Chicano Poetics Heterotexts and Hybridities Alfred Arteaga Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997 |
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Chapter Two: Heterotextual Reproduction
In the beginning, Octavio Paz defined the genesis of mexicanidad in the story of sexualized contact between Hernán Cortés and la Malinche, conquistador and translator, European and American, man and woman. The Mexican Nobel laureate’s mid twentieth-century retelling of the historical intercourse, by then four and a half centuries old, served to clarify and to sharpen a people’s self conception as a bastard race, as hijos de la chingada. But to be hijos de la chingada, Paz informs us, is so much more than being a bastard race, and to be Mexican is so much more than being half Old World European and half New World American. For the Mexican is a product of the miscegenation of Spanish men and Indian women, and to be so means to be the product of cataclysmic cultural intercourse. Whether in Mexico or Aztlán, the Mexican and Chicano subjects’ nascence is narrated in the history and in the mythology of colonial and sexual encounter. For Octavio Paz, the Malinche/Cortés history and myth, let us call it “text,” is most significant for its effects on Mexican psychology because it writes Mexicans as bastard descendents of a sexualized conquest, that is, as hijos de la chingada. In this sense, the meaning of the Malinche/Cortés text lies in its promulgation of a subjectivity that vacillates between the poles of the chingón and the chingada. Briefly and loosely this can be translated into English as the poles of the one-who-fucks-over and the one-who’s-fucked-over. This translation suffices because it retains the elements of both sex and aggression, even if fuck is etymologically more sexual than is chingar. Paz’s schema of Mexicans as of hijos de la chingada is a pronouncement by the nation’s preeminent poet-philosopher that simultaneously explains and affirms the national myth: something important happened when two people had sex, and its effects are felt to this day. The “what” of what happened is of course especially consequential: amid the other acts of conquest and colonization of Mexico, sexual intercourse produced a new race. The facts of this are clear. In 1519 Cortés landed in Mexico with a six hundred men, and in two years he had conquered the Aztecs, whose metropolis, Tenochtitlan, was the most populous in the world. He was able to do so because he allied the diverse people he conquered, most notably the Tlaxcalans, in his campaign against the Aztecs. And he was able to do that , at least in part, because he had the services of a native translator, La Malinche. In addition, Malinche and Cortés produced a half-breed son. The meaning of this begins simply: mestizo people have in Malinche and Cortés the mother and father of their hybrid race. This means that Mexicans and Chicanos are made up in body and in culture of the stuff of that union, and this meaning has very profound effects on subject formation. What I am concerned with here is to speculate on that meaning. Chicano subjectivity posits as central metaphor that it is mestizo and that its constitutive mode is hybridization. The body of that subject is racially hybrid, the product of the miscegenation of immigrant European and indigenous American peoples. The genesis of the mestizo occurs at the colonial encounter, coming to be first in the violent conquest. After the conquest, the mestizo came to be reproduced as part of the larger colonial project. This means that today the act of being mestizo, is an act of working out various cultural tendencies, piecing out a subjectivity within the parameters of hybridity. The sense of being mestizo-Chicano was born in the acts of colonial sex, yet is engendered daily in the conflicts of cultural elements, conflicts that are conceived as sexualized interactions. So I am concerned with sex; I am concerned with texts. The mestizo body is made through sexual intercourse, specifically through the biologic interplay of different sexes, through heterosexual reproduction. The Chicano subject comes about through the interplay of different social “texts,” analogously, through heterotextual reproduction. The physical body is born and reproduces, and analogously, the cultural subject also has genesis and reproduction. Which brings me to the question: what of the analog of sexual reproduction for cultural reproduction? The Chicano subject is a hybrid subject, beginning with the racial hybridity brought about by the disseminating of genes in the colonial project. Attendant with the half-breed, the mongrel, the crossblood, the mestizo, body, is the hybrid subject: chicanismo is the site of cultural confluence. The social texts of “race,” of “language,” and of “religion,” for example, participate in the intercourse of a subject born of dialogue. The Chicano’s subjectivity is heterotextual because diverse texts compete for presence and because their interaction is conceived according to an analog of intercourse that is sexualized and gendered. Mestizos came about, in almost every case, like that of Cortés and Malinche, because of sex between a Spanish man and an Indian woman. And because of this, the textual interaction is sexualized and gendered: Catholicism, the Spanish language, the Western system of writing, all descend to mestizos from the father. The conquest was particularized in sexual and gender relations so that the conquistador father could destroy the native culture and native body and infuse his