Chicano Poetics Heterotexts and Hybridities Alfred Arteaga Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997 |
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Chapter Four: An Other Tongue
When I write about Chicano poetry, one of the first examples that comes to mind is José Montoya’s “El Louie.” I’m sure this is so because the poem strikes me as being thoroughly Chicano. It is, after all, about the high life and tragic end of Louie Rodríguez, exemplar of urban youth subculture; it is an elegy for a pachuco. And outside Chicano barrios, there exists nothing quite like the pachuco. Louie would dance both mambo and boogie and conflate the cultures from both sides of the border. Yet more vital than Louie’s story for me, as a poet and critic, is the language of Louie’s story. And the language of “El Louie” matches its content: the verse is as thoroughly Chicano as is Louie’s life. It begins, “Hoy enterraron al Louie / and San Pedro o sanpinche / are in for it…” [loosely, Today they buried Louie / and heaven or hell / are in for it…]. “El Louie” mixes languages in the style of popular Chicano speech: there is Spanish, there is English, and there is hybridization. This style of multilingual hybridization is pushed to the extreme in a poem by José Antonio Burciaga. “Poema en tres idiomas y caló” delineates the linguistic tensions embodied in the Chicano and is written in an interplay of languages, Spanish, English, Nahuatl and the Chicano hybridization, caló. Each of which is present in the following two lines, “Mi mente spirals al mixtli, / buti suave I feel cuatro lenguas in mi boca” [My mind spirals to the clouds, / so smooth I feel four tongues in my mouth]. “Poema en tres idiomas y caló” acknowledges the style of Chicano discourse and reflects the intercultural dynamics at play in constructing Chicano identity. For, being for Chicanos occurs in the interface between Anglo and Latin America, on the border that is not so much a river from the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso and a wire fence from there to the Pacific but, rather, a much broader area where human interchange goes beyond the simple “American or no” of the border check. It is the space to contest cultural identities more complex than the more facile questions of legal status or images in popular culture. “El Louie” and “Poema en tres idiomas y caló” are born of a linguistic interplay that finds its central analog in the porous frontier. Mexicans negotiate the border like no others, north and south, south and north, realizing simultaneous cultural fission and fusion. It is this border context that differentiates the styles of linguistic interplay of Chicano poetry from other styles of polyglot poetics. The poetry of Eliot and Pound, for example, incorporates other languages, from the Italian of Dante, to German conversation, to Chinese characters. The poetics of Montoya and Burciaga is similar to Eliot and Pound’s in the fact of its linguistic hybridization, but the fact of the border contributes to a different emphasis in the styles of that multilingualism. In Eliot and Pound there is much greater emphasis on quotation and literary allusion, while in Montoya and Burciaga, poetic hybridization tends to replicate the polyglot style of quotidian Chicano discourse. The former often focuses on the content of that form (e.g., Dante’s Inferno) and interlards “significant” texts; the later focuses on the form of that form (e.g., caló, hybridization itself) and implements discursive interaction. Because Chicano verse actualizes the discourse of the border and embraces a broad range of difference, comparing the styles of linguistic interplay becomes a prime method of considering Chicano poetics. One way that the styles of interplay can be compared is by juxtaposing the sizes of the linguistic units that play in the works of various authors. That is, from the macro to the micro, the monolingual unit ranges from genres; to texts; to poetic and grammatical units; to individual words; and to morphemes, phonemes, and graphemes. Lucha Corpi, for example, differentiates language at the level of genre: poetry is Spanish, Palabras de mediodía and Variaciones sobre un tempestad are two collections, while the novels are English, Delia’s Song and Eulogy for a Brown Angel. For the poet, Juan Felipe Herrera, the monolingual unit tends to be the book. Rebozos of Love and Akrilica are primarily Spanish books, while Exiles of Desire and Facegames are English. Barbara Brinson Curiel, Speak to Me From Dreams, and Francisco X. Alarcón, Cuerpo en Llamas and Snake Poems, tend to vary language within the book, so that the monolingual unit is the poem, the stanza, or the phrase. Both José Montoya and José Antonio Burciaga alternate languages within the verse line and even within the individual word. In “El Louie,” the word shinadas is a hybrid of English and Spanish, the English verb to shine is written as a Spanish past participle. This hybridization is a type of double voicing, as in “Poema en tres idiomas y caló,” where Nahuatl infuses Spanish (loco becomes locotl) and English (English becomes Englishic). In Alurista’s Nationchild Plumaroja, even the typeface speaks difference: the poems are printed in the script of barrio graffiti. Border discourse contextualizes Chicano poetry to such an extent that even essentially monolingual verse is read within the larger framework of a multilingual poetics. Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Emplumada is basically an English book, although it does have one Spanish language poem and Spanish words and phrases in others. Yet against the relative English consistency is manifested a subject matter of intercultural conflict. And it is a Spanish title that effects the unifying tropes of the text: Emplumada, i.e., pen, feather, pen flourish, plumage. Even very monolingual texts, such as Lucha Corpi’s Palabras de Mediodía and Bernice Zamora’s Restless Serpents, are read as Chicano texts at the extremes of Chicano discourse but not beyond. Because the degree to which the discourse is polyglot, another language is implied, and such discourse imbues Palabra and Serpent with internal dialogue. The border as discursive and existential fact does something to the interpretation of Chicano writing. It removes the discussion of the styles of linguistic interplay from the realm of the aesthetic alone because the border is a space where English and Spanish compete for presence and authority. It is not the site of mere either/or linguistic choice but one of quotidian linguistic conflict where the utterance is born at home in English and in Spanish and in caló. Here, verse is born of and sustained on conflict that has real world consequence. In the broad interface between Anglo and Latin America, the operative tropes, the definitions, the histories and logics and legal codes, the semantics and the epistemes are contested daily. Because of this, the study of literary style is inextricably bound up with that of discursive practice. And as Chicano discourse demarcates the realm of the poem, so it does the Chicano subject. Chicanismo occurs in the very nexus of languages and is continually marked by utterances in the linguistic borderlands. In poem and in daily speech, English and Spanish bestow different levels of authority on text and speaker. The relative imbalance in authority grows daily in the present era of increasing legislative suppression of languages other than English. English carries with it the status of authorization by the hegemony. It is the language of Anglo America and of linguistic Anglo Americans, whether or not they be ethnic Anglos. Further, it is the language of the greatest military and economic power in the world. Spanish is a language of Latin Americans, south of the border and north. Across the border, Spanish is a Third World language; here it is the language of the poor. Today as I write in Santa Cruz, California, the local newspaper carries an article that illustrates contemporary linguistic relations in the US. It is an interesting variant to an otherwise common story in Chicano neighborhoods: the story of deportation. The article begins, “School and city officials expressed outrage, this week over the Border Patrol’s arrest of three Hispanic students outside an English as a Second Language class.” Needless to say, the three were deported to Mexico. They were denied presence in “America” while trying to learn “American.” Reading this from my Chicano perspective, I am struck by the irony of it: irony, not only that “officials expressed outrage” at so typical an INS action, but irony also, that the story made it into print in the first place. For we have been trained to know that, despite the fact that we make up perhaps one in four in the state, what Mexicans, Chicanos, and Latinos say and do in our language is not worthy of print. To speak, or even to attempt to learn to speak, sparks a display of power from the dominant group. It is within this system of unequal discursive relationships that Chicanos speak and write. This is evident, institutionally, in examples that range from the sixteen states that are officially English only, to the four English national language bills introduced into Congress last year, to the American Academy of Poets policy that the national Walt Whitman award be for English only verse. And from the congress to the academy to the streets, over and over, incessantly, an unequal struggle goes on in which Anglo America strives to inhibit dialogue, marginalize Chicanismo, and silence other tongues, and by synecdoche, silence other people. But the US is not a space where homogeneous speakers articulate a single language. It is, rather, the site of polyglossia, where multiple national languages interact. English is neither the sole nor original language. Yet, US American culture presents itself as an English language culture; it espouses a single language ethos; it strives very actively to assert a monolingual identity. This is to say, its overriding tendency is toward the assertion of a monolingual authority and the complementary suppression of alternate languages. In Bakhtin’s terms, this tendency is monologic, espousing the monologue of a dominant, authoritative discourse, eschewing dialogue with others. This monologic bias, from the English Only movement to the writing of US history, valorizes English and suppresses expression both in and about Spanish. English is elevated from the status of one language among languages, albeit the dominant one, to that of sole and pervasive language in general. This is coupled with the simultaneous erasure of Spanish through the restriction of its use and the interdiction of dialogue. Because internal dialogue is so contributing a factor in the making of Chicano discourse, the dynamics of language are especially foregrounded in the verse and in the subjectification of the Chicano. Both come to be within a matrix that includes English, Spanish and caló. This matrix, which Bakhtin calls heteroglossia, is the context of historical, interlingual, and interdiscursive factors that come into play in, and affect the meaning of, any utterance. Chicano poem and cultural subject acknowledge heteroglossia; this is what Chicano means: intercultural heteroglot. “American,” according to the Anglo-American’s selective application of the continental name, means the suppression of heteroglossia and the selective recognition of only that set and sequence of factors that enhance the Self and that mark the alterity of Others. Distinctions of language, color and religion are but some of the markers employed to subjugate. For Chicanos, linguistic practice has been the legal criteria to classify, to differentiate: Spanish Speaking, Spanish Surnamed, White Hispanic. Chicano subjectification is never far from the competition among languages. The role of discursive activity in the creation and maintenance of identity can be neither disinterested nor indifferent. Each articulation is a taking of sides and a demarcation of subjects. There can be no objective disinterest within a situation of constantly unequal subjectification, for even to choose not to choose tacitly supports the status quo. It is comparable to the border check point question, “American or no?” Anything other than a prompt “yes”, even a slight pause, causes suspicion and casts the American status of the speaker in doubt. For Chicanos it is patently clear: each utterance and textual manifestation identifies and aligns, promulgating one version of self, one dimension of space. So what does the Chicano discourse, does the Chicano poem do? First, in the