the dreamscapes of national possibility that accrue to “America,” are of direct concern to the U.S.A.’s Latino populations, a conglomerate of peoples with origins in or connections to the Latin Americas. Latino Dreams is also concerned with Latino relations to the U.S.A.’s conceptual and material coordinates, and to the epistemological problems posed by those “national” relations. In this book I respond to the question of Latino sector relations with the state that contains them by focusing on a range of narratives, published between the mid-1980s and the mid1990s, by writers drawn from Puerto Rico and the three largest Latino sectors. By examining texts from Puerto Rican, Nuyorican, Cuban-American, and Chicano writers, my aim is to set up a cumulative dialogue between disparate experiences and understandings of “America,” the locus for a range of myths and discourses of belonging. If this dialogue is enabled by the overarching Latino, it is also enabled by the overarching “America,” understood as both an unremarked synonym for the U.S.A. and the name of a continent in which Anglo and Latin Americas coexist in uneasy physical and signifying proximity. My selection of narratives includes texts by authors who have received little academic attention—Abraham Rodriguez, Achy Obejas, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz—along with underattended works from more renowned writers—Rosario Ferré, Coco Fusco, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. While there are great differences between the nations these writers fictionalize, their narratives may be said to traffic in the U.S.A.’s attendant myths and governing cultural logics. These writers deal with the material, historical, corporeal, and symbolic spaces in and on which various Americas meet, overlap, battle, and potentially transform each other. My analytical interests in this study are best indicated by a string of questions. How do the selected texts stage the U.S.A.? 12

What sorts of national myths and discourses of belonging are apparent in the narratives, and what do they signify for the narratives’ Latino players? What narrative tactics are mobilized against the U.S.A. and its dominant myths as fictionalized in these texts? What do the narratives say about specific and panethnic Latino cultural typologies, as well as U.S. cultural typologies, in relation to questions of mobility? What sorts of cultural capital are valued and deployed in Latino texts that respond to a pervasive, if always multifaceted and contestable, U.S. imaginary? What extra-national factors interrupt the national concerns evident in the selected narratives? How, and with what political aspirations and risks, do these texts locate Latino cultures and subjects in relation to hegemonic processes? What is at stake for Latino cultural politics in the narration of alternatives to (or mobilities against) the “American” Dream? What constitutes a Latino narrative of “America”? These questions motivate my analysis. They, and my responses to them, focus on the complexities, contradictions, and surprises generated by the nexus of (selected) Latino narratives and the U.S. national imaginary. In plotting this nexus I work with one axiom: Latino texts are U.S. texts. To varying degrees they are also legible as transcultural scenarios in which multiple signifying systems and imaginations are messily entangled. My axiom, then, requires qualification, here borrowed from Alire Sáenz: Latino texts are texts that either cannot or refuse “to be completely contained by that homogenous, devouring word American” (1997b: 79). I investigate this dispute with U.S. containment by placing transculturation—a Latin American critical mode—in dialogic tension with questions of subaltern subordination and domination, the conjunction of rival bodily economies, and the resistant capacities of cultural production. This modified transcultural approach obliges me to attend to the hegemonic processes that make America the “devouring word” for an imagined nation, and to the fate of that nation when targeted in Latino cultural productions. My contention is that each of these Latino texts deploys spe13

cific narrative tactics and cultural logics, and a range of literary and other cultural capital, in order to question and reform the U.S.A.’s imaginary coordinates. These ambitions do not mean that the texts are reducible to a neat hegemonic (pervasive power) versus counter-hegemonic (always already resistant ambition of the oppressed) logic. Indeed, their distinct transcultural tactics expose the fallacies underwriting such a logic. Moreover, the exposure of a simplistic hegemonic-resistant schema is also to some degree enabled because the texts’ national disputes may be complicated by recourse to feminist, queer, panethnic, postcolonial, or transnational agendas. Yet while I am alert to the particular mobilities by which the narratives aim to dispense with a singular notion of the U.S.A. neatly contained by its southern terrestrial and maritime borders, I also recognize instances in which that imagined entity frustrates the counternarrative will. That is, the narratives may provide signs of the U.S.A.’s hegemonic resilience in the face of imaginary disavowal. At times the narratives may depend on or replicate exclusionary, appropriative, and neocolonizing U.S. cultural logics. This is particularly evident when the authors presume to represent, champion, or identify with subaltern subjects without questioning their own authorial relation to the material preconditions of subalternity, or their intellectual complicity in the textual production of subalternity. My readings reveal that eruptions of U.S. imaginary power modulate both the transcultural politics at work in the selected texts and the resistant capacities that may be claimed of them as counter-narratives. In this study I do not regard the authors and narratives I have selected as representative of the imagined communities to which they may belong. This book is not designed as a definitive map of Latino narratives, cultures, or responses to the U.S.A. However, it is intended as a contribution to the rapidly evolving field of Latino literary studies. As such, Latino Dreams is constructed in cognisance of Frances Aparicio’s observation that “Latino Studies is an academic imaginary in a very literal sense of the word. It is still in the state of desire, it is still a potential rather 14

than fact, a field very much in its initial makings despite the three decades of scholarly production in Chicano Studies, Puerto Rican Studies, and the emerging Cuban-American, Central American and Dominican scholarship” (1999: 4).1 The first chapter outlines my critical approach. Here I explain the ways by which Latino narratives are enmeshed in a web of border logics emanating from the southern terrestrial (U.S.Mexican) border, as well as from the southern maritime (Florida Strait) frontier. I relate these logics to the myths and official discourses by and through which the U.S.A. has been imagined, often at the expense of its Latino sectors. This discussion informs my preference for a transcultural reading of Latino narratives modulated by subaltern studies debates. The dialogue I construct between these modes has two benefits. First, it permits me to dispense with the notion that Latino narrative engagements with the U.S.A.’s governing logics and myths are explicable in terms of an intransigent subordination versus domination schema. Second, it enables me to problematize the categories of elite and subaltern and their functions in literary production and textual representation. Thus, while I accept that literary texts are privileged cultural forms in which fictive subalterns are constructed at some risk, I concede that narrative stagings of such constructions may illuminate broader non-literary hegemonic processes and transcultural forces. The chapter concludes with a survey of Latino criticism concerned with issues of Latino mobility from inside the U.S.A., criticism that informs the analysis that follows. Chapter two inaugurates the book’s literary/critical trajectory. It begins not in mainland U.S.A. but in Puerto Rico, and in Rosario Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust (first published in 1988). This is Ferré’s English-language translation and revision of Maldito amor (first published in 1986). Intended for Anglophone U.S. audiences, the narrative—like its Spanish-language predecessor—is comprised of a short novel and three related short stories, and explores questions of myth and national place raised by the takeover of the island by the U.S.A. in 1898. I dis15

cuss Sweet Diamond Dust in relation to what I call Ferré’s selfsubalternizing agenda, that is, the rhetorical bid to jettison class privilege and to ally the white oligarchic Puerto Rican woman with the mixed race or black female subaltern against patriarchal hegemonies, whether Creole elite or U.S. imperial. This agenda—apparent throughout Ferré’s writing—is upset by a doubled metastasis: of the class and racialized antagonisms that trouble “woman” as a meaningful universal category; and of the reluctance by, indeed socioeconomic inability of, Puerto Rican subaltern sectors to ally themselves with oligarchic or cosmopolitan representatives, such as Ferré herself, against U.S. interests. Significant in these respects is the narrative’s complex intertextual traffic in literary and musical forms. I argue that the messages transmitted by these cultural references—from romanticist mythologizations of nation to testimonial, Anglophone feminism, and the Puerto Rican danza—undermine the premise of viable anti-U.S. transracial and transclass affiliations between women. They also confirm the cosmopolitan credentials of Ferré’s stated ability to fantasize herself and her writing as the interstitial solutions to a colonial predicament. As legible in Sweet Diamond Dust, Ferré’s self-subalternizing agenda depicts the U.S.A. and Puerto Rico as safely discontinuous entities rather than as mutually transculturated geopolities whose imaginary frontiers cannot be easily disentangled. Chapter three relocates from Puerto Rico to Nuyorico, and to Abraham Rodriguez’s novel Spidertown (1993), a text that has been largely overlooked in Latino studies, perhaps due to its uncompromising, or unfashionable, depictions of a mainland Puerto Rican predicament. This portrait of life in the South Bronx (El Bronx) is told from the perspective of Miguel, a young drug runner and purported exemplar of Nuyorican subalternity. Immobilized by a dense array of institutional and discursive impediments, Miguel is unable to identify himself as of Puerto Rico or the United States, let alone as a neocultural embodiment of the two. My interest lies in assessing the tensions between Miguel’s management of barrio materialities and his 16

imaginative departures into worlds beyond El Bronx. Those worlds are not simply located in a U.S. dreamscape, but are also accessed through the literary texts and films at his disposal. I argue that the novel’s fictive subalterns, like the novel itself, find no sustenance in a Nuyorican critical discourse that celebrates the transcultural continuities between Puerto Rican island and mainland populations. This dispute helps to explain why Spidertown is explicable as a romance that seeks out literary imaginations other than those provided by either the United States or Puerto Rico. The romance is also cast as an entrepreneurial American Dream adapted to street-level conditions, and, for Miguel, as a romance against-all-odds, with Miguel and his girlfriend portrayed as the young lovers fighting their way from barrioized criminality to U.S. respectability. This two-edged quest into romance, however, has two consequences. First, despite attempting to rescue Miguel from the crack culture’s violent androcentric logics, the novel consistently recuperates those logics. Second, by acceding to the myth that oppressive material limits can and must be transcended imaginatively, the novel’s escape leaves unquestioned the institutional and discursive powers responsible for manufacturing barrio subalternity. Rodriguez’s dispute with U.S. power thus refuses to countenance the transcultural entanglement of Puerto Rican mainland and U.S. imaginations; the difference between this refusal and the stance adopted by Ferré is that Rodriguez withholds from historicizing the barrio in terms of the unresolved U.S.-Puerto Rican relationship. The fourth chapter discusses a novel, Memory Mambo (1996), and a number of short stories, by the Cuban-American Achy Obejas. Set in Chicago, Memory Mambo announces a queer engagement with Cuban-exile notions of national belonging. Memory Mambo’s disturbed protagonist, Juani, desires a viable place in relation to multiple familial and national imaginaries. In plotting her desires, the novel rejects the mythologization or romanticization of island origins. This rejection means that the narrative’s figurations of transcultural kinship networks 17

established in exile, and of a Cuba that exceeds the Cubanstate’s borders, render the “lesbian” herself as one of the novel’s U.S.-identity stakes. The transcultural meeting of Cuban and middle-class U.S. bodily economies complicates this scenario. While both of these economies enforce particular patriarchal interests, their mutual neoculturation in a U.S. setting also permits a range of unmanned opportunities for women. I also explore how the presence of a politicized independentista Puerto Rican character provides Obejas’s novel with a colonized “American” imagination—one that diverges from Ferré’s and Rodriguez’s novels—that counterpoints and challenges certain Cuban exile imaginations. The resultant dialectic of antipathy between the two women highlights how Cuban histories of exile diverge from other Latino sectors’ U.S. histories, thus generating a range of ideological impediments to latinidad. This dialectic is further exacerbated by the taken-for-granted petitbourgeois ambit of Juani’s family, which is clearly at odds with the subaltern predicaments staged in Ferré’s and Rodriguez’s narratives. Thus, notwithstanding Obejas’s nuanced critiques of Cuban-American privilege, decidedly non-subaltern mobilities are evident in the novel and in some of Obejas’s stories. At times these mobilities sit uneasily with Obejas’s desimplification of the cultural logics and ideological pressures that maintain Cuba as the U.S.A.’s national antithesis, while also preventing Cuban exile subjects from embracing a pan-Latino imaginary of U.S. belonging. Chapter five moves to the El Paso/Juárez section of the U.S.Mexican borderlands, the physical and symbolic centre of the Chicano Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s utopian quest narrative, Carry Me Like Water (1995). My analysis counterpoints the conditions endured by El Paso’s Chicano subalterns with the middle-class aspirations of the novel’s Chicano and Anglo Californians. This distinction allows me to explore a regulative but epistemologically fraught conjunction of border “door” and broadly applicable closet logics. I argue that Carry Me Like Water knowingly obliges its protagonists to come out into a border place of cross18

ing that guarantees neither national and identity security, nor liberty from oppression. At the same time, however, the libertarian drive is both announced and assisted by the narrative’s neocultural guise as an updated fusion of the telenovela and the Victorian sensation narrative, here made partly magical. In Alire Sáenz’s novel, as in its intertextual references, liberty is presaged by disclosed secrets and decoded signs. Nonetheless, the novel’s intertextual coordinates do not seamlessly resolve the epistemological conundrums faced by its characters as they come out against a range of constraints. Specific geopolitical and transcultural materialities inevitably restrain transcendent desires. In this chapter, then, I investigate the paradox of a dream text that gathers its main players at a disciplinary border site while asking them to “disrespect” the borders of the U.S.A. Departing from previous chapters in which I focus on a single author and text, the sixth and final chapter compares performance texts, dating from the 1990s, from the Cuban-American Coco Fusco and the Mexican-cum-Chicano Guillermo GómezPeña. My analysis proceeds by identifying the operations of a particular political and aesthetic mode in each artist’s praxis— cultural cannibalism—understood as the rhetorical consumption of the colonizer’s/oppressor’s culture for subaltern ends. In Stuff (first performed in 1996, and published as a script in 1997) Fusco and her collaborator Nao Bustamante parodically cannibalize transnational tourist economies in which Latinas are commodified. In Fusco’s video Pochonovela (released in 1995), she and her co-actors pose as Chicano subalterns with the aim of disrupting the circulations of damaging stereotypes. Fusco’s performance criticism is notable for attempting to confront the political risks and interpretative ambivalences inherent to counternarrative projects conducted as parody. Nonetheless, those projects at times veer close to replicating an intellectual-subaltern power differential whenever the Latino and Latina subject is represented as the base material for, and ostensible stake in, the transcultural politics Fusco espouses and the cultural mobilities she enjoys. Like Fusco, Gómez-Peña also aims to disarm dam19

aging stereotypes. However, in ‘Califas’ (a performance poem that underwent a number of generic shifts in the 1990s) and ‘The New World Border’ (a collaboration originally conceived with Fusco, but here produced with Roberto Sifuentes in the early 1990s), cannibal consumption analogizes the ever expanding, and always already gendered masculine, platform from which Gómez-Peña represents subaltern Others and remaps the American continent. As a consequence, his texts remain dependent on the cultural logics that Gómez-Peña attempts to supersede in his particular New World of transcendent promise. This chapter, then, highlights the transcultural trouble confronting Latino cultural politics when centred on the freely mobile artist or intellectual, and posed from a position within the U.S. state as a subaltern-friendly and radical counter-narrative praxis. Chapter six does not mark the end of my analysis. Discussing some of the tensions between local and global prospects highlighted in that chapter, I present an afterword addressed from my place across el charco pacífico, the Pacific pond. Here I examine the 1992 Sydney Biennale, a key moment in the introduction of Latino cultural forms and debates to Australian audiences. I analyze the Biennale’s problematic use of the Australian-derived boundary rider to account for contact zones in Australia, the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, and elsewhere. I also look at the fate of Australia in a number of equally problematic Latino uses of transcultural paradigms. The afterword highlights some of the intersectional dangers and possibilities for transcultural Latino studies—conducted in and outside the U.S.A.— generated by the worldly circulations of Latino cultural products and debates. This book springboards from a text produced in Puerto Rico, an island with the dubious distinction of the longest formal colonial status of any territory in the world: four hundred years under Spain, one hundred odd under the United States of America. My investigation thus begins in a geopolitical space whose colonized status, demographic dispersal, and split cultural imaginations, highlight an intractable and far from straightfor20

ward problem: how is the U.S.A. to be imagined? This question is approached from different perspectives in texts set in New York, Chicago, El Paso/Juárez, California, and in trans- and post-national metaphoric spaces not necessarily detached from the U.S.A.’s governing cultural logics. The narrative trajectory enabled by these distinct settings reveals how the selected texts traffic in—reject, unsettle, reconfigure, reaffirm—the myths of U.S. sanctity, the values of U.S. cultural capital, and the pervasiveness of “American” dreams. Inevitably, such traffic locates this study in a world of discursive circuits, risks, and disputes. Built into traffic is an evocative and unstable array of connotations: one-way, two-way, and multiple trajectories; continual shifts in speed; the stases of jams and collisions; known, familiar, and defamiliarizing ways; free-flow, intersection, and regulation; official and clandestine routes; fleeting glimpses; danger, security, and flight; driver, passenger, and pedestrian perspectives and disagreements; privileged comfort and the discomforts of the less privileged; and, different modes and means. More specifically, traffic in this book implies two entwined trajectories. First, the movements of critical modes, gendered and racialized bodies, desires, identifications, and commodities as they appear in Latino texts. And second, the transnational mechanisms of commerce, barter, and exchange in which the just-noted traffics, the narratives that explore them, and my study, are embroiled. In the light of these im/mobilities, I regard the selected Latino narratives as transcultural sites in which Latino counter-discursive ambitions and speculations are at once impelled by the U.S.A.’s conflict-ridden material realities, and modulated by its persistent dream properties. Notes 1. Confirming Aparicio’s opinion, monographs that adopted a comparative approach to Latino literary and cultural studies only began to appear in the 1990s. These include: Zimmerman (1992) and Luis (1997), two survey approaches; Sandoval-Sánchez (1999) and Arrizón (1999), both on theatre; McCracken (1999) on Latina fiction writers; Christian (1997) on fiction 21

drawn from many Latino sectors; and Juan Flores (2000), a study of mainland Puerto Ricans and broader Latino issues and identifications. These welcome studies take different critical positions from that pursued in this book. That said, while Latino Dreams joins and is indebted to the welcome trend to compare literature from multiple communities, there are still few book-length analyses that deal with narratives drawn from the largest Latino sectors. A growing number of critical monographs and anthologies also reveal a trend toward comparison in Latino literary studies. This is especially evident in feminist, queer, and performance criticism. It is manifested, as well, in discussions of Latino texts in relation to Latin American literary and critical traditions, particularly those of Mexico and the Antilles, or in relation to cultural productions from other U.S. minorities. Notable monographs include: José Saldívar (1991; 1997); Román (1998); José Esteban Muñoz (1999); and Quiroga (2001). Notable Latino-specific anthologies include: Horno-Delgado et al (1989), perhaps the first anthology of Latina cultural criticism; Ray Gonzalez (1994), Heyck (1994), and Delgado and Stefancic (1998), three surveys of fiction and criticism; Noriega and López (1996), on film and video; Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman (1997), an anthology of transcultural approaches; and, Arrizón and Manzor (2000) and Fusco (2000), which combine performance texts and criticism. Three particularly useful interdisciplinary collections include: Bonilla et al (1998); Darder and Torres (1998a); and, Romero, Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Ortiz (1997). The 1990s also saw a significant number of Latino titles published in such disciplines as sociology, history, political science, economics, demography, and U.S. race, minority and ethnicity studies. To this list must be added Latino-focused journalism. This publishing record would seem to support Aparicio’s observation that, in its broadest sense, the academic imaginary of Latino studies is characterized by an inevitable multidisciplinarity.

22

1 The transcultural contours of Latino U.S.A.

In their 1993 ‘Founding Statement,’ the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group (LASSG) posed the question: “What are the boundaries of Latin America if, for instance, we consider New York the largest Puerto Rican metropolis and Los Angeles the second-largest Mexican metropolis?” (118).1 This recognition of what has been called the latinization of the United States also begs the inverse question: what are the material and imaginary boundaries of Anglophone America, of the U.S.A. itself? Such questions are even more compelling if it is recalled that before 1848 Los Angeles was part of Mexico, that in 2001 Latinos comprised 13% of the total population, and that New York City, Miami, and Los Angeles now vie for status as surrogate capitals of the Latin Americas.2 I mention the LASSG’s question because this book is also concerned with the epistemological problems posed by the U.S.A.’s conceptual and material coordinates. I respond to these problems by focusing on a range of writers drawn from Puerto Rico and the three largest Latino sectors. While there are great differences between the nations the writers fictionalize, their narratives may be said to traffic in the U.S.A.’s attendant myths and governing cultural logics or imaginaries. This claim does not signal a conflation of either the selected narratives or the sectors they fictionalize into an amorphous collective. Rather, it recognizes that the broad struggle by Latinos over what U.S. residency means in material and political terms is also legible as a struggle for leverage over what the U.S. state signifies in an imaginary sense. This is the central premise of Latino Dreams. 1.1. The contours of Latino belonging Much contemporary discussion of national imaginaries, of

course, is indebted to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Anderson argues that the eighteenth-century rise of a printcapitalism and such media as the novel and the “novelistic” newspaper accelerated belief in the viability of social entities called nations (1991: 22-36). The nation became imaginable because enough people agreed that it was sovereign (free under god and free from dynastic rule), that its territory was limited and delineated by boundaries, and that it was composed of a “fraternity” of strangers who nonetheless defined themselves in relation to the same geopolitical and temporal coordinates (ibid: 5-7). That fraternity exists, Anderson asserts, because “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (ibid: 7). Anderson is correct to note that the nation per se becomes meaningful whenever the collective distinguishes itself from what lies across a state’s geopolitical border, that is, from what it deems it is not. But this logic is also at work in national space. The U.S.A. is not alone in posing as a fraternal collective of masculine, heteronormative, monocultural, monolinguistic, and white racialized interests, to name five obvious realms of exclusive national definition. However, the U.S.A.’s imaginability is unique because of the particular ways by which hegemonic rhetoric disclaims certain sectors as non-, un-, or even anti-American. Such sectors provide the internal loci of disavowal required for the U.S.A. to be mythologized as a community. The “actual” conditions of “inequality and exploitation” at work in the U.S.A. are central to that state’s mythical epidermis. Pivotal in this regard are the ways in which Latino populations have been selectively included in or excluded from, or imaginatively fixed as peripheral in or even disruptive to, an array of U.S. national myths and an associated conglomerate of longstanding official or governing cultural logics. So pervasive are these logics that it is tempting, perhaps justifiably, to accept them and the national imaginary they uphold as self-evident. Here, however, I want to demonstrate why it is possible and 24

necessary to speak of the U.S.A.’s governing logics by referring to a compendium entitled American Historical Documents, 1000-1904, edited by Charles Eliot and published in 1910, and reprinted in 1938. This collection purports to tell the ongoing story of the U.S.A.: “Read in succession, these documents afford a condensed view of the political progress of the American people; freed from any prejudice save that which swayed the makers of the history themselves” (3). Appearing under the Harvard Classics imprimatur that accords the selection the force of canonicity sanctioned by a key academic state apparatus, the documents provide both a foundation—texts of “discovery” from Ericsson, Columbus, Vespucci, and Cabot—and a genealogy for the U.S.A.’s centrality in a New World of civilizing possibility. The collection features the 1794 ‘Treaty with the Six Nations,’ the only document to recognize Native people. The key political texts include the ‘Constitution,’ the ‘Declaration of Rights,’ and ‘The Declaration of Independence’ with its assertions “that all men are created equal” and enjoy the “unalienable Rights (…) [of] Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” (ibid: 150). Eleven documents pertain to the abolition of slavery and the Civil War. Of the forty-seven texts, thirteen are treaties with European powers or Latin American states. Six of the treaties confirm the U.S.A.’s imperial designs on Latin American territories. The last three documents date from 1898 (the recognition of Cuban “independence” and the cession to the U.S. of “Porto Rico” and the Philippines) and 1904 (a Convention concerned with overlordship of the Panama Canal). This collection is exemplary for two reasons. First, it confirms a disparity between, on the one hand, the official national rhetoric that asserts freedom and liberty for all, and on the other hand, the realities of internal conflict, dissent, and inequity that such logics either overlook or purport to resolve. Second, and of most concern to Latino sectors, the documents confirm that the sanctity of the U.S.A. has been idealized in a context of Anglo and Latin American antagonisms, exchanges, and proximities. Unapologetically and unambiguously, upholders of the commu25

nal ideal have always imagined the U.S.A. in the regional guises of capitalist giant, military power, and exporter of cultural capital, guises enshrined in yet another of the anthology’s documents, the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. That said, there appears to be a tension between these official documents of state and what Amy Kaplan calls the “resilient paradigm of American exceptionalism” (1993: 11). This is an idea of U.S. cultural uniqueness neatly contained by geopolitical borders and emergent on homegrown terms. Kaplan’s particular concern is that U.S. exceptionalism has been perpetuated by three critical absences in U.S. cultural, historiographical, and postcolonial studies: “the absence of culture from the history of U.S. imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism” (ibid: 11). Berating cultural studies practitioners for not heeding histories of U.S. diplomacy and international relations—and, it would seem, for not reading the U.S.A.’s key political and legal documents—she warns: American nationality can still be taken for granted as a monolithic and self-contained whole, no matter how diverse and conflicted, if it remains implicitly defined by its internal social relations, and not in political struggles for power with other cultures and nations, struggles which make America’s conceptual and geographic borders fluid, contested, and historically changing. (ibid: 15)

Kaplan demonstrates that if the U.S. national imaginary is informed by the myth of national exceptionalism, that myth must necessarily gloss over the unexceptional evidence provided by the U.S.A.’s valued political and legal documents.3 Whether denied or not, the U.S.A.’s governing principles confirm that the U.S. national imaginary is, and always has been, dependent on discourses of geopolitical boundaries in a trans-American context. According to Suzanne Oboler, the U.S. national fraternity has been “shaped in relation to Latin Americans on the basis of nineteenth-century ideological justifications 26

of the ‘national’ superiority of the United States against ‘foreign Others’ in the hemisphere,” including its own Latino residents (her italics, 1995: 160). Moreover, the homogenization of such residents under the Hispanic rubric disregards each sector’s distinct U.S. histories and quotidian experiences, thus confirming those sectors as the internal loci of disavowal on which the U.S.A.’s imaginability in part depends: The ongoing exclusion of (…) historical minorities from the historical memory of the American imagined community means that Puerto Ricans and many second and later generations of Mexican Americans/Chicanos continue to be treated as second-class citizens when they are not perceived as newly arrived immigrants. At the same time, however, insofar as Latin American immigrants today become ‘instant Hispanics’ as soon as they cross the border into the United States, their experiences and identities, like those of their children, are also homogenized and are being shaped by the stigmatizing label Hispanic, constructed in relation to the presence—albeit unacknowledged—of Mexican Americans/Chicanos and Puerto Ricans as historical minorities in this nation. (ibid: 171)

National identity taxonomies have had material consequences for Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, in particular, as they have been “routinely bounced in and out of the ‘national community’ according to the ever-changing political and economic needs of the nation” (ibid: 38). However, conceptual and material manifestations of the regulated separation of Anglo from Latin Americas are not restricted to identity taxonomies alone. A rigidly conceived separation is evident in the Western frontier tradition of U.S. historiography that for many decades ignored the frontier’s collision with Mexico’s north and the U.S.A.’s takeover of that vast territory by 1848. It informs the militarization of the northern side of the U.S.-Mexican border, paradoxically concomitant with NAFTA’s promised border porousness. It is given ideological and detached physical form in the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, a tenacious, antagonistic, and well-armed fragment of the U.S.A. on Cuban soil, notwithstanding its use by the Bush administration 27

since September 11, 2001, as a geopolitical black hole conveniently outside national and international law. It permits the U.S.A. to gloss its colonial rule of Puerto Rico as a benign partnership between equals. It provides justifications for the urban separation of many Latino communities from the wider spaces of national promise. And it is manifested hysterically in the English Only legislative trend that arose in many states in the 1980s. These examples both confirm and trouble the salience of José Saldívar’s thesis that the U.S. national imaginary is not only conceptually dependent on but based in material practices that reinforce a profound “discontinuity between the American frontier and la frontera” (1997: xiv). By focusing on this discontinuity as it impinges on Chicano populations, Saldívar shows that U.S. hegemony has long reified the radical disjunction of Anglo and Latin Americas as a key to national definition. For Saldívar and many Chicano commentators, nowhere is this disjunction more acutely felt than along the geopolitical frontier between the U.S.A. and Mexico. However, many of the border logics and clashes noted above are not explicable in terms of this frontier, or of a single clear-cut discontinuity. This suggests the need to qualify Saldívar’s frontier/frontera disjunction, particularly as it relates to the U.S. national imaginary. Accordingly, I accept that Latino narratives are explicable in terms of a range of imaginative discontinuities and continuities. These relations, in turn, are complicated by Latin American traffic in a frontier myth of irreconcilable Americas. Evident across the political spectrum, the myth appears as a continental imaginary that regards Anglo and Latin Americas as mutually exclusive, confrontational, and delineated by the U.S.A.’s southern terrestrial and maritime borders.4 A pertinent example is provided by the Cuban revolutionary José Martí (1853-1895) to whom has been attributed the origins—penned while exiled in the U.S.A., ironically enough—of a trans-American gaze critical of the U.S.A.’s designs on Latin America.5 Such views from the south disturb ascription of full imaginative responsibility to the U.S. for a frontier/frontera dis28

continuity. Anglophone and Hispanophone rhetorics of antagonism and interchange play off and are implicated in each other. Acknowledging this rhetorical rivalry does not deny that the U.S.-Mexican frontier is at once a key source of border logics that impact on the U.S. imaginary, and a primary metaphoric resource for Chicanos—the largest Latino sector—who seek to combat regulative discourses of nation. As both fact and trope, the U.S.-Mexican border and its attendant borderlands have dominated Chicano criticism since the 1960s. Broadly sketched, a borderlands critical tradition recognizes that despite rigorous geopolitical and economic boundary regulation, Anglo and Latin Americas have long bled into each other along the land frontier, with concomitant challenges to cultural, linguistic, racial, and gender-sexual categories. Particular bodily responses to regulated frontiers may confirm how national, collective, and personal identifications are modulated by the geopolitical border’s function in a capital-regulated, state-supported migratory economy. Regulated limits may inspire perceptions of group and self as literally and figuratively crossed by rival value systems. As confirmed by Alire Sáenz’s fiction and Gómez-Peña’s bordercentric performances, distinct borderlands’ imaginaries share a notion of a grounded frontier zone in which the physical borderline—a site secured and monitored by various state apparatuses, but one that is also an inherently breachable limit—has profound symbolic resonance for Chicanos and Mexicans. Nonetheless, recognition of the terrestrial border’s symbolic importance for Chicanos must avoid regarding that border as the paradigm for interpreting other Latino experiences of the U.S.A. Border logics have not been materialized, spatialized, and mythologized along the U.S.A.’s southern terrestrial edge only. They are also generated in the maritime and perhaps more hermeneutically elusive frontier in the Florida Strait separating the U.S. mainland from Cuba and the rest of the Antilles.6 Writers from or with links to the Hispanophone Antilles, then, do not share Chicano frontier outlooks. While no less conscious of regulated geopolitical spaces than their Chicano counterparts, 29

Antillean and Antillean-origin Latino writers may concede that it has been rare for the U.S.A.’s south-eastern maritime limit to be accredited frontier significance in U.S. imaginations. As a result, such writers often deploy non-terrestrial spatial and journeying metaphors when evoking the region’s heterogeneities.7 The fictions of Obejas and Rodriguez, for example, feature tropes of enforced, defensive, or protective insularity—the barrio or the diasporic subject as embattled island—within a context of U.S. interventions and influence and their mainland repercussions. The Antilles have been the site for a bewildering array of traffics—in slaves, symbols of “lost” indigenes, sugar and tobacco, European invaders and colonizers, U.S. troops, music and literature, mass-produced commodities, migrating labour forces, languages, and discourses—in short, the sorts of traffic that appear in Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust. Such traffic characterizes an intricate temporal and geocultural space in which Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas meet and are transformed away from their original grounds. The insular consciousness of connections to vast elsewheres suggests intimate relations between Antillean and U.S. imaginaries that may not be neatly unravelled into discrete frontier/frontera moments. The U.S.A., then, is to a degree imaginatively invested, managed, and disturbed in and at two southern limits: the U.S.Mexican borderlands and the Antillean border(is)lands, to resituate and resignify the widely used Chicano concept.8 As contact zones, both types of borderlands signify “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (Pratt 1992: 4). Those aftermaths include Latino populations along and beyond the U.S.A.’s southern edges in cities such as New York City, Chicago, El Paso, and San Francisco, to name significant sites of transcultural dynamism in the narratives I examine. However, as Neil Larsen points out, contact zones are never simply places where cultures alone grapple, for culture is implicated in “‘mod30

ern’ forms of imperialist and capitalist exploitation” that also require analysis (1995: 137). In historical-materialist senses the Antillean-American and U.S.-Mexican contact zones are characterized by ambivalent mediations and separations and by intimate conflicts and attractions. Cast in this way it is clear that neither Anglo nor Latin America has ever been unequivocally distinct. Neither of these Americas predetermines or adequately describes the politicized geocultural terrains it designates. Similarly, the U.S.A.’s geopolitical borders have not succeeded in separating Anglophone and Hispanophone Americas. In fact, the latter America has long been located within the very “belly of the monster,” as the exiled Martí once described the United States. The semantic play between what Cherríe Moraga calls “America sin acento” and an accented América (1993: 52-62), thus signals the stakes that are raised when Latinos explore vexed issues of belonging to the United States. These are issues in which Latino cultural productions and criticism incessantly traffic. “America” is liable to a critical resemanticization into América, from within the United States. This is the very point of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group’s question cited at the beginning of this chapter. And it is a point of contention that troubles the signifier “America” when it is regarded from the often oppositional perspective of Latino writers. The critical work of this book, then, is designed to provide a framework for analyzing Latino counter-narratives and their relation to what Alire Sáenz designates the “homogenous, devouring word American” (1997b: 79). This approach dispenses with a U.S.-centric gaze that either detaches Latino texts from the historical, geopolitical, and cultural terrains to the U.S.A.’s south or, not necessarily conversely, places Latino criticism and literature at the periphery of U.S. cultural processes and debates. To this end, I investigate the nexus between national imaginaries and Latino narratives via transculturation, a critical mode increasingly employed in the United States to plot Latino cultural complexities. 31

1.2. Transcultural discourse, genealogy, and traffic Transculturation, a Latin American cultural studies mode, derives from Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar) from 1940. Speaking of the transformations of African and European elements in his native Cuba, Ortiz noted the inadequacy of the English-language terms acculturation and assimilation when used to describe intercultural processes. For Ortiz, the concepts implied European ascendancy in “the process of transition from one culture to another” and assumed a metropolitan imposition of culture on passively receptive peripheries or subordinate sectors, without the metropolis itself being affected by contact-zone involvement (1995: 102-3). As an alternative, Ortiz proposed three simultaneous processes. To the notion of cultural acquisition (acculturation), he added partial cultural destruction, uprooting, and loss (deculturation), and the productions of “new cultural phenomena” (neoculturation) (ibid: 102-3). According to Silvia Spitta, this model foregrounds dynamic cultural interactions: Since foreign influences were invariably present, and continue to be so, the ‘new’ culture (…) is never achieved: it is forever in the making, inevitably deferred. The ‘new’ could be said to refer to the distance that mediates between an African in Africa and a Cuban of African-EuropeanAsian descent. It is in this sense an explanation of difference from the originary cultures rather than a descriptive term. (1995: 4)

Moreover, as Diana Taylor notes, “Transculturation is a theory that explains how theories travel even as it travels and undergoes change” (1991: 101). Such changes are apparent in the transcultural mode’s slow moves from Ortiz to other critics, first in Latin America, then increasingly in the U.S.A., and across such fields as Chicano studies, anthropology, history, musicology, and postcolonial studies, in each of which it is at times cited without reference to its historical genealogy or elaboration of its conceptual complexities and divergent applications. 9 32

In his Transculturación narrativa, Ángel Rama adapted Ortiz’s views to account for Latin American regionalist narratives and to emphasize the selectivity and inventiveness of writers as they attempt to counter the ravages of transculturation (1981: 38-39). Also influenced by and responding to the fiction and ethnographic writings of the Peruvian José María Arguedas, himself a major theorist of Andean mestizo and indigenous transculturation,10 Rama sought to show that local or regional vernacular literary productions could be produced and analyzed on local terms without inevitably replicating metropolitan biases, whether these be philosophical discourses, literary genres, or language uses derived from or sanctioned by the Creole national elite or the European imperium. The projects of both Ortiz and Rama thus exemplify what Walter Mignolo has called a “pluritopic hermeneutics.” By this he means that certain transcultural forms of literary narrative encode within themselves a radical reordering of the circuits of knowledge production in which the “politics of enacting and of constructing loci of enunciation are at stake” (1995: 15). In its various Latin American applications transculturation assumed a counter-hegemonic critical gaze, thus leading Neil Larsen to describe it as one of “two, effectively alternative paradigms of postcolonial oppositional culture in Latin America.” The second paradigm is Brazilian Antropofagia, or cultural cannibalism, a mode that has also been influential in Latino cultural politics, as I show in my last chapter (1995: 121). For Larsen, Rama’s importance lay in his insistence that in the transcultural literary narrative Latin American writers could articulate a local or regional dispute with the discourses of the Creole-dominated state and the realist literary modes derived from Europe. Larsen suggests that Rama’s literary transculturator thus appears “as a kind of partisan anthropologist, actively committed to the defense of the regional subculture, for which, at the same time, he represents the rationalizing pressures of modernization” (1990: 55). Transcultural mediation therefore signals the writer’s “compact with the indigenous or local cultural base” that dis33

penses with the notion of culture as either autochthonous and uncontaminated by outside forces, or derivative, unauthentic and alien (ibid: 56-57). As the textual outcome of cultural processes mediated for local consumption, the transcultural narrative aims to provide a venue in which the “social subject excluded from modern metropolitan representationalities” may not only appear, but speak (ibid: 69). For many Latin American cultural critics, transcultural discourse as Rama understood it provided a radical bi- or multifocal gaze with which to recognize what Spitta calls the “hallucinatory practice of reading the same signs and symbols according to two different cultural codes” (1995: 49). In transcultural narratives, for example, already unstable signifiers are further destabilized because “at least two different cosmologies and systems of logic [are] operating in parallel within the very narration and (…) within the narrators themselves” (ibid: 11). As Spitta suggests, the transcultural mode attends to the signifying clamour of colonial legacies in the Americas. The mode implicitly addresses cultural issues of power, agency, and limits to agency pertaining to the bi- or multicultural and multilingual subject, cultural producer, or cultural critic (ibid: 24). The uneasy coexistence of rival cosmologies and value systems in contact zones determines what Diana Taylor identifies as transculturation’s most vexed political problems: how signs actually signify to different contact-zone sectors and subjects; and “which forms, symbols or aspects of cultural identity become highlighted or confrontational, when and why” (1991: 91). Taylor’s comments point to a critical transcultural imperative. Acknowledging subject privileges, or the factors that enable, liberate, and enhance the ability to read, reconfigure, or reject signs, must be balanced by attentions to subject disenfranchisements, or the factors that limit and preclude intervention in signifying processes. This attentiveness is particularly important when signifying processes are implicated in state-building projects and their impact on national subjects. Crucial here are the political economies of the gendered and 34

sexualized body, key issues neglected in traditional transcultural discourse. This is a considerable oversight in the light of Spitta’s description: “At the level of the body, transculturation has to do with the body of women. The ‘encounter’ between two worlds that has given rise to today’s uneasy mestizaje began as a sexual violation of the indigenous woman by the Spaniards” (1995: 177). Despite this proviso, Spitta argues that, as a mode of cultural analysis, transculturation is preferable to the discourse of mestizaje, burdened by its miscegenative origins and by the history of mestizo production as the Spanish traffic in and rape of native women (ibid: 28, n58). This suggests that transculturation is conceptually antithetical to the discourse of mestizaje, and is not intimately related to it as Beverley has claimed (1999: 126). More provocatively, Spitta claims that despite Rama’s neglect of women writers and gender differentials, “the position of the transculturators in Rama’s discourse is feminized, for they refuse to inhabit the space of the ruling class and choose to align themselves with the poor and disenfranchised” (1995: 24). For Spitta, this refusal means that the exemplary male transcultural writers willingly chose the subordinate chingado (penetrated or sexually passive) position as opposed to the dominant chingón (penetrating or sexually active) position, in the sense articulated by Octavio Paz in his 1950 discussion of Mexican identity, El laberinto de la soledad. Spitta is careful to distinguish the gender privilege enabling this male “embrace” of sociocultural and representational subordination from the experiences of women who enjoyed neither the luxury of choice, nor access to Rama’s privileged and androcentric “lettered city.” If Spitta’s argument here veers close to a conflation of class positions with gender attributes and sexual practices and identifications, it nonetheless confirms as key transcultural issues the political economies of machismo and compulsory heterosexuality. Expanding from Spitta’s timely feminist intervention into transcultural debates, I regard patriarchal and heterosexual logics as highly significant when rival Anglo and Latin American epistemologies of gender and sexuality meet on the Latino body, 35

itself also the site for signifying battles over national security and identification. A pertinent example here is Paz’s influential characterization of Mexican identity as a masculine unease attributable to the notion that mestizo identity makes all Mexicans the illegitimate children of the raped indigenous mother and the dominant European father. In Paz’s lexicon at least, the notion of mestizo illegitimacy underwrites Malinche/Chingada discourse in which women are potentially disparaged as traitors while the Mexican man is defined as the “‘hijo de la chingada’ (…) el engendro de la violación, del rapto o de la burla” (1999: 87-88). As centred on la Malinche, the abject scripts of mestizaje impact on the ways rival cosmologies and value systems battle over the same body and territory. For Chicanos who inherit this discourse of gendered negativity and heterosexualized cultural generation, the bodily clash is exacerbated by their place in a state with its own history of patriarchal imperialism. 11 The symbolic reach of Malinche discourse into the U.S.A. thus exemplifies how notions of gender difference and desire generate loci of avowal and disavowal that modulate and complicate national imaginary constructions. Recognition of these loci, for instance, provides Ferré with her main target in Sweet Diamond Dust. This narrative is intended to disrupt Puerto Rican patriarchal idealizations of the colonized island that either excluded women from the national ideal, or characterized the island’s colonial status as a feminization attributable to the “penetrations” of Yankee invaders. In Ferré’s case, however, her writerly desire to challenge the male-determined national family leads her to an ambivalent reimagining of a new woman-centred family of nation tenuously constructed across class and racial lines. Other rescriptings of the national family metaphor appear in the texts under review in this study; but in Obejas’s Memory Mambo and Alire Sáenz’s Carry Me Like Water, the immediate and national families are also figured as sites of oppressive heteronormative mores. Heteronormativity is Michael Warner’s term for describing the pervasiveness of the heterosexual logics underwriting conceptions of national communities. According to 36

Warner, as a “totalized view of the social,” heteronormativity signifies “heterosexual culture’s exclusive ability to interpret itself as society. Het [sic] culture thinks of itself as the elemental form of human association, as the very model of intergender relations, as the indivisible basis of all community, and as the means of reproduction without which society wouldn’t exist” (1993: xxi). U.S. heteronormativity also has racialized implications, for it is bolstered by what José Muñoz calls “white normativity” (1999: xii). In the narratives I examine such normalizing pressures provide crucial sites of transcultural contestation, complicity, pain, and resistant possibility. The Latino mediation of multiple gender and sexual conventions thus becomes a primary transcultural factor in my analysis. Neil Larsen has identified another area of concern in transcultural criticism. He claims that a regionalist affirmation based on a mediation of local and foreign cultural forms and discourses may emerge as a “synthetic carrier of a national myth of identity” that tolerates or conceptually depends on apparently autonomous regional imaginaries (1990: 74). Transculturation purports to solve the problem of socioeconomic dependency by posing it as “productive consumption,” or the appropriation and resignification of hegemonic cultural forms in ways unanticipated in the metropolitan or imperial centre. But for Larsen, the transcultural will is caught in a subordinate-dominant conundrum: transcultural productions cannot emerge outside either the already established systems of economic dependency, or the state’s control over the material and symbolic structures by which cultural products are produced, circulated, received, and consumed (ibid: 81-82). Although Larsen sidesteps transculturation’s intrinsic lesson that cultural autonomy and purity are both materially and conceptually untenable, his reservations are salutary. In its Latin American applications transcultural analysis has often assumed the cultural autonomy and agency of writers without acknowledging differential locations within modes of production, dissemination, and consumption regulated or tolerated by the state. Since these locations generate yet more logics 37

of subordination and domination, they suggest the usefulness of applying to transcultural discourse some of the concerns raised by subaltern studies in its Latin American guise.12 1.3. The subaltern conundrum in transcultural discourse John Beverley, a founding member of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group (LASSG),13 regards transculturation as inadequate and flawed because it has privileged the high cultural literary text and the mediating role of the writer-intellectual in generating and defining national culture in literary terms (1994: 273). Beverley’s disquiet does not, however, signal a transcultural problem only. For Rowe and Schelling, Benedict Anderson’s belief that the novel has been the most significant cultural medium in projects of state formation is an elitist and logocentric conceit, one that omits the influence of popular cultural productions. Popular sectors may eschew the printed word for the orally transmitted word when imagining themselves as bearers of nationality. Such sectors may also complicate or reject state imperatives by favouring “other allegiances of a regional, ethnic or class nature” (1991: 25). Since the early nineteenth century in Latin America, the novel has often provided a transcultural venue in which hegemonic visions of the nation are envisaged and circulated. Yet, while this function has been supplanted by television, Rowe and Schelling agree that national visions are managed uneasily in literary and electronically transmitted texts for two reasons: receptions of such texts cannot be predetermined, or simply analyzed; and the narratives themselves confirm the impact of subaltern sectors on elite understandings of the nation (ibid: 205). It is helpful, then, to regard the literary text as a significant, but never definitive, transcultural site for staging national logics of subordination and domination. In this site the constructed subaltern’s constructed trace, but never the subaltern’s “true” voice or presence, may be found. The “effective” subaltern subject is to be found in places other than the privileged cultural forms of the novel. I adopt this 38

understanding of the literary narrative in this study. Nonetheless, the problem remains of how to approach the transcultural appearances of subalterns in literary and performance texts. A critical solution of sorts is enabled by the LASSG’s warning of the need to counter moves by “the national elite [to regard] itself as subaltern, that is, as transcriber, translator, interpreter, editor: to avoid, in other words, the construction of postcolonial intelligentsias as ‘sharecroppers’ in metropolitan cultural hegemony” (1993: 119-20). An example of this construction, and its endorsement by some Latino critics, is provided by José Saldívar’s response to the nineteenth-century writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Saldívar defines her as “a subaltern supplementary subject,” a “subaltern mediator who is simultaneously an insurgent critic of monopoly capitalism and a radical critic of Anglocentric historiography” in the decades after the U.S.A.’s takeover of California (1997: 170). This celebratory reading glosses over Ruiz de Burton’s elite social status and fails to register how her particular politics were motivated by her class antipathy to what José Aranda rightly calls the “competing colonial enterprise” of U.S. capitalism (1998: 573). Ruiz de Burton was unequivocally beyond subalternity. She occupied a secure social place from which she presumed “subaltern supplementary” status, rather like that claimed by Rosario Ferré. As I argue in the next chapter, Ferré’s stated literary aim to ally Puerto Rican women of all classes and races against Creole elite and U.S. imperial patriarchies hinges on an avowed selfsubalternization. However, this ambivalent, often contradictory, at times untenable project itself disrupts the idea that the domination-subordination nexus can be subverted by subaltern mediation on the part of oligarchic agents. In a different version of this problem, Gómez-Peña’s performances feature subalterns who are constructed in the service of the artist’s politicalaesthetic agenda, then consumed by it. These examples suggest that despite their differences, subaltern studies and transcultural discourse face the same epistemological and political difficulties when it comes to the representa39

tion of the subaltern. According to Prakash, “The subaltern is a figure produced by historical discourses of domination, but it nevertheless provides a mode of reading history different from those inscribed in elite accounts” (1992: 9). However, this mode of reading inevitably confirms the subaltern’s lack of autonomy. In her influential essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?,’ Spivak argues that the preclusion of autonomy is maintained by “the ideological construction of gender” that underwrites colonial discourses and historical narrative (1988a: 283). The subaltern is denied both a voice and a history, but “the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (ibid: 287). The impossibility encoded in Spivak’s question, “can the subaltern speak?,” is nonetheless “solved” by her answer that the subaltern is no longer a subaltern when she attains the voice by which to register herself in history (1990b: 158). The task for criticism, then, lies “in seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman,” a task that impels the critic to “unlearn” her privilege and work against constructing subjects as always already “muted” (1988a: 295). Spivak’s position counters the celebration of the subaltern as trace, voice, or fully formed presence. Subaltern silence is confirmed as an intractable ontological lack and dislocation whenever oligarchic agents or cosmopolitan intellectuals presume to give a voice to the subaltern in their texts or to equate that voice with their own. There is a need, however, to question the claim that subalternity invariably equals silence, for the equation potentially reifies subordination, and perhaps romanticizes it. As long as the subaltern is silent, she or he is a desirable and desired sign of alterity and unequivocal subordination. The call to attend to the subaltern’s silence as both proof and precondition of her intractable displacement leaves little or no space for the possibility that outside First World intellectual debates the subaltern speaks, and speaks of his or her own subalternity. Thus, while the notion that the subaltern cannot speak is patently true in the literary text, this finding does not automatically translate into the world 40

outside that text. Subalterns speak as shanty-town dwellers, members of Nuyorican Young Lords, Chicano farm-workers, Indian groups, Zapatistas, unionized maquiladora labourers, domestics, street-vendors, musicians, graffiti artists, and, at times, writers. As Mignolo regards this issue, subalterns remain subordinated vis-à-vis dominant cultural perceptions and intellectual analysis, but they are not mute: “the subaltern have always spoken, although scholars and social scientists were not always willing to listen.” Accordingly, he approaches the question of subaltern representability “in terms of dialogues from different loci of enunciation” (1993: 130). This accords with Mallon’s argument that the focus on the problem of subaltern voicelessness may obscure the fact that “most subalterns are both dominated and dominating subjects” whose “ever-shifting lines of alliance or confrontation (…) are not deduced from specific, already existing subaltern identities or subject positions” (1994: 1511). Larsen goes further. He refuses to reduce subalternity to a question of enunciative agency. Instead he asks, “how does the ‘control over social meanings’ advance an emancipatory struggle in the absence (…) of control over the ‘ownership of the media’? Might it not in fact be argued that such ‘control over social meanings’ serves to compensate for the powerlessness of the masses to control the means of their production?” (1995: 202). Such rejoinders have implications for this study. Even when constructed in literary texts, the critical response to fictive subalterns and their shifting place in hegemonic processes is best served by questioning their textual relation to the means of their production and to competing speaking positions. These relations play out in the narratives I examine. For instance, the subalterns featured in Rodriguez’s Spidertown and Alire Sáenz’s Carry Me Like Water have voices. Yet, they are acutely aware of the ways they are registered in and by dominant-cultural imaginaries as enforced silences in contexts of socioeconomic deprivation and class hierarchization. For these subalterns there is little sustenance to be had in mediated subaltern comings-to-voice, as opposed to collective or individual 41

action. Complicating this scenario, such subalterns may attempt to compensate the silences ascribed to them by seeking out the appropriate cultural capital—testimonio, music, and even novels from traditions outside the U.S.A.—by which sense may be made (paradoxically enough) of their subalternity. However, intertextual recourse to cultural media or genres like the testimonio—a literary form with roots in post-Revolutionary Cuba intended to provide a textual venue for subaltern voices— always foregrounds the representational impossibility of recovering an authentic subaltern truth somehow outside or secured from hegemonic processes and discourses of representation. The fraught epistemological questions of subaltern agency and representation have direct implications for Latino narratives. The writers I discuss in the following chapters have voices; and yet those voices belong to “flesh-and-blood living beings” who might be regarded as the “mutating, migrating [subaltern] subjects” with whom the LASSG is concerned (1993: 120-21). These claims counter two assumptions that at times appear in Latino Studies: either all Latinos can be placed under the subaltern rubric, or selected Latino intellectuals can be redeemed by the shift to subaltern status. For example, José Muñoz describes a separatist fantasy by which Cuban-Americans may deny “their relational proximity to other subaltern groups in the U.S.” (1995: 79), the “other” here implying a collective subalternity that includes all Latinos. Coco Fusco implicitly includes herself—“Our continued engagement with questions of identity” (italics mine)—in her definition of a subaltern-friendly politics opposed to postmodernist understandings of identity selffashioning as subversion (1995a: 26-27). Fusco and Muñoz rightly emphasize that the question of what “America” signifies is central to Latino cultural struggles. However, their positions also imply a homogenizing conception of Latinos as an invariably subordinate sector. I am wary of this notion of collective Latino subalternity by implication, particularly when it glosses over particular cultural producers’ intellectual and socioeconomic distance from subalternity. 42

A different discounting of such distance is apparent when the discourse of subalternity is transferred to Latino intellectual terrains. Beverley, for example, rightly regards Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1983) as confirmation that “the very process of formal education would itself efface or problematize the identification of such an intellectual [as Rodriguez] with his or her initial class or group base” (1999: 139). However, in his response to Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony, Beverley also asserts that “In some ways, a Latino postmodernist performance artist like Gloria Anzaldúa or Guillermo Gómez-Peña might be a more reliable guide to Menchú’s world than anthropologists who assume they are authorized or authorize themselves to represent that truth for us” (ibid: 80). This is a deeply problematic claim. Beverley here seamlessly conflates Menchú’s world with the U.S. worlds of two radically different Latino writers. Beverley does not simply romanticize Anzaldúa and Gómez-Peña as marginal subjects akin to Menchú, thus fixing them in their “proper” subordinate place. He also assumes that formally educated Latinos somehow escape the intellectual identification. He thus fails to register how both Anzaldúa and Gómez-Peña are themselves implicated in intellectual constructions of subalternity, a point to which I return in chapter six when comparing the performance praxes of Gómez-Peña and Fusco. To regard the Latino writers discussed in this study as exemplary subalterns is to discount their subjective agency and the material privileges that enable them to write and publish. The writers examined here have voices as “sociopolitical subjects,” to use the LASSG’s terminology (1993: 119). Their texts feature fictive subalterns and explore the relation of Latinos to what the LASSG calls the “blank space” or “margins” of the U.S.A., and to various “administrative structures and practices of domination” (ibid: 120); but these writers are not subalterns. This claim is not intended to replicate what Beverley calls a “modernist sense of aesthetic and ideological agency” (1994: 285, n2). Nor is it meant to suggest that the most significant political resistances occur in the realm of cultural representations as opposed 43

to political arenas and collective programs that focus on class inequities and lack of access to the means of production. Yet, recognizing the limits of the cultural studies’ emphasis on representational agency does not preclude the possibility that Latino writings may disrupt the intellectual-literary versus subaltern dichotomy. Such writings may force readers to recognize degrees of Latino empowerment and subalternity, of cultural centrality and marginalization, of class privilege and inequity, of counter-hegemonic disinterest and resistance, and of dominant cultural complicity and alternative-hegemonic ambition. The LASSG’s suspicion of the literary text as implicated in discursive productions of subalternity and elite national ideals is well founded. However, the anti-literary stance potentially overlooks two simultaneities. First, much Latino writing continues to be ethnicized, disregarded, or deemed to belong elsewhere, by U.S. publishing and academic apparatuses. Second, particular Latino literary imaginations have much to say about the vitality, accommodations, and complexities of Latino cultures in a state that is founded on and continues to generate powerful logics of inclusion and exclusion. Modulated by subaltern debates, transculturation as I understand it does not signify a set of prescriptive terms for designating or simply differentiating between monolithic elite and subordinate cultural forms or subjects within an intransigent hegemonic (pervasive power) versus counter-hegemonic (resistant) dichotomy. Rather, a subaltern-modified transculturation accepts that Latino cultures are implicated in the hegemonic limits, conflicts, and possibilities encoded in Ortiz’s acculturation, deculturation, and neoculturation. This tripartite repertoire encompasses hegemonic (dominant), compliant-hegemonic (uncritical or consensual), counter-hegemonic (resistant), and alternative-hegemonic (power displacing) transcultural processes. As Raymond Williams understood it, hegemony “does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its 44

own” (1977: 112). With this focus I want to avoid the tendency to regard Latino narratives as invariably oppositional to majoritarian imaginations of nation. Moreover, my use of transculturation is not synonymous with what the Australian critic Suvendrini Perera designates “happy hybridisation” (1994:17); that is, a celebration of cultural heterogeneity as cultural resistance or counter-hegemonic success that glosses over painful and violent deculturations and potentially enacts its own authoritarian exclusions.14 1.4. Transculturation and Latino cultures How, then, do Latinos confront what José Piedra calls the “unwriteable [Latino] paradox,” or the “transcultural dilemma,” of disentangling “US in the U.S. and U.S. in US” (1991: 81, 78). As Spitta argues, this dilemma means that transcultural discourse must necessarily adapt to U.S. material conditions, and hence U.S.-based Latino writings, that diverge from the Cuban, Andean, or Southern Cone locales in which traditional transcultural studies arose (1995: 12). According to Spitta, a number of Latino critics have deployed transcultural theory in order “to expand the borders of the national to include the Cuban living in the United States, (…) or to expand the margins of the Caribbean, (…) to include cities as far north as New Orleans and as far south as Montevideo” (ibid: 22).15 However, such uses of transcultural discourse to reterritorialize the U.S. imaginary have highlighted certain risks. They may ignore or downplay factors that limit neocultural agency, with transculturation serving as the convenient shorthand for an uncritical appeal to Latino difference, heterogeneity, or subversive agency. They may reify particular transcultural processes that are sanctioned by U.S. state apparatuses, thus implying the inevitability or desirability of assimilation. And they may accede to the mythical promise of the U.S. idyll itself. These risks come into play because Latino transculturations, unlike Antillean, Andean, or Southern Cone transculturations, are linked to two entwined 45

U.S. epistemologies: that of the border, and that of immigration. The literal freedom of movement, and of socioeconomic mobility, valued in these national espitemologies indicates that the issue of American Dream mobility is intimately connected to the border and immigrant discourses that impact on Latino populations. Extant analyses of Latino cultures drawn from across the political spectrum confirm the imaginative power of the American Dream when understood as literal and socioeconomic mobility. In his Hunger of Memory (1983), for example, Richard Rodriguez argues that however painful, Latino assimilation is inevitable and desirable if Latinos are to gain access to the rights and benefits of the American Dream as citizens. The liberal Roberto Suro, while not endorsing this conservative and linear narrative of Latino migrant assimilation, nonetheless supports reformulations of that narrative into a “‘bumpy-ride’ assimilation” in which Americanization is synonymous with the production of delinquent Latinos (1998: 50-51). However, Suro’s desire to dismantle entrenched class inequities, racialized antagonisms, and institutional criminalization of Latino youth, does not stop him from endorsing a Promised Land conceptualization of the U.S.A.—“the beacon still sits atop the hill, showing the way to freedom and to home” (ibid: 323). The nation, as Suro understands it, must be renewed in order to accommodate and reward Latinos in the manner of migrant waves from across the Atlantic. A third example is Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). For Anzaldúa, both the border and the new mestiza function as metaphors of identity ambiguity, personal risk, and selffashioning potential. The danger here, however, is that Anzaldúa’s tropes imply a neocultural individualistic agency that seamlessly resolves what Jagose calls “the fundamental irresolution of the legislative border,” that is, its simultaneous breachability and separatist function, and its ambivalent productions of various oppressions (1994: 157). And despite the psychic eruptions that frustrate Anzaldúa’s desired interstitial self-fashioning, it could be argued that her border-crossing mestiza represents a 46

Chicana supplement to an Emersonian desire for self-autonomy and non-conformity beyond institutional and discursive limits. The new mestiza also wants her place in a U.S. imaginary of ever expanding horizons. These approaches reveal distinct latinizations of American Dream logics, from the hegemonically compliant to the ambivalently neocultural. Such transcultural engagements with the U.S. national imaginary are counterpointed by what Diana Taylor describes as a widespread refusal to regard as transcultural the ways by which “mainstream, dominant culture” selectively regards Latino cultures as “American” (1991: 103). Taylor emphasizes that transcultural processes include the “acquisition, adoption, and embrace of the [Latino] foreign,” as well as the exploitation of Latino labour power and of a commodified Latino sexuality (ibid: 103). To this list Oboler adds the processes by which Hispanics are regarded as a transparent voting block or a solid numerical category of ethnic citizens, and the construction by business interests of Hispanics as a cohesive consumer market (1995: 14-15).16 Such responses confirm the extent to which Latino transculturations are entangled with a pervasive dominant-cultural anxiety. As Taylor puts it, agents of dominant Anglo culture deem the boundaries of the imagined nation to have become inadequate, hence the need to co-opt, delimit or battle against the power of communities whose presence not only disrupts those boundaries but displaces “dominant groups” from the centre of the national imaginary (1991: 103). The pressing transcultural question of how Latinos might manage cultural containment and domestication underwrites the debates over latinidad as “an available cultural identity, political affiliation, or expressive genre” encompassing but not superseding particular Latino groups (Noriega and López 1996: xii). The rise of latinidades represents a significant neocultural response to U.S. residency. However, the Hispanic versus Latino debates to which the conceptual contours of latinidad are intimately related reveal strong differences in opinion over what the term signifies and the political and imaginative leverage it permits. 17 47

Such differences reflect the fact that Latino populations in the United States derive from myriad legacies and pressures. To name a few, these include war and invasion, political crisis and military dictatorship, bourgeois cosmopolitanism, globalized economic imperatives, U.S. desires for domestic servants and cheap agricultural and industrial labour, Latin American desires for socioeconomic security or betterment, or any of these in combination. Responding to these factors, Chon Noriega and Ana López argue that Latino sectors are explicable in “the matrix of differential histories” by which the names adopted by and the significations accruing to Latinos also multiply and shift. This matrix has five levels: “the ethnic or subnational (Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban-American); the interethnic and interminority (relations across communities of gender, race, sexuality, and so on); the panethnic or national category for minorities (Latino, Hispanic); the mainstream or national (American); and the hemispheric or international (Latin American)” (1996: xiii). 18 This useful schema encodes within it a sense that many Latinos may maintain, reorganize, and resignify national, communal, familial, and personal links across state frontiers. Latinos may regard themselves as members of “a single community dispersed in a variety of places” (García Canclini 1993b: 18), very much aware of how transnational socioeconomic processes link them to their original national home (Darder and Torres 1998b: 16). Conversely, however, Latinos may not regard themselves in these optimistic ways. Residency of the U.S.A. may be characterized by profound cultural shocks and losses, and by the insecurity and incoherence of a national or any other identity. Moreover, as Frances Aparicio has pointed out, continued migration from Latin America has fractured what once appeared to be clear-cut relations between Latino groups and specific U.S. sites: “Urban centers that represented the geocultural space of one hegemonic group—New York’s Puerto Rican population; Chicanos in California and the Southwest; and Cubans in Miami—have been transformed by the migration of dominicanos, colombianos, centroamericanos, peruanos, ecuatorianos, and 48

others” (1999: 8). Such variables make it imperative to differentiate between and within Latino sectors and yet to avoid simplistic distinctions between Latinos and Latin American-born residents. In turn, while those variables inform the continuing debate over identity terms among Latino commentators, as Suzanne Oboler emphasizes, such debate “becomes a false debate— insofar as, like the label Hispanic, the term Latino or Latina, or even Latin American, does not solve the problems raised by existing national and linguistic, class and racial differences in the U.S. context” (1995: 165). This position is endorsed by Noriega and López who argue that since Hispanic and Latino designate the same populations, the crucial issue lies in the different political motivations for their use (1996: xi). The struggle over terminology underwrites the fact that even when Latino is preferred over Hispanic when delineating an expansive collective rubric, like any identity category, Latino cannot elude epistemological slippage or avoid obscuring differences. Yet, awareness of these constraints has not prevented many commentators from ascribing to Latino, and the pan-ethnic sensibility of latinidad, a political force. A marker of a collective place in the U.S.A., latinidad has roots in the politicization and pan-American visions of many Latino groups during the civil rights era, in particular the Chicano and Puerto Rican nationalist movements. As Felix Padilla has shown, latinidades (latinismos) have also emerged as local, “situational” alliances between Latino communities that, sharing particular experiences of socioeconomic pauperization and political disenfranchisement, organize together over specific issues without surrendering group identifications (1985: 139). Since the 1970s latinidad has even been touted “as a significant empirical alternative to either assimilation or ethnic particularism” (López and Espíritu 1990: 200). Noriega argues that the panethnic possibilities for political action and identification signified by latinidad are also imaginatively indebted to “the pan-American political visions of Bolívar and Martí,” which inspire attempts to conceptualize Latino 49

populations in both national and continental terms (1993: 45). In this respect, latinidad signifies “the hilo/thread for a social movement to re-map ‘America,’ and—in a more immediate sense—for negotiating the representation of specific histories/identities as part of the national culture” (ibid: 46). Other advocates similarly regard latinidad as a political project aimed at resemanticizing “America.” Flores and Yúdice, for example, define latinidad as a new “social movement” that challenges the conceptual parameters of the U.S.A. (1993: 202-3). As an alternative-hegemonic and collective ethos, latinidad “threatens the dominant ‘Anglo’ culture with loss of control of its physical and metaphorical borders” (ibid: 203) and resignifies the U.S.A. “in multicultural and multicentric terms that refuse the relativist fiction of cultural pluralism” (ibid: 205). Nonetheless, Noriega points out that latinidad encodes within itself the tensions between an imaginary Latino collective and the particular historical, regional, cultural, and political differences between and in Latino groups (1993: 46-47). Such tensions are explored in Rodriguez’s Spidertown, in which institutional, discursive, and bodily constraints preclude the novel’s subalterns from envisaging a politicized latinidad. In Obejas’s Memory Mambo, the historical and ideological limits to latinidad are embodied in the fraught relationship between the novel’s Cuban-American protagonist and her Puerto Rican activist lover. Both novels reject the celebratory resistant rhetoric and transcontinental reach of much Latino discourse. Tensions of another order are recognizable in what Noriega identifies as the “sleeping giant’ thesis. The “sleeping giant” designates a populous entity forever poised to enter the U.S. “mainstream,” with the implication that Latinos are considered to be either “potential citizens” or a sector about to overrun the U.S.A. from within (1993: 47).19 For Noriega, the “official” U.S. version of latinidad presupposes the existence of a coherent, united Hispanic sector in order to generate “allegories for the nation” under siege from Hispanics. This hegemonic latinidad militates against pan-ethnic mobilization because it depends 50

on the stereotyping of Latinos as illegal aliens, drug runners, and criminals. This troping redefines and contains Latinos as a problem of and at the state’s geocultural margins, thus leaving its definitional protocols intact (ibid: 47). When celebrated by Latinos, however, the “sleeping giant” thesis has other effects, as exemplified by Ilán Stavans’s assertion that the Janus-faced phenomenon of “Hispanicization” and “Anglocization” has produced a dialectic between a rhetoric of alien invasion, cultural swamping, and embattled English, and the rival rhetoric of “Moctezuma’s revenge” (1994: 9-10). The latter term describes the Hispanic “reconquista” of the U.S.A. and the assimilation of Anglos into Latinos: “We shall infiltrate the enemy, we shall populate its urban centers, marry its daughters, and reestablish the kingdom of Aztlán. We are here to reclaim what we were deprived of, to take revenge” (ibid: 200). Deliberately appropriating the racial utopia envisaged by the Mexican José Vasconcelos in his La raza cósmica from 1925, and later adapted by the 1960s Chicano movement, Stavans’s “we” denies Latinas of all sexualities and queer Latinos a place in a desired “cosmic enterprise.” His particular Mexican emphasis also erases nonChicano Latinos from that enterprise. His stance exemplifies the latinidad disputed by Román and Sandoval[-Sánchez], which “circulates as a critical shorthand valorizing seemingly authentic cultural practices that challenge both colonial and imperialist U.S. ideologies in North and South America. The basis of its own ideological construction and sustenance, however, is never overtly challenged” (1995: 558). A celebratory latinidad signals a faulty counter-hegemonic logic if its application continues to disparage certain groups, in particular, women and queer Latinos. Indeed, this species of latinidad may comply with or perpetuate the Latino stereotypes, or “tropicalizations,” circulating in the U.S.A. (ibid: 559). Unreflexive latinidades may not only fail to “irritate” or denounce U.S. “racist and imperialist practices,” but replicate them (ibid: 558). Faced with the tensions between the latinidades of counterhegemonic intent articulated by Latinos and the damaging por51

trayals of Latinos generated by dominant cultural institutions, Frances Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman argue that the U.S. national imaginary is informed by “tropicalism” or tropicalization. The terms refer to a “system of ideological fictions [by] which the dominant (Anglo and European) cultures trope Latin American and U.S. Latino identities and cultures” (1997: 1). Building from Román and Sandoval’s tropicalization while also filtering Said’s notion of the discourse of Orientalism through a transcultural lens, tropicalism avoids the “uni-directional” gaze of Said’s work by recognizing two simultaneous trajectories. First, hegemonic tropicalizations of Latinos are “distributed among official texts, history, literature, and the media” and disseminated throughout U.S. society (ibid: 8). Second, Latinos may appropriate and resemanticize dominant cultural stereotypes into politicized representations of Latinos (ibid: 12). Tropicalization thus emphasizes how Latino identifications emerge in a dialectic between Latino self or group and often virulently stereotypical Anglo perceptions. As with Román and Sandoval’s notion of tropicalization, this dialectic does not, and cannot, preclude the appearances of unreflective “self-tropicalizations” (ibid: 11). As a particular transcultural dynamic, a tropicalized dialectic appears in distinct forms in the narratives discussed in Latino Dreams. Key targets for resemanticization in Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust are the locally produced fantasies of an island paradise threatened by U.S. colonization. Rodriguez’s Spidertown and Alire Sáenz’s Carry Me Like Water explore the rhetoric of Latino criminality, the former text uneasily staging an escape from a criminalized barrio setting, the latter redirecting the charge of criminality to U.S. state apparatuses and the patriarchal home. Obejas’s Memory Mambo distances itself from the self-tropicalizing “close dance” metaphor of much Cuban-exile writing. And while Fusco and Gómez-Peña aim to disrupt the circulations of tropicalized Latino stereotypes by parodying the stereotypes, their performances also raise questions about the efficacy of the cultural-political gesture itself. 52

1.5. The Latino narrative “scenario” Informed by the Latino debates outlined here, the modified transcultural analytic proposed in this book approaches Latino narratives as contested transcultural scenarios of nation. I borrow “scenario” from García Canclini, for whom the term does not designate a narrative text per se, but rather the shifting places in which processes of national identity formation, geopolitical and geocultural boundary construction, and cultural flux are staged, contested, and potentially reformulated (1995: 273). In such scenarios alternative stories of nation and belonging may be articulated. My analysis heeds the ways Latinos have been selectively excluded from or fixed as peripheral or disruptive to an array of national myths and governing cultural logics. It acknowledges how Latino cultural texts may resist and disrupt the imaginary contours of the U.S.A. However, my transcultural approach does not subscribe to the idea that Latino narratives inevitably manage either an escape from U.S. discursive formations or a subversion of U.S. hegemonic processes. Therefore, I attend to the possibility that the U.S.A. may modulate and restrain alternative or resistant Latino visions of nation. Latino texts may even stage moments of hegemonic complicity or generate other authoritative exclusions. In short, complex, mutable, and often surprising logics of domination, subordination, and resistance characterize the U.S.A. on view in the texts discussed in the following chapters. Notes 1. The LASSG emerged in the early 1990s when a number of U.S.-based academics sought to introduce to Latin American studies the theoretical approaches pioneered by the Subaltern Studies collective of Indian scholars whose first volume of essays was published in 1981. For a list of the LASSG’s inaugural members, see Beverley and Oviedo (1993: 237). 2. See Bach (1992) for a survey of migration trends. To this data could be added: 40% of Puerto Ricans live in the United States (Darder and Torres 1998b: 15); Los Angeles is El Salvador’s second-largest metropolis; 10% of Dominicans reside in the United States; over 10% of Cubans live in the U.S.A.; and, according to Maciel and Herrera-Sobek, “It has been estimated 53

that around 20 percent of Mexico’s total population has emigrated to the United States in less than a one-hundred-year period [and that] (…) more immigrants have come from Mexico to the United States than from any other country” (1998: 4). These figures are not intended to signal what Juan Flores calls a “demographic mentality” by which “Numbers call forth labels, which in turn engender stereotypes” (1997: 186). 3. In U.S. historiography there is a longstanding debate about whether or not the U.S.A. is an imperial entity. I side with those historians who accept the imperial designation, reject neat schemas in which an all-powerful U.S.A. is invariably arraigned against passive targets (a proposition that has become impossible to maintain after the events of September 11, 2001), and desimplify understandings of the U.S.A.’s shifting political, economic and cultural hegemony in the hemisphere. For historical overviews and critiques of these debates, see the anthology edited by Joseph, Legrand, and Salvatore (1998: Parts 1 and 3). On this score, it is salutary to note the absence of an equivalent reticence in Latin American cultural criticism produced from the late nineteenth century. South of the border, the U.S.A.’s imperial leanings have long been recognized. 4. In his The Frontier in Latin American History (1978) the first monograph on Latin American frontiers in the light of Frederick Jackson Turner’s pivotal 1893 essay on the U.S. frontier, Alistair Hennessy claims that Latin American states “are frontier societies lacking a frontier myth.” These states, he suggests, did not develop equivalents to the post-Turner ideals of the selffashioned, unconstrained frontiersman, horizonless opportunity, or a democratic and civilizing mission into uncharted wilderness (3-4). Here, however, I want to expand the frontier concept to encompass longstanding Latin American perceptions of continental incommensurabilities. Other expansions of the frontier concept include Weber and Rausch, and Garza-Falcón’s beautiful discussion of Mexican-American relations to the historiographic frontier tradition inaugurated by Walter Prescott Webb. 5. See Martí (1995), José Saldívar (1991: 4-11), and Fernández Retamar (1979: 23-24). Other examples include Rodó’s Ariel (1988) in which he characterized the U.S.A. as a “Calibanic” threat to the cultured “Ariel-like” Latin Americas, and the Latin American left’s Manichean interpretation of the North-South divide as the evil Americanization of Latin American peoples (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 85-86; Dorfman 1998: 252-53). See also Chanady (1994b; 1995) for accounts of national imaginary formations in Latin America. 6. David Thelen, for example, identifies this frontier as “run[ning] through south Florida” where it “is shared by Americans [sic] and Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and other Latin Americans” (1992: 438). However, his use of national categories opposes “Americans” to communities with origins in Latin America, thus denying the latter any claim to U.S. status. 54

7. Antonio Benítez-Rojo (1996) regards the Antilles as a meta-archipelago of “repeating islands” cohered by common histories of slave-based plantation economies and a polyrhythmic chaos of shared cultural signs and colonial legacies: languages, races, and differential experiences of modernity. Flores and Yúdice provide the concept of the “living border” that revives and resignifies the “moving frontier” effect celebrated by Frederick Jackson Turner. For these authors, the “transform[ation of] the ocean into a frontier on whose other side lay a ‘new’ world, (…) was subsequently defined by the westward movement and capitalization of the margin,” but that margin is now in Latinizing motion inside the U.S. (1993: 202). And Luis Rafael Sánchez deploys the “flying airbus” to connote the air-borne, circuitous frontier negotiated by residents of a Puerto Rico split between island and mainland (1994: 11-22). 8. An evocative expansion of the borderlands concept is implied by the title of Lauro Flores’s anthology The Floating Borderlands (1998) itself recalling the Cuban-American Eduardo Machado’s The Floating Island Plays (1991). 9. Some critics argue that Ortiz’s counter-metropolitan approach has been marginalized, if not ignored, in Anglophone colonial discourse analysis and cultural studies. Mignolo demonstrates that Ortiz’s notion of cultural counterpoints anticipates by fifty years Edward Said’s contrapuntal analysis in Culture and Imperialism (1995: xiv). See Coronil’s introduction to the English translation of Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint (1995) for an account of this neglect. Coronil (1993) and Díaz-Quinoñes (1997) provide useful contextualizations of Ortiz’s work. The significant treatments of transcultural discourse in Anglophone criticism are: Pérez Firmat (1989), Larsen (1990), Pratt (1992), Lionnet (1995), Benítez-Rojo (1996), Spitta (1995), Aparicio and ChávezSilverman (1997), and Mignolo (2000). 10. See, for example, José María Arguedas’s Formación de una cultura indoamericana (1997) and the essays ‘No soy un acculturado’ (1990), and ‘The Novel and the Problem of Literary Expression in Peru’ and ‘Puquio: A Culture in Process of Change” (prologue and epilogue essays to the English translation of Yawar Fiesta [1985]). Aside from Rama’s work on Arguedas (1982), useful assessments of Arguedas’s transcultural theories include Spitta (1995), Sandoval and Boschetto-Sandoval (1998), and Díaz Caballero (1987). 11. For elaborations, see Moraga (1983), Norma Alarcón (1983; 1994), Pratt (1993), and Rebolledo (1995) 12. This approach builds from Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman who first proposed a critical dialogue between subaltern and transcultural studies (1997). 13. There is a vast literature on subalternity and subaltern theory, and I don’t wish to replicate that literature here. For assessments of Indian Subaltern Studies and its international influence see Mallon (1994), Mignolo (2000), Guha and Spivak (1988), and Spivak (1988b; 1990a). The 1993 ‘Founding Statement’ of The Latin American Subaltern Studies Group (LASSG) presents the Group’s key arguments. A vigorous debate followed the publication 55

of this text. For example, Gareth Williams argued that the LASSG operates under a fantasy of escape from the “tyranny” of the intellectual (1996). Also highly critical was Florencia Mallon (1994) who decried as obscurantist and simplifying the LASSG’s move away from historical materialism toward a notion of constructed subaltern subjectivity in line with much “northern” poststructural theory. Mallon also notes that despite the LASSG’s antiliterature stance many of the group’s members are literary critics. Responses to such claims are found in Beverley and Sanders (1997), and Beverley (1994; 1996; 1999). 14. Critiquing a trend in Anglophone postcolonial theory, Perera argues that in Australia an Anglo-Celtic antipodean hybridity (whiteness displaced; an “uncontaminated, asexual and non-native hybridity”) is socially laudable, while the Aboriginal-European hybrid is denied or punished (1994: 19). Also suspicious of hybrid discourse, the Mexican García Canclini argues that the rituals by which people “classify the real” are necessary “because we do not tolerate excessive hybridization” and “we can’t live in permanent indetermination and transgression” (1993a: 80-81). Nonetheless, García Canclini prefers the term hybridization, as opposed to mestizaje, for indicating “diverse intercultural mixtures” rather than racialized ones (1995: 11, n1). In this study, however, I try to avoid using “hybrid” or its related terms. As I argue elsewhere, I side with commentators for whom cultural uses of the “hybrid” in our era have not resolved the term’s miscegenative and colonial genealogy (2001). It should also be noted that the conception of transculturation deployed in this book explicitly diverges from Beverley’s reading of the mode as founded, like mestizaje, on “a fantasy of class, gender, and racial reconciliation” (1999: 47). This claim ignores the mode’s conceptual divergence from the discourse of mestizaje. It also ignores Ortiz’s attentions to deculturation, and Rama’s to the ravages of transculturation. I take issue, too, with Beverley’s naming of the disparate writings of Antonio Cornejo Polar, Homi Bhabha, Michael Taussig, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Harlow, Mary Louise Pratt, and Néstor García Canclini “as variations—sometimes consciously so—of the transculturation model” (1994: 285, n2). Of these critics, only Pratt and Cornejo Polar have dealt explicitly with transculturation. While Pratt (1992) has been highly influential in introducing the transcultural mode to Anglophone readers, particularly those interested in postcolonial debates, Cornejo Polar’s short essay, ‘Mestizaje e hibridez’ (1997), reveals him to be a critic of happy hybridity, and of uses of transculturation that celebrate cultural admixture. Bhabha (1994), of course, is the chief architect of happy hybridity, a discourse I regard as antithetical to transculturation. Despite Beverley’s opposition to transcultural discourse and what he perceives to be its elite literary applications, he nonetheless endorses instances of “transculturation from below” in which the subaltern “appropriates us for her purposes,” “us” being U.S.-based Latin Americanists like himself (1996: 272-73). 56

15. The examples Spitta cites are Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island (1996) an account of Caribbean transculturation as postmodernist disorder and chaos, and Pérez Firmat’s The Cuban Condition, in which transculturation is defined as an intralingual “translation sensibility” (1989: 4). While neither text discusses U.S. Latino cultures, Spitta identifies a Cuban-exile nostalgia in both works. She also points out that in Pérez Firmat’s study of Cuban-American culture, Life on the Hyphen, the linguistic approach to transculturation translates as the erasure of the Cuban-African emphasis that distinguished Ortiz’s work, and as the reification of language retention and loss in such a way as to imply the inevitability of Latino assimilation (1995: 21; 1997). 16. See Arlene Dávila’s Latino, Inc. (2001) for a sustained analysis of how Latinos have been marketed into a purportedly cohesive minority. 17. Oboler (1995) provides the most comprehensive overview of “Hispanic” versus “Latino” identity debates. Clara Rodríguez examines the changing “racial” and taxonomic status of “Hispanics” in relation to the U.S. Census (2000). The following sources represent a selected chronology of useful commentary on these debates, most favouring Latino: Padilla (1985); Klor de Alva (1998 [1989]); Flores and Yúdice (1993 [1990]); Noriega (1993); Román and Sandoval (1995); Noriega and López (1996); Aparicio (1997); Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman (1997); Juan Flores (1997); William Flores and Rina Benmayor (1997); Jones-Correa (1997); Nelson and Tienda (1997); Darder and Torres (1998); Aparicio (1999); Oboler (1999); Juan Flores (2000); Dávila (2001); and, Richard Rodriguez (2000: 103-23). 18. A similar schema is provided by Klor de Alva (1997: 61-63). Such schemas are further complicated when Latinos establish political, community, and identity links with African-Americans and Anglophone African-Antilleans (Fusco 1995a: 159-68; and, Juan Flores 1993: 184; 2000: 10). An indigenousinflected Chicanismo may more readily engender political alliances and identifications with Native Americans than with other Latino groups (Anzaldúa 1987; Roberto Rodríguez 1997). 19. The infamous penultimate episode of Seinfeld, ‘The Puerto Rican Day Parade’ that aired in the U.S.A. on May 7, 1998, provided an exemplary scenario of threatening latinization from a dominant cultural perspective. In an episode in which Kramer “accidentally” sets alight a Puerto Rican flag in the centenary of U.S. rule, the anxiety-ridden Seinfeld Four—symbolic representatives of Anglo-America, despite their disparate immigrant origins— encounter a Latino border erected in the heart of transcultural Manhattan that prevents them from returning to a home that no longer exists.

