Angie Chabram-Dernersesian

Transcription

The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum
The Chicana/o
Cultural Studies Forum
Critical and Ethnographic Practices
edited by
a
New York University Press
new york and lond on
new york universit y press
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2007 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Chicana/o cultural studies forum : critical and ethnographic practices /
edited by Angie Chabram-Dernersesian.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN–13: 978–0–8147–1631–1 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN–10: 0–8147–1631–8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN–13: 978–0–8147–1632–8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN–10: 0–8147–1632–6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Mexican Americans—Study and teaching—Congresses.
2. Mexican Americans—Intellectual life—Congresses.
3. Culture—Study and teaching—United States—Congresses.
I. Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie. II. Title: Chicana cultural
studies forum. III. Title: Chicano cultural studies forum.
E184.M5C384 2007
305.868'72073—dc22
2007023002
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Zaré Juan Dernersesian
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chicana/o Cultural Studies and Beyond:
The Practices of Cultural Studies in Our Worlds
xi
1
Session One
A Question of Genealogies: Always Already
(Chicana/o) Cultural Studies?
14
participants: Angie Chabram-Dernersesian,
Rafael Pérez-Torres, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Alvina Quintana,
David Román, Richard Chabrán, Rosaura Sánchez, Renato
Rosaldo, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Alicia Arrizón, Raymond Rocco,
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, C. Ondine Chavoya, Chela Sandoval,
Mike Soldatenko, Mary Pat Brady, George Mariscal, and José
David Saldívar
Session Two
Chicana/o Cultural Studies: Marking Interdisciplinary
Relationships and Conjunctures
37
participants: Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Mary Pat Brady, Emma Pérez,
David Román, Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano,
Alejandra Elenes, Ramón García, Aída Hurtado, José David
Saldívar, Alicia Arrizón, Richard Chabrán, C. Ondine Chavoya,
George Mariscal, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Mike Soldatenko, and
Renato Rosaldo
vii
viii Contents
Session Three
Staking the Claim: Introducing Applied
Chicana/o Cultural Studies
54
participants: Angie Chabram-Dernersesian,
Michelle Habell-Pallán, David Román, Aída Hurtado,
George Mariscal, Chela Sandoval, Raymond Rocco,
Mary Pat Brady, José David Saldívar, Rosaura Sánchez and
Beatrice Pita, Vicki Ruiz, Richard Chabrán,
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, C. Ondine Chavoya,
Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Renato Rosaldo, Emma Pérez,
Ramón García, Alejandra Elenes, and Alvina Quintana
Intercession
Reflections on The Chicana/o Cultural Studies
Forum Sessions (One, Two, Three)
133
Session Four
More Practices of Cultural Studies in Our Worlds
(Asian-American, American, Latina/o,
Latin American, Subaltern, African American)
138
participants: Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Kent Ono,
Lisa Sánchez González, Kevin Johnson, Alicia Arrizón,
José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, Wahneema Lubiano,
Lawrence Grossberg, Lisa Lowe, John Beverley,
Ruth Behar, George Lipsitz, Frances Aparicio, and
Herman Gray
Session Five
Conclusion: Our Critical Pathways
211
Postscript
Preview of Selected Chicana/o Cultural Studies
Print Culture
219
Contents ix
Chronology
241
Notes
243
Bibliography
253
Contributors
259
Index
267
Acknowledgments
Like other works which carry the traces of “grassroots,” this book was a labor of love that required the help, support, and participation of many
people. I would like to thank all the participants of the forums sessions,
including Mary Pat Brady, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Rosaura Sánchez, Beatrice Pita, Ramón García, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, C. Ondine Chavoya,
Lisa Sánchez González, Raymond Rocco, Aída Hurtado, Alvina Quintana,
Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Chela Sandoval, Richard Chabrán, José David Saldívar, Renato Rosaldo, Kevin Johnson, Alejandra Elenes, Rafael Pérez-Torres,
Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, Alicia Arrizón, George Mariscal, Vicki Ruiz, Emma
Pérez, David Román, Mike Soldatenko, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Herman Gray,
Lisa Lowe, George Lipsitz, Kent Ono, John Beverley, Ruth Behar, Frances
Aparicio, Larry Grossberg, Wahneema Lubiano, and José Manuel Valenzuela Arce. There are many more cultural studies practitioners that can be
included in future conversations and forums—go for it! As one practitioner says, “Step on the Accelerator!” My goal was to open up the arena,
not close the book on the topic, and I am grateful to Eric Zinner and Emily Park at New York University Press and to the anonymous reviewers
(¡gracias!), who helped to facilitate the publication of this cultural studies
intervention.
I would also like to thank Zaré Juan Dernersesian, to whom this work is
appropriately dedicated, for his consistent, unwavering, and energetic support of me as I moved through the different phases of this project and
through various personal and professional transitions. Zaré, I cannot
thank you enough for your courage, presence, and optimism, which made
all the difference to me as I assumed and completed this substantial project. On the original home front, I would also like to acknowledge Angie
G. Chabram and Yolanda Butler, who continue to provide important
models of womanhood and survival and to spice up my life in so many
ways; Richard Chabrán, who introduced me to cultural studies and Stuart
xi
xii Acknowledgments
Hall; Rafael Chabrán, who took me to UC Berkeley, where I attended college and graduated in the late seventies; and Matthew, who has given us all
a reason to smile and to hope.
I would also like to recognize the professors in the Spanish Section of
the Literature Department at UC San Diego in the 80s (primarily Rosaura
Sánchez, Carlos Blanco-Aguinaga, Joseph Sommers, and Marta Sánchez),
who recognized the importance of Chicana/o literature and criticism and
helped to place a number of professors in these fields at major universities.
For me, the beginnings of Chicana/o cultural studies can be traced to the
critical dialogues that were born and made possible there at the Spanish
Section at UCSD, between classes, oral presentations, conferences, and
many productive informal gatherings that united friends and colleagues
alike.
Additionally, the seeds for this book—and the complementary The
Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader (Routledge: 2006)—were planted with
my collaboration with the journal, Cultural Studies, and Larry Grossberg,
in particular. Suffice it to say that this collaboration was a creative force in
my recent dialogues with cultural studies.
Finally, I am grateful for the support I received from these friends, colleagues, and family members during the completion of this work: Michelle
Habell-Pallán, Deborah Vargas, Emma García, Kevin Johnson, Ruth
Frankenberg, Roberto Rodríguez, Raúl Villa, Clara Lomas, Sergio de la
Mora, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Mary Romero, Judy Newton, Susan Kaiser,
Adela de la Torre, Melissa Chabrán Bowie, and Gabriel Chabrán. My everpresent canine daughter Kyra (keech dog of the schiperkee breed) also deserves honorable mention. She provided unconditional love and solidarity, often staying up with me until the wee hours of the morning.
The production of this book was made possible by the financial support of the Chabram-Dernersesian household, the Dean’s Book Fund at
UC Davis, The Chicana Latina Institute, and the staff support of Celina
Rodríguez, Kathy Hayden, Connie Zeiller, Alicia Rodríguez, María Perea,
and Johnathan Martínez.
Introduction
Chicana/o Cultural Studies and Beyond:
The Practices of Cultural Studies in Our Worlds
I think that what cultural studies allowed one to do was
not to privilege any one axis. What was privileged here
was intersectionality, multiplicity, the interplay of all
these things.
—Rosa Linda Fregoso, Session One
What Chicana/o cultural studies brings to the table (of
cultural studies) is this long history of growing out of a
community that was colonized inside of the imperial
monster.
—George Mariscal, Session One
These people in Chicana/o and Latino cultural studies
are introducing new themes, new interests, new objects
of study; radical critiques of what came before; and a
significant self-criticism. —Ramón García, Session Two
¡Bienvenidos! I would like to welcome you to the Chicana/o Cultural
Studies Forum, hosted by me, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian. This book
takes the form of a virtual exchange that interweaves the responses of
twenty-five scholars in Chicana/o cultural studies to a series of questions
about the field and their work in it. Their responses attest to the vitality
and spirit of an emerging practice of Chicana/o cultural studies that captured the attention of professors, students, and cultural workers in the 90s
1
2 
and exerts substantial critical influence in the present decade. At this juncture, Chicana/o cultural studies is widely recognized as a form of work
and travel in our borderlands1 and as a transformative critical intervention that encourages meaningful affiliations to other practices of cultural
studies in our worlds. In addition, Chicana/o cultural studies is linked to a
number of interdisciplinary contexts, problematics, and genealogies that
require our sustained engagement at the very start of the forum.
Without promoting a definitive genealogy, let me begin this engagement by stating that, as a naming practice and critical denomination, Chicana/o cultural studies surfaced in the late 80s and early 90s within a
number of publications that charted changing Chicana/o cultures, identities, narratives, and positionalities. If in that period the denomination was
still somewhat of a novelty, by the end of the 90s and the start of the new
millennium, it was widely used within curricular, virtual, and scholarly
productions to describe a number of interdisciplinary constructions,
movements, and convergences.
In one of these productions, which appeared in 2000 as part of a tribute to Stuart Hall, I offer this characterization by way of an introduction
Chicana/o cultural studies [is] a multiply positioned critical practice where
. . . new social, political, and theoretical alliances and publics are made possible. . . . “American” cultural studies gets unpacked, pluralized, and relocated; cultural studies meets area studies; and we re-encounter the ones
who came before us.2
This passage enumerates some of the critical problematics that structure the terms of our critical intervention at the initial sessions of our forum. On the one hand, Chicana/o cultural studies announces a new set of
terms—a new vocabulary, social constituency, and coalition. On the other
hand, this field negotiates earlier critical languages and intellectual legacies. For instance, to a readership well-versed in the dynamics of the Chicana/o vernacular, Chicana/o cultural studies renegotiates Chicana/o
identities with its slash, conspicuous gender vocalizations, and rendering
of differences of class, sexuality, ethnicity, and geopolitical habitation. In
addition, this denomination negotiates a connection with another intellectual legacy—Chicana/o studies—which many scholars link directly to
the Chicano Movement of the sixties, although this legacy has a contemporary expression. To further complicate matters, while Chicana/o studies
has long been understood as an alternative interdisciplinary site that
Chicana/o Cultural Studies and Beyond 3
forcefully incorporates culture at the heart of the social and political imaginary, this knowledge formation generally functions as an umbrella term.
That is to say, it consciously reorganizes knowledge around Chicana/o
subjects. Here culture is not foregrounded as a “bridge” term, as it is in the
nineties-style denomination “Chicana/o cultural studies.”
Chicana/o cultural studies also provides a bold-spirited answer to an
important question, namely: Where’s the culture and identity in cultural
studies? In addition, the framing of the cultural with Chicana/o cultural
studies emphasizes a series of important understandings about the explanatory power and relational value ascribed to Chicana/o culture—including its existence as a knowledge formation with substantial social and
intellectual import and performative value. In the global period, the cultural part of Chicana/o cultural studies highlights the proliferation of Chicana/o multiculture and the complex positioning of social subjects in relation to dominant and alternative cultures, systems, and institutions.
Within the academy, Chicana/o cultural studies represents a multiply
positioned expression that potentially marks a conscious distinction from
and/or affiliation to cultural studies, Chicana/o studies, and other related
fields that target a variety of contemporary social movements, subjects, and
urgencies. Like the “troubled speech” bell hooks identifies as “tongues” of
African American critical discourse,3 Chicana/o cultural studies is an illustration of the new polyphonic nature of critical discourse or what Bakhtin
refers to as the language of heteroglossia (1981). A rerouting and paraphrase
of some of his key insights permits us to see that at any given moment of its
historical existence the language of Chicana/o cultural studies “is heteroglot
from top to bottom” and that this language “represents the co-existence of
contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs
of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given bodily form.”4
Because of the types of novel geopolitical and intellectual mappings negotiated within its languages of heteroglossia, Chicana/o cultural studies
raises a number of questions for our sustained intellectual consideration:
What is the relationship between Chicana/o (cultural) studies and cultural
studies? How do we do cultural studies from within Chicana/o cultural
studies? How do Chicana/o (hemispheric, borderland, and feminist) cultural studies formations intermingle? Have we always done cultural studies?
Consideration of these questions within our forums is not meant to deliver textbook definitions or genealogies of this practice. The idea is to
identify those social urgencies, contestations, epistemologies, conjunc-
4 
tures, and affiliations that inform a multiply positioned Chicana/o cultural studies practice in the contemporary period. Because Chicana/o cultural studies is a dynamic practice, the idea is to articulate those positionalities that stake out a different kind of wager—an emerging Chicana/o
cultural studies sensibility.
The Charge of This Book: Relevant Contexts and Positions
It is important to emphasize that the proposed articulation of Chicana/o
cultural studies responds to a number of larger representational dynamics
as well as to scenarios of blatant exclusion and partial incorporation. If in
the early part of the 90s an agenda-setting cultural studies work offered a
limited incorporation of Chicana/o cultural studies legacies that was absent from mainstream guides,5 in the late 90s a Mexican transnational
production altered this portrait and suggested that Chicana/o cultural
studies is an important form of expression. Throughout the decade Chicana/o cultural studies practitioners anticipated and reaffirmed this transnational perspective,6 and along with a number of other Latina/o writings
of the Americas, they forcefully argued that cultural studies is not just a
“white,” “male,” or “U.S.” thing.7 In addition, they affiliated themselves
with groups who argued for a more international model of cultural studies.”8 Finally, they launched a critique of a British-American formulation
of cultural studies that lacks meaningful stopovers into ethnic, feminist,
and Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies.
While hasty “stopovers” are certainly not sufficient, this critical introduction to the practices of cultural studies in our worlds is premised on
the idea that, as bell hooks writes, we “must not abdicate intellectual responsibility for promoting a cultural studies that will enhance our ability
to speak specifically about our cultures and gain a hearing.”9 In this book I
consciously assume this charge by providing a critical, ethnographic introduction that articulates a movement through diverse social, political, and
intellectual contexts, forms of analysis, ideological fields, cultural practitioners, and critical projects. Significantly, this movement travels beyond
academic presentisms and a Chicana/o centric account of cultural studies,
by incorporating the interventions of thirteen cultural practitioners working in Black cultural studies, American cultural studies, Asian American
cultural studies, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Latina/o, and Latin American cultural studies throughout the 90s.10
Of course these combined interventions do not exhaust the possible
lines of affiliation or forms of critical multiculture that frame Chicana/o
cultural studies in the contemporary period. However, they do provide
readers with a glimpse of the wide spectrum of knowledge bases, intellectual resources, and cross-cultural engagements that have expanded the parameters of alternative critical discourses and produced a thickening web
of interconnections within already hybrid cultural forms.
In speaking of an early cultural studies project, Stuart Hall once remarked that “a certain critical reflexivity”—that is, “the need to make
problematic what others would take for granted”—was a necessary consequence of working in a field of inquiry that lacked a scholarly orthodoxy.11
In the case at hand, it is also necessary to stop and focus reflexively on the
fact that the representation of Chicana/o cultural studies presented here
parts company with widely accepted formulations of cultural studies legacies that privilege a national formation (U.S./American, British, Spanish,
or German cultural studies, for instance). It also moves beyond accounts
that limit cultural studies’ function to a critical reading of the authoritative or mainstream disciplines. Finally, the representation of cultural studies featured in this book is at odds with “mainstream” constructions of
“international” legacies of U.S. cultural studies. These constructions ignore the destabilizing critical dialogues of local forms of alternative, ethnic inquiry that haven’t formalized power out of discourse, lost their
transnational or global dimensions, or achieved the kind of cultural capital often attributed to cultural studies in a U.S. “American” context.12
There are a number of other respects in which Chicana/o cultural studies does not duplicate the traditional cultural studies map. The social subjects routinely featured within Chicana/o cultural studies are themselves
implicated in a transnational context that has witnessed the reemergence
of the Third World in the First World and the dramatic growth of a border
region that exceeds the boundaries of two national configurations and the
periphery of the southwestern United States. Moreover, Chicana/o social
subjects have had to negotiate successive histories of conquest and colonization; proletarianization; class stratification and cultural repression/subordination; racial, linguistic, gender, and sexual discrimination; geographical and territorial displacement; and a condition of pervasive disempowerment, especially in the areas of education, health, politics, and
citizenship.13
Although Latinas/os are increasingly recognized as the fastest-growing
minority group in the nation, Chicana/o cultural studies often suggests
6 
that it is not the soon-to-be-shed “minority” status of this group that really counts. Instead, what counts are the historic struggles for survival, political agency, representation, and social change; the undocumented crossings, transnational herstories and histories; the proliferation of social ideologies, social networks, social movements, and positionings. Equally
important, Chicana/o cultural productions are pivotal for understanding a
homegrown response to an earlier phase of U.S. expansionism and hegemony, as well as a newer global situation that has pronounced hemispheric implications.14
It could be argued that those practitioners who are linked to a Chicana/o cultural studies legacy in the academy can be distinguished from
the majority of their cohorts in the broader Chicana/o community on the
basis of educational access and other forms of social privilege.15 (This
notwithstanding the fact that many of these practitioners are from working-class backgrounds and are often racialized in the academy in ways that
bespeak membership in a marginalized social class.) However, educational
access and privilege do not take away from the fact that historically the
practice of Chicana/o cultural studies is linked to the movements of disenfranchised social subjects, as well as to the grassroots knowledge bases
these movements have provoked.16
In past decades these knowledge bases have undergone profound transformations, incorporating new forms of study, cultural critique, archives,
and platforms for social change, and generating important cross-cultural
dialogues and coalitions. These developments are central for the emergence of a multiply situated Chicana/o cultural studies practice.
As David Román, a practitioner of Chicana/o cultural studies, suggested to me, it is impossible to limit this field to a finite number of texts
or practices. And as Wahneema Lubiano, another practitioner of African
American feminist cultural studies, reaffirmed: “When I read This Bridge
Called My Back [one of the foundational texts in Chicana/o cultural studies], it produced something equivalent to a sonic boom in my head . . . I
realized that I had so much luggage (as opposed to baggage which has a
negative connotation) to carry with me within my critical apparatus. I had
so many things that were so useful. I had to take them out, reconfigure
them and find a use for them.”17
This productiveness is not lost in this book, which recognizes important social and intellectual migrations and possibilities but also works under the conceptual premise that Chicana/o cultural studies is itself, as Hall
states, a “set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges” that cannot
be accessed by a single-authored narrative.18 My rejection of this mode of
narrative address for this book was not only motivated by the fact that it
can seriously inhibit discursive possibilities when just the opposite is in
order, but it was also motivated by a national context in which practitioners who work in underrepresented and marginalized social traditions are
routinely burdened with an academically sanctioned representation—
what I refer to, echoing Raymond Williams, as a “selective ethnic tradition.”19
In this tradition practitioners are often made to speak for underrepresented groups in such a way that there is little or no regard for mediation
or alternative voices, perceptions, or legacies. Because Chicana/o cultural
studies is a set of critical knowledges that count with more than a few
practitioners, and more than one language, legacy, and geopolitical location, this mode of reception is highly problematic. But there are other reasons why this is the case, including the fact that contemporary Chicana/o
cultural studies practitioners boldly usher in their own specific preoccupation with representation itself.20
They variously take up the way we have been represented, by ourselves
and by others, and the way we represent others; the question of access to
social, cultural, and political representation; the selected geographic and
economic landscapes of representation; and the haunting presence of the
ever powerful “regimes” of representation. In so doing, they focus attention on the complex dynamics of an alternative production that cannot be
accessed from the purview of an overarching, homogenizing tradition.
Given these complex dynamics and the need for an alternative venue of
representation, the format I selected here is a wide-ranging, multivoiced,
practitioner-centered narrative that renders a critical and ethnographic
retrospective. In its final presentation this narrative highlights diverse cultural studies interventions and legacies gathered from extensive interviews
I conducted with a number of influential cultural studies practitioners by
telephone and in person throughout the 90s. (Precisely the understudied
decade that witnessed a proliferation of cultural studies conferences, productions, and curricula.) Additionally, this narrative foregrounds the dialogues that can be read between interviewees. My own voice and collaborative role in the actual production of the spoken interviews that form the
8 
basis for the book are suppressed in order to allow the interviewees’ voices
to be taken on their own terms.21
The repositioning of these cultural studies interventions into an imaginary Chicana/o cultural studies forum activates a symbolic connection to
alternative Chicana/o grassroots political cultures (“foros del pueblo”).22 It
also affords me the opportunity to intervene in these exchanges in a new
and exciting way—as a commentator and forum convener. Finally, this
repositioning of critical dialogues allowed for a recasting of the concept of
the forum itself.
While generally described as a “public outlet for discussion of matters
of interest to a group,”23 in this case the forum was envisaged as an alternative place, where we could voice the intellectual conditions, frustrations,
retreats, and desires that led each of us to a contemporary practice of cultural studies that was engaged with a number of key constituencies and
cultural studies’ legacies.24 As the book project unfolded it became clearer
that not one forum but rather a succession of forums—and a postscript
on recent print culture—would be required to complete the task.25
Readers should be aware that in its final presentation the Chicana/o
cultural studies exchange not only simulates public forums, but it also
provides future generations with a retrospective look into a recent cultural studies past. Similar to those Chicana/o and Latina/o works that are
making forays into the mediated testimonio, mystery stories, photo-ethnography, spoken word, CDs, self-help books, and cyberculture,26 the forum interventions gathered in this book draw on the explanatory powers
of culture, experience, and communities. They represent alternative models of learning that newly imagine connections between culture and society at a time when “culture creeps into every nook and crevice of contemporary social life, creating a proliferation of secondary environments, mediating everything;”27 and “the struggles over power increasingly take a
symbolic and discursive rather than simply a physical and compulsive
form.”28
Against the panorama of a conservative backlash that has twisted the
progressive movements for social, civil, women’s, and human rights, these
interventions offer counternarratives–other ways of thinking about and
rereading a significant past. In addition, these interventions are collectively involved in a work of clarification.29 That is to say, they address the
fundamental question of what kind of work will be identified with cultural studies in a transamerican, global context and what kind of social
effects that work will have. Finally, they take on the key question of what
difference it makes when the term “cultural studies” is adopted in this context as a matter of public engagement and critique.30
This innovative format is designed to foreground the contentious debates that give birth to grassroots intellectual movements and practices.
Rather than encapsulating the field in a metanarrative of founding texts or
famous personages, this account performs an interrupted narrative history
that unfolds as readers move between different positions and representations of (Chicana/o) cultural studies. Here, as in some of the early histories of cultural studies, we see the stops and starts, the shifts in directions,
the seeds of new beginnings—and the provisional nature of knowledge
formation that is often lost in accounts that adhere to other kinds of textual closures or scholarly protocols.31
In the sessions that follow we also see practitioners of cultural studies
speak across older and newer languages, intellectual practices, and generational divides. What is more, we bear witness to the emergence of important critical sensibilities that shape critical discourse in the contemporary
period. For example, rather than merely accepting the boundaries between
interdisciplines, these practitioners offer numerous opportunities for conceptualizing how disparate bodies of knowledge are continuously subjected to negotiation and rearticulation. Rather than separating intellectual work from politics, they reaffirm the idea that intellectual work is itself a form of cultural politics, although what constitutes “cultural
politics” is itself up for discussion. Rather than discouraging internal critiques, they usher in another politics of criticism.
From the purview of these cultural studies sensibilities, cultural critique is not a question of silencing “wild tongues” in the service of a prefabricated ethnic community, but of recognizing that “[t]he more contradictions you find, the more you’ve got to speak [and] the more you’ve got
to struggle.”32 From this sensibility cultural critique is not a question of
closing the door on the complex issues of representation with a readymade formula (a la Chicano productions are productions that are by, for,
and about Chicanos, punto, period), but a question of attending to the
multiple mediations of culture; the complexities of identities in difference; the machinations of immigrant, racial, gendered, and global economies and technologies; the problematics of cultural production as well as
spectatorship; and the coexistence of multicultural, transnational, hemispheric, and global legacies.
Beyond these shared general sensibilities, the cultural studies critiques
that inform this book are not homogeneous; they articulate profound ide-
10            
ological as well as methodological differences that produce contrasting visions of how culture matters and of how and where to achieve broader social transformations. Moreover, the participants convened for the forum
speak from different intellectual dialects, ranging from the popular to the
highly theoretical. It was not the intention of this forum to produce seamless or uniform responses, and the interventions necessarily take a variety
of forms. Some are quite long, developing a variety of contexts and positions; others are much shorter. Some participants spoke extemporaneously, while others prepared more formal responses. This mixture of
writerly and spoken styles mimics how cultural studies ideas and concepts
are borne within various forms of mixed speech that coexist on the borderzone between the academy and its secular neighborhoods.
How to Use This Book
In this book readers are invited to listen in on a number of critical sensibilities that take shape throughout a series of redacted and repositioned
dialogues. In a period in which cultural studies practitioners are quick to
propose that it is no longer possible for knowledge formations to universalize themselves into academic metalanguages without reproach, it is also
important to acknowledge that the specificity of our representation of
Chicana/o cultural studies is rooted in the following key aspects of its production.
First, although our forums surpass many textual representations of
Chicana/o cultural studies, they do not exhaust the field or its practitioners. It is my hope that other public forums will follow that broaden the
scope and the participants of our exchange.
Second, the speakers at the forum were selected on the basis of their
participation in key cultural studies productions, including conferences
and seminal cultural studies works. Membership was also affected by
space limitations and my commitment to begin destabilizing the artistic
culturalism often attributed to cultural studies and Chicana cultural studies. Thus, participants in the various forums include a number of people
working in cultural studies and Education, History, Sociology, Psychology,
the Law, Anthropology, Library Science, Political Science, and Urban studies. In addition to this group, there are many others who work in sites frequently associated with Chicana/o cultural studies such as Chicana/o
studies, Ethnic studies, Anthropology, Spanish, English, Women’s studies,
Latina/o studies, American studies, theater, film, Literature, virtual culture,
music, performance, dance, and art.
Third, while both the participants and target group for this exchange
are practitioners working in academia, this does not mean that important
cultural studies work is not being done by community members, who are
involved in literary, artistic, performative, musical, virtual, and theatrical
ventures; journalistic, testimonial writings, and graphic communications;
as well as the more “mundane” practices of everyday life, including those
activities related to social reproduction that are so rich with content for
Chicana/o cultural studies analyses.
Finally, the representation of Chicana/o cultural studies presented here
is organized around a series of questions that focus attention on the relationships between intersectional forms of cultural studies at a period in
which practitioners of Chicana/o cultural studies are actively opening up
new zones of engagement, reframing alternative critical discourses, foregrounding a proliferation of social antagonisms and movements concerning race, class, gender, sexuality, the economy, transnationality, and
geopolitics; and revisiting earlier social categories of analysis and histories
that assign, mark, and classify social subjects and contexts. This productive
labor is central to the emergence of the denomination, Chicana/o cultural
studies, which sheds light on some of the problematics that shape our initial forays into representation today.
These forums are organized into four sessions. Session One places readers in an imaginary forum where practitioners take on the hotly contested
question of the genealogies of Chicana/o cultural studies. Session Two
highlights the relationships between the Chicana/o studies and cultural
studies interdisciplines. Session Three introduces applied practices of Chicana/o cultural studies. The intercession provides useful critical reflections
on Sessions One, Two, and Three. Session Four inaugurates a representation of intersectional ethnic cultural studies practices (African American,
Asian American, Latina/o, Latin American cultural studies, and so on).
Session Five concludes the forum and outlines future directions. The postscript closes the book with a review of selected Chicana/o cultural studies
print material from the 90s.
No doubt this repositioning will be viewed as “suspect” or an “unwelcome deviation” by those who are bent on effecting a rigid distance between cultural studies proper and those critical inquiries that Gloria Anzaldúa describes as “carved and tattooed by the sharp needles of experience.”33 To those who favor separatism, I invoke Stuart Hall, who himself
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vigorously countered this line of thinking when discussing the striking
contrasts between a well-funded, institutionally privileged cultural studies
program that reeks of whiteness and an economically depressed and marginalized African American Studies Department. In spite of these profound inequalities, Hall explained that for him some of the most interesting work being done in the American context is the rethinking of American cultural studies “in relation to American popular culture,” “in relation
to the critical forces, social forces on the ground, and social movements,
wherever they are, in American setting.”34 He insisted that disengagement
from these social forces “on the ground” is not an option for cultural studies because “[u]ntil you go to cultural studies through these structures,
not from within cultural studies itself but through these externalities, you
don’t really translate it; you just borrow it, renovate it, play at recasting
it.”35
I am not concerned with legitimating or policing the methods, assumptions, or intellectual viewpoints of the practitioners who ascend to the podium in the following sessions and articulate homegrown cultural studies
practices. Instead I am concerned with responding to gaps in scholarship
that are so glaring that many authors, among them Cary Nelson and Dilip
Parameshwar Gaonkar, now openly admit that “the history of American
cultural studies is a history yet to be told”; that “its texts are yet to be
found”; and that “its meanings are yet to be articulated to contemporary
needs.”36 In its overall spirit, this book concurs with Nelson and Gaonkar,
who point out how much we lose by our ignorance about cultural history
throughout the Americas.37
For me the hallmark of a (Chicana/o) cultural studies practice lies in a
recognition that it is not enough to perform the arduous task of building
an archive of underrepresented cultural studies legacies and communities.
One must go a step further to engage those cultural studies positionalities
that investigate important social and cultural realities or offer important
social claims, positions, and practices.
Part of this type of evaluation is made possible in the book through the
intertextual movements of critical interventions which often “talk back” to
one another; and another part is supplied in my selective readings of Chicana/o cultural studies productions and forum responses. Of equal importance, readers of this book will have to actively intervene in the forums
and make their own judgments about which Chicana/o, feminist, and ethnic cultural studies positionings are most urgent at this time. Only then
will the dialogical possibilities of this book project be truly realized. As far
as “cultural studies” is concerned, nothing less than a dialogue between
equals—what George Lipsitz refers to elsewhere as a “reciprocal” and “dialogic” encounter—is envisioned in the public exchanges that follow.38 In
these fictional gatherings that bring together edited conversations and real
people, a number of cultural studies practitioners take the word and run
with it. In this way, they provide readers with a glimpse of the bold-spirited and hotly contested practices of cultural studies in our manifold
worlds.
Session One
A Question of Genealogies
Always Already (Chicana/o) Cultural Studies?1
¡Bienvenidos! Welcome forum participants! Without further ado I’d like to
inaugurate the first session of the Chicana/o cultural studies forum, which
will consider the question of whether we’ve always already done cultural
studies. Tomorrow and thereafter I will convene other sessions that address
interdisciplinary relationships and applied practices of Chicana/o cultural
studies. Together these forum sessions promote the idea of cultural studies as
a “speaking” and “listening” practice. In addition, they provide us with the
opportunity to identify important Chicana/o cultural studies genealogies,
lines of interdisciplinary affiliation, as well as modes of (Chicana/o) cultural
studies travel. Now that we are fully assembled we are ready to engage the
first question on the forum program which is “Have we always done (Chicana/o) cultural studies?” I’d like to invite Rafael Pérez-Torres from Los Angeles, California to step up to the podium and to respond to this opening
question.
Rafael Pérez-Torres
To answer your question, I think Chicana/o cultural studies is a different
space. Here there’s a calling into question of earlier categories within Chicano studies (notions of race, for example), especially when issues of hybridity, hybridization, and mestizaje are raised. Then there’s a questioning
of sexual and gender categories. Even the nature of what oppositionality is
in Chicana/o studies comes into question. What’s enabling this space of
Chicana/o cultural studies? It’s what Chicana feminist/womanist, Chicana
lesbians, and mestizaje consciousness have brought to the table. That is to
say, an awareness of the fact that difference is itself different—that there’s
difference within.
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A Question of Genealogies 15
Michelle Habell-Pallán
In a sense it’s true. We’ve always studied culture and how Chicano culture
is suppressed by dominant culture, but I think that the conversation
changes. We’re trying to create an oppositional culture, but the conditions
of the world have changed. Chicano studies can only get richer by engaging theories that address the way different marginalized peoples in different locations are talking back to the dominant culture and transforming
the dominant culture.
To go back to the original question I want to say that while Chicano
studies has always been involved in studying “the unofficial or unrecognized,” there was a shift in the late 80s. I think that cultural studies opened
up a space that legitimates the study of “blurred” genres and allows us to
go back and recognize that there’s always been an engagement with popular culture by artists.
Alvina Quintana
Well no, it (Chicano studies) has not always been interdisciplinary. I hear
that line (that we have been doing cultural studies) in Women’s studies
circles too, where people claim to have always been interdisciplinary. But
the fact of the matter is that they weren’t really. What they had were departments with people from different disciplines talking about a similar
subject. I think that now we are seeing people actually blurring the boundaries, doing some Anthropology within a literary practice, or really doing
some History, not just talking about it in terms of context.
In terms of Chicanas/os, I think that issue (of Cultural Studies) we did
in the 90s was an opportunity for us, for Chicanas and Chicanos, to get involved in cultural studies. I recall Malaquías’s art, Angie’s work on ethnography, and Rosa Linda’s on film. It was the first book I can remember that
was cultural studies, not only the essays themselves, but also the text as a
whole. It became like a cultural studies enterprise, drawing people from
different disciplines and including a larger cultural studies audience.
You know I had a student who saw it in London. It was thrilling for her
to see the work over there. That’s what we were all talking about when the
issue was in the formation stage—moving beyond the confines of this
country and beyond the alternative press mode and speaking to people
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like Stuart Hall. We were always in the position where we would just hear
them speak. So, it was like our opportunity to talk. The two-way conversation was important. I felt that what they were talking about—including
hybridity and the diaspora—“spoke” to Chicanas/os and Latinas/os in important ways. But what I discovered while hanging around African American circles was that some people in that community didn’t appreciate this
kind of diasporic thing being applied to them. They saw it as “The West
once again defining a community.” They didn’t appreciate being colonized
by the Black British either. So there’s that tension there that we need to be
aware of.
David Román
I would agree that there has been something comparable to what we imagine cultural studies to be within Chicana/o studies. My concern is “Call it
whatever you want, just do it. Just keep doing it.” I know it’s important to
provide a kind of metacriticism around these things so we’re self-conscious of what it is we’re doing. But I don’t think we’re at a moment where
Chicana/o cultural studies is something we need to give up. And if we’ve
been doing it for years, then it’s been helpful for us to do so both intellectually and politically.
I’m not concerned with policing borders; I’m interested in crossing
borders. At the same time, I don’t think cultural studies is a model that
you can just transplant from one place and context to another; rather it’s a
dynamic organism. I think that once cultural studies is adopted within a
particular community, it assumes its own form. That is, once it assumes
the geopolitical concerns of a particular time, community, or location.
Richard Chabrán
Well, in some ways, Chicano/a studies prefigured many of the debates that
would later take place in cultural studies, and this is seldom acknowledged. In the early period in Chicano studies, there was a rebellion or a
speaking out against traditional works and disciplines. But ironically, at
the same time, many Chicano graduate students were being trained in traditional methods within the academy, especially within the empirical
method. This method (number crunching, certain types of archival work,
even in literary criticism) gained strength during the late seventies and
early eighties in the social sciences and the humanities. It was really at the
height of that trend that some of us realized that those approaches could
not suffice to answer some of the questions that underlay Chicana/o studies.
That’s when I started to read outside of this area. I need to mention the
importance of Raymond Williams here; clearly he was against the kind of
mechanical Marxism that was also prevalent during his time, so he tried to
open spaces for the cultural moment. This really corresponded to how I
felt at that point. That’s when political economy was strong in Chicano intellectual circles and its application was very mechanical. This didn’t allow
us to take into account the way people lived, questions of race, class, or
gender. Culture was seen more as institutional mechanisms rather than
something that people lived and practiced. So Raymond Williams really
helped us to see that the moment of culture was very important within
emerging societies.
The other thing that was very important was his formulation of the
dominant, residual, and emergent. We all understood the role of the dominant, but what was less understood was the role of the residual [those
kinds of practices that were formed in the past that are still active in the
present]. The residual was viewed as something backward that needed to
be supplanted by progress, but in Raymond William’s formulation, the
residual takes on a completely different meaning. Here it can either be
progressive or negative, but it is an active force within communities. Many
times this is a site where you can see the resistance that people practice
against the dominant. For me the emergent was always the hope for building new kinds of practices and recognizing that there are always new formulations. These are some of the things that attracted me to his work and
to cultural studies in general.
Rosaura Sánchez
For me, of course, cultural studies and Marxism go together. I can’t do
cultural studies without doing it from a Marxist perspective. For example,
I’ve written on the testimonios [in Telling Identities], which would be considered by some as historical texts, but to me they are testimonios, popular
texts, which had not been published because they were not seen as “literary.” Looking at these noncanonical texts required that I do a historical
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analysis of the period, of the texts, and of the individuals involved. And
this required that I do an analysis of those who like Bancroft would profit
from the words of those people that wrote for them. In some cases, these
people would only be given a footnote or not even be credited for their
recollections in the writings of others. So, for me, the whole cultural production was as important as the text itself. Even Bancroft saw this production as a cultural enterprise, or as he called it, “cultural industries.” He
paid people to write, so he took credit as the author.
That’s one example of how I do cultural studies. For me cultural studies
is not only about looking at the present. You can do cultural studies work
on the past. And cultural studies is not simply determined by the object of
study but by the type of analysis. How you look at the object (under analysis) is important. And so in that sense, you could be looking at popular
music, such as rap or conjunto for instance, and not be looking at the
practice of the text as a social and political product and as a commodity or
commodified practice. One also needs to study the relations of the object
(rap or conjunto) to other texts and consider as well the place of music
within this period of late capitalism. For me, these elements have to come
into play for the analysis to be cultural studies. And no, we’ve not always
done this kind of work, even when we’ve done work on popular culture.
Renato Rosaldo
No, I don’t go for the idea that we, Chicanos, got there (to cultural studies)
first, so they ought to give us the patent! I think that in some ways Chicano studies anticipates cultural studies and in other ways it does not. I
also think there are important cultural studies dimensions in the Chicano
critique of Anthropology of the 60s as well as in the work of Américo
Paredes. But this doesn’t mean that Chicano narratives don’t change because they do. In my book, Culture and Truth, I wrote a chapter called,
“Changing Chicano Narratives,” where I discuss the writings of Américo
Paredes, Ernesto Galarza, and Sandra Cisneros from this perspective.
One of the things I noticed while rereading Galarza’s novel for this
chapter is how funny it is. I had read it before as “earnest” and “straightforward,” but the book became much richer for me when I saw its ironies.
What I suggest in my analysis of Chicano narratives is that these types of
works change from the point of view of a different present. So that the title, “Changing Chicano Narratives,” is meant in a double sense. First, I
wanted to point out that I didn’t think that Galarza, Paredes, and Cisneros
were saying the same thing. You could even say, “Notice how different
these texts are—there’s a real difference in how they are thinking, in the
humor that’s there, and in the analytical perception that’s underlying the
humor.”
Second, I wanted to convey that idea that there is no static cultural
studies. By this I mean to say that the cultural studies that’s always been in
Chicano writings isn’t an unchanging essence. Perhaps this Chicano cultural studies parallels the development of cultural studies, but we need to
acknowledge its dynamic character. For example, in these writings you see
that the discourse, the thought, the analysis changes over time. The other
thing I wanted to think about in that chapter was that these older works
are constantly being reread. In going back over some of the venerable classics that were so untouchable in Chicano studies, I thought it would be
important to reread them actively and to critique them. This kind of reading practice is a recuperative act that allows you to see the changes I’ve
talked about. This also brings the venerable Chicano classics down to their
proper size. Here we see that they have to be reread and that they aren’t
going to have the status of a Shakespeare or something like that. In the
case of Américo Paredes, I took the risk and did this because he was a classic in Chicano studies. I talked about the patriarchal nature of his work,
and, yes, I paid for it! He didn’t talk to me for a while, but I told him,
“Look, I’m doing you a favor Américo because this is obvious to anyone
who reads your work nowadays!” My feeling was that somebody’s got to
say this in public and that if we don’t say this and critique Paredes, then
his work will be dismissed by some people. I don’t know if he ever fully
understood this, but what I meant to say was that acknowledging these patriarchal dimensions and making them part of the talk about his work was
an incredibly important thing to do. This critique allows us to see what’s
valuable in his work.
Rosa Linda Fregoso
No, we haven’t always already done cultural studies. I think cultural studies participates in paradigm shifts in scientific thought. Cultural studies allows one to see social reality in terms of networks and interrelationships
as opposed to seeing reality in terms of objects and in terms of objectivity.
Cultural studies acknowledges the fact that any theoretical approximation
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is always partial, never absolute. So this idea of a model that you just impose on an object (be it Chicana/o studies or any other area studies) is a
very Cartesian idea.
One of the things that I feel that kind of gelled and came together for
us is that our previous formations (in Chicano studies) had not allowed us
to see the complexity of objects that we were looking at because we were
being confined by a disciplinary framework. So if you were going to do a
Marxist literary criticism, it had to be a particular way. If you brought in
gender or race, that wasn’t Marxist criticism. The foundation of Marxist
literary theory was about class, so that everything else was either superstructural or ideological—or peripheral to the analysis of class. What did
cultural studies contribute to us? I think that what cultural studies allowed
one to do was not to privilege any one axis. What was privileged here was
intersectionality, multiplicity, the interplay of all these things. Ultimately
that’s the only way that your analysis becomes more refined. That’s why I
like to talk about cultural studies as a network. I find this very useful because it’s almost like the object is within the network, and the network is
pluralized. I don’t mean to say it’s pluralized in a pluralistic way, but pluralized in terms of multiplicity. And I think cultural studies enabled one to
do that.
And let me say that while there’s been a kind of cooptation of cultural
studies, for me cultural studies is not just about studying culture; it’s
about studying culture in a particular historical context that is itself constituted in terms of power relations. In this country, those power relations
are racialized, those power relations are classed, gendered, and sexualized
in particular ways. So if you are going to deal with culture in this country,
you’ve got to deal with those contradictions.
For me cultural studies has a political agenda, which is to usher in a
more egalitarian society. If you want to talk about its socialist underpinnings—its anticapitalist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist underpinnings,
they are there. I don’t think that you can deny that in the work of Raymond Williams—he was anticapitalist; the work of Stuart Hall, who
refined cultural studies to add a kind of antiracist critique; and the feminist critique of McRobbie.
Cultural studies is always about transforming social relations of exploitation and oppression, and that’s the only way I can talk about it. To talk
about cultural studies as pluralism is not cultural studies; that’s an apolitical project. In my own case, U.S. Third World feminism allowed me to
contextualize and specify cultural studies in a U.S. context. [It grounded
cultural studies for me.] I think I make the point when I talked about the
various intellectual and cultural traditions that influence my work. I embrace these traditions through the rebel spirits of U.S. Third World feminists, who reside “between and among different subject positions and critical cultural discourses.” My cultural studies approach is a mestizaje, a
bricolage.
I’d want to emphasize that this (the U.S.) is the context that I study, and
that this context has impacted my approach. I think that’s what the articulation (of cultural studies) is about: locating cultural studies socially and
historically, and engaging the context in which you’re working. I also want
to say that I think that there’s a kind of hierarchy of oppressions behind
that idea that “We were always already doing cultural studies” (in Chicano
studies) that makes me mad. There’s a mantra there that makes me very
uncomfortable because, at base, it’s colonialist. Who cares if you didn’t call
it cultural studies (before) and now we call it cultural studies? Let’s go
from here, let’s trace the genealogy (in the Americas), but let’s not say, “We
were here first.”
We also need to be critical about just unproblematically assuming a
cultural studies legacy in early Chicano studies. A lot of this legacy was
about racial studies oppression, so they (the ones who claim that) we have
been doing cultural studies all the time are cultivating a myth. They
weren’t doing cultural studies. Many of them were doing race, then class.
Among the initial pieces that theorized culture, such as in Juan Gómez’s
work, class was the foundation, and then he added race (lo mexicano).
Race was like a superstructural representation. Race was class and race was
ideology, and that’s how they studied culture. They didn’t look at it in
terms of gender, and they didn’t deal with sexuality or other axes of oppression and exploitation. All those things were considered to be superstructural.
Alicia Arrizón
I think that Latinas/os in Latin America have been doing a form of cultural studies since the 19th century. You see this in a lot of the women’s essay writings. Chicanas/os have done a form of cultural studies as well (for
example, rasquachismo). But oftentimes people don’t acknowledge this
fact! This has to do with the imperialism of knowledge and the fact that
we are very contaminated by discourses that dominate our knowledge
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about cultural studies. Since the 80s, when the essay was written, “What is
cultural studies?” everybody began talking about it as if it had never existed before. But Chicanas/os had been doing it before the 80s. I think that
part of the problem here is that until our cultural studies become institutionalized and acknowledged by the knowledge police in the academy, it
won’t be acknowledged as cultural studies, per se. Although we need to
recognize an early legacy of cultural studies, it’s also important to acknowledge new forms of Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies that do more
than reaffirm what existed before and incorporate academic work with
new sensibilities. This includes the critical work that’s emerged since the
80s in Chicana feminist writings as well as gay and lesbian writings that
challenge dominant systems of representation in ever complex ways.
Raymond Rocco
I absolutely don’t agree with the idea that we’ve always been doing cultural
studies, even though we didn’t know it. I think that the majority of us
from the seventies and eighties were trained in rather strict disciplinary
terms. I didn’t see much in terms of real transdisciplinary work there, so I
don’t think Chicano studies was really into it (cultural studies). What I
think you had was a gathering of people together into Chicano studies
from History, Spanish, English. I don’t think that was interdisciplinary—I
think it was an amalgam of groups.
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano
I would agree that it’s true in a way that Chicano studies has included a
form of cultural studies—the interdisciplinarity has always been there. I
remember during a blowout with the dean at the University of Washington with the board we said, “We’re not just humanities, we’re interdisciplinary.” But I think there was still a kind of compartmentalization going on
in the earlier form of Chicano studies. So that the historians were doing
their thing, the sociologists doing their thing, and the literature people
were doing the same. They might have all been in the same Chicano studies department, but there wasn’t really much of an effort to bring these
disciplines all together into one course.
I think there’s more interdisciplinarity now. And I think that whole
questioning of identity that is so prominent now came out of Chicana cultural studies books such as This Bridge Called My Back, Borderlands, and
Loving in the War Years. At least that’s how I came into Chicana/o cultural
studies, although I always looked at history. Then there’s been an important dialogue with people in cultural studies too. Like you said, Angie, in
your book prospectus for The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader, I hope
they are listening because it’s not a one-way street—we’re also talking to
people in cultural studies as well as listening to what they have to say.
When I say “cultural studies” I’m really throwing down with certain
people like Stuart Hall, the kind of post–Richard White. But I think it was
with Hall and his crew, and the women who wrote The Empire Strikes
Back, that I really connected. I liked the popular cultural thing, but in my
work I’m more focused on looking at the interplay between race, gender,
and sexuality and culture. So I look to these people to make a connection.
C. Ondine Chavoya
I think that Chicana/o studies is an “already interdisciplinary discipline,”
which is informed heavily by the social sciences, by history, and to some
extent, by literature. I think that what’s been opened up in Chicana/o cultural studies are not only new objects of analysis but challenges to this interdisciplinary discipline for its reinscription or valorization of a certain
form of “authentic” politics. Thank goodness for lessons that we’ve
learned, and thank goodness for such brilliant scholars and writers such as
Norma Alarcón, Chela Sandoval, Rosa Linda Fregoso, and Cherríe Moraga. These are people who insist that we can’t think within these single
discursive registers and need to move beyond hierarchical subject positions, which are indeed politicized. I’ll admit, not everyone has this type of
reaction. You saw a very different reaction to this type of positioning in
the huge debate over the name change (from Chicano studies to Chicana
and Chicano studies) at the National Association for Chicana/o Studies.
You see this as well in the continuing resistance within this Chicano studies organization to the incredibly articulate and powerful voices of those
people who are theorizing new subject positions, intersections — and
drawing on the new methods of scholarship and inquiry advocated by
feminists and queers.
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When you open up the door to this type of inquiry, when you place this
type of inquiry at the center of analysis (as many young scholars are doing
now), the reaction you often get is filled with anxiety and resistance. I’ll
admit that this is a gross generalization but I think that as an organization
NACCS was quite content and happy when we were doing our work and
we were in the “corner,” or otherwise marginalized or ghettoized. It’s when
a structural name change was put out from the corner that people became
aware of the number of young people that were talking about the intersections of all these different subject formations and their impact on the political, public, and private spheres, that you saw this type of adverse reaction come to the surface. What happened then was an institutional or organizational attempt to reveil the law of the father. And with this attempt
came the idea that this kind of participation by young people was divisive
and the idea that what really unites us is “our oppression as Chicanos.”
Here Chicano is a singular discursive formation; there’s the idea that all
these other “little,” “specific” things [like sexuality and gender issues]
might be acceptable in your private life, but not in our public voice as Chicanas/os or in our collective scholarship as Chicana/o studies.
Chela Sandoval
The term “cultural studies” signifies a new kind of knowledge production
which emerged out of the global decolonizing political processes of the
19th and 20th centuries. By the mid-twentieth century, these great decolonizing processes culminated in the transformative social movements experienced not only in the U.S. but worldwide. These movements were set on
changing the formation of social orders, human knowledge, identity, language, cultural expression, and power: they aimed at reconfiguring what
freedom means.
All the “cultural studies” knowledges that have been so influential since
the mid-twentieth century then are linked—in the same way—to the decolonizing activities of dominated peoples. So that’s how I came to cultural studies; I too recognized the visions, theoretical apparatuses, and the
methods developed by oppressed people in order to survive with dignity,
as fundamentally linked to the theories and methods, to the entire developing field of knowledge we call cultural studies. People who have come to
cultural studies through the academy often get introduced to its precepts
through some representation of Stuart Hall. They may not recognize or
understand the whole global historical, political, and intellectual trajectory
of cultural studies, of which Hall’s work and the work of the Birmingham
School only represent one other “node.” But the intellectual trajectory of
what we now call cultural studies is rooted in the great decolonizing
movements of earlier times. These transformative social and intellectual
movements tried to provide what might be described as utopian visions of
how the social world could be organized. They gave us access to new formulations of knowledge, new ways of seeing and knowing, new conditions
of possibility.
I’ve spoken to scholars who challenge the developing field of cultural
studies on the basis, they argue, that it opens up space, within which leftists can carry on “moral” and “ethical,” as opposed to “scholarly” work—as
if such a distinction can be made. Indeed, one of the contributions of cultural studies is to point out the artificial and arbitrary nature of such a
distinction between so-called objective scholarship and scholarship with
obviously moral or ethical aims. Such a stand against the field of cultural
studies moreover represents an unacceptable elision of the impact of the
decolonizing movements of the 19th and 20th centuries; it was these that
ultimately pushed the limits of what can be recognized as acceptable human knowledge. One of the positive outcomes of global imperialism at
this moment is that the languages of dominated and oppressed people
have now infiltrated every sector of dominant speech cultures and societies to the point where all citizen-subjects are living inside alternative and
oppositional forms of thought as well as inside the most legitimated forms
of western knowledges. Cultural studies as a field represents only another
[self-conscious] symptom of this phenomenon.
We could do away with the field of cultural studies but still have to
name the ways in which the traditional disciplines (English, History, Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, Biology, Computer Science, and so
on) have been transformed, and are still being transformed, by the decolonizing forces of the last century. Scholars are only now in the position to
begin to identify how all our knowledges and powers have come together
—and in a sense contaminated one another—in productive ways. Cultural studies is the terrain in the university where these investigations,
contaminations, and moral and ethical aims are further explored.
In my own case, I came to this broader formation of cultural studies as
a political activist during the early 70s. I’m one of those people who
wouldn’t have gone to college if it were not for the U.S. social movements
of the 60s and 70s. I wanted to do intellectual work that was connected to
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our activist work so I joined a group of activists in study. Barbara Noda
discusses this U.S. Third World feminist study group in her article in This
Bridge Called My Back. There she writes, “We were probably among the
first of our kind in the early seventies. . . . There in the quiet of residential
Watsonville, we discussed the colonized and the colonizer. Sharon distributed green tea and Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.”
So that’s how it was. In 1972 we focused on psychological approaches to
decolonization, reading Césaire, Fanon, Davis, Marx. But it was what
Barthes referred to as “getting under the surface of things,” and what Anzaldúa calls “la facultad” that really engaged us. We felt that we had identified other ways of viewing, of being, of making coalition, and that it was
through a form of intellectual and emotional self-examination and discovery that we would be able to identify our differences from the dominant. Audre Lorde discussed this perception when she wrote that each of
us needed to dig deep down into that deep place of knowledge within herself.
The idea was to do more than creatively survive, but to develop new
politicized modes of identity that would transform ourselves and the
world around us. So we had to develop other ways of seeing, being, and
exchanging meaning. This aim provided us with an exciting way of doing
political, intellectual, and creative work; our goal was to push the boundaries of the normal, everywhere. By 1978, we believed ourselves part of the
making [of what is now called] cultural studies. We called ourselves “cultural workers” then, people whose commitment was to “cultural theory.”
Some of us worked in the academy, some of us worked outside, and some
of us worked on the boundaries, but for all of us ideas were the realm of
praxis.
So in the 1980s when U.S. scholars started talking about Stuart Hall and
the “emergence” of cultural studies, I was surprised that all this (U.S. and
transnational) intellectual and political energy I just described was coalescing and being grounded in the figure of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School. Ultimately, I’m happy with what the people in British cultural studies have accomplished in their own particular translations of
cultural studies, but to me what’s really important is the exchange and
proliferation of this type of intellectual production and activism between
and among scholars in British cultural studies as well as cultural studies
scholars everywhere.
Mike Soldatenko
No, we haven’t always done cultural studies. For me, cultural studies is
about developing a critical vision of the world, developing critical literacy.
In some cases, cultural studies has become more academic, especially for a
lot of people of this next generation who see cultural studies as an extension of literary criticism. In other cases it becomes hooked up with this
postmodern thing that engages in privileged imaginary travels. Then the
real world obstacles that many of us experience are erased. But in my case,
what the Chicana/o cultural studies network was offering was a space to
engage in an intellectual discourse and a space to claim a political voice—
even for graduate students. We were also trying to develop a critical perspective at the intellectual level of our analysis.
Within Chicano studies there existed a strong nationalist agenda, which
meant you didn’t read outside of Chicana/o studies. In fact, I remember
talking to people about how we should be looking at other progressive
texts outside of Chicana/o studies in order to incorporate them into the
very analysis of Chicano. The response was essentially: “You have to read
the Chicano fathers.” But, you know, there’s a limited number of them,
and there are so many problems with a lot of this early work that stem
largely from the institutionalization of Chicano studies as an academic
discipline.
If we look at the period between the late sixties and early seventies, the
dominant perspective in Chicano studies is in line with an empiricist paradigm within American higher education, and this line wins out over the
feminist and perspectivist approaches to Chicana/o studies. Here in this
empiricist approach, it is assumed that knowledge is a neutral endeavor;
therefore it doesn’t matter how you engage in the search of knowledge. For
the empiricist what’s important is the political battles within the institution, so then you are only worried about whether you have a department
or a political group to push an agenda. And the assumption is that education and your perspective on education is resolved once you teach about
Chicanos—or include the Chicano experience that’s been left out. You
point to the existence of a tradition and say to dominant culture and
everyone, “we have one too.”
This is the case in early Chicano studies and among people who still
emphasize an acritical recovery of the lost past—you know, the famous
recovery projects which are often a continuation of the empiricist ap-
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proach. And this is what the academic institution finds more acceptable.
To engage in what you might call polemical identity politics is something
that the institution can’t tolerate, because it can’t quantify it. For how do
you judge an article that engages identity formation as a positioning as
opposed to an article that engages something you can measure and quantify, like a long lost letter that’s part of an emerging canon or genealogy or
a formula?
I think that empirical Chicano studies was very much a male-centered
construct, not only insofar as men were positioned as the intellectual leaders of the Chicano studies project of the academy (many of them became
bosses of departments and institutes later, occupying their place within the
institutional hierarchy), but also insofar as the perspectives and the definitions and the tools that were used within this period were all male bound
in their terminology and practices. The constant complaint that you read
in the literature throughout the 70s and 80s about these “heavies,” and
how they were being exclusionary in their personal lives, can be applied to
their political and intellectual projects. Already embedded in carnalismo
and chicanismo is a concept of la familia as an institutional mechanism
that carried over to Chicano studies as central organizing concepts. I don’t
doubt that if you were to investigate the past, you’d see a class on la familia
and la chicana. These ideas were incorporated into this idea of empiricist
Chicano studies, which was viewed as a normative family space.
This hasn’t really changed that much. In fact, I think that this is what
Ignacio García was doing in his essay on the Plan in Chicanas/os at the
Crossroads, but he was taking it to the level where the only way Chicana/o
studies can function is by accepting a mom/dad version of what the family
and the significant past are. Those who don’t fit in somehow have to be
kicked out or railed in. You know, the bad ones, the rebel sons and daughters who are confrontational; the children of divorce; the lesbians and
gays; the hotbeds of feminism; and really bad half-breeds. This reading of
the Plan is part of a drive toward canonization, and you find this trend in
how people legislate those pieces or readings or interpretations that are
deemed to be acceptable as the founding pieces we need to return to over
and over again. The idea is “now we’ve created people within our group
who you can read or model and no one else.” And that becomes part of
the canonization process. I think this has nothing to offer us as an oppositional practice.
So that’s why we turned to cultural studies—in order to figure out how
to break away and to create a space for the peripheralized. You know, I’m
referring to people like me who always find it difficult to explain who they
are, even though they are Chicanas/os. I mean in my case I had to prove
that I was more than this Ukrainian, “Soldatenko,” because even though I
could speak Spanish and even though I was from a working class neighborhood [Pico Union, 17th and Burlington], I was of mixed (Mexican and
Ukrainian) blood. I was regarded as “foreign” although I was raised by my
mom, who’s from Mexico City and worked as a costurera (seamstress) in
L.A. most of her life.
I’ve been thinking about this—maybe it’s only through the father that
you retain the identity in this mind-set, which doesn’t consider lived experience. I mean it’s incredible what these people did to mestizaje. Instead of
taking into account the beauty of mixtures, they reduced it to an essence.
These are a few of the concerns that led to my participation in that National Association for Chicana/o Studies Conference on the panel that
would be the basis for the special issue of Cultural Studies. Before that I
had been going to other NACCS conferences as a visitor and not a participant. I found it difficult finding allied intellectuals who were looking at
things more complexly. As the panel on Chicana/o representations was organized, I began to look at whole series of issues around the issue of representation, and not only Chicano perspectives but others as well.
And together we began the process of dialogue, to rethink what Chicana/o studies was about, and we found a space to collaborate. And we
didn’t have to agree with each other about everything. We were asking
questions about what we are allowed to say or not say in Chicano studies.
I think that the fact that these papers were published abroad, in an international space, is significant. There is a lack of a space for different positions in Chicano studies journals. I think there’s a connection between the
fact that This Bridge Called My Back comes out in ’83 and the journal of
Cultural Studies (the special issue on Chicanas/os) comes out in ’90. The
connection is that we had to go “outside” these Chicano journals, especially those of us who wanted to form larger multicultural coalitions.
Mary Pat Brady
I think that’s a hard question—whether we’ve always already done cultural studies—because I think that Chicana/o studies as a field has incorporated various methodologies at different points in time. When you
think about the work that Tomás Ybarra-Frausto did on theater or art go-
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ing back 20 years, you see that he was doing cultural studies. But I think
the Birmingham School has created a significant change in some of that
methodology. So if 20 years ago Chicano studies was attending to various
kinds of cultural practices and thinking about them in politically inflected
ways, I think that what Stuart Hall contributed was a different kind of
methodology for thinking about race and issues of representation.
In that transition scholars such as Angie Chabram-Dernersesian and
Rosa Linda Fregoso have shown those of us working in Chicana cultural
studies new ways to think about race and gender and sexuality together.
And they’ve done it in ways that the early Birmingham School didn’t do.
[Neither did Chicano studies for that matter.] So for me, Chicana cultural
studies is attentive to the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in
ways that I don’t think Chicano studies has been and in a way that I don’t
think that cultural studies is doing all the time either. By that I mean
mainline cultural studies rarely attends to what Norma Alarcón calls the
competing “maze of discourses.”
So that’s one kind of answer. Here goes another one. At this point in
time for me cultural studies is more about what kinds of knowledge we
seek, what kinds of questions we ask, and what kinds of things we notice.
In that sense I do think that some of us have been doing cultural studies
all the time. For example, there’s a way in which the particular historical
material circumstances of the combination of growing up on the border
biracially has the potential to produce particular kinds of critical readers. I
think this form of cultural studies is about learning to read an array of
signs while cultures are rubbing against each other in the sense of a Gramscian war for positions. On the border, you can see how hegemonies try to
assert themselves in obvious ways. So, in this sense, I think I learned some
early cultural lessons even though later I learned a more rigorous methodology.