common senses of language use, other than poetry, the mere presence of Chicano discourse resists Anglo American suppression of heteroglossia, much as the background noise of menials jars a social gathering. The presence of difference undermines the aspiration for an English only ethos. And inasmuch as Chicano discourse is specifically multilingual and multivoiced, it further undermines the tendency toward single language and single-voiced monologue, that is, it undermines Anglo American monologism. It undercuts claims of prevalence, centrality and superiority and confirms the condition of heteroglossia. It draws the monologue into dialogue. In short, it dialogizes the authoritative discourse. And the poem? It is often maintained that poetry is a personal form of discourse, the particular discursive act of an individual poet. Bakhtin argued a generic distinction, that poetry was formally monologic, the single-voiced discourse [edinogolosnoe slovo] of the individual poet. He felt that it could not articulate the double-voiced discourse [dvugolosnoe slovo] of the polyglot novel. Bakhtin eventually reduced the absoluteness of his epic/novel differentiation, yet he nevertheless maintained that it was novelistic discourse that enabled the dialogues among social discourses, as well as that between character and author. But clearly there is a tradition of poetry that is, at least in form, multilingual. Eliot and Pound emphasize the content of that form in the creation of poetic pastiche in poems that blend polyglot quotation and allusion with lines of English language, modernist verse. Eliot’s quoting Dante, for example, by the simple fact of including Italian, does make for a bilingual poetry, and one that is, in a sense, double-voiced. But to the extent that the work is resonant with the authoritative discourse, whether it be Anglo Catholic Royalist or Mussolini Fascist, such bilingualism is not disharmonious with English or Italian nationalist tendency toward single-voiced monologism. This is to say that in this fashion, literary citation and allusion function in a manner that does not oppose the national narratives; indeed, such literary hybridization functions as a self-referential and tautological affirmation of the national telos: the hailing of the great dead establishes the continuity of cultural transmission to the latter day. This, I realize, is a generalization that here only serves to contrast a very different poetics undertaken by Montoya and Burciaga; it ignores completely, for example, Eliot or Pound’s incorporation of common and quotidian speech. Nevertheless, it remains obvious that the two Chicano poets do not cite in the same manner but instead implement an interlingual style that emphasizes the form of the form. Their caló is multilingual and double-voiced in its eclectic hybridization. Its style opposes standard English and opposes the canonical literary telos. It conflicts with the authoritative discourse; it is dialogic. It is in this sense that the simple contrast of styles is possible. The strategy of Eliot and Pound can be understood to emphasize the selective drawing from the treasure house of texts central to Western culture, texts that constitute the authoritative discourse. The strategy of Montoya and Burciaga can be understood to emphasize the style of linguistic hybridization of the present day border context, hybridization that dialogizes the Anglo American monologue. That Chicano poetry upsets the authoritative lines of American literature and of the American Self makes for a type of poetry that requires the consideration of the discourse and power relations that form its context. The study of discursive practices that specifically subjugate and subjectify colonized peoples overlaps with Bakhtin’s more general work in the shared focus on the work of language by which one group fashions authority over another. It specifically examines the process of subject formation within the context of a gross imbalance of power. The relationships between Britain and India or between Britain and Ireland, for example, are over-determined by colonial contexts. Still today, the colonial language, English, figures prominently in the construction of Indian and of Irish identities. Colonial discursive practices are more immediately tied to displays of physical power than are the literary discursive practices that Bakhtinian analysis is usually employed to describe. Each colonial situation is unique, yet common to all are the conquest and domination of one people by another and a dominant, monologic discourse whose employment is linked to violence. Colonial discourse criticism applied to internal US relations would make manifest that the Chicano is identified as Other for the United States. The subjectification of the Chicano occurs within the context of an Anglo American domination that assigns marginality as a constitutive component. Within that context, each speech act is perlocutionary and differentiates in the act uttering. The Chicano subject is marginal because the signifier and signified “chicano” are marginalized in Anglo American discourse. The sign “chicano” and the subject “chicano” are made alien by the centripetal forces of monologism that strive to locate the Self at the center and to locate the Other at the margins. The Other is contained, linguistically and spatially, on reservations, in barrios, in the colonies, far from the centers of the colonizer’s Self and home and female body. “Chicano” exists, to the limited extent that it does exist, as a marker of difference, of inferiority and alterity. Being “chicano” is a process of continual remaking, a discursive process that is always negotiated within the context of the circumscribing discursive practices of the US. Any monologism, with its drive toward a unitary and self-refle(x/ct)ive discourse, discriminates Self from Other, but in the colonial situation, it radically differentiates the identities of colonizer and colonized. The extreme power differential prescribes literal subjectification through regimentation of semantics and prescribes physical subjugation through regimentation of the body. The colonizer’s language and discourse are elevated to the status of arbiter of truth and reality; the world comes to be as the authoritative discourse says. For discursive