by Bruce Bawer
Moraga’s essay is a howl of rage: I rebel, therefore I am. And what does this lesbian Che Guevara do for a living? Is she up in the mountains somewhere forming a guerrilla army to take Aztlán back from the gringos? No, she’s a professor at Stanford University. She was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in 2007 and won an NEA fellowship in 1993. And she was keynote speaker at the 2009 graduation ceremony for the Ethnic Studies program at Berkeley, where she urged the graduates to “finish this revolution.”
If Moraga is a good example of the kind of Chicana who still embraces the dream of Aztlán, veteran Chicana activist Yolanda Alaniz and longtime feminist radical Megan Cornish, coauthors of Viva la Raza: A History of Chicano Identity and Resistance (2008), are good examples of the kind of hard-core Marxist-Leninists who consider “cultural nationalism” like Moraga’s “regressive” and “disastrous” (their words) because it emphasizes ethnic identity over working-class solidarity. Rodolfo Acuña sets the tone of Viva la Raza with a foreword in which he laments the demise of the Soviet Union, which brought about “the death of many U.S. left mass organizations . . . such as the Communist Workers Party and the League of Revolutionary Struggle,” and thus “had a devastating impact on communities of color in the United States.” Alaniz and Cornish’s dream is not of an exclusively Chicano Aztlán but of a multiethnic Marxist utopia. In their version of Chicano Studies, Chicano history and culture become unimportant in and of themselves, and are valuable only to the extent that they can be used to further the workers’ revolution. Alaniz and Cornish’s explicit goal: “to topple capitalism and the racism, sexism and homophobia that sustain it” and replace it with “a system where resources and productive forces are publicly owned and run by workers for the benefit of all.” Among their models: the Russian Revolution (quotations from Lenin crowd the first seventy-odd pages); Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela; and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which Alaniz and Cornish celebrate, in a typical stretch of Orwellian prose, as
the first victorious socialist revolution in the Western hemisphere, which audaciously burst forth at the very doorstep of the United States. Fidel Castro’s charismatic leadership and Che Guevara’s internationalist vision and martyrdom made them powerful models. The Chicana/o movement strove to emulate Cuba’s monumental gains in eliminating poverty and racism and its courageous solidarity with global liberation struggles.
And as deeply as they admire the Cuban Revolution, Alaniz and Cornish mourn the post-Soviet “[e]conomic insecurity” that “led [Cuba] to adopt a foreign policy that was dominated by the desire for stable relations with the U.S. at the cost of providing radical leadership to Latin American, African and U.S. workers.” A Cuba that provides “leadership” to “U.S. workers”: such thinking is par for the course in Chicano Studies.
Enthusiasm for Marxism, and especially for the Cuban Revolution, is also on display—literally—at the NACCS convention, where one large room is set aside for the sponsoring publishers and other vendors (among them the University of Texas Press, the Bilingual Review Press, and the Socialist Worker) to show off their wares. I make a quick tour. At the table devoted to the latest titles from Pathfinder Books, the publisher’s representative, a middle-aged woman, presses on me a copy of a newspaper Pathfinder publishes. “It’s an excellent newspaper,” she gushes. “I’ve been reading it since I was seventeen!” She also draws my attention to a slim book by Mary-Alice Waters, Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? “Of course,” the woman says with a big grin, “we think the answer is yes!” I pay a dollar for the newspaper, four bucks for the book. Later, looking at Pathfinder’s website, I discover that in addition to publishing books by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, Pathfinder acts as an agent for the Cuban government; on the site you can subscribe to Granma and Cuba Socialista, the daily newspaper and quarterly theoretical journal, respectively, of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, as well as La Gaceta de Cuba, “Cuba’s leading magazine on culture, politics, and the Cuban Revolution today.”
If it isn’t already clear that Chicano Studies today is, to a great extent, a locus for Marxist propaganda, consider Latino/a Thought: Culture, Politics, and Society, a major anthology in the field. In his introduction, the editor, Francisco H. Vásquez, asks why we should have an academic discipline called Chicano Studies and not, say, German-American or Italian-American Studies. His answer: “the U.S. Italian, Irish and German populations . . . have in due time been accepted as ‘real’ Americans. They do not need their own ethnic studies at the university.” It doesn’t seem to occur to Vásquez that one reason why these groups have been so successfully integrated is that they didn’t have “their own ethnic studies at the university.” Italian, Irish, and German Americans who went to college studied what everybody else studied. They didn’t go to college to be “taught” about the one thing you could be sure they knew something about already—namely, their own ethnic subcultures—and to be encouraged to nurse grievances about them; they went to college to learn about things beyond their own experience and to do something useful with that knowledge.
