Chicano Poetics Heterotexts and Hybridities Alfred Arteaga Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997 |
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Chapter Seven: Late Epic, Post Postmodern
TIME, GENRE, SUBJECT I turn now to matters of time and genre and to their influence on the subject. At this point and in this moment, I accept subject in a sense that requires some overlap of ontology and discursivity, so that at minimum subjectivity requires a body and articulation. I also posit the acceptance now of what might be termed a Western faith in literary history, so that in setting aside certain doubts, such as the existence of time or of the subject itself, it becomes easy to conceive subjectivity (a body articulating and articulated) as a process subject to the orders of literature and history, subject to, for example, the order of genre. The notion and order of literary genres are of course central to western civilization. If we allow that writing and speaking (as well as reading and listening) are modes of subject articulation, then it follows that if a case is to be made for the authority of a generic order, that sense of order can be drawn from literary and speech genres. Genres organize writing into subsets of styles, each identified by a characteristic arrangement of content and form, so that identity is constructed by adherence to an order. This process defines the literary subset, whether it be rigidly defined and traditional, whether new or hybrid, or whether something else altogether. While these literary stylistic definitions may come to us from Aristotle, the notion of speech genres that I employ here comes to us recently from Bakhtin. In this sense speech genres are the subsets of utterances, the various discourses that are defined by content and form and that both constitute and reflect different social relationships. In a way it is possible to understand the literary genre, say the epic, as similar in its relation to literature as a whole, as is a speech genre, say military speech or religious discourse, in relation to utterances as a whole. An just as the epic can be considered to shape consciousness, that is to inform subjectivity, so too can religious speech. And in keeping with the logic of history, genres exist in time; they have history; they contaminate and are contaminated by the zeitgeist. As historically defined sets and as extant discursive styles, literary and speech genres function both as rule and as means. They represent past tradition with which present articulation negotiates subjectivity. Subjectivity is shaped by genre, by the relation of articulation to tradition. This is the case with the notion of the national subject. There are times when a national subjectivity replicates the content and the form, the expectations and beliefs, the values, sense and meaning of the national history and mythology. There are other times when national subjectivity envisions itself a projection, a natural extension along a historical trajectory. There are also moments of break with tradition, times when the relations with history and myth are characterized by irony, catechresis, by revolution. With this as the point of departure I wish to consider the subject of nation. I ground this in specific texts, beginning for example, with La Historia de la Nueva Mexico by Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, an epic of 1610. It is an epic but one that appears late, appearing at a time when the epic had been ironicized. I also look at fairly recent Chicano poetry that is epic in tendency, that is, poetry that is not specifically epic but that manifests what I understand to be the tendency that supports nationalism. Both examples, Villagrá and the Chicanos, participate in the formation of the national subject, and in both instances, genre and time are significant mitigating factors. The poems occur at crucial times, at moments when radical shifts of consciousness were taking place. They work toward defining a people amidst moments of great change. What follows is a consideration of genre at moments of change. At the cusp of the 15-16th centuries, and that of the 20-21st centuries, poetry was at work making subjects. epic time Las armas y el varon heroico canto, El ser, valor, prudencia, y alto esfuerço, De aquel cuya paciencia no rendida, Por un mar de disgustos arrojada, A pesar de la invidia poconosa, Los hechos y prohezas un encumbrando, De aquellos Españoles valerosos, Que en la Occidental India remontados, Descubriendo del mundo lo que esconde, Plus Ultra con braveza van diziendo…, La Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1.1-10 Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus laviniaque venit Litora, multum ille et terris iasctatus et alto Vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram, Multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem Inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae. Aeneid, 1.1-7 Virgil Upon confronting a new world, Spanish explorers and conquistadors confronted radical alterity with familiar texts in hand. When Columbus ventured west beyond the edges of European maps, he interlarded himself between the lines and in the margins of his copy of Marco Polo’s travels. When Hernán Cortés needed to describe a new island west of Mexico, he turned to a current chivalric romance for a name. Columbus and Cortés put into practice an advocacy for the Spanish language advanced by Antonio de Nebrija in 1492, “language has always been the companion of empire.” Words in the literature and language of the old world served to guide conquest and colonialism as texts in which could be inserted paratext, from which could be derived definition, and to which could be appended story. Back home, cartas de relación had a big impact on the old world. The letters of Columbus and Cortés shook Europe’s notion of the world and in so doing participated in the radical shift in consciousness of the early modern. Columbus and Cortés not only were men of letters but they were men of deeds. Their letters entered into the corpus of Spanish literature with special cachet: they were letters that claimed to relate true acts. Their relación came to signify not only the representation of reality but its narration by an active participant. The acts of encounter and the texts of the conquest entered into the literature of Spain and Europe as an important continuation: Columbus and Cortés derive meaning from the texts of Marco Polo and Amadis de Gaula, and both supplement that meaning with the relación. They alter the meaning of world, and they alter the meaning of self forever after. They provide key texts for the project of the Spanish empire and for it new subject. At the times that their texts appeared, the style and content of the cartas de relación were particularly efficacious in bridging and older world view with a new. The narrative of Marco Polo and the romance of Amadis de Gaula simultaneously provided points of origin and of departure for Columbus and Cortés, that is, the older texts at once inspired the acts of imperialism and provided meaningful context. The revolutionary perspective that Columbus and Cortés provided remained, nevertheless, rooted in a distant world view. So while imperialism provided the social texts for a rewriting of the world, it was inaugurated on a cusp, marked by the Spanish discovery of America, and was therefore conceived by the world views prevalent before discovery. This trace remains a marker of the chronotope of that conception, a genealogy of the factors at play when and where the new writing took place. In this way, later projects undertaken by others could draw upon the Spanish context in ways that the Spanish themselves could not: it is ironic but because the Spanish essentially invented the New World, they themselves remained bound to a perspective of the old. Other imperialist projects, particularly the British, were free to conceive their endeavors after the Spanish, that is, in an imperialist tradition. Gayatri Spivak feels the Spanish imperial text has less impact today than does the