practice does not simply represent colonialism after the fact but rather, functions as the means to order colonial relations and to establish meaning of those relations, in short, to define the world for the benefit of the colonizer. It is this absoluteness of authority in the face of alternate discourses and other peoples that characterizes colonial relationships, relationships such as those between English and Irish, between Anglo American and Sioux, between White and Black South African. The dominant discourse has such authority that it becomes adopted, in varying degrees, by the colonized subject. What begins during the conquest, in the precolonialism, as an externally imposed representation, becomes, in colonialism per se and in postcolonialism, a self-imposed subjectification. The marginal Other autocolonizes himself and herself each time the hegemonic discourse is articulated. The utterance of English in Ireland or the use of a British styled school system in India reinforces daily the colonizer’s presence in the heart of the colonized. The authoritative discourse is, after all, a prescribed monologue structured to inhibit dialogue with the natives. Who would read these lines I now write, if they were written in caló? According to the monologue, the colonized subject is homogeneous and static, a silent text that can be written and read but never talked with. For this subject, discourse is itself textualized, a codified set of relationships and prescribed responses that delimit a fixed reality. The colonized subject becomes the (sub)altern Other prescribed by the dominant discourse in the act of articulating that discourse. The Other comes to be according to and, illustrates the validity of, an externally constructed social text. Autocolonialism is perhaps most marked in those situations where the colonist never goes home, that is, in internal colonialism. In the US, “internal colonialism” was first employed in the 1960’s to describe the “colonization” of Black Americans in white America. Black Nationalists and social scientists used it to describe a situation analogous to the colonial except that the colonized space was permanently encompassed by the colonizer space, i.e., the colonist never left the colony. Within the confines of the US, American Indians, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans share the experience of conquest and continued occupation by Anglo America; Blacks represent that special conquest, the forced immigration of the slave. None were originally English speakers. But for them, after the decimation of conquest, enslavement or genocide, the acceptance of the colonizer’s linguistic practices has translated into an increase in life span and perceived human worth and a decrease in lynching and forced sterilization. The discursive relationships that constitute internal colonies are similar to those that constitute external colonies; the methods that describe the discursive processes that have subjugated and subjectified Indian, Irish, Algerian, and Aztec, are methods that can illuminate the processes of internal colonialism within the US. In response to colonialism, there are several general reactions available for the colonized Other. Very generally, the reactions can be described according to different criteria as either autocolonial, nationalist or hybrid, on the one hand, or as monologic or dialogic, on the other. The former describes the difference between the colonized’s and the colonizer’s discourse; the latter describes the relative tendency to engage in dialogue. Autocolonialism, in the extreme, requires the Other’s adoption of the hegemonic discourse to the extent that the colonizer permits and to the extent that the Other is able predicate it. The Other assimilates both discourse and the relationships it systematizes, so to the degree the discourse suppresses, the autocolonist effaces or denigrates him/herself from within. In the endeavor to mimic the monologue of power, the Other harmonizes with it and suppresses difference. Autocolonialism discourages dialogue. It is monologic. Nationalism opposes the authority of the colonial discourse with the authority of an alternate discourse. Nationalist discourse defines itself in the related actions of rejecting the externally imposed system of representation and advancing an indigenous one. The alien, colonially defined world is rejected in favor of the native, nationalistically defined world. The articulation of difference would seem to dehegemonize colonial authority by its presence alone, and in a sense it does do this. The move to select one discourse over another is dialogic, but the content of that selection, the nationalist monologue, is monologic. Nationalism combines native elements into a privileged discourse, deaf [gluxoj], as Bakhtin would say, to a deaf colonial discourse. Their “dialogue” is the clash of senseless monologues. Its overriding tendency is monologic. Hybridization, or cultural mestizaje, differs from both autocolonialism and nationalism in that it is inherently polyglot. Hybridized discourse rejects the principle of monologue and composes itself by selecting from competing discourses. Further, there is no detritus of difference; distinct elements remain so, relating in a dialogue of dissimilarity. Hybridization asserts dialogue by articulating an alternate discourse and by organizing itself in internal dialogue. It is born of the struggles for discursive dominance and relates within itself and with other discourses according to the principle of dialogue. It is dialogic because it is so multivoiced. The discursive actions, which authorize colonialism’s stringent monologue and extreme power displacement, prescribe antithesis as the ordering factor of differentiation. Antithesis engenders a propitious rhetoric of difference that opposes the favorable representation of one people, to the radical marginalization of a homogeneous and alien Other. Colonial and monologic discourse transpires through the rhetorical fashioning of what, from the dominant viewpoint, is a fortuitous reality. There can be no objective, disinterested discourse in colonial relationships. Antithetical subjectification and radical differentiation are rhetorically determined as the dominant group employs its available discourses (e.g., science, religion, law, art) in