The Latino Body

Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Lazaro Lima

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814753200
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études hispano-américaines

The Latino Body tells the story of the United States Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state. Lázaro Lima charts the interrelated groups that define themselves as Latinos and examines how these groups have responded to calls for unity and nationally shared conceptions of American cultural identity. He contends that their responses, in times of cultural or political crisis, have given rise to profound cultural transformations, enabling the so-called “Latino subject“ to emerge.

Analyzing a variety of cultural, literary, artistic, and popular texts from the nineteenth century to the present, Lima dissects the ways in which the Latino body has been imagined, dismembered, and reimagined anew, providing one of the first comprehensive accounts of the construction of Latino cultural identity in the United States.

Part I

Longing History

Introduction

“The American Congo” and the National Symbolic

Through the centre of this unknown region, fully as large as New England, courses the Rio Grande, which can more correctly be compared to the Congo than the Nile the moment that the degraded, turbulent, ignorant, and superstitious character of its population comes under examination.

—JOHN G. BOURKE, “The American Congo,”
Scribner’s Magazine (1894)

U.S. Army Captain John Gregory Bourke (1846–1898) was one of the earliest ethnographers of the Mexican and Amerindian Southwest. His birth and death marked two of the most important years for U.S. continental and hemispheric expansion between the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and the Spanish-American War (1898). Both his ethnographic work and his experience as an army officer allowed for close, though never disinterested, observation of the borderlands between Mexico and the United States. They represented for him a contact zone where Amerindian and Mexican cultures ceded to the “American” imperial designs of nation: westward migration, colonization, and the waves of violence that characterized continental expansion.¹ Published in the popular Scribner’s Magazine, “The American Congo” captured an emerging national identity that could consider Mexican difference incommensurate with American reality by naturalizing the stigma that made “Mexican” a racial term rather than one of national, cultural, or ethnic identification.² That today we continue to view the West as a tabula rasa imbued with meaning through migration from the East is instructive of the degree to which national memory offers compelling but furtively incomplete ways to participate in a national symbolic order that excises as much as it claims to assimilate.

Public-sphere representations like Bourke’s did not, as many would have it, suppress an inchoate Mexican American identity: they fabricated one for public consumption by giving visual and emotive texture to a people rendered foreign in their own cultural topography. Bourke’s ethnographic work in the borderlands of the American imagination created what may perhaps be the first summative ontology of people under scrutiny by confounding the population’s being with his disciplinary knowing. Their ontological status is displaced by his epistemological errancy; their being and his knowing position the Mexican population outside the nation’s symbolic imaginary. Superimposing Africa in America, his “Congo” is both a space within the parameters of his America (“as large as New England”) and a symbolic place rendered outside reason.

Bourke’s explicit purpose in “The American Congo” was to present “the readers of Scribner’s an outline description, both of the territory under consideration, and the manners, customs, and superstitions of Mexicans” along the U.S. side of the Rio Grande: “the waves of North American aggression have swept across this region, bearing down all in their path; but as the tempest abated the Mexican population placidly resumed its control of affairs and returned to its former habits of life as if the North American had never existed” (592).

For Bourke, the “Mexican population” is not part of the United States because its habits of life are incommensurate with his American reality. This American Congo connotes a site of racial and ethnic disjunctures that are devoid of nuance. The Mexicans returning to their “former habits” are incompatible with national ideations of comportment as evidenced by the continuous “waves of North American aggression” that attempt to order both habitus and habits to futile ends. Mexican resistance to North American aggression can also be read, however, as a strategic unwillingness to defer to the aggressor.

The Mexican resistance that Bourke notes without irony also shows the possibilities for agential transformations offered by Mexicans in the face of public contemplation, such as in the pages of Scribner’s. Though Bourke’s ethnographic work does not seek to render the native informants’ voice, we are nonetheless given a clear awareness of their unwillingness to submit. Bourke’s observations are ultimately bound to a broader cultural crisis about the nature of national identity occasioned by the Mexican-American War. That Mexicans were in their own cultural topography before the American colonization of Mexican territories is inconsequential to Bourke, not because genealogical lines of origin do little to address the nature of coexistence but because they allow him to excise Mexicans from America’s past and his own present in order to imagine a country free of a people rendered unfit for national civic life. This “degraded, turbulent, ignorant, and superstitious” population is effectively deracinated of historical and cultural specificity.

