Queering mestizaje: transculturation and performance 9780472069552, 9780472099559

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgmetns (page vii)
Introduction: The Cultural Politics of "Queering" Mestizaje (page 1)
1. Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestizaje (page 17)
2. Imaginary Spaces: Aztlan and the "Native" Body in Chicana/o Feminist Cultural Productions (page 49)
3. Relocating the Mulata Body: Beyond Exoticism and Sensuality (page 83)
4. The Filipino Twist on Mestizaje and Its Gendered Body (page 119)
5. Epistemologies of "Brownness": Deployments of the Queer-Mestiza Body (page 155)
Notes (page 187)
Bibliography (page 227)
Index (page 237)

Citation preview

QUEERING MESTIZAJE

TRIANGULATIONS Lesbian/Gay/Queer A Theater/Drama/Performance

Series Editors Jill Dolan, University of Texas David Roman, University of Southern California

Titles in the series: Lony Kushner in Conversation

edited by Robert Vorlicky Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History

edited by Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Fler Circle of Female Spectators

by Lisa Merrill Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject

edited by Fabio Cleto Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History

edited by Kim Marta and Robert A. Schanke A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical

by Stacy Wolf AA Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextuahzing American Theater

by David Savran Margaret Webster: A Life in the [heater by Milly S. Barranger Lhe Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Figures in American Stage Fiistory

edited by Billy J. Harbin, Kim Marra, and Robert A. Schanke Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater

edited by Robin Bernstein Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance

by Alicia Arrizon

QUEERING MESTIZAJE Lransculturation and Performance

Alicia Arrizon

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS Ann Arbor

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2006 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper

2009 2008 2007 2006 4 3 2 1 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form ot by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book 1s available from the British Labrary.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arrizon, Alicia.

Queering mestizaje : transculturation and performance / Alicia Arrizon. p. cm. — (Triangulations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-472-0995 5-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-47 2-0995 5-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-472-0695 5-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-47 2-0695 5-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Racially mixed people—Ethnic identity. 2. Racially mixed people—Psychology. 3. Racially mixed people in literature. 4. Hispanic American women. 5. Hispanic American lesbians—

Feminism. I. Title. II. Series.

HT1595.M47A77 2006

305.8—dc22 2006011683

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VII Lntroduction: The Cultural Pohitics of “Queering’ Mestixaje 1

ONE _ Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestizaje 17 TWO Lmaginary Spaces: Aztlan and the “Native” Body in Chicana/o Feminist Cultural Productions 49 THREE Le/ocating the Mulata Body: Beyond Exoticism and Sensuality — 83

FOUR = Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestizaje and Its Gendered Body 119 FIVE Fipistemologies of “Brownness”: Deployments of the Queer-Mestiza Body — ryy

NOTES 187 BIBLIOGRAPHY 227

INDEX 237

Blank Page

Acknowledgments Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto, Me ha dado el sonido y el abecedario, Y con el las palabras que pienso y declaro. [Thanks to life that has given me so much, It’s given me sound and the alphabet, And with it the words that I think and declare || — “Gracias a la vida,” song by Chilean poet, artist, and musician VIOLETA PARRA

Many people in many places, California, Arizona, Miami, Cuba, and the Philippines, among others, have made this book possible. Thus, I thank everyone I have “encountered” in this journey and who have influenced its conception and writing. The financial support provided by the Academic Senate Research Grants of the University of California at Riverside has helped me conduct research in the Philippines and Cuba. On my first trip to the Philippines, I made great contacts with artists and scholars. One of them is Nicanor Tiongson, who in 1999 and 2004 extended to me his friendship, hospitality, vast knowledge, and publications. I am so grateful to have him as a friend and colleague. [ also thank Alice M. Esteves, Library Division Chief at the Cultural Center of the Philippines,

for her assistance while I used its collections. The librarians and staff members at the National Library in Manila were quite accommodating as well. I want to recognize the late Doreen Fernandez with whom I shared

a meal and first learned about sarap. The friendships and advice of my Pinay/Pinoy connections here in the United States are likewise invaluable. Ramon Silvestre has specifically provided me with the right contacts

in the Philippines. I am also thankful to my friends Edna “Deng” Arbolante and Thelma Benitez, who have included me in theit community of pars and mars. Equally, my appreciation goes to Suzan and Vic

vill ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Torres, for the times they brought me my favorite pancit malabon while I was wotking in the final stages of my manuscript. Sarap sarap! My sincere gratitude to my comadre and collaborator in past projects Lillian Manzor, whose Cuban connections helped to make my 2001 trip

to Cuba a great success. She introduced me to the nicest lady in Cuba, Ester Llano, who shared her home with me and to whom I also wish to express my heartfelt appreciation. In Cuba, the assistance and friendship of Victor Fowler as well as the guidance and support of librarians such as Lisia Prieto, Gilda Pérez, and Lourdes Fuentes made my research experience at the José Marti National Library effective and efficient. At the University of California at Riverside, the amity and camaraderie

of friends and colleagues, especially in the Department of Women’s Studies, have been a powerful source of encouragement. I thank Christine Gailey for the support and confidence she has given me. Her leadership and commitment to our department and its faculty amaze me. I also want to express my gratitude to Kris King, who makes our department one of the most efficient and pleasant places in our campus. We ate very

lucky to have you with us. I am grateful to our former dean, Patricia O’Brien, for all the support and encouragement she gave me at UCR. The Race, Moment, Milieu: Memory and History in Visual Culture research group in residence at the Center of Ideas and Society in spring 2002 provided me with valuable feedback on some preliminary sections of my manuscript. Among its participants are Patricia Morton, Theda

Shapiro, Erika Suderberg, Eduardo Douglas, John Pinson, Craig Svonkin, and Marguerite Waller. | am especially grateful to Margie for all

the support she has given me throughout my tenure at UCR. My work with her in organizing the Sexualities and Knowledges Conference in winter 2002 was an exciting and creative experience. Certainly, the res1dence group and the conference would not have been possible without the support of the Center of Ideas and Society and the generosity of its director, Emory Elliott, whose commitment to the humanities and the atts has been a great foundation in our campus. I also appreciate Laura Lozon and Marilyn Davis, whose assistance has helped me tremendously in the past. In addition, my capabilities as a scholar and instructor would be limited without the enormous help of librarians, specifically Sylvia Hu and John Bloomberg-Rissman, Reference Librarians at the Tomas Rivera

Library (UCR); and Sam Elliot, Department of Special Collection at Charles E. Young Research Library (UCLA).

Acknowledgements 1x In winter and spring 2004 I was part of the Queer Locations: Race, Space, and Sexuality residence group organized by Judith Halberstam at the University of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine. I am very grateful to Judith for including me in this group and generally for her generosity and wisdom. Furthermore, I am indebted to the group for its discussion of some preliminary sections of my manuscript, providing useful recommendations for further development. I thank Judith, Jennifer Terry, Glen Mimura, Karen Tongson, Tom Boellstorff, Chandan Reddy, and Roderick Ferguson. Moreover, I want to express my appreciation to scholars, artists, writers, performers, and others who have helped me in one way or another in the completion of this book, beginning with the anonymous teferees who generously provided me with constructive recommendations. My oratitude goes to them, LeAnn Fields, David Roman, and Jill Dolan for their support of my work. Thanks to Judith Baca and the Social and Public Art Resource Center for allowing me to use her art in this book and in my previously published work. From the very first time I saw the piece La Mestizae, | connected with it immediately, and it has since been an inspiration. I am likewise happy, but sad at the same time, to honor the memory of Gloria Anzaldia, whose spirit will continue to inspire me through her “mestiza consciousness.” My special gratitude to Mary Louise Pratt, whose mentorship at Stanford and scholarship have accompanied me since graduate school. The works of other scholars such as Norma Alarcén and Diana Taylor have been influential as well. La gran sabidurta and beautiful strength of Tomas Yvarra-Frausto is forever present in my life. Gracias a la vida que te cruzaste en mi camino. lam very grateful

to all the artists and performers for their contributions to my book. My special thanks for the generosity of Amado Pefia, who allowed me to include his Mestzo piece in this book and in my previously published work; and of Mary Jennifer Young and Rowena Torres-Ordofiez, who made everything possible for me to have a photo of a “mestiza” Barbie. I want to offer my love and gratitude to my close friends who have been encouraging and supportive of me: my comadnita Josie Saldafia-Portillo, who is missed immensely in Cadfas, and equally David Kazanjian.

Both helped me conceive the title of this book. With the same gusto, I want to express my love and agradecimiento to Olga Vasquez for her solidarity, friendship, and contribution to my book. Thank you for the picture. Szempre lista para ayudar. Same to Susan Foster, Maria Alaniz, Ramon

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Rivera-Servera, Amalia Cabezas, and Roderick Ferguson, whose friendships I value. My genuine appreciation is also extended to my friend SueEllen Case, who included me in a feminist research focus group of the

International Federation for Theatre Research. This group discussed some sections of my manuscript and provided me with helpful insights. I

am indebted to Richard Schechner for the support and recognition he gave to my earlier work. My heartfelt gratitude to Lawrence La Fountain for his constructive feedback. Thanks to Kathy Mooney, who read a preliminary draft of my manuscript. I thank Vincent Thanh Phuong, who, in addition to being such a great friend, has always been there for me during all my computer breakdowns. Thank you for your assistance in designing my cover. You and Caroline are a great pair and I am very lucky to have met you.

Very important to my life is my family. I want to thank my sisters Aurora and Martina. Gracias por todo lo que hacen por la Dona Ofeha while I am immersed in my “cacademic world.” Blanguita, no sé que hartamos sin tu ayuda. Gracias por cuidar a mama. Specially, | want to express my deepest appreciation to Patty for being such a great cunada and Tony por ser tan ser-

vicial. 1 would like express my love to all my nephews and nieces, to the young ones in particular (Alexis, Brianda, Paulita, Priscilla, Betzaida, Jaritza, Vivian, and Iliana Azul). Equally important is my extended family. First, | want to thank Wilbert Villa for all the support he has given me throughout the years. Second, my greatest appreciation goes to Nenet and Warren, my dearest Mikko, Cheska, Gaby, and my lovely goddaughter, lana, whose hospitality in Manila made me feel like a “queen.” Thank you all for accepting me as part of your family. While this book was in progress, my beloved father Francisco Arrizon, my favorite aunt Luz Pefia-Reynaga, and three uncles, Cundo, Johnny,

Micuel, passed away. I want to dedicate this book to their memory. Above all, I would like to honor the strength my father showed me throughout his life and the compassion of my sweet #a Luz (gue en paz descancen todos). Their spirits have been and will always be part of my life. I also want to dedicate this book to my mother, Ofelia Pefia, whose sense of humor and resilience continually influence and inspire me every day. Filla representa el poder de la vida misma. Gracias a la vida por la generosidad de darme una mama como Ofelia.

Gracias a la vida, for having sent Gina Marie Ong to my life journey. Without her I would not have completed this book. I thank her for care-

Acknowledgements xt fully reading my manuscript for form and content. Her feedback and unconditional support made the production of this book possible. Intellectually, she has been my foremost inspiration and supporter throughout this process. Personally, her love, patience, and wisdom ate always powerful forces that nourish our relationship. She transformed my life in ways that I never imagined. Our partnership has taught me to be more sensitive toward life; it made me more open to accept love and commit-

ment. More than a love partner, she is my best friend and greatest confidant.

Earlier and abbreviated versions of two of the chapters in this book have been previously published. I want to thank the publishers of Theatre Journaland Lheatre Research International tor granting me the copyright permis-

sion to teprint sections of the following essays in chapters 2 and 3, respectively: “Mythical Performativity: Relocating Aztlan in Chicana Feminist Cultural Productions,” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (2000): 23-49. 8

The John Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The John Hopkins University Press. “Race-ing Performativity through Transculturation, Taste and the Mulata Body,” /heatre Research International 27, no. 2 (2002): 136-52. Theatre Research International is published by Cam-

bridge University Press for the International Federation for Theatre Reseatch 2002. Printed in the United Kingdom. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.

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Lntroduction: The Cultural Politics of “Oueering” Mestizaje We are living and breathing in contradictions, we do live en las entrafias del monstruo, but I refuse to be forced to identify. [am the product of invasion. My father is Anglo; my mother, Mexican. I am the result of the dissolution of blood lines and the theft of language; and yet, I am a testimony to the failure of the United States to wholly anglicize its mestizo citizens. —CHERRIE MoraGa, “Art in América con Acento”’ While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to vatying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for. —Mary Louise Pratt, /mperial Eyes

What is mestizaje? Is it simply the product of racial hybridity, or the mixing of races? How is it linked to transculturation?’ And what power rela-

tions are at stake during an encounter of two (or more) cultures? As a conceptual framework, the ideology of mestizaje has been identified with processes of transculturation—providing an imagery that brings to mind

colonial encounters, forming new subject positions, histories, and cultures ready to be re-construed, re-embodied and re-visioned. Mestizo cultures represent more than the synthesis of indigenous traditions with those of Europeans and/or Africans. It epitomizes the in-betweenness of identities produced by the impact of colonial/cultural encounters and their intimate relation to social processes. This theorization 1s intrinsic in the epigraph from Pratt’s seminal book, /perial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, which examines travel writing and its imperialist effects in

“non-European parts of the world.” She reframes the phenomenon of transculturation in terms of the “contact zone,” the site where the syn-

2 QUEERING MESTIZAJE thesis of differences and inequalities is materialized, while suggesting the

complexities of multiple border crossings.’ Pratt describes the contact zone as the imaginary space of colonial encounters, where the “relations

among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees’ [are expressed] not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interactions, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.”+ When relations of power are at the core of the “encounter,” she suggests that the dialectics of the dominant/subordinate subject need to be conceptualized as the performance of a difference that is itself a process of resistance and rejection.’ While the dominant subject attempts to establish a homogeneous cultural space through (an imposed) authority and (problematic) authenticity, the subordinate unsettles, shatters, and disrupts domination. In this contact zone, Cherrie Moraga defiantly places herself between the intricacies and contradictions she feels as the result of living in what

she calls “las entrafas del monstruo” (the belly of the monster). The strugele she enacts in her writing is the result of the multiple “encounters” her americanidad (Ameticanness) confronts through her position as a Latina lesbian and as the product of numerous “invasions.” In het essay, she generally speaks of land annexation and its effects on Chicanos and

Latinos since 1848, addressing as well the consequences of imperialist intervention in Latin America. Through the metaphorical articulations of “las entrafias del monstruo,” Moraga conjures up a sentiment of resistance to the symbolic orders of U.S. imperialism, and thus points to the imaginary sites of the contact zone. Pratt, in “Art in the Contact Zone,” has described these imaginary locations as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery or aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”° Though Moraga and Pratt configure the contact zone in distinctive ways, their analyses similarly suggest a framework where dialectical bodies or opposing forces emerge antagonistically in relation to each other as the result of power structures.? According to Moraga’s symbolic grammars proposed in the title of her piece, the América with “accent mark” is an example of the resultant interdependencies in the contact zone. Using a voice that 1s

personal as well as political, Moraga, in her defiance of a monolith “Anglo-America,” performs a creative narrative that demonstrates the process of resistance and rejection. Her América also calls to mind José

[ntroduction 3 Marti’s notion of “Nuestra América” (Our America), which envisioned the possibilities of cultural heterogeneity by means of an empowered

mestizaje.* Like Marti, Moraga evokes the concept of “our mestizo América” to call for the unification of Latinos south and north of the U.S.-Mexican border, and to resist the imperialist designs of the United States.

Pratt’s contact zone and Moraga’s América open the space for me to argue that mestizaje functions as an epistemology of colonialism and imperialism and to demonstrate how a “queering”’ of mestizaje can provide an opportunity for critical reading and knowledge production that challenges normative systems and discursive practices.? In particular, this book examines how mestizaje manifests itself in three geographically

diverse spaces—the United States, the Hispanic Caribbean, and the Philippines—with a shared history of Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism that have brought them into profound contact with one another. This book suggests that as an imaginary site for racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities, mestizaje raises questions about historical transformation and cultural memory across Spanish postcolonial sites and thus recognizes the effects of certain kinds of “encounters” as significant to its subject matter. "©

The use of “queering” in this book serves several purposes: to investigate ot probe, as in querying; to present a “queer” angle on the concept of mestizaje; and to account for a sense of difference that comes with mareinality. Here, one must understand and apply queer critiques, which

follow feminist theory in rejecting institutional power, in its broadest terms. Its link to mestizaje authenticates and codifies the histories of domination and resistance embedded in both concepts. In its study of mestizaje as a condition of postcoloniality, Oueering Mestizaje uses the desienation postco/onia/as a theoretical framework that allows the “rereading” of mestizaje in a new light, describing the ways it has become an ideology

associated with the creation of new subjectivities, identity politics, and the performance of “subordinated” knowledge." As an ongoing negotiation, the “queering” of mestizaje attempts to demystify certain kinds of normative practices and to recognize the continuing influence of cultural performances. The notion of cultural difference is used here to rearticu-

late subaltern identities produced in processes of transculturation, emphasizing how such identities are marked, affected, and transformed. The title of the book itself is the result of encounters and associations

4 QUEERING MESTIZAJE deployed through feminist/queer exchanges and the complicity of embodied knowledge. The book not only raises the possibility of partic-

ular forms of contestations, but, in subverting knowledge, it also reaffirms new strategies of identification. Simply put, Ouveering Mestizaye

takes risks in theorizing within the contact zone.'* From the “signifying position” of marginality, my specificity as Chicana lesbian in this study

becomes answerable for the transformation of dominant knowledge structures and ways of imagining.” As a form of transculturation, mestizaje helps to imagine the racialized body and the elements of cultural/colonial difference. It “performs” a

link to local and translocal identities through contradictions, cultural negotiations, and resistance.’+ Conceptually, the articulation of difference draws on hybrid agencies or the culture-between: it is neither European nor African nor indigenous American. Mestizaje can be synony-

mous with hybridization, as both represent the space-between. Etymologically, however, the two need to be differentiated in postcolonial inquiries, because the colonial experience in Latin America is distinct from other forms of colonization in the regions of the Global South (e.¢., Asia and Africa). Alfred Arteaga uses hybridization to convey a “dialogic poetics” that envisions the site and discourses of the contact zone.'> He

explains the effects of transculturation in the Chicano border space, describing the complexities of subject formation resulting from different encounters. One can argue that both mestizaje and hybridization similarly establish their presence in a dialectical process that refuses to accept

cultural dominance or total sovereignty. Hybridizations, Homi K. Bhabha suggests, “deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form from the minority position they occupy; the outside of the inside: the part in the whole.’’!° Although Bhabha is specifically referring to the hybridization of cultural identity and not to mestizaje, his

analysis is relevant here because it suggests that the consecutive processes of encounter and exchange that form cultural identity are produced within the effects of historical transformation. After the term ¢ransculturation was coined by Fernando Ortiz in 1940 and later developed by Angel Rama, contemporary scholars from diverse fields reinterpreted this theoretical construct and offered an ongoing discussion of the ideology of mestizaje.'? Contributions in the area of Latin American cultural studies have been made by Mary Louise Pratt, Vera M.

[ntroduction J Kutzinski, Diana Taylor, Silvia Spitta, Walter D. Mignolo, and Roman de la Campa; in U.S. Latino studies, the works of Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, Juan Flores, Coco Fusco, and Frances Aparicio, to mention a few, have

been significant.'* As a result of this rich scholarship, the ideology of transculturation cannot be examined without also thinking about mestizaje because one affects the other in the process of articulation. In Ortiz’s transculturation, the narrative of “‘otherness” is a critical force in the formation of the modern self.*? This model, despite having been formulated for Caribbean culture (for Cuba in particular), allows a “rereadine’’ approach to the cultural negotiations in contemporary mestizo cultures. As I engaged in these negotiations in writing this book, the-

oretical constructs such as the contact zone, transculturation, and hybridization became essential in developing my arguments regarding mestizaje.*° The relationship between mestizaje and these concepts fosters particular epistemological processes associated with the (de)colonial “imaginary” and with the power of oppositional discursive practices. I am using the notion of (de)colonial imaginary as a method of reading that

symbolically attempts to resist and contest certain systems of domination.

As a formulation of cultural hybridization and mixed-race identities, transculturation dramatizes the in-between site in narratives of encoun-

ters and confrontations. The process embodied in transculturation, Diana Taylor writes, “affects the entire culture; it involves the shifting of socio-political, not just aesthetic, borders; it modifies collective and individual identity; it changes discourse, both verbal and symbolic.”*! This transformative mediation clearly engenders the struggle for representa-

tion. Taylor’s main focus is the changing application of the theory of transculturation to Latin American theater. She examines the dynamic functionality of transculturation in relation to the sociopolitical forces reproduced in discourse and across different cultural contexts. She is concerned with more than the political ramifications embedded in the production of the collective self. For her, transculturation produces meaning based on different contexts and within different discourses, where “forms, symbols or aspects of cultural identity become highlighted

ot confrontational.” Significantly, Taylor’s reinterpretation and adoption of this Cuban theory (as she and others call it) marks serious hierarchic imbalances in First World and Third World discourses.*3 Although she recognizes the power structures that make one world dominant and

6 QUEERING MESTIZAJE the other marginal, she believes that it is precisely the impact of transcul-

turation and its resulting “encounter” that induces cultural exchange within systems of production, reversing hegemonic representation.*4 This attempt to displace the hegemonic power is a crucial aspect of the transference between two or more cultures where the site of difference is at stake. In the words of Bhabha, this borderline negotiation of cultural difference is “like culture’s ‘in-between,’ bafflingly both alike and different.””*

The performance of mestizaje itself has become a realized signifier of cultural difference, setting a productive space for reinterpreting colonization and the logics of its power structure in certain postcolonial sites. In her book Sugar Secrets: Race and the F:rotics of Cuban Nationalism, Nera M.

Kutzinski speaks of mestizaje as the product of cultural syncretism and colonial representation: Mestizaje can variably be translated as miscegenation, racial amaleama-

tion (as in blanqueamiento, whitening), creolization, racial mixing, inter- or transculturation. It is perhaps best described as a peculiar form of multiculturalism—one that has circulated in the Caribbean and in Hispanic America, most notoriously in Brazil, as series of discursive formations tied to nationalist interests and ideologies.*°

Kutzinski reflects on the need to understand mestizaje as the product of a history formed by cultural encounters, differences, and the “whitenine’ of the indigenous/black subordinated colonial subject. Whether in the Caribbean or in other Latin American countries, the development of mestizaje goes back to the conquistadors’ easy sexual access to Indian women. In Mestizaje in [bero-America Claudio Esteva-Fabregat identifies the factors that generated the formation of the mestizo cultures.*”? He argues that racial mixing became the most crucial genetic phenomenon of the first colonial period in Latin America (1.e., the first half of the stxteenth century). Massive miscegenation was facilitated not only by the social condition of the natives but also by the fact that the conquistadors’ position of power made it possible for them to exploit women at will. In some situations, Indian women of important status and lineage were offered to Spanish officers for the purpose of developing connections and kinship lines with the conquistadors. Esteva-Fabregat also notes that in countries ruled by Spain, conquistadors, motivated by their insatiable sexual appetite for Indian women and their incredible sense of power as

[ntroduction 7 colonizers, frequently accumulated large numbers of concubines.?* This phenomenon contributed to the rapid formation of the mestizo people; by the end of the sixteenth century, mestizos were a near majority.” According to Kutzinski, this “peculiar” type of multiculturalism was perceived as an instance of cultural pluralism created to soften the racial

conflicts and differences that brought about social imbalances in the Caribbean and Latin America. Like the “multiculturalism” that emerged in the U.S. “liberal” agendas of the late twentieth century, the multicul-

turalism Kutzinski describes created the facade of cultural diversity, which diverted attention from the inequalities that continued to divide people of color from whites. Mestizaje may represent the illusionary notions of multiculturalisms—both past and present—but in contemporary terms, mestizaje has been developed within the antiessentialist critique of the ethnic, racial, and cultural conception of identity. To the extent that cultural identity requires a reconceptualization or rearticulation of the relationship between subject formation and discursive practices, I believe that mestizaje, which entails the interplay of history in the

process of representation, is the answer. However, this also requires locating the racialized, ethnicized, and sexualized body: beginning in the late twentieth century, mestizaje has become a complex, ongoing negotiation that seeks to authorize hybrid sites of experience and empowerment. It has been used by artists and intellectuals as an ideology of resis-

tance as much as a national allegory or both simultaneously. This evolution is clearly marked by the vast influence of Gloria Anzaldta since the 1987 publication of her Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.>° Although Anzaldua’s new mestiza body has prompted many discourses

and critiques, surprisingly, the idea of mestizaje has remained unexplored. Most critiques have ignored the concept as it relates to the problem of colonial representation and neocolonial subjectivity. Neither has

the notion of mestizaje been considered in the context of the coming together of diverse cultures. This 1s unfortunate given that in addition to being a marker that imagines the intercultural subject, mestizaje involves the performance of an endless alterity (otherness), which complies with the borderline negotiations of cultural difference. Overall, the discourses generated by Anzalduta’s notion of “borderlands” suggest a specific kind of epistemological disposition that resists the hegemonic Western knowledge.

The invention of mestizaje partially helped to organize the diverse

8 QUEERING MESTIZAJE ethno-racial groups in a common struggle against the colonial power of the Spanish conguistadores. According to Amaryll Chanady, the contempo-

rary treatments of mestizaje need to be situated within “the tradition of national self-definition, self-affirmation, and racial justice,’ which teca-

pitulate the ideals developed in Latin America during the period of national consolidation in the nineteenth century as result of the movements of independence against the Spanish colonial power.3" The ideology of mestizaje gained strength after the Mexican Revolution (1910—24) and after the philosopher José Vasconcelos popularized it in his writings of La raza cosmica (1925).°* Vasconcelos’s idealism as expressed in his

“manifesto” predicted the birth of a fully mixed race, a “cosmic race,” capable of solving ethnic and racial obstacles of colonized nations. Although his idea of a cosmic race tended to view the melting-pot theory as necessary to solve racial discrimination, his philosophy provided inspiration for the reimagining of mestizo identity in postcolonial Latin America and in Chicano and U.S. Latino critical studies. In particular, Gloria

Anzaldua’s “border feminism” and queer epistemologies of alterity invoke a “new” kind of mestizaje that transcended Vasconcelos’s notion of cosmic race.?} While Anzaldta’s theorizations of the “mestiza consciousness” did not follow Vasconcelos’s model, she did recognize his contributions briefly in her work. In her discussion of Anzaldua’s mestiza consciousness, Marilyn Grace Miller points out that as an iconographic

category, the cosmic race “is revered without being understood or sufficiently questioned.”34 She implies that Anzaldua, like many others in Chicano/Latino discursive practices, honored Vasconcelos’s ideas with-

out understanding them. While I partially agree with Miller’s critical assessment of some discourses that have used Vasconcelos’s concept of cosmic race, she is simply misguided in her critique of Anzaldua. In order to engage with Anzaldua’s notion of mestizaje, it is important to recognize that Vasconcelos is, despite his iconic stance, yet one more canon-

ized male thinker that feminists, especially lesbians, confront with defiance while pushing for a transcultural/transnational feminism. Given that Anzaldua’s mestizaje carries a polyvalent mode, in which the reclamation of the feminist and queer subject rejects Vasconcelos’s implicit heterosexism and ethnonationalism, it is understandable why she did not engage analytically with Vasconcelos. For her, the theorization of “the new mestiza consciousness” inscribes a redefinition of mestizaje while engaging in gender and sexuality analyses. Norma Alarcon theorizes that

[ntroduction 9 this polyvalent mode reclaims what has been lost through the shackles of

colonization. She suggests that the struggle for representation in Anzaldua’s terms is an act of resistance striving “to heal through rewriting and retextualization.”>’ In the context of “situated knowledge” or feminist objectivity, Anzaldua insists on a transcultural paradoxical feminism that recognizes and engages with the plurality or diversity of her Chicana queer mestiza identity. In this book, [also use “situated knowledge,” borrowing from Donna J. Haraway, who defined it as the feminist “subjugated” standpoint that hopes for the transformation of repressive epistemological systems.3° The struggle for representation and contestation produces a politics of location in the feminist epistemologies of border subjectivities. Imagined through the senses of transcultural feminism, Oveering Mestizaje strives to

challenge essentialist notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Its focal point is the location of hybrid epistemologies—sites that require the inscription of political agency in order to establish the processes that have determined the subject’s diverse alliances. The expansive interdisci-

plinary agenda of postcolonial cultural studies embraces performance, queer, and feminist theories in its scope. The book’s analyses of cultural productions such as visual art, media, performance, and literary texts are used as methodologies and as aesthetic modes that help reconfigure mestizaje in its polyvalent expression, complexities, and specificities. The chapters that follow present different modes of analysis for the study of racialized, sexualized, and gendered identities while integrating a discussion showing that the effects of cultural encounter are unavoidable. The book also shows how the power of discourse, in the Foucauldian sense, can materialize the negotiations of transcultural sites or offer emergent, interventionist responses. As my epistemological inquiry of mestizaje is inevitably linked to Latinidad (Latinness), chapter 1, “Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestizaje,” analyzes the processes of their coexistence. The contemporary idea of Latinidad marks the opening of a cultural interchange of disproportionate economy and human condition between the Anglo-Ametrican ruling elite of the “North” and the subaltern “Latin” group of the “South.” I attempt to develop a theoretical framework that connects and distinguishes mestizaje and Latinidad. The complex dimensions of both concepts require a necessary shift from past to present in order to link historical “encounters” with their modern-day impact. A discussion of

10 QUEERING MESTIZAJE the indigenous movements in Latin America presents the contradictory

characteristics of both signifiers. I then explore the ways in which Latinidad is subjected to different kinds of power structures in contemporary U.S. Latino cultures. Can the notion of Latinidad be applicable to subjects like the commodification of “Latin” taste and style or the marketing of beauty? How does the representation of the Latina body subvett Hollywood’s standards for the perfect female body? How do the “otherine” practices of hegemonic cultures affect the cultural heterogeneity of Latinidad? How can Latinidad be linked to queer desire? I address these questions in the latter half of the chapter, locating diverse genealogies of Latinidad in the advertising industry, the contributions of

the performance trio Culture Clash, the film adaptation of Josefina Lépez’s play Real Women Have Curves, and the work of performance artist

Josefina Baez. I am particularly interested in the ways each production affects certain kinds of genealogies, marking counterhegemonic systems that reassert the possibilities of culture and ideology in representation. The term ¢ransculturation, as used in the book, applies to cultures modified, altered, or influenced through their contact with another culture. For the purposes of chapter 2, “Imaginary Spaces: Aztlan and the ‘Native’ Body in Chicana/o Feminist Cultural Productions,” the term’s definition enacts the complexity of power relations entrenched in the geopolitics of space—the border between the United States and Mexico, the contact zone, the mythical Aztlan. These issues are paramount in my analyses of visual and performance art and their relation to feminist epistemologies inscribed in the desire for critical agency. This discussion opens possibilities for understanding mestizaje not only as a form of transculturation but also as the site of cultural interventions and negotiations. To engage with such “imaginary” and creative space requires the articulation of an aesthetic that performs identity in resonance with hybridization. Thus it begins with a brief analysis of Aztlan’s historical conception as the Chicano homeland. Later sections look at the ways in which mestizaje is intertwined with Aztlan’s geopolitical origin and the “native” body in visual and performance art. This shifting conceptual framework moves Aztlan’s spatiality and mythical subjectivity beyond Chicano nationalism into a more liberated realm in which the Chicanamestiza body functions as the central structure. I discuss the work of Chicana artists and scholars dealing with the idea of mestizaje and the intercultural body. Finally, I examine Cherrie Moraga’s configuration of queer

[ntroduction II Aztlan, including an analysis of her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (1999), 1n the last section of chapter 2.3” Theoretically, I strive to relocate the myth of Aztlan, marking the transitions through which Chicana feminism has resituated Aztlan within revealing geographies, bodies, and knowledges. I explore Aztlan as an allegorical and mythological fieure of speech and at the same time expose the ways in which Aztlan secures the formation of identity in the gap between the real and the representational. The discussion in this book also uses the notion of mulatez (mulattoness) interchangeably with mestizaje even as it recognizes their independent epistemological bases. While in chapter 2 links to the “native” body and the geopolitics of space reconfigure a genealogy of mestizaje in Chicana/o cultural productions, the notion of mulatez is essential in tracing

another genealogy of mestizaje in chapter 3, “Relocating the Mulata Body: Beyond Exoticism and Sensuality.” Here, the analysis of a Cuban cocktail called u/afa inspires an investigation of the mulata body. I chose to use the mu/ata cocktail as an embodiment of discursive configurations to help me conceive the notion of mulatez and some specific constructs

of the gendered mulata body. By examining the mu/ata cocktail’s configuration as a form of transcultural objectification, the discussion sets the stage for tracing the ways in which the mulata body has shaped and has been shaped by the processes of colonization, slavery, race relations, and commodification. Within these processes, transculturation 1s closely connected with the mulata body, inhabiting the performativity of race in a self-conscious manner. While much has been written about the performativity of gender and sexual difference (for example queer performativity), there has been little attention on the performativity of race. Theories of performativity have been used in the philosophy of language, psychoanalysis, and feminist analysis. From the pioneering contributions

of the philosopher of language J. L. Austin (who explored the role of what he called “performative language’’) to Judith Butler’s configuration of knowingness and agency, the notion of performativity lacks the link to the racialized body. In this chapter, the mulata’s body suggests a pattern of “racialized” performativity, imagined in the ever-shifting patterns of cultural transformation and postcolonial discourse. Indeed, it is only by engaging a rupture of absolute heterogeneity that one recognizes there

can be no “pure” identity posed to the very conditions of the mulata body.

12 QUEERING MESTIZAJE A closer look at the mulata body helps trace the objecthood impacted by masculinist power and desire. It also clarifies how the process of subjecthood is performatively achieved. As a theoretical concept, transculturation is mediated through the analysis of art and of significant schol-

atship in the field of Latin America and Caribbean cultural studies. | specifically engage with the ideas of Fernando Ortiz, Vera M. Kutzinski, Antonio Benitez-Rojo; analyze the poetry of Nicolas Guillén, Luis Palés

Matos, and Nancy Morejon; and briefly discuss Cec/a, an exemplary novel written by Cirilo Villaverde in the late nineteenth century, which locates the mulata subjected to the colonial order of slavery and colonization. The discussion of the mulata body is also informed by an examination of popular culture and mythical knowledge.

Similar to their counterparts in the Hispanic Caribbean and Latin America, the mestizo people in the Philippines created the modern state. From the end of nineteenth century on, this population became the symbol of the colonial nation-state: composed, like the state, of hybrid epis-

temologies; and, like the state, the product of a repressive order. By including the Philippines as a Spanish postcolonial site in chapter 4, “The Filipino Twist on Mestizaje and Its Gendered Body,” the book traces a necessary transition in postcolonial Spanish studies and moves the sub-

ject of mestizaje beyond the borders of Latin America/U.S. Latino/ Caribbean to focus on the cultural effects of over three hundred years of Spanish occupation in the Philippines. However, my interest in Filipino

mestizaje was not only motivated by disciplinary needs, but was also influenced by personal experience with my partner, Gina. Early in our relationship—the getting-to-know-you stage—she commented that | was truly a “mestiza,” to whom I immediately responded positively: “Yes, Lam.” I then proudly added, while pointing to a poster featuring two beautiful Huichol Indian women of Mexico, “and they are my ancestots.’3* This comment was met with disbelief from Gina because I was

such a “mestiza.” It immediately became clear to us that we had a different understanding of mestizaje. As a Filipina, she connected mestizaje to a colonial legacy as well as to an identity exemplifying the whiteness and culture of the Peninsulares. On the other hand, as a Chicana, I saw mestizaje as a personal and cultural identity marker that goes beyond its colo-

nial legacy. It encompasses the intercultural experience and political agency of the “brown” body in the U.S. context. This cross-cultural encounter inspired me to expand my conceptualization of mestizaje and its gendered body to the Philippines.

[ntroduction 3 Chapter 4 begins by linking mestizaje in the Philippines to other genealogies of mestizaje in Latin America. I then analyze the literary contributions of José Protacio Rizal Mercado (José Rizal), the Philippines’

national hero and one of its most widely known nineteenth-century authors.?? Rizal’s work provides a cultural genealogy that links the content and context of a certain kind of literary expression to the emergence of a mestizo national consciousness. Discussion of Rizal’s novels, Nod Me Tangere (1887, titled in English The Social Cancer) and E/ Filbusterismo

(1891, Lhe Reign of Greed) setves as a point of departure for analyzing raced and gendered bodies.*° These narratives are interpreted as reflecting the mestizo society of the period and as profoundly influential to the contemporary concept of mestizaje in the Philippines.

Rizal’s main characters, Juan Cris6stomo Ibarra and Maria Clara (Ibarra’s unattainable love), represent the mestzo-dlustrado class (the enlightened ones). The story of these protagonists, including their relationships with those in positions of power, reveals the cultural and political paradigms of colonial society. Maria Clara’s characterization captures the raced and gendered body in relation to a social and economic subjectivity affected by modernity and the excesses of colonialism. As part of the analysis of this fictional woman and her eventual role as a cultural icon in the present time, the chapter also examines portraits of Maria Clara’s real-life contemporaries. As mestizas, these women redefined the contemporary sense of national culture in particular ways. Examples of the zraje de mestiza (the mestiza costume), a fashion ensemble that both reflected and promoted the “Hispanization” of the female body in the Philippines during the nineteenth century, serve as a metaphor for the evolving nuances of mestizaje and thus are interwoven with the analysis. This chapter focuses on the ways mestizas asserted the process of subjecthood performatively, disrupting the grammars of nationhood and embracing a broader sense of locality. The last section of the chapter includes commentaries on the commodification and fixation of the mestiza body in the global market, concluding with an analysis of the work of

a Filipina-Colombian-American performance artist, Gigi OtalvaroHormillosa, whose Cosmic Blood queer performance piece, “Mestiza/o Beast,” connects the subject to the epistemology of the “new mestiza” legacy and its cultural contemporaneity. The racial imperative instituted with the use of mestizaje is at work in “queerine”’ the practice of the gendered body. The considerations of mestizaje, together with the queer configuration, replicate certain politi-

14 QUEERING MESTIZAJE cal initiatives, and in so doing transform normativity and hegemonic representation in various ways. In chapter 5, “Epistemologies of “Brown-

ness’: Deployments of the Queer-Mestiza Body,” the hyphenated “queet-mestiza”’ is used as the justification for a body that enables the powers of race and desire, marking a process of intervention through which identity categories are potential sites of resistance and contestation. | am well aware that independent of each other, the terms gueer and mestizye have been somewhat overused in critical theory and cultural studies.4’ I mean to do something different here—to open yet another possibility in the analysis of mestizaje, one that marks a partnership with queer-feminist politics while demanding agency for its racialized body and heterogeneous experience. Accordingly, this chapter locates the mestiza body and its alignment with the queer category by examining the power of language—Anzaldua’s translations of queer-mestizaje in particular—which compels one to act, think, and express lesbian desire in a transcultural context. In other words, I will be “queering”’ mestizaje and “mestiza-ine’”’ or “browning” the queer. Bringing the racialized body and

the lesbian body together within the queering of mestizaje and the “browning” of queer challenges multiple layers of oppression (such as whiteness and heteronormativity), including the unitary consciousness in

Anglo-American feminist and queer theorizations. Furthermore, the individual and collective expressions of queer mestizaje are illustrated through the analyses of Latina poetic texts, the performance group Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, Zongues magazine, Alma Lopez’s digital art, and Frances Negrén-Muntanetr’s film Brincando Fl Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994).

In this book, the disparate methodological shifts across time, locations, and texts are intended to acknowledge the performative nature of culture. Thus, the shifts—from the colonial to the contemporary, from Aztlan to Manila, from performance studies to literary analysis, from the mulata cocktail to Tongues magazine, and from a discussion of Anzaldta and the Zapatistas to commodity and resistance—suggest that the borderline of postcolonial critique demands an encounter with the past as contingent space that invents and interrupts the performance of the present. Moreover, I look at performance both as a theoretical abstraction and as a time- and space-traversing paradigm for understanding the construction of bodies and images. The significance of the book’s approach lies in its ability to reinscribe bodies and acts best described through the

[ntroduction ry process of cross-cultural contacts—hybridization, the intercultural body, and the hyphenated self. The term performance not only stands for differ-

ent theatrical/cultural practices but also actualizes the potential of human behavior and embodies a reflection on culture and difference that

develops new critical spaces. Here, | am specifically defining performance as “genealogies” of colonial difference, in which the performative sites of mestizaje are mediated by parameters associated with bodies, location, history, identity, subjectivity, and political agency.* The “encounters” made in Oueering Mestizaje, stretching from the east (the Caribbean) to the west (the Philippines), suggest that the common history of Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism impacted these dispatate countries in both similar and different ways. Furthermore, these

“encounters” codify the cultural heterogeneity and transdisciplinarity that privileges minority discourses, queer, and feminist epistemologies. The “queerine”’ of mestizaje and the “mestiza-ine” of the queer as academic/geographic/intellectual contact zones help to underscore how the negotiations of transcultural postcolonial sites are implicated within contestatory “acts” of representation.

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ONE

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestizaye

Latinidad and mestizaje are tied to the imaginary space of the “contact zone’ that is the Euro-American encounter and colonial history. Both concepts incorporate multiple sites of affiliation, including the site of transculturation; at the same time, each concept has inherited specific strategic and positional practices. They map out common knowledge shared by different cultures of Latin American origin, and identify a distinct neocolonial consciousness in the United States. In certain spaces, the two concepts may function as reinvocations of cultural affirmation

and political agency. Consequently, any attempt to conceptualize Latinidad and mestizaje in a broad way requires serious engagement with

postcolonial debates over the imaginary borders of cultural identity. Although both terms imagine the very categories of the modern self, they

also constitute the conjunction of European conquest and capitalist

expansion. Hence, in order to understand the dynamics between Latinidad and mestizaje, it is important to also consider the concepts of “modernity” and “coloniality,” both of which have been used to explain the cultural/historical legacy of Spanish colonization in Latin America and its relation to processes of modernization. These signifiers suggest that although colonialism “ended” with national independence movements in the nineteenth century, coloniality did not. Globalization and imperialism have further marked new forms of “colonialism,” recreating the new phase of neocolonization or (post)modernization. This framework clearly illustrates the cultural contemporaneity and significance of the link between Latinidad and mestizaje, which can also be found in the narratives of translocal identities. 17

18 QUEERING MESTIZAJE Translocal Identities [H]Juman motion in the context of the crisis of the nation-state encourages the emergence of ¢rans/ocalities.’

Iam child of the Americas, a light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean, a child of many diasporas, born into this continent at a crossroads.?

In the aftermath of the Mexican-American war (1846-48), the United States incorporated almost half of the Mexican territory; and later, following the Spanish-American Wat in 1898, the United States took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The significant cultural divide that was a by-product of this imperialism expresses the essence of

translocality. Translocality, as it is generally understood, refers to a change in the relationship among territory, identity, and political affiliation. Arjun Appadurai has described the emergence of ¢rans/ocalities as a

product of the (dis)orders affected by the normative character of the modern nation-state. The movement of people across borders, what

Appadurai calls “the human motion,” is a key characteristic of processes—labor migration and diasporic community-building, for example—in which translocality emerges beyond the limitations of fixed territory and hegemonic grounds.

Translocality is equally well marked, though very differently, in Aurota Levins Morales’s lyrical poem “Child of the Americas.” The “Americas,” in its plural demarcation, is located as the territorial anchor of identity; identity, in turn, is “rooted” in the transcultural processes of colonial subjectivity. Later in the poem, Levins Morales configures the many contradictions that are part of being caught at the “crossroads” of multiple borders: Tama U.S. Puerto Rican Jew, a product of the ghettos of New York I have never known. An immigrant and the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants. I speak English with passion: it’s the tongue of my consciousness, a flashing knife blade of crystal, my tool, my craft. Iam a Caribefia, island grown. Spanish in my flesh, ripples from my tongue, lodges in my hip:

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 19 the language of garlic and mangoes, the singing in my poetry, the flying gestures of my hands. I am of Latinoamerica, rooted in the history of my continent: I speak from that body.

Tam not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return. Iam not taina. Taino is in me, but there 1s no way back. Iam not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there. Iam new. History made me. My first language was spanglish. I was born at the crossroads and I am whole.*

The sense of being “of Latinoamerica’” presupposes a legacy embod-

ied in African, indigenous (Taino), and European ideals that, for the poetic subject, gives her a feeling of completeness. This “whole” self is described in the poem, with Levins Morales’s explicit reference to her identity as a U.S. Puerto Rican, “daughter and granddaughter of immiorants.” As one of the Americas, “Latinoamerica” is at the “crossroads” of identity and place. Here, the term “crossroads” expresses translocality as it is captured in the colonial history that traverses the multiple “selves” (African, indigenous, European, and Jewish) of Puerto Ricanness. As a

genealogy of Latinidad, the Puerto Rican subjectivity that Levins Morales’s poetic configurations define 1s situated both outside and inside the borders of the United States, in between a colonial order. Although this understanding is configured symbolically, it alludes to the “history” of her “continent,” one that inspires the subject to denounce “from that body” the established colonial order that situates her “at the crossroads.” The sense of translocality expressed in Levins Morales’s writing is one

profoundly shaped by the Puerto Rican migration experience in the United States. From 1898 to 1917, Puerto Ricans living in the United States were considered to have no formal civic identity, owing to a 1901 Supreme Court ruling that Puerto Ricans belonged to, but were nota part of, America. After prevailing in the Spanish-American War, the U.S. government denied Puerto Rico both sovereignty and citizenship. The Jones

Act, passed in 1917, made Puerto Ricans pseudocitizens, granting a “statutory” rather than a “constitutional” form of citizenship.’ Several factors, including the desire for full citizenship, the impact of colonialism, and persistent poot economic conditions on the island, have produced distinct migration processes and diasporic community-building.

20 QUEERING MESTIZAJE These same factors have also prompted the translocal subjectivity embodied in the reconfiguration of a people across geographical space. This subjectivity is expressed in Levins Morales’s deployment of self, which enacts the borders of translocality as a way to reframe the history that made het. In considering Puerto Ricans’ sense of translocality, Juan Flores notes the impact of the island’s “commonwealth” status, focusing particularly on the sense of uncertainty it produces.° Even after the formal establishment of a commonwealth, Puerto Rico’s status as a “colony” continued and thus sustained the sense of translocality embedded in U.S.—Puerto Rican political and historical relationships. Flores makes this point as he contests the supposed advantages conferred on Puerto Ricans by their status as U.S. citizens. He casts this “citizenship” as a negative instead because unlike the case in other translocal communities, it has resulted in Puerto Ricans being considered “colonial emigrants.’ He suggests that this emigrant community “is organically inserted into the racial divide and the cultural and class dynamic of the metropolitan society.’”” In referring to “metropolitan society,” Flores points to New York as a place tra-

vetsed by many Latino groups. While he never mentions the term Latinidad, he uses /atinismo in a way that alludes to an essential aspect of Latinidad: In the context of the “New Nueva York,” the toughest test of “latinismo”’ is its negotiation of the varied lines of solidarity and historically structured relations informing Puerto Ricans’ social identity: with

other, Francophone or Anglophone Caribbean communities, for example, or with African Americans and Chicanos, or with other colonial migrants in “global cities,” or of course with other Puerto Ricans, “over there” on the Island, or “out there” in the diaspora.*

The marking of “Nueva” in between “New York” represents the borders of Latinidad, which in Flores’s ideological location, encapsulates identity. The configuration of “Nueva” is the embodiment of hope: the desire to solidify the diverse communities of Latin American descent, including the recent immigrant populations and the “resident minorities.” Present in Flores’s conceptualization of this “New /veva York” is the presupposition that Puerto Ricans—as “U.S. citizens and increasingly Enelishspeakine—are impelled in the name of Latino solidarity to reassert their

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 21 commitment to immigrant and language rights, and to embrace the transLatino vision of ‘nuestra América.’’’”?

The implications of a trans-Latino vision in Flores’s theoretical framework mark a certain kind of Latinidad: one that is very much related to a coalitional strategy that transcends local formations of identity while recognizing its global formative processes. In its global formulation trans-

Latinidad calls attention to the multiple forces and connections that reach beyond the borders of nation states and communities. In formulating the concept “trans-Latino,” Flores directs attention to the model José Marti proposed in “Nuestra América” (1891), in which a “new” vision of

the Americas embraced the hemisphere’s heterogeneous people and multiple geographical borders.*° Marti’s image of “our America” was a critique of the homogeneous capitalist and “European” America. Flores’s trans-Latino model also challenges the notion of what it means to be Latino/a in the United States today, noting that “Latin” America is no

longer a geographical attachment to the continent but a demographic reality in the United States. The use of the prefix srans- (or pan-) figures

the meaning of “across,” as in the word ¢rans/ocal, and attempts to embrace the multiple locations embodied in the growing presence of Latino/as in the U.S. cultural landscape. For Marti, the possessive adjective “Nuestra” (“Our”) next to America marked the complexity embodied in mestizaje, encompassing the diverse populations of the continent and their indigenous, European, and African cultural legacies. Similarly, the use of trans-Latino in Flores’s formulation proposes an alternative way of capturing the possibilities of pan-Latinidad in the twenty-first cen-

tury. It deepens our understanding of the discourse of Latinidad by reshaping the character of Latino/a identity and its diverse cultural processes and social formations as traced by the term’s cultural construction. The complexities and multiplicities encompassed by Latinidad make it

difficult to fully understand the contemporary use of the term without first tracing its historical connections to the imaginary sites of colonization. In particular, Latinidad cannot be comprehended without alluding to the origins of the notion of “Latin America.” The term was first pro-

posed during the French occupation of Mexico (1862-67), when Napoleon III supported Archduke Maximilian’s forcible efforts to become emperor of Mexico (1864-67). Although oppositional forces led

22 QUEERING MESTIZAJE by Benito Juarez defeated Maximilian (who was eventually tried by court

martial and executed)'’ and humiliated the French, the term Lato persisted.'* Following the publication of Union Latino-Americana by Tottes Caicedo in 1865, the notion of Latin/o America gained recognition on this side of the Atlantic.'? In “Toward a Genealogy of Latin America,” Idelber Avelar argues that “Latin America” as an idea was fitst used in France in the 1860s in relation to “Pan-Latinism” and as a way of explaining French foreign policy. Avelar further notes, “It was not until the late

nineteenth century that the term began to be consistently appropriated by literati attempting to formulate a humanist alternative to modernization.”'+ Intellectuals’ concerted efforts to humanize modernity profoundly influenced the notion of “Latin Americanness,” as the term

came to be used to deliberately differentiate “Latin” from “Anglo” America. For example, José Marti’s thought—his identification of and emphasis on the distinct cultural identity of “our America”—cannot be fully understood outside the context of this emerging critique of the effects of the modern world. Although Marti is considered a precursor of modernismo, which was a literary movement in Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century, his writings emphatically denounce the disparities

of modernization. In particular, he saw the United States’ imperialistic aims and desires toward its southern neighbors as an extension of “man-

ifest destiny” and an indication of continuing plans to conquer the “underdeveloped” Third World.’ The United States’ goal of constructing virile civilizations in the supposedly uncivilized “lesser races” of the South is, for Marti, the impetus of modernity. This expansionism came to

fruition through the annexation of half of Mexico in 1848, and the seizure of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines after the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The “unevenness” of modernity, which Julio Ramos critiqued in his influential book Divergent Modernities, became a focal point in the production of Latin American knowledge.'® Ramos asserts that Latin America “as an organized, demarcated field of identity does not exist prior to the intervention of a gaze that seeks to represent it.”"’’? He argues that the writings of José Marti, Domingo F. Sarmiento, and Andres Bello, among others, helped overcome the idea of “barbaric” nations in Latin America and at the same time developed Latin American national literatures and the sense of Latin Americanness. Certainly, we cannot think of moder-

nity without acknowledging the proliferation of ideas contributed by

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 23 intellectuals such as Marti and others who were responding to the struggles for independence in Latin America. But, modernity has also been sionificantly formed by the modalities of domination embodied in the histories of colonialism and imperialism. Consequently, a genealogy of Latinidad cannot itself be put at stake without considering these imperialistic and colonial elements. Since the term’s invention, whether one starts with the French intervention in Mexico or with the collaboration

between the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers in the Amerticas, Latinidad has contributed to maintaining the colonial fantasy of the “new” world, and the knowledge produced in Latinidad became the markings of colonial difference. Mestizaje likewise became an ideology of

this colonial fantasy, which believes that the fusion of various cultural traditions—including language, religion, food, music, and clothing—in the Americas created a new and better mestizo race."