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2 Rosario Ferré’s trans-“American” fantasy, or subalternizing the self

1998 marked the centenary of Puerto Rico’s transfer from Spanish to U.S. colonial rule. However, in the final story of Rosario Ferré’s interlinked novel and story collection, Sweet Diamond Dust (1996b [1988]), Ferré’s reworking of her earlier Maldito amor (1994 [1986]),1 a futuristic 1998 is imagined as the year in which Congress imposes independence on the island. The decision sparks a disastrous flight of capital as well as civil unrest between a politicized popular sector of salseros, many of whom are mainland returnees, and the ostensibly apolitical sector of middle-class, white rockeros. The story ends with the assassination of Captain Candelario, descendant of the plantocratic De la Valle family whose fall from pre-1898 Edenic grace underpins Ferré’s collection. Yet coming after his betrayal at the hands both of his lover and his best male friend, Candelario’s final refusal to take sides has an odd effect on the narrative’s treatments of the Puerto Rican national identity crisis exacerbated by the events of 1898. Candelario’s dying stance provides Ferré’s narrative with a closing scene of an exemplary oligarchic victim. Rather than dispensing with masculinist narratives of nation, the scene appears to reinscribe a hegemonic Creole presence into the national ideal purportedly under attack by an array of subaltern and subaltern-affiliated figures throughout the novel and its appended stories.2 As played out under the U.S. aegis, this seemingly paradoxical move—to attack elite Puerto Rican ideals from subaltern perspectives and yet to concede a space for the retention of oligarchic privilege—makes Sweet Diamond Dust a provocative text with which to begin discussing Latino narrative treatments of the U.S. imaginary. Although the narrative’s settings never shift from island to mainland Latino geopolities, that shift is an-

nounced on a linguistic level by Ferré’s English-language conversion of Maldito amor, her first novel and the only one to be written in Spanish. In this chapter, then, while I refer to the Spanish original, I concentrate on the short novel and appended stories contained in Sweet Diamond Dust—the U.S. version. Of all the authors discussed in this book, Ferré has attracted the most critical attention. However, most commentators have disregarded Sweet Diamond Dust. Few of the critics who have dealt with Maldito amor have examined the short novel and appended stories as a narrative whole, a treatment that perhaps reflects the text’s generic elusiveness, as implied by Susana Cavallo’s questions: “¿Qué es, pues, Maldito amor? ¿El cuento inicial que lleva dicho nombre, la novela entera que incluye cuatro cuentos, o una novela llamada Maldito amor y tres cuentos?” (1992: 199). However, whether dealing with the short novel alone or one of the stories, most critics have read into Ferré’s narrative an effective transclass and transracial victory along feminist and subaltern anti-U.S. lines. Yet as my remarks on Candelario’s death suggest, such claims are made despite the fact that the novel’s response to the U.S.-Puerto Rican relationship is hegemonically compromised. 2.1. Writing without tartamudear Ferré has characterized her ongoing literary project in terms of a voyaging metaphor. In her essay ‘On Destiny, Language, and Translation; or, Ophelia Adrift in the C & O Canal,’ Ferré dreams herself floating between the two apparently discontinuous worlds in which she lives, always shifting between Puerto Rico and the U.S.A., between English and Spanish languages, and between Anglo and Latin American cultures (1991: 15455).3 Regarding those neither/nor “between” spaces as her “true habitat as a writer,” Ferré permits herself to “become the meeting place of both” Anglophone and Hispanophone Americas (ibid: 155). Beyond this posited interstitial embodiment—an encoding of self which implies that she rather than the discrete 60

worlds she mediates is the locus of transcultural processes—the voyaging metaphor reappears in a different form in Sweet Diamond Dust’s prefatory ‘Memoir.’ Here, Ferré argues that a mutable Puerto Rican imaginary is encapsulated in the connotations of the word “Puerto” rather than its mythical qualifier “Rico”: the “Puerto” better metaphorizes the colony’s shifting, nomadic identity (1996b: x). This definition takes on ideological and economic significance in the passage from Spanish to English version. The ideological target in Maldito amor’s depiction of Puerto Rican power struggles is located in “literatura, el lenguaje mismo” that has emphasized the Rico at the expense of the Puerto (1994: 14). However, the translation to English has moved the locus of the dispute for power from literature to market forces of “Change, exchange—in dollar bills or coins, in English or in Spanish” (1996b: x). This shift from literary-linguistic to commercial-linguistic traffic suggests a considered response to distinct cultural markets and readerships as determined by two distinct systems of capital, schematized by Ferré as a preindustrial, traditional Latin America arraigned against industrialized “North American” civilization (1991: 157). Aside from the fact that Ferré found it impossible to translate the Spanish title’s connotations of “a love [of nation] that is halfway between doomed and damned,” she claims that the move to English necessitated a titular recognition of the commodity that dominates the narrative, sugar, and an overhaul of the Spanish-language narrative in order to accommodate “The language of technology and capitalism” and its impact on the island’s economy (ibid: 160-61). This historicization is motivated by Ferré’s perhaps patronizing belief in her “duty” to translate her works not only for the working-class Puerto Rican migrants in the U.S.A. who “can[not] afford to keep memory clean and well tended,” but for their children who have wilfully deculturated their Spanish and thus committed “cultural suicide” (ibid: 163).4 At the same time, Ferré argues that translation involves a commitment to a feminist-modulated pan-American imaginary beyond nationalism (ibid: 164). So jus61

tified, Sweet Diamond Dust—referent, rival, and successor to Maldito amor—contains substantial inserted explanations of Puerto Rican history absent from its predecessor. The Englishlanguage narrative exceeds transliteral equivalence to the Spanish version and circulates as a distinct literary product. In keeping with the strictly maintained dichotomies in which Ferré claims to operate as a writer, the English narrative represents the productive outcome of a different set of cultural values, authorial intentions, and anticipated audiences. Not surprisingly, the existence of rival linguistic scenarios has engendered rival responses on the part of the two critics who have dealt with them at length. According to Suzanne Hintz, the changes in English are designed to provide U.S. readers with the historical information required to unpack the novel’s complex depictions of Puerto Rico’s colonial predicament, under Spain before 1898, and under the U.S. after that date. Hintz rightly claims that “All the external intertextual elements [in Maldito amor] are present in the English translation” (1995: 189); but she also argues that the additions transform the English successor into an ideologically disarmed relative of the Spanish original. No longer concerned with “the search for social or political identity” (ibid), the English-language version constructs “Anglo readers” as “passive recipients of a didactic lesson on Puerto Rican history and culture” (ibid: 190). That lesson, moreover, lacks the Spanish original’s “quality and beauty” (ibid: 191). Opposed to Hintz’s reductive reading of Ferré’s translational and aesthetic surrender to Anglo-America, Janice Jaffe contends that by moving from Spanish to English, “Ferré begins to articulate a positive identity beyond colonialism for Puerto Rico” (1995: 66). For Jaffe, the additions to the English-language text title supply what Maldito amor fails to provide: a desimplified sense of the violent realities of the Spanish colonial regime and the island’s plantocratic system. As well, Sweet Diamond Dust describes the spirited local resistance to the U.S. takeover absent from Maldito amor, while refusing to dismiss all things North American as evil (ibid: 75-77). In this way, the English narrative 62

overcomes the ambivalences encoded in Maldito amor’s title so that Sweet Diamond Dust’s posited audience of Englishspeaking Puertorriqueños may recognize themselves in “a new portrait” of Puerto Rican identity produced by the mutual neoculturation of “Hispanic and Anglo heritages” (ibid: 77-78). These divergent responses highlight the difficulty in any attempt to fix either version’s cultural valency and location. Both versions suffer in the critics’ readings because they are regarded as either more or less authentic, and therefore authoritative, in comparison to their linguistic and cultural rival. Without acknowledging the factors of class and access to elite cultural capital that determine Ferré’s readership, Hintz assumes that the web of intertextual references in Maldito amor are immediately accessible to a homogenized Puerto Rican audience. This readership, unlike English-only readers, requires no assistance in decoding the narrative’s at times obscure cultural references. On the other hand, Jaffe assumes with Ferré that the move to English will be appreciated and read by a homogenized entity of U.S.-based Puerto Ricans, although it is doubtful whether that mostly working-class sector would constitute Ferré’s constituency. Moreover, the preoccupation with the comparative merits or failings of either version may be connected to another factor: the authoritativeness of historical and literary representations produced in a place often rejected by Anglo and Latin Americas as belonging to the other America/América. This factor is at work on the back cover of the English-language paperback edition I possess, with its selling-point references to the narrative’s staging of “the class struggles and political evolution of Latin America—and Puerto Rico in particular” and its “splendid” achievement as a national allegory. Here, Ferré’s collection is defined solely as a Latin American product, thus reinscribing two political and historical discontinuities: first, that between the U.S.A. and its colony; and second, that between U.S. culture and this Puerto Rican scenario of translated culture which engages with the socioeconomic and cultural impact of U.S. rule. Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, Ferré’s English-language works are 63

often dismissed as antithetical to or betraying purported national values. It is significant that Ferré’s three most recent novels, The House on the Lagoon (1996a [1995]), Eccentric Neighborhoods (1998), and Flight of the Swan (2001), were written in English rather than Spanish, with the Spanish translations following. In a sense, the tensions between language use and national status in Ferré’s earlier work seem to have been resolved by Ferré’s English-first decision. Ferré has rejected both Spanish and translation from Spanish as writerly options.5 Nonetheless, the language dispute continues to be played out in these texts. For example, The House on the Lagoon features an extended meditation on language use by one of the characters, Quintín, on discovering his wife Isabel’s novel, written secretly and in English. Echoing Commonwealth status-quo rhetoric, Quintín overlooks the socioeconomic inequalities generated by the metropolitancolonial relationship and instead emphasizes the modernizing and regional advantages that English brings to the increasingly bilingual island when compared to its preindustrial, underdeveloped Antillean neighbours (1996a: 150). He then questions Isabel’s decision—itself replicating that of Isabel’s real-world author—to write in Puerto Rico, in English: “Would Isabel herself give up English if the island became independent? Would she have written her manuscript in English if she didn’t think English was important? If she had written her novel in Spanish and published it in Puerto Rico, why, only a handful of people would read it! But if she published in the United States, thousands would read it” (ibid: 151). In her response to The House on the Lagoon, Lydia González-Quevedo endorses Ferré’s attempts to expand her audience in the U.S.A. beyond a limited Puerto Rican readership. Discounting criticism of Ferré’s English-only move as driven by market forces and facilitated by ruling-class cosmopolitanism, González-Quevedo argues that Ferré overcomes Puerto Rico’s “postcolonial condition” by confirming the essential bilingualism of Puerto Rican culture and identity. This move is paralleled by the “brave” class-boundary 64

crossing by which Ferré dispenses with her oligarchic status (1996: 260-63). However, this leads González-Quevedo to two contentious assertions. Not only does the “hegemonic” Ferré “embrace the margins” and thus speak for Puerto Rico’s multiracial subalterns (ibid: 263), but she herself “may be seen as [a] subaltern who can write [her] history and rewrite that of [her] country” (ibid: 116), a stance replicated by many of Ferré’s female characters who also engage in the boundary-crossing tactics championed by their creator. While González-Quevedo is correct to identify Ferré as a wilful self-subalternizer, I do not wish to follow her example by endorsing this stance. Ferré’s self-subalternization is predicated on a contradictory and fraught desire to reject class privilege and to ally the “raceless” (white) Puerto Rican woman with the racialized (mixed race or black) female subaltern against patriarchal discourses and agents, both imperial and nationalist. This move is evident, too, in Ferré’s role as an implied author in fiction and in the “true” voice of her essays and interviews. Ferré’s shifts between fictional discourse and essayistic modes parallel the author-functions of a host of Latin American writers who imaginatively blur the boundaries between truth and fiction, history and story, and, author and narrator. In Ferré’s case, however, her narratorial project is always imbricated in the unresolved relationship between metropolis and colony—the geopolitical entities she claims to voyage between. In this context, her purported politics of subaltern identification and affiliation threatens to come unstuck. In particular, Ferré’s key argument in her early essays and fiction that U.S. colonialism parallels the patriarchal colonization of women (1990: 107-10) is troubled by a doubled metastasis: of the class and racialized boundaries that disturb woman as a meaningful universal category; and, of the historical antipathy of subaltern sectors toward oligarchic representatives and/or cosmopolitan agents like herself. These tensions shadow the language debates internalized in Sweet Diamond Dust. For certain characters, English-use signals a colonial dependency not as easily explained or overcome as 65

asserted in González-Quevedo’s endorsement of Ferré’s stated ambitions as a writer. Considering Ferré’s linguistic conversion of Maldito amor and her subsequent English-first moves, it is ironic that many characters in Sweet Diamond Dust express their antipathy for the socioeconomic and political imperative to speak English, a position not articulated in the later novels. In the short novel, Titina, the De la Valle family’s servant, testifies how Ubaldino, the family’s patriarch, combined U.S. foreign policy terms (“Manifest Destiny,” “Big Stick Diplomacy”) and the vocabulary of commodities (“Scott Emulsion,” “Palmolive Soap,” “Baseball”) into a litany of nationalist hate against the invaders (1996b: 22). If Titina’s testimony confirms Ubaldino’s perception that the U.S. regime threatens his class standing, Ubaldino’s son Arístides is more cynical. He recognizes in English, “that barbarous tongue,” a means to access the capital needed for modernization and wealth (ibid: 40). Adriana, the protagonist in ‘Isolda’s Mirror,’ hates the English she nonetheless speaks without an accent and argues against having English spoken at her wedding, a stance that conjoins the rejection of a colonizing English language with her own proto-feminist will to independence. This position is echoed in the final story when Barbara reasons that colonial status has resulted in a theft of Spanish language that has been tolerated by the people. Yet in ‘Sweet Diamond Dust,’ the mulatto Gloria regards the rejection of English-language use as a ruse on the part of the hated Creole elite. It masks the real motive for opposition to U.S. control, the oligarchic resistance to providing basic amenities and decent work conditions for sugar-estate employees. Finally, Gloria’s stance diverges from that of Laura, her mother-in-law and employer, who sees in Gloria’s child a neocultural solution to colonialism: “Nicolasito can be said to be the child of all. In her [Gloria’s] body, or if you prefer her cunt, both races, both languages, English and Spanish, grew into one soul, into one wordweed of love” (ibid: 76). These conflicting positions support González-Quevedo’s claim that Ferré’s writing is embroiled in the volatile debates 66

accompanying the many legislative moves since 1898 to secure Spanish, English, or both, as official Puerto Rican idioms (1996: 90-92). However, this insight ought not to translate into a confirmation that Ferré’s attempt to subalternize herself ensures her narratives’ counter-narrative success. Ferré’s linguistic pragmatism, announced by the transformation of Maldito amor into Sweet Diamond Dust and sustained in her later English-language novels, does not quite typify Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s perceptive observation about Puerto Rican English-language use: “English, in both its standard and popular forms, is increasingly more important for speaking not to Washington but to fellow travelers, both Puerto Ricans and others” (1997: 281). The issue of Ferré’s language uses is not simply about which language is a more viable or authentic Puerto Rican idiom, for irrevocably, English has joined Spanish as a Puerto Rican language. Rather, the issue is centred on the sorts of cultural capital trafficked in and announced by her particular recourse to both languages. Ferré may not operate in ideological consort with those independentistas and intellectuals who reify Spanish as the true Puerto Rican language, but neither is she a proponent of Spanglish, the idiom of many Puerto Ricans, whether U.S. or island-based. According to Negrón-Muntaner, practitioners of Spanglish are widely disparaged as “tartamudos, unable to communicate either in English or Spanish” (ibid: 270). While such dismissals fail to account for the neocultural creativity and communicative viability of Spanglish, the point with regard to Ferré is that there are no signs in her writing of a Spanglish imperative. She is at home and voyages easily in Spanish and English, pero sin tartamudear, without grammatical and semantic modulations, interruptions, or contaminations from the other language.6 The interstices in which Ferré claims she and her Englishand Spanish-language narratives float thus signal a conception of continental place that permits movements between states without loss of social status, without actual danger of subalternization, and without fear of gross misunderstandings or voice67

lessness. These extratextual factors—the ease of Ferré’s voyaging in two languages, and the positing of herself and of her novels as bridging solutions to hemispherical antagonisms—thus provide a worldly frame for Sweet Diamond Dust’s political and imaginative project and its particular textual trafficking. 7 2.2. Epigraphs of a Creole national fantasy Even before the reader arrives at the first page of Sweet Diamond Dust, textual traffic is announced by the novel’s dedications to two nineteenth-century Puerto Rican figures, José Gautier Benítez and Juan Morel Campos, the latter responsible for the song that supplies Maldito amor’s title. The traffic continues with two epigraphs, the first from the Spanish Golden Age author Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, the second from Gautier Benítez, that appear in Spanish only in both English and Spanish versions: Es hielo abrasador, es fuego helado, es herida que duele y no se siente, es un soñado bien, un mal presente es un breve descanso muy cansado. - Francisco de Quevedo Perla que el mar de entre su concha arranca al agitar sus ondas placenteras; garza dormida entre la espuma blanca del níveo cinturón de tus riberas. - José Gautier Benítez

The epigraphs encapsulate the thematic concerns of the narrative that follows. The juxtaposition of Quevedo’s amatory verse and Gautier Benítez’s lyric about the pearl that is the Puerto Rican motherland signals the twinning of two discursive fields: that of the colonial, metropolitan centre, of Spain as source of genealogical and cultural authority, here represented by Quevedo, a key figure in the Spanish literary canon; and that of 68

a nineteenth-century Puerto Rican Creole rendering of the island as a prelapsarian paradise. As Ferré notes, the lines from Gautier Benítez typify the master narrative of nation he inaugurated by relating the island’s natural features to the character of its people (1996b: 75). Yet the epigraph also betrays the inherent contradictions of this identification. Despite its island origins and its self-conscious recourse to baroque Spanish language, the image of “el níveo cinturón de tus riberas” confirms that this Creole will to represent Puerto Rico is inescapably and nostalgically tied to Spain, the imported adjective “níveo” having no referent in the tropical destination. The epigraph from Gautier Benítez thus suggests an ambivalent rendering of Puerto Rico as of and yet beyond Spain. At the same time, Quevedo’s transported words, characterized by the collision of opposites from which neither part can emerge unmodified or dominant, hint at the repressed conflicts in the Creole elite’s national ideal. The epigraphic meeting of these textual sources of authority provides the most significant discursive context for the short novel and its appended stories. That context is linked to the novel’s setting on a sugar estate for whose proprietors, the De la Valle family, 1898 signalled the end of one colonial order and the beginning of a different colonial relationship. U.S. control would see the sugar plantocracy’s economic, political and symbolic privilege increasingly compromised, if not dismantled. 8 In ‘Sweet Diamond Dust’ the threatened plantocracy is championed by Don Hermenegildo Martínez, a lawyer who writes a history of Puerto Rico with the aim of legitimizing one plantocrat, Ubaldino De la Valle, as an anti-U.S. hero. This nationalist project is given foundational authority in ‘Guamaní,’ the novel’s opening section. Set before 1898, the image of a conflict-free, bountiful paradise is carefully elaborated, and the main source of Guamaní’s prosperity is attributed to the production of sugar in the town’s surrounding plantations. The perspective is univocal, emanating from the world of the plantocracy and their class allies whose ranks include the speaker. This worldview does not recognize how slaves and their descendants have “no language 69

but the labour of their hands,” to use Lamming’s eloquent words (1992: 120). Nor does the worldview question naturalized gender and class divides. Nonetheless, disturbances to the narrative’s apparently benign descriptions of the Puerto Rican gran familia do appear. The narrator casually mentions Spanish tortures. His descriptions contain words for local fruit, plants, and food that would signify an unfathomable Puerto Rican alterity in Spain. And the narrator contradicts his descriptions of an idyllic Guamaní—for Acosta Cruz a simulacrum of the region around Ponce (1993a: 24), a simulacrum that also functions as a synecdoche for the island—with this qualification: “A happy world no doubt, although poor and backward” (7). Such statements imply much. First, they hint at a violent past of Spanish conquest, Indian genocide (described dryly by Fernando Ortiz as a “transculturation that failed” [1995: 100] and slavery. Second, they reveal a transculturated society that is neither a mere adjunct of Spain nor a passive receptacle for supposedly immutable Spanish values. And third, they threaten to undermine the narrator’s attempts at erasing any traces of class, racial, and gender antagonisms. The idyllic scenario is significant in another sense, for while the Spanish version casually cites the Tainos as Guamaní’s mythical founders, or tends to mention them obliquely in the reference to Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia natural de Indias, ‘Sweet Diamond Dust’ describes Taino culture in some detail. This romanticization of an indigenous legacy returns in ‘The Gift’ with the mulatto Carlotta’s selection to represent the queen in the festival commemorating Juan Ponce de León’s conquest of the island. In this story, however, the “dark” Carlotta’s desire to Africanize the carnival threatens the white Creole elite who regard themselves as the arbiters of what Arlene Dávila calls “haciendo patria, or helping to forge and strengthen the nation” (1997: 153). More overtly than Maldito amor, Sweet Diamond Dust alludes to elite appropriations of the Tainos to provide the national imaginary with both a romanticized “native” and a Spanish colonial provenance, an imaginary familiar 70

to many Puerto Ricans given the post-1950s official recuperation of the Tainos into a fantasy of cultural and racial harmony despite colonization. The need for such a fantasy on the part of the elite is justified by the narrator’s description of Guamaní’s and, therefore, Puerto Rico’s fall from Edenic grace in 1898: “Today all that has changed. Far from being a paradise, Guamaní has become a hell, a monstrous whirlpool from which the terrifying funnel of Snow White Sugar Mills spews out sugar night and day toward the north” (1996b: 7). “Snow white” is the Puerto Rican term for the sugar manufactured for U.S. consumption.9 But Ferré’s use of the term to designate a U.S.-owned sugar mill also cleverly toys with Gautier Benítez’s poetic usage of snow in the novel’s epigraph. Here, an alien phenomenon suggests that U.S. capital and technologies are similarly foreign to island realities. 10 The events of 1898, Hermenegildo claims, inaugurate a Puerto Rican fairy tale gone wrong. His assessment indicates that the novel’s central conflict is between the plantocracy and the U.S. invaders over Puerto Rico’s symbolic “patrimony,” thus confirming Gerald Guinness’s assertion that when “Faced by this challenge to their hegemony the members of this endangered species evolved, with the help of their intellectuals, the comforting myth of a prelapsarian tellurist paradise now threatened by the divisive force of American capitalism” (1993: ix-x). In ‘Sweet Diamond Dust,’ however, the imaginative dispute is even more complicated. While the forces of U.S. capital are arraigned against the sugar plantocracy in Hermenegildo’s account, the novel’s other speakers—Titina, the De la Valle servant; Arístides, Ubaldino and Laura’s son; Doña Laura; and Gloria, the mulatto wife of Nicolás (Ubaldino and Laura’s other son) and mother of Nicolasito—also attack Hermenegildo’s project to redeem the threatened national family. The attacks continue in the three later stories that feature characters either directly related or connected by marriage to the De la Valles. Objecting to the gendered bias underwriting a notion like patrimony, the female voices in particular implicitly converse with a number of 71

twentieth-century, male-authored texts on Puerto Rican national identity, most notably Antonio Pedreira’s study, Insularismo, and René Marqués’s essay, ‘El puertorriqueño dócil.’ As many observers point out, in these works the “penetrations” of U.S. capital and culture after 1898 were claimed, variously, to effect the emasculation, (ef)feminization, “culonización,” infantilization, or overall pathologization of an island characterized by “the rude interruption of the life-span of Puerto Rican culture and its replacement with cosmopolitan progress and civilization” (Juan Flores 1993: 48).11 Gloria’s sarcastic description of Hermenegildo’s subject, Ubaldino De la Valle, confirms that diagnosis: He became just another politician, who could recite poems by heart about the tragic condition of a country that could now effectively rivet its heart to the whirling wheels of progress, but that had lost the sense of its own time; a country where history now began in 1898, when the northerners arrived on the island, and everything before that had never taken place; a country that had had to sacrifice the language it had thought and loved in for centuries for the language of electricity, of modern sanitary facilities, of intelligently built roads and bridges—in short, of survival. But he never did anything about it. (1996b: 83)

The second chapter continues to portray the pre-1898 idyll, although again the narrative cannot conceal the narrator’s ideological leanings.12 Romanticization, reinforced by baroque turns of phrase and descriptions, is paralleled in Don Julio’s capture of the heart of Doña Elvira, figured as the patriarchal colonization of the feminine, as Ferré and at least two critics have noted.13 Don Hermenegildo defines Doña Elvira’s existence in the phallic regime headed by Don Julio solely within the terms of the lyrics of the danza ‘Maldito amor.’ Doña Elvira only attains temporary relief from a violent marriage when playing the tune on her piano, an act on her part that confirms her passive accession to the national discourse that has physically and textually domesticated her. As in the first chapter, Hermenegildo’s 72

narrative deliberately withholds information. Ubaldino is born without preamble into the text, while no explanation is given for Doña Elvira’s death, “deprived of the comforts of our Holy Church’s last rites” (ibid: 15). Hermenegildo’s romanticization of the courtship between Don Julio and Doña Elvira is undermined by his descriptions of marital discord, class and race antagonisms, and conflict within the plantocracy. Most importantly, the chapter’s style and manipulation of events combine to effect an epic origin for Hermenegildo’s hero, Ubaldino’s first appearance as a proper name in the narrative forever aligning his fate with that of the idealized but now threatened national space Don Hermenegildo desires to secure in his history. The contradictory self-interest of Don Hermenegildo’s account persists after the second chapter, as signified by his statement that “Every country that aspires to become a nation needs its heroes, its eminent civic and moral leaders, and if it doesn’t have them, it’s our duty to invent them” (ibid: 24). Although Don Hermenegildo does in fact invent history, his immediate qualification of his confession—“Fortunately this is not the case with Ubaldino” (ibid)—allows him to regard his project as definitive, inclusive, and objective. The other voices in ‘Sweet Diamond Dust’ will try to undermine this stance by disputing the detail in Don Hermenegildo’s history and the discursive fields to which his writing belongs. At the same time, the voices of Titina, Arístides, Laura, and Gloria do not represent a cohesive foe united against Don Hermenegildo’s writerly project. They argue amongst themselves and often compromise and contradict their own testimonies. The combined effects of these contradictory voices are achieved, in line with Ferré’s intentions, by allowing “the ‘anterior surface or secret of the text’ [to] slide (…) over and under a second surface, ‘the posterior and evident surface’ or textual form” (qtd. in Castillo 1992: 157). In ‘Sweet Diamond Dust,’ as in its Spanish-language predecessor, the text’s secret concerns the De la Valle family’s ancestry, and emerges as a chain of revelations that threatens Don Hermenegildo’s genealogical construction. These revelations 73

include a miscegenative family history, Nicolás’s impugned homosexuality, and the questionable paternity of Gloria’s child. Since Ubaldino is also one of the paternal suspects, hints of incest contaminate his posthumous reputation as upholder of moral and national values. Moreover, Don Hermenegildo has previously noted the racialized “skeleton in the cupboard” but has justified overlooking it. Since all Guamaní’s elite families share such secrets, he claims, his narratorial and moral interests are better directed at mythologizing Ubaldino’s nationalist credentials. Yet, while the family’s racial makeup will be revealed in the novel, the identity of Nicolasito’s father will always be indecipherable and unknowable. The trail of contradictory information concerning the child’s paternity that emanate from Titina, Arístides, and Laura is ultimately swallowed up in Gloria’s silence over the problem in the final section. In this sense, the identity of Nicolasito’s father is not as significant as the operations of a myth of origin that make knowing that identity vital for certain figures in the novel. The originating myth again returns readers to the epigraph from Quevedo and his cultural and historical world, one from which the notion of blood purity—limpieza de sangre—was transported as part of the imperium’s master-discursive baggage and, after 1898, deployed by elite sectors to distinguish themselves from the mixed-race and working-class sectors deemed as more deserving of subservient status in a U.S. regime (Santiago-Valles 1994: 86-87). Laura’s testimony articulates the pervasiveness of the dream of racially uncontaminated origins, and the hypocrisies and repressions required to maintain belief in its mythical power. Laura counters what she calls the “pompous [genealogical] megalomania” of the class she has married into in a number of ways (1996b: 70). She relates the myth of origin to the signs of imperially derived and sanctioned plantocratic authority that fill the hacienda, and then mocks them: “The family coat of arms, three dogs hounding a fox up a tree, hung in every sitting room as well as in the study, and Ubaldino had had it embroidered on his underwear, (…) and even [engraved] on the personal gold 74

chamber pot he had inherited from his grandparents” (ibid: 6970). Assisted by the power her financial interests in the sugar estate have accorded her, Laura also attacks the plantocratic class for its delusional misrecognition of the shifting patterns of power in a Puerto Rico governed from Washington. As she says, “greenbacks are the only family tree that still stands in Guamaní” (ibid: 74). 2.3. The greenback family tree Ferré’s desire to acknowledge the symbolic and material power of the U.S. dollar in Puerto Rico appears to motivate the shift from Spanish to English language narrative. However, the shift does not lose “all reference to the hated ‘North Americans’” and the “independence motivated tone” of the Spanish original as Hintz asserts (1995: 188-89). Despite a toning down of anti-U.S. rhetoric in some speakers’ accounts, such claims appear to misread the novel in two ways. First, the English-language text’s references to the foreigners, strangers, and “northerners” clearly signify agents of the U.S.A. Second, in both Spanish- and English-language versions of the novel, a number of testimonies challenge the assumption that opposition to, and advocacy of independence from, the U.S.A. is a popular option in Puerto Rico. The reading of Sweet Diamond Dust in terms of a clearcut anti-U.S. and pro-independence logic glosses over the impact on matters national of the novel’s proposed political affinity between subaltern and elite women. This affinity presupposes that the novel’s “fictive” female subalterns who struggle to get their socioeconomic aspirations heard, let alone met, and for whom class and racial conflicts are more significant than the national question, support the novel’s more privileged female subjects who desire recognition of their gender in a postplantocratic and independent national imaginary. 14 It is necessary to note here that U.S. invading forces were almost universally welcomed by the land-holding class, the antiSpanish intellectual elite, and most workers, the latter “be75

liev[ing] that U.S. labor laws and democratic practices would be extended to the island and would protect them from the often arbitrary actions of their employers and bring them greater rights” (Dietz 1986: 83-84). In his seminal account of Puerto Rican culture, El país de cuatro pisos (1989) José Luís González also makes this point but shifts tack to concentrate on the various Puerto Rican sectors’ attitudes to a U.S.A. imagined on the island as a paragon of modernity, progress, and democracy. In a thorough deromanticization of the metropolitan-colonial relationship and anti-U.S. independence arguments, González claims that the pro-U.S. elite converted to the nationalist cause only when it realized that the new regime was not committed to preserving oligarchic privilege. On the other hand, workingclass sectors welcomed U.S. forces because the colonial changeover was regarded as the signal for “un ajuste de cuentas” with landowners (ibid: 32). For González, this settling of scores by subalterns—organized as workers, African-Puerto Ricans, or women—has dominated cultural life on the island since 1898. However, he does not attribute such political challenges to an all-pervasive and inescapable Americanization. Rather, they reflect the impact of U.S. policies that sought to transform the island into a dependency of U.S. capitalist structures, a transformation that accentuated and gave impetus to the longstanding tensions between subaltern and dominant sectors (ibid: 29-34). Ferré’s novel would seem to confirm González’s assessment. In keeping with Sweet Diamond Dust’s rendering of elite national projects, and subaltern challenges to those projects, Ferré allocates to her characters the full range of political stances that have been articulated in Puerto Rico since 1898. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the description of Adriana’s wedding in ‘Isolda’s Mirror.’ Here, pro-independence members of the residual sugar plantocracy mix with a new bourgeoisie of bankers and businessmen who favour the existing Estado Libre Asociado, the Commonwealth declared in 1952. Around and ignored by both groups is a cross-section of subalterns (waiters, maids and musicians) who favour statehood as part of the 76

U.S.A., “so that it could be said that Don Augusto’s wedding was a thoroughly democratic representation of the political trends on the island” (1996b: 158). The story is set in 1972, a few decades after the events described in ‘Sweet Diamond Dust,’ but already in the novel divided opinions on what the U.S. version of “America” signifies are evident. The black servant Titina, for example, confirms her interpellation into a dominant imaginary when she echoes Ubaldino’s words that “one must be considerate of the northerners, be a generous host to them, (…) but one must never bed in with them” (ibid: 23). Chapters four and six of the novel represent Hermenegildo’s account of Ubaldino’s refusal to “bed in with” U.S. capitalists. Chapter four describes the impact of the U.S. administration in terms of the arrival of U.S. banking institutions, the legislative attempts to “Americanize” the island, the Jones Act of 1917 that made Puerto Ricans into de facto U.S. citizens, and the construction of White Sugar Mills, a U.S.owned sugar-processing plant that inaugurates Puerto Rican modernity. According to the plant’s president, Mr. Durham, modernization is synonymous with an imperial project: “Twenty years ago it [the U.S. fleet] brought you freedom and order; this time it’s bringing you our nation’s progress. Thanks to that army out there your island is being inaugurated today into the modern age” (ibid: 32). Yet alongside such desires to disguise colonial rule as a mentoring relationship between metropolis and island, the chapter also shows how the Creole sugar-plantation owners hoping to benefit from U.S. technology and capital are disabused of their hopes by the U.S. troops who deny them access to the banks in what amounts to “their second lesson in military science” (ibid: 34). Chapter six, however, describes Ubaldino’s anti-U.S. stance in terms of a refusal to cede control of the De la Valle sugar plantation to U.S. bankers. His defeat of U.S. capital is achieved by artful recourse to an obscure Spanish law that confirms his ownership of Diamond Dust. The chapter exemplifies Hermenegildo’s reification of Ubaldino as the sole plantocratic agent able and willing to fight “for greater industrial and 77

political emancipation” (ibid: 53). Nonetheless, any claim that Sweet Diamond Dust (and its predecessor) is a pro-independence tract ignores the fact that Hermenegildo’s masculinist national project, and hence its antiU.S. impulse, is undermined by other speakers. Even Ubaldino’s son, Arístides, who appeals to the discourse of the Puerto Rican idyll (ibid: 42), is portrayed as a pragmatic businessman willing to sell the sugar estate to U.S. buyers. His testimony iterates how his grandfathers represented pro- and anti-U.S. forces, thus confirming disputes within the oligarchy. Further complications appear in his mother Laura’s version of events in chapter seven, a chapter that contains a sustained description—not present in Maldito amor—of the complicated realpolitik of plantocratic life under the U.S. regime. Laura’s lengthy description of Americanization reads like an epiphanic awakening to the fruits and joys of modernity: “I discovered a marvelous new world, (…) I saw that everything that had been told since childhood about the northerners who had arrived on the island a few years before was a shameful lie” (ibid: 67). This new world is filled with roads, bridges, schools, planned towns, and hospitals, and inspires Laura to mimic the U.S. government’s “civilizing mission” rhetoric. As a celebration of the Yankee invasion and the “gringo” qualities it brought, her language rivals the emotive intensity of nationalist romanticizations of Puerto Rico: The foreigners were dynamos, (…) brimming with idealism: they didn’t have to civilize the world, they themselves were perfectly happy in their own land, where they had built marvelous cities and practically wiped out poverty, and yet they believed it their duty to better the destiny of others. And so they came to this ancient isle in the middle of the Caribbean, a primitive, cannibal sea, to give a generous helping hand to those so long forsaken by the Spanish God. (ibid: 67-68)

Armed by this rhetoric, Laura’s testimony reveals a more complicated response to post-1898 conditions than allowed for in Don Hermenegildo’s Manichean depiction of Ubaldino as the 78

sole heroic nationalist resisting the evil penetration of North American capital. Nonetheless, Laura’s endorsement of U.S. modernity is not without its contradictions. Articulating perhaps the most searing indictment of plantocratic realities and worker abuses in the novel, Laura disputes her husband’s nationalist and masculine credentials. She denies that Ubaldino was a “monster of authority, a true Latin American caudillo” because “a true caudillo will always be a projection of the land he lives in, and our island, as José Gautier Benítez sang in his poem [‘Canto a Puerto Rico’] long ago, has always been peace-loving, feminine, and childlike” (ibid: 75). Laura’s appeal to Gautier Benítez when negating Ubaldino’s nationalist reputation again recalls the discursive ambivalence encoded in the novel’s epigraphs. Laura refers to nineteenth-century mythologizations of the island as a feminine space in order to mock Ubaldino’s phallic credentials. However, this tactical citation is also imbricated in the stance taken by essayists like Pedreira and Marqués. For them, Gautier Benítez’s rhetoric of the feminized nation was as damaging as the effeminization of the Puerto Rican “man” purportedly inaugurated by the U.S. takeover. Two rival and contradictory discourses of the “feminine” are at work in Laura’s testimony, and hence in Ferré’s novel. Laura’s U.S. sympathies unwittingly repeat the strictly dichotomized and gendered logics underwriting the national idealizations of ideologically opposed commentators. On the one hand, she describes U.S. rule in terms of an active, virile U.S. progress confronting a pacifistic, impotent, or effeminate Puerto Rico; on the other, in a purportedly ironic gesture, she equates the nationalist Ubaldino with the feminization of the island’s character as described by Gautier Benítez. More conceptual trouble is raised by Laura’s solution to Puerto Rico’s position as the locus of hemispherical antagonisms. In a passage absent from Maldito amor but remarkably like Ferré’s position in her essay ‘On Destiny, Language, and Translation,’ Laura claims that Puerto Rico’s “destiny [is] to become the gate to South as well as to North America, so that on 79

our doorsill both continents will one day peacefully merge into one” (1996b: 76). Recognizing Nicolasito as a child of two worlds, languages, and cultures, in short as the embodiment of a neocultural bridge between the U.S.A. and Puerto Rico, Laura plans to sell pieces of the estate in order to assist other lessprivileged players in this worldly transformation: If in ancient times our island was Spain’s outpost for the discoveries of the New World, the magical frontier between the Tainos, the Caribs, and the Spanish conquistadors, in modern times it will become, as in Midsummer Night’s Dream, a talking wall, or at least a chink in the wall. Through a chink in our tropical moss the North will talk to the South and the South will talk to the North, and one day they’ll finally understand each other. And so I have instructed Gloria to sell our land progressively, piece by piece, to aid those who have already begun to emigrate to the mainland by the thousands, fleeing from the hell of the sugar plantation, to lend the honest effort of their arms and legs to other harvests more generously repaid; as well as to those who will undoubtedly return, perhaps after spending half their lives reaping California grapes, or driving a taxi through the cement jungle of New York, but with enough money in their pockets to buy a piece of their lost paradise back. (ibid: 76-77)

This passage confirms Laura’s rejection of her class status in favour of a political affiliation with the working-class Puerto Ricans who began to leave the island in the early twentieth century, and en masse in the 1940s. However, this instance of the oligarchic Creole white woman’s affinity with the working class does not acknowledge that the negotiation of national interstices by that class is forcefully impelled and not easily assimilable into a healing imaginary, one indebted here to the high-cultural capital signalled by the nod to Shakespeare (an intertext absent from Maldito amor). Laura’s distance from the aspirations of her subaltern “allies” is confirmed in another sense. Despite the realpolitik of her observations about the benefits brought by the U.S.A. to its colony, her testimony confirms that her role in the sugar estate’s revival enables the family to resist selling it to U.S. interests. Thus, while Laura appears as a pro-U.S. advo80

cate, she is also recuperable as an advocate of independence. 15 Laura’s hopes for a subaltern-friendly “talking wall” between Puerto Rico and the U.S.A. are further troubled by revelations about the De la Valle family’s “dark” ancestry, thus adding a racialized component to Laura’s position on the national question. Laura finds out from Gloria that Ubaldino’s father, Don Julio Font, was not a Spanish merchant but a mulatto (74), leading Laura’s version of family history to impart new significance to events previously glossed over. She disputes Don Hermenegildo’s account of Doña Elvira’s life and death, redirecting the blame for that death to the violence perpetuated by family members in the name of genealogical purity once they realized that she “had married a black man!” (ibid: 74). These revelations confirm that her children have black ancestry, hence her dismay on hearing their reactions to Nicolás’s death. After thanking God for the plane crash, they state: “This way no De la Valle will ever marry a black woman again” (ibid: 79). Dismayed by her children’s interpellation into the racialized discourses of the plantocratic order, Laura makes a decision that produces another of the novel’s discursive and material disputes. She disinherits her children. More importantly, in a move of supposed transclass and gender solidarity, she leaves the estate to Gloria and her child, Nicolasito, previously maligned by Arístides as a mixed-race monster. 2.4. Rival scenarios of textual authority Laura’s will, the short novel’s other significant intratext alongside Hermenegildo’s history, comes to symbolize the contesting voices in the narrative. Various efforts to prove the will’s existence or to destroy it reveal how those voices are involved in a dispute for economic as well as representational power. Gloria, who has the final words in the novel, is the symbolic victor in the dispute. Don Hermenegildo is defeated, his loss of control over the writing of history confirmed when Gloria calmly destroys the will before launching a blistering attack on his narra81

torial intentions and their discursive effects. To Titina, “the De la Valles’ immortal servant, Guamaní’s last slave” (ibid: 25), she denounces Don Hermenegildo for “inventing new lies, new ways of twisting around the story he heard from the lips of the protagonists of this tasteless melodrama” (ibid: 82). Angered by the melodramatic capture of so many bodies and histories, Gloria aims to destroy the material and ideological bases from which Hermenegildo writes his sentimentalized account. In this respect, Gloria’s generic dismissal of Don Hermenegildo’s project exemplifies what Debra Castillo has called Ferré’s “rewriting of nineteenth-century romanticism and twentieth-century (novela rosa) fantasies” (1992: 165). Gloria’s critique extends the undermining of romanticist discourses, and the class in which such discourses circulated, observed in Laura’s pro-modernity rhetoric and in Arístides’s account of Laura’s mockery of yet another representative romanticist text, the Colombian novel María: She [Laura] liked to be to read to, and so she would ask Gloria to read episodes of Maria, Jorge Isaacs’s novel, out loud. She used to laugh her head off at its maudlin sentimentality, finding the story of Maria’s shorn tresses and bashful kisses, of her sad roses pressed between the pages of a yellowed letter, in the utmost bad taste, the result of a romantic derangement that had finally ruined Efrain. (1996b: 41-42)

Gloria is passive in this scene; but her later disparagement of “romantic derangement” differs from Laura’s mockery in that it is inspired by her recognition of the class bias inherent in Don Hermenegildo’s manipulation of subaltern voices. According to Gloria, his arrival at Laura’s deathbed did not signal his support for their case, “but rather to let Arístides and his sisters know about Doña Laura’s secret will” (ibid: 82). Reacting against Don Hermenegildo’s intervention also allows her to attack Ubaldino’s anti-U.S. credentials:

82

(…) he’d practice a series of forgetting exercises, to weaken his memory as much as possible, and opposed the advanced social legislation proposed by the northerners at every opportunity. He thus fought freely against the northerners’ efforts to democratize the town, against the right to strike, the minimum wage, and the eight-hour work-day, striving to keep Guamaní’s inhabitants in the same state of abject poverty they had known for centuries. (ibid: 83)

Here, a gritty class consciousness exposes Ubaldino’s patriotism as a front for a reactionary stand against the democratization of labour under the U.S. regime, again iterating that working-class sectors saw in that regime a means of challenging the old plantocracy’s power. The range and rage of Gloria’s attack reveals that Arístides’s definition of her as “one of those mulatto beauties who are used to stopping traffic” has a significant implication for the novel’s internalized textual traffic (ibid: 41). The stopping (of sexual/textual) traffic also describes Gloria’s tactics as she takes issue with Don Hermenegildo’s misappropriation of Titina’s testimony about what Laura’s will promised. On this score, Amy Kaminsky has made the connection between the novel’s key subaltern figure, represented by Titina, and the testimonial genre (1993b: 113). Although Kaminsky does not make the suggestive and neatly alliterative link between the novel’s testamento and its testimonio, her recognition of Titina’s function is apposite. Ferré, like other Latin American leftist and feminist critics, “attributes absolute honesty to the servant” and regards that subject’s oppression as the source of the testimonial’s authenticity (ibid). Kaminsky rightly problematizes this conceptualization: This is a somewhat romanticized, not to say patronizing, version of the subjects of testimonio, but it is a convention of the genre. So when Ferré’s Titina gives her testimony to the untrustworthy Hermenegildo, Ferré is signaling the reader that what Titina says is truth, as opposed to what Hermenegildo writes, which is false: Hermenegildo is writing his romantic, novelized version of the past; Titina is speaking out of the immediacy of her knowledge and needs. (ibid) 83

As Kaminsky suggests, Hermenegildo privileges the purported truth of textuality over the equally purported truth of subaltern orality. However, Titina’s oral testimony also contains some unpalatable truths about subaltern subordination. It confirms her uncritical embrace of a dominant social imaginary and of the plantocratic class as the guarantor of her material security. This is made clear when Titina, blind to the class, racial, and gender divides between Ubaldino and herself, uses the second person plural possessive to signify their shared opposition to the U.S. invaders who want “to take away what was ours” (italics mine, 1996b: 22). Nonetheless, as Kaminsky notes, the narrative’s coherence depends on the readers’ recognition that Don Hermenegildo misuses the subaltern’s authentic voice. He listens to Titina’s story, manipulates it in his historiographical project, and uses her information to intervene against Titina’s and Gloria’s interests in the De la Valle family dispute. Kaminsky’s point can be taken a little further. Gloria’s actions suggest that she recognizes how the struggle for power exemplified by Don Hermenegildo’s misuse of the subaltern’s testimonio is intimately related to the rival battle centred on the testamento. To ensure her truth’s victory in this double-edged struggle, Gloria not only destroys the testamento but sets fire to cane fields and hacienda while Don Hermenegildo and his novel are inside. Such actions make it difficult to endorse Zervas-Gaytan’s claim that the narrative accords women the mediating power to effect a testimonial coming-to-voice of the subaltern (1996: 141). “Women” must be qualified to account for the fact that the final coming-to-voice is managed by a mulatto woman and not by the novel’s white women. It must be remembered, as well, that Arístides’s selfserving interests are articulated as testimony, but his is a testimony of privilege and greed antithetical to Titina’s subaltern position, and to Don Hermenegildo’s mythologization of history.16 In ‘Sweet Diamond Dust’ the functions of testimonial as a medium of counter-hegemonic, subaltern authenticity, and of the testamento as a legal contract authorized by patriarchal 84

power, appear to be similarly contestable. The authority or truth supposedly encoded in each is destabilized not only by the presence of the other, but also by how certain figures in the novel react to those differently authoritative texts. 17 Thus, Gloria’s disdain for hegemonic representatives who manipulate subaltern voices and disregard legal authority has two consequences. First, her act of arson ensures that Hermenegildo’s history and Ubaldino’s heroic nationalist reputation will not survive the flames. Second, her destruction of the will also destroys the possibility of an anti-U.S. alliance between the white Creole Laura and the novel’s mixed-race or black women. Gloria’s ripping up of the will contradicts Laura’s wishes and newly found subaltern-identifying consciousness. Laura is a white Creole member of the oligarchic class. Her wish to cede the sugar estate to Gloria assumes that Gloria will respect the interests of the class that has oppressed her. Although authored by a woman, the will is a signifier of patriarchal power in the narrative. Gloria’s rejection of it thus signals a refusal to participate in the patriarchal control and distribution of property, or to accede to Laura’s desire for a transclass feminist alliance, announced by Laura’s earlier claim to support Gloria “because she’s a woman like me and I consider her my friend” (1996b: 78). The will-ripping scene, then, is not explicable in terms of opposition to U.S. rule. Gloria rejects Laura’s authorship of the will in the same way that she rejects Don Hermenegildo’s textual power. She destroys Laura’s testamento and Hermenegildo’s history, itself the product of misused testimonio, because both construct the subaltern as a subject to be spoken for in elite historiographic and legal discourse. 2.5. The conflagrations of feminist traffic The ripped testamento signifies a class-specific female reaction against patriarchal authority and the abuse of the subaltern voice, rather than an act of anti-U.S. or independentista bravura. These significations are reinforced by the novel’s final image of 85

burning. As Gutiérrez Mouat notes, the conflagration is intertextually rich, for it reveals a feminist debt to an Anglophone literary and feminist canon—with its metaphors of “the mad-woman in the attic” and “burning down the house of fiction”18—that contains Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1993). Gutiérrez Mouat equates Bertha/ Antoinette Mason, the mad woman in the attic, with Gloria; they share mixed blood, marriages of convenience, marginal spaces within the house (attic for Bertha and basement for Gloria, at least in Arístides’s account), imputed madness, and “authorship” of a burning down of the house (ibid: 302-3). These commonalities lead Gutiérrez Mouat to connect the feminist counter-discursive effects of Ferré’s and Rhys’s books. He concludes that in writing back to Brontë, Rhys gives Antoinette a feminist voice so that her history might be known, a history that will benefit the re-reading of Jane Eyre. On the other hand, he claims that Ferré’s Gloria makes a new, radical social ethic out of the incendiary acts of her literary forerunners (ibid: 304-5). There is, however, a point of contention in Gutiérrez Mouat’s otherwise compelling reading, itself confirmation of what Peter Hulme has called “the complex trafficking that exists between texts (and their authors) in the [Caribbean] world” (1994: 85). Unlike Ferré’s mulatto Gloria, Rhys’s Bertha/Antoinette is a Creole. As Firdous Azim emphasizes, the latter is a crucial identification. Coming from a family that has had, but lost, “access to colonial power and wealth” Bertha/Antoinette is a Caribbeanborn white woman disparaged equally by black and wealthy white inhabitants of her island home (1993: 183). She is also regarded by representatives of the centre as infected by her proximity to “racial intermixture” (ibid). She is made irrevocably alien by her distance from England, as Rochester’s reaction to her in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea attests: “Long, sad, dark, alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either” (1968: 56). This context means that nineteenth-century English anxieties over miscegenation overlap but do not entirely coincide with those derived 86

from the genealogically obsessive, aristocratic ideal transported from Spain. But even more significant for the intertextual comparison is Wide Sargasso Sea’s multi-racial end in which Antoinette is dreaming while imprisoned in the English attic. In her dream she burns down Rochester’s house. The dream allows her to return to her Caribbean home and invoke the symbolic assistance of Christophine, a former slave whose skills in obeah mark her as a representative of an epistemic order beyond Europe.19 At the novel’s end, Antoinette appeals to Christophine—“I called help me Christophine help me and looking behind me I saw that I had been helped” (ibid: 154)—for insight into the ways she has been caught in the imperial narratives of history and fiction: “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draught for the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage” (ibid: 155-56). With a nod to this ending it is significant that Gloria’s wilful arson of hacienda, historical novel, and novelist—a burning down of the material and discursive symbols of oppression from her point of view—takes place during a conversation with Titina, the working-class daughter of a freed slave. The mulatto Gloria exhorts Titina to help spread the fire, and to sing the appropriated lines of the novel’s eponymous song. And it is the line, “Now I know why it [this passion] burns” (1996b: 85), that parallels Antoinette’s Antillean consciousness in the last lines of Rhys’s book. Both novels thus end with women, in league with other women, who have recognized and resisted the texts that have discursively contained them. Yet crucial disparities remain between the two novels’ relation to feminist discourses. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the dream-framed alliance between Antoinette and the former slaves, Christophine, and Tia, her childhood playmate, is located as the culmination of a history of slavery and racial antagonisms. The aim is to demonstrate Antoinette’s transcultural place in that history, and to suggest, to dream, a transracial solution to those antagonisms. In Ferré’s scenario, on 87

the other hand, resistance burns along the axes of clearly entrenched racial divisions, and is further exacerbated by class and gender distinctions. The female daughters or descendants of slaves, rather than Creole white women, use arson as a form of material resistance to accompany Gloria’s rewording of the danza. Gloria’s actions are designed to break Titina’s attachment in servitude to her white Creole masters and mistresses, including Laura. ‘Sweet Diamond Dust’’s conflagratory climax is indebted to Rhys’s novel and Anglophone feminist traditions; but, in this instance, it does not repeat Rhys’s dream of a transracial and transclass alliance between women. 20 That said, the intertextual significance of Bertha/Antoinette reaches beyond Gloria to embrace all the silenced or misrepresented figures in Don Hermenegildo’s account, or in the testimonies of other speakers. Titina, an echo of Jean Rhys’s Tia, is relegated to permanent subordinacy by Hermenegildo’s definition of her as the family’s “last slave” (ibid: 25). The Creole Doña Elvira is not only locked in the basement, an inversion of the attic featured in Brontë’s and Rhys’s books (and restaged with Gloria’s confinement to that basement), but also locked into the romantic discourse encoded in the lyrics of the song that Gloria will resemanticize at the novel’s end. Nicolás is erased from the narrative in a plane crash, and maligned by Arístides as a eunuch and homosexual, an emasculating and homophobic negation not simply from within the machista discourse that affects all the women in the novel, but also within the secure heteronormative parameters of Ferré’s narrative itself. And Laura is the anti-patriarchal self-subalternizer whose death is framed by the bed-cum-palimpsest of imperial authority “built from the revered remains of the ship in which Juan Ponce de León, their ancestor, had sailed to the island (ibid: 63). Yet while these figures are recognizable as the textual descendants of Bertha/Antoinette, they also resist alignment because of racialized and gender differences and distinct class positions, as well as their distinct places in divergent European imperial trajectories. Nonetheless, it is clear that Ferré grants to Gloria—the para88

digmatic subaltern—a triumphant attainment of a non-oligarchic story of nation, for as Gloria says to Titina toward the novel’s end: Facts have a strange way of facing down fiction, Titina, and if Don Hermenegildo’s aborted novel was to have been a series of stories that contradicted one another like a row of falling dominoes, our story, the one we’ve taken the authority to write, will eradicate them all, because it will be the only one in which word and deed will finally be loyal to each other, in which a true correspondence between them will finally be established. (italics mine, ibid: 82)

Gloria’s manifesto-like words here assert a subaltern victory from below attained through and as testimonial. The proclamation of alternative-hegemonic success sidesteps the troubling implication that any attempt at investing in the purported truth of testimonial is doomed to be as partial, incoherent, and authoritarian as the version of history upheld by Don Hermenegildo. In one of the best responses to Maldito amor, Pino-Ojeda makes the point that the narrative reflects the tension in Ferré’s own status as a writer who walks the line between continuing or rupturing hegemonic discourses of nation. The crucial question for her readers, then, is whether Ferré is able to articulate an alternative-hegemonic discourse thought from subalternity, or failing that, to find a deterritorialized position from which she may articulate an anti-phallocentric discourse (1996: 135). The question is more complicated when regarded in relation to projects of national imaginary formation in a context of U.S. rule. Gloria’s rejection of Don Hermenegildo’s mythologization, and of Laura’s desire to bequeath to Gloria the sugar estate, signify an anti-phallocentric will and a rejection of any purported transclass and transracial affinities between women. Yet the fact that Gloria’s subaltern coming-to-voice is staged in a narrative written by a Creole white woman, and related intertextually to other texts by Anglophone women, suggests that the narrative is 89

not immune to a universalizing feminist imagination as understood in the United States. Yet, while Pino-Ojeda correctly observes that Gloria’s conflagration announces a (subaltern/feminist) renaissance (ibid: 231), it is necessary to state that Sweet Diamond Dust does not stop with ‘Sweet Diamond Dust.’ The narrative continues with three stories that update the De la Valle family saga, in the process qualifying this purported renaissance. 2.6. Women’s bodies in the national imagination ‘The Gift,’ the story that follows ‘Sweet Diamond Dust,’ continues the novel’s thematic concerns. It again confirms the power of what Kaminsky calls “residual authority,” the speaking power “which is still brought to bear on the production and reception of texts, despite oppositional feminist literary acts such as writing, narrating, and reading that call into question the authoritative discourses of male domination, as well as those of, for example, class hierarchy and European rationalism” (1993b: 104). Set in the 1950s, the narrative updates the De la Valle family connection with the distantly related figure of Mother Artigas, the Corrector of Discipline at the Sacred Heart convent school for girls drawn from leading families in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in Latin America (1996b: 105). Mother Artigas symbolizes the residual authority of the sugar oligarchy to arbitrate Puerto Rican identity. She is also a figure whose “modern” approach to women’s education and social roles evokes the seventeenth-century Mexican proto-feminist nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and a liberal worldview familiar to Anglophone feminists: “She believed that women had an undeniable right to knowledge, having been unjustly barred from it by men for centuries, and the only obstacle that for a while had made her hesitate on her decision to enter the convent had been the clergy’s traditional feminization of ignorance” (ibid). Confronting her authority, however, are two students: Merceditas Cáceres, a white member of a leading plantocratic family; and Carlotta Rodri90

guez, a mulatto whose attendance at the school reflects the changed socioeconomic conditions on the island, the financially straightened school forced into providing places for the daughters of the new entrepreneurial class. The friendship between the girls is announced by Carlotta’s gift of a mango to Merceditas, a slowly ripening symbol of the girls’ transclass and transracial affinities that also symbolizes the posited real-world relation between white Creole author and her mixed-race subaltern characters. If the school’s admission of Carlotta suggests something of the transcultural impact of decades of U.S. control, the historical background of the story provides more signs of those changes. Baseball is the most popular national game, and fraternities like the Lion’s Club are well established. Merceditas’s family has responded to a new capitalist order by converting their sugarestate into a successful rum-manufacturing business. Most importantly, the socioeconomic transformations have been decried by the old sugar elite, their economic centrality long ago dismantled, their claims to blood purity threatened by the increasing visibility and social prominence of people of mixed race. Within the confines of the convent school, the transracial friendship between Merceditas and Carlotta is barely tolerated by the nuns who see in it signs of the perverted, because subalternmodulated, social order emerging outside the school walls. Carlotta appears to signify both a subaltern threat to an elite national project and an agent of a desired national reimagining on subaltern terms. She provides Merceditas with a new historicized understanding and raised class-consciousness of island realities, although that consciousness remains oligarch-friendly in the latter’s claim that “The old bourgeois families’ proud stance before the economic ruin that the arrival of the troops from the north had provoked at the turn of the century seemed to her quixotic, but worthy of respect” (ibid: 97). Carlotta’s selection to play the queen at the annual festival celebrating the Spanish conquest threatens the elite’s “proud stance.” Her preparations result in a carnivalesque inversion of social pro91

prieties, and her extravagantly made-up body spearheads an African-Puerto Rican eruption into whitened cultural view. The horrified reaction on the part of the town’s elite families and the school’s nuns to this “grotesque affair” confirms that Carlotta upsets more than social conventions and racialized boundaries (ibid: 109). She also challenges the construction of what Darlene Dávila calls the folklorization of Puerto Rican identity, a myth forged in the 1950s to signify the home-grown national credentials of the colony in opposition to the impact of U.S. cultural forms, and characterized by the fusion of distinct Taino, African, and Spanish cultural and racial legacies (1997: 5). In practice, that myth, in common with all Latin American manifestations of an official mestizaje, masks a blanqueamiento or whitening logic. African contributions to the national project in particular are subject to an erasure or more acceptable Tainoization in a hierarchy of cultural values from white Hispanic down through brown Taino to the black African base (ibid: 7071). At the story’s end, then, the nuns punish Carlotta for disrupting the safe parameters of this national fantasy. Her hair is shorn, her dress is ripped, and she is cursed as a “filthy nigger” (1996b: 117). This maltreatment inspires Merceditas’s boundary-crossing intervention. Coming to Carlotta’s assistance, Merceditas also returns Carlotta’s gift of the mango, a now putrid metaphor of the convent school’s Catholic raison d’etre—the Sacred Heart—to its rightful owner Mother Artigas. In her reading of the story, Kaminsky claims that “Ferré is above all writing her way out of an embedded class position, having chosen, like her protagonist in ‘El regalo’ (‘The Gift’), to drop the glittering prizes, as well as the rotten mango-cumsacred-heart, into the lap of the sterile guardians of the upper class, and good riddance” (1993b: 112-13). By making Mother Artigas the agent of Carlotta’s punishment, the story also seeks to problematize the notion that feminism, or at least the liberal, universalist strand advocated and personified by Mother Artigas, is untouched by the racialized discourses that underpin debates on Puerto Rican national identity. However, this apparent repeat 92

of Gloria’s rejection of the viability of a universal feminist national alternative is troubled by disparities in class status and racialized significations. The problem here is that the white woman rescues Carlotta from the nuns’ ritual depersonalization and demonization. Merceditas is empowered to reject her oligarchic status, to ally herself with the subaltern, and therefore to leave the school “with her friend, head held high and without deigning once to look back, with that gesture of paramount disdain so commonplace in those of her class” (1996b: 89). Merceditas’s newly found feminist and class consciousness provides the central political message of the story, leaving Carlotta— muted, her body violently disciplined, her identity stripped from her—to serve as the subaltern device by which Merceditas achieves a politicized feminist apotheosis. This privileged feminist imaginary resurfaces in ‘Isolda’s Mirror.’ In this story Adriana—soap-operatically described as “a nightclub singer and fledgling classical pianist” (ibid: 129)— authors her own ritual rejections of a patriarchal traffic in women and that traffic’s role in a national imaginary that aims to mediate between Creole oligarchic and U.S. capitalist interests. Once again the story continues the cumulative narrative’s interest in the De la Valle family’s residual privilege, in this case with Don Augusto Arzuaga, formerly married to a member of the De la Valle clan. However, Don Augusto is not of the oligarchic class. He comes from the new and powerful bourgeoisie that in the year the story takes place, 1972, is threatened by the international oil crisis. The melodrama unfolds as the tale of Don Augusto’s self-interested wooing of Adriana—the exact image of the nude figure in his favourite painting—and his plans for a lavish wedding party in order to use Adriana’s beauty to persuade U.S. bankers into keeping his businesses afloat. More overtly than in any of the other parts in Sweet Diamond Dust, Adriana functions as a (female) synecdoche of nation. This function is also rendered as an anti-U.S. idealism, exemplified by Adriana’s refusals to speak English, especially at her wedding, and her singing of the lyrics of Puerto Rico’s “na93

tional” anthem, La Borinqueña, the Taino name for Puerto Rico again recalling the post-1952 use of the indigenous base to define a national culture in opposition to that of the U.S. imperium. In this regard, Don Augusto’s wedding invitation to the old gentry and to the new pro-U.S. bourgeoisie threatens Adriana’s wish not to be a divided subject, forever “crossing back and forth over an undefined frontier” (ibid: 140). She refuses to signify the woman who heals political rifts and unites the island’s sectors. That those political differences are unresolvable because of entrenched racial and class prejudices is made clear at the wedding. There pro-independence advocates argue among themselves about the feasibility of independence if it means that the island will have to join forces “with the “niggers” of Frenchand English-speaking islands,” while resolutely ignoring the pro-State sympathies of the musicians and servants around them (ibid: 158). The irreconcilability of these national positions is reinforced by the story’s climax in which Adriana emerges naked from her dress as an exact replica of Isolda in Don Augusto’s painting. The chaos of fist fighting and debauchery she provokes confirms the impossibility of determining a common political ground and leads to Don Augusto’s economic ruin (ibid: 160). Adriana’s body here signals a rejection of the discourses set in motion by the epigraph from Gautier Benítez, which equated Puerto Rico with a female body. However, this symbolic function has consequences beyond a mere pointing out of irreconcilable national imaginaries. Unlike the other women in Ferré’s narrative, Adriana’s avenging function is not contrasted by female figures with darker skins or lower class positions. The stripping bare of Carlotta’s surfaces by the nuns in ‘The Gift’ provides a telling point of comparison to this story. Here, Adriana’s revenge depends, as Debra Castillo notes, on “a precise and exact reduplication of the reproduction,” a transformation of the female body’s surfaces into purely superficial spectacle (1992: 156). Unlike Carlotta’s made-up appearance—the sign of an Afro-Caribbean eruption that provokes a disciplinarian strip94

ping by Creole arbiters of the national romance—Adriana’s makeup is cast as a subversion of the ideal, an undomesticated “cosmetic transformation” (ibid: 157). Yet when compared to Carlotta’s fate in the previous story, the political properties of Adriana’s makeover are limited. As Castillo describes it: “In Adriana, Ferré creates a resemblance of a resemblance, a woman (Ferré, Adriana) reflecting the idealized image of a cultural artefact (a story, a painting) that in itself pretends to comment on a well-known mythic story (of colonization, of love). Yet, finally, it is a reproduction without foundation, a styled resemblance as resistance literature” (ibid: 167-68). While Castillo nonetheless recognizes in this “styled resemblance” the subversive power of “makeup” (ibid: 168), the story’s “reproduction without foundation” also reminds readers that subaltern interruptions or disputes do not trouble this reproduction. Rather, Adriana’s victory is simply rendered as the refusal by a woman to mediate a masculine struggle over what Puerto Rico signifies under U.S. rule. That struggle, the story seems to affirm, is of concern only to rival hegemonic sectors, including the new bourgeoisie to which Adriana belongs. These comments have resonances for the other cultural artefacts that appear in Sweet Diamond Dust as musical forms and titles. 2.7. Ambivalent rewordings of lyrical capital Throughout Sweet Diamond Dust music plays a critical discursive role, rivalling the elite cultural capital announced by the many literary references. This is iterated at the short novel’s ending when Gloria urges Titina to sing the reworded lyrics of the song that, with Morel Campos’s original words, had earlier signified Doña Elvira’s passive and fatalistic surrender to an oppressive marriage. Elsewhere Ferré has described the ambivalences built into Maldito amor’s title “about the treacherous nature of love.” The title thus repeats the ambivalences in the epigraph from Quevedo, and links Gautier Benítez’s epigraph to Morel Campos’s danza and his descriptions of a Puerto Rican 95

idyll (1991: 160). Such intertextual connections highlight the novel’s uneasy management of authoritative discourses. As Hintz says, the references to Gautier Benítez evoke not only the class-bound mythologizations of the Puerto Rican paradise founded in his verse but also his historical role as an anti-slavery campaigner (1995: 84). Such resonances are repeated in the presence of a danza written by a descendant of slaves “in a novel that targets the racism of patriarchal society” (ibid: 83). Other critics emphasize the danza’s transcultural genealogy as an amalgam of European waltzes and African rhythms performed by working-class musicians for the plantocratic class. The danza presents a polyphonic but uncomfortable encounter between elite and subaltern (Balseiro 1992: 19-21). These contradictory significations mean that Gloria’s misuse of the lyric at the novel’s finish cannot quite disarm or dispense with the discursive role of the danza in dominant ideals of nation or the authority enjoyed by the audience who commissioned the form. As sung by Gloria and Titina, then, the novel’s final lines, “Now I know why it [this passion] burns/ When I remember you” (1996b: 85), generate rival readings. They celebrate the defeat of an elite masculinist project to mythologize Puerto Rico and redeem the “nation” from colonial status. At the same time, they also perpetuate the national myth in line with Ferré’s point that such intertextual references both “confound” and “console” (ibid: x). Nonetheless, while Acosta Cruz notes the ambivalence of Ferré’s critique and resuscitation of romanticist national discourses, she is not alone in arguing that the novel’s mistreatments of canonical texts indicate a female triumph over a Creole masculinist, bourgeois national project, and U.S. hegemony (1993a: 30).21 Yet beyond the conflicts within the plantocratic class that threaten the coherence of Don Hermenegildo’s historical account from within, gender, racial, and class differences also interrupt this scenario. For example, Gloria’s rewording of the danza distances her from Doña Elvira’s passive surrender to the same piece of music. Gloria’s use of the danza not only reminds the novel’s readers of the discursive fields in which cul96

tural products circulate, but also of the unstable, unpredictable, and contradictory ways by which the national values accruing to those products are incessantly, but not necessarily subversively, resignified.22 Gloria’s rewording of the danza’s lyric also implicitly critiques Pedreira’s Insularismo and its dismissal of the musical genre as bland, irredeemably feminine, and thus reflective of the emasculating landscape. For Pedreira, the danza reflected the key problem of Puerto Rican identity by typifying the weak, unmanly, and indecisive colonized national character (1992: 145-58). The persistence of this “sterile” state of affairs could only be overcome by a superman able to mediate the island’s realities with vigour and virility. As Santiago-Valles describes this rhetoric, “the ‘Porto Rican’ upper stratum persisted in their efforts to establish that they belonged to a breed which, if not quite the adult/manly colonialist, was at least not as subjected, not as feminized, not as infantilized as most of the Island’s transgressive and allegedly backward inhabitants” (1994: 241). However, as with Laura’s recourse to rival gendered logics of nation, Pedreira’s stance is similarly contradictory. The island has been mythologized as an idyllic space whose contours follow the ideal woman’s body. Rejecting this rhetoric, Pedreira claims that the island is irredeemably feminized by the U.S. imperial takeover. His dispute with the nineteenth-century feminine idyll, and his attempts to redeem the damaged masculine credentials of the island under U.S. jurisdiction, signal that the imagined nation has always been a site of masculine definition, and hence definitional crisis. The crisis gives rise to a phallic contest over the right to determine the island’s permeability, and hence its imaginability as a nation. U.S. military and capital penetrations that have supplanted locally produced oligarchic narratives of nation are resisted by local masculinist wills to reclaim the island for locally produced discursive penetrations. In both cases, Puerto Rico becomes a phallic target, hence Ferré’s aim to expose this targeting and to reimagine the island from female subaltern perspectives. 97

