Collective Identity and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography

Juan Velasco

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137595409
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first book length study of this genre, Collective Identity and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography facilitates new understandings of how people and cultures are displaced and reinvent themselves. Through the examination of visual arts and literature, Juan Velasco analyzes the space for self-expression that gave way to a new paradigm in contemporary Chicana/o autobiography. By bringing together self-representation with complex theoretical work around culture, ethnicity, race, gender, sex, and nationality, this work is at the crossroads of intersectionalanalysis and engages with scholarship on the creation of cross-border communities, the liberatory dimensions of cultural survival, and the reclaiming of new artfashioned against the mechanisms of violence that Mexican-Americans have endured.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Juan VelascoCollective Identity and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Chicana/o AutobiographyLiteratures of the Americas10.1057/978-1-137-59540-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Beyond the Hunger of Memories

Juan Velasco¹

(1)

Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California, USA

End Abstract

Already in the 1970s, in an article published in Aztlan, Arturo Madrid-Barela reflected on the painful theme of healing and memory:

Why, someone might ask, should we dig back into our painful memories? Why should we recall the anguish of our Pocho past? Because what we are is inseparable from what we were. Because only by knowing where we have been can we determine where we shall go. (61)

The fact that I opened this chapter with Madrid-Barela’s wish for a communal reworking of memory is a sign of the many difficulties this project faced while determining the structures that define the notion of “self,” and while locating a certain set of experiences (“our Pocho past”) at the very heart of the autobiographical act. What the aforementioned quote suggests is that autobiographies not only relate episodes of a life told in first person, but that the genre produces artifacts destined to feed the desire for visibility of an experience often filtered through the particular lens of the “I.” Moreover, as Madrid-Barela points out, the intentions and desired effects of autobiography involve healing, constructing, and organizing the discourses of identity, culture, memory, and writing. In the light of these assumptions, the task of autobiography is no simple achievement. The autobiographer searches for a construction that involves the writer’s sense of personhood, together with politically and personally charged notions of community and nation. Furthermore, not only the past, but also the present and future are involved, built by reconstructed notions of self and culture. In that case, for both reader and autobiographer, what is at stake is not only the nature of the “I” as it unfolds in the writing, but also the emerging nature of a collective sense of history itself as it is reflected in the text.

I want to emphasize the ambivalent aspects of automitografía, a mode of representation that is open enough to include tensions, and introduces different political interventions regarding its autobiographical effects. But my objective is to uncover the technologies of self-representation by which artists address those concerns and show the disruptions and tensions embedded in that task. Thus, this book is making at least two key interventions. The first relates to Chicana/o automitografía’s critique of Western individualism and its understanding of the person as an individual separable from the communal. Indeed, this is a project designed to uncover the workings of those coexisting paradoxical terms (communal wholeness and the particularity of the personal), describe the interaction of both categories—autobiography as a genre disturbed by the personal, and the role of culture as an ever-unfolding communal project filtered through the “I”—and show the diversity of technologies of representation that inhabit this particular expression of American life.

The second intervention, to which I briefly alluded in the Preface, is a critique of a poststructuralist understanding of autobiography, specifically in relation to the dichotomy of the presence and absence of an “I” in the writing, therefore refusing language as simply loss or “hunger.” This is increasingly relevant if we realize that previous works on contemporary Chicana/o autobiography have been treated only in isolated articles or book chapters and have been dominated by the single figure of Richard Rodriguez.¹ However, the overwhelming attention dedicated to a single book, 1982’s Hunger of Memory, can easily obscure the analysis of the genre. As mentioned by Lene M. Johannessen, “few works written by a Mexican-American writer have received more notice on the American national literary arena than this book, favorable as well as unfavorable” (125). Richard Rodriguez does not occupy a central role in this study for several reasons. First, there is already a large body of work on his writing that is available to anyone interested. My goal is, instead, to establish a much longer, deeper, and richer literary and cultural history of the genre. Also, Rodriguez’s books diverge from the pattern, present in so many other Chicana/o autobiographies, of a self that is both personal and communal, and the search for an intersectional space of identity. Those elements are especially pertinent to this book since I argue for a specific mode of autobiography that not only speaks of personal experience but also creates voices that intervene into the dialogue for an “imagined” community, and the specific “effect” of cultural resistance. Madrid-Barela argues that memory is not so much a tool for individual recollection, as it is (through “our Pocho past”) a way of exploring issues of citizenship and familia, writing and home, aiming at the reclaiming of all the dimensions of cultural survival beyond the hunger of memories. The authors of automitografías see their product as destined not to reproduce the hunger for memories but to address its visibility and the boundaries of the desire created by a genre promising to take care of those needs.