own. This began with the mass slaying of Indian men so that in defeating the native military, the conquistador greatly reduced the potentiality of native paternity. Native progeny was eliminated too as in the practice of feeding Indian children to Spanish dogs. Indian women were raped and made mothers of the conquistadors’ offsprings. The mestizo is the bastard offspring, the child of rape who speaks the father’s language and attends the father’s church. So the intertextuality of chicanismo is modeled after heterosexual intercursive relations of colonialism. But not only is the hybrid subjectivity founded at the heterotextual encounter, it is proliferated by a system of heterotextual reproduction. This is to say, the hybrid subject envisions an articulation of self that emerges from the continued acts of hybridization. Because the hybrid subject descends from at least two competing strains, a paradigm of monolinear descent, such as parthenogenetic reproduction within a single culture, is not appropriate. On the other hand, a paradigmatic ideal of monolinear, homocultural purity, would be relatively more appropriate for non-hybridizing, monological peoples. This was relatively the case for the colonial Spaniard, who, despite profound cultural heterogeneity, could idealize himself as “pure” Spanish in relation to his half-breed mestizo children. For Mexicans and for Chicanos subjectivity is reproduced anew in the self-fashioning act of heterotextual interaction. But this sense is more acute for the Chicano than for the Mexican because the Chicano not only derives being from the Spanish colonial intervention, but also from Anglo American colonialism: for not only was Mexico conquered by Spain, but Northern Mexico was conquered by the United States. It is this second colonization that so profoundly informs the contemporary Chicano reconsideration of a self formed from conflict. Thus it is recently that Chicanos have come to terms with the subject. The subject of hybridity plays itself out in heterotextual discourse, conceived from the model of heterosexual intercourse, according to which, Chicano subjectivity is understood to reproduce. The synchronic implication of cultural genesis and the diachronic implication of cultural transmission are considered in light of the double colonization, the Spanish of Mexico and the US American of Aztlán, the territory that formerly comprised northern Mexico, from Texas to California.Contemporary Chicano investigation of the subject has led to its greater complexity, if for no other reason than a reading of hybridity that introduces new texts, compounds the factors of heterotextuality. This reconsideration of the Chicano not only incorporates the American colonial experience but takes aim at major tenets of Mexican mestizaje. These investigations focus on several poles of textual activity: on the texts of “father,” on the matter of heterosexuality as paradigm, and on the possibility of alternate models for conceiving cultural reproduction. Three writers have focused their attention here, Rolando J. Romero, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherríe Moraga. The three have problematized matters of gender, patriarchy, and sexual orientation within the colonial context. Their work has entered into debate with notions of the hybrid subject that are linked to the specific detail and sense of the Malinche/Cortés paradigm of genesis and cultural transmission.Romero’s strategy in “Texts, Pre-Texts, Con-Texts: Gonzalo Guerrero in the Chronicles of Indies” is simple: he opposes the Malinche/Cortés “text” of mestizo genesis and reproduction with another “text.” This dialogue of opposition is especially effective in two areas: the Gonzalo Guerrero text overturns the historical primacy of the Malinche/Cortés text, and it reconceives colonial patriarchy and the role of the father. In the first instance, the story of Gonzalo Guerrero challenges the story of Malinche and Cortés, that is, it pits a narrative and history that recontextualizes the former narrative and history. The story of Gonzalo Guerrero does not oppose the actual history of Malinche and Cortés, it supplements it, yet in doing so, it radically reshapes its meaning. It neither refutes their act of sexual intercourse, nor does it deny their biologic reproduction and the production of mestizo offspring. What it does do is to overturn the semantic impact of Malinche and Cortés as the historical analogs of the mythical Adam and Eve. It does so very simply: it merely states that Malinche and Cortés were not, after all, first.In the second instance, the Gonzalo Guerrero text undermines colonial patriarchy and affords a complete reconfiguration of the role of the father of the mestizo. The significance of Cortés as Adam is not only that he is the Ur father of the race but also that he is the source of culture, for it was Adam who preceded Eve and who named the objects in the world. Analogously, Cortés and Adam brought about language, inseminating woman and disseminating sense. But unlike Adam, Cortés was not first; Gonzalo Guerrero preceded Cortés and acted in quite a different manner. In fact the power relations of conqueror and conquered were so different that the Gonzalo text presents a narrative of a wholly other colonial patriarchy. The traditional mythical story of Mexican genesis and the history of conquest intertwine in a narrative that climaxes in the intercourse of extremely different people, Spaniard and Indian, man and woman, and so on. After Columbus, Cortés proved the single most potent founding