British, because of later material and ideological conditions. In short, the texts that construct subjectivity are bound with a textualization that extends to the prior and the subsequent, that carries trace and creates meaning for the future. One century after 1492, Spain pushed its empire to the extreme north of Nueva España and undertook the conquest of New Mexico. It had been a crucial century: a new world came into being, the Spanish empire extended from California to Tierra del Fuego, great wealth had been obtained, and the most severe genocide in history had transpired. The imperial century began in a year of great changes. Beyond the work of Columbus, 1492 brought on the formation of modern Spain by the consolidation of Castile and Aragon; the final defeat of the Moors and eight centuries of Moslem occupation; the expulsion of Moors and Jews; the election of a Spanish pope; and Nebrija’s dictionary, the first of a modern European language. It was a year of great redefinition, where each of the contributing factors participated in shaping the sense of Spain and Spaniard and participated in constructing nation, empire and the Spanish subject. At the end of that century, Spanish conquistadors extended the empire into New Mexico. Juan de Oñate followed the example of the conquest of the Aztecs in Mexico by Cortés (1519-21) and conquered the Pueblos in New Mexico (1598-1610). And he did, Oñate, as had Cortés before, accompanied the acts of imperialism with acts of language. One of the first acts was theatrical: Oñate’s conquistadors performed the first European language theater in the present day United States. One of the conquistadors began narrating their exploits in a poem, an epic of relación. La Historia de la Nueva Mexico by Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá relates the story of empire in a genre traditionally suited to the task, but by 1610, when it was published, times had so changed that its relation was rendered ironic. La Historia de la Nueva Mexico announces its place within the tradition of the epic in the opening line. “Las armas y el varon heroico canto” recalls the first line of the Aeneid, “Arma virumque cano.” For Villagrá, as well as for others, such as Ariosto and Tasso, the Aeneid provided the prime example of the epic, the form and content after which they wrote. Ariosto begins Orlando Furioso, “Le donne, i cavillier, l’arme, gli amori / le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto” and Tasso begins Gerusalemme liberata, “Canto l’arme pietose e ’l capitano.” Orlando Furioso (1516) and Gerusalamme liberata (1579) span the century that for the Spanish empire extended from Columbus to Oñate. Orlando Furioso,Gerusalemme liberata and La Historia de la Nueva Mexico share temporal distance from the Aeneid and share having been written in the vernacular. In this, all three participate in the development of modern European national subjects from the medieval remnants of Rome, especially as it progressed after 1492. That century for the Spanish empire may have been shared by the rest of Europe but for Spain the times were particularly acute. Nowhere else did events consolidating the nation and giving birth to empire so densely coalesce as they did in Spain in 1492. Because of this, the Spanish national and imperial contexts provided sharply defined meaning for the letters and epics of relación. The Spanish national and imperial subject emerged better defined and earlier than did the subjects of Italy or of the rest of modern Europe. This was due to the chronotope in 1492, to the factors of language, literature, and politics at play. This particular set of factors, absent from the contexts of Ariosto or Tasso, provides a context that the Historia de la Nueva Mexico shares with the epic of Chile, La Araucana. Published in 1569, Alonso Ercilla y Zuñiga’s epic narrated the conquest of the southern extreme of the Spanish empire. Yet despite the close similarity with the epic of New Mexico (1610), the Araucana appeared in the midst of a sufficiently different chronotope so as to have a very different impact. The Historia de la Nueva Mexico gains meaning in part because of its genre, because of the meaning epic had accrued at the time of the renaissance, the rebirth in Western consciousness of the early modern. Virgil, as had Homer, but especially Virgil for Romance peoples, had come to signify for the makers of a new world, the classical order of the old. The Aeneid exemplified the generic order of the great classical empire. It marked the classical form of relación, so that any subsequent epic narration could bear the trace of classical antiquity. Because the genre, the word “epic” itself, had come to signify greatness, that the Historia de la Nueva Mexico comes after the Aeneid mean that it followed, and followed as, a great narration. The Historia also takes on further generic meaning, for epic had come not only to signify the form of the great story, but the form of the national / imperial text as well. The epic had come to stand as the prime genre for narrating a people, a nation, and had come to do so long before the genre we would recognize today as history. It stood as the genre to represent national reality and to narrate the story of the nation’s most heroic acts. The story of the Aeneid defined the Roman subject by narrating the great exploits of men. In other words, it promulgated a genre whose order very clearly identified what was worthy of narration, what kinds of acts by men forged the nation. Orlando Furioso, Gerusalemme liberata, the Araucana, and the Historia de la Nueva Mexico all accrue this meaning of genre. All are great poems that tell great stories. They relate the types of stories prescribed by the genre: they are full of masculine violence, conquest, of venturing out and defeating an alien other. In this they define a people in the narration of highly selected acts, specifically in the encounter with the outsider. The Iliad and the Aeneid had come to signify classical antiquity for the early modern and had become a prescription for defining the self. For the early modern, the nation and the national subject was defined in the epic narration of great men defeating alien others. To this prescription the four epics in the vernacular, Italian and Spanish, subscribe. By following the Aeneid, generally by generic formula and specifically by opening line allusion, the latter epics locate themselves in a temporal trajectory of meaning, acknowledging precedent and genre, form and sense. The vernacular epics mark themselves as subsequent manifestations of the formula and impulse espoused by the classic epic more than a millennium and a half earlier. The direct references to the Aeneid supplement the meaning accrued, for the latter epics do not merely obtain a gloss of classicism, they locate themselves very clearly as heirs to a well defined tradition. In that they follow in time along an envisioned line of cultural progression, they follow the tendency of the genre to write the subject according to a particular ordering of axiology, aesthetics, epistemology. This epic tendency organizes the production of meaning by providing a frame of reference of exemplary texts and generic order. It imbues texts according to a tradition of meaning, when by necessity they are marked by varying degrees of difference: Gerusalemme liberata and the Historia, for example, are shaped by the Aeneid even though neither is contemporary with it nor written in Latin. This continuity yet difference was of course quite significant for the subject of Europe in the early modern period, during the shifts in consciousness of the renaissance from, roughly, the invention of perspective in painting, through the life of Shakespeare. In moments of great change, the sense of continuity the epic offered could combine with the rule of genre to provide not only the means to read change but provide meaning itself. The epic of the Aeneid could make sense of new languages, such as Italian and Spanish, or of new lands, such as New Mexico or Chile. The epic tendency carries its effects not only diverse