My intent here is neither to undermine the legitimacy of Rodriguez’s experience, nor to dismiss the value of his contribution to autobiography. Rodriguez solidified his position as a skillful writer and innovative storyteller with the widely successful autobiography Hunger of Memory, a haunting exploration into his experience as a gay Mexican-American man. The narrative, however, concludes in a moment of profound loneliness and despair, as Rodriguez silently stares at his Mexican father—the chasm of alienating “difference” insurmountable.

This notion of difference is in clear contrast with Madrid-Barela’s recollection of “painful memories” as healing, since, for Rodriguez, “memory” is merely the trace of Spanish sounds slowly fading into the silence of his assimilation and his secrets. This is relevant since the “silence and silencing of people begins with the dominating enforcement of linguistic conventions, the resistance to relational dialogues, as well as the disenablement of peoples by outlawing their forms of speech” (Alarcón “Theoretical” 36).

The absence of language and words and the “loss” of culture and family define Rodriguez’s identity. Hunger of Memory reveals what can go wrong when loss, silencing, and assimilation define “difference” as simply absence. He reactivates the most pessimistic and desolate perspective of identity by relating loss to “hunger” as well. His text advances the idea of loss as a set of painful memories that lack meaning or structure. It is a story that functions as an empty and floating sign, a faint echo of a voice sinking slowly into the world of his assimilation. This text is a warning to the kind of intense pain available to those unable to transcend the dualistic division of experience (hope or loss), or detect any “presence” in the fainting void of sexual and cultural assimilation. Thus, his story translates the emptiness (the loss) into an insatiable hunger—this is the pain of a hungry ghost lost in a world of empty words.

Indeed, Hunger of Memory is an important autobiography filled with secrets and silences. Secrets permeate every word. Even language, manifesting the silence between him and his father, erases the signs of memory and his familial connections. In the chapter titled “The Achievement of Desire,” Rodriguez reaffirms as inexorable not only the distancing from his family, but also the loss of any memories of himself, the inevitable price for gaining success through assimilation: “Here is a child who cannot forget that his academic success distances him from a life he loved, even from his own memory of himself” (Hunger 48).

Rodriguez, through his process of assimilation, experiences not only negation of his parents’ language, but also negation of his own physical self. This connection between erasure of culture and language and the erasure of body is illustrated in a moment where he takes a razor to his own skin, attempting to cut away any remainder of his race. “I wanted to forget that I had a body because I had a brown body,” Rodriguez writes (Hunger 126). In a manner similar to his presentation of ethnicity, family, and language, homosexuality appears merely in terms of its negation. Rodriguez’s act of writing is solely an act of nostalgia, his sexuality remaining closeted to the very end.

In this sense, as opposed to the other automitografías that I will explore here, Hunger of Memory represents the rejection of a common mito. As Rodriguez understands his experience to be “queer” in the eyes of Joaquín (the warrior symbol of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement), Hunger of Memory can be interpreted as the inability to carve out a space for queerness inside the confines of the Chicano Movement. Furthermore, through hunger, Rodriguez constructs his identity as alienated, while refusing to rewrite his homosexuality as a challenge to heteropatriarchal conceptions of cultural nationalism. Ultimately, his hunger pervades as it is manifested in the text as secrets, silence, or journey toward assimilation. The desire, “the hunger” for what is inevitably lost, becomes the only mark of difference. Loss is the manifestation of an empty being, and only the hunger remains.

Rodriguez’s negation of the Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement translates into a no-man’s land, an emptiness that turns into the nostalgia of memory lacking meaning and significance—a place where even the body becomes an empty and floating sign. In further works, Rodriguez’s hunger renders memory into a place of loss that rewrites the self as “craving,” an impulse lost and pushed back. In Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992), the Catholic—the Mexican—impulse “was pushed back” (xvi). In Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2003), he states that “I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America” (xi). In Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013), he tells the story of a saint who lived in craving: “St. Sabas desired the taste of an apple. The craving was sweeter to him than the thought of God. From that moment Sabas forswore apples. The desire for apples was the taste of God” (47). Again, he links the desert God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to a divinity that “demands acknowledgment within emptiness” (35). It is not surprising that he is interested in the desert religions and this ecology. “The desert remains an absence” (49), Rodriguez writes, and his last book is an exploration of this elusive, incomprehensible emptiness.