father of the Spanish empire, which he did by defeating the largest New World empire. The vast differences between the worlds old and new and the tremendous economic value of the conquest make the work of Cortés and the role of Malinche extremely consequential. This is true. But Rolando Romero tells us that further encomium, the inscription of Cortés as founding father of a new race, is just not true. Then, coupled with the mythicized conquistador, there is Malinche. Her significance, even before that of being Eve and mother, is that of translator. Originally she was used so that Cortés could form alliances with the Indians he conquered, an effort for which he promised her freedom. She served as the communication bridge between Europe and America, carrying on the negotiations, for example, between Cortés and Moctezuma. In all of this, her discursive activity operated at the center of the conquest. She also had sex with the conquistador. Cortés gave her over to one of his soldiers, but after the soldier returned to Spain, she lived with Cortés for a while in a house that still stands in Mexico City. They did not marry, but they did have one son, Martin, whom Cortés named after his father. The relationship of the user and the one used is what is recalled in the relationship as chingón and chingada. In any case, her role did, as did that of Cortés, intertwine participation in the conquest with the begetting of a hybrid race. Romero traces the uncelebrated but documented history of Gonzalo Guerrero, who unlike Cortés, left no words in his own hand. Eight years before Cortés landed in Mexico, some seventeen Spaniards shipwrecked off Jamaica, eventually landing in Yucatán in 1511. One was Gonzalo Guerrero. Like Cortés, but before, Guerrero produced mestizo offspring with an Indian woman. But his relation to the Indian woman, his role as father, and his participation in the colonial project, were in so many ways different than those of Cortés. He may have been a Spanish man, but his role in some ways more approximated that of Malinche. Malinche had been given to Cortés, as a slave, part of a group of twenty women who were to become the first baptized Christians in New Spain. Gonzalo Guerrero was enslaved by the Mayans and became the first Spaniard to assimilate Mexican Indian language, religion, culture. Malinche and Gonzalo both embraced the opposing culture and did so as slaves. Originally when Cortés landed in Mexico, he tried to recruit Gonzalo to aid in the conquest as translator and guide. He was unable to convince Gonzalo to join him: Gonzalo could not be reached but reportedly was married and had children. Cortés instead acquired the services of Jerónimo de Aguilar, Gonzalo’s fellow castaway. Because Aguilar spoke Mayan, his translation skills were of limited value in the Aztec empire until the multilingual, Nahuatl and Mayan speaking, Malinche arrived. At first Cortés spoke Castilian to Aguilar who spoke Mayan to Malinche who spoke Nahuatl to the Indians, but she soon acquired Spanish so Aguilar became superfluous. Gonzalo refused to support the Spanish effort because he was married and loved his children. He had assimilated to the culture of his captors completely: his body was tattooed and pierced, he spoke their language, and he had not only produced offspring, he had married according to Mayan custom. The degree of his assimilation can be envisioned by considering that of Jerónimo de Aguilar. When the Spanish found Aguilar, they did not recognize him as a European; he was naked and spoke poor Spanish. He could not even eat European food: even his digestive system had gone native. Gonzalo Guerrero married his slave master, yet it is possible to construct a narrative, as it is for Malinche, that includes some degree of volition in the process of assimilation. After all, Cortés promised Malinche freedom if she aid his cause, perhaps the same is true of Gonzalo: one version of his life has him completely converted, eventually dieing in combat against the Spaniards. In 1528, nine years after Cortés’s unsuccessful contact with Gonzalo, Francisco de Montejo tried the same in his bid to conquer Yucatán. Supposedly Gonzalo refused, saying, in part, “Look how beautiful my children are.” It is here that the Gonzalo Guerrero text makes such radical change. Here the father makes children in the image of the mother, and it is the father who embraces the other culture. This is not the model of paternity that bears the authority for the source of culture; it is not the father that transmits the law, language, religion, political power. Instead Gonzalo Guerrero provides an image of an effaced paternity, of the father who rejects the colonial project. This is a notion of the father that embraces alterity, and for this the Gonzalo Guerrero text is censured, ignored, condemned. Gonzalo’s narrative is either denigrated or dropped from history.The relative success of colonialism is predicated on masculine authority animated in the precept of the phallus. The history-myth of Cortés is particularly rigid, combining as it does, the lustre of the Adam and Eve myth, an incredibly potent militarism, and an original begetting. It combines the weight of myth and history, violence and sex. The Gonzalo text provides an alternative narrative, one that renders suspect the absolute authority of Cortés and the patriarchal, colonial project. Gonzalo loved his Indian children; he did not feed them to dogs. This alone opposes the history of genocide born with Cortés that would eliminate 95% of the native population in the first