examples of the epic but among generic variations as well. Right around 1492, two chivalric romances appear in Spain: Tirant lo Blanch appears in Catalan in 1490, and Amadis de Gaula, which is actually much older, begins a rapid succession of printings in Castilian in 1508. Along with the likes of Orlando Furioso, they are not written in a classical language and instead contribute to the legitimation of the vernacular as a literary language. Beyond this, they also contribute to generic variation that would eventually lead to the novel. Changes such as these, linguistic, literary and generic changes were complicit in the development of the modern European subject. So while the trace of the Aeneid was still present and the epic tendency still evident, the chivalric romance in the new languages of the European nations did mark a break of sorts with the past, a paradigmatic shift that corresponded with a new paradigm of the world. In the times of altering paradigms, of metaphoric change, of Gerusalemme liberata standing for the Aeneid, Castilian for Latin, the chivalric romance for the epic, and New Mexico for Troy, in those times, the epic tendency and trace of the Aeneid provided a continuity of meaning, an ordered linearity perceived in retrospect. In essence, the order of metonymy could be called upon to ascribe meaning in times of metaphoric change: continuity in times of change.
SPANISH TIME Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá acted, as conquistador and as poet, at the end of Spain’s remarkable century. The 1598 conquest of New Mexico is defined and textualized 12 years later: simultaneously in 1610, the crown names New Mexico a royal colony and Villagrá’s epic is published. The conquest occurs late in history of Spanish imperial expansion in the New World, and the publication of the Historia also occurs late, in some ways too late, in the history of the genre. Oñate’s conquest of new Mexico was already a late act of conquest, working north from New Spain, from old Mexico. His project was conquest, not the exploration, such as that of Cabeza de Vaca before, nor the colonization of the sort of Junipero Serra that was to come later. Oñate followed in the steps of Cortés and sought to conquer another realm for the empire. For Spain, having Cortés and Columbus for comparison, Oñate’s conquest seemed secondary, derivative, late, and slight. For greater Europe too, by 1598, New Mexico was already an old story. A relación of the 1583 expedition of Antonio de Espejo, which claimed discovery of, and to have given name to, New Mexico, was rapidly disseminated across Europe in three languages: it was published simultaneously in Madrid and Paris in 1586 and in London in 1587. Be this as it may, Oñate did have with him Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, a poet who would write an epic of relación and narrate the conquest of New Mexico in the fashion of the great genre. Oñate may have made it in time to conquer the vast northern territory for the empire, but the epic of his conquest appeared too late to be taken without irony. The genre was already old when the Araucana, and Gerusalemme liberata appear. The epic’s capacity to narrate a people was already being supplanted by the emerging genres of history and the novel that were to flourish in the modern period. But on the cusp of the early modern and, particularly so in Spain around 1492, the epic could yet survive as a viable, if archaic, form for “literal” relación. Because transition was so abrupt for Spain, the former modes of understanding remained in close proximity, still useful for some time after the radical shift. The Poema Mio Cid, written about 1140, for example, could still serve as the national epic, especially since the medieval epic recounted a story once again current in 1492: the defeat of the Moors and the consolidation of Christian Spain. Within the brief span between Oñate’s conquest in 1598 and the publication of Villagrá’s epic in 1610, there took place in Spain a most consequential event that had profound ramifications for the Spanish subject and for the West in general. In 1605 Don Quixote was published. It was to have tremendous impact immediately and not only on Spanish letters. It was appeared in Spanish in two parts in 1605 and 1615. It was immediately disseminated in translation, first in the English version of Thomas Shelton (The history of the valerous and wittie knight-errant don Quixote of the Mancha, London 1612), then in the French of César Oudin (L’ingénieux don Quixote de la Manche, Paris, 1614), and the Italian of Lorenzo Franciosini de Castelfiorentino (L’ingengnoso cittadino don Chisciotte della Mancia, Venice, 1622). Success was so quick that before Cervantes came out with part two, his novel was the best seller in London. But the popularity in translation did not match that in Spanish, where in its first year Don Quixote was published four times, twice in Madrid, and twice furtively in Lisbon and in Valencia. Don Quixote became the prime text defining the Spanish character, both reflecting and forging Spanish subjectivity, and supplanted other texts such as Poema Mio Cid. It had a profound impact on western literature by defining, as it did, the novel, and by relying so heavily on irony. Don Quixote radically altered Spanish reading so that after it, the epic of Oñate’s heroics was read ironically. The rules changed so markedly in 1605 that publication of the Historia seemed a case of particularly bad timing. The changes that Don Quixote precipitated for the European subject, can be evidenced, according to Erich Auerbach and Robert Alter, in the changes in the order of character and the order of genre. Both Auerbach and Alter argue that at the time of Don Quixote, and at partially due to it, Western consciousness broke with the pre-modern and moved to the early modern. In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Auerbach contrasts the problems of reality for two characters, Don Quixote and Hamlet. The madness of each marks a new level of introspection for the Western subject, a distant reflection of the self, a psychological depth, an irony. This is evident to a degree in Don Quixote: Seldom, indeed, has a subject suggested the problematic study of contemporary reality as insistently as does Don Quixote. The ideal conceptions of a past epoch, and of a class which as lost its functions, in conflict with the reality of the contemporary present ought to have led to a critical and problematic portrayal of the latter, the more so since the mad Don Quixote is often superior to his normal opponents by virtue of his moral steadfastness and native wit. But Cervantes did not elaborate his work in this direction. (332-3) Shakespeare, however, did seem to elaborate where Cervantes did not: Among the Spanish authors of the golden age whom I know, Cervantes is certainly the one whose characters come nearest to being problematic. But if we want to understand the difference, we need only compare the bewildered, easily interpreted, and ultimately curable madness of Don Quixote with Hamlet’s fundamental and many-faceted insanity which can never be cured in this world. Since the pattern of life is so fixed and secure, no matter how much that is wrong may occur within it, we feel in the Spanish works, despite all their colorful and lively bustle, nothing of a movement in the depths of life, or even of a will to explore it in principle and recast it in practice. (332) What Auerbach finds more fully developed by Shakespeare than by Cervantes is the problematic relationship of protagonist to reality. These problems with reality manifest in the characters’ madness. The insanity of Hamlet is greater than that of Don Quixote because he faces a reality where the pattern of life is less fixed. While Auerbach clearly locates the problem with reality in the order of character, he nevertheless hints at the significance of the order of genre. He observes of Cervantes but does not elaborate: His representation of Spanish reality is dispersed in many individual adventures and sketches; the bases of that reality