Massacre of the Dreamers

Essays on Xicanisma. 20th Anniversary Updated Edition.

Ana Castillo

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780826353597
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights
This new edition of an immensely influential book gives voice to Mexic Amerindian women silenced for hundreds of years by the dual censorship of being female and indigenous. Castillo replaced the term "Chicana feminism" with "Xicanisma" to include mestiza women on both sides of the border. In history, myth, interviews, and ethnography Castillo revisits her reflections on Chicana activism, spiritual practices, sexual attitudes, artistic ideology, labor struggles, and education-related battles. Her book remains a compelling document, enhanced here with a new afterword that reexamines the significance of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

CHAPTER ONE

A Countryless Woman

The Early Feminista

I would have spoken these words as a feminist who “happened” to be a white United States citizen, conscious of my government’s proven capacity for violence and arrogance of power, but as self-separated from that government, quoting without second thought Virginia Woolf’s statement in The Three Guineas that “as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” This is not what I come [here] to say in 1984. I come here with notes but without absolute conclusions. This is not a sign of loss of faith or hope. These notes are the marks of a struggle to keep moving, a struggle for accountability.

—ADRIENNE RICH, “Notes Toward a
Politics of Location,” Blood, Bread, and Poetry

IN THE 1980S I COULD not call myself a citizen of the world as Virginia Woolf, speaking as an Anglo woman born to economic means, declared herself; nor did I make the same claim to U.S. citizenship as Adrienne Rich does, despite her universal feeling for humanity. Today, in my own nation of birth and citizenship, as a mestiza born to the lower strata, at best, I am often mistaken for an immigrant, at worst, as a nonentity. Moreover, this occurs not only in the United States, the country of my birth, but also in European countries. In Latin America, including México, I am taken for a foreigner.

Nationhood aside, there is a visceral connection within me for the land of my ancestors. If in search of refuge from the United States I took up residence on any other continent, the core of my being would long for a return to these lands. The collective memory that I share with other indigenas and mestizos and mestizas makes me yearn to claim these territories as my spiritual homeland. In the following pages I would like to review our socioeconomic status, our early activism and feminism, and begin the overall discussion that progresses toward a Xicanista vision.

Leftists and liberals recognized the atrocities of U.S. intervention in Central America during the 1980s, as similar sympathizers did with Vietnam in the 1960s. Their support was also reminiscent of North American leftists and liberals in the 1930s who struggled against fascism during the Spanish Civil War. Yet, mestizas on U.S. soil, immigrants and native, are viewed less compassionately, even skeptically. We are advised to assimilate.

Racism polarized into a black-white issue. Mestizos in the United States were seen by many white people as having the potential to “pass” for white. This opinion was based on assumptions, lack of information, and misinformation that accompanied policies, media control, and distorted historical documentation. The United States cannot deny its early history of importing Africans as slaves; however, censorship continued regarding the extent of genocide of Native Americans. Mestizos and mestizas were identified as a mixture of the dispensable Amerindian race and the lowly Spaniard. (In colonial times, according to the caste system, the ruling Spaniards designated the criollo, an individual of Spanish blood born on Mexican soil, as having genetically inherited laziness by virtue of his/her birth.) Little is known by the general public about how these attitudes caused ongoing persecution of Mexic Amerindians and mestizas on land that was México and later became U.S. territory. For example, while it is well recognized that in the South there were lynchings of African Americans, it isn’t common knowledge that Mexicans were also lynched and hung in Texas and throughout the Southwest. Today there is a common belief that the civil rights movement succeeded in creating a true democracy and that increasing poverty and unemployment are primarily a matter of the repercussions of world economics and the lack of motivation of certain racial and ethnic groups.

PEREGRINATIONS

While I’ve had more in common with a Mexican man than with a white woman, in many ways I have more in common with an Algerian woman than with a Mexican man. Although women everywhere experience life differently from men everywhere, white women are heiresses to the privilege granted by colonization. We have lived in a polarized world of contrived dualisms, dichotomies, and paradoxes: light versus dark and good versus evil. We as Mexic Amerindians and mestizas have been the dark. We are the evil . . . or at least, the questionable. Ours is a world imbued with nationalism, real for some, yet tenuous as paper for others. Nonwhite women—Mexicans/Chicanas, Filipinas, Malaysians, and others—who comprise 80 percent of the global factory workforce, are the greatest dispensable resource that multinational interests own.¹ The women are, in effect, represented by no country. We have been the invariable targets of every kind of abusive manipulation and experimentation. As a mestiza, a resident of a declining world power, I have the same hope as Rich who, on behalf of her country aims to be accountable, flexible, and learn new ways to gather together earnest peoples of the world without the defenses of nationalism.

