War Echoes : Gender and Militarization in U. S. Latina/o Cultural Production [1 ed.] 9780813569352, 9780813569345

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War Echoes

War Echoes Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production

ariana e. vigil

Rutgers University Press

new brunswick, new jersey, and london

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Vigil, Ariana E., 1980– War echoes : gender and militarization in U.S. Latina/o cultural production / Ariana E. Vigil. pages  cm. — (American literatures initiative) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-6934-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-8135-6933-8 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-8135-6935-2 (e-book) 1. American literature—Hispanic American authors—History and criticism. 2. Gender identity in literature. 3. Militarism in literature. I. Title. PS153.H56V54 2014 810.9’868073—dc23

2013040665

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2014 by Ariana E. Vigil All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

For my parents, Vicki B. Vigil and David Vigil

Contents

Preface ix Introduction: Gender, War, and Activism in Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production

1

1 Gender, Difference, and the FSLN Insurrection

27

2 “I Have Something to Tell You”: Polyvocality, Theater, and the Performance of Solidarity in U.S. Latina Narratives of the Guatemalan Civil War

64

3 Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue and the Politics of Decolonial Love

92

4 Father, Army, Nation: Familial Discourse and Ambivalent Homonationalism in José Zuniga’s Soldier of the Year

121

5 Camilo Mejía’s Public Rebellion and the Formation of Transnational Latina/o Identity

156

Coda

189

Notes

197

Works Cited

215

Index

229

Preface

This book project began as an exploration into the intersections between U.S. Latina/o literature and transnational activism, focusing exclusively on Latina/o cultural production in response to the Central American revolutions. As I have reoriented the project to one that investigates U.S. military intervention and expanded the scope to include Iraq, I have often found myself remarking that I began by studying revolution but ended up studying war. I now feel that this remark is accurate in some ways but inaccurate in others. On the one hand, I did have to let go of some of my youthful, naïve romanticization of twentieth-century revolutionary movements in order to more fully confront the harsh realities of war and militarism. On the other hand, and despite my explicit criticism of U.S. militarism and growing suspicion of any military endeavor, I continue to be inspired and humbled by the expressions of solidarity and commitment to justice exhibited by the authors and activists that are the subject of this study. More than anything, I have become convinced of the power of art, and especially the written word, to change people’s lives and of the possibility for change inherent in the coming together of committed, loving people. It is my hope that this book honors the work of the artists and activists who have come before and makes some small contribution to our shared vision of justice. Throughout the course of drafting, rethinking, and revising this manuscript, I have benefited from the time, thoughtfulness, criticism, and compassion of many, many people. Friends and colleagues have provided everything from academic advice to political analysis, sympathetic ears,

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and friendly homes. All of you have demonstrated unwavering confidence in my own abilities to complete this project and a sincere commitment to my own health, happiness, and success. I remain honored and humbled by your support. I would like to thank Mary Pat Brady, Debra Castillo, Sofia Villenas, and Helena María Viramontes. Mary Pat Brady especially has remained a stalwart mentor, a sharp critic, and a sincere ally. During my time at Cornell and in Ithaca I developed relationships with several people who have continued to foster my growth as a writer, scholar, teacher, and activist. Thank you Harley Etienne, Marlena Fontes, Nischit Hegde, Tony Marks-Block, Nohemy Solórzano-Thompson, Blanca Torres, and Meg Wesling. Armando Garcia, mi querida, you remain the best reader of my work. Alicia Muñoz, you have been a friend, collaborator, editor, and taskmaster. Sonam Singh saw me through episodes of self-doubt and anxiety and offered invaluable editorial assistance. Thank you especially to Stephanie Li, my “academic big sister,” for years of advice, encouragement, and motivation. I was fortunate to begin my academic career at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in a joint faculty appointment that was well-suited to my teaching and research interests. Research for this manuscript was supported by a semester of leave and a Faculty Seed Grant from UNL. Thank you to the faculty in the English Department, the Institute for Ethnic Studies, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and in particular Barbara DiBernard, Pete Capuano, Iker González-Allende, Chantal Kalisa, Emily Kazyack, and Julia Schleck. Marco Abel, Susan Belasco, and Ken Price read drafts of the manuscript and mentored me as I began corresponding with presses. Amelia M. L. Montes, una jefa maravillosa, ensured that UNL was a place where I could thrive. Eric González, Megan Peabody, and Morgan Watters provided warmth and humor through the long Lincoln winters. The Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill welcomed me with open arms and made my pretenure move as easy as possible. Thank you Michele Berger, Jane Burns, and Joanne Hershfield for support and mentorship. It seems that as soon as I set foot in “the Triangle” I found a friendly, energetic, and stimulating community. I so appreciate having friends and colleagues who share my sense of political outrage and commitment to creating a different academy and a different world. Thank you Andrea Benjamin, Jes Boon, Karen Booth, Lydia Boyd, Emily Burrill, Cristina Llopis Carrasco, Marta Civil, Altha Cravey, Elyse Crystall, Jean

preface / xi

Dennison, Oswaldo Estrada, Priscilla Layne, Dave Pier, Michelle Robinson, Rebecca Walsh, and John Charles Williamson. I have felt particularly welcomed and inspired by my colleagues in U.S. Latina/o Studies, María DeGuzmán and Laura Halperin: working alongside you and with the first Latina/o Studies Program in the Southeast has been an honor. Thank you especially Jennifer Ho for your advice, compassion, humor, and understanding. A stimulating and inspiring circle of friends and activists has led me to call North Carolina home; thank you Amy Glaser (my oldest friend in the Triangle!), Matthew Grady, Dan Guberman, Aisha Harvey, Josh Horton, Susan Kelemen, Jim Smith, Macanudo, and the PBC. Kristin Herbeck, the other mother, there are no words; I miss you every day, and the completion of this book without you would have been impossible. My academic career has been supported and fostered by mentorship, inspiration, and collaboration with scholars and activists from across the United States and Canada. Thank you Arturo Arias, Claudia Milian, Ben Olguín, and Dana Olwan. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, your analysis, energy, and generosity continue to amaze me. Sonia Saldívar-Hull supported this project since its earliest stages. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández and Ricky T. Rodríguez offered valuable criticism and feedback and helped shape this book for the better. One explicit goal of this project has been to acknowledge and understand the important and ongoing contributions of Latina/o artists and activists. In the course of writing this book I was fortunate to meet and befriend many of you, and I am inspired and humbled by your work. Thank you Carlos Mauricio, Alejandro Murguía, Dolores Pérez Priem, Nina Serrano, and Mario Zelaya. To those who have known me the longest and best—Estrella González, Rockie González, Adam Koehler, Eric Long, David Pearl, John Rachel, Leah Friedman Spohn, Reena Trapani, Cristina Tzintzún, Tane Ward, and Whichael—les quiero mucho. Thank you to Katie Keeran and the staff at Rutgers University Press for your assistance and support. And finally to my family: for tolerating years of stress, exasperation, and threats of giving up, for your humor, patience, and unconditional love. Thank you to the Blum, Hersch, Suen, Supan, Trejo, and Vigil families, but especially Vicki Blum Vigil, David Vigil, Kiva Vigil, and Rachel Vigil.

War Echoes

Introduction: Gender, War, and Activism in Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production Dear Jorge: I came to the revolution by way of poetry. You can come (if you so desire, if you feel you must) to poetry by way of revolution. —roque dalton, “dear jorge”

In October 2003 Camilo Mejía, the son of the well-known Sandinista sympathizer and internationally famous folk singer Carlos Mejía Godoy, became the first U.S. soldier to publicly refuse to redeploy as part of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The idea of the son of Sandinista revolutionaries fighting in an imperial invasion appears implausible, even unbelievable. However, Mejía’s trajectory, including his enlistment and subsequent antiwar activism, is indicative of how U.S. military intervention and responses to U.S. militarism have given rise to new kinds of U.S. Latina/o political, cultural, and social commitments and movements. Neither Mejía’s participation in the U.S. Army nor his later activism is accidental. Rather his story is rooted in late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century U.S. political, economic, and military policies as well as ideas and articulations of gender and ethnic identity. More specifically, we can place Mejía within a context that includes U.S. military intervention post–Viet Nam, challenges to U.S. economic and military power, the relationship between gendered militarization and immigration, and changing Latina/o social and political realities. While the origins of Mejía’s story can be traced to U.S. military intervention in Central America, it would be too simplistic to view his migration to Florida, which spurred his eventual enlistment in the National Guard, as nothing more than the consequence of U.S. imperialism. U.S. intervention in Nicaragua played a large role in his and his family’s mobility, but so too did the gender politics of Sandinista and post-Sandinista

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Nicaragua as well as transnational migration trends and, of course, personal circumstances. At the same time, the fact that a Nicaraguan-born immigrant and son of Sandinista revolutionaries became the first officer to publicly refuse service in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq anticipates two important threads of the larger narrative with which this book is concerned. The first thread involves the trajectory and scope of post–Viet Nam U.S. military intervention. Although this history is by no means singular or linear, this book contributes to our understanding of this period by connecting U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s to U.S. intervention in the Middle East in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. The United States has practiced policies of military and political intervention in one region and applied them in another; therefore Mejía’s location in Iraq in 2003 illustrates the relationship between U.S. intervention in Central America and the Middle East from the 1950s through the present day. This book does not seek to tell a simple story of unwitting participants in empire or simplistic reactions to U.S. policies. Rather, via a second thread, I seek to offer a more complex account of the ways U.S. Latinas/os have participated in, protested against, and formed relationships with U.S. militarism. Mejía’s transformation from a member of the U.S. Armed Forces to a conscientious objector exemplifies the transformation of U.S. Latina/o engagements with U.S. militarism in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first explored in the following pages. This transformation involves movement from a stance that sees armed warfare as a mode of political engagement to one that finds no redeeming qualities in war. Mejía’s position as an antiracist, antiwar, antisexist, and queer-inclusive political activist also encompasses the shifting trajectories of Latina/o cultural and political work. Mejía’s memoir, Road from Ar Ramadi, presents and re-presents his own formation as a writer and activist and illustrates the nexus of militarism, political engagement, and cultural production in which this project is situated. Mejía’s story and the differing circumstances of these conflicts and time periods helpfully put into question accepted definitions of war and war stories. The historical parameters of this project, 1979 to 2005, grant much needed attention to post–Viet Nam conflicts, while the term militarization indicates the inclusion of conflicts in which the United States was heavily involved but which lacked a formal declaration of war. A consideration of works that take up militarized endeavors, as well as a consideration of the larger context of organizing in response and opposition to armed conflicts, calls for a more expansive understanding

introduction / 3

of war. In this regard, this project considers institutionalized violence and militarism not just on the battlefield but also within the family, the nation, and the community. This questioning of the spatial and temporal parameters of war acknowledges how individuals and communities far removed from the front lines are nonetheless impacted by armed conflict. In this way War Echoes calls attention to the space in which the majority of individuals experience violence while insisting that we recognize the myriad ways in which war “comes home,” particularly for women and communities of color in the United States. The book thus concurs with Cynthia Enloe’s (1993, 2) assertion that wars “don’t just end” and illustrates how U.S. Latina/o texts offer a unique perspective on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and militarism. The plurality inherent in the phrase war echoes reflects the book’s multifaceted approach to militarized violence as well as its situation at the intersection of discourses of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, militarism, and cultural production. Foregrounding war, I view warfare (and militarization more broadly) as a significant catalyst for social, political, and artistic developments. Specifically the texts studied here evidence how war and militarization prompt the rejection of a singular national context on the part of U.S. Latinas/os. Moreover they illustrate how the avowal of militarized force in differing national and transnational contexts contributes to the avowal of articulations of national belonging as well as the rejection of institutionalized violence within multiple places— including the nation and the home. The multiplicity of this rejection— captured by the plural echoes—indicates that this contribution can be adequately understood only by taking into account issues of nationalism and citizenship but specifically discourses of gender and sexuality as well. Thus echoes captures both the multiplicity of effects that emanate from war as well as the ways these effects reverberate between and among one another. An attempt to listen to an echo requires us to appreciate multiple surfaces and locations simultaneously; similarly this book posits that we recognize the intersecting nature of issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Finally, just as echoes are transformed by their movement through time and space, War Echoes appreciates the dynamic nature of the processes, movements, and moments studied here. Employing a gendered and raced perspective allows us to understand how militarization involves intra- and international processes and is both representative and productive of the relationship between nationstates and national subjects. Military service and national identity have historically been constitutive of one another; those who serve do so as

4 / introduction

recognized members of a national community, while those excluded from service understand this rejection as a commentary on their lack of full citizenship rights. At the same time, the use of militarized violence within particular communities speaks to the extent to which armies do not only use force “over there.” When young men of color are asked to sacrifice their lives for a state that offers little in return and female soldiers and civilians are assaulted by “their own soldiers,” we can appreciate the extent to which military conflicts lay bare the racial and gendered contradictions at the heart of national projects. Within the United States such contradictions have given rise to calls for expanded definitions of both soldiers and citizens. For example, when Mexican Americans returning from Viet Nam protested the lack of civil rights they experienced within the United States, they did so by reiterating the relationship between citizenship and military service: just as they served as “Americans,” so too should they be treated as such. We can see a similar rhetoric employed in more recent demands for the “rights” of gays and lesbians and women to serve. Thus participation in the military—even when such participation is contested—has historically served to strengthen nationbased identities. In contrast, through a set of late twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury Latina/o cultural works, this book shows how engagements with U.S. militarism have served to disrupt and alter nationalist expressions of social and political commitments. Each of the five chapters looks at a distinct moment of U.S. military intervention in four different nations: Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Iraq. In each instance, characters and texts must negotiate their relationship to their familial, ethnonationalist, and/or national communities in light of the military conflicts in which they have become involved. As the works and my analysis demonstrate, the assertion of a completely nation-based identity fails to adequately reflect or account for the kinds of alliances, affinities (affective and political), and political movements in which authors and characters participate. Rather characters, authors, and texts consider and articulate transnational affiliations. As a whole, the book coincides with assertions concerning the productive nature of military service; however, I focus on how armed conflicts give rise to nonnational political and ethnic positions and relations. Authors utilize various mechanisms to articulate these positions while also searching for a means to reject particular kinds of relations and create new ones. These mechanisms echo how military conflicts provide the impetus for reconsiderations of national ties, but cultural products are the vehicles through which such

introduction / 5

considerations can take place and new kinds of ties can be expressed and strengthened. To this end, I propose the term glocal to describe the social, political, and personal perspective enacted by these narratives. Glocal captures the relationship between national and state-bound subjects and extra- or transnational ones. The term is preferable to the descriptor transnational because it forces us to consider not only multiple national contexts but also events and processes at the level of the family and ethnic community. Joining a glocal perspective with a focus on a more expansive consideration of military conflicts locates violence within traditionally patriarchal and oppressive institutions—including the family, the military, and the state—as well as within “everyday” acts and practices. The terms glocal and glocalization emerged in the early twenty-first century as descriptors of how globalization is experienced and manifest at the local or micro level. Likened by some to internal globalization, glocalization describes how a large-scale phenomenon—for example, the growth and influence of the Internet—can affect a discrete group of people, such as neighborhood residents or coworkers (Hampton 2010, 1113; Roudometof 2005). I acknowledge the history of and scholarship on this terminology and practice while suggesting that the term’s application to a new field—that of cultural production—offers the opportunity for fruitful, and necessary, analysis. As I use it here, glocal calls attention to the tension between global and local developments and movements and establishes the necessity of teasing out these tensions rather than accepting glocalization, or glocality, as static or discrete processes. The concept of a glocal war narrative similarly builds upon scholarship surrounding globalization and localization. Globalization arose as a term to describe ostensibly “new” kinds of capitalist processes, among them “flexible specialization” and “flexible accumulation.”1 Localization was viewed as a corollary or challenge to globalization; depending on one’s perspective, localization reflected the possibilities for greater local cultural and economic autonomy made possible by the diversification and “borderlessness” of global capital or was the byproduct of capitalist excess that nonetheless enabled “an elaboration of diverse cultures of resistance to or difference from capitalism” (Joseph 2002b, 73).2 Recognizing the history of the term while remaining skeptical of the “newness” of frameworks of localization and globalization, I apply the descriptor glocal to narratives that were written during and emanated from historical periods somewhat prior to the rise to prominence of discourses of globalization. In doing so I acknowledge that both capitalism and

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opposition to capitalism have operated at the global level and suggest that artists and activists writing and working far in advance of the turn of the twenty-first century recognized the interplay among militarism, capitalism, and imperialism and responded by creating and engaging in work that similarly mounted local, national, and transnational critiques of these interlocking systems. Thus in applying the term glocal to some of the earlier narratives, War Echoes contributes historical depth to this concept and suggests that the interconnectedness and transnationalism so often discussed today was in fact thoroughly discussed by Latina/o artists and activists in the mid- to late twentieth century. My use of the term glocal also troubles the relationship between the global and the local, just as I seek to trouble aspects of “Latina/o” identity. While the somewhat narrow focus of this book, which considers only works by and/or about Latinas/os, does privilege a particular ethnic and geographic community, I do not uncritically laud “local communities” or “local activism.” To do so would be to fail to see how local communities and movements are in fact formed through global processes and, as such, cannot provide an easy “solution” to global “problems.”3 Rather I look at global and local processes and the ways they impact each other. In structuring this project as one that looks at how Latina/o artists and activists work and organize transnationally in response to U.S. militarism, I take seriously how military projects that emanate from one nation-state not only impact many nations and communities but provoke a similarly varied response.4

Violence, Subject Formation, and Art Just as I eschew a perspective that seeks to draw a straight line from global to local processes or vice versa, I do not suggest a crude relationship between the various kinds of violence that this book examines. That is, while I seek to place violence in domestic and national spaces in relation to transnational and extranational violence, I do not draw a causal relationship between the two. Yet the prevalence of military rape and sexual assault and the alarming number of assaults and murders that take place at the hands of returning veterans means that these spheres of violence are not disconnected. Rather than make a causal claim, my study makes a correlative one, emphasizing the prevalence of violence. Furthermore War Echoes analyzes how the fight against violence must not be simplistic but must necessarily understand the interconnections between violence as it takes places in distinct geographical and historical

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time periods and how violence impacts and is impacted by issues such as identity and social position. In engaging with articulations of nationalism and transnationalism, I pinpoint the role that states and state violence play in shaping identities and movements. My perspective attends to the creative activities of cultural workers and political activists while also taking seriously the contingencies of circumstance and state power, reading activists and their work as involved in a “contingent relationship between character, action, and circumstances” (Scott 2004, 167). As such, I search for a perspective that remains both respectful toward and realistic about the ability of subjects to form themselves in light of extraneous and state-backed pressures and violence. As Saidiya Hartman (1997) emphasizes, subjects are constituted in response to and also through violence. For minority communities, violent processes such as slavery, forced migration, and genocide contribute to their very construction as subjects and groups. At the same time, victims and survivors of racial and sexual violence continue to assert their ability and autonomy and their own subjectivity in ways we cannot ignore. Exploring cultural and political expressions via creative works allows us to remain cognizant of the relationship between state violence and subject formation while nonetheless privileging self-conscious and self-directed representations and articulations. Creative works allow us to appreciate the extent to which subjects—in this case ethnic “minority” subjects—create, respond to, contend with, and at times acquiesce to the situations in which they continue to be found and formed. The book’s focus on cultural production further captures this tension. I see cultural production as a dialectic through which we can view how state-backed violence produces subjects as well as how such subjects engage with violence and their own subjectivity through art. The cultural works considered here function as means through which subjects both reflect and articulate particular identities and affiliations. The repeated engagement with issues of U.S. military intervention marks these works as performances that are “enactments of social struggle and contending articulations of racial meaning” (Hartman 1997, 57). Hence I use the word production rather than products to emphasize continual processes of creating and enacting. The productive process implicates and involves not only the artists themselves and viewers or readers of any given piece of art but also a larger community of receivers, including critics. I argue for the importance of studies of militarism and U.S. military intervention in Central America and the Middle East in particular to the field of Latina/o studies. The attention given to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador—and the solidarity movements

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that arose to counter this intervention—underscores the salience of Central American and Central American–American studies to current articulations of U.S. Latina/o culture and politics. Moving (chronologically and geographically) from Central America to the Middle East allows us to connect U.S. foreign policy and opposition to such policy in both regions. The exploration of these particular issues through cultural works speaks to the continuing relevance of the artistic and creative as sites of reflection and theory.

Transnational Feminism In seeking to explore the ways Latina/o artists and activists engage with U.S. military intervention from classed, raced, gendered, and sexualized positions, this study also embodies a transnational Latina feminist approach. I use the term transnational feminism while recognizing the dangers of employing such a concept uncritically. M. Jacqui Alexander (2005, 186) explains, “The long-standing challenge for imperialism to be made integral to the political and cultural lexicon of U.S. feminism is still very much in place.” As such, my perspective relies on developments within transnational feminist literary and cultural studies as well as scholarship that theorizes the global position of the United States and specifically work that approaches the United States as an imperial power. Transnational feminism pays attention to the intersections of race, gender, nation, sexuality, and economics in relationship to the movement of individuals, ideas, and concepts between and outside of national contexts as well as relations of power between peoples and states. In this instance, global feminism stands in opposition to transnational feminism, as the former has “elided the diversity of women’s agency in favor of a universalized Western model of women’s liberation” and “stood for a kind of Western cultural imperialism” (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 17). Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003, 19) clearly lays out the problems in the global feminist approach in her seminal essay “Under Western Eyes,” in which she warns that exclusively examining “sexual difference” leads to a reductive, monolithic understanding of both patriarchy and “Third World difference.” Rejecting this kind of global feminism, I look at the situations and experiences of women and men from diverse national backgrounds without ignoring local factors or the situation of individuals within a larger capitalist system—in other words, I take a glocal perspective. I take seriously the relations of power between and among women and remain skeptical about the possibility, or even political

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efficacy, of establishing a “common ground.” In placing the notion of common ground to the side, I follow the lead of Chela Sandoval (2000), who suggests that women of color theorize from multiple sites and positions simultaneously. Deploying a transnational feminist analysis within a study of militarization allows us to explicitly question the relationship between women and domestic, national, and international violence while bearing in mind how armed conflict both produces and reproduces particular gendered identities, norms, and values. Looking at gendered violence within and outside of war suggests continuity between temporal and geographic spaces of both war and peace while also highlighting the ways that practices of violence and gender are mutually constitutive. Just as violent practices associated with war occur with increasing frequency in supposedly nonmilitarized spaces, so too do apparently domestic and/or cultural constructions of gender find expression in ideas about and deployments of military violence. For example, the prevalence of sexual assault against women in the United States and the use of rape as a tool of war complicate the ability to distinguish between wartime violence and peaceful violence or, by extension, between wartime and peace. At the same time, the rate of sexual assault against women within the U.S. Armed Forces is a reflection of the larger epidemic of sexual assault within U.S. society as well as a means of institutionalizing and normalizing sexual violence. Similarly when Enloe (1994) speaks of “masculinity as foreign policy,” she calls attention to the ways gender norms are deployed in political and military settings.5 Rhetoric that encourages “toughness” in a military setting both normalizes particular performances of gender and suggests how military values and ideas may be reinforced by gendered ones and vice versa. The early twenty-first century has brought renewed attention to the relationship between violence and national identity. According to Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman (2004, 3), September 11 “exposed the limits of understanding the United States as a ‘domestic’ space, somehow bounded and separated from the processes and politics of economic, cultural, and political integration.” The attacks on U.S. soil ended the already eroding distinction between conflict “over there” and war “here,” a change that similarly eroded the distinction between the feminized civilian and masculinized military space (5). Likewise “violence perpetuated at home is increasingly understood as part of broader social, political, and economic processes” (4). Just as the location of war has changed, so too have its

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“combatants.” When the U.S. Department of Defense began referring to civilian casualties as “collateral damage” during the Gulf War, it exhibited a callous disregard for human life and also spoke to the growing number of noncombatants killed during war. At the end of the twentieth century, civilian deaths made up 60 to 80 percent (with some sources claiming 90 percent) of war casualties (5). While attention to the massive civilian cost of war may help bring into sharper focus women’s experiences, these experiences are by no means monolithic; for women of color, their “experiences in and perceptions of war, conflict, resistance and struggle emerge from their specific racial-ethnic and gendered locations” (Sharpley-Whiting and White 1997, xiv–xv). By questioning the role, portrayal, and construction of gender, transnationalism, and ethnicity, this study attends to the ways women’s and men’s experiences of war are classed, raced, gendered, and sexualized as well as the ways civilians and combatants are situated within national and transnational contexts. Yet my acute interrogation of gender politics does not simply look at how gender and violence interact as discrete experiences or constructs. Militarized violence creates and produces the conditions for expressions of particular kinds of gendered experiences—both opening and closing possibilities for deviating from normative expressions. Thus I explore in depth how gender roles, experiences, expressions, and identities are impacted by military violence as well as transformations that occur (or do not occur) within militarized movements. While I rely on transnational feminist theories and methodologies, my subject is specifically military conflicts and violence within a Latina/o context. To this end I heed the suggestion of María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (2007), who calls for a transnational Latina/o studies that understands U.S. Latina/o identities as ones that began their formation as a consequence of U.S. militarism and neoliberalism. I look at the movement of goods, capital, and people between nation-states as well as the circulation of literary and political discourses. In the context of immigration, transnationalism often refers to individuals who maintain roots in two nations; my use of the term as it applies to U.S. Latina/o communities places such communities between and within several different national contexts. In the works I examine, Latina/o identity may not be bound to one, two, or three national groups but go so far as to challenge the concept of national identity itself.

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Latinas/os and War Recent cultural production by and about U.S. Latinas/os and the U.S. Armed Forces has contributed to the historical memory of Latina/o service and exemplified the extent to which questions about the rights of veterans and representations of veterans’ experiences raise contentious issues regarding political identity and national belonging. In 2007 Ken Burns’s World War II documentary The War was dogged by controversy surrounding its failure to include any Latinas/os. Latina/o individuals and organizations protested vehemently and eventually won the inclusion of the voices of Latino and Native American soldiers in the 14.5-hour documentary.6 The protests over the film grew out of frustration and anger with the history of discrimination faced by Latina/o soldiers and veterans and a desire to have this history recognized and remembered. A more recent documentary, The Longoria Affair (2010), captures how these tensions have affected and continue to affect local and national politics. Directed by John J. Valadez, The Longoria Affair discusses the case of Felix Z. Longoria, a private who was killed in the Philippine Islands in 1945. When Longoria’s widow, Beatrice Longoria, asked to hold her husband’s wake in the only funeral parlor that served her town of Three Rivers, Texas, the director refused, claiming, “The whites wouldn’t like it.”7 The Longoria case illustrates the racism faced by the Longoria family (and that of other Mexican and Mexican American residents of Three Rivers) and how military service continues to be a site for negotiations of cultural and national belonging. After Senator Lyndon B. Johnson arranged for Longoria to be buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, twenty American Legion posts in Texas passed resolutions condemning him,8 offering a stark example of how issues involving race and the military impact political affiliation and participation. Moreover differing attitudes on the part of Anglo and Mexican American residents of Three Rivers toward the idea of renaming the town post office after Longoria highlight how the memory and representation of incidents such as the Longoria affair continue to be contested. For example, town resident Patti Reagan protested that renaming the post office was not being undertaken to remember “Felix’s heroism, but [to remember] the racism involved in the Longoria Affair.” Reagan’s reticence to mark this history of racism stands in stark contrast to the desire of others interviewed in the film who continually display their wish to talk about the affair within the context of the enforced segregation and discrimination they endured. Both The War and The

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Longoria Affair help illuminate the history of U.S. Latina/o involvement with U.S. militarism and how this history is remembered and retold and reverberates among Latina/o and non-Latina/o communities, artists, and activists. The War and The Longoria Affair stand beside a larger corpus of written work on Latina/o participation in and responses to U.S. military service that embodies three strands. Within the first strand, scholarship has stressed the participation of Latinas/os in World War I, World War II, and the Korean conflict.9 Projects such as the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project have sought to recover and honor the legacy of Latina/o service.10 As the collection Beyond the Latino World War II Hero (Rivas-Rodríguez and Zamora, 2009) explains, experiences of racial discrimination during the war years led to increased politicization on the part of many soldiers; such experiences contributed to the postwar Chicana/o civil rights movement. Richard Griswold del Castillo (2009, 20) writes, “[Latina/o service members] became especially aware of the contradiction of being treated as outcasts while being told that they were expected to be patriotic Americans. The contradiction was stronger among this generation than in previous ones, because of the harsh experiences of the 1930s and the economic recovery that occurred during World War II, as well as the celebration of their status as citizens of the United States.” Common experiences in relation to U.S. immigration, the military, and labor blurred intergroup distinctions and prompted a growing Latina/o identity (Rivas-Rodríguez and Zamora 2009, 2). The contradiction between the rhetoric of justice and equality and the lived experience of Latinas/os mobilized young Latinas/os and encouraged returning service members in particular to demand full inclusion and citizenship in the United States (2). In the 1960s opposition to the Viet Nam War introduced a second perspective with different voices that were more outspoken in their criticism of U.S. military and imperial policies. Arising from Chicano nationalism and Third World Liberation movements, opposition to the Viet Nam war asserted that it was part of a colonial project that benefited neither the Vietnamese nor other colonized and formerly colonized individuals.11 According to Lorena Oropeza (2005, 5), Chicano activists who opposed the war “willingly forsook a venerable Mexican American civil rights tradition that had emphasized ethnic-group patriotism, especially as manifested through military service, in the hopes of obtaining first-class citizenship.” Works that examine Chicanas/os in relation to Viet Nam explore how young veterans and activists demanded inclusion in U.S.

introduction / 13

society and also called for a change in the shape and articulation of U.S. society and politics.12 Jorge Mariscal’s (1999) Aztlán and Viet Nam foregrounds the complex relationship between Chicanas/os and warfare by looking at the writings of Chicanas/os from a broad range of identities and ideologies, including the works of soldiers stationed in Viet Nam, protesters organizing in the United States, and family members of enlisted personnel. Many of the works in the collection assert feelings of patriotism and duty and motifs of heroism and masculinity. Some writings, however, suggest that Chicanas/os and Vietnamese share a similar status in their relationship to dominant U.S. hierarchical racial and economic structures, not least because of their lifestyle as farmers and rural people. For example, the speaker of Gina Valdés’s poem “Hearts on Fire” references her uncle’s work as a rice farmer, using this labor to link Chicana/o and Vietnamese campesinos. The comparison between the Chicana/o and Vietnamese family in the poem disrupts ideas of patriotism and loyalty to the United States on the part of the Chicanas/os, suggesting that they have more in common with Vietnamese farmers than they do with “Americans.” While the poem engages in Chicana/o ethnonationalism, it nonetheless expands on this stance by linking two distinct ethnonational groups and emphasizing the class standing shared by many Chicanas/os and Vietnamese. War enables this linkage; by referencing a mine exploding, the speaker places her cousin literarily, politically, and physically alongside a Vietnamese boy. The suggestion that Chicanas/os and Vietnamese share cultural, economic, and racial similarities presents a radical break from earlier Chicana/o writings about war.13 According to Oropeza (2005, 5), “the central refrain” of the Chicano movement’s protest against the Viet Nam War was that “Chicanos—and Chicanas—should struggle at home for their raza . . . not fight and die in a faraway land.” Poems such as “Hearts on Fire” likewise move from the idea that Chicanas/os share commonalities with Latin American and Asian communities to propose that these commonalities necessitate a particular political stance—one that is in opposition to U.S. intervention in the domestic affairs of foreign nations. Implicit but often undertheorized and underanalyzed are questions of gender and sexuality in relation to U.S. Latina/o identity and U.S. militarism. This book contributes to the existing scholarship by granting sustained attention to such questions. In her essay in Beyond the Latino World War II Hero, Joanne Rao Sánchez (2009) points out that the experiences of Chicanas in U.S. wars remain underexplored. The lack

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of literature on the topic means that important questions—including how the experiences of Mexican American women differed from that of other women and how racial and ethnic discrimination affected the wartime experiences of Mexican American women—are still unanswered (65). I use feminist and gender theory to consider answers to Sánchez’s questions while also bringing attention to non-Chicana/o Latina/o texts and experiences. The use of Latina/o and feminist theory as well as the explicit focus on gender as a category of analysis contributes to a questioning of Latina/o identity and to an exploration of the relationship between women and war and the genre of war narratives. The work of Mariscal, Oropeza, and Rivas-Rodríguez focus almost exclusively on the experiences of Chicanas/os and grows from distinct periods in U.S. history: World War II and the Viet Nam War. While the Chicana/o antiwar activists discussed by Mariscal and Oropeza took into account differences of race and class, their positions are still distinct from the kinds of antimilitarism and anti–U.S. imperialism that have grown prominent in more recent years. In this third manifestation of Latina/o responses to U.S. militarism, writers and activists acknowledge the earlier positions while presenting a new, glocal perspective. In addition to instituting a critique that takes into consideration race, class, gender, and sexuality, this third perspective looks at the history and continued effects of colonial projects and their relation to ongoing military conflicts. These emerging perspectives are unique in their broadening of an understanding of colonial projects to include U.S. intervention in the Middle East. The United States has intervened both covertly and overtly in the Middle East and Central America in similar ways for more than half a century. For example, the very first CIA overthrow of a democratically elected foreign leader occurred when U.S. intelligence officers joined with their British counterparts to remove Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh from office in 1953.14 This coup was followed by a similar coup only a year later, when the CIA (this time aided not by British officers but Guatemalan dissidents) removed Jacobo Árbenz from his position as the president of Guatemala. In both cases the countries came to be ruled by repressive (and in the case of Guatemala, genocidal) forces whose effects and influence continue to be felt to this day. More recently political figures such as Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte, who made significant contributions to Ronald Reagan’s policies toward Central America, reappeared to serve George W. Bush’s administration in Iraq.15 Former secretary of state Donald Rumsfeld sparked controversy when he referred to the use

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of the “Salvador option” in Iraq. This “option,” which involved the use of death squads to defeat the FMLN during the civil war in El Salvador, was quickly publicly denied by the Bush administration. Despite the denial of U.S. administrators, and despite the U.S. propensity for historical and political amnesia, these connections have not been lost on U.S. Latina/o actors and activists. In an interview in 2006 Carlos Mauricio, a survivor of torture in El Salvador and now an antitorture activist, offered his perspective on the first elections held in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion. Explaining that the January 2005 Iraqi elections followed a pattern that had been established twenty years earlier in El Salvador, Mauricio said, “The Salvadoran oligarchy, the Salvadoran army, and the United States government do what they have traditionally done in other countries such as Argentina and Iraq. In Iraq also they’re doing it: first they assassinate the people—in El Salvador they assassinated 100,000 [and] one million of us had to flee. And those that remained, remained terrorized—so, they held elections.”16 The elimination of oppositional political figures—of whom Mauricio was one—calls into question the “democratic” nature of elections and further strengthens a connection between U.S. polices in Central (and Latin) America and the Middle East. That it is the Salvadoran-born Mauricio who offers these connections speaks to the specific people and places where “alternative” understandings of U.S. military intervention may be voiced and theorized.

Central American–American Studies and U.S. Latina/o Studies In its movement from U.S. military intervention in Central America to the Middle East and its specific engagement with both literature and activism, this book differs in both breadth and scope from existing scholarship and covers new historical and geographical terrain. Specifically, as U.S. intervention in the late twentieth century heavily involved Central America, War Echoes engages with non-Chicana/o material and in particular Central American and Central American–American identities and experiences while also exploring pan-Latina/o solidarity. Glocal war narratives by writers and activists who question U.S. hegemonic relations with foreign countries set the stage for the questioning of hierarchies of power and attention within Latina/o communities in the United States. Hierarchies permeate both states and ethnic communities, a point Arturo Arias (2003) explores when he cites the “erasure” non-Chicano

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Latinas/os suffer within the U.S. Latina/o community alongside the imposed invisibility of particular populations within Central American nations themselves. Arias turns to precolonial ethnic formations and discusses the impact that histories of genocide and enslavement, as well as psychological factors that “installed a normalizing discourse of power,” had and continue to have on the formation and articulation of Central American and Central American–American identities (177). Within the social and political history of the isthmus, space was racialized in the service of national projects, including that of citizenship. Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, for example, was marked as black and indigenous in order to erase blackness and indigeneity in other parts of the nation (Hooker 2010, 246–47). This racialization led to both discursive and physical violence; according to Arias, invisibility in national and ethnonational projects contributed to the slaughter of indigenous communities in Central America throughout the twentieth century, including the massacres in El Salvador in 1932 and in Guatemala through the 1980s. Much of the violence took place in rural communities, highlighting the ways race and space inform one another. Arias (2003, 181) contends that the invisibility of Central American migrants caused their countries of origin to label “them as an unpresentable, and thus, disposable, population,” attitudes that were lethally expressed in the ethnic and political violence of the 1980s. The larger historical focus facilitated by Arias and others allows us to understand a Central American–American identity in relation to both U.S.-based identities (Chicana/o, U.S. Latina/o) and Central American identities and the continual repercussions of the long history of enslavement and genocide in the construction of both (see Gudmundson and Wolfe 2010). These perspectives on the role of factors such as colonization, nation building, war, and migration shed light on issues pertinent to the identity of Central Americans in relation to Mexicans and Mexican Americans, while also offering a different kind of model than that of the ethnic nationalism that arose within Latina/o communities in the mid-twentieth century. The silence that continues to obscure this genocidal history has significant physical, social, and political consequences: the “nonidentity” of Central American–Americans means that U.S. Latina/o representations may become unquestionably hegemonic, subsuming subaltern identities and discourses in an imperial manner (Arias 2003, 172). The explicit recognition and discussion of Central American–Americans within U.S. Latina/o communities may help to avoid such essentialist and reductionist discussions of U.S. Latinidad. While

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Arias and others offer a critique of Chicano nationalism, this critique should in no way be seen as a refusal to recognize the important political work that Chicano nationalism has and may continue to achieve; rather it is a way of recognizing new articulations of Chicana/o and Latina/o identity. Furthermore even if we set aside how the necessity for Central American–Americans to hide their identity and “pass” as Mexican American is damaging to all U.S. Latinas/os, we must also face the fact that Latinas/os are increasingly rejecting national identity markers for more expansive articulations of identity and community. Arias (2003, 172–73n7) gives examples of Latinas/os who refuse to identify by national origin as well as those who identify more as Central American–American than Guatemalan American. According to both Arias and Maritza Cardenas (2009, 147), the exclusion of U.S. Central Americans from the Latina/o imaginary has contributed to the construction of Central American–Americans. The ensuing analysis of primarily Chicana/o engagements with U.S. involvement in Central America illustrates how Chicana/o texts have contributed to the exclusion or erasure of which Arias and Cardenas speak. At the same time, placing such texts within the context of imperial and military intervention and reading from a glocal framework allows us to find a space for dialogue. Just as Arias and Cardenas argue that Central American–Americans have been created out of exclusionary practices, I show how Central American and Central American–American issues—including U.S. military intervention—have prompted new and necessary considerations of Chicana/o and Latina/o positions and perspectives. Indeed while the majority of the texts I analyze were written by Chicanas/os, three out of the five chapters deal explicitly with U.S. intervention in Central America, highlighting the foundational role that Central American issues and Central American–American experiences and identities have and continue to play in shaping U.S. Chicana/o and Latina/o culture and politics. It is precisely by interrogating Chicana/oauthored texts that we can see how U.S. intervention in Central America prompted Chicana/o artists and activists to rethink their own national and ethnonational ties and political positions. As chapters 1 and 3 argue, Chicana/o characters are unable to simply subsume the political reality of Central America into their Chicana/o consciousness. Rather they must rethink and reorient their understanding of themselves as inhabitants or citizens of the United States in relation to their experiences in Nicaragua or El Salvador. Deconstructing the violence (epistemic and otherwise) of Chicana/o nationalism to move outside of Chicana/o

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and even U.S.-centric theories solidifies the commitment to analyzing Chicana/o texts and narratives in a way that unsettles the place of those texts within Latina/o cultural studies. Similarly War Echoes not only confronts the geopolitical and cultural boundaries of the United States but also challenges the boundaries and articulations of Latinidad. Following Nicole Guidotti-Hernández (2007) and Frances Aparicio (2003), I see both the potentially dangerous and liberatory aspects of Latinidad. While Latinidad has been deployed within dominant media such as film and music to homogenize Latina/o populations, the term nonetheless offers “a way for Latino/as to create discourses about their own identities” (Guidotti-Hernández 2007, 212). My focus on how the term Latinidad is deployed within U.S. Latina/o texts privileges the voices of Latinas/os, while my attention to continuities and discontinuities within Latina/o communities directly confronts the homogenizing potentials of the concept. Indeed the potential for Latinidad to be used as a tool of homogenization lies in the hands of Hollywood and media conglomerates as well as Latina/o cultural producers. Aparicio (2003, 93) explains that she approaches the concept as one that “allows us to rethink the ways in which national categories of identity have limited and elided the new forms of identity formation emerging in Latino/a communities.” Such national categories of identity may function within Latino/a identificatory practices as well as when, for example, a Chicana/o narrative that engages with Mexican culture is used as an easily transferable example of Latina/o immigrant nostalgia. My approach to Latinidad remains attuned to such elisions while nonetheless insisting on the potential of the concept, particularly when it elucidates particular political experiences and affinities. I agree with Aparicio about the importance of “rethinking Latinidad through media and popular culture as a site through which we produce knowledge about a Latino other and explore our (post)colonial analogies” (94), but I also want to rethink the ways Latinidad is deployed through culture to elucidate and contribute to a mode of political engagement. That is, War Echoes as a whole is an investigation into how cultural responses to a particular set of issues—in this case U.S. military intervention—both arise from and simultaneously rework political and cultural affinities among Latina/o artists and activists. This study contributes to notions of Latinidad an appreciation for the concept’s strength as a mode of identification that can complement specifically anti-imperialist philosophy and practice. Examining Latina/o identity in relationship to U.S. militarism provides a unique opportunity to heed Aparicio’s call to reconsider nationbased notions of identity in light of new and emergent identities. The

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narratives I consider treat U.S. military intervention abroad and thus place U.S. Latina/o actors in conversation with global processes and projects. These conversations in turn develop a distinct Latina/o glocal position. Such a position is inhabited by an individual who recognizes herself as a member of a distinct group in relationship to historical and current U.S. political and social processes and leverages this identity to connect with individuals, movements, and ideas that are similarly situated in relationship to both U.S. and global processes and powers. Within Latina/o scholarship, the term transnational is often used to describe migrants who maintain ties with more than one national community—for example, Mexican migrants who live in Chicago yet maintain deep emotional, financial, and social ties to a Mexican community. Unlike transnational, glocal describes a slightly broader process by which individuals may understand themselves in relation to more than two national contexts. Glocal recognizes the power of the nation-state without granting it primacy. In starting with Latina/o solidarity work in the 1970s, this book argues for the importance of transformations that occurred as a result of U.S. intervention in Central America while adding to the historical narrative of Latina/o radicalism, and specifically to the story of U.S. Latina/o engagements with U.S. militarism. Here I fill a historical gap in criticism of Latina/o art and activism, work that often moves from the Chicana/o movement to the literature of the 1980s without considering texts produced during the 1970s or, more important, the impact that political changes in the 1970s and 1980s had on more contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural production. While arguing for the significance of this particular time period, I focus on militarism to contribute to a larger narrative about U.S. Latina/o engagements with armed movements and warfare. By examining the reflection, transformation, and creation of Latina/o identities within artistic and mainly literary texts, this book also speaks to the role of language in subject formation as well as the multiple, and perhaps contradictory, desires at play in such investigations. As both a representation (Vertretung) and a re-presentation (Darstellung), Latina/o literary texts speak for as well as shape and transform a heterogeneous subject (Spivak 1988, 276). Sustained attention to these rhetorical processes yields a more nuanced notion of subject formation while also implicating the critic. To speak of Latinas/os as a unified whole would be to ignore material differences as well as my own desire to “[reintroduce] the undivided subject into the discourse of power” (274). Indeed U.S. ethnic

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studies scholars have long argued that “minority” literatures have much to teach us about the formation of Western modes of thought. Reading Latina/o literature as a critique of U.S. empire and imperial understandings of minority subjects, then, shines light on the relationship between literature, militarism, and identity in a way that recognizes the political potential of categories such as Latina/o. That is to say, acknowledging and exploring the heterogeneity of terms such as Latina/o helps us also to see the complexity behind concepts such as America. And insofar as a Latina/o text or perspective calls into question the multiple processes that go into the formation of any subject or seemingly cohesive whole and affirms the ability for groups and individuals to harness a particular identity as a way to both name conditions of existence and seek to change them, the term Latina/o has proved its usefulness.

Artistic and Political Production Analyzing this set of particular texts together allows us to speak to the organizing experiences that Latina/o artists and activists have shared. For example, a large number of the artists in this study—Alejandro Murguía, Nina Serrano, Lourdes Portillo, Demetria Martínez, Sr. Dianna Ortiz, and Ana Castillo—were and are involved in Central American solidarity work. Looking at these individuals and their work allows us to appreciate the importance of artistic and political organizing around U.S. intervention in Central America as a specific moment that influenced developments in Latina/o thought and culture. At the same time, such a specific focus allows us to trace differences in aesthetic and political approaches as well as transformations over time. Specifically I historicize revolutionary feminisms and explore border-crossing activism as it existed long before narratives of globalization granted them attention. Such historicization is urgently needed in order to understand and assess current Latina/o cultural and political developments. The current emphasis on cultural citizenship, notably found in work around the D.R.E.A.M. Act, risks ignoring the violence at the heart of citizenship projects and the ways citizenship formation has tied into war making. As political and historical commentaries, these texts offer a valuable illustration of the relationship between identity, citizenship, and war, and as cultural products they offer much needed visions of new possibilities. War Echoes illustrates the necessity of tracing current Latina/o engagements with militarization to and through these earlier historical moments and argues for the continued salience of cultural production

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and criticism. The performance, publication, and consumption of cultural products contribute to a historical record and shared experience that documents ideas and movements and gives birth to new ones. Understood this way, art becomes a form of transnational communication, a means through which artists and activists may incorporate the work of actors outside their particular national context as well as a means of expressing solidarity. The process of criticism plays an important role as well; the multiple ways we may read any one text reflect multiple ways of entry into a host of topics: transnational organizing, militarization, the gendered dynamics of war, and revolution, to name a few. As a model for transnational organizing, these processes of production and consumption, functioning among and between communities defined by neither national nor ethnonational ties, may supersede or circumvent the nation-state. Just as the flor y canto festivals and Nuyorican poetry illustrate the transformative relationships between Chicana/o and Puerto Rican artistic movements and identities, respectively, the works studied here highlight how the Central American solidarity movement shifted articulations of Latina/o identities. As chapters 4 and 5 argue, these shifts continue to take place, this time via engagement with U.S. intervention in the Middle East. In looking at U.S. intervention in Central America and Iraq together, I argue for the impact that these particular engagements had and have on Latina/o cultural production and suggest that other moments of military intervention will continue to shape the evolution and articulation of new movements and identities. By looking at issues of art, activism, and identity together, this book views cultural production as a reflection of ideologies and identities and a place where such identities are formed. Focusing particularly on the interactions between Latina/o cultural works and militarism allows us to see how texts respond to violence, racism, nationalism, sexism, and heterosexism while simultaneously functioning as vehicles for thinking about, discussing, and imagining these issues. Neither cultural production nor its producers are ever static. Cultures, including Latina/o culture, are not organized “around delimitation, the shoring up of unique, indistinguishable features. . . . Rather, they are centrally about people being ‘in touch,’ about negotiation and dialogue” (Concannon et al. 2009, 5). Hence my perspective emphasizes the inextricable relationship between cultural producers and cultural products and between social production and identity. In this way I follow Miranda Joseph (2002a, 32–33), who follows Marx, in understanding production as “acts of

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making” and recognizing that such processes, including those that give rise to works of film and literature, generate particular identities. In turn I emphasize how print culture produces as much as it reflects a concept of transnational Latinidad.17 The following chapters engage with themes of militarism, identity, and gender as they arise from, carry over into, and become transformed within discrete historical and national contexts. The book is organized both chronologically and geographically, beginning in Nicaragua on the eve of the downfall of Somoza and continuing through conflicts in Guatemala, El Salvador, and both Iraq wars. Despite this seemingly linear trajectory, I do not wish to suggest that one conflict ends before another begins or to imply that these conflicts do not reflect back on one another. The chapters are linked by themes of U.S. foreign policy and military intervention and a focus on evolving discourses of anti-imperialism. The interrelated nature of all of the chapters and conflicts are well illustrated by the book’s framing chapters, both of which are intimately connected to the Nicaraguan Revolution. When Mejía, the son of Nicaraguan revolutionaries, became the first U.S. soldier to refuse to redeploy to Iraq in 2003, we see just how interconnected one military conflict is to another. Privileging the artistic and communicative process, each of the five chapters explores how different authors, texts, and activists utilize particular mechanisms to enact a glocal perspective. This perspective is expressed in five literary emphases: interpersonal communication, polyvocality, decolonial love, ambivalent homonationalism, and nonmilitarized citizenship. Chapter 1 begins with an analysis of works that arose from the Nicaraguan solidarity movement, which sought to end U.S. support for the Somoza dictatorship and the subsequent Contra War. “Gender, Difference, and the FSLN Insurrection” examines two works: Alejandro Murguía’s (1990) collection of short stories Southern Front and Lourdes Portillo and Nina Serrano’s film Después del Terremoto (1979). This chapter lays out one of the central concerns of the book by examining the internal dynamics of the FSLN army and the pro-Sandinista community as well as how these communities responded to U.S.-backed violence abroad. While Murguía’s collection broaches topics that would prove important (and divisive) during the Sandinista Revolution, Portillo and Serrano’s film presents a woman-centered perspective that directly takes on these issues. I read conversations between the film’s principal characters Irene, Luisa Amanda, and Julio against women of color feminist theoretical considerations of difference to suggest that the characters use

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not armed struggle but interpersonal communication to enact and express a glocal perspective. Chapter 2, “‘I Have Something to Tell You’: Polyvocality, Theater, and the Performance of Solidarity in U.S. Latina Narratives of the Guatemalan Civil War,” continues the examination of communication by looking at the difficulties of speaking about torture and human rights abuses in narratives that take up the Guatemalan Civil War. Like chapter 1, this chapter examines two different genres of cultural production: Sr. Dianna Ortiz’s (2002) testimonio The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth and Ana Castillo’s (2005) play based on Ortiz’s story, Psst . . . I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor. This chapter analyzes the politics and practices of Ortiz’s decisions concerning speaking of her experiences as well as how her experiences are represented in Castillo’s plays. The use of polyvocality furthers and enables both authors and texts to express a glocal perspective that adequately addresses the complicated relationship between various forms of state-backed violence, including torture, rape, and imprisonment. In addition the performative aspects of both texts call on readers and viewers to enact their own interventions by speaking out against torture. Looking more in depth at how characters work in solidarity with torture survivors, chapter 3 examines the role of decolonial love in Demetria Martínez’s (1994) novel Mother Tongue. “Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue and the Politics of Decolonial Love” reads the novel as a love story that reflects a radical engagement in the lives of others. This chapter highlights how the novel’s principal character, María, harnesses her understanding of herself as a U.S. citizen, a Chicana survivor of abuse, and an ex-lover of a Salvadoran refugee to oppose U.S. military and social hegemony in Latin America. Naming María’s engagement “decolonial love,” I examine how her transformation is made possible by the model provided by her friend and madrina Soledad, who shows María how to engage in transnational political activism that involves love of self and others. When María reclaims the domestic sphere in the service of a global project, she illustrates how community-based activism becomes a way to link individual experiences of trauma to one another in a transnational struggle to end violence and impunity. The analysis of Mother Tongue relies on iterations of transnational community as well as discussions of the role of love in social justice work to further argue for an understanding of collective narration as activism. Mimicking the carryover of U.S. policies from Central America to the Middle East, the last two chapters move to memoirs by U.S. veterans of the Iraq wars (1991 and 2003). Chapter 4, which focuses exclusively on a

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work by a veteran of the U.S. Army, analyzes José Zuniga’s (1994) memoir Soldier of the Year: The Story of a Gay American Patriot. Consistent with the glocal perspective explored in earlier chapters, I focus on Zuniga’s portrayal of the violence within the U.S. Army (particularly against women and gay and lesbian soldiers) and the violence enacted against Iraq. However, Zuniga himself remains hesitant to fully confront these connections. Rather his espousal of what I term “ambivalent homonationalism” illustrates an incipient glocality that precedes more contemporary currents within both antiwar and queer activism that point out the repressive nature of the armed forces and question the desire to participate in such historically oppressive and undemocratic institutions as the army and marriage. Returning once again to Camilo Mejía (2008), chapter 5 focuses on the veteran’s memoir Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía, which details his identificatory development as he seeks to distance himself from the status of a soldier to “reclaim his humanity.” As he does so, he pushes the political and ethnic boundaries of the glocal perspective by refusing service in the U.S. military and proposing a non-military-based citizenship. Opposing all militarism, Mejía espouses a new kind of global citizenship, illustrated through both his antiwar activism and his opposition to the D.R.E.A.M. Act. Looking forward, the coda briefly analyzes two growing sites of U.S. militarization: the U.S.-Mexico border and Colombia. Contextualizing this intervention within the U.S. “war on drugs,” I explain how the narrative of the drug wars has sought to justify increased militarism and policing in communities of color in the United States and in foreign territories. The coda joins this consideration with an analysis of the growing militarization of the everyday lives of U.S. residents, including Latina/o immigrants. This conclusion to the book offers a new perspective and a new manifestation of “glocal war” while also revealing how the kinds of critical engagement with U.S. military intervention discussed throughout the book may continue to evolve. Moreover I suggest the continued salience of a transnational Latina/o perspective on U.S. militarism and highlight the important work being undertaken by contemporary U.S. Latina/o artists and activists. Opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq increased steadily following Mejía’s 2003 refusal to redeploy, but disapproval of the war in Afghanistan was much slower to take hold. Nonetheless international aversion to the continued U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is once again calling into question the state of U.S. empire and the role of colonized

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and formerly colonized peoples in this empire’s workings. The historic actions of U.S. veterans at the NATO summit in May 2012, when over fifty veterans discarded their medals of honor, broke the silence on condemnation of the U.S. military from within and reenergized and inspired critics outside the armed forces. The veterans who spoke out at the summit confronted both the racism of U.S. policies in the Middle East and the sexism within the military. In doing so they exposed the patriarchal violence that operates within the military while forging connections with the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan, to whom many of the veterans apologized. But even as those who care about war and militarism witnessed these important events and the ensuing police crackdown, military recruiters continue to target disenfranchised communities while the D.R.E.A.M. Act and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are touted as progressive developments. If there is anything these actions, events, and legislative developments can teach us, it is that military policies and responses to them interact with communities, identities, and movements in complex and often contradictory ways. Recognizing that one overarching narrative of these interactions is neither possible nor necessary, this book nevertheless explores how U.S. Latina/o cultural production has represented, synthesized, and theorized the interplay between gender, identity, sexuality, and ethnicity in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. In doing so I hope to offer a way of understanding and viewing how current military projects are refracted in various arenas (social, political, and artistic) and to ensure that issues of social and political identity, activism, and art remain an integral part of such discussions.

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Gender, Difference, and the FSLN Insurrection Two things decided my life: my country and my sex. —Gioconda Belli, The Country under My Skin

In a conversation at her home in Oakland, California, in 2007, Nina Serrano described how she became involved in both Nicaraguan solidarity work and filmmaking. Her story emphasized the significant role of her gender and ethnic identity and the impact these had on her political and artistic orientation. After telling me about her Colombian-Anglo heritage, Serrano described her Central American solidarity work and her meeting with the Salvadoran poet and member of the Salvadoran Communist Party Roque Dalton in Cuba in 1969. Dalton noticed the Spanish headline of a local San Francisco community paper Serrano had and questioned her about Los 7 de la Raza, a group of Salvadorans who were accused of murdering a policeman.1 Serrano told Dalton that “the defense of those [men was] being used as an organizing tool in the barrio, in the Latino barrio in San Francisco.” Dalton told her, “When you go back I want you to help them,” and Serrano “vow[ed]” she would. Serrano’s initial entrance into Central American politics within the United States derived not from a U.S. Latina/o internationalist consciousness but rather from a Latin American internationalism (provoked by Dalton) that she literally brought back to the United States. Dalton’s role in Serrano’s development as a political activist evidences how she incorporated Latin American revolutionary ideals into her U.S. Latina/o activism.2 Serrano’s connection to Latina/o and Latin American politics through the poet-revolutionary Dalton emphasizes the place of the artistic imagination in her political formation as well as in her enactment of her political ideas. She explained how her identity as a poet as well as her age and

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her gender determined her participation in Latina/o politics in San Francisco. She contacted the organizing committee for Los 7 de la Raza, but they “were . . . not at all interested in [her]”: “I was a poet and I was older than them. . . . They were . . . young students and youth and . . . they said, ‘Oh a poet, well, go contact this other crazy poet, Roberto Vargas, he’s putting together a fundraiser for us’—and you could see they thought little of that—‘ . . . Get a hold of him,’ and so I did. And thus began my entrance into using poetry as a political tool. . . . I did my first poetry reading . . . through [a] fundraiser that Roberto was doing called Los 7 de la Raza.”3 Serrano’s story illustrates and expands on the concept of concientización. For Paulo Freire (1993, 17), concientización, or conscientização in Portuguese, is a process of political and social awareness whereby an individual learns to see “social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality.” Concientización is inextricably linked to both liberation and demystification. When Serrano undergoes and enacts concientización alongside Roque Dalton, Roberto Vargas, and others, she demonstrates the communal and dialogic basis of both concientización and liberación: she develops awareness of herself as an international Latina activist and of the inextricability of U.S. Latina/o and Latin American communities and experiences. Serrano’s concientización involves multiple forms of awareness simultaneously as she directly confronts the role of U.S. military intervention in Latin America as well as her own role as a woman and a poet within a larger political movement. The arts play an important role in prompting as well as expressing this political awareness, and thus it is appropriate that Serrano’s later artistic production continued to reflect a nuanced perspective that exhibited appreciation of multiple forms of power, inequality, and agency. The initial distance Serrano experienced when she became involved in the case of Los 7 de la Raza continued when she and Lourdes Portillo made the film Después del Terremoto (1979). The two women chose to “push the boundaries of political film” by making a narrative film about a political subject, a choice that was not well received by others in the Sandinista solidarity movement (Fregoso 2001, 5). Portillo notes, “There was a break with them [the Sandinista movement in the United States] because they wanted us to do a [kind of] documentary that they had been used to seeing” (51). In an interview with Rosa Linda Fregoso, Portillo explains how the independent funding she and Serrano secured for the film allowed them to make the kind of film they wanted and withstand the break from the activist community: “Since we got an [American Film

gender, difference, and the fsln insurrection  /  29

Institute] grant, I figured in a certain way it was my film, so that I had control and could do what I wanted. So we broke with them and did the narrative film” (51).4 Economic independence gave Portillo and Serrano the creative license to create a film that challenged both U.S. foreign policy and internal movement dynamics. Portillo and Serrano’s experience with the making and distribution of Después del Terremoto within and through the Nicaraguan solidarity movement speaks to three important issues. First, Serrano’s relationship with Roque Dalton highlights the extensive interplay between revolutionary Latin and Central American artists and activists and their U.S. Latina/o counterparts. These connections were both artistic and political in nature. Second, the filmmakers’ experiences with a male-centric solidarity community that refused to support a project made by and about women point to internal differences and conflicts, notably along lines of gender. Third, Serrano and Portillo’s narrative film questions the very idea of political art and cultural production, raising issues about the kinds of activism and artistic production that are considered “political” or “revolutionary.” These last two points are interrelated; in its insistence on examining the lives and experiences of Nicaraguan exile women Después del Terremoto offers a response to long-held biases that “women’s concerns” are not central to a political platform or are somehow less political. Examining these issues in depth, this chapter looks at how U.S. Latina/o filmmakers and authors search for ways to articulate solidarity with the Nicaraguan cause, paying particular attention to how the cultural works negotiate gender-based differences.