century of colonialism. It also demonstrates that culture need not necessarily flow solely from the patriarchal source, that is, Gonzalo’s history demonstrates that while the father can inseminate, he can be culturally inseminated as well.For Cortés, it was vital to be the first and sole colonial patriarch, and ironically, he sought base his claim as such in the fact of Gonzalo Guerrero’s prior presence. In the politics of empire, Cortés had to negotiate his claim to Mexico amid the competing imperial authorities, the king’s, the governor’s and his own over newly discovered territory. Romero argues that Guerrero and Aguilar’s presence in Yucatán enabled Cortés to argue that the governor in Cuba had no right to Mexico and “Whoever brought Guerrero and Aguilar into their camp could thus claim to have a right to the territory, or at the very least, prove that Diego Velázquez had not inherent right to the new lands” (“Texts” 348). In this way, Gonzalo Guerrero presented no threat to Cortés and served as no competing patriarch. Even Gonzalo’s children, being Indians, posed no competition to Cortés’s progeny. In developing the project he calls “Gonzalo Guerrero as Counter Malinche,” Rolando Romero radically rewrites the patriarchy that serves as basic structure for the notions of genesis and reproduction of the Chicano subject. “Father” is no longer the colonial agent, but instead becomes a relatively passive contributor to the gene pool. It is a radical revision, yet, nevertheless, two things remain similar: one, “father” remains the site of one way cultural transmission, either, on the one hand inseminating, or on the other, assimilating; and two, heterosexual reproduction remains the central analog. Gonzalo Guerrero alters the colonial paradigm to be sure, but it remains centered on the father and his sexual activity. The Chicano subject is effected profoundly by all of this, particularly so in the areas of gender and power relations. According to Octavio Paz, the politics of the sexual encounter mark Cortés and Malinche as chingón and chingada. This aligns the markers “man,” “European,” and “father” with colonial authority, with power, with machismo. “Woman,” “Indian,” and “mother” align with a passive femininity, except where actively supporting the conquistador against the native population. Paz allows that a man may be passive, may be chingado in the affairs of men; the Aztec warrior, for example, was chingado by Cortés. Romero’s articulation of the Gonzalo text opens up a new range of possibilities: Gonzalo’s wife was his master, effectively she was chingona and he chingado. Bernal Díaz del Castillo notes authority in her words to Aguilar when he tried to recruit Gonzalo, “And Gonzalo’s Indian wife spoke to Aguilar very angrily in her own language: ‘Why has this slave come here to call my husband away? Go off with you, and let us have no more of your talk’” (61). Bernal Díaz del Castillo also notes that Malinche refuses to be chingona, acquiescing completely to the Spanish patriarchs, “…saying that God had been very gracious to her in freeing her from the worship of idols and making her a Christian, and giving her a son by her lord and master Cortes, also in marrying her to such a gentleman as her husband Juan Jaramillo. Even if they were to make her mistress of all the provinces of New Spain, she said, she would refuse the honour, for she would rather server her husband and Cortes than anything else in the world. What I have related here I know for certain and swear to.” (86) In the Gonzalo Guerrero text, very simply, masculinity is allowed passivity before the feminine, this demonstrated by the passive assimilation of the most masculine of exemplars, the Spanish conquistador, before an Indian woman. In a more complex way, sexuality, passivity, and responsibility are rewritten as well. For Paz, that Malinche is chingada means that a sexual passive role combines with compliance with the colonial project so that she is used up by the Spanish empire and then discarded. Furthermore, she is spurned for having slept willingly with the enemy and having been instrumental in the conquest and ensuing genocide, even though she acted as a slave. Her compliance while a slave parallels that of Gonzalo Guerrero. For if we allow that Malinche’s complicity in sex and politics is tempered by her position as a slave, the same can be allowed for Gonzalo. In this manner, Romero’s reading of “man” and “father” is quite different from that of Paz, for in it lies the possibility of a patriarchy without authority. For in the power relations in slavery, is any slave, female or male, ever allotted full subjectivity? Isn’t any sex between master and slave tacit rape?And yet, even if sexual relations do figure prominently in the paradigms of cultural formation and transmission, they need not necessarily be heterosexual relations. Lesbian writers, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, approach the matter of Chicano subjectivity by emphasizing the colonialism by Anglo America and by positing a paradigm of cultural reproduction with an analog of homosexual intercourse. In their discussion, the locale is the borderlands, the territory the United States conquered from Mexico, and the intercourse is woman to woman, and yet, many of their concerns resonate with those of Romero. This is so because all three focus on key matters of subjectification: genesis and reproduction. The title of Gloria Anzladúa’s work is telling, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. The site of new hybridizing is the border