remain untouched and unmoved. (333) In Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre, Robert Alter places the self consciousness of Don Quixote not so much in the working of character, but in the stucture of the novel: The novel begins out of an erosion of belief in the authority of the written word and it begins with Cervantes. It fittingly takes as the initial target of its literary critique the first genre to have enjoyed popular success because of the printing press—the Renaissance chivalric romance. Although novelists were by no means the first—and Cervantes of course the first among them—to see in the mere fictionality of fictions the key to the predicament of a whole culture, and to use this awareness centrally in creating new fictions of their own. (3) While Auerbach finds in Cervantes a minor dispersion of reality, Alter, on the other hand, identifies the structural irony of Don Quixote: it “begins out of an erosion of belief in the authority of the written word,” and it sees “the mere fictionality of fictions.” Structural irony pervades Don Quixote: the prologue’s addresses the reader, “desocupado lector,” for example, distances the reader by calling attention to the fictive event of reading and to the very novelness of Don Quixote. This paratextual distancing is small of course compared to the narration itself, where the windmill world of the reader is far from the monster world of the character. The dramatic irony that so thoroughly informs Don Quixote similarly informs Hamlet. The reality known to the reader is not that known to either protagonist, and in the case of Hamlet, the “Mousetrap” functions to a limited degree the way the prologue functions in Don Quixote. The self consciousness that Auerbach finds in each work may not differ so much quantitatively as they differ qualitatively. For in Hamlet the main focus of the irony lies between character and reality (or character and representation of reality, or character and story), and the reader is asked to take the protagonist seriously. In Don Quixote, the madness of the protagonist serves to direct the main thrust of the irony, between reader and story, and the reader is asked to laugh. In that Don Quixote stands recognized most often as the first modern novel, it stands as generic exemplar. And in this capacity it does something that Hamlet does not: it creates genre. The novel was, after all, something novel. Alter juxtaposes Cervantes with Milton in order to describes the relationship of the new genre, with the break from the pre-modern: Milton is perhaps the last great moment in a tradition of mimesis that begins for Western literature with Homer and the Bible. His poem memorably represents that aspect of the Renaissance which is the conscious culmination of a continuous cultural development through two and a half millennia. Cervantes’ novel, on the other hand, is one of the supreme achievements of that impulse in the Renaissance which was already moving toward the troubled horizon of modernity. Cervantes cannot share Milton’s Christian-humanist confidence in the power of language and the literary tradition to adumbrate the glory of God’s nature. From this point on, cultural creativity would proceed more and more through a recapitulative critique of its own past, and a major line of fiction would be avowedly duplicitous, making the paradox of its magically real duplicity one of its principal subjects. In these respects, Cervantes does not merely anticipate a later mode of imagination but fully realizes its possibilities; subsequent writers would only explore from different angles the imaginative potentialities of a kind of fiction that he authoritatively conceived. In this, as in other ways, Don Quixote is the archetypal novel that seems to encompass the range of what would be written afterward. Ironically reaching for the dream of a medieval world through Renaissance literary productions, it remains one of the most profoundly modern of all novels. (29) Self consciously standing on the cusp of the modern, Don Quixote inaugurates a sensibility that would remain intelligible for the modern. The irony that speaks to the modern is found not only in the mad introspection of character but also in the very order and structure of genre. Because of this, Don Quixote could remain a modern novel whose irony could be appreciated by Auerbach or Alter or by Eliot during his reign over English poetics at Faber and Faber. The time of Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva Mexico (1610) at the end of Spain imperial century is also the time of Don Quixote (1605) and Hamlet (1603) at the dawn of a particular type of ironic subjectivity that would later come to be viewed as characteristic of modernism. But whereas the Historia subscribes to an order articulated by Virgil, the Quixote and Hamlet articulate one that would inspire Freud. Contemporaneous only chronologically, the Historia seems belated while the Quixote and Hamlet seem precursory, early modern. In genre and epoch, the Historia comes at the end of a time, at the end of Spain’s most dramatic century and at the end of a naive subjectivity that could be narrated in epics and in cartas de relación. Its orientation to the past, not simply its retrospection but its reverence to the pasts of Cortés and Virgil, aligns Villagrá’s epic with the cusp of subjectivity at the beginning of Spain’s imperial century. It seems a much older text than it is, sharing with Columbus, Cortés and even with Ercilla, the profound impact of 1492 and the older world view it altered. The Historia narrates its reality of great acts by great men according to the generic order of the epic, an order that emerges from a distant, and for the modern, nearly incomprehensible past. Don Quixote is a novel in which the past figures prominently. The protagonist lives too late to inhabit a bygone world, the world of the chivalric romance, of Amadis de Gaula, for example. Don Quixote lives at a time when all the dragons have been killed, and Don Quixote is printed at a time when the conquest of the New World had transpired. The protagonist looks back to a lost age, to an enchanted time when the world was a different place. And while Don Quixote looks back, abrogating the distance with the imaginary, the reader, the “desocupado lector,” delights in the irony of that temporal dislocation. Quixote is an old man whose madness transcends time, and the reader is keenly aware of the break with reality. This structural irony pervades the novel as a realization of a potential of the genre. It marks much more than the peculiarities of character and points to a fundamental irony that would color perspective to follow and would come to stand as a primary mode of modernist consciousness. In addition, Don Quixote actually was something novel. It was something new in form, quite unlike poetry. While the epic may share the narration of a story with the novel, the epic, like the lyric, differs very fundamentally from the novel. In his theory of the novel, Bakhtin contrasts the poetic impulse of poetry with the tendency of the novel to articulate a novelistic discourse. Simply put, poetry strives for the unmediated, single voice, expression of the poet. Poetry claims a transparency or immediacy or direct link between poet and poem, between intention or vision and meaning. For Bakhtin, the poem is always the monologic articulation of the single poet, speaking his or her mind, expressing sentiments and truths as far as they can be known by one. In this manner, poetic discourse is expressly suited for the task of the epic, for articulating the spirit of a people. The novel, on the other hand, invites dialogue: novelistic discourse becomes a site for the interaction of various characters speaking with various perspectives, for dispersing reality. The novelist juggles dialogue where the poet espouses “truths.” Because of this, the novel differs generically from the epic and other poetry precisely here: the novel invites difference and comes to be amid different perspectives. And in this manner, the novel works in quite a different way than