Chicanos and the FSLN In contrast to Serrano’s description of incorporating a pan-Latina/o revolutionary consciousness and involvement into her U.S.-based activism, Alejandro Murguía explores historical and ethnolinguistic connections between U.S. Latinas/os and Central Americans. In his memoir, The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California, Murguía notes that the name Nicaragua comes from the Nahuatl word Nicarahuac, meaning “hasta aquí llegó el Nahua” (the Nahuas came this far). The Nahuatl roots of Nicaragua’s name link the indigenous inhabitants of Nicaragua and Mexico with the Aztecs, one of the largest and most powerful preColumbian groups in Mesoamerica. Although often glorified by critics of the brutal European colonization of the Western Hemisphere, the Aztecs (or Mexica) are also well known for their conquering of other

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indigenous groups and the strength and military character of their empire.5 While Murguía invokes Nahuatl to suggest a common language or ancestry shared by Mexicans and Nicaraguans, he also unwittingly references this history of Aztec and European imperialism experienced by non-Aztec indigenous inhabitants of the regions. In addition to their complex relationships to imperialism, Chicanos/Mexicanos and Nicaraguans share equally complicated histories in relation to capitalist exploitation. While European colonialism sought military and financial gain during the colonization of the Western Hemisphere in the sixteenth century, similar goals brought a third imperialist power, the United States, to Central America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The U.S. intervention in the domestic affairs of Nicaragua, like its intervention in the affairs of most of Central America, dates back to at least the nineteenth century, when filibusterers such as Cornelius Vanderbilt set their eyes on the narrow strip of land that runs between Nicaragua’s Atlantic and Pacific Coasts as the potential site for an interoceanic canal. Vanderbilt established the Accessory Transport Company to provide a way to transport goods from New York to San Francisco via the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua, the world’s second largest lake. The tycoon planned to eventually establish a canal; this plan was later realized when the United States took over a deal initiated by France and divided the republic of Colombia in order to create the country of Panama and the Panama Canal. The economic interest in Nicaragua shown by Vanderbilt and others was matched by military and political interest by other U.S. actors: Nicaragua’s history bears another indelible scar from U.S. intervention in the form of William Walker. Originally invited by the ruling elites of the city of León to aid them in their struggle against the rival city, Granada, the professional solider and mercenary Walker landed in Nicaragua in May 1855. He quickly conquered the city of Granada and set up a puppet government under President Patricio Rivas. The United States (under President Franklin Pierce) recognized Walker’s regime as the legitimate government of Nicaragua one year later. U.S. businessmen who hoped to threaten Vanderbilt’s control of the Accessory Transport Company financed Walker and his men. Vanderbilt responded by using Walker’s threats to take over Costa Rica and his own considerable control of transportation routes in the Western Hemisphere to arm a group of Costa Ricans to fight against Walker and prevent supplies from reaching the would-be conqueror’s army. Walker held fraudulent elections, declared himself president of Nicaragua in 1856, and then revoked Nicaragua’s emancipation of slavery in an attempt to attract

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southern U.S. businessmen to his cause. Though Walker surrendered to Vanderbilt’s forces in 1857, he was not done with Central America, and he soon set sail for Honduras. There, in 1860, British forces intercepted him. The Honduran Army executed Walker on September 12, 1860. Though Walker’s conquest of Nicaragua is often viewed as farcical, this perspective belies the amount of death and destruction he wrought and the ugly mark he left on the country and people, found everywhere from the burnt façade of Granada’s Convent of San Francisco to deep-rooted feelings of distrust of the U.S. government and its policies. U.S. interference in Nicaraguan politics continued into the twentieth century, until the FSLN (Frente Sandinista Liberación Nacional or Sandinista National Liberation Front) directly confronted U.S. influence by overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. The roots of the Somoza dynasty and its challengers date to 1927, when Liberal soldiers led by Juan Bautista Sacasa revolted against Conservative President Adolfo Díaz, who had been installed under U.S. pressure. Under the threat of U.S. intervention, the Liberals and Conservatives signed a peace accord in May of that year. Terms of the peace accord included the establishment of a National Guard (la Guardia Nacional, which would become, under the Somoza dynasty, a brutal agent of torture and repression) and the deployment of U.S. Marines to enforce the agreement. General Augusto César Sandino, who had played a decisive role in aiding the Liberal advances, was left out of the peace accords. He retreated to the Segovia Mountains and declared war on the United States. After quickly learning that he would have more success using guerrilla tactics, Sandino famously evaded the marines for years. His demands included the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Nicaragua and the restoration of the United Provinces of Central America. U.S. Marines finally left Nicaragua in 1933, turning over the pursuit of Sandino to the National Guard. Having achieved one of his demands—the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Nicaragua—Sandino agreed to negotiate with President Sacasa. He was invited to Managua, and, in exchange for Sandino’s sworn loyalty and surrender, Sacasa promised to grant Sandino’s army amnesty and land in the province of Jinotega to settle their families. During a subsequent round of negotiations, the leader of the National Guard, Anastasio Somoza García, betrayed Sandino. Somoza’s men ambushed Sandino on February 21, 1934, and then descended on the Sandino cooperatives, massacring entire families. Two years later Somoza would force Sacasa to resign and declare himself president. Although Somoza was murdered by the poet Rigoberto López Pérez in 1956, the dictatorship he had established continued, passing through his

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sons Luis Somoza Debayle (1922–67) and Anastasio Somoza Debayle (1925–80). The dynasty endured with U.S. support until the 1979 overthrow of Somoza Debayle by the FSLN, a movement that saw itself as continuing Sandino’s anti-imperialist legacy. Seeking to grant even greater historical perspective to U.S.-Nicaraguan relations, Murguía (2002, 133) notes that gold prospectors from the northeastern United States traveled across Nicaragua (via the Río San Juan) to arrive in California and reminds readers that William Walker’s disastrous mission to Nicaragua sailed from San Francisco, thus bringing his own Californio identity into the discussion of Nicaraguan history. However, just as Chicana/o ties to Aztec imperialism complicate Chicana/oNicaraguan relations, the lust for profit and power that spurred both gold prospectors and nineteenth-century filibusterers creates an uneasy connection between the two groups. As inhabitants of lands lost in the U.S. pursuit of Manifest Destiny, Chicanas/os have firsthand experience with the dispossession and marginalization that often accompanies imperialist expansion, but as U.S. citizens they are also located within the very source of so much contemporary aggression. Nineteenth-century California, a land whose native inhabitants were driven to near extinction by European colonizers and whose Mexicano people are now often considered unwelcome interlopers on land they have occupied since the Spanish Conquest, becomes both a casualty and an instigator of imperialist and capitalist expansion. When Murguía attempts to explain Chicana/oNicaraguan connections via references to imperialist and capitalist expansion, he (perhaps unwittingly) broaches a much more complicated history. Moreover both Californio and Chicana/o claims to California obfuscate Native American rights and indeed their presence. Viewing Chicanas/ os as always in opposition to U.S. imperialism and nationalism ignores a more convoluted history of linguistic and political violence and contributes to what Nicole Guidotti-Hernández (2011, 84) refers to as “celebratory, uncritical discourses of mestizaje and indigenousness.” Looking at Murguía’s narrative from a perspective that places it in this larger context of gender, race, power, and capital allows us to acknowledge both its production in the vein of pan-Latina/o and anti-imperialist solidarity and its references to the kinds of ethnic and inter-Latina/o tensions that would give rise to, among other things, violence between the Sandinista government and Nicaraguan indigenous communities and disagreements within the U.S.-based solidarity movement. Cultural works that grew from the Nicaraguan solidarity movement in which Murguía, Portillo, and Serrano were involved allow us to

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analyze how texts set against the history of U.S. intervention in Nicaragua explore the relationship between neo-imperialism and expressions of U.S. Latina/o and pan-Latina/o identity. Characters in Murguía’s Southern Front and Portillo and Serrano’s Después del Terremoto confront U.S. military intervention and express solidarity with the Nicaraguan people and the FSLN insurrection. Their opposition to U.S. policy occurs alongside attempts to negotiate national and ethnic identity as the characters struggle with how to represent and enact an anti-imperial stance within and alongside U.S.-centric communities and experiences. While their political opposition to U.S. involvement in Nicaragua prompts a reconsideration of the relationship between U.S. Latinas/os, Chicanas/os, and the U.S. nation-state, this reconsideration is complicated by the importance of difference, in particular the role of gender and sexuality. Murguía’s principal character, Ulises, attempts but fails to use his participation in the FSLN to embody an “undifferentiated” Latino resistant subject. Ulises draws on shared histories of European colonialism and U.S. imperialism as well as his place in the FSLN insurrection to suggest that Chicanas/os and Nicaraguans and their struggles are “the same.” However, differences stemming from language, ethnicity, and the illegibility of Chicana/o identity as well as “internal” conflicts surrounding age, gender, sexuality, and nationality prove disruptive, suggesting that armed conflict is an inadequate means with which to either negotiate these salient issues or express pan-Latina/o sentiments. Characters in Después del Terremoto similarly confront differences in gender, language, citizenship status, and age but do so in a nonmilitarized setting. Unlike Murguía’s Ulises, who relies on the urgency of war to assert a unified identity, the characters Luisa Amanda and Irene invoke interpersonal communication within a larger community and kinship network as the means with which to negotiate difference while still speaking from a transnational political and affective position. Both texts illustrate the extent to which U.S. military intervention abroad calls for a rethinking of the relationship between U.S. Latinas/os, the U.S. nation-state, and Central American subjects and experiences, while also suggesting that militarism is an inadequate means with which to express transnational solidarity. The works highlight the importance of understanding and recognizing differences in race, gender, sexuality, language, citizenship, and age as they complicate group-based identities and propose interpersonal communication to address difference and express glocal identities and experiences. Consistent with Murguía’s discussion of Chicana/o-Nicaraguan relations in The Medicine of Memory, Southern Front is characterized by its

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attempted fidelity to the discussion of similarities between Chicanas/os and Nicaraguans. When differences due to language and nationality arise, the male-dominated, heterosexual space of war becomes a place where these differences are resolved. However, when female characters challenge heteropatriarchal institutions such as marriage and the guerrilla army, they disrupt Sandinista-controlled and postwar spaces. That issues of gender and sexuality play a prominent role in disrupting the formation of unified communities suggests gender and sexuality were and are integral rather than subsequent or complementary to the formation of “racialized systems of power and capital” (Guidotti-Hernández 2011, 84). Moreover the text continually suggests that differences of gender and sexuality cannot be fully resolved on the battlefield and anticipates anxiety about the role of women in the new, revolutionary Nicaragua. While male characters in Murguía’s work assert a shared history of colonialism and current oppression at the hands of state structures, female characters in Después del Terremoto repeatedly call attention to class- and gender-based differences between and among U.S. Latinas/ os and Nicaraguans. Furthermore whereas male soldiers in Southern Front turn to war to resolve their differences, women’s conversations and conflicts play out in the domestic sphere. However, the home space is unable to completely resolve the issues of war and violence that come from the hands of the state, and characters turn to a realm outside both the battlefield and the home—the public street—in their search for an egalitarian space. Both Southern Front and Después del Terremoto end ambivalently, but while the former work imagines the coming of more war, the latter opens up possibilities for characters to create a new reality. The last images of Southern Front and Después del Terremoto—a lone Ulises lying in his bed and Julio and Irene agreeing to talk over a cup of coffee, respectively—present radically different visions of resolution and hope for the future. As works of cultural production closely tied to a social movement, Southern Front and Después del Terremoto make important contributions to the body of literature and theory that seeks to understand and document opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America in the latter half of the twentieth century.6 In addition, as they integrate a critique of U.S. imperialism while also concentrating on ethnic identity, the two works complement histories of activism that have concentrated on mostly Anglo, upper-class, and Church-based solidarity workers. The work of Murguía, Portillo, and Serrano exhibit how these artists understood their multiple identities—as U.S. citizens, as Latinas/os, as women,

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as anti-imperialist activists—in relation to the FSLN struggle against the Somoza dictatorship and subsequent Contra war.7 Products of activists whose solidarity work began well before the 1970s, the works by these three artists form part of what Ana Patricia Rodríguez (2009, 131) terms a “vanguard transnational solidarity culture and literature by Latinos/as and Central Americans in the United States.” The political activity of the artists spurred further work of Latina/o activists while the cultural texts themselves continue to reflect important strains and tensions within U.S. Latina/o art and politics.8

Southern Front, Revolutionary Urgency, and the Sublimation of Difference Murguía’s (1990) Southern Front is a collection of short stories, based on the author’s own experience as an internationalist, fighting with the FSLN during the Final Offensive of June and July 1979. Most of the stories in Southern Front center on Ulises, a twenty-nine-year-old Chicano from San Francisco who joins the FSLN in the late 1970s; all are set at the Southern Front of battle, mostly in and around the towns of Peñas Blancas (on the border with Costa Rica) and Sapóa.9 The stories that compose the book are war stories that recount “ordinary” days around the base, as well as moments of violence such as ambushes and the execution of spies. While not all of the stories are marked by the explicit violence of warfare, all are marked by rigid masculinist and heterosexist codes of conduct, illustrating the insubstantiation of militarized modes of relation into quotidian life and setting the stage for the unresolved question of how a military can transition into a revolutionary government that is able to manifest, among other ideals, gender equity. Four stories from the collection—“In the South,” “To the Front,” “Combat in the Ravine,” and “The Dead Who Never Die”—emphasize issues of Latino internationalism, internal cleavages due to race and nationality, the importance of the heteronormative battlefront as a place where such cleavages are resolved, and the irreconcilability of gender and sexual differences.10 In the first three stories Ulises asserts a shared Chicano Nicaraguan Third World identity, an assertion Ben Olguín (2002, 105–6) refers to as a “Sandinista claim to sameness as a subaltern, multiracial Americano subject,” the effect of which is to “[push] the boundaries of Mexican-American, Chicano, and U.S. Latino identity.” While Ulises’s character points to historically significant internationalist strands within Chicano activism and identity, the

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“sameness” to which this particular kind of Sandinismo lays claim is predicated on masculinity, heterosexuality, and an unreflective valorization of mestizaje that erases indigenous histories and experiences. Thus although Southern Front is part of a literary “topography” that is at once “‘American’ . . . and also very much an anti-imperialist Third World and internationalist space,” when assertions of trans-Americanidad do break down, gender plays a formative role (Olguín 2002, 104). In addition the role of violence and warfare in these internationalist politics is particularly important as characters rely on the urgency of the revolutionary cause to subsume differences of race, language, and class. When the narrative moves away from the battlefront in the last story, gender-based issues emerge and force characters and readers to consider how war shapes and silences articulations of identity, political affiliation, and solidarity. “In the South,” the first story in Southern Front, asserts that Chicanos and Nicaraguans share a history of imperialism and colonialism and suggests that war against contemporary imperial forces is the logical enactment of Americano solidarity. The narrative opens as Ulises and other Chicanos arrive in Nicaragua; Ulises reflects upon what has brought him to the Southern Front and how his fate has differed from those of his friends back home.11 He writes that he was the only one of his barrio to escape the triple threat of gang wars, Viet Nam, and prison. His thoughts then turn from his neighborhood, where “vatos were still killing each other,” to cynical premonitions that “in the murky depths of Foggy Bottom, some career desk man was surely planning the next Project Phoenix or invasion of the Caribbean or Central America” (Murguía 1990, 12–13). War, whether in the form of a foreign neocolonial enterprise or urban violence, threatens the lives of Ulises and his Chicano compatriots and prompts him to evaluate his relationship to the U.S. nation-state and U.S. institutions. Rather than use service in the U.S. military to assert his status as an American or to demand treatment as such, Ulises places himself in direct opposition to U.S. militarism and the U.S. nation-state, an opposition expressed by his musing that in fighting alongside the FSLN, he may in fact be fighting the “real” enemy. While U.S. militarism is integral in altering his relationship to the U.S. nation-state, he nonetheless continues to define himself in relation to armed warfare. That is, his refusal to serve in the U.S. armed forces occurs alongside his decision to join the FSLN, meaning that military service disrupts his relationship to the United States but remains the means through which he expresses his political and ethnic affiliations.

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After using Viet Nam, prison, and gangs to highlight the marginal position occupied by Chicanos in the United States, Ulises turns to indigenous language and figures to establish a common culture for Nicaraguans and Chicanos. He focuses on pre-Columbian men who resisted European conquest as well as contemporary FSLN leaders, thus positioning the struggle against Somoza as an outgrowth of the struggle against colonization. Armed resistance provides a historical thread that links Chicanos and Nicaraguans to each other and to their Aztec ancestors, making the current war against Somoza a way to realize these links: “In his heart he knew that being here was the right thing. Chicano, Mejicano, Nicoya—the same ancient Nahuatl culture and language, the same struggle from Cuauhtemoc to Carlos Fonseca—even if others didn’t understand it now, they’d understand it later” (Murguía 1990, 18).12 While Mexico (both pre- and post-1848) and Nicaragua do indeed share a history of struggle against European colonization and U.S. imperialism, Ulises’s invocation of the unstable categories of culture and language to unite all Mesoamerican peoples and their descendants fails to acknowledge any differences between indigenous groups or the more complex relationships between race and nationality that have historically emerged during times of colonization and war.13 Somoza becomes interchangeable with all colonizers—Spanish, British, and French—while Cuauhtemoc and Carlos Fonseca stand in for all resistant colonized peoples, allowing Ulises to erase the non-Aztec history and culture of Mesoamerica and create “resisters” and “enemies” that lack any internal contradictions or disparities.14 In uniting or collapsing figures such as Cuauhtemoc and Fonseca, Ulises attempts to script a linear and romantic narrative of resistance that leaves unquestioned the differences—material, political, and epistemological—between Cuauhtemoc’s and Fonseca’s causes. Ulises assumes that the present occupied by himself and Fonseca is precisely the future imagined by Cuauhtemoc; as a result he proposes answers in response to particular conditions—neoimperialism being one—without considering how the questions that he faces may be quite different (Scott 2004, 2–3, 7). His political and narrative project is dependent on the creation of a particular colonial past, evident in how he integrates his own actions into this larger story of antiimperial resistance. Ulises’s reliance on an unselfconscious narrative of resistance is made possible by unexamined epistemological questions as well as assumptions and obfuscations concerning race, gender, and sexuality. Although his ruminations on his place in the Nicaraguan struggle introduce a

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transnational consciousness that allows him to consider the violence of the United States as it affects both domestic (Chicano) and international (Nicaraguan) peoples, his perspective relies heavily on Chicano masculinist nationalism. As Angie Chabram-Dernersesian (1999) points out, one of the anthems of the Chicano movement, Rodolfo “Corky” González’s poem “Yo Soy Joaquín,” similarly seeks to join disparate histories, ethnicities, and social realities into one whole. Moreover this conflation takes place through the pronouncements of a singular, masculine voice. The speaker of the poem, Joaquín, claims that Spaniards, Mexicans, indigenous peoples, and mestizos are all raza through the authority of “his authenticating discourse of the universal Chicano” (267). Chabram-Dernersesian names this discourse a “‘Chicano’ rendition of pluralism even though it is framed within a nationalist perspective that opposes assimilation and white melting-pot-ism” (267). Joaquín, like Ulises, erases the particularities of race, ethnicity, class, language, and religion in the creation of a Chicano subject that is, ironically, engaged in a struggle to maintain his own difference from white U.S. culture. Chabram-Dernersesian finds a similar example of the use of Chicano to subsume ethnic plurality in the popular image of a three-headed figure composed of European, indigenous, and mestizo faces. This figure, meant to represent mestizaje, portrays the Chicano/ mestizo face in the center, thereby positing the mestizo as the container or culmination of European and indigenous ethnicity. By rhetorically positioning his mestizo body as the culmination of indigenous resistance, Ulises enacts a similar move. In his claims to sameness with the Nicaraguan cause, Ulises engages in a particular kind of nationalism that is both coyly transnational and blatantly masculinist. Like Joaquín, who unites Spaniards, mestizos, Mexicans, and indígenas under the banner of Chicano, Ulises brings Nicaraguan martyrs into the Chicano context without fundamentally challenging the originary location of Chicano. His ability to engage in this kind of “pluralism” derives from his masculine social location (Chabram-Dernersesian 1999, 267). When his transnational subjectivity and his belonging at the Southern Front is challenged in later stories, the narrative reveals the extent to which his vision of the ChicanoNicaraguan connection is very much only his discourse. His response of turning to his heterosexual identity in order to fashion a social and political location recognized by others further illustrates the ideas of gender and sexuality undergirding this position. Ulises’s claims to “sameness” rely not only on heterosexual male privilege and the denial of ethnic particularities but also on the erasure and

gender, difference, and the fsln insurrection  /  39

appropriation of indigenous peoples. His version of Chicano pluralism is akin to renditions of “multicultural” Mexican identity that uncritically celebrate mestizaje at the expense of the frank acknowledgment of the continued reality of colonialism (Chabram-Dernersesian 1999, 268). Mexican ideas of mestizaje position indigenous peoples at a biological origin point from which they have evolved into “the formulaically more progressive mestizo” (Saldaña-Portillo 2001, 407). In deploying mestizaje in a transnational context, Ulises asserts that the figure of the mestizo (conveniently embodied by himself) is the “presumed intersection between Mexican indigenous identity and Chicano/a identity” (407). Making himself the contemporary representation of an Aztec indigenous past, Ulises contributes to the continual “disappearance” of native peoples, and in particular of North American Native peoples (Smith 2006, 68). According to Andrea Smith, the white supremacist logic of genocide holds that indigenous peoples “must always be disappearing, in order to allow non-indigenous peoples rightful claim over [North American] land. . . . Non-Native peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous—land, resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture” (68). When Ulises asserts that he is the heir to a lineage of resistance that dates back to Cuauhtemoc—an Aztec king tortured and murdered by the conquerors—he erases contemporary indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. He also erases the participation of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and indigenous groups in antiindigenous violence, denying the at times complicit relationship between these groups and U.S. and European colonialism and genocide.15 His decision to place himself in relationship to only an indigenous Mexican group reflects the uniting of white supremacist logic and Chicana/o mestizaje in which the latter concept is used “to produce a biological tie with pre-Aztec Indians rather than a political tie with contemporary U.S. Native Americans or Mexican Indians” (Saldaña-Portillo 2001, 415). When he uses Cuauhtemoc as the starting point of a lineage that is, from then on, exclusively mestizo, Ulises allows men such as himself, Sandino, and Fonseca to stand in as the contemporary embodiment of indigenous resistance. Again a racist logic of erasure is necessary for such a vision to take place; the sentiment “They are us” functions only in a world in which “they” no longer exist or, in Saldaña-Portillo’s terms, in which “they” have “evolved” into “us.” This deft sleight of political hand relies on the assumption that indigenous peoples are unable to mount their own autonomous resistance movements, either because they are unable to organize effectively or because they simply do not exist. Ulises’s attempts

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to use Mexican and Chicana/o ideas of mestizaje to bolster a transnational, anti-imperialist, pan-Latina/o ideology allows us a glimpse into the difficulties and pitfalls inherent in transnational projects that rely on uncritical deployments of identity and resistance. These difficulties proved particularly disastrous during the Sandinista Revolution when Ronald Reagan was able to exploit the Sandinistas’ missteps in regard to Nicaragua’s indigenous communities, and they continue to plague political coalitions in the United States. Finally, Ulises’s ethnic transnationalism includes a special place for warfare. Armed resistance unites Cuauhtemoc, Sandino, and Fonseca and offers Ulises the opportunity to take his own rightful place in this lineage. Unsurprisingly his version of history ends with a contemporary justification of war. Ulises confirms to himself that he is in the “right” place and inculcates himself against any opposition by predicting that anyone who doesn’t share his viewpoint will “understand it later.” This understanding will either arrive on the battlefield or after the FSLN victory, but either way war will play a seminal role in making evident the connections that Ulises has drawn. In a later story, “Combat in the Ravine,” Ulises’s understanding of his relationship as a Chicano to the FSLN leaves the space of his private thoughts and enters the battlefield. Engaging Somoza’s troops, Ulises actively participates in the “same struggle” through both words and actions. During a successful ambush, the men in Ulises’s platoon exhort the enemy Guardia to surrender, shouting popular slogans: “¡Viva Monimbó! ¡Viva el Frente Sandinista!” (Murguía 1990, 69).16 Ulises joins in both the shouting of slogans and the firing of bullets, but he introduces a Chicano context by shouting, “This one’s for Rubén Salazar, and for Toño and Ulises Tapia!” (69). Salazar, considered a martyr of the Chicano movement, was a journalist for the Los Angeles Times who was killed during the Chicano moratorium of August 1970 when a tear gas canister fired by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy struck him in the head. Toño was a Chicano compañero from San Francisco who fought and died in Nicaragua, and Tapia is the Nicaraguan martyr from whom Ulises took his nom de guerre. When Ulises opens fire while invoking the name of Chicano and Nicaraguan martyrs, he suggests that the murderers of all three men are one and the same: the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department becomes interchangeable with Somoza’s U.S.-backed troops, just as the conquering Spaniards became interchangeable with Somoza in Ulises’s earlier metaphor. Again opposition to U.S. militarism engenders a transnational consciousness that finds expression through armed

gender, difference, and the fsln insurrection  /  41

struggle. In Ulises’s shout, it is Toño, the Chicano compañero, who provides a linguistic and spatial link between Chicanos (Salazar) and Nicaraguans (Tapia). The name and memory of a Chicano who died in Nicaragua allows Ulises to forge a connection between Chicanos and Nicaraguans and to elevate the importance of armed struggle. Of course when Ulises seeks revenge against Somoza’s troops in the name of Tapia, he also asserts his own place in the FSLN struggle. In taking Tapia’s name as his guerrilla pseudonym, he pays homage to the fallen fighter and attempts to merge his Chicano body into the Nicaraguan army unit. While “In the South” and “Combat in the Ravine” display Ulises’s understanding of his role in Nicaragua as related to his understanding of himself as Chicano, soldiers in “To the Front,” challenge this link and fail to recognize the difference between “Chicano” and “North American/gringo.” In the story Ulises defends himself against claims concerning “all” U.S. citizens and later joins the soldiers in their shared pursuit of women and military victory. These moments highlight the extent to which similarities between Chicanos and Nicaraguans based on their relationship to instruments of state power do not preclude differences that arise due to language, class, and nationality and also illustrate how the conquest of women and nation serves the goals of reconciliation and unity. The relationship between patriarchy, heterosexuality, war, and transnational political affinities becomes even more pronounced in this story as a woman’s body plays a key role in Ulises’s integration into the army unit. Women become both the ultimate reason men join the Frente as well as the path through which they can fully participate in both the armed struggle and the cause of liberation. “To the Front” is split into four parts and takes place in different locations around the front, including a bar on the Costa Rican border and the tent where the soldiers bunk down for the night. The first and fourth sections include descriptions of Ulises’s and other soldiers’ relationships with women, making heterosexuality the framing motif of the story as a whole as well as a point of reference that provides both an entrance and an exit or resolution to the conflict. In addition the first section details Ulises’s argument about his North American versus Chicano identity, so that the four sections follow Ulises on a linear path from outsider to insider, a path that moves through the battlefield and culminates in the synthesis of warfare and sex. The opening scene finds Ulises in the unfamiliar situation of defending himself against the label gringo. Sitting at a bar accompanied by unnamed women, a Nicaraguan soldier expresses disappointment at

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the little money Ulises has brought, certainly not enough money for the men to “make a night of it” before they go to the front (Murguía 1990, 24). When Ulises asks Norman why he assumed Ulises had more cash, Norman replies accusingly, “All you gringos are rich, no?,” to which Ulises eventually responds, “I may be from the States, but when did you ever see a gringo who looked like me?” (25). Here Ulises uses his family’s country of origin, Mexico, and his dark skin to distance himself from gringos and align himself with Nicaraguans and internationalists at the front. Interestingly he is forced to refute Norman along national lines; he claims Chicanidad or Mexicanidad based not on his birthplace in California but on his parents’ birthplace in Mexico. This claim ironically erases the presence of Chicanas/os and Mexicanas/os in places like California before the existence of the United States, reifying post-1848 national boundaries at the expense of ideas of “greater Mexico.”17 Norman seems to accept Ulises’s understanding of his Mexicanidad as based on roots in Mexico and dark skin; he adds that he heard there was a gringo, “a chele,” at the Front. Chele, Central American slang for “lightskinned,” defines gringo by race, not nationality. Norman and Ulises seem to reach a common acceptance of what constitutes a gringo and a nongringo, but this understanding is based on hopelessly unstable terms, terms subject to change depending on one’s location and identity. For example, regardless of his skin color, the Nicaraguan Norman would likely be “brown” in the United States, while Ulises’s skin color, Chicano ethnicity, and fluency in Spanish do not stop Norman from identifying him as gringo. What perhaps is a less unstable category is the one term of identification that Ulises and Norman share but of which they do not speak: their identity as men and as male soldiers. This gender identity and the way the men enact their identity in relationship to women in fact becomes the greatest point of commonality between Ulises and Norman and moreover a commonality they enact in the space of war. While Ulises’s opposition to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua affords him the opportunity to distance himself from a U.S.-based identity, when he defines his Chicano ethnicity in relationship to Mexico to justify his position at the front, he misses the opportunity to assert a politically based position of transnational solidarity. Accepting the identity of a gringo, for example, or that of a middle-class Chicano, would seemingly be more in line with the multirace, multiclass, international coalition that made up the FSLN. The Sandinista leadership at this time was not made up of peasant or working-class organic intellectuals but was dominated by university-educated men who ideologically rejected their

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bourgeois roots and privileges. The FSLN was well acquainted with the concept of a political and ideological rather than racial, class, or nationbased alliance. The heterogeneity of the FSLN, both in rhetoric and practice, makes all the more ironic Ulises’s decision to evoke a social location that renders ethnicity synonymous with a particular nation-state and class position. While unacknowledged by the male characters, their gender identity is powerfully involved as well, given that the national space experienced by Chicanas and Mexicanas is “notorious for its masculinist orientation” (Chabram-Dernersesian 1999, 278). Bolstered by the masculine privileges his Chicano nationalism affords him, Ulises is unlikely to consider more complicated alliances that move outside the boundaries of male heteronationalism. Although marked by a certain amount of conflict, the scene in the bar is nevertheless an example of homosocial bonding. The presence of silent women in the narrative suggests that the conversation that takes place between Ulises and Norman can be read as a triangular one. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985, 38) explains that triangular relationships are an expression of male heterosexual desire made visible in the form of “a desire to consolidate partnership with authoritative males in and through the bodies of females.” The silent female bodies become a path to homosocial bonding. Despite Ulises and Norman’s initial animosity toward each other based on national identity, their identity as heterosexual men offers a point of commonality. Importantly this homosocial bonding takes place not only via the bodies of women but also against the backdrop of war, a point to which I will turn shortly. As the story continues, Ulises relies on a gendered and sexualized nationalism to integrate into the FSLN. In the first section women who remain silent accompany the men. Norman and Morales flirt with and touch the women, while Ulises remains alone. Norman’s and Morales’s relationships with the women in the bar reflect their status in the army: the two Central Americans are not alone either in the bar or in the company of soldiers. When the three men leave the bar, Ulises notes that he will be the only one to be sleeping alone: Norman will return to sleep with his pregnant wife, while Morales will sleep with the other Panamanians. The indoor space (a house) will be full of wounded soldiers, and he and two other compañeros will sleep in a chicken coop in the backyard; he notes that though the coop “was cozier than sleeping in the mud,” he was still “sleeping alone” (Murguía 1990, 26). Here one’s relationship to others, and especially to women, becomes the greatest marker of difference. Ulises’s single status and his non–Central American nationality

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together combine to leave him literally outside of the army, and he is the only character of the three to sleep outside and thus alone. Though Morales is apparently single, his space in the Frente is not as lonely as Ulises’s because he is from Central America and part of a Panamanian group of soldiers, while Ulises is the only Chicano in his battalion. Ulises works quickly to remedy his outsider status through both his sexual and military prowess, increasing his stature within the army ranks. In the next two sections of the story he joins a squad and is appointed its leader. As squad leader he is allowed to carry arms in camp and he is given a rifle, a FAL, which he christens Miriam.18 Naming his weapon after the girlfriend he left behind in San Francisco, he replaces “a fetish for his lost girlfriend onto his newly issued assault weapon” (Olguín 2002, 104). The object Ulises acquires that facilitates his participation in the army is a phallic one, underscoring the role of masculinity and homosociality in war. Through his possession of the rifle/Miriam, he justifies his place in the army. Now he is no longer a lone Chicano soldier but rather a heroic lover who, like Norman and Morales, fights on behalf of a larger community. Ulises’s christening of his gun with the name of a girlfriend signifies that he participates in the war not only as a Chicano but also as a heterosexual man. With the acquisition of a weapon/woman/phallus, Ulises is one step closer to becoming a fully functioning member of the FSLN. All that remains is for him to consummate his relationship with the army, and he gets this chance in the fourth and final section of the story. As the story nears a close, Ulises and a fellow internationalist, Gaspar, are awoken by bombardment from Guardia troops.19 As he comes to his senses, Ulises realizes that his heart is beating fast not only because he was startled by gunfire but also because he was having a sexual dream: “It was the dream of Miriam, at the same time as the explosion” (Murguía 1990, 38). Rather than fire back at the Guardia, Ulises ejaculates. When Ulises relies on a performance of male heterosexuality to participate in the insurrection and express his affiliation with the FSLN, he underscores the ways masculinity and heterosexuality define both the prototypical soldier and the recognized citizen. Participation in military service is linked to citizenship in the nation; in the U.S. context, military service was historically both a way of being defined by and helping to define the nation. As Margot Canaday (2003, 940) explains, “military service was an obligation of citizenship” for men. Defining the army as a heterosexual space and a means with which one can enact participatory citizenship, as the United States has historically and explicitly done,

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defines citizenship as heterosexual. When debates about gays and lesbians serving in the U.S. Armed Forces prompted debates about U.S. national identity in the late twentieth century, the link between participatory military service and social citizenship was laid bare. Canaday argues that social policies such as the GI Bill helped to meet the basic needs of veterans so that “they could participate to the fullest extent in the social and political life of their nation” (936–37). When homosexuality was used as a means to deny veterans such benefits, the definition of an honorable soldier was linked to that of a full social citizen, and both identities were explicitly defined as heterosexual. While Ulises is fighting in a non-U.S. context (and in direct opposition to the U.S. state), his military participation in the war relies on male heterosexuality, illustrating that the narrative contains U.S.-centric ideas of citizens and soldiers as heterosexual. In addition the narrative gestures to the extent to which both the U.S. and other nation-states (including Nicaragua) would continue to grapple with both defining and challenging the relationship between citizenry, sexuality, and military service. Given how the characters in Southern Front rely on the urgency of war and participatory heterosexuality to create and unify the revolutionary community and, by extension, begin to define a liberated Nicaraguan citizenry, it is not surprising that the laying down of arms that accompanies the FSLN’s triumph over Somoza introduces both national and sexual anxieties into the narrative.20 In the last story in the collection, which takes place after the fighting has ended, a woman plays a decidedly disruptive role, inadvertently challenging Ulises’s understanding of his role in the army. In addition to examining the sexism in this story, I understand its setting—outside the purview of war—to be a comment on the difficult role that the Sandinista Revolution would have in realizing egalitarian ideals in postdictatorship Nicaragua. The last story of Southern Front contains echoes of both “To the Front” and “In the South” in its references to the Chicano-Nicaraguan connection and the use of heterosexuality as a means to fully incorporate into the FSLN. However, “The Dead Who Never Die” also contains significant differences that affect the plot, trajectory, and tone of the story. In this last piece the fight against Somoza has ended and the Sandinistas have triumphed. The tone, however, is ambivalent and tense rather than celebratory, as the guerrilla army searches for its purpose in postwar Nicaragua. Whereas earlier stories had allowed Ulises to express his solidarity with the Nicaraguan cause by engaging in battle and in sexual relationships with women, both avenues of expression are cut off to him

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in this piece, and the collection ends with the protagonist searching for a social and political home. The somber ending of the story and the collection as a whole exquisitely pinpoints the vexed relationships between transnational solidarity and anti-imperial struggles, heterosexuality and nationalism, and violence and unification. “The Dead Who Never Die” parallels the first story in the collection, opening with Ulises again approaching the Costa Rican–Nicaraguan border.21 Unlike “In the South,” however, when Ulises arrives with several other soldiers, in this final story he arrives alone, walking the last five kilometers to Peñas Blancas. The camaraderie of war present in the first story is absent. Ulises stops to rest at the same place he spent his first night at the front, but where once he slept with “a column of 150 compas,” the place is now abandoned, “no sign of any living creature except perhaps the iguanas that scurried away in a rustling of branches as he approached” (Murguía 1990, 103). Although soldiers remain in the area, there is no longer any need for them to occupy the formal units they once did. They are dispersed along the front, lacking an enemy and thus lacking cohesion. Ulises also notes the lack of civilians: “All the civilians had fled during the war; the stores and restaurants that had been the heart of town were completely gutted, ransacked, and bombed. The civilians had not returned, except for the mercaderas who came from Rivas to sell vigorón to the bus passengers headed for Managua who stopped at the immigration building to have their papers checked. All the former import stores of the dictator were now offices for the new army and government” (104). The promise of a new government is mentioned but has not yet materialized. The town remains in a state of limbo, illustrated by the passengers who only pass through on their way to Managua. Ulises’s nostalgia for civilians may be ironic since he came to the area during the height of the final insurrection and likely never experienced the town when populated by noncombatants. Rather he longs for a defined place within a larger community, a place and a community that both he and the town lack. The story thus opens with a stark portrait of absence: the community of soldiers fighting against a common enemy is gone, and the “new army and government” promise change but also uncertainty. In the next scene the ambivalence of post-Somoza Nicaragua for Ulises comes through at a celebratory party, where he finds himself unable to express either his Chicano identity or his heterosexuality to his fellow soldiers. However, the brief return of the violence of war once again helps him join the community of soldiers. When Ulises arrives he finds a party, complete with singing, the recitation of poetry,

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and music. He has brought back from his furlough whisky and a box of bullets, as well as a pair of earrings he intends to give Venancia, a guerrilla from Matagalpa. But Venancia brushes him off and later gently removes his arm from around her shoulder (Murguía 1990, 105, 107). As the party continues, several of the compañeros offer songs and poems from their native land. After some consideration and a careful mental rehearsal of the lines, Ulises decides to deliver a piece about California. He hesitates, unsure of whether or not to recite his poem because half of it is in English (107). He thus remains socially on the margins of the party, his relationship with the others lacking definition. He is neither part of a romantic couple nor a member of a national group whose identity and culture can be shared without translation. Before Ulises is able to recite his poem, a soldier named Angel arrives and announces grimly that a body has been found (107–8). The party immediately breaks up and the compañeras/os grab their guns and exit into the rain, Ulises following quickly behind. Although the death of a soldier disrupts the celebration, it also brings a familiar order to the gathering. Whereas Ulises was unsure of how to participate in the party, he understands clearly how he must participate as a soldier once the violence of war threatens the army. The murder of the compañero, known only by his pseudonym, Manuel, is especially tragic since it occurs after the triumph. Moreover the meaning of Manuel’s murder is uncertain, as his death is accompanied by neither the revolutionary righteousness of war nor the promise of a new society. In his short eulogy a soldier takes Manuel’s torture and murder by retreating Guardia soldiers as indicative of the cruelty of the enemy: “His death . . . shows us that the enemy will stop at nothing in his frenzy to disrupt our vanguard and our people from the road we have chosen” (Murguía 1990, 109). While the soldier lays the death of Manuel at the feet of Somoza’s soldiers, the FSLN also bears responsibility. Occurring after the official triumph, this death may be the first casualty of the Contra War, marking how the “new government and army” have failed to protect their citizen-soldiers and foreshadowing the deaths that this new government will demand. While standing guard over Manuel’s body, Ulises returns to a familiar theme—commonalities between Chicanos and Nicaraguans—in his attempt to understand Manuel’s death and his own role in the FSLN. This time, however, the hopelessness of death is more apparent. He thinks of Rubén Salazar and Toño: “Sometimes he missed the dead something awful, and it was moments like this that the dead filed before him, singly

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and en masse” (Murguía 1990, 113). Once again he makes a mental list of indigenous, Mexican, Chicano, and Nicaraguan revolutionaries: Carlos Fonseca, Rigoberto López Pérez, Augusto Sandino, Farabundo Martí, Emiliano Zapata, and Cuauhtemoc (114). In “In the South” the memories of these figures helped Ulises to articulate his place in the Nicaraguan struggle by calling upon a shared history of indigeneity and resistance to colonialism and imperialism.22 Now these men are marked not only by their status as heroes and as fighters but by their death. However, the somber tone that accompanies Ulises’s invocation of these historical figures may in fact reflect a more respectful, nuanced engagement with the past. According to David Scott (2004, 135), “Tragedy has a more respectful attitude to the past, to the often-cruel permanence of its impress: it honors, however reluctantly, the obligations the past imposes.” The litany of martyrs Ulises mentions and his specific reference to them as “the dead” suggests that one of the obligations the past imposes is death. Before resigning himself to death, however, Ulises returns to his earlier mode of participatory citizenship: heterosexuality. Thoughts of Venancia had crept into his ruminations on heroes and death while standing guard over Manuel’s body, but he had brushed such thoughts aside (Murguía 1990, 110). Once they are relieved of their duties, however, Ulises accompanies Venancia back to her bunker and, undeterred by her earlier rebukes during the party, attempts to present her with the gift of earrings. Venancia refuses the gift and explains to Ulises that she was married and her husband was killed in the war just two weeks earlier. She eventually accepts the earrings “as a compañera from a compañero” (116). Ulises returns to his barracks alone, having failed to find an adequate mode of belonging either as a Chicano soldier, a revolutionary hero, or a heterosexual lover. As Sedgwick (1985, 45) reminds us, defeat by a woman proves particularly humiliating: “For a man to undergo even a humiliating change in the course of a relationship with a man still feels like preserving or participating in a sum of male power, while for a man to undergo any change in the course of a relationship with a woman feels like a radical degeneration of substance.” After Venancia’s rebuke, Ulises’s outlook is particularly bleak. The final pages of the story paint a picture of isolation and uncertainty. Ulises indicates that what he most missed was the companionship that accompanied his time at the front. He concedes that the fiesta had been valuable, that it “had broken the spell temporarily,” and blames his loneliness for his pursuit of Venancia, defensively asserting that he had “only pretended to go for Venancia” (Murguía 1990, 117, 118). The only companionship he

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is able to summon are memories of the dead: “He imagined all the ethereal dead waiting for him in the wet garden or buried hills and cemeteries from East Los to Peñas Blancas, and he pictured all the dead he’d known in his life, and he himself fading away like a mural at Palenque” (118). Death, rather than resistance to colonialism and imperialism or revolutionary fervor, now unites the young men from Chicano barrios and those from the Nicaraguan border. Ulises is nonetheless slightly comforted by this community of dead men, and his thoughts turn to an image of hope: the sun that chases away clouds and shines over Managua, the Segovias, and Central America (118– 19). This last image of sunlight spreading over Central America, while suggestive of a brighter future, relies on a literary cliché and seems far removed from the descriptions of transnational solidarity evoked in earlier sections. The image lacks any mention of Chicano-Nicaraguan solidarity and in fact lacks any mention of other people. In Ulises’s experiences so far, war has offered the companionship he needs, and thus it is not surprising that the story ends not with his returning to the United States but rather thinking ahead to the next war. On the temporary relief Ulises felt during the party, Murguía (1990, 117) comments, “That’s what he needed, the camaraderie, the closeness that surviving together gives a group.” Recognizing that what he desires is companionship, and absent the ability to consummate a sexual relationship with a fellow female soldier, Ulises turns toward the last place he has known companionship—the battlefield: “He would put in for a transfer to Managua—that would fix him. And after that, on to El Salvador” (118). Caught in the throes of its own civil war, El Salvador promises only more violence for Ulises. Though he recognizes the road he has chosen will be “hard, long [and] lonely,” he takes comfort in his identity as a soldier and a member of a group fighting for a cause (118). Thinking into the future, long past his own death, Ulises continues to take solace in military-based order and communication: “One day, who knows when, will there be compas to give the last salute to the universe?” (118). In linking himself to the cause of war, Ulises not only alleviates his current loneliness but becomes part of a structure that will endure until the end of the world. Ulises’s vision is somewhat prescient—for Nicaragua, war was hardly over—but as a literary device the specter of endless war is seemingly out of step with stories about a revolution won. While Ulises plays a familiar role—the lone soldier heading off to battle—such a character seems more appropriate for a story of coming war, not one set after the laying down of arms. In “In the South” he had declared confidently that

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the relationship between the anticolonial struggle of Cuauhtemoc and the anti-imperial struggle of Fonseca would be understood in the future (“later”). At the end of the collection, though, that future remains unseen and unimagined. Ulises has begun to rethink his earlier perspective on the lineage of resistance in which he placed himself and to abandon the larger narrative that moved from subordination through resistance to triumph. In the final story Ulises and the collection as a whole recognize that “if the past is a wound, it is one that may not heal” nor “go away by an act of heroic agency” (Scott 2004, 166). Moving away from the sense of inevitable triumph with which the book opened, the tepid image of hope that brings Southern Front to a close fails to resolve either the internal or the external contradictions that have plagued the combatants at the front and instead proposes further warfare as an escape from these conflicts. In Southern Front Murguía creates a fictional world where opposition to U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua provides an opportunity for a Chicano character to distance himself from the U.S. state and express and enact a glocal political affiliation through warfare. The coming together of participatory heterosexuality and participatory warfare in “To the Front” illustrates the extent to which this identity relies on violence and heterosexuality. By introducing issues of race, language, nationality, sexuality, and gender against the backdrop of a life-and-death struggle, Murguía makes the resolution, or at least sublimation, of differences necessary for the survival of the guerrilla army. When war functions as a means of resolution, however, the resolution is both incomplete and decidedly heteropatriarchal. Warfare is unsuccessful at resolving racial, class, and sexual differences, while the physical sacrifices it demands threaten the very existence of the group on whose behalf it is waged. Furthermore, despite their historical participation during the military offensive, female characters do not appear on the battlefield in Southern Front, meaning that they are left out of the scenes of camaraderie and belonging that are so important to Ulises.23 Not only are women confined to nonmilitary stories and scenes, but their presence is almost always negative and disruptive. The lack of resolution with which the collection ends may contain hope for an unwritten future, but the lack of any nonmilitary community for Ulises tempers this hope. Southern Front highlights the ways violence proves doubly inadequate to create or maintain political unity, calling into question a reductive concept of unity, violence as a means with which to achieve unity, and the fruitfulness of relying uncritically on a romantic idea of revolutionary

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struggle. Eschewing theories and practices that would seek the kind of unity Ulises tries but fails to enact, feminists of color such as Chandra Mohanty (2003) and Chela Sandoval (2000) have called instead for the recognition of difference as a basis upon which to build solidarity. Such theorists encourage us to avoid looking exclusively at sexual difference while acknowledging and confronting difference in the service of building broad-based political and social movements.24 Heeding such calls, the following section explores how the filmmakers Lourdes Portillo and Nina Serrano enact differential consciousness in their film Después del Terremoto, in which U.S. support for the Somoza dictatorship likewise prompts a reevaluation of characters’ relationship to the U.S. nationstate. The narrative focuses on individuals who chose to leave Nicaragua and who question the political expediency of the FSLN insurrection, illustrating that characters do not merely exchange one national identification for another. Like Southern Front, Después del Terremoto details how differences in terms of nationality, class, gender, and sexuality must be confronted in order to enact and explore a glocal subjectivity. However, unlike Ulises, the principal protagonists of the film propose a communicative-based paradigm of expressing this subjectivity.

Gender and Revolution In chapter 2 of her memoir, The Country under My Skin, the former FSLN combatant and internationally acclaimed writer Gioconda Belli (2002) offers an explanation of the connections between California and Nicaragua similar to those described by Murguía. Although both Belli and Murguía call on history and politics to sketch the connections between the United States and Nicaragua and both emphasize the role of U.S. military and economic intervention, their histories differ in trajectory and focus. Murguía references U.S. history to explain how he became involved in Nicaraguan politics and the Sandinista insurrection, while Belli’s tale moves in the geographically opposite direction, telling how her Nicaraguan identity and participation in the Sandinista Revolution led her to the United States. In addition Belli’s memoir, like most of her work, places issues of gender and sexuality at the forefront. The narrative opens with the simple, powerful declaration “Two things decided my life: my country and my sex” (ix). With this statement, the author suggests an inextricable, although not uncomplicated, relationship between gender, sexuality, and nation. Belli connects her gender and sexuality not only to her Nicaraguan identity but also to her current

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identity as a resident of the United States, explaining that love facilitated her connection to California through her marriage to a North American reporter, Charles Castaldi. Belli’s opening chapters invite readers to view her life story through the lenses of nation, gender, and sexuality. She thus demands that politics not be separated from identity, and in giving identity the power of origin (“decided”), she insists that both her personal and political trajectory (hers is a “memoir of love and war”) be traced back to her identity. Gender, sexuality, and nationality are not circumstantial addenda to her life’s political activism; they are its very impetus and, in the case of gender and class, its facilitator.25 Belli’s insistence on foregrounding gender and sexuality and their relationship to her political consciousness and revolutionary activism can also be found in her fiction. In her first, best-selling novel, La Mujer Habitada (The Inhabited Woman), she offers a fictionalized version of her life, telling of a young bourgeois woman, Lavinia, who joins a militant organization to overthrow a dictatorship. The novel is notable for its inclusion of long conversations between Lavinia and other characters on the role of women and the continuous presence of machismo within the organization. Belli ends the novel with Lavinia participating in the takeover of the house of General Vela, an action similar to events that occurred in 1978.26 However, Belli diverges from history in making Lavinia’s participation a suicide mission in which the protagonist murders Vela and is killed in the process. Lavinia’s body is sacrificed in the service of the revolution, making her unable to reap the benefits of either the political/military or gender struggle in which she was involved and cutting off armed insurrection as a path to emancipation for her character. In her memoir Belli (2002, 3) similarly hints at the irreconcilable distance between the revolutionary female body and the use of weapons when she describes her disgust with weapons training: “After every shot I would feel a sudden, overwhelming urge to throw down the weapon as if it were on fire, as if my body could only be whole again once I let go of that lethal appendage gripped in my hand and pressed against my shoulder.” While Murguía’s Ulises unites with his weapon in the homoerotic moment of firing/ejaculating, Belli’s body rejects the phallic rifle. The assertion that her body could be “whole” only once it was free of the “appendage” reflects an aversion to violence and a defense of the integrity of the female body. The rifle, along with its bullets, are an unwelcome intrusion on her body, making her use of the weapon as a means to gendered emancipation ironic at best.

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The Country under My Skin and The Inhabited Woman tell stories of activism that insist on the importance of gender and sexuality while calling into question the ability of violence to achieve complete liberation for women. Belli’s perspective can be found in works of her contemporaries in both the United States and Nicaragua. The following analysis of Nina Serrano and Lourdes Portillo’s film Después del Terremoto further examines how female artists and cultural workers evaluated issues of gender, sexuality, class, nation, and violence in light of the anti-Somoza struggle. Concerns with both where and how liberation occurs play out in the film as the characters confirm non-nation-based identities and affiliations while challenging the relationship between war and revolution and inviting readers to imagine alternative possibilities.