The discursive resonance of “The American Congo” resided in its ability to amortize and consolidate various nineteenth-century representations of Mexican, Amerindian, and, as I will later argue, Black corporealities as prima facie indices of difference and strangeness. At face value, the habits of Bourke’s subjects become racially marked through a simple tautology, with disastrously complex consequences: these people are not American because they are racially different from “real” Americans, and they are racially different because they are not American. Bourke’s presumption of a normative Americanness and its conflation with whiteness inscribed colored difference as a deviation from an American norm that did not exist outside the representational logic of the interests it served. His tautology ultimately deprived his Scribner’s citizen-readers of part of their historical memory and aspirants to citizenship of the very promises of democratic participation and inclusion that underwrite the narratives of American democracy.

In this study, I contend that what is understood today as the “Latino subject” surfaced along the literal and metaphorical divide between Mexico and the United States, a divide that fractured alliances, elided ethnic and racial identities, and disembodied subjects from the protocols of citizenship. The literal divide was a trope of nationalism, and its complicit metaphorical weight and accompanying truth claims were perpetuated in the public sphere through various print media.³

Bourke belonged to that first generation of Anglo-Americans who were able to naturalize a sense of belonging in a territory that extended from coast to coast. After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which put an end to the Mexican-American War, Mexico ceded modern-day California, Utah, Nevada, and parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming, as well as Texas (which had claimed independence from Mexico in 1836 as the Lone Star Republic). For Bourke and his generation, the newly acquired territories represented a cultural landscape untranslatable to monological majoritarian interests. His Scribner’s piece, replete with high-quality engravings, gave visual evidence of a people as inhospitable to reason as the region was to Anglo-American order. As a career soldier, his authority was institutional and emblematic of how language and images began to create subaltern bodies for literary and visual public consumption after the war. As an ethnographer, he began the production of knowledge about what we today call Latinos by conflating space and race and making ethnically marked identities incompatible with national imaginings. That Latinos have appropriated similar mechanisms of identity construction for political gain is instructive of both the limits of American citizenship and the promise of democratic participation that this study charts.

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory analyzes the conditions under which it becomes necessary to create a specific Latino subject of American cultural and literary history.⁴ It tells the story of the U.S. Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state’s appellative assertions of difference (the contemporary emphasis on “Latino” instead of “Hispanic,” for example) to their own ends in the public sphere. This study accomplishes this by providing an analysis of Latino cultural, literary, visual, and popular texts that suggest that becoming historical has often been tantamount to becoming “American,” and how this public metamorphosis of group ontology has almost always entailed a crisis in meaning for both Latinos and the broader culture.

The term “crisis” is meant to call attention to the cultural manifestations of historical conflict that have resulted in publicly rendered and redressed modes of being both American and Latino through narratives, images, and various other sign systems. A crisis is ultimately a narrative recapitulation that takes place either before or after the crisis event has occurred. The crisis itself eludes common locution and, in this sense, could be said to be inherently antinarrative. Narrative either precedes a crisis, as a justification or exoneration of an impending or perceived crisis, or follows it, as an explanation or attempt to make sense of a crisis moment after the fact.⁵ Crisis identities are therefore always grounded in the recognition of a capitulation that seeks an explanation or resolution in and through narrative. Indeed, the term signals a philosophical inquiry into the structures of consciousness experienced from what could be understood as the narrative first-person point of view, the cogito before the ergo sum.

By studying a series of crisis moments, the book proposes that the current emphasis on and ostensible novelty associated with Latino identity is but a recent manifestation of a larger and unresolved cultural crisis that arose after the Mexican-American War. I contend that ever since the war the various conceits associated with American democratic participation and the unfulfilled promise of equality have created crisis moments where competing forms of cultural citizenship have vied for legitimacy and access to cultural capital.⁶ Indeed, the Latino cultural production currently in the forefront of the public sphere foregrounds the most recent Latino crisis as the national culture begins to contend, as never before, with the largest “minority” group in the nation. Having inherited the unresolved Mexican question—What is the country to do with Mexicans?—the national culture is faced anew with the contemporary renderings of that older question—What is the country to do with Latinos?—rather than the more logical, exacting, though infinitely more difficult, process of identifying why Latino subjectivity has been constructed as incommensurate with the American body politic.

The discrete crisis moments I propose for consideration in this study are therefore necessarily epochal and, as I will argue, represent significant transformations in the way both majority and minoritarian cultural actors have been imagined, rendered, and conceived within the national culture. These epochal shifts are necessarily diachronic and seek to capture the way in which changes over time have required representational strategies that in some way break with previous and often entrenched modes of understanding what today we understand to be “Latino” identity negotiations. The engagement requires not just understanding how and when do Latinos enter American literary and cultural history but, more specifically, why it becomes necessary to do so in the public sphere of national contemplation.

