by Bruce Bawer
Breaking the silence; telling your story: for many academics who have ridden to career success on the wave of identity studies, this is where it all begins and ends—with autobiography, whether one’s own (as in the cases of Guido and Gonzalez) or someone else’s (as in the case of Alvarez’s paper on Gil Cuadros). For all the Marxist revolutionary slogans, Catholic spiritual imagery, and self-help and social work rhetoric, the real subject throughout was personal pain, personal confession, personal grievance; and the common theme was the indifference of mainstream American and/or Chicano society to the pain experienced by gay Chicanos, especially those with HIV. I feel immense sympathy for all these men, but I must add that, as a gay writer who lived in New York during the first two decades of the AIDS crisis, I’ve been reading and hearing stories like these for more than half my life now. That such material is apparently considered groundbreaking here at the NACCS seems to me only to underscore just how backward the Chicano “community” still is in regard to homosexuality and AIDS.
Indeed, what is ultimately most lamentable about the session is that although the participants acknowledge the prejudice against gays and AIDS sufferers that reigns in Chicano communities, their awareness of this prejudice doesn’t translate into a greater regard for “Anglo” civilization and values (not to mention “Anglo” medicine), or into a rethinking of the question of who really is the “oppressor,” at least when you’re a gay Chicano with AIDS. On the contrary, these young men seem desperate to reconcile their HIV status and sexual orientation with their Chicano heritage, desperate to locate a “place”—psychologically, spiritually, ideologically, geographically—where they can be their authentic individual selves while remaining true to their “people,” their “culture,” their group. Yet they appear to have gone to heroic efforts to resist recognizing that their only hope for the kind of wholeness they seek lies in the culture of the dreaded “Anglo,” the alleged “oppressor”—a culture that has provided them with the very terms by which they define themselves sexually and with institutions and communities in which they’ve found safe harbor.
Look, for example, at Omar Gonzalez: he’s been through so much, and yet his years of pondering his experience have resulted in nothing more than a barrage of highly emotional personal testimony (plus a touch of magic-realist fantasy in the form of the image of his mother throwing herself on his coffin). Indeed, it would seem that the whole point of telling one’s story, in this setting, is not to follow it to its logical conclusion—not to learn something from it—but rather to strive to bring it into some appearance of harmony with at least certain aspects of Chicano Studies ideology. Especially for jotos, I reflect as I leave the conference room, the challenge at the heart of Chicano Studies is this: how can you honestly attack capitalist Anglo society as “heteronormative” when you yourself hail from—and are professionally compelled to celebrate—a culture notorious for primitive macho posturing, strict gender roles, and patriarchal family structures? And how can you claim that a return to that culture will be “healing” for gays?
After hearing and reading so much about Chicana feminism, I’m curious to see in person what it looks like these days. It’s Saturday morning in Seattle, and the session is titled “Dancers, Mothers, and Grandmothers: Expression and Performance as Knowledge Production”—and it proves to be an ideal introduction not only to Chicana Studies today but to the sort of activities that Soldatenko is talking about when he describes Chicano Studies as having taken a “cultural turn.”
All three speakers are female graduate students—Chicana Studies’ future. First Jennie Luna of the University of California, Davis, reads part of her dissertation. It’s about Señora Cobb, aka Mama Cobb, whom Luna describes as an “elder,” “healer,” “dancer,” “teacher,” “actress,” “mother,” “midwife,” and “community resource,” among many other things. She is apparently quite celebrated in certain circles, and is particularly famous, it seems, for having “transformed danza,” a centuries-old genre of native dance in Hispanic America that both she and Luna appear to regard as a potential alternative (because it’s both pre-European and nonpatriarchal) to the European male traditions associated with the Catholic Church. Born in 1932, Cobb became known as the “rainbow woman of the earth,” says Luna, because she is supposed to have emerged from her mother’s womb, the last-born of a set of triplets, and dropped to the ground just as a rainbow appeared in the wake of a storm. She went on to have nineteen children. Luna first encountered Cobb when the former was a high school student and the latter was a keynote speaker at an event encouraging “Raza youth” to get an education. Cobb spoke in her native tongue—the Aztec language, Nahuatl—and her presentation had a powerful impact on Luna. Later, when Luna became, as she puts it, “a college student and activist,” Cobb spoke at events she organized. Luna also accompanied Cobb on “pilgrimages” to “sacred sites.”