I will discuss this perception of autobiography later, which was anticipated in Memories for Paul de Man, where Jacques Derrida defines the term prosopopeia (from the Greek expression “face making”) as the tropology of memory and “autobiographical discourse as epitaph” (25). However, the cultural and sexual anxiety conferred upon autobiography is transcended by a different way of understanding the dialectics of loss (absence) and hope (presence) in the automitografías created by the writers I will analyze later. The text, as epitaph or as a space of loss, is rewritten by Gloria Anzaldúa through what she calls the act of “making faces.” From Anzaldúa’s point of view, autobiography is not so much the signature of the epitaph (loss), as described by poststructuralists, as it is the setting for “making faces.” Self-restoration is delivered through narratives as the act of haciendo caras, a way to recreate the voices to break away from loss. Other writers, like Cherrie Moraga, will use the notion of “making familia from scratch” to envision an alternative community (her lesbian familia) against heteropatriarchy and narrow versions of cultural nationalism. The alternatives offered through the works of Anzaldúa and Moraga transcend the binary discourse offered by the readings of hunger and craving, silence and loss as “absence,” in the context of Rodriguez’s multiple autobiographies.

Since the book focuses on Chicana/o autobiographical works, my intent is to include different strategies used by artists that reclaim this act of “making faces.” Investigating new as well as foundational texts, I explore the nature of this kind of self-representation, and its relationship to self-restoration based on theories of identity in transition. Moreover, by including visual and literary production, I align my project with contemporary work in American and border studies, and engage with earlier studies on the creation of cross-border communities (Sonia Saldívar-Hull, José David Saldívar, José Limón, Donna Kabalen de Bichara, and Héctor Calderón), the liberatory dimensions of cultural survival (María Josefina Saldana-Portillo, Genaro Padilla, and Ramón Saldívar), and the reclaiming of new feminist subjects (Norma Alarcón, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Paula Moya, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, and Chela Sandoval) fashioned against the mechanisms of violence that Mexican-Americans have endured. It is my belief that a focus on identity, culture, and the politics of this unique mode of representation will give us a clearer vision to distinct notions of cultural citizenship that are expanding the notion of “America” into Las Américas. I pay critical attention to Naoki Sakai’s notion of “translation” in the border as the “unfamiliar in transition,” and José David Saldívar’s notion of “trans-Americanity” to address notions of identity formation and its relationship with the physical and cultural space of Las Américas.

The creation of this unique space challenges fixed locations of language, citizenship, and identity within the USA. The crossings in this space move our perspective then, from “loss” or “illegality” to a trans-Americanity point of view, and frames the importance of culture (José Limón’s “Greater Mexico”) as the existence of a trans-Mexican space that connects both sides of the border. Within such a theoretical framework, this project examines the constitution of a unique, but ever unfolding, transnation in the USA, which questions colonizing conditions and serves as a category that defines political awareness within self-representation.

In order to address the key interventions and the interests I have mentioned earlier, I shift simultaneously within two critical discourses: Chicana/o cultural studies and autobiography studies. Let me start with the need for the first one, which points at how these works go beyond dualistic alternatives regarding cultural space, and are marked neither by presence nor absence but rather by the act of crossings within the context of Las Américas. The subversive nature of a cultural space that transcends dualistic thinking regarding citizenship, identity, or even geographical territory has been a point of special focus by Chicano/a critics. Going back to some of the pioneers of Chicana/o criticism, the issue was already being discussed in Philip D. Ortego’s “The Chicano Renaissance” (1971), Carlota Cárdenas de Dwyer’s “Chicano Literature: An Introduction” (1975), and especially in Ramón Saldívar’s “A Dialectic of Difference: Toward a Theory of the Chicano Novel” (1979).²

When researching earlier Chicana/o literary and cultural history, even those from different theoretical perspectives, we can see that a major contribution of those works is the idea that the Chicana/o writer is able to create a response to the “threat of erasure” through the creation of a unique cultural “space,” which is able to extend citizenship and identity beyond nationality...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Beyond the Hunger of Memories
• 2. Automitografía
• 3. Crossings
• 4. Culture as Resistance
• 5. Making Familia from Scratch
• 6. The New Mestizas
• 7. Canicular Consciousness
• 8. Conclusion: Interrelationality
• Backmatter