zone, the northern half of Mexico taken by the US, the homeland Chicanos call Aztlán. For Anzaldúa, the material site of intercultural conflict supersedes the initial act of intercourse as the primary fact and condition of the hybrid subject. The border is a political marker that demarcates the reach of Anglo American colonialism. It was created in violence, and to this day, Mexicans north of that line, Chicanos, are subject to violent cultural wars. To be Chicano in California or Texas, for example, is to wage a dynamic subjectivity that pieces a self from the conflicting texts of Anglo American, Mexican, Chicano. Anzaldúa’s locus of, and paradigm for, mestizaje is the borderlands, and in her vision, this zone for subject contention is highly sexualized. “The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” she says, including “the perverse, the queer…, the mongrel…, the half-breed, the half dead” (3). The hybrid inhabitants are viewed by the powerful, “legitimate” whites, as transgressors, transgressors not only of national boundaries but of sexual mores, including prescribed heterosexuality. For Anzaldúa, sexuality, specifically sexual orientation, is a dynamic factor at play in the politics of the subject.Borderlands/La Frontera begins with a violent image, “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” (3). The image of the genesis of the hybrid subject is in violence to the body, in a wound, and its reproduction transpires in a rupture, in the continual reopening of that wound. The paradigm of heterosexual reproduction is supplanted by that of international violence. According to this paradigm, the transmitting medium of culture is not semen but, rather, blood.Bloodshed engenders a “third country—a border culture.” The violence of Anglo American colonialism, both in the establishment and in the maintenance of rule over the borderlands, is, ironically, a generative force. For what comes about there amid the struggles between economic worlds, between nations, between cultures, is a hybrid alternative. This alternative is not so much racial, as in the synthesis of the mestizo; it is cultural. There they speak a “bastard language, Chicano Spanish, [that] is not approved by any society”: an alternative language for the making of alternative space, the third country between the US and Mexico.Borderlands/La Frontera is less concerned with reproducing the body than it is with producing new consciousness. Because of this, the procreative role of the father is bypassed, as is the more general patriarchal imperative. There is no need for the primacy of heterosexual reproduction since the object for reproduction is the cultural subject and not the body. What Anzaldúa sees as the potential product of the borderlands is “la conciencia de la mestiza,” a new mestiza consciousness. It displaces traditional patriarchy because it is gynocentric, and further, it is not particularly rooted in sexual reproduction.The hybridity that pervades the new mestiza subject manifests a concomitant ambiguity. Heterogeneous forces impinge upon borderlands subjects and create ambiguities in the social and in the personal spheres. Anzaldúa cites the new mestiza’s tolerance for ambiguity as the very means to oppose the closed texts of Western binarism that prescribe heterosexuality, patriarchal authority, and intolerance for deviation. In explaining how the ambiguous third country—border culture is manifested in the personal subject, Anzaldúa posits homosexuality as an alternative to prescribed heterosexuality and to either/or gender differentiation. She states, “I like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within” (19). In this manner, Anzaldúa describes an alternative third gender, one that is not oriented toward reproduction of the body but that is oriented toward the reproduction of culture. The lesbian mestiza pits tolerance for ambiguity and alternate gender identification against the rigid heterosexual prescription. This position is active, she chooses to be this way, choosing, even, to be lesbian, as she says, “I made the choice to be queer” (19).Since the new consciousness is elected by choice and since the object of production is consciousness rather than the body, the mestiza’s subjectivity can be widely inclusive. It is not inherited from sexual intercourse like race but is taken on in response to the ambient forces of repression. When she considers the scope of that repression, Anzaldúa embraces nearly everyone as potential subject of the new consciousness, for nearly everyone is marginalized in some way in the borderlands. Not quite everyone is included, however; she rejects the purest incarnation of patriarchy, the white male heterosexual. It is perhaps at this point that she is most adamant in her opposition to patriarchal politics, for clearly the white male heterosexual has the most invested in the texts “father,” “colonialism,” and “phallus.” The problem of the father is taken up further in Cherríe Moraga’s The Last Generation. Moraga undertakes a project very similar to Anzaldúa’s in that she also explores hybridity as a lesbian Chicana response to Anglo American domination. The similarity of their focus and strategy is evidenced in their collaboration in 1981 in coediting This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Both writers deploy the texts “woman” and “lesbian” to heterotextually undermine the homotextual monologue articulated by patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. Borderlands/La Frontera and Last Generation both work out textually what