Luna mentions the concept of palabra. Palabra means “word,” but more profoundly it designates a “sacred concept” that’s “synonymous with responsibility and commitment,” with “put[ting] one’s integrity on the line.” It’s associated with the very “breath of life”—for “one’s word is one’s life.” What does all this have to do with Señora Cobb? Well, according to Luna, some people say that if you don’t come from the tradition of danza with which Cobb is associated, “you don’t have palabra.” For Luna, Cobb is a vital figure because she’s helped to preserve the “indigenous tradition of sacred dance,” which “has survived genocide [and] colonization”; Cobb’s work constitutes a “reclamation” of the Chicano (and especially Chicana) past, supplies “an inclusive space for all who identify with Nahuatl,” and provides an accessible starting point for young Chicanas who wish to make a connection with their own cultural history—for, as Luna puts it, “knowledge of our past is the strongest tool we have against colonialism.” She says she spent two years interviewing Cobb for this project, and informs us that Cobb, because of her devotion to the oral tradition, wouldn’t let her use a tape recorder, telling her instead to “use your mind.”
Luna serves up a grab bag of other details about Cobb, from whom she claims to have “gained a wealth of knowledge”: Cobb once kicked customers out of a store so she could perform a blessing ceremony for the merchant’s sick father; she makes trajes (dresses or suits); some people call her loca (crazy); at ceremonies she’s been known to “call people out for wearing the inappropriate traje”; she worked for several years as a bounty hunter. Luna loads us up with information about Cobb—but doesn’t explain successfully why any of it should matter to us and be seen as having a larger meaning. But within the context of Chicana Studies, the point is clear: Cobb personifies female, pre-European traditions (good) and symbolizes liberation from European colonialism and Catholic patriarchy (bad). Luna wants to redefine “tradition”: in Mexico, she says, the word implies a connection to Catholicism, whereas when Cobb and Luna speak of tradition, they mean la danza. “It’s important to document our stories and listen to our elders,” concludes Luna, her words almost identical to those with which Gibran Guido ended his presentation at the joto session.
Next up is Eve Delfin of the University of California, Merced, who examines “the spirituality of folklórico”—that is, baile folklórico, or folkloric dance—in a “hegemonic society.” Baile folklórico is an umbrella term for traditional Latin American folk dances that contain elements of ballet. Delfin maintains that “folklórico uses spirituality that affirms the importance of dance in our society,” and she underscores the difference between danzas (which are purely native) and bailes (which betray European influences). The members of the “folklórico community,” she explains, have various ideas and philosophies about exactly what it is that they do, and have regionally distinctive outfits, movements, and even politics. In the 1960s, she informs us, Chicanos made use of folklórico to come together, pitting “spirit, community, identity, belonging, imagination . . . against hegemony”; they b
ecame interested in folklórico in an effort “to find a spiritual link to their ancestors” in the face of a “hegemony that seeks to erase this link.”
Delfin extols the “essentially spiritual nature” of dance; acknowledges the syncretism that brought Spanish influences to bear on native dance; recalls the way in which folklórico was used as “a nationalizing tool” after the Mexican Revolution, but also as “a form of resistance by indigenous people” and as a means of “repair[ing] breaks that result from hegemonic social structures in the United States.” Aside from baile and folklórico, clearly, the key word here is hegemony. But Delfin seems far less interested in politics than in spirituality—for her, baile folklórico “gives people a sense of unity, of community, in which performers transcend time and space” and forges for the dancers a “connection to one another, to their familia, and to their ancestors.” “We are inherently spiritual beings,” she proclaims, asserting that dance provides “affirmation, a spirit of unity.”