order to constitute, codify, and read its literal power. Scientific discourse has been used to quantify and qualify, to prove (empirically or logically, for example), the essentially different nature of the Other. Examples range from the Victorian biologists’ fetishization of the female, especially Black female, buttocks and genitals, to the more contemporary gender and racial discrimination through ostensibly objective intelligence testing. Religious discourse defines the good and the bad, the right and the wrong. Even in seemingly moderate form, it identifies the heathen and heretic, and is typically employed in the rhetoric of genocide, be it of Jews or Armenians this century, or of American Indians before. The law, of course, defines citizen, alien, slave and constrains woman, child, Indian. Presently, it determines who is countable in the census and what languages can be spoken at the work place. Art differentiates the beautiful from the ugly, the civilized from the primitive, art from kitsch, the subject from the non subject. For not only does artistic discourse fashion the representation of peoples, it also discriminates who is to be represented and who represents. These and other discourses designate alterity by denoting essential and characteristic distinctions, differentiae such as race, region, nationality, ethnicity, religion, language, as well as those of class, time, age, and gender. These features are read as antithetical differentiæ that prove the marginality that they designate. Tautologically, art confirms superior racial beauty and a higher degree of civilization; science, superior intelligence and the transcending of superstition; religion and law, superior soul and body; history, the correct sequence of ascendance to that superiority. Historical discourse is especially significant in that the hegemonic history is the dominant narrative, the official version of reality to date as well as the plot for the future. The rhetoric of monologic colonial discourse can be observed to proceed as follows. Subjectification of the Other is realized by the rhetoric of antithesis and synecdoche. The centripetal forces of antithesis exteriorize the Other. The colonial Self is present, here and central, the Other, there and marginal, absent. The Self differs in essence from the Other. They are not like us: they are not our color; their god is not God; their beliefs are not true, not science, etc. Antithesis allows for an open troping by which the Other can be relegated to anything beyond the borders of Self: the Other is colored, pagan, superstitious; the Other is primitive, savage, beast. The more intense the monologism, the more open the troping, the more extreme the alterity. Within the range of potential antithetical tropes, synecdoche functions to locate the troping of the Other within a narrow band of essential homogeneity. The rhetoric of antithesis restricts heterogeneity to the dominant Self, and synecdoche acts to disallow individuation to the Other. To know one is to know all. The characteristics of the group are the characteristics of each individual. Within acceptable and well defined parameters, the Others are all the same. And yet, there is the occasional interstice in the homogeneity, when the rhetoric is forced to recognize an “individual” Other: the good slave, the Indian scout, the token “spook who sat by the door.” But the number of such individuals must be severely restricted in order to maintain the image of homogeneity, that image that ensures the verisimilitude of the antithesis. Not only is subjectivity fashioned through, and are actions informed by, the rhetoric of the dominant discourse, but identity and action are legitimated through a strategy of ultimate referentiality. Colonial discourse aspires toward a system of representation in which word is linked contiguously with reality, in which hegemonic story is true history. For the aspiration of monologue is the aspiration for the single language, single voice, and single version of social relationships. Monologic authority is vested in the metonymic organization of discursive elements into the correct combinations that constitute the true history and the real political borders. Colonial discourse emphasizes referent and content, appropriating the epistemes of “truth” and “reality” in an endeavor to surpass metonymy and achieve the status of mirror, where the word reflects exactly and uniquely the world. This is to say, the hegemony envisions so contiguous a discourse that the troping collapses from consciousness and the power of discursive representation is rewritten as the power of literal presentation. It eschews the chaotic relativities of dialogue and the substitution of metaphors and aims, instead, at apodeictic reference to the world. This so referentially “true” discourse is not, however, aphasic discourse, as Jakobson would describe a solely metonymic discourse, but rather, a phasic one that oscillates between the axis of combination (metonymy and synecdoche) and the axis of selection (metaphor and irony). The contents of the ethnocentric and racist trope can range from “cannibal” and “redskin” to “animal” and “noble savage.” But the form of relating those tropes, the organizing strategy, is combinatory rather than selective, syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic, and metonymic rather than metaphoric. Alternate versions of social relationships, i.e., alternate paradigms, are proscribed through the prohibition of dialogue. Instead, the monologue of the mirror presents the authorized versions of reality, truth, telos. Rhetoric is refashioned as logic, and tropes disappear in a semantics of reference in which the meaning of the Other is the trope for the Other. The monologue strings together discourses favorable for the physical domination of a people, from the writing of stereotypes, to the creation of slaves, to the making of genocide. These “truths” shape the “reality” in which the relative presence and absence of the Other is juggled. Antithetically, the Other is generally rendered absent, exteriorized from the central and present Self. But at times, the Other is brought into dangerous proximity. During physically violent encounters, as in the conquest, the Other is at once vividly represented as a dangerous presence