Chicano Poetics Heterotexts and Hybridities Alfred Arteaga Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997 |
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Chapter One: Mestizaje / Difrasismo
HOW THE POEM MEANS Poets, I imagine, set themselves tasks when they undertake a book of poetry. These tasks must be bound up inextricably in authorial intention, in aesthetic concerns, in the fact of the poetry. And the poems themselves must be as least as varied as the poets, as the creators who write poems for reasons of ego, love, art, perhaps, even religion, or politics. In some way the poem manifests the poet’s task and yokes together the personal and the public of the craft, there where the voice of one touches others and multiplies. I can speak for myself. When I wrote Cantos, I set to the task of working out poetically some sense of how one is Chicano. It was a personal matter and remains so, and the impulse to begin poetry there at the personal, at some point of me, makes sense. And yet it is just as truly a social matter, and the writing for other people makes just as much sense. I do not claim an exemplary life for anyone, do not claim possession of a purer piece of truth than anyone, but simultaneously I do not seek to erase the factors of time and place that coalesce as they do only in me. A poem is set into motion by my act, in all the particulars of my social and personal contexts, and it is set off outward to sing, to dance, to break bones, in the world beyond me. But let me talk of the specific, of the point of departure for Cantos. I open the book with a point of particular significance to me, one that points to a larger issue for Chicanos and for Americans in general. The first canto begins with the following stanza:
The last line, “A line, half water, half metal,” seems to me, on the one hand, to point to the intersection of the personal and the social and on the other, to point to something else. Simply, that line signifies the border and not a border only in metaphor, but the actual physical and political borderline between the US and Mexico, which is, after all, Rio Grande water from the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso and metal fence from there to the Pacific. The real borderline impinges upon me in real ways, figuring as a wedge in my family history and as a limit of Anglo tolerance for my kind. It is a line that crosses the personal and the social in me in profound ways. It is the poetry of the expression that concerns me here. For one of the tasks I set for myself is to make poetry, to make something in language that does something. To evoke the border as “a line, half water, half metal,” is to state a truth that bears at least some of the demands of logic, but it is further to state a “truth” by means of a trope. Cantos can make a sense according to logic, but it also does the stuff of poetry, and in the first stanza, the troping of the borderline says something not only about the international demarcation, but it says something also about how language undertakes the act of being Chicano. What I intended with that poetic line was to employ a poetic device of the pre-conquest Mexican Indian poets who wrote in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. My attempt to evoke the border in a union of two elements, water and metal, was an attempt to employ a trope that was very characteristic of Nahuatl poetry and a general feature of Nahuatl language and thought. In Llave del Náhuatl, Angel María Garibay calls this trope difrasismo. Difrasismo is the means of representing something in the coupling of two elements. In this way, city is in atl in tepetl, water and hill; body is noma nocxi, hand and feet. And perhaps the most well known difrasismo is that for poetry, in xóchitl in cuicatl, flower and song. This coupling of elements, two to suggest another, reveals something of how poetry comes to mean in Nahuatl. Poets, such as Nezahualcoyotl, relied on this general tropic feature of Nahuatl, which, as Garibay observes, often conceives in binarisms. To call body “hand and feet” is to conceive body by its parts, in effect, by synecdoche, the trope of the relation of part to whole. Noma nocxi does call to mind the single concept of the whole “body” from the parts “hand” and “feet,” and as it does, it comes to mean according t the particular arrangement of the difrasismo, the Mexican two for one. In a slightly different figuration, in atl in tepetl signifies “city” as “water and hill.” It is a difrasismo, as is noma nocxi, but water and hill are not related to city in the same manner as are hand and feet to body. Rather than parts for whole, perhaps the relationship is one of contiguity: water and hill signify city because they are near the city. This difrasismo is therefore one of metonymy. The term for poetry is more difficult. Flower and song is a difrasismo in which the two elements work differently. Song functions as a synonym, for Nahuatl poems were sung, that is poems were songs. Flower, however, is a metaphor, for clearly flowers are not poems. In xóchitl in cuicatl is similar to the