George Mariscal
I think it’s counterproductive to say “We’ve already done cultural studies”
when much of the Chicano Movement literature from the 60s and the 70s
wasn’t doing the kind of analysis of gender that needs to be done and is
now being done in cultural studies. When you close off the conversation
by saying that “we already did this” (cultural studies), you really cut yourself off from many of the insights that have been made since the Birming-
ham School first hit in the U.S. And even though I myself have expressed
concern over the transplantation of Eurocentric models, I don’t want to
reject this British Marxist tradition because it is very important. So I don’t
want to say that we’ve already done cultural studies because the conjuncture is totally new and the insights over the last 10 or 15 years are very important for working on Chicano topics. In this sense, the work that came
out in the initial issue of Cultural Studies was crucial for bringing those insights into Chicano studies.
So to get back to the original question, no, by no means were we always
doing Chicano cultural studies. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t
earlier corresponding cultural studies traditions to which we might lay
claim. I pointed out some of these traditions in a section of my essay
[“Can Cultural Studies Speak Spanish?”] that deals with the contributions
of Mariátegui and the way his work can be compared to that of Gramsci.
I also think it’s important to point out that many of us (Chicanos/as)
work like bricoleurs; we draw from wherever we can in our work. What
Chicano cultural studies brings to the table (of cultural studies) is this
long history of growing out of a community that was colonized inside of
the imperial monster. We are in a position to synthesize a number of traditions. But if we create that synthesis without including the Spanishspeaking traditions, then we have lost something central to our own history. This is what concerns me most about some of the work being done
now by people who are very proficient in European theory. They are not
working at all in the Latin American or Mexican traditions or in the local
Spanish-speaking traditions of the U.S. In fact, there’s also a whole generation of Chicano scholars trained in English departments who are not able
to use Spanish as a scholarly tool. In the 70s and 80s, many Chicanos were
driven out of Spanish departments because of elitism and racism. So
there’s an English hegemony playing itself out among people who are very
bright young scholars but have no idea of Latin American or Mexican
contexts. Again, the danger is that this legacy gets lost. My hope that
young Chicano scholars will recuperate Spanish-language traditions has
nothing to do with “authenticity” or essential identities that were privileged by some during the Chicano Movement period. If this were the case,
we would all have to read Nahuatl or Navajo. I would argue though that
indigenous and Spanish-language research will be vital to a viable Chicano
cultural studies project in coming years.
At another level, I think we need to be aware of the obstacles we may
face as we attempt to make the necessary connections to Latin American
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cultural studies. There are serious ones on two fronts. One concerns the
traditional Latin American scholars from Latin America who are trained
not to think about us as being part of their own problematic. For them,
“Nuestra América” ends at the Rio Bravo, which means U.S. Latinos are
excluded. The other obstacle concerns those who do know about Chicanos
but have class and racial biases that preclude building solidarity. If you
think about it, the way literary and cultural training gets done in Latin
America [along the “ciudad letrada” model described by Angel Rama] is
very elitist. For many intellectuals trained in this way Chicanos are either
too working class or too indigenous or too pocho (Americanized).
Another aspect of the problem is that within the academy in the United
States Latin American scholars are not commonly trained to think about
Chicano/a culture. This is ironic because when one thinks about progressive scholars in Latin American studies in the United States it is clear that
many have been very open to Chicano/Latino issues. [I’m thinking of people like John Beverly, Jorge Klor de Alva, Doris Sommer, and, of course,
Jean Franco.]
In view of all of this what Chicano cultural studies needs to do is learn
the context of contemporary Latin America and find those progressive
sites that are willing to incorporate our issues. For me an obvious one is
Cuba. I was there recently and I discovered that they have tremendous interest in Chicanos. At the recent NACCS in Portland there was a delegation from the University of Havana. They were even proposing that a
NACCS (National Association of Chicana/o Studies) conference be held in
Havana in the year 2003. Again, one way for us to overcome those obstacles that get in the way of making a productive connection is to identify
these sites within Latin America that aren’t elitist or racist and then to establish contact with those progressive circles. We also need to think about
expanding our horizons even further—into places like Spain. While traditional Spanish departments in the United States have been hostile to Chicano studies, Spanish universities are interested in our culture. In fact,
there is a Chicano studies program at the University of Alcalá. And there’s
an interest in other parts of Europe as well.
In the last 30 years we’ve struggled to gain recognition for our scholarship and I think we’re going to have to make a big push for another decade
to get Latin American scholars to realize that they have a lot to learn from
us. At the very least they have to recognize that we’re part of the hemispheric problematic and that they can’t simply dismiss us, especially since
by the year 2050, U.S. Latinos will be the second largest community of
Spanish-speakers in all Latin America. I’ll admit it’s going to take a lot of
work on our part to make this happen.
There are also earlier models of scholars of Chicano literature who have
been more internationalist in their research and their politics and whose
work laid an important foundation. In fact, the piece I’m doing now is
about the influence of the Cuban Revolution on the early Chicano Movement. Here I’m looking for these moments of Chicano internationalism
which really force us to rethink the Chicano Movement as a strictly cultural nationalist movement. I say this because during the late 60s and early
70s many of us were looking across the globe and making important connections. For me cultural studies has got to be involved in progressive social change. Part of that social change involves the university itself. A lot of
young cultural studies scholars feel so much pressure around career and
tenure that they avoid campus politics. Many of their senior colleagues,
even those with “radical” reputations, don’t talk about what the corporate
university is doing. If we don’t do so, then we are complicit with it.
José David Saldívar
Well, let me address the issue of whether we’ve always done cultural studies this way: In my work I’m very conscious of creating a conversation
with an “emerging” form of hemispheric cultural studies. If there is something new in this work that I’m engaged in along with other people in
Chicana/o cultural studies, it is that it moves us beyond the national. At
this point we are conscious of the fact that we can’t map out the local
without its global designs [to use Mignolo’s ideas]. So, yes, I’m self-reflective about making linkages with Black British cultural studies as well as
about making linkages with the Latin American Marxist tradition —
specifically the work of Retamar and the work that comes out of Casa de
las Americas. The work of the Latin American left is also very important
for understanding colonialism. How could it not be? I mean, how can we
not understand our role within the nation state and not understand its
own imperial designs?
One of the flaws of traditional Chicana/o studies and ethnic studies
programs is that they are so concerned with their own local battles that
they have forgotten that these battles have a history. They’ve forgotten that
we need to think about the critiques of empire—the ones that concern colonialism as well as postcolonialism. I just want to go back to the point
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Angie made earlier about how I see myself as a Chicano cultural critic because I do think we do travel in our critical projects. For me subaltern
studies are a natural trajectory. I think it’s important to acknowledge that
ours is not a one-way conversion. Well-known postcolonialists such as
Spivak and Bhabha are reading Chicana/o critics as postcolonial critics.
I just heard Gayatri Spivak give an essay called “Our Asia,” which is in a
sense a complement to José Martí’s “Nuestra América” and to my work
The Dialectics of Americas. We need to recognize that with these gestures
these critics are making linkages with us. And I think that those of us who
are working in Chicana/o cultural studies need to respond because the
gestures are being made at an important historic moment in the U.S. We
also need to recognize that in a sense we’re moving beyond what some
might call natural borders or affiliations, by moving toward the Asian critics who do postcolonial studies and bring in a different sense of the
global.
I also think it is interesting to look at the type of repercussions that our
work has on other people. For instance, some of the people from the Chicago group have approached this by a narrative which recounts how when
they were in India, they were colonial subjects; how when they moved to
be educated in Britain, they were Black; and how now when they’ve immigrated to the U.S., they are ethnic. So what does that mean? If they are ethnic in the U.S., what are the models that have represented this in this context? You got it: Ethnic studies, Chicana/o studies, Puerto Rican studies,
Women’s studies. These area studies have given them models from which
to represent themselves. I think we’d be foolish not to make linkages with
them if we are talking about cultural formations that are trying to break
up the nation state.
I am aware that some people might question the relevance of the postcolonial for Chicanas/os because of the persistent colonial legacies. I like
to introduce my thoughts about this by thinking about G. Spivak—one of
the leading postcolonial critics. Early on in her essay, “Teaching for the
Times,” she says: “Given the situation of self-representation of multicultural literature in the United States it seems more canny to stop [or start]
with prospects for decolonization” (p. 36). I’ve been figuring out a history
of decolonization, presumably a condition before postcoloniality [or postcolonial] can be declared.
Concretely, I’ve been very interested in figuring out how we come up
with an understanding of the history of decolonization. And that’s why I
think I include work on Retamar because he himself has been influenced
by other critics of decolonization within the Caribbean—people like Césaire and Fanon. So we need to start with the prospects for decolonization.
That to me is still part of the postcolonial project no matter what we think
of the “post.” [Whether it means after colonialism or what the subaltern
studies group calls “beyond occidentalism,” beyond the modern—and in
this case, beyond the colonial.]
There’s a kind of utopian gesture in Spivak when she says, “As far as I
can tell, . . . a general condition of post-coloniality is a future anterior,
something that will have happened, if one concerned oneself with the present crafty details of the calculus of decolonization.” I think that within
Chicana/o studies, Black British cultural studies, and African American
studies this gesture is much more grounded. That is to say that this calculus of decolonization has taken on other names. I’m thinking here of Toni
Morrison’s work in Beloved or Gilroy’s reading of the jubilee or what Chicana feminists might call, the coaticlue state. So I think we need to be a little bit careful about saying it’s just utopian. These forms have histories—
they are grounded culturally—and they are being set into motion and
they are being recodified by different critics and writers.
Aside from fostering these types of global or hemispheric affiliations
with postcolonial and cultural studies, I think that people who work in
contemporary cultural theory from Chicana/o studies today are really
aware of the fact that we have to account for different types of subjectivity
and different ways of understanding experiences and identity within our
work on Chicana/o productions. In Border Matters I try to account for
some of these differences by juxtaposing writers who are looking at the
Texas-Mexican border. For instance, in Islas’s Migrant Souls, the main
character is totally alienated from the home and family because of the culture’s and the nation state’s insistence on normative heterosexuality. [Of
course, he’s going to feel alienated.] And yet, you have a Chicana artist like
Carmen Lomas Garza creating what some might see as a kind of utopian
view of the family. In her art everyone is sitting around making tamales in
the tamalada. “My family is different,” she says, “everybody worked.” How
are we to dispute that experience? I think we have to be careful not to homogenize or to generalize from these experiences, but to somehow tally
them up, so to speak.
I also think we need to be aware of the fact that as Chicana/o cultural
theorists, we are transforming Chicana/o studies (for better or worse) and
of the fact that we’re representing a new generation. Many of the people
who founded our field are now retiring after 30 years of long and hard ser-
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vice. I’m in a position here at Berkeley to recognize this and to salute them
in the most positive way because they did form a field from within a protracted struggle. Those of us who are following and are now in that leadership position have a tremendous responsibility to move it to the next level
of struggle.
We have to deal with the whole issue of the university and what that
means to be a Chicana/o intellectual within the post–Cold War when area
studies was created [not to be narrow about it] to be a part of U.S. foreign
policy. Now that the Cold War is over, what’s going to happen with the
university? Do we need to move the borders and boundaries of area studies and reclaim our positions within something called the humanities. So
where I see our colleagues in the social sciences theorizing the history of
their disciplines, I don’t see those of us who work in the humanities from
cultural studies doing the same. So I think we need to historicize our work
in different ways from the earlier generation. Someone who is offering
some interesting perspectives that can be engaged here is Walter Mignolo.
In his award winning book, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, he argues
that in order to understand writing, we have to totally redefine it within
the history of colonialism and imperialism. And what he’s calling for in
this work (as he acknowledges a lot of us in Chicana/o cultural studies) is
that as postcolonial critics we need to be concerned with border thinking,
especially in the face of the monolithic paradigms. In a way, all of our
work is a form of epistemological thinking that concerns itself with something we might call “internal colonialism” (and its history). Where I think
we’re in a better position than our predecessors who founded the internal
colony model (people like Almaguer and Muñoz) is that we realize we
need to push beyond those internal borders of colonialism to a context of
the world system of colonialism. We need to do this because that history,
which goes back several centuries, is our project too. And I think that’s
how I would like to see those of us who are working in the humanities
from Chicana/o cultural studies responding to somebody like Edward
Said, who is the president of the MLA and draws a straight line from Aurebach (European intellectuals who left fascism in Europe and came to the
U.S.) to himself. But what about those of us who come from other parts of
the world? Those of us who’ve already been colonized internally and who
can claim very different lines of affiliation? Those who don’t draw lines
from Europe to America but from India to America, from Latin America
to the U.S.? That’s what I think we need to engage, our place within a
world system.
Session Two
Chicana/o Cultural Studies
Marking Interdisciplinary Relationships
and Conjunctures
In this session, we will focus critical attention on the interdisciplinary relationships between Chicana/o (Cultural) Studies and Cultural studies as a
way of “marking” the conjunctures of “similarity and difference” that are inscribed within the knowledge formation, Chicana/o cultural studies. Michelle
Habell-Pallán, would you like to start off and address these relationships?
Yes. I’ve been thinking about this topic, and sometimes there’s no relationship between them. Sometimes cultural studies doesn’t want to see
Chicana/o studies and vice versa. If there’s a general thing called “cultural
studies,” then this formation sometimes overlooks Chicana/o voices. At
least in Chicana/o studies you are going from the assumption that Chicanas/os are speaking subjects and intellectual subjects! This is something you might have to fight for in the larger cultural studies that might
tend to see race as black and white. I also want to say that while I am inspired by Black British cultural studies, it’s not a model we can reproduce
in Chicana/o cultural studies because it doesn’t necessarily work. The social conditions of Blacks in Britain are different from Chicanos in Los
Angeles.
So I’m not rejecting Black British cultural studies, I’m doing something
else that makes sense for what I’m doing. For example, when I write about
transnationalism, feminism, and the violence that women have to endure,
the artists are providing the inspiration on where to go. They are talking
about families living on both sides, about aunts working in the U.S., but
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living in Mexico; and immigrant women coming to work in the sweatshops in L.A. That’s why I find Chicana feminism so useful, but that’s not
to say that I’m not engaged in the writings by Black British cultural studies. My readings of Stuart Hall have been very helpful for me to understand issues of popular culture and issues of race.
Rafael Pérez-Torres
Chicano studies brings different ways of thinking about the intersections
between high culture and popular culture. In the articulation of Chicano
studies, high culture is always the unspoken other, the unspoken evil. High
culture doesn’t exist for us, right? So there’s an uncoupling of the high culture/low culture paradigm that’s significant. Another difference is the
highlighting of racial categories that are not strictly in terms of black or
white. I guess that what I’m saying is that in Chicana/o cultural studies
there’s this idea that culture develops out of hybrid moments. Within Chicana/o cultural studies that hybridity is always connected to some type of
racial or historical connection. So hybridity is never innocent, it’s always
engaged in a kind of power dynamic that’s related to colonialism, to the
local history.
Mary Pat Brady
There are a number of ways to look at the differences between these intellectual formations (Chicana/o studies and cultural studies). I remember
Tony Bennet’s work in that Nelson and Grossberg cultural studies anthology. He argued that cultural studies wasn’t thinking about public policy
enough. That might have been and still is true perhaps for cultural studies
broadly defined. But I would say that in the particular case of Chicana/o
cultural studies and Chicano studies people have been talking about public policy pretty explicitly since we gained admission to graduate schools.
This is because we’ve had to think about public policy. You know Proposition 187 wasn’t a first for us!
At the same time, I also think there are a number of ways in which cultural studies has become like this term “political correctness”—it has become a rather slippery term. People dismiss cultural studies, or complain
about its “hegemony” in Ethnic studies without doing the actual narrative
Chicana/o Cultural Studies 39
of the critique itself. Now this makes me think about what it is that certain
practitioners in cultural studies have done that makes other people in institutions and disciplines so afraid. What’s the kind of institutional transformation that they may be making that makes people so fearful? What
kind of change is it masking or not masking?
What’s clear to me is that part of the anxiety is that a lot of cultural
studies is talking about black and brown bodies and about texts as important sites of nondominant knowledge production and theory. I’m
thinking here of the work Sonia Saldívar-Hull has done with the prefaces
to anthologies or Francis Aparicio’s analysis of salsa, bomba, and plena as
not objects of knowledge but as theoretical tracts. This kind of work really unsettles disciplinary divides, especially when feminist Latinas refuse
to take the academic status quo as the norm for their theoretical practice.
I also think that we don’t understand the extent to which the university
continues to reinscribe enlightenment norms through its definition of the
proper object of knowledge and study. Both Spivak and Alarcón have
been writing about the significance of the native informant to the formation of the enlightenment subject. Spivak has argued that there isn’t any
room in the enlightenment university for perceiving the knowledge production of the “native informant.” But Alarcón says something different
—and I think cultural studies has a lot to learn from her. She says that
while the position ascribed to a woman of color with the economy of
knowledge leaves “her” silent, unknown, she nevertheless produces
knowledge that she struggles to articulate precisely because the terms of
knowledge production have been defined through a discourse that can’t
imagine “her” as thinking, much less speaking, or acting. Now it seems to
me that cultural studies, done well, as it has been by people like Michelle
Habell-Pallán for example, has begun to construct the tools to get at the
problematic Norma describes. And that is really unsettling to disciplinary
formations because it promises to critique the very foundation of knowledge making, knowledge institutionalizing, knowledge canonizing. That’s
why wily administrators, like those that Angie Chabram-Dernersesian described in her introduction to the issue of Cultural Studies, are attempting to solidify cultural studies approaches that will eliminate the possibilities for radical project. People seem willing to take cultural studies if it
proposes a kind of “resistance-lite”—the cynical formulation that Eve
Sedgwick noted years ago: “kinda subversive; kinda hegemonic.” So it
doesn’t seem all that wise to just embrace cultural studies as the alternative to disciplinarity.
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That’s why it’s good to notice the work of certain practitioners whose
work has been very influential in a positive way—Paul Gilroy’s or George
Lipsitz’s or Hazel Carby’s for example. Still I think it remains true that
some cultural studies practitioners continue to duplicate “the same”—
that is, the objects of their study have changed slightly but the field of references they’re willing to draw from has not. And for them things still look
pretty much the same—it’s the same basic map. For me there is a big difference between this practice of cultural studies and a Chicana feminist
cultural studies which is a practice that is attentive to race, gender, and
sexuality and another kind of mapping. As Chicana feminists, I think we
need to be attentive to the way that we can be disciplined by methodologies. We have to figure out ways to navigate the blind spots inherent to the
habits we learn from academic work. In some ways, I think people have
tried to get at these blind spots by working between the edges of disciplines, snatching things from them, then running out.
Emma Pérez
I don’t think that Chicana/o studies and Chicana/o cultural studies are
the same thing, but I wish they were. In fact, I really wish there were more
Chicana/o cultural studies. Some people feel that it’s already assuming a
hegemony, but I wish people would acknowledge cultural studies more.
That would be so exciting to me. Social scientists are still so trapped by
their quantitative measuring. They fail to recognize that they themselves
have borrowed from some other kind of narrative that’s already been constructed for them. So I think that in Chicana/o studies there’s been this
knee jerk reaction against too much study of culture. People say, let’s hire
a sociologist who’s going to do demographic studies for us because we
need to know these kinds of answers about immigration and only by hiring a social scientist will we understand it. (Never mind understanding
the ideologies and the repetition of rhetoric around immigration that
needs to be examined as well.) So, to answer your question, no I don’t
think Chicana/o cultural studies, cultural studies, and Chicana/o studies
are the same thing. Clearly, I want for us to train more Chicana/o cultural
critics!
David Román
One of the great things about the cultural studies movement is that it’s not
just about locating one particular kind of archive or one particular set of
identities that you will then put forward as the object of analysis. Rather,
cultural studies makes itself available to cross-disciplinary analysis, interdisciplinary analysis; it’s not about compartmentalization. All of the Ethnic studies, Women’s studies, and critical race studies can be viewed as a
part of the cultural studies movement because cultural studies is about
opening up analysis, not about shutting down; it’s about making possibility, not foreclosing. But it’s not as if cultural studies itself were beyond reproach; it’s not as if it can’t be critiqued, dissected, or held accountable for
its history or the work it does.
Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez
I’ll answer this question in terms of my recently published book. In Border
Visions you see a different view of the perennial search for cultural place
and space and of the creativity and struggles of the Mexican population of
the U.S. This view follows very broad sweeps of development beginning
with pre-European periods and ending with the present. This view also articulates my own personal struggle to go beyond the confines of borders
and disciplines, particularly, Anthropology and Chicano studies. It is likely
that there will be an attempt to pigeonhole it as one or the other, but it is
really both. You could say that this work is driven by Chicano studies engines and experimental ethnography.
I’m really interested in comparative work—I think it’s the future. So it’s
not surprising that I’ve connected with black cultural studies. What I’ve
really enjoyed is the overt presence of issues of sexuality and race in this
work. Having said that I don’t think I’m trying to subsume Chicana studies into cultural studies. By this I mean that there’s an important conjuncture and dialogue going on that invigorates my work with those Chicana
lesbian texts that have shaped my critical practice and consciousness.
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Alejandra Elenes
In terms of the differences between early Chicano studies and cultural
studies, I think that the key element is how the notion of identity is developed. In early Chicano studies people were more tied into a Marxist tradition and an essentialist (modernist) notion of identity and subjectivity. In
order to be a Chicano, you’d have to be “abcd.” This analysis was also tied
to a narrow focus of race and ethnicity in contrast to what we see today.
One of the fears that people have now is that scholars have gravitated to
cultural studies and have redefined cultural studies from the inside (of
Chicana/o studies). So that a lot of the major works in the field of Chicana/o studies are very cultural studies focused. I’m very much into cultural studies—and I want to push it—because it has good things to offer,
but I am also in favor of a (Chicana/o studies) discipline that is multifaceted. I am also aware of the fact that whenever you focus too much on one
area (cultural studies), others might suffer. You have to understand that
there’s also a “real” fear that those who continue to struggle toward the development of Ethnic studies, Women’s studies, Chicana/o studies, might
get erased under what is perceived to be an “anglo-gringo” (white) theoretical construction (cultural studies). This fear exists even though cultural studies itself has a working class tradition and an alternative race and
class component.
Unfortunately this too has been erased, it’s not recognized as one of
cultural studies major creative contributions. People even say to me: How
can someone in education be involved in cultural studies? They don’t
know that some of the original works in cultural studies focused on
schools. I don’t think it’s that people are paranoid in terms of their fear:
everywhere we see the process of erasure in U.S. academies.
Ramón García
For me personally and intellectually, there’s no difference between Chicana/o cultural studies and cultural studies. What I’m interested in writing
about and understanding is the reality that I see, which happens to include
emerging cultural formations and popular cultural references from Mexico and North America. I think that institutionally there’s a great difference between cultural studies and Chicana/o studies which involves a lot
of power and politics, and difficult dialogue. Where this is going to go remains to be seen. From another angle, I think that many of the scholars
working in cultural studies are at the forefront of Chicana/o studies. These
people in Chicana/o and Latino cultural studies are introducing new
themes, new interests, new objects of study; radical critiques of what came
before; and a significant self-criticism—all of these things are necessary to
move Chicana/o studies forward. That shouldn’t bother us; we must postulate new things that later on we can critique.
In terms of the contribution of Chicana/o cultural studies to cultural
studies in general, I think Chicana/o cultural studies brings in a more serious international perspective, which is my one hesitancy and difficulty
with an American cultural studies that is based on the Birmingham–Stuart Hall model. My hesitancy is that its sensibility, its style of writing, and
its objects of study are very Anglo-centered, very North American or British. I think that’s why I’ve looked toward Carlos Monsiváis who is much
more playful in his style of writing. He speaks of Mexican popular culture
as an international culture. That probably comes out of his own intellectual place. I hope that Chicana/o cultural studies will bring in a little bit of
playfulness and that it will make American cultural studies more international in its sensibility—not so Anglo-Saxon. José Saldívar’s work is significant here because he speaks about American cultural studies as the
“Américas,” as inclusive of the Latin American. There’s a real dismantling
of American national borders in that sense.
Certainly Latinas/os aren’t the only racialized minority cultures, so we
have a lot to learn from the history of African Americans, Asian Americans, Armenian Americans, and people who have been othered within
American culture and in the new neoliberal world order. There’s no reason why work from another location wouldn’t be applicable to a Chicana/o culture, if the situation warrants it. What happened in nationalism
is that there was an appropriation of Mexican modernism, in terms of
“heroes and great events,” but this did not have a very wide resonance
with the community at large. What would have happened if Chicanos had
appropriated the myths of modern Mexico? Particularly those that disrupted male heroism: the movie stars like María Félix, Isela Vega, and
Irma Serrano “La tigresa.” I know what would have happened—nationalism would have been radically sexual, feminist, and something fundamentally disruptive. But would it have been nationalism? That’s where we
are at, at the question of appropriation, revision, and imaginative construction.
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Aída Hurtado
I don’t see the mission of cultural studies and Chicana/o studies as fundamentally different. I see both fields as dovetailing into each other to create
even a more incisive analysis of our lived experience.
To me the value of the initial impetus for the discipline of Chicana/o
studies was a material basis for our academic production. I hate to be a
crass Marxist but this basis had to do with mobilizing farm workers to
unionize for a decent wage and better working conditions such as fighting
against the use of pesticides that got into their lungs. It was as simple as
that. And that surely was my motivation for learning more about our history and showing that we had something valuable to say. If we were to
achieve social justice, I’m not sure that I would continue to be an academic. [Obviously that’s not going to happen within my lifetime, so I
don’t have to worry about that!] It is from that historical/materialist position that I value or do not value academic production. For example, I read
a lot of queer studies but I read them from the position of “Will this help
me understand in a concrete way why some people get decent jobs and
many people do not?” “Will these readings help me understand why some
people get to eat and many others do not?” Many times these readings do
help me answer these very difficult questions but the onus is on me to do
very hard intellectual work to see the connections between what is being
theorized and social action. And sometimes these readings do not help me
at all—they are simply intellectual masturbation. So the challenge is to
distinguish between intellectual production, whether it’s cultural studies
or any other kind of intellectual production, that advances the initial goal
of Chicana/o studies for social justice—not only for our group but also
for all oppressed people.
We are living at this incredibly exciting moment in history. Part of the
excitement is that we [those of us who work in Chicana/o studies, feminist
studies, cultural studies, and any other progressive intellectual areas] don’t
have a definitive statement on how to achieve social justice. To me that’s
the beauty of cultural studies. That’s what I get attracted to—the sense of
instability and the constant reconfiguration to the point of driving you
nuts. Some people might say, “Let’s get real, we’ve had these shifts before.”
But many of the previous analyses and disruption of categories were contingent on one group being dominant over another. [It didn’t matter if
they were leftist or whatever.] What we’re trying to do is rupture the lan-
guage and rupture the categories. That’s what cultural studies do best. We
are trying to figure out how the hell we are going to coexist without domination—that’s the ultimate goal.
I see my work participating in cultural studies as well as in Chicana/o
studies. But I like to qualify this by saying that I’m also trying to make interventions within the Black British tradition of cultural studies. [You can
see this in “Cultural Theory in the Borderlands” chapter where I talk about
“the Birmingham battle” for “making cultural studies more than just a
white thing” and about my desire to encourage further comparative research in mass and popular culture.]
Some of our colleagues object to this type of intervention and claim
that we are “ruining” Ethnic studies and Chicana/o studies by going to
cultural studies, but this is a misinformed critique. What I remind them of
is that we’re reinvigorating Chicana/o and Ethnic studies because we’re
going back to roots and routes that are social and sociological and Marxist
in nature. And I remind them that we’re making important connections
with radical international scholars of color—people like Stuart Hall, Paul
Gilroy, Kobena Mercer, and other key figures—that have made important
contributions in the area of race, nationality, and national culture. Finally,
I make it a point to emphasize the fact that the international cultural studies movement is an ongoing discursive formation, with multiple routes
and no simple origin; and that there is much to be gained by newly articulated Chicana/o cultural studies practices. . . . By the way, I just wanted to
congratulate you, Angie, on your publication, The Chicana/o Cultural
Studies Reader. I had the privilege of reading the introduction. I think this
type of project is extremely important for continuing the dialogue about
cultural studies within Chicana/o studies and beyond. This type of intellectual outreach is the effect of the kind of work we are trying to do. I also
think that this is an extremely important moment for bringing together
not only what happened in the nineties, but also what we hope to see happen in the next decade in cultural studies and Chicana/o studies.
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Alicia Arrizón
Performance studies such as the ones I do on Chicana Latina artists really
enhance the whole theoretical spectrum of cultural studies; they are really
connected. But I think that in Chicana/o studies, it is not only performance studies that have contributed to the growth of cultural studies.
There are great books, videos, theories, and artistic practices that have
done so as well. I also think that we need to acknowledge that there are
different perspectives in Chicana/o studies, namely: not everyone is open
to cultural studies.
There’s a whole group of artists and critics saying that they are striving
for our original voice so “abajo con los discursos extranjeros” (“down with
the foreign discourses”), including poststructuralism, feminism, cultural
studies, and theory. I think that we really need to keep an open mind and
to remain open to new perspectives. I’m not concerned about authenticity; we need to acknowledge the fact that we are neocolonized people who
are communicating in English. (We aren’t writing in Spanish or in the indigenous languages.) Our discourse is a very contaminated one.
I think that the kinds of contradictions we experience as neocolonized
people need to be confronted and evaluated. Once we negotiate them, we
can only make Chicana/o studies stronger. I also think we have to internationalize our studies—open the doors! I also think we need to accept that
there are going to be other people who will be doing Chicana/o studies
that are not Chicanas/os or Latinas/os. Chicana/o studies can grow, but it
needs to be open to negotiating growth.
Richard Chabrán
A clear difference between Chicana/o studies and cultural studies is cultural studies’ refusal to be contained within a discipline or to view itself in
this institutional form, while Chicana/o studies has always fought to be
viewed as a discipline and as a separate institutional space. Back in the
early seventies, I started out in Anthropology because I immediately recognized the dearth of intellectual space devoted to minorities. I mistakenly
assumed that as a discipline devoted to the study of culture, Anthropology
would embrace the kind of search I had in mind. The reality that several
of us Chicana/o undergraduates found was that this was not the case. We
battled several faculty who always positioned Mexicans as the Other. It
was clear to us that the more traditional faculty never had confronted the
native in their classes so they could say whatever they wanted to in class.
Then all of a sudden as a result of the political struggle, they had to deal
with us. Pobrecitos. (Poor things!) It was at this moment of challenge that
we fought for a separate institutional space for Chicano studies. That’s
when I helped develop The Chicana/o studies library at UC Berkeley. The
Chicano Periodical Indexing project grew out of this collection project.
(This was the basis for the Chicano Periodical Index and later the Chicano
Database.) A key part of this project was the development of a Chicano
Thesaurus for indexing Chicano materials. It was our contention that the
terms used to describe the collection should reflect the cultural reality of
the group rather than those of the dominant society. As one example, we
refused to use such terms as illegal alien to describe Mexican immigrant
workers.
C. Ondine Chavoya
Let me talk about the relationship between Chicana/o studies and cultural
studies in terms of my experience. When I first entered the visual and cultural studies graduate program in ’92, I received some initial resistance to
focusing my research on Chicana/o art. Not long afterward, I was invited
to participate in a panel organized by a graduate student at Berkeley. This
was the first panel of its kind at the NACCS to address the future of gay
and lesbian studies in Chicana/o studies. The panelists included Yvonne
Yarbro-Bejarano, Tomás Almaguer, Cherríe Moraga, E. D. Hernández, and
myself. Earlier at the conference, Renato Rosaldo had given a keynote address in which he was encouraging us to continue our work in the field of
cultural studies. For some reason, although I was in the middle of that
kind of work at the time at the University of Rochester, I felt that there
was a difference between cultural studies and Chicana/o studies. Remember, I came to Chicana/o studies through cultural studies.
At the University of Rochester I was being told, “You didn’t come here
to do Chicana/o studies, you came to do the program in visual and cultural studies.” One of the fears I had at the time of the NACCS Conference
was that there were these divisions that were being set up under the idea
that there are acceptable limits and unacceptable areas. Under this idea
[Chicana/o art] didn’t fit within the purview of cultural studies. I just
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wanted to remind people on that panel at the NACCS that so much of the
interdisciplinary foundation of cultural studies was coming to the U.S. via
England, and that the battles that had been fought to establish and invigorate Ethnic studies—and its challenge of traditional theories and methods
—had the potential to be displaced or subsumed within this broader cultural studies rubric. So that was a concern that I already had in ’92.
Something else happened at that same NACCS in San José that is relevant here for my connection to this new formation of Chicana/o cultural
studies. On our panel, we had just spent about forty minutes with these
blockbuster critics—Cherríe Moraga and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano—who
were outlining strategies for continuing our work in gay and lesbian studies within Chicana/o studies. I remember that the room was packed. [Yes,
in many ways, this panel was a historic event!] But one of the first concerns that was raised by a young undergraduate was, “I didn’t know you
existed in our community, I thought only white people were gay.” This situation brings up an important point: I think that these are the types of experiential questions that are better or more adequately addressed in that
bridge between Chicana/o studies and cultural studies, or within what we
call Chicana/o cultural studies.
George Mariscal
One way to talk about the difference between Chicano and cultural studies
is by recognizing that within early Chicano Movement literature foundational narratives were very powerful. I’ve been teaching courses on the
movement and in many texts by Reies López Tijerina there is a race-based
notion of the land, of the chosen people, that is very strong. I think that if
we don’t keep a check on this type of identity construction, there’s a very
potential to be exclusionary in a way we should be struggling against. The
irony of Tijerina is that despite his attempts at coalition building with African American groups he often displayed hostility to recent Mexicano immigrants because they were not Hispanos indigenous to the Southwest. In
the Chicano Movement there was a strategic need to go back to the indigenous past. But already in the 80s Alurista was talking about the fact
that this type of a claim was a tactical tool he was using to galvanize the
community. So I think that foundational narratives have their role but
only provisionally. Once they get frozen in time, they have this potential to
be exclusionary.
A historicized cultural studies will also show us the contradictions inherent in any identity that claims to be authentic. The study of contradiction is part of that Marxist component that one finds in the original cultural studies’ model. You know, the line from Marx through Gramsci to
Raymond Williams. I don’t want to let go of this tradition. I find it to be
very useful as an analytical tool. The other thing I always come back to
when reflecting on the importance of this cultural studies’ tradition is the
fact that Raymond Williams himself started doing night classes for working class people. To some extent his project was about working class identity and about understanding class conflict and the role culture plays in
that struggle.
I would hope that the work we do in Chicano cultural studies continues to have some resonance with that early project of Chicano studies
going out to disenfranchised communities. [This is why I quote Pablo
Friere at the end of my article.] If Chicano cultural studies loses that
type of outreach, then I think that we are no better than any other established academic discipline. For me a politically engaged Chicano/a
cultural studies project would not only encourage outreach; it would
also turn its analytical tools toward examining the ways in which academic programs created thirty years ago by mass social movements, for
example, Chicano studies, are now participating in market structures
and reproducing corporate values. This takes place in an academic context where Latino youth are denied access to university education or are
tracked into low-tech futures or prison. California Proposition 21 passed
in March 2000 makes prison a much more likely scenario for many.
Tenured Chicano/a faculty who enjoy a generalized class privilege ought
to be attentive to hierarchies of labor within the university. Vasconcelos’s
notion of making the university work for the community is largely forgotten and so is Williams’s idea that cultural studies practitioners need
to share their knowledge with people who don’t read, write, and think
for a living. Our scholarship must be accessible to other communities.
That’s the idea that I had in mind when I wrote the book, Aztlán and
Viet Nam, which was a compendium of testimonios of veteranos and
anti-war activists about our community’s experience of the war. This
had never been done before and the feedback I’ve gotten from veterans
and family members has been worth more to me than anything the university could have ever given me. If five people in East L.A. read the
book that’s more important to me than if five academics write a review
of this book.
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Doing this book also meant breaking down the traditional concept of
“the literary” and including what some people might consider to be “bad”
poetry. It meant parting with the old notion of the aesthetic and looking
for the historical and sociological value of these documents.
Rosa Linda Fregoso
I think that perhaps the new social formation of Chicana/o (cultural)
studies intersects with cultural studies in a much more productive way
than the old Chicano paradigms, which were very vertical. They assumed
that we were all working class in origin, instead of saying we were working
class in solidarity. This was supposed to guarantee our politics.
Initially, I was reflecting on the paradigms of the older generation, but I
see these problematic trends with the younger people too in Ethnic studies
who are claiming a modified version of the vertical Chicano studies
model. This model looks at race in a very essentialist way. So now, they’ve
got all the people of color grouped together, because here you don’t look
at gender, you don’t look at sexuality. This is a race theory, and the paradigm is still very vertical. When you really get down to it, this is very antithetical to the cultural studies project. Because cultural studies is about all
kinds of oppressions and all kinds of social transformations. That’s our
world and that’s our work! The more contradictions you find, the more
you’ve got to struggle around. I mean, I’m not tired of it. Dále más. (Go
for it/Step on it). There are more things to think about now, and si te
aburres de uno (if you get bored with one), you go on to another one.
I also want to add that I think it’s important to be strategic in terms of
our citation practices because Chicanas/os have had such a hard time
coming into theoretical discourse. If I can find a Chicana/o that says the
same thing as Stuart Hall, I like to quote her or him. I also think it’s important to muddle the discourse up, to dirty it up, you know. Meter a las
rasquachis (put in the poor, the downtrodden, the marginalized) there
también (too)—put us in there too. You know what I mean? In my work I
like to write about films that nobody would write about, except people in
the independent community. But this is not about any kind of essentialist
belief that the Chicana/o perspective is better, or that it is more lucid. It’s
about the fact that I’m committed to muddling up the canon, to complicating it. There are people who don’t have any institutional clout, but have
similar perspectives to influential critics in cultural studies. If I can quote
my mother—if my mother’s saying something very similar to Kristeva—
well then I’ll quote my mother. It’s all very strategic.
As far as the end of innocence that Stuart Hall talked about, I think I
finally got it through to my Chicano film students when speaking about
post-Movement film. We are in a stage where we don’t have to be perfect
for white people. We can talk about our contradictions, talk about what’s
wrong with Chicanas/os, and talk about it publicly. It’s like airing dirty
laundry. This is a discussion among ourselves. If white people are listening
in, who cares? When you keep all the dirty laundry inside, you’re never
gonna talk about the shit. I think maybe that’s what Angie ChabramDernersesian was relating to when she talked about the end of innocence
of the Chicano subject. And I think Chicana feminists broke the ground
on this because they began to air the dirty laundry in the 70s and 80s.
Mike Soldatenko
Cultural studies and early Chicano studies were trying to move beyond
the academic world. They were trying to be political in the real world as
well as trying to do an intellectual task. I don’t know if the institution can
allow you to do that or if it perverts this process by institutionalizing a relationship with the outside or negating it completely. How does one deal
with that constraint? I mean, how do we struggle against that given what
we do for a living? As a professor who needs to get tenure, I think it’s very
difficult to engage this work as a social responsibility “action.” Most likely
you’ll be defined as polemical and not a true academic because the academy doesn’t want us to engage this social responsibility actively. But as
Chicanas/os who do cultural studies and who work in two realms our task
is to enforce this social responsibility within the academy. We need to assume and to enforce this responsibility as intellectuals and as human beings and be accountable to the world around us.
I have to admit that by nature I’m pessimistic, but given the environment that exists within the current academic institution today, years after I
wrote the article I’m even more so. I think the move against affirmative action—which is probably going to be followed up by the attack against
Ethnic and probably Women’s studies—has made it difficult to engage in
these types of Chicana/o cultural studies discussions and practices. How
can we do this work effectively when we are not able to reproduce ourselves as a critical mass within the academic institutions where these de-
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bates (around cultural studies as an interventionist practice) are going to
occur?
I think we forget how special that period of time was between the late
60s and maybe mid-80s, when there were intellectual openings that came
about as a result of the fracturing of the academic institution. This was
when Blacks, Browns, Natives, and Asians entered the institution, and
when new perspectives could come to the fore. We could even criticize the
very nature of science itself. All that is now being retracted, which makes a
critical position within the institution so much more difficult to sustain.
When I look at the decline in numbers, then the need to accept empirical
approach to survive, I become very pessimistic as a historian about what
our future is going to be. And again, maybe this returns us to that point:
Part of our success in the academy was the existence of a civil rights movement—or whatever you want to call it—existing outside the academy.
And not only a Chicano civil rights movement, because if anything stood
out from the demonstrations against 187 in California it’s that if we don’t
have cross-ethnic and cross-racial alliances, it makes it very difficult to
force society in general to do any type of reform. Our intellectual survival
depends on what’s going on in the outside world.
Renato Rosaldo
Some of my published work relates to the question. The first incarnation
of my essay, “Whose Cultural Studies?” (American Anthropologist: 1994),
was delivered at the MLA. This essay addressed some of the tensions between area studies (such as Chicana/o studies) and cultural studies. What I
was trying to get at there was why scholars of color should have a prominent place in the discussions about cultural studies. I geared my comments to a dual audience: it was my position that there should be a prominent role for scholars of color as well as for anthropologists within cultural studies. My feeling was that we can moan and groan about people
stepping on our feet, but there’s an opening in cultural studies to be at
center stage and to be in the big tent, so to speak. My thought there was
that we shouldn’t turn our backs on that opening; that what we needed to
do is to press forward. It’s like the politics of citation—we’ve got to be in
the room!
So if they are getting an analysis wrong, we have to say they’re getting it
wrong! We have to be in the room and on the panel. We have to be in a
position to have voice. It’s not enough just to be in the room. We need to
be able to speak with some authority when people are going off, so they
should be ready to meet that standard. Having said that, I do realize that
there are a lot of ownership issues among some people in Ethnic studies
who don’t want to relate to broader intellectual spaces like cultural studies. There’s also a sense that Ethnic studies can be always safeguarded and
that nothing bad will happen there. I’ll deviate a little here to illustrate my
point that this is not true.
When we were first trying to figure out how to set up Chicano studies
at Stanford in the early 70s, we went to a number of campuses, including
one in Southern California. In one program, which was housed in a temporary building, there was a lot of talk about autonomy. We noticed a certain nervousness among the people there. What we realized later was that
the faculty senate at that institution was voting on their funding that very
day. We discovered that with a certain kind of autonomy, you had total
vulnerability to be shut down. And in fact the program was shut down a
couple of years later. There you saw the importance of both being in the
big tent and of having Chicano studies. You saw the importance of having
a home place where you don’t have to explain all your assumptions and
where you could just go to the edge of where you were going; you also saw
the importance of going into the big tent once in a while. If you were totally alone, you would just be talking to yourself and not having the impact that it is possible to have.
So in my essay I thought that the thing to do was to press for being in
the room and having the authority to speak. And that was the opportunity
which cultural studies (more than any other program or field or area of
inquiry) offered. There was a possibility at least of pressing the demands
of that kind of presence and of this being recognized as being “legitimate,”
as contrasted to let’s say with an ordinary English department where the
struggle might be harder. So that’s one thing I was trying to get across in
my paper, “Whose Cultural Studies?”
Session Three
Staking the Claim
Introducing Applied Chicana/o Cultural Studies
One of the proposals that emerged from the last two sessions is the idea that
Chicana/o cultural studies is not a seamless, homogeneous formation whose
relations with other forms of social inquiry (Chicana/o studies, feminism,
cultural studies, for instance) are guaranteed in advance or etched into stone.
In the third session you’ll have the opportunity to voice yet other important
proposals as you comment at length on your own intellectual urgencies, cultural studies affiliations, practices of cultural studies, and connections to alternative and interdisciplinary sites.
The questions for this forum include: Are you a practitioner of cultural
studies? If so, how do you do cultural studies? (Or stake a claim on it?)
Yes, I do consider myself to be a practitioner of cultural studies. Growing
up I felt that “Chicana/o culture was in the music.” Maybe that’s because
of how my immediate family experienced Chicano culture. Although I
grew up in the blue-collar section of the Anglo suburb of Downey (we left
Huntington Park when I was 5), we listened to Los Angeles–based radio
stations that broadcast oldies all over L.A. County. I always say “music”
saved my life. As a teenager in the 1980s, I listened to punk, alternative, and
new wave on radio-station KROQ broadcast out of Pasadena. KROQ’s
playlist included a lot of new wave/ska music that was coming out of Britain on the Two-Tone label. This label, and the bands it recorded, had a
very strong anti-racist message—“Two-Tone” referred to the alliance of
Black and white British youth against the white supremacist British National Front. Thanks to my average public schooling, I didn’t know much
about racism in Britain, or Britain for that matter, but hearing that mes54
Staking the Claim 55
sage in the music helped me to survive the racism I confronted daily at
school, and it helped me to imagine that one day I would get to a place
where racism didn’t exist. But that message also had a large appeal to other
Chicana and Chicano kids in L.A., especially at concerts and dances. That
new wave/ska sound, to me, had a very Chicano feel to it—although at the
time, I doubt I would, or could, have articulated in that way.
When I first started graduate school I wanted to do a project on the
spoken word in music because I felt that a number of scholars didn’t take
Chicano art, Chicano popular culture, or Chicano spoken word seriously.
I felt that people in the academy didn’t feel the cultural texts I was drawn
to were important. I was studying literature, so I felt pressure that maybe
this music should be studied from an ethnographic standpoint or as cultural ritual, but not as culture in the sense of making “art” or “great art.”
Honestly, those foundational Chicano texts I read in graduate school
didn’t move me in the way that the music or the spoken word of performance art did. Those texts were so removed from my reality. Understand,
I’m a fourth generation L.A. Mexican American who grew up speaking
English. I always say that rock ’n’ roll got me through graduate school. But
I must admit that my early graduate training gave me the tools to initiate a
Chicana cultural study. Let me elaborate.
I wanted to do a critical reading of social relations, but I also wanted to
acknowledge the kinds of interventions that were being made in the artistic sphere by people who weren’t recognized as “Chicano” or by mainstream categories. I wanted to get into that intersection. A lot of the cultural production that interested me was being produced by folks who had
either never gone to college or only taken a few college classes. Cultural
studies gave me the framework I needed to examine these works because it
allowed me to talk about social relations while examining Chicano popular culture. In the field of cultural studies there is the recognition that
popular culture is important because it affects so many people and because people invest so much in it. Popular culture is part of everyday life.
Although it is often not recognized as worthy of study or funding, I feel
that if you really want to examine everyday life, you have to talk about
popular culture and how it functions in people’s lives. If you want to get to
that point where you’re truly trying to understand people’s motivations,
you have to talk about popular culture. If you are trying to figure out
where and how we are going to fight this backlash against the civil rights
movement, then you must investigate practitioners’ manipulations of
popular culture.
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Alternative/pop music is one of the few spaces where these issues are
talked about, where there’s a counterdiscourse articulated against Proposition 187 and against the way Chicanas and Chicanos have historically
lacked access to education and health care. You see all of this in El Vez,
who functions as an Elvis translation and an Elvis impersonation show.
That’s the last place you’d expect to find it, but there it is. Certain intellectuals lament the fact that we have run out of sites of struggle, that
there are no mass movements, but I think that all is not lost yet, because
I still see that spaces of opposition do exist. Performers like El Vez are
connoisseurs of mass popular culture, and they know it so well that they
can manipulate it. El Vez understands the dominant culture fantasy of
what Mexicans are—he recognizes it—but turns it upside down and critiques it. He’s not only translating for them, he’s translating for us by
playing with masculinity and identity and critiquing standard notions of
manhood.
El Vez is also important for another reason: He’s taking Chicano culture
to Europe and talking about the ways that Chicanos and Mexican immigrants in the U.S. get treated as second-class citizens or relegated to mostly
service positions, domestic positions, gardener positions; and about how
they don’t have access to health care or good education. In Europe other
racialized immigrants are living in a similar situation. You see this, for instance in Germany, where Turkish immigrant youth are really big fans of
El Vez, because they hear something that resonates in their lives. They tell
him things like “We love you. That’s just like my family when you talk
about working overtime and not getting recognition and not being considered as a full citizen, that’s how we feel in Germany.” Here, you see that
Chicanos have something to teach other people who are in similar situations. That’s what I mean when I say Chicano culture resonates with the
larger changes that are happening at the global level.
Chicano culture and cultural studies can help us to talk about the way
that Chicano culture has been at the forefront of cultural innovation. I
have noted before that a lot of these innovations are totally hidden even
when Chicanos have made it into the mainstream. Even so, we need to
recognize that we’re not just being imposed upon by the dominant U.S.
culture or by European culture—Chicano culture has changed U.S. culture too.
At another level, we’re at a really exciting moment in cultural production where the intelligentsia, the critics are meeting up with the artists and
vice versa. For instance, in the film “Pretty Vacant” filmmaker Jim Mendi-
ola writes about this Tejana “punkera,” who lives a hyphenated identity in
Texas. [Her alternative roots are in the Chicano Movement and the punk
band, the Sex Pistols—it’s a contradiction, but that’s her life.] Mendiola
was inspired by Rosa Linda Fregoso’s book, The Bronze Screen. Her critique of the way that Chicano cultural nationalism limited the kind of
subjects that could be represented by Chicano film resonated with him
and inspired him to make a different kind of film.
The Chicanas who were punks in the 80s, of whom Mendiola’s film alludes, made important cultural interventions. In a television interview
broadcast in the mid-90s, pioneer Chicana punks, Alicia Armendáriz and
Theresa Covarrubias—who then performed in their band Goddess 13—
talked about the rage that they possess and how they release it on stage. At
one point Alicia Armendáriz says, “We are the only ones talking to women
of color, we are the only ones who are speaking that point of view, and
that’s who we are.” Most of these young women were working in isolation
at the grassroots level. People, family included, were telling most of them,
“You know, you shouldn’t be doing this, Chicanos aren’t artists, Chicanas
aren’t singers in punk bands. Who are you trying to fool?” So it took them
many years to get rid of that junk.
The fact that Chicana feminist cultural studies scholarship provides
such a valuable kind of imaginary community that is supportive of Chicanas and other women of color has made a huge difference for many of
us. I wonder how the lives of these artists would’ve changed if they had
run into supportive women, if they had possessed an imaginary community? Who knows if they could have changed the art world or the pop-music scene? Who knows what they could have done if somebody would’ve
just supported them?
In my own case, as an inexperienced graduate student seeking inspiration, I can remember going to the library at UC San Diego and looking for
anything by a Chicana or a Mexican American woman that dealt with alternative or punk music. Finally, it was Chicana/o cultural studies, and my
participation in the Women of Color Research Cluster at UC Santa Cruz,
that got me through graduate school. I remember that issue Angie
Chabram and Rosa Linda did for Cultural Studies, and the articles they
wrote on Chicana feminism. I loved what they were doing, how they were
trying to give a larger context to progressive movements. That fact that
there was a Chicana cultural studies project out there made it easier for
me to initiate the kind of work I wanted to do. It was as if I had finally
gone to the library and found that article on the women.
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David Román
I’m drawn to cultural studies but I believe we need to put pressure on the
“cultural” and not just the “studies” part of the “cultural studies” term. I
think that cultural studies should be heavily invested in a wide range of
cultural productions including theatre, performance, and ritual. For
someone who works on the performing arts like me, it’s really critical to
see cultural studies facilitate a discussion between cultural studies scholars
and cultural producers—particularly artists. I’m also drawn to the political histories behind cultural studies, including the critical methodologies
that have shaped it. But what’s most immediately appealing to me is the
possibility of working with people who actually make culture happen.
That’s the part of cultural studies I’m most committed to. I think that if
we’re going to be talking about cultural studies we need to make sure that
we have space in that conversation to imagine artists as cultural producers
who are critical to the larger project of cultural studies itself.
I also think that cultural studies needs to be self-consciously aware of
its political communities. Cultural studies is about making the work relevant to the people who live in the communities addressed. It’s not like the
old Anthropology, where the relationship between the scholar and the
community under question was never questioned. Instead, it’s about a
mutually reciprocal relationship with the subjects of study, that is to say,
the communities in which we live. For me, the most influential figure in
cultural studies has been Raymond Williams. His work provides a model
for my own interest in identifying cultural sites of possibility, cultural sites
of hope. In his important book, Modern Tragedy, Williams had a lot to say
about the possibilities of theater. In Modern Tragedy, he launched an engaged political critique of the social world that still holds today, and he
saw the theater playing a crucial role in shaping 20th-century thought. I
too share that belief in the theater. His work taught me that theater can
transform the way we experience tragedy, or, as he would say, the experience of the modern world. Despite the danger and despair of modernity,
hope is within the realm of the possible—“We must speak for hope, as
long as it doesn’t mean suppressing the nature of the danger.” Tragedy is
not inevitable; there are always degrees of agency. For me, cultural studies
is about identifying these degrees of agency. Cultural studies is a dynamic
methodology available to a diverse range of people to use for their own intellectual and political community-building projects.
In terms of my contributions to cultural studies, I guess you could say
that I’m trying to open up the conversations that Chicana/o scholars have
launched in order to address other Latina/o immigrant communities in
the United States. While I work on Chicana/o culture, I’m also involved in
comparative pan-Latino perspectives. I’m also part of a larger intellectual
movement that emerged in the late 80s and early 90s and started introducing the question of sexuality into Chicana/o studies in a serious manner.
Queer theory challenged some of the assumptions of progressive cultural
critiques of American culture, done by people in Ethnic studies, Women’s
studies, and American studies, broadly conceived, and opened up a new
way of thinking about the history of sexuality.
The third way I’m contributing to cultural studies is through theater
studies. Actually, I’m a second-generation theater historian. Jorge Huerta,
Nicolas Kanellos, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano were among the first generation to seriously address the works of Chicana/o playwrights and performers. When I came into the scene of Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies, they’d already set the stage, establishing the bibliographies that we’d be
looking at and the critical methods we would be using to address those
works. I see myself as part of a next generation of critics who are indebted
to their work but also building upon it. I write on other performers that
haven’t been discussed before, and I examine some of the more established
works in new ways. You can see this new sensibility in my essay on “Teatro
Viva.” Let me talk a bit about the trajectory of the essay, then, I’ll focus on
the content.
“Teatro Viva” was published as part of my book on AIDS and performance [Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS], but it
was initially commissioned for an anthology by Emilie L. Bergmann and
Paul Julian Smith called ¿Entiendes?: Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings
that were also part of a conference held at UC Berkeley a few years before. This anthology looked primarily at Hispanic and Latin American
works. When Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano and I were invited to contribute
to the collection, we decided to focus on queer U.S. Latina/o and Chicana/o works, a group that hadn’t really been critically engaged at any
length in the past. We wanted to make sure that some of the Chicana/o
archives of the United States would be reexamined in the context of this
larger thing called “Hispanic” writings and this new methodology called
“Queer Theory.”
Often when I think about my participation in anthologies, I see myself
representing multiple voices; I’m not only the Latino voice or the queer
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voice, often I’m also the theater and performance voice in the anthology.
In my essay for ¿Entiendes? I wanted to highlight the fact that the kinds of
energies that people were drawn to in the earlier years of the Chicano
Movement were still evident in contemporary grassroots cultural productions, in this case, this collective in L.A. called Teatro Viva, which translates
as “Live Theater” or “Theater Life.” Concretely, I wanted to show how
some of the politics and aesthetics of Teatro Campesino, and other foundational arts of the Chicano Movement, were still viable as a means of addressing contemporary issues, in this case issues concerning sexuality and
AIDS. The fact that Teatro Viva used the Teatro Campesino model actually
signaled to the Chicano community that this kind of community-based
performance had a history and that this history was inextricably linked to
the community’s survival.
If I had to critique contemporary Chicana/o cultural studies my concern would be that it sometimes overly invests in the traditional archives
of Chicano culture. In the process of establishing the importance of Chicano and Latino culture, a limited canon has emerged and taken shape. I
find this ironic, especially since one of the guiding impulses of Chicano
literary and cultural studies was to challenge the idea of an exclusive
canon in the first place. There are so many interesting artists and writers
out there doing really good work. I always tell graduate students to direct
more of their energies to these new emerging artists. This was how I was
able to enter the field. I looked at people who hadn’t been looked at before. In this sense, my work follows the model of the generation before
me. A number of those of us in theater and performance studies who have
been integrated into the larger Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies projects focus on expanding the archives of the field. If you consider Yvonne
Yarbro-Bejarano’s career, for example, you’ll see that it is based on examining artists that haven’t been studied before. Because of Yvonne’s contribution, scholars are now interested in Cherrie Moraga’s theater in a way
that they weren’t before. Sure, people knew of Moraga’s essays and other
projects, and people wrote and taught these works, but Yvonne was among
the first to seriously address Moraga as a playwright. I think that contribution is critical. And, of course, Yvonne continues to write on Moraga’s theater. The University of Texas published her book which focuses on Moraga’s recent work for the theater. Another case in point is Jorge Huerta.
The work that he discusses in Necessary Theater: Six Plays About the Chicano Experience and Chicana/o Theater: Themes and Forms was new at the
time he was writing those books.
I think each generation can talk back to the archives that already exist;
but I also think the challenge for the new generation is to do some fieldwork of their own and ask: Who’s out there now? At this point in time,
Luis Alfaro is now a considerable force in Latina/o studies. Most people
now know who he is. He has a growing bibliography on his work. We
might ask now: What other work has Luis’s work enabled? Who are the
other voices out there that are following his work or talking back to it? In
terms of queer Latino playwrights, there’s wonderful new work being done
by a new group of gay male writers, including Jorge Cortinas, Ricardo Bracho, Nilo Cruz, and a new generation of performers, including Felix Pire,
Tony Valenzuela, and Paul Timothy Díaz.
I also think that the issue of self-critique is very important to this generation of cultural studies critics. This is a very sensitive issue. It’s not as if
Chicana/o or Latina/o cultural studies aren’t vulnerable sites of cultural
production—in fact, they are embattled sites. Many people still question
the viability of Latino studies and more broadly, Ethnic studies in general.
We need to reflect on the politics of critiquing work that is already marginalized in the academy or work that is thought of as not completely up
to par. Nonetheless, one of the things that José David Saldívar and Héctor
Calderón were able to do in Criticism in the Borderlands was to reintroduce ideological critique as a viable form of cultural criticism and as the
place where Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies needed to go. They encouraged us to start doing this kind of direct critique, even if it meant
questioning certain writers that we loved or that seemed to be very important to us. I think that along with other folks in the field, they really did
launch a moment where we were able to be more self-critical of the work
that came before including works of criticism.
Given this base, I felt that I could participate in that project by pointing
out some of the limitations of this anthology. I don’t think the omission of
this area was overt on the part of the editors or that the editors felt that
there wasn’t a place for queer work in the field. I think it was more a matter that those of us, who were doing queer studies, weren’t part of this
larger conversation around Chicano studies cultural critique at that time.
My criticism of the anthology was meant to introduce a conversation that
is now central to Chicano and Latino studies.
Things are different in reference to Chicana feminism. I think it’s important to point out that Chicana/o studies has had a space for Chicana
feminist cultural critique for a longer time. Partially that’s because of the
power of the writings anthologized in This Bridge Called My Back and the
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intensity of the writings of Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. In some
ways, their works are inextricable from the larger project of Chicana/o cultural studies. Both have emerged as among the most important Chicana
writers of the past two decades. Still, the conversation around their work
usually focuses on the issue of gender, sort of along the lines of “here are
some interesting women writers.” When the scholarly conversation shifts
to a focus on lesbianism, a topic central to Cherrie and to Gloria’s work
and one that they themselves are immediate to voice, it usually is as a kind
of descriptive and not as a politic. That’s why it’s still been important for
queer Latinas to foreground the issue of sexuality.
There are also important differences in the type of social critique that
emerges from contemporary Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies. I think
that the new generation is not necessarily working from the “additive
model” approach, where race, class, gender, and sexuality, for example, are
considered in isolation or as an addition to some already understood subjectivity presumed to be normative. Instead there’s been a paradigm shift
in how we imagine identity and subjectivity in the wake of multiculturalism. The new generation saw these categories as a matrix for social analysis
to be studied in relation to each other and not in isolation. Those of us
who embody these multiple identities know that they are often in competition with one another and that it’s never an “either/or” situation. To live
this multiplicity of identities involves a way of being in the world that can’t
be compartmentalized as easy as theory might suggest. So I’m drawn to
work that’s able to articulate this or perform this or bring it into visibility.
As for me, I would like to see the field of Chicana/o Latina/o cultural
studies critically examine the AIDS epidemic from the multiple disciplines
that comprise the field. I know that we all have our own issues that are important, that we feel should be the field’s priority, but my own personal interest falls here. People might wonder why AIDS ought to be prioritized
over issues of health care and/or citizenship, but, as far as I am concerned,
all these issues are interconnected. And it’s not as if other people outside
of academia haven’t taken note of what’s going on. Among political leaders of communities of color we do see people, such as California’s Congresswoman Maxine Waters, organizing to recognize the crisis state of
HIV in Black communities. We’re also seeing this advocacy among the
Latina/o representatives who lobbied Clinton to provide more funding for
Black and Latino communities, both in terms of HIV prevention and
treatment. But Chicana/o Latina/o intellectuals have not been addressing
this. There was a great essay published in Differences, the feminist journal,
in 1989, entitled “Silences: ‘Hispanics,’ AIDS, and Sexual Practices,” that
served as a springboard for my own work on Latinos and AIDS. Still, few
people in Latino studies seriously address AIDS in their work.