does the epic. Don Quixote, in story and in genre, changed time. It thoroughly undermined the primacy of poetic discourse, especially its single voiced and unmediated presentation of poetic vision, and supplanted it with prose and ironic mediation. This meant that the Historia de la Nueva Mexico appeared too late, coming as it did five years after DonQuixote, to be able to be read as it might have been. DonQuixote had changed the time of the Spanish subject, and because of this, the epic relación of the conquest of New Mexico was read as an anachronism, and rendered ironic by the changing times. After DonQuixote, the times were such that the Historia could not be taken as had the Araucana, that is, taken on the terms of the epic and the literal relación. The result was that the Historia was largely ignored, having nothing of the huge impact that, by contrast, the Araucana had. Don Quixote spoke to the seventeenth-century Spanish subject in ways the Historia de la Nueva Mexico did not. The Quixote came to articulate the national character, post conquest, late empire, disenchanted and ironic. It would supplant the archetypes provided by Cortés, Columbus, or by Amadis de Gaula. The epic of Oñate never had much impact on the national character of Spain or of Mexico. After all, not only was the Historia late, its story paled in comparison to that of Cortés and the conquest of old Mexico. Nor does it figure in the cultural history of the United States. Its sole impact has been on New Mexico, where the epic succeeded in realizing its potential and participated in an retrospective subject making.
CHICANO TIMES Of all Chicanos, northern New Mexicans are perhaps the ones with the strongest sense of themselves as hispanos. And this, I think, is due in part to the Historia de la Nueva Mexico. The factors of isolation and the early colonization preserved a subjectivity that in some ways has maintained connection with a distant past. Santa Fe, New Mexico, is second only to St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565, as the oldest city in the United States, which, needless to say, means that the Spanish presence in the present day United States antedates the English. Santa Fe was the northern most extension of the Spanish empire for nearly two centuries until the late eighteenth century colonization of California. Compared to the other major Chicano regions, Texas and California, New Mexico had a much longer period as part of New Spain, from colonization and the founding of Santa Fe in 1610 to New Mexican statehood in 1912 (302 years), compared to the founding of San Antonio in 1718 to Texan independence in 1835 (117 years), and San Francisco, 1776, to Californian statehood, 1848 (72 years). This combines with the relatively brief period of mexicanness, when New Mexico was part of the Mexican nation, from independence from Spain in 1821 to conquest by the United States in 1846. It therefore becomes particularly easy for the northern New Mexican to fashion an image of self that emphasizes its Spanishness, that is, to fashion the self as hispano. This dimension of New Mexican subjectivity is rooted in cultural practice. To this day, New Mexican Spanish bears traces of the sixteenth century that are absent in the Spanish of other Chicanos as well as the Spanish of Mexicans and Spaniards. The use of asina or ansina for the current así is an example. Religious practice there is similarly marked with vestiges: the flagellation of the penitentes recalls the different world when Santa Fe was settled. New Mexican cultural practice bears links to the great century for Spain that began with Columbus ended with Oñate. And part of New Mexican culture is the Historia de la Nueva Mexico. The northern New Mexicans have an early modern epic in a way that no one else does in the United States, in the way that Chile does with the Araucana. And on one very elemental level, possessing a renaissance epic has had powerful consequences in orienting New Mexican subjectivity toward time past. The Historia de la Nueva Mexico was read in New Mexico in ways it could not have been read in Mexico nor in Spain. Villagrá’s relación of Oñate, the Pueblos, and Santa Fe could be taken as the local and epic truth. It could be taken as the unmediated expression of a founding father, of a conquistador and poet. Because it is the founding epic of an isolated and retrospective people, the Historia could be taken by New Mexicans without any of the post Don Quixote irony that pervaded the Spanish speaking world. In other words, in New Mexico the epic was allowed to have the impact of an epic: Villagrá spoke of and for the people. As a result, the New Mexican subject is both reflected in and forged by a early modern text whose content and form ascribe to a much older world view: “Las armas y el varon heroico canto, / El ser, valor, prudencia, y alto esfuerço,… / De aquellos Españoles valerosos, / Que en la Occidental India remontados, / Descubriendo del mundo lo que esconde, / Plus Ultra con braveza van diziendo….” It is a world view of exploration and conquest, of the deeds of valiant Spaniards in the sixteenth century, of Spain’s first imperial century, of an epic that reaches back to Virgil for precedent, for form, for meaning: “Arma virumque cano.” This makes northern New Mexicans different than other Chicanos. Perhaps the text that would approach the Historia in impact for Californian Chicanos would be the nineteenth-century corrido, “Joaquín Murrieta.” It differs from Villagrá’s epic, not only because of its late date of production, two and a half centuries after the Historia, but also because of generic characteristics: a corrido is quite a different verse form than the epic. The corrido would be even more central to Texas, where if it wasn’t invented, at least flourished simultaneously with its more southern Mexican counterpart. In fact, when documenting Texan Chicano literature, much has been made of the central importance of the corrido of Gregorio Cortez, such as in Américo Paredes’s seminal work, With His Pistol in His Hands. The corrido is a highly formulaic verse form, much more rigid a form than the epic, is descended from the Spanish romance and relates the heroics of a real person such as Murrieta or Cortez. The Californian and Texan corridos so differ from Villagrá’s Historia that they manifest relatively little of the epic effect. To begin, corridos are popular verse, set to music and performed: they are much less the literary and textual artifact that is the epic. And even though they maintain a consistency of story, the corrido by virtue of its realization through performance, is a more open form, one that allows structurally for the alterations and adjustments of the individual corridista. Then too, the genre itself was born in the particular chronotope of nineteenth-century conflicts between Mexico and the United States, and to a lesser degree, between Mexico and France. The “Joaquín Murrieta” corrido tells of revenge against the greedy gringos in California and of Gregorio Cortez’s flight from the Texas Rangers in Texas. Its focus is Mexico versus the United States and not, like Villagrá, Spaniard versus Indian. The times of the corrido and of its effects on Chicano subjectivity is the time of Manifest Destiny, the time of US imperialism and the conquest of northern Mexico. The times of the epic is a wholly different time with a wholly different perspective. There are corridos in New Mexico too; there are the tales of Elfego Baca for example, but there are no equivalents of the Historia in California or Texas. And this has contributed to the construction of a subjectivity that can read itself in an early modern epic and that can trace meaning to so distant a past. It is understandable then that in the 1960s, the Chicano movements in California, of the Farmworkers union and the Brown Berets, and in Texas, of the La Raza Unida Party, had nothing similar to the land grant movement, where northern New Mexicans claimed redress from the United States for lands stolen from them, for lands originally granted by the king of Spain and for