Loca Motion
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Loca Motion

The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture

Michelle Habell-Pallan

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Loca Motion

The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture

Michelle Habell-Pallan

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About This Book

2006 Honorable Mention for MLA Prize in US Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies

In the summer of 1995, El Vez, the “Mexican Elvis,“along with his backup singers and band, The Lovely Elvettes and the Memphis Mariachis, served as master of ceremony for a ground-breaking show, “Diva L.A.: A Salute to L.A.’s Latinas in the Tanda Style.” The performances were remarkable not only for the talent displayed, but for their blend of linguistic, musical, and cultural traditions.

In Loca Motion, Michelle Habell-Pallán argues that performances like Diva L.A. play a vital role in shaping and understanding contemporary transnational social dynamics. Chicano/a and Latino/a popular culture, including spoken word, performance art, comedy, theater, and punk music aesthetics, is central to developing cultural forms and identities that reach across and beyond the Americas, from Mexico City to Vancouver to Berlin. Drawing on the lives and work of a diverse group of artists,Habell-Pallán explores new perspectives that defy both traditional forms of Latino cultural nationalism and the expectations of U.S. culture. The result is a sophisticated rethinking of identity politics and an invaluable lens from which to view the complex dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2005
ISBN
9780814744604

1
From the Shadows of the Spanish Fantasy Heritage to a Transnational Imaginary

Images flash on the six-by-six-foot screen. The ear-splitting theme from Black Rain, the 1980s Orientalist film about a white American cop in pursuit of the Japanese Yakuza (Japanese mafia), screeches. The three performers on the stage run in horror to hide from the larger-than-life images of found icons from everyday life in Los Angeles: Virgen de Guadalupe candles, Taco BellÂź logos, MissionÂź tortillas, a neon burro-riding campesino (peasant), a piñata, fake Mayan ruins, and former California governor Pete Wilson. The juxtaposition of the images—particularly the campesino—with the terrified artists is striking. In this powerful performance piece, entitled Deep in the Crotch of My Latino Psyche, Luis Alfaro, Monica Palacios, and Albert Antonio Araiza illustrate how they work in the shadow of the enduring popular images that they and other Chicanos and Chicanas negotiate in their everyday lives.1
The artists’ attempt to run from these images illustrates their desire for their work to be contextualized by more than these one-dimensional images of Mexicanidad/Mexicanness and Mexican Americanness and Latinidad. The work of all of these artists, whether performance or writing, seeks to construct new images of Chicano/a subjects by commenting or signifying on those sometimes hated, sometimes loved, and often wornout representations. For example, rather than trying to escape the romantic “colorful” pastoral images informed by a mythic California past and articulated by the discourse of the Mission Revival,2 a reimagining of the Southwest’s past passed on the perceived influence of the Spanish Fantasy Heritage. This Fantasy Heritage “evokes the lost world of Spanish aristocrats and their haciendas, Spanish friars and Indian Missions, as well as alluring señoritas and the Anglos who came to possess them.”3 Absent from this fantasy heritage are Mexicans, without whom California’s twentieth-century agribusiness industry would not have flourished. “Anglo Californians used the cultural material of the Spanish colonial past to mask the presences of mostly poor, mixed-race, immigrant Mexicans in their midst.”4 Alfaro and Palacios, as well as the artists Marisela Norte, El Vez (Robert Lopez), and Jim Mendiola, incorporate them, with irony, into their work.
Image
Publicity photo of Beto Araiza, Monica Palacios, and Luis Alfaro for Deep in the Crotch of My Latino Psyche. Photograph by Becky Villaseñor. 1993. (Reprinted with permission from Monica Palacios.)
The performance piece just described perfectly captures the main goal of this book: to situate recent performance and writing within the larger context of images, sounds, and performance forms.
This opening chapter traces how scholarly representations of the Spanish Borderlands history shaped mainstream images of Mexican Americans, Mexicans, and Hispanics—images that Chicana and Latina artists negotiate and/or contest in their work—that began to circulate throughout the popular imagination. As we shall see, popular images of Mexicans in the United States link, in complex ways, to a discourse of nation building that began before the transfer, in 1848, of what is now the U.S. Southwest from Mexico to the United States. This link is important, since, whether or not the artists and audiences are conscious of this legacy, as part of the popular imagination, it shapes the reception of Latino popular culture.