Latina-FSLN Solidarity Work Written, directed, and produced by Portillo and Serrano in San Francisco in 1979, Después del Terremoto (After the Earthquake) offers a glimpse into the lives of Nicaraguan immigrants living in the United States.27 The twenty-seven-minute, black-and-white film concentrates on Irene (played by Vilma Coronado), a young woman who lost contact with her fiancé, Julio (Agnelo Guzman), after the 1972 earthquake.28 Irene now lives in San Francisco’s Mission District, surrounded by other Nicaraguan exiles. Her closest friend is Luisa Amanda (Leticia Cortez), the only other woman her age in the film.29 Other characters include extended family and friends, some of whom remain unnamed. The film opens with Irene in her bedroom. A local Spanish-language radio station plays in the background as Irene removes a stack of cash from a drawer and leaves the house. Riding a public bus, viewers see the Mission District through her window, and the phrase “y empezó así” (and so it began) flashes across the screen. Irene takes the bus to a local store and puts a down payment on a television. She then meets Luisa Amanda at her job. Irene and Luisa Amanda talk about Nicaragua, life in the United States, and their romantic lives while walking and then while getting dressed in Irene’s room. The women’s preparations are juxtaposed with those of Julio, who has come to San Francisco and is staying with relatives. Through Julio’s flashbacks and Irene and Luisa Amanda’s conversation, we learn that he was detained and tortured by the Guardia. Irene has not heard from him for years and thinks he is dead, but Luisa Amanda tells her she believes Julio is in exile and cannot return to Nicaragua. All of the film’s characters come together at Doña Mercedes’s birthday

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party, where Irene and Julio are reunited for the first time in three years. Toward the end of the party Julio is asked to show slides from Nicaragua. When the pictures of beautiful landscapes give way to malnourished children and Julio begins to decry the U.S. support that helps keep so many Nicaraguans in poverty, an elderly woman interrupts him, shouting, “Pero no estamos allá, estamos aquí” (But we are not there! We are here!). After the party Julio and Irene begin their own heated discussion regarding their future while walking the streets of the Mission District. The film ends with Irene and Julio deciding to discuss their differences over a cup of coffee, and the phrase “y empezó así” again flashes across the screen. Far from the military front lines of the FSLN, the characters in Después del Terremoto face different struggles than those of Southern Front. Rather than tensions surrounding ethnicity, class, and nationality, the predominantly female characters joke and argue about language fluency, marriage, and appropriate sexual behavior. The distance from Nicaragua and the anti-Somoza struggle is significant as characters attempting to make a new life for themselves in San Francisco argue with those recently arrived about the extent of their involvement in Nicaraguan politics. Most important, these discussions take place alongside one another. When in the final scenes a birthday party prompts jokes about gender relations, political discussions about Nicaragua, and Irene and Julio’s conversation about their future, the inextricability of personal and political concerns and the central role of gender are driven home. Without the urgency of battle, Después del Terremoto presents another panacea: cultural assimilation. Irene continually calls attention to her physical location in the United States, notably through her assertion “But I am here!” Although this exclamation distances her from the machista political rhetoric of Julio, it also brings her closer to what Ana Patricia Rodríguez (2009, 150) calls an “‘undifferentiated’ ethnic Latina position.”30 Irene uses her purchase of the television set to assert her independence from Julio, but in doing so she appears to accept a limited view of independence, in which freedom becomes the freedom to consume. Given the choice of adherence to a masculine revolutionary ideal or Western female emancipation through consumption, Irene seems to choose the latter. However, Luisa Amanda, who continually critiques both sexism and material culture, challenges Irene’s decision. In addition Irene and Julio remain in a state of limbo at the film’s conclusion. The lack of resolution concerning their relationship—coupled with the film’s ending phrase (“and so it began”)—suggests that the two characters

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together may be able to construct a third path, one that can encompass both radical political engagement and glocal feminist consciousness. Después del Terremoto relies on images of movement and containment to highlight differences due to gender, age, and location. For example, Irene and Luisa Amanda are in constant movement, traveling through the Mission District either by bus or foot. Elderly women, on the other hand, are shown exclusively in the domestic space, making tamales and shaking their heads over the young women’s behavior. Static versus still images are also used to differentiate Nicaragua from the United States. Irene’s old photographs of Julio and newspaper clippings of Managua after the earthquake are left behind in the house when she ventures out to purchase a TV. The moving images on the TV screen reflect her “moving on” from her life in Nicaragua. In addition, while the young women enjoy the free exercise of physical and economic independence, Julio’s first appearance in the film is accompanied by flashbacks of his detention by the National Guard. As he sits strapped to a chair, several men who accuse him of being a communist and a guerrilla beat him. Thus Nicaragua is presented as a place of confinement and torture, in contrast to the freedom and mobility found in the United States. Approaches to religion, language, and gender norms also highlight generational differences. Elderly relatives speak exclusively in Spanish, while younger characters such as Luisa Amanda and Irene switch between English and Spanish, and the youngest characters communicate only in English. Older characters are also more religiously and socially conservative. One of Irene’s aunts prays to Saint Anthony to find her niece a “respectable” husband, while the young women display noticeably more blasé attitudes toward marriage and religion. When Irene asks Luisa Amanda what she thinks of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the latter responds bluntly, “Truthfully, not much.” However, Luisa Amanda has strong thoughts concerning marriage, and when the conversation turns to Julio she presents Irene with her options: “And if he wants to get married? What do you get, Irene? A second-hand bedroom set and maybe four kids sleeping in it.” Other scenes show Julio unable to communicate with his young, monolingual cousin and the elderly aunts crossing themselves as Luisa Amanda shouts out, “Liberate the women from the kitchen! Let the men make the tamales!” As the film is set within a discrete ethnic and geographical space but continually calls attention to internal differences, it does not invoke a sense of community “as an ideal of homogeneity or selfsameness” but reminds us that “we must grapple with the differences that constitute community” (Hartman 1997,

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61). While occasionally humorous, the work’s extended attention to the negotiation of such differences presents these issues as sources of conflict that cannot be easily resolved. Irene is the undisputed protagonist of the film, but it is Luisa Amanda who appears to best execute Chela Sandoval’s idea of “differential consciousness,” negotiating differences of age, sex, gender, class, and nationality within a transnational context.31 She warns Irene of the grim future awaiting her in marriage, but she is equally critical of her friend’s seeming propensity to adopt U.S. cultural norms. When Irene tells her she has purchased a TV, Luisa Amanda stops dead in her tracks. “Mira, Irene,” Luisa Amanda confronts her friend, and then switches to English, “nobody needs a color TV, especially you who works six days a week, twelve hours a day. What are you going to do? Put it in your pocket and watch it while you clean?” Irene defends herself, saying she has never had a TV, but Luisa Amanda is distracted by the sight of a young man loitering on the street near them. She grabs the youth by the arm and tells him to go home and do his homework. Her preoccupation with education and her denigration of material culture remain consistent throughout the film. In a later scene she muses, “Maybe [in the United States] we have a bit more food, and other things, but I feel like something is missing.” A few minutes later she continues in the same vein: “Clothes are nice, but there’s more [than] surviving. . . . Go to school, Irene.” Thus in a manner that suggests a third path between Julio’s machista rhetoric and Irene’s desire to enjoy the material things she never had, Luisa Amanda counsels her friend to reject both heteropatriarchal norms and material culture. Irene’s purchase of the television becomes a point of contention for both the film’s characters and its critics. For Rosa Linda Fregoso (1993, 102–3), the purchase is an act of feminist emancipation. Ana Patricia Rodríguez (2009, 149) considers several possibilities, suggesting that the TV may “signify U.S. (cultural) imperialism in Central America . . . [or] immigrant socialization in the United States,” but she concludes that “by the end of the film, for better or for worse, Irene has become a woman with a television set of her own, exhibiting feminine liberation in the form of personal consumption.” This troubling link between capitalist consumption and female emancipation is not lost on the film’s characters, and the TV later becomes the focus of an argument between Julio and Irene. However, before turning to this argument—with which the film ends—I’d like to place the TV in the context of images presented in

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the film. Viewers are initially presented with two kinds of images and ideas: the first group includes the TV, the United States, and freedom as consumption; the second group involves photographs, Nicaragua, and machista revolution. As the film progresses, a third image is introduced: the photographic slide. While composed of still images, the slides continually interact with characters and their bodies, rendering the images mobile through human interaction. This mobility carries over into the ideological realm as slides instigate important confrontations and conversations between characters. In the search for a third path, the slides present not a solution but a means, suggesting the importance of negotiation as opposed to resolution. In the first scene in which Julio appears, his slides prompt a series of questions on behalf of his young cousin, but due to a language barrier the two cannot communicate. The young girl opens Julio’s luggage and removes a slide from his bag; she then wakes him up, asking insistently, “What is it? Tell me what it is.” Julio speaks only Spanish, and he can’t understand his cousin’s English. When he calls out to her mother, asking why her child does not speak Spanish, she replies smartly, “The same reason yours won’t.” Unable to communicate in a language she understands, Julio cannot tell his cousin about the slides, about Nicaragua. When he lapses into a flashback of being beaten by the National Guard, the film suggests that the horrors of Nicaragua cannot be expressed in the United States. While this scene echoes the theme of intergenerational difference that pervades the film, it also introduces the importance of effective communication. Subsequent scenes chart Julio’s attempts to communicate the political situation in Nicaragua in a way that inspires action. Immediately following Julio and his cousin’s impasse, the two characters stumble upon a different kind of interaction in which, despite their mutually unintelligible languages, they are able to communicate. The young girl finds Julio in the bathroom and hands him a hairbrush, saying, “Comb me, please.” Julio responds in Spanish, “You want me to brush your hair?” While assuring her, “But you look fine,” he begins to brush her ponytail. Kneeling, Julio is at eye level with his cousin. She reaches out to touch a scar on his forehead and asks, “What’s this?,” to which he responds in Spanish, “This scar? It’s a souvenir.” Despite his use of Spanish, the young girl appears to understand. Juxtaposed against the previous scene, this interaction focuses on physical-based communication. Although Julio was unable to talk about Nicaragua, when he lowers his body to his cousin’s height, she is able to lay her hands on

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part of what Nicaragua has meant to him: beatings and torture. Here the political reality of Nicaragua is expressed not through rhetoric or lectures but through Julio’s body. Moreover participation in domestic affairs—the intimate, everyday activity of brushing a child’s hair—has engendered this communication. Thus the domestic space has rendered the war translatable. In the penultimate scene of the film, physical interaction within the domestic space again helps make political and personal realities translatable. Midway through the party Julio is asked to show some slides concerning the current situation in Nicaragua. He discusses the dire situation of Nicaragua’s people, accompanied by pictures and statistics concerning poverty, malnutrition, and illiteracy. He then begins to decry the U.S. support for the Somoza dictatorship but is cut off midsentence by an older woman who jumps in front of his slide projector to protest his indictment of the United States: woman: One moment! Get a hold of yourself, young man! So much nonsense! The [Immigration and Naturalization Service] can deport us back to our country.32 julio: But it’s my duty to make you see what’s going on. woman: You’re not going to enlighten us! We already know the corruption of the [Nicaraguan] government. But we are not there! We are here! Julio’s language is reminiscent of male revolutionary vanguardism, but the woman challenges his political authority, assuring him that she does not need to be enlightened by his rhetoric. Instead she suggests that it is he who has something to learn about the situation of exiles in the United States. The woman demands that Julio recognize the different reality for Nicaraguans in San Francisco, a reality that affords them distance from Somoza’s power but proximity to U.S. immigration authorities. As it did for Ulises, U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua drives a wedge between characters and nation-based identities; the older woman refers to Nicaragua as “nuestro país” (our country), but she couples this identity with that of an immigrant living in the United States. In contrast to Southern Front, however, characters and the film as a whole look to other modes of expression to enact their glocal identities. The older character stands up to Julio, and does so by placing her body in front of the projector’s light. She thus disrupts the image, causing it to be displayed on her apron. This physical intervention as well as the precise placement of the image on the woman’s body—the picture falls on the

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lower part of her stomach or womb—demands the inclusion of women and women’s bodies in political movements. Moreover while the image is static, the woman’s body continues to move. After a brief pause she moves again, breaking the too easy conflation of woman with nation. She literally pushes Julio back into his chair, exerting herself as a speaking, acting subject. Just as Julio’s interaction with his young cousin enables her to see his scar, the woman’s disruption of the static image with her body provokes a new kind of conversation in which the experiences of exiles in the United States are not forced to take a back seat to the guerrilla insurrection. As they talk, the woman and Julio reveal that they share a difference of opinion concerning means, not goals. She acknowledges the corruption and injustice endemic in Nicaragua, while he defends his position, arguing that armed struggle is the best path to justice. The common ground discovered through their conversation is different in both form and content from any other introduced in the film thus far. That is, the two characters agree on a shared political stance—the need to eliminate Somoza—rather than a narrow sense of nationalism or identity that, as the film has illustrated, varies greatly according to age, gender, location, and class. Moreover the heated discussion contrasts the political silence pervading both Nicaragua and the United States at the time. While the U.S. government turned a blind eye to human rights abuses under Somoza, Somoza’s regime sharply punished anyone who dared speak out against the government. When Julio and the older woman continue to verbally challenge one another but eventually agree to continue the slide show, they enact a methodology and political praxis in direct contrast to the bloody silence in Nicaragua. The argument between the woman and Julio spurs a conversation between him and Irene over Irene’s purchase of the television set, which Irene uses to mark her independence from Julio and he uses to remind her of her female obligations to others besides herself. The lovers vacillate concerning their possible future together. Julio begins the conversation by saying that “everything has changed” regarding their engagement, and though Irene initially appears hurt by the idea, she later enthusiastically agrees. When a few minutes later Julio timidly asks, “Then, it’s true, we’re not going to get married?,” Irene stridently replies, “Of course not.” However, seeing the pained look on Julio’s face, Irene takes his arm and gently suggests, “Why don’t we drink a cup of coffee and talk about this calmly?” They continue walking down the street, and the film ends with the phrase “y empezó así.”

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In addition to the indeterminate conclusion of their conversation (marriage appears to be off the table, but they haven’t forsaken the idea of a relationship), two aspects of this scene are notable. First, the characters are engaged in movement together. For the first time in the movie, Julio is seen outside the confinement of either a home or a prison, partaking in the mobility that Irene has enjoyed throughout the film. In addition the aimless stroll of lovers reflects a new kind of mobility and freedom in the film. By showing Irene walking with Julio, indeed leading him down the street, the film suggests that she may be able to exercise both independence and political engagement without submitting herself to either U.S. consumption or Nicaraguan nationalism. Second, the characters converse within the heart of San Francisco’s predominantly Latina/o Mission District. The street outside the party is full of people walking, restaurants, and cars. Thus the public space becomes an alternative to either domestic or physical confinement. While the Mission District is and historically has been culturally coded as Latina/o, at the time of the film’s making it was undergoing profound demographic changes, due largely to U.S.-backed violence in Central America and subsequent immigration from Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. In placing the characters in the once Mexican, now Central American Mission District, the film visually enacts the evolving and heterogeneous nature of community that was articulated during the birthday party. As the characters walk, they take their place in the creation of a pluralistic community while explicitly inviting viewers to join this continually evolving social unit. These last two scenes of Después del Terremoto challenge the idea of a cohesive Nicaraguan community and of such a community as existing completely outside of or prior to capitalist processes (Joseph 2002a, 154). When the filmmakers place the principal characters on the streets of the Mission, they emphasize that the conversations that have taken place at the birthday party also take place within a larger, and evolving, context. Despite deconstructing the idea of a discrete Nicaraguan community in united opposition to U.S. imperialism, the film does not foreclose the possibility of continued struggle. The gender issues raised by Irene and Luisa Amanda do not shut down the anti-imperial politics of the other characters and the film as a whole; rather they expand the terrain of political possibility. This expansion is signaled by the last shot of the film, which shows Irene and Julio walking toward the camera, their figures growing larger as they approach the camera and, by extension, us. The question of whether it is possible for Irene to remain a politically engaged actor and an independent woman

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has shifted from if to how, with the film pointing the way through conversation. The repetition of the phrase “y empezó así” cements the idea that the characters are engaged in an act of creation, not termination. What began as a coy allusion to a past that viewers cannot possibly know ends with a reference to a future that is open to interpretation and participation on the part of both the characters and the audience. When Irene and Julio begin a conversation that is as much about their relationship to each other as it is about their relationship to a movement, they engage in a coalitional politics that simultaneously affirms the interconnectedness of the personal and the political and provides a blueprint for a form of nonviolent glocal solidarity. This alternative political and personal praxis relies on what the feminist philosopher María Lugones (2006) terms “complex communication.” According to Lugones, such communication “thrives on recognition of opacity and on reading opacity, not through assimilating the text of others to our own” (84). When Irene and the woman at the party insist that Julio see the difference and distance between their experiences in the United States and the political realities of Nicaragua, they require him and others to recognize this opacity and interrupt any attempts at the reduction or transparency of their lives. Moving their conversation to the streets of the Mission, outside of spaces dominated by the rhetoric of war or the rhetoric of familial responsibility, allows Irene and Julio to recognize each other’s liminality and to embark on a relationship in which they use complex communication “to understand the peculiarities of each other’s resistant ways of living” (84). Después del Terremoto thus moves beyond a critique of masculine revolutionary vanguardism and freedom as consumption to the proposal of an alternative form of transnational solidarity that relies on communication and the recognition of difference.

Summary While the Sandinistas instituted sweeping change throughout Nicaragua and launched highly successful campaigns to combat illiteracy and improve access to health care services, they were considerably less successful at addressing internal ethnic-, class-, and gender-based inequalities. The U.S.-backed Contra War was bolstered by the dissatisfaction of members of indigenous and African-descent communities who responded to long-standing mestizo racism and perceived threats to their autonomy by taking up arms against the Sandinista government. At the same time, FSLN attempts to institute a pluralistic economy, combining private and

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public ownership, alienated members of the upper class, while the appropriation of private estates by FSLN leaders and accusations of corruption contributed to class-based antagonisms. Finally, women who had fought alongside male soldiers in the FSLN ranks found themselves once again relegated to the bedrooms and kitchens and expected to give up political power and sacrifice children and loved ones to the Contra War in defense of the revolution.33 Though the possibility of a direct military confrontation with the United States perhaps left them no choice, the FSLN’s reliance on the threat of war to maintain political cohesion backfired when the party lost the 1990 elections. Her interviews with Nicaraguan women following the elections led Margaret Randall (1992, 57) to conclude, “[Many Nicaraguan women] believe that as the new government fought to survive, ‘women’s issues’ were relegated to a secondary place.” The Sandinistas were apparently stunned by the defeat. War, however, played a decisive role in the elections, as the election of Violeta de Barrios Chamorro’s conservative UNO coalition is widely seen as a desperate vote in favor of peace by Nicaraguans who recognized that only the election of a U.S.-approved government would bring a stop to U.S. aggression against Nicaragua and the cessation of the Contra War.34 The divisive role of the Contra War in Nicaraguan history points to a fundamental contradiction at the heart of calls for revolutionary or national sacrifice. While the comandante in Murguía’s “The Dead Who Never Die” correctly perceives Manuel’s death as a premonition of the difficult days ahead for the Nicaraguan nation, his eulogy doesn’t consider that continuous warfare may in fact fracture the nation it seeks to construct. For Nicaragua, war eventually proved too great a sacrifice for its citizens, and especially for women, peasants, and indigenous communities. Taken together Southern Front and Después del Terremoto reflect how the deep and long-standing involvement of the United States in Central America was matched by enthusiastic and passionate participation of U.S. Latinas/os in Central American solidarity movements and the creation of cultural works that reflected politically engaged ideas and experiences. Grounded in this transnational social movement, both works nonetheless speak to the continued salience of ethnic, gender, sexual, and other differences while presenting two different modes of contending with such difference and articulating a glocal perspective. Murguía’s stories offer armed conflict as a space where characters attempt to sublimate differences in order to express non-nation-based identities and affinities. Después del Terremoto’s portrayal of the life of Nicaraguan immigrants in the United

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States depicts differences due to gender, age, class, and nationality far removed from revolution and at the same time suggests that an alternative path exists between masculinist revolutionary engagement and Western consumption as liberation. Most important, both works share a commitment to the liberatory possibilities of art. When Julio’s slide show provokes an important exchange between him and other characters, the filmmakers point to art’s ability to stir up emotions and actions. According to Murguía, “Part of our responsibility as writers and as poets and artists and intellectuals is to be aware of what goes on [in Latin America] and have an opinion on it, even if you don’t participate to at least understand why these things happen” (personal interview). Serrano’s story about how Dalton encouraged her political activism confirms the importance of the artistic and political exchanges to which Murguía refers. Interactions with Central American poets played significant roles in the transformation and activism of Murguía, Portillo, Serrano, and Belli; thus we would do well to look at the works of these artists as models of radical political engagement that rely on collaboration, imagination, and exchange rather than violence, domination, and sublimation. Continuing this exploration of collaboration in the realm of polyphony, the next chapter examines how Latina/o narratives that engage with U.S. military intervention in Guatemala present polyvocal narration as a methodology for nonviolent glocal political praxis.

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“I Have Something to Tell You”: Polyvocality, Theater, and the Performance of Solidarity in U.S. Latina Narratives of the Guatemalan Civil War We seek interlocutors, not admirers; we offer dialogue, not spectacle. Our writing is informed by a desire to make contact, so that readers may become involved with words that came to us from them, and that return to them as hope and prophecy. —Eduardo Galeano, “In Defense of the Word”

When U.S. media outlets sought to tell the life story of one of the first casualties of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, they found themselves on the streets of Guatemala City, immersed in the reality of a nation still recovering from over thirty years of civil war. José Antonio Gutiérrez, a lance corporal in the U.S. Marines, was killed on March 21, 2003, in Iraq. The paradoxes inherent in Gutiérrez’s life and his relationship to U.S. militarism are stark: orphaned during a genocidal U.S.-backed civil war in Guatemala, the young boy’s few opportunities included immigrating to the United States and joining the Marines. A “green card soldier,” he was granted U.S. citizenship posthumously. While it would not be overly cynical to brush aside Gutiérrez’s U.S. citizenship and remember him as a Guatemalan victim of U.S. imperialism, to do so would overlook the more complicated ways that U.S. military policy affects U.S. ethnic minorities and immigrants. When Gutiérrez joined the ranks of the U.S. Armed Forces, he did so as an immigrant and as a U.S. Latino and a member of several groups (immigrants, young men of color, workingclass youth) targeted for recruitment. Examining his life and death within these multiple contexts allows us to acknowledge that U.S. militarism can and does impact Latinas/os in ways that involve transnational and national processes simultaneously. Just as we can read Gutiérrez as both a Guatemalan immigrant and a U.S. Latino, we would do well to understand him as one of the first casualties of one invasion and as a recent casualty in a longer conflict. Gutiérrez’s story highlights how U.S. military intervention in Guatemala continues to reverberate in the lives

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and on the bodies of U.S. Latinas/os and Guatemalans. Because of this, his history can be told by invoking several different narrative techniques: we can read him as a victim of U.S. imperialism and as a heroic defender of the American Dream. This chapter is largely concerned with the stories we tell about these intimate and intricate violences in Guatemala and their reverberations more broadly. Focusing on narrative intervention, I examine the use of polyvocality in texts that confront the history and legacy of U.S. military intervention in Guatemala. I begin by offering a brief introduction to U.S. involvement in that country, dating from the CIA-backed coup of 1954, to set the stage for my analysis of two texts, Sr. Dianna Ortiz’s (2002) The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth and Ana Castillo’s (2005) Psst . . . I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor.1 I highlight how Ortiz’s memoir meticulously details the relationship between language and torture, noting how the detainee’s voice is utilized in torture and how gender and Western notions of the individual voice contribute to these uses. I then look at how Ortiz positions herself in relation to state power, setting up an axis of affinity such that her refutation of a firstperson narrative parallels her refutation of a nation-based identity and social and political orientation. Several passages from her text serve as exemplars of how the survivor utilizes polyvocality to position herself as a glocal antitorture activist. Turning to Castillo’s plays, I explore how the dramatic pieces mimic and strengthen Ortiz’s polyvocality. Examining Castillo’s plays in light of both polyvocality and performance, I consider how the dramatic works engage in what Tiffany Ana López (2003) terms “critical witnessing” and suggest that the texts contest Western notions of truth, highlighting the gendered and racialized basis of this concept. I end by arguing for the importance of polyvocality and performance as feminist praxis in talking about and contesting state-backed violence.

Guatemala and the United States The unstable political situation into which José Antonio Gutiérrez was born in the early 1980s had roots in events fifty years earlier, when the CIA-backed coup of 1954 marked both a new era of overt U.S. intervention in the affairs of foreign countries and the start of the Guatemalan Civil War, which raged until 1996. When Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was elected in 1951 he became the second democratically elected president in the history of Guatemala. Three years later, when he was overthrown by a coalition of businessmen and politicians that included the president

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of the United Fruit Company (Sam Zemmuray), U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA chief Allen Dulles (John’s brother), and President Dwight Eisenhower, Árbenz became the second democratically elected foreign leader to be overthrown by a CIA coup. The first such coup had taken place just one year earlier, when U.S. and British operatives joined forces to take down Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran. The deposition of Árbenz and Mossadegh established a pattern in the U.S. approach to the Middle East and Central America that continued throughout the late twentieth century.2 Árbenz’s role in Guatemalan politics had begun in 1944, when a group of young liberal officers overthrew President Juan Federico Ponce Vaides. Known as the October Revolution, the coup brought to power a military junta—consisting of Árbenz, Francisco Javier Arana, and Jorge Toriello Garrido—who ruled briefly until the country’s first democratic presidential elections brought Juan José Arévalo to power. Arévalo served until 1951, when he was succeeded by Árbenz. Citing his refusal to bar communists from his government and his implementation of significant land reforms, the United States labeled Árbenz a communist threat and recruited a Guatemalan dissident, Carlos Castillo Armas, to lead a coup against him.3 Once Armas came to power, Guatemala would not know effective democratic leaders until the end of the twentieth century. Even when civilians such as Julio Cesar Méndez Montenegro and Vinicio Cerezo were elected, their mandate was controlled by the army. Throughout this period the United States contributed directly to the repressive forces that ruled the country. When not sending in troops, the United States supported ruthless leaders and brutal “counterinsurgency campaigns” that at times had as their stated objective the murder of innocents.4 As in Nicaragua, a robust solidarity network opposed to U.S. intervention in the region mirrored the close relationship between U.S. and Guatemalan military and security forces. And like their Guatemalan counterparts, U.S activists confronted state-backed violence on multiple levels. The case of Sr. Dianna Ortiz, a U.S. nun abducted by Guatemalan forces in 1989, highlights how issues of violence, military intervention, and solidarity render clear demarcations of national identity or boundaries impossible in this context. Ortiz’s testimonio, The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, and Ana Castillo’s plays based on Ortiz’s experience, Psst . . . I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor, illustrate how U.S. Latina/o authors and activists continue to search for adequate ways to speak about and confront the history of U.S. intervention in Guatemala and its repercussions for U.S. Latinas/os. Both texts

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utilize polyvocal and performative speech that reflects multiple subject positions to express the dislocation of the individual subject from the national context and to enact a glocal political position and antitorture agenda. While valuable as texts that bring to light an often ignored history, both works also make important interventions into literary and political discourses. Examining their contextual and literary elements allows us to consider how the transformation of a work of testimonial literature into drama encourages new considerations of both literary genres and their impact as social and artistic commentaries. Specifically the use of polyvocality in the plays reflects the community-based narrator that is central to the testimonial text, emphasizing the ability to read dramatic works as forms of testmionio. Furthermore a key function of testimonio—the demonstration of concientización and the urging of action on the part of the readers or viewers—is similarly evident in Castillo’s work, suggesting a new purpose and urgency for dramatic works. Reading Ortiz’s memoir alongside Castillo’s play allows us to recognize the performative aspects of testimonio. The dramatic pieces thus bring attention to performance as an important but often overlooked facet of testimonio.

Ortiz While serving as a missionary in Guatemala, Sr. Dianna Ortiz was abducted and held in a secret prison for two days, where she was tortured and raped.5 A controversial aspect of her story is her insistence that a North American was involved in her abduction. This man, whom she knew only as Alejandro, was present at different points during her detention and eventually offered to deliver her to the U.S. embassy, assuring her that her detention had been a case of mistaken identity. Distrustful of this man and anyone he knew, Ortiz jumped from his vehicle while it was stopped at a busy intersection in Guatemala City and escaped. Once in the United States, she began a long and painful process of recovery. Her work for justice has included courtroom trials and testimonies in both the United States and Guatemala and fasts in front of the White House. She founded and was the first director of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International. In Ortiz’s discussion of her experiences during and after her abduction she confronts the radical pitfalls and potentials of language in both its life-destroying and life-creating possibilities. Her memories of her detention illustrate the use of torture to fundamentally alter the

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detainee’s relationship to language. Words—her own—become manipulated by her torturers. She remembers: They’ve taken my sweatshirt off and are explaining the rules. We’re going to ask you some questions. If you give an answer we like, we’ll let you smoke. If we don’t like the answer, we’ll burn you.” “The rules are unfair,” I venture. They burn me. (Ortiz 2002, 37) Elaine Scarry (1987, 20) suggests that instances such as this one illustrate the “language-destroying capacity” of interrogation, “the purpose of which is not to elicit needed information but visibly to deconstruct the prisoner’s voice.” Scarry notes that it is not the prisoner’s voice that is destroyed, but language. In Ortiz’s torture, language was destroyed through the interruption (deconstruction) of the relationship between voice, language, and communication. She could not communicate with her torturers. No process of speaking and listening existed; her torturers did not hear her words but rather responded to her voice as an excuse to continue the torture. The deconstruction and appropriation of the detainee’s voice contributes to the individual’s subordination and to the power of the torturing regime. A survivor explains that such appropriation means that victims’ speech is used against them and “translated into the power that [destroys] them” (qtd. in Treacy 1996, 132). The agents of torture literally take over a detainee’s language. In the case of Ortiz and other torture survivors, “whatever was said, the regime was speaking. Whatever response the victims managed to articulate was subordinated before it was uttered” (132). Moreover freedom from captivity does not necessarily alter the relationship between the victim’s voice and those in power. For Ortiz, the words of the torturers continued to haunt her as they were echoed by other state agents, U.S. and Guatemalan. For example, despite the record of her family doctor, which noted 111 cigarette burns on her back, Guatemalan and U.S. authorities suggested that her wounds were self-inflicted or results from a fight with a lover (Ortiz 2005, 35, 41). Ignoring her status as a celibate nun, the authorities imposed a marginalized identity—that of a lesbian—upon her and relied on homophobia to denigrate and discredit her. Notably, this denigration happened through language, through a discursive violence that furthered the physical and psychological violence she had already endured. As in her experiences of torture, in which her voice was used as an excuse to continue

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her abuse, Ortiz found that her testimony was appropriated by the state to discredit her and throw doubt on her story. Though her words were distorted to silence both her experiences and her identity, she later reclaimed her voice to enact her own subjectivity as a woman, a survivor, and an antitorture activist. As a result of her experiences Ortiz loses both the ability to express herself fully through language as well as her understanding of language as a vehicle to communicate anything other than pain and degradation. She explains, “When my memory was wiped away, chunks of my vocabulary went with it. Trauma does that sometimes. . . . My only real vocabulary was composed of the only vivid memories I had: being burned, being raped, being tortured. . . . The language of this world, in which some things are harmless, in which words are used to connect one person to another, for communication, not for degradation, this language was foreign and new” (Ortiz 2005, 61). Her “vivid memories” are contrasted to the general reference to “being tortured”; her refusal to name specific memories at this juncture is indicative of her damaged relationship to language and her attempt to repair this relationship. By failing to identify specific memories of torture while acknowledging the multiple ways language can be used, she begins to verbally wrest her experience away from her torturers. She alludes to the destructive and productive aspects of language as she acknowledges that beyond the world of her torture, language may be harmless or productive, even as she continues to narrate how long it would take for her to experience those uses. Throughout her recovery language continues to be punishing and painful. Attempting to express herself through images, Ortiz turns to drawing and at one point shows her psychiatrist, Dr. Snodgrass, a picture of the pit into which she was lowered, a hole filled with other dead and dying victims of torture. The doctor barely responds to the drawing. Ortiz (2005, 66) later learns that he wrote in his medical records that she described being “thrown into a ‘pit’ with other alleged dead bodies.” The psychiatrist’s use of quotation marks and skeptical qualifiers (“alleged”) to describe Ortiz’s torture display his inability to hear or believe her story. The doctor also refuses to name Ortiz’s experience as torture, referring to it instead as “abuse” (65). Moreover, as she did with Guatemalan and U.S. officials, Ortiz continues to occupy a disempowered position in relation to men, illustrating how sexual violence against women during war extends and reflects the relationship between women and patriarchal state power during times of peace.

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The inability of others to acknowledge Ortiz’s experiences points to the failure of language and the loss of the speaker’s authority, a loss highlighted when Guatemalan and U.S. officials regard her story as suspicious and question its veracity both publicly and privately. Guatemalan defense minister Héctor Gramajo tells an Americas Watch investigator that Ortiz’s case was one of “self-kidnapping,” that she had not been abducted but instead had gone to meet a lesbian lover. Her bruises, he claims, were the result of a “lovers’ spat” (Ortiz 2005, 41). Later, U.S. political affairs officer Lew Anselem complains of “lesbian nuns coming down to Guatemala” (45–46). The eerie echo of Gramajo’s words by Anselem calls into question the independence of their respective investigations and also confirms what Ortiz’s torturers told her: “If you live to tell about this, if you somehow manage to survive, no one will believe you” (39). The torturers’ prediction of Ortiz’s future exhibits their appropriation of the power of narrative. As James Thompson (2004, 151) points out, “The use of stories in war is a strategy of those who aim to end conflicts as well those who hope to maintain them.” In her early interactions with U.S. and Guatemalan officials, Ortiz is confronted with the loss of her authority, the inability of her voice to communicate her experiences, and the apparent accuracy of her torturers’ version of events and rendering of her as a sexualized menace. The deployment of misogyny and homophobia by Anselem and others in relation to the investigation is a continuation of the violence that Ortiz experienced at the hands of her captors and indicates the extent to which her status as a nun played a part in her experiences both inside and outside of Guatemala. Judith M. Bennett (2000, 9) uses the term lesbian-like to name women, including nuns, whose lives offered them the opportunity to nurture, support, and love other women and “resisted norms of feminine behavior based on heterosexual marriage.” Ortiz’s status as a nun placed her beyond the bounds of heteronormativity, a location that rendered her violable by agents of torture as well as government agents charged with her protection. Anselem’s comment, then, is an expression of frustration regarding a woman whose social, religious, and sexual choices position her outside the control of heteronormativity. His words are also a reflection of his attempt to reassert control by denying Ortiz the protection of a proper state investigation into the crimes committed against her. The accusation of lesbianism reveals the strategic use of misogyny and homophobia to continually silence the survivor, while

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the repetition of the charge by both Gramajo and Anselem suggests formal collusion between the two governments and speaks to the pervasive misogyny and homophobia at the heart of both nations. When her speech—the only thing she can use to fight back against her torturers—becomes misappropriated in a manner reminiscent of her days in the torture chamber, Ortiz encounters a central problem for the storyteller or narrator: the loss of narrative authority. According to Ross Chambers (1984, 50–51), “To the extent that the act of narration is a process of disclosure . . . the narrator gives up the basis of his or her authority in the very act of exercising it.” Ortiz feels revictimized when she testifies about her torture because the act of testifying becomes one in which she has little control over either the process or the results. In this way testifying before an unfriendly court becomes similar to her torture during which she had no control over what happened to her. Moreover the nun blames herself for any “decisions” she made while being kidnapped, tortured, and interrogated: “I let myself be interrogated, just as I walked with the Guateman and José out of that garden without screaming,” she recounts, comparing the Guatemalan court’s insistence that she submit a new affidavit with the morning she was kidnapped from the garden of the Posada de Belén (Ortiz 2005, 153). The loss of speech and the degradation of communities are explicit and related goals of torture. Indeed perpetrators target women engaged in advocacy work both because of their sex (and oftentimes ethnicity) and for “the public nature of their . . . actions: for their assumption of a voice” (Matthews 1998, 188). As Ortiz (2005, 80) discovers, without an effective voice, she cannot continue her work in Guatemala: “Torture is calculated to destroy trust and the ability to communicate; in an atmosphere of mistrust and silence, organizing becomes impossible.” The breakdown of communication is key in this goal; individuals who are too afraid to speak cannot possibly hope to mount effective actions. Thus one facet of overcoming trauma from torture is not only communication but communication that leads to action. Ortiz’s text plays an important role in this action; testimonialista Alicia Partnoy (2009, 16–17) affirms, “To tell might be useless if it does not help to stop the violence, put an end to impunity, and protect the dignity of victims.” Accordingly Ortiz strategically joins her voice with others’ in explicit calls for justice. The communicative impasse between Ortiz and Gramajo, Anselem, and Snodgrass demonstrates the extreme difficulty in communicating

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pain. Scarry (1987, 4) notes that pain is unshareable, and its unshareability is ensured by its resistance to articulation in language. Nevertheless Scarry and Ortiz, as well as critics of human rights narratives, affirm the importance of communicating pain as well as the key role language plays in seeking the help of others in campaigns to put an end to torture. Scarry (1987, 9) writes that “the act of verbally expressing pain is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain,” while Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith (2004, 3) note that human rights discourses rely on “narratability,” the testimony of witnesses that “brings into play, implicitly or explicitly, a rights claim.” Ortiz’s testimonio illustrates that, despite her speech being manipulated by her torturers and those in power, speaking is her only hope for herself and others. This understanding is displayed in her continual reference to the case of two of her friends, Rosa and Miguel. During her abduction Ortiz was repeatedly questioned about Rosa and Miguel, but after her release she was too frightened to warn them that they were in danger. She recalls, “I didn’t say anything to anyone. . . . After Miguel’s disappearance, I didn’t warn Rosa that the torturers had asked about her. . . . I wanted to confess . . . but I wanted even more to protect myself. . . . So, like the Guatemalan government, I kept quiet about my role” (Ortiz 2005, 211–12). Ortiz’s understanding of the power of words shifts here. She begins to see herself as a perpetrator of the same kind of discursive violence enacted by Snodgrass and Anselem. Aligning herself, because of her silence, with those responsible for her torture, she nonetheless recognizes the importance of speaking and equates silence with complicity. Even more significant than the shift in Ortiz’s relation to language is the relationship developed between the “I” and the nation-state illustrated in the passage above. Ortiz repeats the word I frequently, making clear to the reader the role that she (thinks she) played in the continued danger of her friends. After explicitly linking herself to multiple instances of complicity (“I didn’t say . . . I didn’t want . . . I wanted to confess”), she compares herself to “the Guatemalan government.” When she does so she creates a parallel between the individual actor complicit in torture and disappearance and a national entity. With this parallel Ortiz links the use of the individual voice to state purveyors of violence and sets the stage for her use of multiple voices to mount a transnational political and rhetorical project against torture.

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Polyvocality in Ortiz If you live to tell about this, if you somehow manage to survive, no one will believe you. —Dianna Ortiz, The Blindfold’s Eyes My friend Ana Castillo has written a play about us. —Dianna Ortiz, preface to Ana Castillo, Psst . . . I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor

In its usage here polyvocality refers to both the use of multiple voices—several characters or narrators—to reflect singular and/or collective experiences as well as the use of a singular voice to reflect collective subject locations. The first epigraph enacts this first definition in that Ortiz appropriates the voice of her torturers and joins it with her own in the larger context of her narrative to reference her specific experiences of torture as well as the experiences of others. The “you” of the quote remains undefined; while it was originally spoken in the context of her own abduction, its reproduction in her memoir brings the words of the torturers into a larger context of torture worldwide. When Ortiz repeats the sentence within The Blindfold’s Eyes she uses polyvocality to invoke multiple torturers, victims, and survivors. The second epigraph is emblematic of the second definition of polyvocality, as Ortiz speaks from a singular subject position to invoke multiple identities and experiences. The reference remains specific and does not involve the collapsing of identity; Ortiz marks her own location when she names Castillo “my friend.” At the same time, the “us” to whom she refers is not an undefined group. The polyvocal utterance brings forth multiple persons as well as multiple contexts, as the “us” includes victims and survivors of torture: the living and the dead. Thus Ortiz enacts polyvocality as a “conduit” through which to call forth multiple individuals without collapsing her identity into theirs even while she uses her individual identity (“my”) to reference “past or future contexts of time, place, and person” (Washington 2012, 159–60). The first definition is found in specific passages in both texts, while the second is identified most readily in the process through which each work was produced. As a testimonio, Ortiz’s work invokes the second description of polyvocality. While the memoir is written mostly from the perspective of a singular “I,” Ortiz cowrote it with Patricia Davis and structures her narrative in such a way that she insists on narrating a collective experience.6 In the words of the Latina Feminist Group (2001, 13), texts such as Ortiz’s

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reflect “an effort by the disenfranchised to assert themselves as political subjects through others, often outsiders, and in the process to emphasize particular aspects of their collective identity.” The Blindfold’s Eyes is not merely the story of one person’s triumphs over obstacles; it includes “an affirmation of the individual subject . . . in connection with a group or class situation marked by marginalization, oppression and struggle” and “signifies the need for a general social change in which the stability of the reader’s world must be brought into question” (Beverley 1996, 35–36). The collaborative nature of the work indicates how Ortiz seeks to bear witness and enlist others into a collective project: a global movement against torture and impunity. Unable to reconcile her identity as a torture survivor with the U.S. government’s idea of her as a confused, troubled woman, Ortiz turns to polyvocality within the text as well. Invited to a conference on torture in Guatemala held in Washington, D.C., she declines to give the keynote but eventually addresses the attendees. In her memoir she recalls that she was coaxed out of her reticence to speak by an indigenous pastor who insisted on the value of survivors’ stories, explaining that the world has so little access to such testimonies (Ortiz 2005, 187). Accordingly Ortiz spoke not only for herself. As she said, “What I would like to share with you this afternoon . . . is based not only on my personal experience of torture, but on the experiences of other survivors of torture. I stand here before you, not as an individual, but as one of them. . . . We’re here to say to all the Ríos Montts and all the Gramajos of the world, No matter how many times you have slashed our throats and thrown our bodies into ravines to be eaten by vultures, no matter how many times you have beaten and burned us with cigarettes, no matter how many times you have humiliated us in every conceivable way, we are alive” (190–92). The invocation of a collective “we” reflects a political and literary intervention into practices of state-backed violence and human rights discourses. The plural subject position refutes the attempted destruction of individual lives and larger communities but also insists on collective accountability and action. The repetition of this subject—through the pronouns our, we, and us—also suggests that Ortiz’s demands move beyond a liberal rights-based discourse that enacts human rights claims at the level of the individual. In fact her speech invokes multiple (named) perpetrators of violence as well as multiple survivors and antitorture activists. Her use of the collective “we” reflects and enacts polyvocality. Her words are strengthened by the rhetorical presence of others while she simultaneously asks listeners to align themselves with torture survivors and join a political movement to end torture.

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In a moving story about translating for the father of a fellow torture survivor from Guatemala, Ortiz (2005, 138) herself functions as both a speaker and a listener: When Julio would try to speak with people at Su Casa [a rehabilitative center for survivors of torture in Chicago where Ortiz lived and worked for a time] about what had happened to him, he would simply say, “Julio . . . torture,” and lift his shirt to show some of the scars. His father, who came to Su Casa later, was asked to speak at a university in Chicago. He kept repeating, “I am Joaquín Chualcu Ben, the father of Julio Chualcu Ben. My son was tortured.” I was asked to translate, and Joaquín kept repeating the same thing, ten times at least. After the third or fourth time I asked, “Do you want me to say that again?” And yes, he wanted me to repeat it. Some of the people in the audience later told me I should have said something else. “How could I have said something else?” I answered. . . . And no one left that room without knowing his name and his son’s name, and without knowing that his son was tortured. Chualcu Ben’s awkward repetition and failure to meet the audience’s expectations for how the father of a torture survivor should narrate his experiences places a distance between him and the audience. Because he is not testifying as the audience members would, they cannot identify closely with him; they cannot easily place themselves in his position. Consequently they are forced to recognize the difference between themselves and Chualcu Ben. This recognition of difference has the ability to both preserve cultural respect and create political alliances. Forced as they are to recognize his difference—as both an indigenous man and a survivor of genocidal practices—the audience is moved to occupy what Doris Sommer (1991, 36) calls a “distance [that is] akin to respect.” This distance—which protects Chualcu Ben from any (further) attempts by Westerners to appropriate indigenous experiences and identities—removes from the audience the option of simple substitution (“they” can never be “he”) and instead opens up a greater possible field of coalitional politics and solidarity. Sommer’s analysis of the political possibilities engendered by the opaque testimonial holds true: once the reader or listener confronts the impossibility of taking the place of the speaker, “the map of possible identifications through the text spreads out laterally. Once the subject of the testimonial is understood as the community made up of a variety of roles, the reader is called in to fill one of them” (44). Following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Sommer

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contends that the political possibilities inherent in such an approach push audiences into a scenario in which they must recognize the possibility of “several simultaneous points of activity” and the acknowledgment “that politics is not necessarily a top-down heroic venture” (44). In many ways the effective distance that Chualcu Ben seeks to put between the audience and himself can be contrasted with Ortiz’s own testimonial experiences. The amount of ridicule and rancor that her testimony received came about in part because officials sought to too easily identify with her singular identity and thus assumed the prerogative to criticize and disbelieve the individual experiences she had and choices she made. When Chualcu Ben removes from the audience any possibility of close identification or usurpation, he similarly removes from them the ability to judge his own choices and practices, instead forcing them to consider their own complicity in torture and to act on it. The father’s inability to say anything beyond stating the fact of his son’s torture becomes a metaphor for the loss that torture entails, while Ortiz’s refusal to intervene in his narrative illustrates her support of his voice and his experiences and mimics for the audience the act of forming a “solidarity pact” with a survivor (Partnoy 2009, 19). Ortiz’s joining of her own voice with that of others also involves her engagement with what José Muñoz (1999, 4) terms “disidentification”: “Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.” This concept aptly describes Ortiz’s rejection of her placement in relation to state forces. In their interactions with Ortiz, men such as Gramajo and Anselem script her into a particular “cultural text”; they transform her from a survivor of horrific violence into a lying, lascivious, lesbian nun. Rather than trying to respond within the confines of the text into which she has been written—a text reliant on her status as an individual woman of color in relationship to state apparatuses—Ortiz disidentifies with the state’s perception of her.7 She “scrambles and recodes” the given cultural text by engaging with the experiences of other torture survivors to fashion the identity of survivor and antitorture activist (Muñoz 1999, 9). Government officials such as Gramajo and Anselem present Ortiz as a troubled and confused woman who underwent an experience that is both singular and unknowable. She rejects this identity; moreover when she speaks on behalf of torture survivors around the world, she displays

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the extent to which she is rejecting the identity of a normative U.S. citizen-subject and embracing not merely the identity but the work of a glocal subject, fulfilling Muñoz’s understanding of how disidentification “enables politics” (9). In addition both Ortiz’s and Chualcu Ben’s speeches enact an affective intervention into discourses of torture and confession that challenge normative ideas about truth and the performance of ethnicity. This affective performance mirrors and enacts a nonnormative (and nonwhite) subjectivity and citizenship. As Muñoz (2000, 69) explains, the United States has an “unofficial, but no less powerfully entrenched, national affect.” The repetition of the sentences quoted above (“I am Joaquín Chualcu Ben, the father of Julio Chualcu Ben. My son was tortured.”) illustrate an excess of affect that stands in contrast to both the measured words of the torturers and the expectations of the North American audience. In their failure to perform “racial normativity” and U.S. national affect, Ortiz and Chualcu Ben also contest majoritarian concepts of truth (68). That is, the performance of excessive brown affect through the use of repetition takes on a “cultural logic” in the United States that constitutes an “affective code that positions itself as the law” (69). Thus when Ortiz fails to perform in a way that can be read affectively as white—when the excess of her emotions and testimony cannot be assimilated into a logic of whiteness—she is necessarily positioned outside whiteness and its attendant powers: the recognition of truth and national belonging. As Ortiz’s response to the audience illustrates, she does not try to perform in a way that enables recognition by white regimes of power. Instead she uses polyvocality to disidentify and manifest a brown affect; she joins her voice with Chualcu Ben’s to contest expectations and assumptions about the “proper” way to express one’s experience and identity. When this strategy is used in the work of Ana Castillo, we can see how Ortiz’s work extends horizontally to involve others in the enactment of nonwhite, nonnormative, and non-nation-bound practices. Participating in public conversations about the experiences of torture survivors, Ortiz affirms the continued existence of a community of survivors in a way meant to spur action by listeners. She simultaneously validates the power of speaking pain aloud and emphasizes the incompatibility of speaking and pain. When one brings “pain into the world by objectifying it in language,” Scarry (1987, 51) argues, one of the two— pain or language, is destroyed. In Ortiz’s case the objectification and articulation of pain through language—processes she enacts through her writing and activities—leads to the diminishment and destruction

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of pain (51). At the same time, and as a direct result of the necessity of involving others in the attempt to articulate pain, Ortiz underscores the collective nature of both oppression and healing. In enlisting the solidarity of others she acts on the knowledge that “neither problems nor solutions solely originate with the individual” (Torres 2003, 39). Addressing torturers domestically and worldwide, Ortiz uses polyvocal speech to overcome the loss of linguistic authority she and other torture survivors face and to model a collective political project. While Ortiz’s speeches illustrate how she speaks from a collective position to talk about her own experiences of torture as well as the experiences of others, her discussion of a particularly gruesome aspect of her torture illustrates the memoir’s reliance on both forms of polyvocality defined earlier. During her torture Ortiz was forced to stab a female Guatemalan detainee repeatedly with a machete. The torturers filmed her action and threatened her with the release of the videotapes should she ever speak of what happened. Ortiz was convinced that her torturers would alter the video in a way that obscured the manipulation of her arms by the torturers, thus making her out to be a murderer. The nun never knew the other woman’s name and refers to her throughout The Blindfold’s Eyes as “the Woman.” Although her role in the torture of the Woman continued to haunt her, Ortiz nonetheless relied on her memories of this other woman. She tells readers that she started bringing the Woman with her to therapy: “Bringing her to therapy was my way of conveying to her that not knowing her name didn’t keep me from remembering her and all she had suffered. She was and continues to be a part of me” (Ortiz 2005, 124). Moreover at several points Ortiz specifically calls forth the Woman’s voice and imagines what the Woman would say to her (87, 124). Ortiz uses the rhetorical presence of the Woman to discuss the torture they underwent as well as to move forward with her own process of speaking and healing. She relies on polyvocality by summoning a second voice, the Woman’s, to speak of her own torture and by speaking from a singular perspective to reflect a shared experience. Importantly Ortiz’s use of polyvocality here furthers a glocal position because she refuses to forget specific differences (of nationality and ethnicity, for example) even while she seeks to be a part of a global movement. Despite her claim that she carries part of the Woman with her, Ortiz never collapses her experience or identity with that of the Woman’s. She agonizes over not asking the Woman to repeat her name: “If only I had, I could have tried to find her family. I could have told them about the daughter, the mother, the sister they had been separated from” (123). In naming the relationship

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between the other torture victim and her family (“daughter,” “sister,” “mother”), Ortiz recognizes a distinct distance between herself and the Woman; she does not subsume the Woman’s identity and experiences into her own. Finally, Ortiz’s ability to communicate her pain and the pain of the Woman is evidenced by the significant role that she takes in Castillo’s plays. With the publication and performance of Psst . . . I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor, Ortiz and Castillo display the ability of torture survivors to communicate their pain to others and the role of creative expression in the quest for justice.

Polyvocality in Castillo Chicana poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist Ana Castillo stages Ortiz’s story in two short plays, published together in 2005 as Psst . . . I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor. Castillo’s plays reflect a collaborative process indirectly, as they are based on Ortiz’s memoir, and directly, as they incorporate the nun’s words in the preface.8 Moreover the plays contain multiple instances of characters speaking together to tell the nun’s story. Viewers and readers see a process of collective storytelling and bearing witness unfold on the stage before them. Castillo’s plays thus both engage in and model polyvocality. In taking up the nun’s story, Castillo explicitly validates Ortiz’s experiences in a way that government officials and even therapists had failed to do. The plays accomplish several feats: first, they transmit Ortiz’s story to a larger audience through international performances (the first play was originally performed in Chicago, the second in Mexico City). Second, they grant the Woman a significant role, allowing the character to speak for herself and, at times, even struggle alongside Ortiz against the torturers. In these plays the Woman is known as the Friend. This shift in designation retains the anonymity of the woman—thereby emphasizing the vulnerability of all people to torture—while more firmly placing her in relation to Ortiz’s character. Third, the plays affirm that Ortiz’s voice has been heard and that her story will be told. As Scarry (1987, 9) explains, in order for human rights campaigns to be successful, listeners must not only hear but also be encouraged to participate in active resistance against torture. Mi Amor relies on the interaction between Sr. Dianna and the Friend to affirm the importance of polyvocality as a means to speak against injustice, while the writing and publication of the plays involve the playwright herself in this process of communication. Just as Sr. Dianna attempts to join her voice with the Friend in order to honor

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that woman’s memory and testify about her torture, Ortiz and Castillo join their voices in a struggle against agents of torture worldwide. The first version of the play, a two-women, one-act play performed initially at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2003, weaves together several voices to tell the story of Sr. Dianna and the Friend. One actress plays Sr. Dianna; a second, called the Other, takes on multiple roles, including the Friend, Ursuline nuns, and an anonymous newspaper reporter. Although the speaker of each passage is clearly delineated, the voices blend into one another. When Sr. Dianna narrates how she was tortured along with the Friend, the second actress (as the Friend) picks up where Sr. Dianna leaves off. Sr. Dianna says, “I went and put my arms around her. Until they came back and . . . ,” and her Friend picks up the thread: “ . . . took us outside, naked, burned, violated from body to soul” (Castillo 2005, 12–13). Here both women together narrate the torture that they underwent. Although the entire play works in a similar fashion—with one character continuing the other’s sentence—in this instance the joining of voices is particularly important because the characters are talking about the torture they underwent together. The significance is twofold: first, the two voices validate one another; whereas Sr. Dianna’s story was repeatedly questioned and regarded with suspicion, remaining uncorroborated by anyone in the Guatemalan or U.S. governments, now her fellow torture victim verifies the events. Second, the characters emphasize that torture is something that happens to a people, a community, and a society. The fact that the second character in the play morphs into several personas suggests that torture can and indeed does happen to anyone and everyone. This second point is significant for Ortiz, as she expresses her dismay at U.S. citizens’ refusal to acknowledge the existence and perpetuation of torture by their own government. She writes in her preface to the play, “For those of us who work to create a torture-free world, two of the major problems we face are the public’s belief that they do know torture when they do not, and that it cannot happen to them” (Castillo 2005, xvii). That two women, one of whom remains unnamed, experience torture together emphasizes that torture can and does happen to anyone. The second version of the play is longer and contains two acts and eight characters: Sr. Dianna, the Friend, Ortiz’s parents, several Ursuline nuns, and an indigenous or Ladino man named José. Unlike the first version, wherein the two women are tortured together, in this version of the play, Sr. Dianna and the Friend fight back together against José. The

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character of José shares the name of one of the men who tortured Ortiz, and like the figure in The Blindfold’s Eyes, Castillo’s rendering of José portrays him as a sometimes ambivalent or unwilling torturer. However, the Friend responds to José with little compassion. At one point the Friend taunts José, “Come here, my little cretin,” and when he approaches, she bares her bloody and breastless chest, forcing him to face his and his compatriots’ inhumane deeds and denying him any comfort (Castillo 2005, 37). Attacking his speech, the Friend corrects his grammatical mistakes and even kicks him. She also encourages Sr. Dianna to speak up: “Go ahead, Madre. Show him the burns! Show him his chiste, the lovely result of his pranks!” (43). Though she does not insult José, Sr. Dianna asks him, “Did I deserve what you did to me, José?,” and then she testifies to what she underwent: “One hundred and eleven” (43–44). The Friend and Sr. Dianna verbally support each other’s stories, attacking José’s version of events, challenging his insistence on forgetting the faces of those tortured and affirming the truth of their own experiences. In Scene 2 of Act II, four characters—Sr. Helen, José, Sr. Dianna, and the Friend—act out a trial. It is reminiscent of the mockery of justice Sr. Dianna experienced, as she sits as the defendant, Sr. Helen as the judge, and José as the witness. The court scene recalls some of the problems inherent in truth and reconciliation hearings in which survivors are expected to recount their experiences while perpetrators are given the opportunity to deny, defend, or rationalize their own actions. Afforded courtroom space and time, perpetrators may reinvent themselves and their past in practiced narratives (Payne 2008, 19). Nevertheless the responses to José by Sr. Dianna and other characters offer an opportunity for contestation and validation and contribute to what Leigh Payne terms “contentious coexistence.” While acknowledging that speech acts such as confessions of torture do not lead seamlessly to the installation of democracy, Payne contends that such acts are nonetheless important because they spur debate that “enhances democratic practices by provoking political participation, contestation, and competition” (3). Despite the fact that it should be José on trial, not Sr. Dianna, the courtroom parody allows her to speak and forces the other characters to listen to her story: “All the things you and your men did to me? The burns. My nipples nearly bitten off. I stunk of you for so long. I reeked of your semen, your sweat, your shit-fetid assholes, your pubic hair, like nettles digging against my skin” (Castillo 2005, 56). Sr. Helen and the Friend support Sr. Dianna’s testimony, assuring her that she committed no crime.9 The depiction of the trial as a theatrical farce is particularly significant given

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the sexual violence experienced by Ortiz: the scene reflects the lack of justice afforded her and alludes to the revictimization experienced by many sexual assault survivors in judicial proceedings. At the same time this section of the play reflects Wendy S. Hesford’s (2006, 39) claim that documentary theater can provide a cultural space in which ethical and moral questions about trauma and the violation of human rights can be contemplated. Audience members are situated as the jury, with the ethical and political charge of witnessing torture and rendering judgment. When it comes to the most horrific aspects of their torture—Sr. Dianna being forced to stab the Friend with a machete—Sr. Dianna and the Friend again narrate together. The Friend’s voice is interspersed with Sr. Dianna’s as the nun recites the Hail Mary. Toward the end of her testimony, as she is narrating the death of the Friend, Sr. Dianna must carry on the recitation of the prayer on her own: “NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATH” (Castillo 2005, 60). Here Ortiz’s character assumes a polyvocal stance as her voice reflects not only her own experiences but also the Friend’s. Moreover Ortiz’s voice registers on multiple levels as it reflects a playwright (Castillo), a character, several named victims of torture (Ortiz and the Woman), as well as countless unnamed victims and survivors. Both versions of the play end similarly, at a point in Sr. Dianna’s life prior to her torture, the moment before she is kidnapped. The last scenes of each play occur in the garden of the convent where she was staying, the garden from which she was abducted. The final line of each play is identical—“I have something to tell you, mi amor”—but the speakers are not the same. In the first version the speaker is the “disembodied voice of a man,” and the narrator asks if it could be the voice of the Ambassador, who was recently quoted as doubting Sr. Dianna’s story (Castillo 2005, 16). In the second version the voice belongs to José. The effects are twofold: first, the torturers, like the tortured, are presented as interchangeable; second, just as the Friend’s lack of specific identification paints a picture of the tortured as anyone, so too does the interchangeability of José and (possibly) the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala suggest that the torturers are “anyone”—including agents of the U.S. state. Again this point is echoed by Ortiz in her preface: “It would also be well to remember that the torturers are among us even now. By that, I mean not only the immediate torturers, low-level military personnel, CIA and others, but those who have given the orders, those who have justified the orders, those who have established a climate of permissiveness resulting in such orders and those who have benefited from torture, politically and/or economically” (xvii).

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The implied relationship between Sr. Dianna and the Friend’s torturer and a U.S. official emphasizes the role that the U.S. government had and continues to have in torture around the world and at home—bringing to mind institutions such as Guantánamo Bay and the U.S. prison system—suggesting that the torturers are indeed among us. In drawing attention to torture through the performative repetition of the phrase “I have something to tell you,” the text raises the possibility of different outcomes. The performative phrase “activates and stages cultural imaginaries,” engendering alternative ideas and possibilities (Taylor 2007, 727). These last scenes, detailing the moments just before Sr. Dianna’s kidnap and torture, impart a radical possibility, the effect of which is to place the readers in a position to bring about change and perhaps signal their complicity. The seemingly unnecessary repetition presents to readers and viewers the idea that Sr. Dianna’s torture need not have occurred and that the torture of anyone need not ever occur again. The perspective of the play is not to ask, What could or should Sr. Dianna have done differently? Rather the play demands of the audience the response What can we do? Suggesting that both the tortured and the torturers may not only be among us but may actually be us, and calling on “us” to respond, the play mimics and reinforces the process of concientización integral to testimonio texts. The staging of moral, social, and political questions regarding torture makes these plays examples of what Diana Taylor (2007) refers to as “scenarios.” In her discussion of approaches to U.S. involvement in and justification of torture, Taylor refers to the oft-quoted “ticking bomb” scenario in which an individual is encouraged to agree that torturing a detainee who has information about an imminent attack (“a bomb will be dropped in New York City”) is justifiable. For Taylor, scenarios “[stage] cultural imaginaries” and allow societies to envision how they see themselves and their conflicts (727). As such, scenarios transmit “cultural fantasies, fears, and values” (728). While scenarios are similar to narratives, unlike narratives they involve “staging and embodiment” and carry a “persuasive . . . emotional force” (728, 729). Scenarios can be powerful and dangerous meaning-making devices; the tickingbomb scenario “hides its own theatricality,” and its forcefulness renders “false logic or no logic at all more gripping than facts” (733). Still, Taylor acknowledges that scenarios may be used to heal, such as those used in Augusto Boal’s work. In Castillo’s plays viewers are not asked, What if torture can elicit life-saving information?, but are presented with a scenario in which they must ask, How does torture destroy? The trial

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scene specifically asks, What if we want justice for survivors? What the plays stage are definitely not models that audience members can simply follow. They do not provide a blueprint for action; rather they require audience members to become emotionally involved and to act in ways they see fit. Here Castillo harnesses the performance-inducing power of scenarios—requiring that audience members go beyond witnessing to participation—if even only emotionally. The transformation of Ortiz’s testimonio into dramatic works that stage human rights scenarios speaks to the importance of Latina/o theater and drama’s multiple possibilities and potentials. Affirming that Latina/o theater and performance grows from a history of colonialism and syncretism and thus “has risen as much out of Mayan ritual tradition as Greek,” Caridad Svich and María Delgado (2004, 1, 4) assert that such work contains not one map “but many maps.” The critics continue, “[This writing speaks] of old dreams and new dreams. Of what is possible and necessary” (4). Castillo’s plays capture the possibilities of and the important urge to social action that is found in so much Latina theater by voicing the realities of injustice while imagining and creating new realities. In addition the performative creation of antitorture activists highlights how new and politically salient identities are constructed. As Judith Butler (1990, 15) writes, “Identities can come into being and dissolve depending on the concrete practices that constitute them.” Castillo’s plays illustrate how particular artistic practices contribute to the production and performance of new identities.