and is effaced of full humanity. A present body, absent voice, absent humanity. Necessary for conquest, and for genocide, is the “truth” that the colonized is in some ways both dangerous and inferior, perhaps as wild beasts. The Other is a homogeneous menace, significant yet generalized, dangerous yet never humanly present. In contexts of relatively diminished physical force, the Other is more fully relegated to the realm of absence. The more fully realized the physical subjugation is, the less is the need to represent a dangerous proximity, and so the less the Other need be envisioned present. Further, the Other is denied discursive presence, both in the sense that the Other is relatively absent from the vocabulary of the dominant discourse and in the sense that the Other is absent as an agent of discourse. The Other becomes non-discursive and non-interactive and approaches the status of text: static, extant, “true.” The hegemony restricts access to active discourse to itself. The Other is textualized, and according to traditional Western metaphysics, the written text, the literal Other, is denied presence: the Other is exteriorized, frozen, inscribed. Effectively, the Other is silenced, existing only as defined by a rigid and prescribed alterity or not existing at all. Chicanos are products of two colonial contexts. The first begins with the explorer Colón and the major event of the renaissance: the “old” world’s “discovery” of the “new.” Spanish colonization of the Americas lasted more than three centuries, from the middle of Leonardo Da Vinci’s lifetime to the beginning of Queen Victoria’s. The first century is marked by conquest and true genocide: in Mexico alone, the indigenous population is cut down 96%, from 25 million to 1 million. The modern Mexican and Chicano descend from the miscegenation of Spaniard and Indian and the cultural encounter of conquistador and native. The second colonial context begins with the immigration of Austin’s group from Connecticut to Texas, Mexico. Within one generation of Mexico’s decolonization from Spain, two wars were waged in which Anglo America conquers Mexico and acquires its northern half. People were acquired with the lands, and the “Americanization” of natives in Texas, New Mexico and California is analogous to that of natives in Manhattan, the Dakotas, Puerto Rico or Hawaii. But because only half of Mexico was acquired, immigration can still figure largely in the constitution of the Chicano. Conversely, the territory of the Navajo, as that of the Puerto Rican, is entirely circumscribed by the US; there can be only internal migration. Yet, for the Chicano, as for the Indian, the history of subjugation at home delimits the process of subject making. For both groups, alterity has coincided with the erasure of the Other domain, the Other space having been assimilated by the US: Chicanos and Indians are rendered aliens from and in their own lands, internally colonized. The colonizer never left Indian nor Chicano space, neither Manhattan nor San Francisco. Shaping the original conception of the conquests, its subsequent rationalization, and its eventual erasure from US consciousness, colonial discourse represented and continues to represent Chicanos and Indians as marginal and inferior Others. Both are not real Americans in many senses, including the linguistic, and for both “being” “American” remains problematic. To a large degree, both the colonial Indian and Chicano subjects are constructed according to the representation of their linguistic practices. The Indian, at the time of the conquest and when compared to the middle class WASP archetype upheld as the American national Self, is relatively less literate. Anglo America is both deaf and blind to Indian expression. This is read as “proof” of inferiority. Indigenous languages had no words for Jesus, for money, for opera, ergo, the Indian is uncivilized, savage, and quite likely, subhuman. And by extrapolation, Indians can only benefit from conquest, that is, it renders Indians civilized, genocide and colonialism save Indians’ souls, and further, Indians are so worthless in their “wild” stage that the world would loose little at their elimination. Such is the rhetoric that forgets the complete extermination of some Indian people and the suppression of the rest. A threshold marked by the ability to write separates Civilized Man from the savage beings, and among the literate, human worth is appraised, at least in part, according to the relative values ascribed in a hierarchy of languages. The Chicano subject may be subaltern, but in so far as, and to the degree that, the subject is Hispanic, the Chicano is human. And since Spanish is relatively close to English in the linguistic hierarchy, the suppression of Hispanic America is more problematic and of a different order than the nearly absolute suppression of Algonquian, Athapascan, or Uto-Aztecan America. The presence of an alternative, extant and literate linguistic tradition causes a crisis for Anglo America: not only does it preclude the status for English as sole, unchallenged mode for civilized American discourse, but it also undermines several myths that are at the very heart of the self-image propagated by Anglo America. Part of the inspiration, orchestration, and rationalization for New World colonialism lies in the troping of the Americas as a new world and in the paramount role envisioned for the Anglo American. Anglo American mythology would have it that the United States is so much more than a mere extension of Western Europe, that it is the first blank slate since Eden, the new and perhaps last chance to get things right. Anglo Americans met the challenge and performed that most elemental and significant of linguistic acts: the monologic, Adamic act of ascribing meaning, naming the new items in the new world. They inscribed themselves American Adams, invented new political institutions, forged new cities in the peopleless (not counting savages) wilderness. History is a narrative, made story with plot, with telos, with heroes and villains. The United States locates itself at the climax and terminus of the trajectory of Western Civilization that began at the original Eden. The move West, from Eden to the thirteen colonies, traces not only the spatial relocation but, more importantly, the