which they still possessed fading, early modern parchments. In time, the Historia de la Nueva Mexico had two quite different effects. For the world outside of New Mexico its impact was negligible, a product of bad timing. Within New Mexico it was read without irony, taken seriously, and incorporated into the literature of the subject. To the degree that the Historia speaks for and of the New Mexican hispano subject, to that degree, that subjectivity transpires bound to a former time and a former world view. In 1972, when the Chicano movement and a Chicano subjectivity was still young, Reies Tijerina sponsored a conference in Albuquerque to consolidate the movement and to clarify identity politics. Tijerina, who lead the New Mexican land grant movement, invited two other major proponents of differing types of chicanismo, José Angel Gutierrez from Texas and founder of the political party, La Raza Unida, and Rodolfo Corky Gonzales from Colorado and the Crusade for Justice. Gutierrez sought unity behind the identity raza, the race or people, especially as in the mestizo race, in a quest to forge a racialized, third party politics. Gonzales, in his own writing and in his organizing efforts, had been implicated in use of the term Chicano and the homeland, Aztlán. Tijerina, who based New Mexican land grant claims on the colonial authority of the Spanish crown, was faced with the dilemma of wanting to maintain an hispano identity while at the same time unifying with more radical and consciously anti colonial elements. Tijerina called the conference, el Congreso Indio Hispano. But for Chicanos who were sensitive to the racism in asserting a Spanish identity, Tijerina’s compromise proved naive, if not insensitive, offensive. For Tijerina, the Indio Hispanic subject accrues general meaning because of a very particular contiguous relationship: some northern New Mexicans are descendants of the very colonizers who had been granted land by the King of Spain. It is a subjectivity that comes to meaning linearly, that is, that comes to definition because of a claim to an unbroken line back to an authoritative source. Such meaning is construed upon a sense of hispano that is imbued with patriarchy and colonialism, that is, in short, imbued with meaning from the past time of Oñate and Villagrá. The existence of the physical artifact, the possession of the actual land grant documents, underscores the continuity that writes the New Mexican subject: for in addition to the textual transmission of regal decree across the intervening generations, there remains the actual document itself, signed in the actual hand of the deputies of the king. And this effect of the land grant text, its participation in the formation of the subject, is similar to the effect of Villagrá’s conquest epic of relación. The northern New Mexican is defined as a nation, not as a state but as a people, in part by the literal reading of colonial texts. It is a subject that reaches back to the authority and acts and texts of king and conquistador and epic poet. It is a subjectivity that comes to be, in part, in the present in the quotidian acts of valorizing a retrospective perspective. The overriding tendency of such a nationalist subjectivity, even despite Tijerina’s synthetic Indio Hispano, is toward a narrowly defined subject articulated at the end of a narrow line. The Historia de la Nueva Mexico functions as a source text to which the New Mexican subject looks in retrospect for meaning, in the same manner that the epic itself looks in retrospect to the Aeneid. To the degree that that subjectivity is hispano, it restricts the essence of the contemporary subject to a narrow definition that can occupy the present end point of the colonial and even classical trajectory. The essential New Mexican nationalist subject can therefore be idealized as the hispano land grant holder and descendant of a conquistador. At further and further remove on the hierarchy of national subjectivity, that is, less and less in line with the authoritative line, would be the landless or more newly immigrant hispano, the mestizo, and the Indian. The tendency of this subject formation to found its sense on a literal contiguity with texts of relación manifests itself in patriarchal, postcolonial, and racist politics of self definition. The converse of this to a degree is the Chicano identity politics that define Chicano as Indian, denying the hispano component of mestizaje. It bases itself on a matrilinearity that ignores the rapist conquistador father. Instead of the Historia of la Nueva Mexico, founding texts would be the Popol Vuh, the poetry of Nezahualcoyotl, and countless elements of the oral tradition. This perspective has been advanced to varying degrees by many opposed to a hispano identity, from Alurista to Gloria Anzaldúa. Taken to its extreme, its most radical formulation rejects not only hispano but latino as well, rejecting any Latin American identification that descends patrilinearly from the colonizing Spaniard. For the cultural similarities that unite hispanos or latinos, such as the Spanish language and Catholicism, were introduced by the colonial fathers. The Chicano-as-indio, however, is similar to the Chicano-as-hispano in that it also proposes a subjectivity descended from one source, albeit maternal in the case of indios and paternal in the case of hispanos. This tendency toward a unitary subjectivity is similar in form but quite different in context: the historical and contemporary facts of colonialism and postcolonialism value being Indian much, much less than they value being hispano. Because of this, indio Chicanos in the United States and indio Mexicanos in Chiapas, for example, espouse a radical anti-hegemonic subjectivity if only because of the facts of race politics. Yet despite the huge difference in power, the tendencies of both indio and hispano chicanismos are similar in form: an idealized and unitary self that is defined by the rule of a past line. Panticipating in Tijerina’s Congreso Indio Hispano was Corky Gonzales, the Denver activist who had been extremely influential in Chicano identity politics. Gonzales had sponsored the 1969 youth conference that produced the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, in many ways the birth certificate of the Chicano. In addition, Gonzales was the author of what was considered the epic of the Chicano movement, the poem I am Joaquín / Yo soy Joaquín. In the poem, Gonzales served as the epic poet or the genius of the cultural nation, one who both related and embodied the spirit of Aztlán. In the 1972 Bantam books edition, the cover declares “An epic of the Mexican American people / the most famous poem of the Chicano Movement in America” and includes a chronology, “People and events from Mexican and Mexican American History,” from 3000 B.C. to 1972. The focus of the epic is Joaquín Murrieta, the anti gringo hero of the Californian corrido, but be that as it may, I am Joaquín never realizes the narrow focus of the Historia de la Nueva Mexico, of Orlando Furioso, or of the Aeneid. As Gonzales declares on the back cover of the Bantam edition, “I am Joaquín was the first work of poetry to be published by Chicanos for Chicanos and is the forerunner of the Chicano cultural renaissance…The sounds of movement, the literary and anthropological quest for our roots, the renewal of a fierce pride and tribal unity, are the reasons why I am Joaquín had to be shared with all my hermanos y hermanas, fathers, mothers, and grandparents. Their time, and now our time, could not be left behind and forgotten.” This, the “epic of the Mexican American people” and the “most famous poem of the Chicano Movement” works differently than the traditional epics, consciously different due to differences in the factors of time, genre, and hybridity. Taken at once, time, genre and hybridity taken together as a coalescence, as fusion, as interplay, they can be as the active matrix where varieties of the subject can be understood to work out. In such a configuration, time would mark time, as in chronological order and the times, as in epoch and