The Performance of Solidarity In their transformation of a testimonio from a written work to a dramatic performance, Castillo’s plays stage an intervention in human rights narratives while also engaging in an act of creation. Butler (1990, 139, 25) reminds us that the performative aspects of identity involve a “dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” such that “identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” While Butler’s work refers specifically to gender identity, her analysis holds true in its application to Castillo’s play, in which the political consciousness of an antitorture activist is created via the performative acts that appear to merely express this consciousness. The creation of antitorture activists via an artistic act is equally important. According to Chambers (1984, 51), the creation of art may compensate for the loss of narrative authority: “the production of art is

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what compensates for the divulgence of (fictional) information.” Similarly Partnoy (2009, 22) calls for “co/labor/actions,” works she defines as “innovative, non-logocentric, non-hierarchical models of research, creative production, and action.” Ortiz and Castillo’s co/labor/action results in performative renderings of solidarity that emphasize the participatory and collaborative work that must lie at the heart of creating a broad-based poetics and politics of justice. Both the memoir and the play recognize, and in turn require readers and viewers to recognize, how forms of institutionalized violence such as rape, abduction, and torture cross national boundaries. At the same time, the authors and texts remain attuned to the ways social positions due to race, class, gender, and sexuality account for how such violence impacts individuals and communities differently. The works thus enact a glocal perspective by repudiating violence in multiple contexts without flattening experiences or enactments of such violence. While scholarship on human rights narratives attests to the power and importance of such narratives in disseminating experiences and putting pressure on readers to act, the performance of narratives such as Castillo’s draws connections between the experiences of actors and audience in a way that more intimately implicates and involves audience members. In staging various forms of injustice, Castillo’s plays ask audience members to bear witness to such atrocities and invite the audience to act. Moreover the plays both model and perform acts of justice. By staging Ortiz’s story and committing to disseminating it to a larger public, Castillo affirms that she has heard and believed Ortiz’s story. In receiving her words, Castillo validates Ortiz’s experiences, a critical aspect of human rights work. At the same time, the plays showcase characters who listen to and disseminate each other’s stories, modeling for viewers acts of listening and speaking. Castillo’s plays bring torture, imprisonment, theater, and social justice in conversation with one another in ways that have particular significance for activists who oppose the prison industrial complex. In her preface to Castillo’s play, Ortiz makes explicit the links between her experience and the U.S. prison industrial complex when she suggests that “those who have spent time in U.S. prisons” may “fear the possibility of torture for themselves” in a way few U.S. citizens can (Castillo 2005, xvii). Uniting an exploration of Latina/o drama and social action, Tiffany Ana López (2003) explores the disturbing discursive similarities between prisons and plays as she seeks to explain how theater can engage in prison activism. Asserting that “prison functions as a high-stakes

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performance space,” she mentions the “costumes” and “scripts” that make up the visit to a prison (25). López also details the racial and gender dynamics of the U.S. prison system, in which African Americans and Latinas/os are disproportionally represented, and “women of color find themselves cast in supportive starring roles” to men in their families and communities who have been committed to prison (30). López uses the term critical witnessing “to describe the commitment to stand at the cultural front lines as an activism-driven viewer of prison theater or as an advocate and visitor working within the theatrical realm of the prison” (27). Critical witnesses, in the form of playwrights, speak and describe events in order to create viewers who are not just watchers, but witnesses (33). Castillo’s plays, along with Ortiz’s preface, thus attempt to position readers as critical witnesses who will not only watch but will bear witness and take action regarding social injustice.

Truth, Voice, and Gender As texts produced via the collaboration of women, The Blindfold’s Eyes and Psst . . . I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor engage in the gender-based solidarity often implicit in testimonios, while simultaneously challenging gendered notions of narration and truth. Leigh Gilmore (2003, 701) explains that “popular notions of truth telling are gendered” such that “the epithet ‘liar’ hangs in the air less as a provable accusation than as a metonymic symptom of a woman falling under public scrutiny and censure.” The gendering of truth telling is more pronounced when women seek to speak of traumatic events, as trauma “is figured as the unspeakable, the unrepresentable” (702). Women who write about traumatic events thus struggle with representing that which is thought to be unrepresentable as well as their reception by a skeptical public. In addition to the difficulties faced in having their narratives believed (by a publishing industry or a larger public), storytelling presents the hurdle of relying on the same mechanism—narrative—closely related to deployments of power and violence (Partnoy 2009, 19). Counterhistories from the perspectives of marginalized and oppressed subjects fill narrative gaps in communities and nations even as they pinpoint the role of stories in repression, oppression, and silence. The sinister side of storytelling is perhaps revealed most acutely when victims of torture are forced to divulge information and when survivors relive trauma when testifying or have the veracity of their stories questioned by officials and members of governments and judicial systems.

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While readers may intuit a radical difference between the forced speech of confession and the voluntary speech of testimony, the two in fact are linked via concepts of truth. Idelber Avelar (2004, 34) recounts Page duBois’s explication of the Greek concept of basanos, a word that means “torture” but that evolved from a test to determine whether something was genuine or real. Avelar explains that under Athenian law a slave could be tortured, but a free man could not (34). Thus, “DuBois’s hypothesis is that the establishment of the slave body as one that can be tortured (and furthermore as one that will be necessarily truthful when tortured) was instrumental in the very constitution of the concept of alêtheia (truth) in ancient Greece. . . . The juridical sanctioning of torture endows philosophy with the metaphor that organizes its central concept, truth” (37). While duBois links the concept of truth to processes involving torture, Michel Foucault notes a second concept of truth in Greek thought, the idea that truth is something that is hidden or buried and must be revealed and brought to light (37). For Foucault, this reasoning collapses truth and confession (43). Moreover the second concept is indebted to the first and gendered insofar as “the feminine is the hidden inside that will be penetrated and illuminated by the masculine” (37–38). Avelar, duBois, and Foucault help us locate the ideas of torture, confession, and truth that continue to pervade contemporary juridical and social discourses, even while evidence of the lack of connection between torture and truth abounds.10 Ortiz’s work both illustrates and contests these Western and androcentric ideas concerning truth. Her testimonio showcases how the demands and expectations of lawyers and judges re-create her experiences of interrogation and torture such that she is continually forced to inhabit a subordinate position in relation to male authorities. Nevertheless she insists on continuing to use her story and the words of others to call for and enact justice. As alluded to earlier, Ortiz’s experiences in Guatemala and the United States speak to the use of violence to silence women in times of peace and war. Sexual violence in particular is connected to violence against women in a host of other contexts, as such instances seek to disempower, silence, and shame women (Kelly 2000, 46). While torture survivors are often hesitant to speak of their experiences, this holds especially true for women who have experienced sexual violence. Unfortunately the silence of survivors is often matched by the silence of human rights reports, as such reports remain dependent on the ideas of truth and testimony outlined by Avelar earlier. Moreover men and male experiences are privileged such that “to many human rights activists the ‘desecration’ of the

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female is processed as torture of the male” (Bunster 1993, 103). Viewing the torture and abuse of women as an extension of violence against men highlights the extent to which male experiences continue to occupy a position of prominence and normativity. Women’s testimonies of war prompt a radical unsettling of demarcations between war and peace and challenge how we view the individual and collective repercussions of violence against women. Recognizing the role of gender and race in acts of speaking and listening, feminists, lesbians and women of color have attended to the dual difficulty and importance of listening to women’s voices and women’s stories. Gloria Anzaldúa writes of the invisibility and silence of lesbians of color and asserts that when such women do speak, their speech may be inaudible: “We speak in tongues like the outcast and the insane” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981, 165). Anzaldúa continues, “I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you” (169). While women’s silence, speech, and writing respond to the gendered and racialized silence of particular constituencies, such speech, as Anzaldúa asserts, is not always immediately legible or audible. Similarly the construal of normativity as masculine means that women are traditionally evaluated by how much they act like men; they are often ignored unless they act in ways that resemble traditional male behavior.11 This situation may mean that the particularities of women’s abuse as well as their iterations of resistance and agency are ignored (Kelly 2000, 45). Thus the form of speech and writing discussed in this chapter—polyvocal narration—takes on particular import. The authors and narrators employ strategies that emanate from the specificity of their experiences as women of color and, as such, may not be immediately recognizable as resistant, powerful, or even literary. .

Summary: Polyvocality as Feminist Political Praxis From the standpoint of feminist ethics, polyvocality is not only strategic but also political. Debra Shogan (1997, 61) explains that for the feminist theorist Kathleen Martindale “a commitment to polyvocality is a commitment to ‘hear the differences in and among women.’” In this approach polyvocality is more than a strategy in which a narrator or author reflects or utilizes the subject positions of others; it is also a mode of analysis in which the text commits to examining and understanding such subject positions. This understanding of the particularities of different subject positions is particularly important in works committed to

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a politics of political and ethnic solidarity. Ortiz’s identity as a Chicana impacts her experiences with U.S. and Guatemalan individuals and institutions in often contradictory ways. Her ethnicity renders her vulnerable to particular forms of violence even while it grants her access to certain places and platforms—U.S. audiences and publishing houses being two. Polyvocality makes possible the recognition and strategic enactment of these contradictions. In the context of a transnational feminist and human rights project, in which Chicana and Latina authors and activists strive to reflect their own experiences as well as the experiences of citizens of other countries, this commitment to hearing differences takes on particular political import because it promotes a strategy whereby collective experiences can be acknowledged without usurping the voices or experiences of individuals. Polyvocality as a political as well as a literary stance has consequences for transnational projects that demand that many voices be heard. M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) uses the example of the Feminist Majority Foundation and their work regarding the situation of Afghani women under the Taliban to offer an astute critique of U.S. feminists who fail to listen to the voices of women around the globe and the political consequences of such acts. Alexander faults the organization for “operating within a modernist continuum . . . [that leaves] little analytic room for matching the contours of U.S. patriarchal state violence with Afghani state violence,” such that the group “[anchors] a set of implicit and explicit assumptions that locate violence in tradition only” (184–85). By ignoring the parallels between U.S. state violence (domestically and internationally) and Afghani state violence, the organization suggests that patriarchy can be found only in “primitive” or “traditional” cultures, ignoring the multiple sources of patriarchy and setting up U.S. feminists as the saviors of Afghani women. This position has real political consequences because it silences the voices of Afghani feminists themselves. In addition, by ignoring U.S. statesponsored terrorism and focusing only on the violence of the Taliban, the Feminist Majority Foundation supported the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq (185). The inability of the foundation to give equal weight to the voices of Afghani women or to acknowledge the ways patriarchy and U.S. state-sponsored violence affect the lives of U.S. women led the organization to align itself with imperialist policies that hold little hope for improving the lives of either U.S. or Afghani women. A polyvocal approach to this situation would involve more attention not only to Afghani voices but also to the differences within U.S. feminist

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communities and an acknowledgment that neither structures such as patriarchy nor movements of resistance to it function in singular ways. While Alexander (2005, 186) notes that the actions of the Feminist Majority Foundation reflect that “the long-standing challenge for imperialism to be made integral to the political and cultural lexicon of U.S. feminism is still very much in place,” Ortiz’s and Castillo’s works demonstrate the extent to which contemporary Chicana cultural production is challenging U.S. imperialism. Ortiz and Castillo’s insistence on drawing parallels between the situation of U.S. political prisoners and prisoners around the world, as well as parallels between the operation of patriarchal judicial systems in the United States and in Guatemala, reflects a commitment to creative and political work that can mount an inclusive, transnational response to violence. Exploring the embedding of individual acts of violence against women within larger institutions (courts, governments, and militaries) that perpetuate and condone such violence, Ortiz’s and Castillo’s works pinpoint how racial and gender hierarchies function between and through national and transnational bodies and force us to question the distinctions between “personal” and “state” violence. Indeed Ortiz is a survivor of both male sexual violence committed on the “individual” level and political torture. That we must understand her experiences as resulting from both gender-based violence within “local” social structures (national and ethnonational communities) and the deployment of sexual violence during political and ethnic conflicts attests to the inextricability of the multiple contexts captured by the descriptor glocal. The treatment of Ortiz by U.S. officials echoes the paternalistic and racist violence that was used against Guatemala’s indigenous population, highlighting how racist and sexist logic coalesces and is used within national (domestic) and international contexts. In addition her torture indicates how sexual violence is used to control and subjugate minority populations and illustrates how such populations are already “at war” with their “own” nation-states. While the genocide against Guatemala’s indigenous people was an outgrowth of their exclusion from the state (and indeed from humanity), the use of sexual violence stems from a simultaneous exclusion and inclusion. That is, sexual assault and the threat of sexual assault are used both to exclude some populations (in this case, Guatemala’s indigenous population) from the protections of the state and to coerce others (Ladinas) into alliances. Gender-based violence is the mark of exclusion and lack of recognition of the rights and bodily integrity of indigenous women and the price of protection for nonindigenous

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women. Here gender violence bifurcates racial violence, and its effects are rendered differently upon different populations. Similarly while Ortiz’s status as a Chicana is at play in her kidnapping and torture, it is also at play in her survival and eventual escape: her status as a U.S. citizen probably saved her from being murdered. Ortiz’s use of polyvocality references how survivors and activists speak on multiple levels simultaneously. She speaks as a survivor of domestic policies that see women as expendable sexual objects and as a victim of U.S. military intervention in Guatemala. She opposes both local structures—sexist, racist, and classist U.S. courts and government officials—as well as larger institutions such as the U.S. military and prison industrial complex. When she speaks with victims such as the Woman and Chualcu Ben she encourages readers to draw parallels between different kinds of state-backed violence while remaining cognizant of the uneven and inconsistent ways violence is enacted upon different populations. Her refusal to speak for other survivors mirrors her refusal to privilege the experiences of either foreign or domestic peoples and makes her narrative indicative of a glocal position on war. Exploring the use of a polyvocal authorial and narrative strategy helps us to appreciate the construction and dissemination of Ortiz’s and Castillo’s works as well as the political and social implications of their strategy. Polyvocality reflects a political and narrative approach used by writers, authors, and eventually readers and viewers. In the context of the works analyzed here, polyvocality becomes a means to respond to militarized state violence and engage in the creation and expression of a glocal identity and politics that move beyond the individual and the nation-state. Keeping in mind the importance of listening to others explored in this chapter, the next chapter looks at how texts and characters rely on different mechanisms—transnational activism and decolonial love—to respond to U.S. military intervention in El Salvador.

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Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue and the Politics of Decolonial Love Fiction to me is scripture. —Helena María Viramontes, interview with La Bloga

In the last homily before his assassination on March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar A. Romero of El Salvador exhorted his listeners to understand the political involvement and commitment that love requires. The Gospel, Romero (1985, 191) explained, warns against “[loving] oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us.” Perhaps suspecting that his death was imminent, Romero insisted that “those who out of love for Christ give themselves to the service of others will live, like the grain of wheat that dies, but only apparently. . . . The harvest comes about only because it dies, allowing itself to be sacrificed in the earth and destroyed. Only by undoing itself does it produce the harvest” (191–92). While the speech at first appears to engage with the familiar imagery of Christian martyrdom, Romero in fact calls for something quite distinct from self-sacrifice. His speech emphasizes not sacrifice of oneself in the face of a larger evil—that is, futile martyrdom—but rather the surrender of self in order to take part in a larger struggle. Romero’s analogy of agricultural harvests also involves a temporal distinction from more traditional concepts of Christian martyrdom. Rather than death, the grain contributes to the harvest, thus invoking a cycle that reoccurs every year. Moreover Romero does not claim that “sacrifice” is equal to “death”; he notes that those who “serve Christ” will “live” and that the grain of sand only “apparently” dies. The image of the seed that ruptures or dies to form part of a larger process appears in the words of the protagonist and narrator of Demetria

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Martínez’s 1994 novel Mother Tongue. Early in her narrative María says that she “was looking for a man to tear apart the dry rind of [her] name so [she] could see what fruit fermented inside” (11). Unlike the actors Romero calls for, María figures herself as a passive subject; she wants someone else to look inside her so that she may see. However, as the story continues, María assumes agency in her own self-discovery, a selfdiscovery that follows Romero’s exhortation to love herself so much that she gets involved in the circumstances that history demands of her. As in Romero’s metaphor, once María participates in her own process of self-knowing, she joins a larger movement or process, and like Romero’s model, this process is motivated by love. Recognizing that the love of which Romero speaks is nevertheless distinct from that which motivates María, I name María’s inspiration decolonial love, which involves the investigation of the self alongside another and in relationship to larger communities and processes. This kind of love is distinguished from bourgeois notions of private, domestic love, and while it may involve self-exploration, it does not end there.1 As María enacts it in Mother Tongue, decolonial love involves the use of multiple senses—most important, sight and hearing—and includes movement with and through a larger community of people. She manifests decolonial love in her trip to El Salvador, her making of an altar, and her writing. This love is opposed to individual-based notions of attraction and kinship and involves less self-centered kinds of social activism. When María is able to incorporate aspects of her experience and identity as a Chicana into a social, political, and personal position in which she recognizes her place as a North American in relation to El Salvador and Salvadoran survivors, decolonial love enables her to enact a glocal identity whereby she incorporates aspects of her personal history into her political consciousness and activism.

Historical Background Prior to his death in 1980, Romero, a formerly conservative priest, had become increasingly critical of the Salvadoran government and ruling class and their neglect and repression of the poor. This repression had grown especially acute after a coup by liberal-minded military officers in October 1979. After staging a bloodless coup on October 15, the young officers found themselves the nominal heads of a government and military that would not relinquish power. El Salvador’s popular organizations began to take more a militant stand—occupying factories, holding

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strikes, and taking over land. As Ignacio Martín-Baró (1985, 15) explains, the military used these demonstrations as an excuse to increase repression in the countryside; they began to evict campesinos from land they had taken over, massacring many in the process. The killing reached levels reminiscent of the genocide of 1932, known as La Matanza (the massacre).2 Even though he was a member of the clergy, Romero’s stance made him a target of the government-sponsored death squads. In death he joined his fellow clergy who, since the late 1970s, had “paid [their] quota of blood alongside the people” (13). In addition to Romero, dozens of priests and nuns were tortured, murdered, and expelled from the country, including Father Rutilio Grande, whose assassination played a pivotal role in Romero’s conversion into a voice for the oppressed (6). Romero’s murder made international headlines and alerted many U.S. citizens to the severity of the conflict in El Salvador. However, the United States was already involved in the Salvadoran Civil War at the time of the archbishop’s death, and that involvement would only deepen in the coming years. Romero was well aware of the international network of arms and capital that kept afloat the forces of repression in El Salvador, and much to the displeasure of the governments of El Salvador and the United States, as well as the Vatican, he pinpointed the U.S. role in this network. In February 1980 the archbishop asked the United States, then under the leadership of President Jimmy Carter, to stop funding the Salvadoran Army. He referred to the U.S. government’s plan to send military advisors to El Salvador as something that would “undoubtedly intensify the injustice and the repression inflicted on the organized people” (Romero 1985, 189). Appealing to Carter as a Christian and self-identified defender of human rights, Romero asked him to stop giving military aid to the Salvadoran government and to guarantee that the U.S. government would not intervene “directly or indirectly with military, economic, diplomatic or other pressures” (189). The Carter administration appeared unperturbed by either Romero’s letter or his subsequent assassination; just a few days after his murder, the administration’s request for $5.7 million in military assistance for El Salvador was approved by Congress (Pearce 1982, 229). Romero’s assassination was just one incident in a larger history of violence and U.S. involvement in El Salvador. Even the archbishop’s funeral, attended by religious leaders from around the world, ended in a massacre when snipers opened fire on the square in front of the cathedral. Thirty people died and countless were wounded, all in front of the entire world (Martín-Baró 1985, 19).3 In December of that same year, four U.S.

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churchwomen—Sr. Dorothy Kazel, Sr. Ita Ford, Sr. Maura Clarke, and Jean Donovan—were abducted, raped, and murdered. The U.S. government could not ignore evidence that suggested the Salvadoran military forces—the forces receiving U.S. military aid—were responsible for the murders (Pearce 1982, 237). Carter suspended military and economic aid—for one month. After sending his assistant secretary of state William Rogers to El Salvador and the ousting of Colonel Adolfo Majano from the ruling junta, Carter restored economic aid on December 14. A month later, citing the need to support the Salvadoran government against left-wing terrorists being armed by Cuba, the U.S. restored military aid (238). When Ronald Reagan took office he continued to increase the amount of military aid and advisors. In March 1981, the one-year anniversary of Romero’s assassination, Reagan sent $25 million in military aid and twenty more military advisors (241).4 By this time there were as many as fifty-seven U.S. advisors and personnel in El Salvador (241). Romero’s letter to President Carter the previous year had been prompted by precisely such plans to send U.S. military advisors and equipment to El Salvador (Romero 1985, 188–89). The murders of Romero and the churchwomen initiated a new wave of deaths. In the first four months of 1981 7,700 people were murdered in El Salvador, including thousands of civilian evacuees slaughtered on the banks of the Rio Lempa on March 15 (Pearce 1982, 241, 244). According to the Catholic Church’s legal office in San Salvador, death squads and government security forces killed over 13,250 civilians in 1981 (García 2006, 24; Porpora 1992, 97).5 Finally, by the end of 1981, the U.S. Congress made the continuation of aid to El Salvador contingent on the country’s improving its human rights record. This improvement was to be “certified” by the president twice a year, but the certification process was a “farce” (Porpora 1992, 99). Congress approved every certification (four total) over the next two years, even accepting Reagan’s certification of January 28, 1982, just one day after the New York Times and the Washington Post reported the massacre of hundreds of civilians in the province of Morazán.6 Reagan based his certification on the claim that the number of civilian casualties was being calculated by “biased” organizations, including the Catholic Legal Aid Office. According to his administration, although the Legal Aid Office reported the death of over thirteen thousand civilians, “only 5,407” civilians had been murdered in 1981 (101). The Reagan administration relied on disputed numbers and suspect sources for its report.7 Massive migration and emigration was the response to this instability and bloodshed. Army “operations” displaced thousands of civilians

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from their homes, and thousands more left El Salvador altogether. By the mid-1980s “half a million Salvadorans were internally displaced . . . and over one million had fled to other countries” (García 2006, 26).8 Refugees typically went first to bordering countries such as Honduras. There they faced the “option” of settlement into refugee camps or lives as anonymous, undocumented immigrants. Residence in the refugee camps brought formal status as political refugees and recognition by the host country as well as the international aid community. But politics also played a role in the deployment and distribution of aid. For example, many countries avoided calling the displaced people “refugees,” preferring to call them “economic migrants,” thereby exonerating host governments from legal responsibility.9 In addition the camps were overcrowded and frequently dangerous; aid workers recounted numerous instances of refugees in Honduras being forcibly removed from camps by both Honduran and Salvadoran troops.10 According to María Cristina García (2006, 36), “most refugees bypassed these camps altogether” and instead chose to join the informal economy in large cities farther away such as Mexico City and Los Angeles. An international network of organizations responded to the refugee crisis, and by the late 1980s almost four hundred organizations—including churches, synagogues, universities, and entire cities—were a part of the international movement known as Sanctuary (Cunningham 1995, 65).11 Although Martínez (1994) does not specifically name María’s activism in Mother Tongue, the organization she joins is closely linked with her church and other religious institutions, suggesting she is a member of the Sanctuary movement. The novel’s setting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, places the characters of José Luis and María close to the first Sanctuary church in the United States—Southside Presbyterian Church of Tucson, Arizona—as well as within the only U.S. state to declare itself a sanctuary.12 Martínez herself took part in actions that challenged the U.S. role in El Salvador, at a time when the United States was engaged in a war against communism on many fronts and in many places around the globe. She was the first reporter to be prosecuted in connection with the Sanctuary movement as well as the first Chicana to have one of her poems used against her in court (Ikas 2001, 113). Her trial came a year and a half after she had accompanied a Lutheran pastor to the border, where he aided two pregnant Salvadoran women crossing into the United States. The pastor had invited Martínez in the hopes that she would write a story about the event; instead she wrote the poem “Nativity, for Two

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Salvadoran Women,” and a year later she was indicted for charges related to smuggling (Martínez 1997, 58).13 Although both she and the pastor were acquitted, Martínez writes that the experience, especially the trial, was “a poet’s nightmare” (58). She recalls, “Words, so full of liberating possibilities, were twisted and used against me and a movement dedicated to saving the lives of refugees. . . . After my acquittal . . . freedom of expression was more of an abstraction for me than a reality. I felt as if someone had cut out my tongue” (58–59). The silence that Martínez experienced was originally self-imposed—her lawyer suggested she be careful of what she said over the phone during the trial—but it soon proved debilitating. She struggled to write poetry, and it was not until 1992, while attending a Chicano poetry festival in Chicago, that the first line of Mother Tongue came to her. The author writes that she felt “deeply peaceful” as she wrote down the words. She distinguishes her own voice from María’s, explaining, “Maybe one day I will have the courage to believe that what I was following was my own voice—a voice free and whole, talking right over the heads of ‘the authorities’” (60). The extreme importance the novel places on María regaining her voice—both in speech and in writing—echoes Martínez’s own experience of losing and regaining her writer’s voice. The subtitle of Mark Danner’s (1994) account of the massacre in Morazán, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War, places the Salvadoran Civil War in the context of the cold war. Indeed for the Reagan administration, the conflict in El Salvador and in Central America was about Soviet containment. Whereas President Carter had favored détente and relationships based on “tolerance for ideological pluralism,” Reagan approved active military support for “anti-Communist authoritarian regimes” (LeoGrande 1988, 52, 5). The recent history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam loomed heavily over the Carter and Reagan administrations as well as the U.S. public. According to William M. LeoGrande, if the Viet Nam War showed the “limits of U.S. power” and suggested that the country “was no longer willing or able to ‘pay any price, bear any burden’ in the international struggle against Communism, then the debate . . . over what price should be paid, and where,” would take place in Central America (7). In addition to supposed concerns about “the ‘Evil Empire’ of international Communism,” Reagan was reacting to an apparent impending end to the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower. By 1981 not only had the United States left behind defeat in Viet Nam, but the country had also seen unprecedented oil crises, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the defeat of

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Somoza and installation of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Iranian Revolution—all events that seemed to successfully challenge the U.S. position (6). Mother Tongue does not assume readers will have familiarity with this history even as it interweaves many names and events from it into the plot.14 As a narrative rendering of the Salvadoran Civil War from a Chicana perspective, the novel is part of a small body of work that speaks to the importance of the Salvadoran conflict for Chicana/o and Latina/o writers. Works such as Mother Tongue suggest that narrations of U.S. intervention in El Salvador—in newspaper articles, history books, and congressional records—have been insufficient in expressing the significance of the conflict for Salvadorans and in fact all Latinas/os. In both content and form, Mother Tongue presents a new way of looking at this history that stresses the voices of women, communal storytelling, and the continued relevance of the past. María’s engagement with her lover and her shifting understanding of herself in relationship to José Luis, El Salvador, and the United States model an alternative mode of political engagement that I term decolonial love.

Mother Tongue Mother Tongue presents the recent political violence in El Salvador as a personal story that is tied into the lives of Chicanas/os. The novel places the Salvadoran protagonist, José Luis, alongside the Chicana narrator, María, as they struggle to make their experiences intelligible to themselves and others. This is not to say that the novel draws parallels between its characters’ situations. If anything, Martínez goes to great lengths to portray the huge gaps between María’s and José Luis’s experiences and understandings of their own lives, gaps that are based in constructs of nation, race, gender, and sexuality but that come to the forefront in their personal relationship. And it is in their personal relationship that Martínez allows these issues to be addressed and, to some extent, resolved. Martínez’s novel is deceptively simple. In slightly more than a hundred pages, Mother Tongue touches on the past and present of several characters linked by a history that ranges from the conquest of the Americas to the present. The book begins, however, as a love story. María, a Chicana from New Mexico, aids and eventually falls in love with José Luis Alegría, a Salvadoran fleeing his country. This name is a pseudonym, as was the name on his plane ticket, “A. Romero,” an homage to the slain priest. The two develop a friendship that escalates into an intense and

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at times painful love affair. Through their relationship they are forced to confront the violence of their pasts—his at the hands of Salvadoran torturers who abducted him and murdered his fiancée, hers at the hands of a sexually abusive neighbor. Their story is told through several different voices, including that of their son (also called José Luis) as well as newspaper articles, diary entries, and poems. Mother Tongue has four main characters and three narrators. María is nineteen years old at the story’s beginning. Through her friend, Soledad, a fifty-year-old immigrant from Mexico, she becomes involved in the Sanctuary movement and meets José Luis, then twenty-nine. He stays at Soledad’s house during the summer of 1982, and the majority of the narrative centers on this time period. The story unfolds mostly from María’s perspective and is revealed as a present-day María, now forty, recounts her relationship with José Luis. María’s story also includes diary entries from the summer of 1982, which are present-tense accounts of herself and her lover, as well as bits and pieces of other memorabilia: poems by Claribel Alegría and Roque Dalton, a grocery list, a recipe for pozole, and an Associated Press article about the murder of the U.S. churchwomen. The contemporary María often comments on these objects and on her younger self. In addition to María, José Luis and José Luis Jr. also narrate sections of the story. María’s voice frames José Luis’s as she shares with readers his diary that she has found in her house. The narrative is told in past tense as the older María looks back at herself and the summer she met José Luis. She describes meeting José Luis at the Albuquerque airport the day he arrives in the United States and the beginning of their friendship. That summer she is unemployed and living on a small inheritance from her late mother. She is therefore free to write, read, and daydream about José Luis. He quickly finds a job as a dishwasher, and María often meets him downtown after work. The climax of the novel centers on the night of José Luis Jr.’s conception, when José Luis and María make love and then have a violent confrontation that propels each to face the demons of their past. This section is written as though María is speaking to her son and comes after the narrative has jumped to the future. That is, readers are first introduced to José Luis Jr. as an eighteen-year-old returning home from college to visit his mother. His mother then recounts for him the night of his conception. That María chooses to revisit this night with both her son and readers underscores its significance. Although in the narrative it is one of the last nights she and José Luis spend together, this night is actually the first time that the characters begin to confront themselves and their pasts.

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Finally, in the section narrated by José Luis Jr., he and his mother travel to El Salvador, where they find a question mark beneath a photo of José Luis. This question mark indicates that he may be alive, whereas María had assumed he had returned to El Salvador and been killed. The novel ends with a letter from José Luis to María. He explains that he did return to El Salvador and was forced to go into hiding, but that he survived. He is writing the letter while on a trip in Canada to visit the Toronto Center for War Survivors. As I discuss below, the novel relies on the written word to explore and represent the processes of self-confrontation and self-recovery undertaken by its characters. In this sense María’s narrative and José Luis’s letter (which is the novel’s epilogue) reflect and constitute the changes undergone by the principal characters.

Structure The changes that María undergoes, through which she recovers her voice and memory and exhibits the ability to listen to herself and others, follows the structure of the novel itself, which similarly relies on multiple voices and perspectives. Mother Tongue places characters and their stories in relationship to one another, allowing readers to explore continuities, discontinuities, and growth. In addition Martínez’s poetry heavily influences both the form and the content of the book.15 In interviews the author often remarks that the book is really a long poem and that she knew nothing about writing a novel at the time. Of the organization, she comments in an interview that she thought “in terms of the squares of a quilt” and that she was intrigued by the structure of Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters and the idea that a reader could read the book in any order (Dick 2003, 86–87). Martínez’s hope that the book could be constructed of interchangeable sections and that the “core meaning was so clear that no matter what order the pages landed in” the book would still be readable accounts for some of the repetition in the narrative (86– 87). The central themes of the book—love, loss, memory, violence, and rewriting—recur in all five sections. The structure of the novel—its shifts in narrative voice and jumps from past to present events—allows for different ways to read the story. That is, just as María tells her story with constant references to and occasional digressions into the past, so too are readers encouraged to understand the narrative not as a linear progression of events, each one building upon the previous, but as a series of interlinking memories and histories that continually relate to and reflect on each other. Events in María’s life are not narrated as discrete episodes with a clear beginning

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and end; nor are they building blocks that contribute to the formation of the woman that is María. Instead events from the past constantly recur in the present (in the form of María’s memory and her narrative), suggesting that memories and histories form a web that composes subjectivity. These references from the past to the present and the present to the past indicate that our history tells us something about our present and our present tells us about our history. When María claims that she is trying to tell the story of José Luis not from memory but “from love,” she identifies both the structure and the content of her narrative as a love story (Martínez 1994, 37). The decolonial love that the novel explores, as both readers and María learn, is not simply the relationship between two individuals. Rather decolonial love becomes a mode of engaging with individual and communal histories and experiences and of understanding and acknowledging the relationship between individual experiences and large-scale and structural processes of violence, abuse, and militarization. By including several first-person narrators along with third-person texts, such as poems and newspaper articles, the novel counters narratives of the Salvadoran conflict that discounted personal tragedies and sufferings. The novel does this without itself discounting the place and role of larger groups and constituencies. That is, the interplay between the personal and the communal in Mother Tongue portrays the legacy of U.S. intervention in El Salvador as encompassing individual as well as local, national, and transnational experiences. To view experiences of suffering and exploitation as solely individualistic, as María initially approaches José Luis’s experiences, is to lose sight of the role of structures and institutions, including national armies and nation-states themselves. But to view the conflict as only involving cold war actors (read: nation-states) would do a disservice to the ways the conflict impacted individuals as well as lose sight of how these national and individual experiences have impacted and continue to impact demographic and social shifts within El Salvador and the United States. The interplay between individual and communal experiences and identities within the context of a love story marks Mother Tongue as a text that explores decolonial love from a glocal perspective. Mother Tongue’s use of multiple narrators also responds to Western sources of knowledge, including books and newspaper articles, which privilege a particular narrative structure and source. Specifically the book points to the importance of communal storytelling in two places before the narrative opens. The first appears as an excerpt from the Popol Vuh, the book of creation of the Mayan/K’iché people:

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Remember us after we are gone. Don’t forget us. Conjure up our faces and our words. Our image will be as a tear in the hearts of those who want to remember us. The quote contains plural referents only (“we,” “us,” “our”), which occur seven times in four sentences. These pronouns place an emphasis on the story of not one person but an entire group. The second example is found in the acknowledgments when Martínez writes, “It takes more than one person to tell a story.” Taken together, the quotes illustrate that stories are not just individual narratives but narratives of groups of people, of communities, and that storytelling requires groups of people. The structure of the story—its reliance on multiple narrators—reinforces this idea.

Sensory Lack By opening her novel with the arrival of José Luis to the United States, Martínez underscores the connections between the Salvadoran conflict and U.S. Chicanas/os. As a character seeking refuge in a nation that was contributing to the violence in El Salvador, José Luis reflects a historically accurate picture of migration and enacts a metaphorically intimate relationship between the two countries. At the same time, the author immediately places José Luis in relation to María, driving home the historical, political, and cultural connections between U.S. Latinas/os and Chicanas/os and Central Americans. In its privileging of a brown female voice, Mother Tongue is instantly at odds with accounts of the Salvadoran Civil War told from the perspective of (white male) dominant actors. The narrative goes further, however, by deconstructing even this voice, illustrating that it is neither whole nor singular. That is to say, María’s obvious flaws suggest that her perspective must be questioned and her story taken apart and reconstructed while the use of multiple narrators and the epigraph from the Popol Vuh imply that not only is María’s single voice insufficient but that it may in fact already contain others’ stories. As other critics have noted, the novel simultaneously suggests “the power of the Latino/a community in the United States” while critiquing overly simplistic renderings of this community (Lyon-Johnson 2005, 215). Marta Caminero-Santangelo (2007, 198) argues that the text differentiates between María’s and José Luis’s experience to highlight a “fantasy of connectedness” between the two individuals, while Dalia Kandiyoti (2004, 422) notes María’s reliance on the “assumed . . . seamlessness of the Latino–Latin American connection.” These critical perspectives are useful for deconstructing ideas of either a monolithic U.S. Latina/o

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community or an undifferentiated trans-Latina/o one. At the same time, the emphasis on María’s construction of her fantastical connection to José Luis indicates the characters’ abilities to rethink and reformulate their assumptions. Although Mother Tongue points quite directly to the flaws inherent in generic assumptions of community based on unstable categories such as language, ethnicity, and even personal experience, it does not preclude the possibilities of transnational community. María’s early perspective concerning her connections to José Luis, while failing to adequately account for difference, serves to point out the very fallible ways in which ideas of community may be constructed, even as her character speaks to the real importance of such connections. The narrative paints a sympathetic portrayal of her quest for community support and figures such a community—specifically a transnational Latina/o community—as integral to her growth throughout the novel. Her emotional and political growth in turn is primary to the narrative itself, as her expanding understanding of herself and her lover occurs in tandem with her telling of the story. Mother Tongue powerfully and effectively shows the limits of basing notions of community on essentialist ideas of race, ethnicity, or family. The moves that María makes as a character—from naïvely thinking herself aligned with José Luis to painfully confronting their differences until finally finding an emotional, geographic, and political space from which to advocate for her life and his—trace at an individual level evolving ideas of U.S. Latina/o solidarity in response to U.S. military intervention abroad. Throughout her early relationship with José Luis, María remains unable to see or hear him. This lack of sensory perception is coupled with a turning inward as she attempts to create a closed-off domestic space for herself and her lover. María’s inability to see or hear José Luis is accompanied by an inability to understand him in relation to his country and his experiences or to understand herself as a North American woman. Her individualistic relationship to José Luis signifies her understanding of love as a self-centered process and is mirrored by her inability to see, hear, or even feel her lover. The dearth of sensory understanding and communication is highlighted by their sexual relationship, as sex becomes a way for them to ignore one another and themselves. María allows her desire for José Luis to blind her to who he really is, refusing to hear, see, or even feel the man before her. José Luis likewise uses María’s body and her love for him as a respite from the war he continues to carry inside. That both initially use

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sex to avoid remembering painful events from their pasts suggests that sex may be a site where trauma and memory are confronted, contested, and negotiated.16 Their sexual relationship also highlights the culturally constructed basis of memory, gender, and sexuality. Most strikingly, in María’s attempts to fashion herself as a holy prostitute, she initially avoids any association with the Chicana archetype of La Llorona, preferring to align herself with the historical figure of La Malinche. But when she begins to recover the sexual memories she had repressed, she is forced to understand herself and her relation to her heritage differently. María and José Luis’s sexual relationship, then, reveals the historical violence implicit in constructions of sexuality and language, while simultaneously pointing to the possibilities for reconstruction. The first line of the novel establishes the importance of sex to the characters and the narrative and places their sexual relationship within larger but specific contexts of gender, race, nation, and violence. María writes, “His nation chewed him up and spat him out like a piñón shell, and when he emerged from an airplane one late afternoon, I knew I would one day make love with him” (Martínez 1994, 3). She figures herself as the receiver: El Salvador has expelled José Luis, and she will take him in. This act of receiving is explicitly sexualized by María and undertaken self-consciously. She tells readers that she “asked forgiveness in advance” and remembered words she had “read somewhere” (4). She repeats these words: “A prostitute compassionate am I” (4). Attributing the sentence to the goddess Ishtar, María directly compares herself to prostitutes from history who offered their bodies to men returning from war. María also unselfconsciously engages in racialized ideas about immigration, belonging, and violence. In claiming that José Luis was “spat out like a piñón shell” she characterizes him as the mere detritus of a nation, positioning him as a racialized other to both his own country and hers. While María explains José Luis in relation to “his nation,” she fails to do so for herself, marking him as “other” while allowing her own subject position to remain unmarked by the particularities of race, nation, or citizenship status. Her ability to ignore how her relationship to José Luis is mediated by the country in which she resides is made possible precisely by her location within the United States: her distance from the violence in El Salvador is maintained by the continuation of U.S. military aid to El Salvador. Moreover her ahistorical reference to Ishtar indicates her assumption that she can transcend the limitations of race, class, and even temporality, while her description of José Luis fails to afford him the same mobility.

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María’s reference to Ishtar and her attempt to relate to José Luis on a purely individual and sexual level illustrate the extent to which her very ignorance of the role of race and nation in her life are evidence of her specific national context. Similarly her self-description as a prostitute cannot be divorced from her cultural context. In this case María associates herself with the most notorious “whore” of Chicano culture, La Malinche. By deploying the idea of the holy prostitute, María attempts to rescue herself and Malinche from the role of the degraded woman and to emphasize her own and Malinche’s sexual agency. In this act María and Martínez join numerous other Chicana writers who, as Tey Diana Rebolledo (1995, 64) explains, “do not view La Malinche as the passive victim of rape and conquest but instead believe her to be a woman who had and made choices.” That María focuses on sexual agency to the exclusion of racial and national contexts illustrates the important role sexuality will play in her development while also establishing the extent to which her sexual relationship will necessitate a reconsideration of herself as a middle-class Chicana living in the United States. At the same time that she identifies herself with La Malinche, María distances herself from another major figure in Chicana folklore: La Llorona. Rebolledo (1995, 63) explains that the images of these two characters seldom come together, remaining separate and clearly defined. María moves away from La Llorona by asserting that she is the receiver, not the hunter, of lost souls. Her distance from La Llorona in the beginning of the book may also represent her distance from traditional Chicana culture. Unlike many Chicana characters, María is almost completely devoid of family or friends (Gutiérrez y Muhs 2001, 135). Her mother has recently died of cancer, and her father abandoned the family when she was young. María has no family members and only once mentions friends who “quit calling” when they saw she had fallen in love (Martínez 1994, 46). Her only personal relationship besides the one with José Luis is with Soledad, who serves as a madrina to María throughout the story.17 María’s distance from La Llorona in favor of a self-positioning in relation to Ishtar may also represent a defense mechanism. As readers are to learn later in the book, María was sexually abused as a young girl. Her desire to be someone who gives her sexuality freely may represent her desire to forget the sex that was, like Llorona’s children, taken from her.18 The first line of the novel also reflects María’s self-referential orientation as she mentions José Luis’s nation only to distance him from his homeland. Notably she mentions neither the name of her country nor José Luis’s. Moreover she turns a conflict that has everything to do with

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nations (his and hers) and José Luis’s membership in a targeted community into a purely personal affair. Her reliance on singular personal pronouns—“he,” “I”—illustrates how she understands herself and José Luis. Furthermore her description of José Luis’s face is overdetermined by ethnic and national markers; he possesses “a face with no borders: Tibetan eyelids, Spanish hazel irises, Mayan cheekbones” (Martínez 1994, 3). Seeing José Luis as generically other allows María to see him as placeless, to divorce him from specific racial and national histories. Her idea of José Luis allows her to read his presence in her life as a romantic twist of fate rather than a move that has everything to do with nations and communities. Again María’s ability to divorce herself and José Luis from their particular national contexts is indicative of her position within the United States, whereby she can regard herself as the bearer of a benevolent hospitality that she paternalistically deploys in relation to the outcast immigrant.19 In stark contrast to María’s self-centered fantasy of romance is an instructional letter she receives from Soledad. While María uses only singular personal pronouns, Soledad relies on plural pronouns to connect her life to the lives of her friends and comrades. Her first reference to José Luis is as “our guest,” a term that references a larger, paternalistic group of activists. In addition Soledad offers a compelling and concrete portrait of the community that makes up “we.” She lists others in Albuquerque who will lend their services to José Luis: a barber on 2nd Street, volunteers, doctors, and lawyers (Martínez 1994, 4–5). Only later in her letter does she discuss her personal life, which she also explains in relationship to a larger cause, telling María that her marriage was only for the protection that U.S. citizenship offered an immigrant in need (6). Thus Soledad discusses herself and her personal life in relationship to a larger community of activists and in support of progressive causes, while young María avoids any mention of specific political or ethnic communities as she attempts to script José Luis into her own personal narrative. Akin to María’s inability to see José Luis as Salvadoran is her inability to hear him. Both her blindness and her deafness are engendered by her race and class privilege. Although she writes that she accompanied José Luis to several speeches he gave at local churches, she admits that she didn’t really hear him. He wears a handkerchief to hide his face when he speaks in public, but it is María who seems to don both a blindfold and earplugs. “After hearing his story once or twice, I stopped listening,” she writes (Martínez 1994, 18). It is possible that José Luis’s story is just too painful for her to hear, but as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that

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María is unable, or unwilling, to listen to the painful truth of anyone’s experiences, including her own. When, a few weeks into his stay in the United States, José Luis offers to tell María his real name, she refuses to hear it. She tells him she fears the authorities, but admits to readers, “Even greater than fear was my need for him to remain a stranger, his made-up name dark glasses he must never take off” (13). Rather than feel alienated by not knowing the name of her lover, María takes comfort in the distance between them, sustaining crevices in their relationship in which she may hide from both herself and José Luis. José Luis’s covering of his face is distinct from María’s refusal to see and hear him. His choice to cover his face while speaking in public refers literally to decisions made by refugees to conceal their identity as well as metaphorically to the difficulty in using words (language) to communicate one’s pain to others. That is, the handkerchief prevents José Luis from being recognized by the authorities, but the fact that he uses a cover also marks a difference between him and his audience, a difference whose basis is his experience as a torture survivor and refugee. His face requires protection; theirs do not.20 A later passage elaborates María’s refusal to account for even that which she feels beneath her fingertips: the scars from José Luis’s torture. Shielded by her middle-class status and U.S. residence from the political violence that José Luis has faced, María never guesses the origin of the scars on his body until he tells her of his torture. She imagines the “constellation of markings” as remnants of passion, “marks left by a woman’s fingernails” (Martínez 1994, 81). She attempts to gain knowledge through observation but does so in a way that does not acknowledge or relinquish her own position as a knower, initiator, or “master of the known” (Young 1990, 4). Even after he tells her of his torture María admits, “As I so often did in those days, I refused to believe my own eyes. I refused to believe that what I was seeing was a pattern of scars, the legend to the map of his life” (Martínez 1994, 81). In this passage María becomes an exemplar of the U.S. citizen about whom Sr. Dianna Ortiz warns her readers: a person who believes she knows torture when she does not. As Martínez has constructed her, however, María is a character who has more to lose than simply her ignorance. Offering a critique of her younger self’s refusal to believe her own eyes, the elder María hints at what would be the implications of her acknowledgment of José Luis’s torture. If she allows herself to see his scars as the result of torture, she would be forced to rethink what she knows of him and to question and understand the role that his torture and everything he underwent in El Salvador plays in his current

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life. His scars offer a key, a “legend,” to understanding his life before he came to the United States, but María refuses this aid. Her unwillingness to decipher José Luis’s violence-filled past is indicative of her unwillingness to unravel the mysteries of her own past. She cannot let herself question the role torture played in José Luis’s life because to do so would entail a confrontation with the abuse in her own past, a confrontation for which she is simply not ready. María’s refusal to see or hear her lover puts her love into question, a question that grows through her description of the inability of touch to provide a means of connection and communication. This third sensory failure is explored through their lovemaking, an act that serves only to highlight the distance between María and José Luis. For his part, José Luis understands that María wants to use sex to heal him without really knowing him. He writes in his journal, “She is trying to separate me in her own mind from my history. She thinks by loving the ‘real’ me, the me before the war, she can make my memories of the war end” (Martínez 1994, 52). True to her earlier references to Ishtar, María wants to love the war out of the man. But akin to her earlier misrecognition of his torture scars as marks from a lover, sex becomes another way for María to misread José Luis. Just as she has misread his face and shut out his stories and scars, she misreads his country and his experiences. The first time they make love, she writes in her diary, “We had both dreamed the night before about his country. I said, José Luis, last night I dreamed I was there, I smelled bougainvillea. He said, I dreamed I was there too, mi amor, but it was something about white phosphorous, napalm” (42).21 María’s El Salvador is empty of people, full only of romantic ideas. José Luis’s image of El Salvador, in contrast, invokes manufactured weapons, used by one group of people against another. Not only does María misunderstand José Luis, but she specifically fails to recognize difference. According to Laura Lomas (2006, 361), María’s “self-projection elides José Luis’s difference” and illustrates “how easy it is for the North American characters, including the big-hearted María, to consume a sensationalized, romanticized, or demonized version of the Salvadoran or Chicana in their midst.” In gently correcting María’s fantastic notion of El Salvador, José Luis resists her misrecognition of his identity and history, a resistance he continues throughout their relationship. However, José Luis also fails to address María’s differentiated position within the United States. When the characters receive news of two murdered U.S. nuns, José Luis suggests María is a murderer responsible for the deaths of innocents in El Salvador. María recalls the scene for

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readers, noting that José Luis “hates me for what happened” (Martínez 1994, 75). José Luis verbally lashes out at her when she attempts to comfort him. He apologizes later, but she writes, “It is too late. . . . He saw in me an image of a gringa whose pale skin and tax dollars are putting his compatriots to death. . . . My credentials, the fact that I am Mexican American, don’t count now; in fact, they make things worse. . . . Earlier in the morning, he had made love to a Chicana. But after telling him the news of the nuns’ deaths, I am transfigured. . . . I am a yanqui, a murderess, a whore” (75). Although José Luis has indicted María on nationalist grounds, she interprets his anger as a comment on her sexuality, pointing to the ways issues of community formation turn on female sexuality. The bodies of these women, murdered by Salvadoran forces financed by U.S. money, highlight the inability of ethnic nationalism—whether Salvadoran or Chicana/o—to adequately account for the ways women’s bodies are marked by transnational processes. While José Luis and María misrecognize each other in relation to their ethnic and national communities, Soledad provides a model for connecting across difference. Soledad successfully explains the relation of the global to the local and of the community to the individual. Although she figures herself as a member of a transnational community, she accounts for differences in language and citizenship and employs difference as a more effective means of activism. When she sees that María is falling in love, she recognizes both the risks inherent in loving a survivor of war as well as the futility of changing María’s heart. She recounts her own relationship with a refugee—“My Carlos was a good man but the war made him loco sometimes”—and then offers her understanding of war and love: “No, no, the only way to take the war out of a man is to end the war, all wars” (Martínez 1994, 70). From Soledad’s perspective, she cannot effect change in her own life and the lives of her loved ones without a glocal vision. Whereas María thinks that she can take the war out of a man through love and sex, Soledad proposes that love on a larger scale—ending all wars—is the only way to truly love a man. María tells readers of Soledad’s vision of political love: “At first even I was fooled; I thought she had married for love. And in a sense, she had. Having no children of her own, she adopted El Salvador. She knew its provinces, its disappearances” (Martínez 1994, 71). Though Soledad “adopts” El Salvador, she does not do so in a paternalistic way. Her love for El Salvador comes through knowledge, activism, and the recognition of difference. When she tells María of her ex-husband Carlos, she mentions the way war made

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him “loco,” stressing her sympathetic distance from his experiences, and though she says of El Salvador, “I know, I’ve been there,” she uses her firsthand knowledge to stress the individual nature of the experiences of war: “You can’t even hear yourself think in El Salvador” (70). Although Soledad “knows” El Salvador—“its provinces, its disappearances”—she doesn’t claim to know the experiences of all its refugees, and she acknowledges that men such as Carlos have undergone things she can’t understand. Soledad provides an example for how María can engage in solidarity with El Salvador in a nonpaternalistic way. This solidarity hinges on María recognizing her own class and national privilege and moving outside of a hyperindividualistic perspective in which she regards herself as the savior of a brown man. María’s hesitancy to place José Luis within a larger context is expressed in her use of singular pronouns and her attempts to ignore her own specific location. Moreover ignorance of her interconnection with others is a fundamental part of her conception of love. Her lack of a larger community may stem from the recent loss of her mother as well as insecurities about her Chicana identity (Castillo 1997, 13; Kandiyoti 2004, 432). However, she also implicates falling in love with José Luis as the cause of her lack of other relationships. She writes of friends who “quit calling” when they heard she had fallen in love and explains, “[My friends] knew I wouldn’t come out of the house, the house I drew with crayons, a house of primary colors I called love. . . . [They] tried to tell me it was not real. To prove them wrong, I drew a keyhole on the front door and invited them to look through to the other side. See for yourselves, I said” (Martínez 1994, 46). Her use of the metaphor of a house illustrates her understanding of love as a domestic, private matter. Moreover her offer to her friends indicates her concern with safety; notably she does not invite her friends inside but asks them only to observe through a “keyhole.” María’s description of her “house of primary colors [she] called love” illustrates that she believes she can love José Luis and herself through retreat and isolation. Despite María’s early description of herself as a holy prostitute in relation to José Luis, sex functions not as a means of connection between the two characters but as an act that highlights their distance. This distance is engendered by María’s idealized notions of love, war, and El Salvador and is manifested in her inability to utilize sensory perceptions of hearing, sight, and touch. This sensory lack is also directed inward as María refuses to see herself or her past. Still, her interest in exploring sex and sexuality speak to its importance. Her desire to understand herself as a holy prostitute reveals

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a desire to create a different history for herself, to place herself within a sexually and socially validated position within society. This desire is contextualized within the limited choices she has as a woman, a Chicana, and a Catholic. While her attempt to refashion herself as a holy prostitute, like her attempt to avoid confronting her past, proves untenable, she and José Luis nonetheless explore the importance of sex as both a source of trauma and a mode of accessing that trauma in their relationship.

