The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  Quite the contrary: when Acuña gets around to recounting the history of Chicanos during the early Cold War years, he sneers in familiar left-wing fashion about the “red scare” and “Red hunters,” writing about communism as if it were no real threat, accusing anticommunists of “paranoia” and referring to “the so-called Communist expansion.” He mocks “the Euro-American belief of [sic] a monolithic, worldwide conspiracy directed from Moscow” (as if there hadn’t actually been a monolithic, worldwide conspiracy directed from Moscow). He praises a group called the American Committee for Protection of Foreign-Born (1933–82), but instead of acknowledging that it was a communist front organization founded—and funded—by the American Communist Party, he puts it this way: “Superpatriots labeled the ACPFB a Communist-led organization. . . .” And once his narrative brings us into the 1960s, the text becomes a blizzard of acronyms, most of them the names of Mexican American activist organizations: AWOC, CSO, NFWA, UFWOC, PASO, MAYO, UFW, LULAC, MASO, MASA, MAYA, MAPA, AMEA, UMAS, LRUP, WGP, CCHE, ME‌ChA, CPLR, PADRES, MALDEF, CRLA, CMAU, CLF. It’s a useful reminder that this isn’t an objective history of a people but a propagandistic account of a political movement. Acuña fills page after page with capsule biographies of political activists—the obvious implication being that these are the principal figures worth knowing about in Chicano history. There’s no mention of such accomplished Mexican-Americans as Peanuts animator Bill Melendez, novelist John Rechy, dancer and choreographer José Limón, Nobel Prize chemist Mario J. Molina, singers Vikki Carr and Ritchie Valens, and actors Anthony Quinn, Dolores del Río, Gilbert Roland, Ricardo Montalbán, Eva Longoria, Salma Hayek, Edward Furlong, and Jessica Alba—not to mention innumerable famous athletes and several astronauts. But of course the success of such people in American society challenges the very premise of Chicano Studies.

  Eventually (in chapter 14), and rather indirectly, Acuña does acknowledge that not all Chicanos share his own politics, noting that according to a 1983 Los Angeles Times poll most of them actually prefer to be called Mexican, Mexican American, Latino, or Hispanic. But to Acuña this choice, freely made, is not just an innocent matter of individual preference, but the consequence of sinister “conservative” efforts to destroy the entire Chicano rights project. And as he moves into the 1970s, Acuña takes the opportunity to praise such groups as the Socialist Workers Party, the Mexican Communist Party, and a Maoist faction called the ATM (short for August 29th Movement) for “raising the consciousness of students” and “enhancing the political consciousness of Chicano students.”

  Acuña’s book is largely about poverty, and taken for granted throughout is the proposition that Great Society–style programs, by definition, benefit the poor. There’s nothing remotely resembling an objective examination of this issue, and those with sincere alternative views are consistently treated as duplicitous apologists for heartless capitalism. But when it comes to economics, there’s an amusing twist: after having complained for hundreds of pages about Chicano poverty—which, naturally, he blames entirely on “Euro-American” exploitation—Acuña suddenly does a turnaround, griping about the increasing prosperity of Chicanos since the 1960s, a development that, in his view, has made them more complacent and less radical. As he puts it, while the “growth of the Chicano middle class . . . gave Chicanos more of a voice in government and society,” it also led “middle-class Chicanos” to acquire “social and economic interests differing from those of the working class” and caused them to be “coopted by the mainstream, making them agents of social control, intermediary gatekeepers, power brokers, or influence peddlers between the Chicano community and the ruling class.”

  What’s intriguing here is that Acuña is all but admitting that the problem isn’t—as many practitioners of Chicano Studies claim—that the American dream is a “lie,” but rather that it’s a dream that does come true and that, once fulfilled, poses a threat to radical Chicano politics (and to the empire that Acuña and others have built on those politics). The ugly truth, from Acuña’s point of view, is that Chicanos who have attained material comfort thanks to the capitalist system don’t want to overthrow it. For Acuña, one particularly unpleasant fact is that, in recent years, the Latino vote has grown increasingly Republican, owing to Latinos’ deep-seated religious and cultural conservatism. Acuña plainly doesn’t feel comfortable addressing this reality, because it challenges his compulsion to identify Chicanos and their culture with “progressive” ideals—and to depict them as victims of conservatives, not as conservatives themselves. A similar situation arises in connection with the case of Puerto Rico, which he describes as a victim of continued (and, it goes without saying, oppressive) U.S. “colonialism,” saying that some Puerto Ricans want their island “to become a state” while others support independence; what he avoids mentioning is that Puerto Ricans have voted consistently in referenda for the retention of their oppressive “colonialism”—otherwise known as commonwealth status—which affords them ample benefits without subjecting them to federal taxes.