Several times in his book Vásquez returns to a single historical incident that, in his view, is clearly central to the history of U.S.-Latino relations. The hero of the story is Ricardo Chávez Ortiz, a Mexican citizen who on April 13, 1972, hijacked a commercial flight that he had boarded in Albuquerque and demanded radio time “to talk about the unjust treatment of Mexicans.” “He got the airtime,” writes Vásquez, “but, as you might imagine, no major change occurred in the life of Mexicans in the United States. He paid with federal prison time for the right to speak to power.” There’s no hint that hijacking a plane may not have been the most appropriate means of gaining a podium.*
Vásquez says that his intention in his book is to promote “critical thinking.” A subhead at the end of his introduction is more honest: “Becoming Politically Involved.” Indeed, he is blatantly out to indoctrinate his students. He claims that the readings included in the book “differ in political tone and orientation” and warns students to “read with a suspicious mind, suspend judgment, and do not take statements as given truths. . . . [T]hink for yourself.” Yet the range of opinions in his book is as broad as those at a Communist Party convention. And his version of the facts, time and time again, is breathtakingly dishonest. The Mexican, Russian, and Cuban revolutions, in his description, were “struggle[s] for civil and human rights for African-descent, indigenous, and Latino peoples and women, gays and other marginalized peoples.” He refers to the “fight . . . between capitalist democracy and communist and social democracies,” his obvious intention being to fool naïve readers into thinking that the Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba can be considered in any way to be (or have been) democracies. He equates Castro’s revolution with the American Revolution—because both, he says, represented a rejection of colonialism. Not that he approves of the American Revolution: on the contrary, he takes an entirely cynical view of America’s founding, presenting the colonies’ rebellion as a power grab by capitalist oppressors. By contrast, he describes Marxism, benignly, as “a political-economic analysis of society that is familiar in most of the world” (and thus, by implication, legitimate and respectable) but that “in the United States . . . is associated with ‘godless communism’” and thus “reject[ed] . . . offhand” by “most people.” Like Acuña, he doesn’t bother to fill students in on the history of Marxism and what it has wrought (The Black Book of Communism is not in his bibliography); he says only that for students “it is important to become familiar with the concepts and terms of Marxist analysis” because many of the contributors to his book take a Marxist view, even though some of them regard it as “a necessary but not sufficient analysis for the understanding of Latino/a political realities.” To read his anthology (which is riddled with quotations, many of them lengthy, from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Foucault, and Said) is to see a very wily Marxist teaching his undergraduates, step by step, to view the world through Marxist eyes.
Through all of Chicano Studies’ twists and turns, Aztlán, founded in 1970, has remained its flagship journal. The magazine, which comes out twice a year, is beautifully (which is to say expensively) produced, with high-quality paper and illustrations. The topics of its articles run the gamut from literature, art, and culture to politics and society. The language is never crudely rebellious or violently anti-establishment—the clear objective is to produce a “respectable” academic publication—though the contents are consistently informed by an oppositional posture toward an America that is unwaveringly depicted as capitalist, imperialist, and oppressive. The spring 2010 issue is typical. In “Toward a Borderlands Ethics: The Undocumented Migrant and Haunted Communities in Contemporary Chicana/o Fiction,” Pablo A. Ramirez of the University of Michigan argues that works of fiction by Chicano writers Helena María Viramontes and Daniel Chacón “help us understand that maintaining a Latina/o ethnic identity is . . . an ethico-political project that challenges the United States to form new visions of democracy and new relations with Latin America in order to maintain transborder communities and families.” In “Líderes Campesinas: Nepantla Strategies and Grassroots Organizing at the Intersection of Gender and Globalization,” Maylei Blackwell of UCLA builds “on Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of nepantla” to show “how campesina [female peasant] organizers create sources of empowerment from their binational life experiences and new forms of gendered grassroots leadership that navigate the overlapping hybrid hegemonies produced by U.S., Mexican, and migrant relations of power,” thereby “challeng[ing] the racialized and gendered forms of structural violence exacerbated by neoliberal globalization.” And in “The Curandera of Conquest: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonial Remedy,” George Hartley of the Department of English and the Latin American Studies Program at Ohio University argues that Anzaldúa’s “primary role . . . is that of the curandera [folk healer or witch doctor] of conquest, the healer of la herida abierta (the open wound) created by the borders imposed by capitalism, nationalism, imperialism, sexism, homophobia, and racism.” Also worth mentioning is an essay from the fall 2009 issue titled “The Core Ideals of the Mexican American Gang: Living the Presentation of Defiance,” in which Robert J. Durán of New Mexico State University denies “that criminality is the defining characteristic of gangs” and argues that “[g]angs maintain their cohesiveness and longevity through four core ideals: displaying loyalty, responding courageously to external threats, promoting and defending gang status, and maintaining a stoic attitude toward the negative consequences of gang life” and that “[s]tate-sponsored opposition to gangs only further solidifies these ideals”—meaning that gang members must be encouraged to “rechannel” their “collective energy” into “community empowerment.”
