by Bruce Bawer
Edén Torres also waxes nostalgic. She’s an older woman, amply built—a Mother Earth type with the long white hair of an aging sixties rebel and a constant, if rather inscrutable, smile. She’s very light skinned—you’d never guess in a million years that she identifies herself as a Chicana—and her personality (or at least her present mood) is one of steely good humor: on this day and at this place, anyway, she combines a wry, lively demeanor with (as one discovers soon enough) a tough-as-nails ideological rigidity and, yes, a skillfully suppressed anger. Author of one book, Chicana Without Apology/Chicana sin vergüenza: The New Chicana Cultural Studies (Routledge, 2003) and an associate editor of Aztlán, she’s an example of the ever-widening phenomenon of studies crossover: at the University of Minnesota, she’s both an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and the chair of the Department of Chicano Studies, and has also taught American Studies. It doesn’t take long to realize that she knows exactly what she thinks and has known it for a long time. It’s also clear that she has a sense of absolute security and authority in academic settings and is used to being taken seriously in them.
Today, the setting in question is a session at the 2010 annual NACCS convention in Seattle, and Torres is here to air a complaint. Her youth, she recalls, was dominated by a “rage-filled aesthetic.” When she was young, politically active Chicanos like herself dreamed of Aztlán. But her Chicano students today? Nope. For many young Chicanos nowadays, Chicano identity just doesn’t mean what it did to her. They’re apolitical. They don’t see themselves as “different.” They don’t aspire to secede from the United States. They’re “complicit in dominant formations”—which means that they consider themselves members of mainstream American society and buy into its values.
Nor are they interested, she tells us, in hearing about institutional oppression. They embrace “mainstream narratives” of their people and are taught—not by her, but by others—to identify with the goals set for them by Anglo society. They want economic success! More and more of them are “middle-class students who are no longer the first in their family to attend college”—and are thus disturbingly aloof from the issues raised by the revolutionary texts they read in her classes. Worst of all, they don’t feel oppressed—they don’t feel despair. This plainly infuriates—and baffles—her. How is it that diversity and multiculturalism have produced a generation of young Latinos who affirm their cultural identity, yet who “remain so politically naïve” that they embrace oppression, imperialism, and colonialism? Many of them have parents who have told them race no longer matters; many have grown up in diverse, affluent communities. In short, the American dream has come true for them—and she can’t stand it.
Not that she puts it quite this way herself. As far as she’s concerned, the American dream was, and is, an illusion. Latinos—even young, successful, fully integrated Latinos—remain oppressed, whether they realize it or not. The problem, she explains, is that they simply don’t recognize “Western cultural imperialism” when they see it. She tells us about one of her Latino students who lamented—yes, lamented—that he’d never experienced racism. She makes it clear that she finds this preposterous: of course he’d experienced racism; he just hadn’t recognized it as such. What that student didn’t realize is that you don’t need to be called a “spic” or “wetback” to be a victim of racism; no, racism takes a variety of forms, and what’s so tricky about the forms it takes nowadays—and in identity studies today this is a truism, a mantra, a creed—is that those forms have grown ever more subtle and subcutaneous, ever more unconscious and unarticulated.
It’s all about hegemony. And if hegemony is the problem, Chicano Studies—which Francisco H. Vásquez describes in Latino/a Thought as “an anti-hegemonic, liberation movement”—is the antidote. In Torres’s eyes, the pathetic fact about the life of that Latino student of hers is that thanks to American hegemony he’d experienced racism—institutional racism, systematic racism—every day since he was born, and hadn’t even been aware of it! Like the Jim Carrey character in The Truman Show, he’d spent his entire existence in a world of illusions, trapped in the oppressor’s web, and had been lured by that oppressor into embracing a false image of himself and of the hegemonic empire, which he had foolishly believed to be a free country and of which he had so misguidedly considered himself a full and equal citizen.
For Torres, it’s a disgrace. Young people today are permitted by mainstream American society to be Latino—but only if they accept middle-class values. “Perhaps,” she admits, “I’m a political dinosaur who wants to retain a difference . . . a brownness.” (This last bit sounds unintentionally funny, considering how pale she is.) For unless we cling to our non-Anglo self-image, she insists, we’re doing the capitalists’ work.