The last story in Ferré’s collection, ‘Captain Candelario’s Heroic Last Stand,’ explicitly engages with Pedreira’s phallocentric stance by providing a protagonist, Doña Elvira’s greatgrandson, with the virile credentials that Pedreira was searching for. For the first time in Sweet Diamond Dust, the national implications of Puerto Rico’s mainland and island divisions are confronted. Set in a futuristic 1998, on an island granted independence by a U.S.A. no longer requiring it for defence purposes, the story uses music to characterize divergent political interests and to indicate the split Puerto Rican national psyche. As detailed in the story, the condescension on the part of the U.S. Congress to grant Puerto Rican independence seems to confirm the passive, docile national qualities identified by many Puerto Rican commentators since 1898: In any case, the senators and representatives said to us, we should be thankful for having enjoyed the privileges of paradise for more than a hundred years, during which we had benefited from the Metropolis’s bounties. And it had been all our own fault, they insisted, because during that century we had been the victims of a false national pride, of an insane hubris that now had begun to strangle us like a useless umbilical cord, forcing us to remain forever a stillborn state. (1996b: 164)

This “stillborn state” is described as the inevitable result of a U.S. intervention and imagination that wanted to transform Puerto Rico into “the showcase of the Caribbean” (ibid), the 1952 renaming of the island colony as a Commonwealth inaugurating a period of industrialization and modernization that also drove hundreds of thousands of islanders to the mainland. A member of the ruling party that wants the U.S.A. to retain control, the unnamed narrator suggests that independence has not solved the legacies of colonialism. The disastrous flight of capital from the island, described by the narrator as an “unnamed terror” (ibid: 170-71), bears out the prediction of a postcolonial disaster characterized by neocolonial dependency and socialsector breakdown. 98

Captain Candelario’s position, however, is resolutely nostalgic. Coming from the oligarchic class, given the best military training in the metropolis, he is a nationalist, but one ashamed of Puerto Rico’s small size and international inconsequentiality. Like Pedreira he attributes the persistence of a colonized state of mind to the delicacy of the land and its people. As head of the “missionaries,” Candelario is given the job of securing public order, a task he approaches “through intelligent discourse” and the gentlemanly art of war (ibid: 173). He becomes the main agent in the ruling party’s strategies to dissuade the U.S.A. from deserting the island, strategies that include cutting wages, banning pro-Statehood demonstrations, reducing drug-traffic, and thus saving the U.S.A. administration costs. His best friend and colleague is Pedro Fernández, whose ancestors were slaves on Candelario’s family sugar plantation. This homosocial coupling echoes the other transracial pairings in Ferré’s narrative, but inverts their gendered (female) parameters. The national malaise is further complicated by the emergent civil war between salseros and rockeros. Both Candelario and Fernández are required to crack down on the former, the latter being apolitical, middle-class and unthreatening to Creole elite or U.S. interests. The rise of the salseros in the island’s slums represents Sweet Diamond Dust’s final eruption of a subaltern imaginary of a nation now split between mainland and insular geopolities: They had originally settled in Barrio Obrero, La Cantera, and Los Bravos de Boston when they had arrived from the countryside, fleeing the ruin of the sugarcane, tobacco, and coffee industries at the end of the thirties and forties. By 1950, however, they had realized a second migration was imperative for survival, and thus they had flocked to the mainland by the thousands. (ibid: 182-83)

Unruly, proudly African-Antillean in appearance, their identities forged by constant toings-and-froings between mainland and island, the salseros are regarded by the story’s elite as a poten99

tial subaltern threat party political power and a sign of a U.S. contamination of Puerto Rican culture. Despite his role in preventing the salseros’ rise to power, Candelario regards them with ambivalence, finding their music “atrocious” but admiring the fact that “even though his countrymen didn’t have the heart to fight for their independence, at least they could sing about it” (ibid: 184). The mulatto Pedro, on the other hand, comes from the slums and is in full sympathy with the salseros, although he, too, is employed to limit their activities. Candelario’s lover, Barbara, is open about her sympathies and warns him about persecuting the salseros to whose music she grants an almost sacred subaltern power. At the story’s end, both Pedro and Barbara are involved in Candelario’s murder, despite the fact that he has permitted a salsa concert against orders. The ostensible motive for the killing appears to be Candelario’s unresolved position on the national question. As Pedro says, “you never seem to be able to make up your mind. At least now you have the satisfaction of knowing that your countrymen weren’t as timid as they appeared to be” (ibid: 196). Thus Candelario is killed for the crime of not taking a nationalist side or acting as a Puerto Rican man should, a stance he confirms with both his and Sweet Diamond Dust’s final words: “Neither salsa nor rock. I prefer classical music” (ibid: 197). This move to dispense with the residual oligarchic privilege embodied by Candelario as a descendant of the De la Valle family is, at best, ambivalent. His classical-music preference demonstrates a refusal to adjudicate the U.S.-Puerto Rican question; but his appeal to “high” western cultural capital implies an apolitical universalism, and a considered distance from both local politics and local cultural forms. Moreover, the supposed ironic undercutting of the heroic masculinist version of nation that Candelario performs with military precision is itself undercut by the apparent move to demand a taking of sides with the island’s subaltern sectors. The subaltern counter-narrative of nation, enabled through treachery and deceit, inverts the active/passive binary underwriting Pedreira’s descriptions of the national mal100

aise. The subalterns now embody the active masculinist credentials he desired, while Candelario symbolizes the island’s emasculated failure, its (feminine) inability to act. So rendered, Candelario becomes the final victim of the text’s staging of the imperial-colonial dichotomy. Yet, it is not the female mixed-race subaltern but the oligarchic and unreservedly masculine Candelario, “his soul once more cast in steel,” to whom is accorded last word valency in this story, and therefore in the cumulative narrative itself. In the end, Candelario’s political disengagement appears not as a crime but as an exemplary oligarchic resistance to impossible national choices. Thus, while Ferré affirms a prosubaltern counter-narrative of nation, she also reinscribes and revalorizes a heroically masculine hegemonic presence into the very national project purportedly challenged throughout novel and appended stories. 2.8. Transcultural bridge or fantasy? Sweet Diamond Dust attempts to adjudicate between colonized and colonizing imaginations of nation. As such, it is implicated in the entanglement of Puerto Rican and U.S. history and (literary) culture in the senses identified by Juan Flores: Puerto Rico is “part of American history,” and Puerto Rican literature is uniquely positioned to deal with imperial “American social values and priorities” and to “rework” geopolitical boundaries (1993: 142-43). This imaginative adjustment entails the expansion of the U.S.A.’s imaginary edges in order to accommodate its Antillean colony, and the adaptation of Puerto Rican imaginaries into extra-insular understandings of Puerto Ricanness. Both moves confirm that the post-1940s mass migration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S.A. has shattered the myth that either metropolis or colony can make claims to bounded national entities with exceptional cultural terrains, and with reassuringly discontinuous national languages and literatures. Yet, Ferré’s novel appears to withhold from the imaginative reworking that the Puerto-Rican-U.S. relationship demands. In101

stead, it emerges as part of Ferré’s stated project to mediate distinct metropolitan and colonial geopolities by “floating” in their interstices, or by making a “chink in the wall” the sign of a desired and inevitable conduit between rival Americas. As Juan Flores suggests, such bridging fantasies are inherently conservative, implying either “the convenient marriage of that age-old mythical pair, Anglo-Saxon materialism and Latin spirituality; or in its more pertinent ‘Commonwealth’ version, the neighborly co-existence of the benevolent, self-sufficient colossus and that helpless speck of tropical subculture” (1993: 13). As a response to hemispherical relations, Ferré’s tropicalizing navigations in national interstices may not grant her texts immunity from circulating in the senses outlined by Flores; that is, as mere “colonialist wish-dreams, invidious constructs intended to conceal and legitimize the real relations between North American and Puerto Rican societies” (ibid). At stake here is Ferré’s cosmopolitan ability to cross borders, which translates in her narrative as the purportedly transgressive efficacy of the racial and class boundary crossings undertaken by many of her characters. As Jonathan Friedman points out, such transgressive “migration” is the preserve of “the poet, the artist, the intellectual, who sustains this displacement and objectifies it into the printed word” (1997: 79). From their ranks come the privileged winners in a process of “self-definition” that is then imposed on subalterns “via the forces of socialisation inherent in the structures of power that such groups occupy: intellectuals close to the media; the media intelligentsia itself; in a certain sense, all those who can afford a cosmopolitan identity” (ibid: 81). Throughout Sweet Diamond Dust, Ferré’s explicit targets are the elite discourses of nation that have ignored or discursively speculated in subaltern subjectivity. This targeting is complicated by the fact that projects of Puerto Rican national imaginary formation are also imbricated in a more powerful national imaginary, that of the U.S.A. In this context, Ferré’s cumulative narrative grants counter-hegemonic valency to such subaltern figures as Gloria and Titina, to such bourgeois figures as Adri102

ana, and to such oligarchic but subaltern-identified presences as Laura and Merceditas. Connections are also made between exclusionary national discourses, the U.S. takeover, and the patriarchal colonization of women. These connections are intended to signal an attack on Creole romanticizations of the feminine island and the discourse of a national effeminization brought about by U.S. control. At times, however, the challenge to such exclusionary and androcentric paradigms replicates their logics to make a broad feminist point: Puerto Rican women, regardless of racial and class status, are colonized by men in a parallel of the U.S.A.’s colonization (patriarchal penetration) of the (feminized) island. This equation has two consequences. Class and racialized antagonisms frustrate the narrative’s proposed alliances between women. And those antagonisms mean that Sweet Diamond Dust presents an ambivalent scenario—articulated in unstuttering English—of the material-historical and imaginative problems posed by the U.S.A. in Puerto Rico, and by Puerto Rico in the U.S.A. Ferré’s stated literary focus on elite national ideals, and on concomitant subaltern usurpations of those ideals, depends on a conception of the U.S.A. and Puerto Rico as discontinuous geopolities, rather than as entities whose physical and imaginary frontiers are inextricable. Although the narrative’s intertextual references seem to challenge imperatives of categorical separation, such references also draw attention to the limited subversive viability of the leisured floating between worlds that Ferré celebrates. As a result, Ferré’s project fails to concede that the transculturated geopolities on either side of her imagined interstices are inhabited and negotiated by many Puerto Ricans who lack the boundary-crossing ease that Sweet Diamond Dust takes for granted. Notes 1. The editions to which I refer are: Maldito amor (1994, 3a ed., Río Piedras, PR: Huracán; first pub. 1986, México D.F.: Editorial Mortiz); and, Sweet Diamond Dust and Other Stories (1996, New York: Plume; first pub. 103

1988, New York: Random). 2. 1998 was notable in another sense. On December 13 of that year Puerto Ricans voted to retain the island’s Estado Libre Asociado status rather than become the U.S.A.’s fifty-first state, while less than 4 % of voters favoured independence. Similar results were obtained in the referendum held on November 14, 1993. According to Ramón Grosfoguel, working-class sectors in particular have consistently rejected the independence option (1997). He argues that Puerto Ricans have opted pragmatically for the least damaging form of oppression under global capitalism. Moreover, noting the experiences of neighbouring Caribbean states, subaltern sectors fear that independence would mean the dismantling of even the limited worker rights and conditions guaranteed under U.S. rule, and the worsening of s disparities by the neocolonizing forces of capital. Similarly, Frances Negrón-Muntaner argues that the three options faced by Puerto Ricans fail to provide “any clear ‘political’ mandate”; therefore Puerto Ricans engage in a “productive vacillation” or negation of “the ‘political’ as framed by dominant discourses” (1997: 279). See also Negrón-Portillo (1997). 3. Many Puerto Rican writers share Ferré’s recourse to voyaging metaphors. Luis Rafael Sánchez’s widely cited ‘La guagua aérea’ (1994: 11-22), relocates the island’s frontiers into the air-space linking mainland and island geopolities. With this text, Rafael Sánchez joins an imaginative tradition established in the 1960s when “air migration starts to be represented as a process of transculturation” (Sandoval-Sánchez 1997: 194). Ana Lydia Vega’s story ‘Encancaranublado’ (1997: 11-20) uses the flailing boat image to represent a Puerto Rican social imaginary intimately connected to the island’s Antillean neighbours in counter-distinction to U.S. economic and military power in the region. Juan Flores asserts that “with respect to the national culture, it is not the shores of the Island that demarcate the ‘¿qué somos y cómo somos?,’ but the expanses of sea, land and air which conjoin our cultural territory with the other(s),” the “other(s)” being other Antillean states, and the land reference pertaining to Puerto Rico’s mainland extensions (1993: 98). 4. This assessment evokes the diagnoses made by Octavio Paz and Mario Vargas Llosa when discussing the state of Mexican-American and Nuyorican cultures respectively. In 1950 Paz decried the Mexican-American (Pachuco) as an orphan who “ha perdido toda su herencia: lengua, religión, costumbres, creencias” (1999: 17). An uncanny repeat of these sentiments, but directed at the “newricain,” appears in Vargas Llosa’s 1970 essay ‘Imágenes y realidad de Puerto Rico’: “No conozco condición humana más dolorosa y trágica que la del ‘newricain’ (...) ha perdido su historia, su cultura, su lengua y no ha adquirido las del país donde vive” (1983: 242). 5. The decision suggests the author’s changing attitude to the U.S.A., and a rejection of her writerly stance in the early 1990s: “I never write in English. I translate my own work” (1993: 100). 104

6. Aside from Negrón-Muntaner (1997), useful analyses of these language debates are provided by Vientós Gastón (1980), and Rafael Sánchez (1998: 31-38). Rafael Sánchez insists on blurring the linguistic divide between the U.S. and Puerto Rico beyond “una mera oposición gramatical” (ibid: 38). Unlike Ferré’s fiction, the Spanish in his cultural criticism, and his novels La guaracha del Macho Camacho (1976) and La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1989) revels in English contaminants, interruptions and puns. In this way Rafael Sánchez challenges calls for a Spanish cleansed of the metropolitan idiom; at the same time, the anglicismos in his writing remind his readers of Puerto Rico’s continuing colonial status. 7. I am not alone in raising this point. As Rubén Ríos Avila notes (1998: 117, n9), a caricature of an oligarchic Ferré is evident in the character Socorro Averasturi from ‘La herederea,’ in Ramos Otero’s story collection Página en blanco y staccato (1987). Similarly, the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska states that “Rosario Ferré está ancladísima en su condición social” (qtd. in Pino-Ojeda 1998: 147). This observation seems to be confirmed by Ferré’s first two English-language novels in which her nostalgic gaze is locked onto the by now overly familiar historical grounds of her family’s ruling-class splendour. And while her most recent novel, Flight of the Swan (2001) is not overtly autobiographically framed, it nonetheless also remains firmly anchored in the rarified world of the Puerto Rican elite. 8. The impact of U.S. capital on the old plantocracy’s economic power and the island’s agricultural and manufacturing structures was swift and decisive. According to Dietz, within thirty years of U.S. occupation Puerto Rico was transformed “into a classic monocultural colony, directed by U.S. business interests and dominated by capitalist methods of production” (1986: 99). At the same time, U.S. capitalist control of sugar plantations and the modernization of sugar processing (with such innovations as centralized grinding mills) did not improve the socioeconomic conditions of either working-class wage labourers or colonos (farmers who worked their own small parcels of land) (ibid: 111). Dietz provides the following figures on sugar-worker wages: “The average daily wage of plantation workers in Puerto Rico was 63 cents in 1917; in Hawaii, by comparison, the daily wage was 97 cents, and in Cuba, $1.26” (ibid). See also Santiago-Valles (1994), Maldonado-Denis (1972), and Quintero Rivera (1988) for examinations of the socioeconomic impact of U.S. control. 9. Thanks to Debra Castillo for this information. 10. In her preface to the novel Ferré claims that another signification has come to be at work here, the traffic in drugs: “Sweet Diamond Dust (…) is also related, as I see it now, to angel dust—cocaine, another means of traveling (…) Literature is prophetic (…) and although in 1986, when I wrote Sweet Diamond Dust, the drug problem wasn’t rampant on the island, today Puerto Rico is the third most important port of entry for drugs for the United 105

States. In my dreams I saw what was coming” (1996b: ix). 11. For an historical account of the literary impact of Pedreira’s and Marqués’s ideas see Gelpí (1993). Gutiérrez Mouat analyses Maldito amor’s depictions of Puerto Rico as a lost paradise in relation to René Marqués’s patriarchal nationalism (1994: 295-301). Pino-Ojeda provides a beautiful discussion of the novel in relation to Marqués’s use of female metaphors and Pedreira’s concern that women have abandoned the kitchen and hearth and thus left the nation with neither a symbolic heart nor secure traditions (1996: 15465). Cruz-Malavé examines the links between colonization, masculine impotence, and homosexual panic in Marqués and Pedreira (1997). Culonización is Manuel Ramos Otero’s sodomitically charged pun on colonización (1991). For a comparison between Pedreira’s and Marqués’s visions of a pathologized Puerto Rico and the criollo imaginations of the Uruguayan Rodó and the Mexican Vasconcelos, see Juan Flores (1993: 13-60). 12. Pérez Marín links Ubaldino De la Valle to José de Diego (1866-1918), a plantocrat and a champion of Puerto Rican independence (1994: 39). 13. See Ferré (1990: 109-10), Vega Carney (1991: 78) and Jaffe (1995: 67). 14. I would also argue that Hintz may be misreading Maldito amor when she defines it unequivocally as an anti-U.S., pro-independence work. The novel’s textual traffic alone undermines this conclusion by revealing Ferré’s indebtedness to Anglophone feminist traditions. Moreover, Maldito amor’s staging of reactions to “America,” while less fleshed out with historical detail than Sweet Diamond Dust, closely parallels the latter’s contradictory exploration of the idea that either independence or a Manichean rejection of all things emanating from the U.S.A. represent viable or desirable options for all of the novel’s players. That said, Hintz is correct to note that the English-language version does provide much more pro-U.S. sentiment than Maldito amor, a move which exposes Ferré to accusations of a wilful toning down of the Spanish-language text’s political undercurrent. 15. Ferré herself appears to have moved away from an earlier proindependence line, and now publicly speaks out in favour of Statehood, as exemplified by her opinion piece in the New York Times, on 19 March 1998. Ferré’s position in this article generated a great deal of debate, much of it highly critical of Ferré’s perceived political shift, in the newspaper’s letter columns. My thanks to Silvia Spitta for bringing this to my attention. 16. As Pino-Ojeda argues, Arístides’s testimony reveals a lack of common ground among the female protagonists in the novel (1996: 210). 17. Ferré’s novel The House on the Lagoon also features a manuscript at the centre of a battle for representative power. In this case, the text is a novel written in secret by a woman, Isabel, who threatens her husband Quintín with death if he dares to burn it (1996a: 375). On discovering the novel, Quintín is impelled to comment on its fictional distance from historical “truth.” At first he simply adds his observations in the margins, but soon writes his own his106

torical novel on the reverse side of his wife’s text (ibid: 186-94). Unlike Sweet Diamond Dust, this battle for textual authority between an oligarchic husband and wife is clearly demarcated along gender, rather than class and racialized, lines. 18. Ferré refers to this tradition in her essay ‘La cocina de la escritura’ (1982: 46). The use of “the madwoman in the attic” metaphor to signal a feminist novelistic project was popularized by Gilbert and Gubar’s study The Madwoman in the Attic (1984), to which Ferré also refers in her essay. The Henry Jamesian reference, “burning down the house of fiction,” posits an Antillean feminist reaction against master narratives. 19. Christophine’s name also evokes that of Henri Christophe and hence the Haitian regime he headed in the early 1800s. Rhys’s Christophine is not portrayed in terms of the tragedy or megalomania that have characterized Christophe’s literary appearances. However, the allusion connects Wide Sargasso Sea (and Sweet Diamond Dust) to Caribbean texts dealing with Henry Christophe, including the Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s novel El reino de este mundo (1949), the Martiniquan Aimé Césaire’s play La tragedie du roi Christophe (1964), and the Jamaican C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1963). My thanks to Stephen Gregory for alerting me to these literary connections. 20. Pérez Marín notes that Maldito amor’s burning down of the hacienda utilizes a device often found in the Puerto Rican cañaveral novel, such as Enrique Laguerre’s La llamarada (1935) which features two such conflagrations (1994: 42). In her ‘Memorias’ to Maldito amor, Ferré connects Laguerre and the carñaveral genre to the romanticist tradition in which Gautier Benítez and Morel Campos were central figures (1994: 10). On Gloria’s arson, Martínez Echazábal claims that Don Hermenegildo escapes the conflagration (1990: 118), a claim that contradicts Gloria’s statement that his survival will be a remote possibility. The links between Ferré, Rhys, and Brontë also connect Sweet Diamond Dust/Maldito amor to a tradition among Anglophone Caribbean women writers of writing back to Jane Eyre. For example, in Jamaica Kincaid’s novel, Annie John, the eponymous narrator dreams of escaping to Belgium after reading that “the author of my favourite novel, Jane Eyre, had spent a year or so there” (1986: 92). Jane Eyre’s discursive aura is implicit within the English-built public library in A Small Place (1988), Kincaid’s scathing portrait of colonial legacies in her native Antigua. Jane Eyre also appears as a disputable authority in the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff’s Claiming An Identity They Taught Me To Despise (1980: 43-44), and No Telephone to Heaven (1989: 115-16). 21. See Acosta Cruz (1993b: 272-73). This feminist victory is noted by Hintz (1995), Filer (1996), Apter-Cragnolino (1993), and Bustos Fernández (1994). Lisa Davis argues that Ferré uses parody to transform a national allegory into an allegorical “feminist rewriting of history” (1991: 167). On the other hand, 107

Cavallo’s reading of Maldito amor’s intermixing of generic categories (1992), demonstrates the difficulty in attributing the text to any one genre. 22. Aparicio has investigated the presence of musical forms like the danza and the plena in Puerto Rican literature, particularly in terms of the erasure or disparagement of African inputs (1998). While she endorses the feminist reconstruction of the danza and the plena in Ferré’s early short story, ‘Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres,’ she also recognizes in that story the discursive ambivalences that surface in Maldito amor and Sweet Diamond Dust, ambivalences deriving from the tensions between Ferré’s narrative use of subaltern African-Antillean cultural forms and her privileged speaking position (ibid: part one). Mullen explores the same story’s allusions to Luis Palés Matos, Puerto Rico’s renowned negrista poet in the 1920s, and claims that they prove Ferré’s advocacy of an African-Antillean consciousness (1989: 93-94). However, Mullen does not discuss the appropriative implications of Ferré’s allusions to the poet and his negrismo. See also Quintero Rivera for a study of the relation between music and hegemony in Puerto Rico (1998).

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3 Abraham Rodriguez’s boy-zone romance of “American” escape

This chapter relocates from Puerto Rico to Nuyorico, the favoured destination for hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican immigrants to the U.S.A. in the twentieth century. The geopolitical shift from island sugar plantation to New York’s South Bronx (El Bronx) is paralleled by the idiomatic change from Rosario Ferré’s Spanish-English language discontinuity to the barrio English of Abraham Rodriguez’s debut novel Spidertown (1993).1 Unlike Ferré, however, Rodriguez has to date been largely ignored by literary critics, most notably those working in Latino studies.2 A sustained exploration of the inner-city deprivations laid bare in his earlier story collection, The Boy Without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992), Spidertown is told from the perspective of Miguel, a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old drug runner. More than simply a Nuyorican bildungsroman in the late 1980s,3 Spidertown is also a portrait of an El Bronx characterized by social sector collapse, the informal economy based on crack, racialized antagonisms, violence, poverty, and posse stakings of barrio streets. Rodriguez’s Nuyoricans populate a warring contact zone, an inner-city island, cordoned off from the surrounding city. This zone’s frontiers are patrolled by many boundary riders, from pimps, drug lords, and corrupt police, to tenant organizers, parents, and the young Latinos themselves. Spidertown depicts a fragment of the U.S.A. in crisis. The geopolitical and transcultural distance of Miguel’s world from the insular terrains discussed in the last chapter is considerable. While Spidertown, like Sweet Diamond Dust, is notable for its traffic in literary and popular cultural references and the discursive fields to which they belong, Spidertown’s many literary and cinematic allusions do not signal a desire to disarm authoritarian national narratives by an act of rewriting. Rather,

they confirm that for Miguel, the acts of reading or viewing cultural texts enable a desired escape from material constraints. Moreover, Spidertown’s protagonists do not share with Ferré an enjoyment of interstitial transamerican movements. Their world is bounded and rarely extends beyond the South Bronx. These spatial limits are reinforced by imaginative limits. For example, while the novel itself forms part of the Nuyorican narrative tradition, Miguel has no sense of the cultural resilience celebrated by many Nuyorican intellectuals, writers, musicians, and artists.4 He has no understanding of how imperial legacies include his displacement into the U.S.A. Faced by an array of structural and discursive impediments, Miguel is unable to identify himself as either Puerto Rican or (U.S.) “American,” let alone as a neocultural embodiment of the two. My interest in this chapter, then, lies in assessing how the issue of Nuyorican subalternity— to be precise, Rodriguez’s rendering of both subalternity and a transculturated part of the U.S.A.—is posed in a narrative with identifiable material-world and inter-textual coordinates. In this chapter I trace the tensions between Miguel’s management of barrio materialities and a will that impels his departure into worlds beyond El Bronx, and therefore the U.S.A. I want, then, to focus on a number of scenes in the narrative that stage struggles between worldly conditions and fantasies of safe places and transcendence elsewhere. 3.1. The taxonomic trouble of barrio subalternity In one of Spidertown’s many significant conversations about national place, Miguel and Cristalena, his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, have a dispute notable for its disagreements over accepted and appropriate taxonomies and for its evocation of identificatory incommensurables: She put her hand to her chest to restrain her laughter. ‘You, you’re a Puerto Rican American.’ ‘I thought I was Latino.’ 110

‘Nah. You’re a Puerto Rican American.’ ‘How come I’m not a Latin American?’ Her eyes widened like she was amazed at his stupidity. ‘Hispanic is too much Spain. Latin American means Latin America. Puerto Rican means you come from Puerto Rico.’ ‘But I don’t come from there.’ ‘Stop that. I’m gonna hit’chu with something.’ ‘I don’t. If I do I came the long way.’ He scowled. ‘Puerto Rican American. What a loada shit.’ ‘It’s not shit, Miguel. It’s people trying to find their own identities.’ ‘I know my identity. I’m a spick. I like spick, okay? It tells me right away what I am. It don’t confuse me into thinkin’ I’m American. I’m a spick, okay? Thass how whites see you anyway.” (1993: 266-67)

In their conversation, Cristalena and Miguel reveal awareness of the ideological weight that identity categories carry in the U.S.A. But while Cristalena articulates a nuanced Latina-inAmerica consciousness, for Miguel it is the amorphous Latino, and more significantly the demeaning spick, that best reflect his perception of self and place in a state whose parameters are determined by the discursive power of whiteness. Hearing from Cristalena of the debates over ethnic identity categories for the first time, Miguel regards them as nonsensical. Puerto Rican, Puerto Rican American, and American fail to denote a barrio subjectivity with no national significance. As Miguel muses, he and his peers are “lowercase people” (ibid: 288), the novel’s clearest definition of the subalternity that Miguel embodies. While signalling a problematic of identity categories, Cristalena and Miguel’s conversation also indicates that impediments to and possibilities for a distinct mainland Puerto Rican consciousness emerge from the presence of multiple ethnic groups in the same neighbourhood. Residing alongside Puerto Ricans are Cubanos, Dominicanos, Mexicanos, and AfricanAmericans. Miguel’s de facto step-father, Nelo, is described as “a fat Dominican goblin” (ibid: 179-80). Amelia’s father runs a sandwich shop that blares out Cuban mambos, including Pérez Prado’s ‘Homenaje a Castro’ that is greeted with a loud raspberry and laughter from the mostly Cuban clientele (ibid: 76). 111

Mexican women slam their doors when Miguel enters their building, while the members of one “Hardworking Dominican family” package drugs for Spider’s operation (ibid: 43). Nonetheless, the narrative tends to avoid distinguishing between Latinos, and often it is difficult to ascribe national origins to particular characters. The diversity of individual origins, and the cultural and racial tensions and interactions between barrio groups, barely elicit narratorial comment in the novel. Such origins and relations are unremarkable, normalized, and allpervasive. But for the most part, Spidertown’s South Bronx residents describe themselves simply as Latinos, in contradistinction to African and Anglo-Americans, and without articulating their awareness of the historical forces and disequilibria that have led to and characterized the presence of sizeable Latino populations in New York City. For most of the novel’s characters, then, the term Latino transcends group sensibilities and origins to signify shared barrio experiences that are profoundly marked by Nuyorican proximity to African-American communities. Crucial in this regard are the shifting imperatives to speak Spanish and the characters’ constant recourse to what Flores, Attinasi, and Pedraza, call the “interpenetration” of English and Spanish languages by mainland and island residents along a “Spanish-English spectrum” (1993: 163). Interlingual and bilingual facility is also encouraged by interactions with other Latino groups, as Spidertown makes clear. Language use emerges in the novel as perhaps the most significant assertion of a distinct neocultural Nuyorican habitus. The novel’s pages dispense with the debates about linguistic deculturation and contamination—debates in which Ferré and her fictions are also players—simply by embracing Nuyorican linguistic vitality and complexity. Thus while English is the novel’s dominant language, that language’s contours are dynamic and unabashedly impure. English elides with Spanish—“I go in my Baby (…) Confianza, amigo!” (1993: 44). Spanish interrupts English—“Maybe I do things a lo bruto sometimes” (ibid: 92), “Coño, what a tajo, man, they clipped’ju 112

good on the head” (ibid: 123)—and even Mexicanismos are evident: “I got my own chava, bro’” (ibid: 154). Speech is peppered with Spanglish—“Coño, meng!” (ibid: 161). Both English and Spanish languages in proximity demonstrate the influence of African-American cadences—“YO, CHECK OUT THA’ BITCH SHE GOT THEM HOT TIGHT PANTS ON (…) ’EYY! QUE BUENA TU ESTA, CARAJO!” (ibid: 152). And particular forms of English are clearly associated with particular barrio groups, as is implied by Cristalena’s mimicry of posse talk: ‘Yo bro’,’ she snapped in a nasal voice, ‘long time I don’t flesh it up with my piece, know wham sayin’?’ He laughed. ‘Oh shit. Please no. I hear tha’ shit all day.’ (ibid: 165)

The creative force of Spidertown’s ingleñol is everywhere apparent, and the tenor of the examples cited above signals Puerto Rico’s irrevocable impact on U.S. English. Nonetheless those examples also highlight how Nuyorican language uses in the novel obey and reinforce gender and generational logics. For Cristalena, a “good” daughter from a Pentecostal family, posse idiom is comprehensible but only used by her in private to make a humorous point. For Miguel and his male colleagues, on the other hand, command of that idiom identifies and reinforces their place and function in a street culture whose androcentricism is also announced in and by code. Such idiomatic uses are paralleled by generational ones. Miguel’s mother Catarina reverts to Spanish when she wants to reprimand her son. Nelo, her partner, uses “a stiff, formal (…) [and] barely used” Spanish that Miguel interprets as a sign of Nelo’s inability to empathize with Miguel’s dislocation (ibid: 124-25). Amelia, the only protagonist to be studying at college, surprises Miguel with the seamless Spanish she speaks with her father, but she converses in English with her friends. All of the novel’s young Latinos speak and comprehend Spanish, but their favoured idioms are forms of 113

English that affirm generational boundaries. None of the characters attribute politicized, transethnic affiliative, or secure identificatory significance to their languages. The generational and gender divisions of barrio subalternity are reinforced in other ways. For example, the most notable of the novel’s rare overtly political and historical references appears in Amelia’s description of a previous lover. He introduced Amelia to Puerto Rican nationalist figures like Ramón Emeterio Betances and Pedro Albizu Campos, and to “Latino culture, stuff I never even thought about,” only to dismiss her nascent politicization when it threatened the masculinist latinidad he espoused: He didn’t like I had different opinions about things, and that I could argue about them. One night after fucking, we got into a big fight, and it all came out of him, about how fucked up women are and how he didn’t want to end up with a woman who didn’t know her place. (…) He said a man strives, a woman maintains. Most Latino guys I’ve met have that same attitude buried deep down inside. (ibid: 140)

The novel’s second- and third-generation barrio residents appear to want to identify with and claim a meaningful latinidad. But they have few avenues for learning about Nuyorican and other Latino writings or political struggles. And as Amelia’s experiences vouchsafe, the little exposure they might have to politicized Latinos is not conducive to the development of what Chela Sandoval calls an “oppositional consciousness” informed and strengthened by a tradition of tactical community struggle and cultural resilience, let alone by notions of gender equity (2000). Indeed barrio gender divides confirm the paradox of Miguel’s identificatory predicament. Alienated from parental culture by displacement, he is nonetheless interpellated into the same macho bodily economy in which his father and Amelia’s activist lover also operate. In matters of manhood, Miguel, like his male peers, appears to replicate island bodily values, a point to which I will return. Nonetheless, Miguel’s embrace of con114

ventional machismo does not counteract the narrative’s insistence that Miguel, Spider, Amelia, and other participants in the crack economy are not simply outsiders in the U.S.A.; they are also outside the parameters of a meaningful latinidad. Impediments to latinidad do not preclude astute adjudications of the U.S.A.’s racialized terrains. As Spider says to Miguel when considering which Hollywood actor might play Spider in the imaginary film to be based on Spider’s life story, “But we want a Latino brother. Blacks got they own expression, know wham sayin’? We should have our own.” Miguel’s response—“I don’t know one Latino actor that could be you, Spider. Not in Hollywood” (1993: 63)—iterates his awareness of the lack of Latino figures in mainstream culture. A perceptive analysis of parallel and overlapping, yet also differential, Nuyorican, and African-American disenfranchisements, the conversation also confirms both speakers’ perceptions of their cultural insignificance in relation to a majoritarian Anglo-American imagination. Yet the delineations of a Nuyorican subalternity excluded from an U.S. mainstream are even more nuanced in Rodriguez’s novel than the above account indicates. Underpinning Miguel’s earlier noted impatience with Cristalena’s designation of him as Puerto Rican, is a conviction that this nominal also fails to designate his U.S. location. 3.2. Puerto Rican shadows in the barrio Throughout Spidertown Puerto Rico appears as a shadowy and elusive barrio presence, either unimaginable to young Nuyoricans with no direct experiences of the island, or regarded by them as a signifier of generational and cultural incompatibilities. The depoliticized, ahistoricized, and decidedly non-insular parameters of a transplanted and deculturated Puerto Ricanness is clear in Richie’s accusation—“I thought’chu was Boricua, bro’” (ibid: 238)—that he levels at Miguel for an apparent lack of enthusiasm for empinadas, rather than for an inability to identify himself with the Taino name for the island adopted by Puerto 115

Rican nationalists. More poignantly, Puerto Ricanness is associated with a paternal authority rejected by Nuyorican sons and daughters. According to Amelia, Firebug’s arson is motivated by a desire to impress a father who “don’t even know” what his son gets up to (ibid: 23). Miguel’s sense of displacement is also modulated by his attempts to distance himself from his father’s violent reactions against a disparaged working-class status: “I’M A SELFMADE MAN. He’s a self-made mess. Works as a construction man, a bag of muscles, two hands to carry yuh bricks. Gets treated like a sack a’ shit all day, comes home, screams and takes it out on the family” (ibid: 10). Spider, Miguel’s employer, similarly voices a desire not to be like his working-class father who has nostalgically recreated island life in New York City: “What kinda man is that? (…) I GOTTA tell myself THAT AIN’T ME, THAT AIN’T NEVER GONNA BE ME, MISTA SITTIN’ BACK RELAXIN’ INNA GHETTO the wurl can go t’ hell but I got my dominoes my wife my bacalaitos” (ibid: 6869). Spider’s rejection of paternal authority is not attributable to paternal abuse but to different class aspirations, hence Miguel’s disbelief on hearing Spider’s words on the subject: “It’s always the father! The parents hand their sickness down to the kids, right? He was waiting to hear it from Spider’s own lips, tales of abuse and violence and heavy drinking (…) He was disappointed. The story didn’t make any sense” (ibid: 68). So normalized is paternal dysfunctionality for Miguel, he cannot accept that other Nuyorican families may not, in fact, mirror his own. The imaginative distance between a precariously transplanted island culture and barrio actualities is confirmed in a posse visit—the novel’s only significant departure from its El Bronx setting—to Orchard Beach the summer before Miguel decides to stop running drugs. The posse in this case is a group of teenagers temporarily united by their associations with Spider and comprised of Miguel, his “girl” at the time, his friend Firebug, Amelia, and assorted couples. The beach around them has been transformed by the families already established on the sand: 116

“Orchard Beach THE SHINING STAR OF THE CARIBBEAN, smell that sand surf chuletas lechon bacalaitos frying on blackened grills in pots filled with bubbling oil, fat lady in a big white hat handing out tostones as if they were Bible tracts, every radio going full blast, kiddies scooting sand flying” (ibid: 274). The beach, then, is temporarily and ironically resignified into the Puerto Rican “Shining Star” idyll, the U.S.-Puerto Rican partnership in benevolent capitalism and modernization supposedly inaugurated by the declaration of Puerto Rico’s Commonwealth status in 1952. This displaced idyll becomes the site for a battle of wills as the posse members’ overt sexuality and bodily displays challenge and affront the moral codes maintained by Puerto Rican elders in a New York setting. The beach trip ends when Firebug accidentally blows up the Puerto Rican family barbecue and the posse decamps rather than confront the adult men. Despite the humour with which Miguel recalls the explosion—“juicy bloody ribs lying everywhere, clumps of dead burgers staining the plastic kiddie scoops that lay like discarded rifles” (ibid)—the scene reiterates the incompatibility of mainland-born and transplanted-island imaginations. While confirming that the novel’s young Nuyoricans are alienated from their elders, the beach scene also demonstrates that the entangled metropolitan and colonial history is not inconsequential in barrio actualities, or in the reading of Rodriguez’s staging of those actualities. But the scene approaches these entangled histories by emphasizing the imaginative split between barrio and island as experienced by many of the novel’s young players. The narrative attributes the split to the cultural displacements and socioeconomic inequities that continue to subalternize sections of the Puerto Rican diaspora. One of Spidertown’s key points is that its young Nuyoricans have little or no sense of the imperial past that underwrites their status, although at times, hints of that imperial history’s impact on particular bodies are made. Miguel’s antipathy toward his father, for example, is shadowed by the descent into violence that the father’s move to the U.S.A. inaugurated: “He joined the 117

Army. He learned to speak English an’ shoot people. The he got out an’ all he knew how t’ do was yell an’ fuck an’ use his fists” (ibid: 42). But this reminder of imperial legacies is atypical in the novel. Spidertown’s treatment of the Puerto Rican national question is not staged in the manner announced by the epigraph from John Dos Passos—“The language of the beaten nation is not forgotten in our ears tonight”—that introduces the stories in Rodriguez’s earlier The Boy Without a Flag (1992). In its deftly managed staging of the domestication of a Nuyorican schoolboy’s nascent Puerto Rican nationalist consciousness, the collection’s title story prepares the ground for the absence of that consciousness in the later novel.5 In ‘The Boy Without A Flag,’ the agents of discipline are the central character’s Puerto Rican father and two Puerto Rican teachers, Mr. Rios and Miss Marti, the latter’s name inverting the ideological significations derived from her renowned historical namesake, the nineteenth-century Cuban revolutionary and pan-Americanist, José Martí: In her best military bark, Miss Marti ordered everyone to stand. Two lone, pathetic kids, dragooned by some unseen force, slowly came down the center aisle, each baring a huge flag on a thick wooden pole. All I could make out was that great star-spangled unfurling, twitching thing that looked like it would fall as it approached over all those bored young heads. The Puerto Rican flag walked beside it, looking smaller and less confident. It clung to its pole. (1992: 13-14)

Miss Marti is an agent of accommodation to the U.S.A., and appears to be the antithesis of the boy’s father who asks his son: “Come out of fairy-tale land (…) Do you know what imperialism is?” (ibid: 14). The question’s political message—one that also cuts to the heart of Spidertown—is heeded by the boy, who refuses to salute the U.S. flag at school, “Because I’m Puerto Rican. I ain’t no American. And I’m no Yankee flag-waver” (ibid: 18). Told to learn his proper “American” place by Miss Marti (ibid: 19), and pragmatically advised to “make some kind 118

of compromise” by his only ally, the ironically named Miss Colon (Columbus) (ibid: 22), the boy imagines himself as heir to the Puerto Rican nationalist, Albizu Campos, who spent nearly twenty-five years in a U.S. prison until his death in 1965: “They were bound to break me the way Albizu was broken, not by young smiling American troops bearing chocolate bars, but by conniving, double-dealing, self-serving Puerto Rican landowners and their ilk, who dared say they were the future” (ibid: 23). While this observation seems to point to a mainland continuity of the Puerto Rican national question as fictionalized by writers like Ferré, it also confirms that the young Nuyorican schoolboy experiences the mainland-island relation as a rupture enforced by other Nuyoricans. Subordination is not simply attributable to the teachers’ desire to quash a nascent nationalist spirit; the father’s unexpected reaction to his son’s rebellion also makes the boy aware of what it means to be a colonized denizen of the U.S.A.: “Do you know how embarrassing this all is? I didn’t think you were this stupid. Don’t you know anything about dignity, about respect? How could you make a spectacle of yourself?” (ibid: 28). The father’s public recanting of the leftist independentista agenda he broadcasts in the family home thus serves as a lesson in accommodation to U.S. imperial and state hegemony, and a heavy transcultural reminder that Puerto Ricanness cannot be imagined without the U.S.A.: I still had to learn that he [my father] had made peace with The Enemy, that The Enemy was already in us. Like the flag I must salute, we were inseparable, yet his compromise made me feel ashamed and defeated. Then I knew I had to find my own peace, away from the bondage of obedience. I had to accept that flag, and my father, someone I would love forever, even if at times to my young, feeble mind he seemed a little imperfect. (ibid: 29-30)

As fleshed out elsewhere in The Boy Without a Flag, however, the pressure “to make peace” with an imperial U.S.A., but from inside its borders, is frustrated by barrio actualities and con119

straints. And this tension between “the bondage of obedience” and quotidian impediments to belonging is repeated in Spidertown. Thus, the story’s conjoined imperative and question of the father’s words—“Come out of fairy-tale land (…) Do you know what imperialism is?” (14)—must be directed at the later narrative’s players as they attempt to transcend barrio limits without awareness of the legacies responsible for their mainland location. An account is required, then, of the nexus between imperialism and Miguel’s desire to be at peace in and with the U.S.A., despite his residency in an urban location cut off from the U.S.A.’s and Puerto Rico’s signifying reach by a range of historical, institutional, and discursive forces. 3.3. Disputing a Nuyorican critical imagination In Spidertown, Miguel’s statelessness is not simply posed as a problematic of national identifications. It is also intimately related to the ways he may or may not perceive himself in the items of cultural capital to which he has access: Miguel had a ninety-minute cassette of Spider talking about himself. (…) It had been Spider’s idea, because they had gotten on the thing about books and how Miguel read them and then got into Miguel’s dead dream of wanting to be a writer. Miguel shouldn’t have even blurted it out, because it was dumb. There weren’t any Puerto Rican writers. Puerto Ricans didn’t write books. Miguel had never seen one. Miguel tried to tell Spider about how stupid it was, but to Miguel’s amazement, Spider loved the idea. ‘You should write about somebody real amazin’, a real amazin’ kinda life. Somebody people gonna go OHHH SHIT!, somebody bigger than life. The only way there could be an amazin’ spick writer be to write about amazin’ lives. Why don’chu interview me, bro’? I’ll talk about myself into a tape recorder an’ you can write a book about it. Don’t be laughin’, I’m serious! (…)’ (1993: 62)

The notion that the “amazin” lives of figures like Spider are yet to appear in familiar cultural modes, confirms Miguel’s convic120

tion that neither mainland nor island Puerto Ricans are worthy of fictionalization or memorialization. Interestingly, Spider’s insistence that Miguel become the recorder and mediator of his subaltern voice suggests that the testimonial genre might provide a medium for memorializing barrio truths. Yet, evoking the ambivalent appearances of the testimonio in Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust, the alternative-hegemonic potential often ascribed to the mode is not taken seriously in this instance. Miguel cannot envisage how one subaltern might assist another in producing a testimonial. And although Miguel agrees to record Spider’s voice and life story, his later (mis)use of that testimony—he surrenders the cassette to the police—will assist him and not Spider in a move away from barrio subalternity. Miguel’s inability to accord identity coherence to his origins is paralleled by his perception of the irrelevance or unworthiness of Nuyoricans as subjects for, and writers of, fiction or biography. But Puerto Rican writing, whether produced on mainland or island, is not alone in being singled out in this way: Miguel and Spider and all those other shadows, they were tiny pins on a map, they hardly registered at all. Their kind came and went. They didn’t write about them or direct plays or paint murals about their lives. They were all walking shit. Whether they lived in the South Bronx or Bed-Stuy or Harlem or Los Sures. It didn’t matter. They didn’t exist. They were all lowercase people. (1993: 288)

Here Miguel’s self-diagnosis restates the novel’s recurrent idea that he has fallen through a breach in the national idyll peddled by the media: “I used to look at it an’ I never felt like any of it was mine, you know, like all those smilin’ faces an’ lawyers on TV an’ shit? An’ people livin’ in big houses on pretty blocks an’ tree-lined streets. I din’t belong to it, or anythin’” (ibid: 214). But “lowercase” status also signifies that Miguel and his peers represent a forgotten constituency in multiple imaginaries, undocumented even in the cultural work—fiction, plays, murals— produced by Nuyorican artists and celebrated in Nuyorican cul121

tural discourse. The “lowercase people” in Spidertown are not “quintessential ‘citizens of the city,’” travelling dwellers and anchored nomads of the imploded postmodern megalopolis” (Lao 1997: 182). Their subalternity cannot be optimized in these terms. Miguel and many of his friends and neighbours are citizens nowhere. With this emphasis, the novel’s depictions of stateless Nuyorican subalternity suggest a narratorial disinclination to partake of the aspirations articulated as early as 1981 by Flores, Attanasi, and Pedraza: Puerto Ricans in the United States are tending toward neither assimilation nor uncritical cultural preservation; they are neither becoming Americans nor continuing to be Puerto Rican in any handed-down or contrived sense. Their historical position as a colonial people at the lowest level of the North American class structure makes either option unfeasible. But what is left is not simply confusion, or cultural anomaly, or ‘a subculture of poverty’ (…) In music, literature, painting, theater and dance, Puerto Rican artists are giving expression to the experiences of a people at the intersection of two nationalities (…) (1993: 176-77)

Miguel is neither the builder nor the beneficiary of the creative capital outlined here. Miguel embodies a subalternized predicament that suggests the novel itself discounts the viability both of mainland Puerto Rican culture and assessments of it. For example, he is not rendered in terms of “the dialectic tension between two different cultural worlds” Edna Acosta-Belén identifies in Nuyorican writing, a tension that “is expressed through dichotomized interpretations of surrounding reality” (1992: 993). Acosta-Belén describes a range of relational Nuyorican sensibilities that derive from evolving physical and imaginative distances and/or trips between mainland and island. Nuyorican identity is fragmented and rendered contradictory by constant interlingual and spatial shifts, marginalization in both island and mainland contexts, and racialized and class conflict. Nonetheless, Nuyorican writers 122

construct and reinforce a historical and identificatory dialectic in two ways: by attempting to “recreate the ambiguities and dualities corresponding to the unresolved nature of the contradictions of two social groups in conflictive interaction” (ibid: 992); and by returning to the island and searching for “biological” and “mythical” connections that may provide antidotes for alienation in the U.S.A. (ibid: 993-94). This analysis evokes Juan Flores’s identification of “transitional phases” in the constructions of “Nuyorican cultural consciousness” inaugurated by Puerto Rican first impressions of “the abandoned buildings, the welfare lines, the run-down streets, [and] the frigid winter nights with no heat” of a hostile New York environment (1993: 186). Over time, quotidian despair in this setting is countered by personal perceptions of island origin that provide “meaning in a social context bereft of accessible human bearings” and allow the recognition and reclamation of African and Taino cultural roots (ibid: 187-89). Alienation is also overcome by constant journeys between mainland and island. In fact, “reentry” affirms the indisputability of New York City’s Puerto Rican identity; that is, of a Nuyorican bilingual, multiracial, African-inflected, and popular-cultural habitus that permits affiliations with other marginalized groups (ibid: 190-92). Like Acosta-Belén’s Nuyorican dialectic, Flores’s “Nuyorican consciousness” is ultimately predicated on continuing, productive circuits between colony and imperium that succour a Nuyorican identification. Yet the idea that Miguel has access to and can find identity coherence in mainland-island continuities and discontinuities, or in Nuyorican cultural explanations of such interchanges, is meaningless to him. His material prospects do not extend beyond “the crude reality of the ‘mean streets’ of New York City” (Acosta-Belén 1992: 993), or “the conditions of hostility, disadvantage and exclusion that confront the Puerto Rican in day-today reality” (Flores 1993: 186). Appearing, then, to disdain what Miguel Algarín calls a “Nuyorican aesthetic” sensibility (1987: 161-63), Spidertown focuses on painful deculturations and subaltern voicelessness. The novel eschews providing any sense of 123

hemispherical and national transcultural interchange and instead prefers to emphasize geopolitical and transcultural disjunctions. 6 Spidertown belongs to the vibrant Nuyorican literary tradition in prose narrative that has emerged alongside poetry, drama, and music. But its barrio and drug-gang focus insinuates a disregard for the argument, proposed by Juan Flores for example, that narrative emphasis on Nuyorican experiences of socioeconomic deprivation manufacture a superficial, stereotypical image of Nuyoricanness (1993: 186). This image, Flores argues, can in turn be “isolated and sensationalized by the dominant culture, as in entertainment packages from ‘West Side Story’ to ‘Fort Apache’ and in social pathologies like Oscar Lewis’s La Vida.” The end result is a narrative of Nuyoricans as a violence-prone, poverty-stricken sector somehow responsible for its own location at the disparaged edges of the U.S.A. (ibid: 186). In Spidertown, however, any trace of Nuyorican post-alienation cultural debates, or of the Nuyorican literary canon, is absented at both narratorial and intertextual levels. So discounted, Nuyorican cultural production provide no imaginative support for Rodriguez’s fictive subalterns as they negotiate the limited urban spaces that the U.S. state deigns to provide them.7 Instead, that imaginative potential is allocated to other works of literary and cultural capital. 3.4. Crossing over into imagined elsewheres Spidertown’s depictions of the U.S.A. as a land of exclusions are moderated by the fact that Miguel and his peers are avid consumers and interpreters of cultural products. They are bombarded by and enjoy access to cultural commodities from the U.S.A. and abroad. Spidertown contains a rather odd grab-bag of references to television programs—The Jeffersons, Bewitched—and movies. The latter include Nightmare on Elm St III, On the Waterfront, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, romantic films like Tess and the Spanish film Camila, which “seemed to tell them that love was dangerous” (1993: 216), and 124

Miguel’s favourite genres, “classic” film noir tales of spying and war-zone danger, from Casablanca to The Bridge at Remagen. Musical references are also common, but music with origins in Cuba and Puerto Rico—mambos and guarachas, but not salsa, for this musical form is not mentioned in the novel—is relegated to the background, heard only in passing whenever young Latinos pass by or enter adult spaces. Young Latinas prefer the sanitized pop of Jody Watley and Gloria Estefan and young Latinos prefer African-American hip-hop. Miguel also listens to heavy metal, another indicator that his occupation of U.S. space is not reducible to a Latino cultural typology. These cultural references, then, establish an intimate relation between national and cultural imaginations and their exclusions. That relation embroils Miguel and his peers, and the novel that contains them, in questions of canonicity, defined by John Guillory “as a problem in the constitution and distribution of cultural capital, or more specifically, a problem of access to the means of literary production and consumption” (1993: ix). For Guillory, the hegemonic use made of the literary text—the commodity deployed by state apparatuses like the school to regulate and valorize literacy—allows that text to be designated cultural capital in two senses: as “linguistic capital, the means by which one attains to a socially credentialed and therefore valued speech”; and as “symbolic capital, a kind of knowledgecapital whose possession can be displayed upon request and which thereby entitles its possessor to the cultural and material rewards of the well-educated person” (ibid: ix). In Miguel’s case, a cultural capital lack in the second sense is at work, rendered as his ignorance about Puerto Rican literary and other forms of cultural production like plays, poetry, and murals. The precluding of access from these forms of cultural capital, and the Nuyorican neocultural buoyancy they announce, parallels and reinforces his national alienations. But while Miguel may have no knowledge of Nuyorican and Puerto Rican literary texts, his situation does not exactly replicate that of Chicano writer Benjamin Alire Sáenz who has said 125

that “in my neighborhood, the great literature of the world was not something that any of us aspired to write—it was not even something we aspired to read” (1994: 523). Miguel does read books, and his apparent rejection of literary cultural capital is both inconsistent and inconstant. On matters literary—the most important and symbolically resonant cultural debates in the novel—Miguel constantly contradicts himself, as Amelia notes in anger after listening to Miguel berate her for being a crackaddict who goes to college: “What about you, kiddo? Don’chu think a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old kid who reads Tolstoy and who happens to be Latino is sacrilege?” (1993: 20). Nonetheless, and although Miguel dreams of being a writer, he claims that books are an ambivalent if not inappropriate cultural medium for asserting self in his world. Miguel is taught this lesson by a father—a differently oppressive patriarch from the pseudoradical nationalist in ‘Boy Without a Flag’—who destroyed the novels his son read in secret. In his early teens, reading permitted imaginative escapes from an oppressive father, while also signifying a generational disjunction. However, despite abandoning school at the age of fourteen and leaving home, only to amass in his room over one hundred books that he does read, Miguel says: “I don’t read books no more. (…) My father was right, man. (…) I guess you only read them when you don’t have experience. Lookit me now. The streets. Thass a education. Books din’t teach me shit. Neither did school. They don’t lead nowhere” (1993: 21). That said, the books Miguel devours—and some of the films he watches—do, in fact, lead somewhere; they lead elsewhere beyond the barrio and, in some instances, beyond the U.S.A. itself. If Spidertown is legible as a barrio bildungsroman in which Miguel moves away from involvement in a brutalizing crack economy and a bounded urban space, his desire to escape physically is confirmed by his fanciful escapes into the literary texts at his disposal. Miguel’s choice of texts becomes significant here. Aside from Tolstoy, he reads Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Christiane F., Chandler, Graham Greene’s spy novels, 126

Dickens’s Oliver Twist and, at the end of the narrative, Richard Wright’s Native Son. He discusses Sartre with Amelia, and Dickens with Amelia and Spider. The collective cultural value announced by this intertextual conglomerate suggests that, for Miguel, the social status announced by access to symbolic capital outweighs any perceived notion of the exclusionary effects of what Guillory calls “the ‘ideological’ content of literary works, a content which the critics of the canon see as reinforcing the exclusion of minority authors from the canon by expressing the same values which determine exclusionary judgments” (1993: ix). If this is so, then Miguel’s non-Latino literary choices serve “as the vector of ideological notions which do not inhere in the works themselves but in the context of their institutional presentation, or more simply, in the way in which they are taught” (ibid: ix). Yet Spidertown presents its readers with a problem in this regard. The novel’s intertexts—U.S. and European—are associated with a sixteen-and-a half-year old barrio resident who left school at the age of fourteen to work on the streets. He has rejected the educational state apparatus and its function in canon formation. Moreover, Miguel’s barrio location and antipathy toward a Puerto Rican identification makes it impossible for readers to ascribe to him a Latin American bourgeois or intellectual imagination that looks to Europe for its valued items of literary capital. Miguel, it seems, has acquired by osmosis a taste for reading literary texts that cannot be attributed to institutional teaching. This taste is not of interest for signalling a narratorial implausibility; rather, it is noteworthy for demanding some account of those texts’ function as symbolic capital in Miguel’s struggles against material constraints. His predilection for works from “high” literary canons on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that his dreams of escape from a devalued part of the U.S.A., and from exclusionary U.S. imaginaries, are armed by literary texts and cultural imaginations that are not beholden to American Dream logics. Spidertown’s inclusion of such items of literary capital thus complicates our understanding of how na127

tional imaginaries themselves are rendered, or not, in Latino writing. As well, they problematize the relationships between Latino and non-Latino literary texts as U.S. cultural capital. These complexities are at play in the novel’s two most important literary references, one British, the other African-American. Despite Miguel’s ambivalence about the cultural capital and relevance of books, he, Amelia, and Spider constantly discuss and relate their lives to literary texts. In their first meeting Miguel responds to Spider’s questioning about his reading habits and knowledge of Dickens by likening Spider to Fagin, and himself to the Artful Dodger, intertextual allusions that signify their posse fraternity at the “bad” edges of the juridical system. Dickens is the one author who connects Amelia, Spider, to whom she gave a copy of Oliver Twist, and Miguel, who after being beaten up finds comfort in a readerly dose of Dickens. Up-dated Dickensian rather than U.S., Puerto Rican, or even Latino cultural allusions, it seems, inspire and invite parody when Amelia and Miguel discuss his relationship with Cristalena: “A South Bronx fairy tale. Sex, drugs, money, vice, an’ loud hiphop music” (1993: 137). If the Oliver Twist reference signifies the characters’ “lawless” barrio location, it also locates them, and Miguel in particular, at the “good” or “high” edges of the western literary spectrum. In the context of this double location—one physical, disparaged and marginalized; the other imaginative, valued and liberated—the Victorian realist novel-cum-fairy-tale Oliver Twist has particular resonances for the novel’s engagement with the U.S. national imaginary. Such resonances imply the equivalence of Miguel’s and Oliver’s experiences of street-level violence, organized crime, and eventual rescue. But while Miguel imaginatively escapes from the streets and into Dickens after being beaten up, his escape is into a fairy-tale text from a British nineteenth-century liberal tradition. In Miguel’s hands the symbolic value of Oliver Twist accords with William Palmer’s assessment of that text as governed by “late eighteenth-century concepts of perfectability and natural benevolence” (1997: 121) That is, 128

“Oliver is protected from (…) corruption (…) and no temptation or corrupt influence can penetrate his natural goodness” (ibid). Moreover; underpinning Dickens’s novel is the notion that the exceptional individual like Oliver will be recognized in situations of social pathologization, and rescued from them. The implication of this Victorian fairy-tale message for Miguel is that he, too, has been wrongly placed. He has a natural, innately good (Latino) core that will survive and transcend the subalternizing pressures of the crack economy, and of the U.S.A. itself. At Spidertown’s end, accordingly, Miguel emerges as a barrio survivor. He has “solved” the Sartrean problem—announced early in the narrative by a dialogue between Miguel and Amelia (1993: 28)—of how to overcome “self-deception” and confirm his humanness through individual choices of his own ethical making, unmodulated by institutional, environmental, or discursive forces. That Rodriguez’s narrative posits an existential solution to barrio predicaments is also suggested by Detective Sanchez’s gift of Richard Wright’s existential novel Native Son, originally published in 1940, to Miguel while he is in hospital. The didactic import of this intertext in the narrative is made clear by Sanchez’s later comments to Miguel as he recovers from a shooting injury in hospital: What I like about him [Richard Wright] is his ability to present us with the case of a young man [Bigger Thomas] who was born into a situation that he couldn’t change. He couldn’t help what he did. He just didn’t know any better, and there was no one to teach him. Sometimes I feel like more Puerto Ricans should read it. We could learn so much from the black man. (ibid: 322)

Like Oliver Twist, Wright’s novel is an exploration of urban crisis, violence and squalor. But it is a U.S. narrative. The intertext’s appearance, and what Sanchez does with it, again confirm that Spidertown’s main players are afflicted by an individualized crisis attributable to entrenched class disparities and racialized hierarchies. In accord with this literary resonance, Detective 129

Sanchez becomes the figure—at once like Dickens’s Mr. Brownlow and Mr. Max, Bigger Thomas’s lawyer—by whose presence and example Miguel may realize he can “help what he does,” despite his situation. More tellingly the narrative’s citation of a significant work from the African-American canon signals that the travails of Bigger Thomas and Miguel are also alike. The characters’ position in relation to the nightmarish whiteness encoded in the signifier “America” can be managed only by an affirmatory act of (non-white) individual coming-toconsciousness. Unlike Oliver, both characters must transcend the black-white dichotomy that structures what Toni Morrison calls a pervasive “American” imagination: “American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen” (1992: 47). The ramifications of Spidertown’s reference to Native Son do not stop at affirming the commonalities of Nuyorican and African-American socioeconomic and racial subordination, or the neocultural possibilities arising from those sectors’ interactions. Wright’s novel is the most significant of Spidertown’s U.S. intertexts. While Raymond Chandler, Anne Rice, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain are named, Native Son is the only U.S. novel to be identified and discussed. When considered in relation to Oliver Twist, the presence of this literary text is both suggestive and provocative. It reinforces the impression that Spidertown defies its readers to ascribe to its world and players conformity with a Latino cultural typology. Miguel is asked to read and learn from the travails of an African-American, and not another Latino. This implies that while Miguel’s Nuyorican experiences parallel those of Bigger Thomas, a desired Nuyorican cultural habitus will be distinct from African-American experiences, hence the need to build from the didactic example. It is perhaps not insignificant, then, that Spidertown chooses to bypass the one Nuyorican narrative to which it is most readily comparable, Piri Thomas’s 1967 Down These Mean Streets. Written by a Nuyorican of African descent, Thomas’s autobiog130

raphy—itself indebted to Native Son—was a ground-breaking exploration of barrio poverty, racial discrimination, and male disquiet. The title of Thomas’s memoir provides the metaphoric designation for a notable trend within 1960s and 1970s Nuyorican writing, the narrative of the “mean streets,” a sub-genre to which Spidertown belongs.8 As Junot Díaz asserts, the topical and topographical similarities between the two narratives separated by twenty-six years are remarkable, although Díaz regards Spidertown as an anachronistic and derivative replay of Thomas’s memoir (qtd in Collazo 1999).9 But what interests me here is the fact that Spidertown’s most resonant U.S. literary reference is not Nuyorican. While I don’t wish to overemphasize what Spidertown fails to do or contain, this absence again insinuates an intertextual distance or lack of interest that parallels a fictive world untouched by Nuyorican cultural productions. Since the 1960s, these productions have sought to dispense with the “mean streets” narrative by focussing on Nuyorican cultural resilience and resistance. Miguel’s imaginary of “lowercase” statelessness could be designated a failure to find nourishment in such productions and the resistant capacities ascribed to them. Cultural capital for Miguel, and for the novel that contains him, becomes valuable only when it enables and allegorizes his flights of fancy beyond what the U.S.A. signifies. 3.5. The frontiers of a crack dream Miguel’s renarrativizations of a range of cultural texts in order to countenance his own magical transcendence of material limits are intimately tied to his understanding of what the U.S.A. signifies. He imagines the U.S.A. as a space of limitless socioeconomic promise to which non-white denizens aspire, but with little hope of entering: “Miguel was the one with the American dream, of making it to the top honestly and cleanly. It was a stupid dream and he had no reason to even hope for it. Inside he felt like the American dream was a lie. No spick kid was going to make it that way” (1993: 185). Despite Miguel’s access to a 131

car and the relative freedom of movement this provides him, the narrative’s in-built topography of identifiable street-names and neighbourhood locales—night-clubs, crack houses, tenement blocks, bodegas, movie theatres—confirms that he circulates in a bounded territory cordoned off from the city beyond it. Miguel’s world, visited only once by a white character, the corrupt policeman Cheese Face, is always counterpointed by two white worlds: the world of American Dream promise; and that materially grounded if “mundane humdrum WHITE world where Miguel felt like he didn’t even register” (ibid: 275). Failing to “register” also suggests that while Miguel desires a life after running drugs, he cannot conceive of what that life might entail apart from a position at the Puerto Rican nadir of U.S. socioeconomic structures10: Where could he go to make a life for himself? (…) If he dropped out of the business, he’d be nothing, a young punk living on a grant, a crime subsidy that would soon run out. Then what? He’d be a regular seventeen-year old brat trying to get a job at McDonald’s shoveling fries and pushing a mop. He couldn’t leave. He was dependent, like an addict. He couldn’t go and he couldn’t stay. (ibid: 71)

The prospect of working at McDonald’s is far less attractive, because less lucrative, than participation in the drug economy. As justified by Careta, a minor drug-dealer to whom Miguel goes for advice, faced with replicating their parents’ workingclass subordination or going on welfare, young Nuyoricans may have little recourse but to participate in the informal drug economy (ibid: 202). The various exclusions and lacks affecting Miguel that appear to drive him into the crack economy accord with what has been identified as a U.S. urban variant of apartheid. AponteParés describes this species of apartheid in terms of “‘fortress cities’ brutally divided into ‘fortified cells of affluence’ and ‘places of terror’ where police battle the criminalized poor” (1998: 272). The former are often middle-class residential, 132

work, and recreational spaces, while the latter are neighbourhoods populated by working-class sectors, including various communities of “colour,” which despite predominating in certain areas, intermix and thus defy attempts to describe inner-city spaces as racially and/or ethnically pure zones. New York City’s particular urban version of apartheid was exacerbated in the 1970s and 1980s by the economic downsizing of the industrial sector, and a massive reduction in barrio residential space due to demolition programs and urban-renewal initiatives of benefit to the middle-classes only (ibid: 272-73). Outside the official economy, many young male Latinos in New York’s inner city in the late 1980s and early 1990s embraced the opportunities promised by illicit, informal enterprises, from the drug economy to street vending, sweat-shop and other “unregulated” work (ibid: 272).11 To these material factors can be added a century-long continuity in dominant-cultural perceptions of ethnicized districts as criminal zones requiring state attention and confinement. 12 In Spidertown, white police enter El Bronx as hated figures, at once state apparatus agents of discipline and national boundary riders. Even when corrupt, their excursions into the barrio transform them into bounty hunters for the U.S. state. Cheese Face, for example, orders Miguel to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at gunpoint (1993: 74), a sardonic but humiliating lesson in imperial-state hegemony that recalls the stance of the teacher authorities in ‘The Boy Without a Flag.’ The power of whiteness is also transferable to Latinos. Recovering in hospital after being shot at Spadgie’s night-club, Miguel answers Detective Sanchez’s question—“An’ how’s a cop supposed t’ be?”—with one word, “White” (ibid: 299). But as Bourgois notes, “It is not merely the police who enforce inner-city apartheid in the United States but also a racist ‘common sense’ that persuades whites, and middle-class outsiders of all colors, that it is too dangerous for them to venture into poor African-American or Latino neighborhoods” (1996: 32). The corollary of this is the fear that Latinos and African-Americans experience when they move 133

from their neighbourhoods into spaces de-coloured by the power of whiteness (ibid: 8). Spidertown’s residents, however, rarely leave El Bronx. Constrained by inner-city apartheid, Miguel’s departures are imaginative. Paralleling his escapes into other cultural terrains via novels and films is his fantasy of revenge against white authority figures, his killing of Cheese Face for example: ‘He was a good person, always helping out, helping people,’ says LILYwhite neighbor from his LILY-white porch somewhere out on Long Island FAR from the action, maybe near a fucken beach. ‘He was devoted to helping kids.’ Pah pah pah, eat lead mothafucka, go play cops and robbers someplace else, this ain’cha turf. Occupation army. Working-class scabs. Go shoot a black kid in the back, mothafucka. (1993: 77)

Miguel’s fantasy is telling in another sense. It demonstrates how barrio residents need not leave the barrio to endure threats of violence. Even the school to which Miguel returns, with its metal detectors and “barred windows like a prison,” is structured as if violence is inevitable (ibid: 306). The world Miguel inhabits and moves through is at war. But Spidertown reveals that racial and class wars are also complicated by the underground crack economy in which Miguel participates. In Spidertown, crack-dealing is accredited with transforming El Bronx into a war-zone. Observing the impact of what she calls “lowlifes,” Cristalena says: “Makes me wish I had a machine gun so I could knock ‘um off. (…) Business nothing. This block used to be nice once, little kids playing, old men playing dominoes. You could hang out. Not now, not anymore” (ibid: 11). Bystanders wounded in posse shootouts are jokingly referred to as “mushrooms” (ibid: 67). Tenement citizen groups attempt their own strategies to subvert the drug-gangs’ hegemony over the streets and the police corruption that reinforces that hegemony. They do this not by reporting drug-dealers, but by reporting invented scenarios of “Robbery, marital dispute, man with gun, this kinda shit” to which the police must respond 134

(ibid: 117). The tactical opposition of these barrio residents, however, is quashed by Spider who hires Firebug to burn out the offenders. When not employed to destroy such targets, Firebug simply hosts a wienie roast,” the burning down of tenements as a ritual destruction of barrio space motivated by boredom and powerlessness. Posses stake claims to the streets, clearing outsiders from public space with a semiotic display of colours. The signs of crack, and the fear that the drug economy inspires in non-participants, the barrio’s majority, are everywhere apparent, even to Miguel: Was he the enemy? He felt like it as he entered his building. Three of the apartments on the first floor were empty, and one was a crack house. (…) There were still normal people: The frightened Mexican ladies with their thick black hair scurrying down the stairs clutching their big-headed kids. They always slam doors. (…) Maybe he hadn’t noticed it before, this state of war, not until Cristalena. (ibid: 87)13

Miguel’s growing unease with “this state of war,” however, belies the fact that his own drug-running is not reducible to socioeconomic imperatives only. As a response to multiple disenfranchisements, Miguel’s posse place also confirms his embrace of a crack fantasy. Nowhere is the imaginative appeal of the drug-based street-culture better detailed than in Spidertown’s longest monologue, the “preamble” by which Spider “speechifies” his life-story with the help of Miguel’s mediation (ibid: 275). The nineteen-year-old Spider is Miguel’s employer, a compadre or god-father figure for his younger employee. Spider regards himself as an entrepreneur, not a criminal. Imagining himself so successful that he is invited onto Donahue, he constructs a speech for the U.S. talk-show audience to explain why he employs barrio youth: “The idea, Phil, is to inculcate in the youth the idea that they too can have big cars and guns and be Clint Eastwood and say MAKE MY DAY (…) It’s my job to open the world to them, to introduce them to the concept of business, free enterprise” (ibid: 67). In keeping with his corpo135

rate agenda, Spider provides his workers with incentives: drugs, clothes, jewellery, women, substantial wages, bonuses, and, in Miguel’s case, a car and business cards. Training in the drug economy begins early, and Spider boasts that “he can grab a tenyear-old kid and turn him into a successful businessman faster than IBM or ITT” (ibid: 66). In control of a small-scale drug operation run with military precision, Spider also describes his enterprise in social revolutionary and expansionist terms. But his logic is contradictory. On the one hand he attempts to break-up the Nuyorican family, a social unit that implodes when the children realize they can make more on the streets than their parents do in formal work. On the other hand, families with little chance of finding socioeconomic security in the legal economy find employment and a renewed sense of familial unity in the underground economy, under Spider’s tutelage. Despite such contradictions, Spider’s plan is to “suit up like Che and head for other cities, to spread his operation out, to use the same principles that have worked so well here” (ibid: 67). His entrepreneurial revolution is also fantasized as a youth-style revolution. His example, power, and wealth will inspire “Spider: The Movie” and ironically inaugurate a change in white youth attitudes to “Spicks” as embodiments of a “POOR is cool” style worth emulating (ibid: 68). At this point Spider’s “preamble” retreats from the romance of entrepreneurship and returns to street grounds. He justifies his function in the underground economy as the only feasible option for a barrio resident like himself: “Are poor people wrong to get money any way they can: THE WORLD IS A LOCKED DOOR. Ain’t this a war? It’s a goddamn people’s revolution!” (ibid: 70). Fortified by this rhetoric, Spider offers youngsters like Miguel a chance to attain “an American Dream idea I bet they didn’t think about” (ibid: 275). Spider’s informal code of practice reveals that the streetculture he embodies pivots on an astonishing paradox. Despite foreclosure of barrio subalterns from the American Dream, crack-entrepreneurship is equated with that Dream, and struc136

tured according to U.S. corporate values. Spider’s reclamation of such values, and the organizational coordinates of the posse he runs, would seem to confirm Bourgois’s thesis that the crack economy generates a distinct habitus, with its own semiotic codes, informal regulations, power structures, and forms of cultural capital (1996: 8). That said, it is difficult to ascribe to Spider’s operation the optimism evident in Bourgois’s designation of this habitus as a “street culture of resistance.” Bourgois argues that gang resistance appears as a “complex and conflictual web of beliefs, symbols, modes of interaction, values, and ideologies that have emerged in opposition to exclusion from mainstream society” (ibid). Yet he also claims that posse culture is “not a coherent, conscious universe of political opposition but, rather, a spontaneous set of rebellious practices that in the long term have emerged as an oppositional style” (ibid). Accordingly, because “lifestyles of violence, substance abuse, and internalized rage” (ibid: 9) undermine resistances to hegemonic processes, drug-economy participants “shape the oppression that larger forces impose upon them” (ibid: 17) and play a pivotal role in their own destruction and in that of the communities in which they reside. Even with such qualifications, Bourgois’s notion of resistance despite self-destructiveness does not account for the world constructed in Spidertown. Rodriguez rejects any optimistic qualification of the crack culture by showing that Spider’s corporate hopes for his particular operation defeat any underlying counter-hegemonic ambitions. In what amounts to a streetlevel surrender rather than resistance to mythical “American” promise, crack dealers like Spider conceive of themselves as ethical agents of the free-enterprise dynamic that feeds the American Dream itself. Moreover, the imaginative appeal of a posse structured according to a corporate model is always tempered by the logistics of selling crack that work against a gang-led resistance to hegemonic processes. The considerable financial stakes in the crackcentred street culture require operational regulations to which all participants must abide. As Spider says to Miguel, “There are 137

rules, you fuck. The world is fulla thum an’ you can’t escape ’um” (1993: 169). Confronted by rule-breakers, violence becomes Spider’s main method of discipline, a means for punishing perceived and actual offences and precluding other infractions. Thus, once Miguel commits to abandoning Spider’s operation, he is marked for disciplining. Long before that decision is voiced, his ambivalence about his employment has lead to slip-ups and inevitable warnings. He is harassed by corrupt police, beaten by Spider’s agents, and set up by Spider for a drive-by shooting. Even the sartorial changes inspired by Cristalena, the replacement of his posse uniform for a new look, have life-threatening consequences. Spider’s employees notice the changes—“You too good f’ us now bro’?” (ibid: 41)—and let him know that non-conformity and code-transgression, the signs that Miguel has other, higher aspirations, will not be tolerated on the street. Miguel’s “turf infractions” render him vulnerable to what he calls an ill-defined but threatening “they”: In the street-level war game of the crack trade, ‘they’ can change from one week to the next. This week it’ll be a local posse, trying to make points with someone. Next week it’ll be a rival crack lord, upset over some turf infraction. Sometimes it’s someone in your own organization who sells out for an extra gram, a new position, a better corner, who provides THE ENEMY with info that leads to that corpse in a plastic bag in an empty lot on Leggett Avenue. Sometimes the head man gets too chummy with the new boy and the old boys get jealous. Actually there are so many more reasons for murdering someone than not that it’s a miracle that bodies don’t have to be pushed off lots by bulldozers like in all those classic black-and-whites of the forties. (ibid: 112-13)