Voices María’s insistence on removing herself and her lover from any larger national context occurs in tandem with her self-imposed blindness to the realities of José Luis’s situation. While her position as a middle-class North American facilitates her lack of self-awareness, privilege is only one facet of her distance from José Luis and others around her. As readers learn, María is a survivor of child sexual abuse. Her recovery of her memories of this abuse involves seeing and listening to her younger self, a recovery that begins with the recuperation of her name and voice. María’s recovery of her voice relies not on abandoning her younger self but rather on incorporating herself and her previous experiences into the woman she is today. While she tells readers how she incorporates aspects of her younger self into her life, the narrative mimics a second incorporation, that of José Luis’s voice. In this way the novel charts how María enacts decolonial love of both her self and José Luis by hearing these other voices. While her development of decolonial love involves José Luis, it takes place outside the temporal boundaries of their relationship, a point Martínez makes clear in the epilogue. That is, while María revisits José Luis’s diary and aspects of their relationship, she doesn’t try to incorporate him seamlessly into her own life narrative, as she did when she first met him. Rather she allows herself to develop in relation to but separate from José Luis. This separation is marked in the narrative by the failure of José Luis to “return” to María’s life and the letter that readers see. José Luis’s letter forms the last section of the narrative, allowing him to have the last word and to communicate directly with readers. Moreover just as María’s original relationship with José Luis involved an individualist and privileged self-centeredness, her growth outside of her relationship with José Luis forces her to understand herself in relation to a larger community. What begins as a psychological journey of personal healing ends with a physical journey that places María within a larger and non-nation-based community. Mother Tongue’s difficult climactic scene, in which José Luis beats María, melds sex, violence, and redemption. Although the novel’s

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dominant themes—war, sex, violence, voice, and memory—play important roles, community identification propels the healing in which both characters subsequently participate. The abuse is precipitated by María’s discovery of a poem by José Luis’s former lover, Ana. When María asks him about Ana, he lapses into a trance that, while shielding him from himself, exposes him to María. Whereas once she was unable to identify his features as possessing the markers of one nation or ethnicity, when José Luis falls into a trance, she sees his country and his history for the first time: “And in his eyes I could see people running and dropping, flames and plumes of smoke, processions of women holding photographs of their children, telephone poles falling, bridges flying to pieces” (Martínez 1994, 100). María does not see an individual portrait of grief, nor the tragedy of one woman or man; rather she sees the destruction of an entire community. What had been missing in her understanding of José Luis was not knowledge of his individual experiences—though she refused to assimilate this knowledge—but recognition of the communal nature of suffering, of the links between his experiences and those of his compatriots. This scene indicates María’s newfound ability to connect what she sees in José Luis’s eyes to his experiences. She tells her son, “Your father and his friends had handed their lives over to the cause of stopping the war and in the end, they could not even flee from it” (100). For the first time María places José Luis within a larger movement by referencing him, “his friends,” and their “cause.” She understands now that war is not something that she can take out of her man but is something that ravages entire communities and that can be confronted only on a large scale. Soon after María witnesses the violence in José Luis’s eyes she experiences his rage on her own body. The scene is notable for its violence and how that violence is portrayed as crossing several temporal, geographic, and physical borders.22 It bears mentioning that the abuse María suffers at José Luis’s hands does not cause or propel growth on the part of either character. As I explain below, their relationship suffers an irreparable rupture as a result of the violence. However, María’s responses to the violence, and specifically her repetition of her name in Spanish, engender the recovery of her memory. After José Luis’s trance ends, María lapses into memories of the abuse she suffered at the hands of a neighbor. She connects her experiences of abuse to the suffering of entire communities. Lomas (2006, 367) notes that when María recalls that she was abused while her neighbor watched scenes from the Viet Nam War on television, the narrative creates a “crucial nexus between foreign and domestic

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violence.” Moreover “María’s seven-year-old body figures as the country being invaded” (367). Whereas for Lomas this scene “underscores the accumulation of unresolved, incompletely articulated trauma from the U.S.-Mexico war through the neocolonial wars of the 1970s” (368), I would like to suggest that what is most powerful is the linking of María’s war with José Luis’s war and wars around the world. María is able to link her own abuse with the abuse of others, and she stresses this link when she tells her story to her son. According to María, her abuser goes on to “cancel whole populations” (Martínez 1994, 104). The abuser harms not only her but entire peoples. María emphasizes this larger perspective to her son, telling him, “You are not unique. . . . [You are] one of millions conceived in love and war” (101). She wants her son to know what she herself has come to understand, that the formative trauma of her life links her to others around her and that the task of recovery must be similarly linked. As Soledad says, to end one war, we must end all wars. María’s ability to see her own trauma is tied to her ability to see José Luis’s trauma; moreover what she sees when she encounters her experiences and José Luis’s is the connection between her lover and others. That is, she doesn’t suddenly understand José Luis’s history of torture; rather she sees a community that is still suffering from trauma, and then she is able to understand the relationship of José Luis to this community. Likewise she doesn’t simply remember her abuse as it happened to her; she remembers it in a way that connects her abuser to someone who goes on to “cancel whole populations.” María connects the abuse that she suffered to “children everywhere crying out” and even brings this experience to her son and her reader when she switches to the second person to say, “A knife in a place for which you have no word is the most lethal of weapons. It carves words on your inner walls to fill the void” (Martínez 1994, 103). She takes what she sees in José Luis’s eyes, a community being destroyed, in order to understand the man who is part of that community; she then takes her own memories of abuse and links them to the abuse of others: Vietnamese campesinos, survivors of domestic violence, and finally “you,” her readers. The relationship between self and community is used to comprehend both individuals and groups, and furthermore to make connections to groups, to connect us/you to her/them. María’s confrontation with her abuser allows her to extricate him from her subconscious. This confrontation and subsequent overpowering is linked to the power of language and specifically names: “When I said to José Luis, it’s me, María, I remembered. And the ghost of the man with the minus sign smile fled. The demon could not bear it. He could

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not bear the sound of my true name” (Martínez 1994, 104). That María chooses to call herself María, the name that José Luis prefers to call her, and that she speaks her own name aloud is significant.23 In the beginning of the novel she writes that her name had become a curse and that she “was looking for a man to tear apart the dry rind of that name so [she] could see what fruit fermented inside” (11). Later José Luis asks her if he can call her María. She says of course; after all, María is just Spanish for Mary. No, José Luis says, Mary is English for María (45). His joke mirrors a story María told him the day he arrived, of a Spanish colonial expedition that lands on the Yucatán peninsula. When the Spaniards ask the Maya the name of the land, the Maya reply, “Uic athan,” “We do not understand what you are saying.” The Spaniards misunderstand and name the place Yucatán. María speaks of the misnaming of the Yucatán as violence; the Spaniards “impose” their name; they “inflict it” (10). José Luis’s and María’s anecdotes present two perspectives on names. First, José Luis offers a counternarrative to English. His joke makes Spanish the language of origin and English the translated one. He decenters English dominance at the same time that he suggests that Spanish is María’s true language. She does not need to translate her name into Spanish; she needs to untranslate it from English. María’s anecdote goes one step further by decentering Spanish. Spanish, after all, is not a language indigenous to the Americas. Her story also works against the myth of the “discovery” of the Americas, the notion that the conquistadors brought enlightenment and civilization to the natives. María’s anecdote also points to the power and gender-based violence inherent in naming. She compares the Spaniards to Adam, who believed he had the power to name all of God’s creations. The Spaniards and Adam symbolize male dominance and abuse. Thus María’s speaking her own name is a way for her to challenge cultural, religious, sexual, and linguistic dominance. Rather than letting José Luis translate her name into Spanish, she names herself. Contrary to her fantasy, it is María herself who “tear[s] apart the dry rind of [her] name and see[s] the fermented fruit inside.” The fermented fruit she finds inside is the memory of sexual abuse, a memory that was hidden in an English name. Thus María challenges both linguistic violence (English and Spanish misnaming) as well as sexual violence when she speaks her “true name.” That she speaks it makes her an agent in her own healing.24 Her agency connects this process of self-healing to self-love and connects love to alternative constructions of knowledge. For María, this self-knowledge involves understanding herself as a survivor of sexual abuse and as a Chicana.

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This understanding leads her to situate herself among a larger Chicana/ Latina community, as I discuss below. María’s name also associates her with the mother of Jesus, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Mary Magdalene, so that when Mary refers to herself as a prostitute she becomes both virgin and whore. In making the Virgin (Mary) and whore (Malinche/Mary Magdalene) inhabit one character, Martínez effectively deconstructs the virgin/whore binary. That is, if María is able to embody aspects of both la Virgen and Mary Magdalene, these two constructs of women’s sexuality cannot be mutually exclusive. The character of María, embodying aspects of both the virgin and the whore, displays the untenability of this binary as a way to view Chicana women. When María speaks her “true name” she begins to see herself and her past for the first time. In turn she allows herself to see José Luis and for him to know her. Only her “true name” is able to bring him out of his trance. As a result of their powerful confrontation, both José Luis and María are able to face their own memories. She remembers the sexual abuse she suffered as a child and even starts to see José Luis’s counselor and speak about her past with friends. José Luis, for the first time, is able to cry and sleep. Moreover by dismissing the man who had “cut out her tongue,” María regains her own tongue. She grants herself the right and power to speak. Like Malinche, Cortés’s tongue, María speaks for herself and others. This right to speak for oneself has often been denied Chicanas and other women of color. Emma Pérez (1993, 47) writes that women of color need “un sitio y una lengua,” a space and a language from or through which to speak. Lengua is “tongue”; the man who cut out María’s tongue took away her language. With her tongue back, she has a language, a way to tell her story and communicate with others. Her recovery is simultaneously sexual and linguistic. Here Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s (2001) comments on Cherríe Moraga’s conflation of the mouth and cunt are useful. According to Yarbro-Bejarano, Moraga’s creation of the mouth/ boca points out that “not only our attitudes about our bodies but our very bodies themselves are constructed” (7). The critic continues, “If this is so, Moraga’s writing seems to suggest, there’s nothing to stop us from reconstructing them from the blueprint of our own desire, however implicated those desires might be in hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality” (7). Similarly María does not strive to forget the traumas that formed the person she is; rather she tries to incorporate them, and, like her adoption of the name María, use them to form and reconstruct herself with and through relationships with others.

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María’s descriptions of Soledad and the advice of her madrina serve as evidence to both María and her readers that she has undergone radical change. Soledad’s letters and her voice, interspersed throughout the narrative, suggest what nineteen-year-old María had not yet learned and what thirty-nine-year-old María has come to understand. In addition to Soledad’s advice about ending all wars, María herself drops hints that a renewed understanding of community was key to her personal growth. In a passage written later in life, María implies that what was missing in her youth was an understanding of her connection to the lives of people around her. Speaking of her current relationship, she speaks of “real love” and tells her readers that her lover’s stories “exorcise the inner authorities that say quiet, don’t tell, that keep women like me from speaking the truth about their lives” (Martínez 1994, 58). Here María’s idea of “real love” is tied to others, especially other women. Whereas once her idea of love had been to draw a house around herself and her lover and invite her friends to look inside, now she displays her willingness and ability to step outside her own house and make connections with others. She harnesses this decolonial love, one that stems from acceptance of self and an understanding of one’s relation to others, to move toward a glocal perspective. Tellingly she connects “real love” and “truth” to “stories,” “women like me,” and “their lives” (58): her concept of truth stems not from a singular experience but from a collective act of storytelling.

Love and Revolutionary Consciousness After their violent confrontation, the characters turn to their respective communities to move toward healing. The first voice we hear once María has recounted her story is, significantly, Soledad’s. Soledad shares her own history of sexual abuse—“It happened to me too”—and then tells María, “You’re not alone” (Martínez 1994, 105). Soledad goes on to highlight the structural nature of inequality and to connect her and María’s experiences to an even larger community of women. Though she somewhat cynically says, “I’m beginning to believe all those ladies who carry on about ‘the patriarchy,’” she nevertheless highlights patriarchy as a source of structural inequality and furthermore suggests that neither she nor María are alone, but are joined by “all those ladies” (105). Once again Soledad models a particular form of radical politics, one that relies not only on a larger community, as her early letter to María suggested, but on listening to others, specifically women. In listening to María’s accounts of abuse as well as the voices of “all those ladies who carry on about ‘the patriarchy,’” Soledad positions herself as an ally and comrade.

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When María repeats Soledad’s words in her narrative, she illustrates her own ability to listen to Soledad.25 In her letter Soledad also offers her perspective on María’s earlier metaphor of the house. She tells her goddaughter, “Life is a risky business. But the alternative is to dig a hole and bury yourself. You may not know it, but I have my share of scars. And I would have them even if I had never come out of the house. Better to have scars from living than from hiding” (106). Soledad alludes to the fact that for so many women, the home is no safe space. Indeed María’s abuse took place in her own house. She also suggests that healing cannot wholly take place within the private, domestic space. Soledad’s suggestion is echoed by José Luis’s subsequent absence from the narrative. By removing him from María’s life, Martínez indicts him as an abuser; there can be no future between María and him. At the same time, individual solitude—for either character—is no solution; rather they must seek healing with and through others. María and José Luis begin to heal from their respective traumas in ways that closely align each character with other members of their communities. María writes that as part of his process of recovery José Luis “let himself cry . . . about Ana . . . and about all his friends” (Martínez 1994, 107). José Luis expresses his grief not only for his own lost life but for the lost lives of his friends and lovers. He begins to seek help from people who have experienced similar traumas, going to a doctor whose parents were survivors of Nazi concentration camps. José Luis is strengthened by his ability to converse with others, and he eventually becomes active in a community of survivors of torture, joining a delegation to the Toronto Center for War Survivors. By connecting his healing to that of other survivors, José Luis reflects the support that was missing from his life and suggests a model for collective healing. María too becomes active in community-based action. Her son describes her work with survivors of violence, suggesting that justice may be a communal project. Mother and son visit San Salvador, and after reading of efforts by the Church to open mass graves, he says, “It sounds like they won’t rest until everyone is accounted for” (Martínez 1994, 112). Here, once again, Soledad’s admonition about how to take the war out of one man is echoed in José Luis Jr.’s words: in order to account for the death of one person, all people must be accounted for. José Luis Jr. also describes how María connects with other women in El Salvador. The young Chicana who had nearly no family or friends and whose Spanish was “like an old car, parts missing,” now chats with Sr. Margarita like they “were old friends” and later talks in Spanish to two

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Salvadoran women who have lost their children (7, 112). Whereas María once shunned connections to others, both she and her son now seem to recognize that she belongs among the mothers of the disappeared. The geographical location and the tenor of María’s work in El Salvador raise two important issues. First, in traveling to El Salvador María reverses the journey that José Luis made early in the novel and fulfills Soledad’s admonishment to “leave her house.” Her trip can also be read as a parallel to the movement of U.S. funding that has been flowing to El Salvador for decades, but rather than military aid and advisors, María sends her body and emotional support. Second, what María does in El Salvador—listen and witness—also repositions her as a U.S. citizen in relation to El Salvador. She does not sweep in as the savior to the nation or the people; she listens to their stories. In traveling María fulfills Chela Sandoval’s (2000) ideas about the citizen activist as well as calls by radical women of color to consider their residency in the United States in relationship to ethnic communities in the United States and abroad. According to Sandoval, “Love as a social movement is enacted by revolutionary, mobile, and global coalitions of citizen-activists” (184). Similarly in her preface to the 2002 edition of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe Moraga (2002, xvii) calls on U.S. women of color to assume “a position of a global women of color activism, while at the same time remaining specific to our concerns as Native, Asian, African-originated women living within specific nation-states.” María’s revised understanding of herself in relation to the United States and El Salvador is indicated in her trip to El Salvador and reflective of her ability to harness the affective and political power of love. María’s trip to El Salvador and her actions upon returning to the United States present an alternative understanding of both activism and love that wrests these practices away from the sphere of liberal individualist politics and grounds her and her work in reciprocal relations based on listening. Early in the novel María describes how José Luis, a man who has “actually done something with his life,” makes her want to “sell [her] belongings, smuggle refugees across borders, protest government policies by chaining [herself] to the White House gate” (Martínez 1994, 24, 43). She perceives activism as work undertaken in the public sphere and ignores work done privately, such as organizing, translating, cooking, and loving (Lyon-Johnson 2005, 215). By the end of the novel, though, María’s understanding of activism has changed to include listening to herself and others and, importantly, writing. Martínez scripts María as a

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character whose recognition of her own experiences of domestic violence enable her to hear the voices of Salvadoran survivors and emphasizes the transformative effects that María’s trip to El Salvador have on her growth as a woman and an activist. In doing so the text offers an example of the relationship between decolonial love and collective and communal modes of political engagement, in addition to a model of how one may confront gendered violence in multiple sites at once. Importantly María illustrates her understanding of historical and national specificity through an altar she builds in her house and the activism in which she participates. After they return from El Salvador, María and José Luis Jr. place a poster of the Madre de los desaparecidos alongside a picture of José Luis and a picture of María as a seven-yearold girl. María’s altar lies within her home, the same space in which her abuse took place, but rather than reclaiming only this space, María becomes involved in local activism, echoing Soledad’s admonishment to “leave the house.” She thus reclaims the domestic sphere in the service of a larger project. Moreover she incorporates multiple facets of her identity—as a mother, a Chicana, a survivor of sexual abuse, and a U.S. citizen—in her social justice work. Leveraging her status as a U.S. citizen, she participates in a letter-writing campaign, asking the Salvadoran government to allow forensic experts to document the extent of the war’s atrocities. Thus community-based activism becomes a way to link individual experiences of trauma to one another in a transnational struggle to end violence and impunity. Finally, María incorporates both love and storytelling into her process of self-recovery. Early in the novel she lays bare her project to reconstruct the man she loved using the only tools available to her: words and love. “So forgive me if I embellish,” she warns her readers. “I never intended to reconstruct him from memory, just from love, which may be the only way anyone can ever hope to get at the whole truth” (Martínez 1994, 37). She also notes that love can “not be divorced from history, that his war had to become [her] war” (27). This suggests that love, rather than a way of skipping over truth and history, represents a way for one to engage in these things. When María says in the beginning, “Desire was not good enough. Love would ripen in the light of time we spent together,” she echoes Archbishop Romero (13). Desire was not good enough to connect her to José Luis, only love. This love, as Romero noted and María learned, must include getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, risks that bring us closer to ourselves and our histories even while they simultaneously bring us closer to others’ histories.

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Summary Chicana activists who positioned themselves at odds with U.S. foreign and domestic policy—including economic and military aid to the Salvadoran government and the denial of refugee status to Central American immigrants—expressed their opposition through activities and organizations such as the Sanctuary movement as well as through the printed word. In Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue, both the content and the form of the novel are a repudiation of U.S. involvement in El Salvador and the ways that involvement has been narrated. Martínez’s work humanizes the tragedy of the Salvadoran Civil War by focusing on the war’s effects on a small group of individuals and by literally naming victims of the war and their loved ones. At the same time, examining the relationship between the two main characters through their sensory engagements offers a way to acknowledge and learn from their evolution in a manner relevant to ongoing discussions concerning the positioning of Central American subjects in relation to U.S. Chicana/o narratives.26 The mode of reading employed in this chapter involves recognizing the liberatory possibilities in the work’s reliance on multiple narrators and a nonlinear structure, a format that, joined with the politics of decolonial love, presents an alternative mode of accessing and speaking of the past. While María and José Luis’s story ends on a hopeful note, the legacy of the Salvadoran war has left deep scars. The number of Salvadorans living in the United States continues to increase, to the extent that many view the United States as “departamento 15,” or the fifteenth department (state) of El Salvador.27 Moreover U.S. intervention in the domestic affairs of El Salvador has far from ceased. During the 2008 Salvadoran presidential elections, several members of the U.S. Congress visited El Salvador in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the election of Mauricio Funes, the first left-wing leader in El Salvador’s history.28 The United States has also sponsored the creation of the International Law Enforcement Agency (ILEA) in El Salvador, an organization that trains Latin American law enforcement officials. The insistence by the United States that it train military personnel through the ILEA in the future has led many activists to suspect that the ILEA may be another School of the Americas. The ongoing military intervention in El Salvador speaks to the continuation of policies that began in the 1970s and 1980s and connects U.S. intervention in the area to intervention in the Middle East, the topic of the next two chapters.

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Father, Army, Nation: Familial Discourse and Ambivalent Homonationalism in José Zuniga’s Soldier of the Year Debates on gay marriage and gay kinship . . . have become sites of intense displacement for other political fears . . . about the very unity and transmissibility of the nation. —Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Heterosexual?”

Prior to President Barack Obama’s rescinding of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), the U.S. military’s policy toward gay and lesbian service members established during the Clinton administration, radical queer activists offered their own perspective on the place of sexual minorities within the armed forces.1 In a tongue-in-cheek reference to the policy, posters by the organization Against Equality extolled viewers, “Do ask! Don’t shoot!” Placed in urban queer environments such as San Francisco’s Castro District, the posters reflected a different form of opposition to DADT than that found in the political platforms of mainstream gay rights organizations.2 The words, emanating from the mouth of a young man of color who sports a shirt proclaiming “Homos for homo sapiens,” oppose gay and lesbian discrimination as well as U.S. militarism and challenge the idea that equality for any group of people can be achieved via participation in institutions such as the U.S. Army. The simultaneous challenge to mainstream gay rights campaigns and the very existence of the U.S. military is partly a response to the ways the campaign to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was silent on the issue of the military’s human rights abuses abroad and other systemic forms of discrimination within the U.S. Armed Forces, including military rape, racism, and sexism.3 The opposition to the U.S. military expressed in the poster questions the relationship between queer individuals and militarism as well as between these individuals and the U.S. state. In cartoon bubbles emanating from his head, the man on the poster asserts, “It may be a civil right to be in the military but it’s a human right to be free from illegal

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wars.” These lines uncouple queer rights from the U.S. military and from the United States by calling for a “human” approach that moves beyond and outside of a nation-specific context. The position ostensibly redraws political alliances, calling into question the source of danger and oppression for queer individuals and communities: “foreign terrorists” or “illegal wars”? In addition the poster challenges U.S. exceptionalism by questioning the idea that the United States is a more democratic nation than others and dispelling the notion that U.S. intervention can bring peace and security for women and ethnic and sexual minorities in foreign countries. The importance of examining the relationship between national identity, race, and normative gender and sexual identity is particularly relevant today, given the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.4 The question this chapter poses is this: How do discussions about who “belongs” in the military reflect a larger anxiety about who belongs in the national community, and how do these discussions relate to questions about, challenges to, or changing notions of normative kinship relations? In other words, what is the relationship between the family, the military, and the state, and what is at stake in political positions that pose challenges to only specific iterations of these institutions?5 Soldier of the Year, a memoir by José Zuniga (1994), helps answer such questions. I argue that the familial metaphors through which Zuniga develops his portrait of the U.S. Armed Forces belie the extent to which the family and the military are institutions linked via their reliance on heterosexism, patriarchy, and misogyny. Explicitly addressing the issues of citizenship and national belonging briefly broached in earlier chapters, I contextualize this discussion within feminist analyses of the gendered nature of the nation, the relationship between the U.S. military and U.S. national identity, and the development of the nation-state alongside the rise to prominence of the nuclear family. Attending to the politics of race and class, I offer an appraisal of how these three institutions—the family, the military, and the nation—are linked within a Chicana/o context. Looking at the deployment of gendered, sexualized, and racialized identities both within and outside the armed forces, I read Zuniga’s Soldier of the Year alongside two critical strains: Jasbir Puar’s (2007) concept of “queer homonationalism” and Richard T. Rodríguez’s (2009) analyses of the cultural politics of the Chicana/o family. For Puar (2007, 4), homonationalism is the result of American exceptionalism that is “marked through or aided by certain homosexual bodies.” While Puar’s work provides a necessary perspective on the interplay between U.S. gay

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rights rhetoric and the “war on terror,” Rodríguez’s theories concerning how Chicana/o cultural works engage with familial representations to support and occasionally contest notions of patriarchal and heteronormative nationalism allow me to ground Zuniga’s work in the specificities of Chicana/o ethnonationalism. According to Rodríguez (2009, 2), the family “in some shape, form, or fashion” has been the “single issue almost always at stake in Chicano/a cultural politics since the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s.” The work of these two critics frames this chapter’s attention to Zuniga’s subtle critique of U.S. actions in Iraq, the characterization of the army as an oppressive familial structure, and Zuniga’s own participation in a queer, nonheteronormative bisexual relationship. The resulting chapter places Chicana/o cultural politics concerning the family and nation in conversation with feminist and queer discussions of the relationship between these two institutions and those of the military and the state. I argue that in Soldier of the Year Zuniga espouses an ambivalent homonationalism that critiques the army, the state, and heteronormativity. While he stops short of opposing U.S. actions in Iraq or military-national projects, via comparisons between army rules and those imposed by his father and his participation in a long-standing relationship with a woman and a man, he suggests that neither the structure of the army nor that of the family (whether heteroor homonormative) is capable of meeting the desires and needs of gay men of color. When Zuniga enters into a relationship with a man and a woman he begins to construct a kinship network that remains outside those approved at the level of the state, including same-sex unions currently recognized by several U.S. states. At the same time, the inability of Zuniga or the movements of which he is a part to embrace a political position that can recognize and account for such relationships indicates the binding of ideas of familial and national belonging to a heteronormative framework that is itself buttressed by imperial and neo-imperial military practices. I argue that the attempt to negotiate national and racial conflict in the intimate sphere, what David Eng (2010) calls “the racialization of intimacy,” as well as representations of queer homonationalism and Chicana/o cultural politics must be considered in light of military violence and specifically how the violence present in the armed forces echoes, and is echoed by, patriarchal familial and national institutions. This chapter also offers an appraisal of what these connections mean in the context of changing notions of the family, the military, and the nation. What I’m calling for here is an acknowledgment and appreciation for the fact that discussions about who belongs in the military or

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the family are linked not only to each other but also to discussions about who belongs in the national community. Zuniga’s narrative illustrates this very well; when he challenges his biological family, he necessarily mounts a challenge to the military. And while he and his memoir largely shy away from mounting any challenge to the nation-state, I argue that this challenge is inevitable and one that makes Zuniga’s stance ultimately untenable. The untenable political position he inhabits nonetheless paves the way for the more comprehensive Latina/o critique of the U.S. military and the U.S. nation-state explored in chapter 5. I begin with an introduction to Zuniga’s memoir and an exploration of the use of familial metaphors in the narrative. I then place this work within the context of the Persian Gulf War and debates about gays and lesbians in the military in order to set the stage for a larger examination of how Zuniga’s work intervenes in discourses of gendered and sexualized nationalism. Soldier of the Year succeeds in articulating how heterosexism, patriarchy, and misogyny are reproduced and reinforced within the family and the military. Zuniga’s own challenges to his biological family and the military and his creation of a different kind of family, like María’s reshaping of herself and her community discussed in chapter 3, highlight the constructed nature of these institutions and the possibility for change. The narrative also links gender, class, and sexual hierarchies in the family and the military with those that operate within the nation. Here a feminist analysis of the gendered, classed, and sexed nature of the nation helps me to explore how the issues that Zuniga raises—gay and lesbian rights in the military—must also be read in relation to debates about the nation. Although Zuniga’s memoir does not explicitly carry its analysis of patriarchy and heterosexism in the family and the military to the level of the nation, his description of his family in fact offers a new model of kinship.

Queer Politics in a Glocal Framework When Zuniga suggests altering particular aspects of the family and the military without challenging either the larger structure or the national context to which these institutions are linked, he inadvertently gestures to the necessity of a transnational analysis that can look beyond the scope of national “rights” and movements. His ambivalent homonationalism points to the inherent discrepancy in calls for the repeal of DADT that fail to recognize other forms of oppression and discrimination endemic in the armed forces. His memoir thus foreshadows both

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currents in contemporary queer activism that disavow the goal of joining such historically unjust institutions as the army and marriage and the work of veterans such as Mejía who offer an explicit critique of the domestic and international operations of the armed forces. José Zuniga published Soldier of the Year: The Story of a Gay American Patriot in 1994, when he was just twenty-four years old. The book narrates his early childhood through his college years, his entrance in the armed forces, and his development as a gay rights activist primarily concerned with repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. A fifth-generation military man, Zuniga joined the army after graduating from college with a journalism degree. He trained as a medic but worked primarily as a journalist while stationed at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. From 1990 to 1991 he served in Iraq. Following his return to the United States and transfer to San Francisco’s Presidio, Zuniga entered into a relationship with a married couple, Dave and Laurie. The three lived together, and his partners supported him as he assumed a position of national prominence. In 1993 he was named the Sixth U.S. Army’s Soldier of the Year; in April of that year he came out publicly at a national rally and was honorably discharged a month later. Zuniga now serves on the board of the Service Member’s Legal Defense Network, a nonprofit nonpartisan organization once devoted to repealing DADT but that now “empowers, supports and defends the Department of Defense and military service LGBT community . . . to strengthen our military culture’s culture of inclusion” (sldn.org). Several things are notable about Zuniga’s narrative. While his political position is somewhat predictably conservative and the book contains only oblique criticism of U.S. foreign policy, he is extremely critical of core aspects of the military. He uses descriptions of his father, family, and home life to characterize the military as an abusive parent. When he does unequivocally critique the military, it is on the grounds of gender and sexuality. In addition he is not unsympathetic to the plight of heterosexual service members and at several points discusses the sexism of the military that degrades men and women of all sexualities. The rhetoric of family begins with his characterization of the military and continues as he describes his development as a national gay rights activist. He exhorts gay activists to support their “family” while continually portraying the military and his own biological family as a dysfunctional, abusive unit. As the narrative continues and Zuniga begins his foray into national politics, he begins to expand his notion of family and queer community. However, he fails to question how these communities

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are constrained within a particular national and nationalist framework. His interactions with a drag queen force him to accept the presence of a greater range of gender and sexual expressions within his own concept of “the queer community,” but he doesn’t ever consider himself to be part of a queer community outside the United States. Thus while employing a rhetoric of inclusion, he nonetheless advocates changing only some aspects of the military or queer family and ends up arguing for an exclusionary, nation-state-based family and community. Zuniga wants to create an equitable space for gays and lesbians within the army even as he ignores how U.S. militarism contributes to a lack of stability for millions of citizens around the world; his attempts to fashion a more inclusionary, democratic family within institutions based on hierarchy lead him to develop a concept of family that is ultimately limiting. The other notable aspect of Zuniga’s book is that despite his political conservatism, he spends a significant portion of the narrative in a nonheteronormative relationship with a man and a woman. This relationship seems somewhat out of step with his conservative politics, which advocates for homosexual equality with heterosexuality without fundamentally challenging established institutions. Yet in his daily life he directly challenges common manifestations of monogamy and heteronormativity. While Zuniga does not weigh in on the prospects of gay marriage, his own engagement in and discussion of a loving nonheteronormative relationship presents a challenge to the idea that marriage between two people (of any gender) is the only or ideal form of kinship.6 Little critical attention has heretofore been paid to Zuniga’s memoir, although the work is touched upon in Ben V. Olguín’s (2002) essay “Sangre Mexicana, Corazón Americano.” Olguín asserts that Zuniga’s memoir differs from more conservative queer army memoirs by Margarethe Cammemeyer and Joseph Steffan. He goes on to write that Zuniga’s evolution into an activist “who travels the nation militating for gay and other minority rights beyond an ideologically ambiguous call for inclusion of them in the U.S. military” locates his work “outside straight Anglo-American male hegemonic claims to ‘America’ and ‘Americanness’” (96–97, 95). Indeed Zuniga’s transformation is stunning as he describes learning the important lesson that an injury against any member of his family is an injury to all. But while he has much contempt for the conservative Republican establishment that backed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, he never asserts that he no longer identifies as a Republican or as an “American”; indeed much of his wrath is directed toward Democratic politicians, particularly President Bill Clinton and gay senator Barney

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Frank. Furthermore while Olguín claims that Zuniga’s Rainbow People include “international victims of the U.S. imperialist wars in which he once served,” the critiques of U.S. empire in the narrative are oblique and by no means a centerpiece of Zuniga’s story. The larger focus on the importance of lifting the ban with a tepid critique of U.S. imperialism characterizes the work as one of, at best, ambivalent homonationalism. Olguín’s perspective on the work is better supported by two facets of the memoir that he overlooks. One is Zuniga’s status as a man who is involved in a three-way relationship with his lovers, Dave and Laurie. This relationship places Zuniga decidedly out of the bounds of the mainstream gay rights movement, which has a long history of excluding bisexuals and whose calls for marriage equality often rely on the idea that queer individuals desire the same kinds of relationships that are legally recognized for heterosexuals: committed, monogamous partnerships. The second facet Olguín overlooks is that Zuniga’s critique of the U.S. military, while it focuses very little on U.S. imperialism, is quite vocal on not only the homophobia but also the sexism of the institution. In addition Zuniga’s critique is developed via the sustained analogy of family, in which his own tyrannical military father is re-created in the military institutions. Here the narrative makes a critique that places it firmly in conversation with antimilitary and transnational feminist critiques, which point out the connections between domestic and foreign violence and suggest that the violence at the heart of the military hierarchy reproduces not only violence overseas but also within the family.

Familial Metawars Throughout the first of the memoir’s four parts, Zuniga’s discussion of his military career and development as a soldier go hand in hand with his discussion of his family life and maturation. The first time Zuniga (1994, 4) refers to his father it is as “Colonel Salvador Salazar Zuniga, my father,” pointing to his status in the military and U.S. society. As an officer, the colonel received a college education and enjoyed access to resources denied to other members of the military and the U.S. citizenry. For Zuniga, the position of power that his father was able to hold as a result of this background directly impacted their relationship; the phrase describing the colonel’s relationship to Zuniga—“my father”—appears only after his full name and title. This introduction is an apt one for Zuniga’s father, who is characterized as a strict, distant parent who interacts with his family members in regimented, authorial ways. Of his home Zuniga writes, “In this fiefdom,

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the colonel was lord of the manor” (12). Along with military-based order and hierarchy, the colonel strictly enforces obedience and normative masculinity. When Zuniga is eight years old, his father instructs him how to shine his boots, and when the young Zuniga announces his desire to become a priest, his father expresses his disapproval by buying him a pistol (16, 15). Here his father displays his desire to shape Zuniga’s identity into one that expresses a heteronormative version of masculinity and one based on violence and power.7 The memoir traces the Zuniga family military legacy back several generations, suggesting that Zuniga’s own entry into the U.S. Armed Forces was inevitable. The author describes his roots as based in two “great Spanish families” and mentions his paternal grandfather’s participation in the Mexican Revolution (1994, 11, 16). Zuniga’s description of his family as Spanish indicates his desire to emphasize a white European heritage, even as he clearly inscribes his family within Mexican political history. The use of the descriptor Spanish as opposed to Mexican also reinforces the family’s class background, echoed in his father’s education and attainment of the rank of colonel. As a child Zuniga assumes that the privileges of his family will be his own. He describes his early childhood heroes as people such as William Travis of the Alamo and recalls fond memories of watching “ruggedly handsome U.S. Marines storming a Normandy beach front” (10). When he enlists in the army he admits a sense of both “trepidation” and “relief” (51). Signing a six-year enlistment allows him to escape from a loveless relationship and “to continue the Zuniga military legacy [he] had been purposefully eluding” (51). His early descriptions of his family highlight how his enlistment fulfilled both personal and familial expectations that were bolstered by race- and class-based assumptions and privileges. While the racial and class politics remain unquestioned and unexamined in Zuniga’s decision, he is overt about the similarities between his patriarchal family and the U.S. Army. After joining the army he looks back on his life and comments, “If I had to compare my life then to anything I’ve lived to date, boot camp is the closet analogy,” and later writes that after a day or two in the corps, his experience “blurred into . . . the same regimentation of [my] home life” (1994, 22, 35). He reinforces these similarities by using familial metaphors to describe the army. When a newspaper article he writes is approved by a general, a fellow journalist announces the news to him by explaining, “The Old Man loved it!” (88). Lest readers overlook the terminology, the author adds, “Old Man . . . [is] another sign of how the chain of command embodies a paternalistic

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approach” (88). This “paternalistic approach” indicates that the hierarchy upon which the military is based is not gender-neutral but rather dependent on specifically masculine embodiments of authority. The use of the word paternalistic further links this masculine authority of the general to the masculine authority of Zuniga’s own father, highlighting how gendered enactments of power move between the institutions of the family and the military and mirror one another. While Zuniga’s use of military metaphors to describe his father alongside his discussion of his family’s legacy of service lends an air of inevitability to his own entry into the armed forces, the oblique critique contained in his attention to paternalism also establishes the oppressive structure of both the family and the military as natural adversaries. Fulfilling his status as a subordinate son and soldier to his father and superior officer, Zuniga never directly challenges his father. However, his memoir clearly indicates dissatisfaction and resentment with his early life. In the opening section he describes his disappointment at his father’s failure to fulfill his promise to attend his Soldier of the Year ceremony. Painfully resigned to his father’s behavior and relying on his ever-present military metaphors, he recalls that “despite [his] years of training” he was wounded by his father’s absence (1994, 5). Keeping in mind that Zuniga’s father is a colonel, we can read his disappointment as that of both a son and a subordinate soldier and, more important, of his growing inability to subordinate the latter identity to the former. Although a soldier cannot express disapproval of his commanding officer’s action, the son cannot help but feel wounded. In addition, while the training to which Zuniga was exposed was behavioral and emotional, his feelings in spite of his training point to the failure of his militarized childhood to completely supersede his affective responses. In fact Zuniga comes to understand that he is neither a proper son nor a proper soldier. The general who awards him the medal praises him “the way a father might have,” but Zuniga also recalls an earlier homophobic rant by this same general (1994, 7). Zuniga remembers that the general had responded to a press conference on the topic of allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military by declaring, “Fags don’t belong in this man’s Army!” (6). The general declares that the U.S. Army is exceptional, singular, and masculine. “Fags” are an undifferentiated group who lack the humanity of “men” and threaten the cohesion of the army unit. The two homophobic father figures cement the overlap between the family and the army and assure that Zuniga’s rebellion will have to confront both institutions simultaneously.

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Furthermore Zuniga portrays the oppressive nature of his family and the army as not merely personal but as based on structural inequalities rooted in sexism and homophobia, foreshadowing the extent to which his rebellion will be public and political. He regards his mother’s decision to forgo her own love of art for familial responsibilities as one bound by “the limitations Spanish Mexican society imposed on its women” (1994, 22). He is similarly sympathetic to the plight of women, straight and gay, within the armed forces. Women, he explains, occupied a position of “double jeopardy. Either [they] were strong and masculine, and hence lesbians on the road to eventual discharge, or they were weak and an easy target for sexual harassment” (58). Men of course were also subject to the damage of homophobia and hypermasculinity. Zuniga is particularly incensed and saddened by the fate of one of his boot camp colleagues, a man who was targeted from the first day and eventually expelled as a way to set an example to the other recruits. “In every platoon formation, without an ounce of provocation, Private Clement was singled out due to some undefinable characteristic the drill sergeant usually attributed to homosexuality” (57). Zuniga explains that the targeting of Clement was meant to create bonding and strength within the rest of the unit and describes this tactic as a “training technique” that “[creates] the type of monsters who could perpetuate hatred and misogyny without even noticing it” (58). Here not only is the systemic homophobia and sexism of the army laid bare, but it is done so in a portrait of a perverted, savage family that “grow[s] stronger” and bonds by “purging one of [its] own” and “feeding on the scraps that are left over” (58). Later in the narrative Zuniga celebrates the release of the Tailhook report, in which 175 officers faced disciplinary action for the assault of eighty-three women and seven men during a 1991 convention in Las Vegas, for the report’s addition to the mounting evidence of the dark underbelly of military culture. Again Zuniga points to structural inequalities: “What good fortune to have this testament [the report] to the existence of unbridled, military-sanctioned heterosexual machismo and misogyny available for the public to inspect. . . . The Tailhook issue, like the issue of allowing gays in the military, was one of defining and putting in place enforceable regulations governing sexual misconduct, not sexual orientation” (1994, 204–5).8 Zuniga claims that the problems facing the military stem not from the particular sexual orientation of individual soldiers but from a larger culture that encourages violence and misogyny and regards particular bodies (predominantly female bodies) as property. If sexual orientation were an issue, he muses, then

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the public should rightfully question whether heterosexual men are a threat to the military (205). Despite his harsh criticism of the sexism and homophobia of the army, Zuniga does not directly critique the role that this institution plays, including its wars. In the introduction to the book, he describes himself as “a staunch Republican” and never alters that description (1994, x). When he learns he will be deployed to Iraq, he writes that he “knew that America was right to intervene in a blatant attack against a weak country” and that he “was proud to play a part” (97). As I explore later, Zuniga’s critique of sexism and homophobia in a manner divorced from issues of nationalism and militarism contributes to his adoption of a homonationalist political stance.

U.S. Intervention in Iraq Zuniga’s characterization of the Gulf War as one that began when an aggressor nation “blatantly” and without provocation attacked “a weak country” was, and to a large extent still is, the popular narrative of the impetus for the 1990 U.S. invasion of Iraq. However, while Zuniga’s engagement with Iraq begins only the day that Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, the history of U.S. intervention in Iraq extends to the early twentieth century and is intimately connected to three other nations: Iran, Kuwait, and Great Britain. For much of the twentieth century Great Britain was the reigning colonial power in the Middle East; the British seized Iraq during World War I but eventually bowed to anticolonial pressure and set up a monarchical, independent government in 1932. Around that same time the kingdom of Kuwait was established. As Ramsey Clark (1992, 213) explains, the establishment of Kuwait restricted Iraq’s access to the Persian Gulf and gave the United States and Great Britain a powerful bargaining chip when it came to the oil-producing region. When Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the Iranian-Anglo Petroleum Company, Great Britain and the United States pressured Kuwait to open up previously unused fields. The two Western powers used the same tactic when Iraqi prime minister Abdul Karim Qassim organized the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a body formed to strengthen the position of oil-producing nations. U.S. intervention in the affairs of Iraq increased substantially during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88). The United States in fact supported both nations in the conflict, although it favored Iraq. However, immediately

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after peace was declared, the United States set about systematically demonizing Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein. This seemingly schizophrenic side-switching makes sense only within the context of U.S. lust for oil and power. The United States promoted the buildup of Iraq’s army during the Iran-Iraq War but then used Iraq’s military strength to paint the nation as a threat, thereby paving the way for an invasion of Iraq and the seizing of petroleum resources the United States had coveted since the 1970s (Clark 1992, 22). During the Iran-Iraq War, the United States turned a (temporary) blind eye to the buildup of Iraq’s military, while after the war it supported Kuwait’s economic pressures on Iraq. In 1990, with Iraq’s economy still suffering from the war, Kuwait (along with the UAE) refused to abide by production quotas established by OPEC. This action led Hussein to declare at an Arab League summit that Kuwait was waging a war against Iraq “by economic means” (Clark 1992, 17). A few months after this speech, Hussein sent Iraqi troops to the Iraq-Kuwait border. While Iraq was certainly the aggressor in the conflict, popular narratives in the United States about Iraqi troops brutally occupying their helpless, smaller neighbor fail to tell the whole story. Not only did the United States support the buildup of Iraq’s military and Kuwait’s economic harassment, but U.S. officials also greatly exaggerated the threat that Iraq posed to the United States and other Middle East nations. Although President George H. W. Bush claimed that thousands of Iraqi troops were moving through southern Kuwait to the Saudi Arabian border, satellite pictures found no evidence of such troops (Clark 1992, 28–29). Nevertheless the United States sent over half a million troops to Saudi Arabia (29). After the conflict ended, many of these troops remained at U.S.-installed permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia. These bases continue to play an important role in the U.S. occupation of and war against Iraq as well as the larger “global war on terror.” Were U.S. actions that instigated or turned a blind eye to the growing conflict in the Middle East throughout the 1980s not enough to suspect U.S. motives for invading Iraq in 1991, the military also specifically targeted Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. Pointed attacks destroyed sewage and water treatment facilities, power lines, irrigation systems, grain silos, schools, government office buildings, and civilian hospitals (Clark 1992, 65–67). After the war economic sanctions prevented Iraq from buying the materials needed to rebuild its infrastructure (79). By 1992 these sanctions, which continued under the Clinton administration,

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were estimated to be responsible for the deaths of three hundred children under the age of five each day (82). The devastating effects of both the war and the sanctions suggest that the U.S. war against Iraq did not end when Iraqi troops withdrew from Kuwait. Acknowledging and remembering this history of U.S. intervention in Iraq is central to the ensuing discussion of the links between domestic and transnational violence and the relationship between the family, the military, and the nation. While Zuniga may not consider the ways U.S. domestic policies concerning kinship and family formation tie in with U.S. foreign policy, the following sections illustrate the extent to which the rhetoric of family, war, and nationalism are in fact intimately connected.

Unqueer Nation Zuniga’s description of his family and military life points to the use of familial tropes by military institutions and the use of military tropes to organize intimate relationships. In both instances the entwinement of the military and the family is meant to create cohesive institutions within a larger institution, the nation. The rhetoric of family that pervades these three belies their relation to one other and their dependency on particular ideas of gender and sexuality. While Benedict Anderson’s (1983) well-known definition of a nation as an “imagined community” points out that nations are constructed institutions, feminist critics explain that the nation relies not only on the power of myths, print culture, and celebrations (days of remembrance, holidays) but also on the promotion of particular gender ideals.9 These ideals serve the interests of specific individuals, namely national elites. Relying on claims to uniqueness, national groups construct themselves in relation to the other but weave gender and sexuality into ideas of “us” and “them.” Joyce P. Kaufman and Kristen P. Williams (2007, 18) term this aspect of gendered nationalism “women as signifiers of group differences,” while Tamar Mayer (2000, 10) explains the concept involves ideas about how “our women are always ‘pure’ and ‘moral’ while their women are ‘deviant’ and ‘immoral.’” This stratification occurs along the lines of sexuality, race, and class as well, “despite the national discourse of internal unity” (Mayer 2000, 6). The effort to distinguish “us” from “them” involves the imposition of discourses of othering within the national group. Thus we can understand debates about the rights of gays and lesbians within the United States (and within the U.S. Armed Forces) as an effort on behalf

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of one national group to distinguish itself from others as well as an internal dialogue about who or what is included within the nation. Not only do gender and sexuality function within the home, military, and nation, but the rise to prominence of the liberal nation-state and the prevalence of ideas about the nuclear family are historically linked. Randall Halle (2001, 381) explains, “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at the dawn of the modern era, liberal political theorists relied on the recognition and promotion of a significant and intimate interconnection between the family and the state. Those political theorists who drew this interconnection of family and state . . . derived from the family a form of human universalism, autonomy, and equality that countered absolutist hierarchies and privilege.” While theorists such as Hegel espoused connections between the family and the nation, the formation of both institutions continue to undergo change. “[The nuclear family’s] claim to be the ideal family form lasted less than one hundred years, and now it wanes. In approximately the same time span the nation-state rose and declined” (Halle 2001, 381).10 Now we can reread the anecdotes about the “Old Man” liking Zuniga’s article and the young soldier having a father-son like relationship with his major in a different vein. The patriarchal hierarchy of the military constructs officers as fathers and soldiers as sons and also constructs fathers and officers as political elites and sons and soldiers as citizens. As Kaufman and Williams (2007, 2) note, “States use marriage to reinforce their own nationalistic and/or patriotic needs.” If Zuniga’s upbringing was meant to teach him how to be a proper soldier, his time in the military is meant to teach him how to be a proper citizen. The leader of all three institutions (family, military, nation) is almost always a man, and nowhere is there room for the questioning of heteronormative roles without sacrificing the attendant identity of son, soldier, or citizen. At the same time, Halle’s historical perspective on the newness of contemporary nation-states and families also suggests that the rigid policing of the behaviors of soldiers, sons, and citizens reflects an anxiety about changes taking place within families and nations. Like the family, the military and the nation are dependent on gender binaries: “Members are assigned distinct roles in accordance with their gender—as in the patriarchal family, for the nation to sustain itself it needs both masculinity and femininity” (Mayer 2000, 14). Within Zuniga’s narrative, we are given several examples of how the heterosexist, misogynist space of both the family and the military rely on rigid notions of feminine and masculine and the subordination of women. Zuniga’s father imposes strict gender-based expectations on his children

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(Zuniga will be a soldier; his sister will not), while the emotional roots of the family are tethered to his mother, whose own wishes and desires are ignored. Similarly the constant degradation of both femininity and females within the army serves to police the boundaries of gender and sexuality and retain a sexist status quo. Given the relationship between the family, the military, and the nation and particular iterations of gender and sexual identity, conversations about, and especially threats to, any one of these institutions must be evaluated within a context that takes into account their interconnections. The controversy over President Clinton’s vow to lift the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military that erupted just after the Gulf War exhibits the extent to which the sexual and gender norms of the military are a reflection of the sexual and gender norms of the U.S. nation as well as the extent to which such norms rely on particular enactments of the family. According to Holly Allen (2000, 310), the military stands alone as “a symbol of U.S. national community.” For both proponents and detractors of lifting the ban, at stake was nothing less than the national interests and ideals of the United States. Furthermore “family values” were often brought into discussions of the role of gays and lesbians and women in the military. For many, the military mirrors the traditional gender roles that are associated with the patriarchal family. Allen quotes Congressman Robert Dornan’s testimony in the hearings before the Military Personnel and Compensation Subcommittee and the Defense Policy Panel of the Committee on Armed Serves in 1992, in which he asserts that he could not imagine his “three daughters or four granddaughters or any women” performing acts of military heroism (318). Allen explains that Dornan’s testimony reflects the idea that women are “dependent family members” who in turn help “dignify the national role that male defenders play” (318). Allen’s analysis echoes Mayer’s assertion that the nation is dependent on gender binaries, on the enforced distinction and opposition between masculine and feminine aspects of particular ideals and values. Rather than ignore gender-based difference, the debate around allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military and women to serve in all combat positions “makes strategic use of women and homosexuals” (Allen 2000, 323). Women become those citizens who need to be protected by masculine soldiers, while the frequent assertions that homosexuals reflect an enemy from which the nation must be defended reinforces the necessity of a national defense force. While Allen (2000, 309) points out that the military relies on a “fraternal model of U.S. community,” the institution also models a traditional,

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patriarchal family. This idea of family is ironically bolstered by particular “feminine” traits even while it is leveraged to exclude women and homosexuals from serving. Allen quotes an officer’s testimony in the hearings: “Homosexuals constantly focus on themselves. . . . They never talk about the good of the unit” (321). In invoking the collective good, the soldier likens the military unit to a family. However, as Stephanie Coontz (1992, 42–43) explains, the rise of capitalism included a growing concern for the nonindividualistic values that were to be found in the family; such values were understood to be distinctly feminine. At the same time, when the importance of the family as a producer of noncompetitive, moral values was lauded, this development also solidified the distinct roles women and men were to play in the private and public spheres. These ideas can be found in contemporary advocates of “traditional family values” who claim that the values of the public/male world (competition, aggression, individualism) must be balanced by those of the private/female world (altruism, nurturance, collectivity; 42–43). When opponents of altering the military’s policies on gays and lesbians and women stress the collective, familial nature of the military, they ironically paint the military as a feminized space, albeit one in which neither women nor lesbians truly belong. Of course, the feminization of the military family also portrays the institution, as well as the nation in which it is located, as vulnerable and in need of defense. In the lead-up to the 1990 invasion of Iraq, U.S. citizens were assured that Saddam Hussein possessed the capability to launch a missile into the United States, a fear of penetration that would be realized on September 11. However, the familial metaphors that Zuniga and his fellow soldiers use to describe military life reflect a shift in understandings and representations of masculinity that emerged during the Gulf War. Such representations looked corporeally different from earlier images of masculinity but continued to rely on heteronormativity while reinforcing the role of (male) soldiers within the U.S. national family. Robyn Wiegman (1994, 175) notes that the recuperation of U.S. masculinity following the Viet Nam War gave way in the early 1990s to a more “domestic” manhood; Mariscal (1991, 104) uses the phrase “tenderhearted masculinity” to describe the same phenomenon. Familial discourses played an important role in expressing this new kind of masculinity. “Tenderhearted masculinity” was partly a response to a post–cold war political imagination in which fears about an external communist threat shifted to anxiety about “an interior incursion, recasting feminism, black power, and the gay rights struggle as inherently antithetical to the familial concept

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of ‘nation’” (Wiegman 1994, 175). Prominent articles, such as a 1992 Newsweek article that featured General Norman Schwarzkopf sitting on a twin bed and holding stuffed animals that wear military fatigues, reflect what Wiegman terms a “domestic(ated) masculinity” (178). While this “sentimental” masculinity looked very different from the “hyperphallicized Rambo” that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, it was no less reliant on patriarchal and homophobic ideas. “Remasculinization,” Mariscal (1991, 104) writes, “is never a simple return to an earlier moment; rather, it suggests a rearticulated category shaped by both residual and emergent discursive practices.” The emergent discourse can be seen in the integration of feminine norms by the U.S. government and army. Iraq and Hussein were not feminized but rather a cast as a macho opponent, though no match for a U.S. government that was “hyperefficient, assertive and sensitive” (103). However, as Zuniga describes the role of familial rhetoric in his unit, residual discourses persisted. Images of soldiers that reflected their status as husbands and fathers merged a patriarchal ideology that held men to be the protectors of their families with one that understood the nation to be a feminized, vulnerable entity. For Mariscal (1991, 102), “the only character portrayed as essentially feminine was the entire community, decorated in yellow ribbons, waiting passively at home for the returning heroes.” Father- and husband-soldiers fulfilled their duties to their families and their nation simultaneously, while reinforcing the underlying patriarchal and heteronormative underpinnings of both institutions.11 Military rhetoric that emphasized the familial organization of the armed forces reified the family as a safe haven from “outside” threats as well as an institution that must, like the nation, be defended. The shift to a more feminine, sensitive kind of masculinity ironically upheld not only the place of the fathersoldier in relation to the nation but also, as Lauren Rabinowitz (1994) points out, the traditional role of women within the family. This rearticulation of family values became a mechanism through which to sublimate political criticism of the war itself. Talk shows such as The Oprah Winfrey Show, Donahue, and Sally Jessy Raphael “solicited angry antiwar statements” but then responded by shifting the conversation either to the importance of expressing personal emotions or “the importance of supporting the troops on an emotional level” (190–91). Rabinowitz explains, “In this manner, public debate and discussion became reconfigured within the limits of the personal, the emotional, and the ideal of a woman’s nurturing role in the family” (191). That these conversations took place within the feminine space of the talk show reinforced the gender-based boundaries and limits

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of particular kinds of discourse. Guests who were critical of the war were pressured to alter their stance in acquiescence to the appropriate emotional tenor of afternoon television. Manipulating criticism in this way and containing it within the space of the talk show contributed to the maintenance of the distinction between the domestic/private/affective and the national/ public/political as well as “the attempt to isolate and manage the private as a distinct zone outside of capital relations and racial exploitation” (Eng 2010, 10). The perspectives of Wiegman, Mariscal, Rabinowitz, and Eng help us to understand the political context behind the complex interplay between family, masculinity, heteronormativity, the military, and nationalism with which Zuniga’s memoir is concerned. As Soldier of the Year illustrates, one result of this masculinity as paternalism was the reinforcement of the exclusion of gays and lesbians from the national family with the passage of DADT. It bears mentioning that the efforts to present U.S. soldiers and their families as emotive individuals were nowhere to be found when it came to representing Iraqis. Rabinowitz (1994, 191) writes that talk show interviews with individuals who had family members in the Gulf always framed the soldier as part of a family “through shots of accompanying children, siblings, and parents, or through pans or cuts to family photographs, often featuring the military enlistee.” Such shows reinforced the connection between the individual family and the national one (191). Iraqis, on the other hand, were rarely if ever depicted in such a humanizing manner; instead they “were routinely depicted as isolated and unemotive” (Wiegman 1994, 186). As Wiegman points out, even images of horrific slaughter, such as pictures of dead Iraqi bodies lying on the road to Kuwait City, “lack[ed] in narrative and detail the kind of emotional pitch achieved by the reportage of familial contexts” (186). A U.S. pilot illustrated the extreme dehumanization of the enemy that occurs during warfare when he referred to Iraqi soldiers outside Basra as “fish in a barrel” (Mariscal 1991, 114).12 Such images solidified the boundaries of the U.S. national family and placed Iraqis outside of any family in a manner not unconnected to the ways people of color and gays and lesbians in the United States are continually othered. The continuation of policies that discriminated against gays and lesbians in the armed forces ensured that any description of a “military family” was a straight one, driving home the fact that neither Iraqis, dissenting communities of color, nor gay and lesbian individuals could be part of the U.S. family. While Zuniga makes little mention of his ethnicity in regard to either the army or the Gulf War, his position as a “Spanish Mexican” is not

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irrelevant to either his affiliation with the armed forces, his hesitancy to directly oppose U.S. imperialist policies, or the familial politics that underlie the memoir. Chicanos and Latinos have a long history of serving in the armed forces and have historically been overrepresented in both the rates of casualties and the ranks of decorated veterans (Mariscal 1991, 109). This historical relationship, along with the power of “the discourse of nationalism, Catholicism, and service” in Chicano communities and the desire of minority groups to become incorporated into the nation are at play when Chicanas/os hesitate to take an active stance against war (110, 113). Zuniga’s careful description of his family as military and his military as family points to the significant role military service has played within Chicano families and drives home the idea that for Chicanas/os, opposition to the U.S. Army and U.S. government policies is an intimate rebellion. Finally, Zuniga’s lack of explicit and engaged discussions of his ethnicity in favor of extended discussions of sexuality and sexual politics again places him and his memoir within a distinct moment of change regarding the discussion of and relationship between sexual and racial politics in the United States. In focusing almost exclusively on the lack of rights afforded gay men and lesbians in the military, he suggests that the struggle for racial equality has been won and that these two movements—for sexual and racial equality—are distinct and discontinuous. Referencing his ethnicity only in regard to a lineage or history confines the importance of race and ethnicity to the past and ignores “the simultaneity of racial and sexual discrimination” (Eng 2010, 17). Moreover discussing ethnicity only in relation to his family separates race from larger structural processes and institutions, suggesting that racial identities and conflicts are experienced only, and thus can be resolved only, within domestic spaces. Zuniga’s decision to focus on the sex and gender politics of the U.S. military to the near exclusion of the racial dimensions of militarism places his work alongside what Eng terms “queer liberalism.” However, as I discuss below, the occasional acknowledgment of the imperial practices of the armed forces suggests that the perspective reflected in Soldier of the Year may be best described as embodying ambivalent homonationalism.

Reconstructing Familia The extent to which gender and sexual norms are linked in the family, military, and nation is best exemplified in Zuniga’s simultaneous yet ambivalent challenging of all three institutions. When Zuniga begins

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a relationship with a man and a woman, he is forced to challenge his own ideas about sexual orientation and family; tellingly his relationship with Dave and Laurie immediately precipitates his decision to come out publicly. His decision to reject the sexual and gender norms of his biological and military family thus occurs alongside his fashioning of a different kind of family. The manner in which he describes his relationship with Dave and Laurie and the role they played in his public campaign to repeal the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military contributes to the narrative’s intervention in contemporary discourses on family and nation. Zuniga exhibits his ability to challenge and reject particular aspects of familial arrangements and ties while upholding the value and possibility of alternative kinship relations. At the same time, he fails to place his critique of the sex and gender politics of the family within a larger context that takes into account the relationship of the nation to the family. This attempt to disassemble the hierarchies based on gender and sexual orientation within the military without examining the relationship of these hierarchies to the U.S. nation and U.S. foreign policy contributes to Zuniga’s inhabiting of a political position that Jasbir Puar (2007) terms “homonationalism.” After he returns from Iraq, Zuniga is transferred to San Francisco’s Presidio, a post that puts him in close proximity to a large and heterogeneous queer constituency, making him question his own prejudiced ideas about sexuality. He meets Dave at a club in the Castro District and is both attracted to him and repulsed by his bisexuality. After Dave explains his marriage to Laurie and his feelings about dating men and women, Zuniga identifies him as “an elusive breed: the Bisexual.” He then laments his own attraction to Dave in his typically over-the-top fashion: “What torture! To like someone while actively disliking who they are or who they are making themselves out to be” (1994, 150). The young soldier simultaneously doubts the “authenticity” of Dave’s sexuality while trying to separate Dave as a “person” from his sexual orientation. Within the space of one chapter, however, Zuniga has fallen in love with both Dave and Laurie, and he offers a new perspective on sexuality, one that takes into account the limitations that both hetero- and homonormativity place on sexual expression. He disavows the term bisexual for himself, while acknowledging that others in similar circumstance may choose it. “Monosexism,” he points out, wields an enormous amount of pressure within both straight and gay communities, and he speculates that were it not for these pressures, more individuals would identify as bisexual. Zuniga’s entry into a relationship with a man and

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a woman and his experiences in attempting to explain that relationship to others forces him to confront prejudices from other queer-identified individuals. “I had allowed myself to imagine that people who are targets of prejudice have an almost instinctive sensitivity to the mistreatment of minorities and avoid engaging in it themselves. Unfortunately, I found out that this is untrue” (1994, 171). Later he will come face-to-face with the prejudices that he himself continues to hold, a moment that will help expand his notion of family. At this point in the narrative, however, he simply explains to his readers and himself, “I label myself a human capable of loving a man or a woman because they too are human” (171).13 As I discuss further below, Zuniga’s reliance on a rhetoric of undifferentiated humanity marks his thinking as steeped in Western and male-centric notions of individualism and personhood in a manner consistent with his lack of engagement with racial politics as well as the constrained position he occupies as a soldier. With the development of his relationship with Dave and Laurie, Zuniga begins to construct his own family, and the strength and support he receives from them is integral to the public, political moves he makes. He decides to leverage his status as the 1993 Sixth Army’s Soldier of the Year to influence the debate about lifting the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military. He understands his decision to come out as a way of supporting President Clinton’s attempts to follow through with his campaign promises. “I’ll try to help you, Mr. President. I’ll give up my career to provide you ammunition” (1994, 179). Zuniga’s direct address to Clinton, which foregrounds the president’s position as head of the nation and the military, illustrates his acquiescence to a heteropatriarchal hierarchy and desire to remain a participant in the U.S. national project. Dave and Laurie prove to be indispensable allies in Operation Coming Out, and Zuniga begins to adopt the rhetoric of family to describe their relationship. His lovers function as chaperones, counselors, researchers, and public relations advisors. Laurie introduces Zuniga to Elizabeth Birch, cochair of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, who puts the two in contact with Robert Bray, NGLTF’s media coordinator (1994, 189). Both Dave and Laurie help Zuniga write a coming-out speech and prepare for the media attention that he will receive after making a public appearance at the NGLTF’s Honoring Our Allies reception. “Laurie’s zeal reminded me of that of militant suffragettes. Dave was the calming force gapping the rifts between propriety and confrontation” (192). Ironically, while he is in the midst of making a public statement about his sexuality,

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he must keep his personal relationship hidden, and he acknowledges to readers that his new family is a liability in his campaign. “There was no question that in a world of sound bites, where romantic entanglements make for juicy gossip-column fodder, our relationship would be torn to shreds” (209). The earlier entwinement of family and military in many ways lays the groundwork for Zuniga’s active challenging of the structure of family. In addition the overlap between parental and military authority in his narrative means that confronting one institution cannot occur without confronting the other. As he comes out, an act aimed at the military and the government, Zuniga finds that his personal life is also challenging the family structure. “How could I explode the established notion of what constitutes a family in a two-minute news segment? How could I explain the meaning of family by blood, love, friendship, and community to a jaded journalist allotted five inches of copy for his story? Please, God, don’t let our enemies pick up on this” (209). His participation in an alternative family arrangement provides the support he needs to enter into the political debate surrounding gays and lesbians in the military, while it also forces him to confront the stigma attached to such relationships. Using the term family to refer to his relationship with Dave and Laurie challenges both hetero- and homonormativity. As Mary Bernstein and Renate Reimann (2001, 3) write, a family is a group of people who define each other as such and who have a strong emotional and/ or financial commitment to one another, regardless of legal, biological, or physical (cohabitation) relationship. In the United States heterosexual families and individuals often challenge traditional notions of the family, while gays and lesbians may embrace heteronormative ideas. The critics explain, “LGB people often embrace white middle-class, straight suburban American norms in the ongoing quest for acceptance” (5). As the gay and lesbian rights movement has made visibility an important tenet, “uneasiness remains when the ‘wrong people’ claim visibility” (6). Zuniga’s experiences fall on both sides of this uneasiness. On the one hand, he himself exhibits uneasiness with the visibility of the “wrong kind” of gays and lesbians in the form of Queer Nation and ACT UP. On the other hand, he understands that his ability to be a gay activist is contingent on keeping his relationship with Dave and Laurie hidden. Zuniga illustrates how “the gay movement regulates internally who are the acceptable queers and who are the queers better left in the closet,” while he also displays how such regulation can take the form of selfinduced invisibility (5).