  Needless to say, Acuña deplores integration—the idea, as he puts it, that Mexican Americans “will go the way of Italian Americans”—because it means accepting “white male” and “capitalist” norms. He describes those who try to prevent illegal immigration as “racist nativists” whose motive is “to keep America White” (even though immigration controls are supported by millions of nonwhite Americans, including millions of Latino Americans). And in his epilogue he celebrates “[t]he beauty of the term Chicano,” which “defined and continues to define purposes” by “acknowledg[ing] a history of oppression. . . .” Or, as Edén Torres puts it at the NACCS convention, a Chicano “is a Mexican American with a non-American image of himself!” One of the purposes of American higher education, one should think, is to help young citizens to understand, respect, and build upon the values on which their nation is founded; Chicano Studies was born in—and, to this day, continues to inculcate—opposition to such thinking.

  If Acuña’s book is the standard Chicano Studies textbook, Soldatenko’s Chicano Studies: The Genesis of a Discipline (2009) seems well on its way to being regarded as the standard history of the discipline’s development up to 1982. The book, I discover at the Seattle conference, is even the subject of its own session. Soldatenko, the star of the panel, proves to be a gregarious, down-to-earth type with a ready laugh who reminds me a bit of a middle-aged Ernest Borgnine. The presentations and subsequent comments by audience members make it clear that nobody present has any serious quarrel with Soldatenko’s account of what Chicano Studies has been; but there’s lively discussion of the question of what Chicano Studies should be. The room is packed (mostly with men), the conversation lively, the air charged with testosterone. (It occurs to me later that at this conference, with its abundance of gay, lesbian, and feminist panels, this was, in effect, a straight-guy session.) Many of the attendees are plainly eager to speak their minds. One suggests that Chicano Studies needs to “stop navel-gazing and come back to something more real”; another insists that “good research doesn’t necessarily lead to greater justice”; somebody complains that “the whole function of American education is to protect American exceptionalism” and that “Chicano Studies reified American exceptionalism in its doctrines.” Participants raise questions: Can we use science to get at “the answers”? Is the “cultural turn” problematic? What about the connections between Chicano Studies—and Chicano activism—and revolutions in Africa, Latin America, and (of course) Cuba? After a man in the audience tells us that “at Berkeley they wanted Third World Studies, not Ethnic Studies,” there’s a lively exchange about whether there’s a need for new disciplines with names like Power Studies and Sociogenic Studies. Soldatenko beams broadly through it all, plainly enjoying the give-and-take, and even tosses out the occasional joke, as when he playfully insults one of his fellow panelists by suggesting that he’s a mere “liberal” rather than a Marxist. (In these precincts—as at a GOP co
nvention—liberal is a dirty word, though for rather different reasons.) Everyone seems sincerely engaged; if you watched this session with the sound turned off, you’d think you were witnessing an urgent, substantial debate about matters of the first importance.

  One subject that doesn’t come up—although there’s an ample amount of it on display in Soldatenko’s book—is anti-Anglo racism. For example, Soldatenko quotes a remark by a Chicano journalist deploring Chicano Studies’ dependence on the Ford Foundation’s “private gringo bureaucracy.” He sums up an article by a member of the Brown Berets, “a Chicano(a) nationalist youth group,” who argued that “Anglo values are the product of the capitalist system—a system that removes humanity” so that “for the Anglo, everything is reduced to a contest, while for Chicanos, it is family, memory, and ultimately humanity.” At no point in the book does Soldatenko even hint that he finds any of this hate rhetoric offensive—and at no point in the session devoted to his book does any of the eager participants bring up the topic.

  Nor is there any mention of another aspect of Chicano culture that’s clearly alive and well—namely, the fierce hostility to gay people (and especially to gay men) that still reigns (especially among heterosexual men) in Mexican-American communities. In order to get a sense of how this ticklish topic is dealt with in these precincts, I find my way to a session bearing the bemusing title “Toxicity within the Body of Chicano Studies? Exploring Our Queer Bodies and the Toxic within Our Sacred Sites.” Pablo Alvarez of Cal State Northridge reads a paper consisting mostly of detailed plot summaries and very long quotations from the oeuvre of Gil Cuadros (the gay Chicano author, I learn, of a 1994 short-story collection titled City of God), plus occasional comments by Alvarez in which he essentially keeps repeating the same observation, namely that in Cuadros’s work “the sacred emerges from a toxic body and a toxic society.” His continual restatement of this point does not serve to make it any more comprehensible. Alvarez characterizes the autobiographical protagonist of Cuadros’s stories as “living with AIDS on the battlefield of Aztlán” (Cuadros died of AIDS in 1996 at age thirty-four), thus turning Aztlán into “AZT-land.” (This kind of wordplay, of course, is omnipresent in the humanities and social sciences today.) The word toxicity recurs frequently in Alvarez’s paper, only he pronounces it “toxidity.”