It’s the same in Women’s studies, where you see a lack of attention to
these issues despite the fact that HIV infections and fatalities among
women are at really high rates. Feminist scholars such as Cindy Patton and
Paula Treichler, who were among the first intellectuals of any gender to
write on AIDS, have done a tremendous job in helping us think through
these issues, but more work still needs to be done. For me, the most important book on AIDS and race is Cathy Cohen’s new book, The Boundaries of Blackness. This work focuses on HIV in African American communities.
In my opinion, the lack of attention to AIDS in area studies is striking,
given that women and people of color now comprise the new demographics of AIDS/HIV in this country. I actually don’t understand this omission.
In part, that’s why I take issue with Criticism in the Borderlands, an otherwise amazing book that is truly significant historically, on a number of
levels. Nonetheless it had its limitations. In “Teatro Viva: Latino Performance and Politics of AIDS in Los Angeles,” I critiqued the volume’s omissions and asked the following questions: “What does it mean that homosexuality isn’t addressed in the essays of this volume?” “What does it mean
that AIDS isn’t included among the social issues addressed by the anthology?” “How can Latino studies engage these topics?” This was in 1991,
when we were already seeing how AIDS was moving directly into communities of color. For me, the questions were, and remain: When and where
do we begin to intervene as intellectuals? How can we make our work
matter in the public sphere?
Aída Hurtado
Yes, I’m into cultural studies. What I do is take the proposals of U.S.-based
American feminists, Third World feminists, and Chicana feminists and
say, “OK, if we are serious about social change, how are we going to accomplish it?” Ultimately, I’m interested in figuring out how I can convince
my readers, intellectually that is, that feminist proposals are doable.
I’m trained as a social psychologist, but my work is really the psychology of the social. In fact, for me personally, the only purpose of scholar-
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ship is social action. If we had an equitable society, if we had racial and
economic justice, I would not be an intellectual. This does not mean, however, that I fail to recognize that as an intellectual, I’m extremely privileged. I have been afforded certain opportunities that others do not get. I
know how to read and analyze, and I have a contribution to make. But ultimately, if academic production is not linked to social change, I will have
failed to make a contribution.
Because of my working-class background I never had a “plan” for my
academic career. I still do not have a “trajectory” mapped out for what I
am going to write next. My intellectual production is largely a result of a
confluence of different forces that most of the time appears to be random.
This was the case with my book, The Color of Privilege. I had no plan to
write this book. It came together while I was a visiting professor at the
University of Michigan. At that point, I had written two out of the four
chapters in essay form but I could not publish them anywhere. Nobody
wanted them. Both essays had been rejected by Women’s studies journals
as well as by Ethnic studies journals. [Part of it was because many journals
did not understand where I was coming from]. When I was in Michigan, a
colleague from Women’s studies came into my office and said: “We’re editing a series called Critical Studies in Gender. Would you like to contribute
to the series? Do you have anything lying around that you could turn into
a book?” I said: “Well, I have these two essays but they are sort of disconnected.” She said, “Just write a book proposal.” I wrote the proposal very
quickly and it got accepted without revisions.
Later when I distributed The Color of Privilege for feedback I knew it
was very controversial. I also knew the risk I was taking by criticizing key
constituencies—the ones implicated in each of the three blasphemies. I
was not mistaken. I lost several friendships over the first two chapters. People who ordinarily were very open-minded and on the cutting-edge of
scholarship told me, “I got the feeling reading your book that you were
putting out our dirty laundry for everybody to see.” But that’s what you are
buying into when you write the way I do. At times, it can be lonely because
I feel like a mad woman who is only speaking to a few other mad women.
The lesson I have learned, however, is that eventually this type of writing
pushes all of us forward whether we are inside or outside the academy.
When I think about my writings of the last 18 years, and this book in
particular, I know it has made an enormous difference that I have spent
most of my professional life at UC Santa Cruz. It is a place that truly honors multidisciplinary work. I have participated in Women’s studies and in
cultural studies and I have never felt rejected or given the cold-shoulder in
these circles.
In my case, the broadness of my theoretical work in critical gender
studies emerged from the complexities I found in my empirical work.
When you examine what emerges in the field, the inadequacy of our theoretical constructs become clearly apparent. For example, when I gathered
data with various constituencies, what the data told me did not resonate
with any of the social science paradigms I had studied. So that pushed me
into reading feminist theory and cultural studies.
The work of Chicana feminists was extremely useful to me in understanding the empirical data I was examining in various research projects
dealing with Chicanos and other Latinos. Many Chicana feminists use cultural production for theorizing in very effective ways; cultural production
becomes a shorthand for avoiding verbose descriptions that dilute how
people experience social reality. I truly believe that, at times, social science
discourse is inadequate in expressing what a poet can communicate in
twenty stanzas or a cultural practitioner can say better than a social scientist in a hundred pages of academic writing. You know what the Bruce
Springsteen song says—something like: I learned more from a 3-minute
record than I ever did in school.
I am completely energized by Chicana feminist writings, especially by
creative writers like Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, and
Elba Sánchez. In fact, it was this creative literature that is largely based on
theoretical, historical, and biographical essays, that inspired my latest research project. In my latest book, Voicing Feminisms: Young Chicanas Speak
out on Sexuality and Identity, there, I ask young, educated Chicanas their
views on feminism and about gender issues in their communities, especially from their own historical and class perspective. I interviewed these
young Chicanas about their lives to see if their experiences resonate with
Chicana feminist theorizing. The impetus of this research is my obsession,
which actually started in the 1980s with examining how Chicanas have always had—and continue to have—such a strong resistance to identifying
with the white feminist movement, especially with the feminist label,
while being forced to live very feminist lives. There is a very profound theoretical contradiction between Chicanas’ lived experience and their reluctance to ally themselves with white feminists—even those of us who do
political work with white feminists—it’s an uneasy alliance. Yet, I see so
many strong Chicanas in and out of the academy who are fearless. They
fight hard for social justice issues on a daily basis. Outside of the academy,
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I see these brilliant Chicanas heading nonprofit organizations, creating social change in poor neighborhoods, and I am in awe. Yet, most would
never think of their primary identities as feminist—if at all!
On the other hand, in my experience with white feminists who fully
embrace feminism, I see them acting in daily lives what I perceive to be a
hyperversion of hegemonic femininity, especially in the university setting.
For example, the amount of whining over teaching and workload—“I
can’t do this, I can’t do that! Professional life is too demanding!” When I
first arrived to Santa Cruz, these complaints did not make sense to me because all I perceived was their privilege. I grew up with a strong mother. If
she saw a building in front of her and if somebody said, “Your job is to
move that building,” then she’d figure out how to do it. It upset me that
these women who moved buildings, so to speak, were being othered (to
use a cultural studies term) and objectified. Their strengths were not being
properly conceptualized which could potentially demonstrate a feminist
intervention. Neither was the fact that some of them did not use the
strength they had to abandon the men they needed to leave behind. Many
of them—many of us—have that incredible contradiction of strength.
This amounts to putting up with abuse from men at the same time you
are incredibly strong in other arenas.
I could not find anything in our academic production to help me understand that contradiction—a contradiction that was very clear to me. I
was trying to be true to what I was experiencing—not only as a person but
also as a social scientist. And as I said before, I could not turn a blind eye to
what is obvious—the data are very clear. I was also disturbed by the disdain by some feminists for quantitative data—certain narrowness about
what is considered valid knowledge and the notion that if it’s quantitative
data it is suspect and “male-dominated.” I really believe that our methods
should be thought of as a capirotada (a Mexican bread pudding), where
you use whatever tools are available to illustrate your argument. So in the
first chapter of The Color of Privilege, I felt it was very important to document the structural differences between white women and women of
color, especially around education and income, to argue how white
women benefit from their familial relationships to white patriarchy. Without the quantitative measures of their privilege, I don’t think the argument
is as strong. We need to get away from that attitude of rejecting quantitative data and be more open-minded even as we consume it critically.
Like other people in cultural studies I also think we need to “walk out
of our prescribed disciplines or domains”—the ones we are trained in or
work in. In my case doing this had a profound effect. Although I was
trained as a social psychologist I was drawn into feminism by Alison Jaggar’s bible, Feminist Theory and Human Nature, which was recommended
to me by a graduate student from Turkey. I remember being so absorbed
in the book I would not prepare my lectures. Instead, I would stay up
reading this book until one or two o’clock in the morning. Then I’d go, “I
have to lecture tomorrow!” I was so inspired by it and yet I was so appalled
by it, all at the same time. I was appalled by Jaggar’s statement that feminists of color had only produced “descriptive writings” that did not
amount to a coherent theory. That was the challenge for me. I was incensed by this statement and it spurred me on to write something that was
“theoretical” and worth reading.
I looked to African American feminist theorists as the models of what I
considered “talking back,” which is what I meant by the subtitle in my
book “three blasphemies.” I was talking back to different constituencies in
a blasphemous way.
To me, Chicana feminist writings are not as raw as the writings of African American feminists. For me, African American feminist writings are
the models of “talking back.” I position myself this way: “What would bell
hooks say?” The situation of African Americans in this country is so dire
that they cannot pussyfoot around with euphemisms or metaphors. It is a
model that I try to emulate—to have that kind of courage, which I’m not
sure I always have. Chicana lesbian writings also influence me in this way.
I read a lot of what they write as a way to push me to analyze their proposals. Many of their writings are full of passion, anger, frustration, and they
blast many of us. I take their accusations seriously and try to think
through, from a feminist perspective, what implications do their proposals
have for all of us if we truly want a just society.
In this sense, I see my work as a critical intervention guided by the
principles proposed by Chicana feminist writings. I’m actually drawing on
their method of disrupting the discourses of different constituencies. Each
of the three blasphemies in the book intervenes with different constituencies; they are blasphemies because they articulate criticisms that are considered by some in each constituency as unspeakable. (I knew that each
chapter would systematically disrupt, if not downright anger, one constituency at a time.)
In the first chapter, obviously I’m talking back to white women, that is,
privileged white women. In the second chapter, I’m speaking back to our
community—specifically to the Chicano/Mexicano version of patriarchy.
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In the third chapter, I’m speaking back to leftists and other progressive
movements that do not live up to their ideals. In the last chapter, I’m
speaking back to the system of privilege based on whiteness.
When I was writing this book, I was struggling with finding an appropriate paradigm to discuss race privilege based on whiteness. The literature on whiteness was very new and what I considered esoterical. Toni
Morrison’s book Playing in the Dark was pivotal to my efforts of opening
up a critique around whiteness. I got the idea for the last chapter in The
Color of Privilege from Playing in the Dark. Specifically, I used an allegory
that I called “The Trickster’s Play” to articulate the power of whiteness.
Reading Morrison’s book had an enormous impact on me. She made this
profound statement in her book that for me, it was like the “heavens
opening up.” She was reading the classics in American literature like Hemmingway and Faulkner and she noticed that there were no Black characters. One obvious analysis is that Black characters are not important
enough to be central to the story. Instead of following this superficial
analysis, Morrison concludes that Blackness is the background to foreground whiteness. The absence of Blackness highlights the importance of
whiteness. There are these little slivers in this literature of what Morrison
calls “an Africanist” presence that speak volumes about race relations in
this country.
These white male writers were indeed writing about race through the
racialization of language used to describe the Africanist presence, always
in the background, at the same time, always making whiteness superior. To
capture this muted but present Africanist presence, Morrison does a discourse analysis of the language used to describe Blackness in these texts. It
is through the racializing of language that we come to see whiteness for
what it is. Her analysis literally blew my mind. I was so agitated, I had
difficulty thinking about anything else for a few weeks after I read her
book. While reading Morrison, I stumbled upon the idea of how to create
the mirror that would highlight the power moves deployed by whiteness
to control the “other”—not through force but by sheer psychological warfare through the racialization of discourse.
Regardless of my directness, and one could even say harshness, in my
analysis of the power dynamics of race, class, and gender, and to a certain
extent sexuality, I was also interested in providing people, regardless of
their privilege, an invitation to destroying all forms of oppression. I did
not want to exclude white men, especially economically privileged ones,
from also participating in a transformative political project. The reality is
that white men, especially the ones that are economically well-off, have the
most to lose in the struggle against white privilege and economic justice—
not only in economic terms but also psychologically. Who are they, if they
don’t dominate? I don’t think most can answer that very simple question.
Masculinity in this society is defined by whom you dominate. “Real” men
are supposed to dominate children, women, and other men. At some level,
I have empathy for them because if you were to say to me that everything I
have done and lived on an everyday basis as a Chicana—from the way I
speak Spanish to the way I cook my frijoles [beans]—has systematically
oppressed everybody in the world, I would be devastated. And then if you
said to me, “Now, if you are really committed to social justice—redo yourself,” I would have an existential crisis. I would say to myself, “This is what
I grew up with, this is what I was taught was right, this is what resonates
with me, this is what gives me psychological power, this is who I am.” I
would have to go out into the woods and undo myself.
There are so many battles and such limited amount of time that each
constituency needs to focus on the issues they can affect most. We need to
be very strategic about our targets. My target audience is young people.
We are losing a whole generation of leadership because they do not see the
relevance of academic work. If they do not see the relevance, we are dead.
There is no future. If the academy does not change so ordinary people resonate with intellectual production, in 20 years we could disappear as an
enterprise. The academy is not an easy life; if we are going to inspire
young people to do this work, it’s because it inspires their souls. I am always looking for young academics that are not established yet and try to
connect with them. We can get very insulated and only interact with other
senior professors and basically be speaking to each other socially as well as
professionally. We need to strive to be inclusive and make an effort to cultivate and nurture the next generation of scholars.
George Mariscal
I suppose I’m a cultural studies historicist. In my work on premodern and
early modern Spain, a cultural studies perspective allows me to look at
noncanonical cultural objects, and find as much evidence as I can of
nonelite culture, popular culture, and works by women and ethnic minorities. Also, cultural studies allows me to interrogate the origins of
Western racism. I think many English-speaking scholars who look at the
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history of race don’t know the Spanish or Portuguese traditions, so it’s
been important for me to go back and look at the kind of (racial) discourse that’s working through Spanish literature and culture.
In terms of contemporary work on Chicanos, my essay “Can Cultural
studies Speak Spanish?” raises a concern about the way cultural studies becomes institutionalized in university settings that are traditionally hostile
to Spanish-speaking cultures. The original version of that essay was published in the early 90s when my own department (Literature, UCSD) was
claiming to do cultural studies. This was the public relations stance anyway, yet I had a strong sense that nobody really knew what “cultural studies” was. We were known for new historicism and some of the most important new historicists were working here. Suddenly, we were saying,
“now we’re doing cultural studies.” As we continued to talk about this new
formation, I found that it was all still always about English and American
culture.
As a professor from another section in the department, I was interested
in using the insights of the Birmingham School while training our graduate students, but I did not want to lose sight of Spanish-speaking traditions, which are very old and rich. In fact, I remember that one of my students came to me and said she wanted to do a comparative analysis of
Chicano culture and Irish culture. I asked her what was attracting her to
Ireland when she was in San Diego and could very easily go to México to
do a Chicano-Mexican project. This had never occurred to her because all
of her other professors were stressing Anglophone traditions.
You know, there’s an overwhelming tendency in the U.S. academy to
privilege things that are English. Paul Gilroy has even suggested that cultural studies became fashionable mainly because it was about “Englishness.” I also think there are very deep historical reasons why things Spanish are considered to be implicitly inferior. [In my article I talk about “The
Black legend.”] The Spanish language was not accepted toward the doctorate in many universities through the 70s and 80s. As a student I was told
by a senior faculty member that there was no literary tradition in Spanish
(with the possible exception of Cervantes, he said). The simple term for
this is “institutional racism.” In the U.S. academy, English studies will always be privileged.
Our ability to challenge these attitudes is limited, especially in the contemporary context of the corporate university and the declining interest in
foreign language studies within the humanities. Foreign languages, most of
all Spanish, are in high demand in order to train people working in
“emerging markets,” but not for combining the language with a critical
analysis of neoliberalism and culture. Nevertheless, we need to take advantage of the general interest in Spanish and attract students with a social
conscience into our programs. Once we accomplish that, our curriculum
ought to include a wide variety of traditions that represent those communities who are not enjoying the benefits of globalization and should critically engage hegemonic discourses. This would mean a closer collaboration
between practitioners of Chicano and Latin American cultural studies.
The wide variety of Latin American writings on “race” and U.S. imperialism allows us to view our own situation from the outside, and could be
generative of important new research. Of course, in the post–Cold War
era one risks the danger of being considered foolish for even talking about
class struggle or socialist alternatives. The last two generations of U.S. culture critics have been trained to think that Marxism equals mechanical determinism, base superstructure, teleology, etc., and is therefore to be
avoided. But we ought to make every effort to teach a dialectical model
that includes issues of class, race, sexuality, and gender, and insist that the
class component not be effaced as it often is in academic circles. (To discuss class privilege is to expose one’s own privilege as a professor or even
as a graduate student.)
There are two other issues I wanted to touch on here that I raise in my
article concerning cultural studies. One is the issue of how it travels, and
the other is the importance of looking at how it is affected by local circumstances. If we don’t do this we are not going to understand how those
theories are employed or what kind of work they are doing, and we aren’t
going to understand how they may be excluding other kinds of ideas or
communities. In essence what we are talking about is a (cultural studies)
model for political action. We need to be cognizant of what’s going on politically on the international scene, but we also need to know what’s going
on locally. This is especially true for academics that often have no idea of
what’s happening outside their own university walls.
At this point in time, we also have to consider the potential of a panLatino cultural studies, which has become quite the rage, and we have to
deal with the idea of a “Hispanic” identity. Part of me is very pessimistic
about all of this. I was in the NACCS at México City in June of 1998, and
this was supposed to be one of those “encuentros” between the Chicano
community of scholars and the Mexican community. But what I found
was that both parties were only interested in their own issues. There were
very few attempts to bridge the gap that’s been there for so long. I think
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that we need to keep pursuing this project because it’s crucial if we are going to make any political progress here in the next century. I also think
that a pan-Latino cultural studies project always needs to have a pan-Latino political movement behind it.
For me, any pan-Latino agenda would begin by focusing closely on issues of class and economic inequality within specific communities. In
other words, for me, a pan-Latino movement premised solely on “ethnic
affinities” or “racial memory,” as Cherrie Moraga calls it in The Last Generation, will be seriously flawed. I would pose the question: How will a “people of color” solidarity withstand the political divisions between Chicanos
and Miami Cubans, Chicanos and the Mexican ruling class, Chicanos and
Mexican Americans who identify as Hispanic? One would be confronted
by a “Clarence Thomas conundrum” writ large.
A progressive pan-Latino movement would have to begin with a clear
class-consciousness about who is being left out by the supposed benefits of
the global economy. This means that Chicano professionals will have to
think about communities they may have left behind. They will have to understand their own privilege as a responsibility to struggle for the rights of
their less fortunate sisters and brothers.
I have to admit I’m not very comfortable with this trendy Latino paradigm because it often ignores these issues that need to be talked about, including the internal divisions within the Latino community. Also, if you
want to homogenize Latino studies, which many people do, we could very
easily become “Hispanic” studies. This is totally different from what I’d aspire to do. I think it’s going to be necessary to tease out the natural progressive connections, between let’s say, Central American populations and
Puerto Rican populations, and to attend to the ways the Cuban American
community has changed.
I guess you could say that Latino studies interests me as long as it engages these issues and is linked to a broader Latin American problematic.
The UC Santa Cruz program in Latino and Latin American studies is interesting for that reason. But then again you’ve got to have Latin Americanists and Latinos who are willing to learn from us; and we’ve got to be
willing to learn from them. This doesn’t mean that we have to abandon
Chicano studies—on the contrary, given the reality Chicano studies is
probably more necessary now than it was 20 years ago. We are in the year
2000 but at UCSD we are still struggling to create a Chicano studies program. Why? Because our Ethnic studies program, which has existed for 10
years, has done absolutely nothing to sustain a Chicano studies emphasis
or major. There’s a way in which the push toward globalization comes into
play here. I can’t say how many times I’ve been called a nationalist by people who, first of all, want to distance themselves from the Chicano Movement, then from Chicano politics, and then from Chicano studies. The
notion that “we are beyond the nation” is completely misguided and
makes no sense for small nations under the boot of global corporatism.
Chela Sandoval
I am especially interested in the proliferations, exchanges, and affinities
between decolonizing liberatory discourses that are capable of engendering a transdisciplinary, global, and dissident politics of resistance. The new
methodology that can make this possible is borne and carried by cultural
studies scholars everywhere, and is increasingly theorized as “border,” “diasporic,” “hybrid,” “cyborg,” “disidentificatory,” and/or “mestiza/o” in nature.
In my essay in Living Chicana Theory, I described “la conciencia de la
mestiza” as requiring a methodology that is capable of creating alliances
with intellectual and political movements across disciplines. When Anzaldúa talks about “el lenguaje de la frontera” (the language of the borderlands), she is not only describing a particular language and cultural expression, she is describing a mode of consciousness that can be learned. To
speak this language, el lenguaje de la frontera, means that one learns how
to be a “linguistic terrorist.” That is, someone capable of a transforming
differential identity, who self-consciously uses, challenges, and/or transforms dominant forms of speech, and who can invite hearers of this
speech entrance to “the borderlands.” For Anzaldúa, and for Chicana feminists who advocate this method, linguistic terrorism requires the ability to
cross sign systems, to make fun of, transform, or challenge dominant sign
systems through pun, play, satire, rasquache, or radical pastiche. When
you deploy this “differential” consciousness (la conciencia de la mestiza)
you have entered the place where signs are made and linked, you become
aware of moving around in that realm where normalizing systems are
challenged—you have entered “the borderland” which exists somewhere
between where consciousness exists as an amorphous place of possibility
and as a material reality.
“La conciencia de la mestiza” is integral to radical Chicana feminism. It
is that form of consciousness [developed since we first started calling our-
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selves “Chicano”] that links Chicana feminism with Chicano studies
through conceptualizations of “the borderlands” and links these up with
the decolonizing movement of theory and method that is being called
“cultural studies.” During the 1970s, the political application of “borderland consciousness” is what gave feminists of color access to the “tactical
subjectivity” that finally became the differential mode of “U.S. Third
World feminism.” It was this differential mode of consciousness and social
movement that enabled feminists of color to make the Women’s movement transform and account for our particular challenges and concerns.
When feminist differential political activists tried to explain the grounds
from which they made their challenges, however, they were rarely understood, for they were speaking a new language that rose from the place Anzaldúa calls “la conciencia de la mestiza.” It was this differential “borderland” consciousness and its languages that permitted a tactical subjectivity
to take shape. A differential oppositional consciousness is suspicious of
dominant forms of speech that try to identify, name, and ground us, as
ways of keeping us trapped within languages of authority and power, yet it
often uses those forms of speech nevertheless.
Feminists of color who enacted the differential mode of U.S. Third
World feminism were interested in constant mobility. Whether that mobility had to do with gender status, sexual and/or erotic possibilities, or
our racial, cultural, or class positionings—differential voices insisted upon
flexibility and freedom: release from what Jameson called the “prison
house” of language which labels, grounds, and names us. So that’s what
brought me to cultural studies politically and practically speaking: the
differential politics of U.S. Third World feminism. In any formation, I always look for the utopian moment that I think will push the whole—
everybody—forward, and that is why I’m interested in Anzaldúa’s formulation of “la conciencia de la mestiza.” Anzaldúa’s formulation has been attacked for being a mode of consciousness that anyone [not necessarily
only Chicanas/os] can develop, but that’s why I like it. Every form of liberatory consciousness should be able to be taught and learned as a method.
Ultimately, I’m interested in the connections, the linkages between forms
of thought that challenge forms of dominating, normalizing, and authoritarian thought. These connecting, linking modes are emerging in practices
all over the world, but scholars need to develop the skills to be able to recognize them when they are before us—especially when they’re couched in
very different terminologies and languages.
My book is called Methodology of the Oppressed. There I talk about the
forms of oppositional consciousness that have emerged in highly industrialized, late capitalist, “First World” countries in the post–World War II period. What my book does is show how across all domains of academic
thought that have been racialized, gendered, and sexually segregated into a
“theoretical apartheid,” there is a shared theory and method that insistently disrupt the very discourses from which they arise. And as this apparatus rises, it also creates the conditions of possibility for making new
forms of human alliance across difference. This particular “theory and
method uprising,” which represents differential consciousness across academic terrains, provides us tools for constructing a dissident globalization
that’s hopeful and provides us, activists, forms of consciousness and language that speak against the despair of postmodern globalization. This differential consciousness reaches for another kind of globalization with the
force and spirit of those dispossessed peoples who reach for creative
utopian transformation. It is they who have developed the theoretical and
methodological formations and alliances that have transformed the face of
knowledge in the 20th century, they who enabled “cultural studies” as a
cross-disciplinary mode of knowledge formation.
So, this is how I stake my claim on a continuing and ever-broadening
21st century formation of cultural studies. Cultural studies scholars need
to develop a method for being self-conscious regarding the approaches we
use to develop our work, for the approaches we use also position our texts
in relation to power. We can analyze anything, be as interdisciplinary as we
can be, but not necessarily create liberatory knowledges if we are not also
self-conscious, self-reflexive about how our produced knowledges may be
positioned inside power. Cultural studies requires the differential method
that Anzaldúa talks about, which emerges from having that painful consciousness, that awareness of where and how one stands in relation to
signs, of identifying how value slides inside sign and meaning systems, in
order to subvert whatever is dominating, silencing, regularizing—“la conciencia de la mestiza.” Above all, the field of cultural studies must be about
enabling scholars to skillfully and self-consciously position themselves in
relation to knowledge.
For example, if earlier we, Chicanas/os, accomplished a kind of insider’s
rasquache joking in order to ensure our own survival through creative acts
of subversion, then now we raise this burla-act to the level of method, a
methodology of emancipation, used for the purpose not only of ensuring
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the survival of our most immediate communities. Rather, viewed through
the differential conciencia de la mestiza, we can reunderstand subversive
rasquache as yet another technology for ensuring the survival of the human community. We’ve used la conciencia de la mestiza to flexibly position our identities, to differentially move inside sign systems to use, break
them apart, or transform them, but these acts are not enough. Every act,
performance, or technology of resistance must be guided by an ethical and
moral commitment to equalize power between human beings. That’s the
crucial technology of resistance, it guides all the others.
Like I said before, the important thing for Chicana/o cultural studies
practitioners is to be able to be as self-conscious as possible about how we
read and put knowledges together. That is to say, we must be self-consciously aware of what kind of sign and coding systems we draw from, create, re-create, or transform. We can use the differential conciencia de la
mestiza as a method to help each other be as self-conscious as possible
about how our approaches and our coding systems position our work in
relation to systems of power. Methodological and ethical self-consciousness designates what makes a cultural studies scholar.
Raymond Rocco
I think I began to be interested in cultural studies in relation to the role of
culture and the empowerment of Chicano communities. Initially, I approached this interest through Political Science, but Political Science theory was defined in narrow disciplinary terms. Those boundaries didn’t
give me much leeway in terms of doing the kind of work I wanted to do.
In the early 80s, I read Raymond Williams’s essays, and soon afterward,
Marxism and Literature with a group of people in the Southern California
area. That led me to the Birmingham studies, the studies of the Centre,
which included the work on subculture and Stuart Hall’s work.
I also began to read Gramsci and returned to Paulo Freire. So my approach to cultural studies was a blend of Gramsci, Hall, and Freire—all of
these different influences. I was interested in figuring out how to link the
impact of the macrostructures of power to culture and to Chicano Latino
communities. I wanted to do this because if we are going to devise theories of empowerment, we have to understand how power works. We need
to address this so that our interventions can be effective. That’s always
been my position. I mean you have to have more than a strong and clear
ideological position, you need to get at why something is happening. So
that was how my interest in cultural studies emerged.
We also knew from our empirical work that a lot of folks in our communities didn’t fit the romanticized notions that some in Chicano studies
had been pushing. At that time it just wasn’t “PC” to talk about it. You
know there are a lot of folks out there that don’t have the Chicano ideology that we hope they have, so the issue is: How do we help to develop
that? Paul Willis’s Learning to Labor was important here because he was
trying to show how the questions of power are reproduced in everyday
life, and that’s what I was after: looking at how in our everyday life the
powers of structures are reproduced.
I’ve continued to pursue these issues in my own work today by trying
to understand the various processes that have been at work in the transformation of Latina/o communities here in Los Angeles during the last 35
years in response to international restructuring. There are a lot of ways to
deal with that change, but in my own case, I’m trying to understand just
what it is that transformed the Chicano community into a broader Latin
American community. I’m also looking at the effect of this on these communities in terms of their responses. At base, I’m still looking at the viability of different options and different strategies for empowerment that Latino communities have developed and can develop in the future. For example, the research design and fieldwork of our project on Southeast Los
Angeles was generally structured to probe this concern. We wanted to see
whether folks in these communities were developing political responses to
the effects of restructuring on their lives. And so we devised the research
in a way that would tell us something about the connection between
macrolevel institutional change [which is where the forces propelling restructuring are initiated] and the household units that form the basis of
neighborhoods. What eventually emerged was a framework that focused
on the concrete sites of civil society that mediate between institutions like
the economy, the state, and households. It was here, in places like parks,
patriotic associations, shopping centers, churches, soccer clubs, parents
groups, swap meets, and schools, where we found the kinds of activities,
networks that facilitated the development of local political actions. This
meant that we had to link three levels of analysis in our work, and each required a different kind of research and data. We studied institutional
change through sources on the political economy of the region, used eth-
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nographic studies to get at what was going on in the civil society sites, and
carried out household life histories to find out the types of social networks
that folks developed to cope with and respond to the institutional changes.
I think the cultural studies literature helped us steer clear of a unidirectional, one way model of causation. That is, it helped us frame the study in
such a way that we didn’t see the strategies that communities developed as
“determined” by the institutional changes. Rather we saw the relationships
as complex processes of mediation that had differential patterns of interaction and reciprocal impacts. And of course, these patterns of mediation
incorporated the categories of culture, gender, sexual orientation, class positioning—all of which name the characteristics of everyday life through
which people filter their experiences of structural exchange to develop responses. Time and again, we found immigrants drawing on their experiences in Latin America to develop what are considered in this U.S. context
to be novel economic, cultural, and political practices in response to their
situations. I recall the first time I saw a woman selling real estate in a small
open booth at a swap meet, which was clearly outside the expected norms
in that sphere of business here in the U.S. [But this is fairly common in
her hometown in Perú.]
Remember the fieldwork for the project was carried out over a sevenyear period, from 1990 to 1997, so not only did it take a long time to get an
idea of what was going on, but we also collected an incredible amount of
data and information from our ethnographic studies and from the life histories. In fact, we gathered so much that there are materials that I still
haven’t gone through systemically or incorporated into my writing yet.
Between teaching classes and committee work at the university, and the
extensive work which often required three full days a week in the field,
there was little time for reflecting on the results we were accumulating.
However, during these years I was using my classes to read through
more theoretical works on democracy, theories of difference, transnationalism, globalization, and citizenship in multicultural societies. A round of
books and articles were being published throughout the first few years of
the decade that made it clear that the types of processes we were seeing at
work locally in Southeast Los Angeles, were also occurring in Europe,
Canada, and Australia. It was clear there was a strong and direct connection between the globalizing policies of capital and the resultant massive
migrations of labor on the one hand, and the issues around which societal
and political conflict were organized in the states undergoing these
changes, on the other.
I began to see that what was at stake in these transformations was the
very notion of a viable, inclusive, democratic form of governance, which
is, of course, what the new social movements, including the Chicano
Movement, were driven by. Scholars on both the left and right realized
that the transnational logic of restructuring presented a serious challenge
to the basic political principles [and the cultural assumptions it incorporated] of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) that the West operated on for
three centuries [and had imposed on a good part of the rest of the world].
The assumption of the isomorphic relationship between nation and state
could no longer be sustained without modification.
Nation is essentially a cultural category, while the state is a category that
has to do with territorial jurisdiction. The formulation of international
politics that Western societies operated on rested on the assumption that
states would be culturally homogeneous. Of course, this was never a reality anywhere, but it was part of the dominant ideology that had been consolidated during the experience of colonization. It’s not that cultural difference didn’t exist before in these countries, but rather that it was suppressed in every possible way; and so it never had a legitimate space to
exist in within these societies. This is one of the clear lessons of cultural
studies, particularly those works that concentrate precisely on the experiences of those populations whose cultural, racial, and gender “difference”
marked them as “other.”
What was problematized by restructuring and globalization was precisely this assumption of cultural homogeneity as the basis of the state
form of governance. The massive migration from the non-European
“margins” to the center of the Eurocentric world, completely transformed
the cultural dynamic of many of the major global cities throughout the
world.
About the third year of the project, I was focused on how I was going to
frame all these results. I was dissatisfied with my initial essays because they
were very descriptive but it was in the process of writing those essays that I
began to see connections with some of this more theoretical work that I
had been reading. It was from that process of trying to interpret the data,
the life histories, the ethnographic descriptions, through the arguments,
concepts of this work that I was reading that I began to develop a very different understanding of what was going on in these Latino communities
in Los Angeles. What I began to see was that in the process of developing
strategies to deal with the impact of globalization and restructuring, what
was emerging within some of these Latino networks was a new form of
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politics of citizenship, rooted in a form of “rights-claims.” (These are one
of the crucial elements of citizenship.) While most of us think of citizenship as a stable term that designates a certain type of legal standing with a
society, in fact, the scholarship of the last 20 years or so clearly shows that
citizenship is variable and differential in most societies and that it is one of
the main instruments by which the level and nature of societal membership is regulated. The emergence of rights-claims by Latinos in these communities is essentially a challenge to the particular political configuration
of citizenship as presently defined.
What all of this demonstrates, I believe, is that the parameters of political ordering that presently determine the positioning of different elements
and sectors in a society have to be restructured to account for the new reality of societal relations. The pressure for this comes not only from those
“new” populations that are now constitutive of these societies, but also
from transnational capital, which requires a new regime of economic governance to regulate and coordinate the internation basis of the global
economy. They have already promoted the development of a wide array of
instruments for doing so and have applied constant pressure on the state
to create laws, codes, treaties, etc. that make national borders less and less
significant in economic terms.
But there has not been a corresponding change in the secular nature of
“political” governance or jurisdiction. So, the fit between this element and
the changing legal and institutional basis of the global economic infrastructure is no longer very good.
In my view, the future of Latinos in the U.S. depends on how well we
develop political agendas that rest on an understanding of these new relationships (and the disjunctions that come with them). The research we
did in the communities of Southeast L.A. made us realize that at least
some sectors of Latinos do in fact understand this transnational reality as
the context within which political claims and demands of inclusiveness
have to be made.
How would I characterize the approach I’ve developed to address this
complex set of issues? I consider both the theoretical and methodological
positions I’ve adopted to be transdisciplinary in nature. It was clear to me
long ago that if I wanted to answer the kinds of questions I had in mind I
couldn’t worry about whether what I was doing fell within the disciplinary
boundaries of Anthropology, literary criticism, geography, and certainly
not political science. On the latter, I discovered that the narrow methodological boundaries of the field made it extremely difficult to pursue some
of the issues I was concerned with. My sense is that unfortunately many
scholars within the field are more concerned with the modeling and statistical methods than they are with the substantive issues of politics.
So what I do is not orthodox Political Science, Anthropology, or literary
criticism, and neither does it follow some of the older conceptions of Chicano studies. Instead, I would say that what I can do can best be described
as part of a collective project to establish a cultural studies approach to urban formations that draws on the intersection of many different kinds of
critical and cultural discourses.
Mary Pat Brady
I was thinking about that question, of whether I consider myself to be a
practitioner of cultural studies, and I concluded that I have a few answers
for you. For example, if someone had asked me that question five years
ago, I would have said, “No, I’m basically reading Chicana literature—
mine is a literature project.” I had the idea that cultural studies was popular culture. So, even though I was reading cultural theorists like Hall and
Williams, it didn’t occur to me that what I was doing was cultural studies
because I was so limited by my concept of what cultural studies was. Once
I began really thinking about how much cultural studies had influenced
not only what I thought, but what I had been taught, then I began thinking: “Of course, literature is part of culture [duh] and cultural studies is
more of a framework than it is prescriptive about what the object of the
study is or should be.”
I think another reason I wouldn’t have said I was “doing” cultural studies is because I had been thinking for so long about the production of
space and how we might understand Chicana writers as spatial theorists,
as geographers who understand that the Gramscian war of positions is a
spatial war as much as a discursive one. So, although cultural studies often
deploys spatial metaphors, sometimes I’ve felt impatient that the use of
language like “making a space for X or Y” has stripped the power from
spatial language to invoke both the material and the metaphoric simultaneously.
So, maybe I would trace my intellectual formation first to Chicana feminism, African American feminist studies, and then to cultural studies.
Thinking about it, I’d say texts like Bridge or the poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes obviously pose a range of epistemological critiques; they ask ques-
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tions about genre, experience, and subject formation. They critique the
settled binaries of modernism and anticipate many of the critiques that
we’ve seen poststructuralist theory proffer.
Chicana feminism in a lot of its variants has consistently pointed out
that we can’t take for granted what things we value and what types of hierarchies are hidden behind daily practices. Chicana feminists like Cherríe
Moraga also taught me to work from the autobiography in a conscious
way and not to repress it. The novel I’ve written about—Margins—is an
example of that kind of work. That book was the first Chicana lesbian
written. So you can imagine how exciting it was to come across it in the
bookstore, A Different Light (San Francisco), just after it was published. It
probably sounds silly, but I was a graduate student at UCLA really just
coming out more or less after years of playing dodgeball with my sexuality. There was the book set in Los Angeles at UCLA and there I was. The
book had a huge impact on me! It was liberating in a way that I can’t quite
describe other texts as being for me. It didn’t seem all that interesting to
write about the novel’s impact on me. I mean, that seems totally boring
but it did seem useful to follow Moraga’s advice and figure out what the
novel was saying to me that I didn’t necessarily want to tell the world. Just
when I read Margins, then by coincidence José Saldívar introduced me to
another book, Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies and it seemed like
the two were made for each other. The conjunction between the two
books was pretty compelling. Soja’s book opened up a critical geography
that allowed me to assimilate so many of the experiences I’d had while
growing up on the margins of two nations and at the center of what I
think of now as an incredibly sophisticated, cosmopolitan anti-nation region. The book really gave me a framework of analysis that allowed me to
draw together issues of spatial representation and public policy with Chicana feminist methodologies.
You know, Chicana feminism is really important in Margins—the novel
inserts itself into the tradition of Chicana feminism as it was emerging in
the eighties. It begins by mentioning Cherríe Moraga’s anthology, Cuentos,
and Helena Viramontes’s short story collection, The Moths. But even before this, it includes an acknowledgment of other Chicana writers. So, you
can say that the novel really wants to make itself an inheritor of Chicana
literary feminism. I think that’s interesting because it also points to an implied critique of Chicano studies itself. Clearly, the novel makes no acknowledgment of Chicano studies and of what it makes available for Chicana lesbians. In this way you could say that De la Peña does set up an op-
position between Chicana feminist literary practices and Chicano studies
institutional practices that is significant. I think we could tease that out
even further. We could ask: “How many Chicano studies departments keep
Chicana feminist writers in their ranks for any length of time?” These
writers usually come in for a year, then they go. In the case of Terri de la
Peña, she doesn’t teach a class at UCLA, although the students love her
book.
It’s important to point out that Margins does far more than articulate
itself as an inheritor of Chicana feminism. It really tries to talk about race
and about a moment in Chicana nationalism, and to think about desire as
racialized, as inflected by seeing race. The novel also tries to produce a discussion for us, Chicana lesbians, about how we love each other, about how
we talk about that love, and about how we allow ourselves to value each
other. That’s all complicated by a meta-anxiety around whether the radical
Chicana lesbian should only date other people of color or other Chicana
lesbians.
But this debate is set within a whole other context that is crucial. I’m
thinking of the moment in the novel where Veronica has to confront the
loss of her lover Joanna. She’s standing at the grave with Joanna’s mama
and they are really battling it out for control of Joanna’s memory. It’s
amazing because their fight really shows how the language of desire is so
shaped by nationalism and heterosexuality and religion. Veronica isn’t really allowed to articulate a desire outside of those categories—or you
could say those discourses shape the words that Joanna’s mom can hear.
So, the kind of romance that develops between Rene and Veronica is explicitly placed within I guess what you could call an epistemological gap
and the novel hints at that by leaving all sorts of things unsaid and unexplained at the level of the plot.
Another thing I really liked about the novel is how it sets up these
stages: the convent is a stage, the restaurant is a stage, the university is a
stage. I guess what I’m doing in my analysis is very Foucauldian: I’m
showing how these places are regulating arenas. You know the cemetery is
very much a regulating arena not unlike the academy and the convent, and
there’s a way in which none of these kinds of arenas want to think about
themselves as doing the same kind of thing as the cemetery! And for me so
much of the pleasure of the novel is that it makes these kinds of connections available to us.
As I mentioned before, I am very interested in the prevalence of spatial
metaphors, and not only in terms of their production in Margins. I think
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we have to think about why space is so important nowadays. Some time
ago Jameson noted in his famous essay on postmodernism and the logic
of late capitalism that “we all have to think about space now,” and he emphasized its significance for us. What struck me then, and what continues
to strike me now, is that the current interest in space is partially a product
of the fact that imperialists have sort of run out of new land for empire, so
they are wondering about what to do with the space that’s left. But they
aren’t the only ones thinking about space. That’s what I mean when I said
you could see Chicana fiction writers as geographers. You can go back to
Ruiz de Burton’s really strange novels and see a spatial theory of imperialism being worked out even if it is one that fit, as I think David Louis
Brown noted, really handily into an agrarian-feudal economy. Rosaura
Sánchez has shown how the testimonios of the Californios were at base
theoretical analyses of the spatial practices of imperial capitalism.
One of the challenges Chicana feminism is negotiating is the ongoing
production of the category “Latino,” which presents itself on a bigger
scale. The geographer Neil Smith says that when you jump scales, it’s always a violent political move. I think that’s a very useful insight for us as
we think about what that category—Latino—means. I think that if we
don’t think about it, were’ going to be sorry. We need to consider how the
paradigm of Latino is informed by area studies and what fissures it masks
in the name of something else.
While I’m troubled by these things, I also want to say that even in my
most pessimistic moments I am nourished by other things. It’s truly extraordinary to see the kind of incredible work some people are doing—
for example, the kinds of questions that Chicana feminists are asking. It’s
nourishing to see the way people are trying to push the field in a hundred different ways. There are other good things to point to, including
the fact that a lot of Chicana feminists are really good mentors. Sonia
Saldívar Hull has been an incredible mentor to me, for instance. I can’t
be grateful enough to her. She was a really good reader, and she was
good at teaching me how to navigate the institution and the complexities
of an English department. It was like someone had opened up a bag of
gold for me. She understood that mentors are not just about suggesting
sources and books, but it was also about trying to navigate relationships
from where you stand, and that generosity has really been important.
That’s one of the things I really love about Chicana feminism. I think
that Laura Pérez has been really generous and Norma Alarcón has been
really generous and you, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, have been gener-
ous too. This generosity is not only expressed in terms of how people
encourage each other, but also in terms of how they listen and make
people feel that they have an idea. I also want to mention José Saldívar,
who’s been really supportive. Now that I’m on the “other side,” I also
think a lot about a group of incredible friends that I went to grad school
with and how lucky I was to have met so many amazing people at UCLA
and UCSB and Berkeley.
Yes, I do consider myself to be a practitioner of cultural studies! I write
about cultural studies as well. [In fact, the subtitle of my recently published book is Remapping American Cultural Studies.] But let me backtrack
a little bit and put this work into its context. For a while now I’ve been involved in a somewhat of an impossible project: I’ve been attempting to
write three books in ten years! (I’m now writing the third). Early on, I decided I was going to try to be dialectical in these books because they really
form part of a single “remapping” project. So, my first book, The Dialectics
of Our America, can be seen as addressing the debates within American literary history and as introducing an alternative conception of America or
North America by looking at Cuba and at the work of Roberto Fernández
Retamar. And I think I made the audacious claim in this book that we
should read him as an American postcolonial critic [at least that’s what
they tell me].
When I wrote the book, I thought that what he was saying was very
much in line with the critique of Occidentalism, the critique of Eurocentrism, and the critique of U.S. hegemony. Much like José Marti’s work,
“Nuestra América,” Fernández Retamar’s critical work [especially “Calibán,” “Nuestra América y Occidente,” and “Algunos usos de civilización y
barbarie”] becomes central to an emerging oppositional American literary
history because his work makes clear that the American nueva narrativa,
literary history, and intellectual power are specifically situated historical
practices enacted within a set of hostile relations in the American hemisphere. Focusing on the tensions between “Nuestra América” and “el Occidente,” to use Marti’s and Retamar’s terms, then permits us to look at
American cultures and literatures anew. So I place García Márquez,
Rolando Hinojosa, Américo Paredes, Tomás Rivera, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others in this geopolitical context.
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The dominant assumption I’m reacting against in this work is that
North America, South America, and Caribbean writers have little in common except their so-called national ethnic roots. My book attempts to
look at the rich cultural interplays and contacts among writers of different
national backgrounds in the Americas. In this sense, I was posing the
question of what a new American literary history might look like. For me,
this history would have to speak Spanish, it would have to look South
(México, Central and Latin America, and the Caribbean) as well as North,
and it would also have to be Cuban Marxist.
My book, Border Matters, articulates an emerging transfrontera imaginary that challenges dominant national centers of identity and culture
with new borderland subjectivities and theories. By the time I wrote it, I
was already very much within the sphere of cultural studies institutionally.
At Stanford, I became a part of Renato Rosaldo’s faculty postdoctoral seminar reading group at his invitation. Later, I was hired by the University of
Santa Cruz in literature, but I was very much in conversation with the
Center for Cultural Studies (CCS) that was under the direction of James
Clifford. There, I was very much intervening within the debates in cultural
studies and saw myself working in that field from the various roots and
routes that I described in the introductory chapter of Border Matters.
So, to take up your initial question again, yes, I do consider myself to be
a practitioner of cultural studies. In terms of how I “do” cultural studies,
I’d like to respond in this way. Recently, I read one of the reviews of this
book written by Fernando Delgado. I think he got me right in terms of
what I’m trying to do in this work. He proposed that my latinization of
British and American cultural studies intellectually challenges both traditions while arguing that remapping the symbolic border is called for since
the real border allows for and even encourages migration, movement, resistance, and social change. I don’t know if I phrased my argument in Border Matters exactly that way, but I was happy to see someone who was
writing in communications studies getting my gesture. And I agree with
Delgado in the sense that there is a latinization of British cultural studies
going on in my work. [You also see this in Angie Chabram’s and Rosa
Linda Fregoso’s interventions in the Cultural Studies journals 1990/1999.]
One issue that has surfaced around my book when I’ve given talks to
sympathetic audiences is whether we need to worry about essentializing
our identities by our usage of the autobiographical. (That’s usually the critique from the poststructuralist perspective.) My response to this is that I
think feminism has taught us a lot about the need to be conscious of the
relations of the body and its location and about the location of the critic
or the writing subject. I think that location and the whole idea of the situated/embodied subject [to use Anzaldúa’s and Moraga’s notion] are important, and this is reflected in my forays into autobiography. I’ve also
been reflecting on this idea from a different perspective—Mohanty’s work
on “postpositivist realism.” He argues that we have to remember that experience does matter; that it is always already a theoretical construction of
the world. And so if you are in a subaltern position, this does give you
epistemic privilege. What Marx said in his famous critique of Fuerbach is
relevant here. He said that philosophers don’t only have to interpret the
world; the point is to change it. This is not an anti-theoretical perspective,
it’s a theory based on experience, on the body and its relations. What he’s
suggesting is that workers have understood what capital and capitalism
have done to their wage-earning bodies. This is akin to the theoretical perspective that many of us in Chicana/o cultural studies are articulating and
to what Mohanty calls “epistemic privilege.” So, I think that those gestures
from the autobiographical in my work point to a theoretical construction
that not only seeks to interpret our world but to also change it.
But, of course, the autobiographical is only one part of my larger intellectual project, which as I pointed out before, incorporates a series of
works with important connections between them. For instance, in the first
book I’m dealing with literary history and making alliances with the South
and with Cuba in particular. (Here I’m reshaping literary history into a
more hemispheric or transnational context.) The second book really addresses this context by looking at the transfrontera imaginary and talking
about the relationship between British and Chicana/o cultural studies, and
my new project is on the multiple meanings of the war of 1898. I see this
year as a multicultural, multilingual moment of globalization, so I’m moving into subaltern studies with this latest book. Yet, I see connections in all
the works, so I don’t see that in one moment I was doing literary history,
the next cultural studies, and now subaltern studies. These books are all
part of the same remapping project.
In Border Matters, you see this concern in the structure of the book. I
was very conscious of opening with Los Tigres del Norte, an undocumented conjunto band which crossed the border from México and ended
up in the capitalist Silicon Valley. At the time I wrote the book, I felt that
cultural studies at Stanford, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz was totally missing
this formation (conjunto) that was right there, in the backyard of these
universities! This music spoke of an important cultural formation (music/
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bodily movements and a Spanish language expression) that was totally
segregated from most Californians as well despite its transnational and
hemispheric dimensions. I ended the book with the Mexican Elvis, El Vez,
because I thought that he and Los Tigres were two sides of the same notion of cross-border performativity.
I was pretty self-conscious of the fact that this type of work involved a
break with “national” models of cultural studies, including “American”
cultural studies. In fact, in the preface I argue that Border Matters “challenges the homogeneity of U.S. nationalism and popular culture.” I argue
for inclusion of the U.S.-México border experience within cultural studies,
and I engage the idea that the nation-state is not congruent with cultural
identity. One of the models for this work was Paul Gilroy’s book [and I’m
not referring to The Black Atlantic, but rather to his earlier book, There
Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: Race and Politics in the Nation]. His critique of Englishness—and how it could only include whiteness and the
right-wing politics of the nation/Thatcherism—was especially important
to me. So was his message that there wasn’t an equivalent sign between the
cultural and the national because of the fact of British Black migration in
the post–World War II era. His reading was compelling not only because
he argued that this construction of Englishness excluded peoples of color
and their histories but also because he identified an unwieldy alliance between the left and the right (which brought together people like Williams,
Thompson, and Thatcher) around racialist questions of Englishness.
What Paul Gilroy was saying rang a bell with me, especially his idea that
there was a kind of fascist movement in Britain that was rearising in the
new Europe. I felt those same political forces at work right here in California. [People are always stunned when I say that, aside from the Bay area
and perhaps some areas of Los Angeles and Santa Cruz, California is primarily a fascist state.] I’m thinking about our recent history of having a
straight Republican leadership from Reagan to Deukmejian to Wilson.
And, of course, I’m thinking about the anti-immigrant agenda that was
conceived of by the Republican right and their think tanks in California
and that has entrenched itself in the political imaginary in recent years.
As I was writing Border Matters, it was very clear that California was a
very xenophobic place for people of color, especially for Chicanas/os and
Latinas/os. I was also thinking about the fact that California has the seventh largest economy in the world. For me this means that you can’t speak
about the local anymore solely in terms of the national. With the Diaspora
and migrations of workers coming in through the circuit of capital, the lo-
cal is inextricably linked to the global. Post-65 radically changes things.
Now we ask: What is the working class? Is it unified? Is it gendered? Is it
women? Does it speak Spanish? How is it racialized? How does it engage
in transnational struggles? These are some urgencies that formed the
backdrop for my remapping of cultural studies in Border Matters.
In the historical chapter that delves into an extensive discussion of early
U.S. border writings, I was also influenced by the Chicana/o literary recovery projects (organized by Arte Público Press) that have totally reconfigured how we do Chicana/o literary studies. I also thought it was important to look at the testimonials of people like the Californios, who had
once been empowered as an aristocratic class and who, according to
Rosaura Sánchez in Telling Identities, had been totally proletarianized by
colonialism and imperialism. I know this is a controversial subject. In fact,
Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita are coming under challenge by a new
generation of Chicana/o scholars—who are perhaps goaded by their mentors who have an ax to grind—about their usage of the category of the
subaltern in reference to the early historical writings. I’ve willingly entered
that debate on subaltern studies. That’s part of why I was fascinated by
this period—the 19th and 20th centuries—and by looking at the work by
María Ruiz de Burton, who published two novels at the turn of the century.
Her work, The Squatter and the Don (1885), was a critique of monopoly
capitalism and it was making similar kinds of critiques that another radical nationalist—José Martí—was making at the same time in New York
when he founded the Cuban National Revolutionary Party in 1892. He too
was critiquing what he was calling the emergent hegemonic U.S. monster;
he also claimed that he’d lived inside the entrails of the belly of the beast.
[My students think it was Ché Guevara who said this, but, no, it was José
Martí who said this in 1895 in his last letter to Manuel Mercado.] I felt that
María Ruiz de Burton made the same claim at the end of The Squatter and
the Don when she said, “We need to expel the invader” from California.
For her the invader was monopoly capitalism and the big four: Stanford,
Hopkins, Huntington, Crocker, and of course, the railroad. She saw this
invader as not just dominating Alta California but all the citizens of the
United States. And she also includes Latin America because, in her view,
those railroads were going to go there too.
So it was in the context of looking at the histories of monopoly capitalism and the war of 1846–1848 and U.S. manifest destiny that I became interested in the subaltern, which I think emerges as a whole new category.
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I’m taking this idea quite seriously, following the lead of Rosaura Sánchez
and Beatrice Pita, both of whom argue for the construction of a subaltern
citizenry or noncitizenry in this context. That’s where the debates that I
referred to above converge: around the issue of whether this (the subaltern) is a class only or a specifically class designation, as Gramsci suggests
in his Prison Notebooks. Some people think that Rosaura, Beatrice, and I
are wrong because we’re misapplying Gramsci or we don’t understand
class. I think that’s quite surprising given our previous work and relations
with Marxism.
My response is that what our critics—and I can only speak for myself;
Beatrice and Rosaura can speak for themselves—don’t understand is that
I’m looking at the subaltern not as a Marxist-Gramscian category only but
as a postcolonial category coming out of the South Asian criticism of
Guha and Spivak (1998). They basically remind us that Marxist-Gramscian
Hegelianism is totally Eurocentric and that for the subaltern to be represented here they have to come into being as a state. That is to say, they
have to become part of the occidental nation-state. And that’s why Gramsci argues at the end of the Prison Notebooks that the subaltern are totally
unrepresentable.
Now I’ve taken a different view; I’m following the lead of Guha and
Spivak, who are not arguing for a universal Hegelian Marxist vision of
class but rather proposing that there are other categories that make up the
subaltern [gender, caste, religion, other forms of domination]. I think if
we look at different parts of the world, capitalism’s going to work in different ways. So why shouldn’t we be more flexible in understanding how
domination works in terms of caste, race, gender, sexuality, and in terms
of how dominant perspectives make people into “lesser categories?”
So I’m a little bit baffled by younger scholars who are holding on to a
Gramscian perspective, as if that’s the only word on subaltern studies. It
seems to me that they’ve been a little shoddy in thinking about postcolonialism—they haven’t really looked at the work of the Latin American
subaltern groups. In fact, mine is a double vision: I’m embracing not only
the South Asian subaltern studies group but also the emerging new group
of Latin American subaltern studies. [People like John Beverley, Ileana
Rodríguez, Alberto Morieras, and Walter Mignolio, who is the dissident of
the group that criticizes his colleagues for not fully embracing Chicana/o
studies or Latina/o studies.]
Outside of the U.S. this group has come under fire for calling themselves a Latin American subaltern studies group when they are writing
from the U.S. There’s also debate within that group about what constitutes
Latin Americanism. You know, there’s already an ambivalence built into
the Latin American that constitutes both a vernacular tradition and a
Latin Americanism coming out of the Latin American centers. I’m intrigued by this debate because we’re also implicated and because Latina/o
studies and Chicano studies have a lot to say about these questions. We
too can ask: Are we writing from a metropolitan perspective? And we can
ask: Are we writing from a vernacular perspective? I’m also intrigued by
what some people from Latin America are saying about the Latin American subaltern studies group—they are saying that what this group is doing
is making a kind of Macdonaldization of the academy and writing an imperialist discourse about Latin America, without fully realizing it. So the
Latin Americanists from Latin America are accusing people from this
group (and others) of not being conscious of their location in the U.S.
And I think this is where Chicana/o studies has a contribution to make
because the people in Latin America forget that Latinas/os are going to be
the largest minority group in this country—we already are in California.
Just because we’re in California living under colonial imperial enterprises,
doesn’t necessarily make us part of this Macdonaldization of the Americas, does it? Clearly, a lot of people don’t have a clue about Chicanas/os or
about what to do with us. I recently attended a Latin American conference
in México City where the Latin Americanists had no understanding of the
fact that there are more Mexicanos in Los Angeles than perhaps any other
city than México D.F. in Mexico, or that there are more Cubans in Miami
than in Havana, or that there are more Puerto Ricans in New York City
than in San Juan.
This Latin American group had no way of understanding just what this
means. And, of course, not only do a lot of them not have an understanding of these experiences and realities, but they totally marginalize us as intellectuals and as critics. That’s one of my main gripes with them! Where I
think we can come together in our work is in trying to destabilize the centers of metropolitan empires—for me those are the main linkages between the South Asian group and the Latin American subaltern group as
well. Part of the project then is to break up the nation and its centers into
its fragments. There are many centers and margins in the nation-state—
that seems to be Chabkabary’s analysis of the nation and its fragments under colonialism. That’s what I’m trying to do with the U.S.-Mexican border—to look at the border and its history as a violent militarized zone and
as a historical formation. And I’m arguing that the only centers are not
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just México City and Washington, D.C.! So those are some of the linkages
we share—a similar understanding of being inside the belly of the beast
(the empire).
In terms of our current work in Chicana/o cultural studies, I do agree,
however, that we seem to be involved in what appears as a fundamental
contradiction. We are resisting borders and establishing linkages with diverse groups but we’re also protecting turf or creating a space where we
can work and deal with the experiences of particular groups. So, we have
to deal with that contradiction. I also think we need to view our challenges
in terms of the context in which we live. I was reading the work of my colleague Rachael Moran in the law school who sheds light on this context.
She proposes that Chicanas and Latinas/os form 30–50% of the State’s
high school graduates in the year 2000 and questions why is it that we are
kept out of the debates around preferences and rights. Clearly, the world
we live in is not a black and white world. In fact, we are six times the number of African Americans in the State and we’re three times the number of
Asian Americans in the State. Yet, even with these numbers, we’re totally
left out of the debate!
Moran argues that this stems from important public policy paradigms.
The first one is a civil rights paradigm, which uses the experiences of the
African American. The way we are swept away here is with an argument
that says, “You’re not Black and you don’t have this experience, so you
don’t count.” The other policy paradigm that excludes us is immigration.
This policy relies on the older myth that has immigrants coming from Europe and assimilating. Here there’s the idea that “You don’t count here because you don’t assimilate.” So, under these two paradigms of rights and
preferences, legally speaking Latinas/os are totally left out of the picture.
Given the fact that we are now the largest minority group, we have to totally redefine these paradigms; we can no longer be erased or made to be
invisible or mute! We need to ask: What would the racial formation be like
if it incorporated a new group of Latina/o experiences that are multiple
and heterogeneous? We can ask the same thing about cultural citizenship:
What would it look like if configured along the lines of Benmayor, Flores,
and company? So, I think that this is part of our challenge for the next 20
years. We need to redefine these categories and we need to enter into the
debates!
Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita
For us cultural studies is not presentist, as some have argued; it is not only
about looking at the present. As part of the recovery project for Arte Público Press, for example, we’ve done critical and historical editions of The
Squatter and the Don and Who Would Have Thought It? We continue to
work on the production of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, who lived and
wrote in 19th-century California; this work which involves looking at a variety of cultural texts, from letters to legal documents to photographs, is
very much within the tradition of cultural studies. Within Chicano cultural studies itself, as you know, a number of debates have surfaced recently, not only in relation to historical scope, but also in reference to the
characterization of this type of cultural production as “subaltern,” and we
would like to respond to these issues here.
We would agree that the use of the term “subaltern” is, in fact, problematic, for its usage often masks an attempt, to quote Meiskins Wood in reference to other studies, to “retreat from class.” In the case of Latin American subaltern studies scholars, their general retreat from Marxist-oriented
analyses has paralleled their eager acceptance of other types of studies and
social movements, including those of identity issues, that is, gender, race,
ethnicity, and sexuality, often to the exclusion of class, and their embrace
of the term “subaltern.”