The notion of “the colonial difference,” as suggested by Walter Mienolo, enacts the power of the modern/colonial world system that has conditioned subaltern knowledge and subordination. In differentiating mestizaje from Latinidad, Mignolo asserts that the former has to do with the homogenizing forces that eventually produced the nation-state, while the latter was a discursive configuration established by Creole (Spaniards born in America) intellectuals of South America. As a discursive formation, Latinidad became foreign to the Amerindian and African American communities since it suppressed these identities. According to Mignolo, While this happened in South America, the Spanish-American War of 1898 not only established new articulations among imperial powers,

but also created the conditions for what is today “latinidad” in the United States. Now then, this new configuration of “latinidad” is so far from the motives that France had, in the nineteenth century, as to suggest it as the name for the campaigns of the Spanish government and royalty to promote Hispanic culture (through centers and universities) in the United States."?

This discussion of Latinidad is one of the focal points of “Globalization and the Borders of Latimidad,” an essay in which Mignolo examines the historical and political conditions that have shaped the term’s nuanced meanings.*° Specifically, he suggests that modernity cannot be understood without a grasp of coloniality, because “the success of the selfdefinition of modernity consisted in creating the illusion that coloniality

24 QUEERING MESTIZAJE was something that belonged to the past, and that modernity was destined to supersede it.”’*’ He proposes a modification to help understand Latinidad in relation to the paradigms of coloniality/modernity. Mignolo suggests that it is the “multiple borders” of Latinidad that help situate the “Latin” America of the South as a genealogy that contributes to a deeper understanding of today’s U.S. Latino culture. His configuration of “mul-

tiple borders” supports the framing of Latinidad as a heterogeneous sionifier that has become unquestionably complex with the advancement of globalization, which he sees as the modern-day materialization of colonization. In Local Histories/ Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Bor-

der Ihinking, Mignolo further explains his ideas about the powers of “coloniality” and “border thinking.”’** While he insists that border thinking, which he also calls “gnosis,” is the result of the “modern world sys-

tem,” Mignolo positions himself as a scholar influenced by poststructuralist/postcolonial thought. His notion of “coloniality of power,” as conceptualized in the book, “presupposes the colonial difference as its condition of possibility and as the legitimacy for the subalternization of knowledges and the subjugation of people.’’*? Mignolo recognizes the complexities involved with applying these theories in a Latin American context, suggesting that subalternity and “subjugated knowledge,” in the Foucauldian sense, have produced new forms of knowledge concerned with culture and globalization in a world marked by Western hegemony and structures of colonial power. Although the concept of border thinking has become a somewhat clichéd metaphor in critical race studies and U.S. Latino/Latin American studies, it remains important as a Chicana/o postcolonial knowledge that was championed by Gloria Anzaldua in her overall body of work from the mid-1980s on. While recognizing that “border thinking” was partially influenced by the Chicana/o subjectivity, Mignolo justifies his position in a discussion of Anzaldtia’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.*+ The

linkages Mignolo proposes in his reading of Anzaldta’s “pluralinguistic” method are substantial and significant. In comparing Anzaldta’s multivocality with the experiences of other authors who have applied similar “languagine”’ systems (1.e., Peruvian José Maria Arguedas and Jamaican

Michelle Cliff), Mignolo develops a theoretical framework to better understand what he calls “the transnational dimensions of plurilanguaging.”?> Although Mignolo marks a significant methodology not only to

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 25 comprehend his notion of border thinking, but also to read Anzaldta’s plurilinguistic method and its embodiment of three traditions (SpanishAmerican, Aztec-Nahuatl, and Anglo-American), his argument fails to recognize the power of “the mestiza consciousness,” which in Borderlands/ La Frontera represents the mechanism by which women speak and define their bodily identities. Here, Anzaldtia locates the mestiza whose collective identity is in question: In a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways, /a mestiza is a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another. Being tricultural, monolincual, bilingual, or multilingual, speaking a patois, and in a state of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed:

which collectivity does the daughter of a darkskinned mother listen

to?

It is through the “languagine”’ or the printed word that Anzaldta places the consciousness of the borderlands as the continuing struggle over meaning. The bodily inscription of /a mestiza can only be conceived as the result of the “plurilanguagine” system that requires the historicization and politicization of subject formation and its relation to discursive practices. The relation of the mestiza’s bodily identity can only be captured within discourse, or the “laneuagine” process. Stuart Hall considers this relationship to be fundamental in the affirmation of bodily identities. For him, as for Anzaldta, the question of identity is not essentialist, but strategic and representational, the site of encounters (linguistic, cultural, and social). While Anzaldta insists that identities cannot be located in a static model, Hall claims that the discourses and practices contributing to

the formation of the social subject and the processes that produce subjectivities ate modalities of identity construction. His notion of identity—which emerges at the crossroads—is a site of “temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us.”’*7

While Mignolo’s notion of border thinking and the analysis of Border-

lands/La Fronteras plurilanguaging system underscore new forms of knowledge and the subalternity of identities, it marks counterhegemonic

processes in dialogue with the current stage of globalization and (neo)colonial difference. Interestingly, when he turns to the discussion of Anzaldua’s polyphonic language and the bodily inscription of the mes-

26 QUEERING MESTIZAJE tiza, which is described in the text as the “consciousness of the border-

lands,” gender subjectification is overlooked. Although I agree with Mienolo that Anzaldta’s border thinking is the result of diverse linguistic

traditions and memories, I believe that her “border consciousness” requires—as the evolution of her work clearly proves—a rupture with all oppressive systems so that the mestiza becomes the mediator of the values that can be transmitted between borders. This is just fitting given that the mestiza is the embodiment of the historical, political, and social conditions that marks Latinidad and the Chicana subjectivity. In addition, the bodily inscription of the mestiza arises from a conscious rupture against oppressive traditions in the attempt to rearticulate history: “using new symbols, she shapes new myths. She adopts new perspectives toward the darkskinned, women, and queers.”** Anzaldtia’s border consciousness goes beyond linguistic traditions, stressing the politics of exclusion while marking bodies in creative ways, in the shaping of myths. Antonio Gramsci argues that the recreation of myths helps organize a collective will and has the capacity to produce action, which, in turn, affirms the “truth” in the myth. For Gramsci, the emerging myth is linked to the struggle for eroup recognition and control.*? Similarly, for Anzaldua, the shaping of

the “new mestiza consciousness” in the theorization of the border becomes an attempt to reclaim bodily identities for the use of a counter-

hegemonic struggle. The mestiza shapes the border consciousness, which is reconfigured as the potential to affect knowledge and subalternity. The queering of mestizaje further represents the body as a border dweller capable of constructing its own space or /a facu/tad that resists negation and subordination: La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of

deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface. It is an instant “sensing,” a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning. It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that 1s, behind which feelings reside/hide. ‘The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world.*° Within the knowledge of /a facultad, the borderlands and the mestiza consciousness are constructions that resist and challenge colonial patriarchy,

possessing the capacity to respond to multiple sites of oppression, “It]hose who are pounced on the most have it the strongest—the

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 27 females, the homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, the outcast, the

persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign.’”>* In many instances, Anzaldua describes /a facultad not only in the many languages she speaks (Mienolo’s analysis of plurilanguaging), but also in the embodiment of queerness and the coming together of opposites, “I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female.’’>*

On the whole, a significant distinction can be made between Mienolo’s border thinking and Anzaldta’s border consciousness. While both are positioned against poststructuralist theory, Mignolo’s humanistic approach suggests that subaltern knowledge is the “design” of the borderization of indigenous and Western systems in the Americas. For Anzaldua, this knowledge system is also infused, but the queer/gender sensibility articulates a theoretical difference that crystallizes into what she identifies as “nepantilism,” the figurative and symbolic space where the “queer” gendered body comes to stand for the racialization of the mestiza. My discussion of the epistemologies of “brownness” in chapter 5 will further elaborate on the power of this “queer-mestiza body.”

Indigenous Counterpoint and Resistance

When Mienolo turns to the discussion of Latinidad, he insists on its relation to colonial difference. That is, Latinidad represents the intellectual activity of the creole and mestizo elites who eagerly tried to define Latin America after independence—but it also speaks of marginality. While the adoption of Latinidad may have reproduced colonial difference, it subordinated the Amerindian and African experience 1n modern Latin America. The history of indigenous movements throughout Latin America is a

precedent that cannot be ignored. As a result of the pan-American indigenous commemorations of the quincentennial anniversary of conquest, the 1990s marked the emergence of groups that, by confronting a

system of domination historically oblivious to their existence, are

attempting to reaffirm their native identities and traditions. In Guatemala, for example, an emerging pan-Mayan movement is counter-

acting the /admo structures of governance that have tremendously affected indigenous peoples. Ladino culture (which is the equivalent of mestizo) dominates urban areas and 1s heavily influenced by trends originating in Europe and the United States. In describing the ladino experi-

28 QUEERING MESTIZAJE ence, Rigoberta Mencht discusses the ways indigenous people in Guatemala are ostracized and looked down upon by the general population, even by indigent mestizos. In a comparative mode, she alludes to sionificant socioeconomic distinctions: The /adino has many ways of making his voice heard—if he goes to a

lawyer, he doesn’t need an intermediary. He has more channels of access. And so that’s why the poor /adino rejects the Indian. If a dadino gets on a bus, that’s normal. If an Indian gets on, everyone is disgusted.

They think we are dirty, worse than an animal or a filthy cat. If an Indian goes near a /adino, the /adino will leave his seat rather than be with the Indian. We feel this rejection deeply. If you examine the conditions of poor /adimos and our conditions, you'll see they are the same. There is no difference.*?

Unlike many Latin American countries, Guatemala still has a large indigenous population—the Mayan—that has consistently struggled against the ladino culture in order to retain their identity. Ladino colonialism attempts to integrate the Mayan into society as a minority class instead of as a distinct ethnic group. As a result, Mayans are forced to integrate and become “‘ladinoized”’ (1.e., adopt the ladino language [Spanish], clothing styles, and way of life). The pan-Mayan movement can be characterized as a reaction to ladino structures and a resurgence of a cul-

tural movement that confronts the state’s efforts to eradicate the indigenous experience. Together with the Zapatista liberation movement in Mexico as an explicit rejection of the systematic brutalization of indigenous communities, the pan-Mayan movement has raised awareness of the plight of indigenous peoples in Latin America.3+ The Zapatistas have insisted that the privatization of land contributes to the destruction of indigenous cultures that are centrally organized by a collective relation to the land. The emergence of the Zapatista movement in the 1990s revisits the 1910 Mexican Revolution, which included the claim for terra y libertad (land and liberty) among its most significant ideals.>>

In her discussion of the Zapatistas’ resurgence movement, Maria Josefina Saldafia-Portillo suggests that in the early stages of the group’s formation, more than identifying as an indigenous entity, members were demanding indigenous rights using the discursive terms of mestizaje. Saldafia-Portillo speaks of “Indian difference” as the representation of the Zapatistas’ need to authenticate their strugele and nationalistic agenda.

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 29 She identifies a link between “Indian difference” and mestizaje: “If mestizaje posits Indian difference as an originary moment in the formation of

national consciousness to be superseded by mestizo universality, the Zapatistas posit authenticating Indian difference as moving forward through time to encompass and redeem the national consciousness of the

mestizo.’3° Saldafia-Portillo’s argument is relevant here because she explicitly marks the contradictions embedded in mestizaje. She notes the difference between “indigenismo”—the glorification of Indian difference—and mestizaje, which she sees as the representation of political and ideal citizenship. She draws attention to the problems embedded in this dichotomy: Indigenismo glorifies Indian difference as a cultural formation. But it is mestizaje that represents political citizenship in Mexico, as mestizos are the revolution’s architects in every sense. Indians may be Mexico’s ideal ancestors, but mestizos are Mexico’s ideal citizens. Indian difference is an essential precedent for this mestizo nation, but /wdzans, the bearers of difference, are the continuing targets of educational and cultural reform.>?

Saldafia-Portillo’s identification of mestizaje as the “political and ideal cit-

izenship” represents particular notions of performative affiliations. Implicit in these affiliations is the notion of “revolutionary mestizaje.” As

a subjectivity that transcends the discourses that had presupposed the existence and predominance of a homogeneous and cohesive ethnic eroup since the nineteenth century, “revolutionary mestizaje” requires justifying the nonindigenous (mestizo/ladino) subject, an attempt to see history from the perspective of the “subjected” Indian. As a concept, the idea of “revolutionary mestizaje” imagines the site(s) of an identity that, by appropriating Indian difference, enacts a coalitional heterogeneity.

This revolutionary deployment of mestizaje is largely recycled and revised. It proposes identity-building parameters that transcend the limits of José Vasconcelos’s synthetic model introduced in the early twentieth century. The revision of mestizaje characterizes and denounces different forms of colonial domination. Marilyn Grace Miller suggests that while the contemporary and “revolutionary” characterization of mestizaje subverts previous knowledge, the problems of race and class in Latin America (and among U.S. Latinos) remain untresolved.}* Nevertheless, the mestizaje as reconfigured in the twentieth century imagines race as an

30 QUEERING MESTIZAJE intercultural project that maps knowledge as the result of not only cultural and historical adaptations and challenges, but also the reaffirmation of what Mignolo calls the “coloniality of power.” The connections between mestizaje and ladino culture are complex and conflictive. The commodification of ladino standards has characterized the ideology of mestizaje as an imaginary (and discursive) space in which contradictory elements are juxtaposed. Therefore, I think of cultural mestizaje as the unifying identity in Latin America and as a conceptual idea that helps map Latinidad in the United States. (In this paradox-

ical sense, mestizaje is similar to “heterotopia” in Foucauldian discoutse.)>? When we think of cultural mestizaje as an intercultural proj-

ect, dichotomies such as indigenous/mestizaje or suppressed/supptessot can be seen as the context that validates hybridization within a larger framework that imagines the sites of race. In a discussion of mestizaje and Latinidad, this imaginative frame of reference incorporates the different dimensions of collective social and cultural experience.

Hybridization is a response to heterogeneity. By taking on both inequalities and diversity among people, differentially is put at stake, and no one is subjected to sameness. As Néstor Garcia Canclini explains in Flybrid Cultures: Strategies for Fentering and Leaving Modernity, hybridization

has become one of the most significant processes of globalization.4° Canclini views “intercultural hybridization” as an epistemological grounding for cultural politics that has transformed concepts such as identity, dif-

ference, inequality, and multiculturalism. He sees in hybridization the sociocultural processes that sustain a partnership with diversity and difference, generating new practices, relations, and subject formations. Although he highlights both syncretism and mestizaje as concepts that specify hybridization, he emphasizes the latter because “it includes diverse intercultural mixtures—not only the racial ones to which mestizaje tends to be limited—and because it permits the inclusion of the modern forms of hybridization better than does ‘syncretism,’ a term that almost always refers to religious fusions or traditional symbolic movements.’’4" Canclini’s discussion of hybridization, although not uncommon, leads me to imagine cultural mestizaje as the result of a heterogene-

ity that questions the uneven strands of modernization. He speaks of Latin American modernization not in terms of a “force” that dominates by transforming tradition but rather as “attempts at renovation whereby diverse sectors take responsibility for the »u/itemporal heterogeneity of each

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 31 nation.”4? His idea of “entering” and “leaving” modernity questions whether Latin American (or U.S. Latino) identity or cultural mestizaje (or hybridization) can remain autonomous in the midst of globalization and the emergence of postmodern cultural practices. He concludes that these

multiple temporalities must be recognized if we are to understand the links between culture and power as well as the contradictions that exist between the “cultured” and the “popular sectors.” Overall, the ideas Canclini proposes in Hybrid Cultures are important contributions to postcolonial Latin American studies. His assertion that “the hybridizations described throughout this book bring us to the conclusion that today all cultures are border cultures,” draws attention to the particular effects of translocality.44 He does not use that term per se, but he refers to the translocality of symbolic actions and events that negotiate the borderization of cultural practices: ““Thus cultures lose the exclu-

sive relation with their territory, but they gain in communication and knowledge.”’* The translocality subtly embedded in Canclint’s ideas captures the geopolitical and cultural sites of /a frontera, the spatiality of the physical border that divides the North from the South, Mexico from the United States, Latin Americans from U.S. Latinos, the First World from

the Global South, and so on. These perspectives unmistakably echo Anzaldua’s multivocality of the border consciousness; however, Canclini fails to recognize her foregrounding theorization on hybridity and mes-

tiza consciousness in his work. Such absence of an engagement with Anzaldua’s scholarship is crucial and problematic largely because Canclini’s critiques of theories fail to address gender issues in particular. Clearly, his ideas of hybridization and border cultures can beneftt from a serious dialogue with Anzaldua. As a translocal site, the border constitutes the capacity of mestizo cul-

tures and identities, a major insight gained from Anzaldua’s Border lands/La Frontera. Both Latinidad and the notion of translocality can therefore be linked to the discursive configuration of the border space. And even though Anzaldta rejected the term Latimidad in many public lectures, I find her ideologies of border subjectivity necessary when dealing with the epistemology of Latinidad. Through the sites of mestizaje, she imagined hybridization. While Anzaldua’s configuration of the border zone focuses particularly on the constant movement of, and the linkage among, space, subjectivity, and identity inhabited in the U.S.-Mexican territory, her resistance to hegemony provides, as well, a transcendent

32 QUEERING MESTIZAJE challenge to homophobia, patriarchy, gender, and race (in the name of the Chicano/a indigenous legacy). Moreover, the specific conceptualization of Anzaldta’s “mestiza consciousness” embodies the same knowledge of resistance inherent in the Zapatista movement’s revolutionary mestizaje. While the adoption of indigenous difference in Anzaldta’s theories of mestizaje, as among the Zapatistas, functions as a form of resistance to systems of power, it also performs certain degrees of commodity. This duality—commodity and resistance—is an indispensable element of the conceptual framework I use to trace the borderization of Latinidad. In the next section, I examine the performance of Latinidad as constructed through the dialectical interplay between these two fotces.

Performing Latinidad: Commodity and Subversion

It is important to point out that Latinidad does not necessarily identify or characterize a specific people or culture. In its global nature, however, it contributes to a reassessment of neocolonialism as a force that distincuishes Latinos as a minority in the United States. In particular, its borderization considers the utopia of an América mestiza with no geopolitical

borders that captures traits of identification among Latin Americans from South to North and vice versa. As previously discussed, the term translocality 1s a trope that locates the mobility of identity and place, and makes the contemporary emergence of Latinidad easier to comprehend, not only as a term that “unifies” the diverse communities of Latin Amer-

ican heritage in the United States, but also as a rearticulation of a new imperial language affected by the postnational state of globalization. For corporate elites and their political allies, globalization has become a positive signifier, but in forwarding the interests of neocolonization, it also sionifies a new stage of capitalism or modernization. While a demoeraphic revolution is indisputably under way in the United States, the volatility of globalization affects the current state of Latinidad tremendously, especially in the way transnational capital is contributing to the materialization of Latinidad.

Consider the configuration of Latinidad as illustrated on the Tecate beer billboards that were displayed in 2004 throughout Albuquerque and Los Angeles (and perhaps in other U.S. cities). The central image on the billboard is a leaning, icy beer bottle with the tag line, “Finally, a cold

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 33 Latina.” By implying that Latinas are usually “hot,” the ad supports the stereotype that Latinas’ bodies and sexuality are “temperamental,” “passionate,” and “spicy.” Chicago-based Lapiz, an agency specializing in the Latino market, created this ad. It was perceived as racist and sexist by many protestors including twenty members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who signed a formal letter to the U.S. distributor of Tecate, Labatt U.S.A., calling for the billboard’s immediate removal. In response to such ovetwhelming criticism, Labatt pulled the ad immediately.4° The explanation Labatt offered in response to the protest suggested that the

billboard was meant to be humorous and entertaining; it was not intended to insult Latinas/os. Defending the ad, a company spokesperson explained that it was “created to target [our] consumers: Mature adults with a mature sense of humotr.’’47 It seems quite obvious that the ad was geared toward the male audience (the supposed consumers of beer) and that the female/Latina body has been objectified in order to please and entertain this targeted subject. The marketing strategy in this case deliberately represented Latinidad as a commodity. This commodification further captures the material condition of Latinidad in terms of a long-established focus of gender relations where he/she, subject/object, is a vulnerable target of the corporate world.

The coded marking of “hot” suggests a genealogy that locates Latinidad as the result of socially constructed values grounded in commercialism and consumerism. The Latina body, as represented here, is tied to the ideological structure of heterosexuality and its compulsive tendency to locate the feminine in relation to the masculine desire and fetish. The same ideologies of compulsory heterosexuality and commodification are marked in an El Pollo Loco (a fast food chain) promotion: “El Caliente: The Hot One.”4* Here, the male body is the subject of the female gaze and the humor is obvious. In this promo, tent cards featuring the El Caliente character adorned the tables of different El Pollo Loco locations.4? Surrounded by flames, El Caliente stands tall and proud while grilling the chicken.*° On one side of the tent card, the tag line reads, “why men want to erill like him” as arrows point to the chicken, while on the other side, arrows identify El Caliente’s eyebrows, hair, and body as the reasons “why women want to dine with him.” This ad satirically represents the Don Juan prototype through the performance of El

Caliente, re-creating the aura of Hollywood’s invention—the Latin lover.>* It is an image that speaks mostly to non-Latino audiences, and its

34 QUEERING MESTIZAJE effects have permeated the American consciousness. The Latin lover sionifies the exotic “other” as an object of desire and digression; he has become “an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of orioin and identity.”>* El Caliente and the markings of the Latina body in the Tecate beer ad are nothing less than the products of this knowledge, travetsing the scenario of fantasy and the excesses of capitalism. The marketing of contemporary notions of Latinidad, as portrayed in these ads, is the main subject of Arlene Davila’s book Latinos, [nc.: The Marketing and Making of a People? She argues that due to aggressive mar-

keting and advertising, Latinos are becoming very visible in the USS. media. Davila explores the mechanisms by which “Latino images” are becoming marketable in the context of economic globalization and how these processes mark certain kinds of definitions of Latinidad. She questions the power relations involved in the marketing industry, suggesting

that ultimately they more often serve the ad’s target audience than Latinidad. In contesting particular hierarchies of representation that affect Latino culture, Davila argues:

In the mainstream channels one can now hear rumba rhythms in Burger King ads, see soccer scenes and Salma Hayek advertising Pepsi and Revlon, and recoil at the infamous Chihuahua appealing to Argentinean revolutionary Ché Guevara in order to sell Taco Bell, along with other crossover ads that, with or without subtitles, are using Latinidad and things distinctively Hispanic to sell to both Hispanic and non-Hispanic audiences. *4

The familiarity of the ads Davila mentions support the argument she pre-

sents about the Latinization of mainstream America through current marketing and advertising practices. She examines the dynamics behind the Latino marketing industry and points out a long list of wrongdoings, but fails to offer a solution. What Davila does provide is insight into the emergence of Latinidad in relation to the advertising practices and a rigorous critique of the processes behind the marketing of identity. However, her notion of Latinidad constitutes only the basic understanding of Latinos as a people and culture in the United States. In an attempt to critique such “othering” practices, Davila merely defines Latinidad as the continuing process that represents (misrepresents) and enacts Hispanic and Latino culture.>> Actually, by repackaging the Latino population into images, more often stereotypical, the heterogeneity of group subjectivity

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 35 becomes invisible, reduced to the exotic. The marketing of Latinidad represents a genealogy that, by downplaying heterogeneity, relegates the status of a people and culture to nothing more than a celebration of “otherness.” Conversely, the Latina body, as it has been slowly evolving after the cinematic portrayal of Selena by Jennifer Lopez, Frida Kahlo by Salma Hayek, and Ana by America Ferrera (in Real Women Have Curves), reptesents genealogies of Latinidad invested in the proliferation of cultural difference. In some ways, these performers have been able to transeress the “otherine” practices of Hollywood’s hegemonic culture and offer posi-

tive models for negotiating Latinidad as the product of cultural awareness. First, Lopez’s and Hayek’s presence in mainstream pop culture has undoubtedly broken some barriers for Latinas in Hollywood. Their curvaceous and brown bodies deconstruct Hollywood’s standards of beauty as well. Due to media hype, Lopez is especially known for her curvaceous backside, and she has used this “othering” practice of Hollywood to her advantage—usineg her sexuality to gain publicity and to sell her movies,

music videos, and albums. In fact, Lopez has become the first Latina actress to have a lead role in a major Hollywood film since Rita Hayworth, and the highest-paid Latina actress in Hollywood’s history. As a U.S. Latina, Lopez appeals to a crossover audience. She has parlayed her success in the movies into an equally flourishing music career as well as lucrative business enterprises that include a fashion line, jewelry, perfumes, and scents. In contrast, as a recent emigrant, Hayek often speaks of the hardships in “conquering” the film industry in the United States. Born in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, Mexico, Hayek came to the United States in 1991 ready to succeed as she did in Mexico as a soap opera actress 1n the 1980s. However, Hayek consistently faces the dilemma of finding apt roles in Hollywood. She spoke about this candidly: “To begin with, I am foreign. ... Next ’m Mexican, and the Mexicans are probably the least welcome people in this country. On top of that, ’m a woman. And then, on top of it all, someone handed me the sex-symbol situation.’’>° Hayek’s quest to “conquer” Hollywood and her cultural specificity as a Mexican immi-

erant made her even more determined to make a film about Frida Kahlo’s life and to play the title role. This movie is very personal to Hayek: “I want to tell this story about my country and my people. For a couple of decades, Mexico was an important center where great people

36 QUEERING MESTIZAJE from the arts and politics gravitated. | want to remind the world of

that.”

While Lopez and Hayek embody genealogies of Latinidad that posit the Latina subjectivity as product of diverse processes, one as a USS. Latina of Puerto Rican descent and the other as a Mexican immigrant, dramatist Josefina Lopez, who is a self-described all-around chingona (a tough, independent woman), offers yet another distinctive way of negotiating Latinidad. Her play Real Women Have Curves (1988), adapted into a

film directed by Patricia Cardoso (HBO, 2002), is a symbol of hope for young Latinas.’* While the movie explores with humor the lives of hardworking immigrants in East Los Angeles, it is the story of the main protagonist Ana (played by America Ferrera) that is most relevant here. Ana, a young Latina living in East Los Angeles with her family, has just graduated from high school. Her teacher, Mr. Guzman (played by George Lopez), sees Ana’s potential and encourages her to apply to college. Consequently, Ana is accepted at Columbia University in New York with a full scholarship. Her domineering mother Carmen (played by Lupe Ontiveros), however, insists that her daughter follow in her foot-

steps—to stay home, get married, and continue to work in her sister Hstela’s (played by Ingrid Oliu) struggling garment factory. The drama escalates when Mr. Guzman unexpectedly shows up at the family’s home to talk about the importance of Ana’s college education. Ana’s father (played by Jorge Cervera Jr.) and grandfather (played by Felipe de Alba)

are supportive and sympathetic, but her mother is not swayed. Ana spends the summer torn between her obligations to her family and her desire to attend college. Meanwhile, Ana works temporarily in her sister’s factory, where she joins other female workers sewing evening dresses for retail stores. Ana anerily compares the factory to a sweatshop: her job is to iron eighteendollar dresses that will be sold for six hundred dollars at Bloomingdale’s. “You are all cheap labor for Bloomingdale’s,” she rages. In this “sweaty” working condition, a key scene takes place when Estela refuses to turn on the fans since they blow dust on the dresses and Ana strips to her under-

clothes because of the heat. The other seamstresses, except Carmen, soon follow Ana’s lead and also remove their clothing. This turns into a

party-like situation, with the women comparing cellulite and stretch marks, celebrating their plus-sized bodies. This revelry reinscribes a carnivalesque dimension that resonates with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory. For

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 37 him, the aspiration of the carnival is to undermine the hegemony of any ideology that seeks to dominate, and the carnivalesque uncovers an alter-

nate conceptualization of reality. Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival “offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the rel-

ative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things.”*? By displacing dominant perception of the “ideal”? feminine body—visually and discursively—this celebration of plus-sized bodies in the film creates the opportunity to transcend the limits of a predominant order that perpetuates a system of subordination in the media. In the midst of several crises, Ana has to make serious decisions and

stand up to her mother’s traditional ways, frustrations, and separation anxiety. Carmen repeatedly derides Ana about being overweight and nags her to lose weight so she can find a husband. When Ana points out that

Carmen is herself overweight, her mother counters that only married women have the luxury of being fat. Throughout the film, Ana maintains that she is happy with her body—“I happen to like myself.” When she decides to engage in sexual intercourse with her boyfriend, Jimmy (played by Brian Sites), Ana asks him to turn on the light and to look at her body.

He responds with admiration as well as respect, and thus reaffirming Ana’s self-confidence and self-esteem. Ana’s romance with Jimmy not only functions as an act of rebellion against the mother’s domineering ways, but also as a trope for liberation from the Latino traditional ways. In the end, Ana decides to defy her mother’s wishes and goes off to college. The morning Ana leaves for New York City, Carmen locks herself in the bedroom, refusing to say good-bye to her daughter.

The story is semiautobiographical. Recalling the experiences that inspired her play, Lopez observed, “At my sister’s sewing factory, I met Latinas who were proud of their work and carried themselves with dignity. While they sewed, they shared gossip and stories. It is these women who inspited me to write Real Women Have Curves.”®° She also indicated the influence of other personal experiences: “I wanted to be an actress but my high school teacher told me, with kindness, that I needed to lose weight in order to have a career. All my life, ’d been told something was

wrong with me—Mexican, woman, undocumented, overweight, a dreamer. I decided to make something positive of these disadvantages: I became a writer.”°' Although the play has a much smaller cast than the

film, and Hstela, not Ana, is the main character, the message about women’s body image and the importance of self-esteem 1s present in

58 QUEERING MESTIZAJE both the film and the play. In its totality, this message subverts Hollywood’s “standard” of the “perfect”? body—thin, anorexic-like female body—the image that now dominates movies and television. As portrayed in the key scene of Lopez’s film adaptation, rea/ bodies not only deconstruct Hollywood’s obsession with “perfection,” but also mark some truth about women’s experiences. Director Cardoso has said, “I would love to help change perception through images—to encourage us to accept ourselves as we are.”°? Even recognized actresses such as Jennifer Lopez do not necessarily attain that “ideal.” As previously mentioned, her body, at five feet, six inches and 120 pounds, deconstructs Hollywood’s perfectionism. Lopez says, “ve seen articles where they had me grouped in with ‘larger women.’ ... But I don’t take it as an insult, because they’re identifying me as a real person. If that helps other people’s self-esteem, well! It helps mine too!’’® It is obvious that in adapting her play to film, Josefina Lopez and her co-screenwriter made some compromises by changing the main protagonist. Focusing on Ana rather than Estela draws in the younger crowd, and turns the play into a cross-generational success story. The film addresses the concerns of young women as they are coming of age and deals with the complicated issues in familial relationships, mother-daughter in particular. Gtven Hollywood’s incessant demands for the perfect body, Rea/ Women not only opposes these demands but, in its treatment of the Latina body, also subverts the knowledge embodied in hegemonic representations of Latinidad.

In performance art, stagings of Latinidad represent cultural specificities that insist on the recovery of group diversity, which is often downplayed in the “othering” practices of the Latino people and culture. In taking inventory of their history as a neocolonial community in the United States, Latino and Latina theater practitioners and performance attists explore questions of identity and subject formation from various

vantage points. The members of Culture Clash (Ric Salinas, Herbert Siguenza, and Richard Montoya) use humor to expose and resist the complexities of race relations in America, affecting yet another genealogy of Latinidad.” In their book Cu/ture Clash: Life, Death, and Revolutionary Comedy, they blend Latino political consciousness with satiric representation.°’ The book brings together three of theit most memorable performances: [he Mission (1988), A Bowl of Beings (1991), and Radio Mambo: Cul-

ture Clash Invades Miami (1994). It also includes a short interview with the

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 39 eroup in which they discuss their origins, and an introduction for each of the plays. Zhe Mission is about a comedy group and the kidnapping of the Spanish entertainer Julio Iglesias; Bow/ of Bemngs is a collection of sketches, including The Return of Ché Guevara and Chicano on the Storm. Radio Mambo

(which was commissioned by the City of Miami in 1995) is a series of sketches, done in an interview format, that examine the social complextties of the black, Jewish, Cuban, Haitian, and white communities of Miami. In this work, as in Radio: Bordertown (a 1998 ethnographic perfor-

mance about San Diego), the group members perform multiple characters marked by gender, race, class, and region. As part of these ethnoeraphic performance pieces, the group also created Nuwyorican Stories (1999), focusing on New York City’s Lower East Side; Messton Magic Mystery Tour, dealing with the impact of gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District; and the latest in the series, Anthems: Culture Clash in the Di1s-

trict (2002). This last piece is the story of Washington, DC, in the aftermath of September 11.°° In August 2004, to celebrate theit twentieth anniversary, Culture Clash resurrected Cu/ture Clash in AmeriCCa, a petformance that brings together different segments of their work covering 1995—2002.

The group’s numerous contributions trace a movement from cabaretstyle performance to comedy/narrative plays to, most recently, documentary and ethnographic satires. Herbert Siguenza explains their new direction after Radio Mambo: “Our work became reality based. We weren’t

writing out of out imagination anymore, we were writing true stories, monologues based on oral stories told by real, living people. It opened up out whole perspective. I think that’s the real difference—when you start

writing off of real stoties.”°? The power of depicting “real stories” influenced the 2004 production of their urban comedy Chavey Ravine.”

The play is the story of a once-flourishing Latino community that spanned the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop. In the 1950s, these communities were displaced when corrupt business elites used the tactics of McCarthyism to defend their interests. The buildings and homes in Chavez Ravine were destroyed, and the area eventually became the site of the Los Angeles Dodgets’ new stadium. Culture Clash retells this story by using historical facts and portraying several characters (using wigs and distinct props); they make the Chavez Ravine community come to life once again. Ghosts from the bulldozed community rise up to speak to Dodger pitcher Fernando Valenzuela in

40 QUEERING MESTIZAJE 1981. Time moves back to the late 1940s, and family and community life

become the play’s focus. In the process, we meet and get to know two men, a poet named Manzanar and Frank Wilkinson, the site manager for public housing. In 1952, Wilkinson was targeted by the California Senate

Committee on Un-American Activities because he believed in public housing and was committed to helping the communities at risk. After refusing to answer any of the committee’s questions, Wilkinson was fired and became a janitor (the only job he could find). In 1957, when Chavez Ravine was being considered as a site for Dodger Stadium, a few families

remained in the area, resisting the orders to move, but as the play suggests, they were violently removed. The Dyvesion of the Barrios and Chavez

Ravine, a mural by Judith Baca (1983) shown in figure 1, represents the resistance of those who were removed by force (see figure 2). Like Cul-

tural Clash, Baca weaves the history of a local event that affected an entire community into her art. Both portray the struggle over land and the displacement of a people who were persuaded to sell their homes with promises of relocation to low-income housing that was never built.°9

Chavex Ravine 1s a vety entertaining and humorous play—communicating through music as well as dialogue a fascinating legacy of Latino culture—but at the same time, Culture Clash’s message is somber and orave. The play reminds us that though at present, Chavez Ravine is synonymous with Dodger Stadium and baseball, it was home to the people

who lived in those now-destroyed communities. While the conflicts inherent in this historical event were specific and local in nature, the dislocation of poor immigrant communities marks a deeper historical displacement—the universal condition of being subjected to systems where different cultures “clash” or oppose one another. Oppositional cultural systems ate embedded in processes that have defined Latinidad, whether

as a commodity or as a form of resistance in the search for cultural expression. Similarly, the juxtaposition of oppositional knowledge marks the overall artistic trajectory of Culture Clash. When an interviewer asked the performance trio what people should get out of their art, Salinas responded, “With our humor and out art, | think what we want people to do 1s just

question what is being fed to them by the mass media. We are such an alternative that I hope they get the alternative nature of it, so that they know that the other stuff, ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s complete

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throughout the intercultural exchange of migrant subjectivities, travers-

ine time and space. From this perspective, the representation of Latinidad becomes a continuous reenactment of cultural practices embodied in the boundless definition of performance. While performance 1s an appropriate medium to actualize the potential of Latinidad, its practice embodies a reflection on culture and difference as terms that

Borders of Latinidad and Its Links to Mestixaye 43 develop new critical spaces in theater and art history. This reflection synthesizes Latinidad as well by recognizing the complexity, diversity, and historical specificity of subject formation. In his book /osé, Can You See? Latinos On and Off Broadway (1999), Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez describes the image of Latino and Latina theater in symbolic terms as an “octopus

with many legs.” This multilegged “creature,” he suggests, rejects any homogenization of the subject. He adds: Latino theater always locates itself within the domain of difference, of hybridity, of monstrosity. We can imagine this gigantic animal, “Hispanic theater,” with a huge head, sitting over the U.S., moving its tentacles on a multiplicity of stages and suctioning audiences. It is this

image of monstrosity that accurately captures the nature of a U.S. Latino theater that denies all categorization based on superficial resemblances such as labeling and the imposition of rigidly defined and dominant dramatic structures. This theater revels in problematizing and destabilizing the essentialist notion of monolithic Latino experiences, identities, and ways of seeing.”4

As with many other cultural practices—including music, poetry, literature, att—Latina/o performance and theater are and always have been the result of cultural mestizaje, representing the ongoing conflict inherent in transculturation. Sandoval-Sanchez, as a native Puerto Rican now living and teaching in the United States, is well aware of this context of

revision and deconstruction of dominant structures. His book title conflates “no way, José” and the first line of the U.S. national anthem. He points out in the book’s introduction that this “implied command” asks a non-Anglo “other” (1e., “José,” who here embodies Latino culture in vatious ways) to see and embrace America’s dominant culture. For San-

doval-Sanchez, Latina/o theater and performance art are phenomena deeply rooted within cultural values and traditions that critique Broadway’s and Hollywood’s negative stereotyping of Latinidad.

As an outstanding example, performance artist Josefina Baez validates her gendered and racialized body as a trope for representation (see figure 3), successfully negotiating Latinidad while challenging hegemonic systems. Baez is a black performer, born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New York. She has been teaching theater and creative writing in New York’s public schools since 1984 and is the founder and director of the Latinarte Theatre Troupe.’> Since 1996,

44 QUEERING MESTIZAJE Baez has been presenting her Apartarte/Casarte (split up/get married) performance dialogue project, in which she explores themes of migtation, marginality, language, identity, and the body. The performance 1s organized as a social event and takes place in living rooms, bathrooms,

and kitchens all over New York City, and especially in Dominican immigrant communities. The domestic space she uses is a critically important part of the performance, as it helps her forge the conception

of identity and define the movement of her body. In his review of Alpartarte/Casarte, Ramon Rivera-Servera suggests that the site of domesticity in the performance confronts its materiality while providing a feminist critique of women’s lives through the uncertain borderization of space.7° While the home becomes a diasporic public space, the celebration of domesticity contributes to transform everyday social practices. Furthermore, the home becomes a space where the interrogation of identity 1s juxtaposed to nationality and locality. This juxtaposition is also evident in another performance, Dominicanish, 1. which Baez employs poetry, soul music, and kuchipudi (a type of Indian dance) in an exploration of what it means to be a Dominican in New York City.” In his analysis of kuchipudi, Rivera-Servera considers that the use of this Southeast Asian dance in Baez’s performance functions as a representational strategy to engage with the experiences of the Dominican diaspora in New York City. He suggests that this diasporic knowledge is “grounded in a politics of affinity, one that honors the cultural origins and migration history of the performance form and relates to it a similarly complex history of travel.’’7* Rivera-Serveta’s analysis of diasporic knowledge provides a clear explanation of Baez’s strategies for using kuchipudi in Domznicanish. ‘This diasporic intervention in the performance links identity to a struggle of identification where the local and the global intersect. As utilized in the performance, diasporic knowledge

is closely related to border crossings as conceived from the expressive

forms of kuchipudi. Furthermore, the use of the term “Dominican York” in the performance operates as a transnational signifier that expresses movement and cultural survival:

Yo soy una Dominican York. Y esta condici6n me otorga una infinidad de estimulos constantes y variados. Enriqueciendo mi cultura personal en formas inesperadas.’?

borders of Latinidad and [ts Links to Mestixaye 4J

7

“>
At the same time, however, the emphasis on the interventionist role of the “gabacho” (Anglo-Saxon) led Chicano political militants to focus on the failed promises of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo."® In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal “eringo” invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlan from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their

birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.*’

For young Chicano militants, reclaiming a lost heritage was not to be limited to a spiritual and cultural recovery. The goal of regaining the territory usurped by the United States in its nineteenth-century hunger to expand and to implement the ideals of “manifest destiny” became paramount. Since these lost lands occupied the same space once known as

Aztlan, land annexation could be understood as an act of affirmation, identifying and laying claim to the native homeland of all people of Mex-

ican ancestry.'® The “Organizational Goals” section of E/ Plan states: “Lands rightfully ours will be fought for and defended. Land and realty ownership will be acquired by the community for the people’s welfare. Economic ties of responsibility must be secured by nationalism and the Chicano defense units.”'? In practice, the goal of recovering land proved

idealistic and romantic. Nevertheless, the historical intertwining of Aztlan and land annexation is an important element in contemporary communities of peoples of Mexican descent living in the United States. The ongoing movement of people north to Aztlan has been a key factor shaping the heterogeneity of this population. Moreover, in the face of a persistent U.S. politics of domination, the commitment to a cultural identity that includes a physical basis in the

land provides a weapon against resurgent nativism and xenophobia. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the ongoing public debate over immieration has occurred in an increasingly hostile ideological environment. This is especially clear in recent efforts to suppress public services to

JO QUEERING MESTIZAJE immigrants and to militarize the patrolling of the U.S—Mexican border.

In addition, new forms of political domination and the deepening of institutionalized racism are evident in the popularity of English-only measures and the banning of affirmative action policies. Finally, despite a long national history of demographic transformation shaped by immiegtra-

tion, there is a rising tide of fear among many white Americans in response to the perceived “Latinization” of the United States.*° Some Chicanos and Chicanas see Aztlan, in both its mythical and geographical aspects, as a way to successfully combat such cycles of racism, xenophobia, and exploitation.

Performing Aztlan: Mestizaje and the Native Body

But now, Raza, you ate about to witness a miracle on stage an identity escape act never before presented to a live audience a Hispanic who, having lost his way to Aztlan, will experience a conversion right here, on stage & will find his inner indio, the tiny indio we all have inside of us, trapped in a 50o-year-old inner prison, the gringo prison within. So, Gémez-Pefia, go for it & please do not divert from the script.’

This text introduces Guillermo Gémez-Pefia’s performance in Borderama (1995),°* a play depicting a sardonic image of a “lost Hispanic” who finds his way to Aztlan by accepting his indigenous heritage in “eringolandia”’ (gringo prison).7> As in most of the Gémez-Pefia’s performance work,

this piece explores the political, cultural, psychological, and spiritual ramifications of the U.S.-Mexican border. While the “lost Hispanic” character mockingly plays with juxtapositions of real and imaginary events, the discursive configurations of Aztlan also evoke popular knowledge. In a squeaky computer-generated voice, another character played by Roberto Sifuentes is heard onstage directing Gomez-Pefia to get in touch with his “Indian” self. “We are all phony Chicano impersonators,” Sifuentes tells Gomez-Pefia, “and only the Virgin of Guadalupe up there can show us the one & only way to Aztlan.”*4 The configuration

of the mestiza mother is invoked as the guide that will help these

Imaginary Spaces 7 “wannabe” Chicanos find their path to Aztlan.*> In other words, to reach Aztlan, they must first find and accept their zudigenismo. After evoking the

name of the Virgin, Sifuentes puts a feathered Aztec headdress on Gomez-Pefia and orders him to speak an indigenous language (Nahuatl). In a robotlike manner, GOmez-Pefa follows the orders. The utilization of a multilingual combination of English, Spanish, Spanglish, and Nahuatl here makes the performance both complex and intriguing. By applying the discursive terms of postcolonialism, Borderama deals with Indian difference as a way of representing the consciousness of mestizaje. On one hand, the cultural exchange presupposes that the embodiment of the historical, political, and social conditioning has the potential to affect the knowledge of indigenismo, ot Indian difference. On the other hand, this appropriation enacts subjectivities as the result of commodification and

fetishism: bodies that insist on justifying mestizaje while making an attempt to represent the specter of zudigenismo. Through the representation of symbolic knowledge (often in stereotypical ways), Gomez-Pefia inhabits and denaturalizes the images with which hegemonic culture contains and subordinates minority Others.*°

Here, I am interested in the configuration of Aztlan as a place of renewal and recovery—the imaginary site where political agency func-

tions as an alternative to cultural commodity. This configuration of Aztlan performs the contradictions and complexities of the border space. Its dramatic state is an ever-evolving product of the collision, separation, and reengagement occurring between nations, languages, cultures, and histories. My focus is on the importance of utterances as forms of exhibition underneath the representation of space. Rafael Pérez-Torres suggests that the border, which “represents a construction tied to histories

of power and dispossession,” determines the evolution of ideological configurations. As a result, “the construction of personal and cultural identity entailed in any multicultural project comes to the fore in Chicana/o cultural production.”’’ Pérez-Torres defines Aztlan as an “empty

sionifier,” by which he means that Aztlan reflects “that which is ever absent: nation, unity, liberation.”?® In my view, these “absences” are dynamic—they make themselves present in the in-betweenness of border space and provide strategies for individual and collective identity. Thus, Aztlan is marked performatively by processes of transformation in which time and space intersect to produce tropes of spiritual decolonization. These tropes are consonant with ideologies that intersect and often

jd QUEERING MESTIZAJE contradict each other. While Aztlan’s ambivalent subjectivity draws attention to the specific value of a politics of cultural production, it also represents relations of domination in the discursive divisions between the First World and Third World, the North and the South, Mexico and the United States, the dominant and the subordinate. Like Pérez-Torres, Laura Elisa Pérez defines Aztlan’s discursive spa-

tiality in terms of power relations. She, however, sees the dialectical forces of “order” and “disorder” (reason and deviation) as counteracting

the systematic politics of domination that threaten the validity of Aztlan.*? She mainly discusses Chicana cultural productions, emphasizing the visual arts, and examines ways in which Chicana feminists have further altered the “logical” order of patriarchy and homogeneity. From this perspective, continuously recovering Aztlan is an act with no borders because, as Pérez explains, “we occupy a nation that does and doesn’t exist.”’° This yearning reflects the traumatic contradictions of Chicano/a subjectivity, caught among historic, linguistic, and mythic origins. As the site of creative and political intervention, Aztlan both signals the heterogeneity of the subject and authorizes an alternative way of knowing that

may offer a fantastic epistemological system. Aztlan dramatizes and enacts the complexity of power as a mode of differentiation, a hierarchical structure, and a system of defense. The concept of Aztlan and the legacy of mestizaje are also intertwined. The idea of the mestizo performing body is key to the political imagery of Aztlan: Chicano subjectivity becomes the product of the transcultural processes consciously marked by the acceptance of blended Spanish and indigenous precolonial roots. The idea of transculturation as a form of mestizaje is best exemplified in the art movement that emerged in conjunction with the Chicano movement. The search for identity and collective self resulted in a revival of cultural mestizaje. As a fundamental issue at the heart of the art movement, the mestizo body emerges not as exoticized image but as a complexity of personal, social, and historical experience. In Amado M. Pefia’s Mes#zo (1974), a tripartite head represents the

“encounter” embodied in the Mexican identity as the product of the union of the Spanish and precolonial cultures (see figure 5). The triheaded figure situates the Chicano subject in the middle, between the Mexican and U.S. sides. The overlap of the faces defines mestizaje as the intersubjective and collective experience of intercultural negotiation. The

dialectic embodied by the tripartite head dramatizes the relations

Imaginary Spaces 59

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nurturing aspects at work opposing the atrocities of land abuse. In creatine Madre del Mundo, the artist embodied the demand to “save the land, honor treaty rights, stop nuclear testing on our sacred earth.”*’ From the Chicano nationalist art and theater movements of the 1960s to the emergence of feminist queer bodies and discourses, the racialized configuration of the mestiza ts cast in remarkable ways in Chicana (and Latina) cultural productions. The body and embodiment of the mestiza

74 QUEERING MESTIZAJE

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sculpture symbolizes the nurturing condition of the motherhood against the atrocities of land abuse in the Americas. (Reproduced by permission of La Pena, Austin, TX.)

as the specter of the native woman underlie difterent ideologies, sustain the visibility/invisibility of power relationships, and support the power of colonial and postcolonial discourses. While the embodiment of the mestiza body has shaped the positioning of the subject caught in the desire tor an “origin” in Chicana and Latina cultural productions, there 1s always danger in subsuming the “specter” of the native body. Therefore,

Imaginary Spaces zy it is important to recognize that the claim of the “native” body becomes the attempt to recover an image of identity in which the transformation of the subject is subsumed. The mestiza body and “consciousness” may produce some tensions in the displacement of Indian difference, but as I pointed out in the previous chapter, the claims of the “native” body enact a coalitional heterogeneity that recovers “native” agency in the struggle for social justice.