zeitgeist, and would thus form a basis for evaluating a tropic relation to the modes of consciousness of an age. Genre would mean the organization into style and order the form and contents of prevalent texts. It implies a prescriptive system of values. Hybridity would mean simply the relative tendency to combine factors that inform subjectivity. Thus considering the dissimilitude of the time/genre/hybridity matrices, I am Joaquín, can be understood to participate in a subject formation with a wholly different orientation, a different politics even, than does Historia de la Nueva Mexico.I am Joaquín points to a Chicano subjectivity whose moment occurs at the end of modernism and at the cusp of postmodernism, and despite its epic qualities, it does not locate the ultimate authority for meaning in a dead past. The Historia authorizes a hispano subjectivity whose meaning is deferred to former times and lost origins. I am Joaquín becomes the epic of the Chicano movement at the very end of the modernist era, an era preceded by the early modernist visions of Columbus and Cortés and Cervantes. It comes to define chicanismo, and even though not a radical poem, it comes to participate in a radical subjectivity. The Chicano poetry that I am Joaquín inspires, ensues after modernism, during the turn toward postmodernism, and quickly eclipses Gonzales’s epic. The time/genre/hybridity matrix of the Historia is particularly suited to the construction of a unified subject, to a well defined ideal national character. The epic participates with archaisms of language and religion and with the land grant movement to write the New Mexican national subject. That subject can look in retrospect to the early modern era for sense; it can read the Historia literally and without irony and envision a non hybridized descent from the father. This is a possibility for the New Mexican subject in ways that it is not possible for other Chicanos who lack an early modern epic. I am Joaquín, on the other hand, has a different matrix. It is ostensibly retrospective: it defines the Chicano by citing every ancestor. And yet, while it does outline a genealogy, its focus is decidedly contemporary and with a vision toward the future. I am Joaquín, lost in a world of confusion, caught up in the whirl of a gringo society, confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes, suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society. My fathers have lost the economic battle and won the struggle of cultural survival. And now! I must choose between the paradox of victory of the spirit, despite physical hunger, or to exist in the grasp of American social neurosis, sterilization of the soul and a full stomach. (6-9) The epic tendency to define the national character is a tendency of I am Joaquín. That it spoke for and defined the Chicano movement was in fact the reason it was considered the epic. But while it asserts the epic tendency, it is somewhat duplicitous in the realization, for I am Joaquín has it both ways: it defines chicanismo while at the same time it undermines its own endeavor. La Raza! Mejicano! Español! Latino! Hispano! Chicano! or whatever I call myself, I look the same I feel the same I cry and sing the same. I am the masses of my people and I refuse to be absorbed. I am Joaquín. The odds are great but my spirit is strong, my faith unbreakable, my blood is pure. I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ. I SHALL ENDURE! I WILL ENDURE! (98-100) On the one hand, meaning construed from the past: the Chicano is defined by a genealogy. But in this case the emphasis is not on linearity and proper sequence but rather, on selection. Emphasis is furthermore on an extant subjectivity that happens to descend from diverse sources, so that meaning lies in the existing combination. In this way genealogy functions not so much to establish an authoritative line and origin, but rather to identify the elements that combine to play in subject formation. This is then supplemented in two ways: first, subjectivity is implicated further in selection, rather than merely combinatory sequence, and second, the epic project of writing the subject is itself undermined. I am Joaquín not only delineates the Chicano subject “la raza, etc.” but also declares “whatever I call myself, / I look the same / I feel the same / I cry / and / sing the same.” That is, not only is the subject a product of selection but also unaffected by the epic definition. The subject is thus, in Bakhtin’s terms, unfinalized and therefore open to further reading, writing, meaning. Both instances, selection and indefinability, project a characteristic of chicanismo that corresponds with contemporary notions of subjectivity: it is something performed rather than simply essential. Selection implies the formation of a subject from competing paradigms of subjectivities, from, for example, the differences embodied in the names Raza, Mejicano, Español, Latino, Hispano, Chicano. Selection also implies that the subject realized in the process is itself paradigmatic. If envisioned as Hegelian dialectic, then the resulting subject of selection can be understood as a synthesis, as the higher truth made from the competing factors, from thesis and antithesis. José Vasconcelos conceives mestizaje in this way, so that la raza cósmica is a higher truth for humanity, the synthesis of the European and the American races. But if selection is understood as a Bakhtinian dialogue, then no such synthesis occurs. Instead, subjectivity is seen as the site of competing discpossessedourses, discourses posessed with different authorities. In such an active field, the subject asserts a self by employing and opposing various discourses. Both dialectic and dialogism share an emphasis on selection, which is the pole of metaphor and irony. This differs from an emphasis on combination, metonymy and synecdoche, that the Historia de la Nueva Mexico provides for the New Mexican hispano subject. In this case, hispano subjectivity defines itself by correct placement on the authoritative line, so that the past is not one of alternative paradigms but rather, one of origin, source, meaning. This linear retrospect makes the hispano subjectivity a conservative one, defined by birth. A paradigmatic Chicano subjectivity, on the other hand, remains unfinalized, subject to a choosing of the self. Indefinability manifests as a lack of faith in the relación and therefore contributes to a concern for the responsibility for the subject. By declaring “whatever I call myself...,” I am Joaquín undercuts its own authority over the subject by deferring responsibility. The poem, as well as the epic poet, does describe chicanismo, but that description is neither complete, finished, nor absolutely true. Instead, the description of the contemporary Chicano subject points toward an unfinished future, toward another time when subjectivity can be more fully realized: “I must choose....” In this way, indefinability complements selection so that chicanismo is presented as an active working out of factors, past, present and future. The posture of I am Joaquín as an unfinished and open text is well situated temporally, both in time, as precursor to other Chicano poetry and in the times, occurring as it does, on the cusp of postmodernism. Although I am Joaquín and the Chicano subjectivity it engenders is contemporaneous with the late reading of Historia de la Nueva Mexico and an hispano subjectivity, their times are radically different. Consider the retrospective linearity of the hispano as evidenced by some of its subjective markers: early modern linguistic archaisms, early modern religious practice like that of the penitentes, and the valorization of descent from the colonial father. The chicanismo that informs I am Joaquín and that it participates in is characterized by different markers: by hybridized language, the Chicano caló; by religious action such as that of the Católicos por la raza, who in the opening chapter of Acosta’s Revolt of the Cockroach People, violently protest Christmas mass by the cardinal in Los Angeles; and by the