Miguel’s reference to “classic black-and-whites” appears as a cinematic bricolage that can’t be identified or historically situated. It is unclear here whether Miguel is indeed referring to 1940s film noir, for the allusions also evoke 1930s gangster films, war films, and even Holocaust imagery. The monologue thus provides an intertextual parallel to his contradictory, dehistoricized predicament. 138

Despite the incongruity of its images, Miguel’s thoughts reveal that the climate of violence generated by organized crime in Miguel’s neighbourhood matters to him in an imaginative sense by allowing him cinematic fantasies of escape to complement his literary fantasies. Those predilections are noted by Cristalena who warns him that “This ain’t no movie, lover” (ibid: 132). Miguel ignores the warning. He continually casts himself as a player in a generically fluid script in which images of frontier lawlessness fuse with images drawn from urban gangster and 1940s battle-field plots: “what a movie life to be standing on the street one minute sharing a joke and the next to find yourself frozen staring for a fraction of a second at a car that slows, at a gun muzzle poking from the back seat through the open window” (ibid: 287). In Miguel’s “movie life,” clear divides between good and evil are established, and enemies are always lying in wait: “They’ll wait ’til he’s trapped in my car, Miguel thought, and they’ll surround it quickly an’ pump it fulla shells” (ibid: 13). Ambushes, gun fights and quick get-aways recall western and gangster films: “The first time some fuck with an automatic raspy drilled his car as he was making his getaway. The street cleared like a dream, the streetlight going out just as the shots spattered out. Before he ducked he actually saw the flashing gun muzzle in the window of a metallic-blue Mustang” (ibid: 45). At other times, the car chase evokes the horse chase, with Miguel outwitting his pursuers by temporarily leaving town (barrio) limits: There were headlights behind him, growing larger, engine growling, and those swift stuttering barks kept coming. He turned sharply on East 156th, racing toward Southern Boulevard. The car wasn’t behind him anymore. He was trembling a little, waiting for a green light, thinking he had lost them, when he heard that strange engine sound again, a nasal churning. He spotted a loaded-down Falcon speeding by on the boulevard, windows full of young laughing faces. Miguel realized with a tremor that this was the car that had done the shooting. When the light turned green, he kept going straight and got on the Bruckner Expressway. (ibid: 50-51) 139

The ambush metaphor is even deployed to account for Miguel’s romance with Cristalena—“He leaned against a parked car and waited, out of sight of the storefront so he couldn’t be spotted. An ambush, he thought to himself, grinning” (ibid: 209)— thereby confirming the couple as lovers fighting against the odds in a zone of frontier lawlessness, where Spider’s posse boundary-riders patrol the sites of crack-dealing and posse players are always alert to danger. The imagery recalls Bourgois’s observations that crack-gang members may regard themselves as “the ultimate rugged individualists braving an unpredictable frontier where fortune, fame, and destruction are all just around the corner, and where the enemy is ruthlessly hunted down and shot” (1996: 326). For a time Miguel is seduced by the frontier romance of crack-dealing. He embraces both Spider’s corporate rhetoric and the material benefits gained by working for him as a drugrunner. Most importantly, Spider provides Miguel with driving lessons and a car that he restores and personalizes so that it will be recognizable on the streets as belonging to Miguel. As perhaps the most important non-literary commodity aside from crack in Spidertown, the car signifies Miguel’s access to the American Dream of mobility as adapted by Spider and recognized by his peers. Moreover, Miguel’s “Baby” at once proves and signifies the selfhood otherwise denied to him: “The car was his own personal tag. (…) The car had become an extension of his arms and legs” (1993: 255). When Miguel decides to retreat from his posse world, the need to jettison such a symbol of macho conspicuousness is likened by him to castration—“It was like parting with his dick” (ibid: 255)—an ontologically shattering emasculation. Miguel’s wish to escape from Spider’s authority also threatens the masculine conventions he has hitherto embodied and performed, and benefited from, without question. 3.6. A macho boy’s bodily frontiers When Miguel and Firebug appear on the novel’s first page, their 140

conversation establishes the gender and sexual, not to mention racialized, coordinates of the narrative that contains them: ‘They got this perfume f’ faggits, man. (…) Yeah man! I saw it. It say ‘Parfoom por le homo’ right on the bottle.’ Miguel let the laughter burst right out of him. It sounded brittle, like paper being torn into strips. ‘It means ‘man”,’ he said. ‘I think thass paisano talk.’ ‘Maan. Only patos wear that shit. Is that wha’ thum blancos need t’ score some pussy? No Latino need shit like that. Latinos can walk into a room smellin’ like puro sobaco an’ still get pussy galore.” (ibid: 1)

Postulating a virile distinction between Latino and white men, the passage also delineates the homophobic and misogynistic parameters by which the speakers’ bodily presence is affirmed. Yet toward the novel’s end, the sureness of Miguel’s gender status has been challenged by the break with gang life: “It was all in his blood. To be THA MAN. The woman just did what the man said. That was respect. Tradition. Yet Miguel was throwing it all away, the ghosts of a hundred million Latin machistas all hanging their heads and cursing him” (ibid: 308). At the heart of the novel’s barrio crisis, then, machismo, or at least Miguel’s embodiment of it, is in crisis as well. Machismo is generally regarded as a set of organizing principles by which Latin American and Latino male bodies acquire meaning. Rationalized in accord with an active and passive binary logic, machismo is characterized as a homosocial regime in which “standing as a man is gauged by the execution of certain transactions (…) in relation to other men” (Lancaster 1995: 148). Such acts as “drinking, gambling, risk-taking, asserting one’s opinion, (…) fighting, [and] the conquest of women” are performed to assert individual masculine status before the gaze of other men (ibid: 149). Gender relations become crucial here. While passivity is conventionally scripted onto the potentially threatening bodies of women, it is also a performance that can be attributed to the active male whenever his masculine creden141

tials are deemed wanting. In the failure of the active principle, asserts Lancaster, lies a potential descent “to the zero point of the game,” the emasculation construed as literal and symbolic social powerlessness (ibid). To recognize in Spidertown a staging of machismo in crisis, therefore, would suggest that Miguel is threatened by a descent to the “zero point” as determined by the gaze and judgement of other men. With two years experience away from his mother’s home and on the streets, Miguel—still a child according to legal definitions—is already interpellated into conventional ideals of Latino manhood, despite his identificatory alienation from PuertoRicanness. Those ideals include not crying, being “a strong rudder” for women (1993: 178), “having the cojones to stand your ground” (ibid: 176), and, publicly denying that he reads literature, a form of cultural capital associated by his peers with the feminine. Upholding gender divides is central to Miguel’s masculine identification. He is relentless in the search for sexual partners, and asserts the correctness of his sexual aim with what Firebug, himself no paragon of anti-homophobic virtue, calls “pato-phobia” (ibid: 89). Before meeting Cristalena, he engages in “fuckfests,” the loud sexual rituals with whatever women are at hand by which he and Firebug celebrate Firebug’s “wienie roasts,” his acts of arson on derelict and inhabited tenement blocks. “Wienie roast” itself has many connotations. It suggests a sardonic resignification of a 1950s “all-American” family ritual, the hot-dog roast. “Wienie” may also signify a penis, but a penis that implies its bearer is either infantilized or wimpish, both meanings alluding to unsuitable male conduct.14 Together, such resonances coalesce anxieties about national place with bodily (phallic) fears, hence the need for bearers of masculinity to assert phallic possession and rigour. For Miguel, this assertion is practised with many terms of abuse for the women he sleeps with, of whom all but Amelia and Cristalena are treated with scorn: “You don’t even have to like the bitch. It’s what’s in her pants, under her skirt. The rest of that shit is disposable” (ibid: 16).15 Miguel’s misogyny and strict adherence to gender 142

codes is typical of the participants in the underground crack economy, and in Spider’s posse enterprise in particular. However, the homosocial coordinates of Miguel’s posse place are always unstable. Miguel participates in the macho economy as a young male who benefits from the compadrazgo or god-father fraternity headed by Spider. Bourgois describes the compadrazgo relationship as “a powerful tradition in Puerto Rican culture that sanctifies solidarity and reciprocal obligations between men” announced by traditional marital and blood-kin ties and including “fictive kinship” arrangements (1996: 82). Yet, in Spidertown family structures are fractured by generational incompatibilities, and the unity of Spider’s street operation is not based on blood and marital associations. A response to the imploded family unit, the posse is distinctly neocultural. This new conception of family is structured by a traffic in women, the commodities shared between men as confirmation of fraternal closeness, and reinforced by threats. Without what Spider calls “a certain amount of discipline” (1993: 148), the unfailing loyalty that compadrazgo demands of its participants collapses. Relations between Miguel and Spider begin to unravel when Spider arranges public punishments for Miguel’s perceived lapses in commitment, signalled for the reader by an increasing unwillingness on Miguel’s part to find escapist solace in film and television. Both parties articulate a sense of betrayal at the hands of the other, but for Miguel, Spider’s actions undermine the homosocial securities of his world: “I thought’chu was really my pana. But’chu jus’ lookin’ out f’ yuhself, Spider. (…) I can’t work f’ you, f’ anybody like that” (ibid: 170). Once he commits to the final break with Spider’s operation, Miguel can no longer be sustained by the crack dream of a posse fraternity. His prospects include constant threats of violence, the collapse of status, and the withdrawal of male friendships. As the impending jettisoning of Miguel’s car affirms, Miguel’s humiliating, emasculating fall from masculine grace is confirmed in public, on the streets, before the gaze of men. 143

More unsettling still for Miguel, his fall is directed and witnessed by one man, Spider. Spider’s betrayal of his paternal surrogacy confirms Miguel’s experiences of father figures who have failed to embody and uphold the masculine functions ascribed to and expected of them. In Miguel’s world, all male authorities, from corrupt police to his mother’s new partner Nelo, are deemed unworthy. All of this signals that Miguel’s decision to leave the drug-economy embroils him in a conflict of Oedipal proportions with Spider, as the narrative pointedly announces: “There was this classical play about the son who kills the father. It’s supposed to be a tragedy. Miguel looked right into Spider’s eyes” (ibid: 320-21). Resolution of this Oedipal scenario requires not only escape from Spider but the reinforcement of unguarded bodily frontiers. This reinforcement is easily managed. Despite the collapse in the homosociality that has buffered his masculine self, there are bodily limits over which neither Miguel, nor the narrative, are prepared to cross. A sense of those well-patrolled frontiers is provided by Spider’s justification of his murder of a disobedient crack runner: “’Cause if he gets away with that, every li’l pancho be dickin’ me up the ass. I can’t risk it” (ibid: 14). Spider regards challenges to his position in terms of a sexualized metaphor; betrayal of his authority is equated with the permeability and potential penetration of the male body’s surfaces by another, implicitly more active male. In the homosocial world of the gang, threats to masculine authority are ruthlessly repressed to preclude what Reid-Pharr calls the “danger of being homosexualized” from erupting and resignifying participating bodies (italics his, 2001: 113).16 At the same time, as Firebug insinuates when noting the favours Spider grants to Miguel, an underlying erotics is inherent to the appeal of posse compadrazgo: “I didn’t get no guided tour (…) Maybe he wanna dick you or somethin’” (1993: 177). Miguel, too, confirms this appeal: “It’s like being in a war movie and hugging your wounded buddy, like being in a war movie and escaping by the skin of your teeth and then staring at each other in the cold, laughing, wiping at wet eyes 144

and feeling crazy grateful” (ibid: 287). In Miguel’s case, however, the limits of homosocial desire are reached, and confirmed, when his experiences with Spider’s authority disabuse him of the appeal of the movie scripts and novel plots he projects onto barrio actualities. The posse-buddy system—“pana-ness”—has not secured the intimate male bonds he desires and expects. Miguel comes to regard his predicament as an irreparable rupture in the close relations with the other males in the bodily economy that has so far sustained him. Resolution of Miguel’s Oedipal scenario occurs when Miguel delivers to Detective Sanchez the cassette on which Spider has recorded his “preamble.” With this act, Miguel’s decision to escape from Spider’s homosocial fraternity is irrevocable. Having recorded and mediated Spider’s testimony, Miguel now uses that testimony as a legal document that will ensure Spider’s penalization and assist his own escape from subalternity. Also notable is that in the handing over of the evidence Miguel is accompanied not by men, but by his confidant Amelia and his girlfriend Cristalena. I want to defer for the moment analysis of how those female companions-in-escape from barrio constraints serve a pivotal symbolic function in Miguel’s break from the posse bodily economy. It is enough here to note that, cut free from gang homosociality, the novel’s final image of Miguel flanked by two women seems to suggest that Miguel’s path to redemption lies with women, beyond men. And yet, Miguel is reprieved from permanent occupancy of the “zero point” of the macho game. Paradoxically, masculine frontiers are restored by Miguel’s break from the crack economy. Detective Sanchez, the patriarchal agent who recognizes and disassociates the “true” Miguel from the street chaos of criminality, is crucial in confirming that Miguel’s heterosexuality has never been at stake in his gender crisis. In line with machismo’s performative conventions, Miguel’s move away from barrio and gender constraints is, after all, performed before another man’s gaze. An earlier, brief conversation between Sanchez and the hospitalized Miguel is telling in this instance: 145

Sanchez kept grinning. ‘I just think you’re wonderful. I’ve been waiting a long time for you.’ ‘Ahhh man I hope you ain’t some fucken pato, bro.’ Sanchez laughed. (ibid: 292)

Sanchez, anxious to obtain Miguel’s help in prosecuting Spider, not only restores Miguel’s faith in masculine authority, but provides reentry into the homosocial world that Miguel feels he has lost. The joke shared at the “pato’s” expense unites both men and signifies a key moment in Miguel’s post-crack recuperation. Miguel’s masculinity has been shocked yet redeemed, shattered yet healed, his bodily defences exposed but now reinstalled. Most of the women in Spidertown do not fare that well. 3.7. Disposable commodities, redemptive resources For the young men in Spidertown, women comprise an amorphous, faceless, and interchangeable sexual resource, drawn without discrimination from Latino and African-American sectors. Miguel regards women as “disposable” commodities, an opinion that persists even when he meets the exception to the rule. With the predominance of its women-as-whores images, Spidertown affirms, albeit uneasily, yet another distinct feature of the underground crack economy, the demonization accruing to female addicts because of their public visibility. 17 Latina or African-American, the street presence of women in search of crack or other drugs is always interpreted in Spider’s posse fraternity as a defiance of patriarchal regulations and an open invitation for sexual exploitation. Thus, while Miguel’s particular predicament is, in part, figured as a crisis in masculinity, the high visibility of women addicts in the novel’s treatments of the crack economy indicates a parallel crisis for the bodily custodians of both motherhood and femininity as understood by patriarchal logics. If, as Ileana Rodríguez contends, womens’ “submission to patriarchy (…) is not only a domestic, house religion, but a national law” (1994: 67), in Spidertown, where the state in 146

any possible juridical or imaginary guise lies beyond the barrio’s frontiers and, hence, outside the street terrains of crack business, submission to patriarchy becomes a barrio law. This law holds despite the fact that traditional patriarchs are depicted in the novel as absent and/or discredited figures, their familial and gendered power disregarded or rejected by their children. Thus, in the move from home to the street, the significations accruing to the bodies of female crack-economy participants move from dutiful and domestic passivity to unnatural mobility and sexual availability. The many appearances in Spidertown of women signified according to the latter attributes fix them as a disparaged sector. This figuration is confirmed, too, by providing the narrative with exceptions—Miguel’s mother, Catarina; and the younger women, Amelia and Cristalena—the only three female characters who elude wholesale demonization. But even these women cannot evade being disciplined, constrained, or conventionalized in the roles accorded to them. Catarina is the sole representative in the novel of the female head of a household, a familial reorganization visible in many U.S. communities, but finding its highest levels among Nuyoricans (Clara Rodríguez 1997: 110). Catarina’s U.S. place, like Miguel’s, is shadowed by patriarchal dysfunctionality. Nonetheless, Miguel blames her for his years on the streets and despises her involvement with a series of men since she left Miguel’s father. With Nelo, however, she appears to have found a place in a restored patriarchal order, as she confirms when Miguel asks to return home: “Miguel, you’ll have to respect him, treat him like the man of the family, because he’ll be your father technically, don’t you know that? (…) We demand respect, and if you can’t give us that, then I guess what I’m saying is that you can’t live here. I got rid of your father. I don’t expect him to come back in a photocopy version” (1993: 206-7). Notwithstanding her gender critique of her son’s behaviour, and her own redemptive reconciliation with Miguel—she nurses him in hospital after he is shot—she is fixed in her subordinate place toward the novel’s end. When she objects to Miguel’s wish to visit Cristalena, Nelo 147

says: “‘Just let him go. If he wants to, so what? Let him go. He’s a man, isn’t he? You’d think he was your daughter.’ The words spilled out of him with undisguised venom. Catarina instantly sat, clutching her arms, her eyes wide and stunned” (ibid: 318). Miguel accepts this instance of patriarchal consolidation without comment, and despite the fact that his redemption is assured by other women, Amelia and Cristalena. Amelia, Firebug’s girlfriend and Miguel’s confidant, emerges in the novel as a figure of material and intellectual independence. Disdaining gender convention she has set up her own apartment. She goes out alone, expresses her opinions, and pragmatically uses Firebug for sex. She rejects the example of her sisters who accepted the marriage route and perform an ideal of dutiful femininity for their men. Amelia regards herself as an outsider on account of “being a Latino girl with brains” (ibid: 27). Initially at least, Miguel regards her crack addiction as the incomprehensible proof of a wasted talent. Yet, while Amelia claims that Miguel’s friendship has influenced her to give up crack and return to college, her intellectual vigour accords her some influence over Miguel. This influence is at once didactic and salvational. Amelia is the only person in Miguel’s circle who criticizes Spider’s version of the American Dream. She claims that Spider’s corporate rhetoric signifies a response to barrio actualities that denies the operations of U.S. apartheid, while also complying with and reinforcing them: What happens when he [Spider] leaves the ghetto? Ain’t he nothing once he steps out of this place? (…) You go out into the real world, that’s someone else’s turf. You can be a big man on Fox Street, but once you head downtown you’re just another ugly spick kid. (…) Self-deception. We get some money an’ it buys us VCRs an’ stereos an’ gold chains an’ we drive through the streets shooting at each other like we’re big bad successful men. But it’s a trap. White people couldn’t a’ come up with a better way to screw up blacks an’ Latinos. (ibid: 80-81)

Challenging Miguel’s enthrallment to Spider, she contextualizes 148

and deromanticizes Spider’s position in organized crime structures: “He ain’t the top, he’s only a middle manager. (…) But the real brains, they scoop in the cash” (80). She points out the skewed logic of Miguel’s claim that, as a mere drug-runner, he is not complicit in the destruction of bodies and community (ibid: 20). Such discussions are also notable for enlightening Miguel as to the extent of his interpellation into machismo. Amelia refuses to let Miguel’s misogynistic comments pass without comment: “Sixteen, but able to hurt women as well as any adult man. Congratulations” (ibid: 110). Her role as an agent for Miguel’s feminist consciousness raising is confirmed when she and Miguel sleep together without having sex. The experience is alien to Miguel. But within the heterosexual dynamic of the narrative it generates in him a different sense of his gendered Other: “It was new for him to abstain from something so close at hand, new to be faithful and giving in this way. It was unselfish. It made him proud. Lying there with his back to her, he realized she was being unselfish, too, that she hadn’t really done anything to put him on the spot” (ibid: 143). An important moment in Miguel’s “libidinal education” (Cixous 1994: 132), Amelia’s body in this scene is cast as a vehicle for a masculine coming-totruth: Miguel is able to resist the underlying threat, “the spot,” that her body presents. The scene highlights how significant, but also limited, Amelia’s symbolic usefulness is for Miguel’s transformation to a new, more honourable persona. She is too streetwise, too marked by crack-addiction and multiple sexual partners, and too outspoken and intellectually independent to be Miguel’s “true” partner in this barrio romance. That place can only be filled by Cristalena, a stereotypical Latina entity according to Amelia, although as yet unseen by her: “Sounds like some kinda dishwashing liquid. (…) Straight, virginal, innocent, clean. Goes to church. Long hair. Doesn’t know anything about all this shit, right? (…) a little virgin, a device sent by heaven to cleanse your soul” (1993: 84). By letting Amelia voice this sardonic description, the narrative attempts to 149

preclude the reader’s attribution of symbolic device status to Cristalena. The attempt fails. The stereotypical contours of the Latina femininity Cristalena embodies are secure. She is the narrative’s most significant redemptive presence, a figure whose name marks her as the cleansing, clarifying force behind Miguel’s abandonment of drug-running. At the same time, Miguel’s predicament is equated with Cristalena’s struggles against parental constraints and ideals of dutiful Latina girlhood: “She was a mirror image, a girl with a mind and a life and her own battle for independence, her own turf war” (ibid: 132). Cristalena, too, must fight her way from the bad to the good edges of the barrio, in her case against oppressive gender conventions—implied to have survived the parents’ displacement into the U.S.A., where they were reinforced in fundamentalist Christianity—in order to find a more amenable location. This quest is always legible in bodily terms: the spatial journey from a brutalized to a safe(r) piece of the U.S.A. threatens Cristalena’s body with the resignification from good to bad. Her main dilemma is that while she wants to live with Miguel, that move would mark her as “cheap” and destroy her reputation as “a good girl” (ibid: 100). Her refusal to live with Miguel is also motivated by a fear of financial hardship, and by the fact that her plans are incompatible with Miguel’s involvement in crackrunning: “I ain’t tying myself to some sinking ship. I know that sounds cold, but I got plans, Miguel. I wanna go to design school an’ make something of myself” (ibid: 271). Thus, like Miguel, and in a barrio iteration of both a familiar Emersonian dream of transcending material circumstances and an equally familiar immigrant dream of making good in the U.S.A., Cristalena desires escape from the mean streets. Both young people seek avenues of freedom from institutional constraints. Both recognize in each other the avenues by which personal freedom and unfettered mobility might be achieved. The transformation wrought on Miguel by Cristalena’s angelic presence is dramatic. He jettisons his posse uniform for new clothes that will please her. He abandons his “fuckfests” for 150

an unfamiliar monogamy. Continuing the lessons in new-male tenderness inaugurated by Amelia, he experiences odd sensations: “She was changing him, making him softer, more tender” (ibid: 104). With “a name like some poem” (ibid: 37), Cristalena becomes “almost a whole world to him, a country that had offered asylum” (ibid: 210). Echoing the earlier scene of libidinal education with Amelia, Cristalena embodies the opening into an American Dream not defined or shadowed by Spider. At the same time, her body presents Miguel with an opportunity to claim a national identification provided by neither the U.S.A. nor Puerto Rico. In this boy-meets-girl-and-makes-good scenario, it is impossible to disregard Amelia’s earlier reading of the device called Cristalena. The conventional development of Miguel and Cristalena’s fairy-tale romance belies Miguel’s earlier denial of the “South Bronx fairy tale” in which Amelia suggests he is acting. Obeying an unabashedly soap-operatic logic, the narrative installs Cristalena as the prize in Miguel’s quest to overcome barrio limits. While she, too, derives from Miguel a strength to resist her parents’ strictures, it is significant that the angelic Latina femininity she embodies represents an ideal that no other woman in the novel can match. Her good Latina status is never at stake. She is outside the crack economy and thus untainted by its destructiveness. She was never a “crack babe” or a “putona” (ibid: 97). She has befriended Amelia, but is in no danger of replicating Amelia’s particular sexual history. Introduced into the narrative as a barrio innocent, initiated into “real” sexuality by Miguel, she nonetheless leaves it with her reputation intact. Her goodness has transformed Miguel, cleansing him of badness. She has stood by her man and, it is implied, always will. Despite Miguel’s embrace of a version of Latino masculinity that purportedly no longer disparages women, the novel’s final scenes suggest that the destabilization of Miguel’s machista core has been transitory. Cristalena may not signify to him a mere penetrable and dispensable object—“A cow asking to be branded” (ibid: 102)—but she is worthy of a diamond bracelet: 151

“Once you put on my bracelet yuh my wife. You hear that shit?” (ibid: 265). This is the same bracelet he once bought in order to “tag,” to identify as his property, Patti, a black crack-addict with “juicy tits” (ibid: 104). Then, he refrained from “tagging” because of Spider’s advice: “Tha’ girl see more traffic than the Holland Tunnel. So you put tha’ shit away an’ save it f’ some real girl someday” (ibid: 104). The shift in Miguel’s attitudes is supposedly encoded in the difference between “tagging” and gift-giving; but, the comparison between Patti and Cristalena confirms how the good-bad dichotomy provides Miguel with a scale of bodily values and gender difference against which his male self is always already enabled. The “real girl” Cristalena and the not-quite “real girl” Amelia have formed a redemptive feminine dyad, both women encouraging Miguel to break from the drug-economy. Yet even as he accompanies them Miguel continues to obey Spider’s dictum that “A good straight girl can save a boy’s soul” (ibid: 97). Only with the aid of his “good straight girl,” and of Amelia, a girl who is neither “good” nor “straight” but may become so again, can Miguel’s male subjectivity be recuperated from the barrio’s subalternizing pressures. 3.8. Walking away from a disposable constituency At the novel’s end Miguel stages the last “wienie roast,” the ritual conflagration of his car, the pride-and-joy symbol of his barrio success (ibid: 316). Watched at a distance by Detective Sanchez, and assisted by Amelia and Cristalena, Miguel lights the fire that signals a break with the barrio past. The transition is not made without regret: “he was going to lose his freedom, he was definitely losing the car. He was going to be a sixteen-anda-half-year-old now and live with TWO parents and have his own room and go to some school. He’d have to take the subway down to see her; they could go out on dates to movies and neck, but they’d have to phone home if it got too late” (ibid: 272). Yet, however banal post-posse life might be, Miguel’s return to his family marks him as a barrio survivor. At the novel’s end he 152

is poised for a newly individualized place in the U.S.A., although his relation to that state is yet to be defined. Miguel thus moves with his Latina companions toward a future tabula rasa: “No big decisions, no heavy plans. He was only going to walk along arm in arm in arm and watch their shadows snake along the sidewalk ahead of them so tall. There were no more posses in his world. There was only the three of them, walking away from it” (ibid: 323). When Miguel, Amelia and Cristalena walk away from the burning car and the crack economy they also walk away from barrio conditions of utter subalternity. So staged, the protagonists’ attainment of freedom in choice leaves intact the hegemonic contours of the state responsible for Puerto Rico’s colonial status, economic dependency, and geopolitical split. Moreover, Miguel’s post-barrio consciousness is not modulated by a politicized anger directed at the material and ideological preconditions for his subalternity in an inner-city space rent by the crack economy. Miguel’s antipathy for the barrio’s least powerful denizens, but not for the drug hegemony’s powerful beneficiaries, is consistent and insistent from narrative opening to end: “Miguel stood there simmering. He hated them, all of them, all the crackheaded junkies and the pop-eyed addicts and the spicks who looked honest and weren’t, like this fucken Dominican rat carving cheese for the lady diatribing about how the church has let down the masses while his store is a front for a drug op” (ibid: 115). Miguel’s final venturing forth from El Bronx does not soften this perspective. The working-class labourers of Miguel’s parents’ generation, the crack-addicts and low-level pushers, and all the women regarded by Miguel as “steak,” are abandoned by both narrative and protagonists to their “lowercase” statelessness. Moreover, despite attaining an individualized notion of freedom in choice, Miguel leaves the narrative detached from identity categories like Puerto Rican, U.S., or their neocultural combination. In Spidertown the work of defining a sustainable identity is deferred, as is the claiming of a Nuyorican place in relation to the U.S.A.’s imaginative and ma153

terial limits. The novel suggests that even when figured in fairytale mode, Nuyorican subalterns occupy an impossible nowhere. Rodriguez’s fairy tale has another, rather more provocative, message. Urban apartheid, Anglo-American cultural hegemony, inner-city social sector breakdown, the operations of a Latino economy of the macho body, and the impact of crack, all contribute to or exacerbate the subalternizing conditions endured by the novel’s protagonists. But Spidertown does not simply lay bare multiple oppressions in an attempt to imaginatively transcend them. It also distances its subalterns from the aspirations of the Nuyorican cultural traditions to which the novel, in fact, belongs. Spidertown repeatedly posits a discrepancy between, on the one hand, its fictive staging of the materialities generating Nuyorican subalternity and, on the other hand, the discourses favoured in Nuyorican intellectual readings of Nuyorican cultures. This discrepancy is announced by the novel’s most significant literary intertexts, the signs that a politicized and creative Latino cultural typology has been eschewed. Quite simply, the Nuyorican literary tradition is overlooked as a relevant cultural-capital resource for the novel’s escapees from barrio constraints. And with one exception the terrains of U.S. letters are similarly overlooked. The exception, Native Son, itself signals a counter-discursive relation to U.S. canonical exclusions. This treatment of literary capital suggests that Spidertown refuses to plot its engagement with the American Dream solely, or even recognizably, in terms of the cultural capital produced in the national “home(s).” Thus when Miguel, Cristalena, and Amelia move from the U.S.A.’s “bad” frontiers to its “good” frontiers of future promise, their move does not follow expected cultural coordinates. Rather, their quest is analogized by the novel’s other significant (Dickensian) flight of fancy into cultural terrains beyond the U.S.A. and Puerto Rico. In that flight lies the narrative’s paradox. It is only as a romance of escape that Spidertown can magically detach itself from the U.S.A.’s and Puerto-Rico’s geopolitical, transcultural, and historical entanglements as felt and managed in the Nuyorican barrio. 154

Notes 1. Page references are to the first edition of Spidertown (1993). Many names and Spanish words in the novel are printed without accents. 2. There are two exceptions: Ilán Stavans’s brief description of the novel in Hispanic Condition (1994: 49); and Juan Flores’s discussion of the problematic relation between Spidertown and the Nuyorican canon (2000: 180-88). In contrast to this academic neglect, a short, uncredited review of Spidertown in the Library Journal (Oct. 1, 1993) reveals that Rodriguez has achieved some recognition in the U.S. publishing industry: “This gritty look at life in the South Bronx has reportedly netted Rodriguez a $50,000, two-book contract and a $375,000 movie option.” 3. At one stage in the novel Miguel and Cristalena go to see the teen horror film Nightmare on Elm Street III, indicating that the novel’s action takes place in 1987 (1993: 36). 4. Often autobiographically modulated, Nuyorican narrative appears in Spanish with Memorias de Bernardo Vega (written in the 1940s, published in 1977) and Pedro Juan Soto’s Spiks (1956), and is consolidated by narratives written in English with varying levels of Spanish interruption. Writers in this tradition include Jesús Colón, Piri Thomas, Piedro Pietri, Nicholasa Mohr, Edward Rivera, Esmeralda Santiago, Giannina Braschi, and Ernesto Quiñones. Such authors are inevitably concerned with national imaginary boundaries, and with the colonial and capitalist factors responsible for the mass uprooting of 40% of Puerto Rico’s population to the U.S. For surveys of Nuyorican narrative, see: Cortes, Falcón, and Flores (1976); Eugene Mohr (1982); Juan Flores (1993: 142-56); and Luis (1997). These authors iterate that although a Nuyorican prose tradition in English only emerged in the 1950s, mainland Puerto Rican writers began to respond to “America” in the 1890s. 5. Page references are to the first edition of The Boy Without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992). Many names and Spanish words are printed without accents in this story. 6. Some Nuyorican writers are ambivalent about claims that their works are meaningful in mainland and island contexts. For example, Nicholasa Mohr has attributed the imperative to write of her U.S. place to the fact that “Our struggles as displaced migrants, working-class descendants of the tabaqueros (tobacco workers) who began coming here in 1916, were invisible in North American literature” (1989: 113). Yet, while Mohr seeks out literary and cultural connections between mainland and island, she also states that “There are few writers from Puerto Rico with whom I feel I can share a sense of camaraderie” (ibid: 115). 7. On his dispute with the “elders” of the Nuyorican writing scene Rodriguez says: “I’m afraid that these old writers lost the ability to create the dynamic to which young people could be encouraged to write, to do anything, 155

to be actors, to go out and do artistic, creative things. That’s not happening” (Carmen Hernández 1997: 141). 8. This sub-genre itself could be said to represent a Nuyorican neoculturation of Raymond Chandler’s dictum, from a 1950 essay, about the heroic fictional detective: “But down these mean streets a man [the detective] must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid” (1974: 398). Nuyorican narratives of the “mean streets” shift the emphasis away from Chandler’s “common” detective to the criminalized Nuyorican, a figure who is shown to be “a good enough man for any world” (ibid). My thanks to Ian Collinson for this reference. 9. Distancing himself from Spidertown’s implicit canonical dispute, Junot Díaz has emphasized his indebtedness to Nuyorican and other east-coast Latino literary traditions (Collazo 1999). However, in the laudatory critical reception to his first short-story collection Drown, many mainstream critics deLatinized Díaz, locating him in the U.S. literary tradition of youth alienation and outsiderness exemplified by Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. See, in particular, Gates (1996) and Stewart (1996) 10. For insights into this socioeconomic subordination, see Bourgois (1996: 53), and Clara Rodríguez (1997). 11. Michael Smith describes this form of apartheid as a “politics of suburban exclusion” whereby “the class and racial segregation of metropolitan areas in the United States is a byproduct of the social actions of political actors in various local jurisdictions” (1988: 9). These actions present “significant barriers to social mobility: zoning laws, restrictive building codes, property tax differentials and the like, which stratify metropolitan communities by income, race and class, thereby preventing free mobility of individuals” (ibid: 10). The use of “apartheid” was popularized by Massey and Denton’s study of African-Americans in American Apartheid (1993), where apartheid signified segregation updated. 12. See Bourgois for an historical account of these perceptions in New York City (1996: 48-76). 13. The barrio-at-war or urban-frontier conflict imagery recalls other Nuyorican fictional and autobiographical responses to U.S. residency. In his Down These Mean Streets, for example, Piri Thomas describes the “alien turf” into which he was deposited when his family moved to an Italian-dominated neighbourhood, a relocation that demanded of him survivalist guerrilla tactics: “I kept wishing those cats went to the same school I went to, a school that was on the border between their country and mine, and I had amigos there—and there I could count on them. But I couldn’t ask two or three amigos to break into Rocky’s block to help me mess up his boys. (…) It would have been murder” (1997: 29). 14. Thanks to Susana Chávez-Silverman and Etienne J. Chávez-Silverman for clarifying the significations of a U.S. ritual that perplexed me. 156

15. Disturbing images of women as “disposable” appear throughout Spidertown. In his brief description of the novel, Stavans describes Miguel’s world as “an erotic, high-time fiesta” (1994: 49). With this tropicalizing response, Stavans reinforces stereotypical Latino gender divides and overlooks the brutalizing and objectifying effects of the bodily economy staged in Rodriguez’s novel. Indeed, the novel’s treatments of women have led at least one reader, Junot Díaz, to dismiss Spidertown as trafficking in a “vile” misogyny (Collazo 1999). As my analysis indicates, Spidertown’s gender depictions are ambivalent, if not contradictory. On the one hand, they signal a refusal to gloss over the bodily violences in Miguel’s world; on the other hand, the depiction of these violences as the signs of a masculine crisis does not grant Miguel, or the narrative that contains him, amnesty from perpetuating oppressive bodily logics. 16. There are, nonetheless, neither homosexual men nor homosexual acts in Spidertown. This marks a significant divergence from Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1997) in which there are clearly defined homosexual bodies (“faggots”) and homosexualized spaces (“the faggots’ apartment”). Yet, for Piri and his friends, participation in sexual acts between men does not automatically signify their own homosexualization, however much they perceive those acts as threatening their manhood. See Reid-Pharr (2001: 99134) for a detailed analysis of these bodily logics in Thomas’s memoir. 17. Bourgois observes that the crack economy is unique in the history of New York’s underground economies because fifty percent of addicts are women, a factor that has generated a particularly virulent rhetoric of blame. Women crack addicts were accused of betraying their “proper” feminine and maternal place, despite the fact that they were often denied places in crack-dealing structures and were thus impelled into prostitution to support their habits and families (1996: 278).

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4 Cuban memory, “American” mobility, and Achy Obejas’s lesbian way

“Guantanamera,’ the unofficial national anthem of island and exiled Cubans, derives from Joseíto Fernández, a Cuban radio presenter who composed the refrain in the 1930s and added to it lines from the first poem in José Martí’s 1891 collection, Versos sencillos (Calvo Ospina 1995: 27). Fernández’s musical invention was notable in two ways: the lyrics “could be changed at will with each performance”; and for eighteen years the news bulletins on his radio program “were sung for the audience in verses that followed the rhythm of the Guantanamera” (ibid: 27). Since the 1940s scores of singers have covered the song, the most famous rendition for Cubans arguably being that by Celia Cruz from 1967. However, in keeping with Fernández’s usage, ‘Guantanamera’ has been neither stable nor predictable. Many of its interpreters have added new verses to the original refrain, hence the many composers to whom the song is attributed, beyond either Fernández or Martí. Thus while some versions are better known than others, ‘Guantánamera’ circulates as a worldrenowned cultural product but one subject to constant revision, with no correct, original, or authoritative lyric. In Memory Mambo (1996), the first novel by Achy Obejas, ‘Guantanamera’ serves as a governing metaphor for a Cuban family’s rival accounts of displacement in the U.S.A.1 For Nena, the sister of the novel’s narrator Juani Casas, family history is “sort of like singing ‘Guantanamera’—everybody gets a chance to make up their own verse.” Juani agrees with her sister’s assessment: “‘Memory mambo,’ I said, one hand in the air, the other on my waist as if I were dancing, ‘one step forward, two steps back’” (1996: 194). Juani, it seems, would endorse José Muñoz’s claim that U.S.-based “Cubans live in memory” (1995: 76). However, aware of ‘Guantanamera’s’ propensity for imagi-

native rewording, Juani also realizes that memory itself— elusive, unreliable, selective, contradictory, and always unsingular—poses identificatory difficulties for Cubans in the U.S.A., whether they live in Chicago like herself or in the huge Cuban enclave in Miami. Deeply scored by ideological, historical, and bodily differences, the accounts told by Juani’s relatives, her Puerto Rican lover, and even herself, render Juani the author and victim of narratorial and national dissimulations. Indeed, the impact of historical revisionisms on Juani evokes Martí’s first verso sencillo: “Yo sé (...)/de mortales engaños,/ Y de sublimes dolores” (1997: 16).2 Memory Mambo, then, presents a Latina project unlike either the self-subalternizing agenda underpinning Ferré’s fiction or the imaginative bid to transcend the U.S.A.’s subalternizing pressures in Rodriguez’s Spidertown. Juani is anxious to secure for herself a viable place in multiple familial and national imaginaries, each of which is politicized differently, and each of which may demand some measure of “protective” isolation from transcultural U.S.A. As a result of such pressures, Juani claims to embody an insularity that differentiates her from her family. Yet her claim is modulated, and complicated, by three factors: her lesbianism, her fraught relationship with a Puerto Rican activist, and the meanings she attaches to “America” as a woman of Cuban descent. These factors distinguish Memory Mambo from celebrated but securely heteronormative novels such as Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and The Agüero Sisters (1997), or Oscar Hijuelos’s Our House in the Last World (1983) and The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989). Like Obejas’s earlier story collection, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994) and her second novel, Days of Awe (2001), Memory Mambo announces a queer engagement with a dominant Cuban exile “national” imaginary and its conceptual entanglement with the U.S. national imaginary.3

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4.1. Cuban kinship networks and states in excess In his analysis of national-imaginary formation, Benedict Anderson claims that the nation is composed of a “fraternity” of strangers for whom, “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (1991: 7). But what happens to this explicitly masculinist scenario for CubanAmericans if, as María de los Angeles Torres claims, the Cuban state can no longer confine “cubanía” to and of the island (1998: 58)?; or, concomitantly, if the boundaries of the U.S.A. that are supposed to signify a geopolitical, ideological, and cultural incommensurableness between the U.S.A. and its hemispherical nemesis, Cuba, cannot sustain the idea of an exceptional U.S.A.? One explanation is provided by David Mitchell’s response to Cristina García’s Dreaming In Cuban. Mitchell recognizes in that novel “a vaguely autobiographical attempt to reassess her [García’s] individual and familial dislocation between two antagonistic national bodies” (1996: 52). Operating as “classificatory units of belonging,” both the U.S.-based Cuban family and the imagined national family “exist in parasitic relation to one another by virtue of a shared desire for a unity that inevitably proves to be illusory and contradictory. In other words, family and nation paradoxically coexist because neither grouping succeeds in sustaining the singularity to which each necessarily aspires” (italics his, ibid). With some necessary qualification—to counter the masculine and heterosexualized coordinates of nationhood when idealized as a giant kinship network (gran familia); and to accept that the nation-family nexus is not a Cuban conundrum alone, but a U.S. one as well—these observations may be applied to Memory Mambo. Obejas’s fictive Cuban family in exile reproduces in miniature the nation imagined as a gran familia, but both family and nation are not only split between Cuba and the U.S.A., but also inside the borders of each geopolity. This sense of plurality-in-rupture is built into the novel’s first 161

chapter where Juani provides a meditation on her family’s collective memories and her own tenuous relation to the contradictory narratives told about her family’s past. Having arrived in the U.S.A. from Cuba with her family in 1978 when she was six years old, Juani reaches adulthood obsessed by a need to determine the truth about her family’s motives for escape: “What I want to know is what really happened” (1996: 14). Later in the novel Juani announces that “in this house of nostalgia and fear, of time warps and trivia, I’m the only one I know about for sure,” a claim to self-knowledge that she attempts to affirm with meticulously kept journal entries and correctly identified and placed family photographs (ibid: 79). However, the knowledge required to attain a coherent historicized and nationalized sense of self proves to be elusive: “I no longer know if I really lived through an experience or just heard about it so many times, or so convincingly, that I believed it for myself—became the lens through which it was captured, retold and shaped” (ibid: 9). In part, Juani’s unease stems from the fact that she must adapt to multiple yet overlapping constructs of family and nation.4 Aside from her immediate “national” family (parents, sisters, cousins), Juani claims membership of two categories of cousins, those of “blood” who for the most part reside in Cuba, and those made “in exile” after 1959. The former grouping is defined by the heavy material and psychic demands that “cousins in blood” may make of their U.S. relatives. The relations with “cousins in exile,” on the other hand, emerge unburdened by traditional genealogical and marital obligations. Juani’s distinction between cousins in blood and cousins in exile affirms that distance from Cuba is not simply geopolitical. It is also marked by a psychic, if not an epistemological, incommensurability between her U.S.based Cuban imagination and the “coded” news about deprivation emanating from island kin. If such codes cannot be aligned with Juani’s experiences of the U.S.A., thus leading to a sceptical suspension of disbelief about Cuban materialities, the relationships between cousins in exile are characterized by the production of neocultural communicative codes. These codes—“a 162

way of speaking that’s neither Cuban nor American” (ibid: 13)—offer Juani a medium for unpacking the potentially unfamiliar signifying systems presented either by continuing contacts with the island or by the U.S.A.’s transcultural terrains, and hence for making sense of displacement. Juani’s thinking here challenges the idea that coherent identities can be formulated in accord with distinct national terrains. While her sets of cousins are dissimilar, they also overlap with and include members of other groupings: Juani’s immediate relatives; the web of relations by marriage in her large extended family, including her aggressive cousin-in-law, Jimmy; and the constructed family of mostly Puerto Rican activists who barely tolerate Juani because she is Cuban. In all of these “families” are articulated a range of responses to questions of national belonging. Among the Cubans there is no consensus over their place as products of a Cuban history that is also part of U.S. history, an entangled history, moreover, into which the novel’s Puerto Ricans insert their island’s colonial status. The novel’s central mnemonic problematic thus challenges Pamela Smorkaloff’s claim that “Juani’s is a journey into historical truth” (1997/98: 6). Whether conceived of as monolithic and graspable, or as plural, irresolvably complicated, and resonant beyond Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, historical truth is one of the novel’s casualties. In turn, the novel’s denunciation of memory as an inadequate vehicle for discovering historical truths suggests that Juani’s “new syntax” may also be found wanting. As Juani admits, “There are times, I admit, when I can’t remember if I’m related to somebody by blood or exile” (1996: 13-14). Her desired classificatory approach to familial place is prone to misreading and taxonomic insensibility. Juani’s new codes still must confront her transcultural dilemma, manifested at the level of both sign and semantics, of how to decipher what “Cuba” might signify in the U.S.A. to subjects with rival familial narratives of the past to uphold, and with distinct experiences of residency. In a sense, Juani is engaged on a quest not simply to know Cuba, but to know the U.S.A. that Ana López calls “Greater Cuba” (1996). 163

This is the other, mainland Cuba that for many CubanAmericans in the 1980s and 1990s with no direct experiences of the island, was also materialized and imagined as a home, a native land. For Juani, the destabilizing sense of belonging to two national homes, and to multiple families, is established immediately after her family’s arrival in the U.S.A. Juani rather than her sister is allocated the task of mediating between her Cuban parents and the unfamiliar cultural terrains encircling them. Familial and national identifications for Juani are marked by the generation gap formed by her proximity to and her parents’ protective distance from “the world outside the family” (1996: 140). That gap is reinforced by Juani’s newly acquired English language facility and related ability to deal with officials and bureaucratic procedures. Nonetheless this evocation of familial insularity, and of Juani as the family’s conduit to and from a U.S. elsewhere, collapses in moments of unexpected transcultural confusion. The comic force of the novel’s description of Tío Pepe’s funeral, for instance, derives from the collision between a Cuban insularity in which island customs are replicated and the U.S. customs clumsily adopted at the behest of the family’s Catholic priest. Supported by the younger cousins like Juani and Patricia, the family embraces the (Irish-) “American tradition,” with the result that both U.S. and Cuban funerary notions are transformed. The link with Cuba, the stubborn reinforcement of belonging still to that nation, is confirmed by the “handful of Cuban dirt on the casket (brought from the island by Tomás Joaquín for precisely this purpose)” (ibid: 92). Traditional rituals such as covering windows and mirrors with black cloth are adhered to, while the demands of feeding a large gathering result in the arrival of “plates of black beans and rice, guacamole, yuca con mojo, freshly baked breads, baskets of fruits, flan and tres leches, and about a dozen other kinds of dessert” (ibid: 92-93). Patricia’s Jewish husband, Ira, as confused by the cultural melange as his Cuban in-laws, advises Juani’s father that he thinks no music should be played, thereby generating 164

doubt as to “What kind of an American is he?” (ibid: 93). Juani’s assessment—“I realized most of us were Latino, awkwardly trying to perform an American custom, and didn’t really have much sense of what to do” (ibid)—neatly sums up the party’s collective transcultural perplexity. But beyond the superficial eruption of the U.S.A. into the Cuban family home and the concomitant Cuban resemanticization of the wake, already deeper changes are at work. Tío Pepe’s widow, Celia, defies Cuban conventions by removing the black cloths and “letting in the light” (ibid), thus proclaiming her own symbolic release from her former husband’s control. The messy transcultural coordinates of the wake reveal that cubanía is not counterpointed by an equally transparent U.S. sensibility, the latter predicated on an inexorable process of assimilation. According to Muñoz, this “normative narrative” by which Cubans are judged to succumb to the U.S.A. is common in the critical literature (1995: 79).5 Yet as Muñoz rightly argues, the “teleological chain” of becoming “American” cannot be sustained. National and cultural significations emanating from Cuba and the U.S.A. constantly, unpredictably, contradictorily meet on the displaced Cuban body, so that it becomes impossible to identify Cuban subjects completely deculturated of their Cubanness, let alone to single out “a” way of being Cuban in the U.S.A. (ibid: 79). These points are reinforced throughout the novel by figures who cannot be unequivocally located in one or another kinship group. A case in point is Jimmy, Juani’s “cousin-in-law” by virtue of marriage to her cousin Caridad. He provides Memory Mambo with a paradigm of conventional machismo, as confirmed by Juani’s recounting of their introduction: “the first time I met him and he felt like he had to sit and talk all night about “which one of us has gotten more pussy in our short lifetime.” It was the kind of thing only a heterosexual man would consider, and probably only a barrio boy at that” (1996: 19). Juani’s view is seconded by Caridad’s sister Patricia, for whom Caridad’s dependence on a husband who subjects her to periodic beatings 165

makes evident an unhealthy attraction to his innate Cubanness, likened to “a primordial memory” (ibid: 60). Caridad is Juani’s cousin by both blood and exile, a displaced figure herself who disrupts Juani’s kinship schema while appearing to be more Cuban than any of her cousins: “Cari came to the U.S. when she was—what, seventeen?—right smack in the middle of her prime, as far as Cubans are concerned. Just as she was at the age to have formal relationships, she was dropped into the barrio, where everything was scary and she didn’t know English, and the men were all potentially dangerous” (ibid). The decoding of Jimmy’s inherent Cubanness is made, however, in full knowledge that unlike Caridad, Jimmy was sent unaccompanied to the U.S.A. as a child during the 1980 Mariel boatlift in which 120,000 Cubans left the island (Angeles Torres 1998: 50). Raised in an Anglo-American rather than Cuban family, the innately Cuban Jimmy is also liable to be regarded as thoroughly de-Cubanized. As Caridad points out, “he got so Americanized without even realizing it that when his real sister showed up from Cuba years later and he came to live with her, he didn’t know her, and didn’t know how to be with her. He’d say ‘excuse me’ all the time, preferred Folgers and eggs to Bustelo and toast for breakfast, and couldn’t dance to save his life” (1996: 44). Rather contradictorily, Caridad concludes that Jimmy “doesn’t belong in either world, Cuban or American.” Since his parents and most other kin remain in Cuba he should be treated with compassion by his new female relatives. Identified as a typical Cuban machista, yet also deemed to be Americanized, and yet again defined as a stateless neither/nor persona in need of Cuban feminine succouring, Jimmy embodies an identificatory slipperiness that to varying degrees afflicts many of the novel’s figures. More telling, however, is that all three responses to Jimmy’s predicament confirm how conventions of gender inform his familial place. This insistence has farreaching implications in the narrative, for when Caridad tells Juani that she and Jimmy “are so alike” in speech and the way they stand (ibid: 144-45), Juani’s and Jimmy’s identificatory 166

travails are implied to be alike. The purported bodily similarities between the two cousins in exile—one a lesbian, the other a machista poseur and patriarch-in-the-making—indicate that the narrative’s responses to the problematic family-nation nexus are never detached from the conventions by which gendered and sexual identities are recognized, and regarded as meaningful, in Juani’s world. 4.2. Staging the “lesbian” within Memory Mambo‘s internalized debate over mainland cubanía collapses the generational shift that Noriega and López have identified in Latino Studies as a whole: a move from “reform[ing] Latino cultural nationalism by divesting it of its patriarchal, homophobic privileged agency” to a critique “of the underlying nationalist premises themselves—that is, of the discourses of belonging” (1996: ix). Memory Mambo has not relinquished interest in the former agenda. In fact it interrogates “discourses of belonging”—Cuban imaginaries of originary homeland and U.S. exile (Cuba displaced and in excess)—by countering the “patriarchal, homophobic privileged agency” that continues to underpin nationalist premises. Obejas’s approach to this double project is announced with a little in-joke made early in Memory Mambo, when Juani describes herself sitting at a kitchen table in her cousin Caridad’s apartment: “On the placemat Cuba looks like a giant brown turd; the flag’s colors have faded so that the triangle appears pink” (1996: 15). Here the Cuban post-revolutionary national aura is not only made kitsch but treated to what, after Bakhtin, might be called a symbolic degradation into low earthiness. Moreover, as many of Obejas’s lesbian and gay readers might recognize, the emblem of state, the flag, is converted into the sign invented by the Nazis to distinguish homosexuals from other concentrationcamp inmates, and reclaimed and resemanticized by gay and lesbian activists across the globe since the 1970s. Rather neatly, the red triangle made pink by exposure to the U.S.A. announces 167

a narratorial queer agenda on two fronts: first, the insertion of lesbian desire into the heart of Cuban-exile imaginaries, and, by extension, into Cuban-exile narrative; and second, the parallel insertion of the Cuban-exile lesbian into U.S. queer imaginaries. Juani is never closeted in the novel. Her queerness is publicly proclaimed, unapologetic, and known to and discussed by family members. Juani’s position, therefore, is not like that described by Gloria Anzaldúa, for whom the Chicana/o family apparatus sanctions a repressive homophobia, thus leading to a “Fear of going home. And of not being taken in” (1987: 20). Juani is at home, a lesbian player in her family’s gender structures. Her familial status, however, is rather more ambivalent than this description admits. Although her sister and cousins accept her lesbianism without question, her father constantly asserts a need to “protect” Juani from the heteronormative assumptions of curious family friends who ask Juani about her marital prospects: “I can always count on my father to rescue me with a quick comment about women’s liberation, or there being no man good enough for his daughter. His motivation isn’t to spare me discomfort but to save himself. Because he’s afraid I won’t lie, it’s vital to him that I not be provoked into the truth” (1996: 80). Although debarred from entering public conversation by Juani’s father, an identity named and known as “lesbian” is here presumed to be truthful, secured from and untroubled by any suggestion of taxonomic slippage. In some ways Juani’s distance from Cuba and her ability to adopt a lesbian identity distinguish her from her Cuban cousin, Titi, in photographs of whom Juani recognizes and names the “lesbian” who is subject to repressive heteronormative logics: “I (…) know that the damage in Titi’s soul (…) is connected to how she loves, or more precisely, how she’s not allowed to love. Her face, with its thin lines and bloody red lips, is a map of a sealed island, surrounded not by water but by an invisible, electrified barbed wire” (ibid: 75). Here, sexual repression is figured as political repression, and is metaphorized as an embattled, paranoid authoritarian island-state. Also at work is an elliptical 168

analogy, the inferred standing in of Cuban bodily for political boundaries and disciplinings. In Juani’s usage, the body-nation nexus is meant to signal her disagreement with her family’s diagnosis of Titi as another familial victim, an “archetypal wouldbe-exile,” of Castro’s regime (ibid: 76). Paradoxically, Juani’s cousin-in-exile codes enable her to transcend the maritime frontier discontinuity and recognize that Titi’s desire to escape from Cuba does not signify an ideologically determined position on the Revolution and its failings, but rather the “crazier idea—that once here, she might be free to be queer” (ibid). That imaginative overcoming of national borders signals a glossing over of disparate cultural organizations of sexuality, for Juani insists that despite official silence on the subject, there is, in fact, “a gay society” in Cuba that would be familiar to U.S. queers (ibid: 75). At the same time, Cuban “gay society” is not equivalent to U.S. gay and lesbian spaces.6 Titi cannot satisfy her “need to be loved in daylight—to walk down the street arm in arm with her lover without the pretense of mere friendship, to be utterly and ordinarily in love” (ibid: 76). Rather troubling for Juani, Titi’s particular lesbianism exemplifies the psychic damage caused by sexual repression and forced closeting. While Juani concludes that Titi is unable to desire other women in public, in Cuba, her own ability to do so is not upheld in the novel as proof of a U.S. lesbian or feminist utopia. Rather like Titi, Juani’s lovers have not enjoyed her “out” status, and Juani is disdainful of this widespread closetedness. But there is a sense, too, that Juani is only certain of her decoding of Titi photographed in disturbed unhappiness because, at times, she recognizes her cousin’s existential and sexual insularity in herself. This recognition is most notable whenever Juani is in the company of Jimmy, whose macho posturing seems always to signal a heterosexual libidinal enclosing of Juani’s sexuality: “I could see it: Jimmy chortling in the laundromat, making faces, grabbing his dick as if it were a southern sheriff’s water hose” (ibid: 126). As lesbians separated by exile, then, Titi’s and Juani’s experiences of sexualized boundaries provide yet more bodily par169

allels to broader familial and national divergences and reconvergences. By making such parallels, the transparent sexual identity supposedly secured by a publicly registered move out of the closet becomes a significant locus of dispute in the novel. That dispute is complicated further by Juani’s girlfriend. Gina echoes familiar Latin American leftist dismissals of gay and lesbian activism as bourgeois individualist decadence imported from the U.S.A., and as a distraction from more pressing political concerns like Puerto Rico’s continuing colonial status: “‘Look, I’m not interested in being a lesbian, in separating politically from the people,’ she’d say to me, her face hard and dark. “What are we talking about? Issues of sexual identity? While Puerto Rico is a colony?’” (italics hers, ibid: 77). Juani interprets the problem of nomenclature that Gina represents as proof of the “contradictions between her politics and the closet,” contradictions that Juani chooses to overlook for the sake of avoiding conflict, or loss of passion. But while Juani can state that “for Gina, being a public lesbian somehow distracted from her puertorriqueñismo” (ibid: 78), Gina’s response to that viewpoint indicates a sexual identification that is not simply explicable as a choice between different political agendas: “‘That’s so white, this whole business of sexual identity,’ she’d say, while practically unbuttoning my pants. ‘But you Cubans, you think you’re white (…)’” (ibid: 78). Together with the assertion that “I’m not interested in being a lesbian,” Gina’s statement here marks a critical moment in the narrative, for it challenges the purported transparency, truth, and intelligibility of the category lesbian itself. Gina refuses to “be” one. And she refuses to be one because she regards that identity as inimical to her leftist politics, and to her mulatto identity as well. With its proliferation of possible, potentially antagonistic lesbians, Memory Mambo enters into productive dialogue with the findings of many queer Latino writers. Noting how Latino queers may be constrained from attaining a sexualized identity in their own families and communities, such writers also voice a 170

suspicion of “gay” and “lesbian” as oppressive and exclusionary paradigms, U.S. sexual identities most readily available to those subjects with the requisite racialized and classed credentials to gain admittance into predominantly middle-class AngloAmerican sexual cultures. For such critics, the terms “lesbian” and “gay” encode an uninterrogated white racial component into an identification based primarily on sexuality, and detached from other factors such as class, race, and, in Gina’s case, Puerto Rico’s experiences of colonialism.7 Thus, while Juani regards Gina’s admission as evidence of political contradictions and internalized homophobia, Gina’s statements suggest a different conception of sexuality. Gina clearly regards a queer identity and a political-activist identity as mutually exclusive in the way Juani recognizes. But her rejection of a queer identity also suggests a refusal to accede to U.S. cultural logics that run counter to a widespread belief in Latin America that identity per se does not have a sexual core. Juani’s sexual identification, then, appears to function as an identity in the manner noted by Fuss: it proclaims itself, and insists on doing so (1995: 2). Gina’s identifications, on the other hand, imply “a process that keeps [sexual] identity at a distance, that prevents identity from ever approximating the status of an ontological given, even as it makes possible [for those around Gina, at least] the formation of an illusion of identity as immediate, secure, and totalizable” (ibid: 2). And yet the figurations of Gina and Juani suggest a dynamic and unsettled relation to this posited identity-identification distinction.8 Gina rejects a proclaimed sexual identity, but she nonetheless recognizes and names it in Juani, much as Juani does in the photographs of Titi. In turn, the security and visibility of Juani’s lesbian identity is never guaranteed, despite her assertions of a liberated sexual selfhood. As Fuss describes the effect of identificatory instability on identity positions adopted for political or personal reasons, “Given the capacity of identifications continually to evolve and change, to slip and shift under the weight of fantasy and ideology, the task of harnessing a complex and protean set 171

of emotional ties for specific social ends cannot help but to pose intractable problems for politics” (ibid: 9). To put this another way, “intractable problems” result from the novel’s placements of its lesbians inside and out of the closet, the trope by which western homosexualities become epistemological targets. The closet signals a discourse of sexual identity that considers all subjects as sexually knowable; hence, aberrations from a predominant heterosexuality may be disavowed, regulated, and punished, but also purportedly avowed, liberated, and celebrated. As already noted, however, the distinct figurations of Juani’s, Titi’s, and Gina’s lesbianism resist alignment, hence the epistemological trouble some of the novel’s characters have in determining what and who exactly is being closeted. Consequently the closet trope discussed throughout Memory Mambo “figures the disquieting possibility, all the more disquieting for its indeterminacy, of an incommensurability between an interior and exterior, between appearance and reality, between name and thing” (Jagose 1994: 71). The lesbian in Memory Mambo is not simply many, but a category of being that is as contradictory as the categories of family and nation are to Juani and the members of her family. The unstable figurations of the lesbian in this family-centric environment must always be related back to the complicated web of transcultural processes encoded in the hyphenated conjunction of Cuban and American. So far, those implications have been only hinted at; and they are introduced now in cognisance of the hyphen’s inadequacy, its implication of separating, yet uniting, assumed equivalences of power and meaning. In any guise, the lesbian in Memory Mambo is like the novel’s other diasporic subjects, whatever the scripts of gender or sexuality allocated them in the narrative. Her body, like theirs, is never beyond, never unaffected by, the rival culturally and linguistically contingent bodily economies that meet in Juani’s families and communities. Despite Juani’s eschewal of the closet—in Jagose’s words, her “gestures towards fixity and definition” (1994: 13)—and despite Gina’s gestures against those end172

points, lesbianism is never “outside [the] dominant conceptual networks” (5) of heteronormative convention and prescription evident in the novel. And these complex bodily dynamics are most clearly staged as one particular kinship relationship made in exile, that between Jimmy and Juani. 4.3. Becoming “infeliz” Jimmy is delineated according to macho conventions as the bearer of the active, penetrative principle commonly ascribed to men in Latin American bodily economies organized along an active (masculine)-(feminine) passive axis.9 He is a purveyor and upholder of a hypermasculinity that has survived transplanting from Cuba and a purported Americanization, as is manifested by his strict control over Caridad’s movements. Such controls reflect Jimmy’s fear that Caridad might take advantage of U.S. middle-class mores that permit greater socioeconomic independence, unchaperoned public appearances, and voiced dissent from his domestic regime. Aside from such potential threats to his macho standing, Jimmy’s sexual aim and prowess is also at stake in line with machismo’s symbolic and material operations, enacted, according to Lancaster, “with two audiences in mind; first, other men, to whom one must constantly prove one’s masculinity and virility; and second, one’s self, to whom must also show all the signs of masculinity” (1995: 149). However, unlike the macho travails experienced by Miguel in Spidertown, the undermining of Jimmy’s masculinity derives in no small part from his proximity to Juani, a lesbian. In fact, as a lesbian—a sign of the bodily possibilities permitted in the U.S.A.—Juani presents Jimmy with a macho challenge. The sexual and gender confusion she generates in Jimmy suggest that queerness—for Juani, legible in Anglo-American terms as an identity—has altered profoundly his body’s meaningfulness within what Lancaster calls the structural coordinates of conventional machismo. That is, “by definition, it is only with other men that a man directly competes” (ibid). Jimmy is 173

thus forced into the situation that the otherwise perceptive Lancaster does not countenance. He is figured as the machista who perceives himself to be in direct competition with another woman for male honour and who, as a consequence, must rearm his body’s machista significations in order to structure the power relation between himself and a woman. That need to rearm the body’s active aura becomes for Jimmy a phallic conflict, hence the need to forbid Caridad from socializing with Juani and her lesbian friends: “what kind of man would people think he was if his wife was always hanging with tortilleras?” (1996: 17).10 The injunction confirms his fear that the lesbian may not only affront his virile reputation but usurp his husbandly function. Jimmy’s position here thus accords with popular Latin American conceptions of the lesbian as an embodiment of phallic lack, but one with the disturbing potential to masquerade as a symbolic manhood. Constantly reaffirming such a reading of Juani’s body whenever he is with her, Jimmy is intent on affirming that he, not she, is the bearer of the (literal) phallus: “‘You ever want one of these?’ he asked me. He rested his head on the back of the couch, his cheeks all flushed. His penis pushed at his loose dress pants as if trying to erect a tent. “Not inside you, but like, one of your own?’” (ibid: 19). Jimmy reinforces the effect of such gestures in speech by making puns in Spanish that draw attention to what he regards as Juani’s sexual abnormativity. For example, he rewords the English “duct tape,” a commodity supposedly invented in Cuba by Juani’s father, into “duck tape—cinta pata, cinta maricona.” In this way he generates a homophobic translation from “duct” to the Spanish for “duck” [pata], the latter also a synonym for lesbian, hence the shift from “pata” to “maricona” or queer (ibid: 29). Juani reacts to Jimmy’s constant sexual posturing not by distancing herself from it, but by gaining a vicarious sexual thrill from it—“I’m as fascinated as ever with his brazenness” (ibid: 55)—even to the point of recharging her sexual fantasies with images of Jimmy’s penis and masturbating to those images. Jimmy’s phallic-led pressure on Juani cannot for long be read 174

either as libidinal fantasy or as the purely symbolic rather than physical assertion of masculine primacy. When Juani can no longer repress her anger at Gina’s criticisms of Juani’s Cuban privilege and attacks her, Jimmy’s knowledge that Juani’s hospitalization results from domestic violence, and not from a politically motivated attack on Gina and her lover by an unknown assailant, provides him with the leverage to assert his power over Juani. As Juani recovers from her injuries, Jimmy’s exhibitionism and menacing encirclement increasingly isolate Juani from her family, leading her, with Jimmy’s collusion, to add a new set of lies about her own past to those told in her family. Juani and Jimmy, himself a perpetrator of domestic violence, are thus bound to each other in deceit. Jimmy’s masculine power is reconfirmed by his new function as the only family member who knows Juani’s secret. This patriarchal manoeuvre to bring Juani back into heteronormative line is not permanent. Juani is able to break Jimmy’s control when she witnesses him molesting her niece Rosa and physically attacks him. This time, however, Juani’s actions are cast as ambivalently redemptive. They impel her to admit the extent of her collusion with macho mores in her dealings with Gina. One sign of the effects of this collusion with a set of patriarchal and homophobic prescriptions is indicated in a suggestive narratorial aside much earlier in the novel, when Juani muses about her familial function: “I’d become one of Caridad’s infelizes” (ibid: 143). The “infeliz” here signifies sad and unhappy; but it also invites readers to make a signifying connection with its opposite “feliz,” in the sense that the Spanish may be punned to indicate the English happy, and hence gay and/or queer. Here, however, “infeliz”—unhappy; un- or not queer—points to a resignification, if not semantic breakdown, of the once-claimed surety of Juani’s sexual identity. Evocatively, if unintentionally, Juani’s musing suggests that her embattled lesbian status is, after all, closer than she had imagined to her “infeliz” Cuban cousin Titi. Juani’s lesbianism is both confirmed in and disturbed by such signifying effects. Her body is never unmarked 175

or unmodulated by heteronormative prescriptions emanating from both sides of the Florida Strait.11 4.4. Cubanas unmanned In light of the gender-sexual contradictions explored above, it is worth recalling the metaphor favoured by a number of critics when discussing the particular transculturations engendered by the mass presence of Cubans, if not all Latinos, in the U.S.A.: the dance between Anglo and Latin Americas. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, for instance, in his introduction to Cheek to Cheek, refers to the comparative study of literature produced in Anglo and Latin Americas as a “close dance,” a “cheek to cheek” coupling that neatly makes the signifying “move” into border-line mode “between North and South” (1990: 1-2). The “close dance” in his usage, however, is not simply performed at the borderline-as-hyphen (also the key trope in Pérez Firmat’s study of Cuban-American culture, Life on the Hyphen: The CubanAmerican Way [1994]). It is also performed at the borderline-ashymen, a permeable, penetrable geopolitical and cultural space where desires for hemispherical mastery—in this case for engendering a new literary criticism of high literary transAmerican unities—may be actualized. Pérez Firmat’s “close dance” trope thus functions in “line” with what William Luis calls, unabashedly, the “master codes of Cuban American culture” (1997: 188). For Luis the master codes of music and dance keep homeland identities alive in a new setting while facilitating the transformation of immigrant and host cultures alike: “For some, the dominant culture leads and the other follows; for others, the recessive one becomes assertive. However, both listen and dance to the same tune in the same geographic space” (ibid: 189). Aside from the simplification that the metaphorical and hyphenated dance between cultures implies a balanced pairing of equals, the trope obeys a logic that is explicitly gendered (defined by the master’s moves) and heteronormative (signifying a heterosexual mating ritual). 176

This logic is recognizable in Memory Mambo in the sexually charged stand-offs between Jimmy and Juani. In Luis’s hands, however, the trope also suggests that transcultural processes are determined by a genetic master-code whereby the active principle of dominance is obviously preferable to the principle of weakness and passivity. Music and dance are also key cultural forms in Memory Mambo, as its title attests. The primacy Obejas gives to music marks a notable departure from the narratives dealt with in the previous chapters of this study, where the intertextual impact of musical forms is always contingent on and relational to literary references and allusions. Memory Mambo’s most significant intertext is ‘Guantanamera,’ metaphorized into a sign of unstable and destabilizing familial narratives of the Cuban past. But this sign has ramifications beyond historical memory for the novel’s bodies. When discussing ‘Guantanamera’ with her sister, Juani’s moves suggest a resignification of the “close dance” against the grain of the trope as master code. Juani dances before her sister but alone, “one hand in the air, the other on my waist.” And she dances without gesturing to what, after Perera, might be called a happy-dancing-hybrid conception of Cuban-American identity (1994: 19): “one step forward, two steps back—unnngh!” (1996: 194). Moreover, her desired dancing partner would be Gina, the Puerto Rican from whom she has become estranged. The scene thus encapsulates Memory Mambo’s dispute with masterful delineations of things Cuban-American. Even in those moments in which the ability to dance well signals an “authentic” Cubanexile sensibility, a self-effacing tone undercuts any suggestion of a metaphorical union between authentic Anglo and Cuban cultural partners: “Since she’s [Caridad] one of the older cousins, she actually learned to dance in Cuba, where they play the really authentic music (…) so she got assigned to teach all of us younger cousins how to dance. Patricia’s the oldest of all, but she was born in New York, which we joke is the reason she can’t dance worth a damn” (ibid: 17-18). Displacement thus makes possible unmanned resemanticizations and reorganiza177

tions of the dance, to the point of admitting not only that some Cubanos cannot, in fact, dance, but that male partners are not indispensable. In this instance, being “unmanned” is clearly not like the symbolic unmanning of the conventional macho before the gaze of other men, discussed in my last chapter with regard to Miguel. Rather, my usage here refers to the possibilities for women permitted by the socioeconomic and gender-sexual release of women—announced, for instance, by the death of the husband or father—from direct patriarchal interference. While distance from Cuba may enact painful, and at times humorous, deculturations, it may also admit Cuban women into a range of previously unforeseen economic, familial, and sexual alternatives. The conjunction of rival bodily codes is again pertinent here. Neocultural possibilities are modulated by the struggles of women to creatively “disidentify” with the ascribed roles and pressures emanating from two overlapping cultural systems: transplanted Cuban codes at work in Juani’s family; and majoritarian U.S. middle-class codes. According to José Muñoz: The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (1999: 31)

In Memory Mambo, however, the disidentificatory task of encoding and recoding cultural texts—for my purposes, the material and psychic effects of dynamic bodily economies in and on bodies signed “Cuban in the U.S.A.”—differs from the subaltern agenda identified by Muñoz. The novel’s disidentifications are directed less at resignifying a dominant (U.S.) and minority (Cuban) relationship in the latter’s purportedly disempowered 178

favour, and more at resignifying familial functions and opening up more empowered positions for those excluded or constrained along gendered lines within a non-subaltern Cuban-American minority. The task for many of Memory Mambo’s female players is how to disidentify—resist, sidestep, disarm, recode—the stigmatizations that may accrue to them if they break or challenge transplanted bodily prescriptions, and thus take advantage of the bodily and socioeconomic possibilities for women permitted them in the U.S.A. However, at least one female player in Memory Mambo does not disidentify with oppressive bodily scripts. Caridad accedes to the operations of a machista bodily economy by which conventional gender demarcations and roles are maintained and perpetuated. Caridad’s public movements are policed by Jimmy—“where the hell does Caridad think she’s going to go without him anyway?” (1996: 15)—and her subservience is ensured by violence, threatened and real. Caridad and Jimmy, then, are explicable in terms of the close-dance metaphor, but only when it is regarded as a master-code trope. Those around Caridad are troubled by her insistence on “standing by her man” (ibid: 236) in spite of beatings and his molestation of Pauli’s daughter, and regard her as a tragic exemplar of victimhood. Preferring not to discuss the socioeconomic constraints that may be at work for Caridad, her cousins instead trace Caridad’s loyalty back to the trauma of displacement from Cuba. They also explain Jimmy’s violence as similarly modulated by the psychic damages and bodily deculturation inflicted on him in childhood by enforced removal from his “true” familial and national Cuban home. Caridad proves to be the immobilized exception among Juani’s female relatives. Caridad’s sister Pauli, by contrast, has never been in thrall to patriarchs like Tío Pepe or to the transplanted Cuban bodily codes at work in her male-centred family. While Juani may regard Pauli’s independence as yet another instance of Americanization, Pauli’s body and actions are simultaneously legible in two bodily economies: “In American terms, 179