By relocating their subject position as descendants of the Coatlicue legacy, Chicanas not only detach themselves from the Anglo-American reality of whiteness and “racial purity,” but also, by claiming mestizaje, invoke the unconquered spirit of Aztlan. As envisioned in Libertad by Ester Hernandez (etching, nine by twelve, 1976), this unconquered spitituality represents space as the product of a democratic union where the female body is essentially the creator and instigator of freedom. In this piece, the body of the Statue of Liberty appears in the process of renovation by a female sculptor who has carved the word Aztlan on its base and sculpted a multidimensional body full of indigenous signifiers in place of the otiginal body of the statue.’® The multiplicity of female pre-Hispanic bodies re-created in the Statue of Liberty invokes a fluid cultural space and its potentially counter-hegemonic function. The deceptive familiarity of the statue is in part disembodied, enacting and transforming the physical space into the complex transactions of the native exchange. As the “renovation” of the Statue of Liberty represents the act of recuperating an indigenous “origin,” Libertad is also an emblem of immigration and freedom, which in its new form is claimed through the geopolitical and mythical borders of Aztlan.

Oueering Aztlan: Cthuacoatl’s Legacy in the Twentyjirst Century

The Coatlicue legacy embodies historical origination, mythological configurations, and the potential for hybrid epistemologies, but it also prohibits any possibility of authenticating contemporary native identities,

bodies, or spaces. While I do not believe that there is such a thing as “pure” identity or body, I do believe that the desire for recognition (whether in practice or in theory) represents an authentic engagement of

transformation. It is especially true when communities are forced to

76 QUEERING MESTIZAJE return to the performance of identity. This was the case of many ethnic eroups during the civil rights movements in the 1960s. As an affirming reiteration of subjectivity, this process of recovery always resists a compulsory hierarchical order that manipulates the site of differentiation and altered spaces. In this context, the embodiment of mestizaje becomes a model that proposes the production of cultural meaning. In E/ Plan, the idea of the collective self 1s implicit in carnalsmo—the unity of brotherhood. The idea of sisterhood 1s dismissed by the sites of patriarchy and a heterosexist hierarchy. This sociopolitical ordering is not limited to Chicanas and Chicanos; it is characteristic of the overall social system that affects both men and women, Chicanos and non-Chicanos, alike. Since the early 1970s, the antihegemonic discourse of feminism has played a crucial role in reshaping the idea of Aztlan and the specificity of gender and body politics. Specifically, Cherrie Moraga has moved this

process forward. In “Queer Aztlan: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe,” she proposes a nationalism that would also decolonize the female body:

Chicanos are an occupied nation within a nation, and women and women’s sexuality are occupied within the Chicano nation. If women’s bodies and those of men and women who transeress their gender roles have been historically regarded as territories to be conquered, they are

also territories to be liberated. Feminism has taught us this. The nationalism I seek is one that decolonizes the brown female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth.*?

Moraga’s radical perspective envisions Aztlan as a place where the malecentered, nationalistic specter of the mythical Chicano homeland 1s idealistically transformed into the land of the Chicana-mestiza. This transfor-

mation “genders” the territory as a female brown body, one that will become a place for all raza, heterosexuals and queers. Crucial to Moraga’s transformative model is the notion of “queer familia,” which symbolically contributes to redefine Chicano culture while liberating its heterosexist and homophobic traditions. Since the first publication of Loving in the War Years (1983) to Wazting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (1997), Moraga’s critique gives substance to a new form of kinship and knowledge that resists the politics of cultural nationalism.®° In proposing

queer Aztlan, Moraga extends ideas that are present throughout her

Imaginary Spaces 7 work, expanding the definition of fama in a manner that provides a sense of location for Chicana lesbians.°! The nationalism she proposes is a call for the unification of space, women, and Chicana lesbian desite. The queering of Aztlan not only dislocates the absolute definition of carnalismo and familia chicana from the biological unit to the idea of nationhood, but also places the mestiza body in search of futuristic innovation, full of mythical allusions and utopian attributes. In her play, Zhe Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, Motaga marks this future representational setting in particular ways.°* The main protagonist of the play is Medea, a Chicana lesbian in her early forties. She is a midwife and a curandera (healer) who has also been the lover of Luna, a Chi-

cana in her midthirties. Other characters include Mama Sal, Medea’s aging erandmother in her eighties; Jas6n, Medea’s ex-husband (though they are never formally divorced); Chac-mool, Medea’s thirteen-year-old son; Savannah, Luna’s African American girlfriend; the Coro of Cihuate-

teo, a chorus of women who have died in childbirth; and the Border Guard, who also plays the Prison Guard. Set within an imagined postcolonial site, the play takes place after an “ethnic civil war” that has “balkanized’’ North America and after Medea has been forced to go into exile in the “border region between Gringolandia (U.S.A.) and Aztlan (Mechicano country)” (6). The dramatic time in the play is unpredictable, moving in and out of

the present and the past. In the present time, Medea’s condition as an inmate in a prison psychiatric ward is central. The dramatic action borders the seven-year past leading to her incarceration. By setting the time

in the new millennium (near future), Moraga’s visionary theatricality intends not to separate or displace people but to problematize the reasons for divisions across ethnic/racial/sexual lines. Medea and Luna, who have been exiled from Aztlan, their place of origin, are forced to live in Tamoanchan (Phoenix, Arizona). This is the “unhomed” place where

all queers and other unwanted people are relegated. In the words of Mama Sal, all queers became pilgrims, “Y los homos became peregrinos

... como nomads, just like our Aztec ancestors a thousand years ago” (24). The women’s removal from their ancestral land constitutes part of the tragedy of Medea and her lover. At the beginning of their exile, Medea had hoped some day to be able to return to Aztlan, bringing her erown son with her. But instead she only laments her exile:

78 QUEERING MESTIZAJE Medea. had always imagined we’d return to Aztlan one day with my son grown. I thought they'd change their mind, say it was all a mistake.

Luna. Medea, did you talk to Jason tonight? Medea. Yes.

Luna. What does he wantr Medea. Chac-Mool.

Luna. Whene Medea. Now. Tomorrow. No sé. Soon. He’s sending custody papets. (43-44) Medea receives a letter from Jason expressing his interest in getting physical and legal custody of their son. Apparently, Jas6n also wants to final-

ize their divorce because he plans to marry a young Apache woman. Jason’s future plans do not really bother her as much as the possibility of losing custody of her beloved Chac-Mool. The idea that her son will soon

be living in the oppressive culture that rejects her compounds her tragedy. With this play, Moraga brings to stage the subject of lesbianism again.

Significantly, the nature of the protagonists’ lesbian desires and sexual practices ate openly constructed and ate quite evident in their interactions. Medea embodies the role of the femme, born to be the “beloved.” Luna, as her opposite, embodies the butch who, according to Medea, possesses the touch needed to make women feel like goddesses: Medea. You, you and your kind, have no choice. You were born to be a lover of women, to grow hands that could transform a woman like those blocks of faceless stone you turn into diosas. I, my kind, am a dying breed of female. I am the last one to make this crossing, the border has closed behind me. There will be no more room for transgressions. (46)

The presentation of their femme/butch relationship functions as a mode of introducing the dynamic sexual junction that defines their subject position as lesbians and as transgressors of the space called Aztlan. However, the intent of Medea’s legendary transfiguration offers inescapable evidence of the presence of Aztlan in the performance of mythical bodies:

Imaginary Spaces 79 Cihuatateo Fast. ‘This is how all nights begin and end. [MEDEA emerges from the icon as the “living COATLICUE.” She is uncombed and wears only a black slip. CIHUATATEO EAST wraps an apron around MEDEA’s waist and CIHUATATEO NORTH

hands her a broom. MEDEA begins sweeping. ]

Cihuatateo Fast. A long time ago, before the Aztec war of the flowers, before war, Coatlicue, la mera madre diosa, was sweeping on top of the mountain, Coatepec, when she encounters two delicate plumitas. She stuffs the feathers into her apron, thinking later she might weave them into a cloth for her altar. But suddenly, secretly, the feathers begin to gestate there by her womb, y de repente, Coatlicue, goddess of Creation and Destruction, becomes pregnant. Now, Coatlicue es una anciana, bien beyond the age of fertility, so when her daughter, Coyolxauhqui, learns of the boy-to-be-born, traicion is what she smells entre los cuatro vientos. [LUNA appeats as COYOLXAUHQUL | (55)

While in the play Medea represents Coatlicue, the one who gives and takes away life, Luna embodies the moon goddess. Juxtaposed to Medea and Luna’s lesbian relationship, Moraga’s mythological universe intends to dramatize the Coyolxauhqui/Huitzilopotchli narrative. The dramatist

had previously introduced this Aztec myth in a section “La fuerza femenina” (the feminine power) of her book /he Last Generation. In this myth, Coyolxauhqui fights against the power her brother Huitziloptchli will acquire as the predetermined god of war. When Coyolxauhqui learns that her mother, Coatlicue, will gtve birth to Huitziloptchli, she plans to

mutder her mother. Coyolxauhqui fails and is killed brutally by Huitziloptchli. According to Moraga, in the play Coatlicue represents the “pre-patriarchal” mother, and therefore the resistance of the mad Coyolxauhqui becomes an assertion against “patriarchal motherhood.”®} As an analogy of Coyolxauhqut’s disobedience, lesbian desire functions in the play as an attack on the larger frame of patriarchy. Personally, for Moraga, the power of Coyolxauhqut’s disobedience reflects on her own

50 QUEERING MESTIZAJE tebelliousness and creativity as a writer. In referring to Coyolxauhqui as “La Hija Rebelde” (rebellious daughter), she justifies her own struggles and spirituality as a Chicana-lesbian-writer: I pray to the daughter, La Hija Rebelde. She who has been banished, the mutilated sister who transforms herself into the moon. She 1s la fuerza femenina, our attempt to pick up the fragments of our dismem-

bered womanhood and reconstitute ourselves. She is the Chicana writer’s words, the Chicana painter’s canvas, the Chicana dancer’s step.

She is motherhood reclaimed and sisterhood honored. She is the female god we seek in our work, la Mechicana before the “Fal].7764

It is the reclamation of motherhood and sisterhood as important sionifiers that distinguishes Moraga’s “fuerza femenina” (feminine/feminist power). As part of this knowledge, the recreation of Medea constttutes one of the “fragments” of self-inscription. Medea does not represent a woman who tregerets her role as the transeressor of the social order; she is not the Medea found in many patriarchal narratives. Instead, this Medea embodies motherhood while transeressing her role as a potential lover of men. The issue of motherhood closely connects the dramatist’s

personal experience with that of her protagonist. In the play, Medea laments—as Cihuacoatl lamented the passing of the Aztec empire—the homophobic censorship inhabited in her beloved and estranged homeland, Aztlan. Medea, as the play’s title suggests, 1s the “retold” story of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman.® Drawing from the Greek Medea and the myth of La Llorona, Moraga portrays a woman gone mad between her longing for another woman and for the Indian nation, Aztlan. La Llorona’s presence

in Mexican and Chicano culture dates back to pre-Hispanic, preColumbian times and has persisted in the popular modern and postmodern imagination. La Llorona has been compared to La Malinche because they share the tragic loss of their children.°° Many cultural critics place La Llorona as an extension of La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Malinche. As “mediators,” Anzaldua has suggested, “the true identity of all three has been subverted—Gwadalupe to make us docile and enduring, La Chingada [Malinche] to make us shameful of our Indian side, and La L/orona to make us long-suffering people.’’°? All these mythological and historical

fieures glorify the power of the feminine body in Mexican culture, influencing the epistemology of feminism in contemporary Chicana liter-

Imaginary Spaces ST ature, art, theater, and performance. The narratives of these figures, from the historical Malinche and the mythological Coatlicue to the reverent Guadalupe, represent an unraveling aesthetics of transgression that contests and performs the colonial legacy.

Motraga’s Medea embodies the power and resistance of the native woman who feels a profound connection with the “lost” territory, the one that has been recovered by the Chicano people in her play. Nevertheless, as a Chicana lesbian, Medea is evicted, a homeless exile, because Aztlan has become a place where queer identities are perceived as decadent and harmful to the sense of group collectivity. As in “queer Aztlan,” Moraga decries the male-centered, nationalistic vision of space that perpetuates a specific hierarchical order where race shouw/d matter more than

feminist epistemologies and sexual identities. As a lesbian, Medea laments the dangers of homophobia in the Chicano community bound by the hegemonic limits of patriarchal and heterosexist reproductions. Moraga figures Aztlan’s mythical performativity as the result of binary opposed conditions: indigenous and foreign, heterosexual and queer, same and different, familiar and foreign. This binary opposition places Aztlan as the site of simultaneous limitations and productions. Moraga’s utopic markings place the queer-mestiza body as symptomatic of prohibitive power and spatiality. It is trapped in the symbolic orders of the contact zone. At all levels, these prohibitions sustain a shifting conceptual framework and at the same time situate the subjectivity of the mestiza within an inherent resistance to utopic recuperation.®* In chapter 5, I will

expand on the notion of the queer-mestiza body, opening up another possibility for the analysis of mestizaje. I have examined seminal examples of Chicana visual and performance art and their relation to a cultural legacy inevitably inscribed in transcul-

tural encounters. From the claiming of the “native/mestizo body’—1ts dramatic and theoretical configurations—to Moraga’s queer positioning of the subject and space, the genealogy of Aztlan has tremendously influenced critical discourses and transformed Chicano/a art and performance culture. What is crucial to such a genealogy of space is the belief that we must not solely transgress our historical past, but imagine the future of both truths and myths because the construction of colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial discourses relies on these plots of representation. For Chicana and other Latina artists, dramatists, and performance artists, these discourses are inevitably marked in the necessity to

62 QUEERING MESTIZAJE recuperate the figures of cultural memory and the sites of political agency.

In the next chapter, I continue the discussion of transculturation in the context of mu/atez (mulatto-ness). I will focus on the mulata body as

a genealogy of mestizaje, imagined within and beyond the exoticism charged by its presence in the Latin American and Caribbean contexts.

THREE Relocating the Mutata Body: Beyond E:xoticism and Sensuality MULATA (CLASSIC CUBAN COCKTAIL)

12 ounces light rum 34, ounce dark créme de cacao 1 tablespoon fresh lime juice, or to taste I cup ice cubes Combine all of the ingredients in a bar shaker, cover, and shake well. Strain the w/afa into a martini glass. ‘This combination serves one. —STEVEN RAICHLEN, Miami Spice

Although the blending of chocolate and lime seems incongruous, this recipe calls on these ingredients to flavor a “classic Cuban cocktail.” Traditionally, a wu/ata is served straight up, but it can likewise be made into a

frozen drink by pureeing the ingredients in a blender. Fusing the contrasting flavors of chocolate, rum, and lime gives the mw/ata an exquisite, complicated taste. Sa/ud! When I came across this recipe while consulting cookbooks and other references regarding Caribbean food, I was immediately drawn to look closely at this “classic Cuban cocktail.” I found the grammars implicit in the label w/a/a intriguing because of my interest in race, ethnic, sexuality,

and gender analyses. However, after consulting some of my Cuban friends and colleagues, and finding that they had not heard of the mw/ata cocktail, I grew skeptical of its “classic” nature." But, while in Cuba, I located the cocktail in the menu of its most exclusive hotel bars (such as the Nacional and the Capri). I came across the recipe in different books on Cuban cocktails as well.* Then I concluded that classic or not, the mulata arink represents a cultural and commercial commodity, combining 83

54 QUEERING MESTIZAJE history, pleasure, and consumerism. I also realized that the mw/ata cocktail, like the mulata body, is marked by the effects of transculturation and globalization. (For the purposes of this chapter, I use the term w/ata in

italics to refer to the cocktail, and when I mean the female figure of racially mixed descent, I use the word without italics.) Historically, the term has been used to refer to a mixed-blood individual, the product of miscegenation between a black woman and a white man.’ The word itself is derived from the Latin mu/us, meaning mule, whereas the English term mulatto was used from about the year 1600 onward. The history of the term in the Americas begins with the slave trade that was encouraged by the conquistadors in an effort to help the indigenous population avoid the backbreaking work of the plantation. In this chapter, I mean mulata to encompass mote than a racially mixed female subject who is partially African. Bound to it are all the complexities and unstable processes about how race, gender, and sexuality enact the power relations within colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial discourses.*+ The mulata, in its embodiment

of transculturation, commodification, and eroticization, has influenced the modern and postmodern imagination in the Caribbean, and more generally, in Latin American culture.

Negotiating Mulatez (Mulatto-ness) A synctretic artifact is not a synthesis, but rather a sionifier made of differences. What happens is that, in the melting pot of societies that the world provides, syncretic processes realize themselves through an economy in whose modality of exchange the signifier of there—of the Other—is consumed (“read”’) according to local codes that are already in existence; that is, codes from /ere. —ANTONIO BENITEZ-Rojo, Lhe Repeated [sland

The three ingredients blended in the mw/ata cocktail—chocolate, lime, and rum—embody colonial encounters, the intercultural exchange and the syncretism marked by Antonio Benitez-Rojo in the preceding passage. For him, this syncretism is the product of the cultural interactions between the self and the other, the local and the translocal, the traditional and the foreign. While at first glance these ingredients—chocolate, lime,

Relocating the Mulata Body 8y and rum—may seem no different from the exotic subjectivity enacted (and charged) in many Caribbean and Latin American nations, a closer look reveals that the muw/atas syncretic amalgamation tepresents a confluence of worlds and cultures. As products of transculturation, they mark serious hierarchic imbalances implicated in the invention of the “new” world. Applying the concept of transculturation first to the mu/ata drink, then to the mulata herself, opens new possibilities for understanding the racialized body, its performativity, and the imaginative and creative sites of the contact zone. As discussed earlier in the introduction, the sites stricken by colonization produce the effect of the contact zones where cultural encounters and relations of power are played out. Initially, I will analyze the ingredients combined in the ~w/ata cocktail

in order to mediate transculturation as an historical process. Consider, for example, chocolate. The tree that produces the cocoa bean—an indigenous American plant—was first grown by the Aztecs.’ It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the beans were used to produce chocolate, however. The word for chocolate, xoco/at/, originates

from a combination of Mayan-Aztec linguistic markers. The implicit erammars in chocolate offer original instances of transculturation: now known in Mexico as a mexicanismo (ot americanismo), this chocolate 1s dark,

ranging from black to the color of mulatez. In contrast to the subjectivity reflected in the term mmestizaje, which refers to the blending of the indigenous and the Hispanic worlds (or other European cultures), in the Latin American cultural context, mulatez 1s the marker of the blackhybrid body. Although both mestizaje and mulatez may be associated with relations of power, racial mixing, and the postcolonial imagination, I believe they are best understood as figures of cultural hybridization, countering to the normative, reductive representations of “authentic” racial and cultural identities. Both mestizaje and mulatez are similarly configured in-between the discourses that are mediated by the multiple and often contradictory signifying systems of postcolonialism. Vera M. Kutzinski connects mestizaje and mulatez by classifying the two as a particular type of multiculturalism. While the multiculturalism she alludes to represents the 1980s and 1990s discussion of diversity in the United States, she views it as a framework to locate the cultural, racial,

and ethnic heterogeneity embodied in the term’s relation. She explains that multiculturalism “acknowledges, indeed celebrates, racial diversity

56 QUEERING MESTIZAJE while at the same time disavowing divisive social realities.”° I concur that the consideration of multiculturalism is crucial to any attempt at comprehending hybrid bodies, race relations, and “diversity.” Nevertheless, in

applying this term, the emphasis should be political, not aesthetic or humanistic. Multiculturalism necessarily invokes pluralism beyond the celebration of “racial difference” that had perpetrated the irrevocable paradigm of black and white. It should recognize and value cultural and racial diversity, as well as examine the damages of racism within the sustained ideals of racial superiority that coexist in any history of colonial

and postcolonial societies. The true light of diversity and pluralism attempts to deconstruct the fallacy of racial essentialism. It tries to decolonize knowledge, marking its relatedness with power in a racially dfferentiated society. Multiculturalism not only responds to certain “orders” of domination, but it must perform multiple perspectives in which the hege-

monic body becomes displaced and contested. Thus, the multicultural subject compromises with the conscious politicization of symbolic positioning and repositioning of identity, in contact with but differentiated from others. As forms of Cuba’s multiculturalism, for Kutzinski, mestizaje and mulatez are the result of the creolization and Africanization of

the nation-state. The Africanization was indeed encouraged by the demands for slave labor that accompanied the rapid expansion of Cuba’s sugar industry.’

The second and third ingredients in the w/ata, limes and rum, ate nonindigenous to the Americas. Limes are believed to have originated in India or Malaysia. In 1493, on his second voyage to America, Cristobal Col6n brought with him the citrus stock that produces limes. This fruit soon became a crucial component in the cuisine across the Caribbean and Central and South America. Rum, the last of the three key ingredients in the #u/ata, is found wherever sugar cane is grown. Its motherland

is the Caribbean: Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. For Cubans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans, rum is what tequila is for Mexicans.* It is also common knowledge that rum was a favorite of pirates,

bandits, and slavers. E/ ron, as it is popularly known, represents the “mixed blood” of Caribbean nations.? Nowadays, Cuba produces and markets Ron Mulata, targeting the popular domain. The front and back sides of the bottle features a “mulata” (see figures 14 and 15) with inscriptions indicating that its production was inspired by the legend of Ochun:

Relocating the Mulata Body 87 Inspirando en la leyenda de Ochun, la Venus lucumi de la mitologia Yoruba. El ron MULATA posee un aroma y un sabor muy patticulares, intensos y auténticamente criollos. E] ron MULATA SILVER DRY es fruto de la destilaci6n de aguardientes muy ligeros, afieyedos hasta el punto 6ptimo de envejecimiento. Con cola, ginger, soda y limon crea la mezcla perfecta en todo tipo de cocteles, desde el daiquiri o el mojito hasta el sencillo y sabroso Cubalibre.*°

[Inspired by the legend of Ochtn, the /wcumi goddess from the Yoruba mythology, Ron MULATA has particular bouquet and taste that are intense and authentically Creole. The Ron MULATA SILVER DRY is the product of very light molasses fer-

mented until its optimal point of intensification. With cola, ginger, soda, and lemon, it creates the perfect combination

for any type of cocktail, from the daiquiri or the ito to the simple and tasty Cubahbre.|

The bottle’s inscription places the goddess of love and sensuality in the Yoruba mythology, Ochun, as an embodiment of mulatez and a commodity of popular knowledge."’ In the practice of Santeria, Ochtn is a mulata, descendant of the African goddess. Although the mulata body linked to Ochtin may superficially function as tropes of fixation, I am

more interested in the cultural-religious space constructed by theit knowledge. Popular thought has Ochtn as a native of Ekiti state in Nige-

tia, where she is admired and adored. Her veneration has extended to Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, and the United States. In some places (Cuba, New York, and Florida), santeros and santeras

(practitioners of Santeria) and devotees honor Ochtn as the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre (Virgin of Charity; see figure 16).'* Although many Aftican-Cuban stories speak of Ochun’s love affair with the male osha, in some instances, she is depicted as a whore. As a paradoxical figure, she represents the infusion of cultural values and religious syncretism. Moreover, La Virgen de la Caridad and Ochun occupy a space that negotiates Cuban identity as the result of mulatez. But it is the socioreligious imphcation of this space that points to the unification of the Cuban community—in Cuba and in the United States—which seems to be divided by economic and ideological differences in Castro’s postrevolutionaty era. In his discussion of the relationship between La Virgen de la Caridad and

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Fig. 14. Ron Mulata de Cuba, ’ URY | “Silver Dry” of Ong.) bot- 4 ,..Aeeyy we= L'q tle. (Photo byrum, Ginatront Marie > ze\ Ochun, Miguel de la Torre suggests that it is this symbolic dichotomy that can help create “a theology of reconciliation for Cuba, because It is an authentic—as opposed to an imported—aspect of our Cuban culture.”'> Similar to the iconic Virgin of Guadalupe in Mesoamerica, La Virgen de la Caridad has become a symbol not only representing the divine, but also nationalist ideals or racial independence, and oppression ot cultural syncretism. While their “appearances” in the Americas can be interpreted as the legitimization of the Catholic authorities and their impetus to complete the religious and psychological colonization of the indigenous and African peoples, their portrayals as worena (dark-skinned) virgins propagated the cult as archetypal emblems ot mestizaje/mulatez. Like citrus, sugar cane shoots were brought to the “new” world by the conquistador Col6n during his second voyage. He brought with him several specialists on sugar cane cultivation and several hundred sugar cane

shoots from the Canary Islands. By the eighteenth century, sugar cane was being cultivated throughout the Caribbean. It was Cuba’s primary industry by the nineteenth century. Whether owned and operated by the French, British, or Spaniards, sugar cane plantations have remained a

Relocating the Mulata Body 89

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fairly constant presence in the Caribbean through time, constituting what Benitez-Rojo calls “a predictable state of creolization.”’+ In his article “Three Words toward Creolization,’ Benitez-Rojo examines the notion of creolization through three terms, p/avfation, rhythm, and performance, and

relates the process of creolization as the cause and effect of these words. He suggests that the plantation and its product created a particular culture formed as a crossing, combination, fusion, and mutual transformation of two orf more preexisting cultures. The plantation 1s “the womb of otherness—and of globality.”"* It is the site where cultures developed

and performed themselves “in the different states of creolization that come out here and there in language and music, dance and literature, food and theater.”'® These cultural productions, according to BenitezRojo, are incorporated in the carnival. As one of the most ancient and recurrent celebrations, the carnival culture in the Caribbean has been saturated by the synthesis of diverse West African and Hispanic influences. In numerous studies, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz highlighted the African contribution to Cuban cultural identity and society. In Cuba, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, the institution of slavery made possible

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the formation of what was known since the 1920s as Afro-Hispanic culture. The culture of the Spanish Caribbean signaled the effort to redefine the very concepts of “identity” and “nation-state” with a language cognizant of the African presence. Therefore, the sugar industry 1s unimaginable without considering the African experience in the Caribbean. The production of rum, the third ingredient in the ww/ata, and the production of sugar parallel one another. Initially, both commercial enter-

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prises had the problem of industrial production, which demanded machinery and technicians that did not exist in the newfound territories. All these needs had to be imported from Europe. In fact, capital was necessary to buy slaves and to bring the right machinery for milling, boiling, evaporating, and refining. Sugar became the product of slave toil, and no

Relocating the Mulata Body gI American society seemed capable of exporting sugar without the use of African slave workers. The production of sugar in the Caribbean and its technological discourse “had awakened the Creole landscape from its languid, precapitalist dream.’’"7 Sugar cultivation began the evolution of the plantation regimes in the Americas and brought about the establishment of African slavery. While Spain outlawed slavery among the indigenous population early in the sixteenth century, it permitted African enslavement. In both Spanish America and Brazil, colonialists turned to slaves imported from Africa as new soutces of manpower. The colonialists also devised a labor system for the

indigenous population in Latin America that, although not formally called slavery, had many of the same effects. Sugar plantations became the site for a culture in which the protagonists were in contact but differentiated from others. This culture, in its performative flow, contributed crucially to the emergence of a black sensibility beginning in the nineteenth century. Fernando Ortiz’s classic work Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar examines the dynamic culture that has arisen from the production of sugar and tobacco. Using the discourse of race as an allegory of representation, he marks both products in a fashion that separates them, while at the same time distinguishing the different social and economic orders they embody: Tobacco is dark, ranging from black to mulatto; sugar is light, ranging from mulatto to white. Tobacco does not change its color; it is born dark and dies the color of its race. Sugar changes its coloring; it is born brown and whitens itself; at first 1t is a syrupy mulatto and in this state pleases the common taste; then it is bleached and refined until it can pass for white, travel all over the world, reach all mouths, and bring a better price, climbing to the top of the social ladder."®

In comparing and contrasting sugar and tobacco, Ortiz situates the discussion of race in figurative terms. He represents each product in relation to the other, and marks the “‘color” of each one to differentiate them. At the same time, he considers sugar and tobacco as a form of cultural synthesis. Ortiz defines the production of sugar as a capitalist enterprise, attached very closely to the history of colonization. Interestingly, he uses gender relations to discuss the controversial nature of the two products, popularly known as Don Tabaco y Dona Azucar, 11 an erotic contest.

92 QUEERING MESTIZAJE Tobacco is dark and gendered male by Ortiz; sugar is white and female.

Man and woman ate posited as exclusionary categories within the author’s symbolic grammars: “Sugar is she, tobacco is 4e. Sugar cane was the gift of the gods, tobacco of the devils; she is the daughter of Apollo, he is the offspring of Persephone.”'?

Ortiz’s discursive configurations position both men and women as symbols of both products. By separating the difference between the roles men and women (should) play, Ortiz splits the two but simultaneously unifies the genders, interchanging one for the other in a dialectical competition: “But if where tobacco is concerned women invade men’s field smoking cigarettes, which are the children of cigars, men return the compliment in their consumption of sugar, not in the form of sweets, syrups, ot candy, but as alcohol, which is the offspring of the sugar residues.”’*° The gender analysis proposed by Ortiz recognizes the roles of man and woman as interchangeable categories, but within a traditional framework of domination. When he characterizes men as the primary protagonists in charge of tobacco, he is positioning the gender relations as a definition of one of their interrelated aspects, the man. Although Ortiz’s symbolic nartative of both tobacco and sugar plays on their “gendered” and “racial-

ized” categories, it is the racialized tropes that have more value to him because they attempt to allegorize mulatez, or the cultural hybridization that emanates from their partnership. His generalizations of these gendered tropes, however, give form to subjectivities that are the result of masculinist depictions within the sites of heteronormativity. Significantly, Ortiz discusses the different types of social and economic conditions in the production of both crops. By contrasting both products within their historical peculiarities, Ortiz’s “counterpoint” suggests a dramatic dialectic that he believes offers original ways to discuss the notion of transculturation. It is on this point that I agree fully with Ortiz. His analysis of sugar and tobacco functions as a model for the historicity embedded in the fusion of races and cultures in Cuba as elsewhere in the Antilles. In this context, the very concept of historicity, like the related concepts of subjectivity, experience, and knowledge, marks

the different locations of race in social orders stricken by colonial encounters, slavery, resistance, and so on. Hence, transculturation, as Ortiz defines it, involves a discoutse about the transmission of difference where the performativity of race establishes a set of polarities characterized in terms of the dynamics and demands of colonial expansion. In the

Relocating the Mulata Body 93 Western imagination, the exoticism, eroticism, paganism, and barbarism of the subjected allow invaders or colonizers to project themselves, in

contrast, as rational, legitimate, moral, and Christian. Indian women, mestizas, black women, and mulatas were often used as sexual objects outside of any social commitments. The mulata as a victim of rape and miscegenation became an image impossible to ignore. In art, Cuban vansuardist painter Carlos Enriquez, has depicted the mulata’s body being enslaved in // rapto de las mulatas (The abduction of the mulatas, 1938). This painting stages the history of conquest and slavery. The picture of women being tortured and raped by men carrying firearms is dramatically illustrated. In the words of Juan A. Martinez, this painting “can also be read as a powerful symbol of the genesis of the Cuban people and culture out of the clash of Spain and Africa in the Caribbean.”’*' The violent bod-

ily inscriptions of the mulatas in // rap/o are an image that must be recalled because it points to the power of colonization and locates sexual subjugation as justification of enslavement. The depiction of the racialized and subordinated mulata is defined through the act of miscegenation and the space of the modern self.”

In colonial times, the mulata was held to be inferior to the mestiza because of her legal status as a slave woman. This preference, first for Indian women over black and for mestizas over mulatas, was the product

of social stratification with reference to caste relations. For example, many Spaniards married Indian women who contributed native nobility and significant dowries. In addition, indigenous women were not only free like the Spaniard, but they were already allied with the white men who had made the women submissive to their power. This was the case of Malintzin Tenépal (La Malinche, or dofia Marina) who served as Hernan Cortés’s interpreter and mistress, and became the mother of his mestizo son. Additionally, she became the intermediary between the two cultures. La Malinche, as she was branded by the Indians, has become a symbol of the cultural tyranny embedded in the process of colonization. Artists, critics, and historians have repeatedly noted the historical and mythical representation of La Malinche as a paradigm of the legacy of betrayal, in some cases, proposing new readings as an attempt to rescue her from her condemnation.”? The first victim of the Spanish coloniza-

tion, La Malinche was known for her ability to speak and understand many different languages. By becoming Cortés’s “tongue,” she allegedly

betrayed her people. Some Mexican feminists consider her legacy of

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Tig. 17. La Malinche, by Santa C. Barraza, refablo, 1991. (Reproduced by permission of Santa C. Barraza.)

“betrayal” to be crucial to understanding the conflictive gender relations ingrained in the social and cultural fabric of the country. Chicanas and other feminists are continually revisiting her meaning as a woman who

endured a violent conquest. La Malinche’s legacy and its recurring deployment embody the unresolved upheaval and cataclysm of the contact zone. Her legacy is a crucial testimony that Indigenous women and their “encounter” with Spanish men were predestined by the conquest and by the conquistadors’ insatiable sexual desire for them. As a paradigm of a colonial/sexual encounter and as a cultural construct, her presence traverses further than the geopolitical sites of colonization. La Malinche is a critical force that has shaped both the feminine and teminist

Relocating the Mulata Body 9S consciousness of contemporary mestizas. Santa Barraza’s depiction of this legacy in La Matnche (a retablo, ot altarpiece, 1991), places her within this context: beside Cortés amid the frantic violence of colonization (see fieure 17). But overall, in Barraza’s painting, she is the mother of a new “race” who possesses the power of, and intuition for, survival.*4

Lhe Choreography of the Mulata’s Body

An important twentieth-century poet who has addressed the power of sugat is Cuban Nicolas Guillén. His revolutionary and innovative voice represents the misfortunes of blacks in the cane field and fills Latin American cultural historiography with the topography of the black body. As a mulato himself, Guillén’s contribution to the Afro-Caribbean movement deepened the presence of blacks in Latin America.*> His poetry provides an intense dramatization of colonization as an invasion of evil forces. Guillén’s vision was shaped by conditions during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when American sugar investment had become the core of the Cuban economy, which was incorporated into the U.S. import system. The large American corporations had taken over the bulk of cane production in other Caribbean islands as well.2° The following poem, “Cafia’ (sugar cane), is one of the most striking among Guillén’s collection Songoro Cosongo (1931). The black body is connected to the earth and to the hierarchic mechanisms of the plantations:

El negro The black junto al cafiaveral. in the cane field.

El] yanqui The Yankee sobre el cafiaveral. above the cane field.

La tierra The earth

bajo el cafiaveral. — below the cane field.

jsangre Blood that drains

que se nos val from us!?7 This intense dramatism denounces U.S. economic power and its effects on the black who cultivates the sugar cane; the poem rejects the authority of the yangui who owns the sugar corporations as well. Within this context of despair, Guillén’s “El negro” and “El yanqut” are counterpositioned in relation to the cane field. One is connected physically and

96 QUEERING MESTIZAJE metaphysically to the earth, despite the exploitative conditions in which he works; the other is represented as having no contact with the land. Benitez-Rojo has suggested that the representation of anti-imperialism in poems such as “Cafia’”’ embodies “not only the confinement of blacks to the canefield, but [also] impregnates Cuban society with the libido of the black, thus transeressing the mechanisms of censorship imposed by the plantation.”’** I believe that the act of transgression is very significant in

Guillén’s poetry because it grounded a politics that recognized the specificity of blackness while challenging local and global systems of injustice and oppression. His position was a rejection of the de-Africanization of Cuban culture rooted in colonialism and its attendant system of slavery. His critical consciousness setves as poetic and political vehicle of resistance to that system. Like Marti, Guillén’s revolutionary voice represents and affirms the equality of the races. As with the liberation movements in the 1960s U.S. civil rights struggle, both Cuban thinkers were

vety concerned for the subjugated populations. While Marti’s radical ideals criticized racial inequality in the late nineteenth century, insisting on the redundancy of racial classification, Guillén’s struggle for representation took form in the valorization of africanidad (Africanity), in which he saw the emergence of a new society in the twentieth century.*? Guillén’s

revolutionary consciousness, as illustrated in poems such as “Cafia,” manifests a new vision of culture on which to ground social and political transformation. *°

Although Guillén’s anti-imperialist ideals took diverse forms in his poetry, he is most concerned with producing a culture that exalts the beauty of the black body. This 1s more evident in poems where he captures the sexual eroticism of the rumba danced by a mulata. For example,

“Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio” (The abduction of Antonio’s woman) represents the synthesis of the power of music and the dancing body of the mulata, captured in the poetic imagination: De aqui no te iras, mulata, From here you will not go, mulata,

nial mercado niatucasa; neither to the market nor your home; aqui moleran tus ancas here your ankle will crush

la zafra de tu sudor: the thickness of your sweat: tepique, pique, repique, repique, pique, repique, repique, repique, pique, repique, repique, pique, pique, repique, repique, pique, repique, repique,

ipo! pol}?

Relocating the Mulata Body 97 The dancing body of the mulata is central to the rhythms that make this poem a perfect musical composition, a rumba. Guillén’s poetic interpretation choreographs the mulata’s body, describing her dancing body at the end of the poem as the “cintura de [su] cancidn” (the waist of his song). Musicality and dramatism are central elements 1n Guillén’s works. ‘The

mulata’s body motivates Guillén’s poem, in addition to challenging others (including the mulata’s man, Antonio) who may interfere with her dancing. She is determined to perform the “repique” (beat) of the sound

of music. The performative action behind the abduction of Antonio’s woman—the body of the mulata dancing the popular rumba—tepresents a key ritual in the popular cultures of the Caribbean. Rhythm is carnivalesque and intimately related to the performance of oral cultures and to the popular imagination. In Latin America, as in many other cultures, music tends to brighten up the dark misfortunes of poverty. Especially in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the rumba dance 1s improvisational and celebratory: people gather in the streets, some with instruments, others singing, and then they begin to dance, following the sound of the drums. Unlike

the practice of Santeria, the rumba does not have religious roots. The dance is full of sensuality and erotic movements.’* The influence of rumba can be traced back to the sixteenth century with the arrival of African slaves in the Americas. The “native” rumba folk dance is a sex “theatrics” with extremely fast, exaggerated hip movements, a sensually assettive attitude on the part of the man and a defensive position on the part of the woman. The music has a staccato beat that follows the vigorous communicative movements of the dancers. The musical instruments include maracas, claves (wooden sticks), the bong6, the marimbola (thumb piano or rhumba box), and the drums. In the 1920s the rumba was popularized by the advent of the radio, the Victrola, and the recording indus-

try. Prior to this time, the rumba was only danced and played among blacks in Cuba. It became accepted as a national cultural expression until

the majority had internalized these rhythms. The formation of AfroCuban culture was therefore influenced heavily by the acceptance of these rhythms. The linguistic markers “pique, repique, repique, po” in Guillén’s poem infuse a vety creative language that blends the sounds of musical instruments such as the drums, the bong6, and maracas. According to Kutzinski, this inventive language was traditionally used in mulata poetry in an

98 QUEERING MESTIZAJE effort “to disguise political choices as purely aesthetic ones.”?? ‘This system of production allowed writers such as Guillén to create an original voice, one that gave meaning to the African-European encounter in post-

colonial Cuba. Guillén’s poetic imagination is the imagination of a mulato in a racist environment. In general terms, his work deals with Afro-Antillean or black culture; for him, the mulata’s body is the muse of inspiration, an icon that asserts his own search for national identity. Guillén’s black sensibility was needed 1n Cuba as well as in the Antilles and

Latin America. The search for a black sensibility helped prevent the denial of race and color in the prevailing definitions of Eurocentric critical constructs. For Guillén, cultural and racial affirmation, the vernacular, and social realism are all markers that challenge the canons of “universal” aesthetics. Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos, whose work has been considered a

precursor of negrismo (black aesthetic and cultural movement) in the Antilles, captures the sensualized body of the mulata coupled with the choreography of her movements in ways that are similar to Guillén’s:34

Dale a la popa, mulata, Shake your butt, mulata, proyecta en la eternidad project into eternity

ese tumbo de caderas this beat of your hips que es rafaga de huracan, that’s the hurricane’s gale,

y menealo, and shake it

de aqui paya, de aya paca, —_ back and forth, forth and back,

menéalo, menéalo, shake it, shake it, para que rabie el Tio Sam! to make Uncle Sam rage!??

Like Guillén, Palés Matos depicts the mulata in terms of the way she moves her body when dancing—or even just walking. From the perspective of the poetic subject in Palés Matos’s configuration of the mulata, the “beat” of her body—“back and forth, forth and back’—determines her

position as an object of irresistible attraction. And, based on his own desire, he suggests that the movements of her body would be enough “‘to make Uncle Sam rage.” While the author objectifies the mulata’s body, choreographing the “storminess” of her walk, Palés Matos considers her excessive sensuality as an alternative way to challenge imperialism. He

highlights the movement of her body, thinking that it might cause the rage of Uncle Sam and depicts her as a hip-swaying goddess of sensuality. At the core of Palés Matos’s objectifying configurations and imagina-

Relocating the Mulata Body 99 tive dialectics, the exotic body of the mulata 1s mediated between the defining self and the performativity of “otherness.” In his argument on the exotic, Edward Said employed the term Orientalism. For him, Orientalism is performed (as is the Orient) more in the relationship to the Occi-

dent’s self-image than in any discourse about the Orient.3° It has been argued that the European ideal of sexual difference constructs women as objects of knowledge, emphasizing the superiority of masculinity rather than unmasking women’s historicity. The powerful reflection produced by Said has a parallel in the narratives of or about the Americas. In Palés Matos’s work, it is the image of the mulata in the form of the “exotic other” that defines him as a white Puerto Rican as well as utilizes her body and sensuality to intellectually combat the forces of imperialism. As in Guillén’s discursive configurations, the mulata embodies a charactert-

zation of national identity, incorporating exoticism into this definition while integrating the assertion of self and other. While the exotic, for Palés Matos, embodies an idealized definition of national identity, it becomes associated with desire, difference, and the movement of the mulata body. In both Guillén’s and Palés Matos’s work, the mulata’s body is merely an object of desire and a capturing symbol of mulatez in the Spanish Antilles. As a voiceless, gendered subject and one without a history, the mulata’s sensualized body tells more about the speaking subject’s positionality of desire than about her experiences as a black woman.

Her body is not a fact but a performance, embodying the rhythms of Afro-Cuban music.

Consequently, the culture that emanates from the Afro-Cuban rhythms connects the Americas to the African diaspora while building a bridge for the enhancement of black culture. In the face of callous slavery and marginality, the rumba was used and continues to be used as a form of resistance that helps to maintain black cultural identity. From the otigins of the rumba to the hybrid sounds of salsa music, Afro-Cuban rhythms are perhaps the most common sites in which the Caribbean has been able to globally embody a unique depiction of culture. Although the rumba and the salsa are popular forms of dance and music that reflect on social and political issues, they have likewise contributed to obliterate the existence of racial oppression. In her analysis of salsa, Frances Aparicio

suggests that the lyrics that focus on the black/mulata body and its overemphasized sexualization, function as a masquerade to racial oppression. Her feminist reading of salsa lyrics critiques the patriarchal norma-

100 QUEERING MESTIZAJE tivity embedded in the music culture. Like Kutzinski’s critique of mulata poetry, Aparicio sees salsa music as the result of patriarchal forms that erase the agency of the mulata/black body while transforming it into a commodity of pleasure and consumption.3” Although the ramifications of patriarchy continue to dominate the contemporary sites of Latin pop culture, women musicians such as La India subvert the specter of patri-

archy in distincttve ways. Her mestizo performing body, singing in English and Spanish, takes a very strong position. She sings to Ochtn and pays respect to Santeria, underscoring in her music Afro-Caribbean syncretism. Significantly, most of her audiences are women who like salsa but ate aware of its patriarchal foundation and see her as an alternative fieure. In some of her songs, she sings about taking control of her life, loving who she is without depending on men while demanding to be treated with respect. She is known for her striking looks, set off with sexy clothes and manicured long nails, at times smoking cigars as she sings. But she is much more: as a composer and arranger of her own songs, La India takes control of her creative process as well as her image.3® Then again, long before La India, the same self-determination and antipatriarchal stance was evident in La Lupe, one of the most dramatic figures of Afro-Cuban pop music. La Lupe, or La Yiytyi—born Guadalupe Victotia Yoli in Cuba (1938)—became famous with the onset of the Cuban Revolution in 1960. Her narrative represents an artist in exile (she lived in Puerto Rico and New York) and a mulata musician trying to survive ina male-dominated world. She is considered a precursor in every way to the current Latino music scene. Although La Lupe passed away in 1992

almost forgotten, her music is making a big comeback, particularly among Latinos. This revival started when Pedro Almédovar included one of her hit songs, “Puro Teatro” (Pure theatrics) at the end of his film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988).?? While in different

mainstream venues she is known as the “the queen of Latin soul,’ La Lupe is particularly remembered in Latino circles for her unique live per-

formances, where she occasionally would throw her shoes to the audience, cursing and screaming frantically.4° As an epitome of Afro-Cubanidad (Cubanness), the legacy of La Lupe is impossible to forget. In the words of José Quiroga, she is “an angel of history.” In his tribute to La

Lupe’s comeback, Quitoga writes that she “is the figure that contemplates the catastrophes of the past as the simulacrum of a cabaret.”4"

Relocating the Mulata Body TOI Lhe “Tragic” Mulata: Fictionalized Reality

The mulata epitomizes the in-betweenness of cultural hybridization. Her presence blurs the essential distinction marked by the effects of racial intermixture. In the tradition of Spanish Caribbean literature and cultural production, the mulata body has often been defined and constituted as an extension of oppressive colonial practices, a perspective that helped locate the embodiment of sexuality linked to this colonial order. Since the

nineteenth century, the mulata’s body and her presence have been demarcated in exploitative terms: she has been defined merely as an erotic symbol embodying the African dance or the musical instrument that conducts the movement of her body. Kutzinski insists that as object of desire and product of a masculinist imagination, the mulata’s body “‘is the inscription of a desire for cultural synthesis upon a field of sociopolitical contingencies that is accordingly distorted.’ While the inscription of desire marks the mulata identity as a category that is not exclusively “white” or “black,” the incorporation of European and African signifiers was fundamental in the inscription of the mulata

body. The “encounter” of these signifiers is well represented in the eraphic art of colonial Cuba. For instance, the mulata became a protagonist in many of the lithographic marquillas advertising Cuban cigars and cigarettes: her sensuality was marked within a scenic ethnographic view while documenting the integration of European and African elements (see figure 18).4? This popular art form emerged in the nineteenth century and persisted into the early twentieth century, a span of more than half a century.

Furthermore, in the nineteenth century, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdes 0 La Loma del Angel (Cecilia Valdes or Angel’s Hill) became one of

the most influential novels in Cuba. The narrative highlighted the image of the mulata sensuality and the interracial conflicts bordering her existence.*4 Cecilia Valdés, who is called the Virgencita de Bronce (the little bronze Virgin) by Villaverde in the novel, is the name of the main character, and “la loma del angel” refers to the mulatto community’s ghetto of that time.*> Cecilia is a beautiful light-skinned mulata, strugeling to become part of the white aristocracy. She chooses Leonardo Gamboa to

accomplish this goal, but their ill-fated romance is juxtaposed to her tragedy as a bastard child. She is the illegitimate daughter of Leonardo’s

L02 QUEERING MESTIZAJE

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formance/creation of Pingalito, Carmelita not only traverses genders and sexualities but also creates an excellent prototype of the Cuban chofeo (poking fun), who celebrates the role of the mulata rumbera as the spectacle of national treasures. In the pertormative terms of Carmelita, the mulata is an object and a subject of the diasporic imagination. She repre-

sents the modern and the postmodern spaces, spanning many mythoaesthetic bodies and embedded in the inventiveness of the “new world” largely conceptualized in terms of the dynamics of colonial expansion. As the product of the promotion of b/angueamuiento, the volatile body of

the mulata encapsulates the process of objectification and the institutionalization of racism, sexism, and enslavement.°° The way her body has been constructed with and subjected to male desire is marked as the site

of the performative where gender in essence is feminine but is less siomficant than its erotic subordination. Going beyond the portrayal of the Afro-Cuban woman as an icon of sensuality and sexuality has been

IIO QUEERING MESTIZAJE relevant in recovering the agency of the mulata. To alter these established

conceptions, Cuba’s leading contemporary black female poet, Nancy Morejon, has created a counterdiscourse that redefines the black body. Her writing attempts to recover the historicity of the black body and represents a counterrevolutionary act against male objectification. In Morejon’s “Mujer negra” (1975), the mulata’s saga acquires substance—the subject is located in the decolonizing terms of history: I walked on. This the land where I suffered abuse and whip I sailed the length of all its rivers. Under its sun I sowed, I reaped, I ate none of its harvest. My home was a barracks. I myself carried stones to build it, but I sang to the natural beat of the Island’s birds.”

“Mujer negra” is one of Morején’s most frequently anthologized poems. Structurally, the poem’s dramatism is embedded in sections with different headings; these divisions present history as an organizing device. The

verse titles include images of determined movement: “I rebelled,” “I walked on,” “I rose up,” “I worked a lot more,” “I went off to the mountain,” and “I came down from the Sierra.” The diverse sections also function as a chronology—beginning with the transplantation of the black from Africa and the implementation of slavery, continuing through the

strugele for independence and the nationalist movement, and ending with the Cuban Revolution: I came down from the Sierra to put an end to capital and usurers, to generals and the bourgeoisie. Now I am: only now do we have and create. Nothing ts not ours. Ours the earth. Ours the magic and fancy Equally mine, here I see them dance around the tree we planted for communism. Its wonderful wood now resounds.”

The process of historical transformation in the poem positions the subject—the black woman—as a symbol of resistance and liberation.