Having said that, however, and speaking as two scholars that still wish
to stress the primacy of class analyses, Beatrice and I nevertheless see a
need to argue for a category that can refer not only to exploited groups,
but to oppressed groups as well; the two are not equivalent sets. Gays,
women, ethnic minorities, and Blacks are subordinated groups in this
country and although politically distinct, it would be analytically—and
politically—irresponsible to disregard the intersections between them.
The conjuncture is easier in some cases than others, for race and ethnicity,
for example, are sometimes filters for class, but the same cannot be said of
gender and sexuality. To bring together under the same umbrella some of
these subordinated groups one needs a conceptual tool, however fuzzy and
messy, that can, whenever necessary, serve as a catalyst for generating a
shared political identity and agency.
Let us recall that Gramsci, who gives us the term “subaltern,” used it in
various ways in his prison notes, but primarily to distinguish subordinated
groups from dominant or hegemonic groups. Given his notion of blocs of
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classes, he often refers to subaltern “classes.” Within this binary “hegemonic/subaltern” designation, the term “subaltern” generally designates
the proletariat or working-classes, but sometimes Gramsci also refers to
the colonized as subaltern groups, as in the case of the Sicilian people governed by Provençal rulers. Given the general dominant/dominated distinction, the subaltern studies group in India has broadened usage of the
term and used it to refer to a variety of subordinated groups, whether in
precapitalist, capitalist, and / or colonized societies, analyzing as well
groups dominated on the basis of class, caste, race, ethnicity, age, gender,
culture, or immigration status. Thus, although binary in framing (hegemonic/subaltern), the term is in fact inclusive of a variety of subordinated
groups. The important thing here is that subaltern group studies not only
seek to vindicate subordinate positions but assume as well an oppositional
and critical stance against elite or hegemonic historiography.
In his notes on the terms “elite,” “subaltern,” etc., Guha points to the
variable positioning of intermediate groups, like regional or local elites,
since they at times side with the elite and at others with the subaltern,
much like the petty bourgeoisie within Marxist analysis. What this contradictory positioning points to is the need to view subalterity as a position
—that is, vis-à-vis another grouping within the social formation—rather
than as an essential identity. Conceiving this construct in spatial terms
highlights the relational character of the term “subaltern.” Following
Gramsci and Guha, then, we have used the term “subaltern” in our work
to designate subordinated groups, both exploited and/or oppressed as a
result of the U.S. conquest and occupation of the Southwest. It is a useful
term in tracking differential access within a racialized, genderized, socially
stratified society.
In the specific case of the Californios, before 1846, they were a local or
regional dominant group in relation to the Indian population, but they
cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as elite, for the small settlement consisted primarily of low ranking, conscripted mulatto, mestizo,
and Indian soldiers and their families, including ex-convicts, who were
forced to go north to Alta California. A largely illiterate population, it was
subordinated to dominant México City directives, first as a Spanish colony
and later as a Mexican colony. Mythologies of an arcadian elite notwithstanding, the Californios were always a subordinated population, disdained
in México as a “penal colony.” The term “aristocratic” is too often used to
refer to the Californio landed classes, but clearly it is a misnomer. They
were, at best, a sort of intermediate administrative strata in the territory. It
is thus shortsighted not to see the settlement within a relational context
that notes its subaltern status vis-à-vis a national economic and political
elite in México City and its precarious position in relation to international
forces, already then with an eye on acquiring a poorly defended territory.
After 1848, however, the Alta California population would be subordinated by the U.S., politically, economically, and culturally. Even those
landed Californios, with their recently — and often questionably — acquired land and cattle, would be reduced to poverty, given the Land Act,
which in effect put their titles in jeopardy, the cost of litigation to try to
prove their validity, the interest on loans, and the high state taxes. While a
few of the landed retained their property for a few years, within 10 to 15
years almost all had suffered dispossession; their children would become
workers on ranches, clerks in stores, and even sometimes bandits. The
wealthiest died penniless and were buried in pauper graves, like in Pio
Pico’s case. Thus, the regional ruling class of Alta California, ruled in turn
by the Mexican government, became the dominated and marginalized of
California. A short 20 years or so later there were few vestiges of any Californio power. By the 1870s, the Californios interviewed by Bancroft’s
agents were mourning their losses and, except for a few Spanish-language
newspapers, run often by new immigrants from México who thought little
of the uneducated Californios, had little or no access to power and representation of their own views.
It is in this specific context that the novel The Squatter and the Don by
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton can be viewed as a subaltern text, as it presents the views of the politically and economically dominated Californios.
In the edited book, Conflicts of Interest: the Letters of María Amparo Ruiz
de Burton (2001), we have tried to counter facile designations of Ruiz de
Burton as an aristocrat and are dismayed that the notion keeps cropping
up. Ruiz de Burton was a woman from Baja California, from a politically
important but poor family that claimed land in Ensenada, land that remained largely fallow, except for a section used for subsistence farming by
an aunt and uncle. It is even highly debatable if MARB belonged to the
propertied class, for even her claims to land in San Diego were equally tenuous, more virtual capital than real. What is important, in this case, is her
assumed identity as a “landed” Californio, who came to understand well
how the law worked to dispossess them and deprive them of their treatypromised rights.
An intelligent and resourceful woman, Ruiz de Burton would learn to
maneuver within the dominant discursive field of her moment to chart
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out this history of discrimination and subordination of the Californios.
Her counterdiscourses, her virulent attack against the government, her
biting critique of the law and monopoly corporations are there for all to
read, and if that is not cultural resistance, even if “compromised” at several
important levels, we don’t know what is. Moreover, the articulation of her
critiques, even if self-promoting and surely not disinterested, still have the
not insignificant merit of focusing on and dissecting the workings of the
new capitalist order of the period and countering hegemony.
Was she a member of the working class? No, she was not. She lived off
her husband soldier/officer’s salary and when he died, she lived off a small
widow’s pension of $25 a month and loans, as long as she could—her class
assertions notwithstanding—but she never forgot that she was a member
of the conquered, dispossessed, and marginalized Mexican population,
and in that sense she never forgot her subaltern status, genderwise, linguistically, and ethnically. That she would often represent herself as a
landed aristocrat does not however negate her real material social and political conditions as a capital-poor Mexican woman, whose “landed” status
was already disintegrating, even as this government recognized her right
to Jamul. In the final analysis, what makes her case interesting is that it
does make evident, on the one hand, the need to scrutinize and distinguish self-fashioning from social position and, on the other, points to the
dangers inherent in “recovery” undertakings. To avoid the pitfalls of compensatory or celebratory studies, one would have to call for a more complex understanding of the interplay of forces and studies rendering visible
to us links of the past to the present.
Thus, because we see the category of the “subaltern” as a relational position rather than as a fixed essence, we have no problem in describing
Ruiz de Burton as part of the subaltern group of Californios in 19th-century California, and her work as a representational space within which the
subaltern speak to counter hegemony.
Vicki Ruiz
Cultural studies is constantly reconstructing itself in terms of changing
historical projects. In that sense, I do see myself as a cultural studies historian because I look for new opportunities to expand the lens of the possible. If you look at the images of Chicanas and Mexicanas in early historical
works such as East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio or even Anglos and Mex-
icans and The Making of Texas, you’ll find that women are either invisible
or landscape characters. These women really are in the shadows of history.
They provide “scenery” at best. So one of the things I set out to accomplish in From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century
America was to illustrate how Chicana/o history changes when you look at
women’s lives to show how women’s presence shapes historiography and
how women themselves made decisions in the context of their worlds and
their times. In addressing the experiences of people of color in the U.S.
West, a debate emerges between structure and agency. In the first case, the
path-breaking synthesis that inaugurated “The New Western History,” Legacy of Conquest represents people of color as victims, just beaten down by
capitalism and racism—pawns, so to speak, in this game of conquest. It’s
an “Ay que pobrecitos” attitude, a real structural interpretation. In fairness,
I should note that Legacy was written roughly a dozen years ago and certainly I would no longer categorize its author, Patricia Limerick [who is a
valued friend and colleague], as a “poster scholar” of structuralist thought.
Of course, then you have writers, like Richard Rodríguez, who subscribes
to the agency camp. Agency advocates see no barriers, anyone can make it
—it’s a matter of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, to use a wellworn cliché. So you see, structuralists deny agency of historical actors
while the standard bearers of agency ignore the structural constraints that
impinge on people’s lives.
I endeavor to intermesh structure and agency. In Shadows, I wanted the
reader to imagine what it was like to be a woman in the 1930s, to recognize
the opportunities available to Mexican women in the U.S., and importantly, what was beyond their grasp. Here it is a question of providing an
understanding of what decisions they could make within the parameters
of their world, of considering the structural elements in their lives [deportations, repatriation, poverty] as well their possibilities and aspirations. I
was also interested in looking at the ways in which their relationship with
popular culture fed their dreams. A reviewer of Shadows contends that I
have written an anthology, not a monograph. This observation doesn’t get
to the heart of the book—to tell stories through time. I attempted to do
this in a linear way but certainly not through a “march of progress” format. The idea was to take themes roughly by decade and look at the dynamics of cultural coalescence and the claiming of public space—to show
how women make culture and politics.
I do think that this is a cultural studies production because it includes
life histories, story telling, poetry, lived experience, and photo essays. I
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look at Shadows as a collective testimonio but I want to clarify that I don’t
believe that historians can give voice to anyone. [I get really tired when
someone says people are providing voice to the long silenced.] As scholars,
we don’t give anybody voice; rather what we do is set the context to let
narrators reveal themselves on their own terms. That’s the ideal I strive for
in my work. This type of history is also different from many other histories of the same period. Aside from being more interdisciplinary, the history I write is informed by, but not totally dependent on, the archive. It isn’t written with the idea of “let me add a couple of local color quotes from
a couple of interviews I’ve done or I’ve found in the archive.” I wanted
women to tell their stories, and as a historian, I have sought to frame and
contextualize their words. These are precisely the stories missing from
American history and early Chicano history.
In this sense, I do see my work as part of a continuing political project.
I mean, if you read Ignacio García’s article in Chicanas/Chicanos Studies at
the Crossroads, you get the picture: The “rah rah” nationalism is still there.
Excuse me, feminism didn’t destroy the Chicano Movement or the family!!! In his work there’s an unproblematized nationalist ideal of the perfect Chicano family with the strong male breadwinner. Shadows is not
only about reformulating social relations in the public sphere, but also
documenting family histories that haven’t been written. I included strong
female-headed families, determined single parents. Just look at the picture
of Jesusita Torres’s mother, Pasquala—the opening photo in Shadows.
That image burned in my mind. [I actually interviewed Jesusita with that
photograph in the background as she recounted the harrowing story of
being left in the daytime in a boardinghouse in Juárez to care of her baby
sister while her mother cleaned and cooked for an affluent family. And
how she, as a nine-year-old, carried her baby sister through the streets of a
strange city to the house where her mother worked. Pasquala would quietly usher her children into the kitchen where she nursed her infant and
fed Jesusita a burrito of leftovers. Then Jesusita would carry her sister back
to the boardinghouse to await their mother’s return in the evening.] I
looked at the passport picture of Pasquala and her children and I was
struck by the fact that you could see that experience in her eyes and her
determination. She was going to get across the border with her kids! I carried that picture with me as I was writing.
I included this image, and of course, the other forty-plus photographs,
because I agree with cultural studies theorist Michael Charlesworth’s observation about the transformative nature of images. [He says that a photo
can “transgress the limits of its own power.”] In the photo essay, I selected
images of women working in different occupations, like the mother of
eight bent over a sewing machine doing piece work in her home and the
young Tejana at the machine at the La Malinche Tortilla Factory. I also included women who protest, making it a point to use the real Salt of the
Earth pictures [the actual strike at the Empire Zinc Mining Company]
rather than the stills from the movie because I strived to highlight the
strikers and they do stand out. I love the picture of Elvira Molano, considered the most arrested woman on the picket line. Here you see how she’s
posing for the camera and throwing a lot of attitude. Then there’s the
cover picture for Shadows of the Cochran Strikers’ Camp in 1933. The
young woman standing in the center of the frame looking at the photographer. She’s probably had a full day out there with the picket signs, but
she’s dressed up, got her hand on hip, and she’s just throwing attitude.
And I love it. You see the power there.
Sometimes cultural studies scholars don’t pay enough attention to
(Chicana) history. That’s why the chapter of my book, “Pickets, Baskets,
and Ballots,” is really important to me. I placed it after “The Flapper and
the Chaperone” as a way to counter the argument that Americanization is
wholly negative (in the case of women) and to counter the double standard behind this train of thought. You know the argument: when men
adopt the drapes, the chains, and the Zoot Suits, that is read as a form of
resistance, but when women adopt a form of popular culture they are condemned for being assimilated! My intent was to show that these women
might have looked like flappers in the 1920s or Ginger Rogers in the 1930s
when they went to work at the cannery, but some also led political lives. So
that’s why you have to look not only at the ways in which women interacted with popular culture, but also the ways in which certain groups of
working-class women sought to exercise control over their work lives
through unionization.
It was impossible for me to go through every strike that Mexican
women have been involved with so I made selections like the 1903 Pacific
Electric Railway strike. I found a newspaper article in which the reporter
covering the strike derisively referred to Mexican women as “Amazons”
because they went into the pit and took away the tools from the scabs. In
essence, I look at women’s activism as the real Salt of the Earth strike and
women’s participation in mutualistas. I not only write about radical
women, but I also write about conservative women like Concha Ortiz y
Pino, the first Hispanic woman elected to a state legislature. The aim was
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to give a sense of the range of what public space entails for these women
and how they claim it. For example, the Ladies of LULAC going from
house to house registering people to vote or the berry workers in El Monte
going out on strike.
Do I think this is feminism? I think it depends on the definition of feminism. For me, social justice and gender consciousness equals feminism.
[This is not about “I am woman, hear me roar!”] If you unhook social justice from the gender train, then you’ve lost feminism. In the case of these
women, I would argue that theirs is a prefeminist stance. This wasn’t feminism, per se, because most women didn’t identify themselves as feminists.
They referred to themselves as people who had a consciousness about
themselves and their issues. I would contend that this was more of a classoriented gender consciousness.
This doesn’t mean that struggles around gender and family issues were
not important or that women didn’t push the gender limits or have some
control over their leisure time. For example, the works of Deena González
and Ramón Gutiérrez demonstrate that throughout the Spanish Borderlands period, Mexican women pushed the boundaries of gender expectations. Gertrudis Barceló [La Tules] is a woman who lives life on her own
terms, running a successful saloon and gambling salon in Santa Fe, yet she,
and others like her, were viewed as “beyond the pale”; they had transgressed acceptable bounds of propriety. During this early period, there
doesn’t exist an alternate set of expectations women can draw upon as an
accepted rationale for behavior not in keeping with “traditional” norms.
In the interwar period (1920–1940), in particular, American popular culture aids and is an ally of young Mexican women who resist chaperonage.
In this period, Mexican American women see their EuroAmerican
peers go out to the movies with their dates unchaperoned [and they noticed that some of their Anglo co-workers did not even live at home, but
have their own apartments]. They see Hollywood movies that depict men
and women socializing without a chaperone. In this way, they are able to
argue, “Hey, maybe leaving the dueña (chaperone) at home is not accepted
on Soto Street (in East L.A.) but boy, it’s accepted at the Cinderella Ballroom (in Long Beach).” I also think there is a key difference in the options
of urban and rural teenagers. If you are a rural Mexican American teenager in the mining town of Globe, Arizona, for instance, you are going to
have a heck of a time escaping la dueña when you attend a dance. However, if you are in East L.A., just hop on that red car and tell your mom
you are going to spend the night with a cousin. It’s much easier to evade la
dueña in the city. These are the small personal victories of women. Popular culture also had hidden powers, so to speak, that are difficult for historians to discern. In my interview with Jesusita Torres, for example, she
talks about how important True Story was in terms of helping her learn to
read:
“I started reading in English. I remember when I started reading the
love story books I started understanding. But I never knew the end of it.
You know why I never knew the end of the story? Because when you turn
the page and at the end it says ‘cont.’ like in continue, I never knew what it
meant. So one day I discovered it myself. I was reading and I always
wanted to know the end of the story. I wanted to know so bad so I continued flipping the pages, then I looked. The same name of the story and it
said the same word ‘cont.’ I learned that. And then from then on I finished
the stories. . . . To me that was something you see, I did not have anybody
to say: “Look, you look at the page and you continue.”
Here is someone who very clearly appropriated popular culture for her
own education. In my work, I do use a Chicana feminist approach that emphasizes the collective and includes social justice issues. This is important
because if you don’t use this approach, your work becomes a “hats off to
the ladies.” I want readers to see women as flesh and blood human beings
and to understand them as historical actors. When documenting the activism of Chicanas in the Movimiento, my feminist consciousness involves
translating women’s practices as political action; Chicanas did more than
talk about sexism—they engaged in concrete activism, protests, action research, union organizing, community centers, and third party politics.
Richard Chabrán
I like to trace my interest in cultural studies to being introduced to Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature by the late Michael Heisley.
There were several things about Williams’s biography that I connected to
personally, including the fact that as a Welsh person he had to confront
the dominant British identity and the question of language. [Much of this
biographical history is explored in his publication What I Came Here to
Say.] I saw this as being similar in some fashion to what Chicanas/os had
to deal with in terms of the academy and life in the U.S. I was also influenced by the Working Papers of the Birmingham Center for Cultural
Studies that were published under the title Culture, Media, Language. The
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theoretical articulations as well as the projects with working-class popular
culture were very exciting to me. I guess I was predisposed to this cultural
studies work because of my background. The fact that I am the son of a
Puerto Rican father and Chicana Mexican mother and that I was raised by
a single parent [my mom, Angie Gonzalez-Chabram] from the workingclass meant that mine was a hybrid identity that was more complicated
than what was proposed in the nationalist literature of the early
movimiento.
As far as my work in Chicana/o cultural studies is concerned, in the last
decade I participated in a number of cultural-studies-related projects, including that first issue of Cultural Studies. There I offered a critique of
Hispanic Cultures in the United States, which represented a right-wing representation of Latinos. Shortly after that, in 1991 and 1992 I helped run two
summer seminars on Qualitative Methods for the Inter-University Program for Latino Research. During those seminars the organizers brought
together a broad range of Latina/o scholars and graduate students to debate many theories and methods, and we introduced them to cultural
studies.
I believe that those seminars provided a place where issues of gender
were also being seriously appreciated. The contributions of Maria Lugones, Mara Soldatenko, Mary Pardo, Rosa Linda Fregoso, and Angie
Chabram-Dernersesian were critical to raising the issue. That dialogue
with cultural studies, per se, was extended into a Latina/o cultural studies
project on cultural citizenship which included Chicano and Puerto Rican
participants, representing ethnographic projects in Los Angeles, New York,
San Antonio, San José, and Watsonville. This work was published under
the title Latino Cultural Citizenship.
We also sponsored a visit by the late Paulo Freire, whose work with literacy offered not just a theory but a recognition of the importance of
working with people working in local communities. At this point we were
all aware that we also needed to move to include other ethnic groups. We
began meeting with Elliot Butler and other people as well who do work in
cultural studies from other sites, including Black studies. One manifestation of that kind of dialogue in cultural studies was the Chicano cultural
studies conference in Santa Barbara. This conference opened up a space
for a multiethnic dialogue. I believe it represented the first conference on
Chicano cultural studies to be held on the West Coast.
In terms of my own work as a librarian, I have been actively trying to
identify, collect, preserve, and organize a broader range of material than is
typically collected within universities. You must understand: there is a tremendous pressure to be selective and edit out particular voices within academic circuits, even within the alternative sector. This kind of struggle
takes place behind the scenes, but it must be resisted. With much apprehension I have come to realize that not only do some faculty (including
Chicano faculty) undervalue the presence of Chicana/o libraries, but in
some cases, they also are working actively to eliminate or curtail them. I
have had these concerns for many years. In an effort to share these concerns a group of us assembled some academic librarians and some faculty
to discuss Chicana/o academic library services. The proceedings of this
conference were published as Biblio-Politica. The book explores theoretical, methodological, practical, and organizational challenges of collecting
and disseminating Chicana/o materials. What we attempted to make clear
here is that while libraries are often considered neutral places, they are in
fact very political spaces in society. This belief has also informed my work
as a librarian. I often share cultural studies literature with Chicana/o
Latina/o graduate students, who are struggling to frame their work within
an interdisciplinary field. And when doing fieldwork, I saw the importance
of doing a cultural studies ethnographic practice that centered on sharing
of people’s voices. I found that the intellectuals who were doing the more
progressive part of that work were becoming more isolated, and so I began
to work more and more in order to find different ways to document that
community voice. I began to do it with technology, over the internet, because it was a place that was not as regulated or policed as other mediums.
So for me the internet was to share different thoughts and voices that were
out there in different communities.
I think this charge is very much in the spirit of cultural studies. Here we
have a technology that can and is being used to dis/articulate cultural phenomena in a way that’s less regulated than in the academy and the entertainment industry. We can share virtually over the world, yet we aren’t
thinking or writing enough about how we can do this. Clearly, there are a
lot of drawbacks to using this technology because not everybody has access, but to me these are all problems that we need to address and solve.
Ultimately, I believe we have to approach virtual spaces with the same
caution as we do any other kind of cultural project—they aren’t inherently good or bad, they are cultural constructions. Some people don’t
want to deal with virtual spaces because for these people they don’t have
the same rigor or legitimacy as other materials or “this or that.” Of course,
those same kinds of arguments were used against television and the early
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Chicana/o press. I think that this type of valuation is a wholly negative response, a response which suggests that virtual phenomena don’t contribute anything. Ironically, some of the same people that have that attitude
go to the opposite extreme of saying that as an information source virtual
reality is everything, so that we don’t need libraries. That’s as serious an
error as negating the value of this network. To me, virtual reality (the web
and the internet) is one place where we can and must work. Cultural studies offers us a way of understanding and promoting this technology as a
means for documenting many voices. Cultural studies also helps us to see
the way that technology works in relation to the dominant and corporate
cultures—and the way technology is being used by people to resist.
At this point in time I’m at the Center for Virtual Research at UCR. The
immediate focus of the Center’s work is applied but long-term it is theoretical because it examines how new technologies (such as the internet)
are shaping academic and community developments. The Center has two
major funded projects. The first is Chicano/Latinonet, which is an effort
to build an on-line collection of Latino-related resources and to supplement this with training. The second is the UCR Community Digital Initiative. CDI, as we call it, is funded by the California Wellness Foundation. At
CDI we have developed a community computing center which focuses on
training youth. I think of it as a new alternative learning space where both
youth and adults can learn to use technology to give voice to their various
resources and struggles. It’s a new space and place where popular culture
can grow. This is related to early adult education programs which were
present at the beginning of cultural studies. In my case involvement with
this youth project allows me to articulate my cultural theory, anthropological, library, and organizing concerns.
Yes, I do consider myself to be a practitioner of cultural studies. In fact, I
teach a course which is now called Chicana cultural studies and that used
to be called Chicana expressive culture. I don’t think everyone has embraced the conceptual move you see in this title change or that everyone’s
totally supportive of it. In fact, I was just at the University of New México
at a feminist conference and a Chicana asked me: Why do cultural studies?
I talked a bit about cultural studies and then I asked what she had to say
about it. She told me she had some problems with its postcolonial focus. I
think what she meant was that frameworks (like cultural studies) are being imported without really examining whether there’s a really good fit
with Chicana studies or not. To a certain degree it’s true that there’s been
less debate about cultural studies in Chicana/o studies in comparison to
what you see in the subaltern Latin American studies group, where there’s
been a lot of conversation. My position on cultural studies is this: For me
it’s not so much a question of incorporating Chicana studies into cultural
studies as much as it is a question of bringing cultural studies into dialogue with Chicana studies. You see this move in my essay, “Cultural Studies, Difference, and the Non-Unitary Subject.” This essay came out of the
1990 Santa Barbara Conference on Chicana/o cultural studies.
You know I was a late comer to cultural studies and that conference
opened up a lot of possibilities for me. Concretely, the confluence between
Chicana studies and cultural studies enabled a dialogue with other people
who were thinking about identity in a nonunitary way. For me locating
this confluence was like finding a connection with cultural studies that
was already in Chicana/o studies, because my understanding of this type
of identity grew out of my previous contact with cultural productions
such as Borderlands, This Bridge Called My Back, and Loving in the War
Years. Let me elaborate more on this point because it’s important.
This Bridge Called My Back was published in 1981. What can I say about
it except that it was like this bombshell! Unlike other influential books it
refused to choose among the various aspects of Chicana identity and embraced multiple, shifting, and contradictory expressions. Nowadays people
have taken this construction of identity to a level of high theory, but to me
it was an example of “theory in the flesh.” I thought it was very powerful,
and I liked the idea that cultural producers such as Cherríe Moraga were
formulating identities which are very messy and unresolved. [I’m referring
to her conflict around being half Chicana/o and white, to her sexuality,
and to her problematic relationship to certain Movement ideologies.]
Anzaldúa’s Borderlands was also important to me, especially its positioning of the mestiza consciousness at a painful and contradictory crossroads. As I mentioned in my essay, some people stress the celebratory aspect of that crossroads without realizing that her theorizing is an act of
desperation. In fact, she’s trying to find a way to make “sense of it all.” Yet
there’s a kind of nontraditional utopian aspect to her work which is about
trying to find a whole self and about envisioning what kind of politics
would come out of this sense of contradiction and conflict. I think it’s very
productive to look at all these things in Chicana/o cultural studies. And to
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get back to your initial question, I guess you could say that my practice of
cultural studies is always sharply directed toward what is being excluded
or marginalized, even within those discourses that claim “a new cultural
politics of difference.”
I need to say that I also have a stake in this kind of work that goes beyond writing. To me the personal, the academic, and the political coalesce.
To put it another way, I think it’s very important that there be spaces for
the excluded in Chicana/o studies, but I think it’s equally important that I
have the opportunity to make those spaces happen in Chicana/o studies
and cultural studies. This is part of where the passion and the pleasure of
doing Chicana cultural studies comes from. So the fact that I got a job at
Stanford as an “out lesbian” who does queer theory, and the fact that I am
able to bring in progressive queer artists of color into the academy is very
important to me. This is part of a larger project of expanding on personal
and intellectual horizons. And there’s a political stand that’s behind this
project that becomes evident when you consider that we’re living in a period in which people are being killed for being gay and in which being gay
or lesbian can be elided in the discourses of difference, including the ones
in Chicana/o studies.
In my article in Cultural Studies (April 1999), I wanted to call attention
to these gaps and contradictions in Chicano studies by addressing the fantasy of Chicano and its exclusionary and heteronormative dimensions.
While it’s true that Chicana feminists have already critiqued this fantasy
within cultural productions I wrote the article because I thought there was
a need for more critique of how Chicano studies foregrounds the Chicano
family and subject in terms of an institutional form of compulsory heterosexuality. I also wanted to draw attention to the exile of the queer son or
daughter that results from the imposition of this structure of family.
In my work I’m also advocating for a general attention to issues of sexuality, so for me this practice of cultural studies is not just about queer
critics of color looking at queer work. I also think that Chicana/o cultural
studies as a whole has a lot to gain by looking at sexuality, per se. But this
is not going to be easy because it involves a complete paradigm shift—you
can’t just “add things on” to an existing conceptual framework. If you do
you are just perpetuating the politics of exclusion. I mean we’re talking
about redressing historic exclusions and marginalizations that continue to
exist. And as we have seen recently, it’s not only an issue of looking at sexuality but also race, class, and gender. Sure, now we have critics making
gestures toward gender and sexuality after having concentrated on race or
class. But my feeling about this is: How are different arenas of scholarship
transformed [such as immigration studies, for instance] when people look
at sexuality at the same time they look at the other categories [gender,
class, economic systems, race]?
A related question I’m very interested in is: What does a critical practice
look like that’s striving to keep all of these critical categories in place at the
same time? I think that for people whose vocation is the study of sexuality
it is almost easier to deal with these conceptual difficulties because your
subject (sexuality) is already centered and your struggle is to widen the focus of your analysis so you are always looking at the other categories of
analysis. At least you aren’t running the danger of leaving sexuality out or
running the danger of adding it afterward. Emma Pérez was so eloquent
on this at a recent NACCS plenary. She talked about how desire is fundamental to any movement and about how if you repress that in any of its
forms you are dooming that movement to failure. [Not to mention the
fact that the repressed returns with a vengeance!] I think that as long as we
aren’t making sexual identities and sexualities visible and striving to make
the connections between categories, we are supporting the dominant
hegemonic discourses within Chicana/o cultural studies.
But this is not the only reason that I do the kind of work I do. As I said
before I have a very personal stake in this work. This Bridge Called My
Back was a crossroads for me, it had a major effect on me. It made me feel
that I had a home within Chicana/o (cultural) studies. Plus, I share Moraga’s racial identity, so there were a lot of points for identification there in
that work. Again, what just fascinated me was that the book brought into
focus different aspects of identity simultaneously in a nontraditional
utopian way. Understand, I’m not trashing utopia. In my recent book,
Writing on Cherríe Moraga, I talk about the early utopian vision of lesbian
sexuality that became very oppressive and exclusive in its own way. That
kind of work was utopian in a way that leads nowhere. But in Cherríe’s
work, you have a different kind of utopian impulse. I mean if you didn’t
think that somehow you could change the world and society, why would
you bother with what she proposes?
What I love about Moraga’s work is that she has constantly always
shown the obstacles and the difficulties of doing this. That makes the
reader confront the dynamics of the society that we live in which keep us
from change and from being visible and audible. I think The Last Generation was the turning point in her production. I found it to be very intriguing because it becomes much more nationalistic and yet she simultane-
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ously expounds on her whiteness. Before it was like: “I choose to be brown
and this is my journey to my brown self.” But in The Last Generation that
took a different twist that I thought was very interesting and almost contradictory given her previous deconstruction of “la malinche” and Chicano nationalism in “a long line of Vendidas.” Again, what fascinated me
and continues to fascinate me about this work are its contradictions, not
its coherences. I mean just the way she talks about identity throughout
this work is very chameleon-like—she says “My identity changes all the
time.” [The lesbian in her work also changes.] What I trace in the book is
her project of looking at sexuality as a microcosm of social relations with
all of its conflicts and contradictions and its shifting qualities.
I need to say that I’m also galvanized by the recent institutional interventions of people like Raul Coronado, who did the plenary at last year’s
NACCS. It was just amazing how he told his own initiation story into
queer sexuality and talked about Chicana/o studies and his place within it.
He also recounted how he came from a Mecha in Texas that was full of
queers who were also Marxists! That combination might come as a surprise to many people. I’m also very excited about José Muñoz’s work,
Disidentifications. In the first pages of that book, which I teach in my Chicana studies course, he acknowledges Chicana feminism and explains how
he’s building on that work. This is an important gesture which not everyone makes. Nobody’s perfect but there are some gay men out there that ignore this aspect or that are incredibly misogynistic. As a Chicana lesbian
feminist I need to say that I don’t throw down with the queer man of color
simply on the basis of sexuality—they have to prove to me that they are
feminists as well.
C. Ondine Chavoya
Yes, I do consider myself to be a practitioner of cultural studies, but even
more specifically, I consider myself to be as a practitioner of visual art,
photography, performance, film and advertising, and cultural studies.
What that means to me is that I inherit certain things from the discipline
of art history [including methods of formal visual analysis], and I try to
combine those traditional methods with interdisciplinary research methods. In some instances, this involves borrowing traditions from Anthropology, Sociology, and area studies [such as American studies or Chicana/o studies]. For me this kind of work is heavily informed by Fou-
cault’s idea that every regime of representation is a regime of power
formed. So that becomes the motivating method through which I bring
together the traditional visual analysis and interdisciplinary research
methods. Having said that, I think that in other ways, my work is very traditionally art historical with regard to the minute attention to the visual
and the archive. And yet, the Chicana/o work [with an emphasis on conceptual, performance, and multimedia work] that I’m looking at is very
unconventional and the way I end up talking about it is also very unconventional, at least for the discipline of art history. This departure from the
conventional must come from my training in cultural studies. Remember,
I came to Chicana/o studies through cultural studies. In fact, as an undergraduate I was admitted to the only graduate program in visual and cultural studies in the nation. Prior to that, I had been formally introduced to
cultural studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, but in reality
my connection to cultural studies began much earlier. So if you don’t
mind, I’ll address this connection through an autobiographical narrative.
I grew up in Santa Ana, California, and was raised very traditionally by
a Mexicana stepmother, and my father, a Chicano, who hates this term. In
my youth, I was considered an eccentric and somewhat “rebellious” adolescent. I was the first of ninety grandchildren or so to go to college. While
I was in high school, I was very involved with Mayo [a high school
Mecha]. I was also very involved with the new wave/punk youth cultures
of the time. These things weren’t polar opposites for me. And I wasn’t living them alone; I was living them along with a group of other young Chicanas and Chicanos. The funny thing is that without even knowing it, my
early interest in popular culture led me to cultural studies and critical theory. For instance, I was introduced to the writings of Roland Barthes and
Walter Benjamin through a German new wave band called “Propaganda”
that appropriated their writings as lyrics. Then when I was sixteen years
old, I had a tremendous, really formative experience: I went to a lecture by
Malcolm McLaren, the founder of The Sex Pistols and a bunch of other
new wave British bands. [He came to give a lecture on popular culture and
the study of popular culture at California State University at Fullerton.]
That was in my junior year in high school. It was at that point that I
started thinking that this (popular culture) was my passion and my life;
and that if I could find a way to continue that passion in my study, then
I’d be fulfilled. Of course, I didn’t know how I was going to make a living
out of it! Then I wound up going to UC Santa Cruz. Unbeknownst to me,
I wound up in an important center for interdisciplinary radical scholar-
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ship. I was in the presence of figures like Angela Davis, James Clifford,
Hayden White, Teresa de Lauretis, Gloria Anzaldúa. The irony, however, is
that it was also at Santa Cruz where I was confronted with this exclusionary narrow nationalism within the university community that I was not
prepared for. Understand, I had been exposed to politics early on. When I
was a teenager, I’d been this little Chicanito who was all involved in Mayo
and a lot of Latino youth conferences, but when I went to my first Mecha
meeting at Santa Cruz, a young Chicana student who held some kind of
administrative authority asked me what I was doing there! I answered her
in Spanish, and she was offended because she didn’t speak Spanish. Basically, she gave one authenticity test [the visual inspection], and I gave her
another one [the linguistic one]. What happened as a result of all of this is
that I ended up becoming more involved with the queer organizations on
campus than with Mecha. Somehow I felt that within my own social life
and intellectual life I could bring the two (cultural studies and Chicana/o
studies) together, but that I could not do this in my political life. That was
between ’88 and ’92. What made that connection between Chicanas/os
and cultural studies possible was my own geographic and cultural displacement to a graduate program at the University of Rochester.
Being so far removed from California and recognizing that the things
I’d taken for granted as cultural realities of the late 20th century weren’t
even acknowledged as valid for academic inquiry in other places, had a big
impact on me and the direction of my research. These cultural realities
didn’t even exist in the computer data bases at the University of Rochester.
I also began to recognize my own privilege as one of five Chicanas/os in a
Ph.D. program in art history in the nation. I knew that many of those Chicanas/os who were in these programs weren’t interested in doing Chicana/o art history. So, somehow I came to this connection in Chicana/o
cultural studies through my decision to work in Chicana/o visual culture.
I’m interested in the issue of how artists are responding to what they
see as a policing of literal borders and public space; a fear of art in public
places; and people who might seen as being “out of place.” They are responding to a xenophobic attitude out there that creates a notion of the
“in place,” the “out of place,” and “the illegal.” The artists [David Avalos,
Louis Hock, and Elizabeth Sisco] I examine in my essay in The Ethnic Eye
highlight some of these issues by creating an object [a poster] that would
catalyze a public debate about the issues of undocumented labor in the
city of San Diego. They hoped this might bring out some of the structuring contradictions of the city’s dependence upon undocumented labor
and its continuing demonized representation of “illegal aliens” in the media and the public sphere. One of the artists—David Avalos—articulated
the purpose of this type of work extremely well. He said that he wanted to
take the issue of undocumented labor and make it into a debate because it
wasn’t a debate yet, it was only being presented by one side (in the mass
media). And that’s what happened—they created the debate! These artists
knew they couldn’t control it, but that’s what really interested me about
that particular group as opposed to other more traditional practitioners of
performance art who try to stop certain things from being said.
What really ties my work together I believe is attention to the contested
territories of public space and public representation. In my research and
writing I argue that Chicanas/os have been historically denied access to
public space and public representation [and I examine and interpret the
work from this perspective]. I’m interested in “Welcome to America’s
Finest Tourist Plantation” bus poster and ASCO multimedia work because
of the way they intervene into the public sphere and make certain statements and imaginative reconstructions about identity, community, cultural citizenship, and cultural geography. This work is going to be increasingly important with the new Diaspora, which is affirming its presence
with the new populations of Mexicanos in Boston, Georgia, Oklahoma,
North Carolina, and in places where there have never been Mexicana/o
populations. [In upstate New York, for example, you saw the highest number of INS deportations per capita, and this is happening outside of the
territory of Aztlán!]
There are a lot of interesting things going around us with these groups.
I think we need to ask: Are these people and their children going to be
Chicanas/os? Are we going to rethink cultural citizenship? I think this issue, which has been addressed by the group at Stanford, is going to be a
crucial one in the future. We need to continue to investigate and repoliticize this issue, along with other renegotiations of territory, of the nation
state and its multiple intersections with race, ethnicity, gender sexuality,
community, dominance, and subjection. Public space and public representation will be increasingly important for us to think about as well. I also
think the Latina/o presence in popular culture is also very interesting.
While I was in France I kept on thinking I was seeing Chicanas/os on
the streets, but these people were North Africans, people who in many
ways resembled Chicanas/os. This affiliation is why Michelle Habell’s work
—and the work of other people who are doing transcontinental work like
hers—is so important. We need to make connections between communi-
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ties and alternative forms of scholarship from unlikely places. But this
type of work isn’t always encouraged. I’ve presented papers where established scholars who work in Chicano art history have dismissed my work
for making reference to non-Chicano voices, even if I’m working to criticize those voices or to bring out another complexity. I think the only way
we’re going to survive the 21st century is by making intellectual and political coalitions with other people, such as, for example, anti-racist scholars.
In my own case I have these kinds of conversations with my friends Isaac
Julien, Coco Fusco, and Kellie Jones, but we haven’t been able to have
those kinds of conversations with other scholars as much in public as is
necessary.
Sonia Saldívar-Hull
I would like to say that I consider myself first of all to be a Chicana feminist critic. This is an instantiation of many things. I’m a worker, a theorist,
a teacher, and a writer and I’m a Tejana, a Chicana, and a feminist. I highlight this because I often get asked the question, “What came first, your
feminist consciousness or your Chicana consciousness?” And I can’t answer that because I think that they were always there together, inextricably
bound together.
My “formal” connection to cultural studies is recent. I published an article, “Ya Soy Mujer,” in a special issue of that journal (Cultural Studies:
1999). There I examine a literary practice of transfrontera feminism that
resists a transnational media (the telenovelas) which “plots” Chicanas and
Mexicanas according to traditional patriarchal designs. In media, romance
studies, and Latin American cultural studies there’s a lack of attention to
working-class Chicanas and Mexicanas, and that’s one of the reasons why
Sandra Cisneros’s literary work on the power of the media (novelas) and
Chicana Mexicana narratives of resistance to the media is so important. I
wrote an entire chapter on it for my book on Chicana feminism.
How did I get involved in this type of a Chicana feminist cultural analysis? It began in graduate school. I had already done all the French feminisms. I knew the American feminists and the history of the Women’s
movement in the United States very well. With Barbara Harlow’s help, I
was able to expand my reading to more global (con)texts. But what I was
looking for wasn’t there; I was looking for a native feminism. It wasn’t until I seriously studied This Bridge Called My Back and Loving in the War
Years that I found what I was looking for. When I first read Loving I read it
for the autobiography and as a way to find my own visibility and voice in
the text. You know, Moraga says that this is a book that she wrote with “all
that family looking over her shoulder.” She expresses how it feels to write
something that you know you can never fully share with your family. I felt
this very strongly too; I knew what she meant. It feels awful to be entering
a field (literary studies) that your family, your parents, for example, will
never understand, and might never support. And even though her concerns were articulated around the issues of sexuality and sexual orientation, I had similar issues around my place in the grand scheme of things as
a woman. My parents so desperately wanted me to be the proper doctor’s
wife, and here I was putting myself through the torture of graduate
school.
So Moraga was very, very important to me in that sense, but then later I
came to understand her work as one of the first articulations of Chicana
feminist theory. Eventually, I came up with the idea that many of the contemporary Chicana writers [including Viramontes, Cisneros, Anzaldúa]
were also theorizing and engaged in a practice of what I called, Chicana
feminism on the border. This reference to the borderlands is not meant to
be a free-floating metaphor or a fashionable trope, as is sometimes suggested. This border feminism is materially linked to a raced, working-class
condition and subject, a specific history of women and people of color, an
embodied theory and practice, and concrete geopolitical borders.
I found articulations of this feminism on the border theory in the forward to the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back, written by Moraga, where she lists all of the issues that inform her feminism. This got me
into thinking, “This is Chicana feminism, a very specific type of Chicana
feminism, one that’s political and concrete.” I also confirmed the fact that I
wanted to write about these kinds of texts. I found Sandra Cisneros’s The
House on Mango Street to be a wonderful articulation of feminism. She reclaims Chicana’s bodies in very beautiful, poetic, and lyrical language but
yet also talks about community and (gender, racial, sexual) politics. From
that little book (Mango) that so many people dismiss as bourgeois yearnings for the mansion or the white picket fence, Sandra Cisneros reworks
the domestic space as a site of politics and possible social transformation.
We witness the formation of an “organic intellectual” who renounces the
idea that writers aren’t accountable. When she talks about going back for
“those who cannot out,” this is a lesson in how not to be appropriated into
the traditional intellectual mode.
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At that time that Cisneros was writing the short stories that eventually
became Women in Hollering Creek, she let me read the manuscript, and it
was awesome. When I read the titular story I said, “Oh, this is it, the perfect enactment of feminism on the border.” Here this Mexicana crosses
over to the United States because she thinks she’s going to be liberated, but
Cisneros shows that gender oppression is no different in Seguin, Texas
than it had been in the pueblitos of México. Crossing that physical border
meant nothing for this woman; she was still going to be a poor battered
wife because of her social condition and the power of the media to plot
culture and her husband’s patriarchal privilege to enact his violent temperament. At the end, a Chicana, together with a group of women working
in an obstetrical clinic, help her to escape the battering husband. It’s as if
they ran an underground railroad! They get her back to México, but you
know, it’s not a perfect ending. She doesn’t go back to a feminist commune or anything like that. Instead she goes back to her father and los
necios (five brothers). She goes back to the patriarchy but she’s escaping
the physical abuse, at least for now, and she takes with her the tale of a fascinating encounter with a Chicana feminist who lives her life on her own
terms. Here you see a glimpse of feminismo popular—a practice of feminism on the border — through this crossing back and forth between
women (mujeres) and nations.
You also see the opening up of a feminist borderland in Elena Viramontes story, The Moths. Here she lays out the conditions in the patriarchal household. She teaches us about the patriarchal mother, the woman
who allows the patriarchy to destroy so many young female lives, and
about the grandmother’s house, which is the little girl’s place of escape. Viramontes totally deconstructs the Chicano family—the sacred familia.
This is the place where some of the most serious crimes are enacted
against women.
Then there’s Anzaldúa. She is from this same general barrio that I’m
from in South Texas. Her book Borderlands is at the heart of my work on
feminism on the border. She clearly articulates the Tejana’s version of history that male historians couldn’t write. She brings to life the issues that
Tejanas suffer, the issues that were central to their lives and their deaths in
South Texas. She does this in prose, and then she does it in poetry form in
that long poem called “The Greasers.” This is about a lynching of a Tejano
family in the late nineteenth century. We see how the rinches are getting
ready to lynch the husband, but before they lynch him, he has to watch his
wife being raped. This is part of his punishment, part of the terrorism of
the violence of conquest. And it took someone like Gloria Anzaldúa to
write that story.
In her work on the coaticle state Anzaldúa gets very much into the psyche. I think this exploration is about a phase that we have to go through—
the internal work—in order to become that materialist, feminist person or
worker or political activist we want to be. I think it’s very brave of Anzaldúa to put that kind of very personal work down on the page for us. A
lot of my students say that their lives have been changed because of that
kind of work that Anzaldúa does and teaches them how to do. And I really
believe that in Borderlands Anzaldúa gives us a radical pedagogy that addresses how we become activists.
What is at (political) stake in this type of border feminist pedagogy?
Well, you know, when I was doing the revisions on this manuscript over
this past summer, I kept remembering my Chicana students and how they
used to asked me “Profesora, how did you do it?” How can I do it? These
were Chicanas who were at UCLA, and that’s quite an accomplishment already. But they’d have to go home after class every day, even if this meant a
two-hour drive on the freeways. They couldn’t come back to cultural
events in the evening. They couldn’t stay at the library because they were
still living under the patriarchal household. They’d ask: “How do we do it?
How do you do it, profesora?” And, you know, that’s the very question I
asked Norma Alarcón years back. I asked, “How did you do it?” I asked
Sandra Cisneros too: “Sandra, how did you leave your family? How did
you live by yourself?” Over the last eight years I’ve been asking these questions. Suddenly I find myself in a very untraditional situation, teaching in
L.A. with my husband and son still in Texas. My students are totally startled by that. And I want to tell them how I did it and share that with them,
and not deny that it was very painful, you know. [My mother thinks I’m
loca/crazy]. I want to show these women how I did it—show them one
way this can be done. And these Chicana writers and theorists are teaching
other ways to do it. They are writing about Chicanas, who are of workingclass origin and facing up to a number of constraints.
Renato Rosaldo
To answer your question, yes, I do consider myself to be a practitioner of
cultural studies. My book, Culture and Truth, contains a lot of cultural
studies, and over the years I’ve been influenced by cultural studies per-
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spectives in my projects in a variety of ways. Let me backtrack a little bit to
the late sixties and early seventies to the whole Octavio Romano/El Grito
critique of Anthropology that came out of Berkeley. I begin here because I
think this was the seedbed or the preparation for the emergence of Chicano cultural studies. In my own work, for example, I really took that critique to heart. I reviewed it very carefully and started thinking about the
need for a historical perspective in the study of culture that would include
colonialism, questions of domination, and so on. That work was influential and even pioneering on various counts, but I found that as a model it
was still very programmatic. My question was basic: How do you actually
do this type of study?
At the time that I was engaged in this line of inquiry, there wasn’t yet a
formation called cultural studies. But I was already reading a lot of the
people who seem to have become identified with cultural studies, including Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Michel Foucault. The one
who really shaped my thought at the time was Williams—I used to teach
him in a lot of my classes. For me the big question that came to the foreground within this Marxian tradition was the question of how you study
ideology. It seemed to me that if you had an interest in culture, as I did,
then you could really contribute something trying to answer that question. It also seemed that a more strictly materialist position had less to
offer.
In my parallel readings of Chicano scholars, I also came to understand
the importance of Américo Paredes to Chicano cultural studies. I found
that in his work there was a reformulation of the old “El Grito Program,”
but I also found that going from that to Américo Paredes was like going
from a sledge hammer to a very finely made sword [to draw on masculine
images of warfare]! Early on, Paredes did a lot of things I thought were
important, including a piece called, “On Ethnographic Work among Minority Groups.” I actually did a review essay on Chicano studies and Anthropology for the Annual Review of Anthropology that crystallized a lot
my ideas about the issue of culture and domination. At that point I
thought that kind of issue was already evident in much of Américo Paredes’s work. The way I think about him now is that he was a guy who
wanted to be discovered, so you had to read him very carefully. He didn’t
toot his own horn and say, “I am telling you how to study culture in relation to domination.” He didn’t do a lot of that up front, but it’s in his
work. This perspective is imbedded there; this kind of study was a huge
preoccupation of his.
In my review of this work and readings of other people who would become “cultural studies” scholars later, it seemed to me that there was a lot
of back-and-forth between Chicana/o studies and what was at that point
becoming cultural studies. And this perception was shaped by my experience with the student and faculty struggles at Stanford to increase the
number of Chicana/o faculty members on campus from two to three to
four and so on. For me, it was clear that this institutional struggle was a
struggle for social justice, institutional enfranchisement, and educational
democracy. It was clear that these struggles implicated not only Chicana/o
studies and cultural studies but Anthropology as well. That’s why in my
new introduction to Culture and Truth I suggest that critical Anthropology
and cultural studies can come together in valorizing subordinate forms of
knowledge that are otherwise excluded from official discourse.
My project on cultural citizenship (1997) is an attempt to do a social
analysis that makes central some of these forms of knowledge. At the time
I undertook this project, cultural studies had come into being and was
very much a part of our awareness. What I was trying to get at there was a
way of saying that the Chicano community’s perceptions of its own oppression, and its plans for the future, were extremely important. It was my
sense that it would be important to include some sense of people’s own
agency. For example, it would be important to know how they seek to
transform things, what their understanding of forms of oppression are,
and what their struggles with dominant ideologies entail. I thought it
would also be important to know how they define well-being and how
they are trying to achieve it.
The idea was that you want to understand the context of the struggle as
best you can, including the existing forms of domination and oppression.
But at the same time, I thought we needed to consult with the people involved to see where they were trying to go. For example, it can be a real
struggle for people to get a raise of fifty cents an hour. In many cases the
struggle is about a sense of respect, a form of well-being on the job. In this
case increasing their salary fifty cents an hour is one sign of that. What
was important for me in that work on cultural citizenship was trying to
work closely with the people involved. And it seemed to me at the time
that what comes into play is a sense of culture.
That (the culture) is what’s gotten transformed in this Chicana/o cultural studies project. Culture is not defined by a definition that states “in
my culture we do x”; rather, it’s any kind of activity or struggle that is culturally mediated. Here culture becomes more like a semantics or pragmat-
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ics; it’s this thing that mediates conduct. You can’t have a good grasp of
what people are doing unless you understand how they perceive things. In
this new Chicana/o cultural studies perspective, you aren’t trying to identify a whole culture, you are trying to understand processes of cultural
mediation. In this way, your project becomes more about change, about
transformation. Actually, my book, Culture and Truth, is kind of a Chicana/o cultural studies manifesto! When I wrote it I had the feeling that I
was writing down a lot of things that were in the air. I found this really
hard to do, but a lot of people said to me, “You really captured what was
out there.”
In many ways in that book I was trying to open Anthropology up to a
whole set of issues that I thought came out of Romano, Vaca, and the
other folks who did the early critique of Anthropology and the social sciences. I was trying to put these issues into this larger context of interdisciplinary cultural studies, which offers a wider audience for discussion. Basically, what I hoped to do was to say, “There’s been a sea change in how
we do analysis and in how we understand the world.” Part of this change
has to do with the shift away from once-dominant modes of thought concerning truth; part has to do with the presence of analyzing subjects that
are now interrogating Anthropology, and part has to do with the way Anthropology’s treasured concept of culture has been refashioned, dispersed,
and wrestled away from a singular or stable location.
It was my position that we should change some of the ways we do
things to the extent that we are thinking about forms of domination, inequality, change, the practices of everyday life, ideology, and subjectivity.
What I was proposing was that we needed to “remake ourselves” and to
“remake social analysis.” At one level, I guess I was also trying to reach out
to other thinkers in order to say: “Anthropology has to remake itself ” and
to say that “there’s a larger remaking of social analysis that’s going on in
cultural studies.” For me it was important that we understand that now
culture, politics, and history have become intertwined in new ways as a result of changes in global relations of domination and the demands of excluded social groups. I was trying to ground this outreach within an understanding of something important that was going in the world. So every
section of the book has a chapter that’s ethnographic or tries to understand a social dynamic, such as the one on “Imperialist Nostalgia.”
In some of my other published work I respond in a more direct way to
another set of concerns that involve the issue of ownership in relation to
Anthropology. One essay that comes to mind is called “Whose Cultural
Studies?” I wrote it because I was sick and tired of the moaning and
groaning of some anthropologists who were whining that “those cultural
studies people have stolen our crown jewels.” (The crown jewels being the
concept of culture and the concept of Anthropology.) The idea was that
“they’ve not only stolen them but they’ve distorted them as well.” And the
complementary idea to this was that “What they (those people in cultural
studies) really need is an anthropologist to set them straight.” The same
train of thought applied to multiculturalism as well. Here there was the
implication that what multicultural scholars needed was for an anthropologist to tell them what Franz Boas had already said. I thought, “They don’t
need to hear what Franz Boas said because Franz Boas got it seriously
wrong for the present.” [Not that it was wrong for his time because he
took a very courageous stand on anti-Semitism just as Nazism was on the
rise. This didn’t stop Hitler in his tracks, but it was persuasive to many
people.] What Boas hadn’t imagined was that different cultures might be
in the same space. He had the idea of each culture as being autonomous
[as in its own museum case], and so his whole starting assumption is
completely wrong. My sense was that the people who thought Anthropology could set multiculturalism straight had it totally wrong too—it really
was the other way around. That is to say, multiculturalism can pose some
compelling problems for Anthropology. This is what I was really trying to
address in Culture and Truth.
When I wrote the essay, “Whose Cultural Studies?” (reprinted in The
Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader), I thought that the moaning and
groaning about the theft of our crown jewels was totally inappropriate. I
thought that with cultural studies there was an opportunity for Anthropology—as well as for Ethnic studies—to get into the “big tent.” I was carrying on a bit because I guessed that anthropologists expected to receive a
guided invitation to cultural studies. I thought: “No, you just need to fight
to get into the tent. You guys are full professors, don’t moan and groan!
Stop whining, you can do it.” At the same time, I guess I was trying to alert
cultural studies to the possibility that Anthropology had a place there.
I think that in some ways anthropologists are right—cultural studies is
grounded on anthropological perspectives, and that some important concepts in cultural studies come through Anthropology. One of them is the
importance of the concept of “social construction” or “cultural construction.” That is a deeply Anthropological perspective. Another one is a kind
of “relativity”—“the sense that things make sense on their own terms and
that we shouldn’t be imposing our views on the sexuality of the 19th cen-
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tury,” for example. Because so many of the people who are doing cultural
studies are in literary studies, sometimes they don’t pay enough attention
to Anthropology. But the issue of the social construction of things, and the
issue of social description [which would be a stand-in for ethnography]
are very important for explaining how you describe what you’re trying to
understand in cultural studies. This type of ethnological research requires
you to talk to somebody, to go out into the field or into a community.
I think there are ways in which anthropologists can push cultural studies. For example, in a study of reception, it’s important talk to somebody
who’s actually viewing what you are studying. A lot of times there’s a kind
of hypothetical involved in televisual analysis, which is: “How is this TV
show positioning the viewer?” The anthropologist in me would say,
“You’re just guessing, it’s pure speculation what you’re saying—you need
to create a little group of people and really see what’s happening.” What I
mean to say to people doing this kind of work is that they need to talk to
people, and that they will learn something if they do.
In contrast to the monumentalist view that you find in classical literary
studies, this type of perspective suggests that cultural activity is really a
worthwhile form of analysis. What’s important is not just the stuff you see
in the museums, it’s not just the canonical great works. This kind of perspective lets you see that popular traditions are of real value—and that
these traditions have a lot to offer us. Actually, I believe that a lot of what
goes by the way of popular culture is deeply anthropological in its presumptions of value. You can also think of this the other way, namely, you
can ask: “What does cultural studies have to teach Anthropology? How
does it require Anthropology to rethink its basic concepts?” The way it
does this is through the whole emphasis on equality, social injustice, and
historical change. [Here you have the idea that we always exist within history, we’re not frozen in structure.] This is why I think that those of us
who are working in Chicana/o studies should also stake a claim on cultural studies. There is a lot we can contribute, including reminding people
about the different configurations of race in Chicana/o writings.
But in order to do this we must be in the room, participating in the discussions about cultural studies. I mean, how can you be discussing issues
of race and subordination in the U.S. and not have us in the room? It’s like
saying “were going to talk about women,” but no women are allowed. It’s
unthinkable to do that now, and it should be equally unthinkable to not
have Chicanas/os present. The issue of cultural democracy is also important here, and you need to decide what’s going to be on the table in cul-
tural studies that will require debate and analysis. Part of this is just getting the issues on the table, and the other part is having different perspectives represented to vex the debate.
I think that if Chicanos aren’t there to say what needs to be said, then
it’s impossible for other people to really hear what needs to be said.
Emma Pérez
I always have seen myself as a practitioner of cultural studies. In fact, I
think historians are practitioners of cultural studies, even though they
don’t always admit it. As interpreters of events “through culture,” they produce culturally specific interpretations. This is the case even when they say,
“These are the facts, therefore, this is the definitive truth!” I think historians need to abandon this position. In fact, this idea was a big part of the
project for my recently published book, The Decolonial Imaginary. I wanted
them to question these premises that underlie how we write history. In this
sense I see myself as an “interventionist” in history. I see myself as an interventionist in cultural studies as well. In cultural studies it’s important to
foreground the great events of Chicana/o history, even as we understand
that these events are culturally produced. [After all, facts are linguistic descriptions!] Whether we’re doing a critique of a contemporary artist or of
someone who’s done something on Emiliano Zapata, we are forced to go
back to one of the important great events of Chicana/o history.
Providing that kind of context is still important to me—I’m still a historical materialist at base. But I also think that historians must use literary
theory in order to make sense of their work. In terms of where I situate my
own production, Chicana feminism is first and foremost for me, although
I see myself operating “all over the place,” including cultural studies, Ethnic studies, Women’s studies, and sexuality studies. Postcoloniality is very
important to my work as well. So, to answer your question, I think I’m
crossing all those borders and all that terrain in my work; I’m borrowing
from, as well as infusing, these knowledge bases with my own intervention. That’s the beauty of cultural studies—it permits that kind of movement. You know, I couldn’t have written that last chapter of The Decolonial
Imaginary without finally saying to myself—look this (a cultural studies
analysis) is really what I want to do.
What cultural studies allowed me to do was talk about Selena as cultural icon and ask: “What does she mean for Chicanas and Chicanos? How
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is her own agency as a feminist asserted? How is her working-class sexuality asserted?” Cultural studies permits all of that in ways that other chapters of the book weren’t going to, because they provided different kinds of
interventions. There’s another way I coincide with cultural studies: I believe that whether we are literary critics, historians, anthropologists, or sociologists, we need to acknowledge that sitio y lengua/site and discourse is
important. We are often trapped within our disciplines, so we need to deconstruct the spaces in which we work in order to reconstruct new ones.
It’s difficult to make people understand that this ripping away is necessary
to reconstruct another site and discourse, and is so much a part of our
work.
Several years back, when I started focusing on this idea of sitio y lengua,
I wanted us to ask, “What if we can finally get to that space where we are
not just deconstructing, where we can finally begin that creative process
and immerse ourselves in that creative process and make it the priority?”
So that we aren’t sitting around just complaining about the racists or the
patriarchy, but instead we are seeing the creative value of our daily lives.
Of course, this also involves seeing the value of how we survive and survive joyfully with each other. It sounds hokey, but I think we need to think
about at what point we can finally celebrate each other and recognize the
value of communities with each other. I think when you examine our cultural productions, those are the things that do this for us.
That for me is where sitio y lengua was important. I believed then, and
still believe, that we have to find and make these decolonizing spaces. I
don’t think we can keep on being little hamsters and writing the same old
liberal histories that aren’t really liberatory at all; we need to really look at
what we’re doing and to focus on what’s being left out in this liberal history. In my case I think what’s being left out is the decolonial imaginary
that I discuss in my book. We’re not in the postcolonial yet—we’re in that
in-between space [the one between the colonial and the postcolonial].
More than anyone else, I think cultural critics have acknowledged this
space. They’ve been aware of the fact that there’s another place where
we’ve been oppositional. But this is not just about being oppositional and
resistant; it’s also about being creative. That’s what’s difficult about it as
well as exciting.
In my work I’m always interested in figuring out how we are trapped.
I’m interested in figuring out how power relations are played out within
disciplines, the canon, and society. This led me to question the earlier
forms of oppositionality in Chicano history. This was a conscious political
intervention. I believe you’ve got to make people mad before they listen. [I
mean I think the reason the article I wrote about Octavio Paz being the
“big chingón” works is because it pisses people off.] I did this kind of interventionist work in history through a paradigm of categories. You know
historians despise paradigms and they despise being put in one—people
feel they are doing something that is very unique. The reason I decided to
focus on the paradigms that shape early Chicano history is because I realized how much I had been caught up in those paradigms. I had to think
about the limitations of these paradigms, including Marxism, about examining how we can avoid falling into their traps, and about moving beyond those traps. Of course, the biggest trap for historians is thinking that
we are writing a liberatory history when in fact we’re writing colonialist
history.