historical development of civilization proper, through Greece and Rome, the English ‘re-’naissance, and peaking at the American naissance of Adam Jr. Egypt, the rest of Africa, and the “Orient,” of course, are ignored. And according to Western cartography, the West does not stop at Appalachia; there is a manifest destiny; civilization was destined to move as far West as possible, to the edge of that ultimate boundary with the East, to that ultimate “shining sea.” And en route west, the Anglo encountered Indian and Chicano, both of whom left traces in the dominant discourse. Indian names and words have been taken to describe American places, athletic teams, motor homes. The use of these terms evokes pride in the conquest, much in the same manner as a mounted animal head does for the hunter. After all, the actual people, the Indians, have been successfully contained: first their numbers have been thoroughly diminished, and second, those remaining are powerless, have the shortest life spans and highest infant mortality rates, and either are collected in remote areas far from Anglo Americans, or are somehow invisible in the cities. The conquest of the “wild west” has been so efficient, the containment of the “redskins” so thorough, that contemporary mention of these peoples is read by Anglo America as allusion to the cast of colorful characters in American history, beginning with Pocahontas and ending with Geronimo. On the national level, the Indian exists as story, not as living human. There can be no dialogue with the Indian text; the Indian can only be written about or read. The Indian is thoroughly contained and can no longer pose a menacing threat. Because of this, the second Wounded Knee can become a cause célèbre, Dennis Banks and Russell Means become inscribed beside Sitting Bull: the attack on Anglo America is so marginal and so contained that it can be romanticized; contemporary Indian resistance is understood through the narratives of nostalgia. After all, what real damage can those absent, silent, noble savages, those ecologically correct, happy campers, do? But since the conquest of Mexican territory, there persists a stubborn linguistic trace that belies Anglo American image production and that is more difficult to contain than by simple appropriation for the naming of motor homes. Consider a particularly significant self-image: Anglo Americans epitomize their imperialist spirit in the cowboy: independent, powerful, free, implacable, and ever moving westward through the vast wilderness, fashioning America. And as such, the cowboy represents the quintessential American. That cowboys appear only after the US acquisition of northern Mexico is no mere coincidence: could the cowboy have occurred in Georgia or in Vermont, or in Surrey, at that? And yet, the paramount Anglo American is thoroughly contaminated by a Mexican, a Hispanic, presence. Cowboy attire, tools, occupation, food, music, and most telling, his own lingo, continually reveal this Other origin. The very language that marks the cowboy has a Spanish accent. Consider the cowboy lexicon and its context of Spanish language and border discourse: arroyo/arroyo; bukeroo/vaquero; canyon/cañon; chaps/chaparreras; cinch/cincho; cowboy/vaquero; desperado/desperado; hoosegow/juzgado; lariat/la reata; loco/loco; lasso/lazo; mesquite/mesquite; mustang/mestengo; pinto/pinto; ranch/rancho; renegade/renegado; rodeo/rodeo. But by selectively reading the heteroglossia, the cowboy icon is figured a singularly American and new phenomenon: the cowboy and his lingo are conceived as US originals; the Spanish, Mexican, Chicano etymology is erased. The linguistic trace also persists in place names. When Anglo Americans finally acquired the western edge, California, they found existing cities already named: San Diego, Los Angeles, San José, San Francisco. The western “wilderness” had been already inscribed by Hispanics, much as the contemporary Chicano neighborhood is inscribed with barrio identifying graffiti placas. The new Eden had been denied Adam Jr.; things were already named, and worse yet, they had been written well before he and she arrived. Even California, the prize of the conquest and today’s most populous state, especially California, undermines the myth: California was named in Spanish a century before the US’s Anglo baptism, their first Thanksgiving. The Chicano incarnates the Hispanic (i.e., literate, European, human, antecedent) inscription of America and makes evident the Anglo American rhetorical postscript. Unlike the Indian trace, the Chicano’s remains threatening. There are so many more Chicanos than Indians. Los Angeles, for example, has the largest urban concentrations of both Indians and Chicanos in the nation. It is not rural New Mexico where Indians and Chicanos remain far from the national consciousness. Los Angeles is home to perhaps 80,000 Indians and perhaps 1.4 million Chicanos and other Latinos. In 1990, the population of Chicanos/Latinos in California alone is greater than the population of any of forty-two other states. Within California, Chicanos equal the combined total of all other minorities; in ten years, white non-Hispanics will fall from the position of majority, a position they hold, partially at least, when compared to Indians and Chicanos, because of a superior life span. In twenty-five years, the largest ethnic group in California will be Chicanos/Hispanics. In reaction to such rapid change, Anglo American rhetoric constructs a Chicano subject with minimal presence, with maximum absence. The growing discrepancy between rhetorical “truth” and existential fact works toward the impending “white shock” when Anglo Americans realize all in not as it seems. Witness the “shock” of Anglo Americans at the reaction of Los Angeles Blacks to the acquittals of police in the beating of Rodney King, “white shock” at the intensity of Black perceptions of a racist here and now. In order to foster an image of an America born in the English language, it becomes necessary to propagate a story of contiguous and historical English precedence. Millennia of Native American presence is easily glossed over because Westerners read nothing of it. Hispanic America is more difficult to dismiss, but this is accomplished nevertheless. For example, history is not written chronologically