Relocating the Mulata Body III Race, gender, and class are implicit foundations of resonance. The dtamatic action of the speaking voice “I,” however, becomes a collective “we,” displacing the power of the gendered subjectivity with the epic history of the black diasporic body. Thus, the black woman’s presence 1s the subject of history, one whose sense of confidence embodies the collective self. It is in such a process that her body foregrounds not the oppression of objecthood as a sexual victim, but her capacity for survival. The performative construction of blackness and not the promotion of b/angueamiento contribute to imagine the mulata’s agency within processes of resionification. Therefore, Morejon’s “Mujer negra’ becomes an embodiment of mediations; reconfiguring the historicity of the subject, the bod-

ily inscriptions of the mulata may represent autonomy. Through the alterity of “Mujer negra,” the black surface of the mulata body can be imagined as the result of the imperative that transcends the invisibility and nonrecognition of Afro-Cuban-Caribbean identity.

Face-ing Performativity

The broader meaning of race emerges when the ww/ata cocktail and the mulata body are examined in relation to each other. While the mwulata cocktail’s implicit creativity must be understood as the product of commodity consumerism, it also represents an embodiment of discursive configurations that has a variety of relationships with its frame, or its

body. Here, the embodied discourse of the mu/ata cocktail helps us understand the constructs of the mulata body, including the diverse processes of her objectification. The mulata’s body as a modeled singu/ar-

ity could be the site where the discursive practices of performativity might be imagined: neither black nor white, but in-between the orders of an enacted differentially. Similar to gender performativity—according to Judith Butler, gender can always be adopted and then performed—tace performativity not only subverts the dominant hegemonic discourse but borders the relation between self and other, black and white (and the inbetween). These relations are rooted in the materiality of histories born of the confrontation between cultural entities of unequal power through which identities of difference are often constructed. When dealing with the mulata’s body, race performativity cannot be theorized apart from heterogeneity, hybridity, creolity, and/or resistance.

II2 QUEERING MESTIZAJE Because it cannot be located without granting access to both black and white, the need to speak of cultural difference embraces the desire to escape essentialism and proves that although white and black are separate and distinct, both take part in structuring the intricate genealogy of the mulata body. Understanding this dynamic means attending simultaneously to both aspects: the mulata body as metaphorical figure for the cul-

tural division between the two—black and white—and as a nonmetaphorical symbol marking the narrative embedded in slavery, male desire, and the process of self-invention. As Kutzinski states, the mulata’s body “may be feminine in appearance, but much more significant than its gender attributes is that it is the site of an erotic ‘performance’ represented as feminine.”°3 In her analysis of cubanidad (Cubanness) and the portrayals

of the mulata, Kutzinski conceives such a body marked by sexual and racial differences. By suggesting that the mulata body has all the attraction of a mythical site, Kutzinski looks at this body in its relation to being cap-

tive and absent but continuously displayed as a spectacle. She argues throughout her book Swgar’s Secrets that the mulata body produces the character of women’s oppression under the rule of many different systems. Indeed, as a signifier of a masculinist imagination, the mulata’s specificity is denied and asserted simultaneously. This visible/invisible paradox marks the process of objecthood/subjecthood affected by the cultural deracination, which functions as the intellectual and emotional counterpart to enslavement. It offers a way of looking at the performativ-

ity of race within a circulating model of cultural exchange because the mulata’s body subverts metaphysical, cultural, and racial boundaries. The subversion works against the imperialism of “purity” that has seriously influenced the problem of xenophobia by maliciously obscuring the polyvalent agency that may define particular kind of bodies. Kutzinski’s analyses are foundational in marking the mulata body as

an epistemology of the same cultural diversity that has suppressed her agency as black/female/body. However, I find her examination of the dynamics implicit in the relations of power between colonizer and colonized wanting. This power relation produces a multidimensional narrative of conquest, rape, and displacement, in which the mulata body becomes in effect a narrative of “invisibility,” created by the colonizet’s patronymic power. While the sexuality of the mulata was defined as highly captivating and fascinating, it was actually being debased to the natural primitiveness and lower order of the colonized Other.

Relocating the Mulata Body 113 If one can reconsider the mulata’s physical and psychological trauma as a subjected/enslaved body in relation to Caliban’s sense of Otherness in Shakespeare’s /empest, a number of binary oppositions come to mind:

normal/queer, civilization/primitivism, good/evil, and enslavement/ resistance.°+ Both traverse the ambivalence of usurped identities and the inevitable tragedy that is constitutive of colonial and repressive social

otders. But as Caliban has been retaken in the Caribbean and Latin America as a symbol of resistance to Eurocentric and neocolonial thought, the envisioning of an America mestiza contributes to dismantling the colonial power that has stripped the black and indigenous populations. In response to Shakespeare’s symbolic world and dramatic characterizations in the The Lempest, many Latin American and Caribbean intellectuals have adapted it as powerful metaphor for their colonial and postcolonial experiences. One of the most recognized figures is Cuban Roberto Fernandez Retamar, whose controversial essay “Caliban: Notes towatd a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” transformed the “‘savage” slave Caliban into a defiant revolutionary.®’ Significantly, the oppressor’s language learned and used by Caliban to fight Prospero 1s atticulated within “the ambivalence of mimicry,” which, according to Bhabha, becomes the site of resistance. This appropriation of colonial discourse allows the subjected/slave/colonized to construct a subaltern identity imagined as a “copy” of the colonizer that, contradictorily, “is at once resemblance and menace.’ While the “essence” of Caliban has been revisited in response to the

trauma of colonization and neocolonization, the characterization of Miranda, the only living female in the island, has been notably ignored by many critics. She, like Caliban, was subjected to distinct orders of suppression imposed by her father, Prospero: political authority and sexual repression mark their relationship. In fact, the Miranda-Prospero kinship

illustrates a form of patriarchy impossible to overlook in the play. The control Prospero has over Miranda and his fixation over the preservation of her “virgin-knot” capture the way power is related to sexuality. Her submission and obedience to Prospero epitomize the “ideal woman, reinforcing the desirability of chastity and beauty. She is referred to as a “ooddess,” deliberately kept innocent and immature. And although she is used in the play to typify the ideal woman within Elizabethan times, she also embodies the ideals of marianismo, which it is deeply rooted in the vender relations of the Americas’ colonial societies.”

II4 QUEERING MESTIZAJE The context in which Caliban is retaken as paradigm of liberation in Caribbean and Latin American discourses is traversed by many conttradictions. Kutzinski has pointed out that in its original reconsideration— by Fernandez Retamar—the appropriation of Caliban formulates for Cuba and Latin America a heterosexual romance of mestizaje.°® While Caliban has become a paradigm of resistance to colonial and neocolonial otders, his hypersexualization in the play is overtly marked. This is manifested through Caliban’s own quest for power, which includes his plans to abduct and seduce (rape) Miranda. Only Prospero’s obsession in protecting the “purity” of her daughter for a more suitable candidate (Ferdinand), prevents Caliban from fulfilling his desires. Nevertheless, the rela-

tionship between Caliban and Miranda underscores their mutual enslavement, touching on both sexual objectification and racial subordination. Their relationship, linked to the “patriarch” Prospero, characterizes oppression under the rule of many different systems. Symbolically, I see in their interactions the partial “effect” of the mulata’s subordination

in the nineteenth century as well as the explicit control of interracial sex—sex between swarthy Caliban and fair Miranda would never have been permitted nor accepted by Prospero. Patriarchal power perpetuates the relations of power, giving meaning to the mulata as subject of masculinist reculations while providing the exotic pleasure for the male gaze. Kutzinski critiques the masculinist lineage of mestizaje as a replication of phallocentric relations of power, which, in the Lacanian frame of reference, would configure the distinction between male and female while involving the repression of all that is female.

In a more recent reading of Lhe Tempest, “El Diario de Miranda/ Miranda’s Diary,” performance artist and theorist Coco Fusco identifies with Miranda while subtly denouncing the lack of attention this female character has received in Caribbean and Latin America postcolonial discourses. In her “diary,” Fusco is not only speaking as a woman but as Cuban, feeling torn by the collective exile of her community. She sees

herself as a modern-day Miranda, forced to understand, like Shakespeate’s character, “her identity as different from the fiction that had been propagated by her symbolic father.’°? Although it is not clear in Fusco’s diary how Lhe Lempest’s Miranda learns to distinguish her identity in the context of her oppressive circumstances, it is obvious that as a sec-

ond-generation Cuban American, Fusco feels the need to question the inherited dogmas (communism and capitalism) that had divided her fam-

Relocating the Mulata Body IIS ily and community, inside and outside the island. She says, “The Mirandas of the present, myself among them, continue to undertake these journeys, straying far from the fiction of identity imparted to us by our symbolic fathers.’’7° Interestingly, Miranda allows Fusco to understand the nuances of Cuban exile politics and the contradictory sites of translocality. While Fusco’s identification with Miranda lacks analysis and may be problematic, I read it as Fusco’s attempt to capture a feminine lineage, counteracting the male lineage consolidated in the reclaiming body of

Caliban. On the other hand, in identifying with the fair Miranda, she paradoxically situates herself apart from her indigenous or African heritaee—such is a dilemma constantly negotiated by women of color, mixed-race in particular. Fusco’s overall work as an interdisciplinary artist aptly navigates the

transcultural sites of the postcolonial Americas. As a mulata, she writes/performs out of the experience of living between worlds, in which the fetishization of Otherness becomes a mediation of the tensions generated by the contact zones. This is distinctively illustrated in Zo Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992), in which Fusco, together with Gomez-Pefia, was on display for a few days in a large cage as “authentic” indigenous people.’’ Dressed in a hybrid “exotic” Amerindian style, they

were impersonating fictional islanders from the Gulf of Mexico. The installation was an experiment that interpreted the history of the socalled discovery of the Americas. The cage performance within the instal-

lation became an important component of the project, which presented the couple as “undiscovered Amerindians.” Through stereotyping, the fetish body of the colonized, the “native,” is simultaneously marked and erased in a performance of colonial difference. The obvious location of these “caged” bodies functions as an act of resistance to the colonial system embedded in the Americas’s conflictive racial relations. As I link

Fusco’s characterization of the “native” body with her theoretical “Miranda self,” the paradoxical figures of mulatez may be captured in

distinct processes of self-identification. This can be exemplified in another collaboration with Gomez-Pefia, “Norte: Sur/A PerformanceRadio Script,” in which Fusco explains the self as the result of multiple encounters: “My name is Coco Fusco, and actually, I was born in the U.S. and am genetically composed of Yoruba, Taino, Catalan, Sephardic, and

Neopolitan blood. In 1990, that makes me a Hispanic. If this were the [t9]50s, I might be considered black.”’* Through her performance char-

116 QUEERING MESTIZAJE acter of “La Authentic Santera” (a witch) in “Norte: Sur,’ Fusco further patticipates in integrating the hybridization that explains the contradictory sites of mixed-race: People were still confused about whether I was black or not. A[t] the end of high-school, three administrators—a black, a Chicano, and a Jew—were deciding if I was eligible for a minority scholarship, [t]he black said no, the Chicano said yes, and the Jew said that I should ask my mother if we had any African ancestors. They were not convinced by my little Afro. Have you ever thought of your ancestors???

In dialogue with her collaborator, Fusco’s mulatez is configured based on the ambivalence of racial identity, ultimately, torn between worlds: the black and white and/or the European and indigenous/African. From her characterizations in the 7wo Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West to her

role as La Authentic Santera in “Norte: Sur,” the representations of hybrid bodies are indicative of the borderline experience and of affirmations that resist binary opposition of race and culture as homogeneous polarized narratives of the Americas. Notably, the heterosexual romance within these affirmations of hybrid bodies is perpetuated in the disyunctive and asymmetrical binary of masculine/feminine interactions.’+ Like Gloria Anzaldua, writing/performing marks Fusco’s body, inscribing it as a woman of color. But if Anzaldua insists on “queering’”’ her mestizo body as a mechanism to denounce compulsory heterosexuality, Fusco’s enactments of mulatez and engagements with Gomez-Pefia are appositionally defined through the performances of heterosexuality. The discursive construction of heterosexual desire is consciously and uncon-

sciously marked, though never instituted through the sites of heteronormativity. The “caged” couple transcends the limits of normative sexualized bodies: through the fetishization of “native/indigenous” difference, the lineage of mestizaje/mulatez 1s queerly configured in the thresholds of liminality. As an in-between space of multiple temporalities, aesthetics, and locations, the liminal space disrupts the sites of heteronormativity to construct unfixed identities.’”° Through transculturation and its intercultural negotiation, the performativity of race can be traced to the genealogy of the mulata body in confrontation with Otherness, its romanticization, commodification, and resistance. Nevertheless, the mulata body transgresses the boundaries of blackness and whiteness, while it challenges the myth of racial purity. If

Relocating the Mulata Body 117 the theories of gender performativity have multiple sources, the performativity of mulatez must interconnect the space for racial, social, and cultural coexistence. In this context it would be unthinkable to speak of the mulata without making references to a “passing” body as a site of disruption in the epistemology of racial difference. When mulatez or “mulattoness” is the figure of “passing,” the interrelation of visibility and appear-

ance may clash in unsuspected and challenging ways. But the very possibility of hybridity as symbol of presence not only resists the space of contestation but also consolidates the split conditionality of the subject.

As a hybrid body, which can perform whiteness and blackness, the mulata’s subaltern agency becomes a reinscription of the divided and

hyphenated self. In Jennifer DeVere Brody’s terms, the “hyphen performs—t is never neutral or natural,’ because it marks “the tension between assimilation and difference.””°

Similar to the racial imperatives instituted in the native-mestiza body,

analyzed in the previous chapter, the conception of the mulata body requires close attention to the diverse processes (historical, cultural, and social) that have shaped her object/subject position. What is crucial to such trajectory is the inscription of a racialized and sexualized body produced as the object of colonial systems (including slavery) and formed as a discursive subject who may resist these systems. As reflected in Nancy Morejon’s “Mujer negra,” the imperatives of blackness suggest a form of agency that may help to locate the epistemology of the mulata as part of

a collectivity that asserts the history of the African-Cuban woman. Within these configurations, the body of the mulata becomes an assertion that can be imagined beyond her erotic camouflage and within the liberatory discourses of women of color that emerged in the early 1980s. The need to assign agency to the mulata body is an effect of the belief that the knowledge of “color” (race: brownness or blackness) demands serious engagement with distinct historical processes, which can locate the racialized body within the epistemologies of colonial/decolonial regimes. As I intend to elaborate in the next chapter, these processes help to negotiate the space of the “colonized” while situating the mestiza body as an assertion of the inevitable “Hispanization” process of the Filipino culture.

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Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestixaje and Its Gendered Body Because “‘white is beautiful,” Filipinas have adopted a ridiculous pout to contract their full, sensuous lips into proper smallness. Because white is beautiful, brown has become criminally ugly. —Nicanor G. Tiongson, The Urian Anthology, 1970-1979

In his essay “Four Values in Filipino Drama and Film,’ Nicanor G. Tiongson analyzes the colonial aesthetics of Filipinos by means of four principles, which he characterizes as markers that defined the encounter between the indigenous and the foreign.' He further demonstrates how vatious dramatic forms helped perpetuate these beliefs, emphasizing the cultural impact they have had on Filipinos—from stage to screen and

from colonial times to contemporary forms of expression. One such value he critically examines is Maganda ang Mapui (“White is beautiful’),

which, according to Tiongson, is a product of the excesses of both the Spanish and the American colonial regimes. As an example of a leading cultural expression that popularized and perpetuated the ideal “white 1s beautiful,” he offers the Aomedya.* During colonial times, the komedya helped sustain the authority of the Spanish regime in the Philippines, while simultaneously constructing new forms of art. Moreover, it helped facilitate the colonization of a new land and people near the already conquetred territories in the Americas.’ The introduction of the Spanish comedia in the Philippines significantly

shaped the consciousness of the natives, who learned to appreciate the “aesthetics” of whiteness through the idealized representation of the Western world embedded in the comedia’s theatrical form. In Spain, the comedia was used to spread the idea that all Christians and Europeans 119

I20 QUEERING MESTIZAJE were superior to the Moors, while the komedya in the Philippines allowed the conquistadors to use the stage as a medium for propagating Christianity. For instance, in the 1609 performance of // martirio de Santa Barbara (The martyrdom of Saint Barbara), the saint’s ascension to heaven and the subsequent destruction of those who had tortured her were aimed at convincing the natives to burn their amulets and the statues of their ancestral gods.4 This piece was produced by the Jesuits in the southern province of Bohol and performed by the natives in their own language. Since the comedia was clearly introduced in the Philippines to reinforce the notion that suffering and obedience are key attributes of good Christian subjects, when the target audience absorbed this message, the result was a particular form of colonial otherness. Tiongson suggests that the komedya “not only made the ‘indio’ cheer and champion the cause of white Europeans who, favored by God and miracles, invariably defeated the Moors, but also demanded a standard of beauty that legitimized and made the ideal the bastard or the mestizo.””’ In addition to bringing about a national inferiority complex, the idolization of “white” became linked with cultural mestizaje and colonial representation. This process began in 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan landed on the Philippine island of Cebu,

claiming it for Spain, and continued beyond 1898, when Agustin Aguinaldo declared the Philippine independence in Kawit, Cavite.° For

more than three centuries of colonial intervention, the Philippines’ indigenous culture clashed and grappled with Spanish lifestyles and Western morals. The komedya subliminally forced the Filipinos to look at the world through the colonizet’s ideals. This insidious strategy affected the entire

culture that fell under the yoke of Spanish rule—a transformation | explore in this chapter. While my general focus attempts to mark a simple but critical transition in postcolonial Spanish studies, the location of

mestizaje beyond the borders of the Latin America/U.S. Latino/ Caribbean parameters suggests a connective framework between the East and West, the Americas and Asia, Aztlan and the “Pearl of the Orient.”’ The objective here is to analyze the way mestizaje was materialized

in the literary expression and political contributions of José Protacio Rizal Mercado (José Rizal), one of the Philippines’s most widely known

nineteenth-century authors. Like José Marti in the Americas, Rizal belongs to the /¢rados (the lettered people) who inserted a political discourse into the ideological debates that integrated nationalist ideals in the

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestazaje and Its Gendered Body 121

midst of turmoil.* As a member of the wealthy mestizo elite of his time, Rizal resented that his upward mobility was limited by the colonizers’ insistence on promoting only “pure-blooded” Spaniards for governmental positions. Therefore, an examination of his writings and subject position as a mestizo and revolutionary idealist has considerable relevance for an analysis of mestizaje, not only with regards to its colonial history but as it relates to the contemporary era. Then I move from Rizal’s writings and life experience to situate the mestiza body as an epistemology of the same legacy that he passionately illustrates and condemns. By discussing a mestiza subjectivity that emerges as the result of the excess of colonialism in the nineteenth century, I investigate how the transformative discoutses of women of color in the United States have radically influenced

the emergence of a queerly configured mestiza alterity in Filipina/o American culture. This identification is key in the book: while my general

aim is to examine mestizo cultures as epistemologies of colonialism across multiple postcolonial Spanish sites, in looking at the Filipina-mestiza gendered body in this chapter, I intend to mark another genealogy of mestizaje influenced mainly by postcolonial theorizations and the nartra-

tives of cultural difference that emerged as the result of colonial “encounters.” Since Spanish colonial history of the Philippines started the same year Hernan Cortés conquered the Aztec empite in 1521, the Philippines, as still another postcolonial site, contributes to situate the Spanish empire globally and to connect common histories of colonized people to sixteenth-century Spain and its exertion of Western-Iberian expansionism and religious fervor. This culture, dertved from a country that was experiencing its Szg/o de Oro (golden century), cultivated by Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca, is eventually a legacy that transformed the pre-Hispanic indigenous cultural traditions in both the Americas and the Philippines. Fitstorical/ Theoretical Links to Filipino Mestizaye We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth. This is the case of every society, but I believe that in ours the relationship between power, right and truth is organized in a highly specific fashion. —MicHew Foucautt, Power/ Knowledge

[22 QUEERING MESTIZAJE The borderline of postcolonial critique demands certain linkages that assett the meaning of the contact zone as paradigm of a history generated by the perpetual struggle between opposing entities that consequently

looks at the past as a way of confronting the present. This assertion would imply that history, in the Foucauldian vision of the world, is the site of conflictive episodes. Although it is common knowledge that Foucault was not really interested in connecting the West and its colonial history, his exploration of subjectivity, the body, and the exercise of power constitutes a useful epistemology in postcolonial debates. His theories and vision of the world emerged from the history of a Europe reshaped in the colonies and by the compulsory urge of categorizing certain people in colonized nations (Asia, Africa, the Americas, etc.) for purposes of sutveillance and regulation. If history for Foucault is marked by the contestation of power, the rule of difference needs to be considered central to colonial histories in order to differentiate colonizer from colonized or “civilized” from “primitive.” In the aftermath of Spanish colonizations,

the various mestizo nations that emerged represent the paradoxes of these transferential relations. For Spain, the desire for expansion, conquest, and power in its Golden Age is the result of a long history of warfare across the Iberian Peninsula against the Moors (Muslims) who had conquered Spain in 711, control-

ling it for three centuries.? Although Spanish history called them “Moors” (probably because they arrived by way of Morocco), they themselves never used the term. They were Arabs, from Damascus and Medina, leading armies of North African Berber converts. Soldiers all, like the Spanish colonizers in Latin America and the Philippines, they brought no

women with them; most married into Spanish and Visigoth families or took fair Galician slaves as wives. From this particular clash of racial and cultural “encounters” sprang the Moorish civilization and a journey that would change Spain forever. But after the beginning of the reconquista

(reconquest) in 1085 by the Christian kingdoms, the Moorish Spain slowly declined. The Moots remained in Spain until Ferdinand of Arag6n and Queen Isabella of Castilla merged their kingdoms, forcing them and the Jews to leave Spain. Some Moots remained in Spain under strict reg-

ulations and were converted to Christianity.'° They became known as moriscos, while those who remained faithful to Islam were called mudeéjares.

Even as the Moorish civilization in Spain gradually disappeared, their presence and contributions in art and architecture remained indelible.

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestazaje and Its Gendered Body 123

The long presence of Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula contributed oreatly to the processes of transculturation in which the influx of mixed race transformed Spain into a miscegenated product, and even an African one."' In fact, one can trace Spain’s mestizaje from various factors: the occupation of the Moors, the African slave trade, and the Gypsies, who apparently migrated out of India into Europe as early as the eleventh cen-

tury. When the persecution against non-Christians began during the “cleansing” period, Jews and Muslims were expelled, but the Gypsies were only listed as people that needed to assimilate or be driven out."* With the success of the Christian reconquista, colonizing Spain represented a history that integrated the discourses of warfare and the combative ambitions of individuals in pursuit of wealth, fame, and status who

ventured through the Atlantic Ocean to conquer and dominate other worlds. Claudio Esteva-Fabregat discusses the historical moment in which Spanish expansionism was aimed at the Americas, indicating that the sixteenth-century Spain was well incorporated into the general discoutse of the great Mediterranean civilizations. He rightfully alludes to

the multiracial infusion generated through the conjectural forces of translocality:

Racially, Spain combined in its constituent types the genetic infusion catried out there successively by other groups—Celts, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, and Arabs—each of which represented in its historical moment a qualitative energy that entered

selectively into the renewed Iberian populations. When Spain expanded into America, they were thus a mixture of Caucasian varieties with small admixture of Negro—and even Mongoloid—genes, absorbed and even dissolved by the great Caucasian mass throughout the process of racial exchange.”

The discussion of a racially mixed Spain is constitutive of an ethnic mestizaje that was practically homogenized in the processes of Christianization and Europeanization that absorbed the Arab and African individuals during the previous seven centuries. The religious fervor and nationalist ideals with which Spaniards fought created a society that grew out of the

conquered while erasing the “color line.” The consolidation of Spain through the reconguista, then, is intrinsically connected to its processes of

external colonialism and expansionism. In the years that followed Columbus’s “discovery” of the “New World,” Spain had conquered

124 QUEERING MESTIZAJE most of the Americas from Texas to the Southern Cone, sending hidalgos such as Hernan Cortés to govern the “New World.” The conquistadors were fortune-hunting adventurers, while others from Spain, such as the clerics, came to the Americas fired with religious fanaticism and determined to convert the non-Christians of the “New World.” But the Christianization of the Indian cannot be explained by religious fervor alone. The church of the Spanish colonization was as much a political otganization as a religious institution. Its participation in the Americas’ conquest magnified the political power of the church. And though the kings of Spain considered the salvation of the Indians to be secondary, they used the church to control the Indian populations by turning them into a loyal labor force for the colonialist to use in exploring unsettled areas where natural resources such as minerals were located."4

The colonial history of the Philippines is tied to the Americas in sionificant ways.'’ Because the geographical distance between the Philippine Archipelago and Spain is great, the former was governed by Spain via the vice-regal outpost of Mexico for two and a half centuries. From 1565 to 1815, the intercontinental links between the two colonies botrdering the Pacific Ocean were so close that the Philippines often became

identified as a colony of Mexico, not Spain. Indeed, this connection materialized with the creation of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade after Father Andres de Urdaneta, sailing in convoy under Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, discovered a return route from Cebu to Mexico in 1565. It continued into the early nineteenth century when Mexico’s war of independence and the Napoleonic Wars put a permanent stop to the galleons. The galleon trade brought shipments of silver bullion and minted coin that were exchanged for Chinese goods, mainly silk textiles. There was

actually no direct trade with Spain—exchanges took place through Manila, where goods were sent to Spain by way of the Americas.

Through the Philippines and its galleon trade, Spain attempted to develop contacts with China and Japan to expand its Christianization

efforts in Asia, but did not succeed. The Philippines became the Spaniards’ only colony in Asia, and they successfully converted the Filipinos to Christianity.’ The only group that resisted this effort of reli-

gious conversion was Filipino Muslims in the southern region of the country.’? Although undifferentiated racially from other Filipinos, they remained outside the mainstream of national life, set apart by their religion and cultural values. Because King Phillip Il of Spain wanted to col-

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestazaje and Its Gendered Body 125

onize the Philippines without the same level of force used in the sansuinaty conquest of the Americas, and because of the natural defense provided by bodies of water separating the Philippine islands, the resistance and efforts of the Filipino Muslims to maintain their autonomy prevailed. Ironically, while the reconguista of the Moots gave Spain the drive to conquer other worlds, Muslim resistance and sovereignty again mark a failure in Spain’s colonial system. State and church were inseparably linked in carrying out the coloniza-

tion/Christianization of the Philippines. The state took administrative responsibility, such as funding expenditures and selecting people for the new ecclesiastical authorities who became responsible for conversion of the indigenous population. Among the several religious orders that took this responsibility were the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Jesuits, known collectively as the friars. On the other hand, the colonial

tule implemented a colonial administration that reached out to the municipal levels through the “political” function of the gobernadorcillo (a

type of governor), who served as an official representing the Spanish authorities while supporting an oligarchic system of local control. Within this system, the principata (principals), or community of landholders, like the Americas’ caciques, were responsible for replacing the idea of communal use of land with individual ownership. The principata, as an oligarchic

system, became mote influential than the preconquest nobility. This eroup had local wealth, high prestige, and certain privileges, such as exemption from taxes. In the nineteenth century, mestizos often associated with the principala by marrying into a cacique family.

While Spain attempted to colonize the Philippines the same way it did

Latin America, it did not transform the archipelago into a “Hispanic” nation. The adoption of Western-Iberian culture was relatively minimal in the Philippines, and instead, its precolonial Asian (Malayan) culture remained dominant. Historian John Phelan provides some reasons why the Philippines failed to become a Hispanic nation.'* The Philippines lacked the needed mixed-race population to help Hispanicize the coun-

try. The extensive miscegenation that took place in the Americas occutred at a substantially reduced rate in the archipelago. Furthermore, a smaller number of Spaniards ventured to the Philippines since it lacked natural resources such as gold and silver to attract them. On top of that, more Spanish friars (exclusively Caucasian) than laymen turned up. In some provinces, the friar and the mayor were the only “white” residents.

126 QUEERING MESTIZAJE Racial composition is one of the most notable differences between Latin America and the Philippines. While the mestizos became the majority in the postcolonial Americas, most Filipinos are of indigenous Malay descent, and the ratio of mixed Spanish-Malay in the Philippines ts

comparatively small. Nevertheless, the influences and contributions of the mestizo people in the Philippines are distinct, and their presence is linked to the creation of the modern nation in the nineteenth century. In Latin America, the meaning of mestizaje was neatly synonymous with “bastard.” The majority of the mestizos were poor and uneducated, comprising an inferior socioeconomic class. For every mestizo who gained a comfortable place in society, there were a hundred others who remained in miserable circumstances. In contrast, the mestizo population in the Philippines became associated with ownership and prosperity, and the term mestizaje was equivalent to socioeconomic potential gained by a disconnection from the indigenous. While for most of the colonial period in Latin America, mestizos were grouped socially with Indians, blacks, and mulattos, in the Philippines, they were socially comparable to the Peninsulares Aberian-born Spaniards). Culturally, the mestizo people adhered to values and beliefs generally compatible with those emerging in colonial Spanish-America. Both in the Philippines and in Latin America, mestizos could become “white” simply by adopting the Spanish language and Hispanic culture. Such social self-transformation indicates the existence of certain fluidity in the system of racial classification created by the newly

formed states in postcolonial Spanish sites. This method of racial classification, Esteva-Fabregat points out, “assumes the organization of a system where racial mobility is culturally conditioned.”'? There is no doubt that racialization in postcolonial Spanish sites was marked by cultural factors and by an economy that depended on a specific (adopted) lifestyle. Moreover, there was a close connection between an individual’s financial status and the degree to which her/his adopted racial identity was legitimated by others—the wealthier you are, the mote likely you will be accepted. Hence, by breaking down racial stratification, the mestizo people transformed the caste system into a system of classes.

Vicente L. Rafael has identified mestizaje (which he calls “mestizoness’’) as “the capacity, among other things, to speak of different registers, as if one’s identity were overlaid and occupied by other possible identities.””° He speaks of mestizaje in the Philippines as a mythologized

phenomenon embodied in the contradictions of colonialism: ““To be

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestazaje and Its Gendered Body 127

mestizo/a is to imagine one’s inclusion in a circuit of substitutions. It is to cultivate a relationship of proximity to the outside sources of power

without, however, being totally absorbed by them.’*' Rafael firmly locates mestizaje in the intercultural experience, the product of cultural transactions and negotiations. For him, the subject position of the mestizo/a adopts the colonial order without being totally subsumed by it. As such, mestizaje opens up a space of negotiation in which the subject ts constituted through the cultural coexistence of social hierarchies. The negotiations Rafael makes allude to the sites of transculturation, in which cettain values and traditions are transformed through the adoption of and contact with another culture. Rafael later noted in his book White Love and Other Events in Filipino History that “unlike the United States, but

more like Latin America, mestizoness in the Philippines has implied, at least since the nineteenth century, a certain proximity to the sources of colonial power.”** While this analysis of mestizaje is true in the Philippines, as its mestizos had more wealth, education, and access to power through their Spanish contacts, it is not accurate with respect to mestizaje in Latin America, where the term itself carried a pejorative connotation of “bastard.”*} Contrary to the privileged economic position enjoyed by the mestizo elite in the Philippines, the nineteenth-century mestizos in Latin America were a majority underprivileged class. And though in both colonial orders, social status was not necessarily determined by the color of skin or ethnic background, economic success was a determining factor for social mobility. Perhaps this difference can likewise be explained in terms of the distinct demographic numbers, the large Latin American mestizo population versus the much smaller mestizo population in the Philippines, which was easier to accommodate in Spanish circles. On the other hand, the new sense of mestizo identity that emerged in the nineteenth century had similar political effects in both locations, specifically with the development of an independent, anticolonial, and nationalist

movement that confronted the repressive and corrupt colonial order with the “pen” and the “sword.” In the mid-nineteenth century, there were around twenty thousand Spanish mestizos in the Philippines, a group comprised mainly of wealthy landowners, ot hacenderos. Known as the heirs of the legacy of the s/ustrado

(enlightened class or highly educated men), these nineteenth-century mestizos were part of an elite community that established a new nationalist identity—they used and reinterpreted the term F7zipino—and took

128 QUEERING MESTIZAJE advantage of their socioeconomic position.*+ During the colonial period, the term /7/pino was used similarly to Cro//o (Creole) in Latin America,

implying a Spaniard born in the colony (of unmixed descent). Another term synonymous with Filipino was /nswlar. The Spaniards born in Spain were denominated in the Philippines as Penznsulares. The term Fiipino was

revolutionized during the independence movement when patriotic natives and Spanish-mestizos in the late nineteenth century transformed it into a national designation to include the native majority.” The ilustrado elite is the generation of mostly mixed-race, upper-class, Spanish-speaking individuals educated abroad. In his discussion of this eroup, David Joel Steinberg sees them as a bloc that became aware of their colonized condition as Filipinos through their experiences abroad: By living abroad together in places like Barcelona and Madrid, they discovered how much they had in common with each other in contradis-

tinction to the alien ways of Europeans, Chinese in Hong Kong, or Japanese in Tokyo. Their travels made them aware of the history of Spain and of that of the Latin American republics that had broken from Spain, and many of them knew a great deal about their Cuban counterparts in the year leading up to the Cuban revolution of 1895.7°

The mestizo ilustrado consciousness that emerges in this period saw the cotruption of Spain’s colonial policies as preventing the progress of the nation. The ilustrado community was composed of Chinese mestizos, Spanish mestizos, and native prncpala.*’ They engaged in trade and bought more land with their profits in order to further engage in trade. José Rizal is a good representative of the ilustrado class.”® He was a fifth-

generation Chinese-mestizo polyglot, mastering Catalan, Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Latin, Malay, Sanskrit, Spanish, and Tagalog, among other native dialects. At the age of eighteen, Rizal won a contest for his poem in Spanish, “To the Filipino

Youth,” in which he suggested that his generation was the future and hope of their “motherland.”’*? With this poetry, he was recognized as the first to identify the Philippines as the motherland of Filipinos, suggesting the need for change. In 1882, he traveled to Europe, where he attended medical school at the Universidad Central de Madrid. Even in Spain, he became well known for expressing resentment toward colonial policies. He began to write novels that scrutinized the Spanish colonial rule in the

Philippines, blaming the religious clergy for its corrupt and repressive

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestazaje and Its Gendered Body 129

nature. His novels Nok Me Tangere (1887) and E/ Fiibusterismo (1891) ate ptime examples of the mestizo literature that emerged under the Spanish reoime.>° In Nok Me Tangere, protagonist Juan Cris6stomo Ibarra returns

home after seven years of education in Europe and attempts to transform the deplorable conditions of his country." In A/ Fikbusterismo (Fh), the fugitive [barra—now disguised as a wealthy jeweler—exacts revenge

against the Spaniards who caused his downfall in No/. Both narratives

are full of bitter realism. The Spanish colonialists are depicted as extremely corrupt and oppressive, manipulating a general population characterized by widespread poverty, frustration, and agitation. The novels awaken the readetr’s sense of nationalism and function as a call for the people’s revivification and regeneration.>* Because these books quickly became a symbol of resistance against the Spanish regime, church leaders increased pressure on the government authorities to ban the books in the Philippines and to arrest their author. Governor Terreto became alarmed that he might not be able to protect Rizal, and convinced him to leave the country, but the religious authorities took revenge on his family instead, including the arrest of his mother. The novels functioned as catalysts in forming a national consciousness that led to the downfall of the Spanish

regime in the Philippines.

Representations of the Ilustrado-Meshizo/a

Rizal’s protagonist, Juan Cris6stomo Ibarra, embodies the mestizoilustrado class in the Philippines. His father is a wealthy landlord who, while his son is abroad, becomes involved in a land dispute with the parish priest, Padre Damaso. Before Ibarra’s return, his father is arrested and jailed without a trial; he remains unjustly imprisoned until his death. Since the father had been considered a freethinker and a revolutionary, and because he had stopped going to confession, Padre Damaso denies the man a Christian burial. When Ibarra learns of his father’s misfortunes and untimely death, his first impulse is to seek retribution. But as his

father had been dedicated to the principle of bringing about change through education, Ibarra decides to put aside his plans for revenge in otder to begin his efforts to transform his country—establishing a school in his home village. Just as Ibarra is laying the cornerstone for the new school, a plot to kill him 1s discovered. The derrick that was supposed to

130 QUEERING MESTIZAJE collapse and crush him instead falls and kills the man who had built it.

The festivities proceed despite this incident, but at the dinner party, Padre Damaso insults the memory of Ibarra’s father. Losing his self-con-

trol, Ibarra lunges forward to attack the priest with a knife. Only the intervention of Maria Clara, Ibarra’s sweetheart, prevents the assault. This aborted attack marks the beginning of Ibarra’s misfortunes. As a result of his violent action, he is forbidden to see Maria Clara again, and her marriage to Linares, a Spanish relative of Padre Damaso, is quickly

arranged. Ibarra’s troubles intensify when he is implicated in a revolt against the Civil Guard. He is imprisoned and accused of being the head of the revolution. The only evidence against Ibarra consists of letters he had written to Maria Clara while he was abroad. Padre Salvi, the head sacristan, takes these from Maria Clara in exchange for two letters written by her mother to Padre Damaso wherein Maria Clara’s mother reveals that her daughter’s biological father is Padre Damaso and not Capitan Tiago, as people had believed. Elias, who was the real instigator of the revolt supposedly headed by

Ibarra, burns all the potentially incriminating papers and helps Ibarra escape from prison. During his escape, Ibarra meets Maria Clara, who explains why she had to trade his letters regardless of the ramifications for him. In between the representation of their “tragic love” is the dramatic revelation of her real ancestry and the main reason why they cannot be together (Padre Damaso). Her characterization’s submissiveness, passiveness, and martyrdom are obviously marked in the following interaction:

“What was there left for me to do? Do you think I could have told you—at that time—who my real father was? Could I have asked you to beg his forgiveness when he had caused your own father so much suffering? Could I have asked my own father to forgive you, because I

was his daughter, when he had wanted so much to see me dead? I could only suffer, keep my secret, and die with it. And now my friend, now that you know the sad story of your poor Maria, do you still have for her that same smile of contempt?” “Maria, you are a saint!” “T’m happy because you believe me...” “But,” said Ibarra, changing his tone, “I hear you are getting mar-

tied...”

“Yes,” she hastened to explain. “My father requires this sacrifice

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestazaje and Its Gendered Body 131

from me. He gave me a home and affection when it was not his duty to do so. I repay this debt of gratitude, assuring him peace by means of this new relationship.’’34 Initially, Maria Clara agrees to marry Linares as an act of obedience to her

father, but (mistaken) news about Ibarra’s death makes her decide to enter the convent instead. While the guards fire at Ibarra and Elias as they cross a fiver to escape, their identities are switched. Finding blood in the water, the guards return to Manila, announcing that Ibarra has been shot and killed.

The narrative in od ends with the “disappearance” of Ibarra, the reclusion of Maria Clara in the convent of St. Clair, the death of Padre Damaso, and allusions to opium addiction on the part of Capitan Tiago. The story continues in /7/ with Ibarra returning after thirteen years of exile. Following his escape, Ibarra flees to Cuba, where he amasses great

wealth. On his return, he passes as Simoun, a rich jeweler, who is obsessed with rescuing Maria Clara from the convent and taking revenge on the Spaniards. Unfortunately, [barra/Simoun is informed that Maria Clara has just died prior to his arrival. [barra reacts to this news by focusing on his quest for vengeance and the pursuit of revolutionary ideals. Again the Civil Guard pursues and seriously wounds Ibarra. He seeks refuge in Padre Florentino’s house, where he confesses his real identity and takes poison rather than “fall into anyone’s hands alive.’’> The story ends with Ibarra’s repentance, absolution, and death.

Ironically, the protagonist’s tragic end parallels the author’s own demise. At thirty-five, Rizal was found guilty of inciting revolution through his writings and was sentenced to death. He was executed by a firing squad in Bagumbayan on December 30, 1896. The circumstances of his death consecrated him as a hero of the revolution, a martyr who had lived and died for the ideals of freedom and nationalism. Like Rizal, José Marti was a victim of colonization; but unlike Rizal, who never actually fought the Spaniards with arms, Marti was a creole who was killed

while fighting the Spanish troops in the 1895 battle of Dos Rios. Nonetheless, the similarities between these two historical figures are impossible to ignore. While Marti’s activities resulted in the establishment of a provisional government under a new constitution for a free and democratic Cuba, the execution of Rizal inspired the Katipunan Revolution against the Spaniards.3° Both men were hailed as national heroes

132 QUEERING MESTIZAJE of their respective countries. To some extent, they have been traditionally

exploited as political symbols. Through their portrayals as saintlike fioures, the sites of nationalism perpetuate the masculinization of histoties marked by the processes of colonization and decolonization. The glorification of male figures in postcolonial histories are often positioned in relation to the narratives of independent movements which take form in the heteronormative systems of nationhood. Although these systems are matked by ideologies of liberation and resistance to colonial power, they foster nationalist ideals, in which specific identifiers are employed to create exclusive and homogeneous conceptions of national identity. Such

sionifiers of homogeneity fail to represent women as patt of the “national” agenda for which they purport to speak and act. Because gen-

der is constitutive of both nation and nationalism, an examination of nationhood without considering gendering practices is unacceptable. Gender issues surrounding nations and nationalisms are perhaps most clearly articulated at times of war, when bodies become the sites of conflict. While the masculinization of history (or historical figures) is inti-

mately connected with national struggles, the general exclusion of women from the discourses of nationhood symbolically becomes a denial of citizenship in times of upheaval. Women came to participate in nationalists discourses and agendas mainly as inactive subjects in which only their role as “mother” or “teacher” would guarantee the future wellbeing of the nation. The interlinked matrices of motherhood and nation influence Licia Fiol-Matta to reframe the role of Gabriela Mistral, a generative iconic figure in Latin American literature. While rethinking postcolonial nation-building in Oueer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela

Mistral (2002), Fiol-Matta inserts a queer reading, suggesting that Mistral’s body as “gender-different’” or butch was discursively and even comically forced to fit feminine ideals at all costs, illustrating “the national desire to

encase [her] in the heteronormative sexual paradigm.”37 According to Foil-Matta, Mistral’s fame and nationalist subjectivization were made possible because she performed the schoolteacher-mother dichotomy. Rizal’s elevation to the status of Philippines’ “national” hero has been debated in Filipino intellectual circles because many believe there are othets, who fought with arms, more deserving of the recognition.3* Further-

more, some people question the heroism of the propagandistsreformists (members of the Propaganda Movement) like Rizal who had advocated for the implementation of the Cadiz Constitution, which guar-

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestazaje and Its Gendered Body 133

anteed equality for Spanish subjects—whether on the peninsula or overseas. [he group was made up mostly of Filipinos from the educated mid-

dle class—ilustrados—who believed that Spain would grant muchneeded reforms if the Philippines were made a province of Spain and Filipinos became Spanish citizens. In Madrid and Barcelona, the propagandists befriended the liberals in the Spanish government and lobbied among them for reforms in the Philippines. As opposed to fighting for independence from Spain, Rizal and his colleagues agitated for reforms ot assimilation with Spain as equals. Real hero or not, Rizal was indisputably an influential writer. His novels raised his countrymen’s national consciousness in the late nineteenth century. Even today, while his influence on Filipino literati is slight, Rizal continues to prevail in the consciousness of the Filipino people. His writings, condemned by the Spanish regime during his own lifetime, became required reading in all schools starting in the 1950s, marking his national stature. | agree with Francisco Sionil José, who has suggested that the popularity of the two novels reflects the ways they satisfy the rigid canons of art. Sionil places Rizal’s work in a broader context: “Rizal joins the exalted ranks of those magnificent Spanish mavericks—Cervantes, Zurbaran, Lope de Vega—all of whom helped shape that ‘other’ Spain—tibettarian and noble.’’®? Indirectly, Sionil not only locates Rizal’s target audience within the mestizo-ilustrado class, but also within the context of the “other” Spain, which, as embodied in Rizal’s novels and personal nartative, represents the effects of colonial power, authenticating mestizaje as a synthesis of “otherness.” For Rizal, who originally wrote No/ and Fifi in Spanish, mestizaje is self-explanatory in its reflection of the turbulent times and the conflictive relationships among the characters. In both novels, victims and victimizers alike are the product of an unholy alliance between the church and state in a colonial system.

Maria Clara vis-a-vis Feminism

Both protagonists, Maria Clara and Juan Crisdstomo Ibarra, are Spanish mestizos; they represent an exclusive social group in nineteenth-century Philippines. While [barra exemplifies the consciousness of an ilustrado nationalist, the characterization of Maria Clara is less straightforward. She is more than a fictional hero1ne—her resemblance to Rizal’s real-life

134 QUEERING MESTIZAJE sweetheart for eleven years, Leonor Rivera (see figure 21), has been well documented. Some of the setbacks Ibarra and Maria Clara must contend

with have counterparts in the relationship between Rizal and Rivera. Their romance was interrupted by Rizal’s travels to Europe and further damaged by the disapproval of Rivera’s mother. Convinced that Rizal was a filibustero (a subversive), Rivera’s mother arranged a mattiage between her daughter and an Englishman. Both Maria Clara’s and Rivera met an early death: Maria Clara in a convent and Rivera in childbirth less

than a year after her wedding. Cultural critic Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil suggests that when Filipinas are required to make choices, they “remember Leonor Rivera, the real-life Maria Clara, muse and heroine of the Filipino race, the compendium of the morals and manners of many genera-

tions, and take the safe course and let the glory go.’4° She further describes Maria Clara and Leonor Rivera as icons of Filipino life, symbolizing the struggles and contradictions of Filipino women. Guerreto-Nakpil’s casting of Maria Clara and Leonor Rivera as standards for “the morals and manners” of Filipinas is quite problematic, mainly because they represent externally imposed colonial values that make up for the “cultural deficiencies” of the subjected. It is obvious that Guerrero-Nakpil’s position is both a derivation and a magnification of the Spanish-colonial legacy and its continuing, contemporary influence. During the Spanish regime and its Christianization efforts, the Virgin Marty was made into the epitome of physical beauty and morality. The Maria Clara character personifies such an ideal body and the submissive, virginal demeanor Filipinas are expected to follow. For present-day Filipinas, allusions to Maria Clara attest to the ways colonial images are contemplated, reflecting Tiongson’s definition of the value “white is beautiful.” Maria Clara’s iconography is clearly a product of the Spanish past and the American present. Tiongson suggests that these standards of beauty represent the impossible dreams of the contemporary Filipina embodied in the “blonde or redhead, white-skinned, tiny-lipped mannequin, as well as [in the] tall, willowy mestiza [fair-skinned] Karilagan models.”4" This criterion of beauty is applicable universally, but in the Philippines, as in most Latin American countries, the indigenous people clearly mark the explicit disparity of such a standard. As ‘Tiongson notes, the Karilagan-looking models reveal an tronic—and uncomfortable— truth about neocolonial representation: it reveals how the white race makes the brown Malay look inferior.** It 1s in this context that skin

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestizaje and [ts Gendered Body 135

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— . ye = Se) Library Division, Cultural : TS Bug? A ‘ee : — Center of the Philippines, hd ye 8 le Manila.) color, as the key signifier of racial difference, has played an important public role 1n societies characterized by the presence of both colonial power and cultural oppositional forms. Contrary to Guerrero-Nakpil’s favorable interpretation otf Maria Clara, Rizal contessed that when he wrote o/, he could not find positive role models of Filipino women. Rizal admitted this in his letter of sup-

port to a group of twenty young women from Malolos, Bulacan (“Women ot Malolos”) who, in 1888, were denied permission to open a “might school” so that they could learn Spanish. The women defiantly continued their agitation tor the school, causing a great upheaval in the Philippines and in Spain, and finally obtained approval. When the news

136 QUEERING MESTIZAJE of the group reached Rizal, he felt compelled to explain and apologize for the pessimistic view of women in his novel, counter to the bravery of the Malolos women. Rizal begins his letter ““To the Young Women of Malolos” with the following disclosure: When I wrote Nok Me Tangere, | asked myself whether bravery was a common thing in the young women of our people. I brought back to my recollection and reviewed those I had known since my childhood, but there were only a few who seemed to come up to my ideal. There was, it is true, an abundance of girls with agreeable manners, beautiful ways, and modest demeanor, but there was in all an admixture of servitude and deference to the words or whims of their so-called “spiritual fathers” (as if the spirit or soul had any father other than God), due to

excessive kindness, modesty, or perhaps, ignorance. They seemed faded plants sown and reared in darkness, having flowers without perfume and fruits without sap. However, when the news of what happened in Malolos reached us, I saw my error, and great was my rejoicing.#?

This passage indicates Rizal’s disapproval, even contempt, for women like Maria Clara—kind, beautiful, modest, ignorant, and a slave to the Spanish friars. He further acknowledges the important role of women, mothers above all, in delivering the country from ignorance and servitude. The letter continues, “If the Filipina will not change her mode of being, let her rear no more children, let her merely give birth to them. She

must cease to be the mistress of the home, otherwise she will unconsciously betray husband, child, native land, and all.’’44 On the other hand,

Rizal applauds the courage of the women of Malolos, whom he called,

“allies,” while indirectly apologizing for not “characterizing” such women in his novels. In a recent book, 7he Women of Malolos, Nicanot G. Tiongson suggests that the bravery of these women became memorable, not only because

Rizal wrote a public letter to congratulate them, but because in their commitment to make a difference, they fought against the hegemony of the religious institution that was the main source of their oppression.* Tiongson points out that the fear of fibusterismo (revolutionary actions and ideas) made the friars adamant in refusing to teach the Spanish language to the masses; the friars wanted to keep the natives ignorant and

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestazaje and Its Gendered Body 137

dependent.*° According to Tiongson, the withholding of the Spanish lanouage from the natives helped to sustain colonialism. Thus, the reformist

principles of the Women of Malolos confronted this colonial “order” that insisted on keeping the indigenous, and women in particular, ignorant and docile. Tiongson proposes that the Women of Malolos participated in establishing a feminist movement in the late nineteenth century and had a far-reaching impact on women in other parts of the archipelago. While the Women of Malolos’ action made the Spaniards aware that

resistance was growing, from men and from women as well, the reformists themselves recognized their audacity. Rizal encouraged them

to continue with their struggle, while contrasting them against the women who seemed like “faded plants sown and reared in darkness, having flowers without perfume and fruits without sap.’’47 Between Maria Clara and the Women of Malolos, multiple degrees of

difference exist. Though in his letter Rizal advocates powerful, free women of intellect, courage, and independence, ironically, it is his fictional creation, Maria Clara, who becomes the model of attraction and virtue for Filipinas. Nowadays, the phrase “Maria Clara” is used satirically to describe women with puritanical or virtuous attitudes and actions, but popular knowledge continues to confer on her an archetypical meaning.