difrasismos for body and city in its significant coupling but different in the elements joined. Difrasismo pervades the Nahuatl language, so that the world is conceived by this common and multifaceted trope. I opened Cantos with a line that figured the border “half water, half metal,” so as to locate my work in a relation to a Nahuatl world view. In one way, I employ the figure of thought merely to make reference to the Aztec perspective, to allude an ancestral root of chicanismo. But in a more significant way, I put difrasismo to the task of signaling from the onset the character of thought in Cantos, in Chicano poetry, and in Chicano thought in general. Difrasismo seems to me a characteristic feature of how my poetry comes to meaning and of how one comes to being Chicano. So while a poem seems to me a connection from the private to the public, Cantos, and Chicano poetry in general, seems to be able to make another sort of link. My attempt in “a line, half water, half metal,” is to take an important concept for Chicanos, the border, and to articulate it in light of a mode of Mexican Indian thought. To the degree that it calls to mind a sense of Indianness, it is similar in effect to what other Chicano poets do when they articulate Indianness. Examples range from Francisco Alarcón’s translation and reworking of Nahuatl spells; José Montoya’s parody of identity politics; Lorna Dee Cervantes’s encounter with the god Mescalito, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s with the goddess, Coatlicue. In other words, it is common for Chicano poetry to mention something Indian. And in this way, allusion serves as a simple means to link Chicano with the Indian element. But the linking is more complex. The examples I chose, Alarcón, Montoya, Cervantes, and Anzaldúa, do much more than merely point to Indians. Each, in various ways, makes a statement about how the Indian presence effects the act of being Chicano. When Lorna Cervantes, in “Meeting Mescalito at Oak Hill Cemetery,” and Gloria Anzaldúa, in “The Coatlicue State,” cite Mexican deities, they introduce into their work matters of alternate consciousness. Mescalito is the god of the hallucinogen, peyote, and Coatlicue is the goddess of a feminine subjectivity. Their evocation serves to illustrate alternate possibilities for apprehending the world. Francisco Alarcón begins with a colonial translation of Nahuatl spells and makes Snake Poems, a collection of Chicano poetry. As he does, he weaves Aztec, as well as criollo, consciousness into contemporary Chicano thought. José Montoya parodies the politics of racial identity in “Hispanic Nightlife at Luna’s Cafe When th’ Mexicans Came to Visit th’ Chicanos in Califas,” dividing la raza into the Casindio, on the one hand, and Casispano, also pronounced Cathipano, on the other. The work of these poets, in ways as disparate as the poets are themselves, asserts some link between Indian thought and Chicano identity, be it by parody or even, by difrasismo. This working out of Indianness as a factor in being Chicano is significant in the first instance because of historical fact. The border that is instanced in my poem or in Anzaldúa’s book, begins in Chicano consciousness as a real political fact, yet the factual border can be treated poetically, described as “capricious borders on the red continent” or “una herida abierta,” or as the place where Chicanos wage Undocumented Love. In other words, the border can be symbol and can be rendered poetic, but it is always a site of real world politics. It is not simply a metaphor. The “reality” of the border for Chicanos is similar to the “reality” of the Indian. Consider for a moment the identity “Chicano” and the homeland “Aztlán.” Chicano derives from Mexicano which derives from Mexica, the name the Aztecs called themselves. “Chicano” recalls an older, original pronunciation. When Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztecs, the Spanish language still possessed the sound like the English “sh,” represented in Spanish by the letter x, so that the conquistador could approximate Meshica as Mexica. Eventually Spanish changed phonemically so that Meshico came to be pronounced Mehico (Méjico), and Don Quihote (Quijote), for another example, ceased to be Don Quishote (Quixote). The soft “ch” in Mexican Spanish approaches the “sh” of older Spanish and of Nahuatl, so that meshicano leads to mechicano and to chicano. In this manner, phonemically at least, Chicano signifies descent from the Aztecs. There is logic to this, for while Chicanos descend racially from many different Indians from Yucatán to California, the presence of the Aztec has been the most prominent in Mexican/Chicano culture. The Chicano homeland, Aztlán, refers to the territories presently occupied by the United States but that were formerly part of Mexico, roughly, Texas to California. Aztlán is the mythical home of the Aztecs, from where they migrated south to central Mexico in 1168. To be a Chicano and to live in Aztlán is to have historical precedence over Anglos in the Southwest; it is to declare a historical fact of descent. The