Last up is Larissa Mercado-Lopez of the University of Texas at San Antonio. A graduate student in English who also teaches Women’s Studies, she’s written a paper titled “Phenomenologies of Mestiza Maternity: Reading Transcorporeal Bodies as Sites of Knowledge Production.” If Luna’s and Delfin’s papers were perhaps insufficiently jargon-ridden, Mercado-Lopez makes up for that deficiency and then some. In her work, she tells us, she is “theorizing [about] maternal bodies” and seeking “to identity the discursive intersections where I can locate and theorize about the maternal subject”; she’s concerned about the “rhetorical warfare on brown bodies” and about “mestiza maternity” (a mestiza is a woman of mixed European and Native American ancestry) as “epistemic privilege”; she believes that “mestiza bodies can be read as sites of knowledge production,” that our “analyses of embodiment must expand to recognize the material relationship between the psyche and the body, as well as the transformative potential of this interaction in the social world,” and that “bodies such as maternal and transgendered bodies shift to produce multiple forms of consciousness.” She has plenty to say as well about “the epistemological implications of maternal corporeality,” “the body’s relationship to power and consciousness,” “the pregnant woman’s phenomenological experience,” and “the epistemological significance of mestiza maternity.”
This session has neatly captured one of the conflicts at the heart of Chicana Studies: Chicana academics feel compelled to identify as feminist radicals and postmodern ideologues who are out to annihilate gender roles and traditional religion, but in their hearts they’re often far more interested in spirituality and conventional female activities (dancing, clothes making). This conclusion is reaffirmed at the “Chicana plenary” later the same morning, the putative subject of which is the environment (the official theme of this year’s conference). Welcoming us to this gathering, entitled “Mujeres Activistas,” Mary S. Pardo explains that the “Chicana caucus was implemented in response to sexism” and notes proudly that it’s “the largest caucus in the organization.” She then introduces Gloria A. Ramirez, who works at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio and edits a journal called La Voz de Esperanza (The Voice of Hope), which Pardo describes as offering “brilliant insights,” such as the observation that “all of our first environments are the bodies of women.” There follows a PowerPoint presentation about the evils of technology. (Looking around the sizable auditorium and examining the faces, I see no sign that anyone finds it amusing that PowerPoint is being used as an aid in a jeremiad against technology.) We’re told that “environmental racism is the disrespect of our Mother Earth” (water is Mother Earth’s blood, soil is her skin, etc.) and that “when you [non-Chicanos] started your Industrial Revolution, you started poisoning our Mother Earth, our air and our water. We took care of them for centuries. Within our DNA we know we belong to our Mother Earth. Humankind and nature are intertwined, cannot be disconnected.”
One of today’s most prominent Chicana activists and academics is Cherríe Moraga, co-editor of the pathbreaking feminist manifesto (femifesto?) This Bridge Called My Back. She exudes even more hostility for the Anglo establishment than most other Chicano academics—which is probably the main key to her success. “Chicano Nation,” she has written, “is a mestizo nation conceived in a double-rape: first, by the Spanish and then by the Gringo.” She’s the author of several collections of bad poetry, all interchangeable with the work of any number of other narcissistic identity studies academics. But perhaps the most succinct summation of Moraga’s views can be found in her essay “Queer Aztlán: The Reformation of Chicano Tribe.” It opens (which isn’t unusual in identity studies) on a self-congratulatory note: “My real politicization began, not through the Chicano Movement, but through the bold recognition of my lesbianism.” Depending on the circumstances, it can indeed take courage to accept one’s own homosexuality, but still, to describe oneself as “bold” is rather—well, bold. Perhaps it’s because Moraga’s essay goes back a few years (it’s based on talks given in 1992) that the Chicano Studies students she describes aren’t at all like the maddeningly integrationist kids Edén Torres moans about. “Radicalization among people of Mexican ancestry in this country,” Moraga writes, “most often occurs when the Mexican ceases to be a Mexican and becomes a Chicano. I have observed this in my Chicano Studies students (first, second, and third generation . . .). . . . They are the ones most often in protest, draping their bodies in front of freeway on-ramps and trans-bay bridges, blocking entrances to University administration buildings.”