I was born, raised, and spent most of my life in one of the largest cities in the United States. Despite its distance from México, Chicago was the third most frequent U.S. destination of Mexican migrants after El Paso and Los Angeles. A great influx of Mexicans occurred during the first half of the twentieth century when the city required cheap labor for its factories, slaughterhouses, and steel mill industry. In an effort to minimize their social and spiritual alienation, Mexican communities developed and maintained solid ties to Mexican culture and traditions. This was reinforced by the tough political patronage system in Chicago, which was dependent on ethnically and racially divisive strategies to maintain its power. Thus I grew up perceiving myself to be Mexican despite the fact that I did not visit that country until the age of ten.

Assimilation into dominant culture, while not impossible, was not encouraged nor desired by most ethnic groups in Chicago—Mexicans were no exception. We ate, slept, talked, and dreamed Mexican. Our parishes were Mexican. Small Mexican-owned businesses flourished. The spiritual and psychological needs of a people so despised and undesired by white dominant culture were met in our own growing communities with the establishment of small businesses and parishes. During the seventies, arts, community centers, nursery schools, and such that were bilingual and bicultural were established by grassroots activists.

As I was growing up, Mexicans were the second largest minority in Chicago. There was also a fair-sized Puerto Rican community and a fair amount of Cubans and other Latin Americans. In those years, however, before the blatant military disruption of Latin American countries such as Chile and El Salvador, a person with “mestiza” characteristics was considered Mexican. When one had occasion to venture away from her insulated community to, say, downtown, impressive and intimidating with its tremendous skyscrapers and evidently successful (white) people bustling about, she felt as if she were leaving her village to go into town on official matters. Once there she went about her business with a certain sense of invisibility, and even hoped for it, feeling so out of place and disoriented in the presence of U.S. Anglo, profit-based interests, which we had nothing to do with except as mass-production workers. On such occasions, if she were to by chance run across another mestiza and mestizo, there was a mutual unspoken recognition and, perhaps, a reflexive avoidance of eye contact. An instantaneous mental communication might sound something like this:

I know you. You are Mexican (like me). You are brown-skinned (like me). You are poor (like me). You probably live in the same neighborhood as I do. You don’t have anything, own anything. (Neither do I.) You’re no one (here). At this moment I don’t want to be reminded of this, in the midst of such luxury, wealth, this disorienting language; it makes me ashamed of the food I eat, the flat I live in, the only clothes I can afford to wear, the alcoholism and defeat I live with. You remind me of all of it.

You remind me that I am not beautiful—because I am short, round bellied and black eyed. You remind me that I will never ride in that limousine that just passed because we are going to board the same bus back to the neighborhood where we both live. You remind me of why the foreman doesn’t move me out of that tedious job I do day after day, or why I got feverish and too tongue-tied to go to the main office to ask for that Saturday off when my child made her First Holy Communion.

When I see you, I see myself. You are the mirror of this despicable, lowly subhuman that I am in this place far from our homeland, which scarcely offered us much more since the vast majority there live in destitution. None of the rich there look like us either. At least here we feed our children; they have shoes. We manage to survive. But don’t look at me. Go on your way. Let me go on pretending my invisibility, so that I can observe close up all the possibilities—and dream the gullible dreams of a human being.²

AT SEVENTEEN I JOINED THE Latino/Chicano movement. It was 1970, and as a high school senior, I rallied around City Hall along with hundreds of other youth screaming, “¡Viva La Raza!” and “Chicano Power!” until we were hoarse. Our fears of being recognized as lowly Mexicans were replaced with socioeconomic theories that led to political radicalism. Yet our efforts to bring unity and courage to the majority of our people were short lived; they did not welcome the ideology. Among the factors contributing to this were the desire to succeed, the consumer fever that overrides people’s fundamental needs, and the competitive American premise that encourages individual versus community efforts. The temptations of the rewards of assimilation and the internalization of racism by the colonized peoples of the United States remain devastating. Society has yet to acknowledge the trauma it engenders. The United States, has allowed to some extent for the representation of people of color in the institutions that influence and mandate peoples’ lives, such as government, private industry, and universities. It has gradually relented to fulfill its professed democratic ideals and include the descendants of its slave trade, the Native Americans, mestizas and mestizos, and North and South Africans and Asians (who also come from a wide variety of countries and social and economic backgrounds and who, due to various political circumstances, are immigrating to the United States at an rapid pace). It will do so because the world economy will not permit anything short of it.