Among those who share Torres’s ire at young Chicanos today who fail to recognize themselves as oppressed is Rodolfo Acuña, the aforementioned paterfamilias of Chicano Studies at Cal State Northridge and author of the definitive Chicano Studies textbook, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. First published in 1972, the book—now in its seventh edition—has shaped the thinking of Chicano Studies students ever since the birth of the discipline, and the changes it’s undergone over the years have both reflected and influenced the changes in Chicano Studies itself.
In his preface to the seventh edition, Acuña explains that when he first wrote the book he simply “wanted to get the historical narrative down for the purpose of supporting a political argument.” Since then, however, various developments have required adjustments in the text. The most important change, as we’ve seen, is that the late 1960s generation of Chicano students who raged at oppression and agitated for Chicano Studies programs—thus making Occupied America possible—has been succeeded by a generation or two of Chicano students who, quite simply, aren’t particularly upset. “About the mid-1990s,” writes Acuña, “I realized that the story [of Chicano history], which was so personal to me, was not as clear to the students and working-class people of that generation. Their life experience differed from my own.”
How? Acuña’s answer is essentially identical to Torres’s: “Racism is today not as easily defined, and the illusion of the American Dream has gripped many younger Mexican Americans; in some cases it blurs the civil rights struggles of the Mexican American and Chicano generations.” In other words, too many young Chicanos nowadays aren’t focusing on grievances but on getting an education and making a living. Which, for Acuña as for Torres, is an alarming development, because it represents the erosion of the very victim mentality on which Chicano Studies is built. Acuña complains that today’s young Chicanos don’t appreciate their forebears’ sacrifices, that they’re embracing alternative labels such as “Latino” and “Hispanic,” and that they’ve “chosen to be part of the illusion that they are equal partners in the great society.”
How dare they not see themselves as perpetual victims! They may think they’re full members of American society, but Acuña—like Torres—knows better, and he’s determined to open their eyes and replace their complacency and ambition with bitterness, resentment, and a full-blown entitlement mentality. Above all, he’s out to quash their individuality and draw them back into the herd, reminding them that they’re members of a group—and heirs to a magnificent cultural legacy that the Europeans destroyed. In order to put across this last point, Acuña romanticizes the “great civilizations” that the Spanish explorers found in the New World. This is standard Chicano Studies practice: the Aztecs and other pre-Columbian civilizations are routinely depicted as having been highly developed and essentially peaceful—and are routinely contrasted with their European conquerors, who are almost consistently portrayed as ignorant and bloodthirsty.
Moreover, while praising the vanquished New World civilizations’ “sophisticated culture” (Acuña boasts that “their mathematical discoveries were a thousand years ahead of European[s’]” and that their “cosmological
understandings were in advance of those of other civilizations”), Chicano Studies practitioners routinely gloss over the more ticklish historical details. When Acuña complains that “some choose to dwell on the bizarre practices such as human sacrifice” that were an essential feature of these “great civilizations,” he is surely not referring to any major players in Chicano Studies, for virtually all of them have followed Acuña’s lead by not dwelling on such matters—even as they focus unremittingly on every horrible detail that they can find of Anglo abuse of the descendants of Aztecs and Mayans.
Never mind that the Mayans routinely sacrificed children when dedicating temples. (A Mayan mass grave of sacrificed children was excavated as recently as 2005.) Never mind that the Aztecs appeased the fire god, Huehueteotl, by burning live captives and tearing out their hearts, and paid tribute to the god Tláloc by burning children to death. (Archaeologists have discovered mass graves of both Aztec and Toltec children—the latter of whom had been decapitated.) And never mind that nearly every important event on the Inca calendar appears to have called for the murder of children—and not just any children, but those who were the healthiest, most well formed, and most beautiful, the better to please the gods. You’d never know any of this by reading Acuña or by perusing most Chicano Studies texts, which seek almost universally to cultivate in students a sentimental view of these ancient civilizations—and a concomitant notion of Europeans as inherently more brutal than the Aztecs, Mayans, or Incas.