they advocate in content, that is, they are literary hybrids that propose a hybrid subjectivity. They are truly heterotexts, admixtures of genres and of languages. Each work combines essay, testimony, and poetry in a dialogue that actively resists simple definition. And the dialogue is carried on interlingually as well: both texts mix English, Spanish, Chicano slang, and some Nahuatl, in a verbal interplay that replicates the interplay of speech acts in the borderlands. This linguistic hybridity is especially telling, because for both Anzaldúa and Moraga, it is an index of both the resistance to colonialism and the propagation cultural alternatives. In this way, interlingualism forms the basis for intercultural relations in the lesbian model similar to the way heterosexuality does in the patriarchal. Interlingual hybridized speech is so integral a mode of articulation in the borderlands that Chicano subjectivity itself comes to be born and reproduced in the act. “I am my language,” says Anzaldúa. For her to be so, mestiza articulation must confront silent acquiescence to what she calls the “cultural tyrannies” of white colonial rule and its obdurate patriarchy. The mestiza subject must manifest and transmit culturally, that is, she must articulate homosexual texts heterotextually, dialogically. The genesis and reproduction of the mestiza must arise in the active and perlocutionary speech act. In this way, reproduction is imagined to occur in an act of the tongue, the lesbian, female tongue, and not in the act of the phallus.Yet while the tongue can displace the phallus and engender consciousness, it cannot produce bodies. And too, the product of this reproduction, the cultural hybrid subject, is more tenuous than the physical mestizo body, relying as it does on choice and performance in language. It is with this in mind that Cherríe Moraga reexamines heterosexual reproduction and the place of the body in culture. The Last Generation is, as she says, “a prayer at a time when I no longer remember to how to pray;” it is a hopeful invocation, yet, an apocalyptic vision. Last Generation is an act of writing the subject in a historical moment of crisis, beyond which perhaps, lies annihilation. Moraga worries that she may be the end of the line, that her words may be the last lines. Her analog for the present crisis is the catastrophic end of the Aztec world with the fact of the Spanish conquest. In this way she conflates cultural annihilation with genocide, the end of the subject with the end of the body.In 1524, just three years after the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, the Náhuatl sages, the tlamatinime, came before the missionary friars in defense of their religion. “Our gods are already dead,” they stated. “Let us perish now.” Their codices lay smoldering in heaps of ash. I write with the same knowledge, the same sadness, recognizing the full impact of the colonial “experiment” on the lives of Chicanos, mestizos, and Native Americans. Our codices—dead leaves unwritten—lie smoldering he the ashes of disregard, censure, and erasure. The Last Generation emerges from those ashes. I write it against time, out of a sense of urgency that Chicanos are a disappearing tribe, out of a sense of this disappearance in my own familia. (2) She may be the last generation, her culture and her body may fail to reproduce. To combat this, she writes; she articulates textually and fixes a potent identity: “I call myself a Chicana writer. Not a Mexican-American writer, not an Hispanic writer, not a half-breed writer. To be a Chicana is not merely to name one’s racial/cultural identity, but also to name a politic, a politic that refuses assimilation into the U.S. mainstream” (56). Being Chicana is a politics of refusal to disappear, but it is not, in and of itself, a politics of reproduction.Moraga’s concerns for reproducing the body of culture coincide with, and perhaps emerge from, her concerns for reproducing her own body. She locates the generational crisis in a personal one: she turns forty, has born no children, and exists in a culture that dictates that she reproduce. Moraga’s concern for her body is at once her concern with how the social inscription impinges upon the physical and with how the physical reproduces the social. The personal so readily melds with the social in the nexus of physical reproduction. This is the topos of the title essay in Last Generation; Moraga concerns focus on the conjunction of the personal and the social in the reproductive arena of the family:At my fortieth birthday party, my tíos and tías sit talking around the dinner table. Most are in their late seventies now, and I notice their whitening hair and frail bodies, their untiring dignity. I relish the sound of their elegant and common Spanish, the subtlety of their humor and vividness of their recovered memories, their cuentos. Watching them, I know lo mexicano will die with their passing. My tío’s children have not taught their own children to be Mexicans. They have become “Americans.” And we’re all supposed to quietly accept this passing, this slow and painless death of a cultura, this invisible disappearance of a people. But I do not accept it, I write. I write as I always have, but now I write for a much larger family. (2) My family is beginning to feel its disintegration. Our Mexican grandmother of ninety-six years has been dead two years now and la familia’s beginning to go. Ignoring this, it increases in number. I am the only one who doesn’t ignore this because I am the only one not contributing to the