American Publics and the Subaltern Subject

For Jürgen Habermas, the rise of the public sphere coincided with the development of literary culture as private bourgeois ideals found public expression through writing and various representational media.⁷ The articulations of class-based ideologies and civic ideals that circulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through print media eventually universalized a public subject who was presumed to be representative of the broader culture. Habermas’s public sphere is, of course, problematic on several grounds.⁸ The presumption of equal access to public articulation of group concerns belies the ostensible democratic imperative in his conception of Modernity, since bourgeois representational agency is not representative of anything except the interests bourgeois ideology serves. For subaltern groups this has resulted in a quandary, since the enabling condition for intervention and clout in the public sphere has often meant the uncritical acceptance of bourgeois inclusionary norms.

Habermas attempts to counter criticism regarding the implicitly uncritical rendering of the Enlightenment project’s universal subject by making a distinction between the public sphere of the literary (literarische Offentlichkeit) and the political (politische Offentlichkeit), that is, the representation of group-specific imaginings through literature and the mechanisms by which representations are accorded legal limits by political systems (Structural Transformation, 51). The conditions under which inclusion in the public sphere is permitted, granted, or denied determine how civic problems can be publicly rendered through textual and visual sign systems by making identities historical and providing context in the national imaginary.

In the chapters that follow, I study how competing forms of being American appealed to the ontological status of citizens (the purportedly knowable core of their being) in the public sphere. I propose that the organizing principle of Latino public-sphere identities offered context-specific strategies for cultural enfranchisement and participation in the broader body politic. Specific crisis moments have given rise to particular forms of Latino cultural engagement that have involved assimilationist, patriotic, cultural nationalist, and more recently gendered modes of being American. These identity modalities have characterized Latino responses to cultural crisis, political conflict, and erasure at moments of profound cultural transformations. These transformations constitute subject positions that alter the way Latinos understand themselves in relation to the American body politic and the way they are imagined as a community by the culture writ large.

Citizenship in the Public Sphere: Appellative Strategies and the Language of Loss

American calls to unity and a shared common vision arise at times of crisis, when it becomes difficult to apprehend what eludes common locution. That language leaves us at moments of culturally significant trauma comes as no surprise to anyone who has witnessed natural or human disaster, either in person or through representational media. That these calls to unity come at moments of profound national crisis and are ignored in times of relative stability make the calls disingenuous, if not outright manipulative, to scores of nationals otherwise excluded from the patriotic embrace.

This book charts the interrelated groups born out of the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the ways these groups have responded to mono-cultural calls to unity and nationally shared conceptions of American cultural identity. Those who were called “Mexican” in U.S. territories after the Mexican-American War asserted a defined contestatory identity nearly a century after Bourke. Mexicans living in the United States eventually called themselves Chicanos, and a counteridentity was born out of the interstices where ethnic memory meets American cultural amnesia. This was not a memory of unmediated access to a truth about the past or some illusory ethnic coevalness, but one that conditioned the possibilities for national belonging through a conversation with the narratives, photographs, and artifacts of the past—the remnants of a cultural presence too long denied. Following the Chicano example, various communities that were heirs to Spanish and later U.S. colonialisms also engaged the dynamics of counter-majoritarian forms of citizenship and national belonging under the unifying aegis of “Latino,” remembering, recounting, and rediscovering stories and images left outside the narratives of nation.

Differences notwithstanding—and these are considerable—these identity labels had and continue to have an essential commonality that coalesces differences for strategic gain. I am interested here in invoking Gayatri Spivak’s well-known recourse to “strategy” and its necessary interests in praxis value over theoretical use value.⁹ Strategy for Spivak acknowledges inequalities and how needs determine forms of address in context-specific forms of engagement. Strategic essentialism, then, could be said to cohere around function and agency, not theory and speculative reason. Latino identity is therefore strategic to the degree that it is a self-constituting identity practice, grounded in the knowledge that it is a necessary fiction. For Latinos, this strategic resistance to and subversion of what it means to be an “American” mediates public-sphere appeals to civic participation and the importance of civic identities in the state identity machine—the deus ex machina that seeks to render visible those subjects that maintain the machine.

Through a series of critical, and sometimes collusive, engagements with...