Still, the Spanish aren’t the number-one enemy in Chicano Studies. While students are expected to learn to resent Spain for having conquered the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca paradises, it’s far more important for them to despise Anglos for having taken over so much of Mexico after its independence from Spain. This explains why Acuña’s preface is followed by a two-page map depicting Mexico in 1821. The map’s size can’t be accounted for by abundance of detail—on the contrary, only one city, Mexico City, is marked. No, it’s an unusually spare map, and its purpose is clear: to dramatically impress upon students just how much of the present-day United States was once part of Mexico. (It’s followed by another two-page map showing “Cradles of Civilization” around the world, and here again the point is obvious: three to four thousand years ago, there was no “civilization” in Europe or the present-day United States, but there were “civilizations” in the places that are now southern Mexico, Central America, and western South America.)
Another aspect of Acuña’s book that’s typical of Chicano Studies is his thoroughly one-sided characterization of U.S.-Mexico relations. America is portrayed consistently as racist, aggressive, corrupt, and violent, and Mexico (with very rare exceptions, such as when Acuña criticizes the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz) as a helpless, virtuous victim. In his retelling, “Euro-Americans”—to use his term of choice for descendants of English settlers—are cast almost exclusively as squatters, cattle rustlers, vigilantes, members of lynch mobs, and so forth. For Acuña, America’s acquisition of territory won in the Mexican War, gained through the admission of Texas to the Union, and bought in the Gadsden Purchase was “theft,” pure and simple—and if not for this colossal transgression, he argues, Mexico would have been a far richer country, owing to the oil deposits and arable land it lost to Uncle Sam. (His assumption, of course, is that Mexicans would have developed California and Texas as energetically and imaginatively as “Euro-Americans” have done.) At one point Acuña acknowledges that “[l]ike [sic] all history, there are two sides to the story”; but almost without exception, his sympathy is entirely with Mexicans and Chicanos, and his book reads like an anthology of the worst things ever done to and said about Mexicans by “Euro-Americans”—a term that, in his hands, comes off as little more than a slur.
While Acuña is quick, moreover, to leap on any statement that might remotely be construed as reflecting anti-Chicano prejudice, he doesn’t hesitate to defend even the most violent anti-white language. For example, he writes about a 1969 press conference at which José Angel Gutiérrez of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) “called upon Chicanos to ‘Kill the gringo.’” Acuña assures the reader that what Gutiérrez meant by this was “that the white rule of Mexicans should end.” Indeed, instead of criticizing Gutiérrez, Acuña attacks Representative Henry B. González of Texas, who replied to Gutiérrez’s explicit incitement to violence by calling for a grand jury investigation of MAYO. Acuña characterizes this action as an “attack” on Gutiérrez; his clear message is that González, not Gutiérrez, was the troublemaker. It’s typical of Chicano Studies that it holds up people like Gutiérrez, rather than people like González (a Mexican American who served in the House of Representatives for nearly four decades), as role models.
One thing the reader of Occupied America will notice very quickly is the preoccupation with labels. “Throughout the book,” Acuña writes in his preface, “I use the terms U.S. Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, and occasionally—toward the end of the book—Latino. The use of the term Chicana/o recognizes the Chicana struggle for gender equality within the group.” He goes on to explain that the intermarriage of people with different national backgrounds has made labeling problematic, but argues that “caution must be exercised in concluding that we are Latinos or Hispanics to the exclusion of Chicana/o or Mexican American” and that “it is also important for other groups such as the Salvadoran and Guatemalan to evolve their own identities.”
Such tireless attention to labels is so common in Chicano Studies that it can sometimes seem as if the whole discipline consists of nothing but discussions about labels. In Latino/a Thought, Francisco H. Vásquez notes the proliferation within Latino culture of “names that refer to how dark the skin may be (güero/a, trigueño/a, moreno/a, prieto/a, negro/a) or to hair texture (pelo liso or pelo quebrado—straight or wavy hair)” and goes on for a couple of pages about these distinctions and the intragroup prejudices that have resulted from them. (One often gets the impression that there’s a never-ending contest under way as to which sub-sub-sub-group is most discriminated against.) Similarly, at the beginning of “This Land Was Mexican Once”: Histories of Resistance from Northern California (2007), Linda Heidenreich discusses at length the labels she’s chosen to use for different groups and subgroups: “Those immigrants who arrived under Spanish rule, I call simply ‘Spanish,’ or ‘Spanish colonizers.’ . . . I call those arriving or living in California after 1821 ‘settler-colonizers.’ . . . For those colonizers and settlers who were raised in California, I also use the term by which they identified themselves, Californianas/os. . . . I refer to Californios and Mexican immigrants collectively as ‘Chicanas/os.’” She devotes more than a page to all this, explaining in detail why she’s chosen to refer to “the dominant population” as “Euro-American.”