Pauli refused to enable her father. In Cuban terms, she was an ingrate” (ibid: 63). But that potentially destabilizing mix of signifying practices presents few difficulties for Pauli. As a twelveyear old, she successfully sabotages her father’s extramarital affair by convincing his mistress that he has herpes. At her father’s death, Pauli returns from working in Mexico with a mixed-race baby daughter, Rosa, whose paternity she refuses to divulge, to the consternation of most of the family’s elders. The extent of her distance from Cuban mores is confirmed at the funeral where she breastfeeds her “fatherless baby” (ibid: 73). Other cousins, too, benefit from displacement. Nena, recognizing Juani’s need for space away from the family, convinces her parents that both daughters ought to rent an apartment and have “more space, more time alone to study” (ibid: 159). Again, a distance from Cuba that enables the embrace of “American” promise is at work here: “Most Cuban women don't move out of their family’s home unless they get married or go off to school. The idea of the two of us sharing an apartment while single and living in the same city as our parents was pure American thinking” (ibid: 158). The message implicit in these examples, and repeated throughout Obejas’s fiction, is that Cubanas may be more able than Cubanos at adapting to the U.S.A. Obejas tends to render the issue of American Dream opportunity in terms of resistance by women to oppressive gender structures. For example, the mother of the protagonist in Obejas’s story, ‘We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?,’ is liberated by the death of her husband. At the funeral the male relatives and friends speak “about my father’s love of Cuba, and how unfortunate it is that he died just as Eastern Europe is breaking free, and Fidel is surely about to fall” (1994: 128). The scene confirms a nostalgic stasis—recognizable in Juani’s father in Memory Mambo as well—an inability on the part of the father and his male peers to accept the permanence of their U.S. residency. The mother is more resilient. She quietly ignores the conventions of dutiful widowhood and begins to take advantage 180

of her new location: “A week after my father’s death, my mother will buy a computer with a Braille keyboard and a speaker, start learning how to use it at the community center down the block, and be busy investing in mutual funds at a profit within six months” (ibid: 130). Such descriptions iterate how the patriarch’s aspirations were always retrograde, the matriarch’s resolutely fixed on a middle-class U.S. future. Similarly, in Memory Mambo previously foreclosed gender possibilities open up for Tía Celia with her husband’s death. Soon after the funeral, the setting for her rebirth, she redecorates the house, begins to buy citrus fruits again (her husband had been allergic to them), and without fear of her uncle Pepe’s approbation, plays with a granddaughter whose presence in the home would not have been tolerated by her husband. But most astonishing to Celia’s nieces is the rapidity of her ontogenesis into outspoken feminist. She champions her daughter Pauli’s “crazy independence, her sexuality and vigor,” and her singlemother status, and for the first time is critical of Caridad’s subservience to a violent husband (1996: 96). This proto-feminist transformation is also marked by petit-bourgeois aspirations for economic and individual independence. For example, Tía Celia asks Juani for advice about “whether she should switch longdistance companies (AT&T is direct to Cuba, so she kept it), or whether she should invest in a money market fund, or maybe buy a car with the money Tío Pepe left her” (ibid: 160). Nonetheless, Juani’s observations of her aunt’s metamorphosis in widowhood indicate how unexpected it is within her extended family’s androcentric coordinates: “Tía Celia’s vision of the future had obviously never included Tío Pepe. I shuddered” (ibid: 163). Juani’s “shuddering” reaction to Celia’s future hopes is telling in another sense. It alludes to the fact that gender and sexual disidentifications in the novel are implicated in a peculiarly Cuban discourse of betrayal, a diasporic imaginary of antagonisms determined by individual ideological positions for or against the Cuban Revolution’s own promised “vision of the future,” and 181

manifested as personal betrayal, even to the point of splitting families along politicized lines (Ana López 1996: 45). 12 In Juani’s world, the adults of her parents’ generation provide contradictory versions of the family’s Cuban past. But most are in the U.S.A. because of opposition to the Revolution and are happy to say so. Tío Raúl is the exception, the single figure who claims to have fought on the revolutionary side. Typically, Tío Raúl’s story is rent by inconsistencies, and everyone in the family has a different version to tell, to Juani’s chagrin. But his account is distinguished from the plethora of familial histories because in it, betrayal of the revolutionary project is intimately connected to romantic betrayal, the key tarnished player in the latter scenario being Raúl’s wife Zenaida. Tío Raúl’s revolutionary past provides a cautionary morality tale of what happens to the patriarch who fails to live up to patriarchal expectations or fulfil family obligations. As one incidental character, a faith-healer, points out, “Raúl had no business leaving his wife to become a guerilla” (1996: 103). Certainly this is the attitude of Raúl’s son, Manolito, who still resents both the father who absented himself during his childhood and the idealism that underwrote that absence. Patricia, too, while more tolerant of her father, once rejected him for being “idealistic but weak” (ibid: 101). But at the centre of Raúl’s fall from revolutionary grace is his wife Zenaida, and her mother, who orchestrate a telegrammed ruse to persuade Raúl away from Cuba and back to New York and his family: “Come home immediately. Zenaida in terrible accident. Only a few days left” (ibid: 107). Because of this deceit Raúl is unable to participate in the Revolution proper and he never forgives his wife for her treachery. In turn, he regards himself as a traitor to the Revolution, for once back in New York he stays, “utterly trapped—in part by Zenaida’s fear of abandonment, and in part by his own guilt and shame. How could he ever explain to his guerilla friends that his wife had lied in such a reckless way?” (ibid: 109). Until they divorce, Zenaida, a convert to anti-Castroism, and Raúl, repli182

cate Cuban ideological struggles in a hostile marriage rent by constant domestic warfare: “He justified having left by claiming he was fighting for ideals and freedom—didn’t Tía Zenaida have any ideals? She claimed he was a jerk who got his male ego challenged and went off to prove he was a real man—didn’t he realize real men didn’t need to prove anything?” (ibid: 10910). Zenaida’s reaction is significant. Much of Raúl’s shame is attributable to the fact that women got the better of him, forever marking his own descent to the “zero point” of the macho game, the game in his case being fought by his decidedly androcentric comrades in arms. Yet if Zenaida is unmanned through divorce, the narrative suggests that she is responsible for unmanning the revolutionary. For her husband, she functions as a signifier of duplicity and untrustworthiness, an always already demonizable figure with the analogized potential for being singled out as typical of her gender. The corollary of this, however, is that the taint of a symbolic feminization achieved by female deceit continues to shadow Raúl when he is a rich and successful émigré artist, ironically supported by the staunchly anti-Communist members of the Cuban-exile elite. As Juani reports, “Manolito, who works like a mule on a chain with his American father-in-law rehabbing and selling urban properties, hates Raúl’s accent in English, his effete ways, and the dumb luck he has always had (…) with money” (ibid: 101). A trace of the fallen patriarch’s emasculation and descent into symbolic femininity is even discernible in Juani’s depoliticized, romanticized spin on the moral of her uncle and aunt’s story: “the message of Tío Raúl and Tía Zenaida is that lies destroy everything, but especially love” (ibid: 115). Here Raúl and his wife are cast as hapless players in a “novela rosa”-type fantasy. Coincidentally, but to different effect, this is one of the genres that shadows Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust where its connotations of feminine passivity are redirected at the patriarchal agents who have disdained the romantic genre’s female readers. Zenaida, however, avoids romanticizing her autobiography 183

because she feels that a most powerful patriarch has ruined her chances of achieving marital harmony: “She’s convinced [that] without Fidel her life would have been very different, that perhaps she and Raúl would have stayed together” (ibid: 114). But Zenaida’s conviction is unsustainable. She attributes to Castro, and, by implication, to the temporal and spatial rupture of the Cuban gran familia supposedly inaugurated by the 1959 Revolution, blame for her displacement into the U.S.A. Juani’s version of events nonetheless confirms that her uncle and aunt were in exile in the U.S.A. many years before the Revolution succeeded. By including this account, Memory Mambo dispenses with what Poyo calls the myth that the Cuban exiled subject were born in 1959 (1992: 89). This is not to suggest that the Revolution has not indelibly marked Cuban exile subjectivities. Zenaida and Raúl’s story is by no means the only example in Obejas’s novel of personal-as-political incommensurables that are traceable back to the Cuban Revolution’s utopian impact on continental imaginaries. 4.5. A Latino dialectic of antipathy Half-way through Memory Mambo, Jimmy makes the following joke: “What’s the difference between a Cuban and a Puerto Rican? A Cuban’s a Puerto Rican with a job” (1996: 122). The gathered members of Juani’s family laugh, forcing Juani to tell Gina, her unamused Puerto Rican girlfriend, that “it was just a Cuban cultural thing, a generational thing, a Jimmy thing, but none of my words had any weight” (ibid: 123), an explanation notable for avoiding any mention of class differentials. Later, in a party at Gina’s apartment, one of Gina’s Puerto Rican friends asks Juani, “Are you a good Cuban or a bad Cuban?” (ibid: 127), the implication being that she and her family are gusanos, the derogatory epithet directed at Cubans—from within and without Cuba by the Revolution’s supporters—who left the island in opposition to the Revolutionary project. Moreover, when Gina and Juani split in the narrative’s symbolically central act of 184

domestic violence, it is clear that 1959 and its legacies have undermined their relationship: “The gulf between us was wider than the ninety miles from Havana to Miami and the air was just as thick with doubt and suspicion” (ibid: 131-32). Such antagonisms belie the romantic claim made by Ilán Stavans that shared experiences of U.S. residency enable the overcoming of the historical, cultural, and racialized divisions between Antillean-origin Latinos: “But once the various citizens of the Caribbean become partners in the search for the American Dream, they create strange, unlikely alliances they would never agree to on their native soil. Tensions permeate inter-Caribbean relations; but when facing Anglos or even other Hispanics, the sense of unity becomes curiously inviting” (1994: 51). Tensions, primarily but not exclusively ideological, also permeate interCuban relations, with implications for both unity and disunity beyond the imagined boundaries of Cuban exile communities. Memory Mambo incorporates those tensions by allocating to its players the full range of possible political and personal stances on the Cuban Revolution and the socialist state’s beleaguered survival. Pertinent here is the novel’s intertextual use of ‘Guantanamera.’ Its lyrics derived from José Martí, the song reminds readers of the opposed uses made of Martí’s pan-American vision. Lauded by and claimed as a revolutionary forerunner for Castro’s regime, Martí is also glorified as a Cuban nationalist by Castro’s ideological enemies in Miami. Memory Mambo, however, is set in Chicago, not Miami, although Juani does travel to the Florida city to see her sister, Nena. As Juani describes the northern setting, “When we first moved here after coming to the U.S., we were some of the first Latino immigrants in the area (a lot of Puerto Ricans (…) were already here) and the Poles who’d made Logan Square their neighborhood weren’t very friendly to us” (1996: 36). Placed on the Chicago stage as the latest migrant wave among many, the novel’s Cubans are distanced from Miami’s Cuban enclave, and therefore from what José Muñoz identities as a majoritarian exiled-Cuban sector’s disinclination to acknowledge its place in 185

U.S. cultural typologies of inclusion and exclusion: By rarely operating outside of local ethnic groups and not interacting with the national body, Cuban Americans are able to formulate a collective imaginary narrative that positions them as distanced from the palpable realities of U.S. racism, while at the same time eliding the very fact of their relational proximity to other subaltern groups in the U.S. This separatism engenders a fantasy that Cubans are somehow magically inoculated against the racist ideologies that affect all Latinas/os in the U.S. (1995: 79)

In many ways Memory Mambo counteracts this notion of Cuban inoculation from the transculturated U.S.A. The novel does not restrict discourse about cubanía to Cubans. It also reveals how the mass presence of Cubans in the U.S.A., together with the symbolic aura of the Cuban Revolution, are profoundly imbricated in the imaginations of the U.S. Puerto Rican community. Memory Mambo stages its exploration of latinidad and its problematization of taxonomies of nation and family through the pairing of Juani and Gina, the “fierce Puerto Rican independentista” (1996: 25). Their relationship signals what I call a Latino dialectic of antipathy. Pivotal to this dialectic is the aura of post-Revolutionary Cuba in continental imaginaries. Since 1959, and particularly during the Cold War tensions of the 1960s and 1970s, Cuba has occupied a central role in a Latin American imagination that interpreted the island’s struggle against the U.S.A. as paradigmatic of broader continental power struggles, economic inequities, and ideological polarizations. The corollary of this has been the centrality of a demonized Cuba in the U.S.A.’s own hemispherical imagination of itself as a bulwark against MarxistLeninism, and as a champion of western democracy and capitalist enterprise. The Cuban revolutionary government’s survival continues to shadow and shape U.S. foreign policy, military and economic responses to the rest of Latin America. In Memory Mambo these rival imaginaries confront each other in and as the 186

relationship between the politicized Gina and Juani, who is discreet with her political opinions, if indeed she has any. These women are marked by membership of national, ethnic, and familial groupings made adversarial by the U.S.A.’s long history of Antillean interventions. A sense of the complexities inherent to a national place modulated by hemispherical politics in the wake of the Cuban Revolution is provided by Juani’s father’s obsession with “duct tape,” a commodity he claims to have invented, yet failed to patent. Her father left Cuba because of economic opposition to the Socialist coordinates of the Revolution, but his accounts of his invention are renarrativized in cognisance of his audience’s presumed position on Cuba: Depending on who’s listening to the story, my father says that either he was a prosperous businessman recruited by the CIA after the Cuban Revolution (what he told Jimmy, who he knew was anti-Castro), or that he was unemployed and, when the CIA came calling, didn’t have any other options (what he told Gina, because he didn’t want to be provocative). But either way (…) in both versions he certainly believes working for the CIA was a good route into the American business community (…) (ibid: 27)

As Juani’s telling iterates, her partner Gina is told a story that will not provoke her pro-Cuban sentiments. In private, however, Gina interprets the story’s underlying petit-bourgeois aspirations as an allegory of discredited capitalism: “He’s delusional because of what exile has done to him—just look at what life in the U.S. has made of your father!” (ibid: 26). Gina’s recognition of the family’s class position is crucial. Alongside her dismissal of Juani’s embrace of a sexual identity encoded “white,” it makes critical distinctions between Juani’s Cuban and Gina’s Puerto-Rican place, and hence between the U.S. histories of the sectors to which they belong. The telling of those divergent histories as they symbolically converge in the interactions of the two women also indicates the extent to which 187

U.S.-based Cubans like Juani may be precluded not only from knowing Cuba, but from historicizing themselves in relation to other frontera/frontier discontinuities and continuities. Those embroiled histories, for Gina always meaningful in relation to U.S. imperial, economic, and cultural influence in Latin America, are insinuated into Obejas’s narrative through Gina’s pivotal presence. In the embodied dialectic she forms with Juani, she serves as a reminder of how Spain’s last remaining New World colonies became targets for U.S. interventions: on the one hand, Cuba’s experiences of military occupation, U.S.-backed client dictatorships before 1959, and attempted invasion and economic blockades afterward; on the other hand, Puerto Rico’s ongoing colonial status. Gina’s politics and her response to Juani’s relatives also remind the novel’s readers that until the Mariel exodus of 1980, most Cuban immigrants derived from upper- and middle-class sectors, were predominantly white or white identifying, and were “favored by the U.S. government and accorded preferential treatment upon their arrival” (Lisandro Pérez 1992: 261).13 That treatment was not accorded Gina as a Puerto Rican. Her presence in the novel thus highlights the distinct historical imperatives that have led the two Latino sectors to reside en masse in the U.S.A., at times in suspicious proximity. In Obejas’s novel, however, the disturbances Gina effects on Juani’s sense of self are interpreted by Juani as a personal and romantic rather than an ideological and historical problematic. The narrative indicates that Gina, unlike Juani and many of her cousins, is able to discourse authoritatively on things Cuban not only because she supports the Revolution’s anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist project, but because she has been to the island. Aside from the political ideals inspiring Gina’s visit and that Juani tolerates but does not share, Juani is piqued by Gina’s experiences of a Cuba that Juani only knows from a Babel of conflictive family accounts: I was jealous that she and her friends knew so much about my country, and I knew so little, really, not just about Cuba, but about Puerto Rico and 188

everywhere else. I was pissed that, while they’d been to Cuba, I had spent all my time working in a laundromat folding other people’s clothes and emptying quarters from the pinball machines in the back. I hated their independence movement, not for political reasons, but because it seemed to give them direction. And hope. (1996: 133)

Before their relationship ends in violence, Juani is constantly decoding Gina’s conversation for signs that ideological and historical enmities will not, as she fears, destroy their romance. For instance, when Gina admits her ambivalence for Castro—“Well, I liked Fidel when he was a revolutionary, (…) I don't like Fidel the dictator, Fidel the bureaucrat” (ibid: 87)—Juani reveals a desire to believe that libidinal energies must somehow heal if not transcend history: “There was a possibility we could bridge the gap between us—not because I give a damn one way or another about Fidel, but because I know all too well how the world of politics, with its promises and deceptions, its absolute values and impersonal manifestos, can cut through the deepest love and leave lovers stranded” (ibid). Juani, in the end, cannot repress politicized narratives of history. Similarly, Gina realizes that she cannot overlook the class status and racism of her lover’s Cuban family. Before Juani attacks her partner, Gina admits “that she was tired of coming over to my family’s house and having to put up with my relatives, especially the men, making Puerto Rican jokes all the time, acting like Cubans were god’s gift to the world (…) She said we were racists and classists and that we only made fun of Puerto Ricans because most of them were darker and poorer than us” (ibid: 122). Juani, then, never gets her desired “reprieve from the politics of revolution” (ibid: 129). Her precarious sense of ontological autonomy is reinforced by what others say about Cuba. She is unable to evade either the assumptions made about Cuban history, or the way that history overdetermines how her relatives perceive her. And she cannot dodge the challenges other Latinas may make to her romanticized Cuban-exile imagination: 189

To me, she [Gina] was like the purest, blackest earth—that rich, sweet soil in which sugarcane grows. I always imagined her as hills in which I would roll around, happy and dirty, as if I were back in Cuba, or perhaps in Puerto Rico. When I was going through these reveries, I always forgot how sugarcane sucks the earth, makes it barren and dry, how it made my Tío Raúl rich but drove him insane first. (ibid: 119)

Juani has imagined her lover as a conduit to a Cuba that is always phantasmic, that can appear to Juani only through a distorted, depoliticized, and dehistoricized lens. The issue of estranged relations to the past that underwrites the Gina-Juani dialectic is not determined by Cuban legacies alone. The Puerto Rican “national” question provides the novel with a parallel historical, ideological, and bodily nexus of dispute, a “colonized” Puerto Rican imaginary to counter a Cuban exile rival. Yet Juani’s commentary indicates an impatience with that imaginary. Like the stories told in Juani’s family, Gina’s Puerto Rican perspective on her U.S. place appears to resist acknowledging historical complexities. According to Juani’s narration Gina persists in championing an independentista cause, one based on the Cuban “blueprint” that many Puerto Ricans have rejected as a viable option (ibid: 129). Yet unlike Juani’s mother who sees Puerto Rican radicals as terrorists, Juani identifies other faults in Gina’s politics. Her narration mocks the ways Gina’s revolutionary ideals interrupt the most mundane of daily affairs. Gina’s politics are so unbending that they prescribe what clothes Juani feels licensed to wear, the lesbian bars she frequents, the food she consumes, and even the music she listens to. At times the narration is parodic, as when Juani describes Gina’s apartment in claustrophobic detail “as a museum dedicated to Puerto Rican independence and Latin American liberation movements,” crammed with revolutionary texts and memorabilia, and even some “bull’s-eyed” targets of imperialist enemies (ibid: 86). Finally, Juani emphasizes the contradiction between Gina’s job “as a strategist for communitybased political candidates” and the politics she shares with “her 190

socialist and communist buddies [who] think elections are a farce, a pillar of the oppressive colonial system that keeps Puerto Rico enslaved” (ibid: 77). These descriptions reinforce Juani’s opinion about the Puerto Rican national conundrum: Puerto Ricans may “like not having to make a choice. Maybe no choice is their choice” (118). Or, as the puertorriqueña in Obejas’s story ‘Forever,’ states: “Love, coupledom, the right person—they’re as anachronistic and elusive as Puerto Rican independence: everybody’s for it, but no one’s quite sure what it means or how to get it” (1994: 97). While it is characterized by ideological and historical disagreements, as well as by class and racialized frictions, Memory Mambo’s dialectic of antipathy always presupposes that interactions between Latino sectors are inevitable and unavoidable. Greater Cuban insularity is a myth, a conceit. That impression survives the reading of the novel, despite the fact that the latinidad encoded in the Gina-Juani pairing is conflicted and ultimately untenable. It is important to note here that Juani’s sister Nena, resident of Miami, is happily involved in an inter-ethnic relationship, her partner being Bernie, the half Jewish, half black Puerto Rican son of a lesbian mother. Obejas’s desimplifying approach to latinidad as a potential neocultural imaginary rebuts the opinion held by some Cuban-American critics that latinidad represents a meaningless imaginative and political consequence of Cuban exile in the U.S.A.14 Running counter to such instances of critical insularity, Eliana Rivero has described Obejas as the first Cuban female author to shift from immigrant to ethnic-centred narratives and to accept as permanent her U.S. belonging (1989: 195).15 Obejas’s fictional mobility in a national sense thus parallels the observations made by Ana López that the move among many Cubans to claim an ethnicity—Cuban-in“America”—corresponds to a national location increasingly characterized by panethnic connections and symmetries (1996: 47). But Memory Mambo’s staging of these interactions is notable for not romanticizing them, and for not glossing over painful or violent impediments to panethnic alliances and latinidades. 191

4.6. Petit-bourgeois mobility and subaltern proximities The dialectic of antipathy embodied and analogized by Juani and Gina would seem to mark a refusal to shy away from the implications of class and racial privilege for Cuban relations with other Latino sectors. Yet Obejas’s gestures toward a desimplified, deromanticized Cuban-exile imagination suggest that more is to be said about her fictionalizations of Cuban placements inside U.S. borders. That is, mobility itself is crucial to Juani’s occupation of U.S. space in two senses: her Cuban “relational proximity [or otherwise] to other subaltern groups” (Muñoz 1995: 79); and her lesbian relation to the frontiers of the U.S. state. Muñoz has claimed that “the maintenance of a cultural abode like exilic memory” attempts to avoid spatial overdetermination on the part of U.S. majoritarian and Cuban exile imaginations alike by “engender[ing] an ambivalent and nomadic relation to the national body politic” (ibid: 81). If Muñoz is correct, then it is also necessary to qualify his claim. However ambivalent, some bearers of “exilic memory” have better means than others to relate nomadically “to the national body politic” and to the borders by which that body politic is defined and perceived. Necessarily, this qualification has underwritten the previous chapters in this book. In Spidertown, Nuyoricans are denizens of the U.S.A., but subalternized beyond any prospect of a nomadic relation to the state. And in Sweet Diamond Dust, Ferré’s selfsubalternizing agenda implicates many of her characters in an interstitial space of which only the most privileged and cosmopolitan of Puerto Ricans can find imaginative sustenance. In Memory Mambo, by contrast, different bodily relations to nationalized (insular) space are staged. The novel’s engagement with Greater Cuba, a species of state excess and boundary nonsensibility, inevitably evokes parallels with such other transcultural terrains as Nuyorico, Dominicanyork, and México del norte. However, the novel’s dialectic of antipathy also reminds Obejas’s readers that U.S.-based Cuban communities are not assimilable with these transnational communities. Despite, and 192

also impeding, the appearance of latinidades, Latino sectors have distinct experiences of U.S. hemispherical hegemony, and distinct internal relations to the U.S.A.’s geopolitical frontiers. As a Cuban exile narrative Memory Mambo is forced to negotiate the multiple discourses that enforce an ideological incommensurability between the U.S.A. and Cuba. The gulf has been mythologized by governments on both sides of the Florida Strait, and by Cuban communities in the U.S.A., at times effacing the structural symbiosis of the conflict between the two states and the impact of that symbiosis on Cuban-exile subjectivities: The postrevolutionary Cuban exile is a distinct political formation whose origin is fundamentally anchored in the foreign policy objectives of the United States government and internal policies of the Cuban state. (…) As long as Cuban émigrés were ‘exiles’ and not a part of the United States, the administration could deny involvement in the military actions being taken against the revolution. (Angeles Torres 1998: 43) 16

Concomitantly, by upholding the myth of an unbridgeable rupture between two geopolities, the Cuban state could deny that it had lost control of the right to imagine Cuba, an entity now split, splintered, and active elsewhere. According to Angeles Torres, “In this context, the relationship of Cuban exiles to their host and home countries acquired a political significance not normally ascribed to immigrant communities” (ibid: 44). One consequence of this “significance” is that in line with a powerful and pervasive U.S. spatial imagination, and in spite of a communal insularity manifested as a denial of “America’s” impact on their Cuban identifications, the residents of Greater Cuba have accepted as a given their freedom in U.S. national space. The denial of that right to other residents represents a massive disenfranchisement, as the preclusion of mobility in Spidertown affirms. It is interesting, then, that Memory Mambo ends with Juani and Patricia discussing Juani’s letter to their Cuban cousin Titi. 193

Juani’s desired trip to Cuba, the discussion confirms, is going ahead, a decision that for the moment overrides the violence of her immediate past: “It’s quiet now” (1996: 237). There is much to be teased from this, the novel’s closing scene of possibility in which two cousins, one in Cuba, the other in the U.S.A., are poised to meet. Juani’s proposed trip neither provides a Cuban variant of Ferré’s interstitial imaginary, nor evokes the “bridging” trips back to Cuba that feature in many Cuban exile narratives. While Juani’s decision implies a desire on her part to conjoin distinct geopolities, the bridging never takes place. In this instance the journey trope can only signify travel-as-possibility, not travel actualized. Her plans suggest that yet more identificatory work is required of Juani on historical, national, familial, and sexual levels. The notion that the desired return to Cuba will somehow heal Juani’s identificatory splits is regarded with scepticism by her cousin Patricia: “The revolution’s dead, Cuba’s just another miserable little Third World country, only a little more romantic than the others because Fidel’s so charismatic. What would you do there anyway?” (ibid: 153-54). Juani responds by concealing her direct motives—“how my whole inspiration came from the fight with Gina and her friends”— behind the clichéd dream of an empirical authenticization of roots, “to see Cuba with my own eyes, walk the streets of Havana by myself, see where we used to live, talk to people, ask questions” (ibid: 154). Nonetheless, this dream is significant because the intention to cross borders again raises the issue of material means: Juani can cross the maritime frontier, whereas Titi—the novel’s lone subaltern—cannot. In many ways Memory Mambo attempts to engage with the issue of Cuban privilege that underwrites Juani’s intention and against which Gina has always struggled. The novel deromanticizes the idea of a socioeconomically paradisiacal exile Cuba by describing racialized hierarchies, domestic violence perpetuated by heterosexuals and lesbians alike, child abuse, and the confusion and pain experienced by transcultural subjects. Juani’s accounts confirm all of Gina’s observations of a family in which 194

racist discourses not only circulate, but provided a motive for leaving Cuba, a place in which her daughters “might couple with anybody even a shade darker than us” (ibid: 35). The example underscores the irony of Nena’s greeting her visiting sister in Miami with the phrase, “Welcome to Havana, U.S.A.” (ibid: 168), for in Miami she is able to keep secret from her distant Chicago-based parents news of her involvement with the mixed-race Bernie. For Gina, however, all of the members of this family, including Juani, benefit from bearing the somatic signs of whiteness. Gina’s criticisms do not attend to racialized hierarchies alone; they also target the family’s petit-bourgeois ambit. This accusation is not received well by Juani, employed in the family’s thriving laundromat business. She objects to what she perceives as the unfounded assumptions of Gina’s stance: “I’m Cuban, and in Gina’s eyes, automatically more privileged—as if my family had ever been privileged, as if we were doing anything except trying desperately to stay afloat” (ibid: 78). Juani also attempts to distinguish her family’s class position from that of the “Hispanics who’ve moved in, driving German compact cars and recording English-only messages on their voice-mail” (ibid: 37). But this class distinction between “old” Cuban migrants and the “new” Hispanics collapses when Gina visits Nena in Miami: We rushed out to her new red Mazda Navajo truck that I would have never imagined my sister driving. We dashed from the air-conditioned terminal through the humid tunnel of cars and vans spewing exhaust to her big truck sitting in a fire lane, a ticket flapping under the wipers. She grabbed it and cavalierly threw it into the back seat, where it joined what appeared to be a collection of tickets. I was struck by what an unlikely act that was for her, so free and optimistic. (…) As she drove along, she sang with the music, perky and alive. This was my sister? (ibid: 167)

In spite of the nouvelle riche coordinates of this scene, Juani’s gaze is resolute as it sees only Nena’s newly found gender liberation and not a securely middle-classed occupation of U.S. 195

space. Nonetheless, the message implied with Juani’s distancing of herself from the “new” Hispanics in her neighbourhood is that not all Cuban exiles enjoy unequivocal access to the American Dream; nor is Memory Mambo to be equated with what Zimmerman dismisses as the Cuban-American variant of the “American Dream Romance” (1992: 38). Similar distancing from that “Romance” occurs in the title story of Obejas’s collection, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994), a condensed precursor in theme to Memory Mambo. With its rapid temporal shifts, the story oscillates between scenes of a young girl’s arrival in Miami with her parents in 1963 and an adult future disabused of faith in the American Dream. Her family is welcomed by authorities as “living, breathing examples of the suffering Cubans have endured under the tyranny of Fidel Castro” (1994: 113). The daughter grows into adulthood shadowed by her father’s litany, “We came for her, so she could have a future” (ibid: 114). But she notices only those “things that can’t be told,” incidents of racism, her placement in a “special education” class after failing an I.Q. test in English, her father’s attempted suicide once he realized he was never returning to Cuba, and periods on welfare. The daughter also articulates a sense of her family’s fear of not appearing anti-Castro enough, “knowing that giving money to exile groups often meant helping somebody buy a private yacht for Caribbean vacations, not for invading Cuba, but also knowing that refusing to donate only invited questions about our own patriotism” (ibid: 124). These “untold” tales contradict the nationalistic rhetoric peddled to the girl from the moment of arrival: “look at his beautiful daughter who will now grow up well-fed and free” (ibid: 123). Such contradictions also alienate her from her parents’ attitudes to their new location. Against the racism she notices directed at her parents, she recalls the mother’s dream that her daughter will marry well, and white, with an “undocumented Haitian woman” for a servant (ibid: 117). Against the 1960s U.S.A. that has permitted his daughter to discover lesbianism 196

and a radicalized non-conformity, the father persists in imagining his daughter as a “lawyer, then a judge, in a system of law that is both serious and just,” despite his suspicion of democratic processes (ibid). And while the father will disdain elections, “convinced there’s no need to become a citizen of the United States (the usual prerequisite for voting) because Nixon will get us back to Cuba in no time” (ibid: 119), his slow surrender to U.S. permanency will be announced by the purchase of “a huge zenith color model [television] to watch the Olympics broadcast from Mexico City” and cheer (Communist) Cuba’s boxers (ibid). Finally the daughter will rebel against these contradictions—“Look, you didn’t come for me, you came for you; you came because all your rich clients were leaving, and you were going to wind up a cashier in your father’s hardware store if you didn’t leave, okay?” (ibid: 121)—only to be beaten in response. The story ends with a tender scene of reconciliation between the daughter, now dying of cancer, and her widowed mother, who gives to her daughter the passport that will permit her to visit Cuba. Before this scene, however, the mother has emerged as the story’s only successful adaptor to the U.S.A. Like many of the older women in Memory Mambo, she is willing, able, and ready to fully embrace the Dream that eluded both husband and daughter. The story’s parallels with Memory Mambo are obvious. Like the ending of the novel, the story leaves its troubled narrator poised for a journey back to origins. In both narratives the deromanticizing impulse is tempered by a celebration of mobility, both metaphorical and literal: journeys are planned, middleclass status is consolidated, and some women embrace the unmanned possibilities permitted by exile in the U.S.A. Those possibilities include new sexual configurations, as the story’s protagonist confirms with her musings on the national coordinates of her lesbianism: “The next morning, listening to her breathing in my arms, I will wonder how this could have happened, and if it would have happened at all if we’d stayed in Cuba. And if so, if it would have been furtive or free, with or without the revolu197

tion” (1994: 126). As with Juani’s decodings of her cousin Titi’s sexual predicament in Memory Mambo, the narrator’s thoughts are anchored by her residency in a U.S.A. implied to be less “furtive” and “more free” than is imagined possible in Cuba. At the same time, the sexual imaginary constructed by both this narrator and Juani appears as a fantasy of proximity to the named or implied lesbian subaltern in Cuba. This fantasy does not quite disregard or challenge the ideological and historical gulf between the U.S.A. and Cuba, as mythologized on either side of the maritime frontier. Rather uneasily, the fantasy confirms the gulf. The fact that Juani and this story’s narrator are planning to travel back to Cuba and meet the sexual subalterns whom they regard as equivalents, confirms both women’s irrefutable physical distance from that subalternity. While Juani and this story’s narrator imagine a sameness despite distance between U.S. and Cuban lesbians, they also uphold national disjunctions; the U.S.A. of their experiences is understood—in American Dream terms—to be richer and freer than the originary Communist island. Imaginatively crossing the Florida Strait reveals, after all, how profound yet unacknowledged are the benefits accruing to these women once displaced into the U.S.A. Their conjoined Cuban-American and lesbian identities are predicated on, if not invested in, a tacit reinscription of the frontier between an exiled Cuban petit-bourgeois subjectivity and an imagined Cuban subalternity, between the U.S. lesbian and the imagined Cuban lesbian subaltern, and between Cuban U.S.A. and an imagined place called Cuba. The undeniable distance from subalternity enjoyed by most of the exiled Cuban players in Memory Mambo, and in the title story in Obejas’s collection, thus emerges as a significant locus of contention in Obejas’s writerly project as it attempts to latinize and lesbianize the Cuban-exile narrative. Those conjoined interests reflect how various identities and signifying systems also intersect, overlap, and regroup on the exile body. Thus, in Memory Mambo displacement is never a synonym for stasis, even when figures like Juani embody an insularity that seems to 198

evoke a lost, irrecoverable Cuba. Nor does displacement signify transplanted (sexual) subalternity. Mobility on many levels permits Obejas’s protagonists, lesbian or otherwise, to conceive of travel itself as a trope of neocultural identity possibilities in the manner described by Ortiz-Márquez. That is, travel becomes a favoured metaphor for “all the significant steps in the construction of womanhood in the women’s respective (…) cultures,” and for the reimagination of new identifications “as ‘women’ once established in the United States” (1997: 228-29). That metaphor is deployed in Memory Mambo and in Obejas’s Cuban-centric stories to allay, side-step, or defeat the many pressures on Cubanas to succumb to an insular and insulated understanding of their U.S. location.17 In some of Obejas’s short stories, however, the Cuban context is absent, replaced by a broader Latina lesbian perspective. In such narratives the queer emphasis is enabled not simply by making the main Latina protagonist a lesbian, but also by allowing the Latina lesbian to enjoy freedom of movement in the U.S.A. Obejas’s story ‘Wrecks,’ from We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994), is a case in point. Set in Chicago, it stages an unspecific Latina lesbian imaginary as a mobile U.S. imaginary without limits: And the idea after a break-up, of course, is to have no limits. I think that’s why I like the notion of cars when I’m going through emotional angst. They provide this very cool, very American answer to pain: Even if you follow all the right directions from Chicago to San Francisco, all you need is one wrong turn—one little fuck up—and you wind up in Mississippi, where there are no lesbians. (1994: 14)

Nonetheless, the story’s narrator tries to undercut what she calls the “romantic posturing about wide-open spaces, the adventurous South, and on-the-road possibilities,” by distancing herself from “images and metaphors for freedom (…) inspired by men, jaded men like Jack Kerouac—that jaded repressed homosexual who never really found love and died a pathetic mess of a hu199

man being. It’s all a cover-up for just one thing: desperation” (ibid: 14-15). Despite making these comments, images and metaphors of movement on the U.S. open road continue to be at this unjaded character’s disposal. She deploys them to ironize her romantic “desperation” whenever a relationship founders and “the motor simply wouldn’t turn over” (ibid: 17), and to describe her trips with lovers to Santa Fe and Mexico that confirm her U.S. place: “I always made us rent sports cars, no matter how inconvenient for luggage or sleeping, because there’s nothing like driving at night, very fast, very sure, in a car that does absolutely everything you want it to. I think it’s patriotic as hell. And I look corn-fed in those pictures, all of which she kept” (ibid: 18). Cars are also available for pick-ups, and the story’s narrator delights in doing so in her volkswagen where “we would make love (…) an idea I successfully sold to each girl with the promise of ‘lesbianizing’ high school necking experiences” (ibid: 21). Yet the lesbianization of a U.S. dating ritual signals that the lesbian in this story—like the story’s implied author perhaps—locates herself in the mainstream. Insinuated into a declassed imagination of individual frontierlessness, and socioeconomically secured inside U.S. borders, this Latina lesbian simply is “allAmerican.” When compared to Rodriguez’s Spidertown, it is clear that ‘Wrecks’ stages an idea of the U.S.A. untouched by the subalternizing pressures that the state is able to manufacture and perpetuate in its barrios. Unbounded space, unfettered movement, and an unconstrained fiscal ability to replace the cars that the protagonist demolishes in her escapes from libidinal disillusionment, underpin the story’s figuration of the Latina lesbian subject. The class parameters of this Latina’s Chicago place and Miguel’s and Cristalena’s residency of El Bronx are irreconcilable. For Cristalena, transplanted and rigidly maintained gender mores constrain her desires to move in public space. In Miguel’s case, his car represents the only valuable item of capital at his disposal. It is always a precariously owned commodity and sign 200

of macho viability. A gift from Spider, customized to announce a distinct individual presence in the barrio, the car and its promise of mobility are made possible only by participation in the crack-economy. Since his barrio location places him beyond the U.S.A.’s signifying reach, the car represents Miguel’s only material means of being free in the U.S.A. In that understanding of freedom—announced, too, by the imaginative escapes permitted him by literary texts and films—is evident a fraught and shortlived assertion of self in the face of multiple subordinations. Notwithstanding their distinct settings, and their distinct ethnic, racialized, gender, and sexual typologies, class status confirms the radical incommensurability of Rodriguez’s and Obejas’s national visions in these narrative instances. 4.7. The other border logic In an interview conducted in 1996, Obejas described Memory Mambo as a bilateral writerly project, at once a lesbianization and a latinization of Cuban-American narrative: In Memory Mambo, the gay content is very up front. And for the first time [in Cuban-American narrative] you see Cubans interacting with other Latin Americans. In Chicago we’ve never had the option to be isolated. At the same time, we may have very different agendas as Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Nicaraguans. And so on; we’re finding common agendas as Latinos. (Harpur 1996: 7)

In the light of Obejas’s claim, then, the absence of a Chicana/o constituency in the novel’s explorations of interactions between Latino sectors is a noteworthy omission, particularly considering that Chicanos have always been the largest of Chicago’s Latino communities. But a Chicano presence is central in one of Obejas’s earlier short stories (again from her 1994 anthology), with ramifications—deriving from a differently historicized relation to the U.S.A.’s borders—for Obejas’s Cuban-American narratives. 201

‘The Spouse’ details the relationship between a Mexican, Raul, and a Chicana lesbian, Lupe, who has married Raul in a business deal intended to secure his Green Card. Raul, however, cannot accept that Lupe has no wish to live with him and grant him sexual access as a “proper wife.” As Lupe says to him, “We’re not family, no matter how many justices of the peace we stand in front of” (1994: 85). Like Memory Mambo, the story explores the transcultural conjunction of rival organizations and understandings of bodily conventions. Raul’s unmet expectations about what marriage should provide him results in his confession that “Since you wouldn’t act like a wife, I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I had an affair behind your back” (ibid: 88). Lupe’s answer is to remind him, “Raul, you didn’t marry a cold woman; you married a lesbian” (ibid: 89). For Raul, however, Lupe’s repeated naming of herself as a lesbian signals a disturbing de-Mexicanization. Her wilfulness can be corrected only by her reentry into a traditional family structure, one headed by himself, and in which she will rediscover her proper Guadalupean femininity. Her patience wearing thin, Lupe reminds Raul that their arrangement is not based on any conventional Mexican familial model and that his future depends on “a nice American girl” (ibid: 86). When that sardonic advice fails to deter him, Lupe deploys threat: “And please don’t bother me anymore. You’re trying my patience. Remember that I can put you right back on the wrong side of the river” (ibid: 89). This threat interests me here, for it signals a border logic not apparent in Memory Mambo. In that novel, exiled Cubans are indelibly marked by significations emanating from the Florida Strait, the locus of ideological disputes between Cuba and the U.S.A. In ‘The Spouse,’ the figuration of conflicting gender and sexual mores is framed by a radically different occupation of U.S. space. The sexual and national identities of both Lupe and Raul are legible in terms of the U.S.-Mexican border’s disciplinarian function to enforce state boundaries and regulate migratory labour flows. But in this instance it is Lupe, a Chicana lesbian, who benefits from these border logics, despite the fact that 202

the Chicana nomial itself is a legacy of the U.S.A.’s imperial ventures into Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet the production of Chicanos by colonizing territorializations is not dwelled upon in this story. More significant in this comedy of errors is Lupe’s understanding of sexual self. She has accepted the U.S. logic of being a lesbian. She deploys that term as a badge of identity security, a sign of impermeable bodily frontiers, and a weapon of clear-cut difference. Lupe, in fact, is a player in the sexual identity game rejected by Gina in Memory Mambo. Even the novel’s figuration of Juani is not comparable to Lupe’s stance; Juani’s claims to a secure sexual identity are shaken in transcultural moments of categorical uncertainty. The intended comic force of ‘The Spouse’ depends on the interplay between the sureness of Lupe’s twinned Chicana and lesbian identities and Raul’s precarious (“illegal”) status in the U.S.A. The Chicana lesbian curtails the Mexican’s heteronormative demands on her by recourse to a protective, disciplinarian border logic, a move that unequivocally confirms and names her “Americanness,” and hence her “true” lesbianness. ‘The Spouse,’ then, provides an uneasy counterpoint to Memory Mambo and that novel’s lesbianization of the Cubanexile narrative. The interrelation of national significations, class status, and sexual epistemologies is handled differently in a novel that draws sustenance from insular imaginations derived from the U.S.A.’s other southern frontier. As with ‘Wrecks,’ the figurations of ethnicity and sexuality in ‘The Spouse’ confirm that Obejas’s fictive Latina lesbian assumes this doubled identity position from a basis of class privilege, one bolstered by an accession to U.S. logics of sexual and ethnic identity. Yet even with a differently frontiered focus from that found in ‘The Spouse,’ Memory Mambo also confirms the importance of class status in modulating the premises by which exiled Cubans may deem themselves as an exceptional and freely mobile U.S. constituency. For some protagonists in Obejas’s novel, class comforts ease the encounter in displacement with their host, the U.S. state. 203

By not resiling from depicting or deromanticizing those privileges, Memory Mambo provides a different slant on Ana López’s call for a demystification of Cuban-exile imaginations: Within artistic circles, their exile has, in general, not been a privileged position from which to speak. Their efforts to assemble a national identity within/out of exile—to reconstruct a national history—have often been seen as the marks of a strident ethnocentrism already compromised by their challenges to the island’s utopia rather than as anguished cries of exilic loss, liminality, and deterritorialization coupled with the paradoxical need to build, to reterritorialize, themselves anew. (1996: 40)

The complexities of privilege canvassed by Obejas to some extent accord with this reterritorializing need. Juani’s fraught Cuban identification, in particular, epitomizes the transcultural anguish generated by the epistemological elusiveness of Cuba in the U.S.A. At the same time, Obejas extends López’s call because her narratives of a Cuba now established in the U.S.A. are also lesbianizations modulated by the southern maritime frontier. In Obejas’s Cuban-American texts, that frontier signifies at once the spatial locus of U.S. and Cuban ideological disputes and a metaphorical resource—the sign of a distance from Cuban and U.S. subalternity—for negotiating those disputes. However, alongside such narratives, Obejas presents other fictive scenarios and other Latina protagonists with the imaginative power to reinstall and benefit from American Dream logics, as well as from the U.S.A.’s “other” border logics of state containment and exclusion. Notes 1. In-text page references are to the first edition of Memory Mambo (1996, Pittsburgh: Cleis). Some names and Spanish words are printed without accents in the novel. 2. In a parallel but more optimistic vein, José Muñoz describes his experiences of a problematics of Cuban memory from which, nonetheless, meaningful identifications are possible: “Cuba (…) is a collection of snapshots, 204

disembodied voices over the phone line, and, most vividly, exilic memories. The ephemera and personal narratives that signify ‘Cuba’ for me resonate as not only possessing a certain materiality, but also providing a sense of ‘place’” (1995: 76). See also Coco Fusco’s ‘El diario de Miranda’ for insights into an epistemologically elusive Cuban-exile identity (1995a: 3-20). 3. Teresa De Crescenzo also emphasizes the queer distance of Obejas’s work from that of more celebrated Cuban-American authors when she describes the novel as a lesbian retort to the “macho world” of Hijuelos’s 1989 novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1998: 33). A similar distance is noted, but without the lesbian emphasis, in Pamela Smorkaloff’s reading of Memory Mambo as a “dialogue with the Cuban canon” produced on the island and in exile (1997/98: 5). Smorkaloff’s approach might suggest that Memory Mambo has affinities along “intertextual traffic” lines with Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust; however, the paucity of Cuban literary references in Memory Mambo suggests that the intertextual focus in this instance might be overstated. McCullough provides a beautifully sustained postcolonial reading of the novel’s depictions of transcultural lesbian sexuality; she also identifies and examines the novel’s few literary allusions (2000). While there are overlaps in our transcultural approaches, my emphasis on rival national imaginaries, and their impact on Cuban-exile identifications, departs from McCullough’s focus. The centrality of a Puerto Rican independista in Memory Mambo who reminds readers of Puerto Rico’s not yet ‘post’ colonial status (vis-à-vis the United States), makes me reluctant to read the novel through a postcolonial lens. 4. Juani’s arrival in the U.S.A. diverges from the author’s, who was born in La Habana in 1956, and went with her family to the U.S. at the age of six and a half as part of the first, prolonged mass exodus from Cuba after the December 1959 Revolution (Harpur 1996: 1). 5. For José Muñoz, the assimilatory stance is exemplified by Pérez Firmat’s Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1994) Within a schema organized along generational lines, Pérez Firmat defines Cuban-Americans as, first, older Cubans who are merely displaced, second, the “one-and-a-halfers” who inhabit two worlds easily, or third, the “all-American” children of exile who lack a Cuban imagination (1994: 7-11). 6. For historical overviews of the changing status of Cuban queer identities before and after the Revolution see Arguelles and Rich (1991) and the excellent study by Bejel (2001). 7. Anzaldúa, for example, has claimed that the origins in Greek myth of the “lesbian” perpetuates the idea that her “forefathers and foremothers are European,” and that the community operating under the name is always already “a gringa community” (1993: 22). Similar unease with a white-dominated U.S. lesbian culture is explored by Cherríe Moraga (1983). Almaguer’s study (1991) of gay Chicanos draws on such Chicana viewpoints to explain the 205

many barriers—in Chicano and dominant gay communities—preventing queer Chicanos from proclaiming a (homo)sexual identity. This identificatory and transcultural problematic lies at the heart of the work of many gay Latino writers, from the Cuban-American Elias Miguel Muñoz (for example, The Greatest Performance [1991]) to the Chicanos Gil Cuadros (1994) and Luis Alfaro (1992; 1994). Critical insights into this problematic include: José Muñoz (1999), Yarbro-Bejarano (1990; 2001), Román (1998), Quiroga (2000) and Allatson (1999; 1999/2000). 8. In Fuss’s formulation, too, the identity-identification distinction is not easily disentangled. As she says: “Identification is the psychical mechanism that produces self-recognition. Identification inhabits, organizes, instantiates identity. It operates as a mark of self-difference, opening up a space for the self to relate itself as a self, a self that is perpetually other. Identification, understood (…) as the play of difference and similitude in self-other relations, does not strictly speaking, stand against identity but structurally aids and abets it” (1995: 2). Accordingly, Fuss argues that the very process of identification—“the entry of history and culture into the subject”—confirms purportedly secure identities as contested and contradictory narratives of selfhood (ibid: 3). 9. A different insight into this bodily economy is provided by Obejas’s story ‘Above All, A Family Man,’ from her 1994 short story collection. Tommy, an Anglo-American man dying of AIDS, is driving from Chicago to St. Louis with his “Mexican” lover Rogelio, an archetypal machista. Rogelio is also married with children. The story recounts from Tommy’s perspective the conflicts between the men generated by Rogelio’s apparent sexual fluidity and Tommy’s inability to comprehend Rogelio’s refusal to assume a sexual identity in an Anglo-American sense: “‘But Tommy,’ he said, his eyes narrowing into slits. “I’m not going to get this sickness. You, yes—you’re a homosexual” (1994: 56). Reminiscent of the Chicano Gil Cuadros’s stories in City of God (1994) as well as the title story from the Dominican-American Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996: 101-7), Obejas’s narrative exposes the pain and pathos arising from the clash of disjunctive sexual epistemologies: “He looks at me, then looks away. Then he looks back again, his eyes pleading for understanding. But my heart is pounding in its thin walls, and I don't understand. I want to ask how much he expects me to take” (1994: 70). 10. Here used by Jimmy as a derogatory term for lesbian (common in Mexican, Chicano, and some Caribbean cultures), tortillera (tortilla maker or kneader) itself is subject to queer resemanticization by lesbian writers. For example, the Chicana Alicia Gaspar de Alba celebrates the term’s rich connotations in her poem ‘Making Tortillas”: “Tortilleras, we are called/ grinders of maíz, makers, bakers,/ slow lovers of women./ The secret is starting from scratch” (Gaspar de Alba, Herrera-Sobek, Martinéz 1989: 45). 11. My thanks to Susana Chávez-Silverman for originally bringing this 206

“queer-gay-happy-feliz” signifying possibility to my attention. 12. The effects of this Cuban discourse of treachery on gendered and sexualized bodies are underattended in analyses of Cuban-American narrative. Intriguingly, its operations suggest that productive future comparisons might be drawn between Cuban-American and Chicano narrative and criticism; in the latter, a parallel but specifically Mexican discourse of treachery centred on la Malinche is widely discussed. 13. For analyses of the political and economic dynamics of Cuban migration to the U.S.A, see: Nelson and Tienda (1997); S. Pedraza (1992); and Borneman (1986), on the Marielitos. 14. For a summary and endorsement of this trend see Alvarez Borland (1998: 149-50). A different stance is taken by Zimmerman. He regards Cuban-exile writers as displaced Latin Americans having little in common with the Chicano and Puerto Rican historical minorities (1992: 36). He further asserts that Latino writerliness is innately oppositional to Anglo-American hegemony, thus disqualifying from the Latino rubric Cuban-exile texts that are “too inadequate in oppositional force and perspective to constitute U.S. Latino expression” (ibid: 38). I do not, however, wish to replicate this prescriptiveness in my reading of Memory Mambo. 15. Rivero’s thesis is echoed by Librada Hernández who applauds Obejas for “undergoing the transition from immigrant to ethnic, and shaping the body of marginalized discourse in American literature in the process” (1994: 295). Indeed, while Cuban-American communities have for the most part not been targeted by the same marginalizing discourses and socioeconomic subordinations that affect many Puerto Ricans and Chicanos, a relatively privileged Cuban-exile occupation of U.S. space is not unequivocal. As Max Castro emphasizes, the English Only movement in the U.S. was inaugurated in Miami, in 1980, in a backlash by non-Cuban sectors against the city’s pioneering of bilingualism in schools and government institutions (1997). Finally, the Elían González affair of 1999/2000 could also be regarded as a watershed for Cuban-exile imaginations. The return of Elián sent an unequivocal message to the Cuban-exile sector that any purported favoured status in the U.S. was, at least under the Clinton administration, no longer to be taken for granted. That said, since the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has resumed a hardline stance against the Cuban state, naming it as part of the “Axis of terrorism.” This position has been welcomed by the Cuban-exile community in Florida and is seen by many political commentators as a sign of that community’s continuing influence in the Republican Party. 16. The U.S. aspect of this imaginary has been dissected to hilarious, scathing effect in Cynthia Weber’s Faking It, a psychoanalysis of a sexually panicked U.S. imaginary in hegemonic crisis in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Weber attributes the psychosis generated by this event to the loss of the “feminized Cuba” that, along with Puerto Rico, had been the U.S.A.’s prize 207

in the 1898 Spanish-American War. Since the new “hypermasculine” Cuba turned out to wear a beard, the U.S. imagination was faced with a troubling choice: “either a symbolic castration—a loss of phallic power coded as an inability to produce meaning that resulted from a lack of a feminine object in which to “express’ its masculine identity—or a queering/nonnormalizing of its subjectivity if it retained Cuba the U.S.O. [Unidentified Sexual Object] as its object of desire” (1992: 2). 17. These pressures are explored in some detail from a personal angle in Obejas’s essay, ‘Writing and Responsibility’ (1999).

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5 Coming out of the “American” nightmare with Benjamin Alire Sáenz

In the epigraph to Carry Me Like Water (1995a),1 the debut novel from Benjamin Alire Sáenz, an unnamed river is introduced as a figure that obeys primordial, cyclical imperatives: “It is spring, and the river is spilling with the newness of winter’s melted snow, each season flowing into each season.” Nonetheless, the epigraph’s narrator qualifies such evocations to account for the river’s categorization by “we” humans: “the river does not know that we have named it ‘river.’” There is an implied causal connection between the meanings imposed on the river and the debarring of the epigraph’s speaker from the world in which “The river has flowed a thousand years.” This speaker seeks a reconciliation with the place from which she or he has been estranged: “River, I’ve come back. River, I’m afraid. Carry me like water.” As the novel confirms, the conditions that have exiled the narrator from the implied home derive from the river’s role as a border. And it is a particular border to which the narrative will attend: that found at El Paso.2 The desert city of El Paso lies to the Texan east of the junction formed by the New Mexican and Texan state border and the national frontier between Mexico and the U.S.A. Facing El Paso across the geopolitical border—the Rio Grande, or the Río bravo del norte as it is known in Mexico—lies Ciudad Juárez, the largest of the Mexican border cities. El Paso/Juárez has a long tradition as a crossroads. To and across this site have moved the region’s Indian peoples, the Spanish missionaries and conquistadores who founded what would become Juárez in 1659, exiles from the 1910 Mexican Revolution, and the migrant labour, capital, and tourists on which the cities’ economies now depend. A sense of these traffics is provided by El Paso’s name, that in part preserves Juárez’s former designation as El paso del norte,

the northern crossing or passing. In the El Paso that occupies the physical and symbolic centre of Carry Me Like Water, the novel’s Chicano and Anglo protagonists attempt to build a more inclusive “American” home. This utopian aim underwrites the novel’s epic momentum as its main players abandon other parts of the United States for El Paso, return to the city as if drawn by its magnetic properties, or strive to restructure the coordinates of their oppressed residency. The novel’s characters, it seems, have come to regard “America” as “the land of forgetting,” as Alire Sáenz puts it in his poem ‘Going North’ (1995b: 50), hence the need for a disclosure of repressed personal histories and a reinvention of self in El Paso. That the narrative contests the “land of forgetting” is confirmed by its temporal setting in the Columbian quincentenary. According to Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, 1992 signalled a critical historical juncture for Chicano struggles against a pervasive national ideal, one that denies the state’s imperial pasts and coerces Chicano sectors to dream “someone else’s sueño americano/American dream, [or] more appropriately, someone else’s American nightmare” (1996: 232). In this chapter I regard Carry Me Like Water as part of its author’s stated project “to enter the debate for the heart of America” (1994: 533). Fittingly, El Paso’s very name provides an interpretive point of entry from which to discuss the novel’s dispute with American Dream mobility. My analysis maps the immobilizing conditions endured by El Paso’s Chicano subalterns in contrast to the Californians who later relocate there. This distinction allows me to identify the regulative logics by which categorical drives intensify and battle, and yet blur and collapse, at the border. Drawing from points made by Carl Gutiérrez-Jones (1995), I suggest that border-door logics in the novel are bolstered by broadly applicable closet logics. This disciplinarian coincidence generates an epistemological conundrum. Targeted by these dual logics, most players in the novel strive to recover obscured, denied, or immobilized identities. However, both border and closet are unstable and contradictory figures of knowledge regulation, hence the conundrum. Carry 210

Me Like Water obliges its protagonists to come out in ways and at sites that may not guarantee liberty from oppression. Moreover, judging by its internalized generic and utopian-discourse references, the plot itself seems intent on ensuring that comingsout or crossings-over into paradise are plagued and qualified by reminders of the political, historical, and transcultural materialities at work in El Paso/Juárez. The task of this chapter, then, is to investigate how the novel mobilizes its players at a border site conceived in terms of an alternative, utopian “sueño americano/American dream.” 5.1. Terrestrial border logics at El Paso/Juárez Carry Me Like Water is part of a Chicano critical and creative field in which the U.S.-Mexican border has profound material and psychic significance.3 For many Chicano writers the border serves as a historical mnemonic in two senses: of the U.S.A.’s takeover of Mexico’s northern half by 1848, an imperial expansion that would produce Chicanos; and of a long migratory history in which millions of Mexicans have crossed over into what Gómez-Peña calls the terrains of potential Chicano-ness (1994: 47). When invoked as defining tropes for Chicano experiences of the United States, the border and its borderlands are characterized by definitional instability or signifying contradictions. As Jagose says of the U.S.-Mexican frontier more generally, the border “which separates as it unites, ensures that the attempt to segregate a domestic from an alien space, to hold a place of safety distinct from a place of danger, founders on the equally fundamental indistinguishability of these oppositions” (1994: 151). The border at once governs “hospitable and hostile interactions of familiar and alien and divides while rendering indistinguishable the categories of inside and outside” (ibid: 152), as well as home and not home, permanent and transient, and citizen and denizen. National apparatuses on both sides of the border desire to fix such categorical oppositions, with weighty consequences for those beings who cross the border or who are 211

crossed by its signifying shiftiness.4 With its setting at the border, then, Carry Me Like Water places its players in a zone of epistemological instability. The novel’s key Chicano residents of El Paso—Diego, and his friends Luz and Mundo—react to this zone in ways that recall Anzaldúa’s perception of place: “Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus” (1987: 4). Polluted and shallow, its course regulated by cement structures, the Rio Grande itself exhibits signs of disease. Luz self-deprecatingly describes herself as “sad and sick as the brown river that pretended to be a border,” while also drawing Diego’s attention to the river’s domestication (1995a: 102). Diego, too, extrapolates from the river-border an existential malaise that describes a populace debilitated by alienation, ill-health, rage, and poverty. Exploited by the Chicano owner of the bar where he works, Diego is further distanced from his surroundings by muteness and deafness. At times Diego’s corporeal problematic—his desire to wake up without “his noiseless trap of a body” (ibid: 3)—suggests the body as cage or prison. At other times sensual isolation places him “on the edge of homelessness” (ibid: 4). Homelessness is synonymous with voicelessness, for Diego communicates in a sign language unknown to the people with whom he interacts, impelling him to the laborious medium of the notepad. Aside from a handful of friends, few locals have the patience to wait for his notes, to disregard his body’s communicative limits. The intractable silencing of Diego’s body translates as a subaltern disenfranchisement and a physical exile in his own home. Like the steps in El Paso’s Sunset Heights that lead to empty lots, Diego regards his lumpen status as leading to “nowhere” (ibid: 44).5 Diego’s self-diagnosis is exacerbated by separation from the Mexico he gazes at from Sunset Heights. He accords to the Juárez mountains a surrogate kinship function not controlled by the city’s elite sectors: “At least the rich could not take the view of the Juárez mountains with them. Often he felt as if the mountains had eyes and ears and lips. (…) for now, the mountains 212

were his life” (ibid: 11). But such consolations are constrained by borderline disjunctions, as conveyed in Diego’s observations of the U.S. and Mexican flags flying over one of the border bridges: “on some days the wind twisted the flags in every direction and (…) they almost touched like dancers who reached endlessly for each other, dancers who knew they would never couple” (ibid: 45). Here, notwithstanding proximity, the emblems of two states that cannot touch affirm that Diego is doubly stateless, and doubly unhomed. Moreover, Diego’s displacement is literally enacted at times by the border patrols (la migra) of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) whose agents examine El Paso’s mostly Mexican-origin populace “for signs of foreignness like scientists looking for that virus that did not belong in the healthy body” (ibid: 72). Describing one incident in which he was apprehended and placed in a van “with people who looked just like him,” Diego notes how “he had enjoyed the ride since it was slower and cheaper than the city buses” (ibid: 73). The sardonic humour here mocks la migra, even as it reveals the state’s commitment to treat Chicano sectors as non-“Americans.” The agents of la migra regard Diego’s street visibility as proof of a criminalized “alien” status, but not of a poverty that gives citizens like him no option but to walk. Luz, whose negotiations of U.S. space are also determined by poverty, has a similar experience when returning to El Paso from Chicago where she has been working as a maid: “As soon as I got off the plane, a migra dressed in blue jeans asked me for my papers” (ibid: 390).6 In Luz’s case, her U.S. citizenship derives from her Mexican mother’s pragmatic disregard for the border so that her daughter could be “born a U.S. citizen in an ambulance on the way to the county hospital” (ibid: 103). As a consequence of having her citizenship chosen for her, Luz considers herself to be caught between rival states’ claims to her identity. While she regards both El Paso and Juárez as “her blood, her history, her inheritance,” her relation to that dual inheritance is ambivalent (ibid). She claims to hate El Paso for its 213

pretensions to “all-American” status at “the heart of a great country,” when the presence of Chicanos and Mexicans reveals that “it could never be anything but a city on the fringes of Gringoland” (ibid: 103-4). And yet she “loves” El Paso for its transcultural refusal to be an “all-American” city, for appearing to disobey the U.S. state’s border regulations (ibid: 104). Those regulations, in turn, underwrite her relationships with her employers who fix her as “illiterate because she work[s] with her body” (ibid: 103). Confronted by such stereotypes, and by the sexualizations that accrue to her as a participant in a domestic labour market, Luz passes as a monolingual Spanish speaker, thus gaining some leverage in the hierarchical relationship between white employer and dark servant. Without warning, she can resort to English and disrupt “gringo” assumptions about her (il)legal status and her supposed occupation of a gendered space of powerlessness. With such tactics Luz attempts to disarm the operations of discursive violence, but she does so within a border economy that provides her with one option only, employment as a domestic. She deals with this option by passing in the guise of the subalternity that the representatives of majoritarian culture assume she embodies. Luz’s passing, and the runs-in with la migra she shares with Diego, confirm that both figures are objects of knowledge in a discourse of U.S. belonging that disavows Chicano as a U.S. identity. While Luz and Diego are protected from expulsion because of citizenship, they are constantly reminded that their citizenship is equivocal. Their experiences iterate the extent to which Chicanos and Mexicans are caught in what Jorge Bustamante calls the contradictory “revolving door” mechanisms by which Mexican migration is regulated (1983: 260-61). Bustamante identifies a conceptual discrepancy “between the economic interests of the employers who benefit from” an undocumented labour economy, and “the political interests of those who seek to preserve the legitimacy of the U.S. economic system by blaming immigrants—defined as a factor external to the system—as the cause of their own crises” (ibid: 275). These 214

contradictions are not simply manifested in the cyclical embrace and ejection of Mexicans in line with periods of economic growth or recession, and concomitant undulations of antiimmigrant rhetoric. According to Kearney, the illogicality of immigration policy is literally written upon the “alien”—a worker without legal rights or accredited subjectivity—whose presence in the U.S. reflects the fact that his or her labour is both desirable and desired (1991: 61-62). Luz and Diego, too, are inscribed with contradictory worker-alien significations, despite their “legal” status.7 5.2. The epistemological conjunction of border and closet Diego and Luz inhabit a borderlands that demands decoding. As Johnson and Michaelsen describe this zone, “The border is policed, access denied and permitted, always on the ground of reading, interpretation” (1997: 22). If this zone potentially “provokes a crisis of interpretation by marking scenes of reading and the decisions they demand” (ibid), the crisis is also one of knowledge and desire. The agents of la migra are entrusted by the state with knowing and distinguishing between alien and citizen. However, their desire is frustrated when the purported signs of the alien appear on people like Diego and Luz. Such “citizens,” too, desire to know themselves, but border signifying processes frustrate that wish by literally resignifying their body surfaces and identity choices into contested “scenes of reading.” Carry Me Like Water does not restrict this problematic to the border. It is also evident in San Francisco, well away from the border-straddling metropolis of El Paso/Juárez. In San Francisco hidden familial and personal connections and denied identities—secret knowledges—confirm the wide-ranging topographical impact of the border’s signifying contradictions and epistemological instability. The sister who “abandoned” Diego, Helen, is married to Eddie (Jonathan), himself separated for twenty-three years from his brother, Jake (Jacob), as a result of their father’s sexual abuse. While Helen (Maria Elena Ramirez) 215

has denied her poor Chicana origins, Eddie has inherited millions from his despised upper-class parents but passed himself as working-class. Jake’s partner Joaquin, who originally crossed the Rio Grande with his mother as mojados (as were Diego, Maria Elena and their mother), is dying of AIDS. Helen’s friend Lizzie is a nurse who tends AIDS patients, including Joaquin. Before dying, another patient, Salvador (Saviour), provides her with a “gift” of second sight by which she realizes he is her twin, and that she is adopted and a Chicana (Maria de Lourdes Aguila). These facts are confirmed by her Anglo mother, Rose, who has her own struggles with an oppressive husband and illhealth. In differing ways, these figures inhabit a plot of extraordinary entanglements, a narrative mirror to the national nightmare. Like the river (Rio Grande/Río bravo del norte), the border metropolis (El Paso/Juárez), and the continent (America/América), many of these characters have two names, and hence two guises, one claimed or imposed, the other jettisoned, denied or unknown, but threatening to erupt. Not merely linguistic conjunctions, the doubling of names iterates how these characters, and the places that claim them, are known in the U.S.A. Impelled to pass as other than they are and to decode the “truths” announced by dreams, visions, and body and city surfaces, these San Franciscan Chicanos and Anglos yearn to come out or to cross over into some other, truer identity in the U.S.A. Unlike the Chicano residents of El Paso to whom the plot allots the tasks of coming out of silence and confronting subordination, Helen and Eddie, Jake, Lizzie, and Rose, must come out by acknowledging their extraordinary hidden pasts: incest, disease, familial separations and conflicts, unknown or rejected paternities, gender and sexual subordinations, millionaire inheritances, genetic legacies, class-boundary crossings, and, in some cases, illegal alien status and Mexican origins. This multifaceted project will also entail an exodus—yet another coming-out scene of interpretative dispute—from San Francisco to El Paso, the U.S. threshold of passing and crossing. With its proliferation of secrets to be dis216

closed, the novel thus processes many of its players through two parallel structures of knowledge regulation: the border, and the closet. In making this claim I want to build from the highly suggestive points made in Gutiérrez-Jones’s essay, ‘Desiring B/orders’ (1995), in which he notes the operational and conceptual overlap between border and closet tropes in the U.S. Chicano context. Gutiérrez-Jones argues that the identity threshold function of the closet (most notably examined by Sedgwick in her Epistemology of the Closet, from 1990]) and the border’s threshold function share similar logics (1995: 110). Both are sites of “disciplinary techniques manipulating desire but also of particular epistemological constructions of what can and cannot be ‘legitimately’ known” (ibid: 111). These observations accord with Sedgwick’s claim that both “‘The closet’ and ‘coming out’ [are] now verging on all-purpose phrases for the potent crossing and recrossing of almost any politically charged lines of representation” (1990: 71). The closet is a discursive locus conceived to conceal and protect, or expose and regulate, identifiable bodies, most overtly but not exclusively homosexualized bodies; the border, too, is a discursive locus when conceived of as a site of admittance and exclusion, a means to permit the surveillance and identification of citizen and alien. As described by Jagose, the closet’s “conventional” function as a “a strategy of defense (…) against the open circulation of its secret interior” (1994: 91), parallels the geopolitical border’s function when managed as a limit of defense, a means to categorize insiders and outsiders, and (if state institutions desire) to prevent outsiders from circulating as insiders. In Carry Me Like Water the preponderance of interconnected identity passings demonstrates that away from El Paso borderdoor logics are bolstered by closet occupancies. Diego’s sister Helen/Maria Elena confirms this prognosis. Happily married, pregnant, and securely middle-classed, she first appears as a serene figure. Her words to Lizzie, however, belie that peacefulness: “I keep secrets” (1995a: 25). Those secrets—her flight 217

from a working-class Chicana past—begin to manifest themselves as a disquiet of the body and of speech. Palo Alto’s middle-class parameters also start to reinforce Helen’s unease. Once happy to have escaped poverty, the anti-rich messages scrawled across walls remind her that passing into a national idyll has not granted her immunity from socioeconomic conflict. Class, then, provides a key to Helen’s adopted life in Palo Alto, a “peaceful, well-to-do town” in which she felt “as if she had become a part of America” (ibid: 19-20). Helen epitomizes Rosaura Sánchez’s claim that class borders may be as or more significant than state or ethnic boundaries in determining how Chicanos experience U.S. place (1990: 295). The state’s middleclass sectors “see boundaries as a forcefield, repelling or setting off what lies beyond, the threat of brown, black, and Asian faces” (ibid: 297). Replaying a familiar Emersonian ideal, such citizens overlook socioeconomic discriminations and regard the state as a limitless place “of equal opportunity for all.” But even sectors excluded from the dream myths of citizenship may reaffirm the myth that boundaries must be transcended in order to gain access to the land of limitless opportunity (ibid). Helen’s embrace of a privileged ideal of citizenship is comprehensible in this discursive context: “I didn’t want to be poor. I didn’t want to be Mexican” (1995a: 132). Having made her move to belong safely in the U.S.A., however, Helen’s identity secrets—secrets of the border—threaten to erupt and unmask the identity she claims to have “banished” under a fake Italian name (Helen Rosalie la Greca). The attempt to escape the subalternity she once shared with Diego is caught in a paradox. Despite constructing herself as a legal citizen of the state that impelled her identity shape-changing, Maria Elena is now forced to acknowledge the Mexican within. Helen’s wilful closetedness distinguishes her from Lizzie who discovers that she has been denied knowledge of her origins by adoption into an Anglo family. Lizzie’s first intimations of this appear as a dream of the “virgin whose heart is pierced with a sword” that induces in her a panicked sense of disem218

bodiment (ibid: 5). Replete with rich Catholic imagery, the clues to her lost past, the dream foretells her later out-of-body experiences, for while tending Salvador in the AIDS clinic she realizes that he is “speaking” to her telepathically (ibid: 33). Salvador, her unknown twin brother, is dying and passing on gifts, inherited from their seer mother, of a second sight and extrasomatic flight. Through these non-verbal communicative modes Lizzie discovers the closeted Chicana within. The narrative contains many instances of dreams that require decoding and action, but Lizzie’s gifts are atypical. They enable her to learn that disjunctive border logics are responsible for her separation from her twin because he “looked” Mexican and she didn’t (ibid: 82). They transform her into a vehicle for uncovering repressed truths in others, and a bearer of an empathetic mode of communication that transcends “the physical world, [and] the rules that governed it” (ibid: 40). These gifts alter Lizzie’s worldly place, to the point that her extrasomatic journeys threaten to exile her into the realms of pure spirit. The rupture of body from spirit convinces Lizzie that she has become at once “open and porous,” without “limits” (ibid: 170), and “a wordless stone, a monument to a dead, nameless stranger” (ibid: 40). Such ambiguities demand a redefinition of the self: “It’s as if I have to learn what it means to be alive” (ibid: 246). Lizzie’s coming out has embroiled her in a transcultural predicament of competing identity claims, none of which are secure, and some of which do not accord with a western rational episteme: “she felt as if she could call herself anything since now she was a part of everything. She could call herself a man if she wanted to—or a frog—or the earth—or the grapes that grew from it every year—or the new wine” (ibid: 170-71). Lizzie’s thoughts on her shape-changing capacities suggest affinities with Anzaldúa’s nueva mestiza project to recuperate from a meso-American metaphysic “an agent of transformation, able to modify and shape primordial energy, and therefore able to change herself and others into turkey, coyote, tree, or human” (1987: 74-75). Certainly, when Lizzie reads the minds of all 219

those gathered at Joaquin’s death and determines that Jake and Eddie are brothers, her abilities are recognized by Tom, the AIDS doctor, as alien to the rigidly rational episteme in which he operates: “His culture gave him no entry, no access into the evening’s happenings” (1995a: 311). Yet Lizzie’s gifts are not treated by her as proof of a return to an authentic indigenous cultural home: “She looked at her skin. Nothing Indian about the way she was raised, the way she looked, the way she thought” (ibid: 171). Indian-inflected Mexican truths are not fully accessible to a Chicana who has been made irrevocably of-theU.S.A.8 Lizzie’s coming out of the body thus iterates the impossibility of the body’s escape from signifying processes—emanating from the geopolitical border, and from class boundaries, racial demarcations, and economies of desire—that produce the body as what Butler calls the “effect of a corporeal signification” (1990: 136). That is, “acts, gestures, enactments” play across the body’s surfaces to engender the illusion of a coherent “internal core” or identity (ibid). In an impossible defiance of these principles, Lizzie desires “to be nothing but being, no longer obsessed with becoming” (1995a: 198). Yet, her extrasomatic flights only temporarily remove her from national materialities, and they cannot solve the identity uncertainties she experiences. Formulating a solution to her identity travails requires the body; for as Butler says, without the body whose “boundaries” are “the limits of the social hegemonic,” identity cannot be fabricated (italics hers, 1990: 131). Lizzie’s desire, revealed on her longest spirit journey, “to go back to Mexico and study the desert, its peoples” (1995a: 433), has to be housed in the “body for which she no longer had any use, a body for which she no longer had any love. She felt a stranger to herself” (ibid: 434). However, finding a use for a body that in split identity terms houses a stranger poses many difficulties. The purported truth of self inaugurated by the literal comings-out from the body of her spirit is rendered precarious by the gesture itself. Many players in Carry Me Like Water face this uncertainty. 220

Helen/Maria Elena admits how “She had lived this invented life for so long that she was no longer absolutely clear about her identity. If she told him [Eddie] the truth, would it be the truth?” (ibid: 96). Eddie voices a similar concern when he asks himself, moments prior to his reunion with Jake, “He had written a script with the information he had, but most of it was fiction, and like all fiction, it was as powerful as any truth and he had mistaken it for truth” (ibid: 309). Coming out into truth is problematized because many powerful fictions may be at work simultaneously. For instance, Helen is figured as an occupant of an ethnicized and classed closet—she passes as middle class and as the less hegemonically targetable Italian-American—that is also a linguistic closet: she dares not speak to Eddie in Spanish. Eddie, Helen, and Lizzie interpret their exiles as multiple closet predicaments that lead them into distinct, but equally epistemologically charged, series of mutual comings-out. Helen announces her Chicana and working-class origins. Eddie comes out as a victim of sexual abuse and a reluctant millionaire. Lizzie comes out as both Chicana and seer. After the initial coming-out scenarios the trope reappears to characterize other aspects of secretive self-hood, from furtive journal-keeping to clandestine Catholic faith. Yet, like the figurations of the lesbian closet in Obejas’s Memory Mambo, the very knowability of the self is at stake in the game of coming out. Many of Alire Sáenz’s characters have passed as what they are not in a state in which, as Luz says to Diego, “the past comes back just when you think it’s disappeared” (ibid: 46), a sentiment echoed by Eddie: “We have pasts, Helen—they don’t go away, you know?” (ibid: 88). To come out marks identity itself as an open-ended, necessarily performative, and historicized scene of interpretative dispute. Lizzie and Maria Elena, for example, reclaim a Chicana identity in a state that has historically disenfranchised its Mexican-origin sectors. Coming out resignifies them as potential prey of the same border discourses that destabilize Luz’s and Diego’s relation to the national signifier “America.” As characters emerge 221

from the (border/closet) door desiring an end to secrecy, their identities remain subject to the logics by which national belonging is patrolled. Thus, the work of claiming viable identities in the U.S.A. continues for the novel’s characters after their initial coming-out proclamations. As Maria Elena ponders this fraught personal project, “She wondered how the return to her brother was possible” (ibid: 97). Clues to how such liberatory returns are countenanced are provided by the novel’s intertextual references. 5.3. Sensational allusions and generic passings In his essay, ‘I Want to Write an American Poem: On Being a Chicano Poet in Post-Columbian America,’ Alire Sáenz argues that he cannot be “measured” against the English or Spanishlanguage poetic canons valued on either side of the border; nor is he direct heir to Meso or North-American indigenous texts, myths, or oral traditions (1994: 523-24). Yet if Alire Sáenz’s relation to literary genealogies is “uncomfortable,” he is sure of the name under which he writes: “Chicano is a realm where I live comfortably (which is not to say painlessly)” (ibid: 523). Nonetheless, in elaborating what Chicano signifies for him, Alire Sáenz in fact measures that political identity against a chain of high-literary references: “But Chicano is not opera. Chicano dies—it is not tragedy: Chicano is not Achilles, is not Hamlet, is not King Lear, does not have far to fall, cannot be measured by The Poetics. Chicano is trickster; Chicano is coyote” (ibid: 524). The coyote is a trickster figure in much Meso- and NorthAmerican Indian lore. The coyote is also a smuggler of “aliens” across the border, a figure claimed by Emily Hicks to be among “the most bicultural” borderlanders on account of “an ability to survive in the interstices of two cultures” (1993: xxiv).9 The coyote is a tactical dissembler, shape-changer, bicultural expert, and canny border crosser. Similar tactics could be said to characterize Alire Sáenz’s writerly agenda. He claims an uncomfort222

able distance from a range of literary genealogies and yet reveals an intimate acquaintance with those genealogies when accounting for his status as a Chicano and a U.S. writer: “I know what I am not” (1994: 523). Such claims require of Alire Sáenz a coyote-like manoeuvring of his Chicano identity through the literary canons against which he might be judged. I want to suggest that a similar coyote tactic can be measured in Carry Me Like Water. Alire Sáenz fashions a utopian plot in which comings-out are intended to secure “real” identities in a “truer” part of the nation. In constructing this plot he invites readers to assess its intertextual clues and to relate them on a metafictional level to the novel’s many stands-off between liberatory dreams and material constraints. These oppositions shadow the novel’s many coming-out gestures. Helen’s quest to return to her people represents one of many liberatory drives in a novel filled with “mistaken truths” that demand the revelation of an extraordinary array of identity secrets. Moreover, for the novel’s San Franciscan residents, identity comings-out precede and inspire the topographical coming out announced by their exodus to El Paso and their establishment in that border site of a new national home of possibility. Thus, although the narrative figures its comings-out as an epistemological conundrum of conjoined border and closet logics, it does so in line with Tyler’s assertion that “Ours is the era of passing as a politically viable response to oppression” (italics hers, 1994: 212). In this era the coming-out gesture “that explicitly affirms one identity and implicitly repudiates another” is made in paradoxical defiance of its own epistemological incoherence (ibid: 214). The paradox suggests that Alire Sáenz’s novel manages the task of identity liberation by downplaying the coming-out gesture’s illusory outcome. To this end, the congruence of the novel’s intertextual clues indicates that the author anticipates that his readers will apply literary measures to Carry Me Like Water. The first significant intertextual reference appears in a conversation after Helen/Maria Elena and Eddie/Jonathan confess their pasts to Lizzie/Maria: 223