exact details of the fact are lost in the construction of a “national” identity, in the way national history is mythologized in the conception of any nation, but the general trajectory remains true: Chicanos descend historically from Indians. But then after the facts of the border and of Indianness, there is the matter of how they are dealt with in the poetry. After the historical-political and historical-racial facts, the border and Indianness figure into the matter of Chicano subjectivity, into chicanismo, as sites and occasions of cultural interaction. The border is, after all, the line of national differentiation that gives birth to Chicanos, not just for having crossed it or having been crossed by it, but for living in the border zone between nations that the line engenders. Mexicans can transform into Chicanos on either side of the border, in Tijuana or Los Angeles, in Juárez or El Paso, and the border patrol hounds us as far as Chicago. The border means that Chicano identity is constructed in defiance of the simple and absolute discretion of the state. To be Chicano in the borderlands is to make oneself from among the competing definitions of nation, culture, language, race, ethnicity, and so on. The border, then, figures the Chicano in cultural difference, and similarly, Indianness figures the Chicano in racial difference. For while Chicano subjectivity comes about because of Anglo American conquest of Northern Mexico, the Chicano body comes about because of mestizaje. And the original birth of that body comes about in the Spanish conquest of the Indians and in the raping of Indian women. From that violent colonial encounter, Mexican Indians mixed with Spaniards to produce the hybrid race, the mestizo. The Indian is thus for the Chicano, the indigenous, the antecedent, the maternal half of our racial double helix. And like the border, Indianness is at once a site of origin and of cultural interaction. At each reproduction of the Chicano body, the racial characteristics of European and indigenous American compete for presence. This use of the border and the Indian in Chicano poetry does something similar to that done by another feature. Linguistically, Chicano poetry often manifests some degree of interlingualism, employing English, Spanish, Caló (Chicano slang), and perhaps Nahuatl. In this way, the poems work out linguistically with thought what the border does culturally with the nation and what mestizaje does racially with the body. For good or for bad, this is the stuff of Chicano poetry: elements of difference interact in play and in competition within the parameters of chicanismo. This is as much as to say that the poetics of chicanismo are such that they locate the work of the poem in the working out of the individual, that an interlingual poem about border crossing or about Quetzalcoatl, is a poem about hybridity, and hybridity is the mode of both Chicano poem and Chicano subject. BODY, PLACE, LANGUAGE Let me continue by grounding my discussion of the poetics of Aztlán in the body, specifically in the racial body. The Mexican and Chicano are born in the colonial encounter between Europe and America. La raza did not exist before this, coming about only as a product of the violent and sexual encounter. The Chicano is racially hybrid, a mestizo, half European and half Indian. This configuration is accurate in the national mythology of Mexico and Aztlan and is founded, at least, on a historical fact: the first mestizos were the offspring of Spanish conquistadors and Indian women. But the reality of mestizaje is much more complex. For while the miscegenation had to begin in a one to one ratio, Spaniard male to Indian female, the subsequent course of the mestizaje was overwhelmingly Indian. And then there are the matters of what Indian, what European? Besides the Aztecs, there is a great diversity among Indians, including those the Aztecs thought different racially, such as the Mayans and the Tarascans. The Europeans too were diverse, for people other than Spaniards immigrated into Mexico, such as the French army sent to impose Maximilian, and further, even taken singly, the Spanish themselves are a diverse people. And then of course Africans contributed to the gene pool, first as the slaves of the Spaniards but also as runaway slaves of Anglo Americans. So what is the point of this, what does the racial hybridization mean? It means that the body, the physical manifestation of the Chicano, is itself a product of hybridity. Mestizaje means that the mestizo is the confluence of different races, in the senses of descending from an original hybrid begetting, of continually procreating mestizo offspring, and of simply being, in the present incarnation, multiracial. Hybridity is a fundamental physical reality of chicanismo. And a consequence of essential hybridity is subjective ambiguity. The mestizo can therefore be both indio and hispano; white Hispanic according to the US census bureau and Indian according to relative composition of the gene pool. But the ambiguity is most significant not so much in the either/or racial binarism, that