I also think it’s important to acknowledge that it isn’t all going to be
said when your work is completed and to acknowledge that what you’re
doing is only going to be one small political project. This gets back to my
discussion of the paradigms. Here the gendered history appeared as this
ironic mode that put Chicano history on its head the way Marx had put
Hegel on his head. I’ve done this kind of gendered history before. Here
you say, “Women are going to be the only priority.” I think it’s important
to know the history of Chicanas, but we also need to ask, “What’s the critique then? How do we place Chicanas historically or contextually? What
do they mean in relation to other people and their community? What do
they mean in relation to their desire and their sexualities?” That’s where I
get into this idea that a truly radical history would be one that begins to
look at technologies of desire and gender, instead of saying we are just
gendering the history and that’s enough. When you look at things in this
way, then you get into the realm of power relations. That’s what I want us
to cop to.
I’m also interested in the transnational histories of the struggles of
women. Part of the archeology I talk about in the beginning of my book
means going back to México and recovering the struggles of women. Part
of this archeology means defying those historically imposed boundaries
and demarcations that say that “Chicana/o history begins in 1848 on this
continent.” Since I was a graduate student I got a lot of flack for being interested in Mexican topics. [The one person who was supportive was Juan
Gómez, who’d done his dissertation on Latin America. He understood the
importance of Latin America to Chicano history.] I wrote a dissertation
on México, and part of this appears in a chapter in my book. There, I basi-
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cally wanted to say, “This (Mexican Women’s struggles) is one of the reasons México is important to us as Chicanas and Chicanos” and “Yes, this is
a transnational movement.” Here I’m also proposing a revision of what we
understand as early Chicana feminism. I’m going back historically and
connecting Mexicana history to the third space, a very different articulation of the liberatory consciousness.
I end The Decolonial Imaginary the way I do because I think third space
feminism can only be open-ended [that’s what I learned from Homi]. Embedded here is this idea of postcoloniality as hope. Here there’s the hope
that one day we can forget the Alamo, that one day we won’t be imprinted
by that memory and its racial and gendered inscriptions. For me, this
third space feminism is not about getting back to the original history—
the originating moment—and it’s not about assuming an insular position
in theory. When I was doing my work on Chicana feminist theory and incorporated a discussion of the French feminists, I knew people would criticize me for moving in a different theoretical environment. [It’s possible
that they’ll critique me for using White and Foucault, two theoreticians of
history in The Decolonial Imaginary.] When people quote Marx, nobody
says that to them. It’s ironic, don’t you think? [And, of course, neither
White nor Foucault is doing what I’m doing in this work that links Chicana history to third space feminism.] Lurking behind the position that
we shouldn’t travel theoretically is the idea that Chicana/o theory is only
one thing. Obviously, I don’t agree with this position. I really believe that
Chicana/o history and culture are the product of a dialectic—we borrow
things we think are useful. This results in a fusion of sorts. Ultimately, I
think “Chicana/o” is an engagement of the world. That’s why cultural
studies are so important—it’s about recognition that we have a relationship to the world. And cultural studies is about examining that relationship—defining our own culture in that relationship.
Ramón García
I see myself as others in cultural studies have seen themselves: as organic
intellectuals in the Gramscian mode. For me, this has a particular resonance because I’m also marginal within my own Chicano culture and
community. Therefore, it’s a question of double marginality that draws me
to cultural formations that are sometimes unrecognized both within
American culture and Mexican culture, as well as within Chicano culture.
And, of course, cultural studies has been the methodology that allows for
that kind of work, of examining marginal cultures, and for making a political alliance with them.
Initially, I got into cultural studies while at the University of San Diego.
I think that working under Rosaura Sánchez had a big effect on my own
interest in cultural studies. Studying Marxism made a difference too. What
was attractive was that within cultural studies Marxism is not monolithic
in terms of its class critique and its class affiliations but is inclusive of contemporary issues, such as sexuality and gender and emerging cultures.
Eventually, I published an article, “Against Rasquache,” in Crítica in a special issue that was edited by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. It was
difficult for me to write that essay because for a lot of Chicana/o intellectuals, political alliances and political ideals and affiliations are linked to issues of “loyalty.” There’s a lot of energy wasted on those kinds of issues,
and I think we should be allowed to change our positions and disagree, to
be self-critical, and to correct ourselves just like any intellectuals in the
universe. That is necessary in order for us to evolve and grow intellectually
and artistically.
That’s the personal background of “Against Rasquache.” In the essay itself I was interested in responding to what I thought was an inadequate
model for framing Chicana/o art and literature. That model was the concept of rasquache, which had become very prevalent in the late 80s and
90s. I didn’t particularly like the rasquache model because it didn’t recognize the complexity and sophistication of the kind of work that was out
there, on the streets. In that essay, I wanted to provide a critique of this
concept and its aesthetics. Basically, I think that we’ve put ourselves in a
trap in labeling ourselves as “rasquache”; it doesn’t do justice to what we
have contributed to world culture, especially in terms of popular culture
and fashion. We’re downgrading our own work because “rasquache” is a
negative word like “naco,” and it’s very classist and racist too. We’ve appropriated this term without making the necessary political displacements, as
has happened with the word, Chicano, or with the word, queer, or other
identity concepts. That kind of reappropriation has not happened with
rasquache, and its meaning remains ambiguous. At its worst, it’s a negative
and derogatory concept that has been misappropriated.
The other thing that’s absent in the use of the term is any discussion of
sexuality in relationship to popular culture. In Euroamerican and European culture, camp is a concrete connection between popular cultures and
gay sexualities. It’s very peculiar why that connection has not been made
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by Chicano critics in reference to Chicano culture and rasquache. Certainly, this connection had been made by the Chicana/o Latino gay community—it just hadn’t been identified as rasquache. Carlos Monsiváis, for
instance, wrote about camp in the 60s in the context of Mexican culture. I
think that’s something that has existed in Chicana/o culture as well. I
think the word “camp” is still a problematic word and inadequate for what
this relationship between gay Latina/o popular culture and Chicana/o
identity is, but it’s a starting place for looking at the importance that popular culture has had in gendered Chicana/o queer sexuality. For me, camp
introduces a new cultural critique and a complexity and contestation that
you didn’t see in rasquache. Earlier Chicano culture, especially in its nationalist phase, was interested in presenting counterstereotypes that were
postulated as positive. A lot of times they didn’t turn out that way because
they were very heterosexist and macho. But the intent of these productions was to provide counterstereotypes to the kind of negative stereotypes
that existed in American culture. I suppose that this was strategically
significant in the 1960s and 70s, and I think it is still useful, depending on
the context. What happens later with the construction of more cultural
and artistic sensibilities is that Chicanas/os create new things, including
irony, satire, and humor.
Historically, Mexican popular culture, since Posada, has had a very dark
humor, an irony that was not significantly adopted by Chicana/o artists
and writers until later. This sensibility has been more prevalent among Latino gay and lesbian writers and artists. What’s the effect of the irony, the
sarcasm, and the movement away from social realism at the level of cultural critique? What I’m not trying to do is create a privileged position
and say we should all be doing satiric work, or that we should not be writing realist fiction. This is a question of other types of critical engagements
and cultural definitions that are at stake here. I think this new sensibility
points to what Angie Chabram-Dernersesian has written about in her article “. . . And, Yes, the Earth Did Part.” There’s a splitting of Chicana/o subjectivity in this new type of work that expands what has been defined as
political and as Chicano. I locate it more forcefully in Asco’s work and performances.
This “splitting” introduces a heterogeneity in terms of Chicano subject
—what Cornel West calls a “cultural politics of difference.” There’s a new
sensibility that introduces difference within Chicano culture and that split
is the Chicano subject that Angie Chabram-Dernersesian discusses in her
work. You see this in the performance artist Nao Bustamante, the video
work of Rita González, gronk, the spoken word artists Marisela Norte
and Luis Alfaro, and you even see this in Sandra Cisneros. There’s a critique of patriarchy and of nationalism and heterosexism, and it’s done
through irony and sarcasm—a very Mexican strategy. I think Mexican culture is very in tune with humor, satire, and irony.
I always found it kind of paradoxical and ironic that Chicano nationalism was so lacking in those things, when it was aspiring to be so Mexican.
What was interesting to me was the Black humor and satire that I learned
from my abuelita. This was more cutting edge than any kind of nationalist
Chicano culture, so I always identified with that reality instead of the nationalist project, which seemed distant to me and even fantastic.
I think that’s where I started to look elsewhere, simply because nationalism didn’t apply to what I observed around me or to the reality of most
of my peers in the 80s and 90s. We didn’t identify with the issue of cultural
purity, with what was demanded by the nationalist sensibility. The new
sensibilities imply a radical break with the purist notions of culture and
identity. I don’t think there was ever a pure Chicano culture. If Chicano
nationalism fantasized about a pure culture, it was just that, a fantasy that
was perhaps useful at a previous moment, but that today is repressive and
nostalgic. Monsiváis has written about how impure Mexican culture is, especially in relationship to popular culture. He wrote this at a time when
Chicano nationalism was at its height and there’s another irony there—
the fact that they speak past one another is symbolic of the miscommunication between Mexican culture and Chicano culture, despite their obvious interdependence. This miscommunication is very real because it is
fundamentally a class issue, a very great divide that is not simply cultural.
National objects and symbols can have very different uses depending
on the historical context; they can be progressive or reactionary. Recently,
Jesusa Rodríguez, the Mexican performance artist, in an interview with
Jean Franco, discussed the taboo of national symbols among Mexican artists. Until very recently, pre-Colombian goddesses like Coatlicue were simply rejected by Mexican artists. It is interesting that for some Chicana feminists, like Gloria Anzaldúa, Aztec goddesses become the basis for particular Chicana feminist theories. Here you see that nationality is not the
deciding factor in claiming something as one’s own.
I think that in terms of Chicano culture, Asco [a Los Angeles–based
multimedia arts collective] is significant because, in a very militant way, it
opened up a discourse that wasn’t there before: a discourse of self-critique,
of cultural impurity. Some of its performances, which were influenced by
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international cinemas such as the No-movies, were basically an urban aesthetic. This aesthetic was ironic, it was glamorous, and it was politically
radical. We lacked the glamorous images, and they made them ironic and
fun. Asco’s work was as political as nationalism, as political as a lot of the
poetry; the artists dealt with the very hard reality of gang warfare, of the
urban plight. They didn’t idealize communities or solutions, and I think
that was a powerful thing, to represent reality in an imaginative way. Interestingly enough, Asco didn’t have a big following.
Until very recently, you wouldn’t see Chicano artists doing such radical,
confrontational work, which really breaks new ground in terms of gender,
sexuality, and political positionings. Asco was way ahead of its time. If you
think about it, popular culture has really been neglected. I mean, if you
look at Chicana/o literature and the bildungsroman—from Barrio Boy to
Pocho—all these Chicano novels did not reflect upon popular culture.
That always interested me because it didn’t represent Mexican culture—
films and comics in México are national pastimes and omnipresent, they
are the machinery of modern myths. Until recently, in Chicano literature,
you wouldn’t find a reflection on American popular culture either, which
has been very significant in Mexican culture. This is something that Monsiváis has been writing about since the 60s—the significance of American
popular culture as Mexican culture.
It makes sense to me that American popular culture is also part of Chicano culture. I think that aside from the issue of cultural purity, earlier
writers and critics were operating within a Frankfurt School suspicion of
the commodity and perhaps within some puritanical conviction that popular culture and fashion are frivolous and escapist. Perhaps they didn’t
view the central place of American and Mexican popular culture and mass
culture within Chicana/o culture seriously, as something worthy of rigorous consideration.
During this period there was also a central emphasis on the folkloric,
and the major criticism I have of this is that the strategy was politically ineffective. This is the case because North American cultural institutions
would like to see Latinos as folkloric, as static emblems of backwardness.
It’s much more radical to say that we belong in North American culture,
in a contemporary global culture that’s complex and difficult. This is what
happens in gay Latino culture. Here you see a critique of the established
Chicano paradigms such as nationalism, heterosexism, and the white gay
cultural formations. In my case, my essay on “Rasquache” is putting the
multiple sites of contestations out there and saying: “Look at the complex-
ity that’s out there, look at what people are doing,” and “If you don’t pay
attention to this, you are going to lose.” Basically, this is the subtext.
Anything that becomes safe, repetitive, familiar, monolithic, and which
does not have a critical edge, becomes stagnant. In terms of my practice of
cultural studies, I think that a lot of urgent things are very connected to
new cultural and political formations that we need to deal with. For example, the question of AIDS in Chicana/o literature completely dismantles
nationalism, the romanticization of the heterosexist family, machismo, etc.
There’s a much more difficult splitting of a Chicana/o subject, not just in
terms of Chicano culture, but also politically and sexually, and in terms of
subjectivity. These are urgent things: AIDS, sexuality, and the new subjectivities. These things are being dealt with in literature and art and they
speak to very serious social realities. We should take them seriously, not
hold back our criticism of those who dismiss these urgent issues or misuse
them politically.
Alejandra Elenes
I was at the University of Wisconsin, which at the time was “a lily white
campus,” when I started to get involved with cultural studies. At the time I
was also very much involved in the struggle to bring Chicana/o studies
into existence. Since we didn’t have a space, faculty, or courses, it was
pretty much “work on your own.” So, I was trying to find works from Chicanas/os, and one day, I was in the library, looking at the journal, Cultural
Studies, and boy did I make a discovery! I thought I’d faint because I
couldn’t believe that there was one whole issue (October 1990) on Chicana/o cultural studies. To me that issue was a life-saver, because it connected me to other people. You have to understand, when you’re starting,
you need validation, especially if you’re isolated, you’re young, you’re female, and you’re not 100% Chicana. I was in a very precarious position of
trying to provide a critique of something and of potentially being dismissed so easily. I said, OK, these people are saying this, they are doing this
type of (internal) critique, and they still have a political commitment. So
it [the 1990 issue of Cultural Studies] was important.
Also, in my work in Education I needed a theoretical framework that
could address the fact that cultures had multiple definitions. You know we
weren’t just talking about the “cultures” of students but also about the
“cultures” of the schools. And, of course, we weren’t just talking about
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“male” definitions of identity. I really got into cultural studies because cultural studies gives you an avenue to study cultural change in relation to
social, political, and economic conditions. That’s why I gravitated to cultural studies. I was already studying poststructuralism and I was involved
in the critique that it was too abstract and devoid of a material base. I
needed to make the connections between the lived experiences of Chicanas/os and the material reality that maintained them in certain positions. Through Stuart Hall’s work I began to understand cultural identity
in a dual process. I found that it was very liberating not to have to work
with essentialist notions of identity, and at the same time to be able to do
an analysis of material conditions.
Alvina Quintana
Well, a lot of us are just claiming cultural studies and shaping it the way
we want to. We’re adding new forms of analysis under this rubric. That’s
what I would define as cultural studies. I mean its [cultural studies] ability
to resist and shape something at the same time—an emergent discourse.
That’s why John Storey says the minute you try to define cultural studies
in that other way (as a discipline), or you try to legitimize cultural studies
by making it a department, then you are going to have to come up with
the canon and the great thinkers. When you start defining who gets to
speak, then you’ve already started to create the problem.
In terms of the legacy, yeah, culture studies has been male-defined—
and that’s a problem. But this is also a problem in discourse in general. It’s
like the riddle that we have to solve as some of the first women who are redefining theories and legacies so that they meet our needs. Rather than always reinventing things or only looking for female authorities, what we
have to do because of who got published in those early cultural studies
legacies (the Birmingham School) is to take those men and reshape them
for our own purposes! That’s what I think a lot of the women are doing.
Of course, this is not to deny the existence of women who have created
cultural theories and are authorities, particularly feminist cultural studies
theorists in the U.S. and abroad. And let me add that I do consider myself
to be a practitioner of feminist cultural studies in the sense that I look at
Women and Women’s writings and issues of Women’s empowerment. I
also look at the relations between women and men, and the relations between women. For example, in my comparative cross-cultural work I look
at how culture has been used to subordinate or empower women. So in
that respect I do feminist cultural studies.
In my essay, “Borders Be Damned” (Cultural Studies, April 1999), you
have an example of this comparative (horizontal affiliations) approach toward the creolized production of women of color. It came about in part
because of my own lived experience as part of a Diaspora. You know I’m a
Chicana who’s out of the Southwest, living in a very small town called
Newark, in Delaware. In that context, Chicanas don’t exist. I mean, when I
first arrived they just saw me as a white woman. That would make me
crazy, but this was not the only problem.
The other thing that drove me crazy about the East Coast was that race
was defined as either Black or white, and that’s why they saw me as white.
And I didn’t want to contribute to that binary, so I thought I’ve got to find
another group. There were a lot of Asians around, so I thought, “I’m going
to look at that group.” It became very clear to me in order for them (my
students and my colleagues) to understand who I was and in order for me
to connect with a community of color, I would have to show my commonalities with another group that was identified as “different.” I started looking at commonalities with Asians, especially in terms of immigration and
colonial histories, and I began to explore similarities, using gender as the
central force. To my surprise there were lots of really fascinating connections.
As I see it, this is a different kind of feminist cultural studies practice,
because it entails moving away from the Black/white binary and interrupting old racial formations. What I’m doing is looking at the real connections that women (of color) have to one another and doing a comparative intertextual/interdisciplinary reading of their literary productions.
This means subverting the canon, which establishes what is great literature
versus what is not, and locating horizontal affiliations. That’s where Lisa
Lowe’s work (Immigrant Acts) has been very important. I’ve become aware
of the whole aestheticization process that privileges British or white canonical literature, and I’ve begun to focus on the resistant practices by
women of color that are more fragmented and break the literary mold.
What I’m also trying to do is to interrupt hegemonic formations of
emergent literatures that don’t allow emergent texts to talk to one another
because they implement this mainstream/margins analysis. Nowadays
we’re talking about creoles and hybrids within cultures, but I’ve been
working up this paradigm so that the critics themselves can engage in a
creolized practice that centers on the relations between emergent texts and
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communities. I’ll confess, it’s hard work. Here I am out here by myself in
Delaware; I’m trying to create communities where we (Chicanas/os) don’t
have large numbers, and I’m looking to point out affinities within and between groups so we can create a larger coalition of women of color in politics and literature. I’m also trying to bring together U.S. Latina writers
within a collection called Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature.
Intercession
Reflections on The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum
Sessions (One, Two, Three)
In an earlier session of the Chicana/o cultural studies forum, David
Román suggested that cultural studies is a dynamic organism that assumes
its own form once it incorporates the geopolitical concerns of a particular
community and location. His words resonated with those of his colleagues
who argued that Chicana/o cultural studies addresses the needs and histories of a community; the educational practices and status of a community;
social relations, structures, and constraints of a community; geopolitical
and ideological formations of a community; cultural politics and practices
of a community; gender, sexualities, and class(es) of a community; and
the social movements and desires of a community.
Framed as they are within contemporary Chicana/o cultural studies
sensibilities, these diverse representations carried the inference of plural
and heterogeneous communities and targeted a number of contexts that
destabilized the idea of a singular origins story for cultural studies circulated by way of a mechanical transplantation of Eurocentric legacies from
England to the U.S. without change. Not only did participants argue that
“the Birmingham model is not one we can easily reproduce” (Michelle
Habell-Pallán), but they also argued that cultural studies should not be
just about “locating one particular kind of archive or one particular set of
identities” (David Román). They also critiqued cultural studies accounts
that continue to duplicate the same (Euro/American) fields of (theoretical) reference and reproduce a “sensibility,” a “style of writing,” and “objects of study” that are very “Anglo-centered, very North American, or
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British” (Ramón García). Although a number of participants voiced a
strong affiliation with the political and educational projects of the Birmingham Center (Fregoso, Elenes, Rocco, Mariscal), for them cultural studies is about opening up analysis, not about shutting down”; “about making
possibility, not foreclosing” (David Román). For this reason, it is not surprising that our forum became a site for promoting alternative transnational, hemispheric global, and (woman of color) feminist and multiethnic Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies legacies (see José David Saldívar,
Alvina Quintana, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Ray Rocco, Mike Soldatenko, Beatrice Pita, Rosaura Sánchez, Chela Sandoval, Alicia Arrizón, Rafael PérezTorres, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and Richard Chabrán).
Let us pause for a brief moment and consider Chela Sandoval’s rather
extensive intervention. Rejecting the idea that the cultural studies legacies
of people of color should be traced to individual foundational figures (in
this case, Stuart Hall) or solely to a “British” legacy, she links cultural studies impulses to the great decolonizing movements locally and worldwide
and to a women of color grassroots feminist circle that consciously works
to promote “differences from the dominant.”
Other forum participants further outlined a contestatory function for
Chicana/o cultural studies, viewing it as a practice that positions itself in a
critical relation to alternative as well as dominant hegemonic cultures and
social formations in the U.S. and abroad. For instance, Aída Hurtado saw
(Chicana/o) cultural studies as “rupturing the language and rupturing the
categories” of (inherited modes of) social analysis in a period in which we
lack a definitive statement on how to achieve social justice, but must
nonetheless press forward in the struggle for social change. Rafael PérezTorres proposed that, aside from ushering in new categories of social analysis, Chicana/o cultural studies explores new conceptualizations of oppositionality that challenge its received legacies of social activism. Ramón
García attached a contestatory function for cultural studies when proposing that as a practice, Chicana/o cultural studies proffers a substantial selfcriticism and a split with essentialist modes of subjectivity within Mexican
and Chicano studies. Mary Pat Brady highlighted specific (race, class, gender) contestations rendered by Chicana feminist cultural studies that set it
apart from both Chicana/o studies as well as cultural studies. Vicki Ruiz
addressed cultural studies practices that lack historical viewpoints and female migrations. Ondine Chavoya challenged early Chicana/o studies
legacies that reinscribed certain forms of “authentic” politics and reveiled
the rule of the patriarchal father. Renato Rosaldo articulated challenges to
Reflections on Forum Sessions One, Two, Three 135
received legacies of cultural studies that dismiss the dynamics of alternative, multiculture. Mike Soldatenko critiqued early canon formations in
Chicana/o studies that legislate reading practices and curriculums to the
detriment of Chicana/o, feminist, and cultural studies. And David Román
identified an important omission in Chicana/o cultural studies—the lack
of attention to the tragic upsurge of AIDS.
Throughout yesterday’s forum interventions participants also voiced a
(generational) urgency: the need to review and rewrite important Chicana/o social practices and discourses of representation. This urgency was
evident in Richard Chabrán’s rethinking of culture, Renato Rosaldo’s “remaking” of social analysis, Aída Hurtado’s multiple blasphemies, Rosa
Linda Fregoso’s intersectional cultural studies networks, Alejandra Elenes’s
newer identity formations and educational constructions of cultural studies, Alvina Quintana’s woman of color feminist communities, Vicki Ruiz’s
female-centered border journeys, and Mike Soldatenko’s commentary on
mestizaje. The different multiethnic, hemispheric, postcolonial, and feminist constructions of cultural studies provided by Vicki Ruiz, José Saldívar,
George Mariscal, Rosaura Sánchez, Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, Beatrice Pita, Ray
Rocco, Alvina Quintana, Chela Sandoval, Emma Pérez, and Sonia Saldívar-Hull also extended the focus and geopolitical sites of habitation of
(Chicana/o) cultural studies.
Without a doubt the self-reflective look (backward and forward) that
triggers (Chicana/o) cultural studies representational practices in the 90s
is context-bound. For the most part it erupts in the aftermath of the Chicana/o Movement and in the midst of contemporary social, political, and
economic transformations, including the various processes associated
with globalization; the im/migrant backlash; rise of neonativism and
American fundamentalism; the continued growth and impoverishment of
disenfranchised communities; the dramatic im/migration movements of
the Americas; the rise of intersectional forms of critical thinking; and the
increasingly important role of culture, cultural politics, and representation
in the struggles for social change.
Given this context—and the others listed by practitioners—it is not
surprising that an explicit social function was often attributed to Chicana/o cultural studies. For example, Aída Hurtado envisioned a formation of cultural studies that further advances the goal of Chicana/o studies
for social justice—not only for our group but for all oppressed people;
Rosa Linda Fregoso proposed that cultural studies is about studying culture in a particular social historical context that is constituted in terms of
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power relations that require attention for those who aspire to social
change; Rosaura Sánchez maintained that “cultural studies is not just determined by its object of analysis,” but also “by how you look at (the commodification) of this object in this late period of capitalism”; and Chela
Sandoval linked cultural studies to transformative social and intellectual
movements that are “set on changing the formation of social orders, human knowledge, identity, language, cultural expression” and on “ reconfiguring what freedom means.” In turn, Ondine Chavoya linked cultural
studies to a theorization of new subject positions that converse with the
works of feminists and queers on social, cultural representation. Yvonne
Yarbro-Bejarano envisioned a cultural studies methodology that looks at
the interplay between race, gender, culture, and sexuality. José Saldívar appealed to a practice of cultural studies that generates critiques of empire
and an understanding of a history of decolonization.
Another important idea that surfaced in the last sessions is that we
must deliberately move past foreclosures that place limits on speech, interdisciplinarity, community, culture, and coalition-building (Alvina Quintana, David Román, José David Saldívar, Alicia Arrizón). Among the most
bold-spirited of practitioners, Emma Pérez suggested that Chicana/o cultural studies is “an engagement with the world.” In this articulation cultural studies is about examining that relationship, defining our culture in
terms of that relationship.
Global perspectives also surfaced in the interventions of participants
who called for more hemispheric or internationalist forms of Chicana/o
cultural studies (Ramón García, Mary Pat Brady, George Mariscal, José
David Saldívar, Chela Sandoval), openly acknowledged the degree to
which critical discourse is contaminated (Alicia Arrizón, Ramón García),
and the degree to which “the languages and the social practices of dominated and oppressed people have infiltrated every sector of dominant
speech cultures” (Chela Sandoval, Ray Rocco, Renato Rosaldo). Chicana/o
cultural studies is not only linked to an understanding of the connections
between the local and the global in these forums, but it is also linked to a
series of movements in history, as seen in the interventions of Rosaura
Sánchez, Emma Perez, Beatrice Pita, Vicki Ruiz, and David Román.
A number of practitioners also called for a broadening of cultural studies networks. They talked about how cultural practitioners from other
“unlikely” locations have influenced their Chicana/o cultural studies work.
They insisted that cultural studies is not a one-way street—that “we’re not
only listening” but also “talking to people, listening to what they have to
Reflections on Forum Sessions One, Two, Three 137
say” (Alvina Quintana). They further explained that we have a lot to learn
from the history of African Americans, Asian Americans, people who have
been othered in American culture and the new world order (Ramón García). They created links with postcolonial critics and subaltern studies
(Rosaura Sánchez, Beatrice Pita, and José Saldívar). They abandoned a
pretense to authenticity (Ramón García) and recognized how our speech
is “contaminated” in the positive sense (Chela Sandoval). They saw Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies as a space for hemispheric (Ray Rocco)
and transfrontera contacts (José Saldívar), they attended to unexpected
affiliations and (virtual) networks (Richard Chabrán), and they spoke to
the potential of engaging cultural studies and Chicana/o studies across
multiethnic borders in a variety of locations (Alvina Quintana, Carlos
Vélez-Ibáñez, Rosa Linda Fregoso, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano).
Yesterday’s forum interventions also reaffirmed that as a practice Chicana/o cultural studies invites us to widen its zones of engagement and to
actively “listen” to the critical dialogues of practitioners, who do ethnically
inflected forms of cultural studies—right here in our midst. At this point,
we open up the forum to an important group of these practitioners, who
have listened patiently throughout the Chicana/o forums. We now actively
position them as “speakers” instead of “listeners.” We do so because their
influence on (Chicana/o) cultural studies is substantial, because we agree
with Benjamin Lee, who suggests that “no single site possesses either the
intellectual or institutional resources to understand those processes affecting all of us.”1
Session Four
More Practices of Cultural Studies in
Our Worlds (Asian-American, American,
Latina/o, Latin American, Subaltern,
African American)
Another bienvenidos is in order. I would like to enthusiastically welcome our
next group of forum participants to the last session of The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum. In this particular session we “pre-view” Black cultural
studies, Asian American cultural studies, Latina/o cultural studies, Mexican
cultural studies, Subaltern studies, Latin American and Latina/o cultural
studies, and other related forms of social cultural inquiry such as critical race
and gender studies and Lat crit race theory.
At the outset of this session I would like to clarify my position on two
matters. First, the fact that these cultural studies interventions appear as
multicultural representations does not mean that they lack complex negotiations with the “past” (as seen in the case of Chicana/o cultural studies) or
that they lack multiple, competing expressions. Second, this final session
provides us with the opportunity to rethink where cultural studies is located
and to further identify and extend the lines of affiliation between practitioners of cultural studies and their respective cultural studies, Ethnic studies
platforms.
I think we probably agree that it is impossible to know beforehand how
these affiliations will take shape in future endeavors. Yet, if we are attentive
to the ways in which these forum interventions often “talk to one another,”
we can identify important cross-cultural influences and convergences. It is
my hope that the publication of successive Chicana/o cultural studies forums will provide a larger public with the opportunity to further engage
the connections between underrepresented cultural studies formations, especially because this type of comparative work is the exception rather than
the rule.
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More Practices of Cultural Studies in Our Worlds 139
Once again, I would like to thank all of the participants in this session for
their attention and patience throughout the previous Chicana/o cultural
studies sessions. The question I would like for us to engage today is: Do you
consider yourself to be a practitioner of cultural studies? If so, how do you do
an applied form of cultural studies?
Kent Ono
You know, Asian American cultural studies has not yet emerged as a
named formation, although people say they do it. If something emerged
like this, I would feel very comfortable with it, but I’d still see myself as
doing cultural studies. What does this mean? It seems to me that cultural
studies has to do with a particular kind of history of scholarship and politics that occurs both inside and outside the academy. Cultural studies relates to a kind of research and teaching and practice that not only challenges disciplinary boundaries but also social boundaries, generally. For
me, Asian American cultural studies is always a kind of transversal of
many particularities around subjectivity, politics, identity, and community. The cultural studies work I do is embodied in this way, and it’s also
set on attempting to articulate some kind of argument and taking a political position that challenges power relations. That’s cultural studies.
I don’t see Asian American cultural studies as that different from cultural studies generally, except that it articulates this kind of position in relation to the history of Asian American studies, which has changed dramatically in recent years. Who practices this form of cultural studies?
There are a few who are doing this in print and many graduate students as
well. Some of the people involved in this work are Lisa Lowe, Thomas
Nakayama, Elena Tajima Creef, Laura Kang, David Eng, David Palumbolin, Fatimah Robtug Rony, and Karen Shimakawa. Wendy Ho is also
headed in that direction too.
In my own case, I got into cultural studies in relation to rhetorical studies and film. I did my graduate work at the University of Iowa, where they
had a media emphasis, but before that I was already doing popular culture
work. [The debates had already formed about populist versus popular, and
cultural studies was in full swing.] However, my experience in Iowa working with a highly politicized group of graduate students of color was crucial for my current direction and thinking about cultural studies. Although the professors were teaching us British cultural studies, we (the
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graduate students) were creating our own formation, both in response to
and in resistance to the fixed formation in the classroom. I did not conceive of British cultural studies as having founded my research. Rather, I
thought what we were doing was a conversation with them. I also felt that
even the teachers were not doing cultural studies—they were teaching it.
They were bringing bits and pieces of British cultural studies into their
work, but we (the students) were actually the ones who were doing this
new formation of cultural studies.
I remember that I did this bibliography in graduate school on cultural
studies and popular culture. I purposefully looked for women and people
of color who were doing cultural studies because most of the people who
were represented in the seventies and eighties were European men—white
men. I came across people that you don’t normally see in cultural studies
histories—like Mike Nava—and other men of color too. This was in contrast to what I was learning in my classes, where we learned the “canon”
and particular scholars were being defined as a part of the canon. You
know the line up: first there was Raymond Williams, then Stuart Hall,
then Dick Hebdige, and then Larry Grossberg. At that point it was very
clear to me that even in Britain many of these people were doing cultural
studies as part of a much larger movement and that Isaac Julien and
Kobena Mercer were doing important work, not simply the people we
were hearing about over and over again. These other researchers weren’t
only talking about class; they were also talking about race and gender and
sexuality. So, in my studies I was trying to find a similar parallel over here.
It was difficult because all of my work was primarily within Asian
American studies, but I didn’t have any Asian American cultural studies
mentors. Yet I was already trying to articulate my positioning within the
legacy of Asian American studies, while acknowledging a variety of things
that British cultural studies seemed to be aware of. I also was developing
my own critique of how that tradition gets institutionalized in ways that
are unacceptable. This was clear in my reaction to a lecture at the National
Communication Association Convention. This conference offers an award
to the top paper in Mass Communications, and in that particular year the
paper that was selected was on Stuart Hall. I went to hear it because of his
importance in my graduate education. During the presentation, I started
becoming very angry because the author of the paper seemed to be purposefully avoiding talking about Black British politics and Stuart Hall as a
politician. He evaded every idea, concept, work that related to race. And
this was the winning paper! I stood up and I said, “I can’t believe that you
could have read all that material and not come across the idea that Stuart
Hall talked about Black British politics; that he talked about himself as Jamaican, about this cultural history, the Diaspora; and the crossing and articulation of cultures.” I think I came off as too challenging because he
couldn’t speak back. But that moment, when the whole audience stood
around listening to that man speak about Stuart Hall that way, led me to
think: someone has to write an essay called “White Cultural Studies.”
Part of the essay would have to be about the whitening of Stuart Hall
because it seems to be so pervasive within the rubric of what’s now called
cultural studies. There’s somewhat of a public display of a particular type
of reinstitutionalization of whiteness here. Unfortunately, those of us who
see ourselves as doing cultural studies from so-called other legacies or racialized positions often get positioned in relation to this (white, male)
tradition of cultural studies and sometimes Stuart Hall is used against us
to represent whiteness. But at least there are other possibilities open for
us now. For example, within Asian American cultural studies there’s
much theorization (especially by graduate students) on how Asian American studies has to begin to address multiple formations. There are some
people who started with Althusser, like Lisa Lowe, but who’ve now moved
more toward culture. A lot of younger scholars are starting with culture
and inflecting it with gender, class, sexuality, and issues of transnationalism and globalization. Much of their work is not making it to the journals, but eventually that will happen because they are thinking about how
to reconstitute Asian America, Asian Pacific American, and Asian American studies. That’s where my thinking is now too, but this is not an easy
task.
There’s a huge tension between contemporary emergent formations of
Asian American cultural studies and an earlier Asian American studies,
which constituted itself as an identity formation that was national. I cannot say what it was like in the early seventies for new migrant Asian peoples, but in the current period, in which the number of migrants exceeds
the number of people born in the U.S., in Asian Pacific cultures, people
are shifting from the early national models to transnationalism. In my
own case, I am a third-generation Japanese American, and will be one of
the last surviving sanseis. Most sanseis are part of the 60s and 70s, so I
have a totally different experience. Lisa Lowe is one generation ahead of
me, I think. She went through this whole thing at a different point, so her
response to earlier formations of Asian American studies is clearer. My
break wasn’t as clear because I never had the nation to begin with.
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There are other tensions to consider that arise in relation to Asian
Pacific cultural studies and the way it’s being circulated within the U.S.
and abroad among cultural studies distribution systems. This is pretty dependent on economics. When the Japanese economy is doing well, there’s
more money to bring people to the U.S. for conferences and other types of
international exchanges. I have to admit that I’m very worried about the
exportation of cultural studies within the U.S. and abroad among folks
who don’t know the history of the U.S.—or the way certain groups have
their own formations of cultural studies. From what I see, there’s a certain
temptation to bypass the history of African Americans, Chicanas/os, Native Americans, and Asian Americans in order to get to cultural studies. So
among some folks in Asian Pacific regions of the world—and mostly the
rich areas like Taiwan and Singapore—the historical struggle that for me
is synonymous with cultural studies is circumvented. So Asian Pacific cultural studies travels from Britain to a couple of places in the U.S., then
back out again, without a stopover.
What does this have to do with the Americanization of cultural studies?
This type of circulation might lend legitimacy to some indigenous formations of cultural studies. The sad part is that these Asian cultural studies
are not making their way back to Asian America. There doesn’t seem to be
an effort to dialogue with Asian American cultural studies either. I mean I
was shocked by the way Lisa Lowe is bypassed by a lot of this circulation
of cultural studies because she came out with such a “pow”—Immigrant
Acts! I thought that people [in Asian Pacific cultural studies and cultural
studies] would have to incorporate her in their global travels and begin
the conversation.
I think that this type of neglect also has to do with the fact that some of
the people who are connecting with a global formation of Asian Pacific
cultural studies do so through a more classical Marxist approach. In my
own case, I would not be where I’m at if I hadn’t read Marxism and Native
Americans, a book edited by Ward Churchill. In it, Russell articulates very
clearly that Marxism is a Western formation. Until I was able to articulate
Marxism within the history of the Western intellectual economy, I was not
able to understand modernism or economics. I needed first to be able to
see Marxism as being set against native peoples and history, and find a
parallel to capitalism. So the fact that some Third World intellectuals bypass a critique of Marxism and modernism in the writings of native peoples in the U.S. in order to get to cultural studies seems to me to be a very
different traveling pattern than what I went through. Understand, I’m not
an expert in Asian Pacific cultural studies, but I feel the omission there (of
Asian American cultural studies), and I not only feel it here, I feel it generally speaking.
For example, cultural studies in the U.S. often doesn’t have any education in Ethnic studies; it often constitutes these as “identity politics.” Once
they are characterized this way, these traditions can be put aside and they
don’t need to be traveled through like you would through the canonical
legacies. The native formations are often dismissed from cultural studies
under the charge that “they are only doing identity politics, and that’s one
thing: passé, essentialist, and not a viable means of struggle.” I think what
you see going on here is this long history of colonialism in the Americas,
and a related denial of oppression and racism.
To acknowledge the identities of others [and their political nature]
means to acknowledge the history of whiteness, racism, and colonialism.
People are so into denial that there’s no space for acknowledgment of any
other tradition or identity. We need to affirm that it’s a huge slap in the
face to say that “we” [people in Asian American, African American, Native
American, and Chicana/o studies] are doing a generic “identity politics”
when we have our own complex positions and connections to cultural
studies. Let me say that there’s a huge and pervasive identity politics
around that people don’t want to talk about, and that’s white identity politics! At least we talk about identity—we are acknowledging it.
People need to be clear about the fact that it makes it very difficult to
talk about Asian American studies when you are talking to someone who
wants to position you as “identity politics” and is, therefore, unwilling to
converse with you as coming from an Asian American position. It’s a denial of the right to speak, to converse in our critical languages and traditions, and to understand our historic positioning. Yes, there’s more in a
name (or a naming practice) than one’s identity. But people who have no
history, who have given up their names and their histories in order to be a
part of the U.S. nation, have a very difficult time understanding other people who want to remember their family’s history, identity, and language.
For me this is just a matter of social thinking. We also need to understand
that every time we say the word, Asian American, we leave someone out
who doesn’t signify under that term, and so we need to restructure and to
advocate. There are other histories that need to be considered, including
the Hmong, the Mien, all of the Laotian ethnicities [at least 60], all of the
Vietnamese [at least 60]. These are people who should be conceived of as
part of the tapestry of lives that need to be woven into a critical practice.
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The fact that there is not a name for all these groups in many people’s
minds becomes part of the disappearance act and a general lack of attention to the multiplicity of communities.
Lately, I’ve been starting to think about things—for example, why people constituted 187 as a Mexican-only thing, when for many years, 25,000
undocumented Chinese migrants were coming to the U.S. from one region of China. Asians need to be brought into the conversation. We need
to engage this in critical dialogue. I collaborated on a book with John
Sloop called Shifting Borders that looks at the rhetoric around 187.
I think 187 was used to divide us around the immigration issue. We’ve
had coalitions in the past and we need to figure out how to reconnect in
the present. We need to develop new intellectual and political coalitions in
cultural studies and outside.
Lisa Sánchez González
I latched on to the phrase “critical race and gender studies” to describe the
work I do. This type of work has the critical immediacy I crave, which
“cultural studies” per se doesn’t seem to have anymore. I just went to a
conference at Stanford where I got the sense that cultural studies scholars
often play hopscotch over the violence of history; you know, making it
lively and light, entertaining, easy to follow, pure discursive play. So I
made an intervention, to remind others that violence is a really important
component of the Diaspora’s history. We’re not just sort of leaving some
place and going some place else for the fun of it, and it shouldn’t be represented as such. I’m talking about all of the everyday ugliness of colonialism and the pressures that often make people move into worse situations
than they started out in. I think critics have a responsibility to render this
ugliness real in their work, and I don’t think it is ethically or aesthetically
legitimate to sacrifice this reality to elegant prose or an esoteric information blitz.
In Puerto Rican diasporic Literature, critics tend to “recover” white,
elite writers; that won’t do as far as I’m concerned, because it is not a recovery, instead it’s a reinscription of the same old canon. In my article on
literary history published in Recovering the Hispanic Literary Tradition, I
skipped over the usual suspects and talked about Luisa Capetillo, an author who was born in 1874 to a working-class family. She was an autodidact who became a very important activist and agitator for the anarchist
movement in Puerto Rico. She participated in different projects, including
public education. She worked with the Federación Libre de Trabajadores
[the union that was organizing around the anarchist agenda]. She worked
in the “Crusada del Ideal,” which was an anarchist crusade to get people
thinking about being workers. And she wrote plays and performed in the
campos to bring people into class consciousness. She also started the first
feminist magazine on the island and was very critical of some of the political maneuverings that were going on among leaders like Santiago Iglesias.
Imagine, she criticizes the so-called nationalist agendas way back then in
1910!
Luisa Capetillo is an important figure because she totally unsettles this
[white-ish] male worker/masculinist militant paradigm that’s been set up
by some old-school Marxists. I mean here we have a woman who wore
suits and a Panama hat, who was critical of even the nationalist party, who
exiled herself to New York at the turn of the century, and who got so fed
up with the politicking and the sexism that she abandoned essay writing
for fiction! She also translated Madeline Vernet, who was this wild anarchical feminist in France that argued things like women need to have orgasms to stay psychologically and physically healthy.
If we set Luisa Capetillo up as our literal or literary great-grandmother,
we need to ask: How does she frame the twentieth century in the United
States for us? Up until about 1985, I’d only seen her mentioned in parentheses and footnotes, but her books are still in the archives. [They are
falling apart literally, they’ve never been reissued.] There are very few serious scholarly explorations of her work, and all that most Puerto Ricans
know about her is that she was one of the first Puerto Rican cross-dressers
and that she got arrested for impersonating a man in Cuba. No, this
woman [Luisa Capetillo] was really out there! So you can see why no one
can handle her.
In my work on the first generations here, I’m looking at people who set
out pretty young in their lives to travel to the States and were very firmly a
part of that diasporic community. I use the term, Diaspora, because for
me it has two meanings: on the one hand, it refers to a violent rupture
with the past that leads to some kind of chaotic dispersion, and on the
other hand, it also refers to a kind of rupture that opens the potential for
both suffering and liberation [in ancient Greek]. When I refer to the
Puerto Rican Diaspora, I always add the term “colonial” before Diaspora
because it’s the only term that makes sense given the context we’re dealing
with. Like I said before, here we’re talking about the collusion of econom-
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ics, politics, all of the ugliness of colonialism. You see this at the San Juan
airport—it’s set up like a prison. People can’t come in and meet their relatives when they come off the plane. They are cordoned off by this big glass
wall, so when you come off the plane, you go to the baggage area, and up
high you see just a wall of faces looking at you. That vision always makes
me want to cry.
At the time when I started my recovery project, I think I was trying to
legitimate the Puerto Rican experience. Basically, I was involved in finding
[Puerto Rican] texts and saying: “Look, this is Literature, this is our Literature. This is real Literature and it should be part of the canon.” But as this
project developed, I started asking some more fundamental questions like:
Why do I want to legitimize this stuff? In what ways do I want this Literature to speak? Do I want it to speak or do I want it to “espeak?” [You know
the difference]. Why am I so overly concerned with creating an archive?
What about things that can’t be documented? What about emotions and
feelings? What about relationships? What about pain and joy? I was interested in things like that which to me seemed to be completely cut out of
the script of mainstream cultural studies as I was introduced to it [that is,
as a social science project] and literary history.
So I started also looking for alternative types of social texts, like salsa,
which is such a strong part of my family’s legacy. It’s literally embodied in
the dance. That’s how I learned to dance with salsa, those are the associations that I have with salsa. As a child I didn’t understand that much Spanish, but I knew the words to the songs by heart. One of my uncles used to
give me quarters to sing. I’d parade around and dance around the living
room, mouthing words that I didn’t quite understand.
When I was in L.A. as an adult, it was very painful to see the way salsa
had been appropriated by Latin American immigrants who identified it as
this glittery middle-class thing. It’s completely ironic because salsa es de la
clase baja en Puerto Rico—es una “cosa de los negros” en Puerto Rico. I
lived in San Juan for over a year, working as a waitress in one of the big
salsa clubs, so I have had an intense experience with it on the island. Here
in California it’s being used by wanna-be elites as their music of choice—
as their soundtrack. A lot of the clubs are very racist too. I remember once
I had a dance partner who was about three shades darker than me and had
curly hair. At a club the bartender accused us of walking off without paying the tab. The bartender was drunk, he kept announcing he was Cuban
to anyone and everyone who asked for a drink, he was white and he was
an asshole. My friend was almost ready to pay the tab for the second time,
just to get away from the scene, but I was furious, I exploded. We almost
got arrested. Then at the clubs they would play these songs like “que se
vaya pa’l carajo, de Cuba los comunistas.” [I used to take notes on cocktail
napkins.] Anyway, I’m not a supporter or nonsupporter of Fidel; I don’t
know what exactly is going on in Cuba, though I do support on principle
the right of self-determination. Thing is, what the hell does this song have
to do with our realities, collectively, in Southern California? Musically, it’s
a sloppy tune too, so why did that song move some of the dancers—and
the bartender—into a graceless frenzy? Politicizing salsa music is a delicate art. I think the best aesthetic is the kind of work that someone like Ismael Rivera did, singing about “las caras lindas de mi gente negra” because
it’s about cherishing and putting flesh on something beautiful without devaluing and dehumanizing others, it’s inspiring in a positive, ethically valenced way. So why does Rivera’s “Negro Bembón” song get so much play,
especially in white-ish venues, while the “caras lindas” song doesn’t? I
never heard “caras lindas” played in an L.A. club, not once. Salsa shouldn’t
be a grudge match, a rhetoric machine [hello Miami!], or a mode of devaluing others vicariously; it should be artful, and when the lyrics and
music—the performative ethics and aesthetics—jibe together in an artful
way, it is, at least for me, a sublime experience.
Then there are also problems with the way salsa has been treated by
critics, the tendency among some critics to only celebrate the liberatory
potential of transnational music, as if the “slum dwellers” of the world are
going to automatically unite through the music or something. We need to
be careful. Just because Puerto Rican salsa is being played in Tokyo doesn’t
mean that the liberatory potential of that music is going along those same
grooves. For me “the connect” is not through the CDs but through how
people take that music into their lives and into the dance; through how
they share in the body language that we have developed as transnational
subjects living under the tightening grip of transnational capital and its
effects. For me, the connect is a starting point, not an ending point. For
example, if I wanted to get a sense of how hip hop is being understood in
Brazil, I would have to go to Brazil and dance, be around to listen and
watch how it’s used. I would have to hang out and see what it means to
people, how they perform it in their daily lives. I couldn’t just follow the
sales figures, or spend a weekend jotting down anecdotal episodes.
For me, someone who’s living in the Diaspora, someone who learned
how to dance salsa at home in the ways I described before, salsa involves a
kind of reterritorialization not only of one’s own body, but also of the
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emotion of the music and the space that you’re in. We could be anthropological about it and talk about its roots and communal legacies, but for
me, in the best of cases salsa confers a sense of belonging and connection
to a history and a gorgeously embodied legacy. In my article in Cultural
Studies (1999), I was interested in reclaiming salsa in this way because salsa
can be a source of knowledge and provide identifications with the living,
identifications with a unique type of collective beauty and grace that other
people have turned into something ugly and awkward.
This goes back to my whole vision of what cultural studies should be all
about in the context in which I work: the recuperation of a uniquely
Puerto Rican colonial diasporic aesthetics and an investigation of how
body knowledges are a very important part of our legacy too. In the last
chapter of my manuscript, which is almost entirely about literary history, I
move into music. For me, love and the aesthetic are inextricable from the
politics of everyday life and the issue of survival, and written artifacts
aren’t the only historical source of this; in fact, they are probably not
nearly as important as other forms of expression that are much more
difficult to track with written or spoken language. Speaking of this—survival — according to the social science demographic information, the
Puerto Rican community is one of the poorest ethnic communities in the
United States: We have the highest rate of women who are unwed mothers
and heads of households; we have the lowest educational achievement
rates; and we have the highest rising rate of HIV infection of any community. This is a dire situation; it’s easy to look away, to walk away from this
pain. But I think Puerto Ricans should cling to our baggage, however motley, however rasquache. We have to own it, unpack it, deal with it.
This reminds me of something that happened to me when I went on a
trip. You know, I had a bunch of stuff in a paper bag, and that bag is all I
had. My dad started teasing me, saying, “You have Puerto Rican luggage.”
Yeah, that’s what they call it. So that’s where that idea of “having Puerto
Rican luggage” came from. Years later, at the San Juan airport, I thought
about this as I looked at all of the bags: paper bags, plastic bags, bags with
broken zippers, bags that had seen better days, bright bags, and boxes that
people use when they travel. Critically, intellectually, that’s our baggage
too.
Kevin Johnson
Latina/o critical race theory integrates other disciplines into legal analysis.
I think the Latina/o critical race theory in the book, The Rodrigo Chronicles: Conversations about America, really tried to talk critically about how
the law adversely affects racial minorities and plays into their subordination. Initially, critical race theory focused on African Americans—you
know, the Black-white binary view. In some ways The Rodrigo Chronicles
fell into that. It’s a bit strange that while there’s a great deal of interest in
critical race theory in Ethnic studies, there is less interest in Chicana/o
studies.
One of the reasons that Critical Latina/o Theory developed was to serve
this community as well as other Latina/o communities. Among the people
who are involved are Frank Valdés, who helped put together all five of the
conferences, Margaret Montoya, Lisa Iglesias, Richard Delgado, and myself. [I’ve been involved from the beginning.] Some of these people focus
on racial subtexts in legal decisions or try to figure out the hidden racial
meanings behind the law, whereas others look at the consequences of laws
that are characterized as “racially neutral.” For example, in immigration
law there’s something called the public charge exclusion, where basically if
you’re poor you’re excluded from entry. On the surface this is supposed to
be racially neutral but it affects Asians and Latin Americans in disproportionate numbers.
Part of what critical race theory and Critical Latina/o Theory do is to
look closely at those legal texts in order to show how they in fact contribute to the subordination of a number of groups. This theory incorporates
a variety of political perspectives that are inclusive of those who call for
limited social reform and those who seek a more radical and total transformation of society. I think that at the very minimum we have to start
shedding light on how immigration laws affect Latinos and Latinas. We
have to do the same thing with bilingual education, the English-only laws,
and affirmative action. It’s important to point out that there are differences between this model and a Chicana/o studies model; a central tenet
of Latina/o critical theory is the building of Pan-Latina/o coalitions. This
group hopes then “to build a community of communities,” which is what
Chicana/os and Latinas/os are. At the same time, you want to build coalitions with other groups like Asian Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans. I’ll admit there’s some tensions within Latina/o race the-
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ory about whether it’s as Chicana/o-oriented as it should be, given the
large population of Chicanas/os in this country, and how, in many ways,
their subordination differs from other groups. Then there’s the issue that
there’s a lot more Cubans and Puerto Ricans than Chicanas and Chicanos
in the group itself. So the coalition is one central tenet, but it remains to
be seen whether that coalition can be built.
In terms of the question of the importance of the law for people who
are seriously interested in significant social change, I would say that the
biggest mistake they could make is to rely on the law. In this case the law is
not the place where you start. You should start with community activism,
political involvement, and that sort of thing. But at the same time, I think
it’s important for people to (1) understand how the law acts to oppress,
and (2) to understand how it can be used to make political change easier
[such as in voting rights cases]. This made a big difference for Gloria
Molina down in Los Angeles in terms of making it possible for her to have
a district where she could run and win.
But ultimately it’s the things that can clear the political underbrush that
you’d want to spend your time on. Political involvement and political activism are primary here. At the same time, I can understand why people
spend their lives representing immigrants in legal proceedings. There are
people who are suffering now and need help. But we also need to think
about how laws can oppress too. For example, we need to think about how
immigration laws operate and are enforced; we need to think about how
they make it easy to have a cheap labor force for agricultural interests.
These laws also make it easier to exclude people from full membership in
society.
In my own work I see myself doing Latina/o critical race theory because I examine the connections between race and immigration and civil
rights issues. You might be surprised by this but most of the people who
look at our immigration laws now think that race is irrelevant. They think
we’ve removed all vestiges of the consideration of race in immigration
laws. They think we’ve had some bad times in the past, that we had the
Chinese exclusion laws and deportations of Mexican workers during the
Great Depression, but that now—since 1965, when we got rid of the Asian
exclusion laws—we have a race-neutral system that is good. The only extent to which they think there’s any bad parts of this law is that we favor
family reunification with all those people from the developing nations
who now are able to bring their families here. Yet regardless of what they
say, race is a subtext of our immigration laws. If you look at any debate or
discussion, you see that the issue of race is there and that it’s pretty clearly
there. At any rate this seems crystal clear to me. Looking at Propositions
187 and 227, for instance, I had no problem seeing that those were racially
motivated at some level. But if you listen to traditional immigration law
scholars, they’ll say the law has nothing to do with race. The other thing
we need to be conscious of is that immigration issues and civil rights issues are connected. You might say that where immigration law ends civil
rights issues begin. I’ll give you an example.
Let’s suppose you’re a Mexican immigrant and you are now a citizen.
The question of whether you’re a full citizen like other Anglos or whether
you’re a second-class citizen remains. I guess I would make an argument
that many Latin American immigrants who are naturalized are not treated
as full members or full citizens of U.S. society. And if you are a Mexican
American or Chicana/o who is a citizen in Southern California or San
Diego your experiences are going to be different than those of an Anglo in
those areas. This is because your racialized experiences mark you as a candidate for immigration enforcement. In this society, where the Supreme
Court says you can consider whether somebody looks Hispanic in stopping them for immigration purposes, the INS has carte blanche to shake
down people who look Mexican. So Mexican Americans regularly get
stopped and asked about their immigration status or where they come
from. That sort of attack on somebody’s citizenship rights suggests to me
that they aren’t treated as full members or citizens. That sort of attack also
suggests that there’s this whole civil rights issue that requires further exploration in relation to immigration.
These issues are now being taken up in Latina/o critical race theory. It
was born in the 1980s of the discontent with the white-dominated critical
studies movement, and it incorporated a focus on race as a central organizing principle. My book, How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/
Brown Man’s Search for Identity, came about as a result of this interdisciplinary type of legal study. In 1996, I was at a conference of Latina/o law
professors in San Diego for the first annual conference of Critical Latina/o
Theory. During the break, Richard Delgado came up to me and said, “Why
don’t you write a book about the experiences of mixed Chicana/o Anglos
in U.S. society?” My initial response was “No, I’m very private, I keep most
of my thoughts to myself.” But then I started thinking more about this
idea. I thought about it for a month after the conference. I finally realized
that the book really fit into the kinds of research that I’d been doing. Let
me explain a bit more.
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I’d been focusing a lot of my attention on these issues related to immigration and civil rights. One of the things that I’d analyzed most carefully
was how our immigration laws in their evolution were affected by the racial make-up of the immigrants they were trying to exclude [the Chinese,
the Japanese, the southern Europeans, etc.]. I was interested in how the
laws were developed and often enforced to exclude different racial minorities. One of the arguments that came through consistently in that legal
history was the argument that these racial minorities failed to mix in—
that they weren’t in a melting pot—and that they weren’t like Anglo
Americans. There’s a book called Alien Nation: Common Sense about
America’s Immigration Disaster written by Peter Brimelow that focuses on
this exact argument. According to him we should limit immigration to
white stock so as to exclude the Mexican, Latin American, and Asian immigrants. He makes the exact argument that was made a century ago—
that we should do this because these groups won’t assimilate.
The focus of my research had been on considering that aspect of the
law and how it connects to the current anti-immigrant backlash. Then I
started thinking about how my mother’s efforts to assimilate really illustrated what I was getting at in my immigration research, namely, that you
can’t ask people to try to assimilate when society won’t allow them to assimilate and be accepted on full membership terms. I’d done a lot on immigration law and seen the Supreme Court talk about how the Chinese
wouldn’t assimilate. I’d already looked at the drawbacks of the issue of assimilation argument from a general legal standpoint, but not as personal
history, which was a more particularized, individual perspective. That perspective seemed to be a part of the argument that I was making in general
legal studies. That’s why I ultimately decided to write the book, which I
drafted in two months.
It’s hard to describe what it was like to write a book such as this. It
was so personal and difficult to write at times. There were a lot of parts
that appear in the final draft that weren’t easy to remember, but they’d
bring a lot of emotion and energy to bear on my project. So I’d wake up
everyday and write for three or four hours. As I point out in the book,
although I am well aware that the use of autobiography in scholarship is
suspect, I believe that it offers a unique opportunity for bringing to the
fore the stories of people who are invisible or ignored when we hear
about Chicanas and Chicanos. Generally, we hear stories of violence, horrible lives, and problem people with problematic families. I wanted to tell
a very different story—the story of my family. At the same time I also
wanted to tell the story of mixed race people and talk about where they
fit into society.
A number of books have been written that talk about the mixed Black/
white experience, including James McBride’s book, The Color of Water: A
Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother and Greg Williams’s, Life on the
Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black.
Part of what I was trying to do in the book was to offer a mixed Latino experience against that experience that is so widely disseminated. You know,
when people think of mixed race people they often think of the Black/
white mixture, and when they think of civil rights issues they think of
them as being Black and white issues. I think that part of what makes it so
difficult to deal with racism is this racial complexity that is suppressed. In
my book I was trying also to talk about where mixed Latinas/os fit into
U.S. society. I wanted to focus on groups of people that weren’t discussed,
people such as myself of mixed white/brown race. To the extent that Latinas/os are recognized at all, it’s not as hybrids or mixed but as
“Latinas/os.” This is unfortunate because if you look at the racial mixture
within Mexican society, you’ll see that it’s incredible. In the U.S. Chicanas/os are also very mixed. In fact, the highest intermarriage rates
among racial minorities and Anglos in this society are between Latinas/os
and Anglos and Asians and Anglos. So when you are talking about mixed
heritage, you have many more Latinas/os and Asians of mixed heritage
than Blacks of mixed heritage. This hasn’t been fully recognized.
When I was growing up I wasn’t sure what I was or where I fit in. In my
younger years I took my mother at her word; I accepted that we weren’t
Mexican. I made distinctions in my mind between “us and the Mexicans.”
I didn’t view Mexican as a negative, but, along with other members of my
family, I didn’t include our family in that group. As I mentioned in the
book, when I grew older I started thinking more about this and wondering about where all the Spaniards were that I was supposed to be related
to. I’d never met them; yet I was supposed to be Spanish and not Mexican!
It became clear to me that my dad, Ken Johnson, was white and that my
mother, Angela Guerra, was Mexican-American. Even though I didn’t feel
fully accepted in either place (Mexican or white), in some ways that realization was really liberating to me because I had a better understanding of
where I fit in. At least I knew what the truth was and I didn’t feel it necessary to suppress that truth.
At this point I consider myself to be Chicano even though I’m of mixed
race. Some may disagree, including my brother who wouldn’t agree with
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this. But there is certainly a precedent for this. For example, I don’t think
that (New México Governor) Bill Richardson ever thinks he’s anything but
Chicano. I agree that we need to recognize that there’s an incredible diversity among Chicanas/os. The stereotypical Mexican that Pete Wilson put
on his commercials supporting 187 is just that, a stereotype.
In my book I also talk about how this mixed race identity impacted my
professional life. That was really difficult to do. A lot of people end “the
mixed heritage story” with college, such as for example, Greg Williams in
his Life on the Color Line. I understand why they do—they don’t want to
deal with taking on their professional lives or run the risk you run when
you deal with racial issues that implicate some of your colleagues. But I
thought it was important to include my professional experiences. I mean
the title of my book comes from a question that I was posed during one of
the first interviews for my first teaching job. There’s a standard form used
in the law association when you apply for a teaching job which includes
the familiar listings of Ethnic/racial identification. I checked the Chicana/o Mexican American box because that’s what I’d always done. But in
my very first interview with a senior law professor in his office, he asked
me the question, “How did you get to be Mexican,” or something of that
nature. Answering that question was the entry into my own autobiographical account of a white/brown man’s search for identity. This account
would include a reflection on my troubling experiences as a law student
and as a Latino law professor. One of the most troubling experiences that I
recount is when I encountered a 1983 issue of the Harvard Law Review that
maligned me and made fun of me in a number of hurtful ways. As I point
out in my book, I was not defeated because the Harvard experience reinforced and heightened my interest in civil rights and social justice.