Mission Revival/Spanish Borderlands Context

The mission literature depicted the history of race relations as a pastoral ritual of obedience and paternalism: “graceful Indians, happy as peasants in an Italian opera, knelt dutifully before the Franciscans to receive the baptism of a superior culture, while in the background the angels tolled from a swallow-guarded campanile, and a choir of friars intoned the Te Deum.”
—Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
Mike Davis’s description of mission literature captures the essence of the Spanish Fantasy Heritage. Although the territories that would become Mexico were colonies under the Spanish crown, Spain did not heavily populate the land it called Baja and Alta California. Spain attempted to strengthen its claim to the territories in 1761, when it dispatched friars from Mexico City to establish Catholic missions along the California coast, beginning with San Diego. While the mission culture was one of the most palpable impositions of Spanish social order, it was executed by criollo and mestizo colonial subjects from Mexico. The cruelty of the friars and the de facto imprisonment of native peoples on their ancestral homelands colonized by Spain are obscured by the Spanish Fantasy Heritage. When Mexico declared its independence from Spain, in 1821, the California territories became part of the newly formed nation. Mission lands were secularized and land grants parceled out to Mexican nationals. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War, the United States annexed more than a third of what was Mexico’s territory via the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Overnight, Mexican nationals living in the annexed territories became U.S. citizens. However, most Mexican landowners lost their land to Anglo settlers, despite the treaty’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.5
The predominant image of Mexico and Mexicans in Los Angeles encapsulated in the phenomenon known as “Mission Revival” was cast more than one hundred years ago. The idea of Mission Revival—closely connected to that of the Spanish Borderlands—was first circulated through romance novels, architecture, real estate lingo, civic boosterism, tourism promotional literature, discussions within legitimate academic circles, and, later, film and television.6 The process by which things Mexican and images of Mexicanos became obscured or minimized in English-language representations of early California was twofold and occurred simultaneously both in the academic and in the popular realms in the early twentieth century. In the academic world, the historians Herbert Eugene Bolton and, later, John Frances Bannon depicted California as a mythical Spanish landscape.7 They used testimonials by Californios (individuals of the landed class who called for independence from Spain), collected by the wealthy entrepreneur Hubert Howe Bancroft, to advocate for the study of what they considered the Southwest’s—and the United States’—Spanish past. In the popular culture, Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 popular romance novel Ramona, and the public performances it inspired, played a pivotal role in generating a mythic California past.8 Because of the work of Bolton, Bannon, and Jackson, “a mis-representation of the conquistadores, friars, and rancheros has given rise to a vision of giants.”9 According to the historian Mario Garcia, these misrepresentations helped to construct what the historian Carey McWilliams has called the “Fantasy Heritage” and the scholar Leonard Pitt has termed the “Schizoid Heritage.”10 Both discourses articulate a romantic early California past by exaggerating things Spanish, as opposed to Mexican, as did the Californios themselves. In different ways, each displaced things Mexican and images of Mexicanos and Native peoples. Yet, these discourses, often characterized as romantic, quaint, and nonthreatening and often promulgated through tourist and real estate campaigns in the Southwest, operated in opposition to the prevailing Hispanophobia of the period, which cast Spain and Spanish culture as inferior to Britain and British culture.11