is, in not quite being either, but rather, in the profound ambiguity of being both. For the body that is the product of diverse roots is more than the sum of those roots: there is something additional in being hybrid. The place where the mestizo body resides is also conceived ambiguously because of its own sort of hybridity. For Anglo Americans, the Chicano lives in the United States, and with colonial amnesia, the Chicano is conceived as an immigrant, an illegal border crosser whose home is a foreign nation south of the border. The convenient irony of this “Americanization” is that it affords Anglos precedence and preeminence in the Southwest, and it makes the “American” Chicano always deportable. This view is the inverse of the Mexican nationalist view that holds Chicanos as emigrants, and always returnable. Chicanos oppose the relatively facile national binarism in two different conceptions of Chicano space, Aztlán and the borderlands. While these concepts differ, they are similar in two aspects: both conceive Chicano space with a different logic than that which defines the traditional nation state and accordingly, both acknowledge states of overlapping identities. In other words, Aztlán and the borderlands are concepts of the homeland that do not directly parallel the concepts of the nation as realized in the US or Mexico, in part because Aztlán and the borderlands are more ambiguous than the territories of either nation state. Aztlán is as old as Aztec mythology, but its contemporary use for Chicanos emerges from the cultural nationalist manifesto, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, written at the First Chicano National Conference in Denver in 1969 by the poet Alurista. The notion of the “plan” follows the tradition of Mexican revolution, during which revolutionary movements were launched with a plan named after the place where it was declared. The Aztlán plan begins:
The plan declares a Chicano homeland, and in a move opposed to US and Mexican nationalist perspectives, it renders the Chicano non deportable. Aztlán is the home where Chicanos are indigenous; it is the land of forefathers and a gringo invasion. This declaration of the homeland responds to Anglo American jingoism and xenophobia, such as in the 1960s epithet for Chicanos and Mexicans to “Go back to Mexico,” as well as to the current calls for their deportation and erasure. Because Aztlán is the original, northern homeland of the Aztecs, by virtue of ancestral presence and racial composition, the Chicano can envision “home” in territories now occupied by the US nation state. This rhetoric of home reconfigures Anglo Americans as “‘gringo,’” “foreign Europeans,” and “foreigner ‘gabacho.’” Point of view is reoriented so that what is the southwest from the perspective of Manifest Destiny, becomes the “northern land” from the perspective of Mexico. This simple change displaces Anglo America from the perspectival center and redefines the compass from a Mesoamerican center. The plan also brings up the question of nationalism. For while the declaration of Aztlán clearly asserts a cultural nationalism, it also enters into the discussion of nation, as a people and a state. “Mestizo nation,” for example, can mean mestizo people, but the declaration of sovereignty and that “we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán,” locates that meaning within the parameters of the nation state. And the plan has it both ways, it is simultaneously just a cultural nationalist manifesto and a declaration of national independence. Where it asserts a nationalism of the state, it impinges upon international convention in general and upon the national definition of the US in particular. For Aztlán is located within US political boundaries, and its declaration takes direct aim at Anglo American hegemony. But because it is possible to view the plan as merely cultural nationalist, it is possible to wage anti gringo rhetoric and yet avoid revolution. The conceived homeland is ambiguous enough to arouse passion, yet not mandate revolution. The border, conceived as an amorphous area along the international borderline, is another figuration of Chicano space. Aztlán is defined as the territory taken by gringo invasion, that is, as land that was Mexico but is now part of the US. The borderlands too are defined by the Anglo American conquests, the annexation of Texas, the Mexican American War, the Gadsen Purchase, but it is the fact of the borderline, rather than acquisition of lands that organizes its space. Aztlán conceives Mexican immigration north as internal migration because Aztlán is the ancestral, Indian homeland. The borderlands emphasizes instead, the facts of violence and cultural conflict within the interface between nations. The two concepts are similar and both have informed the ideology of Chicano subjectivity. They differ, perhaps most significantly, in their ultimate telos. Aztlán aims at the homeland, at the nation as people, as state. It offers an interwoven history and myth of presence. It provides the principle of definition in the present and defines an idealized