Groups, subgroups, and the names for them: the centrality of these matters to Chicano Studies becomes crystal clear at an NACCS conference session titled “NACCS for Beginners,” which is intended to introduce newbies to the basic facts about the organization. It’s an April day in 2010, and people are still standing around chatting when a bright-eyed, energetic young woman steps up to the podium and identifies herself as Cynthia Durate, secretary of “knocks.” (It takes me a few seconds to realize that that is the way you’re supposed to pronounce NACCS.) Durate serves up a PowerPoint presentation about the highlights of NACCS history. Most of the highlights are name changes. Founded in 1972 as the National Caucus of Chicano Social Scientists (NCCSS), the organization became the National Association of Chicano Studies (NACS) in 1988. Later years saw the introduction of the Chicana Caucus and the Lesbian and Gay Caucuses; the latter two subsequently changed their names to the Lesbian, Bimujeres, and Trans Caucus and the Joto Caucus (joto is a traditionally derogatory Mexican term for an effeminate, “passive” partner in gay male sex). In 1995, to show more sensitivity to its female members, the NACS changed its name to the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies (though sometimes one sees
it written with “Chicano” first and “Chicana” second).
All this attention to name changes might seem a bit puzzling: surely the NACCS must have racked up a few, you know, actual achievements during its nearly forty-year history? True, all of these identity studies can seem to be about nothing more or less than the proper naming of identity groups; still, perhaps none is more fixated on this subject than Chicano Studies. For one thing, as the name of the NACCS indicates, it’s no longer appropriate to call it just Chicano Studies. No, you’re supposed to call it (a) Chicana and Chicano Studies, (b) Chicana/o Studies, or (c) Chican@ Studies, where the “@” is understood to be a combination of “a” and “o.”
Chicano Studies may profess to reject Anglo-European culture and thought, but its ideology, like that of every other brand of identity studies, owes a great deal to at least one Anglo-European intellectual tradition—namely, Marxism. Early in Occupied America, Acuña informs us that his account of Chicanos “is inspired by the British historian E. P. Thompson”—a leading member of the British Communist Party. Among the few other non-Chicano historians whom he quotes with admiration is E. J. Hobsbawm, also a communist. Consistently, Acuña portrays capitalism as a destructive force. Indeed, his use of political labels makes it clear that for him, pretty much any group that isn’t outright communist is “far-right” or “ultraconservative.” Acuña compares the Texas Rangers (the state police, not the baseball team) to the Gestapo; he compares the treatment of Mexican Americans during World War II to the treatment of Jews under the Nazis; he puts the words “free world” in scare quotes; and he cites a speech by Fidel Castro with emphatic sympathy, depicting Castro as the savior of the Cuban people from U.S. capitalist hegemony (or, as he puts it, as “the symbol of Latin America’s anticolonial struggle with the United States”) and an inspiration to all Latin Americans who seek to resist that hegemony. “That [Castro] had overthrown a dictator put in power by the United States during the 1930s,” maintains Acuña, “was not lost on Latin America.” There’s no hint whatsoever that Castro himself is a dictator; his manifold violations of human rights and individual liberties go unmentioned. A student would never know from Acuña that not all Latin Americans—and not all Cubans—revere Castro (whose image actually appears on both the front and back covers of the fifth edition of Occupied America), and would certainly never get the foggiest idea from Acuña’s book of what it really means to live under a communist regime. Of course, if Acuña provided his young readers with even a thumbnail portrait of life under totalitarian communism, it would put all of his horror stories about the United States into their proper perspective—and that’s hardly what Acuña is out to achieve here.