I wanted to take that professional risk and talk about these experiences
at length although I was troubled by taking the risk. I mean when you
write a book like that you are writing it with the knowledge that not only
your colleagues but your family will acknowledge it, scrutinize it, and
think about it. You don’t want to hurt people or destroy someone’s image
of you. You are also writing with the knowledge that important people in
your profession—including people who are in Congress—will read the
book. Even so, I thought it was important to talk about these issues. I
mean law schools are not immune from the same prejudices and biases
that you see elsewhere in society. You see this in law schools that are often
thought of as being egalitarian or liberal—like Harvard sometimes is—or
among academics that now occupy important leadership positions. I also
thought it was important to recognize that these problems of race and racism aren’t something that just a bunch of poor whites are engaged in
against poor Mexicans. You can see these problems at every level [in different ways, of course]. The reason I talk about myself is not that I’m interesting as an individual, but that the issues I faced are generalizable issues
that we as a society need to think about and deal with. Multiracialism and
mixed race people are bigger issues. They are much bigger than me or just
one story, and that’s why they are worthy of our consideration.
Alicia Arrizón
Yes, in my book, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage, I embrace an interdisciplinary cultural studies approach to the study of Chicana/Latina
dramatic and performative texts. For me the performative is very important for Chicana and Latina discourse; it invokes bodies that are in action,
bodies that transgress restricted social spaces and histories of conquest
and marginalization. At the same time, the performative is not static; it
changes over time and inhabits multiple locations.
With this analysis I’m trying to challenge the concepts of “difference”
and “diversity” that are celebrated in multiculturalist frameworks under
the guise of political correctness. These frameworks generally ignore the
cultural plurality that defines Latinas/os and their multiple contestations.
In reality, my work centers on marginality and border spaces. This focus
shapes my practice of cultural studies so that the interdiscipline of cultural
studies in which I locate the subject of my analysis—that is, the Latina
body—negotiates various kinds of boundaries, moving across critical discourses and disciplines.
One thing I consciously try to do in my work is to position myself as a
queer, lesbian, Latina and as an intellectual who negotiates between different epistemologies and knowledge bases (cultural studies, feminism, theater studies, gay and lesbian studies, Chicana/o Latina/o studies). Those
different epistemologies move in and out between Anglo America and Latino America. Perhaps that’s the site where Latina/o studies is located.
The other thing I’m trying to do is to create and to find sites of the performative that exist outside of institutionalized theaters. In part, that’s
what motivated me to write the book on Latina performance. I was also
motivated by my own experience in theater and desire to expand on what
we understand as performance. You know that at this point there is a lot of
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attention focused on Yolanda Broyles’s book on el Teatro Campesino,
which is going to have an impact for some time because its an amazing
historical document. Don’t get me wrong, I agree that we need more documents on this theater because there’s a lot more to do. But I also think we
need to expand beyond this group and to incorporate the contributions of
Latinas. In my book, for example, I’m defining what you might call “the
field of Latina performance.” Actually, I began to focus on this type of intellectual project much earlier: I coedited a book with Lillian Manzor entitled Latinas on Stage: Practice and Theory, which includes history, theory,
interviews, and original play scripts of important Chicana Latina performance artists. In my recently published book on Latina performance, I
take this in a different direction: I do a critical study that traces the genealogy of Latina performance and offers a different take on the “origins” of
this type of cultural production.
I start with the Mexican American stage [I ask: Is there such a thing?] I
talk about the first Mexican American playwright, Josefina Niggli, then I
move to the Latina identity. I explore the impact of power relations on
Women’s writing, sexuality, and gender, and I engage the complexity of
identity formation. I want to interject here that for me the idea of culture
as identity is not a static phenomenon—we are always on the move and so
are our identities. My book on Latina performance allegorizes this identity
as transitory and performative. It’s important to point out that while I do
see “Latina” as a term that brings people of Latin American descent together, for me the term Latina doesn’t necessarily invoke an Ethnic or racial category.
More than anything I see Latina as invoking an identity politics. Within
that identity politics the subject of feminism is transgressive and dynamic;
this subject can encompass many positionalities, from the lesbian transgressive body to the nonqueer Chicana feminist, to women of color. So
Latina can include multiple levels of contestation. This really complements the idea of performance because for me performance doesn’t respond to absolute definitions and it doesn’t occupy a stable location.
For me, Latina identity is a term that’s open for interpretation—it
marks the “in-betweenness” embedded in the geopolitical spaces where
identity formation occurs. As a crucial site of gender deconstruction with
strong political implication, it negotiates not only the subcultural claiming
of public agency, but also the experience of marginality. It also deals with
the desire to become powerful and conspicuous. Those of us who are doing Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies need to try to make our students
understand that the term Hispanic and Latino are not racial or Ethnic categories either; those terms embody multiple ethnicities. As I pointed out
before, one thing I try to do in my work is to position myself as a queer, a
lesbian, a Latina, and as an intellectual who negotiates between different
epistemologies. I guess that’s what distinguishes my work from a lot of the
early studies of Chicano theater that focus on groups like el Teatro
Campesino.
Other important differences also separate my work from more contemporary studies. For example, in my book I point out that while Yolanda
Broyles’s gender analysis of el Teatro Campesino is very sophisticated, her
emphasis on gender overstates a heterosexist position. By criticizing the
roles of the mother, wife, etc. and insisting on it, by failing to treat the absence of the lesbian body in el Teatro Campesino, she remains in a heterosexist approach. So that’s one way I see my role as a critic of Chicana/o
and Latina/o cultural studies. When I see this type of restrictive practice,
I’m here to say it. I’m also recuperating very important Chicana Latina lesbian performers who’ve been ignored in Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural
studies.
I guess part of the reason that a lot of these performers have been ignored is because a lot of Chicana/o audiences aren’t very comfortable with
transgression. By this I mean that they aren’t really comfortable with a
body transgressing nationalism. When I go to see the performances I often
notice their reactions and the discomfort they project. I mean, can you
imagine the audience that Valdez brings to his theater reacting to the Chicana Asimilada character who comes out with a burrito attached to her
pelvis in Nao Bustamantes’s play? At the same time, I do think that there
are changes that are taking place, partially because Chicana/o Latina/o
theater is moving on, militating against taboos. I think that Luis Alfaro is
contributing a lot, helping to make a lot of these changes possible.
For me, the notion of performance that emerges in the productions of
these Latina performers on stage breaks with the whole institutionalization of theater. This presence is transgressive because of the history of
marginalization and objectification of women in theater. I mean, look at
the Teatro Campesino—it became an institution—and look at what happened to the women! Yolanda Broyles describes it well: within that institution, women were being directed and produced by Luis Valdez and company. It’s no wonder that Chicana/o Latina/o performance artists like
Mónica Palacios, Nao Bustamante, Elia Arce, Sandra María Esteves, and
Chicana Latina poets began doing one woman shows in the 80s.
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I think Cherríe Moraga was pivotal here. With Giving Up the Ghost,
Moraga transgressed the roles generated by Chicana/o theater, and a lot of
good things happened. Now there are all these new performers coming
out. I also think that we can even look at the installations of the Movement that included performance—at people like Carmen Tafolla who did
a kind of poetry performance installation—as important precursors to
this type of performance. I mean we can trace a genealogy of Chicana performance that goes back to her and includes other people—like Marisela
Norte—who follow in this line nowadays. You know, the idea of performance art [as we know it] comes into being in the late eighties. For example, you see the appearance of all of these “coming out shows,” like the one
Mónica Palacios does. Marga Gómez also produced a show named, “I’m
gay, I’m pretty, and I’m witty,” that exemplifies this trend. The feminist
performances I’m dealing with are very influenced by Moraga, who breaks
all of the taboos. After her, it’s easier for people to come out on stage.
A lot of the Chicanas and Latina performers that I’m looking at equally
negotiate or deal with their sexuality and their race; they are always in and
out of those issues as opposed to a lot of heterosexuals, who might deal
with race and gender or race only, or class and gender only. But you know
there’s not a lot of support for the kind of intellectual production these
performers are doing.
In a lot of Ethnic studies departments we are constantly being told that
gender and sexuality are not as important as race; that we aren’t dealing
with the real issues and we are detracting from the struggle. We’ve heard
that over and over, but these performance artists I’m studying negotiate
both of these issues. Instead of acquiescing, they take a position and say to
us, “I’m Mexican but I’m also a lesbian.” They are countering a taboo that
says that bringing your sexuality in before your race is a sin, a taboo that
says that to consider them to be equally important is a sin. Those of us
who are in Chicana/o Latina/o studies have to learn how to negotiate these
things and to learn how to claim our political agencies. I’ve discussed this
with performance artists. You know, if you are invited to speak just to
white women, you’re going to bring out your Chicanada. If I’m invited to
a Chicano community, I say “Thank you for inviting me, I never thought
you’d invite a Chicana lesbian.”
I’m making a point here—I don’t care to be a lesbian in a white setting,
but I do care to be one in my Chicano community. There are, of course,
people in Chicano studies who don’t think that this type of performance is
political and that those of us who do this type of Chicana/o cultural stud-
ies aren’t political. I don’t agree—I think everything is political. Those of
us who deal with identity politics in our work and our daily life are going
to be attacked because of the new movements in dominant society that say
that “race doesn’t exist,” etc. And we have also been attacked in nuestra comunidad. Have you heard about the guy who was insisting on the internet
that he’s tired of these queers trying to impose sexuality! For him, we
queers are damaging the world. I find that attitude among a lot of Chicano nationalists, most of them male, who believe we are doing a lot of
damage to their Movement.
Cherríe Moraga just wrote an interesting play called The Hungry
Woman: A Mexican Medea that’s relevant to the discussion here. In her
play, two Chicanas are exiled from Aztlán because they are lesbians. She
paints a frightening world where all these places are segregated, and her
play is very political. It just isn’t true that the kind of cultural critique we
do in Chicana/o and Latina/o queer studies is apolitical. When I critique
the heterosexist positions of the Movement, in the very moment I’m doing
that, I’m being political; I’m not only critiquing these positions, but I’m
also claiming an identity as a woman, feminist, lesbian; and I’m making a
space for others to claim theirs or to imagine a different identity formation through my analysis of these Latina performers. I really think that the
performative is important—you really can’t do a political contestation
without the performative. For this reason, I think it’s not surprising that it
is so important in Chicana fiction. For example, If you look at Women
Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros, the performative embodies the intertext of the pop culture, the telenovelas, and the critique of female subordination in the U.S. and México. The performative is in other Chicana
works too. We’ve all done that. You’ve done that in your essay, Angie, “I
Throw Punches for My Race, but I Don’t Want to be a Man,” where you
stage a critique of patriarchal nationalism. If you think about it, our own
language is performative. While we cannot have absolute definitions of the
performative, it is equally true that you can’t do a political contestation
without the performative.
I really think there’s a lot of damage done when people try to claim an
original, authentic voice, because there is no such thing. We are the product of voices—my voice echoes yours and yours echoes other voices. Esto
es un mestizaje discursivo (This is a hybridized discourse). Chela Sandoval
talks about the importance of understanding our position as postmodern,
neocolonial subjects, and I agree with her. I think we should be ready to
recognize our multiplicity and to internationalize our positionalities.
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I want to go back for a moment to the whole idea of Latina/o identity
here because I don’t believe in the authentic Latina/o body either. The authentic invokes purity and this take us back to the essentialism of racism. I
don’t want to go there. I just wrote a paper on the native body that will be
published in the Theatre Journal. I try to problematize the idea of authenticity and argue that what’s at stake here is a recuperation of the sites of
political agency and cultural agency. We aren’t trying to perpetuate the
“authentic” image of the native body; what we seek more than anything is
political agency. That’s what our identity is about; it’s about agency and
about cultural memory and it’s about performance.
I think we need to acknowledge the importance of performance and
the performative in our work. As I tell my students in my introductory
courses, “We perform everyday, wherever we are.” We even strategize these
performances. We ask, for example: “How am I going to negotiate with
these white men when I do this?” “How am I going to negotiate with these
women?” “With my community?” We perform differently in different settings and that’s OK. Sometimes our performances are good and uplifting
and instructive; sometimes they could be better. But they shouldn’t be ignored. Performance is a ritual of being in the late 20th century.
José Manuel Valenzuela Arce
My involvement in cultural studies is atypical in relation to the intellectual
trajectory of most academics. In contrast to the majority of them, I started
working on cultural materials from the logic of social movements, not intellectual histories. My initial incursion into this type of analysis had to do
with the study of cholismo—a youth movement in México.
At the time that I undertook my study, youth movements were becoming increasingly important. While there was a general recognition of this
fact, people were thinking about them without paying significant attention to social or relational contexts. In my book, A La Brava Ese, I critiqued these tendencies as well as those who described youth movements
as static or essentialist or homogeneous. My basic position was that these
movements were only understandable within their “historicity,” that is,
when placed within specific social and historical contexts. In the case of
cholismo, I aimed to understand its specificity, to explore its varied forms
of expression, and to call attention to its resistance to the neoliberal project of modernization. I was also looking at cholismo as a transcultural,
transborder phenomenon. Eventually, I suggested that cholismo incorporated a rich iconography that intervened in the social sphere with an important social and cultural profile of the Mexican.
At the beginning, this work was motivated by a particular type of practice: I was working in the barrios with groups of cholos. The objective was
to oppose a proposed state policy that aimed to reduce the age of incarceration of youth to sixteen in Tijuana. At the time, cholos were themselves
the pretext for a lot of repression and stereotypes, not unlike other vulnerable groups who are scapegoated. It was clear to me that the only way to
counteract this type of measure was by learning more about them and
their needs, desires, frustrations, tragedies, and barrios. To my delight, the
influence of this work, which began through my interest and participation
in social movements and then materialized at the Colegio, extended beyond the academic sphere. In Tijuana, there was a radio program that the
cholos used to listen to, so every Monday I would talk about the findings
of the book on the air. Then we (myself and the cholos) would initiate a
dialogue in which they would ask questions and offer opinions. All of a
sudden you saw an important interlocution taking place at various levels.
The influence of the first book I did on the movement of the “colonos”
in Baja California was also felt in the community. I have a splendid anecdote about this. On the day the book was published, the colonos organized
and bought all of the editions! Later it was useful to them for negotiating
funds and organizing. From all of this you can see that my trajectory in
cultural studies is a bit atypical. First I got involved with the social actors
and movements, then I did a systematic analysis of them within the academic arena, and finally, this work found its way back to these social actors through a number of channels.
In terms of the Colegio, we actually formed the first Department of
Cultural Studies from within Border studies/estudios fronterizos in Tijuana
in 1982. [You know this type of area studies wasn’t very common in México at the time.] We defined the main areas that we would pursue in the
department as social identities, gender, popular culture, and border culture. This was the main thrust of our research projects, which also included a lot of applied studies that brought together the methods of sociology of culture, Anthropology, history, and feminist analysis. We also focused on constructions of migrants, transmigrants, young people, women,
and popular and resistance movements. I might add that it wasn’t until
later—after we’d inaugurated our program in cultural studies—that we
encountered the Literature that recuperated cultural studies from a Euro-
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pean and U.S. context. In reality, in our work in cultural studies at the
Colegio there was a rather spontaneous Gramscian perspective taking
shape. However, this perspective wasn’t the product of academic revisionism. We were really interested in figuring out how we could incorporate
the new emerging Marxism criticism—and the Gramscian perspectives—
in order to analyze how the relationships between culture, society, and
politics were being worked out during the period commonly referred to as
“the lost decade.”
It’s important to elaborate a bit more here—this type of cultural study
does not emerge from an academic field that explores the perspectives of
the Birmingham School, the works of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, or E. P. Thompson. As a matter of fact these authors weren’t really
quoted in México at that time. You could say they weren’t well known. But
Gramsci was well known, especially through the works of Italian authors,
who incorporated him from an analysis of popular culture. I think this attention to Gramsci happened even before he gained importance in the
United States. In disciplinary terms, I think this is the first important difference between what people identify as cultural studies and what we were
doing in Mexican cultural studies. Much of what has to do with cultural
studies here inscribes itself within the logic of work on popular culture.
But, obviously, we mean something very different when we talk about
popular culture in México than what people talk about in the U.S. In the
U.S. people study it from the logic of the circuits of communication, but
in México and Latin America the popular is more closely linked to what
we call “tradiciones profundas” (deep structures) to use the term coined
by Guillermo Bonfil. In this analysis of popular culture, you see a recurrence of the Gramscian conceptual arsenal—and all that has to do with
the debates around hegemonic and subaltern cultures. The Mexican incorporation of what people in the U.S. understand to be cultural studies—
and by this I mean the formation of cultural studies as a dialogue about
what’s happening in the United States and Britain—is a rather recent phenomena. There are still major gaps we need to address with regard to what
people in the U.S. refer to as cultural studies and what we in México understand it to be. We still lack those interstitial points from which we need
to situate ourselves in a serious academic dialogue.
There has, however, been a certain kind of dialogue on cultural studies
between Mexican academics on the border and Chicanas/os. That’s why I
included a section on cultural studies in my book, El Color de las Sombras,
where I talk about its importance in the works of Chicana/o cultural crit-
ics and border feminists. You also see a Mexican dialogue with cultural
studies in the work involving the definition of the border and its interstices, the in-between, Diaspora, mobile identities, and all that conceptual
base that has to do with centering the border. Even though it may seem
paradoxical, in some ways this work has lead to a rethinking of cultural
studies itself. And this rethinking takes us from the Chicana/o context to a
broader context that includes what happens on this (Mexican) side of the
border.
These developments also have to do with the articulation of Chicano, a
term that directs us to a larger social context and referent and to a repositioning of the Mexican culture and identity in a U.S. context. And in this
sense, I do think there’s been an important exchange of knowledge. For
many of us who work in México, it has been very enriching to see the border from the perspective of Chicanas/os. And this isn’t only occurring
among intellectuals; Mexican youth are importing Mexican symbols from
Chicana/o populations in the United States. You see a lot of this iconography being recreated in the barrios, for example, by young people who are
painting these icons in their murals and streets. And this Mexican iconography is being recuperated from the reformulations of the Chicano Movement, not Mexican history.
I don’t think that the type of exchange that I see between Chicanas/os
and Mexican border intellectuals occurs very much in the broader field of
cultural studies. Often in the works of cultural studies theoreticians, Eurocentric notions are replaced by Anglocentric notions, which continue to
ignore Chicanas/os, and the population south of the border. Granted,
some people from México and Latin America are being incorporated now
—people like Nestor García Canclini, Jesús Martín Babero, and Beatriz
Sarlo. In some ways so is Carlos Monsiváis. But I think that, within the
work of some theoreticians, the discourse continues to be structured
around a monologue. You know, it’s difficult to erase certain “inertias” in
the academic world, including the self-centered, self-referential dimension
of certain groups, the lack of historical memory, and the invisibility that
continues to exist. Just recently I critiqued a paper that was written in
English by a friend of mine that talked about the necessity of including
“others.” He did a very interesting study; he questioned Eurocentrism in
scholarship and addressed the lack of dialogue about México, but when I
examined the bibliography there wasn’t a single Mexican writer listed in
his references! These are the inertias that we must begin to erase. At the
very least, we need to get to know one another and one another’s work. I
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think academic inertias need to be challenged in México as well. We’re not
going to be able to understand many of the processes that are happening
in the north of México if we don’t incorporate the “ambitos transfronterizos”/”transborder environments.” By this I’m referring to all of the cultural processes that exceed and surpass the border. In a very fundamental
way these processes include that very reality that had to be negated under
the exclusionary logic of the image of the pocho. [The term “pocho” is a
Sonoran regionalism that means to cut the brush and is used to describe
Mexicans in the U.S.] By this definition pochos are those who have been
cut off from their roots, they have turned their backs on their nation and
place of origin, and reside in the U.S. Notwithstanding this logic, people in
México are becoming more aware of the fact that one-fifth of the Mexican
population lives in the United States—more than twenty million people.
This reality obliges us to rethink the national project with an eye toward
erasing those enormous “desencuentros” (failed encounters) in our relationships with the border and in our relationships with those Chicanas/os
residing north of México.
In my own case, I would also like to see a much closer working relationship between Chicanas/os and Mexicans who are doing cultural studies and border studies. Our common reference points have the potential to
enable us to advance significantly in our efforts to conceptualize social and
cultural processes [such as those which traverse the border]) that may be
significantly different from what’s going in the U.S., Europe, and Latin
America. But for this type of intellectual collaboration to be possible,
there has to be a recognition of its importance. This means that it needs to
be represented in universities and that we need to work against confining
disciplinary borders.
Wahneema Lubiano
I think of myself as a Black studies intellectual, feminist, and cultural
critic. I’ve also written about cultural studies. In 1996 I wrote an article entitled “Mapping the Interstices between Afro-American Discourse and
Cultural Studies: A Prolegomenon” for an issue of Callaloo that Mae Henderson edited on Black cultural studies. This piece is part of a longer essay
that I wrote in the early 90s but never published.
In terms of context, the published article had its genesis in a moment in
the late 80s when certain cultural theorists were being critical of African
American/Black studies, especially African American literary criticism.
The object of some of the criticism was pretty specific—I think it was
Skip Gates and Arnold Rampersad. But the language of the criticism indicted Black studies generally, and I really wanted to take up the criticism
and talk back on behalf of Black studies. I thought it was being misrepresented by some really important theorists whose work I respected, but
who I thought were not aware enough about the long complicated history
of Black studies. In the article I wanted to do a couple of things: First, I
wanted to set the record straight about Black studies from a perspective
that was friendly to cultural studies, not hostile. Second, I wanted to set
the record straight by talking about what the two endeavors (cultural
studies and Black studies) had in common in broadly defined institutional
terms, as well as in relation to the way their attention to everyday life inscribed a leftist political edge. So that’s what motivated the essay.
The specific critique I was looking for concerned Hazel Carby’s description of Black studies in relation to cultural studies. She was using cultural studies as the “good other” as opposed to the “bad” other—in this
case Black studies as exemplified by Gates and Rampersad. This wasn’t a
description that made any sense to me or that corresponded with the reality I knew. Since I didn’t think of Rampersad as a Black studies intellectual, and I thought of Gates as a very specific kind of literary critic, I went
back to do a history of African American studies as it defined itself over
three decades, from the 60s to the 80s. I put together a general definition,
drawing on the work of people who’d been involved in Black studies since
before I was an undergraduate. I set that language—the language of Black
studies—alongside the Carby language, some of which quoted Stuart Hall
and other theorists of cultural studies. My objective was to point out that
the imperatives, the descriptions, the definitions, and the kinds of work
organized under the two different banners were remarkably similar. Given
this fact, my position was that the critique of Black studies in favor of cultural studies was unsubstantiated. I ended up quoting chunks of material
from Black studies and literally putting them next to some of the cultural
studies material she was quoting. I was setting up the interstitial points as
well in this recuperation of Black studies in the U.S.
Nowadays, things are a bit different. To some extent I see that the engagement of cultural studies with Black studies has made the latter more
visible. I say “to some extent” because this engagement can be very good at
times and not so good at others. For example, sometimes this engagement
draws attention to Black studies but in a way that focuses on what has
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gone on very recently. So this attention obscures what has been going on
in Black studies. I guess you could say that the conjuncture between Black
studies and cultural studies is a very fruitful one, but it is also problematic
for the reasons I explained earlier. And of course this is all complicated by
the incredible attacks on cultural studies from both the right and the left.
To my way of thinking this is an American puritanical response to
things. God help us if any kind of political endeavor which has a polemical
edge and leans to the left should be successful! This really drives me crazy.
So now I’m interested in defending cultural studies and in defending
Black (cultural) studies. But at the same time I don’t want to lose sight of
what cultural studies has done to cast a shadow over Black studies and
shorten its institutional history. The effect of this is that people who work
on Black materials now refer back only to a very recent round of work and
engagement. Having said that, I do think that at this point Black British/
cultural studies is building on African American scholarship more so than
in the past. This has been good for both fields. If I have any hesitancy at all
it has to do with what I consider to be the uneven development of a consciousness about Black studies in its older sense. I’m still concerned with a
few decades worth of work that hasn’t been excavated and that therefore
hasn’t been engaged. This is very valuable work which we need to excavate, engage, and build on.
You know, I came through a historically Black undergraduate college,
Howard University. My initial training took place under the direction of
Russell Adams, one of the pioneering Black studies scholars who had been
at Howard for a very long time. Howard had a great faculty at the end of
the 70s. What I learned there gave me enough of a background so that by
the time I did graduate studies at Stanford, I was already building on a tradition. This enabled me to see other forms of theory as being anticipated
by Black studies. For example, I found deconstruction to be fascinating
because it seemed to me to be the kind of thinking I’d discovered in Black
studies. So I was receptive to it in a way that a lot of people weren’t. At the
same time, I was receptive to it from the particularity of my own intellectual biography. The same thing happened when I got involved in cultural
studies—it looked familiar to me. And in fact, cultural studies provided
encouragement for me to go back and rediscover African American studies on paper once again.
The present moment makes me happier than the moment when I
wrote the essay. But I’m still confronted on a daily basis with just how little
people know about Black studies, per se. Which is why it is important to
me to hold on to my allegiances with both fields (cultural studies and
Black studies). So that when my work is described as cultural studies I
never refuse that designation. I don’t scoff at it; I’m not critical of it. At the
same time I insist on calling myself a Black studies intellectual, as you see
in the opening to this response.
Several years ago, I edited a book of essays called The House that Race
Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain that provides a bridge of sorts between
these fields. One of the reasons I approached Stuart Hall to be a part of the
conference that was the basis for this book is because his work literally
helped transform my life. It’s been as important to me as any other body
of work in my own intellectual background. Of all the people in cultural
studies I’ve read, he seemed to be the most receptive to thinking about
what could be learned from other discourses or areas of political, intellectual engagement. I’ve read just about everything he’s written in the U.S.
and I’ve listened to him give talks. I’ve also listened to the tone of his engagement with Black figures.
When I was putting together the collection I thought it would be great
to have him in the conference because he was not only speaking in a way
that I found useful but he was also taking up some of the issues that were
going on in both camps—that is, in cultural studies and Black studies. His
questioning of identity is an example of this; it’s not done from the point
of view of smearing identity politics but rather from the complications of
identification itself. That’s why I think he is amazingly useful and why I
wanted his voice as part of a historical record that engaged Black Americans in a U.S. terrain. Also I wanted his voice incorporated along with a
gathering of the voices of people who are doing critical race theory—you
know, the law engagement. The issues that had come out of critical race
studies had been with Black studies since the beginning, but a lot of that
work in legal theory doesn’t really get engaged because some of the authors are white. I’m referring to the work of someone like Stephen Steinberg or Howey Winant—or the work of someone like Dave Roediger.
I thought there was a way that this collection (The House that Race
Built) could remind us of how critical race theory and Black studies talked
to each other and what they had in common. I also thought the collection
might indicate the specific pointed edges of some discourses that go away
from what we all have in common. For example, critical race theory owes
a debt to Black studies but it’s not just Black studies in the legal realm. It’s
a different moment and it involves a different kind of institutional presence.
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At another level, in this collection I also foreground the issue of race,
which also has been looked at by some people in cultural studies. By contrast, Black studies has always had to be attentive to race in the largest possible sense as well as in the specific sense of Black Americans. Again Stuart
Hall was an important figure here, because if there was someone who
could embody a cultural studies urgency as well as a cultural studies attention to race, then his work did so. He was interested in thinking about race
and Ethnicity and he was attentive to Marxism too. This is important because Marxism has always provided both the background and a vexed sort
of contention within Black studies in the U.S.
In fact, many of the Black studies pioneer intellectuals were explicitly
Marxist. Some of my favorite professors at Howard identified with some
kind of Black Marxism. So I thought in this way I could also pay a debt to
that part of Black studies which is sometimes mainstreamed out of visibility within institutions that are representing Black studies. People end up
mainstreaming for a number of reasons, and the tendency is to forget the
specifics of our respective histories, depending on the crisis of the moment. In the post–Cold War moment of the United States, red-baiting is
alive and well. As a result of this, you have Black intellectuals who sometimes want to forget the left. Depending on the audience I’m talking to,
sometimes I get brickbats in Black studies because my work is considered
to be too far left, too indebted to Marxism, and too indebted to many theories which originate in Europe, whether or not those theories have resonances in something that is American.
In my case, part of what I found fascinating about Stuart Hall had to do
with the resonances I heard from what I already knew about Black studies.
So in a way, it was like discovering what I had already known coming from
a different place, a different cast of characters, and different set of circumstances. When thinking about this type of connection, I also reflected on
how as an undergraduate growing up through the late 60s and 70s most of
the Black people I knew where pretty conversant about things that were
coming out of different places as well. For example, the people I knew that
were involved with Black Panther organizations or Black Panther
wannabes usually found their way into Mao’s little red book. Or it might
be the case that they found their way into Herbert Marcuse, following Angela Davis.
Sometimes this engagement with an international legacy meant that
you’d found things out that were absolutely brand new. But most of the
time you found that someone somewhere else might have put a sharper
edge to something that you recognized in a more diffuse kind of way. So
these cross-conversations and this back and forth shuttling of ideas meant
that resonances became sharper as you began to be aware of the fact that
you lived in a world and not just a set of circumstances.
Feminism worked that way for me too. I found all kinds of examples
where feminists were talking up battles that made sense to me. They
helped me to see new things that I couldn’t see as well before. So being a
feminist and a Black leftist and a person who cared about Black cultural
nationalism meant that I had to do a whole lot of work. Things have gotten even more complicated now that we can identify a Black feminist cultural studies formation which is in conversation with other feminisms and
cultural studies.
I want to talk about the importance of the feminism of women of
color from my own lived experience because it prepares the ground for
this type of complication. When I read This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, it produced something equivalent to a
sonic boom in my head! I was just so overwhelmed by it in a good way. At
first it was almost impossible to sort anything out; it was like the ringing
in my ears from this great explosion that was still there. Honestly, this
women of color feminism swept me away! I realized that I had so much
luggage [as opposed to baggage which has a negative connotation] to
carry with me within my critical apparatus. I had so many things that
were so useful. I had to take them out, reconfigure them, and find a use
for them.
In reference to the legacy of Black feminist cultural studies, I’d like to
mention Toni Cade Bambara, who in the early seventies was both an internationalist and a Black cultural nationalist. She was ahead of her time. I
mean this was a woman who referred to herself as a Marxist Leninist,
Black cultural nationalist feminist. She was absolutely serious about that
designation regardless of its complexity and difficulty. She probably
thought “I’m going to occupy these spaces and I don’t care how much they
fight with each other; they are also allies of each other.” She became somewhat of a hero for me. In her I recognize something that was akin to Black
feminist cultural studies before it had a name as such.
In the contemporary period there are any number of female literary
critics who do that work, although some might shy away from the label.
One example that I would describe as an early form of Black feminist cultural studies is Gloria Hull’s study on color, sex, and poetry (Color, Sex and
Poetry). Hull looks at what happened to Black women writers in the Har-
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lem Renaissance in the 20s in order to intervene in the discourse about
this explosion of cultural objects and critical consciousness and to talk
about what exactly happened to the women in that period. And I thought,
“This is great. This is absolutely what we need. She’s looking at a particular moment and so her work is restricted by it, but she’s going back to one
of the basic sites of Black studies terrain to do some expository work with
a real strong feminist theorist edge to it.” She’s a figure who doesn’t get
talked about that much but she was doing that kind of work. Angela
Davis’s first collection of essays about race and class (Women, Race and
Class) is also another example of early Black feminist cultural studies. She
didn’t claim to be a historian. She wanted to write in what was missing
without a claim to be writing ‘big” narrative history.
You know, it’s interesting that these are not really old texts but they
aren’t quite what we have in mind when we think about cultural studies,
per se. Yet they navigate the kinds of complications that we associate with
feminist cultural studies when it’s engaged with the radical legacies of
women of color. I’m thinking here of some of the women who are doing
Black filmmaking in Britain. When I first read their interviews, I would
find the kinds of things they were taking up in the filmmaking to be tremendously useful.
In my essay in The House that Race Built, my own practice of Black
feminist cultural studies is also informed by a Black feminist critique of
nationalism. At the same time I need to say that it’s not as if I’m critical of
nationalism in every single circumstance. I understand those moments in
the history of the Third World where nationalism fed a liberation movement. I even understand forms of Black cultural nationalism that have
everything to do with forming the resistance to white supremacy, even
when there was absolutely no hope for a Black nation. As a Black leftist
feminist and cultural critic I see nationalism as a form of common sense
that I have to talk back to. Talking back to it for me means completely interrupting its gendered constructions and notions of familism and heterosexuality—and resisting its lacunas. Sometimes I talk about it as a means
of getting people’s attention so I can resist it. Let me explain how this
works in concrete terms. I understand the common sense that says, “White
people in the U.S. over the course of the history of the nation hate Black
people.” There’s a part of me that says “Yeah, that’s true.” In some general
way they act as a general correlative for racism, but having granted that
part of the common sense some relation to reality, I have to then immediately start interrupting the common sense that says “Therefore we have to
make ourselves a powerful entity along the lines of the white nation”—or
says, “We have to have strong patriarchal families to fight against the
strong white patriarchal families.” When I think about what we are doing
in our work, I always talk about it as “fighting with both ends.” I guess I
would put a Black feminist twist on Hall’s description of our work in his
essay, “Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities.” He talks about
the contradictory position of being located in a tradition and yet not being constrained by it.
Lawrence Grossberg
The concerns that made it important to establish a connection to Chicana/o studies in the 90s were threefold. Maybe because I was trained in
England, I always took it for granted that the various kinds of Ethnic, racial, and national issues that were of concern to so many people in the
United States also overlapped with cultural studies. I expected that at least
some of the people working in those areas in England and the United
States considered themselves to be a part of cultural studies. So I was quite
bothered by the fact that in the United States, cultural studies was often
perceived as something of a white male discipline, and its relations to feminism and Ethnic studies and critical race studies were always more distant
and fraught with tension than I had expected. While working at Illinois I
tried to do my part to undo whatever history had led to those perceptions
and also to make connections between these disciplines and cultural studies possible.
Second, it is important to view this connection (to Chicana/o studies)
within a larger context. In the 90s debates were already surfacing about
what was going wrong with the left. At that point there was a critique
emerging from a certain section of the aging New left [including a number
of angry, middle-aged white men] that was premised on the assumption
that the failure of the left was a result of the concern with ethnicity, identity, race, and gender. I thought it was important that cultural studies take
some type of a position against that perception.
I suppose the third thing leading to the connection was the growing
perception that the Spanish-speaking populations were increasingly important and visible in the United States and in the academy. When Angie
Chabram and Rosa Linda Fregoso first contacted me, I can’t say I knew a
lot about it (Chicana/o studies), but Stuart Hall had already spoken with
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me about the contacts he had made with people in the area during his
trips to California. So this is some of the background for that special issue.
I also want to say that as a coeditor of the journal, Cultural Studies, I
think that the contributions of people in Ethnic studies are crucial. And
while I’m glad that the journal has brought more diverse discourses into
the field of cultural studies, in some ways I’m also disappointed in how little it has done in that way. Despite the efforts of some people (Angie
Chabram, Rosa Linda Fregoso, George Yudice, and others), I don’t think
that there has been a very engaged and large-scale dialogue across Ethnic
issues—you know, a dialogue between Chicano, Latino, Black, and Asian
people—or within the space of cultural studies among the people working
in these areas.
I think the first Chicano issue of Cultural Studies was an important step
in that direction because people discovered that there was a lot of work
they didn’t know about. But I think that conversation across Ethnic issues
and within cultural studies needs to take place now more than ever, partly
because of the context of universities and the way cutbacks are going to be
used against the very people who need to be defended. No doubt we will
be used against one another under the idea, “Well we can’t have all these
programs, so some are going to be cut.” And partly because of what is happening on the left, with the emergence of a left attack on cultural politics
and scholarship.
The conversation between Ethnic and cultural studies is also important
in the context of global issues and the ways languages and language cultures have become globalized themselves and intermixed within specific
sites. It’s absolutely crucial now that we look at the work that’s being done
within areas that might step outside the normal boundaries of our own
self-definitions. The biggest problem with people in cultural studies is that
although many have a sense that you are supposed to work on concrete
contexts [and the political struggles within them], they don’t always actually read the concrete work that’s being done in the multiplicity of contexts that are part of the world today. So that while you read the theory
you don’t read as much of the actual analysis unless it’s somewhat directly
related to the context that you are working with. I think that’s a problem
we need to overcome.
I’d also like to see more of a dialogue between a cultural studies model
and an area Ethnic studies model, partly because I’m suspicious of the historical conditions that set up the area studies/Ethnic studies model. I am
also concerned about the danger of cultural studies appearing to be impe-
rialistic—taking over everything. Most people would agree that the area
studies model was very much a post–World War II–Cold War model for
understanding the world. Now we need to rethink some of these issues in
terms of more global struggles over freedoms, economic justice, etc. We
need to ask: How can we understand these problems and these issues in
new ways?
We also need to create collective networking systems that are intellectual and political. I mean Angie Chabram and Rosa Linda and others have
brought together an intellectual community around Chicana/o (cultural)
studies. Is there now an intellectual community that brings together Chicana/o studies and Latina/o studies?
This also involves thinking more about what’s unique and specific [or
not unique and specific] to particular contexts and particular struggles.
The problem of youth is a real problem, and it’s not just a Chicano or
Black problem, although among those populations in America the statistics are more startling and difficult to accept. Clearly, this is a problem
across classes. Strange things are going on in terms of the ability of society
to reproduce itself in its children. And we need to take those issues to
heart, not only personally and politically but intellectually as well.
That’s what cultural studies has always been about for me. First of all it
is the commitment to make intellectual work matter in terms of changing
the world. That’s essentially what I tell my parents when they ask me why I
do cultural studies. I tell them that when my son grows up, I want him to
know that I tried to make the world a better place. And I think we have to
try to change the world with whatever strengths we have as individuals.
Mine are as a teacher, a talker, a writer, a scholar, an intellectual of sorts.
Networking is also important in cultural studies because for intellectual
work to matter it also has to have communities and collectivities. Part of
the way you build communities is from individual to individual—connecting individuals together rather than thinking of them simply as abstract members of some group. Hopefully, those individuals will bring in
new ones, and, before you know it, you have an alliance of sorts.
What I try to do in my travels to Europe is to educate people about the
work being done here. When they think of American cultural studies, they
often think of critiques that have been written instead of the work itself.
So they think American cultural studies is: audience studies, celebrations
of pleasure, MLA postcolonial criticism, high theory, and some vague
sense of Black nationalism. They think it’s all about segregating intellectual projects. And I have to spend a lot of time telling them they shouldn’t
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believe the media hype about cultural studies in America any more than
they believe the media hype about anything.
I want to emphasize that somehow we need to keep making the connections between communities larger and larger and smaller and smaller. I
also want to emphasize Stuart’s role in making these connections possible
because I think he’s a key figure in opening up the field to a lot of different
discourses. Clearly, there are points in cultural studies that people should
connect to from other sites, but those points are not limited or predefined
or anything like that. Now there’s a growing Asian connection to cultural
studies. There are clear groups of interest in Korea, in Hong Kong, and in
Japan and China. That’s a Pacific connection which makes the question of
the links between Asian cultural studies and Chicana/o Latina/o cultural
studies on the West Coast and Southwest quite interesting and important.
So it will be interesting to see what will be happening with that link over
time.
Lisa Lowe
In my work I attempt to contribute to the kind of cultural studies project
that comes out of Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches that consider “culture” as a dynamic site of mediation in which social and economic relations of domination and intervention within capitalism are negotiated.
“Culture” emerges as a critical concept in the work of Raymond Williams,
Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and others, after which we can understand
“culture” to be a set of constitutive and contradictory social processes in
which subjects, ways of life, communities, and countercommunities are
created, rearticulated, and contested. We can remind ourselves that “cultural studies” emerges, in neo-Marxist criticism, as a way of describing the
complicated processes of negotiation, as opposed to simple or transparent
reflection, through which a “social formation” can be said to correspond
to a mode of production; in exploring “culture,” neo-Marxist criticism refuses the separation of “base” and “superstructure,” or the idealist conception of a separation of reproduction from production. “Culture” becomes
a way of naming the full possibilities of conceptualizing ideas, practices,
and articulations as material processes deeply connected to social structure. Yet, “culture” has a diverse genealogy of meaning that we should
probably name at the outset; in other words, not all forms of culture are
equally contradictory or contested, and we should be clear about this.
“High culture,” “national cultures,” “aesthetic culture,” “literary culture,”
“popular culture,” or “working-class culture” are each differentially theorized as particular sites in which relations of domination and contestation
are practiced. “Culture” in the discipline of Anthropology has a different
history than “culture” in European literary studies; both are very different
than Ethnic studies, with its valuing of oppositional cultures. This is all to
say that studying “culture” is a broad approach, not an end in itself. There
is nothing necessarily “progressive” about studying “culture,” even in cultural studies. It is, rather, to what end one studies or values “culture.” Following Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, we can identify a strain of
cultural studies in which studying “culture” is a way of reconceptualizing
the contradictions of capitalism as not exclusively the abstract contradiction of capital and labor. That is, within the differentiated forms of the
capitalist mode of production—racialized, colonial, postcolonial, neocolonial, patriarchal—a “structure in dominance” is “overdetermined,”
and economic contradictions are articulated unevenly through race, gender, religion, sexuality, and region. The material conditions of a given historical moment make particular contradictions rise to the surface.
For my work the study of culture permits the locating of dynamic processes of human societies that cannot be identified through strictly empirical methods of political economy or linear narrative histories. It is a way
of identifying the medium of ruling ideas as well as locating the places
where subjects and communities contest abstract regulating categories
and narratives of universal history. It can be a dynamic terrain where subjects are disciplined, coopted, and incorporated, and where they imagine,
represent, and forge alternatives to abstract regulating universals.
In Immigrant Acts I don’t think I was actually setting out to contribute
to “cultural studies” as a discipline, per se. Rather, I wanted to study the
ways that Asian immigration to the United States provided a critical account of the emergence of racialized capitalisms in the West; I saw Asian
immigration to the U.S. as a particular story about racialized capitalism, as
a case study out of which general theories could be drawn. To do this, I
needed to consider “culture”—broadly construed as U.S. American national culture and its contestations by immigrant countercultures—as
deeply imbricated in processes of immigration, labor, community formation, and racial formation. But if we define “cultural studies,” as a neoMarxist approach to the way race, gender, sexuality, and other social and
affective attributes converge with class, then I suppose Immigrant Acts
(Duke, 1996) is a “cultural studies” work.
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But there is more and more work taking place in something you might
call “Asian American cultural studies,” which is very exciting. I think this is
because the specific history of Asian immigrants in the U.S. offers an interesting critique of U.S. national and economic formation. That is, the
history within which Asian immigrants have been regulated politically,
economically, and culturally creates a particular critique of racial formation and capitalism within the U.S. As I’ve argued in Immigrant Acts,
Asians were admitted along an economic axis as labor, yet excluded from
the political sphere as “aliens ineligible to citizenship” until World War II,
and thus distanced from “national culture.” In the period from roughly
1850 to the second World War, the contradiction between the economic
need for cheap, disenfranchised labor and the political need to constitute a
homogeneous nation with a unified culture was “resolved” through the
legislation that racialized Asian immigrants as nonwhites, even as it consolidated immigrants of European descent as “white.” This Asian American counterhistory of the modern institution of citizenship, then—along
with the counterhistories of other racialized or disenfranchised bodies,
subjects, and communities—helps us to see that legal institutions function as flexible apparatuses of racialization and gendering that reproduce
the relations of production as racialized gendered relations.
The exclusion from political membership in the nation also enforces a
distance from cultural membership in and cultural production of the nation—whether literary, popular, media communications (though due to
the recruitment of Asians along the economic axis, Asian Americans are
more pervasively integrated in consumer culture), so that Asian American
cultural forms are particularly interesting for the critique of national culture. Younger scholars in Asian American cultural studies—Nayan Shah,
Grace Kyungwon Hong, Gayatri Gopinath, Karen Shimakawa, Laura
Hyun, Yi Kang, Kandice Chuh, David Eng, Martin Manalansan, Oscar
Campomanes, Enrique Bonus, John Cheng, Victor Bascara, Chandan
Reddy, Lisa Cacho, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Nerisa Balce-Cortes, and others
—have been especially excellent at considering Asian American culture as
a site for reading Asian race within comparative racial formation, race as a
legacy of U.S. imperialism, as a critique of middle-class heteronormative
domesticity and racialized property relations.
It is absolutely crucial that this work in Asian American cultural studies
be in dialogue and collaboration with work in Ethnic studies, Chicano/Latino studies, African American studies, postcolonial and Third World
studies, and queer studies; thankfully, much already is. In writing Immi-
grant Acts, I was deeply informed by the work of Rosa Linda Fregoso,
Robin D. G. Kelley, Tricia Rose, José David Saldívar, Ramón Saldívar,
Rosaura Sánchez, George Lipsitz, Hazel Carby, David Lloyd, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Judith Halberstam, and others,
as well as by scholars in Asian American studies like Elaine Kim, Michael
Omi, and Gary Okihiro.
Let me add here that after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,
the Asian American profile has changed tremendously. There has been not
only an increase in the population and a widening of national origins, but
more important, a mixed economic profile that simultaneously recruits
Asian immigrants as a form of capital investment and consolidates the
Asian American middle class, and that expands and feminizes the lowwage labor pool. Because of this “mixed” profile of Asian immigrants and
Asian Americans, there is a need for both a continuing critique of racism
and exploitation within the national framework and a movement beyond
this national critique that addresses global economic exploitations beyond
the nation.
The influx of new Asian immigrants in the last two decades has made it
more or less axiomatic to state that Asian Americans and Asian immigrants are a “heterogeneous” group, in terms of national origin, class, gender, sexuality, language, religion, and generation. This has led scholars
within the field to be critical of racial essentialism and cultural nationalist
formations of identity within the context of a single nation-state, and led
activists to question whether ethnic identity always and in every instance
leads to a progressive politics aimed at social and economic transformation. But it is imperative that Asian American studies, and Ethnic studies,
push racial formation critique even further in order to consider different
Asian formations within the global or neocolonial framework of transnational capitalism; this is the current work, our current challenge. The object of this effort would be to supplement an Ethnic studies notion of racial formation within one nation-state with an understanding of the multiple contexts of colonialism and its various extensions within the uneven
development of neocolonial capitalism, in order to inquire into the
significance of the “Asian American” within local situations and material
conditions—in Asia, in the Asian Diaspora in the West, as well as in the
Asian Diaspora elsewhere.
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John Beverley
I got involved in cultural studies in the mid-eighties.
Here at the University of Pittsburgh the dean convoked a committee of
people in the humanities to talk about foreign language departments sharing resources. The idea was that a number of courses in theory and criticism could be taught between various departments. I was on that committee and suggested that maybe we should take this opportunity to do something that went beyond Literature. At the time the idea of cultural studies
was already in the air, but it still hadn’t been codified in institutional terms
in the U.S. academy. So I started saying on the committee “Let’s create a
cultural studies program,” without knowing exactly what that meant.
In my own work, I had already started posing the question of why we
spend all this time and energy on Góngora or Latin American boom novels when we have cultural texts like telenovelas (soap operas) right in front
of us that are reaching millions of people. I saw these texts as being accessible to the kind of training we had in Literature; it wasn’t just a question,
in other words, of a sociological study of mass culture or popular culture.
It was taking the texts of popular and mass culture seriously as texts,
hermeneutically. But when I advocated this on the committee, there was a
lot of resistance at first; people found it hard to move beyond the traditional Literature curriculum. They wanted to get into “theory,” but they
didn’t want “theory” to deconstruct what they were trained to do: the
canon, the authority of Literature and academic humanism. But that’s precisely what “theory” portended, in a way. So they were caught in a contradiction of their own making. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
After a lot of debate, the committee put in a compromise proposal to
the dean calling for a program in literary and cultural studies. The dean
approved it—for reasons there isn’t time to go into adequately, deans and
administrators seem to like programs like cultural studies. Then Gayatri
Spivak—who had just been appointed to an endowed chair in the Pitt
English Department—was chosen to be the first director of the program.
And, of course, she began to put her stamp on it right away, bringing in
people she could attract like Said, Derrida, Rorty, Homi Bhabha, the Subaltern Studies Group. This was a pretty exciting time!
It was interesting to see how the program which began as marginal became hegemonic. I think that having Spivak as the director was a factor in
this, but it wasn’t the only factor. Students and faculty started seeing cul-
tural studies as the place where they could pose interesting questions
about disciplinarity and departmental borderlines. They were attracted to
the program not only from the humanities but also from the social sciences and some of the professional schools. Since cultural studies had a
kind of anti-positivist agenda built into it, it challenged the powerful and
prestigious Philosophy and Philosophy of Science departments here. I
guess you could say that in one way or another the program set the agenda
in the humanities at Pitt—and to some extent in the social sciences—in
the late 1980s and 90s. And when I say it set the agenda, I don’t mean that
everybody agreed or liked what was going on in the program; I mean they
felt they needed to show up and respond to the debate.
My book, Against Literature, came out of the experience. The first chapter is called “By Lacan: From Literary to Cultural Studies.” After I wrote it I
thought I should have added “and back again” because by the time the
book came out in 1993, I was already in the midst of a big two-line struggle
within cultural studies. I had come to see some of the dangers that lie
along the road of cultural studies—not dangers about the past, but about
the future—including dangers related to its rapid institutionalization.
This has to do with the relationship of cultural studies to the revision of
the forms of knowledge in the humanities demanded by the present stage
of capitalism. I was concerned with the dilution of what had been latent in
the work of the Birmingham School: The potential for cultural studies to
become a form of ideological-epistemological agency of social groups and
movements outside of the university. For me the key moves to depoliticize
cultural studies would be to detach cultural studies from its connection to
Marxism, feminism, and the more oppositional forms of poststructuralism. In Against Literature, I talk about how once this move is completed
cultural studies can become something like a superstructure of globalization, a kind of postmodernist costumbrismo (local color literature).
I always thought of cultural studies as a political project. I thought of it
being in the university as a form of what Gramsci called, “The long march
through institutions.” My work has to do not only with a politics happening outside the university such as the Nicaraguan Revolution or identity
politics today, but also with a politics happening within the university and
the disciplines. So it’s no surprise that I was critical of the more conservative direction that cultural studies took when Spivak left in the 1990s to go
to Columbia University.
Generally speaking, this new direction involved a conflict between the
founders of the program like myself and some of the other people who’d
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joined it later. The founders built it around a heavily political and theoretical model. My idea of a foundational text for cultural studies, for example, was Althusser’s famous essay on ideology. The new model was more
interdisciplinary. Cultural studies would be a place where people could do
new kinds of research and courses; but it would not necessarily incorporate the political edge it had before. As far as I was concerned, what made
cultural studies command the attention of everybody was the fact that it
had a political as well as epistemological edge. The early model of cultural
studies at Pitt was saying, “Look, the Literature departments that were always at the bottom of the heap of the university are now producing the
most interesting and challenging forms of thought. We are challenging the
authority of the disciplines.” But the new cultural studies model was saying, “We don’t want to challenge anything, we just want to create an interdisciplinary space where everybody will be welcome.” Here you don’t have
to be a Marxist or a feminist or a deconstructionist. I called this the faculty
club model of cultural studies.
The new, more conservative model won and the program lost its edge.
Our defeat led me to think that cultural studies needed to be interrogated
in the same radical way we’d critiqued the limits of our disciplines earlier.
In essence, the struggle revolved around this question: Is cultural studies
the kind of program that “serves the people” as the Maoists used to say, or
is it just another kind of academic contrivance with a vaguely left-liberal
ambience? I thought the idea of moving from elite culture to popular culture was the main thing in cultural studies. This displaced hermeneutic
authority from the academy and bourgeois high culture to a way in which
ordinary people lived culture and experienced culture. If you stayed in Literature you couldn’t quite get at that; you could only get representations
of the popular. The “big move” in cultural studies was this implicit equation between something being popular in the consumer sense (pop) and
the political sense of the popular, as in Gramsci’s idea of the national popular. In other words, for me cultural studies was not just about interdisciplinarity or theory; it was a kind of academic populism, concerned above
all with the democratization of thought and culture.
The question of the politics of cultural forms is pertinent to an earlier
book I wrote with Marc Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central
American Revolutions. In fact, Jon Beasely-Murray paid us the complement of recently seeing this book as one of the pioneer texts of Latin
American cultural studies. Initially, in this book we thought of how Literature functioned as a form of popular democratic cultural practice in the
context of the revolutionary movements. But we arrived at a recognition
of the limits of Literature itself. Let me explain. To be sure Literature had
this tremendous and exciting role to play in the revolutionary movements,
but it was still limited to a very small sector of the population. That is,
even the literary enactments that were trying to incorporate popular
voices like Cardenal’s poetry workshop project in Nicaragua were still
dominated pretty much by elite ideologies.
This sense of the limits and limitations of Literature—in terms of class,
ethnicity, and gender—would be important for Against Literature. Although the Central American book missed its moment, the experience of
writing it did get me into the question of testimonio. So as one door was
closing another opened. The kind of argument I would make in Against
Literature was that testimonio rises up at the edge of the literature of the
“boom” in Latin America. Nobody paid much attention to the testimonio
as such; it was considered to be a utilitarian or journalistic genre, not “Literature”—that is, unless it had the imprimatur of a famous author such as
Miguel Barnet, Roque Dalton, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer. What
concerned me about the testimonio was that it was becoming a kind of literature. But I was also concerned with the way it wasn’t literature either. It
didn’t really aspire to be “literary” in the way, say, that Borges is literary.
Sometimes testimonios even resisted being considered Literature. The
narrator or interlocutor would say in the text, “We don’t want this testimony about someone being tortured to be read as ‘just’ Literature. We
want to warn people about what’s going on and to have them make ethical
and political decisions on the basis of what they learn from it.” What was
interesting to me was that zone of ambiguity in which the testimonio
functioned. In some ways it functioned as Literature but in other ways it
didn’t. Testimonio screwed up conventional ways of looking at Literature.
Often you couldn’t identify the author. You’d have to ask: Is the author the
one who tells the story or the person who transcribes and edits the text?
Rigoberta Menchú or Elisabeth Burgos? Testimonio also breaks with the
class status of authorship, because here somebody who’s not normally part
of the elite or middle-class “lettered” culture gets to tell their own story in
a way that commands the attention of elite and middle-class culture.
The voice that speaks to us in testimonio is the voice of the subaltern.
In a sense, Spivak’s famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was an attempt to warn against a naive reception of testimonio as literally embodying subaltern voice. In thinking about subalternity and voice, I often like
to refer to a passage in Richard Rodríguez’s Hunger of Memory. Rodríguez
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describes there going home to Sacramento from Stanford [where he has
been studying English Literature as a Chicano “scholarship boy”] for a
summer job in construction working with Mexican braceros. He makes the
point that he’s like them—because he’s also mestizo—but also different
from them. In explaining how he experiences that difference, he says that
he’s articulate while they are silent, taciturn. To me that moment in Hunger
of Memory is a very graphic capturing of the psychic splitting—Freudians
and Lacanians would call it Spaltung—between an elite and a subaltern
position, and the semiotic arbitrariness it involves. Because it’s obvious
that the braceros [those who occupy the subaltern position: Rodríguez calls
them “los pobres”] can speak. They just don’t speak to him. One can imagine them going off and talking quite a lot about their hopes and lives, indeed, about their fellow worker Richard Rodriguez [a pocho, they may
say]. If they had the opportunity to tell their story in a way that would
command our attention as Hunger of Memory does, it would be like the stories Tomás Rivera recounts in . . . y no lo se tragó la tierra. They are silent, in
other words, only in relationship to Rodríguez and his sense that elite culture is necessary for someone to have a “public” voice. But the distinction
between educated and not educated bespeaks an ideology of the authority
of high culture that the indoctrination into the academic knowledge confers, both in metropolitan and in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
In my recent work I’ve been interested in the kind of subaltern theory
that identifies the distortions in the representation of the subaltern in elite
cultural representations such as Rodríguez’s. I’m interested in looking at
how subaltern social classes and groups are barred from actively participating both in political processes and in the constitution of academically
authorized knowledge. I want to say that that exclusion is precisely what
produces the subaltern, in part. Testimonio is important here—I see it as
mediating between high culture and subaltern culture in the sense that it
forces us to confront the subaltern as an agent of a transformative project
that aspires to be hegemonic in its own right.
That work was part of the collective project of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, which I was involved with between 1992 and 2001.
We formed the group in the wake of the defeat of the Sandinistas and the
collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a way of rethinking our own militancy.
We conceived of the subaltern along the lines of Ranajit Guha’s famous
definition of the subaltern as “a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class,
caste, age, gender and office, or in any other way.” That “in any other way”
covers a lot of possible ground. Although we were inspired by the work of
Guha and the original South Asian group, we were also aware that a recognition of the limits of elite historiography did not come as an unexpected
surprise in Latin American studies. [In fact, Latin American studies has
been involved with related issues since its inauguration in the 60s.] We
also saw our project as forming a crucial part of the emerging discourse of
Latin American cultural studies, and as responding to the new situation of
globality which implicated Latin America within the United States. [Let’s
remember that the third largest Spanish-speaking population in the world
resides in the U.S.] In this sense, we saw subaltern studies as being concerned with the present and the future, not just as a way of looking at the
past.
This articulation of subaltern studies as a form of cultural studies became more interesting for me than cultural studies per se. Cultural studies
seemed to be containable within globalization. But subaltern studies has
to return again and again to the problem of inequality and discrimination.
It arises out of a consensus that’s built around the need for not only a formally democratic but also an egalitarian world order. In subaltern studies,
you look for those social positions that are the most exploited, the most
marginalized, the most unrepresentable. What you’re getting at is a kind of
thinking from, and about, extreme situations, at the margins of the state,
of politics, of culture in the sense this has for the academic humanities.
But this perspective on the singular also gives us a new way of thinking
about “the people” as a collective subject. We were looking at the need to
reconceptualize the relation of nation, state, and the people in the wake of
the collapse of the project of the left in Latin America and elsewhere. We
didn’t see the subaltern as one thing only or as a static entity, but rather as
a mutating, migrating subject—something like what Liberation Theology
means by the category of “the poor.” [Rodríguez’s “los pobres” or what the
Italian political theorist Paolo Virno means by “the multitude”: the masses
of both male and female urban workers, the peasantry and field workers,
subproletarians and lumpen, the chronically un- or underemployed, those
outside the money economy as such, indigenous groups, Blacks, Jews,
lower-class mestizos, cholos, women as such, gays, school teachers, provincial intellectuals, the homeless. . . .]
I don’t think of subaltern studies as the place where people vie for the
position of who’s the most subaltern. To my way of thinking, there’s an
implicit egalitarianism in the subaltern position, a kind of commonality in
singularity, because the subaltern as such is a negation of hierarchical
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privilege. [Although the privileges in question vary and people don’t experience subaltern alterity in the same way or to the same degree—for example, men and women, or indigenous and Latinos.] If that commonality
in singularity could be brought out and developed, then we could talk
about political hegemony. Instead of thinking of the subject of revolution
as “the same,” however, here you’d be aiming for an equality of difference,
in effect.
You are founding an idea of socialism or communism on the principle
of multicultural diversity, in other words. Global capitalism can tolerate
multicultural difference; in fact, as Jameson likes to say, “global difference
is global capitalism.” But it can’t tolerate equality. To the contrary, it multiplies inequalities of all sorts, not just economic. What I am interested in
now is multiculturalism as the basis for a new, potentially hegemonic, radical coalition. I’m not saying that class has disappeared here—remember
that in the definition of Guha’s that I quoted earlier, class is the first form
of subordination. Rather I’m suggesting that the way the subaltern studies
model talks about subordination and conflict gives you a different vision
of how you could mobilize people politically. And, of course, the context
of this is: How are we going to seriously displace the ideological hegemony
of neoliberalism which everybody—including even people who call themselves socialists or communists—seems to be under now?
My last book, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural
Theory, is a product of that wager. It ends thinking about the question of
democratization in relationship to what we do as academics. Some people
think democratizing higher education means essentially bringing more
minority or poor people into the academy—affirmative action, in other
words. I think we need to consider how academic knowledge and training
itself produces social discriminations and distinctions. [That to me is the
signal virtue of Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory; it celebrates but it also
shows how elite identity is produced via higher education as a negation of
subaltern identity.] Otherwise multiculturalism becomes simply an enabling ideology for a new “ethnicized” middle class—variants of what in
Miami people call YUCAs (young upwardly mobile Cuban Americans)—
instead of becoming an enabling ideology for the masses who get left out.