state in the future. As such it functions as the national myth in a manner similar to the myths of any people. The borderlands functions much less as a national telos. Perhaps its greatest use lies in conceptualizing relations of difference. Compared to Aztlán it is a poorer conception of homeland because one never knows where the real borderlands ends and the metaphoric one begins, when application of the term becomes merely symbolic appropriation. The borderlands concept does not make the same claims to Indianness that Aztlán does. That claim fosters the essentialist argument that Chicanos have more valuable presence in Aztlán than do Anglos in the Americas because Chicanos are more Indian. It is an argument well suited to conceiving the nation, Aztlán, homeland to Chicanos, descendants of the Aztecs. Instead, borderlands works against the tendency to define nation, for it emphasizes an overlap between nation states where the sharp distinctions are both contested and ambiguous. One interesting consequence is that chicanismo need not exist only in the US, for the border forces that shape lives in El Paso do so similarly in Juárez, in Los Angeles as in Tijuana. It is precisely this preoccupation with international forces and cultural conflict that so characterizes the notion of the borderlands. So while Aztlán places relatively greater emphasis on the homeland, the borderlands emphasizes more the state of relations. As such, being Chicano is not so much to be resident of an area but to be subject to and to partake in the contestation of identities in that area. There, US and Mexican identities, in their various manifestations, such as the national, the racial, and the linguistic, and every possible hybridization, compete for presence. There, identity is acted out within the matrices of political powers and cultural conflicts. This puts chicanismo at the site where social forces converge, and it stresses being Chicano as a dynamic of being in relation to others. It is significant that the primary proponents of Aztlán and the borderlands have been, in both cases, poets. As Luis Leal points out:
In 1987 Gloria Anzaldúa opened her book, Borderlands/La Frontera, with a now famous supplement to Alurista’s concept. In “The Homeland, Aztlán / El otro México,” she states:
That it is the poets who articulate the homeland and the national myth is no surprise, for this seems their proper function throughout the world. Consider David Lloyd’s discussion of Ireland:
Genaro Padilla takes this up in Aztec terms, describing Chicano poets (and other cultural workers) as tlamatinime, who create and transmit culture and who work the myths that bind a people. Padilla also analyzes the relation of intellectual work to cultural nationalism in light of Franz Fanon’s work on Algerian nationalism. In an early essay, “Franz Fanon and the National Culture of Aztlan,” I undertake a similar strategy to explain the essential Indianness of Aztlán and the necessity of a progressive cultural production to define, and to maintain the presence of, a people. When Alurista and Gloria Anzaldúa speak of and forge the homeland, they do so in the language of that place. The language of Aztlán and the borderlands is a language of languages, not simply national language, like English or Spanish, but rather language as system. It is the site of confluence in the way the Chicano body is mestizo and the homeland is international. And like the body and home, the language is hybrid and thus more than merely a sum of its parts. Alurista and Anzaldúa write in a combination of English, Spanish, and the Chicano slang, Caló. Both also introduce bits of the Nahuatl, which supplement the indigenous presence, the mexicanismos of Mexican Spanish. Chicano speech is like the mestizo body and the borderlands home: it simultaneously reflects multiple forces at play and asserts its hybridity. When Gloria Anzaldúa writes lines like, “This land was Mexican once, / was Indian always / and is. / And will be again. // Yo soy un puente tendido / del mundo gabacho al del mojado…,” she brings the border into her words (3). And when Alurista writes a poem like “Who are We?… Somos Aztlán: A Letter to ‘El Jefe Corky,’” he brings the homeland into his words. Both incorporate chicanismo not only as the object of the words but in the actual words themselves. The poems reflect Chicano speech and thought, for linguistic hybridization is the fact of Chicano articulation. In the manner that Alurista and Anzaldúa create the Chicano homeland in the consciousness by writing about it, they also create Chicano consciousness by writing in its terms. In other words, they serve the function of the national genius in the content and form of their work. Language itself, the very fabric of the poem, is significant in the delineation of a homeland and its people. Poetic language is particularly suited to the task of myth, to envision a national origin, and to the tasks of defining a people, their place on the planet, and their future. For Chicano poets, Alurista, Anzaldúa, and the majority of the rest, language is hybrid. This caló, in