Maria Clara is the embodiment of a static beauty and a subordinate agency, which inspires intense critical engagement. Her overstated femi-

ninity counters the imagery of the warrior woman as personified by Gabriela Silane (1723-63). The narrative of Gabriela Silang is one of coutage and resistance. She is known as the famous genera/a who dared to

fight the Spanish army in the 1762-63 rebellion of Locos province. Artists often depict her as a woman on horseback with long hair flying in the air and carrying a long bo/o (machete) in her upraised hand (see figure 22). As an incarnation of the rebel amazona, Gabriela Silang’s iconography has been used as a symbol for resistance and liberation. The 1984 forma-

tion of a women’s organization in the Philippines, Gabriela, has influenced a global feminist movement and political action that take an active stance on issues of poverty, globalization, militarism, violence, health, sex trafficking, and other issues affecting women. Later, the organization expanded to the United States with the creation of Gabriela Net-

work (GABNet). Since its inception, this movement has focused its efforts on organizing, educating, and advocating around the world with

138 QUEERING MESTIZAJE

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respect to the global trafficking of Filipinas through the “mail order bride” industry (international matchmaking services), prostitution gener-

ated by militarization and tourism, and forced labor migration.t? The organization is featured in a 1988 documentary film by Trix Betlam, Gabriela, which shows how the power of activism ts shaped by the actions of women of distinct classes and social spheres. The success of the orga-

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestazaje and Its Gendered Body 139

nization is particularly marked in the collaboration of nuns, students, lesbians, intellectuals, artists, prostitutes, and housewives, whose collective efforts became very important during the Marcos regime. Conversely, Maria Clara is the antifeminist prototype created by the

imaginative sites of colonization. Because religion, and specifically Catholicism, is so ingrained in Filipino culture, the values embedded in Maria Clara’s iconography cannot be conceived of without carefully examining the marianismo paradigm. This is the synthesis of the colonial petiod’s idealized model of the female gender, the Virgin Mary, who personifies the benchmark of Christianity and serves as a vehicle of subordination. With the fictional character of Maria Clara, Rizal exposes the condition of marianismo that subjected women of his time. He evokes (and at the same time condemns) the virgin-mother dichotomy as imprinted in the Western Christian tradition. Maria Clara’s romanticized beauty and her embodiment of marianismo make her an exceptionally useful marker in tracing the genealogy of the mestiza body as a construction of the colonial legacy in Filipino culture. Rizal originates the body of the mestiza through Maria Clara’s delineation, using the standard of beauty that legitimized and made whiteness as well as other Western values synonymous with mestizaje. Maria Clara

can be seen as tantamount to an anti-indigenous aesthetics that exalts beauty in relation to its Western construction. However, by making the Maria Clara character an illegitimate daughter of a priest, Rizal subtly defines mestizaje in relation to the bastardization (Hispanization) of the culture and state. Of his main female protagonist, Rizal wrote: Maria Clara did not have the smallish eyes of her father; she had her mother’s eyes, large, black, shadowed by long lashes, gay and sparkling

when she was at play, thoughtful and deep otherwise. As a child, her hair was almost fair; her nose, neither sharp nor flat, gave her a classic profile; her mouth recalled her mother’s, small and winsome, with cheerful dimples; her skin was as fine as an onion’s, and as white as cotton. (34) Most of the metaphorical allusions to Maria Clara’s physical beauty refer

to her fair skin color and delicate features. Her “classic profile,” for example, functions as an allegory of beauty marked by the colonial ideal

and locates as oppositional the configuration (and brownness) of the native, indigenous body. Hence, a marked separation between a brown

140 QUEERING MESTIZAJE body and the “classic profile” of Maria Clara becomes a cultural and historical disjunction. Conceived through miscegenation and born into a wealthy, elite family, Maria Clara is a female prototype of Rizal’s social circle and historical era. His was a period of cultural Hispanization in

which middle- and upper-class women in particular were completely dependent. As in Latin America, the colonial structure in the Philippines imposed a dichotomized, gender-based division of labor: men became

the producers, inhabiting the public realm, while women became the reproducers, inhabiting the private/domestic arena. This separation of men and women into different social spheres introduced the complementary gender archetypes of machismo and marianismo. Understanding the dynamic link between these two ideals 1s a prerequisite to appreciatine gender relations in postcolonial Spanish societies. The gender prototype of marianismo 1s the cult of the Virgin Mary; the second paradigm, machismo, can be defined as the “cult of virility.” Marianismo demands that women be virginal and pure, like Mary. They are expected to be good wives and mothers or, if like Maria Clara, they never marty, should be devout and dedicate their lives to God.*? Self-sacrifice is the underlying principle of the complex. In her widely read discussion of marianismo, Evelyn Stevens redefined this as a strategy of spiritual superiority, noting that it “depicts women as semi-divine, morally superior and spiritually stronger than men, and these are the characteristics that allow for and make possible the acceptance of men’s behavior by women.’”*° Stevens believes that women’s acceptance of men’s “decadent” attributes positions women in a role that is both morally and spiritually superior. Her arguments regarding this “spiritual strength” can be justified only in the context of the ideological changes that have taken

place in Latin American feminism, which has been reevaluating the meaning of marianismo since the 1970s. The cult of the Virgin Mary has evolved into a faction that defines women in relation to divine knowledge and the capacity for sacrifice and resistance. These configurations may propose an alternative understanding of the theoretical conception in marianismo, but in essence they continue to represent women’s agency

as inseparable from colonial history and certain regimes of power. Although separating the subject from that legacy may be difficult, even utopic, it is an act of resistance to represent the female gender identity as an unstable category. The emphasis of an unfixed gender identity, as many feminist theorists have argued, should acknowledge its link to the

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestazaje and Its Gendered Body T4I

history of women’s subordination. Like culture, gender becomes a fluid process of negotiation rather than a rigid imposition of meaning. As discussed in an earlier chapter, the understanding of a transformative marianismo has become a major trend in Chicana feminist visual and literary practices. The iconography that depicts the veneration of the mestiza Virgin of Guadalupe is a testimony that by rejecting the submissiveness and passivity of the Christian model, she becomes a figure of resistance and opposition. In No, Maria Clara’s beauty and purity, as reflected in her “cotton” white body, characterize her as the total essence of femininity. Such emphasis on her physical attributes transforms Maria Clara into an object of desire, not only in the reader’s viewpoint but also in the gaze of her beloved Juan Criséstomo Ibarra. As romantic as Rizal’s conception of Maria Clara may seem, the iconography she represents parallels the marianismo model: sweet, innocent, and submissive. Marianismo incorporates the colonial legacy, describing a body that has been subjected to the Western (Christian) meanings of womanhood, and integrating such values as the fear of God, the sanctity of virginity, and the virtue of motherhood. It supported an institutionalized system that imposed a hierarchy of the genders. Marianismo characterizes the ideal woman as lacking sexual desires. Such constructions of femininity have defined the role of women in most cultures, especially in those shaped by certain colonial regimes and patriarchal societies. Through her romanticized beauty and passivity, Maria Clara transcends space and time: she embodies the inter-

change and contestation of the effects produced by the (violent) encounter of cultures. The contradictory process by which cultural and gender identity are defined can be traced through her characterization and, later, through the iconography she comes to represent. The symbolism embedded in Rizal’s Maria Clara carries values linked to the adaptive qualities of the mestizos as well as political and socioeconomic values associated with other power structures and institutions of domination. Given that, it is only natural that after more than three centuries of Spanish occupation, the Filipinos were significantly transformed by this encounter of cultures. Besides Christianity, Spanish influences can be seen in their food, language, fashion, values, customs, and traditions. Over time, the name Maria Clara has come to embody a socioeconomic power linked to Filipinas’ adoption of the lifestyle and fashion of Spanish ladies. Indeed, a “Maria Clara” fashion style came into vogue at the end

142 QUEERING MESTIZAJE of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. A recent Maria Clara exhibit at the Filipino Heritage Museum describes an ensemble honoring Rizal’s protagonist as “like the heroine ... delicate and feminine but clearly self-assured in terms of its projected sense of identity. It is, in fact, the only national costume that carries a literary name, and for this reason calls attention to the apparel’s subtle nationalist aesthetics.””** In figure 21, Leonor Rivera is wearing a Maria Clara ensemble with the

sloped shoulder and wide “angel” sleeves of Victorian fashions. The fashion of “Maria Clara” is likewise displayed in a portrait of Josephine Bracken (see figure 23), Rizal’s love partner at the time he was arrested and sentenced to death.’* She was just eighteen years old when she met Rizal, who was thirty-five. The couple applied for a marriage license but was denied by the Spanish friars because of Rizal’s stance against the church. It was only much later—two hours before Rizal’s execution— when the engaged couple were finally married. Nevertheless, Josephine 1s

immottalized as the “sweet foreigner” in the closing lines of Rizal’s “farewell” poem, “Mi Ultimo Adios”: “Adidés dulce exttanjera, mi amiga, mi alegria’”’ (Good-bye, sweet foreigner, my friend, my joy).>? In the early and middle nineteenth century (long before Nod and Fih were written), what was later called the Maria Clara costume was initially known as the zrae de mestiza (the mestiza costume). This fashion style was not so much a specific mode as it was a visible indicator of a general cultural orientation. It clearly signaled wealth and good taste; it was impossible to speak of the fashionable mestiza without alluding to her distinctive class and affluent economic position. Hispanic influence was evident in many of the details of this apparel, including the fine embroidery, ornaments, shoes, and use of maniillas (veils). The traje de mestiza and its later

incarnation as the Maria Clara costume were key innovations in the development of a mestiza consciousness in the nineteenth century. Commissioned portraits of Philippine mestiza subjects in their costumes capture the effects of commodification on structuring a new identity (see fieure 24). In the portrait of “Spanish mestizas,” the style applies to the Spanish Empire cut of a floor-length pleated saya (or skirt) with multicolor checks and combines with a /apzs wrapped just below the bust line. The ¢apis, which mestizas have worn over their skirts since the eighteenth

century, is considered a precolonial garment, although the name may have been derived from the Spanish verb /apar (meaning to cover).*4 In the mid—nineteenth century, the traje de mestiza grew more elabo-

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestizaje and [ts Gendered Body 143

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rate. The skirt became fuller, showing traces of the bell shape that was likewise becoming fashionable in Europe at this time. The pavue/o (handkerchiet), the pesneta (decorative hair comb), and the shoulder-length man-

tila completed the typical ensemble. Besides symbolizing wealth and adaptation, this form of dress represents the imposition of Christian values. The clergy explicitly reected native clothing traditions and preached the importance of chastity. In their study Patterns for the filipina Dress: From the Traje de Mestiza to the Terno (1890s—1960s), Bernal and Encanto note:

The use of the pauelo was apparently an imposition of the Spanish missionaries on the uninhibited Indian women. These women were used to going about freely clad in clothing of fine, transparent materials. For a long time, they also resisted the use of underwear. Friars preached on the importance of modesty in clothing as they zealously went about propagating the Christian faith.*°

144 QUEERING MESTIZAJE

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| ao elaborate sraje de mestizas, it 1s M cs” RS a met ie: rs SS le ( an allegory of “Mother Spain” Be thet Cc Philippi am.coe reliedsi. FkCe AcesareSleading . = ~, Ca ing 1 ppines to . : | _ progress. It was originally 7 4 commissioned in 1886 by the 4 foreign minister in Madrid + TO eSSg ageRNY Seeee S31 e arasa”, aftereS seeing an ae earlier > eat ; , version

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1 Some OO the subject, given by Luna eee §6couttesy of the Library Divia sion, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila.)

148 QUEERING MESTIZAJE ity to the Philippines that od and F724 are combative narratives targeting

an oppressive and corrupt system. The novels are indictments of the repressive and suffocating inequalities of colonial rule. As an ilustrado, Rizal benefited from that system in various ways, but, as with many of his

generation, he spoke out in service of a nationalist cause. Part of that cause advocated equality and development. Espana y Filipinas may be much less combative than Rizal’s novels, but Luna’s painting still identifies the same need for modernization evident in a nationalist posture. Picturing the two women in the traje de mestiza evokes the class consciousness, social transformations, and nineteenth-century Hispanization that characterized the period. Despite Rizal’s misgivings about Luna’s commitment to combating Spain, others have acclaimed the painter as “a triumph of the race” because of his accomplishments as an artist.” Rizal, Luna, and many other propagandists agitated for reforms, each in his own way, but all using their erudition to demonstrate that Filipinos were the equals of Westerners and capable of voicing their national identity. The night before his scheduled execution, Rizal offers his life to his motherland in his “Mi Ultimo Adiés” (My Last Farewell). This poem has become a classic text, and most Filipinos know at least part of it: Mi patria idolatrada, dolor de mis dolores, Querida Filipinas, oye el postrer adids. Ahi te dejo todo, mis padres, mis amotres. Voy donde no hay esclavos, verdugos ni opresores, Donde la fe no mata, donde el que reina es Dios. Adidés, padres y hermanos, trozos del alma mia, Amigos de la infancia en el perdido hogar, Dad gracias que descanso del fatigoso dia; Adios, dulce extranjera, mi amiga, mi alegria, Adiés, queridos seres, morit es descansar.°?

(My idolized country, sorrow of my sorrows, Beloved Filipinas, hear my last good-bye. There I leave you all, my parents, my loves. Pll go where there are no slaves, hangmen nor oppressots, Where faith doesn’t kill, where the one who reigns is God.

Goodbye, dear parents, brother and sisters, fragments of my soul, Childhood friends in the home now lost,

Lhe Filipino Twist on Mestazaje and Its Gendered Body 149

Give thanks that I rest from this wearisome day; Goodbye, sweet foreigner, my friend, my joy; Farewell, loved ones, to die is to rest.)

Commodity and Fixation

After independence and during the initial American occupation (1900-1941), Filipino ilustrados disappeared in the shadows. In time, their values and beliefs were disregarded by a new generation passionate about the U.S. intervention. This new generation could neither read nor speak Spanish; English was becoming the medium of communication, a means to bind diverse constituencies (religious, geographic, and linguistic) to one another in a way Spanish never did. Steinberg noted that to U.S. colonial officials, education was necessary for democracy; it was “a tool to limit oligarchic domination.’ Ironically, the United States succeeded in Amerticanizing most of the country in a few decades while Spain had failed to “Hispanize” its subjects despite three centuries of col-

onization. The educational system established by the Americans did more than combat illiteracy. As Renato Constantino explains in his essay “The Mis-education of the Filipino,” “We became literate in English to a

cettain extent. We were able to produce more men and women who could read and write. We became more conversant with the outside world, especially the American world.”°° During the Spanish colonial regime, education had been limited to the ilustrado class, so only a chosen few had the privilege of learning. By the time the Americans arrived, the gap between the ilustrados and the majority of the population had widened enormously. English came to be seen as the language of democracy. Still, before long, a new group of American ilustrados replaced the “Spanish” ones and strongly supported the new way of life.°’ In general,

the arrival of the Americans introduced a new lifestyle built around democratic institutions and created more opportunities for women. The 1920s marked a series of transformations. In fashion, the traje de mestiza became the national costume for Filipinas, although it was once again changing, evolving into the /erno, a term derived from the Spanish word for “matching.” Like the Maria Clara style, the terno is a variation of the “mestiza dress.” Unlike the traje de mestiza, the terno seems destined to retain its identity, thanks partly to the fact that the style incorporates dis-

1j0 QUEERING MESTIZAJE tinctive butterfly sleeves. The authors of Patterns for the Filipino Dress: From the Trae de Mestiza to the Terno (1890s—r1960s) obsetve that while some aspects of the traje de mestiza (such as the /apzs and the panuelo) disappeared dur-

ing and after the American period, “the butterfly sleeves were the last bastion of the Filipina dress.”’°* Additionally, the terno was adapted to mote indigenous fabrics, including pifia, sinamay, jusi, and pinukpok.°? The traje de mestiza produces a body that is the product of commodity and foreign enticement—tt is applied to whatever style wealthy mestizas chose to follow—but fashion itself becomes the subject as well as the

means of tracing a genealogy of mestizaje. This is because the traje de mestiza locates a paradoxical body associated with colonial encounters and with the postcolonial imagination. It points to a cultural space that transcends time, situating mestizaje as the effect of the narcissistic wound of colonization. While in contemporary Filipino society the mestiza body is a myth and reality, its identification is always linked to the imaginative sites of colonial identity. During the 1990s, the traje de mestiza reappeared in a line of Filipina Barbie dolls. The “Filipiniana-styled” dolls (“manikas” in Tagalog) is recreated wearing either a “mestiza dress” or the “Maria Clara’’ ensemble (see fieure 26). This glamorous interpretation of the mestiza body is the product of the excesses of consumerism and global communication. Dis-

played and advertised in www.manika.com, these Barbies perform the site of mestizaje, often incorporating the idealized ethnic self. The reinvention of mestizaje 1s captured in processes defined by the commodity of ethnicity and the fixation of an identified Filipina body personifying false markings of cultural difference. This recapturing of mestizaje is not only symptomatic of a colonized past, but in its corporality as one of the most globalized toy-products in the world, it represents the power of homogenized global culture. In the terms of Frances Negron-Muntaner, the impact of the “color” Barbie is just “another plastic globalized commodity bearing the signs” of ethnicized and racialized bodies. In her book Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture,

Neegrén-Muntaner discusses the Puerto Rican—Boricua Barbie as an American icon that perpetuates articulations of national identifications as commodities of “fake” cultural signifiers.’° The falseness is the represen-

tation of a lineage that perpetuates the fixation of the ethnic body trapped within the symbols of corporate whiteness. Frantz Fanon

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Expistemologies of “Brownness” 163 ious sketches, BdP situates the intersectionality of space and identities as tropes of a queer representation rooted in the sites of the barrio (Latino neighborhoods). The sketches include “Working Class Butch Latina/o Identities” (City Terrace); “Interracial Desire” (Montebello); “Family Guilt—Latino Queerness” (East Los Angeles); “Bar Culture / Softball

Culture” (El Sereno); “Gentrification” (Silverlake); and “Class/Classism” (all of LA Metro).1° As a celebration of the macho cockless vatos (dudes), the various sketches in 7eenage Papi resist the idea that only men possess the “eift’” of masculinity.'7 The enactment of masculinity, as understood by the BdP ensemble, is not a rejection of femininity but a performance of female masculinities that are often ignored by, or misunderstood in, our society.

The BdP members personify the theoretical subject discussed by Judith Halberstam in her groundbreaking book Female Masculinity, which

studies women who feels masculine or perform certain types of masculinity that are also linked to the notion of lesbian desire. She argues that female masculinity plays a significant, albeit disregarded, part in the histoty and development of masculinity.'® It is important here to consider

the frame of reference through which “female masculinity,” “brown” female masculinity in particular, operates. For the BdP members and others like them, the “brown” queer female masculinity necessitates the capturing of the marimacha as an epistemology of knowledge that must be reclaimed. As hybrid bodies, the matimacha and other female masculinities are not simply the product of discursive regimes, nor are they applicable only to female drag. Rather, they are a rearticulation of queer repre-

sentation and identification counteracting heteronormative/patriarchal culture. In this context, the marimacha experience may at times become a radical deconstruction of gender performativity. This deconstruction ts itself inherent in a body that moves across the boundaries of gender. It suggests that the cross-gender experience does not always involve parodic impersonation, as in Butler’s idea of gender performativity, but some-

times is actually #e embodiment of the site of performance. Thus, as a genealogy of a queer female masculinity that imagines the sites of racialized sexuality, the matrimacha “lesbian” genealogy allegorizes the need to authorize articulations of self formed by the performance of difference and enactment of cultural survival. The confronting of “lesbianism in the

flesh,” as Cherrie Moraga so aptly discusses, “is the avenue through which [she has] learned the most about silence and oppression, and it

164 QUEERING MESTIZAJE continues to be the most tactile reminder to [her] that we are not free human beings.”"?

Another term, /ort/lera, is also a potential site of queer female identification. It alludes to women making love as analogous to the mak-

ing of tortillas. The “clapping” of the hands that traditionally occurs when cooking corn tortillas represents lesbian desire. In her poem, “Making Tortillas,” Alicia Gaspar de Alba beautifully parallels the act of making tortillas to the act of making love: Pressed between the palms, clap-clap thin yellow moons— clap-clap still moist, heavy still from last night’s soaking clap-clap slowly start finding their shape clap-clap. My body remembers the feel of the griddle, beads of grease sizzling under the skin, a cry gathering like an air bubble in the belly of the unleavened cake. Smell of baked tortillas all over the house, all over the hands still hot from clapping, cooking.

Tortilleras, we are called, orinders of maiz, makers, bakers, slow lovers of women. The secret is starting from scratch.*°

Gaspar de Alba’s poetic configurations celebrate the act of making tortillas by referring directly to the “clapping” motion, in which the love of women by women is symbolically spoken. As with Anzaldta’s cultural markers of the lesbian body, Gaspar de Alba’s use of ‘orti/lera focuses

exclusively on the cultural resignifications of desire. The linguistic codification of the term not only reconfigures a particular location of the subject but also makes it possible to reclaim /ort/era as a model to politi-

Expistemologies of “Brownness” 165 cally challenge the dominant figures of normativity while subverting the “lesbian” as a predominant category of female queer sexuality.” The particular identifications and figurative affinities associated with these cultural signifiers propose alternative queer performative strategies, expanding and resisting the categorization of lesbian as it is known in the dominant language. This is important because I often hear discussions among Latina undergraduate and graduate students who cannot find the right language to talk to their parents about their queer sexuality. Without question, a significant part of such negotiations is the misguided idea that lesbianism is an issue that relates only to “white” culture. Although I find it difficult to imagine a queer Latina coming out to her parents as a tortillera or a marimacha, the space these terms produce is a reminder that the body is closely connected with language and cultural experience. The frame of reference through which language and cultural experience operate develops a consciousness of queer resignification deployed to represent identifications and desires denied by heteronormative culture and by the dominant language of that system. Moreover, this perspective calls for the recognition of a cultural identity that asserts agency in the use of

erammars that situate the speaking subject against the universalizing effect of “white” representations of queerness. My intent here is not to analyze all the different cultural signifiers that translate queer categories of the Latina body. [am more concerned with the ways these terms make available to Latina queers a mode of performative agency. For Latina queer artists, this process is inevitably necessary to maintain the figures of cultural affirmation. This claim is never, at any level, an attempt to represent fixed categories; Latina queers cannot afford any such purity. This body in its multiple inflections is performa-

tively constructed in-between cultures and queer desire. In “Baby Dykes,” Gina Montoya navigates the border terrain of identification, using poetic configurations to try to learn a new language—lesbianism: How many years of oppression must there be to be considered trust worthy in Lesbian culture and Lifestyles? More rules to learn. What is politically correct? Another sub-culture for me that doesn’t let me in just as the Spanish did not want us, just as the Indians

166 QUEERING MESTIZAJE did not want us. Now the “Hets”’ do not want us.

For some, another margin to slide Back and forth, in and “out” of,

AsIdoasa

Mestiza Chicana Coyota Now also Lesbiana Learning a new language: Lesbian Some speak in feminism some speak in “Het”: double standards Yet all “out” in the mainstream together. Speaking in Lesbian Speaking in English Speaking in Spanish Speaking in Spanglish

Another lifestyle to live in sensible shoes, yet walk without respect jobs representation sometimes without love. I ponder over the classical and all powerful image: WHITE UPPER CLASS MALE PRIVILEGE!

What a wonder it would be to change that to: BROWN WORKING-CLASS LESBIAN PRIVILEGE!

Still only the dream of a brown, working-class and Idealistic “Baby Dyke.’’**

The crucial specification—“brown working-class lesbian’”—teclaims

the personal-political identity in its body-inflected multiplicity. It 1s impossible to capture the meaning of “lesbian” on its own without the other specifications. The brown mestiza body gives meaning to lesbian subjectivity and exists in opposition to deep structures entrenched in “white-male privilege.” Moreover, whiteness is assumed in the rebellious desire of an oppositional body. The method of oppositional conscious-

Expistemologies of “Brownness” 167 ness is a mark that defines the struggles embedded in U.S. Third World feminism of the late twentieth century. Chela Sandoval has identified these struggles with a language of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions.*? She calls this the “methodology of the oppressed,” in which an alternative mode of critical theory opens new understanding of consciousness. This new consciousness, she assetts, is “organized 1n opposition to the dominant social order that charts the feminist histories of consciousness ... while also making visible the different grounds from which a specific U.S. Third World feminism advanced.”*4+ Even as Sandoval deconstructs in her “methodology” the hegemony produced by Western thinkers (the works of Frederic Jameson, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault in particular), she attempts to construct the sites of women of color to legitimize the theory and practice of U.S. Third World feminism. Sandoval advocates for the possibilities of building international coalitions across race, class, gender, and sexualities to negotiate social equity and the space for feminism. Though her study is pragmatic and helpful, the ideas of two major authors/activists, Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal,

who had earlier proposed their own “methodologies” of the “subjugated” subject, are conspicuously absent. This is noteworthy because Sandoval’s theory echoes their ideologies of the “oppressed” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1968] by Freire and Theater of the Oppressed [1979] by Boal)

and applies them to the U.S. Third World feminist context.*> In their mission, both Freire and Boal have challenged systems of oppression by promoting critical thinking and social justice in the Third World. By “neglecting” Boal’s and Freire’s earlier methodologies, Sandoval’s theory

of “alliance” is formed without taking into account a sociohistorical transnational movement of the “oppressed.” I believe direct engagements (or disengagements) with Freire and Boal would have contributed to alter the sites of her “oppositional” consciousness and her critique of Western discourses more organically. In spite of that absence, Sandoval’s “oppositional consciousness” is very useful in tracing a genealogy that legitimizes the practice and theory of the mestiza consciousness. Within the context of the mestiza “oppositional” consciousness, for this “Baby Dyke,” and for most queer of color, the term /esbzan represents a new language. It is a dialect that articulates more than a sexual orientation. It is a lifestyle through which the female subjectivity emerges, recognizing the inflected multiplicity in which queer desire is linked to a brown body. For Anzaldta, the term /sbzan ts “a cerebral word, white and

168 QUEERING MESTIZAJE middle-class.”?° Along with many other queer Latina artists, she often

problematizes the term because it ignores race and class issues. In Anzaldua’s configurations, /esbian, unlike the term queer, is and always will

be in the process of cultural translation. This articulation of difference from the cultural translation of the racialized queer perspective is an ongoing negotiation that seeks to demystify whiteness and normativity while authorizing cultural hybridities. Edward Said has observed that “no one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim,

ot American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind.’’*” Said points out the need to think beyond narratives of origination and authentication and to focus on processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference. Anzaldua’s affirmations of the queer-mestiza body problematize authenticity as a way to counter the hegemony of discursive regimes. As I have shown earlier in the book, the presence of the “native” body in Chicana and Latina cultural productions and discourses becomes a metaphor for the recovery of cultural memory and agency while rejecting “authenticity” in many ways.

Similarly, the rejection of authenticity inspires the questioning and counteractions of Claudia Marin, the protagonist in Frances NegronMuntanetr’s experimental film Brincando el Charco (1994), which narrates Puerto Rican identities.** Matin questions her identity as a light-skinned

Puerto Rican lesbian photographer who is attempting to build her community in the United States. “I am a surface where mestizo diasporas display one of their many faces,” she says, describing the collective self by contrasting her body with the darker and black surfaces of the bodies around her. Later she declares, “There is not a single drop of pure blood in my body but there is still difference.” Negron-Muntaner herself, playing the role of Claudia Marin, claims directly and indirectly that she cannot “afford” any purity. As an ongoing conflict within the hybrid body, the question of purity deconstructs the myth of “desired” authenticity.

This deconstruction helps Marin redefine “the gran familia Puertorriquefia”’ (the great Puerto Rican family), but the voice-over, images, and bodies culminate in the representation of divided loyalties, including the political action of queer representation. These divisions are clearly illustrated in the character’s artwork, which documents photographs of other Latina/o queers.

The film mixes fiction, archival footage, images of demonstrations,

Expistemologies of “Brownness” 169 interviews, music videos, and soap opera conventions to weave the story

of Claudia Marin as she confronts the simultaneity of privilege and oppression that configures her position as a middle-class (light-skinned) Puerto Rican. The film becomes a mediation of class, race, and sexuality

as a way of negotiating difference. The protagonist’s identifications, however, constantly cross all lines in order to find ways to depict her multi-inflected body or, as she puts it, to find “another way of narrating myself.” Marin is not only coping with the effects of what has happened to her people politically since the colonization of Puerto Rico. As a lesbian, she is also struggling to find her place after seven years of exile in Philadelphia. When her father suddenly dies, she copes with detachment while considering her allegiance to a family whose members abandoned her when they realized she was queer. While watching a videotape of the first Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade in Puerto Rico, held in 1991, Marin is confronted once more with the idea of “purity” in the context of language. The question “Is the language of liberation English?” materializes in response to the images of gays and lesbians marching in the parade and shouting very common slogans in

English (and in Spanish). Through the documentary footage of the parade within the film, contradictions of belonging and otherness, of “us” and “them” are contemplated.*? Marin concludes again that she “can’t afford any purity” because her “empowerment speaks a creole tongue.” As in Anzalduta’s conceptualization of “border tongue,” in Brin-

cando el Charco the notion of “creole tongue” represents the notion of evolutionary development through hybridization. Anzaldta’s queer confisuration of “border tongue” functions as a figure that provides hybrid progeny.2° In Negrén-Muntaner’s film, the diasporian body (as she calls it) helps construct and deconstruct the multi-inflected self. In both narratives, hybridity functions as a figure of mestizaje and as a mix-

ture of diverse genres and modes of representation. Both NeegrénMuntanet’s film and Anzaldua’s linguistic formations provide the means for locating the queer racialized body within processes of cultural translation and resignification. Both make visible the symbolic configurations of the brown body as the result of diverse social and cultural tendencies in which the borderization of identity is located within the plurality of power/discourse formations. The transcultural mediations of “brownness” are included with queer desire in the digital creations of Alma Lopez. While Lopez’s modification

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170 QUEERING MESTIZAJE

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Fig. 28. Alma Lopez’s Lupe and Sirena in Love (1999) from the “Lupe and Sirena Series.” (Reproduced by permission of Alma Lopez.)

ot bodies through a computer-generated system alters the notions about static definitions of art, her artistic approach maintains a critical position to multiple heteronormative spaces. In making visible the queer-mestiza body, Lopez (best known as the Chicana Digital Diva) composes distinctive artwork that integrates lesbian desire with Mexican and Chicano pop icons, urban settings, and nationalist myths. In Lupe and La Sirena in Love

(1999), for instance, Lopez represents a love attair between Sirena, the mermaid image on a loteria card (loteria is a bingo-like game) and the Vir-

ein of Guadalupe, the divine mother of cultural mestizaje for Mexicans

Expistemologies of “Brownness” I7I and Chicano communities. In this depiction of love, Sirena and Guadalupe embrace in the company of angels. All around the two women ate the Los Angeles cityscape and the United States /Mexico border (see figure 28).3’ While the Virgin and Sirena appear to stand hold-

ing each other, below their figures is a viceroy butterfly instead of the angel that holds the traditional image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The butterfly symbolizes the vulnerability of life demonstrated in the narra-

tive of queer desire and love. In explaining the reasons why Lopez selected the viceroy and not the monarch butterfly, which look very similar, she associates its vulnerability and survival instincts with the susceptibility of difference: The reasons I chose to use the Viceroy butterfly was because I wanted to allude to more than the Monarch’s migration pattern and its genetic memory. I thought it was interesting that the Viceroy butterfly mimics the Monarch for survival purposes. The Monarch butterfly is poiso-

nous to predators; the Viceroy is not. The Viceroy pretends to be something it is not just to be able to exist. For me, the Viceroy mirrors

parallel and intersecting histories of being different or “other” even within our own communities. Racist attitudes see us Latinos as criminals and an economic burden, and homophobic attitudes even within our own communities and families may see us as perverted or deviant.

So from outside and inside our communities, we are perceived as something we are not. When in essence, we are vulnerable Viceroy butterflies, just trying to live and survive.3?

Placing Alma Lopez’s Lupe and Sirena in Love in its proper context requires first recalling the ways Latina artists, especially Chicanas, have

contemplated the body of La Guadalupana. Lopez clearly has been inspired by the work of Ester Hernandez and Yolanda Lopez, artists who have been invoking the body of the mestiza mother subversively since the late 1970s. In Alma Lépez’s own vision, the alterity epitomized in her

att not only responds to internal and external oppressions, but also becomes the product of an intersectional aesthetics in which the most intimate desires are linked to divine and mythological sites. In another digital print of the Virgin, Our Lady (1999), Alma Lopez portrays the Viroin wearing a rose-coverted bikini and posing in a bold, seductive manner: While the traditional imagery of La Guadalupe is used (1.e., the cloak, the roses, and the crescent moon), both the angel and the Virgin are substi-

172 QUEERING MESTIZAJE tuted with photographs of the artist’s female friends. In a discussion of this image, she indicated that her objective was to portray the Virgin with a strong and defiant attitude, “very much like the women in my community.”33 The inspiration provided by community and family in her art can be seen in Heaven 2 (2000), a digital mural originally installed at Galeria de

la Raza in San Francisco. Although the mural intersects different sites simultaneously, it mainly projects the idea of “heaven” embodied in lesbian love and desire. Although love from family and community is also represented by way of the priest, altar boy, and the elderly woman, the young woman in bed rejects this latter scenario in favor of queer-romantic love as symbolized by her lover’s image on a heart presented by a cupid. On the right panel of the mural, the culmination of “queer love,” performed by two hand-holding Latinas sitting on top of the moon and sutrounded by the clouds and stars, indicates peace and happiness for the lesbian lovers.34 As an intertext in L6pez’s mural, a poster of her digital print /x/a prominently hangs on the wall above the bed. Her /xta decon-

structs, with a queer twist, the narrative that portrays the story of Popocatepetl (Popo) and Ixtachihuatl (Ixta) in the legendary mythology of the Aztec empire. In the legend, Popo is in love with Ixta, but in order to gain her love, he first has to become a warrior. [xta, believing that Popo has died in battle, kills herself. When he returns, Popo takes her

body in his arms to the highest mountain in Mexico so that the snowflakes will awaken her. Unfortunately, Ixta never wakes up, and Popo, remaining with her body, freezes to his own death. Nowadays, el Popo and Ixta are the most famous volcanoes in Mexico. Lopez’s /x/a, with two Latina protagonists, does not intend to represent the myth as much as it transeresses the heteronormative system that had captured the mythological romance throughout the years. While the intertextuality of [xtain the mural enacts the performance of queer desire, the surrounding landscape represents the reality of the United States / Mexico border.??

Most of Léopez’s artwork has debuted on her website or other cyberqueet spaces, such as Jongues magazine.3° This magazine was ini-

tially conceived as “A Brown and Black Queer Women’s Webzine,” aimed at organizing and sustaining a web-based community of queer women of color. After its first issue in 2001, /ongues modified its format and started printing its material as well as maintaining the website. More than a creative avenue where visual artists, poets, performance artists,

Expistemologies of “Brownness” 173 academics, and activists come together, the magazine’s main objective is a call to action, empowerment, and collaboration: We increasingly need to make collaborations a priority as our work to end racial, ethnic, economic, and gender discrimination and its manifestations becomes mote strategic and critical. By including a fusion of material ranging from drag kings of color and the complexities of identity politics to international policies and the perpetual struggle for justice, why not think any and every issue—political, social, economic, cultural, international, etc.—is a Queer Women of Color issue.?”

The organizing efforts of the creators and collaborators of 7ongues have concentrated on developing events ranging from poetry readings and art shows to workshops on countering homophobia and discussions about safer sex and disease prevention for queer Latina youth. Many of these events were supported by established queer Latino/a-focused community-based organizations such as Bienestar, Altamed, LGPL (Lesbian and

Gay Professional Latina/o Access Network), and VIVA (a queer Latina/o artist organization). The performative nature of /ongues negotiates the sites of marginality and the boundaries of social differences. This is expressed in L6pez’s artwork on the cover (or inside cover) of the magazine. For example, in Desert Blood (2003), the artist creatively represents the tragedy of the unsolved, ten-year crime wave of kidnappings and murders of over three hundred women, many of them young, mestiza maquiladora workers, in

Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. In her piece, Lépez documents the horror through a female figure looking with grief at a dead body that has been found.3* Though only the feet of the victim are visible in the picture, multiple crosses stuck on the ground allude to a virtual graveyard in this isolated desert. Desert B/ood illustrates the gruesome reality in Ciudad Juarez that has moved international human rights organizations and feminist groups around the world into action. By publishing this piece in Zongues, Lopez denounces violence against women while propagating the organization’s commitment to address transnational issues.

Through poetry, narratives, or visual art, 7ongues magazine advances discussions of race and sexuality to represent cultural difference and to recover the agency of “native” myths and bodies. These engagements are

174 QUEERING MESTIZAJE

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magazine, no.The 2 (2002), Alma Lopez. figure by rep-‘ay i| resents the goddess of sex in > a 4

Aztec mythology. (Repro- TWO \ ae )) duced by permission of Alma 2002 ee Lopez.)

demonstrated in the cover of its second issue, titled “Lesbian Activism from Latina America to Los Angeles,” with the depiction of a hypersexualized indigenous body (see figure 29). While the position of the body emphasizes its own eroticization, the figure appears to be a reconceptualization of Tlazolteotl, the earth goddess. In Aztec mythology, Tlazolteotl is associated with the moon and earth. She is the goddess of sex. In her incarnation as Teteoinnan, mother of the gods, she is protector of the midwives, cvranderas (doctor women), and fortune-tellers.*? What 1s politically important with this image is how the sites of ancient mythology, race, and sexuality provide strategies tor selt-representation (singular or communal) and disassociation from the dominant queet-white ide-

Expistemologies of “Brownness” I7J ology. Simply put, this process of identification redefines the idea of queerness itself by “mestiza-ing”’ or “browning” the queer body.

Feminist Alyphenations and Contestations When I asked a black woman in her twenties, an obsessive moviegoet, why she thought we had not written about black female spectatorship, she commented: “We are afraid to talk about ourselves as spectators because we have been so abused by ‘the gaze.’” An aspect of that abuse was the imposition of the assumption that black female looking relations were not so important enough to theorize. —BELL HOOKS, black Looks

As conceptualized by bell hooks in the early 1990s, the notion of the black female spectatorship is an “oppositional” gaze or way of looking that resists or rebels against the power of the “white” gaze. Her “black” gaze attempts to recover blackness from the dominant culture that appropriates it as commodity (often in negative terms) in popular culture. She insists on the analysis of the ractalized body as a signifier of differ-

ence in feminist film theory, which according to hooks, had tended to limit its focus to sex/sexuality as a paradigm of psychoanalysis. The site of disaffection expressed in hooks’s articulations is relevant to my conceptual analysis of the queer-mestiza body. It allows me to link “brownness” to the politics of oppositionality or in the performance of subversive knowledge, which according to hooks, is the gaze looking “against the erain,” contesting domination.*° Because the epistemology of the queermestiza (or brown) body is often performed by racialized and gendered subjects that are negotiating the marginal sites of difference, an understanding of this difference needs to be placed in a larger context of queer and feminist theories. The queet-mestiza body brings out in me the personal and the political together, invoking a critical position against prescriptive theories of oppression. As a Chicana lesbian feminist, I am committed to a dialectics that not only describes the relations between practice and theory, but also dismantles patriarchy and the power structures that sustain it. The epistemologies I trace through the queer-mestiza body represent situated and

176 QUEERING MESTIZAJE embodied knowledges against various forms that have obscured the maroinality of subjugated subjectivities.4* While I feel and perform my queerness and brown body on a daily basis, I believe that the category “queer” must be located within the contestatory sites of postmodernism.** The term gueer has created multiple debates regarding knowledge and construction of the self. Its postmodern “condition” uniquely challenges the political agency achieved in the 1970s and 1980s by feminist and lesbian/gay movements. Although most feminists—including some selfdefined postmodernists—emphasize the importance of social criticism, demands for political agency have further justified feminist theory. Linda

J. Nicholson, in her examination of the French philosopher JeanFrancois Lyotard (best known for his seminal book /he Postmodern Condttion [1979]), calls for a “postmodernist-feminist theory” that would locate the subject of history and its multiple specificities. According to Nichol-

son, this would replace “unitary notions of woman and feminine gender identity with plural and complexly constructed conceptions of social identity, treating gender as one relevant strand among others, attending also to class, race, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation.’’4? However, in attempting to locate the subject in coalition with multiple discursive configurations, Nicholson indirectly silences women of color even as she tries to sympathize with their experience. The specificities of mareginality are not imperative in her theory. On the other hand, Lyotard’s theory provides valuable tools to situate marginal sites. He has argued that the essential idea of “grand narratives of legitimation” has lost its credibility

in postmodernism.*+ Lyotard suggests that the grand narratives of modernity—from positivism to Marxism—have been replaced by a new form of knowledge that represents itself as a commodity of the postindustrial era (the computerized societies). Problematizing the absolute

meaning of a “erand story” led Lyotard to focus on the action of language, the way it functions in human interactions. His insistence on the legitimacy of the performative and the multiplicity of language is the basis for his understanding of the “postmodern condition” as one characterized by the loss of the unified subject. This contention on the cultural effects of the performative has had a tremendous influence on poststructuralist feminism. Judith Butler argues

that gender identity is open to change through resignifications of processes that provide a space for performative agency. Butler embraces Foucault’s idea of “‘subjectivation,” which situates gender identity forma-

Expistemologies of “Brownness” 177 tion in a dialectical process, but she goes beyond Foucault. She claims that it is precisely in the “materialization” of the body that agency can be located “as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power.”*> The “material” body as understood by Butler is mediated by temporalities repeatedly tak-

ing place in language. In her analysis, agency becomes the product of postmodern formulations of identity, challenging easy categorizations without reaching absolute “truths.” Butler’s deconstructive critique exposes the shortcomings of Foucault’s conceptual theories, but more importantly, she provides a significant account of agency within the disciplinary inscriptions of the body regulated by social norms. Butler’s idea of performative agency has had an enormous impact on feminist studies of gender identity. Her theories of gendered and sexed bodies (especially in Gender Trouble [1990] and Bodies that Matter [1993]}) are

inspiting interdisciplinary interventions. Nevertheless, I believe she underestimates the seriousness of racial subordination.*° While her analysis emphasizes how sex, gender, and sexuality are performatively consttuted, she fails to connect race to this model. Butler does not even touch on the performative dimensions of race. And though in Bodzes that Matter she discusses Larsen’s novel Passmmg and Jennie Livingston’s Pars 7s Burn-

ing, her analysis of race, or what she calls “racializine norms,” 1s superficially constructed.*’ Similarly, in Female Masculinity, Halberstam analyzes gender and sexuality as categories that are immensely mutable, but race and class are to some extent perceived as static categories. While Halberstam attempts to link analysis of gender and sexuality to race and

class issues, she fails to problematize the nuances and power relations embedded in the latter terms.4* This exclusive focus on gender/sexuality in feminist and queer theories is almost always at the expense of the queer-of-color critique. The unfortunate consequence is to imply that issues about racialized bodies (women of color and queer women of color in particular) are secondary, threatening coalition building in the process. A central concern in feminist theory is an understanding of agency as it relates to women’s marginality and gender subordination. When feminism met the racialized body, the hegemonic space of women’s experience was dramatically transformed and at the same time challenged by the multiplicity of discourses and intercultural interpretations of women of color. Norma Alarcén made this argument explicit in “The Theoreti-

178 QUEERING MESTIZAJE cal Subject(s) of his Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism.”4? She traces how the discourses and experiences of women of color provided a “new” theoretical paradigm in feminist theory; one that critiqued the Anglo-American feminist subject as lacking the understanding of gender in relation to race and class. Alarcon indicates that, in patt, the problem of “white” feminist was “to assume a speaking subject who

is autonomous, self-conscious individual.”°° This subject formation, accotding to her, neglects the nuances of difference and the discursive complexities that give form to the category “women of color” and its struggle for representation. Her critique attempted to raise consciousness

that Anglo-American feminism lacks a clear understanding about the struggles of women of color, even years after the publication of 7hzs Bridge Called My Back. In different ways, Alarcon’s essay tries to clarify how the multiple subjects in Brzdge reclaim identities that have often been disenabled by the unitary consciousness of feminism that insisted only in critiques of gendered relations of power. In order to grasp the theoretical

framework proposed in Ardge, she argues, one has to understand the strugele for representation within multiple oppositional forces, “almost in relation to culturally different groups and not fust genders.’”*’ The culturally racialized body as an objection to this unitary consciousness in Anglo-American feminist theorizations is the focal point of Alarcon’s critique. But I think the intervention of women of color avd lesbians of color creates certain types of contestations that have transformed the

whole practice and theory of feminism. While the queer-mestiza body emerges as an epistemological shift of the theoretical subject implicit in the signifier women of color, its multifaceted experience takes into account

lesbian desire and at the same time “queering” the body it represents. Thus if we accept Lyotard’s formulation of the postmodern as a shift in our relation to knowledge, the queer-mestiza feminist body represents a new paradiem that forces a disruption of categorizations and sustains vatious disciplinary battles. The queer-mestiza is symbolic of numerous contestations. Its visibility as interpreted and configured becomes a testimony against several regulatory practices (such as whiteness and heteronormativity), taking risks “against the grain,’ and coming to terms with the polttics of representation and their antagonistic relations. Here, the implicit battle that has characterized lesbian feminism and

its relation/separation to queer theory is relevant. The complexities involved in definitions of sexual identities have influenced new identity

Expistemologies of “Brownness” 179 categories. In locating the intersubjective “queer lesbian studies,” Halberstam suggests that the interjection of “queer” subverts the identity politics assumed in the proposed configuration, but “by continuing to use and rely upon the term ‘lesbian,’ we acknowledge that identity is a useful strategy for political and cultural organizing.””** Her intersubjectivism, however, cannot escape its own inherent modern/postmodern temporalities. The interconnections rooted in these temporalities provide a space for negotiations between identity politics and the possibilities of the performative. Furthermore, the conflict produced by the modern/

postmodern interdependence (each of the two categories is defined within a cause/effect process) “actually replicates the tension within gay/lesbian studies between the political value of modernist identity strategies and the enfranchising liberation of postmodernism’s opening of identity categories.’”*?

Locating lesbian desire next to the designation gueer produces a useful

description of a body politic that, by unsettling hegemonic phases of time, relocates the cultural negotiations of hybrid sites. The queer-lesbian

suggests a subjectivity traversed by multiple epistemologies that take place in the hybridization of the body. The hybrid position of the subject calls attention to sexual differences and to the location of gender within nonnormative regimes. Thus while the lesbian identity in its engagement with the queer recovers female agency, its stability is simultaneously contested by an association with queerness. It is on this basis that the queerlesbian body seeks to establish a coalition with feminist and queer episte-

mologies. In this alliance, the queer-lesbian body revisits the need for agency and accepts different temporalities of subjectivity. The queer-lesbian body marks gender and sexuality together, demanding political representation while insisting on its specificity. This specificity will again be

altered when the sites of the brown body, through an understanding of mestizaje, joins the processes of “queering.” The politic of the racialized body takes on a particular charge. While mestizaje challenges the stability of race dominance—imagined in the location of “queer” and “lesbian” as

epistemologies of whiteness—the racialized body also claims its own agency in dissonance with the permanence of that order (knowledge) that is unspoken but unequivocally established as prior. The queer-lesbian designation is more than the product of a hyphenated linguistic methodology; it overcomes the emancipatory regime that separates “oender’”’ and “sexual difference.” The terms have their own

150 QUEERING MESTIZAJE independent history and political ramifications, but linked to one another, they invoke a much-needed debate concerning the paradigms underlying feminist and queer studies. The process of ““queering,” or the embedded disruption in queer theory, follows feminist theory in discarding the idea that sexuality is an essentialist category controlled by biology. The edited collection Feminism Meets Queer Theory tenders these epistemological inquiries, bringing into focus the work of feminists in their encounter with queer theory.’+ Its editors, Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor, acknowledge that the concept of a feminist-queer theory provided by the collected essays does not resolve the tensions resulting from the encounter between

feminist and queer studies, but it opens a forum to debate the relevant issues. In essence, this meeting of queer and feminist theories highlights the “crisis of meaning” and the modernist impetus toward the discovery of “uncertain” identity categories. In her contribution to the volume, Butler points to various paradoxes within recent debates in feminist and queer theory, drawing attention to a methodological division “which would distineuish theories of sexuality from theories of gender and, further, allocate the theoretical investigation of sexuality to queer studies and the analysis of gender to feminism.”** She asserts the need for coalitions among queer and feminist scholars to combat the methodological pressures that sepa-

rate the disciplines. Butler’s arguments clearly point to the conflictive dichotomy inherent in modern/postmodern temporalities, differences in perspectives of time and space that have produced the instability of identity categories in dramatic ways.