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Zuniga’s uneasiness regarding his own and others’ expressions of sexuality helps us to understand the relationship between hierarchical social organization, family and kinship relations, and the nation as well as what is at stake in debates surrounding gay marriage. Echoing Halle’s (2001) discussion of the link between the heterosexual, nuclear family and the liberal nation-state, Judith Butler (2002, 21) writes, “Debates on gay marriage and gay kinship . . . have become sites of intense displacement for other political fears . . . about the very unity and transmissibility of the nation.” According to Halle (2001, 381), when conservative politicians and pundits decry the changing nature of the family, they are also reacting to political changes in the formation of the nation and the state insofar as “economic and demographic transformations mark the kinship structure of the bourgeois nuclear family as superseded.” In this sense the fears of political conservatives may not be unfounded. However, for communities that have long been excluded from both the nation and the family (as well as communities that have been victims of state violence), the changes to these institutions may well be cause for celebration rather than lament.14 At the same time, Butler, like Bernstein and Reimann, explains that it is certainly possible to alter familiar relationships without altering the structure and function of the nation-state. For example, the legalization of same-sex marriage would change but not destroy distinctions and hierarchies based on one’s relationship to the legitimating forces of the state. “In the case of gay marriage or of affiliative legal alliances, we see how various sexual practices and relationships that fall outside the purview of the sanctifying law become illegible, or, worse, untenable, and new hierarchies emerge in public discourse. These hierarchies not only enforce the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate queer lives, but they also produce tacit distinctions among forms of illegitimacy” (Butler 2002, 18). If we “open up” the institution of marriage to same-sex couples, what becomes of those individuals whose relationships and identities remain unrecognized within even this “expanded” definition of marriage?15 Zuniga’s acknowledgment that he cannot be out about his relationship with Dave and Laurie partly answers this question. Butler goes on to warn that the social ostracism that Zuniga feels due to his nonheteronormative family may become institutionalized: “To be legitimated by the state is to enter into the terms of legitimation offered there, and to find that one’s public and recognizable sense of personhood is fundamentally dependent on the lexicon of that legitimation” (20). This dependence on state legitimation may discourage us from seeking out and enacting other ways of

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organizing intimate and affiliative relationships. Zuniga’s narrative lays out the perhaps inevitable confrontation with the legitimating powers of the state that nonnormative familial arrangements may inaugurate, while both he and Butler suggest that a reconceptualization of family rather than marriage may be in order. Butler (2002, 40) calls on us to refuse to “allow kinship to become reducible to ‘family,’” an idea echoed in Zuniga’s (1994, 209) desire to explain “the meaning of family by blood, love, friendship, and community.” While Zuniga does not frame his life with Laurie and Dave in terms of the relationship between alternative kinship arrangements and the legitimating power of the state, the narrative does join his formation of a family unit with his entry into national politics, thus suggesting the link between state politics and family formation. The narrative thus touches on the importance of family as both a cultural construct and a political force. Richard T. Rodríguez (2009, 2) explains, “The family is a crucial symbol and organizing principle that by and large frames the history of Mexican Americans in the United States.”16 Furthermore Chicana/o familial rhetoric was used specifically as a tool for political mobilization; Chicano movement leaders Reies López Tijerina and César Chávez invoked biological family “to crystallize the need for collective cohesion” (23). The important role that Dave and Laurie play in Zuniga’s political campaign and Zuniga’s insistence on using the word family to describe their relationship affirm the social, emotional, and political importance of family and the ability of individuals to construct different kinds of families to meet their needs. Zuniga, Rodríguez, and others also criticize the oppressive gender and sexual relations within traditional Chicana/o families that rely on fixed gender roles as well as the assumption of heterosexuality and male authority.17 Similar to the use of familial rhetoric to preserve a particular ideal of national unity in the debates surrounding women and gays and lesbians serving in the armed forces discussed earlier, the preservation of one idea of familia was integral to the Chicano movement’s furthering of an ethnonationalist structure that reserved leadership positions for men and fathers. Here again Zuniga’s stance is decidedly ambivalent. While he acknowledges “the limitations Spanish Mexican society imposed on its women,” his appeal to Clinton throughout the later sections of the book exhibit his engagement with a political ideology that “ensure[s] that [a] patriarchal father figure [remain] in charge” (Zuniga 1994, 22; Moraga 1993, 157). Understanding the reverberations between and among ideas concerning the family, the nation-state, and ethnonationalist

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groups requires that we take into consideration the political ramifications of personal relationships. Seen this way, we can read Zuniga’s faith in Clinton as indicative of an enduring faith in his own father and, by extension, a heteronormative and patriarchal family and nation. At the same time we must also understand his publicly proclaimed gay identity and formation of a family with Dave and Laurie as explorations of different kinds of personal, social, and political organizing. Unsurprisingly, then, Zuniga’s entry into national politics occurs alongside the simultaneous fashioning of an alternative family and his own expanded understanding of what constitutes community, particularly “the” gay community. In his coming-out speech, Zuniga declares his desire to be part of the military and the U.S. nation, while also asserting that he is a member of a cohesive gay community. He invokes a gay military community in phrases such as “our combined successes” and stresses that this community has “common cause” with the larger gay community. When he is confronted with individuals and ideas that do not neatly conform to his understandings of the “correct” public performance of queer identity, both he and his readers are called on to reexamine the supposed homogeneity of “the” U.S. gay community and the political efficacy of assuming such homogeneity. In a section titled “Friendly Fire,” Zuniga confronts and expands his own ideas about who is a member of his gay community. The chapter opens with an excerpt from an April 1993 interview with Zuniga published in the national magazine The Advocate in which he distances himself from radical gay organizations such as ACT UP and Queer Nation and declares them “part of the fringe element” (1994, 264). In response to the interview, Zuniga’s public stance regarding the military was lauded, but he also received reprimands for his denigration of the named organizations. A queer activist whom Laurie contacted, after learning that she was involved with Zuniga’s case, entered into a “tirade” and claimed that gay and lesbian service members were “opportunists” (265). Zuniga also received letters “scorning” him for his comments. He goes on to explain how this experience, along with his chance encounter with a drag queen in Austin, Texas, caused him to alter his viewpoint. After lightly berating him for his comments in The Advocate, the performer, Sassy, spends some time talking with Zuniga, and the two discover several similarities, a background in a military family being one. Sassy then tells Zuniga, “If you remember anything I say tonight, remember this: We’re all one big family. Drag queens, leather daddies, military boys, college boys. . . . When one of us gets screwed, we all get screwed” (267). Sassy’s vision of family

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is strikingly masculine and heteronormative; he invokes only gay male identities and uses the verb screwed, a word that in popular parlance is synonymous with penetrated. In Sassy’s mind, to be screwed is to be dominated, to inhabit a feminine/passive position, and a decidedly negative one. Such a heteronormative, misogynist perspective, coming from an individual whose gender expression challenges sex/gender binaries, is ironic to say the least, but Sassy’s comments are nonetheless successful in prompting Zuniga to rethink his idea of community: “I had never really understood certain of the fetishes and subcultures in our community. I saw that I didn’t need to understand them, but that it was incumbent on me to respect them. Otherwise I was guilty of the same moralistic evaluation of theirs that I so abhorred from the right wing” (267). Zuniga experiences a backlash from those he deems members of his community when some gay activists question the amount of time, money, and energy spent on lifting the military ban in the face of issues such as the AIDS epidemic (268). After his apology to the activist Laurie met is brushed aside, he exclaims, “My soul had been denigrated by one of my gay brothers” (269). This painful lesson serves to cement his relationship with his community/family; from this point in the narrative Zuniga continues to refer to his gay community as his family. In a chapter titled “Tribal Mosaic” he affirms, “We have not forgotten nor will we forget our brothers and sisters with AIDS. . . . We must not minimize the enormous strides made by groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation . . . along with the wisdom we have gained [through the struggle over lifting the ban]. . . . We . . . have developed a better understanding of ourselves as a family” (294–95). The reaffirmation of the importance of family along with a rethinking of the traditional notions of family that Zuniga began when he fell in love with Dave and Laurie is continued throughout his narrative. In both his relationship with Dave and Laurie and the lessons he learns from Sassy and others, Zuniga emphasizes the malleability and strength of familial ties, the ability to change ideas and constructions of family, and the relationship between political and familial ideology. Zuniga’s continual engagement in a rhetoric of family and “personhood” evidences his reliance on a particularly male-centric and Western understanding of justice and equality that reflects his social position. He claims to be interested in forming a family alongside his gay and lesbian “brothers” and “sisters”; he actively avoids discussing or acknowledging any differences in identity or experience. Even when he relates his encounter with Sassy as evidence of his own errors and growing consciousness, he exhibits his desire to simply include individuals like

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Sassy in his family without questioning the assumptions upon which his concept of family is built. By not discussing himself or his peers as differentiated subjects Zuniga reveals his own position as steeped in ideas of universal, normative citizenship. The use of familial rhetoric to discuss public, politicized identities may well be strategic on his part. “The modern conception of the public,” Iris Marion Young (1990, 120) argues, “creates a conception of citizenship which excludes from public attention most particular aspects of persons.” By not engaging in a discussion of difference, the memoirist reveals his own philosophical indebtedness to a concept of citizenry based on a white, bourgeois subject and frames his project in a manner intelligible to subscribers to Western ideas of political engagement (110). We can read such aspects of his memoir as indicative of his ideological ties to white, bourgeois identity; they also allude to his formation within patriarchal and militaristic institutions. As Saidiya Hartman (1997, 54) reminds us, “The forms, relations, and institutions of power condition the exercise of agency.” To call for the recognition of gays, lesbians, and non-gender-conforming individuals as “humans” is a direct refutation of the kind of hateful and objectifying ideas Zuniga relates as coming from his military superiors. In this sense the structure of Zuniga’s arguments in favor of the rights of gays and lesbians is formed through and against the institutions and ideologies within which he himself is located.

Militating for the Nation Despite the kinds of lessons about family and community discussed earlier, Zuniga’s attempts to fashion a more inclusionary, democratic family within institutions (the army and the U.S. nation-state) based on hierarchies leads to a limiting concept of family ultimately bound by the nation-state. He suggests that one can change aspects of the nation without dismantling it, echoing some of Butler’s warnings as well as some reappraisals of Chicana/o nationalism.18 Here what Olguín (2002) sees as tangible challenges to “America,” I see as a less explicit critique of the U.S. nation-state in which Zuniga nonetheless suggests that the family, the military, and the nation may be fundamentally altered. While the ethnic nationalism that is the subject of Richard T. Rodríguez’s (2009) project and the state nationalism at the heart of Puar’s (2007) project differ markedly, Zuniga’s memoir provides a way to enter into conversations about both. Nationalism has often been defined in its relationship to the state and its role in state formation emphasized

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(Nagel 1998, 248). Ethnic nationalism has shared with a state-centric nationalism explicit goals of self-determination and sovereignty as well as a reliance on the articulation of a national consciousness via art, music, and dance but has not always joined such ideas with calls for territorial control or the establishment of nation-states. Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994, 108) write that the nationalism advocated by civil rights groups in the late 1960s in the United States was composed of “a diverse current whose main strategic unity lay in rejection of the assimilationist and integrationist tendencies associated with the movement moderates.” Chicano nationalism, the authors explain, had its roots in the Mexican Revolution and anticolonial struggles in the U.S. Southwest that focused on land seizures and gaining control of urban Chicana/o communities (108). This cultural nationalism, which took hold among Asian Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans, was primarily a rejection of white Eurocentric values and explicitly challenged dominant white culture via an oppositional culture and practices including poetry, language, clothes, and visual art (109, 111). While Chicano cultural nationalism differed markedly from U.S. state nationalism, both share an emphasis on unity and “otherness” as well as a reliance on enforced gender hierarchies, masculine privilege, and heterosexism (Nagel 1998, 248). While the problems within Chicana/o nationalism have been well critiqued by Chicana/o scholars (among them Rodríguez and Moraga), Omi and Winant (1994) in fact suggest that it was not simply elements of nationalism that were problematic but its orientation and goals in relation to the U.S. state. They contend that ethnic nationalists “refused to recognize the particularities of the U.S. racial order,” and “the limits of all analogies with revolutionary movements abroad . . . ignored the political sphere” and failed to work productively with reformists or minority socialists (111). What was missing in ethnic nationalist analyses was a serious consideration of the extent to which the U.S. state in fact organized and enforced a particular racial order and the state’s own capacity for adaptation (111). From this perspective, recuperating and refashioning ethnic nationalism in a feminist, nonheterosexist manner may not bring Chicanas/os or other U.S. ethnic minorities any closer to seriously disrupting what Omi and Winant refer to as “the U.S. racial order.” Here we may hear echoes of earlier discussions concerning the family; in both instances what is needed is a fundamental shift in the understanding of both the family and the nation, not simply a reorganization or rearticulation of its boundaries.

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Given these connections, how can Soldier of the Year help scholars and activists to productively understand and engage with changing articulations of ethnic and state nationalism? Rodríguez (2009, 7) acknowledges the relationship between Chicana/o nationalism and state nationalism when he claims that in order for Chicanas/os to “liberate their purported constituencies from the subordinating forces of the state, they must relinquish their dependency on exclusionary kinship relations.” Furthermore “the perpetuation of homophobia, heterosexism, and misogyny in Chicano contexts serves only to promote the hierarchical arrangements upon which authoritarian social institutions depend” (133). Such hierarchical arrangements permeate both states and ethnic communities, a point Arturo Arias (2003) makes when he discusses the “erasure” non-Chicano Latinas/os suffer from within the U.S. Latina/o community and seeks to offer a different kind of model than that of the ethnic nationalism that arose within Latina/o communities in the mid-twentieth century. Reading Zuniga while remaining attuned to the work of Rodríguez, Arias, and Puar allows us to account for the complex and complicated ways that ethnic and state nationalism impact articulations of identity politics. What Zuniga’s memoir brings to the forefront is a valuable reminder that we understand and appreciate the role of U.S. militarism as it shapes the very identities and communities, as well as the conversations and possibilities, that enter into play in these overlapping discussions and movements. While the work of Rodríguez, Butler, Arias, and Puar is theoretically distinct, all help to elucidate particular aspects of Soldier of the Year, in particular the significance of the narrative’s engagement with ethnic and state nationalism, heteronormative familial rhetoric, and homonationalism. In bringing these disparate frameworks and ideas together in the analysis of a work of late twentieth-century Chicano literature, I suggest that Soldier of the Year evidences the extent to which neither Chicana/o nor queer of color politics can be divorced from the U.S. national context. The work also asserts the importance of examining the ways the U.S. military and the reproduction of violence within domestic and international spaces, and especially within Chicana/o and Latina/o communities, will continue to impact how we understand contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o art and politics. Finally, the historical relationship between the family and the nation and the relative youth of both institutions as we understand and encounter them today impacts how we view new familial and national formations. Most pointedly the anxiety about the repercussions of new familial formations drives home the connection between the nation and the family, even absent

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explicit calls for the reorganization of the nation on behalf of Zuniga or others. While conservatives may attempt to “maintain the hegemony of outdated familial and political forms,” these attempts occur alongside “transnational geopolitical configurations [that] sublate the nation-state” and, I add, the nuclear heteronormative family (Halle 2001, 381).

Ambivalent Homonationalism The links between the gender and sexual division of the family, the military, and the nation suggest that challenging hierarchies within one of these institutions will have repercussions in all three. Conservatives understand this very well when they assert that allowing women and homosexuals to serve in the military will damage family values, the integrity of the armed forces, and national security. Despite these links, Zuniga’s own arguments in favor of lifting the ban call on an idealized version of the United States and suggest that one can change the gender and sexual hierarchies of the military without changing the masculine character of the nation itself. In his first public speech Zuniga (1994, 213) repeatedly declares his “love” for the U.S. Army and portrays the army as an honorable institution led astray by “irrational discrimination.” He declares the U.S. Armed Forces the “world’s greatest armed force” and says he is “proud to have answered the nation’s call in a time of crisis” (212). He then decries the fact that “excel[ling] in military service” is an “opportunity” that he is being denied based on his sexuality (213). The rhetoric of opportunity, Allen (2000) explains, indicates an understanding of military service as a form of participation in the nation and reflects a desire on the part of women and gays and lesbians to participate in this important performance of national identity. Advocates of women and gays and lesbians serving in the military “recognize that gender [and sexual] inequality in the military prevents women [and gays and lesbians] from contributing fully to the national community” (313). Looking at military service as an “opportunity” can be read as a call for equal participation in the nation and thus an implicit approval of the national project. Zuniga’s (1994, 214) “pride” in his identity as a soldier and his wish to “celebrate our victory” by “march[ing] shoulder-toshoulder with . . . the heroes of Desert Storm” illustrate that although he challenges specific military policies, he supports the larger institution of the military and the nation within which it is ensconced. Zuniga’s attitude toward the military and the United States is captured in a letter written to President Clinton in 1994 and included as

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an appendix in his memoir. While the letter is written after the implementation of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, it contains Zuniga’s (1994, 321) hopes that “our community” can “recover from [this] ‘defeating’ blow to our unfinished struggle for equality” and his belief that Clinton can aid in this struggle.19 Zuniga ends his letter by quoting a portion of Clinton’s State of the Union address in which the president invoked a vision of “a new American community” (323). The author then affirms his and his community’s commitment “to a vision larger than [themselves]” and pleads, “America begs for a leader to pull it out of the darkness of despair and evil” (321). Zuniga’s insistence that gays and lesbians are committed to a “larger vision” refutes the claim of the selfishness of queer soldiers quoted earlier and insists that gays and lesbians can be contributing, selfless members of the military and the nation. The call for Clinton to lead America “out of darkness and despair” invokes a national community that needs strong, masculine leadership to help it fulfill its democratic potential. The amount of hope invested in Clinton (despite his failure to fulfill his promise to revoke the ban) suggests a stubborn insistence on Zuniga’s part to cling to the ideal of a patriarchal father who can singlehandedly lead his family, military, and nation on the “right path.” At another point in his memoir, Zuniga illustrates how his homonationalism relies on an understanding of sexual and gender inequality as something that, like racial equality, will be conquered. He cites at length a 1941 U.S. Navy “Memorandum on Negroes” that advises against racial integration because of the “disruption” that such integration would engender (1994, 182). According to the memoirist, the opposition to allowing African Americans to serve in integrated units stemmed from “the idea that African Americans engaged in different behaviors from those of white Americans.” Such ideas, he writes, were “invoked verbatim in the gays in the military issue almost fifty years later” (182). Suggesting that the exclusion of gays and lesbians from the military is identical to the exclusion of African Americans illustrates Zuniga’s engagement with what David Eng (2010, 17) terms the colorblindness of queer liberalism. Zuniga assumes that the project of racial equality has been achieved with the establishment of racial integration, laying out a teleology that does not account for the simultaneity of racial and sexual oppression or the continuation of racial inequality. Racism in the armed forces, his approach suggests, was banished by Executive Order 9981, and sexual discrimination needs only another such order to relegate it to the dustbin of history. His schema places power and hope within the state, holding U.S. executives accountable for improving the lives of U.S. citizens.

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The homonationalism of this aspect of Zuniga’s argument is evident in his discussion of Truman and Clinton and the economic reasoning he gives for lifting the ban. Zuniga (1994, 183) seems to hold Truman up as an exemplar of integrity, writing that he “received virtually unanimous advice from his senior military officers that [desegregation] would be disruptive.” He adds, “Truman was denigrated in the annals of history until his memory was resurrected by Clinton”; citing the placement of a bust of Truman on Clinton’s desk, he decries “the irony of it all” (183). Zuniga’s rendering of Truman’s role as commander in chief implies that the former president was “denigrated” for his decision to initiate integration of the armed forces, obscuring the fact that a substantial part of Truman’s legacy was not his civil rights record but his decision to use atomic weapons against civilians in Japan. Zuniga’s view of Truman as a man who encompassed “strong leadership” and “turned the country in the right direction” displays his astounding ability to ignore the relationship between militarization and the maintenance of domestic and international systems of stratification. His reading of the Truman presidency exemplifies the extent to which sexual regulation is not the opposite of U.S. liberalism but constitutive of it (Eng 2010, 27). Zuniga explicitly advocates homonationalism when he weds the rights of gays and lesbians to serve in the armed forces to the strength of the United States. He cites a 1984 study by the Government Accounting Office that finds the cost of investigating and prosecuting gay and lesbian service members and training new ones costs taxpayers “more than $183 million” (1994, 185). This sum reflects a waste of money and lives, Zuniga writes, and reflects the “cheap[ening]” of “the values of a nation” (185). Asserting that the value of integration (whether racial or sexual) lies in its ability to strengthen a nation and ignoring the brutal and racist tactics of that nation, Zuniga’s arguments for including gays and lesbians in the military firmly align with rather than challenge the imperial military practices of the United States. Despite such rhetoric, Zuniga’s memoir is not without criticism of the army’s imperialistic policies. About basic training he writes, “We had been taught the skills necessary for the evolution from warrior to hero to imperialist invader to rude guest who doesn’t know when the mission has been completed and it’s time to leave” (1994, 59–60). Though the book was published in 1994, well before the beginning of the second Iraq War, Zuniga’s cynical take on not knowing when “it’s time to leave” suggests that he understood that the goal of invading Iraq extended beyond removing Iraqi troops from Kuwait or even removing Hussein from power. Later, during his narrative of his time serving as a journalist and a

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medic in Iraq, he pauses to consider the plight of Iraqi soldiers. Referring to artillery barrages he asks, “If we winced at the mere thought of the destruction, how was it for Iraqi troops to live through it?” (109). Zuniga’s concern for Iraqi lives, including military lives, can partly be explained by his status as a medic: “In keeping with the Hippocratic Oath, medics made no distinction between friendly and enemy casualties” (109). His lack of distinction between Iraqi and U.S. lives was not shared by his superiors. While human rights activists attempted to gain a handle on the number of Iraqi civilian deaths during the conflict, General Colin Powell claimed, “The number of Iraqi casualties [is] ‘not a number I’m terribly interested in’” (Clark et al. 1992, 144). Zuniga’s critique of the homophobia and sexism of the army, while arguing for military service as part of a civil rights struggle and ignoring how U.S. militarism contributes to racial, sexual, and gender-based inequality, aligns him with what Puar (2007) terms “queer homonationalism.” According to Puar, homonationalism is the result of American exceptionalism that is “marked through or aided by certain homosexual bodies” (4). In the context of recent U.S. intervention in the Middle East, U.S. exceptionalism—the idea that the United States is distinct from and superior to other nation-states—has taken on new forms, such as gender exceptionalism (3). U.S. gender exceptionalism can be found in “the recent embrace of the case of Afghani and Iraqi women and Muslim women in general by western feminists”; the discourse “works as a missionary discourse to rescue Muslim women from their oppressive male counterparts” (5). In these formulations U.S. gender exceptionalism justifies U.S. intervention in Iraq and other Muslim countries in the name of “women’s rights” while ignoring the gender and sexual violence within the United States and U.S. institutions (especially the army) as well as the racism behind U.S. imperialism. U.S. sexual exceptionalism can likewise be seen in Orientalist discussions of repressive Muslim sexuality as contrasted to liberal, secular, Western sexuality. When U.S. exceptionalism, often in the guise of sexual and gender exceptionalism, is touted and supported by queer individuals in the service of U.S. imperial projects, the result is homonationalism. As these examples indicate, Zuniga’s homonationalism is most clearly evident in the structure of his argument in favor of rescinding DADT. When he names himself a proud soldier who only wants the “opportunity” to serve his country, he illustrates his ability to distinguish discriminatory policies from a larger institutional framework that impacts the lives not only of U.S. citizens but of citizens around the world. His homonationalism

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is ambivalent because it is tempered by his explicit critiques of the army’s sexism and homophobia. In addition he never suggests that the United States is more sexually tolerant than the countries it is fighting. However, his belief that joining the armed forces would be a step forward for queer individuals ignores a host of other inequalities, including race- and classbased inequalities, that U.S. military service depends on and exacerbates. Ultimately Zuniga’s memoir clearly lays out the important connections between sexual and gender hierarchies in the family, the military, and the nation but fails to consider how these hierarchies intersect with global structures of power, and he argues that such hierarchies can be resolved without looking outside the nation. In contrast to Zuniga, the scholarly perspectives offered by Rodríguez, Butler, and Puar help us to understand how challenges to the family will necessarily impact the nation and vice versa. According to Rodríguez and Butler, moving away from the oppressive state requires creating nonexclusionary kinship relations. Rodríguez explains that queers can divest from the service of the state by failing to reproduce state structures in their own families and instead create different kinship relations. For his part, Zuniga attempts to do the second without doing the first. That is, he tries to create an alternative family without addressing the larger oppressive structure of the state; the result is ambivalent homonationalism. Puar, however, reminds us that there is a strong relationship between domestic attitudes toward gender and sexuality and U.S. foreign policy, and ignoring such links results in the reification of exclusionary, not to mention deadly, positions on who is and who is not deserving of rights (including the right to live). She explains that queer citizens must withdraw their support from imperial practices that claim to serve the interests of sexual minorities. All of these critics understand that challenging the gender relations of familial units must accompany a challenging of the gender relations of cultural and national communities. Zuniga’s memoir raises issues concerning the reproduction of gender and sexual hierarchies within the family and the nation in a way that concretely illustrates how these hierarchies can be challenged and reconstructed. The work is particularly useful for the perspective it offers on the importance of sexuality in informing a glocal critique. The work adds depth to this concept by placing that which is (supposedly) the most private and domestic—sexuality and interpersonal relationships—in conversation with large-scale issues and processes such as war and militarization. Soldier of the Year deftly articulates the role of militarism in U.S. culture and is explicit about the necessity of confronting the U.S. military in any effort to alter the social conditions surrounding the lives of women and gay men and lesbians.

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Summary In Soldier of the Year we witness a young Chicano soldier who expands and affirms his notion of community to include his military “family” and gay and lesbian civil rights activists and their allies. The work clearly illustrates the inequalities in the military and evidences shifting ideas of community and family. At the same time, in his support of the necessity to defend the United States, Zuniga limits his notion of community to a distinctly national one. Although his narrative lacks a sustained critique of the connection between the violence within the armed forces and the violence enacted by the armed forces on foreign countries, the work is not silent on these issues. The memoir sheds necessary light on the damage that a sexist and misogynistic military wreaks on its own members and citizens, while the author’s expanding notion of community opens the door for transnational considerations of U.S.-based identities, including U.S. Latina/o identities. This chapter has demonstrated that critiques of the U.S. military are integral to projects that seek a more sustained and sustainable critique of racial, sexual, and gender hierarchies within the United States and abroad. As Alvina E. Quintana (2006, 442) so aptly points out, cultural critics who fail to “follow the lead of resistance narratives that move beyond an ‘us/ them’ stance” also risk failing “to address the ‘militarized’ international and inter-ethnic barriers that police, discipline and ultimately separate artistic endeavors and ethnically ‘complex’ communities.” A memoir that complicates a simple us/them resistance narrative, Soldier of the Year demonstrates how policies, experiences, and attitudes relating to military service may reinforce and/or prompt reconsiderations of individuals’ and communities’ relationships to other hierarchical institutions, including the family and the nation-state. Moreover, as a literary work overtly invested in particular political moments and movements, the memoir encourages us to appreciate the significant role U.S. militarism continues to have within contemporary Latina/o and Chicana/o cultural production. Thus recognizing militarism—be it in the United States Armed Forces, U.S. foreign policy, or the prison industrial complex—becomes necessary to understanding the artistic and political paradigms emerging from Chicana/o and Latina/o artists and activists.

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Camilo Mejía’s Public Rebellion and the Formation of Transnational Latina/o Identity To merely dismiss the moment of group solidarity as an antiquated masculinist construct is to foreclose the potential for mobilization that it implies. . . . The desire for camaraderie . . . could be realized more productively by taking collective action against the war. —Jorge Mariscal, “In the Wake of the Gulf War: Untying the Yellow Ribbon”

In his concluding remarks to a collection of testimony by U.S. veterans of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Camilo Mejía (2008), chair of the board of Iraq Veterans against the War (IVAW), systematically refutes both neo-imperial and liberal justifications for the continued occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only does he call the occupations “illegal and immoral,” but he also contests ideas concerning democracy, free speech and “supporting” Iraqi civilians and military personnel. Repeating a phrase often used in relation to the U.S. mission in Iraq, Mejía asserts that “the hearts and minds” of Iraqis cannot be won until homophobia, sexism, and racism are eradicated “within our own ranks” (213). Furthermore soldiers whose words and testimony are ignored and silenced by government and corporate media cannot engage in a struggle to support free speech and democracy. Addressing segments of the antiwar movement who worry about Iraq descending into chaos or the responsibility of the United States to “fix” a problem it created, he asserts that “there is already chaos in Iraq” and that “certain things, once broken, can never be fixed again” (217). Moreover those who have lost loved ones “will carry a wound that can never be fixed,” and continued occupation may bring only more death (217). In his support for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mejía announces his lack of faith in U.S. authority, military solutions, or easy answers to the problems of imperialism, economic exploitation, and racism, among others. Neither the U.S. military nor U.S. civilians will right the wrongs to which they have contributed; in fact Mejía suggests

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that the idea that U.S. individuals or institutions will do so are rooted in the same ideas of superiority that gave rise to the illegal wars and invasions in the first place. His assertion that militaries will not solve any problems may be welcome by pacifists and anti-imperialists, but his suggestion that some things can never be “fixed” reflects a more profound challenge to ideas of progress and completion that unsettles the role of armies, individuals, and nations. While Mejía and IVAW do not eschew concrete goals and strategies—among other things they call for reparations to the Iraqi people—their response to the wars and occupations hinges on processes rather than solutions. One such process is the act of testifying, through which, according to Mejía, soldiers may start to reclaim the humanity they lost in their military experience. The testimony of Mejía and other veterans reflects a repudiation of militarybased identities, necessarily calling into question national identity, forcing readers to consider how resistance to U.S. militarism may contribute to new articulations and enactments of a global subjectivity. This chapter places a voice that arose from within the U.S. military in conversation with the positions and perspectives of actors outside the military. If we understand that military projects are by default national projects, and that the identity of soldier is linked to that of citizen, how do we read the refusal of soldiers to participate in military projects? Given the connections laid out in chapter 4, I argue that when a soldier refuses to go to war or declares that a war is unjust, she or he in fact makes a statement about the national project as well as the national character. In eschewing the identity of soldier, such an individual breaks the bond between citizen and soldier and troubles the underlying assumptions between citizen and nation. How do such actions impact national identity? How do the situations of migrant, immigrant, and ethnic minority subjects complicate these repercussions? And how do individuals refuse a particular relationship with a particular nation-state but actively build new kinds of non-nation-bound identities? To answer these questions I turn to Road from Ar Ramadi, the memoir of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía. Situating this chapter within transnational Latina/o and feminist criticism, I consider how analyses of war and power that specifically take into considerations issues of gender contribute to a glocal perspective on war and Latina/o identity. Taking into account other narratives analyzed in this book, I argue that Mejía’s account reflects an evolution from the works discussed in earlier chapters. Mejía’s attention to violence within the U.S. Armed Forces critiques army policies, while his discussion of U.S.-perpetrated violence as it

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affects U.S. citizens and Iraqis situates his discussion of U.S. militarism within larger national and transnational contexts. The first half of this chapter consists of a threefold analysis of Mejía’s exposure of the hypocrisy of the army, his analysis of military and national hierarchies, and his gestures toward a transnational identity. After briefly reviewing the discourse of gender in relation to U.S. intervention in Iraq after the Gulf War, I extend the analysis of national and ethnonational identity in the previous chapter by evaluating Mejía’s narrative in light of feminist, Chicana feminist, and Latina/o notions of citizenship. Specifically I draw on feminist and Chicana feminist theories of subordination and domination as a framework through which to evaluate Mejía’s consciousness and activism. In a close reading of Mejía’s description of army structures and norms, I illustrate how he questions the morality and efficacy of policies and practices meant to cement relations of domination and subordination and later exposes the illegitimacy of policies carried out in the name of safety. As he develops his criticism of the U.S. mission in Iraq, he extends his analysis of domination and subordination both inward and outward. That is, he comes to see himself as a subordinate entity within an institution that is exercising dominance over a foreign country. The contradictions in his status as a subordinate individual within a subordinating institution come out most clearly in his discussion of the concept of freedom. As these contradictions become more apparent, he rejects his status as a soldier and creates a new identity as both a human and a transnational citizen. In the second half of the chapter, I look more in depth at the mechanisms through which Mejía deploys his political perspectives. First I explore the role of coalitional politics in his challenges to the army and the U.S. nation-state, relating these politics to theories of Chicana and Latina feminist activism. I then look at Mejía’s critique of the army and U.S. militarism in light of immigration reform and specifically the D.R.E.A.M. Act. In his opposition to the D.R.E.A.M. Act Mejía takes up critiques of citizenship arising from Latina/o thinkers and activists while paving the way for new articulations of transnational Latina/o experiences and identities. I end by considering the larger repercussions of Mejía’s ideas alongside his position as a memoirist and author-activist. As a result of his experiences in the U.S. Armed Forces, Mejía comes to reject a nationbound affiliation and political position. He leverages his understanding of the way militarism and imperialism shape constructions and experiences of gender, class, nationality, and ethnicity to embody a new kind

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of citizen-activist. Speaking out against the U.S. military, he refuses to be defined by this national institution, suggesting a new relationship between citizenry, militarism, and nationality. He specifically opposes the roles that militarism and nationality play in defining who is worthy of particular rights, obligations, and protections, an opposition he enacts in his position on the D.R.E.A.M. Act. He does not offer a prescriptive definition or enactment of a transnational identity; rather his memoir suggests two paths: the rejection of military service and the importance of the written word. In emphasizing the power of both of these endeavors, Road from Ar Ramadi asks us to consider and appreciate how the active repudiation of militarism in all its forms—even those that promise to legitimate immigrant subjects—is a necessary facet of a movement to imagine and enact antiracist, antisexist, and anti-imperial relations. Recognizing that identity is often constructed by particular practices, this chapter defines transnational identity as that which is constructed by “political, social, and cultural practices . . . that in part escape from the cultural and political hegemony” of the nation-state (Kearney 2000, 174). In calling for the immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and disavowing the ability of the United States to “fix” what it has “broken,” Mejía directly confronts the political and cultural hegemony of the United States. His antiwar activism is one of the practices through which he articulates and continues to form his transnational identity. Road from Ar Ramadi specifically evidences a transnational Latina/o identity as Mejía references the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, the experiences of Latin American immigrants such as himself, and his acknowledgment of racial and economic stratification and inequality within the United States in his formation and development as an individual and activist.

War, Words, and Gender In March 2003 the United States entered into the most unpopular war in history. During the weekend of February 16, millions of protestors gathered in major cities around the world to protest the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq. Organizers and police estimated that up to 30 million people participated in protests in over six hundred cities; some countries, such as Australia, experienced their biggest demonstrations ever.1 Those who had opposed the invasion of Iraq from the outset would find their position sadly vindicated as the war raged on and details of the deception in which U.S. officials engaged to create cover for the invasion

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were released.2 Nearly a decade later over 4,400 members of U.S. and coalition forces have lost their lives. Statistics on the number of Iraqi combatant and noncombatant (civilian) deaths are much harder to come by, but approximately 10,000 Iraqi combatants and 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.3 Meanwhile the greatest justification for the U.S. declaration of war against Iraq—Saddam Hussein’s supposed arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction”—has been soundly proven false. By 2008 U.S. support of the Iraq War, named Operation Iraqi Freedom, had declined significantly. In a Pew Research Poll conducted that year, 54 percent of respondents found the decision to go to war in Iraq a mistake, an increase from previous years, when just 49 percent thought going to war was wrong. Despite the increasing unpopularity of the war, respondents were not necessarily enthusiastic about either ending the war or calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces. According to the Pew Poll, only a slim plurality, 49 percent of respondents, called for bringing troops home as soon as possible. The hesitation to support the immediate withdrawal of troops is a complex and multifaceted issue encompassing ideas of military expediency as well as national pride, national solidarity, gender, and race. Whereas the 1991 Gulf War deployed images of what Jorge Mariscal (1991, 104) called “tenderhearted masculinity,” gendered images surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq relied on more traditional renderings of masculinity. In the lead-up to this second invasion, pro-war voices presented a rugged, masculine, cowboy image in contradistinction to the feminine and passive stance of U.S. antiwar voices and cautionary and dissenting European perspectives (Christensen and Marx Ferree 2008, 288). The “masculine” United States and the “feminine” Europe must be evaluated in relation to images of Arab and Muslim gender and sexuality. Historically and still today Muslim and Arab men are often portrayed as hypermasculine, perversely masculine, and homosexual, and Muslim and Arab women as promiscuous, controlled by the men of their culture and religion, and, of course, oppressed (Jabbra 2006, 235).4 Thus we must read in exhortations to “support our troops” a national as well as a gender- and race-based position. Similarly the role of gendered rhetoric in the 2003 Iraq War necessitates that the ensuing examination of the national and transnational repercussions of an antiwar stance also entail an examination of race, sex, and gender. What are the politics of gender and race behind slogans such as “Support our troops”? By extension, what are the gender and racial politics behind antiwar activism?

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How Is a Soldier Not Like a Human? Mejía’s memoir exhibits a preoccupation with the language of war, militarism, and occupation appropriate to the context just discussed. As he charts his evolution from a U.S. soldier to a transnational activist he relies specifically on the opposition between “soldier” and “human.” For Mejía, these two identities are incommensurate, and he eventually chooses the latter. In order for Mejía to, as he puts it, reclaim his humanity, he must not only reject the identity of soldier but do so in tandem with a larger social movement. While he proposes a global antiwar position with which many can identify, his narrative has particular implications for Latinas/os. He describes the dangerous missions on which soldiers of color were sent, and his discussion of his early life foregrounds the ways U.S. intervention and the defeat of the Sandinista Revolution propelled his migration to the United States and contributed to the circumstances in which he found himself, including his enlistment in the Florida National Guard and, eventually, his deployment to Iraq. As he constructs his narrative, Mejía relies on a concept of undifferentiated humanity that seems in contrast to the amount of time he spends attending to the particularities of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationalism as they interact with and are impacted by U.S. military policy. His use of the descriptor human echoes Zuniga’s use of the word and the latter’s desire to gloss over differences in class, race, and sexuality. As chapter 4 indicated, Zuniga’s appeals to universal humanism indicate his class status and his investment in a Eurocentric and patriarchal approach to political organizing and social structures. While the straight-identified Mejía displays much more willingness to challenge such approaches, both his and Zuniga’s activism remain shaped by the institutions in which they are formed and against which they position themselves, including the U.S. military and the U.S. nation-state. That is, “the forms of power” that shape the soldiers’ lives also “determine what kinds of practice are possible within a given field” (Hartman 1997, 55). The titles of Zuniga’s and Mejía’s memoirs—which define the authors as “soldier” and “staff sergeant,” respectively—illustrate the extent to which the authors continue to be defined by the military. Thus we can read the particular kinds of challenges that Mejía poses to the military as conditioned by the military structure itself. Within an institution that denies, overtly and covertly, the humanity of non-U.S. peoples, the insistence on the humanity of Iraqi soldiers and civilians reflects a radical departure from U.S. military norms and ideologies.

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The son of Sandinista revolutionaries, Mejía was indelibly marked by the country of his birth as well as that of his adopted homeland. To those familiar with Nicaraguan politics and culture, Mejía is a significant surname; Camilo is the son of Carlos Mejía Godoy, arguably Nicaragua’s most famous folk singer. Along with his brother Enrique, Mejía Godoy was an important part of the pro-Sandinista cultural movement. Camilo Mejía (2008, 10) opens his memoir with fond memories of traveling with his father, a man he describes as “a human being who loved his people and his country.” He then explains that while the Sandinista Revolution “had started one of the highest profile social justice movements in the world,” the government’s ties to the USSR, its appropriation of land, and its policies toward the poor “made Nicaragua a prime target for the United States” (11). “U.S. aggression,” along with an economic embargo and growing unpopularity for a low-intensity war (a war spurred by U.S. intervention) eventually forced the Sandinistas from office and ushered in a pro-U.S. government (11). Mejía’s narration of his early life and family background is twopronged in its critique of U.S. economic and military policies as well as the internal functioning of the Sandinista government and the individual enactments of misogyny and patriarchy that he witnessed. Although the Sandinista government collapsed, many of its leaders, he explains, “[became] multimillionaires” (2008, 12). Mejía Godoy was not one of those leaders, but he was able to “live comfortably from his music and his art” (12). As a musician, Mejía Godoy was able to emphasize more “cultural” and less explicitly “political” themes in his work. By the time the Sandinistas left office, Mejía’s parents were divorced—his mother had grown “tired of [his] father’s infidelities”—and his father had remarried (6). Unlike Mejía’s father, his mother, Maritza Castillo, “was left without resources or influence” and “ignored by many of her now-rich Sandinista friends” (12). As a result she took Mejía and his brother to her native Costa Rica, where they lived for several years before joining their maternal grandmother in Florida. Mejía portrays the Sandinista Revolution as choked by U.S. military and economic aggression and, to a lesser extent, corrupted from within. Feminist scholars and activists have extensively discussed the accusations of homophobia, sexism, and sexual abuse leveled at prominent Sandinista leaders, and misogyny appears to have contributed to Mejía’s experiences as well (see Randall 1992; Molyneux 1985). A culture of sexual double standards, reflected in Mejía’s reference to his father’s “infidelities,” likely contributed to his parents’ divorce as well as his mother’s inability to retain a position of privilege in post-Sandinista Nicaragua.

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The Mejía-Castillo family migration to the United States reflects the increasingly feminine face of immigration and the influx of femaleheaded households as well as how class and immigration factored into Mejía’s enlistment in the armed forces.5 Castillo’s job as a supermarket cashier wasn’t enough to support the family, so Mejía worked mornings in a fast-food restaurant before attending night school. He explains, “The recruiter didn’t really have to work hard to get me to sign the treacherous contract. The army offered financial stability and college tuition, two benefits that seemed tough to find anywhere else” (2008, 15). The U.S.-backed aggression against and eventual defeat of the Sandinista government contributed to Mejía’s migration to Florida, while the scant opportunities afforded working-class Latin American immigrants led the young man to join the very institution that had so influenced the course of his and his family’s lives. Thus Road from Ar Ramadi illustrates the cumulative and circuitous effects of post–Viet Nam War U.S. military policies and how they intersect with foreign and domestic systems of patriarchy, racism and racial stratification, and class privilege. Despite Mejía’s early discussion of his Nicaraguan–Costa Rican identity and family background, he self-consciously speaks from a soldier’s perspective, often explicitly addressing other military personnel. The sharp distinction between the opening chapter and the remainder of the book introduces one of the narrative’s central tensions: that between a human and a soldier. Tellingly Mejía describes his father as a “human being,” even when Mejía Godoy was involved in explicitly “militant” and “revolutionary” activities as part of the FSLN cultural vanguard. This description illustrates that while Mejía criticized aspects of the Sandinista government, his childhood taught him the possibility of being fully committed to a political cause without losing one’s humanity. Unsurprisingly the soldier begins his book with a critique of the “inhumanity” of the U.S. Army. Perhaps as a result of his direct experience with the abuses of U.S. militarism, Mejía quickly establishes himself as someone who rebukes aspects of the military and in particular grates against the abuse of power by officers. In chapter 2 he describes the role of “smoking,” in which an officer orders a soldier to endure extreme physical punishment such as continuous push-ups. Mejía notes, “Some say [smoking] is forbidden in the army, but [it] is still widespread” (2008, 25). He recalls with regret an incident in which he “smoked” a member of his own squad and writes, “I’ve never apologized to PFC Thomas for that smoking, though I wish I had” (25). He writes that he had “difficulties with the leadership

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of those above [him]” and that he was the object of “concern” due to his desire to create a relationship with his squad members in which they “follow[ed him] not because of the consequences that would befall them if they didn’t, but because they respected and trusted [him]” (24). Mejía’s description of smoking establishes four important issues. First, it exposes the army’s own cruelty to its members as well as its hypocrisy. Smoking or “corrective punishment” is described as an inhumane way of treating a fellow human being; Mejía claims that the punishment is officially denied while unofficially sanctioned. Second, these incidents establish the hierarchical arrangement of the army, based on a relationship between “those above” and those below. Third, this hierarchy is introduced as a source of tension, here described as a difference in how to establish respect and rapport with squad members. In many ways Mejía’s disagreements with his higher-ranking officers as well as his disapproval of particular army policies parallels Zuniga’s portrayal of the overlap between his father and the patriarchal army. While for Zuniga this description makes his rebellion against both his father and the army inevitably linked, in Mejia’s memoir the questioning of higher-ranking officers will continue to grow until he directly disobeys the orders of the army and the nation it “protects.” Fourth, the incident establishes Mejía, and by extension other soldiers, as fallible and changeable. Mejía’s decision to reveal his participation in the smoking of a lowerranked soldier may be a rhetorical move on his part to establish a connection with other soldiers or veterans reading his narrative. His admission also foregrounds his ability to change. The susceptibility of a soldier to engage in acts he would normally avoid is exhibited, while Mejía’s own regret and refusal to continue smoking soldiers establishes the ability of any soldier to successfully follow his or her conscience and opt out of the inhumane aspects of the army or, in Mejía’s case, the army itself. Two more incidents discussed soon afterward portray the army as an institution that fails to follow its own protocol to the extent of placing in danger both Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers. In the next chapter Mejía describes the assignment of running a detainee camp. Lieutenant Cerekas tells Mejía and another soldier how he was introduced to their squad’s new assignment and how he questioned the lack of proper facilities, specifically the lack of a medical doctor. “I don’t think you can have a prisoner-of-war camp without proper medical equipment nearby,” Cerekas explains. “We should not call this a POW camp, but rather a detainee camp” (2008, 41). Later he concludes, “This place is ILLEGAL” (41).6 Cerekas threatens to call the Red Cross, but the platoon sergeant

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convinces him that the only result of such an action would be that “[he] would get fired, and someone else would be put in charge” (42). The lieutenant resigns himself to the situation. This incident again illustrates the army’s refusal to follow its own protocol and displays soldiers’ concerns with the well-being of detainees. “What if one of these prisoners gets hurt?” Cerekas asks (41). Mejía portrays Cerekas as an individual who is placed in a nearly impossible situation where his concerns are not taken seriously. Ultimately Cerekas is reminded of his role in the larger institution and convinced of his own powerlessness in changing the situation. Soon Mejía finds that his superiors are not concerned for his and his men’s safety. After escaping an ambush Mejia is chastised and told that he and his squad “sent the wrong message to the enemy” (2008, 74). Mejia is shocked. As he tells readers, not only did he follow SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) to return fire and keep moving during a moving ambush, but the questioning by his superiors makes him feel as though he and his men were being asked to apologize “for having survived” (75). Mejía was being asked to fail to follow the army’s own protocol and to put the lives of his men in danger for no clear reason. The incident again puts Mejía at odds with his commanding officers while also causing him to question the U.S. mission in Iraq. “I left the command post . . . wondering who the real enemy was in Iraq, and just how close we were sleeping from it” (76). The army has gone from being internally contradictory and cruel to its own members to being a force of imminent danger, possibly even an enemy. In suggesting that the U.S. Army may be the enemy, Mejía implies that the war may not be between the U.S. Army and the Iraqi insurgency.7 Rather the war may be between U.S. soldiers who, along with Iraqi civilians, must fight the U.S. Army. As the narrative develops, the relationship between friend and enemy continues to change, and war comes to figure as a battle not between two distinct national or ethnic groups but between citizens and nation-states, a struggle between human beings searching for justice and nation-states (and their armies) that have no humanity. As he develops the distinction between soldier and human, Mejía continually refers to himself and other soldiers as “occupiers,” emphasizing their position of power in relation to the Iraqi people. He also suggests that this identity is in opposition to that of a human. He writes, “Having to stay alert made me feel as if I was losing all sense of my own humanity. How could I embrace the Iraqis while holding a rifle and carrying grenades on my belt pouches? I wanted to be their brother, but I couldn’t. I was an occupier” (2008, 86). Here the position of occupier

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is incommensurate with that of human or “brother.” While the Iraqis are regarded as a monolithic group, they are nonetheless humanized within a familial context; Mejía, on the other hand, is described only in his relationship to power. As long as he continues to carry the weaponry of a soldier—rifle, grenades—he will be unable to move outside of his identity as soldier and occupier and become, as he claims he would like to be, a member of the Iraqi and human family. Mejía’s narrative is careful to construct war as the problem. While he sharply criticizes individual officers, he does so in a context that makes clear that they are operating under inhuman circumstances, and he explains the extent to which the lives of neither Iraqi nor U.S. citizens are valued. Soldiers go without appropriately reinforced flak vests and die as a result of heatstroke (2008, 97, 137).8 Officers send soldiers on dangerous missions in a selfish quest to win medals. War becomes a game, with sergeants competing against other squads for the most kills (108). Mejía indicts warfare itself and laments the destruction it wreaks on individual psyches: “The truth as I see it now is that in a war, the bad is often measured against what’s even worse, and that, in turn, makes a lot of deplorable things seem permissible. When that happens, the imaginary line between right and wrong starts to vanish in a heavy fog, until it disappears completely and decisions are weighed on a scale of values that is profoundly corrupt” (126). War is a different kind of universe in which one cannot make decisions based on either morality or integrity. As evidence of the alternative and “unnatural” situation war creates, Mejía describes his Iraqi acquaintances in a way that grants depth and complexity to their identities, while his identity as a soldier remains static. Speaking of the hospitality he and other soldiers received from Iraqis, he writes, “I came to understand [this hospitality] was a central part of Arab culture, and was extended even to us occupiers” (128). Even under a state of occupation, the Iraqis are able to maintain important aspects of their culture and humanity, something difficult for the soldiers to do.

Extending Domination and Subordination to the Level of the Nation In his introduction to the second edition of his memoir, Mejía acknowledges the relationship between foreign and domestic violence, between racism and sexism, and between domination and inhumanity. He connects the injustices within the military structure to the injustices perpetuated by the military: “The propagation of an inhuman, cruel,

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misogynist, and racist subculture in the military (to a significant degree a reflection of the larger culture) is necessary to create the conditions in which a land and its people can be denied their sovereignty through military force” (2008, xxiv). The internal functioning of the military, according to Mejía, not only reflects military violence but is a necessary condition for the occupation of a foreign country. His discussion of the connections between the military structure, “the larger” U.S. culture, and U.S. military missions parallels these discussions in Zuniga’s memoir. But whereas Zuniga’s work metaphorically links the family, the military, and the state, Mejía much more explicitly pinpoints the connections and names their sources: misogyny, cruelty, racism, and most significantly inhumanity. The dangerous missions on which Mejía and other soldiers were sent illustrate how the military high command exercised blatant disregard for the lives of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike. Mejía’s memoir is thus useful in linking the functioning of the institution of the army to its actions, specifically in Iraq. Likewise contemporary feminist theory contributes to an understanding of how the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan reflects a particular positioning of the U.S. government in relation to both the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and the U.S. citizenry. Mejía’s glocal perspective, in which he critiques his superiors’ blatant disregard for the lives of both U.S. soldiers and Iraqis, uniquely positions him to refute the patriarchal logic behind what Iris Marion Young (2005) calls “the U.S. security state.” This logic, Young explains, justifies both repression within and aggression outside the nation. The state “plays the role of masculine protector,” placing those protected— in Cynthia Enloe’s (1993) terminology “womenandchildren”—“in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience” (Young 2005, 16). While expecting this protection to be repaid by “obedience and loyalty at home,” the state uses the logic of protectionism to justify “aggressive war outside” (16). Such masculinist protectionism, Young argues, reflects a “bargain between the state and its citizens” that is ultimately harmful to U.S. liberty (16). Recognizing that “the protector-protected relationship is no more egalitarian . . . when between women than between men and women” is necessary to avoid the reproduction of what Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt term “imperial feminism” (Young 2005, 30; Al-Ali and Pratt 2009, 10). “Imperial feminism” has “a long history” within Western nations, including the United States, and its effects can be seen in the calls to champion women’s rights through military intervention. Imperial feminism flourishes when the logic of masculinist protectionism

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remains unquestioned; Mejía’s work, in contrast, seeks to explicitly question and deconstruct this logic. In a poignant conversation with an Iraqi friend, Mejía explodes the logic of protectionism. The young soldier attempts to explain the occupation to his friend in terms of “freedom” but must admit that he himself is not “free” to leave the army. The conversation begins when Mohammed translates a story from an elderly Iraqi man who tells Mejía how the U.S. soldiers arrested and interrogated him, injured his knee, and destroyed his house. Mejía apologizes to the man and adds, “We don’t really want to be here” (2008, 132). Later he tells Mohammed that he is in Iraq to bring freedom to the country and its people; Mohammed presses him: “Freedom?” Mohammed looked at me, incredulous. “Yes,” I insisted with a straight face, not even believing my own words. “But you said that you don’t want to be here,” pressed Mohammed, also with a straight face. “I don’t,” I continued. “And you said that your contract with the army was over,” continued my friend, reminding me of something I had told him in the past.9 “Yes, I said that,” I admitted. “Then why are you here?’ “Because the army can keep you in after the end of your contract,” I explained, sensing where he was going with his questions. “At least if there is a war they can.” “Against your will?” he asked with his eyebrows raised. “Yes,” I said quietly. “So how can you bring freedom to us, when you don’t have freedom for yourselves?” (133–34) The exchange offers a stunning portrayal of the hypocritical logic of the masculinist protectionist state and a nuanced Iraqi political position. Mejía is outmatched intellectually by his friend in this conversation and unable to defend the position of the U.S. Armed Forces according to the army’s own logic. How can an institution that itself violates principles of freedom possibly bring freedom to another people? As Mejía’s and the U.S. Army’s rationale for being in Iraq does not hold water, the young soldier must admit to himself, eventually, that the ostensible reasons for being in Iraq are based on faulty assumptions regarding the lack of freedom of Iraqis versus the freedom of U.S. residents. Mejía exposes the

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hypocrisy of these assumptions when he contrasts his lack of freedom, both mental and physical, with Mohammed’s. Mejía notes that even though Mohammed himself was conscripted into the Iraqi Army as a young man, he is mentally “more free” than the U.S. soldiers. “I hadn’t just lost the freedom to think for myself as an individual with moral and spiritual values. . . . I had also lost the freedom to accept the fact that I wasn’t free” (134). The conversation with Mohammed alongside his earlier details about the dangers in which soldiers are unnecessarily placed mounts a twofold critique against masculinist protectionist logic. Those who are not free themselves cannot possibly hope to free others; in addition, in its blatant disregard for the well-being of its soldiers, the army fails to uphold its “bargain” to them. As Young (2005) explains, the stifling of dissent and the maintenance of strict obedience to the state is meant to be repaid with safety.10 But in failing to keep U.S. soldiers and civilians safe, the army and the state it serves renege on this aspect of the bargain. Young concludes, “There is little evidence that the way the United States has chosen to conduct its war on terrorism has in fact made itself or others in the world safe. Indeed, it may have put Americans at even greater risk” (27). Mejía’s memoir thus exposes the faulty premises and lack of actual protection behind U.S. “protectionist” policies. Young (2005, 32) explicitly calls for a new concept of citizenship that must reject the hierarchy of protected and protector and be global in scope. No person should stand in a position of “paternal authority,” thinking that she or he knows what is best for others (32). Neither Young nor Mejía, importantly, overlook the role of the military in its relationship to paternalistic philosophies and policies. For Young, recognizing the multiplicity of identities and experiences of Arab and Muslim women is necessary to accurately critique gender-based violence, and this recognition must entail a distancing from “paternalistic militarism” (29). Mejía implicitly calls for a reconsideration of citizenship in this criticism of the D.R.E.A.M. Act, in which he exposes the military influence behind immigration legislation by critiquing the U.S. military’s exploitation of vulnerable residents, namely undocumented youth.