population. My line of family stops with me. There will be no one calling me, Mami, Mamá, Abuelita… I am the last generation put on this planet to remember and record. (9)In the course of this narrative, she recounts again and again how she is disappearing into the sofa. At the family gathering, where the bodies are fertile but the subjects sterile, she is the last generation. She is disappearing into the sofa: sinking out of sight; and disappearing into the sofa: turning into furniture, a fixture, an object. While her family reproduces the body at the expense of the subject, she writes to remember and record. Yet she disappears. She links the matter of reproducing the body with that of reproducing the subject so that personally she loses subjectivity, she reifies, sinking into an object. Clearly she evokes the heterosexual paradigm, but to what end? In the ensuing story “The Ecology of Woman,” Moraga narrates a heterosexual encounter in Mexico. The intercourse may be heterosexual, but the subject remains lesbian. Cecilia remains distant from men, taking charge in sex with a boy, for example, and avoiding the Mexican soldiers, men and their real guns. She bathes away the scent of the boy and dreams of women and that she is pregnant. She dreams of a daughter who can confirm her subjectivity, a daughter who will confer maternity and “who will call her mami and forgive her the calling of her own mother’s name for the last time.” But menstruation disrupts the dream, “For three days, she gives birth / to her own motherless / blood” (23)Recall that for Anzaldúa, the new mestiza is born in the open wound of cultural conflict and that bloodshed engenders the new subjectivity. But for Moraga, blood flow is sterile. Both Anzaldúa and Moraga imagine paradigmatic shifts in consciousness brought on by linguistic articulation, and both do so as an alternative to compulsory heterosexuality. Both offer lesbian subjectivity in the face of an oppressive patriarchy: they undermine the text “father.” But what of “mother”? For Moraga, heterosexuality remains problematic, but she nevertheless tries to recuperate “mother.” Clearly she does not embrace colonial patriarchy, but in her concern to reproduce the body, she once again takes up the problem of heterosexual intercourse. For Moraga it is a problem that is not easily dismissed, if only for its reproductive capability.Moraga’s recuperation of “mother,” recalls Romero’s recuperation of “father.” By employing the heterotextual interplay of the Gonzalo Guerrero narrative as counter Malinche narrative, Romero rewrites the facts of colonial patriarchy. Moraga rewrites the colonized “mother” after the facts of the United States and Spanish colonial patriarchies and after the theorization of a borderlands mestiza subjectivity. In very different ways, Moraga and Romero retain a central significance for heterosexual reproduction: she, by supplementing homosocial desire with the desire to reproduce the body; and he, by radically refashioning paternity in many ways except for its primary, biological role. Romero’s work also supplements that of Anzaldúa in two areas, the suppression of the father and the general strategy of the heterotext. When Anzaldúa propounds the new mestiza consciousness, she constructs a hybrid, borderlands subject that comes to be in reaction to colonial patriarchy. Part of the new consciousness is possession of “la facultad,” “the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities.” For Anzaldúa, the borderlands subject is the marginalized who develop la facultad in response to oppression, “[T]hose who are pounced on the most have it the strongest—the females, the homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign” (38). At the site of concentrated colonial repression, the white father is excluded because he determines marginalization, because he does the marginalizing. In “Border of Fear, Border of Desire,” Romero observes the extreme opposition to the white father in the Plan de San Diego, a manifesto that called for the armed retaking of lands north of the Rio Grande in 1915. Similar to Anzaldúa’s union of the oppressed, the Plan called for a union of the Latin, Negro and Japanese races against Anglo American domination. But in a more extreme rejection of the white father, the Plan called for the death of every North American male over sixteen. This goes far beyond a call for unity among the oppressed; it is a call to terminate the traditional and extant patriarchy. In this way, the Plan turns the acts of the colonial project against itself by subjecting it to the erasure of the father. But then, in a move similar to his work on Gonzalo Guerrero, Romero offers another image of paternity, citing in the same article the work of José Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos is philosopher of the Mexican nationalism that glorified the mestizo as the raza cósmica, the union of racial extremes of humanity. Vasconcelos profoundly shapes Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness, and perhaps most significantly as Romero points out, Vasconcelos is a borderlands Mexican whose quotidian life crossed the Rio Grande. It is as if, in relation to the violence of the Plan de San Diego, Romero offers a more passive, but culturally significant, patriarch.It is in this way that Romero’s use of the heterotext supplements the endeavors of Anzaldúa. Romero introduces José Vasconcelos and Gonzalo Guerrero as alternate texts, philosophy on the one hand, history on the other. Each provides a powerful means for conceiving racial