but, rather, from East to West so that Spanish is encountered by the likes of Austin and Fremont during the Western expansion late in US history; it appears historically after English. Spanish is made alien, an immigrant language, no more contiguously linked to America than is German or Chinese. There must be no Hispanization of Anglo America, neither in its history nor in its future. Even cowboy lingo must be envisioned to arise from an English only monologue; it must not resemble an interlingual caló. These moves are advanced rhetorically and not logically. The history and contiguity of Spanish in the Southwest is denied in history book, popular culture, and through language laws. A correlative of the displacement of Spanish is the illiteracy of the Chicano. Chicanos are depicted as non-writing subjects who did not produce literature until taught English by Anglo Americans. This erasure of a linguistic and literary tradition enhances the marginalization of Spanish, both from Anglo America and from the Chicano writer, and moves the Chicano from the pole of civilized Western European culture toward the pole of the illiterate savage. There is no Hispanic history of the Southwest and, besides, caló is no real language at all. Linguistically then, the Chicano speaks a language that has no real claim to the Southwest, speaks it poorly (it is not real Castilian) and worst of all, does not write it. In effect, the Chicano is like the Indian. And in fact this is so declared: the Chicano is inscribed “savage,” marginalized from the Eurocentric appellation “Hispanic.” The Chicano is de-hispanized and written as dark, uncivilized Indian. The Spaniard is romanticized and relegated to the historical past: conquistador, mission padre, and aristocratic Californio. The historical link is broken because of racial difference (Caucasian versus hybrid mestizo), because of linguistic difference (Castilian versus Mexican Spanish and caló), and because of chronological difference (Spaniards of the past versus Chicanos of the present). The myth of Zorro contains the Spanish element in a safe, remote past; today’s Chicano is not descended from Zorro and the other Spanish Californios, but at best, from their servants. In effect, the Chicano is located between Europe and indigenous America, marginalized from the Spaniard, moved partially toward the savage. Both Indian and Spaniard, the constitutive elements of the Chicano’s mestizaje, are deferred to a safe past and are removed from consideration in the making of contemporary America. By envisioning both as “historical” and small in number, they pose little threat to American consciousness, and they can be romanticized and distantly acknowledged in Thanksgiving and Old California. But the number of Chicanos, the most rapidly increasing number, threatens the verisimilitude of the Anglo-American vision. The Chicano is not equated with the Indian because to do so would ascribe to the Chicano the status of native. Because of the border and Mexico, the Chicano can be envisioned as foreigner, so that after rhetorical gymnastics, the Anglo immigrant can write the Self as the undisputed original civilized human occupant. Therefore, the Chicano is not indigenous. Chicanos are foreign immigrants and illegal aliens. The INS and the Texas Rangers attest to that. Present day Chicanos are divorced spatially from Mexicans south of the border, temporally from the Californio, and racially from the Indian. Chicanos are divorced from the Southwest and read, instead, as an immigrant labor force. Not the noble and savage Indian nor the genteel Californio Spaniard, the Chicano is the pest, is the bracero who had the audacity to stay and have childrenin gangs and on welfare. One more point, a historical one: in order to project a narrative of the apex of democracy, the history of the US military conquest of northern Mexico is written as a simple financial transaction. That Anglo America is superior and preferable must be self-evident, so there could not have been objection. The Chicano could not have wanted to resist colonization, let alone actually have done so. Therefore, the conquest of Northern Mexico was not imperialism; it was a bloodless transfer of title of an unpopulated territory. History simultaneously maintains that the Mexicans from California to Texas, who weren’t there in the first place, welcomed US incorporation in a very poor Spanish but not in writing. In these ways, and in many, many other ways, Anglo American colonial discourse subjectifies and contains; it minimizes the presence of the Chicano Other. A heterogeneous group is represented as a marginal homogeneity. The authoritative discourse constitutes the colonist mythology and codifies the hegemony. Chicano literary production can be read as the response to such discursive activity. Chicano poetry has opted for hybridization, a linguistic mestizaje, incorporating the languages and discourses at play in America. It tends to reject the monologue of either autocolonial, assimilationist, English-only verse or the monologue of nationalist Spanish-only verse. Instead, it opts for a multiple tongue, multivoiced literature of the border. The hegemony of Anglo American representation and subjectification is dialogized by a mestizaje of heteroglot texts that assert Chicano heterogeneity and American heteroglossia. Such literature produces a subjectivity that opposes hegemonic subjectification: the alternate subjectification of the Other challenges the authoritative subjectification of the dominant Self, juxtaposing a literary representation with a literal representation. For it is in the realm of the literary that orders other than the literal can be first envisioned. And this literary dialogism is characteristic of Chicano poetry. Consider the poem, “Poema en tres idiomas y caló” by José Antonio Burciaga. It plays among four languages and clearly works in an other tongue: Poema en tres idiomas y caló Españotli titlan Englishic, I yotl distictamentli recuerdotl cuandotl andaba en Pachucatlán. I yotl recordotl el tonatiuh con o sin safos. Poem in Three Idioms and Caló Spanish between English I distinctly remember when I walked over the Southwest. I remember the sun
© 1997 by Alfred Arteaga For complete text inclucing poems, notes, and works cited, see print version |