Coalitional Politics Mejía’s journey from soldier to human is not taken alone but rather in tandem with a host of other individuals and organizations. As with his discussion of his participation in “smoking” another recruit, Mejía

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speaks openly of his mistakes in the military and credits others with his changing sense of self. During a firefight in Ar Ramadi he writes that firing his weapon was “an automatic reaction, almost robotic, like a programmed response that involved no human emotions or thinking” (2008, 144). Luckily he is soon called back to humanity by a soldier who stops him from firing on a car of wounded civilians. He recalls that the unknown soldier “brought [him] back to a state of human consciousness” (148). This anecdote powerfully narrates how a soldier can lose “human emotions” but, more important, can be brought back to “a state of human consciousness” with the assistance of another individual. While Mejía credits an unknown soldier for saving his own humanity as well as the lives of Iraqi civilians, he later describes a successful moment of group solidarity in which a squad jointly refuses dangerous orders and succeeds in changing a mission. At one point Mejía’s and several other squads are sent on a mission that is clearly contrary to army protocol. They follow the same exact patterns for several nights in a row, creating a predictable pattern for insurgents to follow and leaving themselves open for attack. On the fourth night of this repetitive exercise the soldiers are attacked, and several sustain serious injuries. Mejía then tells his superior that he will refuse to participate in the same mission the next night; he is told that refusing orders will have dire consequences. Before he must face these consequences, however, an entire squadron also refuses to go out on the same mission. “On hearing that we were being ordered to follow the same procedure for a fifth consecutive night, [the soldiers of first platoon] decided they would refuse to go unless the mission was reorganized in a way that was sensitive to our safety and that let us regain the element of surprise” (2008, 176). The officer in charge responds, instituting changes so that the next night’s procedure will be much safer. This incident indicates the extent to which group solidarity is important, as Mejía’s solitary protest would have resulted in “dire consequences” but the group’s refusal resulted in significant alterations. These experiences of solidarity become more pronounced when Mejía “comes out” as an antiwar activist and receives help and support from an extensive network of activists and organizations. After a lengthy and unsuccessful campaign to pressure the army to follow through on its own rules and regulations and release him from service, Mejía refuses to return from a rest and relaxation leave in the United States. He goes underground and moves to New York City, giving interviews to the media and contacting soldiers’ rights organizations to figure out his next steps. One of the first persons he meets is Tod Ensign, director of Citizen

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Soldier.11 Mejía recalls, “As soon as I spoke with Tod the door to a new world opened before my eyes. I went from feeling powerless and alone to realizing that there was a whole network of people and groups, from women’s rights organizations and antiwar veterans to military families and religious groups, who all felt as I did about the war” (2008, 225). Mejía enters a “new world” where he is no longer defined by his relationship to power and domination. The individuals and organizations with whom he works and his own activism help him to throw off the identity of soldier and occupier and take on the identity of human. Two activists, cofounders of an organization called Military Families Speak Out, take Mejía to the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, Massachusetts. Founded by a conscientious objector from the Viet Nam War, the Abbey is “a refuge for people of all faiths and walks of life who want to learn about or practice nonviolence” (236). At the Abbey Mejía hears the Muslim call to prayer for the first time since leaving Iraq. The call “served as a reminder of the interconnections between people around the world, the unity of humankind that had brought me to the Abbey” (237). When he is accepted into a movement of individuals and organizations working in the service of “the unity of humankind,” his own understanding and appreciation for his place within humanity is clarified. Though Mejía frames his position as one within an undifferentiated constituency of humans, his attention to difference—in this case, the religious difference reflected in the Muslim call to prayer—suggests that he calls forth a universal humanism as a way of reacting to the U.S. Army’s dehumanization of Muslim peoples and cultures and as a way of engaging with, albeit obliquely, the differences between individuals. The memoir’s consistent engagement with the rhetoric of humanity is a direct response and opposition to the practices of the U.S. armed forces. Mejía is not alone in his use of the language of humanity; many of his colleagues in Iraq Veterans Against the War employ a similar rhetoric. Reading Mejía’s memoir alongside the testimony of veterans allows us to understand his own use of this rhetoric and see how the language of universal humanism is deployed not to gloss over salient differences or assume a normative, unmarked subject position but rather to combat the racist violence of the armed forces. Several testimonies collected at the 2008 Winter Soldier hearings in Washington, D.C. and published that same year decry the dehumanization of Iraqi peoples and explain that such dehumanization was made possible largely through racism. Sergeant Logan Laituri explains that he was not disturbed by the deaths he saw in Iraq until he encountered a fatally injured U.S. soldier. The

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realization that “it took an American soldier, someone [of his] own race and creed and skin color, to wake [him] up out of slumber” continues to unsettle him, he explains (Iraq Veterans against the War and Glantz 2008, 53). Sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith echoes Laituri’s words when he claims that he and other soldiers were desensitized to Iraqi deaths because “they’re not white, they’re not American soldiers” (188). Goldsmith’s testimony exposes how white supremacy is taken for granted within the armed forces to the extent that only whites are read as human. He also underscores the internal racism of the U.S. military and U.S. nation-state in conflating Americans and soldiers with whites. Civilian journalist Aaron Glantz offers his own encounter with the different values placed on white and nonwhite lives when he writes in his afterword that during his first day in Iraq, in 2003, the only thing that protected him from a “soldier at a checkpoint with an itchy trigger finger and loose Rules of Engagement” was that he was with a blond journalist (220). Laituri, Goldsmith, Glantz, and others explain how race and ethnicity serve to either protect or endanger lives in the context of the U.S.-backed war and occupation. Like Mejía, some of these men use familial language to combat the dehumanization that they witnessed and in which they participated. Goldsmith explains that he is now unable to witness death because “this is somebody’s brother, this is somebody’s husband, this is somebody’s son, and this is somebody’s cousin” (188). He uses kinship relations to combat the dehumanization of those around him and to resist participating in it. Soldiers also connect the dehumanization of members of the army to the dehumanization of Iraqis by service members and speak to the role of racism, sexism, and homophobia in this twofold process. According to Specialist Patricia McCann, Illinois National Guard, soldiers endured degrading treatment in basic training as part of a “process of dehumanization” (Iraq Veterans against the War and Glantz 2008, 126). While dehumanization may take place between individuals, veterans emphasize that the problem is systemic and institutionalized. Corporal Michael Prysner, U.S. Army Reserve, reports that language—such as the use of the epithet haji to refer to Iraqis—was used to portray non-Americans as other but that such terms “did not initially come from [his] fellow lower-listed soldiers but from [his] superiors,” including sergeants and commanders (98). Despite the rhetoric of women’s liberation used to justify the invasion of Iraq, veterans also discuss the deplorable treatment of female service members, including survivors of assault; for example, soldiers report that

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survivors have been forced to pay for their own rape kits (Iraq Veterans against the War and Glantz 2008, 127). Such practices indicate that the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the institution is pervasive, ideological, and grounded in ideas of white supremacy and patriarchy. The violence that the army perpetuates against Iraqis is only a repetition of that to which it subjects it own members. “At the core of this war machine,” Lance Corporal Jeff Key, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, writes, “is an ideology that is based on the gender paradigm and homophobia. . . . Good men will go to great lengths and do horrible things to prove that they’re not gay. . . . This is the only way I can explain the cruel way some of my fellow marines treated the kids who came up next to our vehicles during our deployment. . . . Somehow this idea of men are beings devoid of feelings and compassion and that women are weak and just a ball of emotions is at the center of all of this” (139). Key explicitly connects cruelty to an obsession with proving one’s “manliness” and dispelling any suspicion of homosexuality. Unlike Mejía, who sets up a distinction between soldiers and humans, Key contrasts humans with heterosexual men. What all of these soldiers’ testimonies share with Mejía’s memoir is an emphasis on the institutionalization and reproduction of violence and the transformation of individuals within extremely dangerous and stressful situations. Just as Mejía speaks of the “heavy fog” that obscures moral distinctions in a time of war, Specialist Margaret Stevens, New Jersey Army National Guard, explains, “We are all in a situation where all are being forced into an occupation that none of us are really happy about” (141). As the root of the violence is systemic, solutions to its eradication must be as well. For Stevens, this means more than executive orders allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military or having women in positions of power, changes that will do nothing to alter the larger circumstance of the occupation. As his memoir charts his evolution from someone who objects to specific army policies to someone who opposes the army’s entire mandate, Mejía concurs with his fellow veterans who connect the internal and external cruelty of the army to violent ideologies and practices of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Just as the dehumanization of fellow soldiers is linked to the dehumanization of Iraqis, the recognition of the humanity of others plays a role in Mejía’s reclamation of his own self and strengthening of his resolve to refuse army orders. At the Abbey he looks at pictures of children deformed by landmines and depleted uranium. “While looking at [those] pictures,” he writes, “I was aware of a change occurring inside of me” (2008, 237). The faces of the children granted him “a new resolve”

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and gave him “the strength to give [himself] up and speak out when doing so” (238). Mejía responds to the recognition of others’ humanity by affirming his own and consciously placing himself in a human community. The result of his confrontation with the children’s pictures is a renewed resolve to refuse to return to Iraq and to publicly surrender to the military at the Abbey. “I would go public with my denouncement of the war and my refusal to return to it in this place that had been dedicated to peace from its very beginning” (238). A place founded upon the recognition of the humanity of others would be where Mejía would publicly declare his own recognition of this humanity. Significantly, while Mejía’s work is largely without the heavy reliance on familial rhetoric found in Zuniga’s work, familial metaphors occur most prominently just prior to and during his trial and thus also serve to mark how he regains human connections through his antimilitary stance. After making a public speech at the Abbey, Mejía surrenders himself at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts. Both of his parents are present at his surrender; his father tearfully asks Mejía’s mother, “Why have we given them our son?” (2008, 244). Mejía Godoy’s employment of an “us versus them” stance reflects the extent to which U.S. aggression toward Sandinista Nicaragua continues to shape his stance toward the United States. His question pinpoints specifically the U.S. Armed Forces as “them,” while also illustrating how Mejía’s refusal to rejoin his military family reinscribes him in his biological family, at least in his father’s mind. While Mejía Godoy suggests that his family is incompatible with military service, the son relies on familial rhetoric to discuss his military relationships, even after he has left the service. During his trial members of Mejía’s squadron affirm their familial relationship. Private First Class Estime testifies that Mejía talked to his men “as a father,” and Sergeant Funez asserts that Mejía was “like a brother” (281, 288). While these quotes may sound like standard military rhetoric, their occurrence during Mejía’s trial gives them a different tenor. At this juncture Estime and Funez are confronting a man who had ostensibly abandoned their unit and shirked his responsibility as a leader. The prosecutor claims that the trial is about “a deserter” and “a squad leader who abandoned his soldiers at the very time they needed him the most” (275). Nevertheless Estime and Funez assert their continued confidence in Mejía both as a person and as a leader. In response to the prosecutor’s question as to whether or not he trusts Mejía today, Estime replies yes and Funez affirms that Mejía is “a great person” (281, 289). In their continued respect for Mejía, Estime and Funez blur the boundaries between

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the military and civilian/human family, affirming that despite his stance against the war and his refusal to serve, Mejía is still a part of their family. Mejía asserts a similar position. In his address to the court he reminds the judges, “I am part of the military. . . . I am one of you, and this is my family, too” (294). These statements reflect a more encompassing idea of family. Although his father and mother recognize the army as “them” in opposition to the “we” of their biological family, Mejía and his fellow soldiers affirm that one can be a member of several families simultaneously. Although Mejía is no longer a soldier, he can nevertheless remain connected to his military family; his final speech thus serves as a model of a person who can assert his relationship to a human family without forsaking members of the military. Mejía is touched by the testimonies of his squad members because they affirm the sense of camaraderie and solidarity that is so important in the military: “Many soldiers justify participating in wars they find objectionable with the argument that we’re fighting for one another” (2008, 222). Jorge Mariscal (1991, 107) speaks to the importance and applicability of this argument when he explains, “What one used to be able to unselfconsciously refer to as ‘comradeship’ is what still motivates the female and male soldier to a great extent (together with a basic desire for self preservation).” However, Mejía (2008, 222) points out that this argument still does not justify the U.S. military presence in Iraq and is particularly insufficient to justify the loss of Iraqi life: “[Iraqis] had no choice about being swept up in the war and occupation that we imposed upon them.” Mejía displays his ability to deploy the rhetoric of group solidarity in his antiwar stance: “I speak for many soldiers who oppose this war but don’t have the strength to come forward. I’m not turning my back on my comrades; I’m doing this for them” (242). Here Mejía makes productive use of the ideals and discourses of group solidarity, suggesting that one can abandon war without abandoning one’s fellow soldiers. His statements and actions support Mariscal’s (1991, 107) suggestion that we take seriously feelings of group solidarity and recognize in them a potential for progressive and antiwar activism: “The regimentation and discipline underlying military practices can just as easily lead to a reactionary as to a progressive agenda [and] the desire for camaraderie . . . could be realized more productively by taking collection action against the war.” When Mejía and his men employ the rhetoric of family to refer to one another even outside the space of war, they affirm the extent to which these ideals and relationships can continue to have an important impact outside of a military setting. Mejía especially exhibits

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the ability to harness the important feelings and actions based in solidarity in the service of a radical antiwar agenda. In doing so he again affirms the ability of a soldier, with the aid of others, to reclaim his humanity while asserting a human identity that extends to soldiers, veterans, and others working for peace. Mejía’s engagement with an antiwar movement that reflects a political coalition as well as his use of the rhetoric of group solidarity speak to a particular kind of collective activism that plays an important role in Chicana and feminist organizing. Aída Hurtado (2005, 124) explains that Chicana feminist claims to citizenship do not stem from “claiming individual rights denied to them by men” but rather that “Chicana feminisms propose that their subordination is the result of the intersection of multiple systems of oppression that include gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.” A political perspective grounded in collective identities and coalitional strategies reflects the multiplicities of Chicana identities and is distinct from a liberal idea of individual rights. Mejía expands on Hurtado’s assessment by defining “others like [him]” according to racial, class, and gender identity and also political stance. He affirms Hurtado’s and Chela Sandoval’s positions on collective yet diverse political positions when he recognizes that there are many ways to oppose war. Of two women who challenged the military mandate and policies he writes, “[Their resistance] originated not from a profound political analysis of the invasion and occupation of Iraq but from a more primal, human refusal to participate in one’s own detriment, be it physical or spiritual” (2008, xxiii). He calls on readers to understand the complexity of these positions and declares, “An effective antiwar movement should recognize the diverse nature of military resistance in order to work with these individuals and involve them” (xxiii). Again Mejía affirms the changeability of soldiers and the possibility of soldiers traveling the same journey he did to humanity. At the same time, he calls on antiwar activists to take a more inclusive perspective of soldiers and antiwar activists and asserts the political expediency of such a perspective.

Missing Women As the testimonies of the Winter Soldier veterans quoted above indicate, the systemic white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia of the military, far from protecting either Iraqi women or U.S. soldiers, use violence to maintain strict racial, national, gender, and sexual hierarchies. Within the institution the logic of protectionism preserves male

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privileges—including the ability to commit sexual assault with impunity—and silences dissent. Mejía’s memoir acknowledges the violent sexism of the armed forces; in the introduction to the second edition he discusses three cases of women who denounce dangerous and sexist military practices. He mentions the refusal of Specialist Katherine Jashinski to redeploy to Afghanistan in 2005 due to her status as a conscientious objector and the refusal of Army Specialist Suzanne Swift to redeploy to Iraq in 2006, where she feared she would be the victim of command rape.12 He also refers to the testimony of Army Reserve Colonel Janis Karpinski that female soldiers were dying of dehydration in Iraq because they stopped drinking water in the afternoons in order to avoid being sexually assaulted on their way to the latrines at night. The cases of these women affirm the extent to which the military’s reliance on the dynamics of domination and subordination has particularly disastrous consequences for women. The veteran also refutes the idea that occupying Iraq will safeguard citizens—particularly women—of the United States by connecting his objection to the war with his concern for his mother and daughter. Mejía discusses his mother’s opposition to the U.S. Army and his participation in it, and he often refers to her stance on the Iraq War as well as her support of his attempts to leave and eventual desertion. Of his decision to join the Florida National Guard he recalls, “My mother’s main argument was that the U.S. military was always invading some country or involved in some type of armed conflict, and that even if there was no war at the time, I would most certainly end up fighting one day” (2008, 15–16).13 Interestingly Mejía’s mother firmly believed that the Iraq War was in the interests of “a few U.S. corporations, for oil, and for empire,” and that “the Iraqi people had a right to fight against an imperialist occupation” (206). Castillo’s perspective, like that of her ex-husband, was undoubtedly formed through her own participation in an anti-imperial struggle against the Somoza dictatorship and, later, the U.S.-backed Contra War. She has firsthand knowledge of the terror wrought by U.S. military intervention as well as a belief in the right of subjugated peoples to engage in their own armed liberation struggles. Her belief in the Iraqi people’s right to fight off invaders was a source of conflict for a mother who did not want any harm to come to her son. Just as Mejía was able to channel his appreciation for the importance of group solidarity into antiwar political activism, his mother was able to express her sympathy with the Iraqi people via involvement in ending the U.S. occupation. While Mejía was in Iraq, his mother instigated a congressional inquiry into his status

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as a noncitizen soldier in an attempt to have him released (196–97). Upon his return to the States, she continued to tell him that the war was illegal and his redeployment unnecessary, regardless of army regulations or his own citizenship status. She also compiled a list of activists and organizations that would support him (212). Her stance is revolutionary and compassionate; she never wavers in her opposition to the war and maintains her belief in the right of self-determination for occupied peoples, even when such a right involves recognizing her son as the enemy. At the same time, Castillo’s position on the Iraqi insurgency speaks to the difficulty of conflating an antiwar stance with a pacifist one and illustrates the diversity of women’s and even mothers’ approaches to war and violence. In discussing his mother’s perspective on war and U.S. imperialism, Mejía underscores how his own evolving position on war is informed by his and his family’s experiences in the Nicaraguan Revolution and as immigrants to the United States. Mejía’s thoughts about his daughter and his role as a father also significantly impact his decision against returning to Iraq. While concern for his responsibilities as a father may indicate a heteronormative and masculinist approach to family and fatherhood, Mejía interestingly makes his status as father subordinate to his status as a human. Faced with making a decision about whether or not to redeploy he writes, “I had to find a way not to lose myself in the war, to return home still human so I could be a father to my daughter” (2008, 213). Fatherhood is dependent not on the recognition of paternal rights or responsibilities but on the maintenance of a human identity. He also recognizes that even if he returned from Iraq physically whole, were he to sustain emotional and psychological damage, he would be hurting his daughter. “If I returned to the war, I could be killed in more than one way. It wasn’t just the physical death; it was also the many deaths of the soul every time you kill a human being” (213). As Mejía knows, refusing to serve in Iraq is no guarantee of physical or psychological health, as an entire generation of veterans is returning to a nation that offers no care for those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, homelessness, and high rates of suicide, homicide, and domestic violence (Iraq Veterans against the War and Glantz 2008, 213). But as his concluding remarks in Winter Soldier make clear, staying in Iraq is no solution. Mejía finds hope in speaking about the atrocities of the war, in communicating with others, and specifically in reappropriating language. Tellingly, in the last pages of his book he relies on familial terminology to combat the dehumanizing language of war: “There were times in Iraq when I failed to see things

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the way I was supposed to as a soldier, when I knew that what we called targets were in fact homes, public squares, or markets, when I knew that what we called enemy combatants, terrorists, or Saddam loyalists were in fact people, sons, daughters, parents, human beings. On those occasions, when I destroyed human life in failing to refuse my orders, I also failed myself, my soldiers, the Iraqi people, and humanity” (Mejía 2008, 299). Mejía challenges the logic of masculinist protection that would hold men to be protectors and defenders of families and nations without questioning the identity of a man. In Mejía’s concept one must be a human before one can be a man, parent, or father, and recognizing the humanity of another is necessary to recognizing and realizing one’s own humanity. While his mother and daughter play a large role in Mejía’s thoughts and actions, and he denounces sexism and misogyny in his introduction, women as a whole are largely absent from Mejía’s memoir. This absence functions as a frighteningly apt metaphor for the elision of women in a conflict that, according to some U.S. leaders, had as one of its stated goals the liberation of women. The absence of women in Road from Ar Ramadi highlights the ways women’s voices and concerns were silenced and ignored and their bodies abused and appropriated, even as Western men claimed to speak for them. The lack of women’s voices is both a cause and an effect of gender-based violence; the lack of recourse and appropriate responses with which survivors are met by superior officers as well as the culture in general speaks to the extent to which military assaults mirror civilian assaults and the continuum of violence and silence.14 Silence is imposed by physical force when female service members face an epidemic of assault and harassment within military institutions. While women are by no means the only gender targeted for assault and harassment, men are the overwhelming perpetrators of assault, indicating that we must understand the role of gender in sexual violence and the importance of not collapsing a call to recognize the saliency of gender-based violence with “women’s concerns.” Several feminists have decried the use of the rhetoric of women’s liberation to justify the invasion of sovereign foreign nations, rightly pointing out that such rhetoric is nothing less than the manipulation and exploitation of legitimate concerns about women’s well-being. In the case of Iraq, the situation of women under Hussein was often conflated with the situation of women under the Taliban in Afghanistan, contributing to an ahistorical, Orientalist, racist, and sexist perspective that framed the U.S. invasion and occupation as “rescuing women from Islam” or, in the words of Gayatri Spivak, “white men . . . saving brown women from

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brown men” (Spivak and Sharpe 2003, 296). Marsha Howell (2005, 145) points out that women in Iraq were not subject to the “loathsome burka” and that the disadvantages they faced were closely linked to lack of appropriate nutritional and medical care, deprivations that were due in no small part to twelve years of U.S.-imposed sanctions. Howell decries the absolute cynicism of the Bush administration’s claims to support women in light of his government’s “[ravaging of] the budgets of schools, medical institutions, and child-care facilities” (146). She concludes, “It is truly evil to wage war in the name of women when we so obviously care so little about them—as women or as citizens” (145). Referring to the important work of Chandra Mohanty and Uma Narayan, Iris Marion Young (2005, 29) similarly points out that such monolithic (and racist) understandings of gender oppression on the part of Western feminists have “conveniently deflected attention from perhaps more intractable and mundane problems of gender-based violence, domination, and poverty in many parts of the world, including the enlightened West.” Unfortunately, prominent and mainstream “feminist” organizations were guilty of such racist and sexist perspectives. While Eleanor Smeal and the Feminist Majority Foundation have in some ways become popular punching bags for feminist critiques of Orientalism in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, she and the organization simply must be held accountable for their support of the wars from a “feminist” perspective. According to Young, Smeal uncritically supported the rhetoric of women’s rights touted by George and Laura Bush to the extent that she was “cheered by the idea of women flying F16s” (29).15 Howell (2005) points out that while feminists marching under banners that declared the importance of “caring, not killing” may have reified the gendered construction of women, the importance of compassion is an acknowledgment deeply necessary in any society. She writes that such banners were calling on citizens, “men and women alike, to recall what is best about our humanity and to cultivate those qualities, necessary for our survival as humans. These are not women’s values; they are human values, and if by marching as women they reinforced a traditional cultural association between women and caregiving, they were only reminding us that we dare not assign these values to a nonpolitical space inhabited by women alone” (146). Howell’s call for humanity and human values echoes Mejía’s discussion of his journey from soldier to human. She is also correct in pointing out the necessity of understanding “women’s values” as “human values” and incorporating such values into political spaces. Reading evocations of women’s rights outside a

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larger context of neo-imperialism and military intervention may feed into the discourse of U.S. exceptionalism that justified the invasion of Iraq. However, placing these discussions within a glocal perspective that recognizes how race, gender, sexuality, and nationality impact who is “protected” by whom and why, as Mejía’s memoir urges us to do, allows us to understand how women’s rights can and must be a part of evaluations of the moral and political underpinnings of military violence. Despite the absence of women in the narrative, Mejía’s introductory remarks on the cases of Jashinski and Swift as well as the role his mother plays illustrate that he takes care to frame his analysis of the army in a way that recognizes the role of gender and sexuality. Road from Ar Ramadi consistently and thoroughly explores the role of masculinity in relation to abuses within and by the U.S. military. In addition to the discussion of “smoking,” Mejía (2008, 27) relates being told to put “more testosterone” into his leadership style, an anecdote that speaks to the extent to which masculinity is deployed hierarchically and intentionally. A narrow and normative vision of masculinity is similarly evidenced during Mejía’s trial when reporters suggest to one of his former squad mates that he is a “coward” for refusing to return to Iraq. When the soldier, Oliver Perez, defends Mejía by saying that he “fought next to [Mejía] in many battles,” we see how Perez links “proper” masculine behavior with participation in armed violence (251). With these examples, the memoir connects militarism and the imposition and enforcement of particular manifestations of gendered behavior to both the abuses to which soldiers were subject and the war on terror. Mejía’s ability to consider the experiences of individuals from a range of backgrounds and experiences illustrates that his deployment of a human consciousness is not the same as conceptions of humanity that link the human to a monolithic identity marked as white, male, and heterosexual. Requiring that particular attention be paid to the ways gender, sexuality, class, and nationality impact one’s experiences with U.S. militarism, his memoir reminds us that the identities of soldier, veteran, and enemy are neither discrete nor all-encompassing. In this way he urges readers to similarly question rhetoric deployed in the war on terror that suggested military violence was being used to liberate women and calls on us to acknowledge how one’s relationship to militarism often indicates one’s ability to be marked as human or worthy of rights. When the rights of women in Afghanistan took center stage in U.S. political discourse only when those rights could be linked to U.S. intervention in the region, we can appreciate how the recognition of particular groups

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of people as deserving of rights is closely tied to global capitalism and imperialism.16 Mejía’s attention to the abuses of the U.S. Armed Forces— against U.S. servicemen and women as well as Iraqi and Afghani soldiers and civilians—indicates his attempt to enact a global humanity not tied to Western identity or citizenship. Furthermore he pinpoints exactly how the allocation of rights is tied in to military service—and explicitly opposes such a relationship—through his stance on the D.R.E.A.M. Act.

Mejía and the D.R.E.A.M. Act While Mejía describes a new kind of global citizen by characterizing his path from soldier to veteran for peace as a journey toward humanity, his postmilitary activism clearly calls for and enacts a transnational identity. In 2004 Mejía was convicted of desertion, sentenced to one year in prison, and given a bad conduct discharge. He was imprisoned at Fort Sill military prison in Lawton, Oklahoma, before being discharged in February 2005. During his prison term he was recognized as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, and after his release he became active with Iraq Veterans against the War and was elected to its board of directors in 2006. Founded in 2004, IVAW has three goals: immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces in Iraq; reparations for the human and structural damages suffered in Iraq so that the people there might regain their right to self-determination; and full benefits, adequate health care (including mental health), and other support for returning servicemen and women. In 2009 the organization passed a resolution calling for “immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all occupying forces in Afghanistan and reparations for the Afghan people” and also passed a resolution opposing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (www.ivaw.org).17 While Mejía’s work with IVAW brought both him and the organization international prominence, his own stances on issues seemingly unrelated to the Iraq War more clearly illustrate how he has channeled his position as a war resistor into one of transnational citizen and activist. To this end his opposition to the D.R.E.A.M. Act is particularly significant. Mejia’s memoir and his criticism of the D.R.E.A.M. Act reflect a unique position in relation to U.S. Latina/o identity and the U.S. military. Like many young Latinas/os who served in the military, his experience was a politicizing process in which he developed an explicit critique of the domestic and foreign policy of the United States. His position acknowledges that the participation of poor and brown men and women in the U.S. military has often been the price of citizenship. However,

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rather than demanding equality or citizenship as a result of his service, Mejía gestures toward the necessity of an international anti-imperial and antiwar alliance. He frames his concern for undocumented immigrants in glocal terms by asserting the necessity of a political platform that considers the situation of undocumented youth within the United States and the value of the lives of all peoples, including U.S. youth encouraged to join the military and the Iraqi civilians and soldiers whom they are enlisted to fight. Mejía advocates for a decidedly antimilitary and antiwar perspective that upholds the inherently degrading effects of any and all armed conflicts and looks outside of the nation-state for justice. The Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors (D.R.E.A.M.) Act was jointly introduced to Congress by Senators Dick Durbin and Orrin Hatch on January 1, 2001. The bill proposes amending the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 to make undocumented immigrants eligible for in-state tuition for college and the opportunity to become temporary residents. In order to qualify, an individual must be twelve years of age, apply before the age of twenty-one, have earned a high school degree or equivalency, have been physically present in the United States for five years prior to the passage of the Act, be of good moral character, not be eligible for deportation due to a criminal record or security concerns, and complete two years in the military or four years in an institution of higher education.18 As of February 2013 the D.R.E.A.M. Act has failed to pass the Senate; the most recent vote, taken on December 18, 2010, failed by a margin of fifty-five to forty-one.19 Supporters of the Act view the legislation as a way to recognize military service and/ or hard work on the part of young immigrants as well an opportunity for such people to become more fully integrated into U.S. culture and society. Opponents view the legislation as an important battle in the war over comprehensive immigration reform, asserting that the bill reflects “amnesty” and a “reward for illegal activities.”20 The debate over the legislation, however, involves two other positions. First, traditionally conservative institutions, including the military, support the act as a way “to attract quality recruits to an all-volunteer force.”21 Second, progressive opponents of the bill criticize precisely the ways in which the military stands to benefit from the legislation. According to Mariscal, “The Pentagon helped write the D.R.E.A.M. Act” (qtd. in Democracy Now!, 2010). Mejía and Mariscal are part of a small group of people that oppose the D.R.E.A.M. Act from an antimilitary, pro-immigrant, and transnational perspective. In a radio interview prior to the last vote on the D.R.E.A.M. Act, Mejía explained his opposition to the legislation as stemming from the

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Act’s military provision. He began his discussion on Democracy Now! on August 8, 2010, by “[commending] all the people who are working for justice for undocumented youth and everybody else who wishes to attend higher education institutions in the United States.” He then explained his position: The D.R.E.A.M. Act does not include anything along the lines of financial stability, anything along the lines of healthcare, anything along the lines of housing, whereas the military has all of these things. . . . The two-year option to serve in the military is also not a two-year option, because any military contract is eight years. No less than eight years. Whether it be a combination of two years of active service and eight years in the Reserves or four each or three and five, it doesn’t matter. It’s always eight years. And people are always subject to stop-loss. . . . On top of that, the D.R.E.A.M. Act does not grant residency. It grants conditional, temporary residency, which means that at any given point between the time that the person applies for the D.R.E.A.M. Act, there’s a period of six years when this person is not even eligible to apply for permanent residency and is subjected to be deported just like any other undocumented immigrant here. Mejía points out that the option between joining the military or entering college is one constrained by financial needs, thus casting doubt on the likelihood that youth will be able to leave the service after two years, and clarifies that the bill grants only temporary, conditional residency. These criticisms portray the bill as one that takes advantage of a financially vulnerable population, putting them in a position of extreme danger for an extended period of time without any guarantees of full citizenship. For Mejía, the danger to the physical and mental health of young soldiers may continue after two years due to the military’s stop-loss provision (the involuntary extension of a service member’s contract) as well as posttraumatic stress disorder. Other youth of color are joining Mejía in questioning the choice in military service. In the Democracy Now! (2010) interview Rishi Singh remarks that for young undocumented youth from poor immigrant communities, “there would be no other choice but to join the military.” Mejía agrees: “[Military service] is an option, but it’s not a fair option.” This position takes into account the power of the U.S. military in relation to undocumented youth. As Mejía points out, the military “has the Montgomery GI Bill. The military, through the National Guard and

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Reserves, has tuition waivers.” The military can provide health care and housing for undocumented youth, making the military option that much more powerful. For noncitizens, the military offers not only physical but also political and legal support. Hector Amaya (2007) explains that the U.S. state violates its own liberal policies in the granting of posthumous citizenship to Latino immigrants killed in battle. Focusing on the cases of three young servicemen who were killed in Iraq, Amaya claims that the granting of citizenship to these young men violated “the consent to be governed” in a way that replicated the “imperialistic practices of the 19th and early 20th century when the U.S. government also naturalized Mexicans and Puerto Ricans without their consent” (4). Amaya contends that this is a strategic move on the part of the army as it allows the army to ignore the fact that it is not a “volunteer” army but rather one “structured to attract mostly the poor and the non-white” (4). The army has overwhelmingly been the “‘choice’ of poor whites, racial and ethnic minorities, and increasingly, non-citizens” (14). Mejía’s critique of the rhetoric of choice for young immigrants who join the army echoes Amaya’s position. In addition, in his memoir Mejía (2008, 193) repeatedly resists efforts to reassure him that he will return from Iraq a “hero” and a “citizen.” As he tries to get released from the army, he is pressured to apply for citizenship: “I didn’t want to appear unpatriotic, but I had started to wonder why they were so hell-bent on making me a citizen” (198). Later, when chastised by a sergeant for not having applied for citizenship despite his eligibility, Mejía retorts, “I had never thought about citizenship much, but I don’t think that not being a U.S. citizen makes me a bad person” (210). The pressure Mejía faces to become a citizen supports Amaya’s (2007, 14) contention that the U.S. Army and the U.S. state use citizenship to “fatten” the military. Both Amaya’s criticism and Mejía’s narrative likewise attest to the close relationship between military service and national identity and the particular consequences this relationship has for Latinas/os and immigrants. Like Amaya and Mejía, Singh considers the particular circumstances of immigrants of color in relation to the U.S. military. He takes a glocal perspective on war and the D.R.E.A.M. Act, examining the position of immigrant working-class communities in the United States alongside that of foreign nations in relationship to the U.S. military. According to Singh, South Asian immigrant families have seen “how war affects our home countries . . . how the war on terror has affected us here in the U.S. but also in our home countries. So we don’t want . . . young people

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to go fight and continue to . . . kill other people of color in unjust wars” (Democracy Now! 2010). In designating individuals living in Pakistan and Afghanistan as “people of color,” Singh applies a particular racialized and politicized identity to them. This perspective aligns Afghanis and Pakistanis with ethnic minority and immigrant communities in the United States in opposition to the U.S. military. Singh claims a multiracial, multilinguistic, and religiously and geographically diverse South Asian identity, and Mejía aligns himself with the even broader group of “people working for justice for undocumented youth.” Embodying their transnational perspectives by refusing to participate in any war, the two activists assert a political identity that, although rooted in ethnic identity politics, is in fact formed by a political position in relation to U.S. imperialism and militarism.

Summary: Voices for Peace Mejía’s glocal perspective on war, in which he considers militarized violence and its effects across and between multiple nation-states, is evident in both his written work and his activism; however, it is in his memoir that he discusses most eloquently the role of the written and spoken word. Just as he challenges common distinctions between freedom and oppression in his critique of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, he questions commonly held notions of speech versus silence. While he originally wanted to write the book as “a way to ensure [he] would not be silenced even if [he] ended up behind bars,” he did not actually begin the memoir until he was released from military prison (2008, xvii). At that point the memoir had a different purpose: “It was something I had to do in order to begin my healing process” (xviii). However, Mejía had to reach an agreement with himself regarding things he would not write in order to begin this healing process. There were memories that were too horrible and painful to write or discuss; thus only after he had decided “to leave out the missing details” did the process become “less painful and more therapeutic” (xix). He asserts that it is not necessary for the memoirist to tell everything; he does not need to share shameful memories and experiences in order to work toward personal and political peace. Rather his introduction suggests that even cautionary and partial acknowledgment of violence has an important part to play in movements for peace and justice. Mejía claims that he “had always wanted to be an author” and that through the experience of writing and publishing Road from Ar Ramadi

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he gained a greater appreciation for the relationship between writing and activism (2008, xvii). As he heard from others who had read his book he began to understand that the “success” of his memoir could be found “at the community level, where grassroots activists battle against a system that refuses to place human interest above profit and that feeds on poverty and disadvantage to fill the ranks of its military” (xx). Mejía finds in his memoir the ability to challenge some of the hierarchical structures that he so opposes.22 The memoir became transformed, he writes, “into a tool of activism, a sort of chisel [he] hope[s] will contribute to the carving of a new world, beginning by working on ending the occupation of Iraq and organizing around military resistance” (xx–xxi). Mejía’s perspective affirms the power of writing in several regards. Road from Ar Ramadi became both a way of working through his own trauma as well as a way to contribute to a larger political movement. Finally, then, Road from Ar Ramadi affirms the productive relationship between art, identity, and activism. In exploring and explaining his own political and personal evolution he gives sound, voice, and substance to a particular vision of transnational justice. In drawing on his identity as an immigrant, a Latino, a veteran, and an activist for peace, his narrative offers a concrete portrait of a historical and political moment and a blueprint for future endeavors. As Eduardo Galeano (1983, 190) asserts, identity resides in struggle and reveals itself in the written word: “A literature born in the process of crisis and change, and deeply immersed in the risks and events of its time, can indeed help to create the symbols of the new reality.” However, Galeano cautions that such literature must both come from and return to the political collective: “What one writes can be historically useful only when in some way it coincides with the need of the collectivity to achieve its identity” (185). The real act of creating something new comes not in the writing or publication of a work like Road from Ar Ramadi but in its reception, in the way the work is read, digested, and commented upon. The reception of which Mejía speaks in his introduction attests to both the ability of literary works to connect with social justice movements as well as the readiness for such movements to receive and engage with new reflections and articulations of glocal identities.

Coda

In 2013 the contemporary music group La Santa Cecilia,1 the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, and filmmaker Alex Rivera teamed up to offer a nuanced portrayal of the impact of a militarized immigration policy on the everyday lives of U.S. residents. Focusing on Latinas/os in an urban environment, the video for the song “ICE/El Hielo” presents a narrative account of several individuals whose lives intersect with one another and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.2 The music video closely follows three people: a young ICE agent, a young woman who works at a restaurant, and a middle-aged man who works in the kitchen of the same restaurant. The story visually moves between the three protagonists as they act out their morning routines, presenting their lives as parallels; the beginning of the video shows each person waking in a domestic setting, then donning shoes, traveling to work, and so forth. All leave their homes to engage in some kind of labor, and the camera lingers on these similarities and differences: the young man laces up army boots and drives alone in a car; the young mother dons sneakers and takes a bus to work; the older man pulls on work boots and rides a bike. Their lives are distinct yet share particular things in common. All of the individuals are contextualized in relationship to kinship networks: the ICE agent interacts with his wife and daughter; the young woman speaks with her mother and daughter; the older man contemplates a photo of a woman, presumably a spouse in another country. These scenes are interspersed with shots of the band playing the song in a bright outdoor setting. The lyrics are entirely in Spanish and follow

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closely the events depicted visually. The chorus is ominous: “ICE roams freely through the streets / None of us know when it’s going to be our turn. . . . / One stays here / Another stays over there / This happens simply for going to work.”3 In the climactic, heart-wrenching scene, the ICE agent confronts the other two workers and presumably detains them. Viewers are offered two last shots of los que quedan acá: the young woman’s daughter and mother sobbing and hugging while they watch news of the detentions on television, and the picture of the middle-aged man’s spouse, which becomes blurry as the camera fades out. The music ends and text takes over the screen; silently the video informs viewers of the undocumented status of almost all of the individuals featured (including members of the band) and the deportation proceedings affecting several of the actors and/or their family members. A final image reads “#not1more,” directing viewers to www.notonemoredeportation.com, a website that features information and artwork about immigration and deportation and encourages viewers to sign petitions and participate in marches, among other actions. In offering viewers a visual and auditory interpretation of the interconnections between local and national labor patterns, transnational policies, and personal and familial relationships, the song and video present a glocal perspective on militarization and immigration and, importantly, the links between the two phenomena. The narrative that follows the young dark-skinned ICE agent is particularly poignant and powerfully explodes the idea that there are two sides to the current U.S. debate on immigration. Viewers watch the evolution of the young man’s day: he awakes in the morning in his bed, plays with his daughter, drives to work, dons a uniform and helmet, participates in a drill with other agents, and then proceeds to the kitchen of the restaurant, where he detains the young mother and older man. Importantly the militarization of ICE and the lives of all those who interact with it is prominently presented as dark and cold, an impression achieved both visually and aurally: the music drops to a low, slow drumbeat just as the agent is shown buckling his belt; his hands adjust the uniform, but the camera shows only his midsection, emphasizing the loss of individuality engendered by the uniform and its attendant labor. This point is reinforced as the narrative progresses; in full uniform the man turns his back to the camera, showing us only the words on his jacket that reference ICE. When he faces the woman in the kitchen he is shown behind other, larger agents. The lack of individuality is communicated by a monochromatic, desolate environment. The agents wear black and gray uniforms and assemble in an alley flanked by a wire fence and garbage

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dumpsters. These images are contrasted to the bright and lively world in which the others work: the restaurant is well-lit and filled with colorful tables, and the young woman and older man smile and talk with patrons and coworkers. These differences are stark, especially as they appear only minutes after the long sequence emphasizing the similarities between the workers. Thus even though the ICE agent’s world is contrasted with that of the others, viewers understand that his life and experiences are not so different from theirs. The final confrontational moment similarly emphasizes a shared humanity, but one interrupted by an inhumane immigration system. As the agent stands in the kitchen of the restaurant, the camera moves from his face to hers. The mother’s eyes register despair, and the agent cannot meet her gaze; he glances up at the ceiling, and the camera captures the heavy swallow in his throat. In this way the song and video break down the idea that there are two opposing sides to immigration policy: those whom current policy benefits and those whom current policy harms. The tragedy depicted in the video strikes all of the individuals; no one is immune from the devastating impact of the agency that “anda suelto por esas calles.” Emotionally resonant, the video offers a complex portrayal of several processes and institutions. The images capture the hypermilitarization of immigration, the imposition of immigration and militarization on the lives of Latinas/os, and the disruption and dissolution of families, workplaces, and national, ethnonational, and transnational communities. In portraying the individuals as embedded in multiple social and kinship networks, the video avoids essentializing ideas of family and community. The dark-skinned agent who participates in the detention of other dark-skinned individuals references a long and continuing history of U.S. Latinas/os and Chicanas/os who are employed by and complicit with repressive and demonizing immigration institutions and policies. The video also represents more than one form of family. Today a significant amount of rhetoric deployed in current discussions about immigration implores change in the name of “keeping families together.” Though powerful, such phrases risk reproducing exclusively heterosexual and heteronormative relationships. By showing individuals in nuclear, nonnuclear, and transnational families and highlighting many forms of interaction and interconnectedness, the video avoids such a narrow portrayal. In these ways, and similar to the creative works analyzed elsewhere in this book, “ICE/El Hielo” seeks to both reflect and alter a particular reality, explicitly asking viewers to acknowledge the destructive impact of current militarization and immigration policies and to take a stand against them.

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Similarly the focus on militarization captures a growing and devastating reality. The scenes portraying the actions and accessories of the immigration agent speak to the use of militarized technology and policies on the U.S.-Mexico border, developments that are often unquestioned and unrecognized. The processes of militarization and immigration share technology and policy and are united in language and ideology. Employing the same rhetoric used to justify sending more troops to Iraq in 2007, lawmakers in the House of Representatives are currently calling for a “border surge.” Tellingly security corporations and contractors stand to benefit handsomely: the proposed legislation calls for spending of $46 billion, including $7.5 billion on a high-tech fence on the U.S.-Mexico border and adding twenty thousand Border Patrol agents to make that institution the largest law enforcement agency in the United States.4 The increase of military technology and ideology within the immigration debate in the United States has not marked a decrease in U.S. military intervention abroad.5 A future project examining Latina/o transnational responses to militarism must include a discussion of U.S. intervention in Colombia. Engaged for more than forty years in a civil war, Colombia continues to figure prominently in both U.S. drug policy and military intervention. To combat the growing strength of drug cartels and their booming business, the U.S. Congress passed Plan Colombia in 2000. “The $1.3 billion mostly military aid package included support for the training of three new counternarcotics battalions by instructors from the Special Forces and the School of the Americas” (Gill 2004, 179). Despite the plan’s ostensible focus on limiting the production and distribution of coca, U.S. and Colombian military forces focused primarily on areas that had a strong leftist insurgency rather than the areas that played a significant role in the coca trade (180). The “push into southern Colombia” had as one of its main targets the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, a guerrilla organization that was born in the 1960s. The FARC was able to increase in size and strength by offering protection to peasant coca growers from “abusive drug lords” (180). In addition the FARC took advantage of the brutality with which government forces attacked civilians and noncivilians alike, policies that “drove many people into the guerrilla ranks” (180). In addition to military aid, Plan Colombia provided funds for the aerial fumigation of crops to eliminate coca production. Impoverished rural communities that relied on coca crops for their livelihood were coerced into signing “social pacts” by which they agreed to destroy their

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coca crop in exchange for financial assistance. Failure to do so would result in fumigation. However, financial assistance came either very late or never, and not all those who signed pacts were spared government spraying (Gill 2004, 184). Furthermore fumigation was often conducted from ranges far higher than the recommended thirty feet, resulting in deadly chemicals drifting onto nearby land. The brutality of U.S.-trained Colombian forces, along with the criminally negligent fumigation policies, have contributed to massive displacement in Colombia. According to Lesley Gill, this displacement—which now affects more than two million Colombians—has “long been a strategy, not an effect, of Colombia’s civil war” (181, 186). U.S. intervention in Colombia is marked by military aid as well as the rhetoric of the “war on drugs.” As Mary Pat Brady (2002) argues, a more historical analysis of the war on drugs is necessary to understanding current iterations of war: “The ‘War on Drugs’ functions as the critical but disavowed model for [U.S. intervention in Iraq]. Disavowal of the War on Drugs cannot be attributed to mere oversight; rather, such forgetting is crucial to the institutionalization of the War on Terrorism” (451). Moreover the war on drugs must be approached with a glocal perspective in order to understand, contextualize, and historicize the ways in which this war has led to the increasing militarization of the lives of Colombian civilians and also U.S. residents and in particular people of color. The war on drugs has justified more federal money spent on prison construction, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI, and the Border Patrol, “siphoning away monies that might have been spent on health, education, foreign aid, worker training, social security, infrastructure improvements, and other programs” (452). The war also relies on a racist and masculinist logic of protection based on narratives of white men controlling white women by “policing controlled substances, imprisoning men of color at disproportionate rates, and burying this battle under an avalanche of stories of crisis-ridden families, cities, and nations” (452). Looking at U.S. Latina/o responses to U.S. intervention in Colombia may grant both greater historical depth and geographic breadth to “war narratives” as well as spur reflection on growing transnational and transamerican movements.6 We can see similarities between Iraq and Colombia in the long history of U.S. intervention in the regions, large-scale policy decisions, and on-the-ground tactics. One strategy in particular—the supposed identification of terrorists and narcotraffickers—is familiar in both locations. In Colombia antiviolence and human rights activists have

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sought to bring attention to the duplicitous practice of “false positives,” whereby murdered civilians are incorrectly posthumously identified as narcotraffickers and/or terrorists.7 Colombian paramilitary troops have been accused of placing weapons on dead bodies so the murdered will be falsely identified as drug traffickers of members of the FARC. U.S. veterans of Iraq report an eerily similar practice. In his testimony in Winter Soldier Lance Corporal Jon Michael Turner explains the use of “drop weapons,” which soldiers took from Iraqi police and carried with them “in case [they] messed up and shot the wrong person” (Iraq Veterans against the War and Glantz 2008, 24). Corporal Sergio Kocherin affirms the practice in his testimony: “Drop weapons are the weapons that were given to us by our chain of command in case we killed somebody without weapons. . . . We would carry an AK-47 and if the person that was shot did not have the weapon, the AK-47 would be placed at his corpse. Then when the unit would come back to the base they would turn it in to identify the shot man as an enemy combatant” (50). The use of such tactics—and their support throughout all levels of military and paramilitary units—suggests a parallel to the methods used to distinguish Colombians deemed enemies of U.S. strategy. The increasing militarization of the lives of civilians in the United States and abroad is alarming, but we would do well to take seriously the less overtly visible ideological connections as well. The idea that a militarized surge (be it in Iraq or on the U.S.-Mexico border) is necessary stems from a logic of security and safety embedded in and enacted through notions of masculinity, protection, and racism. As individuals, families, and communities attempt to come to grips with a world in which seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin could be murdered for posing no threat outside that of his race and gender, we are reminded of the urgent necessity of examining these connections.8 We need to acknowledge how a logic that upholds the necessity of protection and security is based in a long history of colonialism and imperialism, justified by contemporary enactments of racism, sexism, and violent hypermasculinity, and made possible by the unrestricted flow of public money to corporations that produce weapons of murder and destruction. We cannot separate these considerations. We can no longer ignore the connections between the murder of migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border by individuals tasked with “securing our border” and the murder of children in suburban neighborhoods by men who “feel threatened.” Nor can we ignore the deeply embedded ideas of gender and gendered violence; the idea that men can and should provide protection is not unconnected to the

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idea that such protection may and should include the use of force and the reality that the recipients of such force are disproportionally poor, brown, and/or female. As “ICE/El Hielo” reminds us, art—whether it be a music video, a novel, a film, a poem, or a digital image—can be a powerful means of prompting and meditating on these considerations. Embedded in and related to a history of colonialism and imperialism, along with neo-imperialism and militarized, gendered, and racialized violence, the narratives analyzed in this book offer us the ability to assess and understand the changing face of the United States and the world. These narratives are valuable for the stories they tell about the history of Latina/o engagements with U.S. military intervention, a history that must be told because it contributes to a larger and more complete understanding of the history of U.S. Latinas/os as well as U.S. Latina/o cultural production. A glocal perspective is best able to do justice (and I mean that in every sense of the word) to the difficult reality we face. Such a perspective can honor the specific histories—of resistance to U.S. military intervention in Latin America, of Central American revolutionary movements, of transnational solidarity, of antiwar activism—and connect these particular issues, people, and events to an ongoing situation. This viewpoint, moreover, can help us to see events and processes of love, of revolution, of war on an individual, local, national, and transnational scale simultaneously. Such an analysis, that acknowledges the individual within the larger movement and the larger movement within the individual, offers us a much needed perspective on our history and our present day, but also, I hope, our future.

Notes

Introduction 1. “[Following a world economic crisis in the 1970s,] the story goes, capitalism . . . had to innovate by undoing the rigidities of national economic regulation and mass production” (Joseph 2002b, 72). 2. Borderlessness is used here to describe the flows of transnational capital and finance, not the movement of people. Throughout this book I use the term transnational to capture the increased flow of finance and goods without denying the continued power of the nation. 3. “Part of the seductiveness of the global/localization story (by contrast with the globalization as totalizing story) is that it seems such a precise answer to the yearning for community produced in the Romantic narrative. But it is too perfect an answer; it reiterates the very terms of the Romantic discourse of community. In a blatant disavowal of the transformation process it describes, most popular iterations constitute community as autonomous from capitalism and modernity” (Joseph 2002b, 75). See Joseph (2002a) for a more in-depth consideration of discourses of community in relation to capitalist processes. 4. Chela Sandoval (2002, 26) suggests that a “methodology of emancipation” develops oppositional powers that are “analogous to but at the same time homeopathically resistant to postmodern transnationalization.” 5. See “Masculinity as a Foreign Policy Issue” in Enloe 1994. 6. The campaign to alter the film lasted several months and received a range of responses from Burns and PBS. Originally Burns defended his refusal to reedit the film as “artistic freedom,” but eventually the film was amended to include the voices of Latino and Native American service members. An organization, Defend the Honor, was formed to pressure Burns to make the changes, and the American GI Forum and Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez, director of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas at Austin, also played important parts.

198 / notes to pages 11–14 7. Interestingly the funeral parlor director, Tom Kennedy, was not himself a native of Texas but had moved to the area from Pennsylvania and opened the business only a week before Beatrice Longoria’s request. Kennedy went to Texas looking for a fresh start after sustaining tremendous trauma during his own time in the service. His life and actions challenge the idea that northern Anglos were less inclined toward racism and that military service forged cross-racial bonds between soldiers. 8. Both the documentary and Patrick J. Carroll’s (2003) book on the topic discuss the case in relation to the rise to power of Johnson and Kennedy, the Viva Kennedy clubs, and increasing political participation (and demands) on the part of Mexican Americans. 9. Despite my use of sequential numbers (first, second, third), I am not indicating a temporal relationship between these three perspectives. That is, the scholarship that forms part of this first strand looks at more historically distant conflicts, such as World War II, but is actually quite new. By the same token, while the Viet Nam War occurred after World War II, the critical perspectives I reference stem from scholarship that largely emerged before the work that makes up the “first” strand. 10. The University of Texas at Austin houses the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, a project aimed at increasing awareness of the role of Latinos and Latinas in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The project has led to the publication of three works: Rivas-Rodríguez et al. 2006; RivasRodríguez 2005; Rivas-Rodríguez and Zamora 2009. These works join Griswold del Castillo 2008; Ybarra 2004; and Mariscal 1999. In addition to these works, two films, As Long As I Remember: American Veteranos (2009) and Héroes de Otra Patria (1998), explore the experiences of Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, respectively, in Viet Nam. Finally, several articles, including Olguín (2002) and Amaya (2007), have looked at Latinas/os in relationship to wars other than Viet Nam. The majority of these works remain male-centric and Chicano-centric, a perspective this work consciously seeks to challenge. 11. Muhammad Ali’s infamous declaration “No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger” is emblematic of this perspective, one that suggested that the enemies of U.S. citizens of color were not foreigners but U.S. racism and classism. 12. In chapter 4 I briefly discuss Omi and Winant’s (1994) contention that Third World ethnonationalist politics failed due to their inability to understand the particularities of the U.S. racial context, the role of the state in enforcing a racial order, and the state’s own ability to adapt. For a more in-depth analysis of the U.S. Third World Left, see Pulido 2006. 13. Américo Paredes has several works that deal with both war and a dual consciousness on the behalf of Chicanas/os, most notably the short story “Ichiro Kikuchi” from the collection The Hammon and the Beans (1994) and the poem “A César Augusto Sandino” from the collection Between Two Worlds. (1991) However, Viet Nam era writings are the first significant corpus of twentieth-century U.S. Latina/o writings to explicitly criticize U.S. foreign intervention on the basis of shared racial and economic experiences. 14. English spellings of Mossadegh’s first name vary. I follow the spelling used by the Journal of Middle East Studies. The name in Arabic is ‫عسم دمح‬. 15. I am referring to militarism as it encompasses not only national armies but militaristic processes. Thus the exit of U.S. troops from Iraq has little consequence as

notes to pages 15–35 / 199 Iraq remains a state subject to military processes in the forms of militarized borders, economic processes, and politics. 16. Personal interview, August 4, 2006, my translation. 17. While I do not self-consciously frame this book as genealogical, I am cognizant that it is an excavation of sorts. My perspective follows that of Butler and Foucault in its eschewal of the search for an origin in favor of seeking to understand how identity categories “are in fact effects of institutions, practices, discourse with multiple and diffuse points of origin” (Butler 1990, xxxi).

1 / Gender, Difference, and the FSLN Insurrection 1. Raza means “race” in Spanish but is used politically to refer to the “bronze race”—Chicanas/os and Latinas/os. In its evocation of a community identity however, I would say the meaning of this phrase lies somewhere between “The People’s 7” and “The Brown 7.” 2. Serrano’s history of activism predated her meeting with Dalton by over a decade. She had worked as a staff person on the campaign to recall Senator Joseph McCarthy (“Joe Must Go”) in Wisconsin, was a chairperson of the Student Peace Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and had her passport rescinded for ten years for challenging travel restrictions to China in 1957. Other activities with which she was involved included forming a cooperative child care group in 1958 and joining the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom. At the time of her meeting with Dalton in Cuba, Serrano had been involved with the international and U.S. solidarity movements in defense of the Cuban Revolution for almost a decade. Her involvement in the U.S. Latina/o movement in San Francisco was a result of the vow she made to Dalton (personal correspondence, January 16, 2011 and July 18, 2013). 3. Vargas, a close friend and contemporary of both Serrano and Murguía, is a Latino artist and activist of Nicaraguan descent. Like Murguía, he fought in the FSLN and was an important figure in the San Francisco–based Sandinista solidarity movement. He cofounded the Mission Cultural Center and remains active in arts education. 4. According to Serrano, the making of the film was a break not with the solidarity movement as a whole but rather with some individuals who were part of the San Francisco movement. She notes that opponents of the film went so far as to try to sabotage the completed film’s arrival in Managua. This experience caused her and Portillo to commit to the project even more passionately (personal correspondence, January 16, 2011). 5. While Chicano nationalism often invoked nostalgia for the vanquished Aztec Empire, Chicana feminists pointed out the symmetries between European and Aztec imperialism as well as patriarchal oppression within European, Aztec, and Chicano cultures and politics. For a critique of Aztec imperialism and patriarchy from a Chicana feminist perspective, see del Castillo 1997. 6. Héctor Perla has several articles on U.S.-based opposition to U.S. policy in Central America and in particular on how the U.S. Central American community organized around nonintervention. See Perla 2013 in particular. 7. It is important to note that although Murguía’s collection was not published until 1991, it grew out of experiences contemporaneous with the making of the film; notes Serrano, “We were all part of the larger cultural workers’ solidarity movement in San Francisco” (personal correspondence, January 16, 2011).