The Archive

In the late 1800s, Hubert Howe Bancroft began collecting documents pertaining to the early history of California, including commissioned oral interviews with surviving Californios. According to Pitt, Bancroft “willingly offered money for the Californios’ memoirs and documents,” in search of the Southwest’s “true history.”12 However, in her immensely important work on the discursive interventions Californios made in the context of Bancroft’s project, Rosaura Sánchez demonstrates that, despite his claims to “truth-seeking,” Bancroft commissioned the collection of material from the Californios (the Mexican criollo class) in the interest of increasing the profits of his publishing house.13 Although he paid agents to conduct and transcribe the interviews of the displaced Californios, he refused, for the most part, to compensate the Californios monetarily. Sánchez explains that, “knowing that their manuscripts and dictations had a market value, some Californios were unwilling to provide their time without compensation, but Bancroft was unwilling to provide any reward or wages for their contribution.”14 Despite the profit motive behind the project, and his refusal to consider seriously the Californios’ own analysis of their political, economic, and cultural displacement, Bancroft ultimately funded the largest, if fragmented, archival resource on nineteenth-century Californio documents, “including diaries, journals, reports by military and religious officials, regulations, expedientes, 
 as well as narratives provided by both men and women of Californio origin for the Bancroft Library but not dictated or written expressly for the historical project.”15 He succeeded in doing so because many did consent to the interviews in the interest of having their lives documented for future generations.
According to Sánchez, Bancroft “held contempt for the opinion of the Californios and held no respect for mestizos whom he thought of as ‘a wild, turbulent humanity characterized by ignorance and fanaticism.’” 16 Bancroft also failed to “consider global political and economic relations, as well as the mode of production and class structure of Mexican society” in his understanding of Californio culture.17 Incredible as it may seem, Bancroft’s project, like Charles Lummis’s promotion of California real estate on the basis of pastoral images of friendly red-tiled adobes—countered the prevailing Hispanophobia of the period.18
In his romantic and sometimes patronizing view, Bancroft tended to conflate the Spanish and Mexican eras into a single “Golden Age.”19 As Sánchez demonstrates, the “nonpropertied classes” and what Bancroft calls the plebeian “humble ranchero” are largely absent from the record or are mentioned only in passing. Significantly, the Indians are visible as the “Other” of the Californios, especially in reference to the earlier periods, although acculturated Indians constitute a very small percentage of those interviewed.20 Bancroft assumed that the contribution of these two groups of early Californians was minimal, despite the fact that the frontier would not have been developed without the often involuntary and exploited labor of Indians; still, their point of view was not considered worthy of publication. In the end, even the interviews of the elite Californio class never reached the public because of their criticism of the ways the U.S. government betrayed them in the process of annexing the Southwest when the United States failed to honor Spanish-Mexican land grants. Sánchez, importantly, was the one of the first to provide an extended textual analysis of the Californio and California testimonios (testimonials).21 She explains that most of the interviews remained in their original hand-written form in the dusty stacks of the Bancroft Library and did not circulate in print culture. According to Sánchez, the fact that “they were never published independently is undoubtedly linked to Bancroft’s opinion that the views expressed in the testimonials carried little weight and had even less marketability.”22 Thus, these views, and their often implicit critique of U.S. land acquisition practices, were kept out of public circulation, while Bancroft’s views were not only published but also served as the basis for the invention of the Spanish Borderlands Fantasy Heritage.

The Spanish Borderlands: Scholarship

This book [The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest] is to tell of the Spanish pathfinders and pioneers in the regions between Florida and California, now belonging to the United States, over which Spain held sway for many centuries. These were the northern outposts of New Spain, maintained chiefly to hold the country against foreign intruders and against the inroads of savage tribes. They were far from the centers of Spanish Colonial civilization, in the West Indies, Central America, Mexico, and Peru.
—Herbert Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands:
A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest
This quotation from Bolton’s book demonstrates how, from the 1920s on, Herbert Eugene Bolton’s and John Francis Bannon’s scholarship reproduced the romantic image of California’s past in English by repeating the tendency of the Bancroft project to emphasize things seemingly Spanish at the expense of Mexico’s history. Their scholarship also continued the inexcusable dehumanization of Native people and naturalized the pilfering of native lands by Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Yet, each saw the necessity for and aggressively advocated a comparative approach to studying the American past, developing in the process the concept of the “Spanish Borderlands.”
According to the historian David J. Weber’s informative work “John Francis Bannon and the Historiography of the Spanish Borderlands: Retrospect and Prospect,” Bolton’s name is inextricably linked to the establishment of Spanish Borderlands scholarship in the United States.23 Bolton first delineated the geographical perimeters of his conception of the borderland space in 1921 (though he had been working on his research since 1917), in his groundbreaking overview The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest.24 Bolton’s introduction explains that his “book is the first to tell of Spanish pathfinders and pioneers in the regions between Florida and California, now belonging to the United States, over which Spain held sway for centuries.”25 However, Weber is quick to point out what might be considered a conceptual contradiction—that “the United States did not exist during those centuries that ‘Spain held sway’ over much of North America. . . . [T]he boundaries of the United States as we know them to...

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