In other words, they’ve gotten into college—but instead of taking hold of this precious opportunity to be educated and become successful and productive members of society, they’re making use of it to play at rebellion. “They are the ones who, like their Black, Asian, and Native American counterparts, doubt the ‘American dream’ because even if they got to UC Berkeley, their brother is still on crack in Boyle Heights [a section of Los Angeles], their sister had three kids before she’s twenty, and sorry but they can’t finish the last week of the semester cuz Tío Ignacio just got shot in front of a liquor store.” And what, according to Moraga, is the cause of all these family problems? Three words: “North American racism.” Unlike her Chicano students, she notes, her Mexican immigrant students “have not yet had their self-esteem nor that of their parents and grandparents worn away by North American racism. For them, the ‘American dream’ still looms as a possibility on the horizon.” This, in any event, is Moraga’s analysis of the situation. It apparently hasn’t occurred to her that because they’ve actually lived in Mexico, her Mexican immigrant students may in fact recognize and appreciate the opportunity for a better life that’s been handed to them and want to make the most of it—whereas her Chicano students, who’ve grown up with welfare and affirmative action and the mantra of racism, may have been so crippled by the victim mentality that’s been drilled into their heads ever since elementary school that they’re incapable of taking responsibility for their own futures.
As a Chicana lesbian, Moraga is in the position of being able to complain in every direction, and complain she does—not only about the racism of North American whites, but also about the antigay and sexist attitudes of Chicano men (and of the male-run Chicano community and Chicano movement), the “privileges” of gay men, and “the misogyny of gay Chicanos.” She’s a victim so many times over that her less multiply-oppressed colleagues must wilt with envy. She slams gay Chicano men for their reluctance “to recognize and acknowledge that their freedom is intricately connected to the freedom of women.” (This is yet another version of the claim—which, though utterly historyless, is an orthodoxy today in Queer Studies and Women’s Studies—that the gay rights movement grew out of feminism.) “The earth is female,” Moraga informs us more than once (she never says anything just once), and she also tells us that “the female body, like the Chicano people, has been occupied.” She dismisses fellow Mexican American write
r Richard Rodriguez—who has more talent in his little finger than she has in her whole body, occupied or not—as an “assimilationist” and attacks him for staying in the closet for many years (Rodriguez is now openly gay), which allowed him to “cling to privileges that make other people’s lives more vulnerable to violence.” The denunciation and smearing of truly gifted people like Rodriguez—people the Chicano community should be proud of—by the self-appointed gatekeepers of Chicano Studies is, alas, an everyday spectacle. (Did anyone in the Chicano Studies community even take note when Dana Gioia, who is one of the best poets of his generation and happens to be half Mexican American, was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002? No, because he made it on his merits and not by being a victimization hustler.)
For Moraga, the dream of Aztlán still lives: “Few Chicanos really believe we can wrest Aztlán away from Anglo-America,” she admits, but adds: “If the Soviet Union could dissolve, why not the United States?” What an inspiring teacher she must be! Yet if her own Chicano students are good old-fashioned radicals, the Chicano movement itself is, in her view, only a shadow of its former self: “I mourn the dissolution of an active Chicano Movement possibly more strongly than my generation[al] counterparts because during its ‘classic period,’ I was unable to act publicly. But more deeply, I mourn it because its ghost haunts me daily in the blonde hair of my sister’s children [presumably products of that evil phenomenon, miscegenation], the gradual hispanicization of Chicano students [i.e., the lack of resentment over the “loss” of Aztlán that is symbolized by their decision to call themselves Latino or Hispanic rather than Chicano], the senselessness of barrio violence [which is of course entirely the fault of norteamericanos], and the poisoning of la frontera from Tijuana to Tejas.” She awaits a resurrection of the Chicano movement—only this time “in a ‘queerer,’ more feminist” form. She admires “Chicano nationalism, Black nationalism, Puerto Rican Independence, . . . the ‘Lesbian Nation’ and its lesbian separatist movement, and, of course, the most recent ‘Queer Nation’”—and what she likes about each of these movements is “its righteous radicalism, its unabashed anti-assimilationism, and its rebeldía [rebelliousness, defiance].”