200 / notes to pages 35–45 8. The artistry and activism undertaken by Mission-based Latinas/os in the 1970s, including art and activism involving Nicaraguan solidarity, continues to be explored in contemporary scholarship. See Cordova 2006, 2010. 9. Murguía also fought as part of the Southern Front, and like Ulises, he was part of the Benjamín Zeledón Front. The names Ulises and Zeledón are taken from fallen comrades; the former refers to Ulises Tapia, a guerrilla killed earlier in the insurrection; the latter was a young Liberal who formed an army in 1912 to challenge Conservative president Adolfo Díaz before being defeated by U.S. troops. This tradition of carrying the names of martyrs into battle is common throughout Central America and extends outside army ranks. According to Ana Patricia Rodríguez (2009, 143), the name is not meant to refer to the Ulysses of Greek legends, but only Tapia. 10. I borrow the term heteronormative from Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998, n2) and use it to refer to “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged.” 11. Though the individual stories are undated, reading Southern Front as faithfully autobiographical would place this story in June 1979, when Murguía first joined the Southern Front in Costa Rica. In his foreword Murguía (1990, 8) notes that some of the stories were written just after the July 1979 triumph, although most of those original versions did not survive. The final page of the last short story of the collection ends, “Peñas Blancas–San Francisco / ‘La Misión’ / 1979–86” (119). 12. Ulises’s reference to Nahuatl presents a nationalist (Aztec-centric) engagement with Mexico, a privileging of one linguistic and ethnic group within a heterogeneous Amerindian population. 13. Consider, for example, the Tlaxcalan alliance with Hernán Cortés and Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s challenge to the enslavement of indigenous peoples. 14. Although several different spellings exist, I follow Murguía’s spelling of Cuauhtemoc, the last of the Mexica kings, tortured by the Spanish. 15. For more on this, see Guidotti-Hernández 2011, particularly chapter 2. 16. Monimbó is a primarily indigenous barrio of Masaya that was heavily repressed by Somoza’s troops. The destruction of the city and hopes for its future are immortalized in Carlos Mejía Godoy’s song “Vivirás Monimbó.” 17. See Ramón Saldívar (2006) for more on Paredes’s concept of greater Mexico. 18. The fusil automatique léger, or light automatic rifle, was produced in Belgium during the cold war and used heavily by NATO countries. Ulises’s use of the weapon, dubbed “the right arm of the Free World” for its importance to anticommunist countries, suggests the FSLN has intercepted weapons supplied to Somoza by the United States and/or Israel. 19. Ulises’s companion takes his name from the well-known Spanish priest and revolutionary Gaspar García Laviana, who moved to Nicaragua as a missionary in 1969 and fought under the pseudonyms Ángel, Martín, and Miguel. Greatly influenced by liberation theology, he was a sharp critic of Somoza, and after assassination attempts forced him to flee to Costa Rica, he joined the FSLN, specifically the Benjamin Zeledón Front. He was killed in an ambush on the Southern Front and never lived to see the triumph of the revolution. 20. For more on how the status of women in relation to the Nicaraguan state shifted after the laying down of arms, see Molyneux 1985.

notes to pages 46–58 / 201 21. The story’s epigraph attributes the title to a quote from Tomás Borge describing FSLN cofounder Carlos Fonseca (1936–76). Margaret Randall (1981) describes the situation behind this quote: Borge (1930–2012), the only cofounder of the FSLN to survive the overthrow of Somoza, was in prison when Fonseca was killed. When a guard came to taunt him with the news of Fonseca’s death, Borge said, “You’re wrong, Captain, Carlos Fonseca is someone who will never die” (75). A woman interviewed by Randall describes Fonseca as having been an antisexist ally of Sandinista women (66). 22. Ulises combines significant figures from indigenous, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan history in this quote. In addition to the Nicaraguan and indigenous men mentioned earlier (López Pérez, Sandino, and Cuauhtemoc), he names Carlos Fonseca, a cofounder of the FSLN; Farabundo Martí, a Salvadoran leader who worked with Sandino and was an important member of the Central American Communist Party before his execution in 1932; and Emiliano Zapata, a leader in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. 23. Women made up approximately 30 percent of the FSLN’s ranks and engaged in a host of clandestine and violent activities, including smuggling arms and combat. 24. For an in-depth discussion of feminist of color theory and difference in relation to transnational solidarity movements, see Vigil 2010. 25. As an upper-class woman, Belli explains, she was often able to operate without suspicion in Nicaragua. 26. Lavinia’s mission contains unmistakable similarities to Nora Astorga’s 1978 murder of General Reynaldo Pérez Vega. In March of that year Astorga invited Vega to her Managua apartment, where three FSLN combatants lay in hiding in the closet. Although the combatants had planned to ransom Vega, he apparently struggled and was murdered. Astorga went on to become vice minister of justice in the Sandinista government and died of cervical cancer at the age of thirty-nine in 1988. 27. The film is set in 1976. The title refers to the 1972 earthquake that decimated the capital of Managua and much of the country. In addition to the loss of life and property caused by the earthquake, Somoza took the opportunity to rob his people of much needed foreign aid by interrupting aid packages and selling them to Nicaraguans at inflated prices. The blatant corruption and inhumanity of the Somoza dictatorship revealed during the aftermath of the earthquake raised worldwide consciousness concerning the plight of the Nicaraguan people. 28. Dialogue in the film takes place in both Spanish and English; throughout this chapter translations from the original Spanish are mine. 29. The character is named after Luisa Amanda Espinoza, the first woman to die in combat as part of the FSLN; she was gunned down by Guardia troops on April 3, 1970. The Sandinista feminist organization Asociación de Mujeres Nicaragüense Luisa Amanda Espinoza also bears her name. 30. According to Fregoso (2001, 82), Julio is both a “leftist revolutionary” and “a traditional Latino male, threatened by Irene’s growing economic and social independence.” 31. Fregoso (1993) relies on Sandoval’s theory of “differential consciousness” to analyze Irene’s negotiation of her position as a U.S. Latina, a theory that Rodríguez (2009) points out is Chicana-centric and may not be completely applicable to the Central American context. 32. The filmmakers purposely used the phrase nuestro país to make the Central American country that was being referenced open for interpretation. However, “[they]

202 / notes to pages 62–66 clearly had Nicaragua in mind” (Nina Serrano, personal correspondence, January 16, 2011). 33. See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2005) for a thorough examination of indigenous resistance to the Sandinista project and collaboration in the Contra War. As she explains, deep-seated racial tension between the FSLN’s urban, mestizo leaders and the indigenous and African descendant communities of Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast as well as tactical mistakes on the part of party leadership led many members and leaders of Atlantic Coast communities to champion Reagan-era rhetoric concerning the threat of Sandinismo and to take up arms against the FSLN. Margaret Randall’s work, in particular Gathering Rage (1992), includes important analysis of the FSLN’s missteps concerning gender and economic concerns. See also “Irresistible Seduction: Rural Subjectivity Under Sandinista Agricultural Policy,” in Saldaña-Portillo (2003). 34. Chamorro’s UNO (National Opposition Union) came to power in 1990 with a 55 percent majority. The United States spent over $1 billion supporting UNO’s campaign.

2 / “I Have Something to Tell You” 1. The 2005 work, Psst . . . I Have Something to Tell You Mi Amor, contains two plays with the same title; the first play has one act and the second two acts. This chapter analyzes both plays. 2. See Kinzer (2003) for an account of the overthrow of Mossadegh, and Kinzer and Schlesinger (1983) for an account of the overthrow of Árbenz. In August 2013 the CIA admitted to masterminding the coup that overthrew Mossadegh. 3. The U.S. strategy of using dissidents to overthrow governments it deems threatening has been repeated throughout the twentieth century, from Cuba to Nicaragua. 4. Following the overthrow of Árbenz, Guatemalan resistance took the form of a series of guerrilla movements. The first of these, consisting of the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR, Rebel Armed Forces) and the M-13, sprung from an officers’ coup within the military (partly motivated by anger over the fact that Guatemala was used as a training ground for the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion) and ended with several young officers, including the leaders Marco Antonio Yon Sosa and Luis Turcios Lima, taking to the Sierra de las Minas mountains in Izabal province. They were defeated when the U.S. Army sent Green Berets to the area in 1967 and 1968. It was also during this counterinsurgency campaign that future president General Carlos Arana Osorio gained notoriety as the “Butcher of Zacapa.” Survivors from this movement reemerged in 1972 to build the EGP (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, Guerrilla Army of the Poor), this time in El Quiché province. Other organizations, also remnants from the 1960s movement, established themselves in the cities. These included the FAR and the communist Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (Guatemalan Worker’s Party). Also organizing in the 1970s was Organización del Pueblo en Armas (Organization of the People in Arms; Black 1983, 4–14). See Galeano (1969) for an account of the FAR and M-13 in the 1960s, and Payeras (1983) for an account of the first few months of the EGP. General Efraín Ríos Montt, who ruled Guatemala directly as president from 1982 to 1983, and indirectly as president of the army and president of Congress during some of the bloodiest years of the civil war, is infamous for his analogy (adapted from Mao Tse-tung) of draining the sea to catch the fish: “The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.” Lest Montt be

notes to pages 67–94 / 203 considered an anomaly among Guatemala’s presidents of the late twentieth century, it is worth recalling Osorio’s declaration a decade earlier: “If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so.” See Bob Harris, “Guatemala: Bill Clinton’s Latest Damn-Near Apology,” Mother Jones, March 16, 1999, http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/1999/03/scoop10.html. 5. While I recognize rape as a form of torture, I refer to both practices throughout this chapter, acknowledging that rape has often been excluded from the definition of torture. 6. For definitions of testimonio, see Beverley 1996; Yúdice 1996. 7. Moreover as a U.S. woman of color who publicly challenges the ethics and actions of the U.S. government, Ortiz fails to conform to “normative citizenship.” 8. The 2005 publication of the plays includes a poem written by Castillo, “Like the people of Guatemala, I want to be free of these memories,” and a preface written by Ortiz. The title and first line of the poem reference Ortiz’s account. 9. Ortiz’s decision to abort the pregnancy that resulted from her torture contributed to her feelings of guilt and shame and her fear that others would see her, as her torturers insisted they would, as a murderer. 10. That is to say, as a means of extracting accurate information, torture has been proven to be unreliable. 11. Following Muñoz (1999), we should also recognize the relationship between normativity (including normative masculinity) and whiteness.

3 / Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue 1. While I am indebted to Emma Pérez’s (1999) concept of the decolonial imaginary, my theory of decolonial love is distinct from hers. Like the decolonial imaginary, decolonial love is a “tool” and “political process” that can help us reconceptualize histories (xvi, 4). However, decolonial love is instrumental not only in accessing Chicana or Chicano history but in creating dialogue between and around several different histories. In addition, as this chapter explains, decolonial love involves acknowledgment and understanding of the relationship between individual experiences and large-scale processes and, as María enacts it, is reliant on the sense of hearing. 2. The significant of La Matanza and its role in both the resistance and repression of later decades cannot be overstated. The massacre, led by General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, was the Salvadoran government’s response to popular unrest stemming from the decimated coffee market and worldwide depression. At least thirty thousand Salvadorans, overwhelmingly poor and indigenous, were slaughtered. The government blamed the uprising on El Salvador’s Communist Party and executed its leader, Agustín Farabundo Martí. Martínez, who went on to rule the country until 1944, set the tone for El Salvador’s response to popular resistance. In October 1980 five revolutionary groups—the Fuerzas Populares de Revolución “Farabundo Martí” (Popular Liberation Forces “Farabundo Marti”), the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Army), the Resistencia Nacional (National Resistance), the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores Centroamericanos (Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers), and the Salvadoran Communist Party united under the name of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. Maximiliano Hernández Martínez became the name of one of the most notorious death squads operating in the 1980s (Americas Watch 1991, 1990, 181, 191). Roque Dalton (1984, 42) spoke of

204 / notes to pages 94–95 the continuous presence of La Matanza in the Salvadoran consciousness in his poem “All”: “We were all born half-dead in 1932 / we survived but half-alive / each of us with an account of thirty thousand massacred.” Martínez (2006) herself uses remarkably similar imagery in her poem “Birthday,” in which the narrator contextualizes herself against the most significant event of her generation, the Viet Nam War: I was born in the Year of the Rat Black lung from the incense Of burning American flags. First poems penned by The rocket’s red glare. Math was simpler: 58,000 soldiers And then there were none. I was born in the Year of the Rat. Thirty-eight years, a life Still at half-staff. 3. Limón (1993) and Benítez (2001) contain fictionalized accounts of the massacre during the archbishop’s funeral. 4. The deployment of military aid and advisors before troops was a method used in Viet Nam, a fact not lost on the U.S. government. Representative Clarence Long spoke of the sending of weapons and advisors as a “Vietnam approach” and a “mistake.” Long went on, “The advisors are going to get hurt and when they get hurt the American people are going to get excited. Then we would face massive intervention or humiliating withdrawal.” In fact U.S. military advisors already were getting hurt: two technicians from the American Institute for Free Labor Development (a group set up under the AFL-CIO but with close ties to the U.S. Agency for International Development and the CIA) were murdered by a right-wing death squad just after Duarte assumed the presidency in January 1981. These murders alone should have signaled to the United States that it was still the army, and not Duarte’s Christian Democrats, who were really in power in El Salvador (Pearce 1982, 241, 45, 238). In his memoir Dr. Charles Clements (1984) recalls hearing U.S. advisors stepping outside of their proscribed roles; they were to provide technical and personnel support, not to take part in combat operations. Clements was a pilot with the U.S. Air Force in Viet Nam before he became a pacifist (Quaker) and later a doctor. He was serving civilian communities behind guerrilla lines in the early 1980s when he was asked by a local guerrilla commander to listen to transmissions by the Salvadoran Army that the guerrillas were picking up with a scanner. Clements told the commander that the voices he heard were “asesores norteamericanos.” Although this is all he told the guerrillas (Clements was careful not to compromise his position as a pacifist and refused to give military counsel in any way), he wrote, “Contrary to the strictly limited role that U.S. advisors are supposed to play in El Salvador, these men obviously were, at the very minimum, acting in a command and control functions” (231). 5. Priests, nuns, and lay workers were especially targeted in El Salvador and other Central American countries. See Lernoux (1982) for further discussion of the persecution of the Church in Latin America. 6. See Danner (1994) for an in-depth discussion of this massacre as well as the U.S. government’s attempts to discredit newspaper reports of the event and deflect

notes to pages 95–98 / 205 criticism of the Salvadoran armed forces and U.S. involvement. The massacre, which occurred just before Christmas in 1981, was led by the Atlacatl battalion, whose members, as well as other Salvadoran soldiers, were later trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Fort Benning, Georgia. In January 1982, just after the El Mozote massacre, another five hundred troops were sent for officer training at Fort Benning, also known as the School of the Americas or the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (Porpora 1992, 99). 7. For example, they relied on Salvadoran newspapers for their statistics. All Salvadoran newspapers still in operation at the time were conservative and sympathetic to the government. Newspapers that were at all critical of the government had been shut down. The Catholic Legal Aid Office, a group whose statistics were deemed trustworthy by such organizations as Amnesty International and Americas Watch, was accused of being left wing. After much criticism the Legal Aid Office began keeping count of civilian murders by guerrilla forces. At the end of 1982 they counted 5,397 murders by military and paramilitary forces, forty-six by guerrillas (Porpora 1992, 101, 103). 8. García’s (2006) statistics echo Carlos Mauricio’s testimony cited in the introduction; the torture survivor recalls, “Un millón nos fuimos a huir” (One million of us had to flee). 9. In fact many of the Central Americans displaced during this time did not meet the strict UN definition of refugee. According to the 1951 UN Convention, a refugee is one who is outside his country of nationality or unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country due to a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group or political union. Refugees are also individuals who do not have a nationality and fear returning to their country of habitual residence. According to María Cristina García (2006, 32–35), many of the Central American migrants of the 1970s and 1980s left their home countries due to the “general climate” of violence rather than specific, well-founded fears of persecution. In 1980 the UN High Commissioner for Refugees encouraged a more liberal definition of a refugee as someone who had fled her home, crossed an international border, and was living in refugee-like conditions, and in May of 1981 the UNHCR recommended that all Salvadorans be considered refugees. Despite such proclamations, individual countries continued to debate who was a refugee and what rights and services they deserved. This situation was further complicated by the poverty of Central American nations; politicians feared their own citizens would resent the presence of refugees and that they would compete for jobs and social services with nationals. 10. See Dilling (1984) for a first-person account by a U.S. Catholic aid worker stationed at a refugee camp on the Honduran-Salvadoran border. 11. For more on the Sanctuary movement, see Golden and McConnell 1986; Crittenden 1988. 12. The Rev. John Fife, pastor of Southside United Presbyterian Church in Tucson, initiated the Sanctuary movement on March 23, 1982. Four years later, on March 28, 1986, Governor Toney Anaya declared New Mexico a sanctuary state. 13. “Nativity, for Two Salvadoran Women” was published in the collection Turning (Martínez 1989). 14. According to the author, the love story though which the book is told is “inseparable from the Salvadoran civil war and the U.S. funding of that war” (Dick 2003, 83).

206 / notes to pages 100–112 15. For example, a reference in Mother Tongue to volunteers who packed fishing rods and strapped canoes to the roof of their cars to avoid the suspicion of the Border Patrol (Martínez 1994, 55) appears in the poem “Crossing Over”: “Officers see our fishing rods / and nod us through” (Martínez 1989, 118). 16. Here I am building on Farah Jasmine Griffin’s (1996) idea of “textual healing.” 17. See Gutiérrez y Muhs (2001) for more on the role of madrinas (godmothers) in Mother Tongue. 18. Domino Renee Perez’s (2008) reading of Cordelia Candelaria’s poem “Letting La Llorona Go” is consistent with this idea; according to Perez, Candelaria’s narrator sends the weeping woman away so as to prevent readers from confronting the “darker past” at the heart of the folktale, a past “which includes the way La Llorona’s story is used to uphold a legacy of violence against women” (76). 19. See Kandiyoti (2004) for a reading of the novel that takes into consideration the work’s engagement with issues of hospitality, solidarity, and identity. 20. The handkerchief represents a difference between survivors and activists; this difference was voiced in the Sanctuary movement when audience members expressed skepticism of survivors’ stories. Refugees entered into Sanctuary in the United States completely dependent on Sanctuary workers and volunteers, a position that easily led to their objectification. Refugees were often further objectified through the one “contribution” they were expected to make: speaking publicly about their experiences and the situation in their home country. This experience of public speaking could be traumatic for victims who had recently escaped detention and horrific torture. Women especially were often expected to speak publicly of rape and sexual abuse in front of a room full of strangers. Sanctuary volunteers who had no firsthand experience with torture could be insensitive to the retraumatization that reliving their torture could cause for survivors. The author of an article, “Overcoming Paternalism in the Sanctuary Movement,” published in 1987, recalls this anecdote: “A refugee woman was coming to speak to us and we heard that she’d been raped, . . . but when she made her presentation, she didn’t talk about it, so we didn’t know whether or not it was true” (qtd. in Cunningham 1995, 65). In this quote, the volunteer places certain expectations on the survivor’s “presentation” and fails to question his or her own status as audience member vis-à-vis the survivor’s testimony. 21. Echoes of José Luis’s words can be found in Martínez’s (1989) poem “North American Woman’s Lament (for Orlando),” whose opening stanza is: I, who have loved you, paid for those bullets, paid for helicopters above Morazán, propellers are not petals, nor are they wings of birds, Bougainvillea rides the night breeze with white phosphorous, napalm. (122) Both José Luis’s dream and Martínez’s poem refer to the Salvadoran Army’s tactic of dropping white phosphorous bombs, remembered by an interviewee in José Ignacio López Vigil’s (1994, 43) Rebel Radio: “On the way I saw something unbelievable: the fields were burned, reduced to embers. They’d dropped white phosphorous bombs.” 22. See Vigil (2010) for an in-depth reading of this scene.

notes to pages 114–121 / 207 23. Martínez (1994) uses the phrase true name to refer to a process she herself went through. Speaking of her struggle with bipolar disorder and her first diagnosis with the disease, she writes, “I can live with this suffering a few more days, because someone called it by its true name, called it out of the mists” (2005, 29). 24. María’s appropriation of her voice and name to begin her own healing represents resistance to religious orthodoxy as well. In her afterword to Breathing between the Lines, Martínez (1997, 55) writes that her paternal grandmother, María Jesus Martínez, turned away from Catholicism and to a First Spanish Assembly of God congregation because she wanted to read the Bible: “My grandmother dared to interpret her own life in light of a text that all too often had been used against the poor and against women.” Thus in claiming the legitimacy of her own voice, María, like Martínez’s grandmother, asserts her right to speak directly to God without the interference of the male, Catholic hierarchy. 25. Speaking pain aloud and communicating pain to another person play important roles in eradicating pain. If pain, and specifically torture, silences an individual, speaking resists the pain that was inflicted. “As torture consists of acts that magnify the way in which pain destroys a person’s world, self, and voice, so these other acts that restore the voice become not only a denunciation of the pain but almost a diminution of the pain, a partial reversal of the process of torture itself” (Scarry 1987, 50). 26. According to Iris Marion Young (1990), listening rather than looking is an integral component of justice. Young quotes Jean-François Lyotard: “There are language games in which the important thing is to listen. . . . Such a game is the game of the just. And in this game, one speaks only inasmuch as one listens, that is, one speaks as a listener, and not as an author” (4). 27. See Rodríguez (2005). 28. The visit by members of the U.S. government was seen as an attempt to pressure Salvadorans to elect the right-wing ARENA Party, a group with ties to death squads from the 1980s. A representative from Colorado, Tom Tancredo, even introduced a bill that would threaten to interfere with remittances sent from Salvadorans in the United States to their families back home if Funes’s FMLN Party triumphed. Despite this intervention, Mauricio Funes was elected with 51 percent of the vote in March 2009.

4 / Father, Army, Nation 1. Nathaniel Frank (2009) explains that “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” refers to both a U.S. government policy, passed in 1993, and a federal statute passed by Congress the same year. While the policy and the law are distinct, they overlap enough that Frank uses the word policy to refer to “the entire set of government restrictions against openly gay service” (xiii). 2. The posters are the work of a radical queer collective, Against Equality (www.againstequality.org). 3. Puar (2007) discusses the lack of public statements about Abu Ghraib by gay and lesbian veteran organizations. She notes that the decision by the Human Rights Campaign, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, and the American Veterans for Equal Rights to release a press statement “highlighting brave and patriotic ‘LGBT’ soldiers,” joined with “the absence of any commentary about or position on Abu Ghraib . . . might be read as a defensive move to restore honor to U.S. soldiers while reminding the public of the struggles LGBT soldiers face in the military, thus shifting the focus of victimhood away from Iraqi prisoners” (96).

208 / notes to pages 122–143 4. On December 16, 2010, the House of Representatives voted 250 to 175 to repeal the ban on gays and lesbians from serving openly in the armed forces, a move that was echoed two days later when the Senate approved lifting the ban by a vote of 65 to 31. Despite this historic development, I argue that the relationship between the U.S. Armed Forces and the global community means that the “right” of gays and lesbians to serve in the U.S. Army must be evaluated within a larger context that considers the “rights” of non-U.S. citizens to be free of military violence. 5. Canaday (2009, 2) argues that U.S. government’s interest in homosexuality “developed in tandem with the growth of the bureaucratic state.” Canaday examines how these policies were embedded in government regulations and institutions, which she examines in the cases of immigration, the military, and welfare. 6. In addition to the critics cited throughout this chapter, see Warner 1999; Muñoz 2009; and the work of the collective Against Equality for queer critiques of gay marriage and the gay marriage movement. 7. While outside the scope of my analysis, there is clearly room for an exploration of the development of Zuniga’s sexual identity within, against, and through the Chicana/o family structure and specifically the figure of his father. As Tomás Almaguer (2007, 148) asserts, “It would be naïve for us to think that homosexual desire and longing does not involve some association and past relationship of Chicano gay men with their Mexican fathers. . . . Social and psychological structuring of [gay Chicano desire] is deeply forged within familial contexts.” 8. For more on the Tailhook Report, see Zimmerman 1995; McMichael 1997; Vistica 1997. 9. In addition to the feminist theories of nationalism and gender discussed here, Kaplan et al. (1999) make a significant contribution to bringing gender to bear on nationalism, national identity, and nationalist movements. 10. “In short, the family is the best way to advance capitalism, as the base unit through which capitalism distributes benefits” (Nair 2010, 5). 11. Cynthia Enloe (1993, 166) explains that “‘womenandchildren’ rolls easily off network tongues because in network minds women are family members rather than independent actors.” While media places women within the family, governments embed the family within the nation: “Governments encourage women to imagine that being a loyal member of a family is synonymous with being a patriot. For women in wartime, the nation becomes a family” (175). 12. We need not look far for more contemporary examples of the dehumanization of non-U.S. individuals. In 2010 WikiLeaks released a seventeenminute video from an Apache helicopter that showed two U.S. soldiers laughing as they shot and killed a group of civilians in Baghdad. The lead pilot laughs, saying, “Hahaha, I hit ’em,” and another soldier responds, “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.” See Chris McGreal, “Wikileaks Reveals Video Showing U.S. Air Crew Shooting Down Iraqi Civilians,” Guardian, April 5, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-army-iraq-attack (last accessed November 11, 2013). 13. Despite this exploration of his sexual identity, it appears that Zuniga continues to identify as gay, best exemplified by the use of this term in the memoir’s title. 14. “When queers criticize the State’s emphasis on the normative family, we do so because we know only too well the violence of exclusion and because, for many of us,

notes to pages 143–160 / 209 our identities as queer people have been marked and shaped, not always in unproductive ways, by that violence” (Nair 2010, 5). 15. Butler is of course neither the first nor the only feminist theorist to raise concerns about the meaning of movements for equality in regard to queer communities and marriage. Diane Richardson (2005, 77) explores the problematics of a rights-based argument that demands inclusion into a system based on inequality, questioning the desire for lesbians to “further rights within a system whose very operation depends on logic that defines lesbians as ‘deviant’ outsiders.” Richardson also understands that such demands have a bearing on citizenship, pointing out that a model of citizenship based on relationship-based claims “reinforces both the desirability and necessity of sexual coupledom, privileged over other forms of relationships” and “represents the integration of lesbian and gay men into a couple-based system of rights originally founded on heterosexual and gendered norms” (77). 16. According to Rodríguez (2009, 23), Chicano nationalist claiming of “la familia in . . . politicized ways made sense given the racist terms in which Mexican and Mexican American communities were pathologically rendered.” 17. According to Rodríguez (2009, 54), “The need to be a man, and the impact of that need on Chicano cultural nationalist sentiment, has simultaneously codified la familia as a sacred institution in which gender roles are fixed in the name of tradition.” 18. Rodríguez (2009) follows the lead of other Chicana/o feminist scholars in insisting on holding onto the positive aspects of both Chicana/o familias and Chicana/o nationalism. He agrees with Cherríe Moraga’s assertion that “what was right about Chicano Nationalism was its commitment to preserving the integrity of the Chicano people” and holds up Moraga’s writings and activism as proof that “belonging to la raza need not be contained by a male nationalist desire” (7, 168). 19. While I recognize that no singular, homogeneous “queer community” exists, I follow the terminology used by the author.

5 / Camilo Mejía’s Public Rebellion 1. Angelique Chrisafis, David Fickling, Jon Henley, John Hooper, Giles Tremlett, Sophie Arie, and Chris McGreal, “Millions Worldwide Rally for Peace,” Guardian, February 17, 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/feb/17/politics.uk (last accessed February 12, 2011). 2. Much of the speculation about the extent to which the George W. Bush administration lied about Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction hinges on questions about what administration officials knew and when they knew it. Colin Powell’s speech before the United Nations on February 5, 2003, in which he presented the U.S. case for invading Iraq, has become an important focal point for such speculations. Absent any official inquiries into Powell’s report and what led up to it, it may be impossible to know whether or not he and the administration he represented lied. However, based on knowledge about the extent to which U.S. administrations have historically overrepresented the threat posed by foreign nations (including, but not limited to, the Sandinista government), it is my opinion that Powell and his administration did indeed lie. For a powerful presentation of evidence in support of this perspective, see Schwarz 2008. 3. As of December 30, 2012, Iraq Body Count (www.iraqbodycount.org) had documented between 110,931 and 121,221 civilian Iraqi deaths. The WikiLeaks Iraq

210 / notes to pages 160–168 War Logs, a compilation of nearly 400,000 classified U.S. documents released in October 2010, contained the following statistics: 109,032 total deaths, 66,081 civilian deaths, 23,984 insurgent deaths, 15,196 Iraqi security force deaths, and 3,771 coalition forces deaths. See Datablog: Facts Are Sacred, “Wikileaks Iraq: Data Journalism Maps Every Death,” Guardian, October 22, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/news/ datablog/2010/oct/23/wikileaks-iraq-data-journalism#data (last accessed December 12, 2013). 4. Several scholars have published excellent work on U.S.- and European-created images of Muslim and Arab gender and sexuality. Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism is a cornerstone of such investigations, and his discussion of the role of colonialism in these Western constructions is an important one. In addition to Said, Leila Ahmed (1992), Lila Abu-Lughod (2002), and Jasbir Puar (2007), among others, have published work that grants much needed critical attention to the construction of these images, their history, and their consequences. 5. The migration of Maritza Castillo and her family from Nicaragua to the United States echoes the situation of Irene, the principal character of Portillo and Serrano’s Después del Terremoto (1979), discussed in chapter 1. Both Castillo and the fictional Irene reflect the growth in female migration from Latin America that began in the 1970s and was rooted in the economies of Latin America, “the growing importance of gender in the new international division of labor,” and the displacement of peoples as a result of political instability and U.S.-backed military repression (Fregoso 2001, 85–86). 6. In addition to the illegal detention camp, Mejía (2008) recounts the desecration of dead bodies. In one scene soldiers take pictures of a dead man, laughing, while the dead man’s relatives watch (106). For more documentation of U.S. and coalition crimes in Iraq, see Danner 2004. 7. The disturbing rate of sexual assault in the U.S. Armed Forces also suggests that we should consider issues of gender when speaking of “the enemy.” According to The Invisible War (2012), a female soldier in a combat zone has a greater chance of being raped by a fellow soldier than of being killed by enemy fire. Mejía’s (2008) experiences regarding the ambush he and his squad survived suggest that, if one uses the word enemy to indicate the greatest source of danger to one’s well-being, then for many soldiers, the word is in fact better used to describe U.S. Army soldiers and officers than Iraqi insurgents. 8. Again see the testimonies in Iraq Veterans against the War and Glantz (2008) for more discussion of the mistreatment of individual soldiers—including survivors of sexual assault and those suffering from PTSD—by the armed forces. 9. As a noncitizen enlistee, Mejía’s (2008) case was somewhat complicated. Prior to being deployed, he was just shy of having completed his eight-year contract, “the maximum amount of time a non-U.S. citizen could lawfully be in the armed forces” (189). While the military can use a procedure called stop-loss to involuntarily extend enlistees’ contracts during a time of war, Mejía’s noncitizen status meant that stop-loss could not be applied to him, and thus the extension of his contract was against army regulations (196, 208). In addition Mejía’s residency was close to expiring, after which he could not stay in the army (196). To stay in the army he would have to apply for citizenship or renew his residency, but due to a pending custody trial and fees associated with that litigation, he was hesitant to apply for a renewal (192). Mejía was eventually

notes to pages 169–182 / 211 granted a two-week rest and relaxation to return to Florida to clear up these issues. After asking for and failing to receive a discharge, he failed to report for duty at the end of his leave. 10. We need look no further than the epidemic of sexual assault within the armed forces for an example of the military’s refusal to safeguard the health and safety of its own members. According to a recent military survey, 2012 saw a 25 percent increase in sexual assaults reported at military academies; more than 50 percent of women at academies reported sexual harassment, and 12 percent say they experienced “unwanted sexual contact” (Democracy Now! 2012). Given that these reports came from the institution itself and the low rate of reporting for sexual harassment and assault, these numbers are likely an underestimate of the extent of the problems. 11. Ensign is the cofounder of Citizen Soldier, an organization that advocates alternatives to militarism. He was also involved in the 1971 Winter Soldier event. 12. Command rape is a practice by which a supervisor will force a subordinate into a sexual relationship in exchange for the promise not to send the subordinate on dangerous missions (Mejía 2008, xxiii). 13. He describes how his mother cried the day he left to become a combat soldier at Fort Benning (Mejía 2008, 16), the site of the infamous School of the Americas. For more on the School of the Americas, see chapter 2. 14. See the documentary The Invisible War (2012) for an in-depth discussion of the epidemic of rape within the U.S. Armed Forces. 15. Despite the wealth of scholarship on women and militarism, not to mention the frightening number of military-related cases of domestic violence, sexual assault, and murder, the Feminist Majority continues to uncritically support the full “participation” of women in the U.S. Armed Forces as well as military intervention abroad. On January 14, 2011, the organization released an article on their Feminist Daily News Wire that supported women’s full participation in combat due in large part to the fact that “succeeding in combat is the most direct way to achieve a promotion in the military” (Feminist Majority Foundation 2011). (What does “success” entail, exactly?) And in a 2009 press release entitled “Keep Pledges to Afghan Women and Girls” the Feminist Majority decried the fact that the majority of Afghanis live without “basic necessities,” while failing in any way to connect such conditions to a nearly ten-yearlong campaign by U.S. Armed Forces. 16. Cynthia Enloe (1994, 147) explains that women’s rights have become militarized when, in the case of George W. Bush and Afghani women, “the violation of Afghan women’s rights took center stage in American political discourse” only after Bush declared his war on terrorists and the countries that harbor them. The discussion of Arias (2003) in the introduction also explains how racial and ethnic identity marks certain lives and bodies as human, a point Butler (2010) makes in Frames of War. 17. While space prevents me from offering a more thorough discussion of IVAW and its campaigns, one of the organization’s most significant contributions to peace and justice has been its collection and airing of testimonies as part of its Winter Soldier project. Modeled after the Winter Soldier testimonies organized by Vietnam Veterans against War in 1971, Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan was a multiday event in Maryland in March 2008 (timed to coincide with the five-year anniversary of the Iraqi invasion) in which veterans offered testimony about their experiences, including

212 / notes to pages 183–194 war crimes. The testimonies were published in a book by the same name (Iraq Veterans against the War and Glantz 2008). 18. See Summary of S. 1291, Library of Congress http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ query/z?c112:S.952: (last accessed December 12, 2013). 19. Texas, California, Maryland, and nine other states have passed their own versions of the D.R.E.A.M. Act. 20. Lisa Mascaro and Michael Muskal, “Dream Act Fails to Advance in Senate,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2010. 21. Miriam Jordan, “A Route to Citizenship in Defense Bill,” Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2010. 22. Initially Mejía (2008, xx) was not unaware that selling the book placed economically disenfranchised people at a disadvantage. He discusses how he donated the books to libraries, let students buy it at cost or for whatever amount of money they had, and often gave copies away for free.

Coda 1. Named after the patron saint of music, the band plays a mix of musical styles, including cumbia, bolero, and rock. The members include Gloria Estrada (guitarist), Jose Carlos (accordionist and requinto), Alex Bendana (bassist), Miguel Ramirez (percussionist), Hugo Varagas (drummer), and Marisoul Lead (singer). 2. The title refers to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; hielo is Spanish for “ice.” 3. My translation. 4. Joseph Tanfani and Brian Bennett, “Border ‘Surge’ Plan Would Be Financial Bonanza for Private Firms,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 2013. 5. Precise numbers are difficult to find, but the United States currently staffs and operates more than eight hundred military bases in more than sixty countries around the world. Nearly one quarter of a million personnel work on those bases, which cost U.S. taxpayers over $10 billion a year. 6. In recent years youth and indigenous movements opposed to militarism of all kinds have emerged and grown stronger in Colombia. This movement, along with acknowledgment of the U.S. role in violence in Colombia, has been mirrored by several U.S. groups working in solidarity with Colombia and in opposition to U.S. intervention in the region. Among these groups are the Fellowship of Reconciliation (http://www.forusa.org) and Colombia Action Network (http://www.columbiasolidarity.org). Both organizations distribute literature and promote involvement in other transnational social justice movements, including the movement to close the School of the Americas. While little cultural production appears to have come out of the solidarity movement thus far, the Killer Coke’s use of the Coca-Cola imagery as well as the close relationship between political and artistic movements that I have discussed in this book suggest that the Colombian solidarity movement may be an appropriate place to look for new Latina/o political and literary production. 7. Declassified National Security Archives published and analyzed by George Washington University provide more information about this practice. See http:// www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB266/index.htm, which includes a link to a Spanish-language article by the Colombia analyst Michael Evans. The documents detail CIA knowledge of the practice.

note to page 194 / 213 8. On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old high school student, was shot by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed “neighborhood watch” coordinator in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, where Martin was staying with his father. Zimmerman invoked Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground statute, and the crime made headlines as yet another example of how white male racist violence destroys young black lives. Although Zimmerman was charged with murder, he was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter on July 13, 2013.

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Index

Abrams, Elliot, 14 activism (also activist, activists), antiwar, 1, 8, 12, 14, 24, 158–160, 170–171, 175– 178, 182, 186–187, 195; art, 19, 21, 25, 28–29, 63, 187, 200n8; queer (and gay), 2, 24, 121, 125–126, 142, 146; social, 93, 118; transnational, 6, 20, 23, 91, 118–119, 161; women of color, 85–86, 118, 158, 176, 199n2, 209n18. See also Chicana/o; community; human rights; Latina/o ACT UP, 142, 145–146 Advocate, The, 145 Afghanistan, 24–25, 97, 156, 167, 177, 179–182, 186, 211n17; Afghani women, 89, 153, 211n16 Against Equality, 121, 207n2, 208n6 Alexander, M. Jacqui, 8, 89–90 Allen, Holly, 135–136, 150 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 88 Aparicio, Frances, 18 Árbenz, Jacobo, 14, 65–66, 202n2–3 Argentina, 15 Arias, Arturo, 15–17, 149, 211n16 Arlington National Cemetery, 11 Avelar, Idelber, 87 Aztlán and Viet Nam, 13 Belli, Gioconda, 27, 51–53, 63, 201n25 Berlant, Lauren, 200n10

Bernstein, Mary, 142–143 Beverley, John, 74, 203n6 Beyond the Latino World War II Hero, 12, 13 Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, The. See Ortiz, Dianna Brady, Mary Pat, 193 Burns, Ken, The War, 11–12, 197n6 Bush, George H.W., 132 Bush, George W., 14–15, 209n2, 211n16, Bush, Laura, 180 Butler, Judith, 84, 121, 143–144, 147, 149, 154,199n17, 209n15, 211n16 Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, 102 Canaday, Margot, 44–45, 208n5 capitalism (also capital, capitalist), 5, 6, 8, 10, 30, 32, 34, 56, 60, 94, 136, 182, 197n1–2, 197n3, 208n10 Cardenas, Maritza, 17 Carter, Jimmy, 94–95, 97 Castillo, Ana, 20, 23, 65–67, 73, 77, 79–86, 90–91, 100, 203n8 Castillo, Debra, 110 Central America. See El Salvador; Guatemala; Nicaragua; solidarity Central American-American identities, 16 Central American-American studies, 15 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 14 Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie, 38–39, 43

230 / index Chambers, Ross, 71, 84–85 Chávez, César, 144 Chicana/o, activism, 14, 17, 35, 149; art (including literature), 13, 15, 17–19, 98, 120, 123, 149, 155; identity, 13, 16–17, 21, 32–33, 35 39–40, 109, 148; military service, 11–14. See also Chicana/o Movement; family; nationalism Chicana/o Movement, 13, 38, 40, 123, 144 citizenship, 3, 16, 20, 33, 76–77, 104, 106, 109, 122, 147, 158, 169, 176, 178, 182–185, 203n7, 209n15; global, 24, 169, 182; and heterosexuality, 45, 48; and military service, 4, 12, 22, 44, 64, 185 Clark, Ramsey, 131–132, 153 Clarke, Sister Maura, 95 Clinton, Bill, 121, 126, 132, 135, 141, 144–145, 150–152, 203n4 Colombia, 24, 30, 192–194, 212n6–7 community, 3, 7, 44–46, 49, 50, 55, 60, 67, 106, 155, 191, 197n3; activism, 23, 27–29, 77, 93, 96, 106, 116–117, 119, 187, 199n6; Latina/o, 6, 16–17, 19, 22, 60, 96, 102–103, 115, 149, 199n1; national, 4, 124, 133, 135, 137, 150–151; queer, 125–126, 142, 145– 147, 151, 209n19; transnational, 23, 103, 109, 111–113, 155 Concannon, Kevin, 21 concientización (also conscientização), 28, 67, 83 Contra War, 22, 35, 47, 61–62, 177, 202n33 Coontz, Stephanie, 136 Cordova, Cary, 200n8 Cortés, Hernan, 115, 200n13 Costa Rica, 30, 35, 41, 46, 162, 163, 200n11, 200n19, Cuauhtemoc, 37, 39–40, 48, 50, 200n14 Dalton, Roque, “Dear Jorge,” 1; 27–29, 99, 199n2, 203n2 Danner, Mark, The Massacre at El Mozote 97, 204n6; 210n6 “Dear Jorge.” See Dalton, Roque decolonial love, 22–23, 91–93, 98, 101, 111, 116, 119, 120, 203n1 Democracy Now!, 183–184, 186, 211n10 Desert Storm, 150. See also Iraq, U.S. intervention Después del Terremoto [film], 22, 28–29, 33–34, 51, 53–63, 210n5. See also Portillo, Lourdes; Serrano, Nina

difference, 8, 14, 19, 22, 27–63 passim, 75, 78, 88–89, 103, 107–109, 133, 135, 146–147, 161, 171 Díaz, Adolfo, 31, 200n9 Donovan, Jean, 95 Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), 25, 121–122, 124–125, 138, 153 D.R.E.A.M. Act, 20, 24–25, 158–159, 169, 182–185 Dulles, Allen and John Foster, 66 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 202n33 El Salvador, 4, 7, 15–17, 22, 49, 91–98, 100–102, 104, 107–110, 117–120, 203n2, 204n4–n5 Eng, David, 123, 138–139, 151 Enloe, Cynthia, 3, 9, 167, 197n5, 208n11, 211n16 family (also familial), 3–5, 11, 13, 61, 78–79, 103, 105, 117, 121–130, 133–151, 154–155, 166–167, 174–175, 190, 208n10–11, 208n14, Chicano/o, 122, 127–128, 144, 208n7. See also kinship feminism, 8–10, 20, 60, 90, 136, 167 Feminist Majority Foundation, The, 89–90, 211n15 flor y canto festivals, 21 Fonseca, Carlos, 37, 39–40, 48, 50, 201n21–22 Ford, Sister Ita, 95 Foucault, Michel, 87, 199n17 Fregoso, Rosa Linda, 28, 56, 201n30, 201n31, 210n5 Freire, Paulo, 28. See also concientización Frente Farabundo Martí por la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), 15, 207n28 Frente Sandinista por la Liberación Nacional (FSLN), 22, 27–63 passim, 163, 199n3, 200n18–19, 201n21–23, 202n33 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), 192,194 Galeano, Eduardo, 64, 187, 202n4 García, María Cristina, 95–96, 205n8 gender. See solidarity; violence genocide, 7, 16, 39, 90, 94 Giles, Wenona, 9 Gill, Lesley, 192–193 globalization, 5, 20, 197n3

index / 231 glocal, 5–6, 8, 14–15, 17, 19, 22–24, 33, 50–51, 55, 58, 61–63, 65, 67, 77–78, 85, 90–91, 93, 101, 109, 116, 124, 154, 157, 167, 181, 183–187, passim, 190–195, passim González, Rodolfo “Corky,” 38; “Yo Soy Joaquín,” 38 Griswold del Castillo, Richard, 12, 198n10 Guatemala, 4, 7, 14, 16, 23, 60, 64–91, 202n4 Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole, 18, 32, 34, 200n15 Gutiérrez, José Antonio, 64–65 Gutiérrez y Muhs, 105, 206n17 Halle, Randall, 134, 143, 150 Hartman, Saidiya, 7, 55, 147, 161 “Hearts on Fire.” See Gina Valdés Hesford, Wendy S., 82 heteronormative, 35, 123, 126, 128, 134, 137, 142–146, 149–150, 178, 191, 200n10 homonationalism, 22, 24, 121–123, 127, 131, 139–140, 149, 151–154 homophobia, 68, 70–71, 127, 130–131, 149, 153–154, 156, 162, 172–173, 176 homosocial (also homosociality), 43–44 Honduras, 31, 96 Hooker, Juliet, 16 Howell, Marsha, 180 human rights, abuses, 23, 59, 82, 87, 89, 94–95, 121; activism, 79, 94, 153, 193; narratives, 72, 74, 84–85 Hurtado, Aida, 176 Hussein, Saddam, 132, 136–37, 152, 160, 179, 209n2 Hyndman, Jennifer, 9 identity, 7, 22, 25, 36, 43, 47, 49, 50–52, 59, 69, 73–74, 76, 78, 84–85, 107–108, 110, 128, 129, 134, 146–147, 150 179, 181 185–187, 206n19, 211n16; glocal, 91; and military service, 3–4, 11, 18; national, 3–4, 9–10, 44–45, 65–66, 77, 122, 149, 157, 208n9; political, 11; sexual, 24, 38, 43, 46, 122, 135, 145, 208n7, 208n13. See also Chicana/o; Latina/o immigration, 1, 10, 12, 24, 46, 58, 60, 158, 163, 169, 183, 190–192, 208n5, 212n2 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, also INS), 58, 189–191, 212n2 imperialism, Aztec, 30, 32, 199n5; European, 30; U.S., 1, 6, 8, 14, 22, 24,

30, 33–34, 36–37, 48–49, 56, 64–65, 90, 127, 153, 158, 178, 181–182, 186, 194–195 indigenous, 16, 29, 30, 32, 36–40, 48, 61–62, 74–75, 80, 90, 200n13, 200n16, 201n22, 202n33, 203n2, 212n6. See also Native American Invisible War, The (film), 210n7, 211n14 Iran (also Iran-Iraq War), 14, 66, 131–132 Iraq (also Gulf War and 2003 U.S. Invasion), 1–2, 10, 14, 15, 22–25, 64, 89, 123–125, 131–133, 136–138, 140, 152–153, 156–161, 165–187, 192–194, 198n15, 203n12, 209n2–n3 Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), 156–157, 171–173, 182, 194, 210n8, 211n17 Johnson, Lyndon B., 11, 198n Joseph, Miranda, 5, 21–22, 60, 197n1, 197n3 Kandiyoti, Dalia, 102, 110, 206n19 Kaufman, Joyce P., 133–134 Kazel, Sister Dorothy, 95 Kelly, Liz, 87–88 kinship, 33, 93, 121–124, 126, 133, 140, 143–144, 149, 154, 172, 189, 191. See also family Korean Conflict, The, 12, 198n10 Kuwait, 131–133, 138, 152 La Llorona, 104–105, 206n18 La Malinche, 104–105 La Santa Cecilia (also “ICE/El Hielo”), 189–191 Latina/o activism (also Latina/o activists), 1–2, 6, 8, 15, 18, 20, 24, 27–29, 34–35, 65–66, 74, 76, 102–103, 155, 158, 199n2– 3, 200n8; art (including literature), 19, 21–25, 29, 63, 66, 84–85, 98. 149, 198n13; identity, 1, 10, 12–14, 16–21, 27, 32–35, 39–42, 46, 89, 93, 110, 156–159, 182, 195, 199n1; military service, 11–14 Latina Feminist Group, 73–74 Latina/o Studies, 10–15 Latinidad, 16, 18, 22 Lomas, Laura, 108, 112–113 Longoria Affair, The [film]. See Valadez, John J. López, Tiffany Ana, 65, 85–86 Lugones, María, 61

232 / index Lyon-Johnson, Kelli, 102, 118 Mariscal, Jorge, 13–14, 136–139, 156, 160, 175, 183, 198n10 Martín-Baró, Igancio, 94 Martínez, Demetria, 20, 23, 92–120; Mother Tongue, 23, 92–120 masculinity (also male-centric, maledominant, masculine, masculinist), 4, 9, 13, 35–36, 38, 42–45, 48, 54, 58, 61, 63, 87–88, 102, 114, 126, 128–130, 134–138, 141, 146, 148, 150–151, 153, 156, 160, 167, 176. 179, 181, 193–194, 197n5, 198n10, 201n30, 203n11, 207n24, 209n18, 213n8 Massacre at El Mozote, The. See Danner, Mark Mauricio, Carlos, 15, 205n8 Mayer, Tamar, 133–135 Medicine of Memory, The. See Murguía, Alejandro Mejía, Camilo, 1–2, 22, 24; Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía, 2, 24, 125, 156–187 Mejía Godoy, Carlos, 1, 162–163, 174, 200n16e militarism (also militarization). See U.S. Armed Forces; U.S. Intervention; violence Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 8, 51, 180 Molyneux, Maxine, 162, 200n20 Moraga, Cherríe, 88, 115, 118, 144, 148, 209n18 Mossadegh, Mohammed, 14, 66, 131, 198n14, 202n2 Mother Tongue. See Martínez, Demetria Muñoz, José, 76–77, 203n11, 208n6 Murguía, Alejandro, 20, 22, 29–30, 32–33, 50–52, 62–63, 199n3, 200n9, 200n11; Medicine of Memory, The, 29, 33; Southern Front, 22, 33–51, 58, 62, 199n7, 200n9, 200n11, 200n19 National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), 189 Narayan, Uma, 180 nationalism (also national and nationality), 3, 7, 21, 32–35, 37, 46, 49–52, 56, 60, 63, 78, 123–124, 127, 131, 133, 139, 149, 158–159, 161, 181, 205n9, 208n9;

Chicana/o, 12–13, 16–17, 33–35, 37–38, 41–43, 109, 123, 139, 147–149, 199n5, 209n18. See also homonationalism; identity National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), 141, Native American, 11, 32, 39, 148, 197n6 Negroponte, John, 14 Nicaragua, 1–2, 4, 7, 16, 17, 22, 27–63, 66, 98, 162–163, 174, 178. See also FSLN; solidarity Nuyorican poetry, 21 Obama, Barack, 121 Olguín, Ben, 35–36, 44, 126–27, 147, 198n10 Omi, Michael, 148, 198n12 Oropeza, Lorena, 12, 13, 14 Ortiz, Sister Dianna, 20, 23, 65–91, 107, 203n7–9 Panama, 30, 43–44 Paredes, Américo, 198n13, 200n17 Partnoy, Alicia, 71, 76, 85–86 Payne, Leigh, 81 Pearce, Jenny, 94–5, 204n4 Pérez, Emma, 115, 203n1 Pérez, Rigoberto López, 31, 48, 201n22 Perla, Héctor, 199n6 polyvocality, 22–23, 63, 64–91 passim Popol Vuh, 101–102 Porpora, Douglas, 95, 205n6–n7 Portillo, Lourdes, 20, 22, 28–29, 32–34, 51, 53, 63, 199n4, 210n5. See also Después del Terremoto Powell, Colin, 153, 209n2 Psst . . . I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor. See Castillo, Ana Puar, Jasbir, 122, 140, 147, 149, 153–154, 207n3, 210n4. See also homonationalism Puerto Rican, 21, 185, 198n10 Pulido, Laura, 198n12 Qassim, Abdul Karim, 131 Queer Nation, 142, 145–146 Quintana, Alvina E., 155 Rabinowitz, Lauren, 137–138 Randall, Margaret, 62, 162, 201n21, 202n33

index / 233 rape (also sexual assault), 9, 23, 67, 69, 82, 85, 90, 95, 105, 203n5, 206n20; military, 6 , 121, 173, 177, 210n7–8, 211n10, 211n12, 211n14–15; as a tool of war, 9. See also violence Reagan, Ronald, 14, 40, 95, 97, 202n33 Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 105 Reimann, Renate, 142–143 Rivas-Rodríguez, Maggie, 12, 14, 197n6, 198n10 Rivera, Alex, 189 Road from Ar Ramadi. See Mejía, Camilo Rodríguez, Ana Patricia, 35, 54, 56, 200n9, 201n31, 207n27 Rodríguez, Richard T., 122–123, 144, 148–149, 154, 209n16–17, 209n18 Romero, Archbishop Oscar A., 92–95, 98, 119 Rumsfeld, Donald, 14–15 Sacasa, Juan Batista, 31 Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina, 10, 39, 202n33 Saldívar, Ramón, 200n17 Sánchez, Joanne Rao, 13–14 Sanctuary Movement, 96, 120, 205n11–12, 206n20 Sandinistas, 1–2, 22, 28, 31–32, 34–35, 40, 42, 45, 51, 61, 98, 161–163, 174. See also FSLN; Nicaragua; solidarity Sandino, Augusto César, 31–32, 39–40, 48, 198n13, 201n22, Sandoval, Chela, 9, 51, 56, 118, 176, 197n4, 201n31 Scarry, Elaine, 68, 72, 77, 79, 207n25 School of the Americas, 120, 192, 205n6, 211n13 Scott, David, 7, 37, 48, 50 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 43, 48 September 11, 2001, 9, 136, Serrano, Nina, 20, 22, 27–29, 32–34, 51, 53, 63, 199n2–4, 199n7, 201–2n32, 210n5. See also Después del Terremoto Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, 10 slavery, 7, 30 Smith, Andrea, 39 Soldier of the Year: The Story of a Gay American Patriot. See Zuniga, José solidarity, and art, 21, 28–29, 84–85, 89, 199n7, 212n6; with Central America, 7–8, 15, 19–23, 27, 49, 62, 66, 103, 110,

195, 206n19; and difference, 51, 61, 75, 201n24; and gender, 28–29, 86; military, 156, 160–170, 175–177; with Sandinistas, 22, 28–29, 32–36, 42, 45–46, 49, 53, 199n2–3, 199n7, 200n8; with torture survivors, 23, 76 Sommer, Doris, 75–76 Somoza dictatorship, 22, 31–32, 35, 37, 40–41, 45–47, 51, 53–54, 58–59, 98, 177, 200n16, 200n18, 200n19, 201n21, 201n27 Southern Front. See Murguía, Alejandro Spivak, Gayatry Chakravorty, 19, 179–180 Tailhook report, 130 Taylor, Diana, 83 testimonio, 23, 64–91, passim, 203n6 This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 118 Tijerina, Reies López, 144 torture, 15, 23, 31, 39, 47, 53, 55, 58, 65–91, 94, 99, 107–108, 113, 117, 200n14, 203n5, 203n9–10, 206n20, 207n25. See also human rights abuses transnational. See activism; feminism trauma, 23, 69, 71, 82, 86, 104, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 187; posttraumatic stress disorder, 178, 184 Truman, Harry, 152 U.S. Armed Forces, 1–2, 9, 11–14, 64, 128, 150, 157–158, 168, 171, 174, 182; LGBT service in, 4, 24, 45, 121–122, 133, 207n3, 208n4; Marines, 31, 64, 128, 173; Navy, 151; sexual assault in, 210n7, 211n14–15. See also Chicana/o; DADT; imperialism; Latina/o; U.S. Intervention U.S. Department of Defense, 10, 125 U.S. intervention, in Central America, 1–2, 7–8, 14, 17, 20, 28, 30, 65; in the Middle East, 1, 2, 7–8, 14, 21; opposition to, 13–14. See also El Salvador; Guatemala; Iraq; Nicaragua; solidarity; U.S. Armed Forces U.S.-Mexico border, 24, 192–194 Valadez, John J. The Longoria Affair, 11–12, 198n7 Valdés, Gina, “Hearts on Fire,” 13 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 30–31

234 / index Vargas, Roberto, 28, 199n3 Viet Nam (also Viet Nam War), 1–2, 4, 12–14, 97, 112, 136, 163, 171, 198n9–10, 198n13, 204n2, 204n4; and Latina/os, 12–13, 36–37, 112, 198n10, 204n2; and Mexican American service, 4, 12 Vigil, Ariana, 201n24, 206n22 violence, 7, 17, 20, 68, 71–72, 85–87, 98–102, 104, 107–108, 114, 143; domestic, 111–114, 119, 127–128, 149, 166, 178, 211n15; militarized, 3–5, 9–10, 16, 21–25, 35–36, 46, 47, 49–50, 52–53, 60, 63, 123, 127, 130, 155, 157, 167, 171, 176, 181, 186, 195; national and transnational, 6, 7, 22–23, 32, 34, 38, 65–66, 74, 89–91, 117, 127, 133, 149, 166, 205n9; sexual and genderbased, 6–7, 9, 25, 68–69, 72, 74, 76, 82, 87–91, 119, 130, 153, 169, 179 -181, 194, 206n18. See also masculinity; rape; torture; war Viramontes, Helena María, 92 Walker, William, 30–32

war, 3, 13, 20; on drugs, 24, 193; expanded notion of, 2–3, 46–47. See also U.S. intervention; violence War, The [film]. See Burns, Ken Warner, Michael, 200n10, 208n6 White, Renée T., 10 Wiegman, Robyn, 136–138 Williams, Kristen P., 133–134 Winant, Howard, 148, 198n12 World War I, 12, 131 World War II, 11, 12 Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 115 “Yo Soy Joaquín.” See González, Rodolfo “Corky” Young, Iris Marion, 107, 147, 167, 169, 180, 207n26 Zamora, Emilio, 12, 198n10 Zapata, Emiliano, 48, 201n22 Zuniga, José, 23–24, 121–154, passim, 161, 164, 167, 174; Soldier of the Year: The Story of a Gay American Patriot, 24, 121–154, passim

About the Author

Ariana E. Vigil is an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She holds an MA and PhD from Cornell University and a BA from The Ohio State University. Her articles have appeared in Latino Studies, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, among others.