  Alvarez is followed by a bald, stocky Northridge colleague, Omar Gonzalez, who begins by dedicating his paper to “two queer men of color” who were murdered the previous November for being gay. Gonzalez contrasts the media silence about their deaths to the attention accorded the Matthew Shepard case. “There will be no made-for-TV movies about them,” Gonzalez says bitterly. Alvarez tells us he’s a “gay Chicano living with AIDS” and quotes a colleague’s observation that “the lack of attention to AIDS in Area Studies is striking.” Mentioning two Chicano authors who died of AIDS, he gripes that their deaths will lead to “no movement within Chicano Studies”: “Why change the curriculum for two dead faggots?” All of which leads him to ask: how do we eliminate “the toxic stigma” surrounding gay Chicanos? He tells us about groups (such as NARTH and PFOX) that claim to “cure” gays; about bogus treatments (once “aversion therapy,” now “reparative therapy”) for homosexuality; about a Chicano father who took his gay son to a therapist for a “cure,” only to be told that the boy was just fine as he was. All this sort of thing is old news, of course, especially to gay people (and the audience, it seems to me, is 100 percent gay, or close to it), but Alvarez serves up his material as if he’s boldly pulling back a curtain on earthshaking revelations. He worries aloud about the possibility of “preemptive genocide” of gay people in case a gay gene is isolated; I’m reminded of a disabled man at the Cultural Studies conference in Berkeley who was similarly concerned that selective abortion would result in the “genocide” of disabled people. (It’s striking that these academics, who are forbidden by their professions’ ideology to oppose abortion because it kills individuals, are permitted to worry about abortion as a threat to certain groups.)

  For the most part, however, Alvarez’s paper is not an argument but a narrative—an intense, stunningly personal précis of his own life, from being told by his confirmation class teacher that he would go to hell for being gay, to being thrown out of the house by his mother, to countless acts of unprotected sex that were his way of acting out and/or smothering his own rage. He makes generous use of religious language, characterizing his sex partners, for example, as “supplicants,” and wondering aloud how many of the gay men he sees in Los Angeles bars “may be sacrificed at the altar of the AIDS epidemic.” And he recounts at uncomfortable length a bizarre imaginary scenario in which his mother throws herself on his, Alvarez’s, coffin in feigned agony. “I no longer fear la muerte,” he says. “La muerte lives within me.”

  Heavy stuff. But Alvarez closes on an “up” note, telling us that he finally discovered an antidote to his rage. Where? In Chicano Studies! Though he felt isolated from both the Chicano and the gay communities because of their attitudes toward HIV-positive people, he’s found a home—a refuge—in the Chicano Studies Department at Northridge. Chicano Studies, he has learned, can educate and empower; it can be a site for mentorship; it provides a “safe space” for “intergenerational queer support,” where he can play “fairy godfather,” helping younger gay people to develop healthy pride in their “joteria” (queerness). Summing up his paper, Alvarez claims that his purpose has been to “challeng[e] a heteronormative paradigm.” This sudden injection of postmodern jargon into a piece of personal confession is disconcerting, for Alvarez’s text isn’t an academic paper but a salvation narrative: he once was lost, but now is found; was blind, but now can see.

  Third and last up is Gibran Guido, a slim, handsome young man from San Diego State University. Guido also has experiences to recount. He works, he tells us, as an HIV test counselor. He talks about AIDS as a stigma and about AIDS stereotypes; he notes that HIV doesn’t just attack gays; and he complains that AIDS continues to be overlooked by “our” community (that is, Chicanos). This is all, of course, terribly serious but, again, exceedingly familiar material: nothing that Guido has to say had not already been said a million times before he was born. After telling us a genuinely distressing anecdote about the first time he had to tell a client that he was HIV-positive, Guido serves up a series of sentences in which the key words of the session title, toxic and sacred, recur frequently. We must, he insists, “find the sacred in ourselves, each other, and our cultura.” He speaks of “trying to find the sacred within these sites of toxicity” and of “nurturing ourselves and realizing that we are connected to each other.” He notes that personal stories, whether written or oral, have “proven to create community and acknowledge our connection to one another.” He laments the current “toxicity of silence” and observes that “toxicity comes not only in the form of violence but in the form of prejudice.” Again, this is all quite touching personally—even if the overwrought rhetoric about toxicity and the sacred is more than a little baffling.

  To his credit, and to my surprise, Guido actually challenges the political views that dominate Chicano Studies—specifically, the virtually universal affection for Castro and his revolution. Citing with approval Reinaldo Arenas, the gay Cuban author who died of AIDS and whose autobiography Before Night Falls is a powerful indictment of Castro’s regime, Guido notes the widespread affection in Chicano Studies for the Cuban Revolution, then asks: “But revolution for whom?” He reminds the audience of Castro’s concentration camps for gays. I must admit I’m impressed by this blatant violation of an unwritten Chicano Studies rule: thou shalt not speak ill of Fidel. But soon enough, alas, Guido reverts to type, complaining that “the [Anglo] enemy insists on dividing people into distinct groups”—an odd accusation, given that we’re at the annual meeting of an association that prides itself on its division into groups, with straight men caucusing over here, straight women over there, gays here, lesbians there, and
so forth. Approaching the end of his talk, Guido strikes a bemusing note: after all that has been said at this session about the traditional hostility of Chicano culture toward homosexuality and about what Guido himself has described as gay Chicanos’ “ostracization from our own community,” he calls for “us”—gay Chicanos—to “return to our cultural tradition” because “that [Chicano] culture can heal us.” How? He doesn’t say. By way of conclusion, he reminds us that “we all [on the panel] have a narrative” and that “our silence will not protect us.”