Within the tensions produced by the disruption of the postmodern space, the presence (and absence) of the lesbian body authenticates its own battle in the trajectories of feminist and queer theory. The disenchantment with heterosexual politics in the field has provoked lesbian feminist scholars from Adrienne Rich to Butler to challenge the unexamined parameters of “normative” sexuality in academy. As these authors have made clear, the insistence on situating patriarchy as the soutce of women’s oppression has contributed to the idea that lesbianism should always be considered in relation to the privileging borders of heterosexuality.°° The questioning of how, why, and when the norms of heterosexuality are adopted has been and continues to be imperative in the challenging discourses of lesbian feminists. While the markings of lesbianism have produced many tensions in women’s studies and the feminist movement in general, it has contributed to challenge the privilege of hetero-

Expistemologies of “Brownness” 181 sexuality. Likewise, tensions have been evident between the relationship of lesbianism and queer theory. The comprehensiveness of “queet’’ gives it an assertive meaning, par-

ticularly for those who use it to break the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy. “Queer” is a form of resistance to the question of “normal sexuality”; it creates a space where labels such as gay and lesbian may not matter anymore. Teresa de Lauretis observes, for example, that the term gueer “both transeress[es}] and transcend|s]” these discursive configurations, and in so doing, complicates their modus operandi.” In its global sense, queer may reject any assumption of gender identity, liberating sex-

uality from gender. Therefore, as I suggested earlier, the proposal of a queet-lesbian body becomes a viable alliance that, by acknowledging an ideological space between what it means to be at once queer avd lesbian, revisits the genderlessness presupposed in the generic epistemology of gueer. While this coalition attempts to raise consciousness about the invisibility of the lesbian body, it places the lesbian in a larger context where knowledge is ingrained in the particularities of meaning, defining a subjectivity constructed by relational forces. Furthermore, the “queer” and

“lesbian” conceptualized in its hyphenated version—dqueer-lesbian— provide the grounds for imagining the existence of the female body outside the margins of the discourse of white gay historiography. Despite its counternormative politics, the term gueer has come to signify white gay male, natrowing the visibility of the lesbian body in the academy.** For lesbian of color, the appropriation of gueer requires the recognition of differences and the locations of the racialized body. The queering of mestizaje functions as a strategy of representation that supports the racializa-

tion of bodies and desires. In Anzaldta’s words, “[Mlestizaje is at the heart of our art. We bleed in mestizaje, we eat and sweat and cry in mestizaje. But the Chicana is inside the mestiza.”*? The specificity of the queet-mestiza body evolves from a generic intermixture; it is constituted from the merging of multiple positions. Grounded in an epistemology of

hyphenation, the queer-mestiza provides the basis for cultural identifications that imagine the sites of race and sexuality, challenging the hierarchies of representation. The purpose of analyzing a system that attempts to bring together sexuality and gender could help to distinguish and validate the lesbian body,

which often becomes subsumed into the generic “gay” category. My rebellion against the metanarrative of the gay is not against all knowledge,

152 QUEERING MESTIZAJE but against stories of legitimation that cause the distortion of the lesbian body, especially in the mainstream media. In the popular domain, the term gay is preferred over /esbhian; the former seems less threatening to mainstream viewers and readers. For example, let us remember the picture of comedienne Ellen DeGeneres on the cover of the May 8, 1998, issue of Entertainment Weekly with the words, “Yep, she’s too gay.” As the sitcom character Ellen Morgan, DeGeneres had come out before thirtysix million viewers on April 30, 1997. In so doing, she became the first lesbian leading character to appear on prime-time national television. Days before the episode premiered, DeGeneres was in New York City to promote her new comedy CD on the television interview circuit. Talking to Rosie O’Donnell and to David Letterman, DeGeneres was both shy and playful. She noted that Ellen Morgan did, indeed, have a secret: “I

don’t know how this leaked out, because we were trying to reveal it slowly. Change people’s opinions, basically.” She paused and then added, “We do find out that the character is Lebanese.” The teasing exchanges between O’Donnell and DeGeneres prompted

O’Donnell to accept that she, too, was Lebanese. DeGeneres followed up with the playful comment that “half of Hollywood is Lebanese.” The wotd /esbian was nevet articulated (perhaps it was unnecessary); the word gay was avoided as well. Both women intentionally purged these terms: as entertainers they knew the potential for repercussions. Later, in an interview with Diane Sawyer, DeGeneres asserted that labels did not matter to her. But she noted that she preferred to use the term gay because “for some reason, the word /esbian sounds like a cult or something. “I am a lesbian’ just sounds like you got some kind of disease.” She described herself as getting better at using the word /esbian, motivated in part by her

feminist friends. Although like /sbzan, the term gay is a site of contestation and resistance, I see epistemological distinctions between the two identity markers. Both categories represent specific genders (a man or a woman) and both are gendered subjectivities that vary across cultures and time. The influential work of Sue-Ellen Case, particularly “Tracking the Vampire” (1991), saw queer theory as an anti-essentialist method to destabilize these categories of sexual difference. However, in her later book, The Domain-Matnix: Performing Lesbian at the Find of Print Culture (1996), Case

reclaims the performing space of the lesbian body “tn the face of ‘queer petformativity,’ ... to directly confront the charge of essentialism.”°! In

Expistemologies of “Brownness” 183 her critique of queer performativity, Case suggests that the generalizations of queerness continue to be problematic for lesbian feminists, and, therefore, the revival of “performing lesbian” is crucial at this juncture. The cause for the politicization and recuperation of the performing lesbian opens up the possibility of coming to terms with the importance of lesbian feminist theory while recognizing its uneasy alliance with queer theory. In this context, the lesbian feminist must prioritize a body that 1s conceptually independent of the sex/gender system, because in some queer locations this system is absent. I am also interested in the emergence of a queer body that seeks to defend the grounds of lesbianism because more than providing its own epistemology, it becomes a matter of political agency. It contributes to the enhancement of oppositional discourses and creates a site of contestation—what de Lauretis has called the “conceptual and experimental space carved out of the social field, a space of contradictions, in the here and now that need to be affirmed but not resolved.’°? De Lauretis sustains the tension of that multiple and contradictory space of lesbianism, positioning lesbian subjectivity as a form of consciousness that is not universal but rather is historically and politically determined.

Diverse subject positions contribute to the enactment of queer-mes-

tizaje and lesbianism, not necessarily parallel, but intersecting and equally determining. Hence, processes of queering mestizaje seek to open a space for the articulation of bodies and desires that emanate from subjective experience at the borderlines of race, gender, and sexuality. In its overall project, the queering of mestizaje and “mestiza-inge”’ of the lesbian body serve as critical modes for thinking about differentials of power, challenging multiple layers of oppression. Despite the common impression that the concept of lesbianism is a “Western idea,” women of color in the United States, Third World feminists, and other

transnational communities within the First World have organized around lesbian feminist issues. The invocation of a “new’ terminology that imagines same-sex love and desire has been part of an agenda that attempts to deconstruct the unitary subject of universal knowledge. From the configurations of Moraga’s “queer Aztlan” to Anzaldta’s multiple configurations of the “queer-mestiza” body and Alice Walker’s earlier conception of “womanism,” the perspectives provided by women of color in U.S. feminist history have been some of the most compelling models of lesbian politics.°:

154 QUEERING MESTIZAJE Closing Remarks

By concluding Oueermg Mestizae with this chapter, I want to provide a framework to situate the queer-lesbian body and demonstrate its connection with the ideology of mestizaje and its contemporary understandings.

As shown in multiple readings that continually debate her theories, Anzaldua’s “mestiza consciousness” has been fundamental in this kind of undertaking. While in some cases the appropriation of her mestiza ideology is an act of pure tokenism, her notion of border consciousness becomes a site of intervention that requires the act of cultural translation. While many Anglo-American feminist and queer theorists have analyzed her work in proper contexts, others have directly ignored the nuances described in her

“pluralinguistic’” methodology that connects mestizaje with queer constructs of the self. As illustrated in this chapter, the queer-mestiza body through its various linguistic signifiers generates a “truer” sense of self for the lesbian of color and the sociocultural space she negotiates. On the whole, Anzaldta’s work has helped us to broadly comprehend the complexity of the theory/practice dialectic while arguing for a multi-

layered feminist movement/theory that contends with the complex intersection of oppressions, equally and resolutely, without leaving anyone behind. The trajectory of her work has impacted the life experiences of Chicanas and Latinas specifically as well as U.S. women of color and Anglo-American feminists more generally. Since the first publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981, coedited with Cherrie Moraga) to the edited volume that followed, Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, Anzaldua’s feminist agenda has challenged unitary mod-

els of gender, defiantly representing notions of “womanhood” that take race, ethnicity, sex/gender, class, and sexuality into account. Anzaldta’s leadership in the emergence of “Third Wave” feminism in the early 1980s prompted white, middle-class feminists and women of color to reflect on the cultural differences and relations of power that distinguish the multiple specificities of the female body. Moreover, Anzaldtia’s knowledge production, embodied in the “borderlands,” navigates the cross-section of cultural encounters resulting from the transnational consciousness derived from the mythos of mestizaje. Through the feminization of such cultural legacy, la mestiza zs the imperative force that defies grand narratives of national histories. In explaining the mixture that defines mesti-

Expistemologies of “Brownness” 18y zaje, she writes “from this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, an ‘alien’ consciousness, wna conciencia de myer. \t 1s the consciousness of the Borderlands.”%4

If we locate mestizaje in its relation to the heterogeneous entity of postmodernism, the possibility of the queer-inflected body becomes a trope for political agency. Thus in tracing epistemologies that help locate the queer-mestiza body, I had to rely upon the discursive configurations produced by the postmodern condition, which regulates “subversive” knowledge, formulating narratives that are “inside” and “outside” the Western imagination. This condition is implicitly suggested in Anzaldua’s theorizations of mestizaje and the interdisciplinary studies that continue

to debate and expand the metanarratives of her “mestiza” knowledge production. If one characterizes postmodernity by the radical relativization of Western cultural practices, discourses, and myths (Lyotard), Anzaldua’s metaphors of subjectivity, self-determination, and cosmology through the discourse of mestizaje reemerge as a paradox of contemporary “Western” thought. Through mestizaje, she created a “new” feminism capable of compromising with “a history of oppositional consciousness.”

The language and ideologies Anzaldta created to define feminism are overlapped in-between the “risks” of the borderlands. This metaphorical overlapping of the worlds is a construct from which the uncertainty of the contact zones is revealed. The mestiza, in effect, inhabits the ambigu-

ity of these sites, which are obviously marked in the fragmentations of the postmodern world. Contrary to what Paula Moya has suggested in her “Chicana Feminism and Postmodernist Theory,” this formulation of the Chicana self is not only justified in the predicament of mareginality and contradiction, but also in the formulation of identities that goes beyond abstraction in search of certain forms of political struggles.°° Thus, it is from the sites of dialectical thinking that the mestiza body becomes both “fiction” and “reality,” marking the significant processes of historical and material contexts. Furthermore, Anzaldta’s mestiza knowledge represents the paradoxical nature of disidentification and the writing-into-self process. Her overall mestizaje theory is claimed by the sovereignty of “situated knowledge,” placed against and in dialogue with Western epistemologies. A few years after the publication of her Borderlands/La Frontera, she adamantly continued to locate mestizaje: “In our

mestizaje theoties we create new categories for those of us left out or pushed out of the existing ones. We recover and examine non-Western

156 QUEERING MESTIZAJE aesthetics while critiquing Western aesthetics.”°’ She views and questions

the Western canon as a participating force in the colonizing process of mareinality. Anzaldua’s lesbian sensibility is also dialectically posited, suggesting constructs of bodies mediated by counterdiscourses while subverting the “cultural norms” of regulatory practices that privilege heterosexual over queer, man overt woman, and white over brown. This formulation of sub-

altern subjectivities through her theorizations of mestizaje represents a major intervention in critical race theory, Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural studies, minority discourses, and queer postcolonial studies. Oueering

Mestizge is likewise generated in an effort to demonstrate how both “queer” and “mestizaje” invoke the epistemological ground for interdisciplinarity. For Anzaldta this alliance has strong mystical connections: “The mestizo and the queer exit at this time and point on the revolutionary continuum for a purpose. We are a blending that proves that all blood

is intricately woven together, and that we are spawned out of similar souls.”°8 The linking of “mestiza theory” to “queer theory” conveys articulations that rely on the cross-cultural analysis emerging as the protagonist of disciplinary transformations. The intersectionality of these theoretical constructions, either as verb or a noun—“mestiza-ine”’ queer ot “queerine’”’ mestizaje—accounts for a much-needed coalition of culturally marginal models that has developed out of shifting social patra-

dioms. Their interconnectedness further suggests a subjectivity that exists in community, in process, diverse and multidetermined. This book has not only been a “postmodernist” inquiry on mestizaje,

but a serious attempt to link its performative nature across multiple encounters. Its methodological shifts in time as well as in geographical and mythological sites—from the colonial to postcolonial, U.S. Latino/a to Latin America, Aztlan to the Philippine Archipelago, /a raza cosmica to the mestiza consciousness, Pratt to Mignolo, Cecilia Valdez to Maria Clara, Baca’s La Mestizaje to Luna’s Espana y Filipinas, and so on—suggest

a framework in which knowledge production legitimates complex topographies of subaltern history while identifying a transnational/trans-

cultural approach that gives shape to feminist and queer communal affiliations.

NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. In the simplest terms, transculturation is defined as cultural transformations induced by the encounter between two or more cultures. Transculturation has been used by ethnographers and cultural/literary critics to describe how subordinated or minority groups apply and re-create the knowledge transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture. 2. The main theme of Pratt’s work suggests that “travel writing” has been used as a tool for explaining and justifying imperialism, for normalizing it, and for promoting its underlying belief. 3. Border crossing is the physical or virtual movement across any barrier (1e., the movement of people across geographical spaces and cultures). It can also refer to the engagement of ideas and production thereof. We can talk about “border crossing’ in symbolic ways to suggest how texts echo other texts. 4. Mary Louise Pratt, /wperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York:

Routledge, 1992), 7. For Pratt, a metaphor for the “contact zone” is “colonial frontier.”” However, she considers “frontier” as only a signifier of Europe, while implicit to the “contact zone” is the ramification of colonial encounters all over the world. 5. In general, dialectics is a method of thinking and interpreting the world from the perspective that everything is in a constant state of change and fluctuation. As explained in the theories of Hegel and Marx, dialectics is a process of change through the logic of contradiction, whereby a thesis is transformed into an antithesis; by disclosing and overcoming the contradictions within it, the resolution is reached in a synthesis. 6. Mary Louise Pratt, “Art in the Contact Zone,” in Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, ed. David Bartholome and Anthony Petrosky (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 607. 7. In this context, the notion of “dialectical bodies” refers to the dynamic interplay of the multiple contradictions inherent in the transformative social system cap-

tured in transculturation. Nevertheless, dialectical bodies create a relational system because they are codependent with one another.

8. José Marti was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1853, the son of poor Spanish immigrants. As a result of his commitment to Cuba’s first struggle for independence, he was arrested in his teens and sentenced to six years of hard labor. After being released, he began the exile that would characterize his life. He went to Spain,

157

158 NOTES TO PAGES 3—4 where he recetved his college degree, completing a doctorate in philosophy and humanities in 1874. Subsequently, he lived in France, Mexico, and Guatemala. He returned to Cuba in 1878, only to be expelled again the next year. He arrived in New

York City in 1890 and remained there for the next fourteen years. While in the United States, he worked as a journalist for North and South American presses, becoming one of the most widely read correspondents of that time. On January Io, 1891, he wrote “Nuestra América,” which was originally published in Spanish in La Revista [lustrada de Nueva York. Consult Marti’s Obras completas, 2nd ed. (Havana: Edi-

torial de Ciencias Sociales, 1963-65). In addition to his writing career, Marti spent much of his time planning the second Cuban struggle for independence. In 1892, he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party and returned to Cuba in 1895. On May 19, 1895, he went into battle for the first time and was shot dead almost immediately. Marti’s life and work were seminal influences in the course of the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which American intervention contributed to the defeat and expulsion of the Spanish army from Cuba. The United States formally granted Cuba its independence in 1902. 9. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge or the way we claim what we know. It deals with the nature of reasoning, with truth, and with the process of knowing. 10. The term postcolonial gained wide usage in the late 1980s, designating the con-

temporary cultural and literary productions of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. As applied in this book, the postcolonial, which can also be described as postmodernist, characterizes cultures of resistance that emerged to deconstruct symbolic powers of authority. Postcolonialism (also known as postcolonial theory) does not necessarily imply “after colonialism’; instead it refers to a set of theories in critical race theory and discourse that grapple with the legacy of colonial rules. The theoty discusses how the history of colonialism continues to shape the relationship between the West and the non-West after former colonized states have won their independence. In this book, I also understand postcolonialism as a tool that contributes to the exploration of the experiences of suppression, resistance, race, gender, cultural difference, and oppositional consciousness in relation to the master Western discourses of history.

11. The notion of the “subordinated” is in dialogue with, or borrows from, Michel Foucault’s idea of “subjugated knowledges,” defined as a “set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.” Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 82.

12. Pratt has suggested that the contact zone can function as pedagogical metaphor in the academy. In other words, in the production of knowledge, we become in “contact” and sometimes in “conflict” with each other’s ideas. As she indicated in the quoted passage that opened this introduction, we can determine how knowledge is “absorbed” and reproduced as well as how it can be “appropriated” while it goes through a process of transculturation. 13. Homi K. Bhabha has suggested that the “signifying position” of the minority subject becomes a contestation of totalizing structures of knowledge, producing simultaneously the sites of “subaltern signification.” The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 162.

Notes to Pages 4-5 189 14. In general, translocality refers to a change in the relationship among territory, identity, and political affiliation (i.e., the movement implicit in border crossing). 15. Alfredo Arteaga, Chicano Poetics: Heterotext and Hybridites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Arteaga’s “dialogical imagination” uses the theorizations of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who believed that all thought was “dialogic.” In his Dzalogic Imagination, Bakhtin suggests that all language and ideas have an endless relationship to the world. In other words, knowledge production is the result of collective and dynamic social processes. Bakhtin uses different terms, polyphony, heteroglossia, and carnival throughout his work, but “dialogic” knowledge is embedded in them. Consult, for example, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Lhe Dialogic [magination: Four Fissays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); and Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 16. Homi K. Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between,” in Ovwestions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 58. 17. See Fernando Ortiz, Cotrapunto cubano del tabaco y el azucar (Havana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963), trans. Harriet De Onis as Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Ortiz coined the term s¢ransculturation in 1940 as way of counteracting and subverting the homogenizing grammars implicit in “acculturation,” which was a popular concept formulated by the Anglo anthropologist Melville Herskovits in the late 1930s. Ortiz was specifically responding to Herskovits’s Acculturation: The Study of Culture Contact (1938). Later, Angel Rama

became well known after applying Ortiz’s theory of transculturation in his approach to Latin American fiction. In his 7ransculturacion narrativa en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1982), Rama has generally suggested that this theory is foundational to the comprehension of the narrative and cultural identity of Latin America’s colonial difference. 18. Specific examples of significant scholarship regarding the subject of transculturation include Pratt, /wperial Eyes; Roman de la Campa, Latin Americanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/ Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2000); Vera M. Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Exrotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993); Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chavez-Silverman, eds., /ropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997); Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, José, Can You See? Latinos On and Off Broadway (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Juan Flores, Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Iden-

tity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Diana Taylor, “Transculturating Transculturation,” in /uterculturalism and Performance, ed. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta (New York: PAJ Publications, 1991), 6o—74; Coco Fusco, English is Broken Flere: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: New Press, 1995); and Silvia Spitta, Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America (Hous-

ton: Rice University Press, 1995).

19. As Roman de la Campa explains, the “self,” refusing to become a passive subalternity, is instead “a decisive participant in the formation of peripherally modern societies” (Latin Americanism, 66).

190 NOTES TO PAGES 5-8 20. Asa formation of modern racial and cultural classification (like mulata, mes-

tizo, Indio, and white), mestizaje is the result of the colonial encounter between Europe and the Americas. 21. Taylor, “Transculturating Transculturation,” 61. 22. Taylor, “Transculturating Transculturation,” 61. The discussion of transculturation in the context of Latin American culture has been expanded in Taylor’s most recent book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Ameri-

cas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). In this book, Taylor includes “Memory as Cultural Practice: Mestizaje, Hybridity, Transculturation,” a chapter in which mestizaje is analyzed as a performance of cultural memoty. 23. See, for example, the work of Spitta, Between Two Waters; and Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman’s edited book /ropicalzations. 24. My use and understanding of the term /egemony was influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s theory, which conceives the term as a set of ideas or cultural beliefs by which the dominant ideology is practiced and spread. According to Gramsci, hege-

mony can never be taken for granted because its function does not disappear but changes character constantly. See Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 25. Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between,” 54. 26. Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets, 4-5. 27. Claudio Esteva-Fabregat, Mestixaje in [bero-America, trans. John Wheat (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995). The original, // Mestizaje en [beroamerica, was published in Madrid in 1987. 28. Esteva-Fabregat mentions that a conqueror in Mexico who was Bernal Diaz

del Castillo’s companion had thirty children in three years. He reports that in other countries, Spaniards had twenty to thirty concubines each. 29. Esteva-Fabregat, Mestizaje in [bero-America, 33-39. 30. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestixa (San Francisco:

Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987). 31. Amaryll Chanady, “Identity, Politics and mestizaje,” 1n Contemporary Latin American Studies, ed. Stephen Hart and Richard Young (London: Arnold, 2003), 201. 32. José Vasconcelos, lhe Cosmic Race: A Bilingual edition, trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997). 33. Sonia Saldivar-Hull discusses the notion of “border feminism” in Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), analyzing the writings of Chicana writers (primarily Sandra

Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldua, and Helena Maria Viramontes), and arguing for a critical discourse that takes into account gender politics and the politics of location. 34. Marilyn Grace Miller, Rese and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestixaje in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 38. In this book, Miller looks closely at the constructions of specific national and regional engagements of mestizaje in Latin America, analyzing its complex legacy. She suggests that the invocation of mestizaje is always framed by local histories and sociopolitical conditions. Moreover, Miller’s revisionist reading of mestizaje is framed within transnational relationships, including various geographical sites in her analyses: stretching from Mexico,

Notes to Pages 9-1y 191 and the Caribbean to Brazil, Ecuador, and Argentina. She also includes analysis of mestizo cultures in the United States. 35. Norma Alarcon, “Anzaldta’s Frontera: Inscribing Gynetics,” in Decolonial Vowes: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studtes in the 21st Century, ed. Arturo J. Aldama and

Naomi H. Quifionez (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 124. By means of complicated repertoire of Lacanian psychoanalysis and French feminism, Alarcén encourages a figorous rereading of Anzaldta’s theories, suggesting that the struggle for representation rewrites and codifies “the heterogeneity of the present.”

36. See Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Stans, Cybores, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 183-201. Significantly, Haraway’s

work is focused on the radical historical specificity and contestability of scientific constructions, developing a new doctrine of objectivity that privileges the feminist standpoint. 37. Cherrie Moraga, “The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea,” in 7he Hungry Woman (Albuquerque: West End Press, 2001), 5-97. In this book, Moraga also includes her play Heart of the E:arth.

38. The Huichol Indians (pronounced Wett-chol) are descendants of the Aztecs and are related to their Uto-Aztecan-speaking cousins, the Hopi of Arizona. They ate tepresentatives of a pre-Columbian shamanic tradition, which still functions according to the ceremonies of their remote past. Most of the Huichols live in small villages called ranchos scattered throughout Jalisco and Nayarit, two rugged and mountainous states in north central Mexico. Having withstood the Spanish invasion, they fought to keep their culture alive, despite the presence of their Mexican neighbors. To preserve their ancient beliefs and ritual ceremonies, they began making detailed and elaborate yarn paintings and beadwork. One sees their fine artwork for sale at many locations in Puerto Vallarta. 39. Insome contemporary Filipino intellectual circles, there is continuing debate whether José Rizal should remain the national hero because he did not fight in arms against the Spanish colonizers. Some argue that the pen is mightier than the sword. 40. José Rizal, Nod Me Tangere, trans. Leon Ma. Guerrero (Manila: Insular Printing Corporation, 1995) and // Fiiibusterismo, trans. Leon Ma. Guerrero (Manila: Insular Printing Corporation, 1996). 41. For example, in most Chicano and Latino studies, the notion of mestizaje is directly or indirectly attended to. However, in many cases its conceptual meaning is superficially emphasized as a presupposed characteristic of cultural ethnocentrism. 42. In his book Cztes of the Death: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Colum-

bia University Press, 1996), Joseph Roach suggests a framework that negotiates the heterogeneous orders of text: the written, the spoken, and the visible as multiple principles of performance’s “indefinite entity.” Roach applies “kinesthetic imagination,” “vortices behaviors,” and “displaced transmission” as principles that govern the practices of memoty and contribute to his analysis of what he terms “genealogies of performance.” Furthermore, he presents history as transmitted through ingrained memories of the culture of modernity. His concept of “citcum-Atlantic interculture” emphasizes the impact of cultural encounter and exchange in the face of Eurocolonial expansion and the diasporic histories of Africa and the Americas. For Roach, the

192 NOTES TO PAGES I7—22 intercultural body makes fundamentally visible the performance of difference and identity, as constructed through the narratives of what he calls “incomplete forgetting.”

CHAPTER ONE 1. For Walter D. Mignolo the link between modernity and coloniality points to a subsequent connection between “postcoloniality” and “postmodernity.”” He conceptualizes “colonial modernity” as a subaltern knowledge that articulates the dis-

placement of hegemony. For further readings on “colonial modernities” see Miegnolo, Local Histories/ Global Designs.

2. Arjun Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography,” in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 42. 3. Aurora Levins Morales, “Child of the Americas,” in Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings—An Anthology, ed. Roberto Santiago (New York: One World, 1995), 79. Levins Morales is a Puerto Rican Jewish poet best known for Getting Home Alive (1986), a book she cowrote with her mother, Rosario Morales. 4. Levins Morales, “Child of the Americas,” 79.

5. The act stipulated that Puerto Rico was a USS. territory whose inhabitants were entitled to U.S. citizenship. The act provided for election of both houses of the Puerto Rican legislature, but the governor and other key officials were still to be appointed by the U.S. president, and the governor was empowered to veto any legislation. 6. Ina 1951 referendum, Puerto Ricans approved a U.S. law that granted them the right to draft their own constitution. After the approval of a new constitution in 1952, Luis Mufioz Marin, who had been elected governor of Puerto Rico, proclaimed the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Commonwealth status provided Puerto Ricans with more local control but not complete autonomy from the United States. 7. Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 163. 8. Flores, from Bomba to Hip-Hop, 164. 9. Flores, from Bomba to Hip-Hop, 165. 10. See note 8 in the introduction for biographical information about José Marti. 11. Benito Juarez was born to an indigenous family in San Pablo Guelatao, Oaxaca, in 1806. During his childhood he spoke only Zapotec. He became governor of Oaxaca in 1847 and assumed the Mexican presidency in 1858. As a result of the French intervention, he was obliged to leave Mexico City in May 1863; he continued to govern from different locations within Mexico, however. After Maximilian had been tried and executed, Juarez was reelected president and returned to the capital city in 1867.

12. Napoleon III justified the invasion of Mexico on the pretext that he needed to collect overdue loans. There was no doubt, however, that the French were trying to recapture some of their past glory. 13. José Maria Torres Caicedo, a Colombian by birth, resided in Paris at the time he wrote Union Latino-Americana (Paris: Rosa y Boudet, 1865).

Notes to Pages 22-26 193 14. Ihe passage quoted is from the electronic version at www.tulane.edu/~avelar/genealogy.html, 5. 15. The phrase manifest destiny was coined to describe the philosophy shared by many that the United States had a divine right to become a transcontinental nation. To that end, the 1840s became a decade of rapid territorial acquisition and expansion. In 1848 the annexation of the Mexican territory, known now as the Southwestern states, was a direct consequence of the nation’s belief in its divine right to conquer. 16. This is the title of the English translation of Julio Ramos’s book Dwergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, trans. John D. Blanco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). The original title 1s Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina: literature y politica en el siglh XIX (Mexico City: Fondo

de Cultura Econémica, 1989). 17. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, 251.

18. After the Mexican Revolution, this idea gained strength, and philosopher José Vasconcelos popularized it in his 1925 essay “La raza cosmica’”’ (The cosmic race). Vasconcelos became well known in Latin America after writing this piece, in which he champions mestizaje while defining it as the only hope for humanity. He argues that a cosmic “fifth race” will emerge once the four races of the world—the black, the Indian, the Mongol, and the white—are fused together. He saw the arrival of Europeans in the Americas as the beginning of that process. In general, his model of mestizaje is synthetic and marked by the principle of assimilation. 19. The essay “Globalization and the Borders of Latimidad’ is posted on the fol-

lowing website (May 4, 2001): http://sppo.ohiostate.edu/portuguese/nehinstitute/brazil/Textos/Latinidad4.htm, 20. Mignolo, an Argentine critic, was originally trained as a philologist and semiotician, but with his recent publications he has become known as a scholar of the postcolonialist Americas. 20. The thesis Mignolo defends in his essay follows arguments formulated much eatlier by Anibal Quiyano and Immanuel Wallerstein in “Americanity as a Concept: Or the Americas in the Modern World-System,” /nternational Social Science Journal 1, no. 134 (1992): 549-57. 21. Mignolo, “Globalization,” 3. 22. Mignolo, Local Histories/ Global Designs. 23. Mignolo, Local Hestories/ Global Designs, 16.

24. In Local Histories/ Global Designs, Mignolo mentions “[m]y own idea of ‘border thinking,’ which I modeled on the Chicano/a experience ...”” (5—G). In chapter 5, he discusses Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera. 25. Mignolo, Local Histories/ Global Designs, 219. In comparing diverse “pluralin-

guistic’” contexts, Mignolo attempts to understand how subaltern knowledge and current globalizing processes meet in the domain of language and in complicity with colonial expansion. 26. Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, 78. 27. Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity,’” in Hall and Paul du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity, ©.

28. Anzaldta, Borderlands/La Frontera, 82.

29. Antonio Gramsci developed a critique of cultural hegemony in which he expanded on Marxist ideas. For Gramsci, the values of the dominant groups or the

194 NOTES TO PAGES 26-30 bourgeoisie maintain certain power structures, “economic domination” and “intellectual and moral leadership,” which favor an elite group, subjugating a majority with their “common sense.” Gramsci believed in the need to create a working-class culture that could create a new kind of intellectual and a counterhegemonic movement. See Lhe Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000), and Prison Notebooks. 30. Anzaldua, borderlands/La Frontera, 38. 31. Anzaldia, Borderlands/La Frontera, 38. 32. Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, 38. 33. L, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth BurgosDebray, trans. Ann Wright (New York: Verso, 1984), 168, first published as Me amo Rigoberta Menchu_y asi me nacio la conciencia (Barcelona: Editorial Argos Vergara, 1983).

Mencht was born into a poor Indian peasant family and raised in the Quiche branch of the Mayan culture in Guatemala. As a teenager, she became involved in social reform programs of the Catholic Church and was active in the women’s rights move-

ment. Like her father, she joined the CUC (Committee of the Peasant Union) in 1979, after members of her family had suffered persecution. Menchu became an activist and encouraged the Indian peasant population to resist oppression. In 1981, because of her activism, she had to leave Guatemala and flee to Mexico, where she otganized peasants’ resistance movements and was cofounder of The United Representation of the Guatemalan Opposition (RUOG). These issues and her life story in general are the focus of her book. Mencht has become widely known as a leading advocate of indigenous rights, not only in Guatemala, but also in the Western Hemi-

sphere generally. Her work and activism have earned her several international awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. 34. The Zapatistas are members of the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), created in 1994 as a response to the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The rallying cry of the Zapatistas focused on the unjust treatment of indigenous people and the Mexican people in general. The roots

of this revolutionary group can be found deep in Mexican history and in the 1gto revolution, which included among its leaders Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa. 35. In the years since the Zapatista uprising of January 1, 1994, several connections and comparisons have been made between this rebellion and the Mexican Revolution (1910-20). Consult, for example, Maria Josefina Saldafia-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 36. Saldafia-Portillo, Revolutionary Imagination, 225. 37. Saldafia-Portillo, Revolutionary Imagination, 212. 38. Miller, Rzse and Fall.

39. Michel Foucault conceptualized the notion of “heterotopia” as the space where contradictory elements are juxtaposed. He first used the concept in his text “Des Espace Autres,” translated as “Of Other Spaces.” Although the piece is not part of his published corpus, the manuscript was released into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Foucault’s death. See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” in Dracritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22-27. 40. Néstor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Moder-

Notes to Pages 30-36 195 nity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). The Spanish-language edition, Culturas hibridas: F:strategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, won the 1992 Premio Iberoamericano. In this chapter, all references are to the English translation. 41. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, v1. 42. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 3. 43. He uses the terms cu/tured and popular; the two overlap to some extent. 44. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 261. 45. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 261. 46. I had intended to include a copy of the billboard’s tmage but was not able to

obtain copyright permission from the Lapiz agency. The Lapiz representative explained that due to the controversy caused by the billboard, he was referring me to Tecate beer company for copyright permission. 47. Alex Veiga (Associated Press), “Hispanic Lawmakers, Activists Want Beer Ads Pulled,” San Diego Union-Tribune, May 14, 2004, www.signonsandiego.com. 48. The first television commercial debuted on May 10, 2004, across all broadcast markets. El Pollo Loco is owned by New York—based equity investment firm American Securities Capital Partners, L.P.; company headquarters are in Irvine, California. Currently, El Pollo Loco operates about three hundred restaurants in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas. The “El Caliente” ad was produced by Los Angeles—based

Krueger Communications. For more information, see www.elpolloloco.com or www.kruegerads.com. 49. The “El Caliente: The Hot One” promotional tent cards were displayed in El

Pollo Loco establishments in May 2004. In 2005, I attempted to obtain copyright permission from El Pollo Loco to include a copy of the image of “El Caliente: The Hot One” in this book. I was informed by a public relations staff of the company that any reference to “El Caliente: The Hot One” was no longer correct because they had changed him into “The Master of El Pollo Loco flame.”

50. The El Caliente character is performed by Matt Cedefio, who formerly played Brandon Walker on the TV soap opera Days of Our Lives. 51. According to Victoria Thomas, author of Hollywood's Latin Lover: Latino, [talzan and French Men Who Make the Screen Smolder (Santa Monica, CA: Angel City Press,

1998), the true originator of the role was Antonio Moreno (a Spanish-descent actor who began his career in 1912 with Voue of the Milhon), not Rudolph Valentino, as most people believe. 52. Bhabha, 7he Location of Culture, 67. 53. Arlene Davila, Latinos, [nc.: The Marketing and Making of a People (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001). 54. Davila, Latinos, Inc, 55. 55. Davila uses the terms Latino and Hispanic interchangeably, as do most people in academic and nonacademic circles.

56. Salma Hayek, “She’s Got to Have It,” interview by Laura Winters, E/z, June 1998, 124.

57. Stephen Farber, “Frida,” in 7he Book of Los Angeles: A Mind of its Own (Los Angeles: Real Communications, 2000), 28. 58. Josefina Lopez, Real Women Have Curves (Woodstock: Dramatic Publishing,

196 NOTES TO PAGES 37—40 1996). In this discussion, I limit my focus to the film. While the play had been pro-

duced numerous times since the late 1980s with great success, the movie also received astounding accolades. It was honored at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival with the Audience Award and with the Youth Prize at the 2002 San Sebastian Inter-

national Film Festival. George LaVoo and Josefina Lépez wrote the screenplay adaptation. 59. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 34. 6o. “Film Synopses: Real Women Have Curves,” Ritz Filmbill, October 2002, 1. See http://www.titzfilmbill.com. 61. “Film Synopses.” 62. “Film Synopses.” 63. Jennifer Lopez, “She’s all That,” interview by Elysa Gardener, /nS#z, June 1999, 281. It is important to recognize the changes that have taken place in Hollywood’s representation of the “ideal” body. Current actresses are much thinner and physically toned than those of thirty, forty, and fifty years ago. For example, in the 19508, Marilyn Monroe was idolized as a sex symbol and fashion icon. She was a size

twelve. As female movie stars diet to meet Hollywood’s “standard” of a perfect body, the general public likewise strives to conform to that “ideal” and, thus there is an increase in the number of people with eating disorders. 64. In 1994, Culture Clash made history in the mainstream media, appearing on Fox Network television with their self-titled comedy show. Although the show was canceled after only thirty episodes, Culture Clash’s presence on television was a defining moment for them and for Latinos in general. 65. Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza, Culture Clash: Life, Death, and Revolutionary Comedy (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1998). 66. The author of this play is Richard Montoya. He combines comedy and drama

in the character of a young playwright of Middle Eastern descent. This playwright character walks around the stage (which represents Washington, DC), making observations and interviewing people who, he says, will help him write a play that will serve as an “anthem.” 67. “The Contradictions of Culture Clash,” Revolutionary Worker, Januaty 7, 2001,

4. Posted at http://rwot.org. 68. Written by Culture Clash and directed by Lisa Peterson, the play premiered at the Los Angeles Mark Taper Forum (it ran from May 17 to July 6, 2003). On June 3-6, 2004, the group performed a radio theater version of the play at the Wells Fargo Theatre in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. 69. I discuss the work of Judith Baca in more detail in the next chapter. The mural illustrated in figure 1 is a visual depiction of the testimony staged in Culture Clash’s play. The mural is a section of the Great Wall of Los Angeles, painted over summers from 1976 to 1983 by 215 teenagers supervised by twenty-five artists under the direction of Judith Baca. The wall extends for one-half mile in the Tujunga Wash in San Fernando Valley. Division of the Barrios and Chavez Ravine has been reproduced in Lucy R. Lippard’s Maxed Blessings: New Art in. A Mutticultural America (New York: Pantheon, 1990) and also in Szens From the Heart: Cahfornia Chicano Murals, ed. Eva

Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sanchez (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993).

Notes to Pages 41-47 197 7o. “Contradictions of Culture Clash,” 8. 71. The group’s name itself, Culture Clash, marks the process that is produced in the articulation of cultural difference. 72. dela Campa, Latin Americanism, 64. 73. Mignolo, Local Histories/ Global Designs, 17.

74. Sandoval-Sanchez, José, Can You See? 108-9. 75. Baez’s writing has been published in Forward Motion magazine, Brujula/ Compass, Ventana Abierta, Vetas, Caribbean Connections: Moving North, etc.

76. Ramon Rivera-Servera, “Apartarte/Casarte,” in Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (2000): 112.

77. Josefina Baez, Dominicanish, a Performance Text (New York: Graphic Att, 2000). The performance of this text was directed by Claudio Mir in New York City at the Dance Theater Workshop (November 1999). 78. Ramon Rivera-Servera, “A Dominican York in Andhra,” in Caribbean Dance From Abakua to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity, ed. Susanna Sloat (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 15 3-54. 79. Baez, Dominicanish, 7. lam responsible for the translation of the text. 80. The term Nuyorican first emerged during the early 1970s as a way to identify Puerto Ricans born or raised in the United States, particularly in New York City. Initially, it carried some derogatory connotations; Puerto Ricans back on the island used the term to differentiate themselves culturally from the Puerto Rican migrant popu-

lation in the United States. The term was fostered by New York Puerto Rican writets as a way of defining and asserting their identity as U.S. Puerto Ricans. The foundation of the Nuyorican Poets Café in the mid-1970s was a seminal part of this process. This nonprofit organization began as a living room salon in the East Village apartment of writer and poet Miguel Algarin. By 1975, it was clear that the “Nuyorican” identity had been established as an independent reality (William Morrow published an anthology titled Nuyorican Poetry) and that a new, larger, and more public meeting space was needed. Algarin rented the Sunshine Cafe on East Sixth Street and renamed it the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. By 1980, the café was able to purchase a building at 236 East Third Street to expand its activities and programs. 81. Anthony Giddens speaks of the “out-thereness” and “in-hereness” of globalization, referring to the complex connectivity between systemic transformations and transformations that affect our local sense of the world and people’s sense of identity. See “Living in a Post-traditional Society,” in Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, ed. Giddens, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 82. Juana Maria Rodriguez, Oueer Latinidad: Identity Practices and Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 33.

83. The image reminds us of the female sexuality and the sensual abstraction of Georgia O’Keeffe’s art. 84. David Roman, “Tropical Fruit,” in Aparicio and Chavez Silverman, 77ropical1Zatlons, 13,2.

85. David Roman and Alberto Sandoval, “Caught in the Web: Latimnidad, Aids and Allegory in Lhe Kiss of the Spider Woman,” American Literature 67, no. 3 (1995): 553-85.

198 NOTES TO PAGES 49-52 CHAPTER TWO 1. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, “Iam Joaquin/Yo soy Joaquin,” in Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, ed. Nicolas Kanellos (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 199. The original publication was released by the Crusade for Justice in 1967. The Crusade was a cultural center founded by Gonzales in 1966, in Denver, Colorado. The center sponsored the First Annual Chicano Youth Conference in 1969, attended by Chicano activists and students from throughout the

Southwest. Right after its publication in 1967, the poem was adapted to film by Teatro Campesino. During the Chicano movement, the poem was widely circulated and read during public demonstrations. The poem is a landmark in the development of Chicano poetry and other cultural productions in 1970s. Within the context of social criticism, the poem had become a classic text in Chicano literature. 2. Moraga has a section entitled “Queer Aztlan: The Re-Formation of Chicano Tribe” in her book The Last Generation (Boston: South End Press, 1993). I discuss her ideas in the final section of this chapter.

3. According to Rendon, the epic of the Four Suns begins with the Sun of Night or Earth, depicted as a tiger. This period is by itself sterile. Next comes the Sun of Air, or God of Wind, a pure spirit whose indwellers became monkeys; then the

Sun of Rain or Fire, in which only birds survive; and finally, the Sun of Water, friendly only to fish. For more details, see Armando B. Rend6én, Chicano Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 9. 4. Anzaldta, Borderlands/ La Frontera, 3. 5. Anzaldua, Borderlands/ La Frontera, 3. 6. Nowadays, the image of the running family has become an iconic symbol—

in a positive or negative light depending to how one feels about undocumented immigration and immigrants in general. The image is found on T-shirts, covers of books and CDs, and in fine art, and a photo of the sign is even displayed at the Smithsonian. The creator, John Hood, is a graphic artist who works for Caltrans. He has suggested in an interview with journalist Leslie Berestein that by creating this sion he just wanted to help save lives, adding that now “it has its own life.” Leslie Berestein, “Highway Safety Sign Becomes Running Story on Immigration,” San Diego Union-Tribune, July 2, 2005, http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050410/

news_Intosigns.html, 6. 7. Anzaldua, Borderlands/ La Frontera, 4.

8. Roger Barnett has publicly announced that his group captured over 174 immigrants in just one weekend and thousands over a two-year period. He also announced that he is ready to kill border crossers if he has to. The vigilantes interviewed on CNN on Match 31, 2005, appeared to be in their seventies. Some of them were armed with the intent to kill and harm the border crossers in the Arizona desert. According to the vigilantes, their “project” is a response to the failure of the government to stop the flow of immigration. 9. Influenced by the vigilantes in Arizona, the Minuteman Project was formed in April 2005 by James Gilchrist. The group takes its name from the minutemen who fought in the American Revolution. Described as a civilian border patrol, the group

has generated chapters in eighteen states, including southern border regions and

Notes to Pages 52-54 199 Utah, Minnesota, and Maine. According to the statement of the Minuteman Project, they are patrolling the borders as a way to “secure” their interests and present power structures, which they fear can be lost due to the demographic changes taking place: “At the current rate of invasion the United States will be completely over run with ILLEGAL aliens by the year 2025 ... only 21 years away. ILLEGAL aliens and their off-

spring will be the dominant population in the U.S. and will have made such inroads into the political and social systems that ‘they’ will have more influence than our Constitution over how the U.S. is governed. The ugly consequence of an ignored U.S. Constitution is already taking place. Future generations will inherit this mutated form of the United States of America, consisting of 100 different sub-nations, speaking roo different languages, and promoting too different cultural agendas. That will certainly guarantee the death of this nation as a ‘melting pot.’ Instead, it will be tantamount to a sack of marbles ... with each marble colliding with the other marbles,

as each culture scrambles for dominance of its culture over all others.” http://www.usbc.org/minutemantr.html (posted April 2005). 10. The group was founded in 2004 by Joseph Turner in Ventura, California. Their website is described as the “Home of Real Grassroots Activists Fighting Ilegal Immigration,” http://www.saveourstate.org/. Recognizing the contributions of the big immigrant population in California (and particularly in Los Angeles), the Los Angeles City Council issued an official and harsh rebuke to inland and border antimigrant vigilantes such as the Minutemen and Save Our State on February 3, 2006. The Council adopted a resolution to “include in the City’s 2005—06 State and Federal Legislative Program suppott for any legislation denouncing and prohibiting the vigilante actions of individuals against immigrants along the border and within urban communities and enact immigration reform leading towards a path of permanent status for immigrants here now and wider legal channels for those coming in the future.” 11. “Judy Baca’s Monument in Baldwin Park is Under Attack,” L.A. Writers Collective (June 7, 2005): http://lawriterscollective.blogspot.com/2005 /o6/judy-bacasmonument-in-baldwin-park.html, r. 12. Since the 1960s, people of Latin American descent have become an increas-

ingly important part of the country’s population. It is predicted that they may become the largest group in the United States in the mid-twenty-first century. The country’s largest cities currently have substantial populations of individuals of Latin American descent. Miami could be considered a Latin American city within the boundaries of the United States, given the large size of its Cuban and Caribbean populations. It is a financial and tourist center for much of Latin America. Los Angeles has a Mexican population that is second in size only to Mexico City. New York has a large Puerto Rican population as well as a rapidly growing Dominican immigrant eroup. The Latino population in Chicago is mostly Mexican but also includes Puerto Ricans and Central American groups. During the past decade, Central Americans in the United States have increased at a faster rate than any other Latino group. In certain areas within many U.S. cities, it is not necessary to speak any English at all. This phenomenon has stimulated not only bilingual education but also its mirror opposite, the English-only movement. 13. Some confusion exists today over the use of the term Chicano among those

200 NOTES TO PAGES 54-56 generations that grew up after the Chicano nationalist movement. Only a few have been taught about this social and historical event in their American history classes, so the majority are unaware of how much they have benefited from it. In my Chicano cultural studies course, I have found that some students resist calling themselves Chicanos for fear of ostracism due to misleading or vague notions concerning the meaning of social “militancy” in the cause of civil rights. 14. Documents of the Chicano Struggle (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 4. 15. Documents of the Chicano Struggle, 4.

16. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February 2, 1848, officially ended the Mexican-American war. Treaty terms included the U.S. annexation of the Southwest (territory that now forms Arizona, California, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada). Under Articles 8 and 9 of the treaty, Mexicans living in this area would become U.S. citizens (if they so desired) and their civil and property rights would be protected, regardless of their citizenship. According to historian Richard

Griswold del Castillo, Chicanos began to question the treaty’s provisions in the 1960s. See “The Chicano Movement and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” in /” Limes of Challenge: Chicanos and Chicanas in American Society, ed. Jaan R. Garcia (Hous-

ton: Mexican American Studies, University of Houston, 1988), 32-39. 17. Documents of the Chicano Struggle, 4.

18. Reies Lopez Tyerina was one of the first Chicano activists to call for a reassessment of the treaty. During the early 1960s, Tyerina traveled throughout New Mexico organizing La Alianza Federa de Mercedes Libres. This organization became the catalyst for claiming that legitimate treaty rights had been violated and that compensation was owed. 19. Documents of the Chicano Struggle, 5.

20. Chicanos in California hoped for an improved atmosphere in the wake of the 1998 election of Governor Gray Davis and Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, the first Latino to hold such a high-ranking governmental position. However, Davis was ousted in a 2003 recall election and Arnold Schwarzenegger defeated Cruz Bustamante and 133 other candidates on the ballot to become California’s governor in 2003. Nevertheless, on July 1, 2005, Antonio Villaraigosa became Los Angeles’s first Latino mayor in more than 130 years. There are high expectations that he will usher in a new era for Latinos, who historically have been underrepresented in politics. 21. Guillermo Gémez-Pefia, Zhe New World Border: Prophecies, Poems ¢» Locuras for

the Find of the Century (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 130. The book has received the American Book award. 22. Borderama is one of a series of performances entitled “Dangerous Border Game.” Most of these performances have been written and performed in collaboration with Roberto Sifuentes and local performance artists. Different versions of Borderama, under various other titles, have been performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Denver, Boulder, New York, Helsinki, Washington, DC, and Mexico City.

23. Since his arrival from Mexico City in 1978, G6mez-Pefia has investigated border culture and the impact of interculturalism and transculturation. Through performance, radio, video, poetry, and installations, he has explored the relationship between Latinos and the United States. From 1984 to 1990, he founded and partici-

Notes to Pages 56-58 201 pated in the Border Arts Workshop in San Diego, California. He is one of the editors of High Performance magazine and of the Drama Review. He 1s also the author of the 1993 Warrior for Gringostroika. Mote tecent Gomez-Pefia’s collaborative performances/installations with Roberto Sifuentes, James Luna, Michelle Ceballos, and others, have dealt with processes of transformation and the impact of globalization and technology. Collaborative performances such as The Temple of Confessions, Ek! Naftaxteca: Cyber-Axteca TV for 2000 AD, and “Dangerous Border Game” are sophisti-

cated experiments combining visual art, music, poetry, sound, and computer technology. Gémez-Pefia’s 2003 collaborative project Ex-Centris (A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others) was patt of the Living Art Development Agency’s Live Culture, sponsored by the Arts Council of England’s Visual Arts Department and London Arts. In it, G6mez-Pefia collaborated with Juan Ibarra and Michelle Ceballos (of La Pocha Nostra) and British-based artists Kazuko Hohki and Ansuman Biswas, creating an interactive museum of experimental ethnography. With sardonic humor, it explores colonial practices and representation. 24. Gomez-Pefia, The New World Border, 135.

25. The Virgin of Guadalupe has been known by many other names, before and after the conquest of Mexico, throughout the world. In the Americas, she is known as the mother of mestizaje. Most Mexicans and Mexic-Amerindians recognize her as Tonantzin. In Chicano culture, she is an iconographic figure. She can be seen painted on cat windows, tattooed on flesh, emblazoned on neighborhood walls, imprinted on T-shirts sold at the local flea market, and on annual calendars. In their effort to reexamine the Virgin de Guadalupe, Chicana feminists have used her as symbol of resistance and as a warrior goddess. These issues will be later addressed in the chapter.

26. The commodification of Indian difference in Gémez-Pefia’s work can be read in terms of fetishism. The fetish of the “native” body has been seminal in his work since the production of Border Brujo (1988), in which he performs a cross-cultural shaman. In the next chapter, I will discuss his 1992 collaboration with Coco Fusco in Lwo Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, in which the performers put themselves on display for a few days in a large cage as “authentic” indigenous people. 27. Rafael Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring Aztlan,” Azan 22, no. 2 (1997): 36. In his book, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Pérez-Torres examines the concept of mestizaje, focusing his analysis on Chicano cultural productions. 28. Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring Aztlan,” 37. 29. By the use of the term dialectic Lam referring to the encounter of opposites or

the juxtaposition of contradictory ideas. As I explained in the introduction, this “logic of contradictions” has been inspired by Marx’s “historical materialism,” which suggested that everything is material and that change takes place through the intervention of opposites. Marx’s materialism was in turn influenced by Hegel’s philosophy that saw history through dialectic or opposite forces. Marx’s “historical materialism” later shaped Engels’s “dialectical materialism.” 30. Laura Elisa Pérez, “-/ desorden, Nationalism, and Chicana/o Aesthetics,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caten

202 NOTES TO PAGES 61-66 Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)» 39:

31. Judith F. Baca, “La Mestisaje,” in Encuentro: [Invasion of the Americas and the Making of the Mestizo (Venice, CA: Social and Public Art Resource Center, 1991), 13.