‘It’s a goddamn fairy tale,’ Lizzie said looking at Maria Elena. “You married a nice-looking man who treats you nice and who turns out to be rich. It’s a goddamn Victorian novel.’ ‘It’s not like a Victorian novel at all. Those things end with a marriage—our novel begins with one.’ ‘A modern fairy tale, then? Even better.” (1995a: 187)

Later in the novel a different slant on this “modern fairy tale” is provided by Jake’s reaction to the location of the new family house in Sunset Heights: “Sunset Heights? It sounds like a soap opera” (ibid: 376). At the same time, Lizzie’s extrasomatic flights and telepathy recall the devices of magical realism, a genre that has generated long narratives to match the Victorian novel. Such comments and allusions are not gratuitous. They imply that Carry Me Like Water crosses generic boundaries to pass as a soap-opera that has affinities with the Victorian novel, here updated and made partly magical. Significantly, Carry Me Like Water’s intertextual references cannot be contained by Tyler’s claim that passing, closetedness, and coming out are the defining tropes of our era or, to be precise, her U.S. era (1994: 212). As Alire Sáenz’s novel indicates, those tropes were also the hallmarks of much Victorian narrative. With this allusion, the authorial coyote relation to literary genealogies is foregrounded. Maria Elena’s assertion that her novel-like story begins with a marriage reminds readers that she and other characters are fictional constructs. It also iterates that she and the narrative that contains her are not to be measured against the Victorian novel per se, but against a particular type of Victorian novel. Since Maria Elena’s “novel” begins rather than ends with marriage her situation is not to be equated with Victorian realist or domestic fiction whose courtship plots often depended on marriage as a narrative closing device, an upholding of tradition. At least in Eddie and Maria Elena’s case, the fairy tale plot in Carry Me Like Water requires these already married figures to confess a range of identity masquerades and class and ethnic category transgressions. Thus, Alire Sáenz’s 224

narrative of doubled identities, secret histories, and serial revelations, most readily recalls the sensation novel of the 1860s. This popular genre was often disparaged by critics of the time for its focus on women’s attempts to both protest and escape domestic and class drudgery. Beginning with marriage or featuring serial marriages, sensation narratives appealed to tradition even as their plots posed unconventional, proto-feminist alternatives to gender and class mores. Moreover, according to Winifred Hughes the favoured devices of sensation novels—a genre of the closet and of boundary transgression, so to speak—conform “to the generic principle of doubling,” whereby “The favorite expedient, universal in Victorian melodrama, is mistaken identity, caused by crime, accident, illegitimacy, or deliberate impersonation” (1980: 20). Certain characters in Carry Me Like Water appear as if lifted directly from sensation narrative. The identity secrets of Helen/Maria Elena, for example, recall those of Lady Audley in Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, perhaps the paradigmatic sensation novel. Lady Audley’s identity shifts—Helen Maldon, Helen Talboys, Lucy Graham, Lady Audley—reflect her desire to escape both poverty and the replication of what Jill Matus calls “the tyranny of maternal inheritance” (1993: 342). In Braddon’s novel, Lady Audley responds to her predicament with a chain of questions: “But where could I go? (…) What could I do? I must go back to the old, hard, cruel, wretched life—the life of poverty, and humiliation, and vexation, and discontent. I should have to go back and wear myself out in that long struggle, and die—as my mother died, perhaps” (1987: 316). Helen/Maria Elena, too, is figured as a victim of “maternal inheritance,” in her case of both poverty and demeaned Chicana origins: “But her life would not be like her mother’s. She was not poor, and her husband was not like her father, and there was no going back—even if she lived the rest of her days in El Paso, there was no going back to the way she had lived. She had crossed a line, and now there was a wall preventing her return” (1995a: 273). Yet while there is a wall preventing her return, 225

Helen/Maria Elena has no intention of jettisoning her current American status either: “I left who and what I was behind because it wasn’t a life at all. It was shit; it was like being dead, Eddie. And I’m alive now, dammit” (ibid: 88-89). The insanity imputed to Lady Audley, the sign of a blood curse she can’t elude, also has parallels in Alire Sáenz’s novel. The homeless gringa Crazy Mary represents a woman sent mad by patriarchal disciplining and the enforced removal of her children. Helen’s abandonment of her mute brother Diego is frustrated by genetic codes that repeat the maternal curse of muteness in her son and thus undermine her escape into an American idyll. Nonetheless, Carry Me Like Water does not simply replicate the sensation novel’s particular preoccupations with maternal inheritance. It extends those preoccupations so as to account for Mexican mothers’ desires to cross the border and provide American futures for their children. Luz, Joaquin, Salvador and Lizzie, and Diego and Maria Elena, are bequeathed American residency or citizenship in this way. All confront the maternal legacy of permanent American displacement. For these figures, flight from poverty or social denigration as Mexicans reflects a fear of socioeconomic and racial subordination. The corollary of this is provided by Eddie who, while also fearful of inheritance, desires to escape the legacies of wealth and upper-class values. The sensation novel’s concern with “the secrets of the past [that] threaten the tranquility of the present” (Welsh 1985: 22) also characterizes the melodramatic “closet” genre of the soapopera, here understood in its Latin American guise, the telenovela. This is a genre of passing, as attested by its literal meaning as “a novel transmitted by television”; that is, the productive intersection of “a mode of transmission—the television—and a form of discourse—the novel” (Rector and Ramos Trinta 1981: 194). In the telenovela, the revelation of false appearances and hidden truths activates the genre’s recurring idea that individuals can overcome institutional constraints and hegemonic processes in a heteronormative scenario of romantic rightfulness. Telenovelas partake of the melodramatic narrative 226

devices familiar to readers of sensation novels: financial and blood inheritances, transclass mobilities achieved through love affairs or marriage, doubtful paternities, identity secrets, and crimes of the home and family. To reunite long-separated or lost relatives (like Eddie and Jake, Maria Elena and Diego, Lizzie and Salvador) and to uncover hidden pasts, both the sensation novel and the telenovela resort to devices of coincidence, accident and chance, behind which “emerges the hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 1985: 22). That said, many of Alire Sáenz’s characters are allocated a decision-making power that overrides “the hand of Destiny” as the key determinant of their national status. They are obliged by the narrative to take a stand on their U.S. place, and to do so by attaining an active political consciousness of what their national location and identities entail. This obligation is also modulated by magic realist devices, themselves indicators of more than a cursory interest in miraculous coincidences, false appearances, and identity shapechangings. Speaking of the genre, Zamora and Faris note that “ontological disruption serves the purpose of political and cultural disruption: magic is often given as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation” (1995: 3). In Carry Me Like Water Lizzie plays a pivotal metafictional role in this respect. Her magic enables reconciliations, abets comings-out from identity falsehoods, and draws attention to the construction of the narrative illusion in which she appears. Indeed, considered in relation to the epistemological instability signalled by the conjunction of border and closet logics, all of the novel’s intertextual references suggest that, in line with Kate Flint’s claims for sensation narrative, readers are asked “to join in a process which involves the active construction of meaning, rather than its revelation” (1993: 292). They must relate reading the novel to “the ability to read life” (ibid: 293). This interpretative demand is recognized in Alire Sáenz’s text by Rose, who reacts to Lizzie’s melodramatic disclosures and lifestyle shifts by saying: “You 227

quit your job, you go and practically live with two gay men, you start talking about revolutions, you start losing your interest in sex, you start reading people’s minds, and you leave your body every Tuesday and Thursday. What the hell are the people who love you supposed to think?” (1995a: 245). More to the point, the interpretative demands posed by the novel’s generic clues force readers to countenance the symbolic valency of such clues in a Chicano novel set at El Paso/Juárez. In this setting the tropes of passing, closetedness, and coming out are not simply literary devices. The tropes have characterized life in the U.S.Mexican borderlands ever since the fixing of the national border after the Mexican-American War, a geopolitical change that has generated a long tradition of passing between states and artful responses to state regulations of borderland identities. The congruence of sensation narrative, magic realism, and the telenovela in a Chicano novel set at the border thus raises questions of American cultural capital, literary canonicity, and the coordinates of a Chicano cultural typology. Like Rodriguez’s Spidertown, Alire Sáenz’s novel bypasses U.S. literary capital, the most notable reference to the national canon being Luz’s disparaging dismissal of Hemingway as “that stupid American” (ibid: 48). Reiterating this wilful neglect, the novel’s allusions to the telenovela and magic realism are also allusions to cultural forms emanating from the other América. The telenovela is a neocultural descendant of early U.S. soap-opera that now crosses back into the United States via Spanishlanguage television stations. Magical realism, a genre associated with the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, has also crossed international borders to find readers and practitioners in the United States and elsewhere. Like Alire Sáenz’s formulation of “Chicano,” his novel’s debts to magical realism and the telenovela cannot be “completely contained by that homogenous, devouring word American” (1997b: 79), a claim that can be made of the sensation novel as well. Pertinent here, too, is D. A. Miller’s assertion that “To speak of the relation of the Victorian novel to the age in which it was 228

(…) the mass culture, is thus to recognize a central episode in the genealogy of our present” (1988: x). Most commentators agree that the sensation novel was the most popular British literary genre of the 1860s, with a mass transclass readership, lowerclass origins (Hughes 1980: 6), and plots that were “at once outrageous and carefully documented, ‘wild yet domestic,’ extraordinary in intensity and yet confined to the experience of ordinary people operating in familiar settings” (Welsh 1985: 16). Miller’s statement, and these descriptions, also apply to the telenovela as the predominant Latin American mass cultural form alongside music. The same claims cannot be made of magical realism, despite the popularity in Latin America of writers like Gabriel García Marquéz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Isabel Allende, all of whom have been placed by readers under the magical-realist rubric. Nonetheless, while most Latin American practitioners of magical realism were drawn from social elites, Rowe and Schelling iterate that the genre has popular-cultural origins in widespread belief systems and practices (1991: 214). For Zamora and Faris, the genre’s magical elements are the “ordinary matter [of] an everyday occurrence—admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing” (1995: 3).10 With this qualification in mind, all three intertextual references in Alire Sáenz’s novel signal melodramatic popular-cultural forms opposed to the literary genealogies from which Alire Sáenz distances himself. The novel’s internal cultural passings appear to announce and exemplify the author’s dispute with the “American” nightmare. They indicate a counter-discursive eruption from below that not only parallels the comings-out undertaken by the novel’s players, but generates the illusion that their liberatory desires can and will be attained. Yet this illusion also obeys meta-fictional logics. The novel’s libertarian drives are reinforced intertextually, but its imagined U.S. reality—its staging of real-world interpretative crises, such as those centred on the home—restrains such drives. 229

5.4. Attacking the houses of patriarchy and nation Early in the novel, Lizzie directs her anger at the American Dream as a middle-class family idyll founded in the patriarchal home. The rewriting of oppressive familial scripts, the need “to depart from the roles their parents hand them,” underwrites her call for “a revolution in this country” (1995a: 23-4). Lizzie’s stance against familial oppression provides another motive for the coming-out exodus as a topographical solution to rigid bodily scripts. Revolution is rendered as a physical attack on and removal from patriarchal and heteronormative strictures and inaugurated by the revelations of familial dysfunctionality, patriarchal violence, or sexual abuse. This attack thus appears to conform to Flint’s observation that the force of sensation novels lay in the “imaginative threat which they offered to the perceived sanctity of the middle-class home” and its “deceptive façades” (1993: 276). Carry Me Like Water, however, progresses from the protofeminism of the sensation novel by making the sanctity of the patriarchal home in any of its classed or ethnicized guises a common target for many of the text’s main players, female and male alike. The novel does not discriminate between Anglo, Mexican, and Chicano fathers, leaving Eddie as the only paternal figure who merits redemption. Characters respond to the central Victorian question for women, “If I am not my mother, then who am I?” (Matus 1993: 352), and extend that question to fathers as well. Lizzie’s magical gifts enable her to realize one of the telenovela’s recurrent messages: the oppressive patriarch is not, after all, her real father. The discovery that Lizzie was adopted permits her to reject the false blood connection with her father, although her bond with Rose is strengthened by Lizzie’s knowledge of her secret past. Jake’s disruption of the (sensational/soap-opera) script of subservience to patriarchs begins twenty years earlier when his parents discovered he was gay: “It was the way she [his mother] had said ‘monstrous’—like an actress performing a role for an audience that could no longer sit quiet until the end of the play because the performance was in230

sultingly unconvincing. He was free of them and their rules” (1995a: 63). Lizzie’s later role in the magically realized scene of brotherly reunion allows Jake’s hatred for his parents to be tempered in an abrogation of the father that presages her own rejection of the adopted father who separated her from her twin: “So she crushed her father and spoke her brother’s name with respect though he had died hated and alone and exiled” (ibid: 314). The novel’s anti-patriarchal impulse is also notable for problematizing the patriarchal home itself. For Lizzie’s mother Rose, her husband’s house stands as a monument to a bad marriage, and her rejection of marital constraints is enacted when she extracts from her closet the box that contains her wedding dress and shreds it. Jake and Eddie, however, want to burn down the “corrupted house” inherited from their parents. But the conflagration takes place only as a dream. The brothers realize, as does Lizzie, that “Nothing could bring down the houses of the past” for the memories of abuse remain (ibid: 352). Wealth— even when despised by Eddie and described as “dirty” by Maria Elena (ibid: 327)—also remains, ambivalently providing a psychically disabling and materially enabling legacy. Without this “dirty money,” in fact, the house in El Paso—the site for a new inclusive “America”—could not have been purchased. Such material benefits aside, the notion that the houses of the past cannot be destroyed because their repercussions persist in memory also characterizes Joaquin’s dispute with his Mexican father. Before dying Joaquin dreams that his father is ordering him to speak Spanish, to which he responds: “Aren’t the dead bilingual, Papá?” When his father answers in the negative, Joaquin banishes his father from his dream house: “You’re a ghost with no power in my house. Te me vas! No te quiero en mi casa” (ibid: 210). The dream confirms the intractable gulf between Mexican father and mojado, queer son: “he suddenly wondered what part his father would have disapproved of most: the part of him that loved men, the part of him that had abandoned Mexico, or the part of him that had played the same patient role as his mother in the face of the repeated indiscretions of his lover” 231

(ibid: 210). The conjoined scripts of machismo and Mexicanness that Joaquin does not perform to his father’s expectations name him as a queer vendida in terms of that powerful discourse of treachery in Mexican and Chicano cultures centred on la Malinche, long demeaned as the archetypical Mexican traitor as demonstrated by her synonym, la Chingada. Residency in a U.S.A. safely beyond his father’s house has not distanced Joaquin from the power of this rhetoric, and of the patriarch who upholds it, to admonish him for selling out his nation and his “appropriate” macho gender form. In this instance both discourse and disciplinarian father can only be disarmed in dreams. For the novel’s San Franciscans, by contrast, such liberational limits do not impede their physical exodus to El Paso, a city whose liberatory appeal and potential is linked to its desert setting. The first half of the novel is replete with desert allusions that signify the rightfulness of the desert as a space for attaining identity wholeness. Lizzie’s sensual accounts of her desert dreams transport Maria Elena to that location. After coming-out as a Chicana Maria Elena also comes out as a desert identity: “She felt poor again, without possessions or the need for them, and she wanted to stop running away from the people and the desert that had formed her and given her an identity, however changeable and fragile” (ibid: 278-79). Eddie induces in Maria Elena a calming sensation that confirms his suitability for relocation to the border: “He was the desert after a storm, calm and clean and smelling of salted earth” (ibid: 357). The cumulative effect of such images iterates that desired escapes from the master’s house are also desired escapes from wrongful occupations of U.S. place. The desert, then, is accorded a primary symbolic role in the novel as the venue for a liberated version of familial and national home. Desert images suggest the coalescence of the novel’s utopian drive and the Biblical scenario of desert exodus understood in liberation theology terms. As described by Enrique Dussel, a liberatory ethics aims to provide a conglomerate of subalterns—“The poor, the oppressed class, the peripheral 232

nation, the female sex object” (1998: 243)—with a praxis by which hegemonic processes may be challenged and overcome. In this praxis the primary Biblical scenario of exodus is central. Liberation is analogized as the coming-out “from [the oppressive system of] Egypt, to the promised land, through the wilderness” (ibid: 241). Not simply utopian or purely spiritual, this trajectory targets systemic material and discursive oppressions and asks how subaltern subjects might manage “the sojourn in the wilderness—in the passage from the “old” order to the “new,” not yet prevailing, order” (ibid). The utopian ethos is qualified because material conditions demand a politicized awareness of multiple oppressions without which there is no basis for political consciousness and active resistance. If this notion of Biblical exodus represents “a pattern of deliverance” that invites interpretation (Berryman 1987: 50), then so too does the main exodus staged in Alire Sáenz’s novel. Thus, when the party reaches the desert outside El Paso, the landscape’s libratory qualities are confirmed. Driving into a desert storm the travellers verify their sense of rightful place by becoming part of climate and environment. Eddie watches (and interprets) Maria Elena and Lizzie dancing in the rain and “knows he is seeing the perfect image of freedom” (1995a: 370).11 Nonetheless, these scenes do not mean that the desert is unequivocally outside the “American” nightmare. Many U.S. places are mentioned in Carry me Like Water: San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, New York, Minnesota, Dallas, and New Orleans. Most are found wanting, as if the U.S.A. is contracting on all sides until only El Paso is left. That contraction is rendered literal by the exodus undertaken by Lizzie, Jake, Maria Elena, Eddie and their child, Lizzie’s mother Rose, and even the ashes of Salvador and Joaquin: “they are travelling away from the westering sun as if they are being beckoned by something they cannot resist. The gravity pulls them and they are tired of fighting. They drive free into something they’ve never known” (ibid: 368). Yet this blithe accession to open-road logics, and to a faith that worldly constraints can 233

be transcended through mobility, cannot in itself disable U.S. oppressions. While the border setting is conceived by many of the novel’s players as a place of rebirth, that conception is made “Despite all the rows of cardboard houses, (…) despite the pollution, despite the tamed and beaten river” (ibid: 448). Lizzie’s musing that El Paso is “a strange name for paradise” (ibid: 377) is confirmed by Maria Elena’s description to Eddie of the city’s “rough edges,” a place without yuppies and bookshops, cinemas and bicycle lanes, but with “poverty on a scale you’ve never seen” (ibid: 329-30). These are the same “rough edges” against which Luz, Mundo, and Diego have always struggled. For the novel’s key subaltern figure, Diego, the return to family and community is achieved in El Paso. In the house without patriarchs in which he finds himself, Diego redefines his existence away from national “exile.” Yet, for Mundo, who has no home but the streets and the gang to which he belongs, El Paso, the liberatory destination for many characters in the novel, is also the site for his own violent end. The house in El Paso, moreover, does not insulate its residents from material-world exploitations. Maria Elena works to make the house “a clean and happy shelter,” but she does so in cognisance that “Her mother used to clean houses like this” (ibid: 380). Her stance indicates the heavy work of accommodation to their border location yet to be accomplished by Jake and Eddie. Both men are forced to account for their recategorization into outsider status in this part of the U.S.A.: “it was a strange world, and he [Eddie] felt like an alien” (ibid: 374). In this setting, Anglos are disabused of their claims to secure citizenship. Eddie’s and Jake’s topographical relocation is cast as a shift from a secure to an insecure occupation of U.S. place. The brothers must redefine the coordinates of their citizenship of a state in which demands to close the border—the “Operation Keep Them Out” to which Maria Elena refers (ibid: 406)— betray dominant-cultural anxieties about the national threats embodied by “illegal”, that is criminalized, migration form the south. 234

5.5. Class crimes, poetic wholeness, and passing testimony Carry Me Like Water challenges the migrant-criminal discursive nexus by redirecting the tag of criminality to the classes that benefit most from idealizing national sanctity. Again, the novel’s intertextual clues illuminate this tactic. According to Winifred Hughes, in the Victorian sensation novel “spectacular crime [was] unconnected with the usual criminal class” and relocated in the middle- and upper-class home (20). Describing this approach to criminality in Victorian fiction as a whole, Alexander Welsh notes that the revelation of secrets often provided a means of ensuring justice without recourse to legal and juridical apparatuses (1985: 24). This happens in Lady Audley’s Secret when Lady Audley’s crimes of class boundary crossing, bigamy, arson, and attempted murder are revealed, and she is punished through sequestering in a Belgian sanatorium. Links between crime, disclosure, and secrecy are also made in the telenovela, as Rowe and Schelling iterate, but are manifested as a melodramatic tension between state jurisdictions and kinship ties: “When melodrama emphasizes recognition of kinship as social being, by the same token it ignores the idea of society as a ‘social pact’ between rulers and ruled” (1991: 108). Concomitant with viewer rejections of the “social pact” is the fact that soap-opera permits viewers to express “anger at class relationships,” the loci of society’s most pervasive crimes (ibid: 111). These overlapping generic concerns with issues of criminality and the relation of citizens to the state’s legal apparatuses are highly significant in Carry Me Like Water. Criminality is located in the middle or upper-class ideal “American” home, and it is also attributed to capitalist exploiters. At the same time, the police and la migra are hated for their criminal abuses of a state power figured in the novel as a barrier to “kinship as social being.” Sectors criminalized in the dominant U.S. cultural imagination—the poor, the homeless, the Chicano and Mexican sectors, for example—try to counter such disparagement through the tactical game of secrecy and disclosure, as exemplified by Luz’s use of English when working as a maid. That said, the dif235

ferential class predicaments of Eddie and Diego indicate that distinct tactics are required for uncovering rights from criminal wrongs. Eddie, like Jake, is the victim of his father’s sexual abuse and of his parents’ upper-class values. After his parents’ death, Eddie responds to his family’s hidden history of violence by denouncing his wealth and embracing a working-class persona. However, diverging from the self-subalternization underwriting Rosario Ferré’s writerly project, here the class boundary crossing conceit is admitted: “He knew his poverty was chosen— chosen, and therefore disingenuous” (1995a: 93). Closetedness does not remove Eddie from the “peculiar and odious sense of entitlement” of the class into which he was born and that he recognizes in his peers. Eddie’s later coming out, then, is intended to undo a self-diagnosis of “self-loathing” reinforced performatively in childhood in mute displays of respect and gratitude for being born into wealth (ibid). The key to Eddie’s desire to disarm memories of class privilege and sexual abuse appears to lie in the confirmation of a stable selfhood in relation to Maria Elena, a figure whose move from working to middle-class status provides an inverted image of Eddie’s downward mobility. Eddie conceives of his salvation as a quest into textuality, a writing “his way back to meaning” and away from voicelessness to be witnessed and endorsed by his wife (ibid: 229). But the textual coming-out modes available to him—poetry, the journal he keeps for the brother he has not seen since boyhood—are inadequate to the task. As a result of such failures, the crucial scene in which he “writes his way back into meaning” involves recourse to another poet’s words that betray his fear of perpetual homelessness and nomadism. For Maria Elena, Eddie’s words confirm he has attained his writerly aim: “He had written his voice into her skin and listening to him was almost as physical an experience as feeling his hands on her body” (ibid: 357). In a scene of heteronormative security, Eddie’s quest for voice is achieved through and on his wife’s body. His speech also inspires the eruption of her own dream of rightful location at the 236

border: “It was a prayer, a prayer to the river. River … Diego … Home” (ibid). Moved by her husband’s quest for voice, Maria Elena’s invocation of her lost brother signals the inevitability of their (magical) reunion and her return to the border with Eddie. The prospect of this return nonetheless confirms that Eddie confronts class logics other than those restraining Diego in El Paso. Despite Diego’s claim that “When we have to write things down, we’re all equal” (ibid: 29), he has a different struggle to overcome silence. That struggle leads him to reading and hence to problems of canonicity that do not occur to Eddie. Mundo regards the library books in Diego’s room as items of cultural capital that mean “nothing to him, they did not call him” (ibid: 161). Luz, too, is critical of bookish cultural capital for its confirmation of Chicano disenfranchisements. Yet she also expresses a desire that border realities will become the matter of writing: “Some day somebody is going to write a story about them [la migra] (…) and they’re going to let the whole world know what a bunch of assholes they are.” Diego appears to discount that option as viable or realistic: “But nobody will ever write that story, [and] (…) Nobody would ever want to read a book about the border and the migra—it would all be too strange, too foreign, too dull and hot, too poor and desolate to be considered exotic” (ibid: 73).12 Recognizing U.S. literature’s own exceptional and exclusionary borders, Diego searches for a textual form that will overcome voicelessness. The medium he selects for this task is a suicide letter-in-progress. In Diego’s hands the suicide letter appears as a perverse variant or passing of the testimonio. Assisted by Luz, “his editor” and only reader, the letter records Diego’s quotidian despair and, at Luz’s urging, his reaction to the hegemonic processes constraining him (70). For example, Luz advises him not to delete the stories of a mother he regards as having failed to live up to the Guadalupean model, because the act would silence a mojada whose story has not been told. The paradoxical truth of his letter, however, lies in the fact that while Diego writes he will not fulfil the letter’s promise of suicide. Both letter and life will 237

be finalized only “When they move the Statue of Liberty to the River Grande” (ibid: 50). The admission again exemplifies the novel’s discursive entwining of border logics and American Dream rhetoric. Diego’s words are directed against one of the more powerful of U.S. myths, the teleology of immigrant arrival and “American” becoming in what Boyarin calls the land of “Liberty”(1992: 15). For Boyarin, the discourse of “Liberty” differentiates between acceptable migrant sectors—the European resource for the American Dream—and the U.S.A.’s other sectors, including its Chicanos, many of whom have resisted assimilation (ibid). Subaltern or otherwise, Chicanos undermine the coherence of the U.S.A. when lauded as an immigrant’s paradise, cast only in terms of a trans-Atlantic migrant trajectory that culminates in happy U.S. identities. Diego thus recognizes in the Statue of Liberty the sort of power more commonly attributed to repressive state apparatuses like the county jail targeted by Luz as “a giant dick they use to screw the Mexicans” (1995a: 74). His letter disputes the ideal of the U.S.A. as a liberatory space of unrestricted movement and ever expanding frontiers. Pondering on his limited prospects, Diego’s question—“Where the hell was I supposed to go?” (ibid: 29)—cuts to the heart of the U.S.A. as a migrant idyll and a national venue for unrestricted mobility and improvement. Diego’s assessment of his predicament is echoed by Mundo, although Mundo’s gang membership distinguishes his subalternity from that embodied by his friend. Mundo is pressured by the aspirations of his girlfriend La Rosie who, mirroring Cristalena in Spidertown, wants him to “go to college” and to abandon gang life as a precondition of marriage. Endorsed by Diego, such desires are rejected by Mundo as being out of touch with barrio realities: ‘You [Diego] been reading too many stories in the library about houses with picket fences, you know that? In El Segundo we ain’t got no picket fences. We got kids, concrete, policemen, and the migra—that’s what we got.’ 238

‘So move somewhere else.’ ‘There ain’t no place else. What the fuck am I gonna do where I don't belong? What am I gonna do in gringoland?” (ibid: 224)

Nonetheless, Mundo refuses to be cowed by “gringo” values, and he also refuses a place in borderland systems of exploitation: “Fuck that, man, this baby don't work to make the gringo rich” (ibid: 226). Like Luz, Mundo is also appalled at Diego’s treatment by another Chicano, a figure disparaged by Luz and Mundo for selling-out “his own people” (ibid). Although Luz regards Mundo as a lost cause, he reveals the oppositional consciousness that Diego has yet to attain by echoing Luz’s advice to “Throw all the bastards out of your life, and be free, Diego. It’s time” (ibid: 392). When the time does come, Diego fights back by transforming his suicide letter into a letter of resignation: “I AM QUITTING. I don't think I owe you a two-week notice. I don't think I owe you anything. (…) I am reporting you to the I.R.S. and the Social Security Commission, and I am getting a lawyer to prosecute you for breaking the law” (ibid: 397). This is, as Mundo says, “the most perfect letter you ever wrote” (ibid). It dispenses with the abject script to which Diego conforms in his suicide letter, and it indicates that the subaltern can in fact speak. With his letter of resignation Diego resigns from a borderline status of silent acquiescence. The material solutions demanded of Diego’s predicament in this scene thus counterpoint Eddie’s and Maria Elena’s comings-out into liberty. A parallel material qualification of liberatory impulses characterizes the novel’s figurations of Aztlán. 5.6. Paradise split between rival places of “whiteness” In the 1967 ‘El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,’ a key document of the Chicano movimiento, Chicanos were defined as a nation and a mestizo people distinct from the U.S.A. and Mexico, and in contradistinction to geopolitical logics of separation and containment. The Chicano nation was identified with the U.S. 239

southwest and called Aztlán after the mythic Aztec homeland (1989: 1). Originally “posed as a monolithic narrative into which all Chicanos were to write themselves, regardless of their intracultural differences” (Daniel Alarcón 1997: 11), Aztlán has accommodated the critiques of numerous Chicana writers who objected to the androcentric and heteronormative parameters of Chicano movement rhetoric and symbols. Most recently, Aztlán has been queered by and on behalf of queer subjects also excluded from that liberatory destination and its accompanying communal rhetoric.13 These supplementing resemanticizations of Aztlán confirm the observation made by Crispin in Rudolfo Anaya’s novel, Heart of Aztlán, that “The legend renews itself with each generation, and we must know how to unravel the meaning of the sign—” (1976: 84).14 In Carry Me Like Water Aztlán does not appear in name. However it is suggested by a set of images related to its Nahuatl etymology. According to Pina, “Aztlán is a synizesis or contraction of the Nahuatl word Aztatlan: aztatl, heron; tlan, together; close together; (place near/of the [white] herons) or place originally occupied by los mexicanos” (1989: 14). As the mythical Aztec land of “‘whiteness’ or herons” (ibid: 23), Aztlán announces a paradise in which “injustice, evil, sickness, old age, poverty, and misery do not exist” (Leal 1989: 8). With these meanings in mind, the novel’s allusions to Aztlán would seem to offer a double provocation to a Chicano typology. First, it is a gringo, Jake, who dreams the signs of Aztlán. Second, the “place of whiteness” itself undergoes a signifying slippage in the novel from a place of safety for brown Chicanos to a place of white hegemony. Signs of Aztlán first appear when Jake recalls a summer spent in Seattle, before he was involved with Joaquin. While walking along Lake Washington’s shore he sees a flying white heron and recognizes in it a strange augury, an apparent confirmation of Jake’s conviction that he is “a permanent and unnatural foreigner” (1995a: 153). The white heron’s flight here thus raises questions about Aztlán’s cultural valency. If Aztlán is to 240

be construed as a “possible home,” the sign dreamed here by a gringo indicates the flighty elusiveness of an Aztlán that symbolizes a Chicano paradise and a politicized ethic of resistance to Anglo domination. These tensions recur at the end of the novel’s second section whose title, “The Heron Dies in Flight,” reiterates Aztlán’s utopian precariousness. The heron now appears in Jake’s dream “like the smell of death or dread of an impending unknown” before its death throes end in the waters of a lake, an unsettling augury of how Jake’s exile is to be exacerbated by Joaquin’s death (ibid: 237-38). The images of the flying or plummeting heron as both affirming and troubling signs of paradise, begin to suggest the paradoxical figuration of “the place of whiteness” in a novel set in a state made imaginable by the discursive power of whiteness. Curiously, this paradox has been overlooked in the critical literature dealing with Aztlán as a coming-out destination for Chicanos. Alfred Arteaga, for instance, asserts that the rhetoric of Aztlán effortlessly erases Anglo-American power: “Because Aztlán is the original, northern homeland of the Aztecs, by virtue of ancestral presence and racial composition, the Chicano can envision ‘home’ in the territories now occupied by the U.S. nation state” (1997: 13). In this home, Aztlán signals the purification of “gringo,” “foreign European,” and “foreigner ‘gabacho’” contaminants from both the Chicano category and the U.S. southwest, thus enabling Aztlán to pass topographically as a homeland for brown Chicanos only (ibid). Alire Sáenz’s novel distances itself from this romanticization in two ways. It rejects faith in an Aztlán based on a rhetorical cleansing of European contaminants from an ideal mestizaje. And it acknowledges Pérez-Torres’s argument that in most deployments, Aztlán ignores the continuing large-scale immigration from Mexico as the most important factor in a Chicano “diasporic history” of transculturation (1995: 61). Both imperial and migratory processes are responsible for the ongoing interactions between Anglo and Mexican, Chicano and Anglo, Chicano and Mexican, and white and brown. Those interactions upset the 241

categorical urge to avow cultural purity. By allocating the signs of Aztlán to a white character, then, Alire Sáenz reminds readers that white and brown are interdependent racializations; brownness is always modulated by a hegemonic whiteness. The narrative constructs a contrast between Chicanos—the people imagined by Diego as having voices “the same color as their skins: they speak in brown” (1995a: 72)—and Jake, a bearer of whiteness who becomes the focus of the text’s allusions to Aztlán. Alire Sáenz’s novel, then, is atypical in Chicano fiction for identifying, and hence compelling readers to account for, the conceptual and aspirational tension between one place of whiteness mythically encoded as a paradise for Chicanos, and another place of white hegemony mythically encoded as a paradise for immigrants. This signifying tension frames the relationship between Jake and Joaquin. For instance, in Joaquin’s dying recollection of the original border crossing made with his mother in 1972, a snowfall has transformed their destination into a place of whiteness that is not synonymous with Aztlán. In this harsh landscape the desert itself appears to punish its Mexicans-become-mojados. Joaquin’s mother reminds her son that their border crossing into the land of whiteness will have worldly costs: “‘We will be richer here,’ she said, ‘but we will not be happier. And even if I have to live here—I will never die here.’ And then he knew. It was the end of the world” (ibid: 267). In fact, the U.S.A. will be the end of Joaquin’s world. Like Salvador, Joaquin will return home as ashes only. While this return suggests that the novel is alluding to the symbolic resonance of the Aztec exodus south from Aztlán to Tenochtitlán in Mexican national imaginaries, it also iterates the bodily limits to Aztlán as a coming-out destination. Having crossed the border Joaquin is denaturalized in two states. After his Mexican mother’s death he describes himself as a national orphan, a condition not solved by U.S. residency, for the U.S.A. is simply “a country, and in so far as it had deserts and trees and grasses, it was good, but he had never thought of himself as a citizen of any nation” (ibid: 145). This disregard of 242

national jurisdiction provides a point of unspeakable conflict in Joaquin’s dealings with Jake, who cannot comprehend his lover’s primary identification with a landscape that disobeys geopolitical imperatives. Despite Jake’s alienation, he is protected by the same discourses of citizenship that always threaten Joaquin with expulsion. But the key difference between the two men lies in the values accorded to their skin: “Joaquin had told him that his skin was everything. ‘It’s white, Jake, and it will always be white, and mine is not, and that is what we are,’ but he had spoken those words in anger because someone had called him a spic” (ibid: 297). The “but” here is telling. It confirms Jake as the “bearer” of a “non-specific, ordinary and mere” whiteness and, therefore, as the beneficiary of “a richly rewarded social category” (Dyer 1997: 70).15 Elsewhere in the novel the discursive power of whiteness is manifested more overtly and violently. An exemplary incident occurs after the murder of Crazy Mary in El Paso, when Mundo and Diego go to see the body at the morgue. There Diego gives the gringa Mary the Chicano honorific of his surname Ramirez: “I didn’t have anything else to give her” (1995a: 320). The detective attending their identification of the body is sceptical because “She doesn’t look Hispanic,” a confirmation that borderlands’ subjects are appraised according to somatic clues. In this scene Mundo comes to Diego’s aid: “She ain’t Hispanic, man, she’s a Chicana, you know? A Chicana—what the fuck’s a Hispanic?” (ibid: 299). As it unfolds, the incident puts Aztlán’s libertarian potential into material perspective. Dealing with disciplinarian border logics as they impinge on Diego and Mundo in the present is more urgent than their relation to any utopic discourse. Diego has no option but to mediate between two borderland enemies: the detective who sees in Mundo a racial “type” that requires a U.S. variant of ethnic cleansing, “a cleanup campaign” (ibid: 302); and Mundo who is provoked by the officer’s threats into making his own. The underlying threat of violence does not erupt; but the scene emphasizes the ways by which the power of whiteness determines how (white) boundary riders for 243

the state attempt to immobilize the state’s non-white denizens. White hegemony has different ramifications for Lizzie. She has learned about America’s racialized logics in the Chicago suburb where she grew up, the sardonically named “Libertyville”: “No one could recover from that, Helen, no one— everyone there is as screwed up as they are white” (ibid: 22). But because of Lizzie’s extrasomatic abilities she is also a figure who mediates between the two places of whiteness delineated in the novel. That mediating role is even encoded in her rediscovered name, “Aguila,” which evokes the Aztec myth of origin in which the sight of the eagle devouring the serpent on a cactus signified the arrival in the promised land. But one incident stands out in the novel’s evocations of rival white places. At Joaquin’s death Lizzie’s hair turns white. For those present, this “whiteness” is interpreted as a sign of Joaquin’s liberation from U.S. exile; but it also prefigures the magical reunion of Jake and Eddie, as well as Lizzie’s and Jake’s abrogation of their respective fathers’ names. Here, the significations of Lizzie’s newly whitened hair seem to place the San Franciscans under the redemptive aegis of Aztlán. This promise of redemption does not translate to many of the novel’s other Chicanos. Indeed, Chicano’s potential synonymity with a celebrated brownness means that the brown-white opposition comes unstuck when Chicanos are pale. This point is acknowledged in the novel not only with the Anglo passings enabled by Lizzie’s and Maria Elena’s fair skin, but with the experience of El Güero, a member of Mundo’s T-Birds gang who only speaks Spanish in order to make up for the fact that he “looks like a gringo” (ibid: 364). Moreover, while Luz imagines God with brown features (ibid: 99), Mundo’s first delirious sight of Diego demonstrates the power of whiteness in determining the value of Chicano: “the man standing before him looked like a Chicano. God, a Chicano?” (ibid: 156). In the United States, Mundo’s Catholic God can only be white. These incidents, together with the white heron references and Lizzie’s experiences, demonstrate that whiteness is always a culturally variable and 244

contested sign in Alire Sáenz’s novel. The signs of Aztlán recur in the novel’s fourth and final section, “Carry Me Like Water,” when Jake and Eddie drive into Mexico in order to scatter Joaquin’s ashes. Their destination is Casas Grandes to the southwest of Ciudad Juárez, the site of a desert city mysteriously abandoned long before the arrival of Europeans. For Jake, Casas Grandes confirms the radical disjunction between his American self and a dead lover now confirmed as belonging to the desert ruins and their lost history: “His [Joaquin’s] skin had been almost the same color as the adobe walls of this ruined city. He looked at his palm and felt he was looking at Joaquin, Joaquin who had been like this place: peaceful and dramatic and full of the past—and empty of it” (ibid: 420). In this setting, Jake’s vision of the flying white heron confirms that Joaquin has returned to his rightful place of whiteness. But the scene has other ramifications for a Jake who “wanted to be the dead heron,” and thus not the “Jake who was over forty and was lost in the desert that was his life” (ibid: 421). Jake occupies a different place of whiteness that requires other solutions. 5.7. Coming out with a “disrespect for borders” The last scene in Alire Sáenz’s novel is granted to Jake in a coming-to-terms with his new U.S. location. Walking to the border, he stops to talk with a homeless man whose cardboard sign reads, “SICK WITH AIDS. AIN’T NO QUEER” (ibid: 500). Jake does not take offence. Awareness of the sexual discriminations that have pertained to him is now modulated by his crossing of the geopolitical border and his likening of the border-river to a “chained animal” (ibid: 501). Jake’s observations return the reader to the novel’s opening images of the moribund, captive Rio Grande as seen through Diego’s and Luz’s eyes, but with a crucial difference: Jake’s sociopolitical epiphany iterates the distance between his U.S. privilege and the poverty of the Mexican children “selling their goods to the cars making their 245

way back to El Paso” (ibid). Now he comprehends that the border is designed “to keep these children out,” with implications for people like himself on the U.S. side (ibid: 502). Witnessing border logics at work, then, a shift in Jake’s consciousness occurs. He returns to the house in Sunset Heights with “the queerhating junkie,” the latest addition to the new border family in formation. At El Paso/Juárez, Jake disables a disturbed past by embracing a future in which he will conduct “act[s] of kindness” (ibid: 503). The novel’s final coming-out of exile, Jake’s epiphany also finalizes the narrative’s dispute with the “American” nightmare. Jake confirms his role in the soap-opera called Sunset Heights in a plot of sensational passings that harks back to the Victorian novel and the fairy tale. By rounding off its plot with Jake, Carry Me Like Water reiterates its knowing manipulation of its intertextual clues so that comings-out from border disciplining can be countenanced in “real” ways. This manipulation has enabled a gringo’s dreams of Aztlán to reveal paradise’s other guise in white hegemony. The revelation confirms that his new border location requires the rigorous questioning of U.S. discourses of belonging and entitlement by citizens, like Jake, who benefit most from their perpetuation. In turn, the questioning of border logics in Alire Sáenz’s novel targets the divisions between classes, races, generations, languages, sexualities and genders. Thus, Eddie and Maria Elena’s son, and the daughter Maria Elena is carrying, embody the “border’s future” to be constructed in the house of reconciliation at El Paso. These children will be taught their mestizo, Mexican-American histories. They will learn about class and gender antagonisms, and acquire the languages—Spanish, English, and sign—needed to communicate in Sunset Heights. Above all, they will be taught to “have no respect for borders” (ibid: 497). The future symbolized by these children evokes the scene in Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust when Laura recognizes in Nicolasito a child of two worlds, languages, and cultures, in short, a neocultural solution to colonialism (1996b: 76). The similarities are superficial. In Alire Sáenz’s novel disrespect for 246

borders signifies a rejection of the sorts of privilege underpinning Ferré’s interstitial imaginary, that is its dependence on the definitional coherence of opposed geopolities. Disrespect for borders in Carry Me Like Water gestures away from logics of regulated separation and toward a broad conception of the Americas. With this move the novel complies with Castillo’s observations of other Chicano texts that “not only mark, but provoke, a certain kind of internal cultural crisis in narrowly conceived imaginations of nation, just as they mark, but refuse to inhabit, the gender roles, subject positions, and nationalistic spaces limned for them in the violent conflicts of cultural miscegenation” (1994: 169-70). Neither Mexico nor the U.S.A., Chicano nor Anglo, or white nor brown, adequately designate the new community in El Paso, a heterogeneous grouping that also breaks with familial conventions. This is also the message contained in Lizzie’s final astral visit to Juárez. On this trip she feels profoundly foreign to the world she witnesses. “Moved” by the confirmation of Mexican faith she sees in the city’s streets, she is also enraged by it: “I wanted them to make a revolution. They lived so close to wealth and had nothing”(1995a: 404). Lizzie’s call for revolution made while bodiless impels Maria Elena’s request for Lizzie to take her body, and not simply her spirit, to the colonias across the river. For Lizzie, this physical border-crossing is sobering. Watching the construction of a new border wall she understands the socioeconomic imperatives underwriting the workers’ labour. In an epiphanic moment to match Jake’s, she now wants a tangible presence in the material world. Astral border-crossings have closeted her from the national border’s “truth,” impossibly placing her outside discourse and beyond material conditions. Her previous bodiless relation to the border has analogized an exclusionary U.S. entitlement to move without constraints in frontier space. She has been a safely distant observer of a border zone in which bodies and landscape are inscribed by disciplinarian border logics. By pulling Lizzie back from her magical disregard for borders, the novel reiterates the limits to the subver247

sive capacities of border crossing as mere metaphor. Clearly, Alire Sáenz’s nascent imagined community in 1992 does not conform to a neat Chicano typology. The novel’s Anglos and Chicanos must throw themselves bodily, and in conciliatory concert, into a border site reimagined in line with a range of oppositional possibilities. These symbiotic figurations reflect Alire Sáenz’s understanding of Chicano as a U.S. identity that rejects its U.S. containment (1997b: 79). At the same time, his novel confirms that Chicano is rendered into a meaningful identity category only because its political valencies are messily and ambivalently implicated in what both Anglo and “America” signify. With its many comings-out against the sensational conjunction of borders and closets, Carry Me Like Water appears to sanction utopian dreams and the liberation of secure identities. And yet the narrative self-consciously restrains those drives by passing its actors back into the material histories and conditions at work in the transculturated zone of El Paso/Ciudad Juárez. Notes 1. In-text page references are to the first U.S. edition of Carry Me Like Water (1995, New York: Hyperion). Some Spanish names and words in the novel are printed without accents. 2. The epigraph also finalizes the poem ‘No sabe el río que se llama río’ in Alire Sáenz’s collection Dark and Perfect Angels (1995b: 124). 3. Among the host of Chicano writers from or who have set texts in south Texas are the following, many from El Paso: Américo Paredes, Gloria Anzaldúa, Arturo Islas, Rolando Hinojosa, Tomás Rivera, Diego Vázquez, Dagoberto Gilb, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Pat Mora, and, perhaps the most wellknown of El Paso-born writers, John Rechy. 4. As Roger Bartra notes, U.S. border rhetoric has been matched by an official Mexican discourse that regards the northern border as both a scar in a national psyche and a necessary limit protecting Mexico “from the potentially hostile territory of Anglo-American culture” (1991: 13). Categorical imperatives are further disturbed when the border is a river and not simply a fence or wall. Changing river courses have led to border disputes ever since the Mexican-American War, and the current divide between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez was adjusted in the mid-1960s after the last major border shift generated by the river’s errancy. Inevitably, this mutability impacts on bor248

derland residents, a conclusion that Anzaldúa draws from her Texan experiences of an unstable border that has passed sections of the U.S. into Mexican territory, and vice versa (1993: 21). 5. Diego’s predicament recalls the mute exile of Ovid as presented in the Australian novel, An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf (1978). Malouf’s Ovid is banished to a place where no-one speaks his language and in which “the landscape itself (…) is a vast page whose tongue I am unable to decipher, whose message to me I am unable to interpret” (1978: 17). This Ovid finds a mute boy who has been raised by wolves. He attempts to guide the “Child” into speech and, “after so many years of exile, into his inheritance, into the society of his own kind” (ibid: 81). The opposite occurs. The mentorpupil relationship is reversed as Ovid is drawn into the Child’s voiceless, dehistoricized society. Intriguingly, Alire Sáenz’s second novel, The House of Forgetting (1996), also features a mentor-pupil relationship. In this novel, however, Gloria Santos, a girl of seven from El Paso’s Chicano barrio, is kidnapped by an Anglo academic, Thomas Blacker. Gloria is the focus of a pedagogical experiment to counteract what Blacker regards as America’s wilful forgetting of civilized western values in the face of the state’s socialpolicy accommodations to its non-Anglo others. Convinced that he will transform Gloria into an ideal American, Blacker renames her Claudia and educates her in line with the western literary and philosophical canon. Gloria, also the object of Blacker’s libidinal fantasies once she turns eighteen, is kept hidden in the house until she stabs her captor and her isolation ends. However, “coming out of exile” (1996: 156) cannot restore Gloria’s Chicana identity; in the interim twenty years all the members of her family have died, her Spanish has atrophied, and she lacks the skills required for negotiating the America outside the house’s walls. Denied community, Gloria is condemned to permanent American exile. Indeed, the title of the novel encodes within it a sense of this dispute with U.S. master narratives, and recalls, moreover, similar counter-narrative moves against the “houses of fiction” undertaken by Ferré and other Antillean writers (see above: 94, note 18). 6. In the prologue to his short-story collection, Flowers for the Broken, Alire Sáenz describes the border-patrol surveillances to which he has been subject as a resident of El Paso: “Sons of bitches (…) pretty soon I’ll have to carry a passport in my own neighborhood” (1992: xiii). 7. For Alfred Arteaga, the corollary of U.S. state responses to its Chicano and Mexico sectors as “alien” is that the Mexican state has also regarded Chicanos as migrants, and therefore as “always returnable” (1997: 12). 8. This treatment of Mesoamerican legacies accords with Alire Sáenz’s critique of Chicano appropriations of an indigeneity cleansed of European cultural and racial contaminants (1997b). For instance, Alire Sáenz describes his “running battle” with Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, for him a central text in the Chicano canon. Endorsing its political agenda, he nonetheless dis249

tances himself from what he regards as its nostalgic “fetishization” of Amerindian cultures: “It is too late for me to forge a return to my greatgrandmother’s culture. (…) I occupy a different position from indigenous peoples and I cannot borrow their identities” (1997b: 85). Claiming that the European/Indigenous dichotomy simplifies Chicano cultural complexity (ibid: 86), he argues that Chicanos must “confront” historical legacies and not stage an “escape” based “on ridiculous (and dangerous) notions of ‘purity’ and ‘pedigree’” (ibid: 85). 9. While Hicks attributes to the coyote these bicultural abilities, she fails to mention how some coyotes exploit undocumented border crossers (pollos) for financial, and often sexual, gain. 10. Magical realism is a contested term, and in Latin America and elsewhere many positions and approaches are evident. Some critics reject its usage, while others dispute the term’s application to homogenize Latin American literary productions, or indeed all “Third World” or postcolonial literatures. For an overview of these debates, see Zamora and Faris (1995). 11. Other Biblical interpretations could be made of this exodus. Jake’s repressed name Jacob suggests the Jacob who experienced a long exile in Harran before returning home, as well as a later exile in Egypt impelled by famine. While Jake’s Biblical namesake predated Moses’s eventual exodus, Jake/Jacob as Israel provides a genealogical connection to the Bible’s primary exodus scenario. 12. Diego’s and Luz’s views that “nobody will ever write [the] story” of la migra overlook the fact that the story has appeared in film at least since the 1940s, if from Anglo-American perspectives. Borderline (Dir. Jerrold Freedman 1980) and The Border (Dir. Tony Richardson 1982), for instance, were concerned with issues of border regulation and “illegal” immigration. Such mainstream films made some attempt to expose the abuses of la migra. John Sayle’s Lone Star (1996) gave equal space to Anglo and Chicano responses to regulative border-closet logics. For overviews of films about the border and Mexican migration, see Maciel and García-Acevedo (1998), and Pettit (1980). 13. See, for example, Moraga’s essay ‘Queer Aztlán’ (1993: 145-74) and Alfaro (1994: 233-41). 14. Indeed, whether named directly or alluded to, literary references to Aztlán in the 1990s would seem to contradict Claire Fox’s thesis that the “Borderlands has replaced Aztlán as the metaphor of choice in order to designate a communal space” (1999: 119). For discussions of Aztlán, see the collection edited by Anaya and Lomeli (1989). Critiques of Aztlán as a redemptive site include Daniel Alarcón (1997: 3-35) and Pérez-Torres (1995: 56-96). 15. Another exploration of this conflict occurs in Gil Cuadros’s short story, ‘My Aztlan: White Place,’ that describes the tensions between an irrecoverable Chicano home (Aztlán is buried under a freeway) and the narrator’s 250

other home in a gay community that pressures him to become white (1994: 53-58). The story’s HIV-positive narrator can only elude the impossible demands of rival homes in death: “I will come home. I can feel my body becoming tar, limbs divide, north and south. My house smells of earth and it rumbles from the traffic above. White clay sifts through the ceiling. My bones shine in the dark” (ibid: 58).

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6 Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and “American” cannibal reveries

In May 1928, the Brazilian Oswald de Andrade published his ‘Manifesto Antropófago,’ or Cannibal Manifesto, a bricolagelike compendium of puns, irreverent epigrams, and parodic mistreatments of European colonial discourses and Brazilian elite historical narratives. Elaborating on the text’s opening gambit— “Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically” (Bary 1991: 38)—the Manifesto offered a confrontational response to the perceived problem of Brazilian cultural dependency. By reclaiming the cannibal invented by Columbus and refined in Europe by Enlightenment figures such as Montaigne, the local cultural producer could engage in an indiscriminate “Absorption of the sacred enemy,” whether the colonizing or metropolitan representative, in order “To transform him [sic] into a totem” (ibid: 43). At stake was the autochthonous viability and valency of Brazilian culture, as encoded in perhaps the Manifesto’s most famous line, posed in English in the original, “Tupi or not tupi, that is the question” (ibid: 38), the Tupi in question being the generic name for Brazil’s indigenous population. Antropofagia or cultural cannibalism is now widely touted as an influential Latin American counter-metropolitan discourse. For Randall Johnson, the mode “constitut[es] a reflection on the possibility of creating a genuine national culture, an attack on acritical imitation of foreign models, and a critical metaphor of cultural relations between First and Third World nations” (1987: 42). Neil Larsen suggests that along with transculturation, Antropofagia is a key Latin American postcolonial paradigm (1995: 121). The paradigm succeeds, Larsen argues, because “the ‘anthropophagous’ cultural agent makes his [sic] own bodily subjectivity the ‘end-in-itself,’ the purpose of cultural activ-

ity rather than just another means toward its abstract, postponed moment of production” (1990: 83). Coincidentally, Larsen’s gloss on Antropofagia evokes the work of performance artists in the U.S.A. for whom their own “bodily subjectivity” may also function as the “end-in-itself,” the site for a transcultural text’s genesis, appearance, and reception. The writer-performers examined in this chapter—the Cuban-American Coco Fusco, and the Mexican-cum-Chicano Guillermo Gómez-Peña—often utilize cannibal tropes in performances about Latino cultural resistances in an embattled U.S. context. Even when not foregrounding Antropofagia per se, the artists desire to parodically consume the (U.S.) colonizer’s/oppressor’s culture for subaltern ends. Fusco and Gómez-Peña are not content to disavow the cultural logics responsible for stereotyping Latinos or representing them at the periphery of the national imaginary. They aim to combat, engulf, and revise those logics, with all the promises and dangers that accompany counter-narrative projects conducted inside U.S. borders. The tension between promise and danger arises because Antropofagia provides a model for neocultural resistance that is based, nonetheless, on a politically limiting paradox. A discourse predicated on a faith that cultural exploitation and appropriation, if not neocolonial dependency, could be challenged by political artistry, Antropofagia also used subaltern cultures, particularly indigenous cultures, for avant-garde ends. Fusco’s and Gómez-Peña’s performances thus confront the same transcultural issues raised in the texts so far dealt with in this book, from the constraints on counter-narrative capacity, to the ambivalent speculations made by intellectuals and/or politically committed artists about subaltern agency and subjectivity. This chapter asks two questions of Fusco’s and GómezPeña’s agendas. First, what happens to Latino subalternity when the U.S.A. is cannibalized from subaltern perspectives? Second, what happens to the U.S.A. when the artists’ cannibalizations resonate beyond that nation? In responding to these questions, I regard Fusco’s and Gómez-Peña’s cultural productions as alter254

native national visions that emerge over time and in multiple media. This cumulative aspect to their work explains, and justifies, my discussion of the following pieces: Fusco’s performance with Nao Bustamante, Stuff (from the late 1990s); Fusco’s video Pochonovela (1995)1; Gómez-Peña’s ‘Califas’ (a text that has been revised constantly since 1987); and his ‘The New World Border,’ a collaboration with Roberto Sifuentes dating from 1992-94.2 Notwithstanding commonalities in the artists’ work and their work together in the early 1990s,3 the selected texts enable a comparison between the artists’ cultural-political interventions into the U.S. national imaginary. 6.1. Cannibalization and the circuits of desire In their foreword to the published script of Stuff, Fusco and Bustamante explain their conceptual indebtedness to Antropofagia, but only after discussing their personal investments in the performance: “We started with our own stories” (1997: 63). The Chicana Bustamante’s story details growing up in an activist immigrant family that settled in a part of California noted for its exploitation of Mexican agricultural labour. Fusco’s story, by contrast, bypasses her Cuban-American upbringing to speak of an island “that gained a reputation in the 1950s as an international whorehouse and [that], in response to its present economic crisis, has reverted to sex tourism as a strategy of survival” (ibid). Stuff, then, originates in distinct personal narratives in which are evident trans-American links between women, food, and tourism. The connections are confirmed by the research trips the artists conducted while preparing Stuff, in Fusco’s case to Cuba, and for both women to Chiapas in Mexico, site of the Zapatista rebellion and a zone that, like Cuba, is increasingly dependent on tourism (ibid). These points of personal, national, and discursive interchange underwrite a performance described by the artists as an exposé of “how globalization and its accompanying versions of ‘cultural tourism’ are actually affecting women of color both in the 255

third world and in Europe and North America, where hundreds of thousands of Latin women are currently migrating to satisfy consumer desires for ‘a bit of the Other’” (ibid: 63-64). Moreover, Stuff is to be regarded as a critical intervention into global circuits of desire in which the cannibal trope itself appears in a number of antagonistic guises: “Latin American literature is full of references to cannibalism—as the European colonial’s fear of the indigenous Other as a cannibal, as a trope for Europe and America’s ravaging of Latin America’s resources, and finally, as the symbolic revenge of the colonized who feed off the colonial” (ibid: 63). Here, three cannibal formulations are identifiable: first, a European narrative of the New World as a nightmarish space of threat and desire, the continental venue for what José Piedra calls a libidinally informed literary continuum centred on the cannibal (1992: 233); second, and closely allied to the first narrative, a hegemonic cannibalization, or the colonial and neocolonial appropriation of resources and subaltern bodies; and third, Brazilian Antropofagia. Rejecting the first two cannibalizations, Fusco and Bustamante embrace the latter. Antropofagia provides the artists with a respected postcolonial critical genealogy and a role-model praxis by which they might disrupt the hegemonic consumptions of subaltern cultures and bodies in accord with Fusco’s overall performance ambitions. As Fusco has said elsewhere, an alternative performance tradition emerges in reaction against the ethnographic display of indigenous Others for European consumption inaugurated by Columbus, and the parallel capture of colonized peoples in European texts, representations and discourses (1995a: 40-41). Such appropriations are still evident in the modernist performance tradition inaugurated by the Dadaist Tzara, a “father” figure for many current performance practitioners in Europe, the U.S.A., and elsewhere: In the case of Tzara, his perception of the ‘primitive’ artist as part of his metaphorical family conveniently recasts his own colonial relation to his imaginary ‘primitive’ as one of kinship. In this context, the threatening 256

reminder of difference is that the original body, or the physical and visual presence of the cultural Other, must be fetishized, silenced, subjugated, or otherwise controlled to be ‘appreciated.’ The significance of that violent erasure is diminished—it is the ‘true’ avant-garde artist who becomes a better version of the ‘primitive,’ a hybrid or a cultural transvestite. Mass culture caged it—so to speak—while artists swallowed it. (ibid: 45-46)

In this account of modernist performance, cultural cannibalism—and its close aesthetic relative, cultural transvestism— refers to hegemonic cultural production. The appropriation and exoticization of the non-European’s purported primitiveness, the swallowing of the Other’s culture, signals a wholesale consumption of both culture and Other. The Other here is not simply recolonized by the appropriative aesthetics of modernist projects in the centres of epistemological power. He or she is also resolutely subalternized—muted, locked in dominant-cultural representations as a stereotype or cliché, and/or reduced to the textual or artistic traces that scholars and subaltern-allied artists aim to recuperate, defend, or champion. According to Fusco, Latinos are also victims of hegemonic cannibalism. Her performances, then, contest both the appropriative colonial practices and discourses emanating from Europe, and the U.S. “operations of industrialized mass culture” in which proliferate ahistorical, exoticized, and demeaning images of “Hispanics” (ibid: 68). Stuff’s recourse to Antropofagia accords with Fusco’s location of her praxis in an ostensibly counter-hegemonic or alternative performance history. Fusco and Bustamante seek “an interpretive vocabulary that can distinguish among the expropriate gestures of the subaltern, the coercive strategies that colonizers levy against the colonized, and dominant cultural appropriative acts of commodification of marginalized cultures” (ibid: 77). Nonetheless, the mode’s celebration of modernist vanguardist agency and Creole autochthony authenticized by subaltern signs presents cannibal advocates like Fusco with a problem. For example, the antropofagistas did not account for Creole intellectual-elite complicity in Brazil’s colonial and postcolonial record 257

of deculturation. Rhetorically advocating the total consumption of the European and “his” culture, the antropofagistas blithely consumed indigenous culture: cultural cannibalism rhetorically counteracted (ate) the colonizers, but it also recolonized (ate) Indian Others. Moreover, reading the line “Tupi or not tupi, that is the question” (Bary 1991: 38), one would be justified in asking the Brazilian Tupi in question what they thought of their representation as part of a high literary joke made in English in an ex-Portuguese colony. Paradoxically, Antropofagia’s uncompromising counter-metropolitan stance was predicated on the artistic appropriation of subaltern subjects, transcultural practices, and bodies.4 These factors high-light the political risks facing artistic deployments of cultural cannibalism as an oppositional retort, if not metaphorical solution, to the material historical production of subalternity and neocolonial dependency. That said, these are precisely the risks that Stuff negotiates as it attempts to expose the international circuits of desire in which Latinas are regarded and commodified as sexualized objects. In the performance’s opening Preshow, Bustamante and Fusco read postcards sent to women by unnamed travellers in Mexico, New York, and various European cities. The postcard from Hamburg describes how Germans “are really crazy about the Brazilian girls. (…) and I guess it’s cheaper for the men to have them here than to go to Brazil” (1997: 65). The message from New York records a journalist’s argument with her editor about an article on Cuban prostitution that withheld from claiming “Cuban women turned tricks because of the U.S. blockade,” an argument quickly passed by in a conversation about whether or not prostitutes find their work pleasurable (ibid: 64). The Latina in Copenhagen writes about being followed by a young man who attempts to seduce her with the offer of “chips and salsa” (ibid). The Toronto postcard describes the writer’s ambivalence about seeing a documentary on Zapatista women’s struggles for gender parity, when she doesn’t care to watch “yet another movie about women getting off on guns” (ibid). The person in Chiapas, site of the Zapatista revolt, speaks of the conflict between mes258

tizos and Indians, and tells a story about an Indian woman whose child, the product of rape, was taken from her, thus sending her mad (ibid: 65). These messages iterate that Stuff’s dispute with the appropriative U.S. imagination also confronts that imagination’s global impact on “Latin” women. However, a certain interpretative unease—recalling the gender trouble in Ferré’s writing—arises from the conflation of disparate transAtlantic predicaments described without critical commentary: do these stories demonstrate that the women equally experience political oppression and sexual exploitation?; and, do they homogenize the category of “Latin” woman itself? Scene One features two Latinas, Rosa (Bustamante) and Blanca (Fusco), a compere of proceedings who appears as a video presence and goes by the name EEE (Elizardo Eduardo Encarnación) Jones, and four Travel Tasters selected from the audience. The scene is introduced by EEE Jones in his other guise as the “director of the Institute for Southern Hemisphere Wholeness.” His first question—“Have you thought about what are you going to do on your next vacation?” (ibid: 66)—targets First World tourists who holiday in the Third World, only to find that socioeconomic realities such as “tropical storms, masked bandits, parasites, and poverty,” ruin the experience (ibid). Responding to this tropicalized tourist conundrum, EEE Jones aims to supply unthreatening vacations for people from the North: “I have devised a service that will bring you heat without sweat, ritual without revolution, and delicacies without dysentery. And you don’t have to go anywhere—we deliver it to you. In just a few moments you’ll begin to sample the delights of post-spacial [sic] travel as we approach the third millennium” (ibid). Stage-managed in the home country, “post-spacial” travel provides a sanitized alternative to Third World travel. Blanca and Rosa have significant roles in this parody of tourism-at-home. Blanca’s function is to coordinate the tourist ritual and to ensure that the Travel Tasters understand their roles and the dialogue expected of them. In keeping with Blanca’s direction of the tourist ritual, Rosa’s stage appearances shift from the 259

cigarette-smoking Latina in charge of the food trolley, to the indigenous goddess, Cuxtamali, “keeper of the earth, the mother of all things” (ibid: 67), and to another “authentic” figure, a dancing priestess. Yet, Rosa’s script has her refusing to inhabit such ascribed roles. While Blanca reads dialogue from a large book, Rosa generates a narrative of disobedience from within the parodic script. For instance, while bringing out the food trolley for the feast celebrating the creation myth centred on Cuxtamali, Rosa begins to dispute the stage management of Other cultures, and their purportedly authentic spiritual bases, for tourist edification: “Cuxtamali not only provided for the world, but she was wise enough to provide for herself. Being somewhat insatiable, she kept three lovers. One of them was water (ROSA spits to the side), the second was the wind (ROSA yawns), and the last one was fire (ROSA lights her cigarette and takes a drag)” (ibid: 67-68). She also interrupts the narration with comments like “The goddess does not do dishes!,” or adjusts the script to relay Cuxtamali’s decision to “dump” her three “macho” lovers (ibid: 68). And toward the scene’s end when Rosa is expected to sacrifice food to the goddess, she yells, “Die, Mr. Potato Head, die!,” and attacks the food in a knife-wielding frenzy (ibid: 70). These incidents lead to an on-stage postmortem by Blanca of Rosa’s role in the script’s collapse, a Brechtian exposure of the performance’s artifice intended to preclude the audience from regarding the stage personae as unyielding representations of subaltern subjects. Scene one ends with Stuff’s two longest monologues, conducted by the artists under their proper names. Bustamante’s monologue recounts her “work as a mail-order sex educator and sales associate for a women-owned sex-toy cooperative. I help men and women decide which dildos and vibrators work best for them” (ibid: 71). She advises clients to visit the supermarket in order to determine, through a judicious selection of vegetables, the appropriate size for desired sex aids. The monologue ends with her description of a client covered in fruits and whipped cream, an image of erotic excess and (U.S.) over-consumption 260

that prepares the ground for the second monologue, Fusco’s explanation of Stuff’s debt to cultural cannibalism: An-thro-po-pha-gi-a. That was supposed to be our great, creative, cannibalistic revenge. Absorb our sacred enemies and transform them into totems, they said. Take everything that is thrown our way and have our way with it. That’s how we were supposed to live up to our ancestors. So when you come charging in our direction, running from whatever it is you’re running from, you may not think that we who serve you could be eating as well. But we do. Gently but efficiently, we devour you. (ibid: 71-72)

The shift between “we” and “you” is telling. Fusco and Bustamante clearly align themselves with Latino subalterns in opposition to the purported collectivity of a non-subaltern, presumably Anglo, audience. The performers want to remind this audience that the cannibalizing urge works, as in all transcultural processes, in multiple directions. The droll humour with which this reminder is stated accords with Randall Johnson’s gloss on Antropofagia; using the “weapons” of “corrosive humour, irreverence, parody and sarcasm,” the cannibal paradigm both describes “all social relationships” and allegorizes “the revolt of the colonized against the colonizer” (1987: 50-51). So armed, Fusco justifies the performance’s inclusion of subaltern personae who “speak” of their own desires and resistances. Fusco and Bustamante regard themselves, and the subalterns they represent, as the wilful consumers of the audience “you” implicated in the exploitation of Latina and Latin American women. Confirming this rationale, Scene Two features voice-overs from U.S. Latinas and women from the Latin American “periphery.” A number of testimonies—derived from the stories gathered by the artists in Chiapas and Cuba—recount Third World subalterns’ experiences of tourist economies in which they themselves signify the rewards for First World travellers along with sun, food, tourist kitsch, and music. The voice-overs shift between English and Spanish and make explicit connec261

tions between gringo exploitation, tourism, desire, and food, in the metropolitan centre and beyond it. Now, the subalterns are shown in the act of cannibalizing their hegemonic (colonial or metropolitan) oppressors. One unidentified Latina, for example, provides an insight into the sort of consumptive excess mocked in Bustamante’s monologue by stating, “The first lesson I learned about gringos when I was little was that their food tastes gross. I thought I was supposed to learn how to cook decent food as a matter of cultural survival. I ended up as the only one in my crowd who doesn’t live on take-out. (…) And they say we use food to trap them” (1997: 72-73). When Nao appears on stage to pick her teeth, the accompanying voice-over introduces a lesbian challenge to the heteronormative assumptions underpinning the objectification of Latina sexuality: “Women taste strong, not like men. (…) it takes more raw talent (…) to eat a woman” (ibid: 74). These rejoinders to the consuming will as it affects Latinas are punctuated by Third World testimonies. The voice-over of a Cuban transvestite (slide-projected in approximate English translation) reveals how his relatives accept his sexual desires because his relationships generate food on the family dining table (ibid: 73). Similar assertions of a pragmatic subaltern imperative to exploit metropolitan representatives impel Fusco’s impersonation—in wig and rebozo—of an indigenous girl from Chiapas: A veces hay otros que me llevan a cenar. Siempre trato de ver si mis amigos y mi mamá pueden venir también. Asi nos sentamos en los restaurantes donde a veces nos echan, y los meseros no pueden decir nada. Then sometimes there are people who will even buy me a meal, and then I always ask for chicken. I always try to see if my friends and my mother can come too. Then we can sit in the restaurants where we usually get thrown out and the waiters can’t say anything. (ibid: 74)