I think multiculturalism offers radical possibilities for a redefinition of
both North American and Latin American culture. Some people say that
9/11 marked the end of the “utopian horizon” of multiculturalism. But I
think we are only beginning to walk down that path. What’s at stake finally
is the identity of the nation itself in a new world community.
Ruth Behar
I think Women Writing Culture has definitely begun to enter our canon in
Anthropology. As I travel, I’m meeting more and more students who are
reading the book in their Anthropology and Women’s studies classes. I
think this has something to do with the fact that Jim Clifford’s introduction to Writing Culture was criticized by so many people, including Deborah Gordon, for leaving out feminist anthropologists. We (Deborah and I)
talk about this omission in our introduction to Women Writing Culture.
Basically, he says that feminist anthropologists hadn’t been textually innovative, when in fact they had been. And if they were innovative, they were
not innovative on feminist grounds. It was very interesting that Mary
Louise Pratt was the only woman that was acceptable enough to be part of
that seminar of the Advanced School of American Research that was the
basis for the Clifford Marcus anthology.
By now all of that debate is kind of old for me, although it doesn’t
cease to baffle. I think we are going to keep coming back to it in different kinds of ways because the omission seems to encode so much of the
history of our discipline and its problems. For instance, why is it that he
wasn’t aware of someone like Zora Neale Hurston? She was obviously
working in those two areas that he saw were so important: textual innovation and feminism. This is important background because feminist
ethnography emerged as an effort to connect experimental ethnography
[as it had been practiced and theorized by male anthropologists like
Paul Rabinow] and feminist Anthropology [as theorized and practiced
by women anthropologists like Michele Rosaldo and Sherry Ortner].
There were other women who were coming up with different kinds of
general models in their Anthropology, but they really weren’t doing ethnography. They were doing social theory instead, coming up with very
broad yet important distinctions between the public and the private, nature, and culture. Our generation then began to deal with ethnography
and the issue of Women’s relationships to one another in the course of
fieldwork. We were interested in the question: How do you represent another woman without othering her? Women anthropologists in that earlier period, in the 60s and 70s, were being asked to address general
questions about Women’s role in society. Our generation felt that while
these questions were important, they were too general. We were also trying to connect the positive aspects of reflexivity [and an awareness of
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textuality] with the feminist consciousness of our predecessors in Anthropology.
For me, the Women Writing Culture project emerges from that tension
and from the effort to connect Anthropology to the really crucial debates
around multiculturalism, the role of minority or Ethnic writers in this
country, and the predicament of “native anthropologists” or “halfies.” We
also saw our project as being related to the project of This Bridge Called
My Back, a book you couldn’t have gotten anybody to read or address in a
traditional Anthropology class. Some anthropologists might read it as
“Oh, these are native informants that we might study,” but we [Deborah
Gordon and myself] actually viewed it as a critique of the anthropological
discipline. That’s a perspective that only a very small minority in our discipline would hold of Bridge—a book that had such a huge influence on
so many of the women that participated in the Women Writing Culture
project. In this project, we saw Anthropology within this larger context of
the history of consciousness or the history of thinking about otherness.
We even saw Anthropology within the larger context of cultural studies.
We were not viewing Anthropology as the sole discipline from which to
consider those issues around women and representation. Instead we were
viewing the project as parallel to lots of enterprises taking place around
the same time.
I need to say that for me interdisciplinary work has always been important, especially the connection between Literature and Anthropology. Even
though I’m an anthropologist, I started out in Literature, and I have my
B.A. degree from the College of Letters from Wesleyan University, a small
college in Connecticut. My attraction to Literature was an early one—in
high school I was already writing poetry and by the time I went to college,
I definitely thought of myself as wanting to be a writer. What happened
was that I didn’t get much encouragement or support at that stage. I absolutely adored reading but I had difficulty learning how to do things academically—in a linear fashion [ABCD]—and learning how to comment on
other people’s work. I wanted to create my own texts.
I ended up graduating a year early, but before I left I took an Anthropology course with Fabian Johannes, the author of Time and the Other. It’s
one of the most well known of the many books that he’s written. He really
inspired me. I was desperately looking for a framework from which to understand cultural difference. In essence, I wanted to understand why I was
having trouble learning philosophy. Was something wrong with my brain?
Was I truly analytically deficient as one of my teachers suggested? Or was
my difficulty rooted in the fact that Western philosophy was part of a particular cultural way of looking at the world that did not come natural to
me? My difference was not only rooted in my Ethnic culture [as a Cuban,
Jewish, Latina] but also in my class culture—I was part of a working-class
family that didn’t have any academic precursors. That particular Anthropology course gave me a base for understanding that knowledge did have
cultural and class frameworks. Anthropology became a route I felt I had to
take to develop my ideas in graduate school. Essentially, I ended up taking
this very long journey into Spain and into Mexico and finally into Cuba. I
did all of this in the name of Anthropology!
The earlier stuff I wrote initially as a graduate student was a more classical kind of ethnography that had do with land tenure and inheritance. In
Mexico I began by working on Inquisition documents, then I moved from
there to working with Esperanza, the protagonist of Translated Woman
(1993). I really credit her with helping me to come back to my interest in
Literature and with the whole idea that storytelling is central. It was so important for her that I came to recognize that she would have been a novelist had she had the privilege of an education and the kind of support that
made it possible for me to go into this project with her. So I credit my
work with her with bringing me back to my literary interests.
Then the other part of that return to Literature was getting to know the
Chicana writers. I went to them to see what they thought of Translated
Woman, to see if they thought I was trespassing or exploiting or being a
gringa (white woman). I wanted to see if they would talk about what I was
doing as an anthropologist who was working with Esperanza. I got a lot of
support from Gloria Anzaldúa and Sandra Cisneros. Sandra was the first
reader of the manuscript—she really gave me some wonderful suggestions
that were literary. For example, in the last chapter I had a lot of genealogy
[the kind you are forced to do in the academy]. Sandra read that chapter
and she crossed out the first three pages and she said “start here.” [And so
that’s how the autobiography section starts, in a much more dramatic and
literary way.] That advice was really helpful, but what was more helpful to
me was knowing that both Gloria and Sandra felt that the way I was portraying Esperanza’s life story was important, that in some way it was similar to their experiences with Mexicana identity. That affirmation helped
me to write that last chapter and say: OK, I’m not a Chicana but I’m really
not a Gringa either, I’m a Cubana and I also have a borderline position.
That led me to better articulate my own position with regard to Esperanza, to understand that I’m just this other kind of Latina.
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For me that was intellectually and politically important. It was after
that project that I then said, “OK I see Chicanas dealing with their relationship to Mexican culture within the U.S. and their relationship to Mexico, where am I in relation to Cuba?” The interesting thing is that when I
traveled to Cuba to answer this question, I realized I didn’t want to be an
anthropologist there, at least not initially. Now I’m actually finding ways
that I think I might be able to do a kind of Anthropology there, but initially my response was: No this [Cuba] is too emotional, it’s too deep,
there’s too much family history here and my childhood as well.
There was just so much in my connection to Cuba that I realized I
couldn’t really treat it as a field site. I realized that I had to find another
way to go to Cuba, that I needed to start writing poetry again. And in order for my friends in Cuba to read the poems, I had to translate them into
Spanish. This really got me back into the literary side of my interests.
Once in Cuba I also connected with lots of writers and visual artists, and I
eventually produced Bridges to Cuba (1995), which was like a book of testimonios that I did in order to get people to reflect personally on their connection to Cuba. When I undertook this project, I had already begun
moving in toward this personal kind of Anthropology you see in The Vulnerable Observer, but this experience solidified that direction.
As I told you before, when I was younger, I wanted to become a poet,
but I became an anthropologist instead. I think I compensated for this by
creating a poetic Anthropology. The Vulnerable Observer is an effort to get
at all the kinds of things that poetry gets at— emotion, connection,
catharsis, attention to language, sparseness of expression. I’m referring to
all of those literary attributes that we might place on a poem. I would like
to nuance Anthropology with all of those literary attributes. There are
others who prefer to work on the “isms” mentioned (nationalism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, etc.) before. These “isms” are important but
this is not what I want to do, and it’s not what I think I’m good at doing. I
spent many years trying to squeeze myself into a certain academic mold
but I was uncomfortable doing this. I am trained enough in Anthropology
that I am aware of the social, economic, political, contexts in which personal lives and personal stories take place. It’s not that I don’t have that
kind of scholarly training or even that kind of scholarly interest, but I
think that what I can bring to the discipline is this humanistic approach
and a desire to see what unique individuals are doing within highly structured, highly globalized, and highly monotonous kinds of contexts. I think
I’m influenced in this line of thought by Sandra Cisneros.
One of the pieces of advice that she gives students when she teaches
creative writing is to get them to think about what is the story—the
unique story—that only they can tell. There are a lot of people that can
write about globalization and that feel comfortable writing in the third
person. I’m interested in telling another kind of story, particularly because
I think that in the late 20th century what we are facing is an increasing
sense of anonymity, with the prevalence of social security numbers, frequent flyer numbers, credit card numbers, generalized markers of identity.
In fact, one of the reasons memoirs have flourished as a genre in the last
decade is because there is certainly a fear and a threat of increasing anonymity, of an increasing sameness. I mean you can go to an airport here or
in Tokyo, and you know that it is not going to be terribly different. With
this increasing sameness there’s an important effort to remember that we
still are unique human beings, that we have unique stories to tell. I also
want to say that I don’t view scholarship and artistic/personal writing as
being at odds with each other. I view them as being mutually nurturing. I
think that in The Vulnerable Observer I carry that to a more fuller consequence than in other works.
This book has its own unique trajectory: it starts more ethnographically
with the first two essays, then with “The Girl in the Cast” and the Cuba essay, it gets more autobiographical, although there’s still always an awareness of social context. The end of the book comes back to the academy, but
from a personal, critical perspective. So I think of that book as encoding
different ways to do vulnerable ethnography, from the more deeply ethnographically based piece on death and memory, which uses a lot of taped
interviews with my friend Martha [and the tape recorder in fact breaks
down so there is no transcript to go back to], to “The Girl in the Cast”
which is based on memory, to the academic conference and the interior
monologue that challenges the limits of academic writing and objectivity.
This last piece is important because the academy is really a hard place,
even when you dwell in it for a while as I have. I think it’s hard to believe
in your own language in an academy which values very abstract language,
very disembodied language. It’s also hard to learn to become a public person and to assume a public voice within this context. There are still situations where if I’m at a lecture and I want to raise my hand and make a
comment, I still get a little jittery and nervous and rehearse what I’m going to say over and over. The language in the academy can be so intimidating, it’s the kind of stuff that Gloria Anzaldúa writes about in Making Face,
Making Soul.
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I have made a choice to not speak in that disembodied abstract way
that is familiar in the academy. In part, it’s about honoring where I come
from and about the fact that I do want people outside of the academy to
understand what I’m saying. I really believe very strongly in the idea of access and in the idea that our knowledge is part of a democratic process
that should be open to those who don’t have the privilege to be supereducated. I’ve also said jokingly that it’s kind of a pity I’m so accessible because my parents read everything I write. It would be much better if I
wrote in Latin because if they didn’t understand me (laughing), they
wouldn’t have a clue about how implicated they are in my writing and I
wouldn’t have to deal with their criticism.
Still, I really do believe in access. That’s one of the reasons that I’m so
happy with my collaboration with Pregonez, who is producing Translated
Women in the form of a play. [They call it “Translated Women Two.”) This
play is going to be shown in the Latino community in the Bronx. This
means that anybody who likes to see theater can see Translated Women
and that they’ll pretty much get the gist of what I’m saying. This play is
done in a very accessible and very entertaining way, with music and song. I
think that kind of translation is really valuable because I want these ideas
to be part of the public discussion, not kept within a small academic domain.
These are some of the issues that are important to me. To the younger
women who are coming into the academy and dealing with its constraints,
I would say that they need to find a way to stay true to their voice and that
they should not get intimidated by all those other voices out there that
sound much smarter than theirs. I think my greatest challenge has been to
stay true to my language and not feel forced to use someone else’s language or some notion of academic language that doesn’t feel right to me
or that feels uncomfortable or foreign. So I have had to really come to
terms with what it is I can do and what it is I can do well. I’m not going to
write the “great study of globalization,” somebody else will do that. I’m going to write these stories about Martha and about other people I have
known through fieldwork, stories that I think are worth telling.
George Lipsitz
I take great delight in acknowledging the debt owed by all of us working
with culture to the term “cultural studies” and to the work done in its
name by people like Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, and others. This work has been vital to all of us because it shows how we can connect the ways in which people make meaning for themselves to the social
relations and social structures that shape their imagination and action.
But I have never felt that it is important for there to be an institutional
space called “cultural studies” or to trace our intellectual lineage only
through this term. The best cultural studies work has always come from
the ways in which social movements shake up social life, from the ways in
which new social subjects produce new imaginations, epistemologies, and
archives. We might apply the name “cultural studies” to the wonderful
work of Janice Radway, Michael Denning, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Susan
McClary, and Tricia Rose, but we have to acknowledge as well that the
work they do has a diverse lineage that originates primarily in struggles
with culture by aggrieved individuals and communities. People who have
been dispossessed, disinherited, and just plain dissed by cultural signs and
symbols try to renegotiate their place in society by turning hegemony on
its head, by transforming forms of domination into vehicles for resistance,
negotiation, and struggle. I have no objection to honoring the “cultural
studies” school that originated in Birmingham in England, but I want us
to acknowledge that cultural studies also comes from Birmingham in Alabama, from the “alternate academies” established by people without access
to universities, libraries, art galleries, or conservatories, from the oppositional social movements of our history, from W. E. B. Du Bois and
Américo Paredes and Zora Neale Hurston and many others. I cannot do
my work honorably without identifying and acknowledging those long
currents of critique and struggle that predate what we think of as “cultural
studies.”
I never intended to do something called “cultural studies” or even to
write about culture. I started out as a labor historian writing about strategies of independence among workers in the U.S. during the great strike
waves between 1946 and 1949. Working people do not generally leave
records in historical archives, so I had to turn to culture to understand the
ferocious outburst of working-class self-activity in the late 1940s. The evidence I was looking for did not appear in the minutes of union meetings
or in the analyses of working people left by management specialists, journalists, and industrial psychologists. The information I needed rested in
unlikely historical sources—in bebop, country, and rhythm and blues music, in film noir, in car customizing, in wrestling and roller derby, in popular style and slang. The desire among working people to participate in the
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decisions that most affected their lives at work needed to be understood in
the context of the participatory cultures they created in the social arenas
open to them off the job. From my previous experiences as an activist and
organizer, I knew that these were often the places where people’s deepest
investments and most utopian hopes were located.
Over the years I had known people who hated their jobs in auto assembly plants, but who went home and customized cars all weekend —
painstakingly chopping, channeling, and layering enamel paint on the
very kinds of cars they worked on carelessly during the week. I knew people who could use Motown songs or television programs or Hollywood
films to explain their situations in society, but who would never talk to
you about political theory, ideology, or organization. When I read historical accounts of organized movements for social justice these dimensions
never appeared, and so by reading these realities back into social movement struggle I was able to communicate how working people felt about
what had been done to them, about what they had done, and about what
they must do. Nothing that I have ever done as a scholar in labor history,
ethnic studies, or cultural studies ever gets very far from the question of
how people make meaning for themselves under conditions they do not
control.
To the extent that people consider me a part of cultural studies, it is
usually because of my books Time Passages and Dangerous Crossroads. In
these books I look at the ways in which culture has functioned as a crucible for certain types of oppositional memory and utopian imagination.
Nothing from the past ever goes away completely; the past remains embedded in the present. But nothing from the past can ever solve our problems in the present completely. People augment the present by drawing on
what has already happened and what has not yet happened alike. But all of
my work examines the ways in which culture functions as a social force
whether the topic is labor history (Rainbow at Midnight), Black history (A
Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition), urban history (The Sidewalks of St. Louis), or Ethnic studies (The Possessive Investment in Whiteness).
Much of my understanding of culture and power stems from my reading of the history of slavery in the U.S., especially George Rawick’s book,
From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community. Rawick
shows how people who labored for others from sunup to sundown engaged in a variety of activities at night—from sundown to sunup—that
nurtured and sustained the power to do things by and for themselves, to
resist and subvert the goals of their oppressors, and to carve away niches
for themselves where they could act according to their own desires. They
used their memories of Africa to remind themselves of a world in which
they were not slaves and to access an entire system of religious, aesthetic,
political, and moral thought and action that armed them against the hegemony of white supremacy in North America. Rawick details practices
that slaves used to carve out spaces under their control, from everyday
speech to folk religion to ornaments on houses to names given to children.
This sphere of self-activity enabled captured Africans in America to face
the world every day with the determination to struggle [overtly when they
could and covertly otherwise] for freedom within a system that attempted
to rob them of all agency and humanity. Now if this kind of struggle can
take place under slavery, which is probably the most starkly unbalanced
power relation that we know, then it is probably also true for culture and
power in other realms like patriarchal power in the family, or relations between workers and employers or between consumers and producers. In
Time Passages I was not trying to augment people’s appreciation of forgotten cultural texts. Instead, I wanted to use these texts to provide a deeper
and broader appreciation of how the past influences the present by showing how many of the struggles of the past and present can be accessed by
understanding the sedimented currents within popular culture.
I think it is important here to acknowledge that before you can make a
case for learning from popular culture that you have to concede most of
the arguments against it. People feel oppressed by the pervasive reach and
scope of the media, by the power of advertising, entertainment, and public
relations as the center of our shared social world. They are not wrong to
feel this way. With all the different ways we have of living in the world,
commercial culture shows us the same images over and over again, narrowing our social imaginations and leaving us with defiled images of one
another. I fully understand why people want to isolate themselves from
commercial culture and I think we have to appreciate critiques like those
of Horkheimer and Adorno because there are important truths in their arguments. But these truths compete with others. We will not solve many
problems by knowing less about them, and we will not be able to deal with
the role played by commercialized leisure in our lives unless we understand completely how it works, understand the promises that it keeps as
well as those that it breaks.
For example, the first piece I wrote that was built around a genre or a
corpus of popular culture performances was an article on Chicano rock ‘n’
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roll that appeared first in Cultural Critique and later in Time Passages. I encountered this incredible culture—the music of The Midnighters, Cannibal and the Headhunters, Rosie Hamlin, and Ritchie Valens, fashions like
Pendleton shirts, cholo pants, and zoot suits, and creative ways of reconfiguring urban space like cruising, car customizing, and graffiti writing. I
was drawn to these practices because I sensed that they were something
very important, because they communicated a seriousness, an energy, an
ability to create community through performance, and an incredible sensibility about integrating multiple and competing identities. I came from a
part of the country where there were Puerto Ricans, but not Chicanos. Yet
I felt a sense of belonging when I listened to Chicano music because I felt
it spoke so powerfully to a way of being in the world that resonated with
my own sensibilities. It seemed to me very serious music even though the
lyrics of the songs were often playful, the names of groups were built
around jokes, and the musical devices were mostly familiar to me from
rhythm and blues and Black pop.
I became educated by the complexity of Chicano rock ‘n’ roll, educated
about Chicano life, culture, and history, to be sure, but also about culture
and identity and power in general. Chicano musicians had to do an incredible amount of work to satisfy audiences caught between languages,
generations, and cultures, to speak to people with powerful attachments to
a place that had been a locus of exclusion and brutality, as well as a place
of inclusion and community building. I began to see parallels between this
music and the African American blues that I used to listen to in St. Louis,
music designed to ease the aching muscles and frayed central nervous systems of people who worked in packing houses and on loading docks, music that transformed the mind and body. Albert King, Little Milton, Ike
Turner, Fontella Bass, Billy Peek, and the other blues musicians I loved in
St. Louis communicated a secret code to their audiences, tapping a shared
sensibility that could temporarily neutralize the world of work and its
alienations and indignities while evoking an understanding of the untapped potential of the bodies and minds on the dance floor. Musicians
from East Los Angeles seemed to be engaged in a similar enterprise. They
did not just function as musicians but, in a way, also as physicians, teachers, and wise counselors. I came to understand that this kind of cultural
work could not be explained fully by cultural theories about modernism
or postmodernism, that it could only be understood in relation to struggle, social structure, and human agency. It had everything to do with the
possibilities of radical democracy that had attracted me to the civil rights
movement, to shop floor struggles for job-based unionism, for community mobilizations for justice and empowerment. In cultural practices,
people act as if they have the right to live with dignity and pleasure, to
make the choices that matter in their lives. Unable to wish away all the
forms of social power that restrain and constrain them, they nonetheless
learn how to invert, subvert, and ironicize the very structures that hold
them back.
But you have to know a great deal to see how seemingly simple and
commonplace culture texts can engage in such complex dialogues with social relations and structures of social power. It requires an anthropological
understanding of the uses and effects of culture, a sociolinguist’s feel for
language as a social force, a historian’s grasp of change over time, and a
theorist’s mastery of ideological critique. Because culture helps determine
what is permitted and what is forbidden, who is included and who is excluded, who speaks and who is silenced, it cannot be disassociated from
politics. It is not that political solutions cannot or do not work, but rather
that in our society we too often lack access to political experiences capable
of expressing our identities and our aspirations. In fact, political categories
often function to shrink our identities, to lower our consciousness and
lessen our ambitions, to make us as monovocal, solitary, and isolated as
possible. Yet culture is always about affiliation and identification, and consequently culture always offers us the possibility of reimagining and renegotiating our relations with other people.
I have often heard that people think that I confuse people’s recreation
with the more serious sides of themselves, that my objects of study strike
people as trivial, insignificant, and idiosyncratic. But I think all of my objects of study are quite complex and serious. For me, the meaning of a cultural text is not in the work itself, but in the social relations that the work
sets in motion. Culture can be a sensitive register of social change, it can
alert us to parts of the future that are already here. When banda music became so popular in Los Angeles in 1992, when it became the music of
choice even for English-dominant Chicanos/as who used to listen to the
music of Ice Cube or Michael Bolton, it marked an important moment in
the history of immigration, assimilation, and cultural contestation in California. Coterminous with a militant strike by undocumented drywall
workers in the construction industry, the popularity of banda announced
a new resistance to assimilation, an emphatic affirmation of Mexican identity, and a collective response to the demonization of immigrants and to
attacks on the Spanish language and on the people who speak it.
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In the early nineties, I wrote an essay that was critical of cultural studies
titled “Con Safos: Can Cultural Studies Read the Writing on the Wall?”
(The Chicana/o Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 2006) which pertains
to this issue. Although it is dangerous to privilege any one site over others
[because culture takes place everywhere], I feel that the omission of the
Chicana/o tradition of cultural creation by institutionalized cultural studies was appalling. I still feel that way. There is nothing that any cultural
studies theorist of the 80s and 90s formulated about culture that was not
already present in one form or another in Américo Paredes’s With His Pistol in His Hand in 1958. Of course, Paredes’s work has all sorts of limits for
today’s readers, but his important and original ways of showing that people use certain texts for certain purposes, that these texts have a particular
kind of work to do, lies at the heart of everything we call cultural studies.
Paredes showed us why and how oppressed people go immediately to the
very mechanisms that have been used to ridicule and dehumanize them in
order to turn them around.
The historical experiences of Chicanos/as, of negotiating between different nations, languages, religions, classes, migration cohorts, and races
have nurtured sophisticated ways of understanding both unity and difference. Chicano/a culture has emerged from the efforts of people whose experiences as social subjects demanded new ways of knowing, new archives,
new epistemologies, and new forms of artistic expression. Nurtured in “alternative academies” through inversions and subversions of dominant
speech, style, and song, Chicano culture and criticism remains a rich
source of theory and practice for all individuals and groups grappling
with questions of representation, justice, inequality, and exploitation.
During the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, African American activist A. Philip Randolph explained that it fell to Black people to
theorize the relationship between human rights and property rights in the
U.S., because their ancestors were human subjects who were treated as
property. In a similar way, it falls to Chicanos/as to theorize the connections between culture and power, because it has so often been through
culture that Chicanos/as have been demonized, defamed, and disempowered. Of course, all groups—even privileged ones—have to negotiate their
way through a thicket of cultural signs and symbols, but the centrality of
spectacle, sound, style, and speech to the cultural construction of the Chicano/a identity has produced a sophistication in cultural criticism that
should be the foundation of North American Cultural studies.
Contemporary and emerging cultural forms evoke a profound disturbance in the congruence between culture and place; they emphasize the
international and transnational currents within cultural creation and
communication. Chicano/a studies “wrote the book” on these questions
long ago. How can one do Chicano/a studies and not ask foundational
questions about national identities, about México and the United States,
to be sure, but also about indigenous identities around the world, about
U.S. imperialism and influence in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, about
the presence within México of Asian Indians, Africans, and Europeans
from Germany, France, and Italy as well as from Spain? How can we not
follow the lead of José Saldívar or Guillermo Gomez-Peña (among others)
and not recognize that “America” is a continent as well as a country? Culture, race, and Ethnicity have always been global, we have just not always
seen them as such. The rapid movement across borders that we now see of
people, products, capital, and culture has been going on for a long time. It
does not make national or ethnic nationalist histories less important; indeed, under contemporary circumstances these become more important,
but only if we can recognize the plural patterns of affiliation and identification that they contain. Grounding in the history and complexity of Chicano/a studies is an indispensable resource for that recognition.
Frances Aparicio
My approach to cultural studies has been pretty much centered on issues
of representation and discourse analysis. When I began the project that
eventually resulted in my book, Listening to Salsa, I had conceptualized it
as a comparative Literature type of study. (My undergraduate training had
been in Comparative Literature and I should recognize this field as an important pioneering space for what we call now interdisciplinary studies.) I
was then interested in looking at the intertextual presence of Puerto Rican
popular music and Latino popular music in Puerto Rican narratives. In
many ways my interest in music was pretty much inspired by the postmodern, fictional narratives that were coming out in Puerto Rico in the
1970s. When I moved to Michigan in 1990, I came to the conclusion that
this type of approach was rather limited. Because of all the theory coming
out in cultural studies and the work on popular culture, I realized that I
had many more options in terms of approaching the subject matter. One
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of the main concerns that I had regarding the study of salsa was that I did
not want to just study Literature or to have the literary text be my final object of study. Rather, I wanted Literature to be another voice, another cultural text that was addressing larger issues about gender, race, and cultural
identity. So that both popular music and literary text were complementary
voices in the study of these larger issues. That’s how I ended up writing the
kind of book I did.
The other concerns that were central to the study were the contradictions involved in this kind of project. As a Latina [and a Puerto Rican
Latina] I was deploying salsa as a reformation of my cultural identity in
the context of displacement and in the experience of being within the U.S.
At the same time I realized that the lyrics and the ideology behind many of
these songs were extremely patriarchal and very degrading to women. If
you remember, in the introduction to the book I described the book as an
“an act of love” and a “declaration of war.” The article that came out in
The Chronicle of Higher Education about my book only picked up on “the
declaration of war” part. I wish the author would have mentioned that the
book and the whole project were also “an act of love.” What I was trying to
do with those two phrases was to articulate the very contradictory essence
of the project. As a feminist Latina I was involved in doing this kind of internal critique of gender within the Latino community and particularly
within the music. At the same time, I was reaffirming the importance of
this music for Latinos in the U.S. and Latinos in Latin America. This was a
very difficult challenge, and you see this challenge when you deliver these
types of presentations in front of different audiences.
When you do this type of analysis in front of Anglo audiences, you run
the risk of perpetuating the negative stereotypes and images of Latino
men. At the same time when you do this analysis within the Latino audiences, Latino men often react defensively and try to deny the patriarchal
nature of the music, at times displacing it onto the past. It’s as if for them
the music is not that sexist anymore. As time went by, audience response
to the songs themselves became more important to my work. What led me
to it was that I realized that I could not really capture the complexity of
how women responded to this music by only talking about the text. In
fact, once I conceptualized the third chapter on the lyrics and the whole
tradition of representations of women through different musical genres, I
realized that this was still not enough—that I really needed to see how
women were listening to the music and how they were responding to it.
That became the most exciting part of the book [my research] because it
was a way of showing that listening practices are really key to understanding the meanings that people produce out of the music. If we really want
to look at how women subvert patriarchal meanings, I think that we do
need to conduct interviews [and engage in audience response methodologies]. In my own case, I just don’t think I could have assumed those kinds
of conceptual processes on my own. And then after I interviewed the
women, I realized that I needed to interview some men to get a feel for
some differentiation between those two types of listeners.
As I said before, I think cultural studies has also affected my work in a
variety of ways. When I came to Michigan I realized I didn’t want to do
just a music and Literature type of project, right? Obviously the interdisciplinary aspect of the book was very much informed by that. Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance was very important for me in conceptualizing
how women were listening to the music. So in that sense I think that some
of the work being done within American cultural studies was really crucial
for conceptualizing my project. Tricia Rose’s book on rap, Black Noise, also
helped me. By the time I read that book I was almost done with my project, but it was also important to know that other women of color were
doing this kind of work. And as a woman studying this music, I felt very
comforted by Tricia’s book because it made me realize that there were
other women out there that were taking the risks of looking at the contradictions within the culture of subaltern groups.
Because salsa music is so important to the community, talking about it
and doing a feminist internal critique will generate—and, has generated
—a variety of responses. Not everybody is going to like this kind of work.
You cannot underestimate the fact that there are a lot of people who get
really defensive when you critique salsa. It becomes almost untouchable
for many cultural and musical insiders. I think that this speaks to the pain
of colonialism: the fact that our authority over particular cultural productions is so fragile and threatened reveals the still lingering colonial conditions under which Puerto Ricans and other Latino/a groups survive. I
think we need to look at it that way instead of judging these reactions as
some kind of arbitrary, irrational, or archaic type of authenticity or nationalism. Moreover, gender is still seen as a separate approach to salsa
music. I am now defined as the feminist salsa scholar, and presentations
on salsa will not include the work of women musicians and singers, unless
I am there to represent it. As if masculinity and the very own gendering of
the musical structures and traditions were not relevant to our understanding of the social value of the music.
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Herman Gray
Yes, I do cultural studies, although I must say that I think that my interest
in cultural studies stems as much from my training in Sociology as my
frustration with Sociology’s treatment of culture. The reason I hesitated at
the beginning of my answer is that sometimes I find myself frustrated by
certain kinds of moves in cultural studies, including the textual move,
which pushes me back toward Sociology in an odd kind of way. So, to answer your question, I would consider myself to be a practitioner of cultural studies to the extent that cultural studies has a certain openness to
being problem-driven as opposed to say, theory-driven or only being empirically inductive. In cultural studies the problematic itself provides a
particular set of questions that I find both energizing and productive. Cultural studies also forces thinking about power, about levels of analysis,
about multiplicity and intersections—all of these words that capture what
cultural studies is about require more specification. So there are many
things that feed into this tributary that falls into what I would call a cultural studies practice.
The other way I try to think about cultural studies is in terms of the
empirical/the historical, as opposed to empiricism. The empirical incorporates a certain appreciation for the historical, for the institutional as
well as for what one might call the cultural [both the idea as well as the
practice of culture]. I think of cultural studies as involving all those activities and ways of seeing the world. Which makes the practice of it incredibly precarious and challenging to do well. This raises the question of what
a productive cultural studies practice looks like. I don’t think this is a
closed question; rather it’s one that’s still open, evolving, and contentious.
My intellectual interests have been in institutions and ideas; they are
geared toward examining the concrete ways in which the structures of industries and industrial forms (cultural productions, universities, and performance arts centers) connect with cultural ideas and the way those ideas
are embodied in certain institutional practices. In my work on television,
which I see as a continuation of my work on jazz, I examine how the representations of African-Americans in the 80s formed the intersection
point for thinking about network television and the production of those
images, from the very idea to the actual hiring of actors and the writing of
scripts by production companies. I explore how all that goes into making a
television show on the one side, and how the representations themselves
are enactments of a kind of cultural scene, a political scene, on the other
side. I was trying to negotiate between industrial organization (and practice) and cultural representation.
On another level, I was trying to negotiate between a politics of the 80s
and a notion of Reaganism, and to investigate the ways in which the very
notion of Blackness—as a kind of trope—was being contested. I tried to
argue that the contestation was taking place in the realm of popular culture literally before our eyes, as television viewers. We were being involved
in this contestation because television was the place where meanings were
being waged and made. For me, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle
for Blackness is a concrete attempt to name, to narrate, and to look at the
intersecting points I talked about earlier.
I was also responding to a number of conversations, including one in
Sociology that sees popular culture as a place of nonvalue, of entertainment, a place where politics don’t happen. In that sense, part of what I was
trying to contest was studies of institutional authority, because many of
these are studies of big networks. The other conversation that I was engaged with was media studies, and, in particular, television studies. Part of
the continuing frustration there is the way in which studies of race or
questions of race generally, and Blacks in particular, are often relegated to
endnotes and footnotes. What I found was that (1) the literature around
television studies was getting increasingly sophisticated, and that (2) part
of that sophistication was coming from feminist and queer theory, and
various forms of textual and narrative studies. But none of these studies
was being applied to the complication of race in general, or the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in particular. So part of my book is directed toward media studies and television studies. I hope it is a contribution that says, “Look, we can grapple with both sophisticated ways of getting at this work, and situate race, gender and sexuality as intersecting
places where we can understand something about power.” And I think that
much of this way of seeing intellectual discourses (Media and Sociology
and Critical Race Theory) was influenced by cultural studies and the way
in which cultural studies seemed to appreciate those relationships that
weren’t so hemmed in by disciplinary protocol.
I suspect that some of my influences in this work came from Stuart
Hall, David Morely, and Kobena Mercer’s work on Black Britain. I would
add Marlon Riggs, although he’s usually not seen as a cultural studies
practitioner in the intellectual sense. I think that what he was trying to do
in documentary film had a cultural studies impulse. His films were all
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concerned with the popular, the visual, and the power of the visual to construct competing notions of Blackness. Other people who were involved in
the conversation around cultural studies in this period were bell hooks
and Cornell West. His work on the new cultural politics of difference sort
of triggered the idea that Black multiplicity and Black heterogeneity was a
way to go, although I think there were other impulses too both along with
and prior to Cornell’s work.
My own thinking about the multiplicity and heterogeneity and the contestatory nature of the trope of Blackness also came from both the conversations that I was having with Black intellectuals at UCLA (Richard
Yarborough, Melvin Oliver, Val Smith, and Kimberlé Crenshaw) and people in Chicana/o studies like Rosa Linda Fregoso and Angie Chabram. All
of those conversations were happening and had an impact on my work, so
I would highlight the importance of the way that many of us were trying
to grapple with difference within various kinds of racial and gender formations.
Television was also important to me in the sense that I wanted to place
both the conversation about difference in an arena of commercial culture
and in the sense that I wanted to place television in conversation with cinema, music, and Literature. I wanted to do this because television—like
popular culture—was given short shift by African American scholars.
[This is in contrast to music or Literature or film which were given the
status as “the place where things were going on.”] The more I thought
about it the more I tended to think that television was the key piece
through which music, Literature, and film were circulated. I didn’t want to
see them as discrete and separate entities; I really wanted to see and think
about them as connected in profoundly important ways. I think that kind
of insight also came from cultural studies and my conversations with
other people who were doing cultural studies. This focus on television
came from the theoretical insights—and I guess Stuart Hall was important here — around cultural representations and the circuits through
which representations travel. For me, this insight came to rest around television and were influenced by the multiple conversations that were going
on at the time. It’s important to once again mention the fact that a lot of
people [including Tommy Lott and Clyde Taylor] with whom I was conversing at the time did not see themselves as actually doing cultural studies as it was emerging in the kind of public face of cultural studies. I was
actually talking to people who didn’t necessarily see what they were doing
as cultural studies; yet I think theirs was an expression of cultural studies.
I saw myself as wearing that banner. Part of what I think I was invested in
doing was opening the spaces where those very local and specific conversations around cultural studies projects could be sought out and engaged.
In reference to Blackness in cultural legacies per se, I want to say that in
the narrative of cultural studies, there’s a certain kind of particularity
about the specific inflection of Blackness—a local way in which Blackness
emerges. I cut into it that way because it seems to me that part of what
Hall, Gilroy, Mercer, and Julien (and people like Willis and Hebdige) did
was to sharpen the specificity of what Gilroy calls a diasporic Blackness.
Now certainly when this notion of Blackness meets the North American
Blackness, a different sort of conversation begins. You see Paul Gilroy’s insistence that there’s a kind of hegemonic African American Blackness at
play. What he wants to do is name that hegemony, to open that space up.
So, on the one hand, you have Black British intellectuals coming to the
U.S. and getting involved in early kinds of intellectual exchanges. [Clearly,
bell hooks and Cornell West, and David Bailey and Stuart and Kobena
were involved in those exchanges.] On the other hand, you have a kind of
larger tradition of Black heterogeneity that needs to be factored in that’s
regional, that’s southern versus northern, that’s also immigrant. [You also
have a tradition of Black Caribbean presence in the U.S. that goes back to
the 19th century.] Part of what’s going on is that the presence of the Black
British intellectuals and artists forced a kind of monolithic construction of
American Blackness, which needed to be pried loose. Which is why I was
paying attention to Black difference from within the U.S. What I think that
what we were blind to—what we didn’t sort of get at the time and are only
recently—is that in Britain itself there was a kind of hegemony at play that
had to do with London and a metropolitan connection between London
and New York. This had to do with a kind of cosmopolitan, urban, traveling diasporic Blackness.
In that sense, it is no accident that Paul Gilroy can talk about the movement of Robeson, the Jubilee singers, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey
to London and vice versa. What I’ve always wondered about is what happens if you open that migrant diasporic movement to include the Black
South or the Midwest or the West Coast. I don’t mean to reduce it to a local regionalism; rather I mean to say that you have heterogeneity happening on both sides of the Atlantic. The other pressure on opening that up
from the side of Britain has very much to do with the distinctions between
London and Liverpool. A colleague of mine, Jackie Brown, has been doing
work on Black Liverpool. One of the things she’s been very interested in is
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the way in which Black communities developed in Liverpool in relationship to Black America and Liverpool as a major seaport. Here you get a
sense of the way in which the conversation starts to get more complicated.
In terms of the Black Atlantic, it is not just metropolitan intellectuals in
London that need to be talked about.
When you talk about other intellectuals and locations, Britain starts to
look quite differently in terms of its construction around Blackness. But
then it seems to me that you also need to talk about somebody like Manthia Diawara, who coedited that book on Black British Cultural Studies. He
has a different kind of diasporic modality at work because he comes from
Africa, then goes to Paris, then to London, California, and N.Y. So you
have this African-European-U.S. diasporic intellectual thing happening as
well. Now what’s amazing to me is that—particularly during the period of
early liberation struggles in Africa—lots of African intellectuals came to
the U.S. One of the things that you see in the recuperation of Blackness in
the genealogy of cultural studies is the dropping out of the specificity of
that connection. [I mean, look at Kwame Nkrumah who studied at Lincoln University, a traditionally Black college in the U.S.] There’s a way in
which part of the first erasure of race from a cultural studies project has to
do with the fact that these complexities never register on the radar when
cultural studies is being narrated. I think the appearance of race in cultural studies has to do with the second generation of cultural studies
scholars (Gilroy and Mercer) and the whole group [including Isaac Julien]
that came to the U.S. and found welcome in N.Y. and in U.S.-based urban
areas with an interest in film and cinema. I think that part of the third factor has to do with the way in which those centers put those scholars into
conversation with white scholars, people who were trying to open up new
spaces in cultural studies and to recuperate race in certain ways.
By my light I think that race has been recuperated here in this modality
of cultural studies, but it’s been written in a very specific and precise kind
of way. It seems to me that this specificity and precision is something that
needs to be opened up and thought through by contemporary scholars.
We need to think about what this specificity means for the Atlantic genealogy, about the way in which Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific—
the territories from Venezuela to Trinidad, to Brazil, to Mexico—are missing from that Black genealogy. We need to think about a kind of practice
of cultural studies that is both specific and indigenous to the Americas but
that also inflects a particular kind of racial and Ethnic intermingling. The
conversation that comes out from this type of interrogation is very differ-
ent from the one that comes out of the Atlantic version. Clearly, there are
still places and spaces of complexity that need to be interrogated and renarrated—elements that don’t necessarily fit into the neat parameters of
that category of the Black Atlantic.
I do think that there’s something about the origin story of the British—
and its articulation with the American intellectual fascination with Europe
—that makes the linkage to cultural studies a little bit smoother. It’s much
easier to recuperate that narrative and origin story coming from Britain.
But one could destabilize this by asking, for example, about the origin
story from Africa—or various parts of the African continent—and it’s impact on the Black American literary imagination. The diasporic moment is
there in the negritude movement; in Nkrumah; in the liberation struggle
around Nigeria; and in various other kinds of African colonial moments.
So I think there’s something about the reception of the British origins
story that made a cultural studies origin story [“back to Britain”] palatable: through no fault of the leading Black intellectuals, this very reception
by traditional disciplines worked to take the edge off of the complex conversations among Black cultural studies scholars, and to dampen the very
explicit and radical political project that defined their work and practice.
My essay, “Is Cultural Studies Inflated?” deals with the travels of cultural studies from another perspective. What I tried to do was to raise the
question of the relationship between area studies (African American, Native American, Chicana/o, and Asian studies) and cultural studies. I felt
compelled to raise the question in large measure because I was shaped by
both the experience and the memory of that early moment of recognition
and institutional power struggle around Ethnic studies and Black studies.
Although I wasn’t trained in those places, the resonance of the memory
(of these area studies) was very powerful.
What prompted the essay as well was some recognition that how cultural studies touches down in the United States and where it touches down
has everything to do with how it gets narrated. So, what I was trying to
grapple with was: What is the institutional configuration in which these
notions of cultural studies travel to the United States? Who gets to take
them up? What are the political stakes in how they (these notions of cultural studies) get taken up? What are the available choices that get selected
when these projects get taken up? And, it seems to me that if you frame
the question in these ways, then you see that there were also choices (of
cultural studies) that were not being taken up. I’m referring to choices that
were obviously either being ignored or elided or marginalized or simply
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transformed. Part of what cultural studies is about is the production of
knowledge and the production of culture and so my essay asks this question: What are the conditions of possibility that allow these forms of
knowledge to get produced and circulated? It seemed to me that in the
practical realities of curricular design [and this has very much to do with
the American universities] there were ways in which an origin story of cultural studies from England became contested—or contentious—when
placed alongside projects that attempted to raise the same kinds of questions around the study of culture but were homegrown. I’m referring to
Ethnic studies and Chicana/o Studies, and Asian Studies, to areas that
were very much home-grown products of struggle and intellectual production in the United States. I was very curious about (1) the selection
mechanism or the conditions of possibility that made these sets of projects (cultural and area studies) either more or less appealing to each
other, and more important (2) I was interested in the relationship of these
traveling discourses to these very local and specific kinds of projects. I
think that part of the answer to this question still lies in the structure of
where these things touch down (elite universities, public universities).
It seemed to me that the idea of a kind of homegrown indigenous
practice of cultural studies was less glamorous, but more threatening and
more destabilizing than one that was exported to us from across the Atlantic. In some ways, the tidiness of that fit troubled me. It troubled me
not so much to the extent that lots of positions were complicitous in marginalizing these local practices of Ethnic studies but to the extent that
there was a lack of self-reflection on the part of those people who were responsible for taking them.
So when cultural studies got taken up in Spanish, Literature, Rhetoric,
or Communications Departments in particularly restrictive ways, it
seemed to me that we could stand on the rooftops and shout, “Hey, we’ve
(those of us with connections to area studies) been doing this for a
minute, you know” and “we ought to think these points of articulation.”
To their credit, I think that people like Kobey Mercer, Isaac Julien, and
Stuart Hall were reflexive enough about this point of how cultural studies
was getting taken up in their name and reflexive about the way in which
race and Blackness gave these liberal white academics license to say “But,
we are not inattentive to these questions.”
This takes us back to this complexity of how these various kinds of racial formations get textualized in curricula, publishing, and in a certain
kind of publicity that attaches to cultural studies. My essay was very much
trying to raise a very practical kind of theoretical question about these
points of tension, disagreement, and about potential displacements. These
are complicated questions that need to be worked through. You know, I
think the other reason this is important is that you see similar kinds of
tensions at work, say between scholars who study China and Japan (the
nation state) and Asian American studies; between scholars who study
Latin America and Chicano studies. It’s important to see cultural studies
as a kind of critical self-reflection that is mindful of itself as a movement,
as a practice, and that is mindful of its political stakes and theoretical objects. With some of these other more traditional nation-based states studies that kind of self-reflection isn’t there. So when it comes down to it
those traveling forms of possibility, which are being called cultural studies,
wind up being positioned very much like the Japan studies model. So we
need to ask: What happens when this model has to have a relationship
with Asian American studies?
I reencountered this scenario when I went to Japan with a delegation of
American studies scholars in the spring of ’98. One of the things we were
trying to do was to complicate the conception of the relationship between
American studies as practiced in the United States—an American studies
that was being transformed both by the presence of cultural studies and
the presence of Ethnic studies—and as practiced in Japan by Japanese
scholars. I was aware that as cultural studies travels back to the U.S., these
kinds of complicated conflicts and tensions drop out. Then you get a
model of national U.S. cultural formations that falls under the rubric, cultural studies. So what I was surprised by was the degree to which our delegation made trouble by raising these kinds of questions. We made trouble
in terms of how we posited what cultural/American/Ethnic studies did as
a “critical practice” (produced by people of color in the U.S.). We unsettled
the very ease with which all of those categories seemed to kind of fit together under a kind of national, intellectual project.
In terms of the trouble that’s been brewing at home, I think in some
ways it’s odd that both popular culture and studies of race and Ethnicity
have been the sites of a frontal assault on cultural studies at large. They’ve
been used as the kind of battering ram to either say that we’ve degenerated
into a politics of division (“identity politics”) and selfishness or to say that
a more nuanced rendition of cultural studies is not to be taken seriously
since it’s being duplicated in other places (ethnic and cultural studies, for
instance). And I think that there’s a kind of strategic political move that
those people who’ve advocated this position have gotten mileage out of.
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Those of us who don’t subscribe to this position haven’t defended the territory very well, so you get the move toward globalization as a way of getting us out of the impasse in cultural studies.
Maybe what’s at stake is a kind of missing piece that we haven’t really
dealt with as race and racialization join globalization and capital. And, so I
don’t know that we’ve gotten out of the impasse, or if the impulse has
been to move out toward other places. Maybe this is an expression of the
need for more of the comparative linkages that we all talk about but don’t
do enough of. It seems to me that the concerns that people have around
Ethnic studies can go on simultaneously now that we understand globalization. I think it’s also a question of “to whom are we speaking.”
I was looking at the newest issue of the journal, Cultural Studies. The issue includes an interesting proposal from UC Davis, but if you look beyond this, the issue is really about Australia, England, and Chapel Hill. The
people that they chose to talk to as exemplars of both pedagogy and intervention are at NYU—and American studies at NYU. Why didn’t they talk
to Manthia Diawara at African studies?
The way this remaps the narrative is to vie for a notion of cultural studies that can have it both ways: here cultural studies is neither global or local, neither institutional or disciplinary—it’s some stuff in-between. I’ve
also been thinking about this endless question about institutionalization,
departments, and this endless angst about being institutionalized. I wonder if much of the kind of angst and hand-holding that goes on in the
academy isn’t also about something of our own making. We need to get a
grip on reality—we’re at the university! I also wonder if part of the value
of the commitment of an early principle of cultural studies is precisely
something that was alluded to. Today this principle asks: What are some of
the social positions that bear the most complicated social contradictions?
My point is: Why not do cultural studies from those places? This is the exemplary contribution of Lisa Lowe’s work (Immigrant Acts). She talks
about women who work in the sweatshops as a way to talk about globalization as opposed to transnational capital, and as a way to talk about culture, politics, work, and everyday life, you know what I mean?
This is not to say that to be exemplary is to be exclusivist, but this is to
say that if we talk about those kinds of locations, then perhaps much of
the kind of angst and anxiety about the current phase of cultural studies
might at least get abated. I don’t know if it will go away. This complexity
allows you to raise a series of questions about how you fit into these issues. For me, this is globalization. This is what it means to do cultural
studies from the places where we sit, from our positions, from our racial,
historical backgrounds. Also this means something else—I’m not sure I
have a word for this. Part of this excitement is about the encounter of
these works from England and other places; the encounter of practitioners like you and Rosa Linda and other women and people of color; and
the encounter with other people in other places, for instance, the South,
and so on.
This involves bringing together a kind of exciting intellectual possibility
without succumbing to the very specificity that we bring to a cultural
studies practice. What dampens this is if always made available through a
(cultural studies) discourse that won’t recognize its own power relationship both locally and globally. That’s where the trouble starts: We need to
see that it means one thing to have that conversation around cultural
studies—to have it be opened up and engaged from all of these positions
—but it means something quite differently to have these large-scale conferences, where you get invited, and have only one or two token representations of difference, right?
This is different from that really exciting moment of reading early Stuart Hall and those people who had been trained in cultural studies, you
know, that second or third generation. There was the possibility that we
could talk about salsa, rhythms and blues, across these different intellectual geographies and both share in and bring something to the table. I
think that was really the intellectual excitement around cultural studies
when it was a practice that was full of different kinds of possibilities. I
think we’ve shifted to a different kind of maneuver. That maneuver is
about defending turf and defending discourse, and not so much about exploring and reaching out across difference to construct new intellectual
possibilities. I think that de Certeau was right. That stuff has moved on;
it’s in the streets!!! Within the academy and among intellectuals, we’re sort
of stuck defending these things. And, if you listen to the music—and this
is what I meant at the very beginning about cultural studies being problem-driven—you’ll see that the practices themselves have moved to these
incredibly interesting and engaging points while people were talking about
whether identity was destroying things, about the local versus the global.
Not to be romantic or nostalgic about this, but I think that the real
kind of energy and vitality today is about creating the institutional spaces
—if those are the places where we work—that will enable that kind of
cultural practice to circulate and will enable us to continue to produce
work around these new practices. If the politics around cultural studies
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gets enacted from that kind of work, then we probably can lean on it
much more securely. Or maybe we can make a different kind of politics.
Which is why I studied television in the first place: because it provokes
these deeply passionate positions. I think that intellectual discourse and
the territories that we can construct through them may have become the
sites of our own popular practice. That may be part of what we are grappling with at the profoundest levels. A new form of cultural studies that
involves an engagement with the object itself.
The measure of the vitality and veracity of this kind of work lies in this
kind of engagement. It’s not an either or thing [you don’t abandon institution-making]. But it’s the object itself that’s empowering. I think that part
of what’s fun—and maybe even a little romantic—about the origin story
of cultural studies is to imagine Hall, Hoggart, and Thompson and this
brilliant cast as people who can’t get jobs in the major universities, who
are teaching adult courses and sending ethnographers out, and who are
just kind of hangin’. This is a very different image from what we do and
our students do. I mean the angst about getting jobs and publishing. All of
these are important, but I think that the terrain and the times have shifted
sufficiently. I think that we need to be more self-reflexive about where
these relocations (of cultural studies) are happening, and more self-reflexive about where they are taking us.
Session Five
Conclusion
Our Critical Pathways
We’ve reached the conclusion of our forums and I would like to thank the
participants from the last session for providing us with a much needed
glimpse into the diverse practices of cultural studies in our worlds. Among
other things, this session enabled us to detect important lines of affiliation
and to further reflect on those intellectual and cultural practices that make
cross-cultural representations within “cultural studies” difficult.
While listening to the forum interventions, I was struck by the fact
that, like a number of the practitioners who directed their attention to
Chicana/o cultural studies, practitioners from this session were also critical of Eurocentric tendencies, canon formations, and the inattention to alternative circuits and forms of cultural studies across the globe. Yet their
critiques were shaped by specific ethnic contexts and cultural studies legacies and urgencies.
Take, for instance, the case of José Manuel Valenzuela Arce. When
speaking of Mexican border cultural studies, he scrutinized academic
mappings of cultural studies that reproduce mainstream (Euro/Anglocentric) canons in reference to Mexican subjects to the detriment of a
much-needed circulation of Spanish-language works produced by Mexican cultural practitioners. Valenzuela Arce, however, did more than critique intellectual practices that severely edit the voices of Mexicans and
feminist women of color; he alerted us to a major problem that is sure to
unsettle the vestures of those who would conflate cultural studies traditions across the globe. For him, it is important to consider meaningful differences between distinct cultural studies traditions and to consider gaps
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between “what people in the U.S. refer to as cultural studies and what people in Mexico understand cultural studies to be” (translation). Thus, language and terminology are problematized to the extent that we must ask
the basic question: What is cultural studies in Mexico? What forms does it
assume? What bodies of knowledge does it incorporate? What social problems and communities does it target? Which critical languages does it
speak?
Kent Ono and Lawrence Grossberg elaborated on related issues that
arise from an uneven circulation of cultural studies. Speaking from an
Asian American context, Ono suggested that practitioners in cultural
studies need to be aware of possible disjunctures that can exist between
Asian American and Asian cultural studies. Similar to Chicana/o cultural
studies practitioners, who identified a lack of attention to Chicana/o issues
within a larger body of Latin American scholarship, Ono was concerned
with a possible bypassing of local forms of Asian American cultural studies within representations of global cultural studies networks. In addition,
Ono also identified important racial dis/identifications that have produced a whitening of Stuart Hall within cultural studies scholarship and a
lack of attention to key social, political, and ethnic contexts that are essential for coalition-building.
Bear in mind that his critique emerges in a period in which a formation
of Black British cultural studies is also the object of critical scrutiny, particularly within the African American circles referenced by Alvina Quintana
in her intervention. As she and Michelle Habell-Pallán pointed out in the
Chicana/o forums, cultural studies formations that exist outside of these
Black British binaries can be easily left out of the cultural studies loop.
Lawrence Grossberg further identified problematic scenarios with
transatlantic representations of cultural studies that circulate in Europe
and the U.S. and limit “American cultural studies to notions of audiences
studies, celebrations of pleasure, MLA postcolonial criticism, and some
vague sense of black nationalism.” Significantly, Grossberg also extended
his critique to the U.S. and engaged influential debates in the 90s that were
premised on the faulty assumption that the failure of the left was a result
of the concern with ethnicity, identity, race, and gender. Grossberg’s critical assessment of this line of thinking is well placed as inattention to these
major categories of analysis among leftist circles dampens the possibility
of a coalition between the left and Ethnic cultural studies and is thus unacceptable to those who strive to create meaningful lines of affiliation
among progressive forms of cultural studies scholarship.
Conclusion 213
Together Kent Ono and George Lipsitz also forcefully responded to
negative representations of “identity politics” that further implicate and
dismiss Ethnic studies. Kent Ono countered these representations upon
suggesting that “cultural studies in the U.S. often doesn’t have any education in Ethnic studies; it often constitutes these as ‘identity politics.’ ” For
Ono, the charge of “identity politics” has enabled mainstream cultural
studies to ignore alternative legacies and is profoundly contradictory in
light of the fact that “there’s a huge and pervasive identity politics around
that people don’t want to talk about, and that’s white identity politics!”
For George Lipsitz, the bigger issue behind the indictment of Ethnic studies as identity politics is a possessive investment in whiteness that needs to
be challenged within cultural studies networks that acknowledge a historical legacy of colonialism and race privilege and strive for progressive social
change.
Alicia Arrizón in turn challenged celebratory concepts of “difference”
and “diversity” in academia which “generally ignore the cultural plurality
that defines Latinas/os and their multiple contestations.” Far from rejecting identity politics, she reclaimed and remolded this terrain as she suggests that “Latina” invokes an identity politics where “the subject of feminism is transgressive and dynamic.” As she explains, “this subject can encompass many positionalities, from the lesbian transgressive body to the
nonqueer Chicana feminist, to women of color.”
If Arrizón embraced a cultural studies approach that invokes bodies that
are in action and negotiate various kinds of boundaries, discourses, and
disciplines, Wahneema Lubiano alerted her listeners to the fact that cultural
studies is not only about the present; it is also about the past (in her case,
earlier formations of Black studies). It is in this vein that Lubiano critiqued
recent appropriations of cultural studies that ignore a “long and complicated history of Black studies” and crucial instances of internationalism.
Lubiano’s aim here was not to reject cultural studies or to erase important conjunctures between Black studies and cultural studies but rather to
highlight the important trajectories of Black studies that are dismissed
within contemporary cultural studies works. On many counts Lubiano
dovetailed with Herman Gray. For him, the reception of cultural studies
within traditional arenas often worked to diminish the complex conversations among Black cultural studies scholars and to dampen the very explicit and radical project that defined their work.
From the context of Chicana/o studies, George Lipsitz touched on the
losses or negative consequences of an early lack of attention to this field by
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institutional cultural studies, but he focused on the impact this has had on
the larger field of cultural studies. The inattention to Chicana/o studies is
appalling, he argued, especially in view of the fact that “there is nothing
that any cultural studies theorist of the 1980s and 1990s formulated about
culture that was not already present in one form or another in Américo
Paredes’s With a Pistol in his Hand in 1958.” For him, the failure to employ
Chicano/a studies methods and techniques by cultural studies scholars has
deprived them “of the most powerful possible tools for understanding
most of the prized categories of cultural theory—intersectionality, differential consciousness, code switching, and the centrality of culture within
social relations.”
Wahneema Lubiano’s dramatic narrative of her encounter with women
of color feminism can be read as a testimony to all that cultural studies
loses when it does not incorporate the writings by radical women of color,
described by Chela Sandoval, Sonia Saldívar Hull, Mary Pat Brady, and
others in earlier forum sessions. As Lubiano recalled, her encounter with
this body of writings produced something akin to a “sonic boom” in her
head, which made her conscious that she had so “much luggage (as opposed to baggage) to carry” in her critical apparatus. This realization
prompted her to engage in a particular type of cultural studies practice:
she had to take the luggage out, reconfigure it, find a use for it. Interestingly enough, her description complements a practice of cultural studies
that recognizes the “complications of identification itself ” as a valuable
point of entry into a cultural-studies-inflected feminism with “all kinds of
battles to wage.”
From Latina critical and gender studies Lisa Sánchez acknowledged a
proliferation of social struggles as she envisioned a practice of critical race
and gender studies that allows “the next generation to acknowledge the
complexities of oppression, so they can be better equipped to struggle for
meaningful change in their lives.” In turn Herman Gray asked: What are
some of the social positions that bear the most complicated contradictions? Why not do cultural studies from those places? His own discussions
around the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and the contestatory nature of the
trope of Blackness within different global contexts illustrated this complexity as did Kevin Johnson’s reflections on racial complexity, Latina/o
panethnicity, and mixed-race Latinas/os; Kent Ono’s reformulation of
Asian identities in the contemporary era; Frances Aparicio’s description of
a cultural studies practice that is at once a declaration of love and war of a
Conclusion 215
community; Jose Manuel Valenzuela Arce’s framing of a formation of border cultural studies that extends well into the U.S. as well as into México;
and Lisa Lowe’s vision of a (neo)Marxist cultural studies approach, which
considers “culture” as a dynamic site of mediation wherein the social and
economic relations of domination of capitalism are negotiated.
A critical analysis of the academy and its attendant knowledge formations was also part of the cultural studies project in the last forum. For
John Beverly, cultural studies not only challenges the authority of the disciplines, but it also practices a “kind of academic populism” that is concerned above all with the democratization of thought and culture. Ruth
Behar coincides. In fact, her decision to write in an accessible style stems
from the idea that knowledge is part of a democratic process that should
be open to those who don’t have the privilege to be supereducated.
Concluding Remarks
As we conclude this session it is useful to remember Herman Gray’s proposal that cultural studies is a critical self-reflection that is mindful of itself as a “movement” and of the possibilities it engenders. In our forums,
we witnessed a number of critical self-reflections on “the roads taken and
not taken” in cultural studies. (I am remembering and paraphrasing Edward Said here.) While this reflection yielded a number of roadmaps for
contemporary cultural studies, it did not touch on all of the possibilities
that exist in cultural studies.
In terms of specific engagements that need further elaboration, there
are many which could be identified. In my opinion, I think we could focus
more critical attention on the cultures of public policy and the various
forms of media; the commodification of (Chicana/o, feminist/ethnic,
global) culture and health; the cultures of capitalism and economic sustenance; the cultures of incarceration and surveillance; the cultures of
schooling and community association; the cultures of cyberspace/cyberpolitics and social communication; and the gendered cultures of class that
permeate all aspects of work and social life.