embracing of mestizaje, conceiving descent from radically disparate sources. For the most part, the politics of I am Joaquín are not particularly radical, even despite the poem’s place in the Chicano movement. The poem ends after all, declaring Chicano survival because of very traditional claims to authority, “my blood is pure. / I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ.” Even the call to self author the subject is liberal and concomitant with a humanist drive for social justice. But the refusal “to be absorbed” by US colonialism, with its attendant rejection of the liberal melting pot and the assertion of chicanismo, did inspire a more radical subject. The Chicano movement took its sense of the role of the poet and the function of poetry from the revolutionary and anti colonial movements of the century. In this way Mexico and Cuba, and Ireland and Algeria, provided the context that granted the popular poet a prime role of in the making of the new national subject. Seen in this light, the Chicano poet could define the cultural nationalist subject even if the was little impulse toward a Chicano nation state. Corky Gonzales provided the impetus for a more developed image of the nation in the work of the poet Alurista. In the endeavor to extend the acceptance of chicanismo, Gonzales sponsored the Denver Youth Conference in 1969. There, the participants, mostly through the work of Alurista, put forth the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, the declaration of cultural autonomy and definition of the Chicano subject and the homeland. The plan and Alurista’s own poetic work exceeded the relative liberalism of Gonzales’s I am Joaquín. It is worth noting that I am Joaquín was a bilingual text, that is English en face with Spanish, whereas Alurista’s poetry has always been interlingual, Chicano caló: a very different manifestation of language politics. Alurista’s work had profound effects on chicanismo in two ways: he clarified the place of the subject by conceiving Aztlán as the homeland, and he revolutionized the form of Chicano poetry, by popularizing interlingual poetry. Alurista’s work and the Chicano subject are born with the advent of postmodernism. But it is the poetry that comes later, when the subject of postmodernism is more fully considered, that works out a most radical subjectivity. His conception of home and his interlingual writing established a matrix for subject formation that would be expanded upon by later writers. Aztlán is an ambiguous home: it is a cultural entity; it is not a state, and it defies the authority of national borders. Interlingualism is an ambiguous mode of expression: it undercuts the authority of any single language; furthermore it draws into question the very processes of writing and reading by questioning any texts particular selection and combination. Chicano writers who responded to the postmodern turn from modernism were able to draw upon these ambiguities and play out an ambiguous subjectivity. Time, genre, and hybridity configure the Chicano as an unfinalized subject, one that lacks faith in texts and the relación and yet one that engages in politics. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga write in an age of the dismantling of heterosexist patriarchies; they write to break apart trenchant rule, order, modes of being. And too, they write to build another subjectivity, not merely alternative, but self consciously critical of its own claims to authority. Central to their project has been the erosion of the rule of genre: Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and Moraga’s Last Generation, are confused texts generically, replete with poetry, essay, relación, with dream. They are also confused linguistically in the style of the Chicano utterance, playing among and between languages, and rendering any language a matter of choice. Borderlands and Last Generation articulate hybridity not only in form but in sense as well. Both texts write a hybrid subject by considering first the homeland. Borderlands works out spatially and Last Generation, temporally, new visions of Aztlán and the place of the Chicano in relation to the United States, to Mexico. The subject they articulate is always implicated in choice, in the tyranny of history and the in arbitrariness of the hegemony. Anzaldúa and Moraga are simultaneously involved in destroying and building, in iconoclasm and in iconogony. What marks their work is that their building of texts and subjectivity is always self conscious, and not merely ironic; it is dialogic. For them, the subject is forged amid political struggle; and the subjects they help create are always so involved. And there are those poets who seem to be working in late postmodernism, perhaps even on the post pomo cusp. Juan Felipe Herrera writes some the best Chicano poetry today. In a recent conversation I had with the poet Francisco Alarcón, we brought up Herrera’s name in discussing the problem of which few Chicano writers are read by mainstream, that is, by Anglo-, America. Putting aside the matter of talent, Anglo-America chooses to print and read those ethnic writers who produce a subjectivity in accord with the hegemony. Alarcón and I agreed that Herrera is an amazing poet whose recognition does not correlate with his talent. Part of that is simple ethnic politics: he is Chicano; he is difficult for monolingual readers. But beyond this, Herrera is a difficult poet, especially difficult for readers who prize a modernist, and even a romantic, ideal. Herrera is the poet of the hybrid subject. For him, each poem is a site of play and conflict, and unfinalized process where the reader must participate. Generically, his poetry is Chicano, particularly in its form, for even when the content of a particular poem may not be noticeably Chicano and the language may be English, there is always a dynamic sense that a sense of self is at stake in the articulation. “In Your Name is X,” Herrera takes on the hybrid cross of xicanismo and plays out a subjectivity which he repeatedly identifies but ultimately but does not define. He does so, in this instance, in a single language, in simple English, and yet a simple meaning lies beyond the scope of the poem. Your Name is X x the man with the hands trembling x the unknown echoes of the shadow x the car flying through the windows x the woman with bent fantasy jutting x the falling crates packed with blood x the romance doubled up against a light x the suit worn across the sweat electric x the embrace of night and only night x the eyes moldering through curtains x the hair dripping memories x the nude posing for death x the neck twisting away from the lips x the mute performance of sex burning x the signal that quickens the burial x the street connecting the final touch x the blouse stained with confessions x the room waiting inside the whispers x the wave flourishing in cages x the mineral with infinite heat x the scream fusing through the bone x the animal leash swollen with tears x the music caught inside the walls x the lover biting abstract flesh x the accident quivering desire x the poem written and erased forever x the origin of your name. And in “Para Siempre Maga,” returns to the X, this time as the sign of a cross between people: Al fin estaremos juntos. Ven Amor. Quedaremos escritos en la cumbre de algún precipicio que nadie divisará: uno sobre el otro, como una X mayúscula sobre la tierra del Sur. Brillante. Para siempre. The post postmodern subject is a xicano subject. X for the Nahuatl of Mexica, mexicano, xicano and for the chiasmus of a criollo nun. It is a continual coming to be within the exchange of discourses, languages. The xicano is the subject of Aztlán the cultural nation but not the state and not subject to capricious borderlines. It is not a state of being but rather an act, xicando, the progressive tense, ando xicando, actively articulating the self. The infinitive xicar meaning to play, to conflict, to work out dialogically unfinalized versions of self.
© 1997 by Alfred Arteaga For complete text inclucing poems, notes, and works cited, see print version |