Such testimonies ostensibly demonstrate that the subalterns refuse to inhabit the space allotted to them in dominant-cultural representations as always already muted traces. Despite their 262

handicapped place in socioeconomic and gendered hierarchies, the speakers in this performance cannibalize their hegemonic exploiters. The second scene ends with the stage return of Blanca and Rosa as the two Latinas proceed to teach a male gringo Travel Taster (selected from the audience) the basic linguistic skills— “the most extensive and sophisticated multilingual intercourse you could imagine” (ibid: 75)—and dance steps required for him to pick-up a Third World woman. Based on “foreignlanguage manuals specially designed for sex tourists” (Fusco and Bustamante 2000: 61), this exercise asserts the complicity of the performance’s audience in tourist economies. At the same time, the scene inverts the power dynamic between First World tourist and libidinal object, because the Travel Taster is forced to parrot Spanish, German and French phrases at the whim of the subalterns he desires. The scene ends when the subaltern object (Blanca) of the Travel Taster’s desire is interrogated by a Male Voice who identifies her as Cuban. The interrogation thus reveals how Cuban material realities propel her into the tourist economy as a prostitute: “Todos seguimos al Señor. You know, the man in charge here? (She makes a gesture to show a beard on a chin.) He’s bending every which way to keep things going. And we’re following him” (1997: 80). Despite its Revolution, and its international isolation as a result of the U.S. blockade and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, Cuba has been drawn back into the transnational circuits of hegemonic cannibalism. After this incident Blanca and Rosa present their “grand finale,” a karaoke performance of a song about “Señor John (…) a Malibu swinger” that returns the performance to its originary U.S. grounds. Perhaps in recognition of Fusco’s and Bustamante’s divergent “American” histories, the song details how the gringo cannibalizer upholds the national logics materialized in and at the U.S.A.’s southern terrestrial and maritime borders. Thus, Señor John’s “trip south” to Mexico does not require of him a commitment to “learn some Spanish” since “he’s learned enough./ I learned from my be-lov-ed maid/ When I was a little 263

muchacho/ And then from the gardener, the butler,/ The driver, the waiter and cook” (ibid: 81). This image of gringo entitlement is repeated when Señor John crosses the Florida Strait to a Cuban bar. Confronted by women who “dance and sing, and grind our hips nightly/ To be sure we take home lots of bucks,” Señor John assumes he will be the beneficiary of the tropicalized bodily wares on display (ibid). As a reminder of the tourist mentality mocked throughout the preceding performance, the song ends with the line, “drunk gringos are the island girls’ curse” (ibid: 82). In Stuff, the tension between hegemonic and counterhegemonic cultural cannibalism is paralleled by the tension between the specific national grounds for the performance and the international, but U.S.-centred, circuits of desire and exploitation that the performance challenges. As the final song iterates, the mockery of an excessive U.S. appetite for commodities and subaltern bodies confirms the U.S.A.’s imaginative centrality in the performance. At the same time, Fusco and Bustamante selfconsciously inhabit Latina stereotypes in the hope of spoiling their continued circulations and reminding audience members that they are implicated in the perpetuation of the images on display. This didactic, if sardonic, intention is noted by EEE Jones at the performance’s end: “each and every one of you will go home transformed” (ibid). 6.2. The limits of cannibal revisionism The resistant limits of this desired cannibal-led transformation, however, must be noted. Fusco and Bustamante engage in what Oguibe calls “self-nativization—casting oneself in the mode of exoticist desire with the intent to fracture [the] objectivist gaze” (1996: 4). Fusco is well aware of the parodic riskiness of such exaggerated “self-nativization,” as she admits: “There are those who say that parody isn’t really original, or that it relies on the knowledge that the audience has of the ‘master text’ being parodied. That’s a risk I’m willing to take. If some semiotic confu264

sion arises as to what it is that I am supposed to be, (…) then I can absorb that into the work as part of the experiment” (Oguibe 1996: 4-5). Nevertheless, Fusco and Bustamante’s rationale in Stuff does not quite depend on the experimental incorporation of “semiotic confusion.” Rather it operates in line with a series of apparently coherent oppositions: we and you, performer and audience (symbolic tourist), subaltern object and hegemonic agent, Latino and Anglo, colonized and colonizer, periphery and metropolis, Third and First World. These oppositions imply hegemonic equilibrium and equivalence despite national and class borders. The predicament of the Latina who cooks rather than buys gringo “take-out” is likened to that of the girl from Chiapas who begs tourists for a meal. The New York journalist’s postcard about a “piece on Cuban hookers” suggests an editorial power discrepancy to match that of the Cuban prostitute in the performance’s second scene. Occluded here are the socioeconomic and cultural factors enabling the performers to travel to “Third World” settings and to reproduce testimonies of subaltern exploitation in non-subaltern cultural contexts. Those contexts are pertinent. Unlike some of Fusco’s projects that have eschewed artist spaces for the street and the shopping mall, Stuff has been performed at such institutions as London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Stockholm’s Backstage, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. These venues attract a privileged intellectual and/or middle-class constituency likely to support or be receptive to the artists’ political and aesthetic agendas.5 The venues thus provide an institutional frame for a more problematic implication. Fusco and Bustamante present themselves as intellectual agents with a socioeconomic status akin to that of the subalterns whose testimonies they relay. This move raises two questions. First, does the cultural emphasis of the performance’s message—iterated, too, in Fusco’s claim that “Culture in this country [the U.S.A.] is a critical, if not the most crucial, area of political struggle over identity” (1995a: 26)—sidestep the socioeconomic conditions of 265

female subaltern subordination in the United States and elsewhere? And second, does the parodic posing as and presumption to speak for the subaltern replicate the appropriative logics of the performers’ targets? Speaking of Latin American performance, Fusco has argued that critical responses to performance in terms of “its capacity to politicize the underprivileged is a symptom of the frustration of leftist intellectuals and a way of ghettoizing” such cultural productions (2000: 4). Yet, while Stuff does not purport “to politicize the underprivileged,” its deployment of cultural cannibalism does aim to challenge exploitations of underprivileged Latina bodies in the U.S.A. Missing from the performance’s rationale, however, is any consideration that the Antropofagia mode the performers favour is also predicated on the cannibalization of the subaltern for avant-garde ends. On this point, Roberto Schwarz has suggested that Antropofagia presents “an easy and poetically successful formula” (1996: 108) which disguises how “The painfulness of an imitative civilization is produced not by imitation (…) but by the social structure of the country” (ibid: 15). Without working against the socioeconomic structures that maintain cultural subordination under global capitalism, and without questioning the preclusion of subaltern sectors from the means of production—or, indeed, to the politically impelled cultural production in which they may be impersonated—“the analogy with the digestive process throws absolutely no light on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary cultural life” (ibid: 9). For Schwarz, cultural cannibalism naively reduces the socioeconomic preconditions for subalternity to a cultural problem of representation, agency, and voice. Stuff is caught in this conundrum. Fusco and Bustamante cannibalize an international traffic in “Latin(a)” women, the libidinal resource for First World consumers; but they also cannibalize the Cuban and Mexican Other. They link exploitative U.S. cultural logics to the transnational structures in which a sexually objectified subalternity is produced in places like Chiapas and Cuba. However, the notion of a commodified status 266

shared by the artists and the subalterns whose testimonies they mediate can be maintained only by ignoring class and national disparities between “Latin” women. Fusco and Bustamante do not misuse subaltern testimony in the manner of Don Hermenegildo in Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust, or even Miguel in Rodriguez’s Spidertown, when he surrenders Spider’s recorded life story to the police. Yet, recalling the fraught subaltern affiliations attempted by privileged women in Ferré’s novel, the performers withhold from questioning either their own intellectual role in the cultural reproduction of subalternity, or their particular U.S. distance from the subalterns they seek to reprieve. 6.3. Inhabiting the stereotype Fusco’s short film Pochonovela (1995) does not share Stuff’s explicit debt to Antropofagia. Nonetheless, in this film cultural cannibalism has transmuted into a form of cultural transvestism whereby Fusco and her collaborators impersonate ethnic stereotypes in order to return them to “an established or imposed culture (…) with a different set of meanings” (Fusco 1995a: 34). This ambition operates much like Aparicio and ChávezSilverman’s counter-tropicalizing gaze, a means to oppose the “system of ideological fictions with which the dominant (Anglo and European) cultures trope Latin American and U.S. Latino/a identities and cultures” (1997: 1). As the authors make clear, however, the production of stereotypes is not a dominantcultural preserve only. Stereotypes also circulate as the unreflexive tropicalizations constructed by Latinos themselves (ibid: 11). Similarly, Pochonovela presents two sources of ideological fictions: those imposed on Latinos, and those generated by Latinos. More specifically, the ideological fictions in Pochonovela concern Chicanos, the largest Latino sector. In fact, the video represents the Cuban-American Fusco’s intervention into westcoast Chicano cultural politics.6 Pochonovela is centred on Doña Roña and the working-class, barrio-inhabiting family she heads. Staged as a fictive telenovela, the episode in question 267

deals with the impact on the family when Juan, Doña Roña’s assimilated son, brings home his gringa girlfriend, Darlene SoClean, to meet his mother and his nationalist brother, Juan. This scenario is presented, like Stuff, as parody. But the parody is not simply concerned to spoil ethnic stereotypes; it also spoils the telenovela. As with Alire Sáenz’s intertextual use of the Latin American variant of the soap-opera in Carry Me Like Water, the choice of genre is significant. It reflects how the telenovela crosses national borders to become a U.S. cultural commodity. It also implies a rejection of the traditional U.S. soap which, despite continual innovations and incorporation of minority characters, continues to be “primarily white, middle-class, and oriented toward hearth and home” (Matelski 1988: 23). That said, Pochonovela diverges from Alire Sáenz’s use of the telenovela. The video cannot be regarded simply as a rhetorical refusal to be contained by the U.S.A. The gesture of refusal is complicated because the genre by which the refusal is mounted, the telenovela, is itself parodied, as are the Chicano types it portrays. Although Pochonovela does not share Stuff’s specific debt to Antropofagia, the film raises similar questions about the political limits of its parodic aims. As Margaret Rose argues, “parody makes the ‘victim,’ or object, of its attack a part of its own structure, and its reception is thus to some extent influenced by the reception of the object of its criticism, the text which is made a part of the parodist’s text” (1993: 79). If Pochonovela uses the telenovela in order to interrupt the generation of ideological fictions of Chicanos, this aim is always in danger of replicating and consolidating the fictions. For Rose, “the dual structure of the parody preserves the parodied text within itself and (…) this not only contributes to the ambivalence of the parody towards the latter, but ensures the evocation and preservation of the parodied work [or ideological fiction] beyond its demise” (ibid: 170). Signs of this ambivalence are apparent in the video’s opening scene. Here, Fusco impersonates a Chicana Spanish-language teacher in a public announcement from Taco States University’s 268

“televisual classroom,” broadcast on the Chicanews Network (CNN). The on-air classroom aims to provide viewers with “enough Spanish to answer a bilingual job ad, or just be really down with the homies.” Appearing under the name Tonantzin Ramirez, Fusco presents a glossary of Spanish words for “all you poor, culturally impoverished monolingual viewers” about to watch the episode from “Pochonovela: A Chicano Soap Opera.” The glossary does not simply provide viewers with translations into English. Rather neatly, it also provides a didactic insight into long-standing Chicano disputes with the U.S.A. Beginning with Aztlán (“Chicano heaven”), ending with ¡Qué lindo es el amor! (“Isn’t love beautiful?”), and featuring an assortment of colloquialisms and mild expletives, the glossary includes Maquiladora (“Sweatshop where gringos exploit Mexicans”), Mecha (“Chicano bootcamp”), ¡Viva la Raza! (“Long live the Mexican race”), and La causa (“The cause”). These glosses remind viewers of a history of organized Chicano resistance. Nonetheless, there is a certain irony in these translations, an irony reinforced by Tonantzin Ramirez’s final words: “I know this is really hard, but if I learned these words, so can you. Once upon a time I was just another lost suburban Hispanic afraid to walk into the barrio, but now I feel more confident knowing that I can talk like a chola when I need to. You can too!” The first sentence appears to be directed at Anglo viewers, implied to be in need of transliteral assistance when confronted by transcultural Chicano realities. The second sentence is more slippery. It suggests that the speaker—a Cuban-American in Chicana drag— also targets Chicano cultural purists who might object to her lack of Chicana chola credentials, or street credibility. However, while her speech draws attention to the cultural masquerade by confirming that there is no real chola within, it also implies that an homogenous Chicano constituency is to be found in the barrios, among the homies and cholos who reside there. This vignette prepares the parodic ground for the soap-opera proper, announced by its credits and a theme song that proclaims Pochonovela is “not like any other soap that you know.” The 269

opening camera pan reveals the main room of Doña Roña’s home, decorated with bright green wallpaper patterned with yellow sombreros and flowers, an image of La Virgen de Guadalupe framed by artificial red roses and posters of Mexican movie-stars on the walls, and a leopard-skin couch in the living area in front of the open kitchen. The look is calculated kitsch, a deliberate toying with what José Muñoz calls the “kitsch=ethnic protocol” (1999: 121). That protocol is pushed further in the episode’s first interchange between two Chicanos in drag: Doña Roña (Tomás Carrasco), and Dionne D’Love (Luis Alfaro), the Chicana mystic who converses with her audience from the television screen and by phone. Dionne D’Love contacts Doña Roña after she cuts her finger and bemoans the fact that her sons are absent. A send-up of the cable-television network “Mystic Friends,” and Dionne Warwick’s appearances on it, the scene also presents Dionne D’Love as the medium by which Doña Roña can be warned of the “real” trouble ahead: “Beware, the white rat, el ratón, that will nibble at your tortillas.” Dionne D’Love reappears at the video’s end to pose the question, “¿Qué lindo es el amor, no?” Ostensibly an invitation to viewers to phone the mystic hotline for advice, her comments also mock the anxieties that have plagued Doña Roña since hearing the warning about the white rat: “you fear that your beloved children will be lead astray by forces beyond your control. But I say to you, fear no more!” The anxiety here echoes Cherríe Moraga’s argument that Chicanos “are losing ourselves to the gavacho,” that is, to Anglo-America (italics hers, 1983: iii). This is precisely the sort of “bad news” about deculturation that Doña Roña does not want to hear. In fact, at the beginning of the episode, after learning from Dionne D’Love that “There will be an Other, another earth-shattering event in your household,” Doña Roña turns off the television and says, “Dionne, you’re gone, you maricón.” The presaged “earth-shattering event” is the arrival home of Juan with his girlfriend Darlene So-Clean, el ratón blanco, the Other personified. The introduction of la güera into the Chicano 270

family home provides the telenovela with its opportunity to deflect the dominant-cultural gaze back onto the Anglo. However, this tactic is framed by the drag appearances of Luis Alfaro, first with Doña Roña, then alone at the video’s end. Alfaro is a renowned queer performer who often incorporates gender transvestism in his work. Doña Roña’s directive, “you’re gone, you maricón,” does not merely identify the queerness of the performer in this instance. It also suggests that the video sets up a conjunction of the cultural transvestism mode with another mode described by José Muñoz as Latino camp. Intimately related to the video’s toying with the “kitsch=ethnic protocol” is its toying with the “camp=queer protocol” (1999: 121). For Muñoz, Latino camp signifies at once a form of representation and “a mode of enacting self against the pressures of the dominant culture’s identity-denying protocols,” in particular the kitsch and camp protocols noted above (ibid: 120). Latino camp purportedly redresses the apolitical, aesthetic and de-ethnicized notion of camp, and a desexualized aesthetic notion of kitsch, by ensuring that camp itself signifies a minority reclamation and resemanticization of majoritarian cultural forms (ibid: 121). 7 This variety of camp arises as “a certain mode of crossgenerational, cross-cultural recycling in U.S. Latino culture,” combined with the “convergences, alignments, and reverberations” that take place between it and “the camp produced by sexual minorities” (ibid). In Pochonovela such interchanges are announced in two ways: through the kitsch signs by which ethnic stereotypes are identified for parody; and through the conjunction of gender and ethnic cross-dressings, some by actors off-handedly named as queer in the script. The video’s parodic tactics, then, are dependent on the performers’ aesthetic relation to the identities they assume. The video presents a range of cultural impersonations that cross gender and ethnic lines and confirm the working-class Chicano family as the video’s primary resource, its stereotyped base material. This suggests a tension between the performers who want to subvert ethnic stereotypes, and the working-class Chicano 271

subjects who might not regard themselves, or the cultural practices and forms they favour, as the parodic constructs they signify in the video. In Pochonovela, barrio kitsch—garish housecoats, loud wallpaper, mass-produced religious icons, exaggerated gestures, barrio identities themselves—is mocked, if not ridiculed. Kitsch here indicates what its practitioners would not, in fact, call kitsch, that is, the objects and signs of beauty, tastefulness, and authenticity that characterize a working-class, minority habitus, in Bourdieu’s sense (1990). Pochonovela wilfully cannibalizes this habitus. Removed from their originary setting and placed in a new ironic realm of camp performance, kitsch signs potentially indicate devalued cultural capital, the untasteful, unauthentic, and formulaic matter for parodic (camp) resignification. The performance appears to replicate a high-low dichotomy of antagonistic cultural values that is paralleled by the disjunction between artists and the subalterns whose identities they inhabit. As it sends up clichés of barrioized Chicano subjectivity and the conventional format of the telenovela, Pochonovela requires its presumed audience—arguably a constituency shared with Stuff—to align itself with the performers. This alignment creates an irreducible distance between performance and the habitus from which its stock identities and images are derived. The distancing, to paraphrase Rose, paradoxically confirms the fictive subalterns as normalized (kitsch) models for and victims of the (camp) parody itself (1993: 89). And yet, the video attempts to circumvent this paradoxical distance: it plays its self-tropicalized images of Chicanos for laughs in line with Bakhtin’s claim that “As a distanced image a subject cannot be comical; to be made comical, it must be brought close” (1981: 23). Doña Roña represents the always already long-suffering, hand-wringing Chicana matriarch for whom life presents a series of crises, hence her many appeals to La Virgen de Guadalupe for help and sustenance. Her son, Ernesto Morales Francisco Sandino—the rather unsubtle fusion of four Latin American revolutionaries: Che Guevara, Pancho Villa, Francisco Madero, and Augusto César Sandino—is a car272

toon-like Chicano nationalist, dressed in black beret and Che Guevara t-shirt, who declaims such collaged streams of leftist banalities (to a soundtrack of stirring martial music) as “Mom, don’t you know that it’s better to die on our feet than to die on your knees, by any means necessary, hasta la victoria siempre, ‘coz I had a dream?” Ernesto’s machine-gunned description of Darlene—“a güera: a white-wonder-bread Venice Beach rollerskating trailer-park living sun-roof-car-driving plantationowning my daddy’s a cop colonizing 100% flag-waving güera”—confirms the clichéd coordinates of his own stage character as well as those of his victim. Ernesto’s machista politics are sent up by his mother when she refuses his demand to make five thousand enchiladas for a fund-raising drive; and they are further undermined when she responds to his speechifying with the rebuff: “You’re always talking about, ¡qué viva la raza! How about, ¿qué viva la renta?” Doña Roña’s other son Juan, whom Ernesto describes as a “pinche wannabe” in denial over his Chicano identity, is cast as the assimilated, clean-cut, and conservative Chicano, deculturated of Spanish and interested only in making good in the U.S.A. Doña Roña is horrified by her sons’ activities and aspirations. She is convinced that Ernesto’s life will be ruined by politics, and that Juan will be emotionally and financially damaged by involvement with an untrustworthy gringa. Doña Roña’s comadre, Doña Toña, dressed in an approximation of authentic Mexican costume, is a “magical” character who maintains folk customs in the U.S. setting. Behind the appearance of these figures in this transcultural soap-opera of stereotypical errors is a consciousness that such images are pervasive in the U.S.A. in which the video was conceived. But the performance utilizes these exaggerated characters in order to destroy the symbolic power of Anglo-America as that imaginary entity intrudes into a fictive Chicano home. In fact, Pochonovela could be said to cannibalize Chicano barrio subalternity in order to enable its counter-cannibalization of Anglo-American cultural logics, here embodied by Darlene So-Clean. With her apposite name, blonde hair, and high273

pitched questioning intonation, she provides Pochonovela with a formulaic Anglo counterpoint to its equally formulaic Chicanos. Nonetheless, the latter take advantage of Darlene’s presence to make barbed jokes about Chicano subordination. For instance, Ernesto’s running commentary, and Doña Roña’s overt antipathy, prompt Darlene to tell Juan: “I thought you said your family was into dialogue. I’m just trying to be culturally sensitive and they’re not letting me in, they’re keeping me out. Don’t they know that the only fences that exist are the ones that you put up yourself?” The superficiality of this appeal to dialogue is exposed in little moments of transcultural misunderstanding: Darlene asks for ketchup to provide what the enchiladas lack; she sings ‘La cucaracha,’ only to have an annoyed Doña Roña inform her that “there are no cockroaches in my house”; and when Ernesto asks her if she is studying “International Business” in order to learn “like, how to manage a maquiladora, and lower your labor costs, like, to slave wages,” she answers, “Oh yeah. Have you taken this course before? Will you be my tutor?” Similarly, the delusions by which Juan maintains both an apolitical, de-Chicanoized stance and his relationship with an Anglo girlfriend are exposed. He has never been invited to meet Darlene’s family. His new relationship, he reveals, is modulated by colonial legacies: “only two days, but it feels like five hundred years.” These interactions demonstrate that while all the telenovela’s personae are exaggerated “ethnic” types, Darlene is the main interest of the parodic gaze. She is the video’s sole representative of Anglo-America, a presence through which an exclusionary national imagination is felt, managed, criticized, and potentially returned spoiled. Thus, with Doña Toña’s assistance, Doña Roña orchestrates Darlene’s downfall. She feeds Darlene enchiladas laced with magic herbs that induce a crippling flatulence, itself the pretext for Doña Toña to squirt Darlene with “Frida” perfume, a scent guaranteed to “make her feel as though she were run over by a streetcar,” a biographical allusion to the Frida Kahlo who supplies the perfume with its name. In turn, the 274

perfume transforms Darlene into a gringa simulation of a dancing Latina, the cue for the dialogue to become more acerbic. Ernesto advises Juan to “take her to the park and leave her with the homeboys.” While Darlene dances he says, “Hey Juan, you better get some now. This is about as close as you’ll get to a Chicana.” The episode ends with the family members huddled around the unconscious Darlene, each preoccupied with the dilemma of what to do with her. The last words are accorded to Doña Roña. Rejecting Ernesto’s suggestion to abandon Darlene to the gangs in the barrio, she advises: “First give her some more of that potion. Then take her rings and her credit cards and then you take her home, m’ijo.” As Ernesto has already reminded viewers, Darlene’s physical downfall—an analogue to a desired U.S. downfall—is enabled because it is staged in Aztlán. If this ending is intended to signify that the U.S.A.—the geopolity that Darlene embodies—has been parodied out of existence in payback for its crimes of stereotype generation, two other vignettes support this conclusion. Fusco’s second appearance occurs in a commercial break when she impersonates an attorney who specializes in Latino litigation cases, and whose hyphenated surname implies a marital connection to the Latino community: Did some gringo jerk rear-end you on the freeway? Did you lose a finger or a toe on the job? Are you afraid to report your boss for calling you a greaser? In America, if you are the victim of a crime, you are entitled to compensation. Believe me, I know. I’m Dorothy Whitehead-Colon, attorney-at-law, and I have been in la comunidad for fifteen years, helping Latinos who don’t want to be pendejos.

Fusco here mocks the legal system. The “Colon” of her character’s surname being the Spanish version of Columbus, the vignette makes connections between state apparatuses and imperial legacies. The attorney’s last words—“Mi caso es tu caso”— play with these connections. “My case is your case” reiterates that Chicanos have not been greeted with the phrase’s pre-pun 275

origin, “my house is your house.” The invitation is explicit. As victims of imperial crimes, Chicanos are asked to claim the U.S.A. for their own. This invitation is taken literally in a newsbreak brought by the Sangrona News Service: Gang violence is threatening the Free Trade Zone in Mexilandia. Governor Peter Wilson has declared a state of emergency. Gangs have wrested control of prozac distribution away from legitimate pharmaceutical dealers. These drug-dealing gangsters have been reselling high-grade, Mexican-made maquiladora prozac that has been cut with peyote, which has been producing an epidemic among gringos of euphoric, orgasmic, erotic attraction to their Mexican domestic servants (…)

Evident in this news item is an urge to “irritate” the tropicalized portrayals of Latinos (Román and Sandoval 558-59). This unsettling of stereotypes is stage-managed in a fictive news report from a fictive news service about a geopolitical location that no longer bears the name “America.” The reference to Mexilandia—like the “Gringolandia” that Ernesto at one stage mentions as being “across the river”—suggests that viewers are invited to imagine the unthinkable: Pochonovela’s Chicanos reside in the fantasy geopolity of Aztlán. Yet, this gesture is effective in an imaginative sense only. It occurs within the framework of the telenovela, the cultural commodity in and by which stereotypes are ridiculed and yet plotted in the act of usurping Anglo-American power. On this score, a critic like Larsen who endorses Antropofagia as a “‘guerilla’ strategy for cultural autonomy” on the part of a “cultural agent” (1990: 79), argues that the identity of this agent is the key to the mode’s effectiveness. When regarded as a rhetorical means to privilege an avant-garde voice, Antropofagia fails. When the agent is the commodity itself, for example a text whose “identity” resides in “its own process as a continuous consumptive production” (ibid: 84), the mode succeeds, as exemplified by the Brazilian Mário de Andrade’s novel Macunaíma “which consumes the traditional ethnographic text from 276

within that genre’s formulas” (ibid: 86). But there is always the danger that “Consumptive production, so long as its practice is determined by the boundaries of the commodity form, is at best the formula for a pseudoautonomy, at worst nothing but a rationale for an expansion of the market and ‘good royalties’” (ibid: 91). Even with this proviso, however, the consumptive strategy is constrained. When the agent is the commodity itself—an ethnographic text or, as in Pochonovela, a telenovela— the parody of generic formulas cannot counter the material preconditions for Chicano subalternity in the U.S.A. A discrepancy thus remains between the performance’s targets and the subalternity the performance enacts. The video repeats Stuff’s ambivalent intellectual mediation of subaltern subjects; and paralleling Stuff’s recourse to Antropofagia, Pochonovela’s cultural transvestisms expose the difficulties faced by oppositional cultural production. In Pochonovela, parodic consumption is not directed at the telenovela only. It is also deployed against Anglo-America’s sole agent, Darlene. She is, to cite Bakhtin, drawn into the video’s “zone of maximally familiar and crude contact,” a camp zone in this instance in which “laughter means abuse, and abuse (…) lead[s] to blows” (1981: 23). In what amounts to “a comical operation of dismemberment” (ibid: 23-24), the video’s symbolic Anglo-American is transformed into a sign not of power, but of power made ridiculous. According to Bakhtin, this transformation occurs because “One ridicules in order to forget” memory and tradition, to which should be added the parodist’s own shifting relation to hegemonic processes (ibid: 23). In Pochonovela such amnesia permits the agent of Anglo hegemony to be rhetorically dismembered. More crucially, it allows the performers to inhabit formulaic Chicano identities, to mock those identities in the same way that Darlene is mocked, and then paradoxically to make stereotyped subalterns the agents who overcome cultural exclusions. Forgotten in this barrio scenario are the U.S. cultural logics that enable Chicano subalternity to be regarded as the kitsch resource for parodic attention, and then to reproduce the 277

stereotypes that simultaneously signify, and potentially reinforce, Chicano subordination. 6.4. A patriarchal appetite for subalterns A parodic “cannibal” approach to ethnic stereotypes is also evident in Gómez-Peña’s ‘Califas” (originally conceived in 1987), a work that has appeared as a film, a radio piece, and at least two script versions.8 Typical of Gómez-Peña’s cultural productions, the piece displays a complex formal praxis characterized by a range of “unauthentic” practices: unconstrained code-switching, neologisms, and punning; generic border-crossing; and, gendered, national, and identity impersonations, or cultural transvestism, the cultural cannibal mode at work in Pochonovela.9 Gómez-Peña also claims that ‘Califas’ stages “‘impossible situations’ that subvert historical, political, and cultural facts” (1994: 67). The facts, derived from U.S. imperial history, are both emphasized and troubled by a range of Chicano and Mexican “mythic” types: El Aztec Poet, El Chicano Shaman, El Young Campesino, El Johnny, Quetzalcóatl Jr., El Multimedia Pachuco, The Oaxacan Maid, and The Author. In the poem’s penultimate section, moreover, all of these “Inner Characters” meet as one, suggesting that all are guises of The Author (implied and real) who provides the text with its closing words. In keeping with the parodic double-bind—can the joke preclude literal readings?; does the joke perpetuate stereotypes?— ‘Califas’ presents its audience with problems of interpretation. For instance, in one of the published versions of ‘Califas’ (1993: 41-49), a commentary placed beneath the poem alerts readers to the “cultural misunderstandings” staged in it. In this gloss North America conforms to “a European bas-relief” in which resides a “European flâneur cum North American tourist” whose southward gaze “freezes” Latin America into a timeless set of “historical, historicist ice cubes” (ibid: 42-43). Gómez-Peña’s task is to “recapture our contemporaneity as postindustrial citizens of the same world, the same present, the same society” through per278

formance, “a very good strategy to thaw our imposed identities” (ibid: 43-44). The artist’s fear, however, is that “the ghosts of history” released in performance might “scare the AngloEuropean other” and thus preclude a negotiated “pact of coexistence” between Anglo and Latin/o (ibid: 44). For Gómez-Peña, the North-South divide is not overcome easily. Latin America is ostensibly “a symbolic culture where concepts are explained metaphorically,” whereas “Anglo-American culture is more pragmatic” and resistant to metaphor (ibid: 46-47). Since Latin American parodies or satires are interpreted literally in the North, Anglo audiences must somehow learn to recognize Gómez-Peña’s joke while jettisoning their ahistorical stereotypes of the South.10 This appeal to a conceptual frontier discontinuity appears to reify Latin and Anglo American cultural sensibilities as antithetical, thus running counter to the transcultural challenges to categorical imperatives that Gómez-Peña otherwise espouses. Nonetheless, the explanation provides the artist with a motive— and possibly an alibi, as I explain later—for the work of cultural imposture in this performance poem. Gómez-Peña attempts to forestall literal interpretations by foregrounding the text’s parodic constructedness. A Brechtian making strange—or for Alicia Gaspar de Alba, a rascuachista laying bare of the text’s seams (1995)11—iterates that Gómez-Peña’s versions of historical truths are “impossible” in a narrative sense. As El Johnny explains in a moment of exemplary Spanglish punning—itself a key strategy for disturbing literal readings and cultural purist urges12—the poem is set in a “Californiando” or “being/becoming Californian” contact zone. In this transcultural space, “all realities join/ to become meta-ficción” (1994: 69). ‘Califas’ opens with a demonstration of the text’s parodic counter-narrative framework: the imperial narrative of New World discovery and conquest by Europeans is overturned with an “impossible” account of the Aztec discovery and conquest of Europe, named “Europzin” by the Aztec invaders (ibid: 67). Lest this historical reversal be read literally, El Aztec Poet’s testi279

mony provides a reminder of Mexico’s historical experiences of three imperial forces: “Cortés, Maximilian, Ronald the First,/ did anyone ask you to come?” (ibid: 68). Similar reversals of narrative history occur throughout the poem. The son of the Aztec god Quetzalcóatl appears across the border “to investigate the crimes of the local police” (ibid: 71). However, he is consumed in flames magically ignited, it would seem, by the U.S.A.’s disregard for its indigenous sectors in an Aztlán now “occupied,” and thus disarmed of resistant potential, by Californian suburbia (ibid: 72). El Chicano Shaman wistfully recalls a pre-frontier time “when there was no South or North” (ibid: 68), only to “freeze” on the video screen and reiterate the U.S.-Mexican border reality inaugurated (after war) in 1848 and responsible for the “amputation” of Chicanos from Mexicanos: nos otros & aquellos los amputados del más allá del what you say (...) (ibid)

The American Dream of unconstrained mobility is alluded to in the testimony of El Johnny, the low-rider “cruseando/ low & tight/ from Tijuas to La Logan”; but the references to “the ethno-police” who demand to know his nationality sever the imaginative nexus of mobility and American Dream (ibid: 69). The latter is now located beyond quotidian Chicano experiences, as is confirmed by the disjunction between an Aztlán located in Mexico’s pre-conquest past and the Aztlán of Chicano aspirations inside U.S. borders. The American Dream of literal and socioeconomic mobility, and Chicano and Mexican migrant access to it, is further undermined in the poem’s fifth module. Here, El Johnny declaims to a gringo audience a “what if” scenario in which U.S.-Mexican relations are reversed: 280

what if the U.S. was Mexico? what if 200,000 Anglosaxicans were to cross the border each month to work as gardeners, waiters musicians, movie extras bouncers, babysitters, chauffeurs, syndicated cartoons, featherweight boxers, fruit-pickers & anonymous poets? what if they were called waspanos, waspitos, wasperos or waspbacks? what if we were the top dogs? what if literature was life? what if yo were you & tú fueras I, Mister? (ibid: 71)

El Johnny’s questions imply the need for a continental redefinition that counters the U.S.A.’s signifying power as a national idyll. His “what ifs” rhetorically transform the U.S. state into a beleaguered space of economic dependency under late capitalism. At the same time, Mexico—its real-world economy “sinking” despite NAFTA rhetoric—usurps the U.S.A.’s status as the land of socioeconomic promise. It now signifies the desired destination for illegal aliens—a categorical and neocultural shift from wetbacks to “waspbacks”—from the North. Immediately after this parodic twist, however, Johnny is “busted” by the “Linguistic Patrol,” spends time in gaol and in Vietnam, before ending up in Central America “to teach his carnales/ to kill their other carnales” (ibid: 71). Connections between U.S. interventions in Vietnam and the Central Americas are confirmed by the shared element: the Chicano Johnny. He provides the shocktroop resource for the U.S.A.’s imperial designs; his acquiescence to the state’s demands of him are made possible only because he has forgotten his place as a product of mid-nineteenth century U.S. annexations of Mexico’s north. These examples of inverted and restored U.S. histories demonstrate how ‘Califas’ aims to redress the crisis of memory. The poem asks its players “to fight for the right/ to remember” as opposed to “being remembered” (ibid: 69). However, this call is 281

undermined by the parodic will that drives it, as demonstrated by “a paleolithic wino” who describes the text’s historical truths and border personalities in these terms: a bunch of broken myths a bunch of fading images a bunch of bad performances my words are broken crystal & you are meant to step on them. (ibid: 73)

The lines animate the question: is Gran Vato’s call to reinvent “America” part of the parody, to be stepped on after all? The answer would seem to be no, for the poem asserts the need to reterritorialize the Americas. For example, El Johnny’s discussion of origins disavows geopolitical imperatives: I’m from Sacra but my parents were from Mérida he’s from San Fran his parents were from Mochis she’s from East Los her mother was from Puebla & so on & so forth it’s confusing we know our nation extends from the tip of Patagonia to the peak of your tortured imagination. (ibid: 71)

Here, the Chicano “we” challenges the Anglo-American “you” to recognize and adapt to the transcultural impact on the U.S. imagination of denizens with identificatory connections to and origins in the Latin Americas. At the same time, El Johnny renders U.S. place names into the shortened forms that appear in colloquial Chicano speech, an emphatic sign of belonging to and 282

claiming the U.S.A. as part of a continental home. Similar expansions of “America” appear in the poem’s last two modules. In the Chorus module, Australian surfers in Chile, Salvadorean refugees heading north, “Indian rockers and Anglosandinistas,” and prostitutes in Tijuana who recite the work of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, are figured as “passing through Califas/ entransit to their other selves” (ibid: 74). In this remapped future, the poem’s characters unite to proclaim, “I see a whole generation/ freefalling toward a borderless future” (ibid). These lines suggest that even before the poem is finalized with The Author’s voice, the desired continental redefinition is centred on Gómez-Peña in a replication of his own becomingChicano that shadows much of his work. In ‘Border Brujo,’ for instance, the autobiographical elements are overt, the artist’s birth (1955) and his father’s death (1989) providing autobiographical points of origin for the identity shifts restaged in the performance (1994: 83). Clearly, as the artist notes in Warrior for Gringostroika, a specific personal history of geopolitical border-crossing translates in ‘Califas’ and other texts as at once a metaphor for and a guide to Gómez-Peña’s border-crossing cultural praxis, “the multidimensional perspective, the border perspective”: I crisscross from the past to the present, from the fictional to the biographical. I fuse prose and poetry, sound and text, art and literature, political activism and art experimentation. (…) My works are simultaneously essays and manifestoes, performances and social chronicles, bilingual poems and radio or video pieces. In them I try to exercise all the freedom that my two countries have denied me. (1994: 16)

Border-crossing provides a trope by which to imagine neocultural identities and a reterritorialized U.S.A., both enabled by the conversion of the U.S.-Mexican border into a material problem and metaphoric resource for all Chicanos, and potentially for all residents of the Americas. This border is not synonymous with the one that cuts through Alire Sáenz’s Carry Me Like Water; 283

nor is it like the other frontiers in the fiction of Ferré, Rodriguez, and Obejas. Gómez-Peña’s border is predetermined by his personal border-crossing history. Thus, in the poem’s final module, the prerecorded voice of The Author centres an all-inclusive collective in the newly redrawn “America,” now not the name for a nation but a continent without geopolitical frontiers: standing on the map of my political desires I toast to a borderless future with our Alaskan hair our Canadian head our U.S. torso our Mexican genitalia our Central American cojones our caribbean sperm our South American legs our Patagonian feet jumping borders at ease amén, hey man. (1994: 74)

The “our” of this, the poem’s last statement, announces a will to speak for the continent’s Others and to guide their arrival in the new Americas. Gómez-Peña becomes, as he says elsewhere, a “cross-cultural diplomat” able to “walk the border between Nuyorico and Aztlán, between Cuba York and San Francisco, between east L.A. and Spanish Harlem, between San Antonio and Miami” (Weiss 1991: 13). That is, he functions as a cultural hero and exemplary trailblazer in a distinctly Latin American sense. Although Gómez-Peña has acknowledged “the risks of the use of ‘we’” (2000: 248),13 the pronoun always indicates that he leads his non-artistic flock through un lugar sin límites, that place without limits known as U.S. culture. As Gómez-Peña puts it, “Art is conceptual territory where everything is possible, and by the same token there do not exist certainties or limitations within it” (1994: 40). In ‘Califas,’ the desired conceptual territory is cast into the “borderless future” and celebrated as a 284

“jumping [of U.S.] borders at ease.” While deferred, this utopian response to transcultural realities and constraints inevitably recalls American Dream fantasies of unchecked mobility and transcendence of institutional barriers. In fact, Gómez-Peña’s androcentric and artist-centred stance evokes nothing less than the poet-as-patriarch, Walt Whitman, who also presumed to centre a newly envisaged U.S.A. sans limits. Gómez-Peña desires to celebrate and sing a reterritorialized nation, like Whitman’s claim in ‘Long, Too Long America’ that he could “show to the world what your [U.S.] children en-masse really are” (1950: 247). Both “kosmos” and a container of subaltern multitudes, Gómez-Peña starts out from his border laboratory in an uncanny replication of the Whitman who, in ‘Starting From Paumanok,” aimed to “strike up for a New World” and thus “See revolving the globe,/ The ancestor-continents away group’d together,/ The present and future continents north and south, with the isthmus between” (1950: 13). The Whitmanesque coordinates of Gómez-Peña’s reterritorializing imagination are perhaps unexpected. Nonetheless they add a specifically U.S. dimension to Gaspar de Alba’s claim that his work pivots on the “primary contradiction” between “the privileged auteur and the marginalized subject”; his self-subalternizing “alignments” deflect attention from the fact that “he is formally trained in Latin American literature, linguistics, and art” (1995: 114). Such contradictions have implications for the text’s border-crossing figures. Some of those personalities do not have an artistic investment in the border-crossing “at ease” that Gómez-Peña celebrates and personifies. Rather, socioeconomic factors of unease determine their fictive relation to geopolitical limits. The Oaxacan Maid, depicted “rubbing a floor in Malibu,” best exemplifies this physical rather than transcendent border relation (1994: 72). Yet in her case the conditions of desire and exploitation underwriting her presence in the U.S.A. are erased by the impact on her representation of the artist’s voice, cartographic revision, and gender. Gómez-Peña’s masquerade as the Oaxacan Maid immediately precedes The Author’s vision of a 285

borderless utopia whose continental coordinates analogize the author’s male body, complete with testicles and sperm, and his voice, the “hey man” at the poem’s end. Earlier signs of this phallic will appear when the Maid “daydreams at the mirror,” an object that reiterates how ‘Califas’ draws attention to itself as reverse optic. Here, however, the fictive subaltern is staged mimicking The Author’s unsubaltern vocabulary, while her labouring predicament is cast as an onanistic conundrum of frustrated desire: (…) —she sighs— ‘my proletarian memory my subemployed fingers my pre-Columbian torso my holy vagina, la panochtzin ...’14 —she faints into the mirror— (ibid: 73)

This eroticized moment is followed by the lines, “there’s nowhere else to go/ the South has been destroyed/ the North is occupied/ by Reagan’s conceptual battalion” (ibid). Ostensibly presented as a critique of the North-South disjunction in the Reagan-Bush era, the preceding scene of erotic unease mars the parodic effect, and fatally. The Author both occupies the Maid’s representation and centres her new geocultural location. The female subaltern’s trace is not simply caged but consumed by an authoritative male gaze. Oppressive frontier logics are replaced by equally oppressive gender logics.15 ‘Califas’ thus eschews the critical task, advocated by Spivak, of “seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman” (1988a: 295). The author’s conceit to speak for and pose as the muted fictive female subaltern suggests a form of selfsubalternization to rival that observed in Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust. Nonetheless, in that novel, and however untenable the oligarchic Creole woman’s desire to transcend racialized and classed frontiers and ally herself with the mixed-race or black 286

female subaltern, such alliances were motivated by a recognition of the pivotal role played by patriarchal power in national imaginary formations. There is no sense of that recognition in ‘Califas,’ thus confirming Berelowitz’s reading of the conceptual aims adopted by the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo that Gómez-Peña helped found in the 1980s, and still evident in later work in which the artist advocates a utopic continental revision: “Instead of viewing it [the border] in terms of the patriarchal construction of nationhood, they saw it rather as a space of cultural interpenetration, interconnection, and interdependence” (1997: 71).16 Nor is there any sense in ‘Califas’ that the border-crossings underwriting a utopian borderlessness are enabled by privileges to which the text’s subalterns do not even have fictive access. Gómez-Peña’s cannibal transvestism, then, glosses over the impact of gendered hierarchies and socioeconomic means on dominant U.S. imaginations. He replaces one phallocentric vision of the U.S.A. with another centred on and determined by his own male artistic cosmopolitanism. The few other mentions of women in the poem confirm them as mere sexual resources or dubious national analogies. El Young Campesino, for example, prepares to cross the border for the first time by licking “the bicultural breasts/ of a border madonna” (68). Similarly, El Johnny learns to kill his Central American “carnales” in the name of the U.S.A., and also of its synonym, “Big Albino Mamma/ of Continental Affairs,” who orders him “to lick/ my digital chakras” (1994: 71). Gómez-Peña’s parody does not quite find an alibi in the poem’s gloss: “Often we walk that very fine line where matters of race, gender, colonial relations are presented in such an irreverent way that they border on insensitivity in an AngloEuropean context. And it’s dangerous (…) but I like it” (1993: 47). Insensitivity is not the issue in ‘Califas’ when its dangerous gendered irreverences undermine the artist’s critique of his main target, the U.S.A. In an interview with Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco recognized in ‘Califas’ a “parody of a nationalist tendency to take the project 287

of cultural recovery very seriously.” This parody is also a frustrated gaze: “Instead, here we have people inventing pasts for themselves by looking in a mirror that provides an illusory one” (1995a: 158). Gómez-Peña responded to these comments with a brief analysis of the Chicano malaise staged in ‘Califas’: “Chicanos have created a metafiction about themselves. (…) There is no reflexivity, no historical coherence and no irony” (ibid). While this interchange acknowledges that the historical narratives in which Chicanos are placed or locate themselves provide target and stake in ‘Califas,’ it overlooks the text’s own lack of reflexivity. The Oaxacan Maid signifies a female subalternity at the eroticized service of a masculine political agenda. Parodic cultural transvestism has transmuted into a neocolonialist appropriation, a cannibalization of the (female) Other with whom the artist claims affinities. Relocated into a dream of continental proportions, the subalterns Gómez-Peña inhabits are reinscribed into a myth to rival that of the state under attack. This is the myth of the patriarchal power centred on the artist-hero who, having crossed the geopolitical border, now provides the corporeal and autobiographical bases for a revision of national and continental transcultural terrains. 6.5. The New World cannibal revisionary Gómez-Peña’s artist-centred American Dream continues in ‘The New World Border: Prophecies for the End of the Century,’ his mutable 1992-95 collaboration with Roberto Sifuentes.17 This text now fully stages the postnational world proposed in ‘Califas.’ In this work, “the processes of balkanization that Eastern Europe underwent from 1989 to 1992 are projected onto the United States” (1996: 21). Transformed by “gringostroika,” the U.S.A. no longer exists. The U.S.-Mexican border, too, has disappeared. In their place is a proliferation of open-bordered entities including “the new Federation of U.S. Republics” (FUSR) (ibid: 27), populated and run by culturally and racially mixed communities whose official languages—Spanglish, Ingleñol, 288

Franglé—have supplanted Spanish, English and French. In this text, the U.S.A. has been erased from view, its former power to determine the terms of transcultural debate purportedly broken. In its place is a new “America”—The New World Border— whose cultural logics and social hierarchies invert and mock those of its U.S. predecessor (ibid: 21). Such parodic inversions aim to force “the audience to experience the cultural vertigo of living in a multilingual /multiracial society” (ibid). Vertigo is emphasized by the text’s constant code-switchings between Spanish, English, Spanglish, and other idioms, as well as its “simultaneous [mis]translations” (ibid). It is reflected on a stage that evokes a ceremonial space, replete with votive candles and confrontational props such as dead chickens, the signs of “alien” cultural practices in the U.S.A. Most significantly, cultural vertigo is managed literally by a tactical segregation of the audience according to “a person’s degree of bilingualism, racial background, immigration status, and/or their position vis-à-vis certain political issues” (ibid: 95). In this way, the artist and his collaborator—occupants of a cannibalizing “fictional center”—aim to empower multilingual viewers at the expense of “monolingual ‘Anglos’” (ibid). The latter now experience the quotidian disparagement of the U.S.A.’s minorities. They become players in a cultural war of positionality and interpretative crisis in line with Alice Joanou’s thesis that the “use of humor as a Trojan horse also leaves the conceptual door into [Gómez-Peña’s] work open” (1997: 48). The question, however, remains: for whom is the conceptual door open? ‘The New World Border’ has been presented at international art festivals and biennales in North America, Europe, and Latin America (1996: 22). Like Fusco’s Stuff, such international venues imply a specific audience. Speaking of this audience in relation to Gómez-Peña’s video Border Brujo, Claire Fox describes how Gómez-Peña rejects “conservative” Anglo and “separatist” Chicano audiences in favour of an “alternative arts scene.” This rejection creates “a ‘middle’ of sorts, which consists of those who, in his estimation, would be most recep289

tive to hybrid cultural identities and ‘border crossing’” (1999: 126). In this way, Gómez-Peña consolidates his reputation as the voice of an oppressed Latino constituency; and in empathetic alternative art circles he appears as “a spokesperson for all ‘border-crossers’” (ibid: 130). ‘The New World Border,’ then, arises in a similar milieu; and like antropofagista rhetoric, the text’s political leverage is predicated on an avant-garde compact between performer and audience about the resistant capacity of cultural politics per se. This compact is troubled, as in Fusco’s work, by the parodic double bind. Like ‘Califas’ the narrative has a modular structure, but the nine modules are called “Prophecies,” each detailing a specific transcultural reality of the FUSR. The New World Border has two representatives who serve as the identity venues through which the text’s world is revealed and explained: Gómez-Peña as El Aztec High-Tech; and Sifuentes as SuperPocho. As Gómez-Peña says, such personae are “hybrids, half traditional and half contemporary, half Mexican and half Chicano,” who “articulate” and personify the “cultural contradictions (…) of the U.S.-Latino experience” (Weiss 1991: 11). In ‘The New World Border,’ however, these characters do not symbolize “the U.S.-Latino experience” but, rather, a Latinocentric experience after the U.S.A. At the same time, this postU.S. “experience” is mismanaged in the Brechtian sense referred to in the text itself: “Listen Beto Brecht. This section never worked” (1996: 39). The aim is to spoil the “real” versus “fiction” opposition: “This ain’t performance art but pure Chicano science fiction” (ibid: 25). In this scenario of a “los Estamos Hundidos”—the U.S.A. as “We are Ruined” (ibid)—El Aztec and Super-Pocho baldly confess to the text’s conceptual implausibilities: “Yes, I’m lying to you, extranjero en tu propio país” (ibid: 26). Such interpretative challenges suggest a manipulation of the parodic will to ends only hinted at in ‘Califas,’ or in Fusco’s performances for that matter. As a result, a response is needed to El Aztec’s far from gratuitous question: “Can anyone tell me which country we are in?” (ibid). Cast another way, do 290

the text’s parodic inversions signal an escape from a U.S.centric imagination? Answers to this question must account for the tension between “borderization” and “borderlessness,” the dynamic organizing principles of what Gómez-Peña calls the border paradigm in this and his other performances. For Gómez-Peña, borderlessness, the utopian drive to dismantle or supersede geopolitical borders, is matched by borderization, the increase in disciplinarian practices along extant geopolitical frontiers and the construction of new frontiers. Borderization has the additional connotation of a gaze that sees borders—and, by implication, a need for borderlessness—everywhere. The oscillation between these tropes presents an interpretative challenge for Gómez-Peña’s audiences. Each trope seems to cancel out its rival. In her reading of Border Brujo, Claire Fox notes that “The idea of alternation among personae, spaces, and languages is so integral to the performance that it raises the issue of whether Gómez-Peña would really like to see borders eliminated, or whether his work is indeed dependent upon borders to uphold the oppositions that he critiques” (1999: 124-25). As Fox sees it, this contradiction represents one of the consequences of Gómez-Peña’s moves, well-established by the early 1990s, “to de-emphasize the U.S.Mexico border region, while nevertheless retaining the border metaphor as a way to address general issues of appropriation and cultural imperialism” (ibid: 120). However, the undeniable conceptual move from the physical border “to the global border” that Fox identifies in Gómez-Peña’s work does not mean that the artist dispenses with particular locales. The metaphorical border also signals the expansion of the specific sites from and in which Gómez-Peña and his collaborators speak for the U.S.A.’s subalterns. When deployed as the hallmarks of a transAmerican imagination as in ‘Califas,’ or a post-U.S. imagination as in ‘The New World Border,’ borderization and borderlessness imply not so much a detachment from the artist’s national location, but a reconfiguration of it. The U.S.A., or better said, a part of that state, retains an anchoring presence in Gómez-Peña’s 291

work from which it may restrain his metaphorical or global designs. Gómez-Peña’s contradictory border paradigm is everywhere apparent in ‘The New World Border.’ As El Aztec says, “Geopolitical borders have faded away,” and North America’s major metropolises now replicate “downtown Tijuana on a Saturday night” (1996: 27). The Tijuana analogy demonstrates how that specific border site provides a worldly referent for the text as it expands outwards to embrace the whole continent. Concomitant with such borderlessness is the drive to establish new borders: “Quebec, Puerto Rico, Aztlán, South Central Los Angeles, Yucatán, Panamá, and all the Indian nations have seceded from the new Federation of U.S. Republics.” At the same time, new “independent micro-republics” like the “Maquiladora Republic of San Diejuana” are proclaiming their existence, the text again springboarding from the actual border site of San Diego-Tijuana (ibid: 30). As a consequence of this see-sawing dynamic between borderlessness and borderization, all the inhabitants of the Americas have become “borderígena[s],” that is, “native[s] of the great border region” (ibid: 33). The text does not clarify whether nativization on a continental level means that “borderígenas” manage geopolitical borders with ease, or construct borders around sites like the barrios of Nuyorico and East Los Angeles that were disparaged when under U.S. jurisdiction. However, the cultural parameters of ‘The New World Border’ implicitly signify an alternative hegemony whose governing principles and institutions invert and mock the rejected regime’s favoured discourses and institutions. Throughout this “New World,” old racialized categories have collapsed because the majority of the population “can be technically considered mesti-mulata, that is, the product of at least four racial mixtures” (ibid). This data, and supporting descriptions of such interethnic identities as “AfroCroatians,” “Jap-talians” and “Anglo-malans,” permit the artist to develop a “menudo chowder” paradigm in which “most of the ingredients do melt, but some stubborn chunks are condemned 292

merely to float” (ibid: 34). The “stubborn chunks” are the “Euro-Americans who resisted inter-racial love.” Now they are condemned to toil in “maquiladoras and fast-food restaurants” in the manner of the U.S.A.’s minority sectors and Mexican workers in the assembly plants of the border region. Targeted for affirmation-action programs and protective legislation, they are nonetheless also precluded from power by decrees outlawing “racial, sexual, or aesthetic purity” (ibid: 32), and subject to equivalents of the anti-Latino rhetoric from the old U.S.A., like the English Only movement that arose in the 1980s. In one scene presented from a studio at Aztlán TV, for example, the announcer conducts a Spanish-language lesson that begins: “Repeat after me: Los norteamericanos que no aprendieron a hablar español sufrieron una marginación total” (ibid: 36). Intent on turning the tables on an Anglo-American hegemony not of the text’s inner world, but of its fictive past, its historical present of staging and reception, these inversions demonstrate that the parodic gaze is directed both at specific U.S. discursive formations and at their beneficiaries who may be witnessing the performance or reading the script. These inversions continue in the transcultural conflicts parodied in the New World Border’s Federation of U.S. Republics. One Prophecy deals with the growing resistance to the “official transculture,” understood as the institutionalization of cultural hybridity (ibid: 38). The new state’s art policies are selected for criticism—again linking the fictive world to its material obverse, the U.S.A.—hence demonstrations by “Fem-arte, a collective of Frida-worshipping feminists” angered at “the lack of Anglo women included in the clepto-Mexican panorama” (ibid: 43). In a nicely ironic touch, Gómez-Peña himself is “accused” of “‘latinocentricism’ for not having included waspbacks” in an art exhibition, leading him to claim that “their work is simply not good enough!” (ibid). These incidents suggest that artist communities in this New World invert the institutional exclusion they once experienced in the United States. Other shifts from old to alternative cultural logics are evident. “The New Paganism” module describes how a 293

range of “pagan religions” based on such divinities as “Krishnahuatl, the Aztec god of karma,” and Madonna’s “reincarnation” as “Saint Frida Kahlo,” replace Catholicism and Protestantism (ibid: 41). In keeping with the Eastern Bloc’s impact on “gringostroika,” an alternative cartography of Mafias is also apparent. These Mafias are nostalgic in outlook, composed of onceprivileged sectors, and engaged in what signifies small-time crime, as some of the organizations’ names attest: “Straight White Guys Are Alright,” “Chicken Rights Falange,” “White Women Experts of Otherness,” and the “Born Again Latinos” outraged by the fact that “essentialism has been outlawed by the state” (ibid: 45). As these “Prophecies” suggest, the performance is intent on revising and re-envisioning the U.S. national imaginary as the venue for a cultural war, the aim on GómezPeña’s part being to lead his fellow cultural workers to power in a viable alternative-hegemony. That said, as with ‘Califas,’ this conceptualization of a new “American” culture is surprisingly familiar, seamlessly recalling the dynamic, continentally vast vision of the new world that Whitman expounded in such poems as ‘Starting From Paumanok’: Expanding and swift, henceforth, Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick and audacious, A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branching, A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new contests, New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts. (1950: 22)

In his particular “world [made] primal again,” Gómez-Peña can claim that “America is no longer the continent you imagine,” hence his suggestion to his audience to search for “un nuevo lenguaje para expresar sus temores y deseos interculturales” (1996: 38). The implication is that this new language is yet to be spoken in the U.S.A. beyond the stage. Nonetheless, Gómez-Peña’s essay, ‘The Free Trade Art 294

Agreement/El Tratado de Libre Cultura,’ a theoretical companion piece to the performance piece as published in The New World Border collection, indicates that unlike his audience, he has mastered the idiom of a desired alternative-hegemony (1996: 5-18). Yet, the essay diverges from the performance by appearing as an after-the-fact manifesto, at once a call for a more representative “America” and a proclamation that this New World is already in existence. The essay’s New World is notable, too, for the place in it occupied by the artist-hero I and his claims to a topographically vast speaking platform: “My America is a continent (not a country) that is not described by the outlines on any of the standard maps” (ibid: 5). As with ‘Califas,’ coordinating the New World of both essay and performance is the artist. Gómez-Peña again celebrates himself as the Whitmanesque spokesman (with artistic allies) for all residents of the “place in which no centers remain” (ibid: 7). Emerging from this new “America” without geopolitical borders are entities like “Amerindia, Afroamerica, Americamestiza-ymulata, Hybridamerica, and Transamerica—the ‘other’ America that belongs to the homeless, and to nomads, migrants, and exiles” (ibid: 6). The New World Border is cast as both fact and utopic imaginary. It is a place without borders, “or one in which the countries have borders that are organically drawn by geography, culture, and immigration, and not by the capricious hands of economic domination and political bravado” (ibid). Interrelated, previously unmapped or unimagined Americas supplant or dispense with geopolitical organizations of nations and regions. Residency of The New World Border is characterized by identities in chaotic flux, and the celebration of transcultural artistic exchange. Yet, Gómez-Peña’s utopic continental imaginary is notable in one respect. It depends on the same naturalizing, “organically drawn” logics by which the mixed-racialized subalterns he brings to power in ‘The New World Border’ acquired meaning in Latin America throughout the colonial era and the period of national consolidation. The celebration of “bizarre interracial 295

relations” and “new hybrid identities” iterates the unyielding patriarchal and heteronormative basis of Gómez-Peña’s “new society” (ibid: 33). Gómez-Peña ignores the gender differentials of mass migration, and he fails to account for the fact that since 1492 the production of “hybrids” in the New World has depended on the operations of a compulsively heterosexual bodily economy, characterized by sexual transactions between unequally empowered racialized and gendered subjects. 6.6. The new Gómez-Peña world centre ‘The New World Border’ clearly extends the cannibalizing androcentricism of ‘Califas.’18 In one telling scene, Gómez-Peña backs-up his call for an alternative cartography by describing the dysfunctional, diseased world, “the age of pus-modernity,” in which he and his audience reside: “Many see this as the era of la desmodernidad, a term that comes from the Mexican noun desmadre, which can mean either having no mother, or living in chaos. The Great Fiction of a social order has evaporated and has left us in a state of meta-orphanhood. We are all, finally, untranslateable hijos de la chingada” (ibid: 25). Pathogenic metaphors inaugurate a punning shift from dis-modernity to dismothered to a chaos defined in line with Paz’s 1950 thesis that the Mexican national character is like an orphanhood resulting from a failure to reconcile indigenous and European legacies (1999). Paz accredited this orphanhood to a social dysfunctionality associated with Malinche in her disparaged guise as la Chingada. The latter term perpetuates the idea of female treachery and of the indigenous woman as the site of passivity and penetrability, qualities transferred in Paz’s analysis to the “fucked” (male) Mexican identity. With his reference to Paz, Gómez-Peña implies that the inhabitants of the borderized Americas outside his text are also symbolic male Mexicans, victims of an emasculated and (ef)feminized psyche. Here, the New World Border appears to be premised on the imaginative escape from a social chaos generated by the continent’s passive recep296

tion of active U.S. penetration. Moreover, the “desmadreficación” of the mother from the Spanish “madre-patria,” the mother-fatherland, implies that Gómez-Peña regards the Americas as a “patria,” a space for and to be redeemed by men only. This masculinist notion of national imaginary (de)formation does not simply support Yuval-Davis’s point that “‘counternarratives,’ even if radical in their form, do not necessarily have to be progressive in their message” (1997: 59). It also undermines the premise that the U.S.A. can be simply and wilfully expunged in cultural work. Gómez-Peña assures his readers that his praxis does, in fact, transcend the U.S.A. by the act of opposition itself: “I oppose the outdated fragmentation of the standard map of America with the conceptual map of ArteAmerica—a continent made of people, art, and ideas, not countries. When I perform, this map becomes my conceptual stage” (1996: 7). This dream of escape from material history—again recalling Whitman, and of course Emerson—is repeated in two more claims. First, he plots his ‘New World Border’ against “the sinister cartography of the New World Order.” And second, he invokes a synonym for The New World Border, the Fourth World, in opposition to the First World/Third World binary (ibid). Gómez-Peña asserts that his reimagined Americas are conceptually tenable because “no centers remain. It’s all margins” (ibid). Aside from ignoring the role the artist occupies in this fictive escape from centres, such claims gloss over a most powerful historical global and historical centre, the U.S.A., as it predetermines the cultural and political parameters of GómezPeña’s New World without borders. Encoded within the conjunction of “New World” and “Border” is a set of specific historical and ideological references, principally the declaration of the U.S.-centred New World Order in the conservative (Reagan-)Bush era. The governing logic of the New World Order, as understood and directed by the U.S.state’s powerbrokers, asserted the obsolescence of the Cold War conceptualization of three antagonistic worlds. The Cold War schema by which the U.S.A. had been imagined in opposition to 297

Communist rivals had to be recast. While Cuba remained a convenient and geographically close Marxist-Leninist “threat,” other enemies were soon identified and demonized, as exemplified by the Gulf War and its accompanying anti-Arab rhetoric. The New World Order thus designated a post-Cold War reorganization of international relations. It also connoted a globalization of economic relations, the opening of national borders to capital and labour flows such as that announced by the 1993 NAFTA agreement. However, concomitant with the promise of border porousness was an increasing crackdown by U.S. authorities along the U.S.-Mexican border. Despite betraying the inherent contradictions in U.S. immigration policy, increased border policing and surveillance was and remains justified to appease sectors made anxious by the spectre of unchecked latinization. This ideologically charged context shadows ‘The New World Border’ as a title for a performance and a desired postnational imaginary. The addition of the “B” spoils the U.S. government’s original conception by according to it a play of oppositional signification. Yet the cartographic alternative remains dependent on an astonishingly resilient myth of the United States as a space of utopian promise. Paradoxically, GómezPeña attacks the New World Order by replicating the conventional U.S. dream of transcendence encoded in the “New World” concept itself. This paradox is repeated in Gómez-Peña’s Fourth World. The term appeared in Gómez-Peña’s work as early as ‘Border Brujo’ in 1990, where it indicated “a new mankind [sic]/ (…) the migrant kind” (1994: 78). In its later incarnation, the Fourth World denotes “a conceptual place where the indigenous peoples of the Americas meet with the deterritorialized peoples, the immigrants and the exiles; it occupies portions of all the previous worlds” (1996: 245).19 Those worlds are also transformed. The “ever shrinking conceptual archipelago” of the First World controls most of the planet’s wealth. The Second World, or “geopolitical limbo,” covers “Greenland, the Antarctic continent, the oceans, the mineral world, and the dismembered Soviet Bloc.” 298

The Third World retains its Cold War reach, with the addition of “communities of color within the ex-First World.” Completing the list is another world, the Fifth World, a peculiar amalgam of “virtual space, mass media, the U.S. suburbs, art schools, malls, Disneyland, the White House & La Chingada” (ibid). The virtual qualities and colliding simulacra of this world suggest that it, too, represents a place for the construction of just about anything from anything, material or discursive. Indeed, all of this world’s features derive from and are contested in the U.S.A., and thus in The New World Border/Fourth World. In this new cartography, First and Third Worlds are purportedly implicated in each other, and their separateness cannot be conceptually maintained. Yet since the trans-American Fourth World “occupies portions of all the previous worlds,” and the U.S.A. furnishes the Fifth World with all its virtual signs, the remapping indicates that the U.S.A., and a critical gaze based in and directed from that state, persist as conceptual centres. This scenario exemplifies what George Yúdice calls “the impulse to recognize the diversity that constitutes the United States [as it] overshoots its mark and self-servedly celebrates ‘American’ multiculturalism as isomorphic with the world” (1992: 202). Gómez-Peña’s premise of life after the U.S.A. does not simply posit an escape into a metaphorized space of borderlessness. His vision also replicates perhaps the most pervasive and persistent of U.S. myths: a promised land in which Gómez-Peña’s desire for transcendence and redemption on national, continental, and global levels may be actualized. 6.7. The U.S.A.’s cannibalizing resilience At the end of ‘The New World Border,’ Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes pose on chairs with brown-paper bags over their heads. A prerecorded voice asks audience members if they would “like to spend the night with a sexy, AIDS-free, Third World performance artist for only twenty-five pesos? Free Trade Sex, the ultimate border experience” (1996: 46). Evoking the packaged 299

Latina sexuality critiqued in Stuff, the scene suggests that the male performers, too, are commodified objects in what GómezPeña calls “the United States’ end-of-the-century identity crisis” (ibid: i). Purporting to restore the artists to their proper subalternized place, the scene also appears as a plea to the audience to take seriously the performance’s portents of an American hemisphere without borders. Some critics have seen in these portents proof of a radical resignification of “America.” For example, in his review of an October 1992 performance of the piece, James Moy claims that “America ceases to be a discrete national entity when people of color, Latinos in particular, begin the ‘borderization’ of the former U.S.A., which ultimately results in its transformation into third world status” (1993: 378). I want to counterpoint this observation with one made by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, here describing the signifying collapse of his Chicano identification when a resident of Belgium: (…) I felt American. I was American. That (…) was a painful and difficult thing to admit to myself. Chicano in those years meant nothing. There was no context, no social or political necessity for that identity (…) When I returned to the United States, Chicano became important again because in the place to which I had returned, the inequalities of my society were everywhere to be found. (1997b: 95)

A location outside the U.S.A. fixes this bearer of a Chicano identity with the “Americanness” treated with a measure of scepticism and critical distance when at home. For Alire Sáenz, the U.S.A. is not about to be redeemed by transformation into Third World status as Moy would have it. The U.S.A.’s powers to assert its First World hegemony, and to reinforce its myths of sanctity, are confirmed in all their resilience when the Chicano crosses and gains some distance from the geopolitical border. Despite sharing with many Latino writers a commitment to dispute the U.S.A.’s frontier myths and transcultural denials, Alire Sáenz’s experiences demonstrate that the border-crossing 300

paradigm provides limited metaphorical sustenance or radical political purchase. This message about the U.S.A.’s cannibalizing power underwrites Carry Me Like Water as it explores how border logics are written onto Chicano bodies, which nonetheless belong to citizens, every time those bodies are referred to as “aliens.”20 Similar confirmations of “American” power are apparent in the other texts discussed throughout this book. They are responsible for the generation of an immobilized subalternity in Rodriguez’s Spidertown. They underwrite the ideological conflicts and socioeconomic disparities laid bare in Obejas’s Memory Mambo. And when border-crossing is celebrated in the manner of Ferré’s fantasy of voyaging between geopolities, her novel Sweet Diamond Dust iterates how socioeconomic privilege and cosmopolitan expectations may facilitate the rhetoric of an artist-mediated bridge between distinct national spaces, thus disregarding the transcultural challenges to the state when conceived in exceptional and disjunctive terms. Such literary outcomes confirm Russ Castronovo’s argument “that those attempting to read the cultural map [of the U.S.A.] best pay particular attention to the borders, for it is in these uncertain regions where the landscape of politics is most susceptible to sudden change and reversal. Indeed, it is within this landscape that the nation can reappear with sublime force” (1997: 217). This eruptive, “sublime force” is glossed over in claims that Latino artists, writers and critics have resignified the U.S.A. into “a cultural map which is all border,” thereby shattering “The arrogance of political geography” (Flores and Yúdice 1993: 202). Rather, the “arrogance of political geography” is potentially remobilized in any proposal to fix the U.S.A.’s transcultural complexities into a space simply known as “all border.” Fusco’s and Gómez-Peña’s works are embroiled in this problematic. Aiming to cannibalize the United States for subaltern ends, their performances confront the erasure, denial, and appropriation of Latino cultures and bodies in and by the U.S.A.’s governing logics and imaginations. In Pochonovela, Fusco and 301

her collaborators partake of a cultural transvestism in order to inhabit and spoil the stereotypes generated in dominant-cultural and Chicano communities alike. The video nonetheless identifies its main target as a dominant U.S. imaginary and its formulaic representative, Darlene So-Clean. Both imaginary and its embodiment are punished for crimes of stereotype generation. However, in Pochonovela, the cannibalization of stereotypes also reconfirms the stereotypes’ continued efficacy and functionality in the service of an artist-intellectual project. Similarly, Gómez-Peña’s ‘Califas’ also deploys the cultural transvestite mode in order to spoil stereotyping protocols. But the performance-poem engenders, and is co-opted by, a myth centred on the artist-hero’s male body, the patriarchal analogue for a borderless imaginary of continental proportions. In this text, the project of alternative national imaginary formation permits a masculinist cannibalism of the female subaltern with whom Gómez-Peña claims affinities. A different species of cultural cannibalism drives Stuff. In this performance, Fusco and Bustamante reclaim the cannibal urge for subaltern ends, hence their representation of subalterns who parodically “consume” metropolitan representatives. Stuff emphasizes the international traffic in Latin/a women and highlights the global implications of an excessive U.S. appetite for commodities, including the eroticized Latin/a. Yet, by erasing the national and class distinctions between the artists and the subalterns whose testimonies they mediate, Stuff’s recourse to Antropofagia does not accredit the artists for their roles in the construction of the subalternity they seek to reprieve. Of all the texts dealt with in this book, Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes’s “The New World Border’ stands out as the only one to imagine the Americas without the U.S.A. Here, an alternativehegemony of “transculture” reigns; but as with ‘Califas,’ the postnational imagination is predicated on unwielding androcentric and patriarchal logics. Those logics underwrite the expansive platforms from which Gómez-Peña and his collaborator reimagine the Americas on behalf of the continent’s subaltern sec302

tors. However, the bid to dispense with the U.S.A. never quite eludes the imaginary power of the state selected for revision. In fact, the U.S. national imaginary survives parodic mistreatment in two senses: as a name for a continent reconceived from a position within the U.S.A.; and as a metaphoric post-U.S. space of redemptive promise and unfettered mobility centred on GómezPeña himself. Notes 1. In-text references will be to Pochonovela (Video Data Bank, 1995). I refer to the published script of Stuff (1997) and the excerpt included in Fusco (2000: 60-62). Some Spanish words in Stuff are printed without accents. 2. I refer to two published versions of ‘Califas’ (Gómez-Peña 1994: 67-74; and Gómez-Peña 1993). The version of ‘The New World Border’ I discuss is found in Gómez-Peña’s The New World Border (1996: 21-47). 3. Fusco’s and Gómez-Peña’s collaborations (1992-1995) include ‘The ‘1992’ Trilogy,’ early versions of ‘The New World Border,’ ‘Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…,” and ‘Mexarcane International (Ethnic Talent for Export).’ For Gómez-Peña’s account of these performances, see The New World Border (1996: 95-100). For assessments of ‘Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…,’ see, Behar and Mannheim (1995), Fusco and Heredia (1993), Gablik (1993), and Fusco (1995a: 37-63). 4. Aside from Larsen (1990: 72-97), useful analyses of Antropofagia include: Johnson (1987); Campos (1986); Prado Bellei (1998); Schwarz (1996); and Bary (1991), an annotated translation of Oswaldo de Andrade’s Manifesto antropófago. For discussions of the cultural invention of the cannibal and of cannibal tropes, see Hulme (1992), and Piedra (1992). 5. The performance I witnessed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (21 August, 1997) provided a case in point. The audience—local artists, academics, the Gallery’s middle-class clientele—was predisposed to the artists’ political message. Indeed, the bi- and multilingual and multicultural make-up of this audience presented Fusco and Bustamante with some problems when attempting to select appropriately monolingual Travel Tasters who could be taught the foreign-language phrases needed to pick up the Latin(a) Other. At the same time, the particular U.S. basis for the performance was not adjusted to an Australian context with its own ambivalent client-state relation to the United States. 6. Like Stuff, Pochonovela confirms Fusco’s commitment to pan-Latino collaborative cultural work. She shares writing credits with the group, Chicano Secret Service (Tomás Carrasco, Lalo López, and Elias Serna), and the 303

video’s cast features, among others, this group and the Los Angeleno queer performer Luis Alfaro. 7. Muñoz’s Latino camp reflects two critical disputes on his part. First, he distances himself from Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp,’ in which camp refers to an aesthetic sensibility of “artifice and exaggeration,” while remaining politically “disengaged” (1994: 275-78). Second, he aims to queer Olalquiaga’s de-queered categories of Latino kitsch, by which Latino cultural forms are graded by degrees of “difference between reality and representation,” from the “mere substitute” of the real object such as the home altar, through the “neo-kitsch” object, like tourist kitsch, in which the representation becomes the referent, to the third-degree kitsch object, transformed by the new “hybrid” significations determined by its (artist) maker (1992: 42-47). 8. Unless otherwise stated, page numbers in brackets refer to the version of ‘Califas’ found in Gómez-Peña’s Warrior for Gringostroika (1994: 67-74). 9. At times, Gómez-Peña Gómez-Peña’s performances also feature cannibals and cannibal tropes. For instance, the title of his collaboration with Enrique Chagoya, Friendly Cannibals (1996), playfully alludes to Antropofagia. For Gómez-Peña, such cultural cannibalisms and transvestisms are key features of his “project of reversed anthropology” in which “America’s cultural projections” are dissected (Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes 1996: 23). 10. Gómez-Peña’s preference for performance and multimedia work also signals a rejection of the novel and other literary genres, a stance not quite synonymous with the one taken by the LASSG. In an interview with Fusco, he says: “I am working in a country—the United States—that doesn’t value the written word very much. I feel that my voice as a poet is less effective, less public, and less transcendental than my voice as a performance or media artist” (Fusco 1995a: 157). Elsewhere, he also claims that his multidisciplinary, collaborative and mutable praxis signals a rejection of “copyright,” the artwork’s ideas by implication belonging not to the author “but to the civilian population that generates them” (1992: 65). 11. Gaspar de Alba’s appeal to rascuachismo appears in her analysis of Border Brujo, a video she claims is better dealt with in relation to the mode of rascuachismo than to poststructural or ethnographic analyses of Chicano culture (1995: 113-14). Rascuachismo has been called a Chicano aesthetic with affinities to bricolage. For Ybarra-Frausto, it signifies “an underclass sensibility rooted in everyday linguistic practices and in artistic works put together out of whatever was at hand,” a making-do necessitated by poverty by which a performance’s construction at the U.S.A.’s geopolitical margins is laid bare (1992: 208). 12. The playful code-switching and neologisms in ‘Califas’ are typical of Gómez-Peña’s linguistic inventiveness. They announce a powerful rejoinder to linguistic purists like the Chilean Claudio Véliz: “‘Spanglish’ is (…) an unseemly, scarcely literate linguistic hodgepodge that would not be tolerated 304

in any country within hearing distance of the Real Academia” (1994: 125, n15). Needless to say, Gómez-Peña’s linguistic neoculturations defeat such tired and elitist arguments and provide innumerable examples of the fact that, at least in matters linguistic, he fails to parrot U.S. logics: “you es-tass joudidou”—U..S.A. as “You are fucked”—a memorable moment from the script of ‘Border Brujo’ (1994: 83). Fusco, too, has a comment on this issue: “I don’t speak Spanglish, except with bilingual friends, because before it was a fashionable object of cultural studies, using it was a good way of getting classified as mentally retarded” (qtd. in Behar and Mannheim 1995: 120). 13. In his cyberspace project, ‘The Virtual Barrio,’ Gómez-Peña describes the slippage in his work between “I” and “we.” The “we” may refer to GómezPeña and his collaborators, to “all Chicanos in the net” or “all outsiders/insiders in the net.” Such pronomial shifting, he claims, is inescapable: “‘We’ all criticize the impossibility of a ‘master narrative’ in the 90’s and yet, ‘we’ all wish to belong to a community larger than our immediate tribe of collaborators. How to solve this, I still don’t know” (2000: 248). The fact remains, however, that the “we” in his performance texts is unambiguous: it refers to the artist-hero and his artist peers, the cultural agents licensed to speak for all subalterns, Latino or otherwise. 14. The Nahuatl-adjusted Spanish word “panocha” (literally brown sugar, a euphemism for cunt) here is not included in the other published version of ‘Califas’ (1993). Despite this difference, the eroticized framing is the same in both texts, as are the conclusions I draw from it. 15. Another aspect of this gender regime has been identified by ChávezSilverman, who notes that despite Gómez-Peña’s collaborations with Fusco, he consistently reduced Fusco to second billing or erased her contributions (1997: 108). 16. For an overview of the Border Art Workshop’s history and aims, see Berelowitz (1997). For comments on Tijuana residents’ suspicions of San Diego-Tijuana artistic projects in which Gómez-Peña was involved in the 1980s, see García Canclini (1993b). 17. According to Gómez-Peña, ‘The New World Border’ has appeared in over twenty-five different versions, including early collaborations with Coco Fusco (1996: 22). 18. The link is more than coincidental. The final module of ‘Califas’ is reprinted in The New World Border as the collection’s opening poem, ‘Freefalling Toward a Borderless Future’ (1996: 1-3). 19. Gómez-Peña’s “new” topography represents the latest in a long line of worlds-in-world schemas. According to Gordon Brotherston, such schemas derive from a Babylonian topography “later adopted by the Romans and medieval Europe” and which was current at the time of Columbus (1992: 1). In this model, three worlds were visualized in terms of a circle: “Within the surrounding ocean, Asia, the first and greatest, occupied the upper eastern 305

half-circle; below to the west lay the Second and Third Worlds Europe and Africa” (ibid). After Columbus, the Americas were added as the Fourth World. See O’Gorman (1995) for a full discussion. While this conception was supplanted by the European cartographic systems still in use today, worlds-in-world schemas persist in our era, the most notable being the Cold War model. The Fourth World was resurrected by Native Canadians in the 1970s to signify indigenous cultures and peoples subsumed into states as disenfranchised minorities (Graburn 1988: 2). Brotherston himself adapts the Fourth World to denote the Native Americas. He resurrects the Babylonian model in order to sidestep regarding Europe as the First World, and to provide Native American peoples—whose world that did not end in 1492—with “an identity analagous to those of the other three” (1992: 1). 20. Similar insights into such national reinscriptions appear in Latino writing when characters make the trip across the border or visit their familial homelands. For example, in Cuadros’s poem, ‘Bordertowns,’ the gay narrator and his lesbian friend find that crossing the border into Tijuana erases both subjects’ queer and Chicano identities, with the pair signifying a generic U.S. tourist couple to the Mexican stall-keepers (1994: 109-110). And Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents features a scene in the Dominican Republic in which the U.S.-raised but Dominican-born Yolanda is out for a drive when she gets a flat tyre. The two campesinos who help her regard her as a gringa, a role she reinforces uneasily by offering to pay for their services (1991: 20-21).