Aztlán is published by the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, one of four ethnic studies centers established at that university in 1969. (The others are the American Indian Studies Center, the Asian American Studies Center, and the Ralph Bunche Center for African-American Studies.) The director of the Chicano Studies Research Center and editor of Aztlán is Chon Noriega, whose background is not in political activism but in art, film, and media; he’s curated exhibitions, produced documentaries, and been involved in activities ranging from film restoration to archival work. As I find my way to the Research Center on a hot afternoon at the end of March—the first day of UCLA’s spring quarter—I notice banners hanging from lampposts all over campus. They read: “Art, activism, access[:] 40 years of ethnic studies at UCLA.”
I arrive on time for my appointment with Noriega, but he’s still in a meeting. The secretary in his outer office invites me to take a seat and wait. I decide to walk around instead. I stroll up and down the hall, examining the bulletin boards outside the Chicano and Bunche centers. The ones outside the Chicano Center, I notice, are dominated by pictures of and clippings about Noriega. Twice I return to Noriega’s secretary’s office only to be told that he’s still busy. Finally, after more than half an hour, Noriega and his guest come out of his office and Noriega, after giving him a chummy slap on the back, turns to me and apologizes graciously for making me wait. Everything about Noriega is gracious—elegant, sophisticated, smooth. He’s an attractive middle-aged man in a fine suit that fits him like a glove; he’s Latino in the way Ricardo Montalbán was Latino, except that he doesn’t have the slightest trace of a Latino accent. Certainly the word Chicano doesn’t seem to suit him at all, unless you can imagine a Chicano Cary Grant. Nor is there the remotest hint about him of the intense stew of radicalism in which the Chicano Studies movement was born, to say nothing of the Leninist-Stalinist ideology that dominates the field today; he talks in the soothing, civilized purr of the eminently reasonable academic administrator. He’s the very model, indeed, of a highly successful member of that breed.
Briefly put, he could hardly be more different, at first blush anyway, from David Diaz.
He ushers me into his large, tidy office and we sit down—him in a chair, me on the couch. He offers me a piece of chocolate from a dish on the coffee table. It’s delicious. I ask about the slogan on those banners: why, of all things, “art, activism, access”? Why, that is, those three particular words, of all the nouns they might have chosen? Noriega looks genuinely stumped. “Hmm, how did we come up with that?” he says with a hint of charming, Cary Grant–like bemusement. He really doesn’t remember. In any case, he seems less eager to focus on activism than on art. “We have some pretty significant art holdings,” he tells me. “We have the first Chicano mural painted at a university.” He gets up, crosses the room, and comes back with a poster of the mural. Dating back to 1970, it’s highly derivative of Diego Rivera—a busy, colorful celebration of working-class heroism. “Each center has a mural like this,” Noriega tells me. “The African-American one was painted by a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old kid who is now a mid-career artist.” He goes on for a while about the center’s collection and promotion of Chicano art. “There are some amazing [Chicano] artists who aren’t part of the history of world and American art,” he says.
Noriega seems eager to distinguish his own Chicano Center from the Chicano Studies Department. “The center is different from the department, and precedes it. It was started forty years ago with no students, no faculty, and few resources. It was created along with a library, a press, and a co
mmunity-relations program. It laid the foundations for the field intellectually—through publications and resources—and supported students and faculty in their development and training. By the late 1970s, it had helped bring about the creation of the department and the degree program.” But he’s less interested in talking about the Chicano Studies Department than about UCLA’s other ethnic centers. “We work closely together through the Institute of American Cultures,” he says. “We jointly administer grants and fellowship programs and collaborate on projects that are postracial. We do Chicano and Latino projects, and more broadly framed projects as well. For example, projects involving voting rights and incarceration.” It must be said that Noriega is extremely good at this; I might well be watching a promotional video.
“I’ve been the director for eight years now,” Noriega continues. “I was and am in the Film Department. The center was a unique resource because it was campus-wide. Most people are in their departments and can’t get outside them. The center had an impact across the campus—it could reach out across department lines. My role was to formalize much that was inherent. It was about research, not advocacy, not partisanship—research that would have an impact.” So the center is about “activism,” but not “advocacy”? “Research,” he goes on, “that would reach out into community and have an overlap of interests. We needed infrastructure and increased resources. We needed some way of conveying our history and mission.” It’s impressive how smoothly Noriega steamrollers on; you get the impression that he could keep this up for hours. “We’ve provided a platform that pulls people in from across campus to collaborate on projects. For example, we have a grant proposal out right now relating to a San Fernando Valley hospital. My assistant has a Ph.D. in health sciences. We’re trying to connect the Latino community with better health-care services. The question is, how do we set up an infrastructure whereby the right information can reach the Latino community?” If this is activism, Noriega makes it sound tame, moderate, unobjectionable.