mestizaje and cultural hybridity. Anzaldúa undertakes a similar effort by turning to the texts of myth and religion. She supplements the negative rejection of colonial patriarchy with the positive use of the heterotext. The alternate vision Anzaldúa provides is precisely that, a vision; with a firm basis in Aztec religion she describes “the Coatlicue state.” The recourse to the Aztec goddess Coatlicue provides the mestiza subject the heterotextuality of alternate religious experience. Anzaldúa describes a lesbian, Aztec influenced, rapture that infuses the new subjectivity; she describes the Coatlicue state,Shock pulls my breath out of me. The sphincter muscle tugs itself up, up, and the heart in my cunt starts to beat. A light is all around me—so intense it could be white or black or at that juncture where extremes turn into their opposites. It passes through my body and comes out of the other side. I collapse into myself—a delicious caving into myself—imploding, the walls like matchsticks softly folding inward in slow motion. I see oposición e insurrección. I see the crack growing on the rock. I see the fine frenzy building. I see the heat of anger or rebellion or hope split open that rock, releasing la Coatlicue. And someone in me takes matters into our own hands, and eventually, takes dominion over serpents—over my own body, my sexual activity, my soul, my mind my weaknesses and strengths. Mine. Ours. Not the heterosexual white man’s or the colored man’s or the state’s or the culture’s or the religion’s or the parents’—just ours mine. And suddenly I feel everything rushing to a center, a nucleus. All the lost pieces of myself come flying from the deserts and the mountains and the valleys, magnetized toward that center. Completa. Something pulsates in my body, a luminous thin thing that grows thicker every day. Its presence never leaves me. I am never alone. That which abides: my vigilance, my thousand sleepless serpent eyes blinking in the night, forever open. And I am not afraid. (51)Anzaldúa reworks Aztec mythology and provides an alternate, lesbian, Chicana experience. The rapture engenders something between the maternal goddess and the mestiza subject, something is produced and within the body, something grows everyday. In a very basic way, the heterotextuality here is very like Romero’s, the infusion of different texts has effect and produces something. And in a more specific way, Anzaldúa, like Moraga, confronts the issue of homosexual reproduction, but unlike Moraga, there is no turn to the heterosexual. Instead, the genesis and reproduction of cultural relations remains apart from the biologic; Anzaldúa describes a maternity without a requisite paternity.All three writers, Rolando Romero, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherríe Moraga, have opened up dialogues with the colonial prescripts of “father” and “reproduction.” Each one takes the mestizo hybrid subject to be the site of cultural conflict, and each compounds that conflict. They exploit a heterotextuality that supports the forces of hybridity and opposes those of monologic subjectivity. Their heterotexts oppose the paradigm of a cultural genesis and reproduction that is patriarchal, patronymic, and patrilinear. It is an attack equally on the father as analog of god and as Adam-the-namer and disseminator of language. As a final note, it is worthwhile to consider that Adamic task of naming and ascribing language to things. In their own ways, Romero, Anzaldúa, and Moraga rename things; they employ their writing to refashion relationships in language in order to refashion relationships in consciousness and in the world. They write; they rename. After their texts “father” is not the same; “mestiza” is not the same. Their work addresses the point that while we may know the name of the father, as in the case of Hernán Cortés, we are not given the real names of Malinche or of Gonzalo. This is so because the power to name and the right to bear name are meted out according to rules of the hegemony. We know Malinche, by the Nahuatl mispronunciation of Marina, her Christian name. And we do not know the names of the other women baptized with her, as Bernal Díaz observes, “I do not clearly remember the names of all the other women, and there is not reason for naming any of them. But they were the first women in New Spain to become Christians” (82). We do not know the surname of Gonzalo. We assume it is Guerrero, but it is just one of four attributed to him. We ever know the name of his wife. Nor do we know the name of his children. They all remain ambiguous, poorly defined in comparison to the traditional father and his son: Hernán Cortés and Martín Cortés. It is clear that there is a politics in naming and being named. Cherríe Moraga names herself, “I am a Chicana writer.” Anzaldúa declares “I am my language.” And Romero notes that while Malinche “was being called ‘Doña Marina’ by the Spaniards, Cortés was being addressed as ‘Señor Malinche’ by the indigenous people” (363). All three manipulate texts in an act of definition, in an act of articulating the self amid the forces of erasure. Romero locates the authority to name in the oppressed as well as in the oppressor. Anzaldúa locates her subjectivity in language itself. Moraga names herself as the subject agent, Chicana writer. She rejects silent acquiescence and nameless identity. She articulates, therefore she is; she speaks differently, therefore things are different.
© 1997 by Alfred Arteaga For complete text inclucing poems, notes, and works cited, see print version |