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7 Afterword: Notes on transcultural traffic from across el charco pacífico

Between the place in which this book was written and the cultural terrains it discusses lies el charco pacífico, the Pacific pond. This vast space presents few obstacles to the circulations of U.S. cultural capital and discourses, and it is a space across which Australian cultural forms and ideas also travel. Speaking from the Australian side of el charco in this afterword, I discuss some of the critical intersections of possibility and danger for Latino literary and transcultural studies—including those conducted outside the U.S.A.’s borders—so far not addressed in this study, but which have implications for its narrative trajectory and analytical concerns. With this focus, the afterword meditates on a project concerned with what “America” signifies, not only for Latino writers with a troubled relation to the U.S.A., but also for a resident of a state with its own uneasy relation to U.S. global power. To begin I want to return to 1992, the Columbian quincentenary, and to an international cultural event that took place in Australia, the Sydney Biennale. As part of the Biennale, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña staged their performance ‘Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Sydney.’ The Biennale’s exhibition halls also included installation work from the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo that Gómez-Peña helped to found in San Diego-Tijuana in the 1980s. Anthony Bond, the Biennale’s curator, organized the exhibition under the overarching metaphor of the “boundary rider,” an icon mythologized from an Australian colonial era and frontier ethos: “Quirky and idiosyncratic, he [sic] was by necessity a bricoleur adapted to a fringe life, ‘making do’ in a sparse Australian environment. His life was spent travelling between remote points of the map. While his job was to care for the fences which defined

cultivated/cultural space from wilderness, he was also a carrier of news and stories” (1992: 16). Since the boundary rider— always male in Bond’s usage—signified an “outsider” who “avoided closed categories (…and) cultivated a tolerance of difference,” he became the figure “who best addresses the issues of the border” (ibid). Accordingly, the boundary rider was presented as the “appropriate” paradigm for neocultural agency not only in Australia, but along the U.S.-Mexican border, throughout Latin America, and in contact zones everywhere. He was even ascribed the potential to be a “model for the redemption of modern man [sic] at the end of the twentieth century” (ibid). This metaphoric and millennium-end appearance of the bricoleuric boundary rider was noteworthy for one extraordinary oversight: the euphoric contact-zone utopia he supposedly heralded could be imagined only by ignoring his traditional disciplinarian functions.1 In colonial Australia, in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands (one thinks of Mexican and U.S. armies, Texas Rangers, and la migra), and in other contact zones, the boundary rider has policed cultural and political boundaries. In many guises he has cared for land appropriated by invading and “civilizing” interests. Uniformed or not, he has been employed to prevent undesirable encroachments, and to displace or eliminate indigenous peoples and apprehend undocumented border crossers. Far from being a counter-hegemonic activist or utopian harbinger, the boundary rider has helped to establish the spaces in which authoritarian cultural discourses intervene and prosper. Bond’s universalizing appeal to a paradigmatic fixer of boundaries thus complied with and perpetuated colonizing wills that have identified non-European others as objects of conquest, genocide, surveillance, representational marginalization, and discursive stereotyping. Bond’s dubious rationale had obvious implications for the artists and art works he curated. Speaking of Fusco and GómezPeña’s presence, for example, he made the following claim: Both artists have experienced difficulties arising from the American fail308

ure to face cultural and ethnic hybridity. Their work dramatically exposes the stereotyped expectations in Euro-ethnic societies of their ‘other.’ (…) Their experience is widespread in the USA but has much in common with that of migrants in all parts of the world including Australia. Although government policies favour multiculturalism, and cultural organisations often promote the ‘exotic’ (…) the prejudice of many communities remains (…) [and] is often manifest in the behaviour of minor officials, such as police in Australian country towns and border guards on the US/Mexican frontier. (ibid: 112)

Evident here is a conflation of disparate historical and geocultural contexts into an amorphous, universal “migrant” or “multicultural” experience. In turn, the embrace of Gómez-Peña and Fusco as exemplary boundary-riding bricoleurs is unsettled by the naming of other boundary riders—Australian countrytown police and U.S. border guards—whose distinct disciplinarian functions were not addressed by the Biennale’s organizational logic. In fact, that logic appeared as antithetical to Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s performance aim to foreground the continuing appropriations of the “native” in Western post-colonial imaginations. The boundary-riding conceptualization struck me then as inappropriate and simplistic; and it continues to do so now. However, this study would have been inconceivable had it not been for the fact that the Biennale provided a venue for perhaps the first significant exposure of Latino cultural productions, and what Gómez-Peña calls “the border paradigm,” to Australian audiences. In the years following that exposure, my interest in the problems presented for transcultural analysis when cultural producers, products, and debates travel has deepened. Once alerted to the critical and creative range of Latino disputes with “America,” and hence to the national and imaginative significance for Latinos of both the U.S.-Mexican frontier and the frontier in the Florida Strait, “America” has been profoundly altered in my Australian imagination. At the same time this knowledge has transformed how I perceive the fictive Australian community’s relation to the superpower that shares our main 309

language, and whose cultural products incessantly cross the Pacific to find avid Australian audiences. I now cannot envisage the U.S.A., or Australia for that matter, without seeing frontier discontinuities and continuities everywhere. Lest these admissions imply a desired consolation in an amorphous border-crossing paradigm, they require qualification, particularly since they are made by a resident of a state without borders to match those in the Americas. Australia is a state whose geopolitical frontiers are maritime and vast. Its frontier anxieties are provoked by displaced-European proximity to the South-East Asian archipelago. These anxieties are exemplified by the “Australia-in-Asia” debates that have occurred with great frequency since the early 1980s, arguably the signs of a conceptual, topographical, and generational shift from the hysteria of earlier “yellow-peril” rhetoric. If “Australia”—a term that, like “America,” is highly contested—signifies anything, it resembles what Suvendrini Perera has called the triangular meeting of Aboriginal, European, and Asian worlds (1995: 5), to which should be added the worlds of the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. “Australia” reflects the legacies of British colonization, genocide and displacement of Aboriginal peoples, and post-World War Two migrations, originally from all over Europe, more recently from Asia, but also including people from Africa and the Americas. These factors are responsible for the fact that over 40% of the population is composed of people either born somewhere else, or with one or both parents who were foreign-born. Australia thus replicates neither the U.S.A.’s current demographic make-up nor its transcultural realities. Calls to reinforce more forcefully Australia’s northern edges, for example, do not mimic border-defensive rhetoric at the U.S.A.’s southern edges. That rhetoric reveals different regional configurations and anxieties, and confirms distinct experiences of transnational capitalism and its attendant population shifts, socioeconomic pressures, and geopolitical configurations. Nonetheless, a U.S.-dominated transnational capitalism has had direct consequences for this study and my approach to the 310

debates it canvasses. These consequences are to do with the global transmission and circulation of cultural forms and discourses. Latino cultural products are simultaneously items of U.S. cultural capital. At times they circulate beyond the U.S.A. by virtue of that state’s cultural and economic hegemony on a global scale, a point that Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have also made, albeit in passing: “Despite the imbrication of ‘First’ and ‘Third’ worlds, (…) the global distribution of power still tends to make the First World countries cultural ‘transmitters’ and to reduce most Third World countries to ‘receivers.’ (One byproduct of this situation is that First World minorities have the power to project their cultural productions around the globe)” (1996: 147). All of the literary and critical texts to which I refer are either available in Australian bookshops or obtainable via the net for those, like myself, privileged with access to that technology. Artists such as Gómez-Peña and Fusco have performed here, Fusco more regularly, hence the higher profile she has in Australian artistic circles, an inversion of the status enjoyed by the two performers in the U.S.A. In February 2000, Achy Obejas appeared in the literary component of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival. Latino writers like Junot Díaz have been invited to Australian literary festivals. The global networks of cultural transmission also mean that Australian television viewers regularly see Latinos in sit-coms like Seinfeld, Suddenly Susan, Will and Grace, and Jesse, thus exposing us to the representations that often frustrate and anger many Latinos at home. Border-centric films are to be found in video-stores stocked overwhelmingly with U.S. product. Occasionally a nuanced exploration of Chicano, Mexican and Anglo relations such as John Sayle’s Lone Star (1996) makes it to Australian cinemas. And the media, in this instance mimicking its counterparts in the U.S.A., regards Ricky Martin and Jennifer López as signs of an exotic-erotic “Latin” eruption into Australian popular-cultural view. The corollary of this traffic—ranging from work packaged for popular consumption to the politically or artistically self311

reflexive cultural product—is that Australian traces, too, find their way into Latino texts. The eucalypt graces the pages of Alire Sáenz’s Carry Me Like Water—“Sometimes the smell of death or dread of an impending unknown is in the air like the smell of corn tortillas at a market in Juárez or the smell of sulfur near an oil refinery or the smell of eucalyptus after a rain” (1995a: 237)—a reminder to Australian readers that the global dissemination of our predominant flora is a byproduct of British colonization. Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes drew upon the Australian film Mad Max to invent Mad Mex, one of the ethnocyborgs in their performance-installation ‘El Mexterminator 1’ (1997: 15). Other Australian connections are to be found in Gómez-Peña’s works, from “the Australian surfers/ waiting for the B-wave at Valparaíso” in ‘Califas’ (1994: 74), to the use of music by the Australian band The Umbrellas in ‘The Last Migration’ (1996: 203). In his last Australian appearance as the archetypal U.S.-Mexican border-crosser at the Performance Space, Sydney, in July 2001, Gómez-Peña was even flanked, in a gesture of trans-Pacific solidarity of some clichéd sort, by two stuffed red kangaroos. And Australian Aboriginal experiences of ethnographic appropriation were incorporated into Fusco’s analysis of the international responses to her performance with Gómez-Peña, ‘Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Sydney’ (1995a: 37-65). Nonetheless, the 1992 Biennale highlighted the risks that may befall Latino cultural products and debates that travel or resonate beyond the U.S.A.’s borders. The local stakes and historical specificities underwriting such products and debates may be overlooked in cultural labyrinths such as Australia where receptions of U.S. critical discourses and literatures—at times embraced like a cargo cult, at others regarded with ambivalence, antagonism, or not at all—reflect on Australia’s own highlycharged relationship with the U.S.A. Moreover, since critical transculturations are multidirectional, these risks of oversight also flow back to the Americas, thus generating yet more dubious transcultural claims to rival the 1992 Sydney Biennale’s ra312

tionale. One example of this reverse-flow from Australia to the Americas is provided by Angela Rivera’s essay, ‘Puerto Rico on the Borders,’ which opens with these lines: In 1994 the Australian movie [The Adventures of] Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was projected on the international screen. The title of this film refers to a bus, ‘Priscilla,’ in which a transvestite troupe travels through the Australian desert in search of an audience for its show of ‘lip-synching dancers.’ One of the most interesting scenes in this film is the troupe’s encounter with a group of Australian aborigines. The troupe and the aborigines establish a tentative relationship, which they later develop when the transvestites and aborigines collaborate in a transvestite show. The theme song of the show, entitled ‘I Will Survive,’ serves as a metaphorical bridge between the two worlds living at the edge or on the frontiers. Each group’s main purpose is, precisely, to survive. (1998: 31)

Rivera’s opening gambit here is intended to support her claim that “Some literary texts in the Puerto Rican literary canon also exhibit a similar bridge between cultural discourses, literature, the transvestite/transsexual and the desire for survival” (ibid: 31). But does the author’s posited equation between Priscilla and the Puerto Rican literary canon confirm transcultural synonymity? Directed by Stephan Elliott, the Australian road-movie Priscilla is noteworthy, but not in the way Rivera suggests. The film portrays a Philippina “mail-order bride” as a castrating harridan. It endorses the simplistic notion that Aboriginal quotidian conditions and cultural survival are somehow analagous to the travails of a troupe of white transvestites and gay men: flashy costumes and a snappily choreographed dance number distract from the deculturating impact of two centuries of Anglo-Celtic colonialism. The transvestite and gay characters, moreover, are delineated according to a politically disarmed and sanitized logic: the queer made safe for public consumption. At the same time, the film traffics in the standard clichés of Australianess, with the wide outback serving as a promised land of spiritual discovery and rebirth for Euro-Australians. Priscilla would ap313

pear, therefore, to be a rather unsuitable candidate for making transcultural points about the U.S.A.’s Antillean colony. Priscilla’s comparative use-value can be established only by disregarding how it represents yet another happy-hybrid moment in Australian postcolonial representations. Rivera’s border-crossing attempt to construct a critical bridge of transcultural equivalence across el charco pacífico thus erases Australian historical legacies and cultural discourses in what amounts to a tacit endorsement of the film’s stereotyping protocols.2 A different order of erasure is at work in Gómez-Peña’s provocative redefinition of the Americas as the Fourth World, discussed in the last chapter from the U.S. angle. Gómez-Peña’s Fourth World is “a conceptual place where the indigenous peoples of the Americas meet with the deterritorialized peoples, the immigrants and the exiles; it occupies portions of all the previous worlds” (1996: 245). I am not a resident of this Fourth World. Nor do I recognize Australia in the ‘End-of-the-Century Topography Review’ in which Gómez-Peña sardonically subdivides the planet into five worlds (ibid). Somewhere in his five worlds schema Australia’s indigenous peoples, and its deterritorialised migrants and exiles, are supposed to exist, and explicably. The definition of the Fourth World as a “conceptual place” that somehow designates territories outside the Americas, constructs the Americas as a transglobal model for the hybridizing processes Gómez-Peña revels in and claims as representing the only viable global future. The Australian contact zone— uncomfortable as of the First World, in denial over its Third World pockets, and not like the American Fourth World— disappears in Gómez-Peña’s cartographic project to reimagine the U.S.A. and the American continent. This erasure does not simply confirm that global paradigms are inevitably exclusionary; it also raises the perhaps unintentional prospect that Australia functions in the counter-narrative political projects of artists in the U.S.A. as a mere footnote or addendum to more “important” metropolitan histories. Rendered global and metaphoric, the once-grounded border-crossing paradigm now emanates 314

from the U.S.A. in order to explain transcultural processes across the world.3 If transglobal circulations of bodies, cultural artefacts, and ideas provide loci of productive and contestable cultural interchange across the Pacific, such circulations, in the end, suggest the necessity and inescapability of Australian critical engagements with the signifier America. These engagements include consideration of how U.S. cultural productions, Latino or otherwise, are placed in the U.S.A.’s globally circulating critical and cultural debates on knowledge production and epistemological power. I make these points because the trans-pacific traffic in cultural forms and criticism enables me to discuss Latino narratives, just as it permits Rivera to cite Priscilla in an analysis of Puerto Rican literary texts, or Anthony Bond to insert U.S. border cultures into a transcultural model derived from an Australian colonial era and ethos, or Gómez-Peña to advocate exclusionary U.S.-based transcultural paradigms. Parallel networks of transnational traffic enable all of the narratives discussed in this book to incorporate or allude to cultural capital and discourses—often drawn from places other than the U.S.A.—as intertextual ammunition for counter-narrative projects. Nonetheless, in all of these traffics and epistemological manoeuvres lies the danger that Other histories will be homogenized, misread as equivalents, engulfed seamlessly in global models, or overlooked by critics who fail to interrogate the privileged place of the U.S.A. as a most powerful locus of enunciation.4 These, then, represent possible consequences of the tensions between local and global prospects for Latino and other U.S. cultural critics and producers, and for the non-U.S. critics who read U.S. cultural texts. As Fernando Ortiz pointed out in 1940, transcultural processes are not characterized by neocultural formations and resistances alone. They are also characterized by loss and conflict in the spaces in which two or more cultures intersect and—far from dialectically, evenly, or equally—transform each other. Transcultural criticism, too, confirms and conforms to this observation, even as its practitioners are obliged continually and 315

riskily to adapt the mode to new or unfamiliar settings and cultural formations. Awareness of these risks has not, however, foreclosed this study’s intervention into Latino and U.S. cultural studies. Here I have followed Djelal Kadir’s “lesson” about “sall[ying] into the perilous terrain of the other”: I follow the more hazardous path of intervention, keenly aware that all of our acts may inevitably be as interventionist as they are exclusionary. I find the risks of intervention preferable to the safety of supervention. Supervening, in the final analysis, is a supreme form of willful neglect, if not righteous ignorance. By ‘supervention’ I understand a self-removal to the security of a superior venue, to a self-serving higher ground. (1993: 179)

My study, then, intervenes in the traffic of cultural capital across el charco pacífico, just as it intervenes in the U.S. discursive circuits of possibility and dispute that affect the Latino narratives and authors I discuss. My intervention is constructed as a dialogue with a group of narratives concerned to redefine the messages that the U.S.A. transmits for or about not only itself, but also for or about its Latino sectors. Accordingly, Latino Dreams has been structured with two aims: first, to respect how the selected texts stage the varied motives and historical pressures for Latino residency of the U.S.A.; and second, to avoid conflating or homogenizing texts and authors drawn from Puerto Rico and various Latino sectors. By acknowledging the distinct historical relationships that these sectors have with the U.S. state, the resultant analysis has provided one among many possible maps of the narrative nexus between Latino and dominantcultural imaginaries of the U.S.A. These factors necessarily preclude a totalizing conclusion. However, while there are immense differences between the geocultural terrains staged in the examined narratives, it is also clear that the texts explore many of the same issues. In some cases, they share the same targets. All but Ferré’s novel—the 316

only narrative not set in the U.S. mainland—address disciplinarian border logics and anti-immigrant rhetoric, although Ferré’s text also engages with these problems by highlighting their obverse: international border-crossings and interstitial fantasies are enabled by socioeconomic privilege and comfortable status in both the U.S.A. and its Puerto Rican colony. All of the texts recognize and grapple with the geopolitical and geocultural splits affecting particular Latino sectors. All require readers to recognize the U.S.A.’s complex imperial past and present. To varying extents each of the narratives acknowledges the tacit hierarchized racializations underpinning white hegemony. Some of the narratives point out or attack heteronormative and patriarchal bodily economies, while those economies provide other texts with unquestioned governing principles. Some of the narratives reveal an awareness of panethnic affiliations and conflicts, and a willingness to explore or problematize a meaningful latinidad. Many of the narratives embark on a desimplification of Latino away from synonymity with an invariable subalternity; others fail to admit the intellectual conceits and socioeconomic privileges underpinning the fictive representation and manipulation of the subaltern. All of the texts raise questions about the structural and discursive impediments to neocultural agency and subaltern resistance. All make considered use of intertexts, from music and the telenovela to testimonio and, perhaps most surprisingly, the British Victorian novel, the latter a significant intertextual presence in three of the novels discussed. Use of such intertexts may allegorize a reaction against U.S. exclusions, or announce a dispute with broad U.S. and/or Latino cultural typologies. Such intertexts may also provide metafictional clues to the ways by which Latino writers mediate and move between constructed worlds and those worlds’ “real” referents. Finally, whether figured explicitly or not, each of the narratives confirms that unconstrained mobility inside or across the U.S.A.’s borders signifies a mode of being “American” to which many Latinos may not have access. 317

In these ways, the selected narratives grapple with the U.S.A.’s conflict-ridden material realities and the promises encoded in a remarkably resilient national imaginary. In keeping with the tripartite repertoire of transcultural processes—here placed in dialectical tension with subaltern debates—by which I analyze them, the Latino narratives demonstrate that there is no straightforward Latino response to the signifier “America.” Nor is that signifier to be regarded as immutable, transparent, or discursively homogenous, even when U.S. imaginary power reasserts itself in the face of counter-narrative disavowal. In these narratives, ambivalences, hegemonic complicities, and contradictions abound. So, too, do fraught utopian solutions to U.S. predicaments and rigorous attacks on the discursive and material sources of oppression. At times many of these impulses appear in a single text or authorial oeuvre. At times the narratives refuse to romanticize Latino cultures or avow expected cultural coordinates. In these transcultural scenarios are evident a range of Latino wills to reject, unsettle, reconfigure, and reaffirm the categories of nation and Latino identity, and of subaltern and elite. These narratives, then, at once target and confirm the complex valencies of U.S. cultural capital (that they may share as narratives made in and about the U.S.A.), the border logics of U.S. sanctity, and the pervasiveness and persistence of American Dreams. Notes 1. Moreover, it could only be imagined by assuming that the boundary rider was invariably male. In the Australian colonial era, at least, it was conceivable that some white women, too, could become boundary-riders. This possibility is represented in the nineteenth-century novel Such is Life, by Tom Collins/Joseph Furphy (1970), with the character “Nosey Alf (Jones),” a disfigured woman who passes as a man while working as a boundary rider. 2. It is worth noting how easily and seamlessly Australian road films such as Mad Max and Priscilla are assimilable into long-standing U.S. imaginations of ever expanding frontier spaces and self-fashioning potential on the openroad. Regarded from this angle, Rivera’s appeal to Priscilla, and Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes’s Mad Mex replicant, could both be interpreted in terms of 318

American Dream rhetoric, one that subsumes non-U.S. cultural productions into a U.S. framework by glossing over their local qualities. 3. It must be stated here that similar transcultural disjunctions and misreadings can and do occur in the United States, when works of Latino culture move out of their locales to find other Latino audiences. This is most obvious when west-coast works travel to the east coast, and vice versa. 4. This scenario is simply demonstrated by academic publications from the U.S.A. that deal with U.S. cultural complexities without incorporating “U.S.” or “U.S.A.,” or even “America,” in their titles. Outside the U.S.A., this absence may be read as a sign of a tacit universalism and U.S.-centricity.

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Index Aboriginals, Australian, 56, 310, 312, 313 Acosta-Belén, Edna, 122, 123 Acosta Cruz, María, 70, 96, 107 Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, 313-14, 315, 318 Africa, 30, 32, 92, 96, 108, 306, 310 African Americans, 57, 111, 112, 113, 115, 123, 125, 128, 130, 133, 146, 156 African-Puerto Ricans, 57, 76, 92, 96, 99, 108 Africanization, 70, 89 AIDS, 206, 216, 219, 220, 245, 299 Airbus, 55 Alarcón, Daniel, 240, 250 Alarcón, Norma, 55 Albizu Campos, Pedro, 114, 119 Alfaro, Luis, 206, 250, 270, 271, 304 Algarín, Miguel, 123 Alire Sáenz, Benjamin, 12, 13, 18-19, 29, 31, 36, 41, 52, 125, 209-51, 268, 283, 300, 312, Carry Me Like Water, 18-19, 36, 41, 52, 209-51, 268, 283, 301, 312, Dark and Perfect Angels, 248, Flowers for the Broken, 249, The House of Forgetting, 249 Allende, Isabel, 229 Almaguer, Tomás, 205 Alvarez, Julia, 306, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 306 Alvarez Borland, Isabel, 207 America/América, 11-13, 25-29,

31, 63, 216, 228. See U.S.A. American apartheid, 132-34, 148, 154, 156 American dream, 11-12, 17, 4647, 127, 131, 132, 136-37, 140, 148, 151, 154, 180, 185, 196, 198, 204, 210-11, 230, 238, 280, 285, 288, 318, 319 American exceptionalism, 26, 101, 161, 237, 301 Anaya, Rudolfo, 240, 250 Anderson, Benedict, 24, 38, 161 Andrade, Mario de, 276 Andrade, Oswaldo de, 253, 303 Androcentrism, 17, 35, 103, 113, 181, 183, 240, 285, 296, 302 Angeles Torres, María de los, 161, 166, 193 Anti-Americanism, 13, 16, 17, 24, 60, 69, 75-78, 82, 85, 93, 106, 210, 229, 238, 246, 249, 259, 269, 290, 299, 300, 309 Antigua, 107 Antilles/Caribbean, 22, 29-31, 45, 55, 57, 64, 78, 86, 87, 94, 98, 99, 101, 104, 107, 108, 117, 185, 187, 19, 206, 249, 284, 314 Antropofagia. See Cultural cannibalism Anzaldúa, Gloria, 43, 46, 56, 57, 168, 205, 212, 219, 248, 249 Aparicio, Frances, 14, 21, 22, 48, 52, 55, 57, 108, 267 Aponte-Parés, Luis, 132 Appropriation, 14, 37, 51, 52, 56, 70, 83, 108, 249, 254, 256-57, 258, 259, 266, 288, 291, 301, 308, 309, 312 Apter-Cragnolino, Aída, 107

Aranda, José, 39 Arguedas, José María, 33, 55 Arguelles, Lourdes, 205 Arrizón, Alicia, 21, 22 Arteaga, Alfred, 241, 249 Artist, 20, 41, 102, 110, 121, 122, 156, 183, 204, 308, 311, 314, as Hero, 284, 288, 295, 302, 305, Performance, 19, 39, 43, 253-306, 308, 311 Asia, 30, 32, 218, 305, 310 Assimilation, 11, 32, 45, 46, 49, 51, 57, 122, 165, 205, 238, 268, 273 Attinasi, John, 112 Australia, 20, 56, 249, 283, 303, 307-15, 318 Azim, Firdous, 86 Aztlán, 51, 239-45, 246, 250, 269, 275, 276, 280, 284, 292, 293 Bach, Robert, 53 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 167, 272, 277 Balkanization, 288 Balseiro, Isabel, 96 Barrio, 16-17, 30, 52, 109-157, 165, 166, 200-1, 238, 249, 267-77, 292 Bartra, Roger, 248 Bary, Leslie, 253, 258, 303 Behar, Ruth, 303, 305 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 55, 57 Benmayor, Rina, 57 Berelowitz, Jo-Anne, 287, 305 Berryman, Phillip, 233 Betances, Ramón Emeterio, 114 Beverley, John, 35, 38, 43, 53, 56 Bewitched, 124 Bhabha, Homi, 56 Bible, 117, 232-3, 250 Biculturalism, 34, 222, 250, 287 350

Bildungsroman, 109, 126 Bilingualism, 64, 112, 123, 207, 231, 269, 283, 289, 305 Blanqueamiento, 92 Bodily economy, 114, 140-45, 154, 157, 179, 206, 296. See Gender Bolívar, Simón, 49 Bond, Anthony, 307-8, 315 Bonilla, Frank, 22 Border, U.S., Border-crossing trope, 46, 64-65, 102, 216, 235, 236, 242, 247, 248, 278, 283-87, 290, 300-1, 310, 314, 317, Border logics, 1112, 15, 23-31, 202, 204, 21122, 238, 246, 247, 301, 317, 318, Discontinuities and continuities, 28-31, 123, 188, 310, in Florida Strait, 14-15, 28, 29, 30, 169, 176, 193, 194, 198, 202, 204, 263-64, 309, as Pathologized space, 212, as Revolving door, 214, U.S.-Mexican, 15, 18, 20, 27-31, 209-51, 263, 280-306, 308, 309, 312. See Frontier/Frontera Borderization, 291-92, 300 Borderlands, 18, 20, 29-30, 46, 55, 211, 212, 215, 228, 239, 243, 249, 250, 308 Borderlessness, 282, 284, 286, 287, 291-92, 299, 302 Border paradigm, 291-92, 309 Border, The, 250 Border Art Workshop, 287, 305, 307 Borderline, 250 Boricua, 115 Borinquen, 93-94 Borinqueña, La, 93 Borneman, John, 207

Boschetto-Sandoval, Sandra, 55 Boundary rider, 20, 109, 133, 243, 307-9, 318 Bourgeoisie, 18, 48, 76, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 102, 127, 170, 181, 187, 192, 195, 198. See class Bourdieu, Pierre, 272 Bourgois, Philippe, 133, 137, 140, 143, 156, 157 Boyarin, Jonathan, 238 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 22526, Lady Audley’s Secret, 225-26, 235 Braschi, Giannina, 155 Bridge, between cultures trope, 80, 101-3, 189, 193, 213, 301, 313-14 Bridge at Remagen, The, 125 Brontë, Charlotte, 86-88, 107, Jane Eyre, 86-88, 107 Bronx, El, 16-17, 109-57, 200 Brotherston, Gordon, 305-6 Bush, George, 286, 297 Bush, George, Jr., 27, 207 Bustamante, Jorge, 214 Bustamante, Nao, 19, 255-67, 302, 303 Bustos Fernández, María, 105 Butler, Judith, 220 Cabot, John, 25 California, 18, 21, 39, 48, 80, 210, 255, 279-80 Calvo Ospina, Hernando, 159 Camila, 124 Camp, 271-72, 277, 304 Campos, Haroldo de, 303 Canon, 25, 125-27, 228, 237, African-American, 129-31, Chicano, 248, 249-50, Cuban, 205, Cuban-American, 205, Feminist, 86, Latin

American, 222-23, Nuyorican, 124-31, 155, 156, Puerto Rican, 69, 96, 313 Spanish, 68-69, U.S., 12431, 154, 222-23, 228, 237, Western, 86, 249 Cañaveral, 107 Capitalism, 11, 24, 26, 31, 39, 61, 71, 76, 77, 91, 93, 104, 105, 117, 155, 186, 187, 188, 235, 266, 281, 310 Caribbean. See Antilles Carpentier, Alejo, 107, El reino de este mundo, 107 Carrasco, Tomás, 270, 303 Cars, 11, 132, 136, 139, 140, 143, 153, 181, 200-1 Cartography, 20, 50, 283, 285, 294-99, 301, 306, 314 Casablanca, 125 Castillo, Debra, 73, 82, 94-95, 105, 247 Castro, Fidel, 111, 169, 182, 184, 185, 187, 189, 196, 263 Castro, Max, 207 Castronovo, Ross, 301 Catholicism, 92, 164, 221, 244, 294 Cavallo, Susana, 60, 107 Césaire, Aimé, 107, La tragedie du roi Christophe, 107 Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie, 210 Chagoya, Enrique, 304 Chanady, Amaryll, 54 Chandler, Raymond, 126, 130, 156 Chávez-Silverman, Etienne J., 156 Chávez-Silverman, Susana, 22, 52, 55, 57, 156, 206, 267, 305 Chiapas, 255, 258, 261, 262, 351

265, 266 Chicago, 17, 21, 30, 160, 185, 195, 199, 200, 201, 206, 213, 233, 244 Chicano(s), 12, 15, 18, 19, 27, 28-30, 32, 36, 41, 48, 49, 51, 125, 201-3, 205-6, 207, 20951, 254, 267-306, 311 Chicano Movement, 49, 51, 240 Chicano Secret Service, 303 Chicano Studies, 15, 32 Chingada, La. See La Malinche Christian, Karen, 21 Christiane F., 126 Christophe, Henri, 107 Citizenship, 11, 27, 46, 47, 50, 77, 122, 185, 197, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 226, 234, 235, 242-43, 246, 278, 301 Ciudad Juárez, 18, 21, 209, 21113, 215, 216, 228, 245, 246, 247, 248, 312 Cixous, Hélène, 149 Class, 36, 38, 43, 49, 89, 102, 103, 107, 184, 200, 216, 218, 224, 225, 227, 232, 235-37, 265, 302, Conflict, 16, 41, 44, 63, 70, 73, 75, 122, 129, 132, 134, 156, 191, 235-37, 246, 267, Middle, 18, 59, 99, 132-33, 171, 173, 178, 181, 187-88, 189, 195, 197, 201, 217-18, 221, 230, 235-37, 265, 268, 303, Upper/Ruling, 35, 39, 64, 66, 69, 74, 75, 81, 83, 91, 96, 99, 105, 216, 226, 235-37, Working, 61, 63, 73, 76, 80, 83, 87, 94, 96, 104, 105, 116, 133, 134, 153, 155, 216, 217, 221, 229, 236-37, 267, 271-72. See Bourgeoisie, Elite, Oligarchy, Plantocracy, Transclass affilia352

tion Cliff, Michelle, 107, Claiming An Identity They Taught Me To Despise, 107, No Telephone to Heaven, 107 Close dance, 52, 176-77 Closet, 18, 168-72, 210, 217-28, 231, 236, 247, 248, 250. See Coming out Collazo, Michael, 131, 156, 157 Collins, Tom (aka Joseph Furphy), 318, Such is Life, 318 Collinson, Ian, 156 Colón, Jesús, 155 Colonialism, 30, 34, 40, 55, 56, 102, 253, 254, 256, 257, 258, 262, 287, 288, British, 86, 107, 307, 308, 313, 315, 318, and Puerto Rico, 16, 20, 28, 36, 59, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 76, 77, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 105, 117, 122, 153, 155, 163, 179, 171, 188, 191, 205, 246, Spanish, 20, 62, 68, 69, 70, 288, U.S., 16, 25, 26, 36, 39, 51, 52, 54, 59, 65, 77, 97, 101, 110, 117-20, 133, 188, 203, 210, 211, 241, 274, 276, 278, 280, 281, 317. See Imperialism Columbus, Christopher, 25, 119, 253, 256, 275, 305, 306 Coming out, 217-22, 223, 224, 228, 236, 245, 249 Communism, 183, 191, 197, 198, 298 Constitution, U.S., 25 Contact zone, 20, 30-31, 34, 109, 279, 308, 314 Cornejo-Polar, Antonio, 56 Coronil, Fernando, 55 Cortes, Felix, 155 Cosmopolitanism, 16, 40, 48,

64, 65, 72, 102, 192, 287, 301 Counter narratives, 14, 19, 20, 21, 31, 67, 100, 101, 137, 154, 229, 249, 253, 254, 257, 279, 297, 314, 315, 318 Coyote, 219, 222-24, 250 Crack, 17, 109, 115, 126, 129, 131-54, 157, 201. See Drugs Creole, 16, 33, 39, 59, 66, 68, 69-70, 77, 80, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 96, 99, 103, 257, 286 Criminalization, 17, 46, 51, 52, 132, 133, 135, 145, 156, 213, 234-36 Cruz, Celia, 159 Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo, 106 Cuadros, Gil, 206, 250-51, 306 Cuba, 18, 25, 27, 28, 29, 32, 42, 45, 105, 107, 118, 125, 159, 161-69, 173, 174, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186-88, 190, 193, 194, 197, 198, 202, 204. See Greater Cuba Cuban-Americans, 12, 15, 1718, 19, 42, 48, 50, 55, 57, 159-208, 254, 255, 267, 284 Cuban-American Studies, 15 Cubanía, 161, 165, 167, 186 Cuban Revolution, 28, 42, 118, 167, 169, 181-84, 185, 18687, 188, 189, 193, 194, 19899, 205, 207, 263 Culonización, 72, 106 Cultural cannibalism, 19, 33, 253-306 Cultural capital, 13, 14, 21, 26, 42, 63, 67, 80, 95, 100, 120, 124, 125-26, 128, 131, 137, 142, 154, 228, 237, 272, 307, 311, 315, 316, 318 Cultural politics, 13, 14, 19, 20,

33, 267, 290 Cultural production, 13, 20, 22, 31, 34, 37, 38, 42, 124, 125, 131, 159, 253, 254, 257, 266, 277, 278, 309, 310, 311, 312, 315, 319 Cultural studies, 21, 26, 32, 44, 45, 55, 305, 307, 316 Cultural transvestism, 257, 267, 271, 277, 278, 288, 302 Dada, 256 Dance, 52, 122, 166, 176-78, 179, 213, 275, 313, Danza, 16, 72, 88, 95-97, 108, Plena, 108. See Close dance Darder, Antonia, 22, 48, 53, 57 Dávila, Arlene, 57, 70, 92 Davis, Lisa Anne, 107 Declaration of Independence, U.S., 25 Declaration of Rights, U.S., 25 De Crescenzo, Teresa, 205 Delgado, Richard, 22 Denton, Nancy, 156 Deterritorializaton, 89, 204, 298, 314 Dialectic of antipathy, 18, 18491, 192 Diaspora, 30, 117, 172, 181, 241 Díaz, Junot, 131, 156, 157, 206, 311 Díaz Caballero, Jesús, 55 Díaz-Quinoñes, Arcadio, 55 Dickens, Charles, 128-30, 154, Oliver Twist, 128-30 Diego, José de, 106 Dietz, James, 76, 105 Disidentification, 178, 181 Domestics, 41, 48, 214, 276, 285-86 Dominicanos, 15, 48, 53, 111, 112, 153, 192, 206, 306 353

Dominican Republic, 306 Donahue, 135 Dorfman, Ariel, 54 Dos Passos, John, 118 Drugs, 16, 51, 99, 105, 109, 112, 116, 124-53, 157, 276. See Crack Dussel, Enrique, 232-33 Dyer, Richard, 243 Effeminization, 79, 103 Eliot, Charles, 25 Elite, 15, 33, 38-40, 44, 56, 212, 229, 253, 257, 318, Creole, 16, 33, 39, 66, 69, 70, 99, Cuban-exile, 183, and Music, 95-96, and Nation, 3840, 44, 69, 76, 91, 102-3, Puerto Rican, 16, 59, 66, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 85, 91, 92, 95, 96, 99, 102-3, 105, and Textuality, 38-40, 56, 63, 95, 253, 257 Elliott, Stephan, 313 El Paso, 18, 21, 30, 209-51 El Salvador, 53 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 47, 150, 218, 297 English Only Movement, 28, 207, 293 Ericsson, Leif, 25 Espíritu, Yen, 49 Estefan, Gloria, 125 Exile, 244, 246, 249, 250, 295, 298, 314, Chicano, 209, 212, 219, 221, 234, 249, Cuban, 17-18, 28, 31, 52, 57, 158208, Mexican, 209, 231 Existentialism, 129, Existential malaise, 169, 212 Fairy tale, 71, 218, 151, 154, 224, 246 354

Falcón, Angel, 155 Family, Chicano, 36-37, 168, 208, 224, 227, 234, 246, 249, 255, 267-68, 271, 274, 275, Cuban-American, 36-37, Family-nation nexus, 36, 71, 161-167, 169, 172, 186, 227, 230, 236, 256, Gran familia, 70, 161, 184, Nuyorican, 113, 116, 117, 119. 136. 142, 143, 147, 152, 156, Puerto Rican, 36, 59, 66, 69, 71, 73, 74-75, 80-81, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93, 99, 100, 105 Faris, Wendy, 227, 229, 250 Feliz, 175, 207 Femininity, 35-36, 75, 99, 142, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152, 157, 173, 183, 208, Latina, 148, 150, 151, 157, 166, 173, 183, 202, and Puerto Rico, 72, 79, 97, 101, 103. See Gender, Sexuality Feminism, 14, 16, 22, 35, 60, 61, 66, 83, 85-86, 87, 88, 90, 92-93, 103, 106, 107, 108, 149, 169, 181, 225, 230, 293 Fernández, Joseíto, 159 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 54 Ferré, Rosario, 12, 15-16, 17, 18, 30, 36, 39, 52, 59-108, 109, 110, 112, 119, 121, 183, 192, 194, 205, 236, 246-47, 249, 259, 267, 284, 286, 301, 316-17, Eccentric Neighborhoods, 64, Flight of the Swan, 64, 105, The House on the Lagoon, 64, 106, Maldito amor, 15, 59, 60, 61-63, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 78, 79, 80, 89, 103, 106, 107, 108, Sweet Diamond Dust, 15-16, 30, 36, 52, 59-108, 109, 121,

183, 192, 205, 246, 267, 286, 301 Fifth World, 299 Filer, Malva, 107 First World, 40, 259, 261, 263, 265, 266, 297, 298-99, 300, 306, 311, 314 Film, 11, 17, 22, 115, 124, 125, 126, 134, 138, 139, 143, 155, 201, 250, 267, 278, 311, 312, 313, 314, 318 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 126, 130 Flint, Kate, 227, 230 Flores, Juan, 22, 50, 54, 55, 57, 72, 101-2, 104, 106, 112, 122, 123, 124, 155, 301 Flores, Lauro, 55 Flores, William, 57 Florida, 54, 185, 207. See Miami Florida Strait, 14-15, 28, 29, 30, 169, 176, 193, 194, 198, 202, 204, 263-64, 309 Folklorization, 92 Fort Apache, 124 Fourth World, 297-99, 306, 314 Fox, Claire, 250, 289, 291 Freedman, Jerrold, 250 Frontier/Frontera, 15, 16, 27-30, 48, 54, 55, 80, 94, 103, 104, 109, 131-40, 147, 154, 156, 169, 188, 192-93, 194, 198, 200, 203-4, 209, 211, 238, 247, 279, 280, 284, 286, 291, 300, 307, 309-10, 313, 318, Australian, 307, 310, Florida Strait, 14-15, 28, 29, 30, 169, 176, 193, 194, 198, 202, 204, 263-64, 309, in Historiography, 27, 39, 54, in Latin America, 28-29, 54, Myth, 28-29, 54, 198, 218, 300, Urban, 109, 131-40, 147, 154, 156, U.S.-Mexican, 15,

18, 20, 27-30, 31, 203, 20951, 263, 280-306, 308, 309, 312. See Border Fuentes, Carlos, 229 Fusco, Coco, 12, 19-20, 22, 42, 43, 52, 57, 205, 253-78, 287, 289, 290, 301-2, 303, 304, 305, 307, 308-9, 311, 312, Pochonovela, 19, 255, 26778, 301-2, 303, Stuff, 19, 255-67, 268, 272, 277, 289, 300, 302, 303, ‘Two Undiscovered Indians Visit,’ 303, 307, 312 Fuss, Diana, 171, 206 Gablik, Suzi, 303 Gangs, 124, 134, 137-40, 141, 144, 145, 234, 238, 244, 275, 276 García, Cristina, 160, 161, Dreaming in Cuban, 160, 161, The Agüero Sisters, 160 García-Acevedo, María R., 250 García Canclini, Néstor, 48, 53, 56, 305 García Marquéz, Gabriel, 229 Garza-Falcón, Leticia, 54 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 206, 248, 279, 285, 304 Gates, David, 156 Gautier Benítez, José, 68-69, 71, 79, 94, 95-96, 107 Gelpí, Juan, 106 Gender, 21, 29, 34-36, 37, 40, 48, 56, 70, 71, 79, 81, 84, 88, 96, 97, 107, 113-14, 141-52, 157, 166, 167-68, 172-73, 176, 178-81, 183, 195, 200201, 202, 207, 214, 216, 225, 246, 247, 258, 259, 263, 271, 278, 285-86, 187, 296, 305. See Femininity, Machismo, 355

Masculinity, Sexuality Genre, 33, 42, 60, 83, 97, 107, 108, 121, 125, 131, 139, 156, 183, 211, 222-29, 235, 268, 277, 278, 304 Gilb, Dagoberto, 248 Gilbert, Sandra, 107 Globalization, 20, 48, 104, 25556, 259, 266, 291, 292, 297, 298, 299, 302, 311, 312, 314, 315 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 12, 1920, 29, 39, 43, 52, 211, 25355, 278-306, 307, 308, 309, 311, 312, 314, 315, 318, ‘Border Brujo’ (script), 283, 298, 305, Border Brujo (video), 289, 291, 304, ‘Califas,’ 20, 255, 278-88, 290, 291, 294, 295, 296, 302, 303, 304, 305, 312, ‘New World Border,’ 20, 255, 288-300, 302, 303, 305, ‘Two Undiscovered Indians Visit,’ 303, 307, 312 González, Elián, 207 González, José Luis, 76 Gonzalez, Ray, 22 González-Quevedo, Lydia, 6466 Graburn, Nelson, 306 Greater Cuba, 163, 191, 192, 193 Greene, Graham, 126 Gregory, Stephen, 107 Grosfoguel, Ramón, 104 ‘Guantanamera,’ 159, 177, 185 Guantánamo Naval Base, 27 Gubar, Susan, 107 Guevara, Che, 136, 272-73 Guha, Ranajit, 55 Guillory, John, 125, 127 Guinness, Gerald, 71 356

Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl, 210, 217 Gutiérrez Mouat, Ricardo, 86, 106 Habitus, 112, 123, 130, 137, 272 Haiti, 107 Haitians, 54, 196 Harlow, Barbara, 56 Harpur, Jorjet, 201, 205 Hegemony, 14, 44-45, 47, 48, 50-52, 53, 60, 65, 71, 85, 95, 220, 221, 242, 318, Alternative-hegemony, 44, 50, 89, 121, 292, 294, 295, 302, Counter-hegemony, 14, 33, 44-45, 51, 84, 102, 137, 257, 264, 308, Cultural, 37, 38, 39, 42, 47, 108, 125, 154, 207, 256-57, 262, 263, 264, 265, 302, 308, Gang, 134, 153, Hegemonic processes, 13, 15, 41-42, 53, 137, 226, 233, 237, 277, and Latinidad, 50-52, U.S., 11-12, 14, 24, 28, 53, 54, 96, 119, 133, 153, 154, 193, 207, 240, 242, 244, 246, 277, 293, 300, 311, 317, and Whiteness, 56, 111, 130, 133, 134, 195, 239-45. See Colonialism, Imperialism, Oligarchy, Plantocracy Hemingway, Ernest, 228 Hennessy, Alistair, 54 Heredia, Paula, 303 Hernández, Carmen D., 156 Hernández, Librada, 207 Herrera-Sobek, María, 53, 206 Heteronormativity, 24, 36-37, 88, 160, 168, 173, 175-76, 203, 206, 230, 236, 240, 262, 296, 317 Heterosexuality, 35, 36-37, 145, 149, 161, 165, 169, 172, 176,

194, 296 Heyck, Denis Lynn Daly, 22 Hicks, Emily, 222, 250 Hijuelos, Oscar, 160, 205, Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, 160, 205, Our House in the Last World, 160 Hinojosa, Rolando, 248 Hintz, Suzanne, 62-63, 75, 96, 106, 107 Hispanic, 27, 47-50, 51, 57, 63, 92, 111, 185, 195, 196, 243, 257, 269. See Latino Homophobia, 88, 141, 142, 167, 168, 171, 174, 175 Homosexuality, 74, 88, 106, 144, 157, 167, 172, 199, 206, 217. See Lesbian, Queer, Sexuality Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, 22 Horno-Delgado, Asunción, 22 House, 86-87, 107, 249, of Fiction, 86-87, 107, 249, Patriarchal, 230-34 Hughes, Winifred, 225, 229, 235 Hulme, Peter, 86, 303 Hybridity, 45, 56, 177, 257, 290, 293, 295, 296, 304, 309, 314 Hyphen, 130, 172, 176 Identification, 21, 35, 43, 65, 86, 142, 170, 171-72, 178, 206, Chicano, 243, 300, CubanAmerican, 164, 178, 181, 193, 199, 204, 205, Latino, 22, 29, 49-52, 57, 151, 164, National, 36, 120, 151, 164, Nuyorican, 123, 127, 151 Identity, 34, 35, 36, 41, 43, 65, 86, 99, 142, 171-72, 178, 206, 214-25, 227, 232, 265, 271, 276, 278, 279, 283, 290, 292, 295, 296, Chicano, 206,

210, 214, 215-25, 228, 232, 243, 248, 249, 250, 271-73, 277, 278, 300, 303, 306, Cuban-American, 164, 176, 177, 178, 181, 193, 198, 199, 202, 204, 205, 208, Latino, 18, 19, 27, 42, 46-49, 50, 52, 57, 111, 121, 122, 267, 27173, 318, Mexican, 35-36, 218, 296, National, 36, 37, 48, 53, 120, 151, 163, 164, 202, 204, 227, 278, Nuyorican, 111, 121, 122, 123, 127, 151, 153, Puerto Rican, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 72, 90, 92, 97, 102, 123, 153, 171, Sexual, 167-72, 173, 175, 187, 203, 205, 206, 208, 306, U.S., 18, 19, 27, 50, 111, 153, 202, 203-4, 210, 214-25, 238, 248, 265, 283, 290, 300 Illegal aliens, 11, 51, 213, 215, 216, 217, 222, 234, 249, 281, 289, 301 Imagined community, 24-31, 54, 127-28, Australian, 314, Chicano, 229, 235, 247, 248, 273, 274, 276, 309, Cuban, 167, 184, 186, 193, CubanAmerican, 160, 161-67, 168, 169, 181, 185, 186, 189, 190, 192, 193, 198, 199, 203-4, 205, 207, Gang as, 131-40, Latino, 14, 18, 45-52, 11415, 186, 191, 193, 254, 309, 317, Nuyorican, 115-24, 131, 147, 155, Puerto Rican, 59, 61, 79, 71, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84, 89, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, 104, 181, 186, 190, 192, 194, Trans-American, 28, 49-50, 61, 118, 184, 185, 282, 285, 287, 291, 295, 357

297-99, 302-3, U.S., 11-16, 21, 23-31, 45, 47, 52, 53, 59, 76, 98, 101-3, 119, 127, 128, 130, 147, 153, 154, 155, 160, 161, 186, 193, 199, 207-8, 229, 235, 248, 254, 255, 259, 264, 273, 274, 276, 280, 287, 291, 294, 297, 298, 301-2, 303, 316, 318 Imperialism, 31, 37, 87, 275, 279, 280, 291, British, 87, Spanish, 74, 88, 275, 280, U.S., 16, 25, 26, 36, 39, 51, 54, 65, 77, 97, 101, 110, 117-20, 133, 188, 203, 210, 211, 241, 276, 278, 280, 281, 317. See Colonialism Independence, Cuban, 25, Puerto Rican, 18, 59, 64, 66, 67, 75, 76, 78, 81, 85, 94, 98, 100, 104, 106, 119, 186, 189, 190, 191, Post-U.S., 292, U.S., 25 Indigeneity, 30, 33, 35, 36, 57, 70, 94, 220, 222, 249-50, 253, 254, 256, 258, 260, 262, 280, 296, 298, 306, 308, 314 Informal economy, 109, 132-33 INS, 213. See la Migra Insularity, 30, 99, 101, 109, 115, 160, 164, 169, 191, 192, 193, 198, 199, 203 Intellectuals, 14, 19-20, 38, 4044, 56, 67, 71, 75, 102, 110, 127, 148, 149, 154, 254, 257, 265, 266, 267, 277, 302, 317 Intertextuality, 16, 19, 42, 6263, 80, 86-88, 89, 96, 103, 124, 127-31, 138, 154, 177, 185, 205, 222-29, 235, 246, 268, 315, 317 Isaacs, Jorge, 82, María, 82 Islas, Arturo, 248 358

Jaffe, Janice, 62-63, 106 Jagose, Annamarie, 47, 172, 211, 217 James, C.L.R., 107, The Black Jacobins, 107 James, Henry, 107 Jeffersons, The, 124 Jesse, 311 Joanou, Alice, 289 Johnson, David, 215 Johnson, Randall, 253, 261, 303 Jones Act, 77 Jones-Correa, Michael, 57 Joseph, Gilbert, 54 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, 90 Kadir, Djelal, 316 Kahlo, Frida, 274, 294 Kaminsky, Amy, 83-84, 90, 92 Kaplan, Amy, 26 Kearney, Michael, 215 Kerouac, Jack, 199 Kincaid, Jamaica, 107, Annie John, 107, A Small Place, 107 Kinship networks, 17, 143, 16167, 173, 212, 235, 256 Kitsch, 167, 261, 270, 271-72, 277, 304 Klor de Alva, Jorge, 57 Laguerre, Enrique, 107, La llamarada, 107 Lamming, George, 70 Lancaster, Roger, 141, 142, 17374 Language, 30, 33, 55, 57, 60-68, 69, 72, 80, 101, 112-14, 118, 164, 202, 246, 249, 291, 294, 310, English, 28, 51, 60-68, 75, 93, 94, 103, 104, 105, 109, 111, 112-14, 155, 164, 166, 175, 183, 195, 196, 207,

214, 222, 235, 246, 250, 258, 261-62, 269, 289, 293, 310, Ingleñol, 113, 288, Spanglish, 67, 113, 279, 288, 289, 304, 305, Spanish, 60-68, 69, 75, 105, 109, 112-14, 155, 174, 175, 214, 221, 224, 228, 231, 244, 249, 261, 263, 268, 269, 273, 275, 289, 293, 297, 305 Lao, Augustín, 122 Larsen, Neil, 30, 33, 37, 41, 55, 253-54, 276, 303 Latin American Subaltern Studies Group (LASSG), 23, 31, 38-39, 42, 43, 44, 53, 55-56, 304 Latinidad, 18, 47-52, 114-15, 186, 191, 193, 317 Latinization, 23, 47, 55, 57, 156, 198, 201, 298 Latino, vs Hispanic, 47-50, 57, 111, 243 Latino Studies, 14-16, 20, 21, 22, 42-53, 109, 167, 307, 316 Leal, Luis, 240 Legrand, Catherine, 54 Lesbian, 18, 160, 167-75, 190, 191, 192, 194, 196-203, 204, 205, 206, 221, 262, 306, 311 Lesbianization, 198, 200-1, 203, 204 Lewis, Oscar, 124 Liberal, 46, 90, 92, 128 Liberation theology, 232-33 Lionnet, Françoise, 55 Literary text, 38-53, AfricanAmerican, 129-31, Chicano, 222-29, 248, 249-50, Cuban, 205, Cuban-American, 160, 161, 177, 205, 207, as Cultural capital, 13, 14, 21, 42,

63, 67, 80, 95, 120, 124, 125-31, 142, 154, 228, 237, 311, 315, 218, Latin American, 176, 222-23, 256, 285, Nuyorican, 124-31, 155, 156, Puerto Rican, 69, 96, 313, as Scenario, 13, 53, Spanish, 68-69, and Subaltern representation, 38-45, and Transculturation, 31-53, U.S., 124-31, 154, 222-23, 228, 237, Western, 86, 249. See Canon Local, 11, 20, 33-34, 37, 49, 52, 62, 70, 97, 100, 132, 186, 253, 312, 315, 319 Lomeli, Francisco, 250 Lone Star, 250, 311 López, Ana, 22, 47, 48, 49, 57, 163, 167, 182, 191, 204 López, David, 49 López, Jennifer, 311 López, Lalo, 303 Los Angeles, 23, 53, 161, 265, 292 Luis, William, 21, 155, 176-77 McCracken, Ellen, 21 McCullough, Kate, 205 Machado, Eduardo, 55 Machismo, 35, 88, 114, 115, 140-46, 149, 165-67, 169, 173, 174, 175, 178, 179, 183, 201, 205, 206, 232, 260, 273 Maciel, David, 53, 250 Macunaíma, 276 Madero, Francisco, 272 Mad Max, 312, 318 Madonna, 294 Magical Realism, 224, 228-29, 250 Maldonado-Denis, Manuel, 105 Malinche, La, 36, 207, 232, 296, 359

299 Mallon, Florencia, 41, 55, 56 Malouf, David, 249, An Imaginary Life, 249 Manifest Destiny, 66 Mannheim, Bruce, 303, 305 Manzor, Lillian, 22 Maquiladoras, 41, 269, 274, 276, 292, 293 Mariel boatlift, 166, 168, 207 Marqués, René, 72, 79, 106 Martí, José, 28, 31, 49, 54, 118, 159, 160, 185, Versos sencillos, 159, 160 Martin, Ricky, 311 Martínez Echazábal, Lourdes, 107 Masculinity, 11, 20, 24, 36, 59, 78, 79, 95, 96-97, 100-1, 106, 114, 140-46, 149, 151, 157, 161, 173, 175, 208, 232, 288, 297, 302. See Gender, Machismo Massey, Douglas, 156 Master narratives, 69, 74, 107, 176-77, 179, 249, 264, 305 Matelski, Jill, 268 Matus, Jill, 225, 230 Mean Streets narrative, 123, 126, 130-31, 150, 156, 157 Melodrama, 82, 93, 225-29, 235 Menchú, Rigoberta, 43 Mestizaje, 33, 35-36, 46-47, 56, 92, 219, 239, 241, 246, 295 Metropolitanism, 32-34, 37, 39, 55, 64, 68, 76, 102, 105, 253, 262, 302, 314 Mexican Revolution, 209 Mexico, 22, 23, 27, 28, 54, 180, 197, 200, 203, 209, 211, 212, 220, 231, 239, 241, 245, 247, 248, 249, 255, 258, 263, 280, 281, 291 360

Miami, 23, 48, 160, 185, 191, 195, 196, 207, 284 Michaelsen, Scott, 215 Mignolo, Walter, 33, 41, 55 Miller, D.A., 228, 229 Migra, La, 213, 214, 215, 235, 237, 250, 308 Migration, 29, 30, 42, 46, 48, 53, 54, 57, 102, 176, 214-15, 238, 256, 289, 295, 296, 298, 309, 310, 317, Australian, 309, 314, Cuban, 176, 185, 188, 191, 193, 195, 207, Mexican, 54, 202, 209, 211, 214-15, 234, 235, 241-42, 249, 250, 255, 280 Puerto Rican, 61, 80, 99, 101, 104, 109, 150, 155, U.S. discourses of, 11-12, 27, 46, 238, 214-15 Miscegenation, 35, 56, 74, 86, 247 Mitchell, David, 161 Mobility, 11-13, 15, 46, 140, 147, 150, 156, 191, 192-201, 210, 234, 236, 238, 280, 285, 303, 317 Modernism, 43, 256-57 Modernization, 33, 64, 66, 77, 98, 105, 117 Modernity, 55, 76-79, 82, 296 Mohr, Eugene, 155 Mohr, Nicholasa, 155 Monroe Doctrine, 26 Montaigne, 253 Montevideo, 45 Mora, Pat, 248 Moraga, Cherríe, 31, 55, 205, 250, 270 Morel Campos, Juan, 68, 95, 107 Morrison, Toni, 130 Moy, James, 300

Mulatto, 66, 70, 71, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 90, 100, 170, 292, 295 Mullen, Edward, 108 Multiculturalism, 34, 50, 299, 309 Muñoz, Elías Miguel, 206 Muñoz, José Esteban, 22, 37, 42, 159, 165, 178, 185, 192, 204, 205, 206, 270, 271, 304 Music, 11, 16, 30, 32, 41, 42, 76, 94, 95-100, 108, 110, 122, 124, 125, 128, 159, 164, 176, 177, 190, 195, 229, 261, 273, 281, 312, 317, Classical, 93, 100, Guarachas, 125, Heavy metal, 125, Hip-hop, 125, 128, Mambos, 111, 125, 159, Pop, 125, Salsa, 100, 125. See Dance Mystic Friends, 270 NAFTA, 27, 281, 298 Nahuatl, 240, 294, 305 National imaginary, 24-31, 54, 127-28, Australian, 314, Chicano, 229, 235, 247, 248, 273, 274, 276, 309, Cuban, 167, 184, 186, 193, CubanAmerican, 160, 161-67, 168, 169, 181, 185, 186, 189, 190, 192, 193, 198, 199, 203-4, 205, 207, Nuyorican, 11524, 131, 147, 155, Puerto Rican, 59, 61, 79, 71, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84, 89, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, 104, 181, 186, 190, 192, 194, U.S., 11-16, 21, 23-31, 45, 47, 52, 53, 59, 76, 98, 101-3, 119, 127, 128, 130, 147, 153, 154, 155, 160, 161, 186, 193, 199, 207-8, 229, 235, 248, 254, 255, 259,

264, 273, 274, 276, 280, 287, 291, 294, 297, 298, 301-2, 303, 316, 318 Nationalism, 61, 106, Chicano, 49, 268, 273, 287, Cuban, 167, Latino, 169, Puerto Rican, 49, 65, 66, 69, 74, 76, 78-79, 85, 99, 100, 106, 114, 116, 118, 119, 126, U.S., 196, 247 Native Americans, 57, 249-50, 306 Negrismo, 108 Negrón-Muntaner, Frances, 67, 104 Negrón-Portillo, Mariano, 104 Nelson, Candace, 57, 207 Neruda, Pablo, 283 New Orleans, 45, 233 New world, 20, 25, 78, 80, 188, 256, 279, 285, 288-97, 298, 299 New World Order, 297-98 New York City, 21, 23, 30, 48, 80, 109-57, 177, 182, 233, 258, 265 Nicaraguans, 54, 201 Nightmare on Elm St III, 124, 155 Noriega, Chon, 22, 47, 48, 49, 50, 57, 167 Novela rosa, 82, 183 Nuyorican discourse, 17, 12124, 255, 256 Nuyoricans, 12, 16-17, 41, 104, 109-57, 192 Obejas, Achy, 12, 17-18, 30, 36, 50, 52, 159-208, 221, 284, 301, 311, Days of Awe, 160, Memory Mambo, 12, 17-18, 36, 50, 52, 159-208, 221, 301, We Came All the Way 361

From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?, 160, 18081, 196-203, 206 Oboler, Suzanne, 26, 47, 49, 57 Oedipal conflict, 144-45 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 306 Oguibe, Olu, 264, 265 Olalquiaga, Celeste, 304 Oligarchy, 16, 39, 40, 59, 65, 66, 76, 78, 80, 85, 89, 90, 91, 93, 97, 99, 100-1, 103, 105, 107, 286 On the Waterfront, 124 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 124 Orientalism, 52 Ortiz, Fernando, 32-33, 44, 45, 56, 57, 70, 315 Ortiz, Vilma, 22 Ortiz-Márquez, Maribel, 199 Ovid, 249 Oviedo, Fernández de, 70 Oviedo, José, 53 Padilla, Felix, 49, 57 Palmer, William, 128 Palés Matos, Luis, 108 Palo Alto, 218, 233 Panama Canal, 25 Pan-Americanism, 28, 49, 61, 118, 185, 295, 297 Paredes, Américo, 248 Parody, 19, 52, 107, 128, 190, 253, 254, 259, 260,261, 264, 266, 268, 269, 271, 272, 274, 277, 278, 279, 281, 282, 286-91, 293, 302, 303 Passing, 214, 215-18, 223-24, 226, 228, 229, 237, 244, 246, 248. See Cultural transvestism Patriarchy, 16, 18, 35, 36, 39, 52, 65, 66, 72, 84, 85, 88, 93, 362

96, 103, 106, 126, 145, 14648, 167, 175, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 226, 230-34, 278, 285, 287, 288, 296, 302, 317 Paz, Octavio, 35, 36, 104, 296, El laberinto de la soledad, 35, 36, 104, 296 Pedraza, Pedro, 112, 122 Pedraza, Silvia, 207 Pedreira, Antonio, 72, 79, 97-98, 99, 100, 106, Insularismo, 72, 97 Perera, Suvendrini, 45, 56, 177, 310 Pérez, Lisandro, 188 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 55, 57, 176, 205 Pérez Marín, Carmen, 106, 107 Pérez Prado, Dámaso, 111 Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 241, 250 Performance, 19-20, 22, 29, 39, 43, 52, 152, 159, 253-306, 307, 309, 312, and Body, 141-42, 220, 230-31 Pettit, Arthur, 250 Phallocentrism, 89, 98, 287 Philippines, 25, 313 Piedra, José, 45, 256, 303 Pietri, Piedro, 155 Pina, Michael, 240 Pino-Ojeda, Waleska, 89, 90, 105, 106 ‘Plan espiritual de Aztlán, El’ 239 Plantocracy, 59, 62, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 90, 96, 105, 106 Police, 109, 121, 132-33, 134, 138, 144, 179, 235, 238, 267, 280, 309 Ponce de León, Juan, 70, 88 Poniatowska, Elena, 105

Postcolonialism, 14, 26, 32, 33, 39, 56, 64, 98, 205, 250, 253, 256, 257, 314 Postmodernism, 42, 43, 57, 122 Postmodernity, 57, 122 Poyo, Gerald, 184 Prado Bellei, Sérgio Luiz, 303 Prakash, Gyan, 40 Pratt, Mary Louise, 30, 55, 56 Promised Land, 46, 233, 244, 299, 313 Prostitution, 157, 258, 263, 265, 283 Puerto Ricans, 12, 15-17, 18, 22, 23, 27, 36, 39, 48, 49, 50, 53, 57, 59-108, 109-57, 160, 163, 177, 184-86, 188, 189, 190-92, 201, 205, 207, 313, 315, 317 Puerto Rican Studies, 15 Puerto Rico, 12, 15-16, 17, 20, 23, 28, 55, 59-108, 109, 11117, 120, 125, 151, 153, 154, 155, 170-71, 188, 190, 191, 205, 207, 292, 313, 316 Queer, 14, 17, 22, 51, 160, 16875, 199, 205, 206, 207, 208, 231-32, 240, 245, 246, 250, 271, 304, 306, 313 Quevedo Villegas, Francisco de, 68-69, 74, 95 Quiñones, Ernesto, 155 Quintero Rivera, Ángel, 105, 108 Quiroga, José, 22, 206 Race, 16, 22, 39, 48, 55, 65, 66, 70, 73, 74, 81, 85, 91, 101, 156, 171, 180, 195, 246, 269, 286, 287, 294 Racialization, 11, 16, 21, 24, 37, 46, 56, 65, 74, 81, 88, 92-93, 94, 103, 107, 109, 115, 122,

129, 141, 171, 185, 191, 194, 195, 201, 242, 244, 286, 292, 295, 296, 317 Racism, 51, 96, 133, 186, 189, 195, 196 Radcliffe, Sarah, 54 Rafael Sánchez, Luis, 55, 104, 105, La guaracha del Macho Camacho, 105, La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, 105 Rama, Ángel, 33-34, 35, 55, 56 Ramos Otero, Manuel, 105, 106 Ramos Trinta, Aluizio, 226 Rascuachismo, 279, 304 Rausch, Jane, 54 Raza, La, 51, 269, 273 Reagan, Ronald, 286, 297 Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 55 Rechy, John, 248 Rector, Monica, 226 Reid-Pharr, Robert, 144, 157 Resemanticization, 31, 50, 52, 88, 165, 167, 177, 206, 240, 271 Resistance, 43, 44, 45, 53, 62, 66, 88, 95, 101, 131, 137, 151, 180, 233, 241, 254, 261, 269, 293, 315, 317 Reterritorialization, 45, 204, 282, 283, 285 Rhys, Jean, 86-88, 107, Wide Sargasso Sea, 86-88, 107 Rich, B. Ruby, 205 Richardson, Tony, 250 Rio Grande/Río bravo del norte, 202, 209, 212, 216, 234, 237, 238, 245, 247, 248-49, 276 Ríos Avila, Rubén, 105 Rivera, Angela, 313-14, 315, 318 Rivera, Edward, 155 Rivera, Tomás, 248 363

Rivero, Eliana, 191, 207 Rodó, José Enrique, 54, 106 Rodriguez, Abraham, 12, 16-17, 18, 30, 41, 42, 50, 52, 10957, 160, 173, 192, 193, 200, 201, 228, 267, 284, 301, Spidertown, 16-17, 41, 50, 52, 109-57, 160, 173, 192, 193, 200, 228, 238, 267, 301, The Boy Without a Flag, 109, 118-20, 126, 133, 155 Rodríguez, Clara, 57, 147, 156 Rodríguez, Ileana, 146 Rodriguez, Richard, 43, 46, 57, Hunger of Memory, 43, 46 Rodríguez, Roberto, 57 Román, David, 22, 51, 52, 57, 206, 276 Romance, 17, 94, 136, 140, 149, 151, 154, 189, 196 Romero, Mary, 22 Rose, Margaret, 268, 272 Rowe, William, 38, 173, 229, 235 Ruiz de Burton, María A., 39 Said, Edward, 52, 55 Saldívar, José David, 22, 28, 39, 54 Salinger, J.D., 156, Catcher in the Rye, 156 Salvatore, Ricardo, 54 Sánchez, Rosaura, 218 Sanders, James, 56 San Diego, 233, 292, 305, 307 Sandino, Augusto César, 272 Sandoval, Chela, 114 Sandoval, Ciro, 55 Sandoval[-Sánchez], Alberto, 21, 51, 52, 57, 104, 276 San Francisco, 30, 199, 215, 216, 233, 284 Santiago, Esmeralda, 155 364

Santiago-Valles, Kelvin, 74, 97, 105 Sartre, John Paul, 127, 129 Sayles, John, 250, 311 Schelling, Vivian, 38, 229, 235 Schwarz, Roberto, 266, 303 Second World, 298 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 217 Seinfeld, 57, 311 Self-subalternization, 16, 39, 65, 88, 160, 192, 236, 285, 286 Sensation novel, 19, 225-30, 232, 325, 246, 248 September 11 (2001), 28, 54, 207 Serna, Elias, 303 Sexuality, 35-37, 47, 48, 117, 140-47, 151, 167-75, 203, 205, 262, 300. See Bodily economy, Gender, Heterosexuality, Homosexuality, Lesbian, Machismo, Queer Shakespeare, 80 Shohat, Ella, 311 Sifuentes, Roberto, 20, 255, 288-96, 299, 302, 304, 312, 318 Slavery, 25, 30, 55, 69, 70, 82, 87, 88, 96, 99 Sleeping giant, 50-51 Smith, Michael Peter, 156 Smorkaloff, Pamela, 163, 205 Soap-opera, 93, 151, 224-28, 230, 235, 246, 268-78. See Telenovela Sontag, Susan, 304 Soto, Pedro Juan, 155, Spiks, 155 Spain, 20, 35, 59, 62, 68-69, 70, 80, 87, 91, 92, 111, 188 Spitta, Silvia, 32, 34, 35, 45, 55, 57, 106 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty,

40, 55, 286 Stam, Robert, 311 Statelessness, 120, 122, 131, 153, 166, 213 Stavans, Ilán, 51, 155, 157, 185 Stefancic, Jean, 22 Stereotypes, 19, 20, 51-52, 54, 124, 149, 150, 157, 214, 254, 257, 264, 267-79, 302, 308, 309, 314 Stewart, Barbara, 156 Subaltern/ity, 13, 14, 15, 16, 3844, 50, 55-56, 59, 60, 65, 67, 76, 80, 88, 90, 91, 96, 97, 99, 104, 108, 160-61, 194, 23233, 254, 256-58, 317-18, and artists/intellectuals, 38-44, 254-67, 272, 285-88, 301, 302, 305, Latino, 16-17, 18, 19-20, 39-44, 50, 110-15, 117, 122-24, 129, 136, 145, 152, 153-54, 160-61, 179, 186, 192, 198-99, 200, 204, 210-12, 214, 218, 234, 236, 238-39, 257-58, 261, 264, 272, 273, 277, 285, 291, 295, 300, 301, 02, 317, 318, Representation of, 38-44, 65, 67, 75, 81, 82, 84-85, 89, 93, 95, 100-1, 102-3, 121, 122-24, 154, 160-61, 239, 254-67, 285, 286-88, 301-2, 305, Self-subalternization, 16, 39, 65, 88, 160, 192, 236, 285, 286, Silence of, 40-42, 89, 115, 121, 122-24, 154, 212, 214, 216, 237-39, 286-88 Subaltern Studies, 15, 38-45, 53, 55-56 Suddenly Susan, 311 Sugar, 30, 32, 61, 66, 69, 71, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 85, 89, 90, 91, 99, 105, 109, 190, 305

Suro, Roberto, 46 Sydney Biennale, 20, 307-9, 312 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, 311 Tainos, 70-71, 80, 92, 93, 115, 123 Taussig, Michael, 56 Taylor, Diana, 32, 34, 47 Telenovela, 19, 226-30, 235, 267, 268-77, 317 Television, 38, 124, 143, 197, 226, 228, 270, 311 Territorialization, 203 Tess, 124 Testamento, 83-85 Testimonial/testimonio, 16, 42, 73, 83-85, 88, 89, 121, 237, 261, 262, 265, 267, 302, 317 Texas, 209-51, 308 Texas Rangers, 308 Thelen, David, 54 Third World, 194, 250, 253, 256, 259, 261, 262, 263, 265, 297, 299, 300, 306, 311, 314 Thomas, Piri, 130-31, 155, 156, 157, Down These Mean Streets, 130-31, 156, 157 Tienda, Marta, 57, 207 Tijuana, 283, 292, 305, 306, 307 Tolstoy, Leo, 126 Torres, Rodolfo, 22, 48, 53, 57 Tortillera, 174, 206 Tourism, 19, 209, 255, 259-64, 265, 278, 304, 306 Traffic, 12, 16, 21-23, 28, 30, 31, 209, in Drugs, 16, 51, 99, 105, 109, 112, 116, 124-53, 157, 276, Textual, 16, 61, 67, 68, 83, 85-90, 106, 109, 205, Transcultural, 32-38, 307-19, in Women, 34-36, 83, 93, 143, 152, 157, 266, 302 365

Transcendence, 17, 19, 20, 112, 120, 129, 130, 131, 150, 154, 160, 169, 189, 218, 219, 227, 234, 285, 286, 297, 298, 299, 304 Transclass affiliation, 16, 25, 26, 298, 56, 60, 63, 65, 80, 81, 85, 88, 89, 91-94, 286 Transculturation, 13-15, 19-20, 22, 32-53, 55, 56, 87, 101-3, 176-77, 228, 246, 253-54, 258, 261, 305, 307-18, 319, Andean, 33, 45, Antillean, 18, 31, 45, 57, 70, Chicano, 19, 192, 211, 214, 219, 241, 248, 269, 273, 274, 281, 183, Cuban, 18, 31, 45, 57, Cuban-American, 160, 162-63, 164, 165, 172, 176-77, 178, 186, 191, 194, 199, 202, 203, 204, From below, 56, 89, 229, and Gender/Sexuality, 18, 34-37, 143, 178, 199, 205, 206, and Hybridity, 45, 56, Latino, 13-14, 20, 21, 22, 30, 42-53, 55, 56, 57, 191, 279, 282-83, 285, 288, 289, 290, 293, 295, 302, 305, Limits of, 34-39, 315-16, and National logics, 16-17, 35-38, 279, 282, 289, 300, 301, Puerto Rican, 61, 63, 66, 67, 70, 80, 91, 96, 101-3, 104, 119, 124, 154, 313-14, Southern Cone, 45-46, and Subalternity, 13-14, 38-45, Tripartite schema, 32, 44, 318 Translation, 57, 61-64, 79, 262, 269, 289 Transnationality, 14, 19, 21, 48, 192, 263, 310, 315 Transvestite, 257, 262, 302, 313 366

Treachery, 100, 182, 207, 232, 296 Trickster, 222 Tropicalization, 51-52, 102, 157, 259, 264, 267, 272, 276 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 54, 55 Twain, Mark, 126, 130 Tyler, Carole-Anne, 223, 224 Tzara, Tristan, 256 Umbrellas, The, 312 U.S.A., Governing logics of, 1113, 23-31, as Imperial state, 16, 25, 26, 36, 39, 51, 54, 65, 77, 97, 101, 110, 117-20, 133, 188, 203, 210, 211, 241, 276, 278, 280, 281, 317, and Latino sectors, 23-31, 42-52, National imaginary, 11-16, 21, 23-31, 45, 47, 52, 53, 59, 76, 98, 101-3, 119, 127, 128, 130, 147, 153, 154, 155, 160, 161, 186, 193, 199, 207-8, 229, 235, 248, 254, 255, 259, 264, 273, 274, 276, 280, 287, 291, 294, 297, 298, 301-2, 303, 316, 318, as Promised land, 46, 244, 299 U.S.-Mexican border, 15, 18, 20, 27-30, 31, 209-51, 263, 280-306, 308, 309, 312 Utopia, 18, 52, 269, 284, 204, 210, 211, 223, 232, 233, 241, 248, 285, 286, 287, 291, 298, 308, 318 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 104, 229 Vasconcelos, José, 51, 106 Vázquez, Diego, 248 Vega, Ana Lydia, 104 Vega, Bernardo, Memorias de, 155

Vega Carney, Carmen, 106 Véliz, Claudio, 304 Vespucci, Amerigo, 25 Victorian novel, 19, 128-29, 224-26, 228, 230, 235, 246, 317 Vientós Gastón, Nilita, 105 Villa, Pancho, 272 Violence, 17, 45, 157, 191, 214, 257, Domestic, 72, 81, 11617, 175, 179, 181, 185, 189, 194, 230, 236, Racial, 93, 247, Spanish colonial, 62, 70, Urban, 109, 124, 128, 129, 131-40, 143, 234, 243, 276 Virgen de Guadalupe, 270, 272, as Gender model, 202, 237

Whiteness, 56, 111, 130, 133, 134, 195, 239-45 Whitman, Walt, 285, 294, 295, 297 Will and Grace, 311 Williams, Gareth, 56 Williams, Raymond, 44 Worlds-in-world schemas, 305-6 Wright, Richard, 127, 129-30, Native Son, 127, 129-30, 131, 154

War, 48, 99, (U.S.) Civil War, 25, Cold War, 186, 297-99, 306, Cultural war, 289, 294, Gulf War, 298, MexicanAmerican War, 211, 228, 248, 280, Spanish-American War, 208, Urban war, 109, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131-40, 143, 150, 234, 243, 276, World War II, 310, Vietnam War, 281. See Violence Warner, Michael, 36-37, 55 Warwick, Dionne, 270 Watley, Jody, 125 Webb, Walter Prescott, 54 Weber, Cynthia, 207-8 Weber, David, 54 Weiss, Jason, 284, 290 Welsh, Alexander, 226, 227, 229, 235 Western, the, 139 West Side Story, 124 Westwood, Sallie, 54 Wetbacks, 281

Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 227, 229, 250 Zapatistas, 41, 255, 258 Zervas-Gaytan, Leticia, 84 Zimmerman, Marc, 21, 196, 207

Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 206 Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás, 304 Young Lords, 41 Yúdice, George, 50, 55, 57, 299, 302 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 297

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