its general sense of Chicano interlingual speech, defines a people as a national language defines a nation but not quite in the same way. It does not so thoroughly base subjectivity on a content, like the simple lexicon of a national language. Instead it defines the diverse cultural forces participating in the construction of a subjectivity. It speaks for and forges a hybrid people, a mestizo, borderland people who articulate in language the cultural conflicts in which they are enmeshed. The Chicano subject is not so much the subject of a language as it is the subject of language. The interlingual speech of the Chicano and the hybridized poem in particular are especially apt at expressing the ambiguities inherent in mestizaje and those in either Aztlán or the borderlands. The Chicano’s hybrid thought allows for a movement among discourses that replicates the possible range of perspectives on race or the homeland. This speech is interlingual in that it not only acknowledges a confluence of difference, but it emphasizes the factor of hybridity. It readily permits a fluidity in conceiving race and homeland by treating these concepts as categories of concepts that are composed of multiple and conflicting texts. Mestizaje is therefore not the simple and difficult problem it is for racial purists; instead, it is an opportunity to consider Indianness, Europeanness, and mestizo-ness as perspective bound, politically weighted mental constructs. Aztlán and the borderlands are therefore not the impossibilities for the nation states of the US and Mexico; the Chicano homeland is an open possibility for negotiating difference. Three years after writing “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” Alurista revised his words a bit for the introduction to his volume of poetry, Nationchild Plumaroja. This revision was more gender sensitive and more Indian. What had been in the plan “Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers…,” becomes in the poetry, “brotherhood and sisterhood unites us, and love for our brothers and sisters….” The language became less gender specific, but Chicanos became more Indian. Instead of being mestizos, “a bronze people with a bronze culture,” Chicanos became “a Red People with a Red Culture.” And because Red Chicanos “do not recognize capricious borders on the Red Continent,” that is, because they are fully indigenous, there was no reason to locate Aztlán according to any nation state perspective: “the northern land of Aztlán” became “our motherland Aztlán.” Nevertheless Alurista’s redefinition is plausible because, given the parameters of the hybrid subject, multiple, and even contradictory, positions are possible. In other words, within Caló and within the cultural nationalist epic, it is possible to conceive the self, to conceive the Chicano subject, in any combination of the defining forces. The Chicano is at once mestizo and Indian, and the mestizo or Indian, lives in the US and/or Aztlán, and speaks English and/or Spanish. And beyond this, the subject is hybridized, meaning that there is always the possibility of the subject’s active participation in that definition. If one can imagine that for the Chicano subject, language figures in as the language of languages, one can also imagine how hybrid subjectivity is played out in a difrasismo of difrasismos. This broad cultural difrasismo seems to me characterizes the Chicano subject. Not only does it yoke together different elements, it keeps present the separate elements and the new concept it creates. It is not quite dialectic nor metaphor, nor does is efface the originals in the new. It is a sign of hybridizing, of leaving bare the work of coming to be. And for Chicanos the real presence of the Indian in the mestizo body is not a metaphor, nor is the international borderline, and it is the real elements of our bodies, our homes, our languages, that set us to the tasks of being. And yet Aztlán is a myth, the borderlands an argument, and poetry illogical. I conclude with a personal note and a poem. I was in New York the year after Alurista came out with Nationchild Plumaroja, and I arranged for him come out and do his first readings so far outside Aztlán. His reading at Columbia was attended by the handful of students there and some other Chicanos doing other work in New York, including Dolores Huerta. In speaking with Alurista, I mentioned that I was about to become a father but confessed that we had no name for the baby. He shamed me, saying that I had no excuse as a poet for not coming up with a fine name. He was right. When my daughter was born, I named her Marisol, Sea and Sun in Spanish, a name I mistakenly thought I had invented. I gave her a name that is a difrasismo, and she is the one who chooses what combination of Sea and/or Sun she configures herself to be. I named her two sisters in bilingual difrasismos, Xóchitl Dolores (Nahuatl and Spanish) and Mireya Alba (Provençal and Spanish). And likewise, they can articulate themselves as they see fit.
© 1997 by Alfred Arteaga For complete text inclucing poems, notes, and works cited, see print version |