Today, it may be argued that immigrants do not necessarily share the sentiments expressed above formulated throughout the late sixties through the eighties. They know they are citizens of their homeland and have willingly come to and may embrace their new country. The Reagan era altered the way politics were thought about in the United States. The Republican administration managed to dismantle most of the grassroots organizations supported by the government. With the shrewd dexterity managed in a con’s cups and balls game, the dismantling of a communist “threat” took place in Central America. The average U.S. citizen did not know what country their government was for or against there. (Indeed, the average U.S. citizen does not know where to locate the countries in Central America, often mistaking them for being part of the Mexican Republic.) The influx of Central and South Americans escaping horrors visited on them by their governments (as well as others, who did not disagree with the horrors) altered the previous agenda of the Latino movement. Activists born on U.S. soil, whose antecedents trace back to before annexation of their home states, had a different perspective. “We didn’t cross the border,” the Southwest saying goes, “the border crossed us.” Across the ocean, in a staged production, Reagan challenged the leader of the Soviet Union in 1987, “Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev.” No such cries by Republicans or Democrats are made regarding the U.S.-México border in 2013. To the contrary securing the border is a main point of contention regarding passing any kind of immigration bill.

México has been nothing if not cooperative with the needs and demands of the free enterprise system, evident most recently with the NAFTA Agreement, and yet the U.S.-México border is the sorest point of contention for conservatives regarding an immigration bill. The public is aware of the complaints of ranchers regarding the trespassing of Mexicans who are crossing illegally. We do not often hear of the generations of mestizos who exist in a nether-state along the border. Subjected to prejudices, racism, and poverty, complacency is mostly the rule. Contrary to the perspective that the majority of a population changes policy, voting does. Voting requires conscientización.

The resident Hispanic population in the United States totals nearly 52 million. In 2011, according to the PEW Hispanic Center, the female population of native and foreign-born Hispanic/Latino identified residents was more than 26 million.³ According to the same source there was an estimated 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country. These individuals are from all over the world, but according to the PEW report, more than half of the undocumented population are from México.

Hispanic as the ethnic label for all people who reside in the United States with any connection to the culture brought by the Spaniards during the conquest of the Americas was established in the 1980s by the U.S. government. In my opinion, bundling together a vastly diverse group resulted in a gross misnomer. The label was chosen over the activists’ preference of Latino or U.S. Latino (for native born). The term Hispanic is a misnomer because one-fifth of South America—Brazil—does not speak Spanish. A large population of Guatemala speaks indigenous dialects as a first language and maintains its own indigenous culture. Chicanos and mainland Puerto Ricans, having been brought up in an English-dominant society, having attended its monolingual schools, and discouraged from pursuing the language of their ancestors, may have some or no fluency in Spanish. In fact, even though Spanish speakers in the Southwest expected to retain their native tongue following annexation of the territory in which they lived in 1848, Spanish was prohibited in schools and workplaces. The debate rages on among educators and government alike.

If Hispanic refers to all natives and descendants of persons from Latin America, it includes no less than twenty countries—whose shared patterns of colonization may allow them to be called Pan-American, but whose histories and cultural attitudes are nevertheless diverse in very particular ways. The economies of Caribbean states and coasts in Latin America, which were dependent on the slave trade, explain the African makeup of many in the areas. The middle class and wealthy that first fled from Cuba after the Revolution were white. Today, many in Cuba are notably of African ancestry. Citizens of the Dominican Republic are considered Hispanic because they speak Spanish, but the residents of the other side of their island, Haiti, speak French (and more commonly, patois). Are there enough major racial differences between these two nationalities on the same island to justifiably classifying one as Hispanic but not the other? The Philippines were once colonized by Spain (and consequently some have Spanish surnames) and now have English as a dominant language, but they are not classified as Hispanic. They are placed in another catchall group, Asian.

For the purposes of census taking, Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when the Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. In the U.S. Census there are Hispanic subcategories divided by race or ethnicity. This is reminiscent of other legislated racism efforts. Shortly after the Conquest of México, Spanish rule set up a complex caste system in which to be of mixed-blood virtually excluded people from full rights as citizens and protection by the law. Jews and Moors in that Catholic society also experienced racist attitudes.⁴ Just as with today’s African Americans, among Mestizos, mestizas and Amerindians, the result of such intense, legislated racism throughout centuries is demoralization. As one historian puts it regarding the Mexic Amerindian people, “Trauma and neuroses linger still, and may not be entirely overcome. For the Spaniards, in México, did not commit genocide; they committ...