This catalog was produced to accompany an exhibit SPARC organized in anticipation of the quincentennial celebration of the Americas and its people. 32. Baca’s World Wall earned her an international reputation as a Chicana murtalist. The mural is made of seven ten- by thirty-foot painted panels arranged in a onehundred-foot semicircle. After she had completed four panels, the piece premiered in Finland in June 1990. It then traveled to the Soviet Union. The mural included seven additional panels that were to be painted by artists from the countries in which it would be displayed. Each panel uses striking imagery to address a basic concern of the global community. The panels include “Triumph of the Heart,” “Dialogue of Alternatives,” “Nonviolent Resistance,” “The End of the Twentieth-Century,” “Balance,” “Triumph of the Hands,” and “Israeli/Arab/Palestinian.” 33. “Judith Baca,” in Latinas! Women of Achievement, ed. Diane Telgen and Jim Kamp (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1996), 29. 34. Chela Sandoval, “Mestizaje as Method: Feminists-of-Color Challenge the Canon,” in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1997), 361. 35. Bhabha, /he Location of Culture, 7.

36. Norma Alarcén, “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of “The’ Native Woman,” in Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem, Between Woman and Nation, 67. 37. Alarcon, “Chicana Feminism,” 69. 38. Alarcon, “Chicana Feminism,” 69. 39. [include a chapter titled “Cross-Border Subjectivity and the Dramatic Text” in my book Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1999), 99-131. This chapter enacts the interface implicit in border identity, whereby geopolitics and cultural survival become paramount in the plays written by

Latina dramatists. Although the chapter focuses on the play Latina by Milcha Sanchez-Scott, it also makes extended references to Coser y cantar by Dolores Prida and to Szmply Maria or the American Dream by Josefina Lopez.

40. Fredric Jameson, Lhe Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbole Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 41. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 94. 42. Minh-ha, Woman Natwe Other, 94.

43. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, “Laying It Bare: The Queer/Colored Body in Photography by Laura Aguilar,” in Trujillo, Lzvzng Chicana Theory, 286. 44. Laura Aguilar, “Portrait from the Latina Lesbian Series,” Conmocion 3 (1996): 26-27.

45. Yarbro-Bejarano, “Laying It Bare,” 286. 46. See the image of this portrait in my article “Mythical Performativity: Relocating Aztlan in Chicana Feminist Cultural Productions,” Theatre Journal 52 (March 2000): 34. Alfaro’s work is disseminated through live performances, compact discs, and written form. His performances have been produced in regional theater houses

Notes to Pages 66-72 203 such as the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the South Coast Repertory in Orange County, California, the Midwest Play Lab in Minneapolis, the Chicago Latino Theater, and Center for the Arts in Boston. In addition, his appearances in alternative spaces such as Highways Performance Space and Self-Help Graphics in Los Angeles, as well as in many cultural centers and universities across the United States, have contributed to the diversification of his audience to include Latino and non-Latino as well as gay, lesbian, and heterosexual audiences. Among his contributions are Straight as a Line (1992), Deep in the Crotch of my Latino Psyche (1992), Downtown (1994), and cuerpo politizado (Politicized body, 1996).

47. For morte references on Luis Alfaro’s work consult David Roman’s chapter “Teatro Viva: Latino Performance and the Politics of AIDS in Los Angeles,” in Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 187-201. Also see Paul Allatson, “Siempre Feliz en mi Falda: Luis Alfaro’s Simulative Challenge,” GLO 5, no. 2 (1999): 199-230. 48. The Colorado sisters were born in Blue Island, Hlinois, in a large Mexican community. Their mother, Maria Sabina, migrated to the United States during the Mexican Revolution after her husband died. In Blue Island she met the Colorado sisters’ father, Regino. Grande Chiquita, as they called their grandmother Rafaela, became the center of the sisters’ lives. She was the storyteller, bringing them the stoties that they later incorporated in their theatricality. Consult “Elvira and Hortensia Colorado,” in Contemporary Plays by Women of Color: An Anthology, ed. Kathy A. Perkins

and Roberta Uno (New York: Routledge, 1996), 79. 49. This poem is included in “Performance Photo,” a piece in Encuentro, 16. 50. In his Hestoria General, Father Bernardino de Sahagun discusses the goddesses of Mexican culture, identifying Cihuacoatl with Tonantzin. See de Sahagun, General history of the things of New Spain, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1982). 51. Note that the concept of marianismo will be discussed in chapters 4 and 5.

Marianismo creates an ideal by which women of Latin American descent are expected to live, and the Virgin Mary is the epitome of this ideal. Following the example of the Virgin Mary, women should show submission and acceptance as the will of God. 52. he Coatlicue Theater Company has been developing and performing this play for the last three years. In March 2005 they presented it at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance Studies in Brazil. 53. Sandra Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” in Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, ed. Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 50. 54. See image of Hernandez’s La Vargen de Guadalupe defendiendo los derechos de los Aicanos (etching, nine by twelve inches) in my article “Mythical Performativity,” 4o. 55. Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, 46.

56. Marsha Gomez passed away in 1998. Her artistic media included clay, cast stone, marble, and bronze. Her figures of women depicted in worship represent her political commitment, which promoted a reverence for the earth. In addition to being an artist/sculptor, Gomez was an earth and human rights activist. She served as codirector of “Alma de Mujer,” Center for Social Change in Austin, Texas, a heal-

204 NOTES TO PAGES 73-81 ing retreat center sponsored by the Foundation for a Compassionate Society. She was also a board member of the Indigenous Women’s Network, a pan-indigenous women’s association that promotes networking for the empowerment of women and for environmental safeguarding. 57. The demand was included in the picture of La Madre del Mundo, by la Madte Productions, 1988. This invocation is inherent in another of Coatlicue’s appearances, Chimalma (Shield Hand), a naked cave goddess of the Huitznahua, who was present in Aztlan when the Aztecs left in search of their promised land. See C. A. Burland and Werner Forman, Feathered Serpent and Smoking Mirror: The Gods and Cultures of Ancient Mexico (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1975), 166-67. 58. See image of Hernandez’s Libertad in my article “Mythical Performativity,” 44.

59. Moraga, The Last Generation, 150.

6o. Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca paso por sus labios, expanded ed. (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), and Wasting in the Wings: Portrait of a Oueer Motherhood (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1997).

61. For a more detailed discussion of “queer Aztlan,” consult Arrizon, Latina Performance, 9-10 and 75-76.

62. Moraga, The Hungry Woman. Subsequent references will be included parenthetically in the text. Berkeley Repertory Theatre originally commissioned this play and presented it in a staged reading on April 10, 1995, directed by Tony Kelly. Subsequently, it also recetved staged readings at the Mark Taper Forum’s New Works Festival in Los Angeles on December 2, 1995, directed by Lisa Wolpe, and at the Brava Theater Center of San Francisco on June 10, 1997, directed by Moraga. In May 2005, the play was staged at Stanford University. 63. I thank Cherrie Moraga for reading and commenting on this study when it first appeared in my article “Mythical Performativity.” For more information on the Coyolxauhqui legend, consult Moraga’s The Last Generation, 73-76. 64. Moraga, [he Last Generation, 74.

65. La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, is an ancient tale reaching back to the colonial encounter between the Aztecs and Spanish conquistadors. It is a familiar tale

of the woman who drowns her children and mourns them for eternity. Many versions of La Llorona exist throughout Latin America and in the American Southwest. Wearing a white gown, she roams the rivers and creeks, wailing into the night and searching for her children. This is the most popular version told to young children. In addition, young children are told that if they misbehave, she will come and take them with her. 66. La Malinche, Malintzin Tenepal, or Dofia Marina (her Spanish name) was a young Tabascan woman given to Hernan Cortés (the conquistador of Mexico) by her tribe. She became his mistress, the mother of one of his children, and a translator. She also acted as the mediator between her people and the conquistadors. For many Chicanas and Chicanos, Malinche offers ethnic vindication. She is the mother of mestizaje. 67. Anzaldia, Borderlands/La Frontera, 31. 68. In her play Unconquered Spirits (Woodstock: Dramatic Publishing, 1997),

dramatist Josefina Lopez invokes these complex transactions of the native body.

Notes to Pages 83-86 205 This is the story of Xochimilco, a ten-year-old Mexican girl, who when misbehaving is told the story of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman) by her mother. As the legend goes, an Indian woman and a Spaniard fell in love and had two children. The man left her to marry a Spanish woman, and for revenge the Indian woman killed her children, cut them up, and threw them into the river. By presenting first the traditional version of the legend, Lopez intends to transgress it and then to suggest an alternative explanation of the reasons why La Llorona’s spirit continues to search for her children. The first act is set in the sixteenth century and explores the origins of the legend. After La Llorona is raped, she sacrifices her children to the Aztec gods to give her people strength to fight the Spaniards. It is suggested that La Llorona is not a murderer, but a martyr who sacrifices her children to save her people from the colonizets. The second act is set in San Antonio, Texas, in 1938. In this act, Xochimilco is a grown woman becoming a modern-day La Llorona. The play was first produced at California State University, Northridge, April 28, 1995. It was directed by Anamarie Garcia, with set designed by Cesar Holguin.

CHAPTER THREE 1. I spoke to Alina Troyano (alias Carmelita Tropicana), Lillian Manzor, and Ela Troyano, among others, about the drink. 2. For example, see Ramon Pedreira Rodriguez, Mz Recetario de Cocteles Cubanos (Madrid: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1999), 70.

3. Mulato is the Spanish masculine gender inflection to the feminine form mulata. Mulato also signifies the long, tapering, dried poblano chile with a dark chocolate-brown color and a mild to medium-hot flavor. A traditional ingredient in various regions of Mexico, the mulato is often used in mole sauces. 4. To understand the notion of the modern in Latin America, one has to discuss its transcultural realignments of historical and political affiliations. In my view, the

modern subject in Latin America deals with the politics, culture, and new forms of the racialized body. Historically, of course, postmodernism replaces the institutionalization of modernism and the construction of elaborated symbolic systems. Thus, in a new era of Latin America, postmodernism becomes a new form of interpretation—a new “reading” of the postcolonial body. 5. In the 1400s, Mayans and Aztecs began to process the cocoa bean into a drink they called xoco/at/ (bitter water). When Hernan Cortés arrived in Mexico, he was setved this drink by Emperor Moctezuma. The Aztecs believed that chocolate was the food of the gods. Since they mistakenly saw Cortés as one of their gods, the offering of chocolate was a welcoming gesture. The drink was later transformed by the Spaniards, who added sugar cane to it. When chocolate was taken to Spain, the drink underwent more changes with other spices such as cinnamon and vanilla. The plantation of cocoa became a very profitable industry for Spain, spreading to the rest of Europe by the 1600s. 6. Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets, 5.

7. In the Americas, the history of mulatez begins with the slave trade. Father Bartolomé de las Casas, who is known as a “protector” of the Indian, is also recog-

206 NOTES TO PAGES 86—89 nized as the one who encouraged the importation of African slaves. By the 1Goos, indigenous laborers were substituted by African slaves in many parts of Latin America. For example, Spain introduced slave trade in Cuba at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the demand for African slaves increased in the nineteenth century with the increase in the cultivation of sugar. It has been estimated that almost four hundred thousand Africans were brought to Cuba during the years 183 5-64.

8. Rum is used in a variety of classic cocktails, like cubalibre, pifia colada, daiquiri, and mai tat. 9. The word rwm originated from the term rambillion, which means “noise” and “commotion.” 10. These are the inscriptions in the bottle. Translations will follow in the text. Ron Mulata is distilled and bottled by Distiller Santa Fe in Villa Clara, Cuba. Santa Fe was founded in 1844. The product is distributed by Tecnoazucar. 11. In Yoruban mythology (the Yoruba are the largest ethnic group in Nigeria), Ochtn is an orisha (ortxa) and the goddess of love. An orisha is a spirit reflecting a particular aspect of God in the belief systems of Candomblé in Brazil, and Santeria

and Lukumi in Cuba and Puerto Rico, among others. Candomblé is an African American religion practiced mainly in Brazil and adjacent countries. The religion originated from Africa and was introduced by African priests who were brought as slaves to Brazil between 1549 and 1888. Santeria (literally translated as “the cult of the Saints’’) is a set of related religious systems that fuse Catholic beliefs with traditional Yoruba religious practices by black slaves and their descendants in some Latin American countries. Sometimes, it mixes with traditional indigenous cultures of the Americas. In the United States, the devotees of Santeria use the Yoruba-based term orisha, the Spanish term santo, and the English term saznt interchangeably. 12. At the beginning of seventeenth century the Virgin appeared to two native Indians, Rodrigo and Juan de Hoyos, together with a ten-year-old slave boy, Juan Moreno. They were from Santiago del Prado, now known as “El Cobre.” While traveling by sea in a canoe, they saw a white bundle slowly floating toward them in the distance. At first they took it for a sea bird but as it got closer, they determined that it was a statue of the Virgin Mary holding a child on her right arm and a gold cross in her left hand. The statue was fastened to a board with the inscription, “Soy la virgen de la caridad’”’ (I am the Virgin of Charity). At the request of the veterans of the War of Independence, the Lady of Charity was declared the patroness of Cuba by Benedict XV in 1916 and solemnly crowned in the Eucharistic Congress held in Santiago de Cuba in 1936. Pope Paul VI raised her sanctuary to the category of Basilica in 1977. Presently, she is a national symbol for Cuba. 13. Miguel A. de la Torre, “Ochtn: [N]either [MJother of all Cubans, [N]or the

Bleached Virgen,” http://www.hope.edu/delatorre/articles/ochun.htm, 1. Originally published in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69, no. 4 (2001): 837-61.

14. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, “Three Words toward Creolization,” in Carsbbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity, ed. 1Kath-

leen M. Balutansky and Marie-Agnés Sourieau (Miami: University Press of Florida, 1998), 55.

15. Benitez-Rojo, “Three Words toward Creolization,” 5 4. 16. Benitez-Rojo, “Three Words toward Creolization,” 56.

Notes to Pages 91-94 207 17. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, “Nicolas Guillén and Sugar,” Cadlaloo 10, no. 2 (1987): 331. A special issue on Nicolas Guillén, this number of Ca//a/oo was edited by Vera M. Kutzinsk. 18. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, 9. 19. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, 6. 20. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, 16. 21. Juan A. Martinez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1927-1950 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 122.

22. Before the emancipation period (1886), Cubans used terms such as ~oreno/a to characterize liberated blacks and negro de nacion for Aftican-born slaves. While liberated mestizos were called pardos, mulattos were considered biracial subjects often forced to serve and please their white European “master.” Another term used during this period is negros finos (refined blacks), for blacks who were able to pass as whites, not because of their physical appearance but by escaping segregation.

23. La Malinche has been depicted in the murals of Diego Rivero and José Clemente Orozco. She has been described and analyzed in the writings of Mexican authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, and Rodolfo Usigli. In theory and criticism, the seminal contributions of Adelaida del Castillo, “Malintzin Tenépal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective,” in Essays on La Mujer, ed. Rosauta Sanchez and Rosaura Martinez Cruz (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center, 1977), 124-49; Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Matinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); Norma Alarcon, “Taddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure in Chicana Feminism,” Cw/tural Critique 13 (Fall 19809): 57-87; and Mary Louise Pratt, “Yo soy la Malinche,” Ca//aloo 16, no. 4 (1993): 859-73, have successfully rescued La Malinche from condemnation. In addition, the creative contributions of Carmen Tafolla, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Agela de Hoyos, and Lucha Corpi, among other Chicana authors, identified La Malinche as the instigator and mediator of their own feminist creativity. See some of their contributions in Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero, eds., /ufinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 189-212. 24. For more information on Santa Barraza and her work, see the book edited by Maria Herrera-Sobek, Santa Barraza, Artist of the Borderlands (College Station: Texas A

& M University Press, 2001). Since the 1960s, Chicano artists have utilized folk formats such as the re/ab/o, replacing the original religious meaning with political and social messages. Originally retablos were paintings made on wood, copper, and canvas by Mexican and European artists between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The wotd re/ab/o refers to sacred images painted on sheets of tin-coated iron depict-

ing saints and religious figures. The word also refers to baroque altars found in Europe and churches in the Americas during this time period. Pre-Columbian precedents were combined with European influences to produce this unique, hybrid art form. Santa Barraza has suggested that the retablo has “characterized the mestizo identity from its inception.” See Encuentro, 14. 25. The founders of the Afro-Caribbean movement were Luis Palés Matos, a

Puerto Rican, and the Cubans José Zacarias Tallet and Ramon Guirao. These authors, unlike Guillén, are white. Their contributions often have been criticized for objectifying and mystifying the black body in a stereotypical manner.

208 NOTES TO PAGES 94-98 26. For example, by 1935, nearly 50 percent of all land operated by sugar companies in Puerto Rico was under the control of four big American-owned interests. 27. Nicolas Guillén, Antologia mayor (Havana: Ediciones Unién, 1964), 46. I am responsible for this and most translations in the book. The same poem was included in the book Sénugoro Cosongo, published the following year.

28. Benitez-Rojo, “Nicolas Guillén and Sugar,” 340. 29. Guillén is recognized as a poet of the African diaspora. He has been placed among a group of international figures that includes Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aimé Cisaire in the francophone tradition, and Langston Hughes and Leroy Jones in the African American literary space. Likewise, Marti 1s recognized as an international figure, one who fought vehemently for the independence of Cuba against the Spanish colonial regime. In his essay, “Mi Raza” (My race) Marti’s thoughts about the subject of racial identity are very clear. He said: “All—White and black—are morally redundant when they say ‘my race.’ All that divides men, all that categorizes them in eroupings, segregates or pens them in a cage, is a sin against humanity.” See John M. Kirk, José Marti: Mentor of the Cuban Nation (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1983), 112.

30. It is important to mention Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991), a Cuban writer and contemporary of Guillén and Fernando Ortiz who also took interest in Afro-Cuban culture. Cabrera enjoyed social and financial privilege in prerevolutionary Cuba. She lived in Paris for eleven years, except for short trips to Cuba, until her return in 1938. Her stay in Paris influenced her interest in what was known as “primitive civilizations,” and especially African art. Her writing and ethnographies represent the magical world brought to Cuba by the African slaves. She was introduced to this world early in her life by the servants and caretakers she and her siblings had as children.

After the success of the Cuban Revolution and the solidification of the Castro regime, she left Cuba again as an exile in 1960. She went first to Madrid and later set-

tled in Miami. She is the author of more than twenty books, in which she deals mostly with Afro-Cuban issues. Her most famous book, // monte (1954, The Forest) became a type of sacred book for santeros, practitioners of Santeria. According to the Afro-Cuban tradition, monte (jungle or tropical forest) is the place where the African gods and the spirit of the African ancestors of the slaves live. Although her work has

been traditionally viewed as an extension of Fernando Ortiz, most recently this analysis has been contested by feminists who recognize Cabrera’s work independently. For example, Edna Rodriguez-Mangual suggests that Cabrera’s work offers an alternative to the hegemonizing national myth of Cuba articulated by Ortiz and others. See Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 31. Guillén, Axnfologia mayor, 47.

32. Santeria is recognized as a legitimate religion in Cuba, influencing language, music, literature, theater, dance, and painting. 33. Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets, 179.

34. Although both authors have been acclaimed as the two greatest Antillean poets, most comparisons have tended to value Guillén’s work more highly. Palés Matos has been charged with just being another white author who took advantage of his talent and inspiration to exalt the black body in the Puerto Rican context.

Notes to Pages 98-101 209 35. Luis Palés Matos, “Plena de menéalo” (Shaking it), in Obras 1914-1959, ed. Margot Arce de Vasquez (Rio Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1984), 528.

36. Edward W. Said, Onentalsm (New York: Vintage, 1979). Said conceives orientalism as a discourse of domination in which the Orient is based on the West’s perceptions (or misperceptions) about the Other. 37. Frances R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). In particular, Aparicio’s interdisciplinary approach to salsa music explores cultural and gender politics as an effect of Caribbean patriarchy. 38. Born Linda Belle Caballero, La India self-defines as a true “Nuyorican.” She is part of an urban, hip, bilingual, bicultural generation that is transforming the Latin pop music industry.

39. Nowadays, she has more than twenty-five CDs available for sale online. Among her most popular CDs ate_A mi me Haman La Lupe, La Lupe: The Best; Dos lados de la Lupe; Reina de la Cancion Latina; and Stop [ am Free.

40. In 2001, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (New York) premiered a play honoring her life, La Lupe: My Life, My Destiny, combining biographical details and live music. The play was written by Carmen Rivera and directed by Luis Caballero with musical arrangements by Oscar Hernandez. The revival of La Lupe will be featured in a forthcoming documentary, La Lupe, by filmmaker Ela Troyano. Like most of Troyano’s work, the film was going to be a hybrid—at once narrative, documentary, mockumentary, and performance piece. However, early in the process, Troyano decided that La Lupe’s life was dramatic enough on its own, and thus she decided to make a documentary. Troyano, who has been awarded funds by Creative Capital toward production, will be featuring La Lupe as the quintessential figure of pop Afro-Cuban music who in the name of love and passion made her life an unforgettable spectacle. 41. José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New

York: New York University Press, 2000), 167. Although La Lupe may have been influenced by the cabaret performances of the rumba exotic dancers, her radical style and sophistication transcend time and space and the economy of the cabaret industry. 42. Kutzinski, Swgar’s Secrets, 165.

43. See Kutzinski, Sugar Secrets, for a critical study of the representation of AfroCubans in Cuban cigar lithographs. For an examination of early-twentieth-century Cuban art, see Martinez, Cuban Art. The José Marti National Library in Havana includes an extensive collection of the marquillas. Figure 18 is part of this collection. 44. Cirilo Villaverde gained recognition as an author after the publication of Cecilia Valdes 0 la loma del Angel. This novel is considered his masterpiece by most crit-

ics in Spain and in Latin America. He was born in 1812. Although he received a law degree in 1832, he devoted himself to teaching literature. In 1849, like many liberals of his time, he was implicated in a conspiracy to overthrow the Spanish government. He was arrested and condemned to death, but escaped and fled to the United States. He resided in New York, where he published the final version of the novel in 1882. He passed away in New York in 1894. Consult the following edition of the novel:

210 NOTES TO PAGES IOI—7 Cecilia Valdez o la loma del Angel, 2 vols. (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1972). The first volume was originally published in 1838 in Havana, and the second volume in New York in 1882. 45. The last name “Valdés” was usually given to racially mixed children whose fathers refused to recognize them.

46. The treatment of the tragic mulatto is a recurrent theme in both white and black authors. While white authors depicted the mulatto in a monolithic and stereotypical way, black Americans re-created its characterization as a way to criticize racialization and to affirm their identity as Americans. One of the problems of the “tragic mulatto” is “passing” as a white person. Among the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen, who wrote the novel Passing in 1929, became one of most recognized authors of this literary movement. 47. Despite the abolition of slavery in 1886 and Cuba’s independence in 1902, blacks and mulattos remain subject to a pronounced racial discrimination in Cuba. 48. Don Eduardo Ezponda, La Mulata: estudio fisiologico, social y juridico (Madrid: Imprenta de Fortanet, 1878), 20-21. 49. My translation attempts to give symbolic and figurative meaning to the original text of La Mulata. 50. Ezponda, La Mulata, 46. 51. Kutzinski, Swgar’s Secrets, 75.

52. Michel Foucault, “Docile Bodies” and “Panopticism,” in 7he Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 53. In theater, the black body and the female role have received similar discriminatotry treatment. On the Cuban stage, the entry of the black body—whites performing as black—was affected by racism; in the history of theater, the entry of the woman was generally shaped by sexism and patriarchy. For example, in the Shakespearean era, women were not allowed to perform on stage, and, therefore, men had to perform women’s roles. 54. Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840-189; (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Lane’s study introduces to an English-speaking reader a critical history of a very significant genre in nineteenth-century Cuba. 55. In Brazil, the mulata dancer is also recognized as a national treasure. For example, the presence of women striving to model the social ideal of the mulata is

very common in Rio de Janeiro’s nightlife. In this case, the mulata dances the thythms of samba in cabarets as well as in nationally televised carnival parades. The beginning of the “mulata spectacle” in Brazil started in the 1960s when producer Oswaldo Sargentelly created a mulata show for the entertainment of the elite and tourist alike. After that, he became known as the “inventor” of the Brazilian mulata show. His production eventually contributed to the international marketing of Brazilian-ness and encouraged local women to aspire for the social role of the mulata samba dancer. 56. Elizabeth Ruf, “jQué linda es Cuba! Issues of Gender, Color, and Nationalism in Cuba’s Tropicana Night Club Performance,” Drama Review 41, no. 1 (1997): 87.

57. Countless examples can be used to illustrate the troubling and profound divide that currently exists in Cuba. For example, jrmezerismo (literally translated as

Notes to Pages ro8—1j 211 horseback riding or, in its popular form, “gold digging’), a form of sex work, emerged in the early 1990s as a result in part of the imminent collapse of the revolu-

tion and Cuba’s campaign to attract Canadian, European, and Latin American tourists for revenue. /7meferas ate usually young mulatas or Afro-Cuban women who

become short-term girlfriends or escorts of middle-aged men visiting the island. Some are professional prostitutes, but many of them are just young women looking for temporary companionship of a foreign male who may provide them a ticket to visit the “other” Cuba. This opportunity may include a visit to an exclusive restaurant ot nightclub. 58. Elena Poniatowska, Todo México, vol. 1 (Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 1990), 227-53. 59. Alina Troyano, “Milk of Amnesia/Leche de Amnesia,” in /, Carmelta Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 54-55.

6o. In Cuba, for example, this factor is particularly significant because it was one of the last countries to abolish slavery. 61. Nancy Morej6n, Ours the Earth: Poems by Nancy Morejon, trans. J. R. Pereira (Mona: Institute of Caribbean Studies, University of the West Indies, 1990), 9. 62. Morején, Ours the Earth, to. 63. Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets, 174. 64. Caliban is a character in 7he Tempest (1612), one of William Shakespeare’s last

plays. He is a dark-skinned native of an island in the Mediterranean Sea. Caliban showed Prospero, the Duke of Milan and a powerful magician, the ins and outs of the island when Prospero first arrived, after having been driven out of Italy by his usurping brother and the King of Naples. Now, Caliban is just another of Prospero’s servants who sporadically rebels against Prospero’s intimidation and rebukes him for stealing the island that rightfully belongs to him. Caliban is considered one of the most abstract and symbolic characters in all of Shakespeare.

65. Roberto Fernandez Retamar wrote this essay in 1971 in response to Ame/ (1900), written by Uruguayan José Enrique Rod6, whose ideas envisioned a Eurocentric America, embodying the reason and intellect of the Enlightenment. For Rodo, The Tempes?s Ariel, a captive servant who knows his place, is the model that can connect America to its idealized European past. This argument compelled Fernandez Retamar to displace Ariel with Caliban, the play’s “native” taken as a slave by Prospero. For him, Rod6’s Ave/is a colonial text full of limitations. The essay of Fernandez Retamar is included in his book Cahban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3-45. 66. Bhabha, 7he Location of Culture, 86.

67. As I pointed out earlier, marianismo perpetuates gender roles subject to Christian values, in which women should be self-sacrificing while following the ideal of the Virgin Mary. This concept will be further discussed in chapters 4 and 5. 68. Kutzinski, Swgar’s Secrets, 166.

69. Coco Fusco, “El diario de Miranda/Miranda’s Diary,” in E:nglhsh is Broken Flere, 6-7.

7o. Fusco, “El diario de Miranda/Miranda’s Diary,” 7. 71. The project premiered in September 1992 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The performance artists took their installation to Madrid, London, Wash-

212 NOTES TO PAGES I15—I19 ington, DC, and Irvine, California. This performance was later documented in The Couple in the Cage (video), directed and produced by Fusco in collaboration with Paula Heredia.

72. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Goémez-Pefia, “Norte: Sur/A PerformanceRadio Script,” in Fusco, Enghsh is Broken Here, 170.

73. Fusco and Gomez-Pefia, “Norte,” 175. 74. This heterosexual romance in the collaborations of Fusco and Gémez-Pefia is enacted in performances they produced during 1990-95. See, for example, photos in Fusco’s E:nghsh is Broken Here where the couple appear together. In one, she is depicted as “La Authentic Santera” with Gomez-Pefia as “El Aztec High-Tech” (170). In the second, she appears as “Miss Discovery” with Gomez-Pefia again as “El Aztec High-Tech” (187). 75. Liminality is understood in postcolonial studies as an essential space of resistance and agency. As the space of cultural signification of contending peoples, liminality is marked by the narratives of cultural difference. For Bhabha, “the liminal sig-

nifying space that is zuternally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference” is an essential precondition of the interruption of the people (and nations) as homogeneous. See The Location of Culture, 148. 76. Jennifer DeVere Brody, “Hyphen-Nations,” in Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representations of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality, ed. Sue-Ellen Case,

Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 149.

CHAPTER FOUR 1. Nicanor G. Tiongson, “Four Values in Filtpino Drama and Film,” in The Urian Anthology 1970-1979, ed. Nicanor Tiongson (Manila: Manuel L. Morato, 1983), 105. This article also appears in Rediscovery: Essays in Philippine Life and Culture, ed.

Cynthia Nograles Lumbera and Teresita G. Maceda (Quezon City: National Bookstore, 1973), 198-211. Tiongson is a professor in the Department of Film and Audiovisual Communication, College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City (“Four Values,” 104). The four values are “1) Maganda ang Maputs (White is beautiful), 2) Masaya ang may Palabas (Shows arte the best), 3) Mabuti ang Inaapi (Hurrah for the Underdog), and 4) Maganda Pa Ang Daigdig (All 1s Right with the World).” 2. Both komedya (Tagalog) and comedia (Spanish) can be roughly translated as

“comedy.” As a dramatic form that emerged in the golden years of Spanish theater in the sixteenth century, komedya transformed the stage in terms of its cultural contexts. 3. Asasubcolony of the Spanish Empite, the Fz/pinas was named after a young prince who later became King Phillip Il. The archipelago was called Las Islas Filipinas. Initially, the Spaniards referred to the natives as /udios, following Columbus’s

lead. (When Columbus arrived in the “New World,” he mistook America for the Orient [the Indies]. Thus, he named the indigenous inhabitants /zdzos.) But over time,

Notes to Pages 120-22 213 the inhabitants of Las Islas Filtpinas became known as Fi/pinos, in order to differentiate them from the Native Americans. 4. See Nicanor G. Tiongson, Kasaysayan ng Komedya sa Pilipinas: 1766-1982 (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1982); Tomas Hernandez, “The Emergence of Modern Drama in the Philippines (1898—1913),” Philippines Studies Working Papers no. 1, University of Hawaii, 1976; and Clodualdo A. Del Mundo, Native Resistance: Philippine Cinema and Colonialism, 1898-1941 (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1998).

5. Tiongson, “Four Values,” 104. 6. Although Ferdinand Magellan is popularly known as the one who “discovered” the islands of the Philippines in 1521, it was Miguel Lopez de Legazpi who claimed the Philippines as a Spanish colony and designated Manila as its capital city in 1565. Magellan landed on Cebu and claimed the land for Charles I of Spain in 1521, but was killed one month later by a local chief called Lapu-Lapu. The Spanish crown sent several expeditions to the Philippines during the next decades, but Spanish settlement was finally established when Legazpi, the first royal governor, arrived in Cebu from New Spain (Mexico). From the mid—sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, Spain ruled the Philippine Islands, enslaving the indigenous peoples and forcibly converting them to Christianity. There were various attempts to seize the islands from Spanish rule by the Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, and British con-

stituents, but all failed. It was an era of continuous armed revolt—with the fury abated by enlightened governors such as Legazpi, Basco, and Anda, and renewed by despots such as Izquierdo and Palavieja. The final revolution of 1898 raged into a three-way war among the Filipinos, Spaniards, and the Americans. This struggle ended the Spanish rule and established a transient Philippine Republic that culminated with the American acquisition of the Philippines. 7. “Pearl of the Orient” is a well-known nickname for the city of Manila. It is even represented on the Seal of Manila, which is a circle around a precolonial people’s shield. Besides the pearl on top, the shield features a sea lion in the middle, in

reference to the city’s Spanish influences, and the waves of the Pasig River and Manila Bay in the bottom portion. The seal also depicts the words Lungsod ng Maynila (City of Manila) and Pr/pinas (Philippines) in the circle and carries the colors of the Philippine flag (red, white, and blue).

8. During the colonial period, the /e/rados were the most elite of the educated generation whose ideas and written word both reinforced and resisted the aims of the conquest. Although in different geographical sites, Rizal and Marti become famous figures involved in the independence movements of their respective countries. [ am indirectly alluding to Angel Rama’s book The Lettered City, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), where he discusses the power of discourse, in the Foucauldian sense, suggesting that it helped to reinforce the various colonial societies in Latin America. For Rama, the urban design imposed throughout colonial Latin America made possible the subordination of the indigenous people and the rapid development of the “New World.” 9. The Visigoths ruled until 711, when the Moors came to Spain from North Africa. General Tariq Ibn Ziqad and his army of about fifteen thousand men crossed the borders of Gibraltar and after defeating Visigothic King Roderic and his army,

214 NOTES TO PAGES 122-24 started the conquest of Spain. Although the Moors were outnumbered, they succeeded in overthrowing a kingdom that was already fading. They controlled most of Spain for about three centuries, establishing a “caliphate,” or religious center, in Cérdoba. Most of the Moors were Muslims, but they were tolerant of the Christians and Jews who lived in Spain. 10. For many centuries, Sepharad (the Hebrew word for Spain) was home to a large Jewish community distinguished for its wealth and education. When they were expelled in 1492 and forced into exile, their expulsion marked the end of one critical phase of their history and the beginning of another in Spain. Most historians thought Jews came to the Iberian Peninsula with the Roman legions. But some common legends among Spanish Jews imply that Jews first came to Iberia after the destruction of the temple in the sixth century B.c.E. Others date their entry with Phoenician merchants in the tenth century B.C.E., during the King Solomon era. For an account, consult Jane S. Gerber, The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York:

Free Press, 1994). 11. The factors discussed here do not necessarily imply that all modern Spaniards are of mixed origin. With regards to the African presence in Spain, the African slave

trade, which began in the late fifteenth century, represents another facet that produced the admixture. Portugal and Spain became very skilled in trading with West Africa, where the slaves were obtained. When the trade became transatlantic early in the sixteenth century, Portugal declared a monopoly on slave trading in the South Atlantic because of its early settlements in South America, especially Brazil. Meanwhile, Spain took control of the trade in the North Atlantic based on previous explorations of the islands of the Caribbean Sea. 12. Used by outsiders, the term Gypsy labels an ethnic group whose members refer to themselves as Rom and speak a language known as Romany. It is hard to estimate how many Gypsies are in Spain, but estimates range as low as 50,000 and as high as 450,000. Other calculations have suggested that approximately 300,000 Gypsies live in Andalucia. Due to their cultural marginalization, it has been difficult to get an exact estimate. For more information on the history of the Gypsy community in Spain, consult “The Gypsies” in the online book Spam. This online version of the book is a section of the Country Studies Index and was previously printed in a hard copy by the federal division of the Library of Congress. Consult: http:countrystudies.us/spain. 13. Esteva-Fabregat, Mestizaje in [bero-Amerita, 111-12. 14. During the early years of conquest in the Americas, precious metals became

a commodity of preference for the Spanish crown. In later years, sugar became as valuable as gold and silver. The demand and profitability of sugar in European matrkets were high. When the gold rush faded in the Americas in the second decade of the sixteenth century, colonists saw their future in sugar cultivation. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, the cultivation of sugar demanded the African slave trade in the Americas. 15. These relations increased with the impact of U.S. imperialism and the Spanish-American War in 1898. As a result, Spain lost its control over the Caribbean and the Pacific (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and other islands). When the USS. troops began to take the place of the Spaniards in controlling the Philippines,

Notes to Pages 124-28 215 the Filipinos fought back. The resulting Philippine-American war was long and bloody, generating thousands of military and civilian casualties during its fourteenyeat span. 16. Catholicism in the Philippines incorporated a great substance of native customs and rituals. Much of the Christian conversion effort was consolidated, like in the Americas, through the use of religious dramatic forms—the komedya, the auto sacramental, the /oa, and the cologuio—which setved as powerful tools of Christianization. 17. Most Muslims live in the southern part of the country: Mindanao, southern Palawan, and Sulu. They are divided into several subgroups because of differences in

their language and political structures. The many groups further clashed on the degree of their Islamic orthodoxy, and, therefore, conflict between them has been endemic. In the 1970s, in reaction to President Ferdinand Matcos’s proclamation of martial law and the consolidation of central government power, the Muslim Filipinos began identifying with the worldwide Islamic community, mainly Malaysia, Indonesia, Libya, and Middle Eastern countries, which in turn provided them with support (finances, weaponry, and combat training). In the Philippines, Muslim insurgency and calls for secession respond to the sociopolitical and economic neglect Muslims have suffered at the hands of the majority Christian society throughout the years. 18. John Phelan, 7he Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565-1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959). After more than three centuries of occupation, Spanish influences are reflected in the local languages, foods, traditions, customs, and values. The Spaniards also gave Filipinos Spanish first and last names. However, the Archipelago’s precolonial Asian (Malayan) culture remained intact until the transformations produced with the arrival of the Americans in 1898. 19. Esteva-Fabregat, Mestexaje in [bero-America, 56.

20. Vicente L. Rafael, ““Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca, Public Culture 8, n0. I (1995): 106. 21. Rafael, “Taglish,” 105. 22. Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Exvents in Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 165.

23. In the Philippines, sestzaje carries few of the pejorative connotations of the term Lurasian ot half-caste, while in Latin America, mestizaje embodies the encounter between Spain and a particular indigenous heritage. 24. The term d/ustrado may be a derivation from the term /¢rado. 25. Today, the term F7/pino is a general term used interchangeably with Pidpino. It stands against its original colonial meaning. More recent vernacular representations of Filipino identity include Pinoy, Pinay, and Chinoy (a Chinese born in the Philippines). These designations are used in the Filipino American community, too. 26. David Joel Steinberg, 7he Philippines: A Singular and a Plural Place (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 49. 27. In the Philippines, there were Chinese mestizos as well as Spanish mestizos. Each was considered an exclusive social group. During the early colonial period, mestizo/a initially meant only mixed Malay and Spanish or Mexican ancestry. The term soon became generic for “mixed” ancestry and was likewise adapted to the Chinese

216 NOTES TO PAGES 128-31 population, which had been numerically greater than that of Spaniards or Mexicans. When mixed-race individuals of a Malay/Chinese admixture became more dominant, the notion of mestizaje was expanded and has since been freely used to refer to all individuals of mixed racial descent regardless of race or ethnic background. Accordingly, the contemporary uses of Filipino mestizaje include diverse categories: Spanish-mestizos, Chinese-mestizos, Japanese-mestizos (those of mixed Malay and Japanese origin) and American-mestizos (those of mixed Malay and U.S. American descent). In its popular usage, mestizaje is often associated with “beauty” and refers to an individual with a lighter complexion. It is likewise known in its vernacular construction as /isoy ot Tisay (a play on the words mes-tasoy and mes-tisay). 28. Rizal was born into a rich Chinese-mestizo family in Calamba, Laguna. He

was descendant of Lam-co, a Chinese who migrated from Amoy, China, to the Philippines in the late seventeenth century. Lam-co married a Chinese-mestiza named Inés de la Rosa. During the Spanish regime, Lam-co changed the family surname to Mercado. Later, José changed the family surname one more time, making it

Rizal. Recent genealogical research has demonstrated that in addition to Malay ancestry, Rizal was part Japanese, Spanish, and black. 29. Sylvia Mendes Ventura, /osé Rizal (Manila: Tahanan Books for Young Readers, 1992), 10. 30. I have pointed out in the introduction that the title phrase Nod Me Tangere derives from the Latin and its meaning can be roughly translated as “Touch me not.” El Filibusterismo 1s translated as “Subversion.” 31. Nol Me Tangere has been made into a movie a number of times, but only Ger-

atdo de Leon’s 1961 version is extant. This version won the Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences (FAMAS) award for best picture in 1961.

32. In “Dr. Jose Rizal: The First Filipino,’ O. D. Corpuz distinguishes Rizal’s novels, describing Vo/ as a reformist novel and F7z/ as a novel of revolution. See the essay in Jose Kizal and the Asian Renaissance, ed. M. Rajaretnam (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1996), 69.

33. Even today, Nod and Fri are regarded as works of literary expression that helped form a national consciousness identified with the demise of the Spanish regime. 34. Rizal, Nok Me Tangere, 354. Subsequent references will be included parenthetically in the text. 35. Rizal, // Fiibusterismo, 247.

36. The Katipunan was an underground society whose main objective was to free the Philippines from Spain, by force of arms if necessary. Its members, called Katipuneros, grew to the thousands and came mostly from the poor working class. Its Supremo ot highest officer, Andres Bonifacio, first led the revolution, but he was killed in May 1897. The leadership of the revolution fell into the hands of another Katipunan member, Emilio Aguinaldo, who distinguished himself in the battlefields of Cavite, the heartland of the revolution. When Bonifacio learned that Rizal had been arrested and exiled, he realized that the days of peaceful reform were over. He knew that only an armed revolution would free the Philippines from Spanish rule. Unlike Rizal and other people in the reform movement, Bonifacio believed that the Philippines should be totally separated from Spain.

Notes to Pages 132-37 217 37. Foil-Matta’s book reminds us that queerness is embedded in our experiences and is always part of our histories. She uses the “scavenger methodology” to read Gabriela Mistral’s iconic figure queerly. Foil-Matta not only resituates the narrative that surrounds Mistral’s life but also characterizes her as one of the most significant “architects” of Latin American nationalism. Licia Foil-Matta, 4 Oueer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 55.

38. Those who maintain that others deserve recognition as the Philippines’ “national” hero cite Andres Bonifacio, who proclaimed Philippine national independence in 1896, or Emilio Aguinaldo, who was acknowledged as the Philippines’ most effective general after his famous victory against the Spanish troops in Cavite. 39. F. Sitonil José, “Rizal As Novelist—An Appreciation,” in Rajaretnam, /os¢ Rizal, 218.

40. Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil, “The Filipino Woman: Cory and Leonor, Gabriela and Imelda,” in 7edling Lives: Essays by Filipino Women, ed. Elizabeth Lolarga and Anna Leah Sarabia (Quezon City: Women’s Media Circle Foundation, 1992), 26.

41. Tiongson, “Four Values,” to5. In the Philippines, Karilagan Finishing School, founded by Conchitina Sevilla-Bernardo, is a well-known school for women that produces professional fashion models. 42. Malay was the trade language of Southeast Asia when the Spaniards arrived. The name has its origins from the Sumatran port of Melayu (now Djambi). Speakers

of this language could be found in all the trading ports in the Philippines from Sarangant to Manila. Malay is recognized as one of the major influences of Tagalog, now the Philippine national language. In the sixteenth century, the Manila elite was using Malay as a prestigious second language. Some people believe that to understand the Malay is to begin to understand the Filipino in relation to multiculturalism. It is believed that the Malay is a synthesis of Indians, Persians, Arabs, Thais and, mainly, the Chinese of the Chao period. For more on this subject, consult Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil, “Filipino Cultural Roots and Foreign Influences,” in Lumbera and Maceda, Rediscovery, 184-97; and William Henry Scott, Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Cul-

ture and Society (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1994).

43. This letter, “To the Young Women of Malolos,” was written in Tagalog by Rizal in 1889, edited by Teodoro M. Kalaw, and published by the National Library, Manila, in 1932. 44. Rizal, “To the Young Women of Malolos.” 45. Nicanor G. Tiongson, 74e Women of Malolos (Manila: Ateneo University Press, 2004). By means of Tiongson’s historical perspectives, the Women of Malolos (all daughters of wealthy parents), the twenty women who signed the letter demanding the opening of a school, are given agency. In his book, Tiongson traces the period between 1850 and 1920, which 1s a particularly tumultuous time in the Philippines because of the propaganda-reformist period, the Philippine revolution, and the Filipino-American war. Besides giving attention to a history that has been ignored, Tiongson’s motive is very personal. He is a native of Pariancillo, Malolos, and 1s telated to most of the Women of Malolos “either by blood or by affinity or both, in vatying degrees of proximity” (1). 46. Tiongson, Zhe Women of Malolos, 165.

218 NOTES TO PAGES 137-46 47. Rizal, “To the Young Women of Malolos.” 48. The Gabriela organization has regional chapters in Metro Manila, Cordillera Administrative Region, and Mindanao; subregional chapters in Negros, Panay, and Samar; and provincial chapters in Bicol and Cebu. It is affiliated with the Gabriela Network (GABNet) in the United States, created in the late 1980s in solidarity with Gabriela Philippines. Currently GABNet has chapters in Chicago, Irvine, Los Angeles, New York/New Jersey, Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

49. For more information on marianismo and machismo, consult Evelyn Stevens, “Machismo and Marianismo,” Socety 10 (1973): 57-63, and “Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo,” in Female and Male in Latin America: Essays, ed. Ann Pescatello (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), go—101. 50. Stevens, “Machismo and Marianismo,” 62. 51. “Maria Clara Costume,” Filipino Heritage Museum. I collected this citation from the museum’s website (www.FilipinoHeritage.com/costumes) on October 11, 2002. There is a branch of the Filipino Heritage Museum located in the Philippines Arts and Trade Center in Los Angeles.

52. Born of Irish parents, James Brown and Elizabeth MacBride, Josephine Leopoldine, or Josefina as she was affectionately called by Filipinos, was born in Victoria City, Hong Kong, on August 9, 1876. She took the family name Bracken from her adopted father. She came to Manila on February 5, 1895, accompanying George Edward Taufer, a sixty-three-year-old blind American widower from New York City (her foster father). Upon the recommendation of a Filipino resident in Hong Kong,

Josephine and Taufer consulted medical specialist José Rizal in Dapitan, Zamboanga, for cataract operations on both of his eyes. A month later, Josephine returned to Dapitan with Rizal’s eldest sister, Narcisa Rizal-Lopez, and became Rizal’s sweetheatt. 53. José Rizal, “Mi Ultimo Adios,” in Panitikan: An Essay on the Spanish Influence on Philippine Literature, ed. Jaime Biron Polo (Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1992), 30. Also available at http://www.carayanpress.com/ultimo.html. 54. There is conclusive research evidence that the /apzs evolved from the precolonial native sarong. In the pre-Hispanic era, women’s attire consisted mainly of two pieces: the sarong (a piece of cloth worn with its folds hanging down from the waist) and a small shirt. Both garments were made of the same material. The sarong is still worn today by many women in South Asia. 55. Salvador F. Bernal and Georgina R. Encanto, in Patterns for the Filipino Dress: From the Traje de Mestiza to the Terno (1890s—1960s) (Manila: Cultural Center of the Philip-

pines, 1992), 15. 56. These issues are examined by Herminia Mefiez within the context of female victimization during the colonial times and as manifested in the korido (romance or

ballad), which “emigrated” from Spain and Mexico to the Philippines during the colonial period. See ““The Woman Split at the Well’: Female Victimization in Philippine Balladry,” Axdlan 22, no. 1 (1997): 103-14.

57. Linda Acupanda McGloin, “Colonization: Its Impact on Self-Image/Philippine Women in Rizal’s Novels and Today,” FFP Bulletin, Spring-Summer 1992. My

citation comes from the electronic version of the article, http://www.boondocksnet.com/centennial/sctexts/lamrizal.html, 3. 58. Espana y Filipinas was originally commissioned in 1886 by the foreign min-

Notes to Pages 146-50 219 ister in Madrid after seeing an earlier version of the subject, given by Luna to Pedro

Paterno. It was exhibited together with a number of other works by Luna at the Universidad Exposition of Barcelona two years later. His most famous piece is the Spoliarium, which won top prize at an exposition in Madrid in 1884. At that point, Luna had established his studio in Paris. The same year Espana y Filipinas was commissioned, he married Paz Pardo de Tavera, with whom he had a son, Andres. The marriage ended tragically on September 23, 1892, when Luna in a fit of jealousy killed his wife and mother-in-law and wounded his brother-in-law. Surprisingly, he was acquitted of the charge of parricide and murder by the French court on Februaty 7, 1893. Afterwards, he moved with his son to Madrid, where he stayed until his return to the Philippines in 1894 (he has been absent for seventeen years). Since

his brother, General Antonio Luna, was an active participant in the insurgent Katipunan movement, in 1896 he was implicated for complicity in the group and arrested. Fortunately, Luna was among those pardoned on May 27, 1897, and he left for Spain the following month. In 1898, after the United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War, the emerging Philippine Republic selected him as a delegate to the Paris convention and to Washington, DC, to convince the United States to recognize Philippine sovereignty and independence. Luna died of a heart

attack on December 7, 1899, upon hearing of his brother’s assassination by Katipunan leaders. 59. Encarnacion Alzona, E/ legado de Espana a Filipinas (Pasay, 1956).

60. Lam thinking of the concept of the “gaze” or the “look,” as it was theorized by Laura Mulvey in Vsual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

61. Quoted by John N. Schumacher, /he Making of a Nation: Essays on NineteenthCentury Filipino Nationalism (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1991), 125. 62. Alfredo Roces and Grace Roces, Culture Shock! Philippines (Portland: Graphic Arts Center Publishing, 1985), 151.

63. Rizal, “Mi Ultimo Adios,” 30. The anniversary of Rizal’s death, December 30, is now celebrated as a holiday called Rizal Day in the Philippines. 64. This is one of the most accurate translations I have read of the poem. It was done by Edwin Agustin Lozada and is available at http://www.carayanpress.com/ ultimo.html. He originally published the translation in his book Suenos Anénimos/ Anonymous Dreams (San Francisco: Carayan Press, 2001). 65. Steinberg, Zhe Philippines, 73. 66. Renato Constantino, “The Mis-education of the Filipino,” in Lumbera and Maceda, Rediscovery, 128.

67. Constantino, “Mis-education of the Filipino,” 138. 68. Bernal and Encanto, Patterns for Filipino Dress, 25.

69. Pifia is a type of fiber and fabric that is obtained from the leaves of the pineapple plant. Sinamay is a stiff plain woven abaca fabric of various weights, generally hand-woven. Jusi is a fine fabric made from silk or silk blended with cotton, rayon, ot polyester. Pinukpok is a hand-woven fabric of abaca fibers pounded to produce a lustrous surface. See the “Fabric Glossary” by Angelita Dizon in Bernal and Encanto, Patterns for Filipino Dress, 110-11.

7o. Frances Negrén-Muntaner, Boricua Pop: Puerto Rican and the Latinization of American Culture (New Yotk: New York University Press, 2004). Negr6n-Muntaner

220 NOTES TO PAGES Ij1I—56 includes in her book a discussion of the Barbie: “Barbie’s Hair: Selling Out Puerto Rican Identity in the Global Market.” 71. Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” in Zoward the African Revolution, trans. H. Chevalier (London: Pelican, 1970), 44.

72. The term Eurasian has been in use since the middle nineteenth century to refer to an individual of mixed European and Asian descent. Although it was primarily applied during the British colonization in India, it has been adopted to a much wider group.

73. Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa, “Resisting Appropriation and Assimilation via (a)eromestiza and Radical Performance Art Practice,’ in Pinay Power: Critical Theory: Peminist Theorizing the Filipina/ American Experience, ed. Melinda L. de Jesus (New York:

Routledge, 2005), 327. The first time I saw Gigi perform was at a conference in Austin, Texas, in February 2001. Most of her work deals with the complexities of being mestiza in the United States. Her website www.devilbunny.org is a great source of information about her work. 74. www.devilbunny.org. 75. Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between,” 58.

CHAPTER FIVE 1. “Whiteness” is understood here as an ideology that names special properties unique to “white people,” or essential characteristics that define the group. The concept is an invention created by various ethnic groups perceived to have links with Europe and to be superior biologically and culturally to other “races.” While the ideology historically speaks of white supremacy, a recent look at white privilege and the

ways it pertain to race relations has been the focus of the whiteness studies that began in the late 1980s. Since then, whiteness has been questioned and contested in scholarly publications, including the analysis of race and racism linked to white privilege. The most significant aspect of whiteness studies is the analysis of white people viewing themselves in relation to people of color. In his book, W4zte (London: Routledge, 1997), 10-11, Richard Dyer writes about white “guilt” as one of the problems in whiteness studies: “The kind of white people who are going to talk about being white, apart from conscious racists who have always done so, are liable to be those sensitised to racism and the history of what white people have done to non-white peoples. Accepting ourselves as white and knowing that history, we are likely to feel overwhelmed with guilt at what we have done and are still doing.”

2. Gloria Anzaldua, “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar, or Island: Lesbians-ofColor Haciendo Alanzas,” in Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alhances, ed. Lisa Albrecht and Rose M. Brewer (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990), 216-31.

3. Such subject formation compels Roderick A. Ferguson to analyze in his “queer of color critique” certain genealogies to understand the possibilities of “minority cultural forms.’ He calls queer-of-color analysis a discourse of sexuality that helps to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. By deconstructing the canonical field of sociology that has regulated the knowledge production of racialized sexualities, Ferguson locates a genealogy of social formations

Notes to Pages 159-63 221 within modes of critique that manifest the dysfunctions of capitalism. His analysis 1s vety much influenced by Marx’s historical materialism. See Aberrations in Black: Loward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 26.

4. Bakhtin, 7he Dialogic Imagination. Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia and polyphony do not simply celebrate linguistic diversity but allude to the coexistence of “languages” within a language. This process of coexistence is generated in a state of tension and competition, caught in the borderline of dialectical relations. 5. The title of Anzaldua’s address was “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar, or Island.” Her presentation was later published in Albrecht and Brewer, bridges of Power.

6. Anzaldtia was responding to “Aztec: The World of Moctezuma,” an art exhibition at the Denver Museum of National History. Report published as “Chicana Artists: Exploring mepantia, el lugar de la frontera,” MACLAL: Report on the Americas 27,

no. 1 (1993): 37. 7. Karin Rosa Ikas, Chicana Ways: Conversations nith Ten Chicana Writers (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002), 15. 8. The standard form of the term is masculine, jofo, which is a derogatory Mexican-Spanish name for homosexual. 9. Diana Fuss, /dentefication Papers: Readings on Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Culture

(London: Routledge, 1995), 9. 10. José Esteban Mufioz, Disidentefications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Pol-

iics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 31. 11. José Esteban Mufioz, “Feeling Brown,” Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 67-79.

12, Abdul R. JanMohamed, “Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright, and the Articulation of ‘Ractalized Sexuality,’” in Daescourses of Sexuality: From

Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 94-110. 13. The BdP group includes Raquel Gutiérrez, Claudia Rodriguez, Mari Garcia, and Nadine Romero. The group has performed at various venues such as Highways Performance Space and Self-Help Graphics (Los Angeles), Galeria de la Raza (San Francisco), and college campuses throughout southern and northern California. 14. The Aztecs began to build their city Tenochtitlan around the year A.D. 1325. The city flourished until the year 1521, when Hernan Cortés and his Spanish army invaded and occupied the city. After the Aztecs were defeated by the Spaniards, the Aztec city was destroyed so the invaders could construct the new Spanish city on top

of the Aztec ruins. After nearly five hundred years, little has been found of the ancient capital city of the Aztecs. Nonetheless, excavation continues in hopes that more will be uncovered. 15. Lhe quote is taken from the groups’ website, http://www.butchlalis.com. 16. Leenage Papi: The Second Coming of Adolescence was written by Raquel Gutiérrez

and Claudia Rodriguez. In the DVD flyer of Teenage Papi, the group describes their performance as “tales of tender tops and bossy bottoms, baby daddy diary entries, BDSM thuggery, ride-or-die femmes and more.” Much of the language is marked by a queet-lesbian vernacular. 17. BdP was recently featured in Curve: The Best-Selling Lesbian Magazine, October 2005, 19.

222 NOTES TO PAGES 163-71 18. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

1998). Halberstam proposes the study of masculinity without men. She argues that female masculinity is not a throwaway appendage of the dominant masculinity but ts, indeed, an important element to the whole concept of masculinity. She expresses a true commitment to end the historical stigmatization in which female-masculine bodies have been trapped and “to make masculinity safe for women and girls” (268). I will further discuss Halberstam’s work in relation to issues of race later in the chapter. 19. Cherrie Moraga, “La Guera,” in his Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldtia (New York: Kitchen Table, 1983), 28—29.

20. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, “Making Tortillas,” in Rebolledo and Rivero, /nfinite Divisions, 355-56.

21. Ina larger framework, this alternative system proposed by the term /ort/lera has also been marked in the recent publication of Jortileras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Eexpression (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003). The editors, Lourdes Torres and Inmaculada Perpetusa-Seva, apply the term in a discussion of the heterogeneity of Latina/Hispanic lesbian writers and performance artists. Although the book proposes a discussion of lesbian culture across borders (Spain, Latin America, and U.S. Latinas), it lacks a theoretical debate on the investigation of the queer-lesbian category embodied in the processes of (dis)identification. 22. Gina Montoya, “Baby Dykes,” in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991), 19-20. 23. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2000). Sandoval first introduced her “methodology of the oppressed” in her essay “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory of Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders 10 (Spring 1991), 1-24. 24. Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 5 4.

25. In the mid-1990s, PTO (Pedagogy and Theatre of Oppression) was formed as a result of a series of four conferences held in Omaha, Nebraska (1995-98), in which the ideas and works of Freire and Boal were the main focus. PTO is a not-forprofit organization that holds a conference annually, promoting critical thinking and social justice. 26. Gloria Anzaldta, “To(o) Queer the Writer-Loca, escritora y chica,” in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998), 263. 27. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 336. 28. Frances Negron-Muntaner, director and producer, Brincandoel Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican, 1994, 55 minutes, distributed by Women Make Movies. 29. For discussion of the film, consult Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, “1898 and the History of a Queer Puerto Rican Century: Gay Lives, Island Debates, and Diasporic Experience,” Centro Journal 11, no. 1 (1999): 91-109. 30. For a discussion of “border tongue,” see Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, 55. 31. She explains that while she was creating images for the series entitled “1848: Latinos in the U.S. Landscape after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” she was also asked to design a flyer for a lesbian/bisexual women-of-color event. In the creative process, the image of two popular figures came to her mind: La Sirena and the Virein of Guadalupe.

Notes to Pages 171-73 223 32. See _ http://latinoartcommunity.org/community/ChicArt/ArtistDit/Alm Lop.html, 1. For an update on Alma Lépez’s art and exhibits consult her website, www.almalopez.net. Recently, she completed a film about short-haired butch women titled Bot Hair: a short digital video about short hair. The video features three butch lesbians: Alice Y. Hom (a Chinese-American community activist), Claudia Rodriguez (a Chicana lesbian writer and performance artist from Compton, California), and Lizette Sanchez (a Puerto Rican born in California) talking about their hair styles, their sexuality, and how they are perceived by others. The video 1s twenty minutes long and is the first digital film created by Lépez. In her website, Lopez states: “T love and admire butch women, and this project is an attempt to understand them as well as creating a space for them to speak about their hair, and for audiences to understand butch hair issues.”’ Bos Hazr has been screened in different venues including San Miguel de Allende, Mexico (summer 2005), and at the 2005 Outfest (The 23rd Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival). 33. This quote is the result of one of my many informal conversations with Alma Lépez. Originally, the angel was portrayed topless, but later prints and publications

covet her breasts with a butterfly. In a conversation, Alma indicated that this was done upon the request of her friend who portrayed the “angel.” “Our Lady” had provoked much protest from the Catholic community in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when the piece was shown as part of the exhibit “Cyber Art: Where Tradition Meets Technology,” at the Museum of Folk Art (opened February 25, 2001). Church officials and community leaders initiated a campaign against the piece, requesting the removal of the image from the exhibit. As a result, various meetings and rallies were

organized where supporters and protestors engaged in heated debates about the print. While the supporters were mainly women, artists, intellectuals and academics, the protestors were primarily men, priests and some women. The museum officials decided that the work would remain on display, but the duration of the whole exhibit was shortened by several months. 34. The mural was part of a digital series curated by John Leanos at Galeria de la Raza. After two weeks of display, the mural was vandalized by someone who wrote eraffiti warning about temptation while referring to passages in the Bible. The trespasset/vandal demanded to know why this public space was being used to portray love between women. This mural and most of L6pez’s art can be seen in her website. 35. Lépez’s work is produced in collaboration with many of her friends who perform and pose as models for the images she creates. For example, Raquel Gutierrez and Raquel Salinas are portrayed in Our Lady, Cristina Serna and Mirna Tapia in /x7a, and Claudia Rofriguez and Stacy Macias in Heaven 2. 36. Longues, a Los Angeles-based queer arts journal and organizing project, is

published annually, producing four issues so far. A link to the magazine is also

included in Alma _ Lopez’s’ website: http://www.almalopez.net/tongues/ tongues. html. Lopez is one of the editors and founders of the 7ongues. Other editors include Stacy Macias, Claudia Rodriguez, Lizette Sanchez, Raquel Gutiérrez, and

Aurota Garcia. The editors define the “magazine” as a community site for the empowerment of queer women of color. All the covers of the /ongues have featured Lépez’s artwork. 37. Alma Lopez et al., eds., Zongues 1 (2001): I.

224 NOTES TO PAGES 173-77 38. The last report (November 2004) of the Washington Office on Latin America pointed out that over 370 women have been killed in Ciudad Juarez since 1993. According to that report, many had suffered sexual abuse and torture; murders showing similar characteristics have spread to the nearby city of Chihuahua. The report suggests that approximately 100 cases seem to be the work of one or more serial killers.

For almost a decade, the Mexican authorities did little to address the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, but due to international pressure, President Vicente Fox announced the formation of a new federal government program to prevent these mutders, to investigate and punish the perpetrators, and to promote women’s rights. 39. Teteoinnan was also known as Tozi and Toci. She is the personification of the power of nature, and the goddess of healing. She represents the creative feminine power. 40. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 125.

41. Lam applying Donna J. Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledge,” which she uses as an argument against various discursive configurations that in her view are “unlocatable,” and “irresponsible” knowledge claims. 42. I recognize a postmodern turn in society but I believe it does not imply that modernity has come to an end. It is obvious that underdeveloped countries still yearn for modernization. One must understand that modernity has not exhausted itself but is presently contending with its postmodern derivation. 43. Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/ Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990), 34-35. 44. Jean-Francois Lyotard, lhe Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). The postmodern condition as understood by Lyotard can be defined as the knowledge that has arisen after the Enlightenment, and particularly since World War Il in Western postindustrial, information-based societies. While Lyotard sees modernity as a cultural condition exemplified by constant change in the quest for progress,

he characterizes postmodernity as the embodiment of this process. Lyotard also argues that the various “grand narratives” of progress, such as positivist science, Marxism, and structuralism, were useless as methods of achieving progress. For him, the legitimation of knowledge in the postmodern condition is defined by its own petformative power and action. 45. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 15. 46. Although the issue of race is absent in Gender Trouble, Butler includes considerations of racial identity in her overall analysis of identity formation in Bodies that Matter.

47. Discussions on race are offered by Butler in an interview with Vikki Bell, “On Speech, Race, and Melancholia: An Interview with Judith Butler,” 7heory, Cu/ture and Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 163-74. In this interview, Butler speaks about her work, especially her book E:xcitable Speech (1997). While talking about how her work represents a continuation of certain subjects as well as new possibilities of debate,

she also addresses critiques of her work and responds to questions about the prospect of applying the same theoretical framework to racializing and gendering processes.

Notes to Pages 177-82 225 48. Although in chapter 6 of Female Masculinities, “Looking Butch,” Halberstam discusses the role of a butch Latina character, Private Vasquez, in the film A“ens, played by a Jewish actress, Jeanette Goldstein, her analysis of ethnic and racial identity is presupposed only in representation. Notably, an alleged inside joke with regards to the casting of Goldstein goes: when she heard they were casting for A/ens, she thought they meant “illegal aliens.” She tried to look and sound as Hispanic as possible on her screen test, thus getting the part of Vasquez. 49. Norma Alarcon, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of Thzs Bridge Called My Back, and Anglo-American Feminism,” in Making Face, Making Soul/ Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldta (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990), 356—69.

50. Alarcon, “Theoretical Subject(s),” 363. 51. Alarcon, “Theoretical Subject(s),” 366. 52. Judith Halberstam, “Queering Lesbian Studies,” in The New Lesbian Studhes: Lnto the Twenty-First Century, ed. Bonnie Zimmerman and Toni A. H. McNaron (New York: Feminist Press, 1996), 259. 53. Judith Roof, “Postmodernism,” in Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical [ntroduction, ed. Andy Medhurst and Sally R. Munt (London: Cassell, 1997), 176-85. In explaining the notion of “postmodern commodity,” Judith Roof reclaims the political position of the postmodern, applying its effects to the designation queer. 54. Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schotr, Feminism Meets Queer Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), x11. 55. Judith Butler, “Against Proper Objects,” in Weed and Schor, Feminism Meets Oueer Theory, 3.

56. In this context, it is important to recognize the significance of Adrienne Rich’s essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” This piece has been very effective in raising consciousness about the effects and dangers of patriatchy embedded in the forces of compulsory heterosexuality. Nevertheless, I believe that heterosexuality as an institution continues to oppress both heterosexuals and lesbians in the twenty-first century. Rich’s essay has been reprinted in many anthologies. | recommend the version in 7he Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove (New York: Routledge, 1995). In this context, the work of Marylyn Frye is recommended in this context: “A Lesbian Perspective on Women’s Studies,” in The New Lesbian Studies: Into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Bonnie Zimmerman and Toni A.

H. McNaron (New York: Feminist Press, 1996). See Judith Butler’s discussion of heterosexuality and the specificity of lesbianism in “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in /yside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1992). 57. Teresa de Lauretis, introduction to the special issue “Queer Theory: Gay and Lesbian Sexualities,” in Differences 3, no. 2 (1991): V.

58. These issues are clearly discussed by Sheila Jeffreys in her article “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbian Sexuality in the Academy,” Women Studies [International Forum 17,0. § (1994): 459-72. 59. Anzaldua, “Chicana Artists,” 4o. 6o. Regardless of DeGeneres’s choice of terms to describe herself to the media, her very public coming out narrative was a courageous act with harmful repercussions to her career (at least for that time). Since the landmark coming-out episode,

226 NOTES TO PAGES 182-86 DeGeneres and her TV network apparently had struggled over the show’s increasing homosexual content. Her TV sitcom was canceled one year after her charactet’s

coming-out episode after five seasons on the air. Nonetheless, the outing of DeGenetes’s character spoke heroically to gay and lesbian communities across the country. DeGeneres played a lesbian again in another sitcom in 2001, which also failed. After a successful comedy tour nationwide (also an HBO special) and a comical performance as the voice for a memory-impaired fish in the animated film, Finding Nemo, DeGeneres came back on TV as the host of a talk show, 7he Een DeGeneres Show, 1n 2003. It is a mix of stand-up comedy, celebrity interviews, musical performers, audience participation games, and segments about real people. Since some critics believed her first sitcom suffered a decline in its ratings because it was “too gay,” DeGeneres seems sensitive about not wanting her show to get labeled as a “gay talk show.” Prior to the show’s premiere, she has made it abundantly clear in interviews (and thus assuring corporate America) that she is not going to deliberately include gay-telated topics and issues into the show. Though the show’s high ratings can be attributed to its own merits, perhaps it is also because DeGeneres’s lesbianism is not addressed at all, just like the elephant in the room. Nevertheless, her daily presence

on mainstream TV continues to confront society’s conceptions and stereotypes about lesbians. 61. Sue-Ellen Case, 7he Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the end of Print Culture

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 11. Consult also “Tracking the Vampire,” Dafference 3, no. 2 (1991): I-20.

62. Teresa de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,” Feminist Studies 16, no. I (1990): 144. 63. Alice Walker coined “womanism” in her 1983 collection of essays, /n Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harvest, 1983). In 1984, she justified the term in New York Times Magazine, suggesting that the use of “womanism,” as

opposed to feminism, helped her to conceive the gendered subject in racialized terms. In her view, it not only connected the subject with an African cultural heritage, but also with the overall movement of women of color. The womanist is also the woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. She symbolically analogized it: “Womianist is to feminist as purple to lavender.” /n Search of Our Mother's Gardens, xii.

64. Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, 77. 65. Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 5 4.

66. Paula M. L. Moya, “Chicana Feminism and Postmodernist Theory,” Szgens 26, no. I (2001): 441-83. In arguing for a “realist” view of Chicana identity, Moya is so

preoccupied in deconstructing Norma Alarcén and Chela Sandoval’s theoretical

contributions that she becomes unaware that her own pursuit of “truth” is a reflection of what she defines as “abstract oppositionality” to knowledge production. 67. Gloria Anzaldta, “Haciendo caras, una entrada: An Introduction,” in Making Face, Making Soul/ Haciendo Caras, xxvi.

68. Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, 85.

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INDEX

Acupanda, Linda McGloin, 145 Alurista, Alberto, 54 Aftica, 91, 93, 107, 110, 122 Anzaldua, Gloria Evangelina, 7-9, 14, African/s, 1, 4, 19, 21, 27, 84, 106, 116; 24-25, 31, 51-53, 64, 71, 80, 116, African American/s, 20, 23; contti- 157-61, 164, 168—69, 181, 183,

bution, 89; African-Cuban, 87; 185—86; border consciousness, 26, 31, dance, 101; diaspora, 99; enslave- 184; identity politics, 162; /a conciencia ment, 91; Aftican-Cuban woman, de la mestiza, 61; la facultad, 26-27; 117; African-European encounter, nepantilism, 25, 27; “new mestiza con-

98; goddess, 87; heritage, 115; sciousness,” 26, 32, 152 sionifiers, 101; slave trade, 123; America, 34; América, 1-3, 21; América

slaves, 97 mestiza, 32, 113, 116; americanidad, 2;

Afticanization, 86, 96 americanismo, 85; Ameticas, 19, 21, 23, Afro-Antillean, 98; Afro-Caribbean 84, 88, 91,97, 99, 113, 115, 119-25,

movement, 95; Afro-Cuban- 154; Amerindian, 23, 27; AngloCaribbean, 111; Afro-Cuban America, 2, 22; Anglo-American femmusic, 99; Afto-Cubanidad inists, 184; anti-American, 52; Central (Cubanness), 100; Afro-Cuban and South America, 86; Latin Amerwoman, 109; Afro-Hispanic culture, ica, 2, 4, 6-8, 10, 12-13, 17, 20-24,

go 27-29, 47-48, 82, 91, 94, 97, 98, 114,

Agency, IO-I1, 14, 117, 156-57, 122, 125-27, 140, 186; Latinoamerica, 160-61, 179; hybrid agencies, 15 4; 19; “Nuestra América,” 3, 21-22; native, 75; mestizo, 50; of the mulata, pan-American consciousness, 46; 110-11; of the mulata/black body, pan-American indigenous, 27; South 100; of native myths, 173; performa- America, 23, 108; Spanish America, tive, 165, 176-77; political, 9, 12, 15, 91, 126 17, 50, 57, 82, 152, 176, 183, 185; Aparicio, Frances, 5, 99-100 polyvalent, 112; rebellious, 144; sub- Appadurai, Arjun, 18

altern, 117; subordinate, 137; Arguedas, José Maria, 24

women’s, 140 Arteaga, Alfred, 4

Aguilar, Laura, 64-66 Asia, 4, 120, 122, 124-25; Eurasian,

Aguinaldo, Agustin, 119 132

Alarcon, Norma, 8, 63-64, Austin, J. L., 11

177-78 Authenticity, 2, 63, 64, 66

Alfaro, Luis, 66 Avelar, Idelber, 22

237

238 INDEX Aztecs, 50, 85, 162; Aztec empire, 80, formance of mythical, 78; perfor121; goddess, 66; legend, 68; mythol- mances of, 162; performing, 58, 66, ogy, 51, 174; Aztec-Nahuatl, 25 100, 154; plus-sized, 36, 37; politics, Aztlan, 10-11, 48-51, 5 3-58, 66, 76, 78, 76; pre-Hispanic, 75; queer-inflected, 80, 120, 186; borders of, 75; queering 185; queer-lesbian, 179; racialized,

of, 77 117, 160-61, 175, 177, 179, 181; sen-

sualized, 98; sexualized, 7, 158; subal-

186 109; white, 159 Baez, Josefina, 10, 43-47 Borderlands, 7, 25-26; space, 4, 62,

Baca, Judith, 40, 52-53, 59-61, 64, 155, tern, 47; transcultural, 66, 71; volatile,

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 36; concept of the 184-85 carnival, 37; heteroglossia, 159 Border/s, 9, 12, 17-21, 26, 58, 63,

Barthes, Roland, 167 66-67, 77, 120; tongue, 169; U.S.Bello, Andres, 22 Mexican, 3, 51-52, 56, 63, 65; United Benitez-Rojo, Antonio, 12, 84, 89, 96 States /Mexico, 170, 172 Bernal, Salvador, F., and Georgina R. Borderization/s, 44, 48, 50, 64; of iden-

Encanto, 143 tity, 169

Betlam, Trix, Gabriela, 138 Bracken, Josephine, 142 Bhabha, Homi K., 4, 6, 62, 112, 154 Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 117 Black: culture, 99; black and white, 112; = Butchalis de Panochttlan, 162 blackface, 106; black vs. white, 105; Butler, Judith, 11, 111, 163, 176, 180;

female spectatorship, 175; popula- “racializing norms,” 177 tion, 103; sensibility, 91, 98; woman,

I1O—II, 175 Caliban, 113-15

Blackness, 96, 116-17 Campa, Roman de la, 5; transmoder-

Blacks, 126; in Cuba, 97 nity, 41 Boal, Augusto, 167 Cardoso, Patricia, 36

Body/bodies, 10, 19, 65, 122, 141, 146, Caribbean, 6, 7, 84, 88, 89, 91, 93,

156, 166; in action, 71; authentic, 99, 114, 120; culture/s, 5, 97; con63-64; black, 85, 94, 96, 106, 110, texts, 82; food, 83; nations, 86; 112; brown, 12, 35, 139-40, 176, 1793 Spanish, 90 “caged,” 115; Chicana, 61; colonial Case, Sue-Ellen, 182; “performing les-

153; dancing, 96—97; dialectical, 2; bian,” 183 exotic, 99; female, 13, 75, 1573 Fil- Castro, Fidel, 107 ipino, 150; gendered, 2, 13, 146, 1773 Chanady, Amaryll, 8 hybrid, 86, 116, 163; ideal, 13.4; inter- Chicana, 12, 63, 71, 73; feminist cultural

cultural, 10, 15; Latina, 10, 33-35, productions, 58, 70, 155; feminist 162, 165; Latino, 161; materialization practices, 50, 141; feminists, 158; Chiof, 177; mestiza, 14, 60, 62-63, 67, 75, cana/Latina artists, 68; Chicana and 77, 117, 121, 139, 145, 151, 171; mes- Latina cultural productions, 168; ChitizOo, 58, 100; mulata, 11, 12, 82, 84, cana-mestiza, 10, 76; Chicana/mexi87, 98-99, IOI, T11—12, 116; multi- canas, 69; Chicana/o, 11, 24, 59; Chiinflected, 169; native, 11, 48, 50, 66, canas, 56, 94, 184; lesbian feminist,

74-75, 115; native/mestizo/a, 81, 175 117; new mestiza, 7; oppositional, Chicano, 54, 155, 159; communities, 166; “passing,” 117; perfect, 38; per- 170; cultural productions, 58; cultural

Index 239 studies, 50; culture, 80; movement, Cuba, 18, 22, 87, 92, 97, 108, 114, 131; 54-55; militants, 55; nationalism, Io, postrevolutionary, 108; Cubans, 106; 51; nationalist art, 73; nationalist ide- sugar industry, 86 ology, 156; people, 81; pop icons, Cuban choteo, 109; cigats, 101; cocktail, 170; subject, 58; Chicano/a, 32; att 11, 83; community, 87; cultural iden-

and performance culture, 81; Chi- tity, 89; culture, 96-97; economy, 94; cano/Chicanos, 2, 4, 8, 20, 57, 60; exile, 115; nationality, 108; people, 93; Chicano/Latino discursive practices, theory, 5 8; Chicano and Latino cultural con- Cubanidad, 112; Cubalibre, 87

texts, 152; Chicanos/Latinos, 2 Culture Clash, 10, 38-41

Chinese mestizos, 128 Davila, Arlene, 34

Chocolate, 83-84 DeGeneres, Ellen, 182 Christianity, 67-68, 120, 122, 124, 139, de la Campa, Roman. See Campa,

IAI, 144, 162 Roman de la

Cihuacoatl, 68, 70, 80 de la Torre, Miguel. See Torre, Miguel de

Cisneros, Sandra, 68—69 la

Citizenship, 19, 20; ideal, 29; global, de Lauretis, Teresa. See Lauretis, Teresa

156; political, 29 de

Civil Rights Movements, 76 de Legazpi, Miguel Lépez. See Legazpi,

Cliff, Michelle, 24 Miguel Lopez de

Coatlicue, 66-68, 79, 81; Coatlicue- Diasporas, 18; Dominican, 44 Lupe, 69; Coatlicue Theater Com- Diasporic: community-building, 19; pany, 67-68; legacy, 75; state, 71 imagination, 109; interventions, 62 Colonialism, 2-3, 17, 19, 23, 96, 145; Difference, 3, 86; cultural, 6-7, 112,

excess of, 121 173; colonial, 23-24, 27, 50, 81, I15;

Coloniality, 17, 23-24 cultural/colonial, 4; gender and sexColonization, 4, 6, 9, 24, 88, 95, 106, ual, 11; identities of, 111; Indian, 149; history of, 91, power of, 93; sites 28-29, 57, 75; indigenous, 32; of, 153-54; trauma of, 113; wound (neo)colonial, 25; racial, 112; sexual,

of, 150 99

Colorado, Elvira and Hortensia, 66, Discoutse/s, 4-5, 7-8, 25, 29, 50, 73,

69 123, 168, 178; antihegemonic, 76;

Commodification, 66, 84, 116, 145; of colonial, 63, 113, 145; formations,

popular knowledge, 87 169; Foucauldian, 9, 30; nationalist, Commodity, 14, 32-33, 40, 57, 83, 100, 54; of nationhood, 132; postcolonial, 111, 160, 175-76; of ethnicity, 150 11,74, 84, 114; power of, 47; techno-

Constantino, Renato, 149 logical, 91; Third World, 5 Contact zone/s, I-5, 10, 15, 17, 45, Discursive configurations, I1, 50, 56,

51-52, 94, 115, 122, 185 64, 67, 92, 99, 111, 176, 181, 185 Contemporaneity, 59; cultural, 49, 152; Disidentification, 15 8—Go of mestizaje, 154

Cortés, Hernan, 93, 121, 124 Enriquez, Carlos, 93

Coyolxauhqui, 79 Eroticism, 93; sexual, 96 Creole/s, 27, 103, 106; tongue, 169 Eroticization, 84, 174 Creolization, 86, 89; creolity, 111 Erotic movements, 97; symbol, tot

Criollo, 128 Hsteva-Fragat, Claudio, 6, 123, 126

240 INDEX Eurocentric, 98, 113; Anglo/Eurocen- cultural hybridization, 30; “multitem-

tric, 160 poral heterogeneity,” 30

Europe, 19, 27, 48, 90, 108, 134, 143 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 164

Exotic beauty, 108; other, 99 Gender, 8, 9, 32, 111, 132, 141, 157,

Exoticism, 93, sexual, 106 167, 177; analysis, 92; archetypes, Ezponda, Eduardo, 103-5 140; boundaries of, 163; dynamics, 156; genders and sexualities, 109;

Fanon, Frantz, 150 identity, 145, 176, 181; performativFeminism, 76; Anglo-American, 178; ity, 117; relations, 91, 94, 161; role, border, 8; Chicana, 11; Latin Ameri- 162; subordination, 177; system, 162; can, 140; lesbian, 178; and politics, transgression, 60 61; Third Wave, 184; transcultural/ Gomez, Marsha, 71-72

167 I15—16

transnational, 8—9; U.S. Third World, | Gdmez-Pefia, Guillermo, 56, 57,

Feminist consciousness, 94; ctitique, 44; Gonzalez, Rodolfo “Corky,” 49, 54

epistemologies, 9, 15; movement, Globalization, 17, 24-25, 30, 31-32, 84, 137; practices, 63; queer bodies, 73; 108, 137 reading of salsa, 99; scholars, 145; Global South, 4, 31 studies, 177; theories 9, 175; theory, Gramsci, Antonio, 26 3, 176-78, 180; U.S. Third World Gringolandia, 56, 77 feminist context of, 167; U.S. femi- Guerrero-Nakpil, 134-3 5

nist movements, 61 Guevara, Ché, 34, 39

Fernandez Retamar, Roberto, 113-14 Guillén, Nicolas, 12, 95, 97-99 Ferrera, America, 3 5—36

Filipina/s, 12, 134, 141, 145-46, 149, Halberstam, Judith, 163 154; Filipina~-American artist, 153; Hall, Stuart, 25 Filipina/o American culture, 121; Fil- Haraway, Donna J., 9 ipina/o Americans, 15 2; woman, Hayek, Salma, 34-36

154 Hayworth, Rita, 3 5

Filipino culture, 117, 139; ¢/ustrados, 149; |Hegemonic, 7, 24, 45; body, 86; coun-

life, 134; Muslim, 124; society, terhegemonic, 26, 75; cultures, 10;

150-51 erounds, 18; hegemony of discursive

Filtpino Heritage Museum, 142 regimes, 168; Hollywood hegemonic

Fiol-Matta, Licia, 132 culture, 35; representation, 6, 13;

Flores, Juan, 5, 20, 45 space, 177; systems, 50 Foucauldian sense, 24; vision, 122 Hernandez, Ester, 7o-71

Foucault, Michel, 106, 161, 167, 177; Heterogeneity, 10-11, 30, 34-35, 58,75, heterotopia, 30; subjectivation, 176 85, 111; coalitional, 29; cultural, 15,

Foundation for a Compassionate Soci- AI

ety, 72 Heteronormative culture, 165; patriar-

Freire, Paulo, 167 chal culture, 163; regimes, 146; Fusco, Coco, 5, 114-15; as “La Authen- spaces, 170; system, 172

tic Santera,” 116 Heteronormativity, 14,92, 160, 162 Heterosexism, 8

Galeria de la Raza, 172 Heterosexist, 156; discourse, 157; hierGarcia Canclini, Nestor, 30, 40; inter- atchy, 76

Index 241 Heterosexuality, 48, 180-81; compul- tity, 159; “savage,” 154; Shoshone

sory, 33, 48, 116; heterosexual Indian land, 71 romance 114, 116; performance of, Indigenous, 1, 19, 21, 50, 54, 60, 63, 68,

116 85, 115-16, 119, 145, 155, 159; body,

Hispanic, 33-34, 56, 63, 151; Caribbean, 139, 174; culture/s, 28, 120, 144; fab3, 12; culture, 23, 126; homeland, 50; tics, 150; goddesses, 66; Malay influence, 142; legacy, 146; symbols, descent, 126; movements, I0, 27;

67; worlds, 85, 153 people, 53; population, 84, 91, 125; Hispanization, 13, 117, 125, 145; cul- pre-Hispanic, 121; “savage,” 1533

tural, 140 sionifiers, 162

Hispanophile, 146 Intercultural, 45; exchange, 42, 84; Homophobia, 32, 173; dangers of, 81 experience, 12, 126; negotiation, 116;

hooks, bell, 175 project, 30; subject, 7; relations, 41 Huitzilopochthi, 68, 79 Interculturalism, 67

Hybrid agencies, 155; composition, 162; = Interdisciplinarity, 152, 15.4, 186

epistemologies, 9, 12, 48, 75; exotic Interdisciplinary, 9; artist, 115; intervenAmerindian, 115; forms, 107; hybrid- tions, 177; possibility, 46; studies, 185 performing identity, 152; sites, 7, 179;

sounds, 99 Jameson, Fredric, 63, 167

Hybridity, 1, 31, 66, 111, 117, 152, 155, Juarez, Benito, 22 162, 169; cultural hybridities, 59,

168 Katipunan Revolution, 131 Hybridization, 4-5, 15, 30-31, 59, 64, Kutzinski, Vera M., 4-7, 12, 85-86, 97, 85, 101, 105, 116; cultural, 92, 152; of IOO-IOI, 112, 114 the body, 179 Lacanian: frame of reference, 114 Identity, 7, 18, 21, 25, 38, 44, 49, 63,65, | Ladino culture, 27—28, 30

90, 149; Chicano, 50; colonial, 150; La frontera, 31 cultural, 7, 17, 54, 165; Dominican, La India, 100 45; ethnic, 45; Latina/o, 46; markers, La llorona, 80

182; mestizo, 8, 127; mulata, 101; La Lupe, 100 mystification of, 145; national 98-99, La Malinche, 80-81, 93-94, 156; legacy, 107, 132, 148; native, 75; politics, 49, 95; Malintzin Tenepal, 93 156, 179; pute, 75; queer-mestiza, 9; La migra, 51 racialized and gendered, 62; subal- Latin, 10, 22, 84; pop culture, 100

tern, 113 Latina, 32, 165; artist/s, 81, 171; brown

Identification/s, 48-49, 160, 163-65; body, 162; Latinas, 36, 63, 184; procollective, 50; national, 150; national- tagonists, 172; queer Latina artists, ist, 106; self-identification, 115, 121 168; U.S. Latina, 35; youth, 173 Immigrants, 18, 36, 51, 56; Puerto Rican —_Latinidad, 9-10, 17-21, 23-24, 26-27,

migration, 19; undocumented immi- 30-36, 38, 40-43, 45-48, 50; borders

eration, 52 of, 20; discourse of, 21; PanImperialism, 17-18, 23, 65, 1123 anti- Latinidad, 21

2-3, 15 ism, 22

imperialism, 96; forces of, 99; U.S., Latinismo, 20; Latinness, 46; pan-LatinIndian/s, 6, 93, 124; heritage, 56; iden- Latinization, 34, 47, 56

242 INDEX Latino, 21; community, 39, 45; cul- markers, 85; pan-Mayan movement,

ture/s, 10, 24, 108, 161; images, 27-28 34; Latinos, 2-3, 5, 46; man, 154; McCarthyism, 39 market, 32; neighborhoods, 163; non- Mechicano, 77

Latino audiences, 33; people, 38; Mencht, Rigoberta, 28 population, 34, 54; solidarity, 20; Mestiza, 25-26, 62, 73, 81, 93, 1853 Studies, 5; traditional ways, 37; Trans- brown mestiza body, 166; of the

Latino, 21-22; U.S. Latinos, 29, Caribbean, 18; mestiza conscious-

31-32, 34, 47 ness, 8, 25-26, 31, 144, 156, 167, 184,

Lauretis, Teresa de, 181, 183 186; mestiza-ing, 14-15, 158, 175, Lesbianism, 64, 78, 157, 163, 165, 183, 186; mestizas, 13, 66, 93, 943

180-81, 183 subject, 156

Lesbian/s, 8, 14, 65, 81, 139, 161, 168; Mestizaje, 1, 3, 4-10, 13, 14, 17, 23, 28, body, 162, 164-67, 169, 180-83; cate- 29, 30, 46, 48, 57-59, 75-76, 82, 85,

goty, 158, 159; Chicana, 4, 14, 77, 88, 114, 116, 121-22, 126—27, 139, 80-81; of color, 178, 181, 184; desire, 150, 152-53, 155, 157, 158, 159, 14, 47, 77, 156, 163-64, 178-79; and 169-70, 179, 181; cultural, 30, 50, gay movements, 176; gaze, 146; 106, 120; ethnic, 123; Filipino, 12, Latina, 2, 47; mestiza, 159; Puerto 121; mythos of, 184; revolutionary, Rican, 168; relationship, 79; subjec- 29, 32

tivity, 166 Mestizo, 58; cultures, 1, 6, 31; elite, 27;

Letterman, David, 182 icon, 71; mestixo-ilustrado Class, 13,

Levins Morales, Aurora, 18—20 128—29, 132; mestizos, 27, 141; peo-

Lopez, Alma, 14, 169-73 ple, 7, 12, 126; son, 93

Lopez, George, 36 Mexicanismo, 85

Lopez, Jennifer, 3 5-36 Mexican/s, 1, 159, 170; cinema, 108; Lopez, Josefina, 10, 36-38 culture, 65, 80; feminists, 93; flag, Lopez, Yolanda M., 70-71, 171 64-65; immigration, 54; Mexican-

Luna, Juan, 146, 148 American War, 18; Mexican/ChiLyotard, Francois, 176, 185 cano, 162; Revolution, 8, 28; U.S. Mexican territory, 31

Magellan, Ferdinand, 120 Mexico, 10, 21, 23, 31, 35, 51, 65, 85,

Manifest Destiny, 22, 55 124, 162, 172; French occupation of, Manila, 14; Manila-Acapulco galleon, 21

124 Mignolo, Walter D., 5, 23-27, 186; on

Maria Clara, 13, 130-31, 133-37, border thinking, 24-25, 27; on colo-

139-42, 145, 148, 150, 186 niality of power, 30, 41 Martanismo, 68, 113, 139-41, 161-62 Miller, Marilyn Grace, 8, 29 Martti, José, 2-3, 21-23, 96, 120, 131 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 63-64

Martinez, Juan, A., 93 Miranda, 113-15

Masculinist, 60; depictions, 92; imagina- §_Miscegenation, 6, 84, 93, 103, 125,

tion, 101, 112; lineage, 114; power 140

and desire, 12 Modernismo, 22

Masculinity, 162-63 Modernity, 13, 17, 22-24, 41 Masculinization, 162 Modernization, 30, 32, 148 Mayan, 28; Mayan-Aztec linguistic Montoya, Gina, 165

Index 243 Moots, 120, 122-23, 125 Ochtn, 86—88, 100 Moraga, Cherrie, 1-2, 10, 50, 77, 80, O’Donnell, Rosie, 182 156, 163; “La fuerza femenina” by, Ontiveros, Lupe, 36 79; “Queer Aztlan” by, 10-11, 14,76, Ortiz, Fernando, 4-5, 12, 89; “sugar and

81, 183 tobacco,” 91-92

Morej6n, Nancy, 12, 110, 117 Otalvaro-Hormillosa, Gigi, 13, 152-53 Mulata, 12, 96-99, 101, 103, 105—6, Other, 50; minority others, 57; othering 108-9, 114-15, 117; cocktail, 14, 84, practices, 34, 38 go, 1113; drink, 83; light-skinned, ror; Otherness, 5, 7, 35, 98, 113, I15—16,

mulata-cabaretera, 107; mulatas, 93, 133, 153; colonial, 120 103, 105; poetry, 97, 100; Ron

Mulata, 86; subordinated, 93 Palés-Matos, Luis, 12, 98, 99 Mulatez, 11, 82, 84-85, 87, 88, 99, 102, Patriarchal normativity, 99-100; power,

L1j—I7 114; prepatriarchal mother, 79; soci-

Mulato, 94, 98; dark, 103; mulatto/s, 84, eties, 141 126; tragic, 103; community, 101 Patriarchy, 32, 113, 175, 180

Multiculturalism, 7, 30, 85—86 Pefia, Amado, 58

Mufioz, José, 160-61 Peninsulares, 12

Pérez, Laura Eliza, 58

Nahuatl, 57, 66-67, 161 Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 57-58 National Women’s Studies Association, Performance, 2, 6,7, 9, 14-15, 32, 39,

159 42, 81; art, 10, 41, 43, 48, 64, 67, 81,

Nationalism, 31, 55, 63, 76, 77, 107, 129, 89, 99, 120; artist/s, 38, 68; 81; of 131-32; Chicano, 10; ethnonational- identity, 75; of origin, 64; popular,

ism, 8 108; of racialized normativity, 161;

Nationhood, 13, 62, 77, 103; heteronor- site of, 163; of subversive knowledge,

mative systems of, 132 175

Nation /s, 8, 22, 31, 34, 57, 66,128,146; Performance studies, 14 Chicano, 54, 76; colonized, 122; His- Performative, 14, 29, 70, 109, 144, 161, panic, 123; Indian, 80; Latin Ameri- 176, 179; nature, 173, 186; practices, can, 85; mestizo, 29, 68, 122; modern, 63; self, 153; strategies, 165

126 Performativity, 11, 98, 108, 111-12;

Nation-state, 12, 18, 23, 51, 86, 90 gender, 163; queer, 183; of race, 92,

Nativism, 52, 55 116

Negrismo, 98 Performing subject 146; identities, 66; Negrén-Muntaner, Frances, 14, 150, space, 182

168—69 Phelan, John, 125

Neocolonial, 38, 67; experience, 157; Philippines, 3, 12-13, 18, 22, 119-22,

subjects, 68 124—29, 132-35, 140, 144, 145, 140,

Neocolonialism, 32; neocolonization, 148, 154; Philippine Archipelago, 186

17 Plantation, 89, 94; regimes, 91; sugar, 88 100 Postcolonial, 3, 6, 12, 14, 24, 67, 121,

New York, 18, 20, 37, 39, 44-45, 87, Poniatowska, Elena, 108

Nicholson, Linda, J., 176 186; Americas, 115, 126; critique, 122; Normativity, 14; normative systems, 3 Chicana/o postcolonial knowledge,

Nuyorican, 45 24; Cuba, 98; cultural studies, 9;

244 INDEX Postcolonial (continued) Queers, 26, 76; “of color,” 160; Latina, debates, 122; discourse, 11; histories, 165; Latina/o, 168

132, 154; imagination, 85; Latin Quiroga, José, 100 America, 8; Latina American studies, 31; Sparush sites, 126; Spanish soci- Race, 5, 9, 14, 32, 46, 111, 115—16, 123,

eties, 140; studies, 12, 120 128, 155, 157, 167—G9, 174, 177, 181,

Postcolonialism, 57 183—84; consciousness, 159, 161;

Postmodern, 167, 178; condition, 176; “cosmic race,” 8; discourse of, 91; cultural conditions, 167; cultural Filipino, 13.4; new race, 94; relations,

practices, 31; formulations, 177; 11, 38, 116; white, 134 imagination, 80, 84; interpretation, Racial: affirmation, 98; assimilation, 157; spaces, 109; temporalities, 179, 103; boundaries, 112; category, 159;

180 classification, 126; composition, 126;

Postmodernism, 176, 185 conflicts, 7; differences, 117; diverPostmodernity, 41, 61, 185 sity, 86; identity, 126; imperatives, Pratt, Mary Louise, 1, 4, 186 117; impurities, 106; independence,

Puerto Rican, 36, 169; Puerto Rican- 88; mixing, 6, 85, 103, 153; purity, 75, Boricua Barbie, 150; Jew, identities 103, 116; oppression, 99; subordina-

of, 168, 18; white, 99 tion, 114

Puerto Ricanness, 19 Racialization, 106, 126, 181 Puerto Ricans, 19, 20 Racism, 51, 67, 86, 109, 126 Puerto Rico, 18, 20, 22, 86, 97, 100, Rafael, Vicente L., 126-27

169 Rama, Angel, 4

Ramos, Julio, 22

Queer, 3,9, 11, 14-15, 113, 164, 168, Raza, 76

169; body, 158, 160, 175-76; Rendon, Armando B., 51 “brown,” 163; of color, 167; desire, Representational, 25, 45, 67, 77 165, 167; epistemologies, 8; experi- Representation/s, 5, 9, 10-11, 28-29, ence, 159; familia, 76; female mas- 34, 42-44, 46-47, 50, 57, 64, 81, 85, culinity, 163; feminist-queer theory, 146, 157-58, 160; acts of, 33; allegory 180; gaze, 146; interpolation, 162; of, 91; colonial, 7, 120; cross-cultural, identities, 81; Latinidad, 46, 48; love, 66; neocolonial, 134; self-representa172; mestizaje, 14, 181; politics, 156; tion, 65, 71, 174; strategy of, 153, 181 queer/gender sensibility, 27; queer- Rich, Adrienne, 180 lesbian, 179, 184; queer-mestiza, 13, Rivera, Leonor, 134, 142 27, 81, 152, 154, 156-57, 161, 170, Rivera-Servera, Ramon, 44 175, 178, 183; queer-of-color critique, Rizal, José, 13, 120-21, 128-29, 13 1-37, 177; racialized body, 160, 169; read- 139-42, 146, 148 ing, 132; representation, 163; sexual- Rodriguez, Juana Maria, 46, 47 ity, 64, 165; theories, 184; theory, 178, | Roman, David, 47

181, 186; theory/studies, 47 Ruf, Elizabeth, 107 Queering, 13, 14, 116, 179; mestizaje, Rum, 85—86, 90; el ron, 86 3-4, 9, 13, 14-15, 183-84, 186; of Rumba, 34, 96; popular, 97; rumbera,

mestizaje, 158, 181 108—9

Queerness, 27, 156—58, 175-76, 179,

183; representations of, 165 Said, Edward, 99

Index 245 Saldafia-Portillo, Maria Josefina, 28-29 nial, 67; plural, 59; Puerto Rican, 19;

Salsa music, 99—100 queer, 160; queer-femme, 47; sexualSandoval, Chela, 61, 167 ized, 159; split subjectivities, 71; subSandoval-Sanchez, Alberto, 5, 43, 47 jugated, 176

Santeria, 87 Syncretism, 84; cultural, 88; religious, Sarmiento, Domingo, F., 22 87; syncretic amalgamation, 85 Schor, Naomi, 180 Sensuality, 83, 87,99, 101, 107, 109,169, Taino, 19

174; excessive, 98; normative, 180 Tateoinnan, 174 Sexual: access, 6; aggressiveness, 162; Taylor, Diana, 5

desires, 141; difference, 179; Tenochtitlan, 50 encounter/s, 94, 103; eroticism, 96; Theater, 43, 81, 106; Hispanic, 43; Latin

exploitation, 105; identities, 178; American, 5; Latinarte Theatre intercourse, 37; lust, 105; oppression, Troupe, 43; Latino and Latina theater

66; systems, 145; repression, 113; practitioners, 38; movements, 73

subjugation, 93 Theatricality, 67, 77; bufo theatrical aesSexuality, 8-9, 32-33, 35, 101, 156-57, thetics, 106; sex theatrics, 97 161, 177, 181, 183-84; of the mulata, Third World, 22, 51, 58, 167 112; “normal,” 181; racialized, 160, Tiongson, Nicanor G., 119-20, 134,

163; sex/sexuality, 175 136-37

Sexualization, 99; sexualized identities, 3 Tlazolteotl, 69, 174

Sexism, 109 Tonantzin, 68—69

Sifuentes, Roberto, 56-57 Tongolele, 108 Silang, Gabriela, 137 Torre, Miguel de la, 88 Sionil, Francisco José, 133 Traje de mestiza, 13, 142, 144-46, 148-50 Slavery, 2, 89, 91-93, 99, 103, 110, 112, Transcultural: encounters, 81; engage117; antislavery narrative, 102; chau- ments, 155; juxtapositions, 46; media-

vinism of, 105; in Cuba, 103; social tions, 169; sites, 9

otder of, 106 Transculturation, 1, 3-6, 10-12, 18, 43,

Spain, 6, 87, 91, 93, 103, 107, 119-24, 58, 82, 84-85, 92, 107, 116, 123, 127, 128, 133, 135, 146, 148-49, 154; colo- 145,158

nial, 154 Translocal: identities, 4, 17; subjectivity,

Spanish-American War, 18-19, 223 20 colonial history, 121; colonization/s, Translocality, 18-20, 31-32, 45-46, 17, 93, 122, 124; conquistadores, 8; mes- 115 tizas, 142; mestizos, 128, 133; post- Tropicana, Carmelita, 108—9 Spanish colonial sites, 68; regime, 119 “Tropicana Night Club, 107 Spitta, Silvia, 5

Steinberg, David Joel, 128, 149 United States, 1, 3, 19, 21-22, 27, 31, 43,

Stevens, Evelyn, 140 51, 56, 65, 68, 137; U.S. economic Subjectivity, 7, 29, 63-64, 122, 156, 161; power, 95; flag, 64-66, 85, 87-88 border, 31; Chicana, 26; Chicana/o, 24, 58; cross-border, 63; economic, Vasconcelos, José, 8, 29

145; exotic, 85; mestiza, 121; Villaverde, Cirilo, 12, 101 metaphors of, 185; migrant, 42; Virgencita de Bronce, tot minority, 160; mulata, 108; neocolo- Virgin of Charity, 87

246 INDEX Virgin of Guadalupe, 56, 68-69, 71, 80, Women, 13, 25, 36, 44, 122, 132, 148,

88, 141, 170-71; Guadalupe, 70, 81 161, 163-64, I7I, 173-74, 176-77,

Virgin Mary, 67, 134, 137, 161 182, 186; black, 93, 99; of color, 61,

Visual art, 9, 70; arts, 58 I1j, 117, 121, 158, 160, 167, 172,

VIVA, 173 177-78, 183-84; experience, 38; darkskinned, 103; Filipino, 134-35;

Walker, Alice, 183 Indian, 6, 12, 93; indigenous, 71, 94; Weed, Elizabeth, 180 of Malolos, 135-37; as objects of Whiteness, 12, 14, 75, 116-17, 119, 150, knowledge, 99; white, 103 155-56, 161, 168; vigilante white

supremacists, 5 2 Xocolatl, 85 Whitening, 6, 103

Woman, 35-37, 151, 162, 168, Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 64-65 182; elderly, 172; fictional, 13; Yoruba mythology, 87 ideal, 141; macho, 161; native 63—

64, 67-68, 74, 81; slave, 93; warrior, Zapatistas, 14, 28, 29, 32

137 Zapatista women, 68

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