Cultural studies practitioners also have much to contribute to historical
as well as current understandings of those multiethnic disenfranchised
communities, who are negotiating—not only shouldering—challenging
social transitions and realities at a moment when the clock seems to have
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turned backward instead of forward and the intent to censor oppositional
speech of any kind is at an all time high. Clearly, we need to think more
about fostering alternative zones of engagement that witness, translate,
record, collect, and analyze the social pedagogies and oppositional practices of those disenfranchised transnational and global communities, who
continue to teach us—for better or worse—about social life and social
possibilities; the culture of work, disability, and immigration; the languages/habits of social class, social formation, and empire; the categories
of race, gender, geopolitics, sexuality; the realities of lived experience and
experiential theory; and the structures of social, economic, and cultural
production and consumption. All of this notwithstanding restrictive immigration measures, the increase in the working poor and downsized, and
the continuing assault on social services, bilingual education, affirmative
action, progressive thought, and human rights.
As I close the forum I am candidly aware of the importance of collaborative work and research collectives for those who would agree with
George Lipsitz that “the best cultural studies work has always come from
the ways in which (progressive) social movements shake up social life,
from the ways in which new social subjects produce new imaginations,
epistemologies, and archives.” However, attending to these productions
and to the whole host of social possibilities and predicaments that are
available for study requires bringing together and drawing on collective
resources and the energy of collectives working in different arenas and social locations.
In this day and age in which practitioners are very attuned to the mediating role of culture and cultural production and to the importance of
reaching wider publics, this means being selective as well as creative about
the (cultural) forms and venues we use for doing this kind of serious
work. (Venues which include virtual culture, spoken words, survival manuals, audio-tapes, newspaper articles, position papers, ethnographies, testimonios, videos, radio shows, comic books, workshops, protest-placards,
literature—and, yes, forums!) These venues are to be accessed from everyday life—they are a part of what Lisa Sánchez refers to as “Puerto Rican
baggage,” Wahneema Lubiano refers to as “woman of color feminist luggage,” Herman Gray refers to as “the streets,” George Lipsitz refers to as
“Chicano academies,” and Emma Pérez refers to as “the world.”
Because the “work of culture”—and its explanatory power—permeates every aspect of everyday life and is global in scope, research collectives
also need to consider the all-important woman of color feminist platform
Conclusion 217
in This Bridge Called My Back of “stretch or die.” The lines of affiliation
between practitioners of Ethnic and feminist cultural studies need to extend beyond communal, national as well as hemispheric borders, beyond
what José David Saldívar refers to as (seemingly) “natural” geographical
and political alliances.
In our forums we pushed against some of the many borders that separate groups, fields of cultural studies, arenas of intellectual discourse and
social practice, but we need to continue to push the social dialogues of
Chicana/o cultural studies further, to include other conversations with
other practitioners, working collectives, and social communities who work
and live in other places that stretch the progressive imagination.
We need to extend an invitation to participate to those whose critical
insights and explanatory power are increasingly important for us in this
moment, as we acknowledge the importance of diverse and oppositional
forms of multiculture and yet grapple with a worldwide proliferation of
globalization; the resurgence of ethnic cleansing; female subordination
and gender, domestic and international violence; racism and racial supremacy; social and economic exploitation, oppression, and displacement;
as well as continued lack of access to food, shelter, work, politics, educational, health, and social services.
We need to remember Lubiano’s proviso that we live in a world and not
just a set of circumstances, and to imagine cultural studies as a different
type of speaking and listening practice, with multiple opportunities for intertextuality, comparison, debate, and habitation. At the very least, we
need to collaborate with others in order to “stage” other types of critical
interventions that can bring to the forefront possibilities and social networks that we have not yet imagined on the page or in discourse, and that
can assist us in “putting a sharper edge” (Lubiano) on our current understandings of social life. Finally, we need to be attentive to the fact that
when all is said and done this encounter will hopefully provide us with the
impetus and encouragement to go back and discover new(er) forms of
cultural studies that exist in our midst and our “luggage” (Lubiano) and
can provoke deeply passionate positions and engagements about the central issues of our time (Gray).
It is with this thought in mind—and a recognition that “closures” are
often artificial—that I’d like to formally conclude this session of our cultural studies forums. Once again I’d like to thank those who spoke and
those who listened, those who responded to the initial invitation to participate in this “collective” event and those who will read these conversations
218           
once these forums reach the publication circuit. (At that time readers can
seize on many more intertextual movements than I could today.) I would
also like to recognize those who will carry on with other forums, participants, queries, and problematics, in yet other cultural mediums, geographical locations, and critical dialogues. Until then, ¡Adiós y hasta
pronto! (Goodbye and until we meet again!)
Postscript
Preview of Selected Chicana/o Cultural Studies
Print Culture
It is important to muddle up the discourse . . . muddle
the canon.
—Rosa Linda Fregoso
Our methods should be thought of as a capirotada (a Mexican bread pudding), where you use whatever tools are
available to illustrate your argument.
—Aida Hurtado
[T]here’s no static [Chicana/o] cultural studies. In these
writings you see the discourse, the thought, the analysis
changes over time.
—Renato Rosaldo
In this postscript I further muddle up the (Chicana/o) cultural studies discourse (and whatever stable zones of engagement that have emerged from
our earlier conversations), as I provide additional information and reflect
on yet other Chicana/o cultural studies possibilities and resources, including selected print culture of the 90s.
At times these reflections provide a fuller discussion of cultural studies
texts that were only mentioned in passing at the forum; at times they introduce new (con)texts and practitioners; and at times they provide alternative understandings of selected Chicana/o studies print culture. In addition, if the last cultural studies forum allowed us to extend important
lines of affiliation and to consider other critical pathways, this survey of
219
220          
selected Chicana/o cultural studies print culture allows us to highlight the
different multicultures that coexist within printed Chicana/o cultural
studies. (These include film cultural studies, social historical cultural studies, border cultural studies, women of color cultural studies, and Latina/o
and Latin American cultural studies.) My postscript now turns to a preview of selected print cultures, beginning with a special Chicana/o issue of
the journal Cultural Studies that reframes alternative discourses and representations in October 1990.
Reframing Alternative Discourse, Cultural Studies, 1990,
and Other Writings
Representations are inscribed within the forms and practices of culture
and this is equally true of the cover that introduces the special Chicana/o
issue of the international journal, Cultural Studies. This graphic, produced
by Malaquías Montoya, breaks with familiar mappings of cultural studies
that outline Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and directs us to a legacy of cultural studies grounded in transnational social
movements and border experiences of the Americas. It is not surprising
then that readers of this special issue of Cultural Studies are greeted with a
more than conspicuous cactus (a symbol of México itself) which catapults
upward from the earth, exceeds the barbed wire fence (a symbol of U.S.
conquest, nation building, expansionism, and colonialism), ensnarls the
United States flag, and lifts its unruly arms toward the people (readers) on
the other side (of the page/fence). In this particular artistic trajectory of
an indigenous cultural studies geopolitics, the border subject is centered
in an unforgettable portraiture of the Americas that assists the invited editors of the special issue to introduce a key question: “How does Chicana/o
studies enact, articulate, textualize the community?” (p. 203).
To be more specific, this volume collection is organized around a questioning of the time-honored equation, “Chicana/o studies (always) = community empowerment,” and a questioning of the singular Chicana/o identity that furnishes the terms for this equation (p. 204). For the authors of
the introduction to this special issue (Rosa Linda Fregoso and Angie
Chabram), this interrogation is launched “from a cultural studies perspective” that proposes a reframing of Chicano cultural identity within the
problematics of “difference, production, and positionality” (p. 205). To
elaborate, this cultural studies intervention acknowledges “the predica-
Preview of Selected Chicana/o Cultural Studies Print Culture 221
ment of our double positionality” in relation to alternative and mainstream productions and suggests that cultural studies needs to be attentive
to the complexities of an historical experience fissured by race, class, gender, linguistic discourses, and competing national formations.
Other cultural studies print cultures of the period catapult to the spotlight as they engage “changing Chicana/o narratives” (Renato Rosaldo,)1
write a “borderzone of conjunctures” (Gloria Anzaldúa, José David Saldívar, Chela Sandoval, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, David Román), newly attend to “our” discursive and ideological constructs of the world” (Rosaura
Sánchez, Rosa Linda Fregoso,)2 and extend the geopolitical and critical focus of Chicana/o cultural studies to newer arenas of social habitation and
commitment (Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Devon Peña, David Maciel, María Herrera-Sobek, etc.).3
Chicana/o cultural studies practitioners also take issue with widely divulged essentializing forms of identity and (patriarchal) universalist
mimesis. Practitioners such as Coco Fusco and Norma Alarcón testify in
print “to the impossibility of reducing cultural identity to a simplistic paradigm”4 and to the belief that knowledge of one’s subjectivity cannot be
arrived at through a single theme.5 In addition to highlighting the multiplicity of identity and the importance of multiple-voiced subjectivities,
Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies practitioners agree with Coco Fusco’s
suggestion that “we have worked away from the once widely held belief
that artists of color must all be engaged in what Stuart Hall has called the
act of imaginative recovery of a singular, unifying past in order for their
work to be valid” (p. 33). In turn, Rosaura Sánchez, alerts us to the impossibilities of this type of endeavor upon reminding her readers that “we are
a highly fragmented and stratified population with a number of strategies,” that we are not a “homogeneous group.”6
It is with a consciousness of this fragmentation and of significant internal “differences” within Latina/o groups that Antonia Darder articulates
an important Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies positionality. Rather
than arguing for a solidarity based on sameness, she argues for a “solidarity of difference” as she directs us to our greatest challenge in cultural
studies: negotiating “the ongoing construction and reconstruction of
power” in the interest of social justice.7 This critical spirit emerges
throughout a plethora of voices (Deena González, Raul Coronado, Emma
Pérez, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, and others8) that express significant exclusions, omissions, and differences and utter the multiple “us’s” edited out of
Chicana/o Movement and U.S. nation-forming scripts. Anna Sampaio
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complements this cultural studies positionality upon proposing that traditional forms of Chicana/o and Latina/o subjectivity inscribed within the
nation-state have become incomplete at best with the changes introduced
by globalization and the emergence of intersectional binational and transnational communities.9 A significant number of Chicana/o cultural studies publications of the 90s reaffirm the importance of deconstructing the
geopolitical foundations of knowledge formations based on the nationstate and nationalist epistemologies.
Without a doubt Chicana/o cultural studies practices of the decade also
strongly reaffirm the importance of culture and cultural practices as
“complex” and rewarding in the political, theoretical, and social sense (Editorial, Cultural Studies, 1990). Yet this reaffirmation is also guided by the
belief that it is necessary to critically review (to look at) Chicana/o representational practices, and to reflect on their possibilities as well as their
limits, years after the formative period of the Chicana/o Movement.10 As
we shall see, this critical review often produces a new politics of representation that not only interrupts but also changes the subject within booklength productions.
Chicana/o Film Culture: Theory as Interruption
From the very beginning, Rosa Linda Fregoso’s The Bronze Screen incorporates a number of the aforementioned (Chicana/o) cultural studies sensibilities. The purpose of her book on Chicana/o film culture is to actively
interrupt and interrogate the inherited terms (“by,” “for,” and “about”) of
the critical discourse on Chicano cinema (p. xvii). Toward this end she
launches a number of probative and incisive questions, which include:
“Does the ‘for’ mean representing or speaking on behalf of Chicanos and
Chicanas, or does it represent something quite different? If it is the former,
then there is a certain paternalism in claiming to speak for the community
as though its members cannot speak on their own behalf ” (p. xix).
The fact that Fregoso poses these questions throughout her analysis of
Chicana Chicano film culture is of paramount importance, for with this
type of exploration she infers that the mere existence of Chicana/o film
culture does not guarantee a particular oppositional politics or close the
book on the complex issues that come into play with the production of
Chicana/o filmic discourses and practices. In contrast to foundational “authoritative” movimiento aesthetics (see El Espejo, 1969), which proposed
that “to know themselves . . . there are those Chicanos who need no other
reflection other than their own,” Fregoso proposes that we must look critically at how we are looking at (reconfiguring) ourselves as social subjects
at the level of (filmic) representation. Additionally, she proposes that we
should actively develop counterhegemonic strategies, not approach Chicana/o representation as a transparent social or cultural affirmation or a
celebration of a preconstituted and unchanging essence.
By de-emphasizing the biological claims to authenticity (p. xix) and
scrutinizing filmic visions of community membership, Fregoso paves the
way for radical forms of (spectator) disidentification and dissent that
complement the articulation of Chicana/o as a political category and expand its contestatory reach. With this type of cultural studies practice it is
possible to develop important nuances in critical readings of Chicana/o
film culture because “what determines whether or not a film is reactionary
or progressive depends on the configuration of power relations operating
at any given historical moment.” As she explains: “For instance, in terms of
their antiracism politics, I Am Joaquín and Zoot Suit are radical by comparison to mainstream films and even to most white-Left film standards;
insofar as gender and sexuality politics are concerned, they are not” (p.
xix).
What is at stake here in this type of analysis, what must be determined
by the viewer/spectator is the very nature of oppositionality within alternative productions—or what Rosaura Sánchez refers to elsewhere as a
verifiable counterhegemonic Chicana/o “ideological field.” Clearly, this
field cannot be reduced to a single position/platform and it is not confined by any single analysis or form of social identification. On the contrary, this field requires further exploration as well as interrogation by cultural critics who are attentive to the heterogeneity of Chicana/o positionalities throughout history and to the fact that cultural productions and
films are social symbolic acts (p. xxi).
If these dimensions of The Bronze Screen open a pathway to different
political articulations within Chicana/o (film) studies, this book’s stated
affiliations with cultural studies perform a similar type of work in relation
to widely circulated accounts of an essential Chicana/o and Birmingham
legacy. For instance, upon consciously assuming a cultural studies affiliation and specifying the place of her own location as a positioned subject,
Fregoso names a connection between her “project” (Chicano cinema) and
“social formation” (the Chicano Movement) (pp. xx–xxi). At the level of
analysis, this type of cultural studies positioning translates into negotiat-
224          
ing with fields of study that are not central to Chicano movimiento inquiries, including cultural studies, feminist film discourse, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. Finally, this cultural studies positioning means
recognizing the shaping influence of an emergent cultural studies framework—U.S. Third World feminism. For Fregoso, this framework is attentive to how women of color from working class backgrounds reside “between and among” subject positions and critical cultural discourses (p.
xxii). Not surprisingly, Fregoso eschews those formations of cultural studies that posit a generic, transatlantic, racial, or national lineage and characterizes her approach as a mestizaje that embraces the “rebel spirits of
U.S. Third World feminists” (p. xxiii), as well as the “studies on race-gender-sexuality” in Birmingham, England (p. xxi).
Along with these unconventional cultural studies affiliations, The
Bronze Screen also incorporates what might be construed as widely circulated cultural studies sensibilities; for example, at level of practice its labor
is problem-driven rather than driven by a specific methodology, as is
reaffirmed in this introductory passage:
The chapters in this book are organized around problematics: for example,
the contours of Chicano film culture (chapter 1); the problem of cultural
identity (chapter 2); the subversive potential of humor (chapter 3); the border as a concept for understanding cultural processes, including the formation of subjectivity (chapter 4); engendering subjectivities (chapter 5); and
the return to spectatorship (conclusion).11
Cultural studies perspectives on the production of cultural identity also
resonate with Fregoso’s “reframing” of the subjects of Chicana/Chicano
film culture, as can be seen in this description of this culture as “actos” of
imaginative recovery:
Much like Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined community,” the vision
of the Chicano nation captured in these films represents an imagined community. Far from fabricating or inventing a community, Chicanas and Chicanos have reinvented (imagined anew) a “community of Chicanos and
Chicanos.” (p. xxiii)
Upon driving home the idea that representations are embodied in the
forms and practices of culture, Fregoso draws a significant critical distance
from those early Chicano Movement productions that would fail to ac-
knowledge this “productive relationship.” Her analysis complements a
Chicana/o cultural studies critique, voiced in the special issue of Cultural
Studies (1990), which suggests that within foundational representations
“little attention was given to the examination of how specific cultural productions were constructed.” In the extended language of this early critique
of Chicano Movement legacies:
The excessive emphasis on content precluded attention to the delimitations
often circumscribed by form. The movement failed to acknowledge the partiality of representation, the fact that it is an artifice and a social construction, and that representations did not even encompass the complexity of
Chicano cultural identity.12
In The Bronze Screen Fregoso argues that the forms and technologies of
Chicana/o cultural representations must be scrutinized because they have
a direct bearing on the contestatory potential of these representations.
Suffice it to say that this understanding is not only of importance to Chicana/o cultural studies—it is also of importance to a general cultural
studies scholarship that has relied too heavily on generic ethnic portraits,
ignoring the key issue of the content of form.
Telling Identities: Historical Chicana/o Cultural Studies
Telling Identities provides a different illustration of how identities have
been “multiply-constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions.”13 Here Rosaura Sánchez offers
a recuperation of the Californio testimonio that posits that these are “historical and literary contestations of contemporary nineteenth-century historiography, which often portrayed the Californios as lazy, cowardly, and
incompetent” (p. 6). In addition, Sánchez proposes that within these testimonios the narrators counter the hegemonic discourses legitimating the
U.S. invasion of the territory and assert their right to centeredness at a
time in which the “physical and social spaces from which they could operate had become increasingly circumscribed” (p. x).
In this way, Rosaura Sánchez views the narrators of these testimonios as
“signifying subjects who narrate their own invasion, colonization, and
domination of Alta California from 1769 to 1846, from their own perspectives” (p. 6). While attentive to the way the Californios map their way
226          
through alienating social relations and deterritorialization in order to recover a collective agency and a positionality, Sánchez does not promote an
unproblematic or transparent notion of this early Californio identity or
collectivity, as can be seen in this highly instructive passage:
Yet despite their affiliation with the Californio collectivity, no idyllic homogeneous community is constructed in these narratives; instead, there is
strong evidence of dissidence, internecine conflict, and group fragmentation throughout the testimonials, cleavages giving rise to discourses of
disavowal and disclaimers for particular territorial policies and discourses.
(p. 6)
Insofar as Telling Identities sets out to “recover and to examine texts
long relegated to what might be termed the dustbin of literature and history” (p. x), this book can be compared to other Chicana/o recovery projects of the nineties that destabilize or rewrite ethnic canons. However, unlike many of these projects, Telling Identities argues for the importance of
an interdisciplinary methodology, especially in the case of “a genre like the
testimonio in which literary and nonliterary, popular and elite, historical
and fictional discourses overlap and intersect” (p. xi). In this study of the
Californio testimonio, the relevant cultural studies methodology draws
from multiple “disciplinary areas that deal with issues of ideology, subjectivity, nationalism, racism, ethnicity, gender, feudalism, colonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, and especially Marxist theory” (p. xi).
In effect, Sánchez deploys an interdisciplinary cultural studies analysis
that is not content to examine these testimonios for information about
U.S. expansionism and early Californio history. This analysis goes a step
further and examines the macrotext and the complex dynamics of a dependent cultural production and a mediated narrative (the Californio testimonio) within a broader social, cultural, economic, and historical context. In addition, this analysis addresses the unequal relations of cultural
production orchestrated by the “capitalist cultural entrepreneur” who elicits the testimonios from the Californios who grant elicited dictations or
testimonials and struggle to reposition themselves through their historical
narrations.
At the level of cultural politics then Telling Identities not only considers
cultural production as inseparable from structural and agential relations,
but this book is also attentive to the importance of the subaltern struggles
for representational space that are waged within specific cultural produc-
tions and historical periods. And these struggles are not only relegated to
“our” much ignored predecessors; they are part and parcel of a contemporary reconstruction of our own conflictive past and its contradictions. A
reconstruction that insists that the bones of “our dead have too long lain
cluttered in the mausoleum of the enemy” (p. xi).
Border Cultural Studies: Border Matters
Two years after Telling Identities opens up the path for a reconsideration of
the testimonio within a hemispheric context, another Chicana/o cultural
studies endeavor, Border Matters, proposes an ambitious remapping of
“American” cultural studies. Whereas Telling Identities opens with a retrospective look of the Californios who were (in 1870) living on occupied
land after the U.S. invasion, Border Matters opens with a twin reflection on
the contemporary militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border and the aftermath of the passage of the hegemonic Proposition 187. Passed by voters in
California in 1994, this proposition “denies undocumented immigrants
public education, health services and other benefits” (p. x), along with
promoting a particularly defensive, closed, and exclusive definition of
Americanness.
Saldívar’s book appears at this particular dangerous crossroads,
wherein, to use the language of Stuart Hall, a capitalist formation that has
“disrupted and over-ridden natural communities and imposed artificial
orders” sees it fit “to mobilize patriotic feelings in its own interest.”14 In response to this predicament Border Matters locates the study of Chicano/a
literature within a broad cultural framework that locates expressive forms
which “challenge dominant national centers of identity and culture” (p.
19). Briefly stated, what he proposes to do is instill a new transnational literacy (p. xiii) that hasn’t gotten through to official American culture.
Like other dissident cultural studies productions that challenge the geopolitical formation of the nation, this book directly argues for the inclusion
of the U.S.-Mexico border experience within cultural studies and its international movements. In addition, this book offers a number of critical
readings of “how to re-imagine the nation as a site with many ‘cognitive
maps’ in which the nation-state is not congruent with cultural identity”
(p. ix).
This perspective is driven by the idea that attention to our [U.S.] border matters can help begin to undo the militarized “frontier field-imagi-
228          
nary” historically evident in American culture “by reconfiguring it within
an emerging U.S.-Mexico frontera imaginary” (p. xii). In terms of methodology, Saldívar argues for an historical and intercultural approach that attends to transfrontera contact zones that function as the “social space of
subaltern encounters,” in “which peoples geopolitically forced to separate
themselves now negotiate with one another and manufacture new relations, hybrid cultures, and multiple-voiced aesthetics” (p. 13).
Operating against the uneven discursive terrain of the border in the
Americas, Border Matters thus seeks a reconstruction of “things said and
concealed about migration, immigration,” and of the “enunciations required and those forbidden about the legacy of conquest in the Americas”
(p. xiv), including the violent inscriptions of empire. Although U.S.-México border writings are key to this type of cultural studies investigation, an
expressive transnational Chicana/o Mexicana/o culture is a targeted site
for further research. Concretely, Saldívar draws attention to the need to
investigate “the ways in which our lived memory and popular culture are
linked”: how, for example, the postmodernist shocks of electronic (Chicana/o) mass media create a crisis for absolutist paradigms of national
culture; how “collective memory frames the production and reception of
commercial culture” (p. 35).
Aside from incorporating a number of research agendas for Chicana/o
cultural studies, Border Matters incorporates reflections on what Chicana/o cultural studies contributes to a larger cultural studies legacy. In
the context of this book “[w]hat Chicano/a cultural studies offers the
loose group of tendencies, issues, and questions in the larger cultural studies orbits in Britain and the United States is the theorization of the U.S.Mexico borderlands—literal, figurative, material, and militarized—and
the deconstruction of the discourse of the boundaries” (p. 25). This theorization of the U.S.-Mexican border (lands) is present for Saldívar “in the
multiple discourses of ethnography, feminist theories of subjectivity, and
oral history, urban studies, and ethno-historical becoming and in the politics of postmodernism” (p. 29). Here border cultural studies is a “synthesis
of articulated development” that includes these forms of analysis as well as
literary, critical-legal, cultural studies” and “gender and sexuality studies”
(p. xii).
Border (Chicana) Feminist Cultural Studies:
Borderlands, La Frontera
Quite a different example of the theorization of the U.S.-Mexican border
and border cultural studies can be found in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, La Frontera. This highly influential book embeds theory, imposes
its own novel form of interdisciplinarity (mixing of cultural forms and
languages), and moves without apology from academic to popular to poetic to critical discourse(s). Although published earlier than the cultural
studies interventions reviewed previously, this book has been recovered
in a variety of venues that chart cultural studies legacies, from grassroots
productions to academic scholarship, both at home and abroad. For example, in 1994, when contemporary Chicana/o cultural studies interventions are already in full swing, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, fully cognizant
of the need to focus sustained critical attention on the creative/critical
practices of socially disenfranchised women/critics of color, articulates a
conceptual link between cultural studies sensibilities and the formation
of an embodied feminist borderlands.15 For Yarbro-Bejarano, the conjuncture between the two is present in Anzaldúa’s brand of social constructivism, nuanced representation of identity and subjectivity, attention
to (lesbian) sexuality, and in the production of a multilayered serpentine
autobiographical form that captures the subjective aspects of social historical struggles. Yarbro-Bejarano also sees Anzaldúa’s Borderlands as articulating another politics of difference to the extent that it pluralizes a
unitary subject through a feminist (mestiza) consciousness that enables a
paradigm shift in cultural studies that represents the “in-between” or the
“interstice.”
Borderlands also spurs the critical reflections of an important collection
of essays in African American cultural criticism and cultural studies that
takes up the challenge of “working out—or reworking—the problematics
of the borders, the boundaries and the frame(work)s that structure various and multiple notions of identity—textual, personal, collective, generic, and disciplinary identities.”16 Less critical attention has been
afforded to Borderlands in what is largely construed as “cultural studies,”
although this book incorporates multiple zones of engagement that are
important for a cultural studies practice that does not identify with imperial/colonial centers and looks to actively promote a conversation with
grassroots creative practitioners that move beyond the national.
230          
One of the most heavily quoted sections of this text rewrites national
borders and boundaries on a dramatic if not continental scale, suggesting
to its readers that “the border is a “1,950 mile-long open wound/dividing a
pueblo, a culture” (p. 2), “una herida abierta” (an “open wound”) where
“the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (p. 3). With this characterization Borderlands reintroduces the painful historical connections
between “el otro México” (that Mexico south of the border) and “este
México” (the conquered homeland in the U.S.) that are so lacking in
American history books and the defamatory campaigns of statewide
propositions of the 90s. This book also puts forth the idea that you cannot
read the U.S. (United States) nation against the grain without reconfiguring how it enforces the borderlands of race, sexuality, culture, territory,
language, gender, and social standing.
For the autobiographical subject of Borderlands, part of this reading
practice involves articulating the fact that borders are set “to distinguish us
from them” (p. 3). Another part involves providing alternative imaginative
reconstructions of border cultures, identities, communities, and languages.
Anzaldúa’s account of linguistic terrorism serves as a case in point.17 Not
only does she register the devastating effects of the imposition of the English tongue in homegrown colonial contexts, but she also holds up a mirror to the dominant culture and invites it to see and to hear those who
have been linguistically othered:
We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic
mestizaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire
we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huérfanos—we speak an orphan tongue.18
Within Borderlands the illegitimacy that is cast onto the orphan tongue
and those who utter this tongue cannot be divorced from a state-sanctioned program of deterritorialization, dispossession, and displacement—
or a recycling of injurious colonial legacies that acquires regional (Texan),
transnational (U.S./Mexico), corporal (gendered, racialized, sexualized)
as well as mythic dimensions. Within Borderlands combating this illegitimacy requires the telling of various testimonials, the affirmation of multiple Chicana/o unofficial languages, and the delivery of textbook lessons
on Chicana/o language that does not necessarily cite leading scholars in
this field. This also means conferring legitimacy to an unsanctioned form
of academic and popular expression by imposing bilingualism on a pub-
lic that is accustomed to monolingualism or at least the benefit of a
translation.
Borderlands also provides a counterdiscourse to dominant culture’s inscription of the “national” family and family values and its appropriations
of Chicana Latina/o bodies as sites of material (biological and capitalist)
reproduction. However, this vision is filtered through a critique that targets patriarchal nationalist Chicano Mexicano representations and cultures of betrayal that adopt a celebratory and idealistic notion of Mexican
culture as genderless, nonhierarchical, communal, and nurturing. This in
the face of a native patriarchal Mexican culture that also promotes misogyny, the subordination and exploitation of mujeres/women, the adherence
to compulsory heteronormative kinship arrangements, and the idea that a
Mexican woman’s job is to bear/raise children, endure spousal battery, and
suffer her agony in silence.
Given this context—and what Anzaldúa sees as a legacy of betrayal of
Mexican and Chicana women—various segments of Borderlands set out
to tell the story of an aggrieved border feminist who actively selects those
aspects of her culture that she will retain; rallies against oppressive traditions; and “airs” the accumulated “dirty laundry” when it is appropriate to
do so. In addition, this border feminist rejects the malinchista narrative
and the machista imperative, all the while imagining anti-racist, anti-sexist coalitions that reject homophobia and promote another homeland/
borderlands.19
Women of Color Feminist Cultural Studies:
Making Face and Coalition
Other opportunities for cultural studies engagement are presented by the
anthology Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives of Feminist Women of Color. In this book which appears
just as a number of Chicana/o cultural studies productions are emerging,
Anzaldúa launches otra “entrada” (another entrance) into cultural studies
that highlights yet other alternative cultures and provides an intellectual
program of self-determination and alliance building of a group of feminist women of color on yet another creative margin. This production militates against “the position ascribed to a woman of color within the economy of knowledge.” (For Mary Pat Brady, this position leaves “her” silent,
unknown.)
232          
Making Face provides other ways of viewing, of being, of making voice
and coalition. The contestatory “entrada” of Making Face also reasserts the
position that “ideas are a realm of praxis” (Chela Sandoval). In addition,
this woman of color feminist manifesto asserts a variety of cultural studies
sensibilities as it exposes rather than erases the book’s mode of production; affiliates with a testimonial of survival that seeks to bear witness to
the struggles and interrelationships of marginalized feminist women of
color; declares an intent “to explode the neat boundaries of the half dozen
categories of marginality that define women of color” (p. xvi); and proposes a methodology of the oppressed which disputes the principles of
Western discourses of objectivity, based on the division between the mind
and the body, the silence and the ignorance of the marginalized, and the
maintenance of the status quo.
Politically and ideologically, this project is linked to This Bridge Called
My Back, a book which sought to break through the diabolically erected
barriers that separate politically engaged women of color and to let them
“hear each other and see one another” (p. vi) and their predicaments with
the hope of consolidating an emergent anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist Third World feminist movement and internationalist consciousness.
This with full recognition of the “necessity” of “stretching or dying” and
the full recognition of the difficulty of making these types of political coalitions happen in the heat of the struggle (p. vi). Whereas Bridge put forth
the idea that white feminism had yet to understand that there are other
coalitions to be made (“other ties and visions that bind”) (p. vi), Making
Face puts forth the idea that women of color must focus attention on the
cultural productions they can render and on the obstacles they must overcome in the context of dominant culture’s racializations, social hierarchies, definitions of culture, social marginalization of women of color, and
a lack of access to social cultural institutions.
It is not surprising then that the focus here is on the “productive” dimensions of cultural and creative work—a focus which in this case produces a metaphorical link between the intellectual practice of Making Face
and that of “sewing/la costura” (of women in the maquilas/factories) in
this anthology’s stated platform:
In this anthology and in our daily lives, we women of color strip off the
“máscaras” others have imposed on us. . . . We rip out the stitches, expose
the multi-layered “inner faces,” attempting to confront and oust the internalized oppression embedded in them, and remake anew both inner and
outer faces. We begin to displace the white and colored male typographers
and become ourselves typographers, printing our own words on the surfaces, the plates, of our bodies. . . . In our self-reflectivity and in our active
participation with the issues that confront us, whether it is through writing,
front-line activism, or individual self-development, we are also uncovering
the interfaces, the very spaces and places where our multiple-surfaced, colored, racially gendered bodies intersect and interconnect. (p. xvi)
This passage envisions a shift in the intellectual conditions, agencies,
and coalitions of oppressed women of color, who must now articulate for
themselves connections that must be made in the struggle for self-determination and the creation of a political bloc. Furthermore, the emergent
woman of color creative feminist practice that is envisaged through the
production of alternative grassroots circuits and labors, does not enter like
a “thief in the night,” as is often suggested in reference to the way the
women at Birmingham (England) assumed a feminist counterstance
within what is construed as a patriarchal cultural studies space. Although
the woman of color feminist tradition envisioned in Making Face speaks
from cracked spaces and boasts a form of thievery (a la: “We are forced to
steal a bit of visual, oral or written language” [p. xxiv]), this tradition
claims an earlier feminist genealogy—earlier “waves of feminism”—as it
offers a counterstance to dominant culture.
For Anzaldúa, the ongoing task (homework/tarea) of feminist women
of color is a very ambitious one—this involves the enormous task of
changing “culture” and “all of its oppressive interlocking (oppressive)
machinations of culture” (p. xvii). This task incorporates a specific
method: all the charged feelings (“the guts and the adrenaline”) that are
provoked by a memory of the “horrific” suffering must be unearthed and
confronted in testimonial style (p. xviii). Within the context of Making
Face, this task cannot be completed without addressing the struggles of
oppressed women of color to provide alternative venues for cultural expression and alliance building that can allow them to move beyond the
way they’ve been inhibited and muted by dominant culture’s discourses
and practices.
However, Anzaldúa’s “entrada” is itself a partial representation to a
complex condition and set of cultural mediations; this “entrada” only addresses some of the sanctioned intellectual practices of the academy and
only names some of the privileges of those who “declare themselves to be
“outside of culture” and can “dis-engage” from race/racism/ethnocen-
234          
trism” through an appeal to “selective reality” (here, a “blanked-out” racism [p. xxi]). What makes this woman of color intervention important to
consider from a cultural studies viewpoint is that this intervention affiliates with women who are marked by various social registers—women
“who have always known” that their “lives and identities are simultaneously mediated, marked and influenced by race, class, gender and vocation” (p. xviii).
It bears noting that other Chicana/Third World feminist articulations
of the 80s and early 90s tackle the charge of investigating “la tarea que nos
queda por delante” (the work that needs to be done) and the “naming” of
the interlocking machinations of culture in related yet different ways. For
example, Aída Hurtado’s The Color of Privilege20 provides quantitative data
that allows readers to measure the privilege of white women in relation to
Chicanas in terms of racialized class differences, whereas the “Black Feminist Statement” of the Combahee Collective, which appears earlier in
Bridge spells out the task (and a connection to Making Face) in this way:
The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be
that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, heterosexual,
and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of an
integrated analysis and practice based on the fact that the major systems of
oppression are interlocking.21
Clearly this type of work entails not only an intellectual but also a social and political practice—a practice that recognizes the importance of a
collective struggle against capitalist as well as patriarchal heterosexist, racialized social formations and concurs with Rosa Linda Fregoso’s suggestion that the “more contradictions you find, the more you’ve got to struggle.” The difficulties of writing these multiple contradictions and developing an “integrated analysis” mean that this task requires on-going efforts
and commitments. However, already embedded in these writings is ample
room for interfacing the writings of disenfranchised woman of color in
different global sites.
For example, important links can be made between the intellectual
platform of Chicana/woman of color feminism and the works published
within the cultural studies circuits of the Open University (England) and
who raise(d) the question, “Is Sisterhood global?”22 These are practitioners
who, from another cultural studies context, insist that within the structures of global social relations of power “we do not exist simply as women
but as differentiated categories such as working-class women, peasant
women, migrant women and insist that difference in this sense is a difference of social condition.”23
Making Face also paves the way for articulating yet other forms of intellectual outreach and alliance with social knowledges that have been spoken from the “bodies” of those who have been “battered by life” and yet
voice creative productions “laden with aspirations and coded in hope” (p.
xxv). Within Making Face, these ascendant experiential, embodied forms
of knowledge emerge from theorists of color who understand “marginality” to be a position and place of resistance in this manner: “Theorists of
color are in the process of trying to formulate ‘marginal’ theories that are
partially outside and partially inside the Western frame of reference (if
that is possible), theories that overlap many worlds.” We are articulating
new positions in these “in-between,” borderland worlds of ethnic communities and academics, feminist and job worlds. In our literature, social issues, such as race, class, and sexual difference are intertwined with the narrative and poetic elements of a text, elements in which theory is embedded. In our mestizaje theories we create new categories for those of us left
out or pushed out of existing ones. We recover and examine non-Western
aesthetics while critiquing Western aesthetics; recover and examine nonrational modes and “blanked-out” realities while critiquing rational consensual reality; recover and examine indigenous languages while critiquing
the languages of the dominant culture. And we simultaneously combat the
tokenization and appropriation of our literatures and our writers/artists
(p. xxvi).
Latina/o Cultural Studies: Citizenship, Performance,
Media, and Identity
The creative energies of the margin and coalition are also important for
those Latino cultural studies projects that respond to the anti-immigrant
campaigns of the 90s, the new social movements of the Americas, the
transnational flows of culture, and the effects of globalization with writings that reclaim identity, space, and rights. Not surprisingly, the Latina/o
cultural studies group reengages the infamous discourse of Difference and
exclusion that saturated the media in the 90s and incorporated negative
portraitures of Latinos. Concretely, William Flores and Rina Benmayor
(editors of Latino Cultural Citizenship) argue that cultural homogeniza-
236          
tion and the rejection of difference that it implies “prevent us from understanding the highly complex world in which we reside” (p. 5). For them,
the Latino “difference” that emerged as a result of the new tides of immigration, global restructuring, and the refurbishing of ethnic communities
in the U.S. is not a negative development. On the contrary, this difference
contributes to forms of panethnicity, alliance building, social knowledges,
and political contest.
Significantly, the Latina/o cultural studies group also recasts cultural
citizenship; for them, it is not only a process of empowerment, a “constructing, establishing and asserting human, social, and cultural rights” (p.
12). Citizenship is also a “broad continuum of social practices, from everyday life practices to broad social drama (p. 13). Armed with this cultural
studies inflected understanding of citizenship, the Latina/o cultural studies group seeks to “better comprehend how cultural phenomena—from
practices that organize the daily life of individuals, families, and the community, to linguistic and artistic expression—cross the political realm and
contribute to the process of affirming and building an emerging Latino
identity and political and social consciousness” (p. 6).
Other writings on culture, the economy, and society which incorporate
Latina/o cultural studies sensibilities can be found in Antonia Darder and
Rodolfo Torres’s The Latino Studies Reader. This collection traces the “Latinization” of the United States to major changes in the socioeconomic
landscape and links Latino communities in the U.S. to the transnational
realties shared by populations of Latinos in Latin America and the Caribbean. As opposed to those sociological or cultural writings on Latina/o
groups that stress an emerging ethnic consciousness or limit themselves to
cultural expressions, the coeditors of this anthology propose that “the history of Latinos can only be fully understood and articulated within the
context of the U.S. political economy and the new international division
of labor” (p. 4).
This reconfiguration of Latino identities is not only shaped by the dramatic developments in the social formations of the hemisphere. This reconfiguration is also articulated in response to what the editors view as
“post-modernist” or cultural-based accounts of Latinos. Following
Meiskins Wood, they argue that within these paradigms “capitalism as a
totalizing system does not exist”—it is relegated “to an undifferentiated
plurality of identity politics and particular oppressions” that ignore “the
overwhelming tendency of capitalism to homogenize rather than to diversify human experience” (p. 6).24
Notwithstanding the possible divergences between Darder and Torres
and those woman of color feminist practitioners who argue that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking,” these editors target an understudied arena in contemporary scholarship and call for a “new conceptual
apparatus and critical lexicon” that can help us grapple with “the new racialized social relations and ever-changing class structure in late capitalism” (p. 23).
Juan Flores’s From Bomba to Hip Hop proposes further modifications in
the “Latino” critical paradigm. In this work he focuses attention on the
need to consider the fact that “there is Latino only from the point of view
and as lived by the Mexican, the Puerto Rican and so forth.” Here he
makes the case for a discursive specification of the term “Latino”:
In my writings I take the position that while there is a certain inevitability
in the formation of pan-ethnic concepts like “Latino” or “Asian American”
and may well be some significant strategic advantage to their deployments
in political movements for social change, their validity as sociological constructs depends overridingly on the specifics of each of the groups and their
historical placement in the U.S. society. . . . Without denying the congruencies and threads of connection among them that the term implies, “Latino”
or “Hispanic” only holds up when qualified by the national-group angle or
optic from which it is uttered. (p. 8)
In Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage, Alicia Arrizón also destabilizes the “Latino” bloc as she argues that LatinA (not Latino) is linked to
an experience of (double) marginality and the desire to be conspicuous
against a backdrop of historic erasure and hemispheric power relations.25
If Arrizón invites us to see Latina as an important site of counter gender
and sexual identification and performance, Angharad Valdivia offers another feminist Latina/Latin American positioning that incorporates a
multilevel critique of cultural studies formations. In her book Latina in
the Land of Hollywood: And Other Essays in Media Culture, Valdivia identifies a major contradiction of cultural studies: its tendency to envision
matters from an Anglocentric perspective which does not consider that “in
Latin America alone, we could trace cultural studies back as far as the
twenties (O’Conner, 1991).”26 The connection between Latina and Latin
American cultural studies is rendered in order to “debunk the tendency to
consider the national boundaries of the United States as the perimeter of
multicultural issues” (pp. 8–9).
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However, Latin American cultural studies is not exempt from criticism
in Valdivia’s critique—she deploys a double positionality and critiques
this field for its lack of attention to women’s participation and intervention in this segment of “Theorizing the Frustration”:
Latin America remains a region whose “hybrid cultures” (García Canclini
1995) demand a rejection of simplistic oppositions. To begin with the region
does not fulfill modernity’s and modernization’s linear path of dynamic development. . . . Of course, neither García Canclini nor many other scholars
of modernization dwell on the very gendered nature of modernity (Felski
1995). The fact is, modernization theory—a linear explanatory framework
that posits technological development as well as the adoption of liberal political and economic systems — precludes women’s participation in the
modernization process nearly by definition (Valdivia 1996). Thus it is not
surprising that Latina and Latin American women’s participation and interventions are coded as marginal, if mentioned at all.27
In recognition of the contradictory terrain of Chicana/o Latina/o social
ideologies, some cultural studies practitioners assert that as a term “Latino” or “Latinidad” offer “no guarantees” of a progressive or unified
Latina/o politics. For example, Frances Negrón-Muntaner further proposes: “Due to the globalization of capital, people and culture, never before today has it been more convenient to embrace Latino as an enjoyable
transnational strategy to remap America.”28 In the context of market expansion, the internal shifting of community settlement, and the emergence of a transnational commodity culture, Negrón-Muntaner poses the
central question of “whether a shared bicultural public sphere will emerge
throughout the Americas” in the global period or “whether Latinos will be
fundamentally mobilized as consumers” for a global economy (pp. 117–
118).
In her much-circulated essay, Arlene Dávila considers the second of
these prospects (“Mapping Latinidad: Spanish Language and Culture in
the Spanish TV Battlefront”).29 This essay examines the way Latinos are
mobilized as “market segments” and as representations of “Latinidad” in
Spanish-language television. Rather than suggesting that transnational,
hemispheric productions are by their very nature anti-nationalistic, Dávila
destabilizes this equation and argues that Spanish-language networks such
as Univisión and Telemundo offer a “Latin American–centered approach
to ‘Latinidad.’” Here she elaborates on this connection:
Following the nationalist underpinnings underlying contemporary representations that view cultures as bounded and contained entities, tied to a
territory, a past, and a heritage, it is Latin America rather than the deterritorialized U.S. Latino culture that has traditionally been valorized as the
source of cultural authenticity in Latino/Hispanic culture. (p. 152)
For Dávila, Univisión’s stance is not an arbitrary one; this stance is
“guided by existing hierarchies of representation that necessarily impact
Univisión’s attempts to become the “representative” medium for Latinos
(p. 152). The fact that Spanish-language media such as Univisión’s have
operated primarily as “transnational” rather than “ethnic” media is of
paramount importance since, as Dávila explains, these networks have
opted to import “cheaper Latin American programming into the U.S.
market instead of investing in the production of original programming”
(p. 151).
In many ways it is fitting that I end this preview of Chicana/o Latina/o
cultural studies legacies with Dávila’s critical reflections on Spanish-language television. Similar to the cultural studies enterprises examined at
the beginning of this postscript, Dávila’s article invites its readers to scrutinize supposedly “native” transnational Latina/o (media) productions
(Are they by, for, about us—Latinos?) and their particular framings of
Latina/o identities, cultures, and languages. While her comments are articulated within the very specific context of the transnationalization of media, they also call into question the very assumption that “language and
cultural visibility always mean social gains or political entitlement” (p.
157). In fact, Dávila ponders whether Spanish TV networks can help to
“validate dominant norms of good American citizenship in ways that reproduce rather than challenge dominant race/class and gender norms at
play in U.S. society” (p. 157).
Dávila’s critique is rendered in the spirit of a cultural studies practice
that seeks another representational format for Chicanas/os Latinos, a population group that is often subjected to double subordination by mainstream media and a Spanish network media.
Her article complements scores of Chicana/o Latina/o publications that
envision productive transnational, hemispheric, and cultural studies
movements and contacts; cross-border solidarities and alliances; and alternative geopolitical grassroots networks. Not surprisingly, these productions coalesce within cultural studies at the beginning of the new millennium, just as scores of immigrants and their allies gain momentum, pre-
240          
pare to reoccupy different public spaces on a grand scale, and forever alter
the representational landscape of the national imaginary with new challenges to restrictive social polices, categories, and portraitures. As Rosa
Linda Fregoso suggests in Mexicana Encounters: These transnational immigrants “are the new cultural citizens claiming social space, rights, and
recognition,” “creating the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a
new political consciousness.”30 This consciousness requires a cultural
studies practice bold enough to eschew the nation, the discipline, and
their interlocking borders, and a cultural studies humble enough to recognize that “we are not alone in our struggles nor separate and autonomous
but . . . that we . . . are connected and interdependent.”31
Chronology
The following list provides a “selected” chronology of published works
that draw on an explicit Chicana/o cultural studies affiliation or implement the term Chicana/o cultural studies in the contemporary period.
1989. Renato Rosaldo publishes “Changing Chicana/o Narratives” in Culture and Truth, where he discusses these narratives in the context of
his desire for (Chicana/o) works not included in the canon of cultural
studies.
1990. Rosa Linda Fregoso and Angie Chabram edit a special issue of the
journal Cultural Studies (4:3) on Chicana/o cultural representations.
1990. Douglas Foley publishes Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the
Heart of Texas, which offers an exchange with Paul Willis.
1991. José David Saldívar uses the term “cultural studies” to refer to a “borderzone of conjunctures” and a “form of life and travel in our borderlands” in The Dialectic of Our America.
1991. George Lipsitz circulates the unpublished text: “Con Safos: Can Cultural Studies Read the Writing on the Wall?” which later appears in ed.
Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader.
1992. Renato Rosaldo publishes “Whose Cultural Studies?” in the American
Anthropologist (96:3), where he identifies some major figures in ethnic
and Chicana/o cultural studies.
1993. Rosa Linda Fregoso publishes The Bronze Screen and articulates a
Chicana feminist connection to cultural studies.
1993. Inés Hernández Avila characterizes herself as “a scholar and a professor within evolving disciplines, and synergistic relationship . . . of ethnic studies, women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, cultural studies,
and colonial discourse.” In eds. Buchwald, Fletcher, and Roth, Transforming a Rape Culture.
1994. Jorge Mariscal publishes “Can Cultural Studies Read Spanish” in
English Studies/Cultural Studies.
241
242 Chronology
1994. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano publishes the article “Gloria Anzaldúa’s
Borderlands/La Frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference’ and the NonUnitary Subject,” Cultural Critique 28 (Fall).
1994. Rosaura Sánchez deploys a cultural studies methodology to study the
Californio testimonials in Telling Identities.
1998. The journal Crítica publishes a special issue on Chicano Cultural
Studies.
1998. Alicia Gaspar de Alba engages cultural studies theories of reception
in “Between the Ghetto and the Melting Pot: Popular Hegemony,” a
chapter from her book, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House.
1998. José Manuel Valenzuela Arce publishes El Color de las Sombras and
incorporates a segment on Chicana/o cultural studies.
1998. Jose David Saldívar publishes Border Matters, where he proposes that
“[w]hat Chicano/a cultural studies offers the loose group of tendencies, issues, and questions in the larger cultural studies orbits in Britain and the United States is the theorization of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.”
1999. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian edits a special issue of Chicana/o
Latina/o Cultural Studies for the journal Cultural Studies (Vol. 13, No.
2), which incorporates her article, “Chicana/o Cultural Studies.”
1999. Emma Pérez publishes The Decolonial Imaginary and observes that
“the post-modern imperative has already configured Chicana/o cultural studies.”
2000. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian publishes “Critical Dialogues in Chicana/o Cultural Studies,” in eds. Gilroy, Grossberg, and McRobbie,
Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall.
1999. Chela Sandoval publishes Methodology of the Oppressed, which includes a section of Third World Feminism and Cultural Studies.
2002. Arturo Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez edit Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicana/o Cultural Studies in the 21st Century.
2002. Eden Torres publishes Chicana Without Apologies: The New Chicana
Cultural Studies.
2006. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian edits The Chicana/o Cultural Studies
Reader.
Notes
Notes to the Introduction
1. See José David Saldívar, The Dialectics of Our America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 84.
2. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, “Critical Dialogues on Chicana/o Cultural
Studies,” in eds. Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie, Without
Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London: Verso, 2000), p. 53.
3. bell hooks, “Culture to Culture: Ethnography and Cultural Studies as Critical Intervention,” in Yearning (Boston: South End, 1990), p. 133.
4. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), p. 291.
5. See Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, Cultural Studies
(London: Routledge, 1992), p. 15, in reference to “Latino” studies.
6. Examples include Angharad Valdivia, A Latina in the Land of Hollywood
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), p. 6; José David Saldívar, p. 84; Emma
Pérez, “Gendered History,” in ed. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, The Chicana/o
Cultural Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Frances Aparicio, see
“Entrevista a Frances Aparicio sobre estudios culturales latinos” (Interview with
Frances Aparicio on Latino cultural studies) by Juan Ulises Zevallos Aguilar in
Ciberayllu 9 (Año 3) Julio 1999.
Also see http://www.andes.missouri.edu/andes/Ciberayllu.shtml. For an account of cultural studies work and travels, see my introduction to The Chicana/o
Cultural Studies Reader, pp. 1–25, as well as session one of this book.
7. I was inspired here by José David Saldívar’s refashioning of cultural studies
into borderlands theory, and by his citation of Henry Gates which follows: “As the
cultural critic Henry Louis Gates writes, ‘The Birmingham battle for making “cultural politics” more than just a white thing bumped into the conundrum of identity politics.’ ” Border Matters (University of California Press, 1997), p. 19. For an
example of how Chicana/o cultural studies change the subject, also see Saldívar’s
“Cultural Theory in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands,” Border Matters, pp. 17–35.
8. This thought was taken from Angharad Valdivia’s recasting of the Chicago
Cultural Studies Group (1994), which reads: “As the Chicago Cultural Studies
Group reminds us, ‘cultural studies and multiculturalism require . . . a more inter-
243
244 Notes
national model of cultural studies than the dominant Anglo versions.’ ” Her original source is ed. D. T. Goldberg, Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1994), p. 116.
9. bell hooks, “Culture to Culture,” p. 133. I am indebted to bell hooks for her
notion of ethnography as critical intervention. This proved to be a shaping influence on my work.
10. In her intervention Rosaura Sánchez states: “For me cultural studies is not
only about looking at the present. You can also do cultural studies on the past.” In
my case I would add the proviso that you can also do cultural studies work on a
recent past (the 90s), as is the case of this book.
11. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and the Center,” in eds. Stuart Hall, Dorothy
Hobson, Andy Lowe, and Paul Willis, Culture, Media, and Language: Working Papers (London: Hutchinson, 1980), p. 42.
12. For more on problematic aspects of the “international” and “national”
configurations of cultural studies, see Jon Stratton and Ien Ang, “On the Impossibility of a Global Cultural Studies: ‘British’ Cultural Studies in an ‘International
Frame,’ ” in eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 361–391. An alternative
internationalist gesture is spoken from the inter-Asian context by Kuan-Hsing
Chen who provides this yet partial response: “As I stated before at the very beginning, cultural studies grew out of the global decolonization movement, expressed
largely in the form of social movements. Cultural studies in England has been
connected to the labor, anti-nuclear, antiracism, immigrant and women’s movements; in South Africa, to the anti-apartheid movement; in the US, to the feminist, gay and lesbian, and ethnic minority movements,” and so on. See Trajectories:
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 41.
13. I am building on Rosaura Sánchez’s insights here. For the original see her
article, “Mapping the Spanish Language along a Multiethnic and Multilingual
Border,” in eds. Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres, The Latino Studies Reader
(Malden: Blackwell, 1998), p. 111.
14. For more on this situation see Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez and Anna Sampaio,
eds., Transnational Latina/o Communities (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield,
2002), Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez, eds., Latinos Remaking
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), and Antonia Darder and
Rodolfo Torres, The Latino Studies Reader.
15. Speaking of this context in the area of educational attainment, Sánchez
notes: “Latinos have the lowest ratios of completed education in comparison to
Whites, Blacks, and other races.” She continues: “The Census Bureau indicates that
only 50 percent of Latino adults have completed high school, 22 percent have
completed one or more years of college, and 10 percent have completed four or
more years of college (Kominski and Adams, 1991: 4).” The Latino Studies Reader,
p. 116.
Notes 245
16. These movements include but are not restricted to the movements for civil,
territorial, immigrant, indigenous, worker’s and human rights; the women of
color, Chicana feminist, and feminist movements; the Chicana lesbian/Chicano
joto, gay, and lesbian movements; the Chicana/o Movement; the Third World Liberation Movements; the worldwide decolonization movements; the anti-war
movements; a variety of labor and educational movements for representation and
social justice; protracted movements against racism, the border (¡sin fronteras!),
globalization; and social movements on behalf of alternative identities, languages,
cultures, academic programs, educational bodies, cultural representations, and
secondary supportive institutions.
17. Wahneema Lubiano, Session Four, The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum.
18. I am influenced here by Stuart Hall’s reading of cultural studies as theory.
He views theory “as a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges, which
have to be debated in a dialogical way.” “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 286. I would like to qualify this vision by suggesting that in the case of Chicana/o cultural studies, these knowledges include
several entrances and exits, lines of affiliation, and what Gloria Anzaldúa calls “alternate escape routes.” See her “Una Entrada,” in ed. Gloria Anzaldúa, Making
Face, Making Soul (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990), p. xxvi.
19. Raymond Williams discussed the importance of the selective tradition in
this way: “For tradition is in practice the most evident expression of the dominant
and hegemonic pressures and limits. It is always more than an inert historicized
segment: indeed it is the most powerful practical means of incorporation. What
we have to see is not just ‘a tradition’ but a selective tradition: an intentionally selected version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification.”
Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 115. I have
modified his usage of the term with the qualifier, ethnic, to describe the particular
ways in which the selective tradition operates in relation to ethnic groups through
the concept of “the token few.”
20. See for example David Foley, Learning Capitalist Culture (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Devon Peña, Chicano Culture, Ecology,
Politics (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), David Maciel, Isidro Ortiz and
María Herrera Sobek, eds., The Chicana Renaissance (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000); Raul Homero Villa, Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000); Karen Mary Dávalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in
the Diaspora (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001); Charles
Tatum, Chicano Popular Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); Sonia
Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature
246 Notes
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Héctor Calderón and José David
Saldívar, Criticism in the Borderlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991);
Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999); George Mariscal, Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of
the War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Alicia Gaspar de Alba,
Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the Cara Exhibit (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Carla Trujillo, ed., Living Chicana
Theory (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998); José David Saldívar, Border Matters:
Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997); Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: The California Testimonio (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez, Teatro
Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1994); Rosa Linda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); David R. Maciel and María
Herrera-Sobek, eds., Culture across Borders (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1998); Aída Hurtado, The Color of Privilege (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1999); Rodolfo Torres and Victor Valle, eds., Latino Metropolis (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Leo Chávez, Covering Immigration: Popular
Images and the Politics of Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);
Michelle Habell-Pallán and Mary Romero, eds., Latina/o Popular Culture (New
York: New York University Press, 2002); Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H.
Quiñonez, eds., Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st
Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Carl Gutiérrez-Jones,
Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicana/o Culture and Legal Culture (New
York: New York University Press, 1995); Alicia Gaspar de Alba, ed., Velvet Barrios
(Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Edén Torres, Chicana Without Apology: The New Chicana Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2003);
Michelle Habell-Pallán, Loca Motion (New York: New York University Press, 2005);
Rosa Linda Fregoso, Mexicana Encounters (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003); Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Sergio de la Mora, Cinemachismo (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Rafael Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in
Chicana/o Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Angie
Chabram-Dernersesian, ed., The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader (New York:
Routledge, 2006).
In addition to this “partial” listing, two special issues were published on Chicana/o representations and Chicana/o Latina/o cultural studies in the journal Cultural Studies in 1990 and 1999, respectively. A special issue of Chicana/o Cultural
studies was also published by the journal Crítica, Spring 1998. In the past few years
a new journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies has also appeared.
21. See Cultural Studies 4:3 (October 1990).
Notes 247
22. Other cultural studies connections were influential in my choice to articulate Chicana/o cultural studies through the medium of a forum, including Angela
McRobbie’s comments at the end of the book Cultural Studies. There she provides
a useful precedent for us as she breaks with a cultural studies refusal to endorse
methodology and suggests that “what is required is a new paradigm for conceptualizing identity-in-culture, an ethnographic approach which takes as its starting
point the relational, interactive quality of everyday life.” See Angela McRobbie,
“Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies,” in eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson,
and Paula Treichler, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 730. Furthermore, the Chicana/o cultural studies forum, which emphasizes the answer period
of a conversation through successive alternating responses, is also in intertextual
dialogue with the question and answer period of the book Cultural Studies, and a
Chicano literary work—Rolando Hinojosa’s Becky and Her Friends. In this novel a
number of community members from Texas successively ascend to the imaginary
microphone and offer their perspectives on a recent event. Finally, the idea of the
forum was affected by the numerous conversations I’ve had with Chicana/o critics, including Renato Rosaldo, who reinforced the idea that it is necessary to actually “talk” to people if you want to do something important. The idea is that you
can’t just rely on what people say in writing in books.
23. See for instance The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
(New York, 1969).
24. I am responding here to Herman Gray’s thought-provoking essay, “Is Cultural Studies Inflated? The Cultural Economy of Cultural Studies in the United
States,” in eds. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Disciplinarity and
Dissent in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 203–216.
25. This practice of giving and suppressing voice is a tricky one for women of
color in academia from working-class backgrounds whose labor and voice are often made to be invisible or are unrecognized. In light of this fact I take the opportunity to explain that I initiated the idea for the study; crafted the questions for
the responses of individual practitioners; financed and generated the telephone
conversations and in-person interviews; organized the interventions into the forum configuration; solicited editorial feedback from practitioners; edited the interventions in order to create a manageable size; and produced the imaginary forum collectives as well as the critical reflections on print culture and the forum.
My perceptions on cultural studies can be seen throughout the book, in the introductions, conclusions, and readings of selected Chicana/o cultural studies practices.
My applications of cultural studies can also be seen in other works—articles
such as “Latina/o: Another Site of Struggle, Another Site of Accountability,” in ed.
Juan Poblete, Rethinking Ethnic and Area Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); “Chicana/o Cultural Studies: Marking the Conjuncture and an
248 Notes
Institutional Context, Introduction,” Cultural Studies 13:2 (1999); “En-countering
the Other Discourse of Chicano Mexicano Difference,” Cultural Studies 13:2
(1999); “Chicana? Rican!, No, Chicana-Riqueña: Refashioning the Transnational
Connection,” in eds. C. Kaplan, N. Alarcón, and M. Moallem, Between Women and
Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); “On the Social Construction of
Whiteness in Selected Chicana/o Discourses,” in ed. Ruth Frankenberg, Displacing
Whiteness (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); “. . . And, Yes, the Earth Did
Part . . . On the Splitting of Chicana/o Subjectivity,” in eds. Adela de la Torre and
B. Pesquera, Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Scholarship
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); “I Throw Punches for My Race,
but I Don’t Want to Be a Man,” reprinted in The Chicana/o Cultural Studies
Reader; and “Chicana/o Studies as Oppositional Ethnography,” Cultural Studies 4:3
(October 1990).
26. See for example under testimonios, Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities, and
Fran Leeper Buss, Forged under the Sun: The Story of María Elena Lucas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); mystery stories, Lucha Corpi, Eulogy for a
Brown Angel (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), and Michael
Nava, The Hidden Law (New York: Ballantine, 1992); photoethnography, Norma
Cantú, Canicula: Snapshots of a Girlhood on the Border (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1997); urban culture, Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, Michael
Dear, eds., La Vida Latina en LA: Urban Latina/o Culture (Thousand Oaks: Sage,
1999); border culture, Guillermo Gómez Peña, The New World Border (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996); compact discs, El Vez, “Graciasland,” and Marisela Norte,
“Word”; and cyberculture, The X Column of the Americas and The Chicana Feminist Homepage.
27. This is itself evidence of “culture’s centrality” in this global period for Stuart Hall. See “The Centrality of Culture: Notes on the Cultural Revolutions of Our
Time,” in ed. Kenneth Thompson, Media and Cultural Regulation (London: Sage,
in association with the Open University, 1997), p. 215.
28. Ibid., p. 213.
29. In the introduction to Culture, Media and Language, Hall et al. describe the
work at the Centre as a “sustained work of theoretical clarification,” p. 3.
30. Here I am in part responding to the introduction to Cultural Studies, in
which Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg propose: “The issue
for U.S. practitioners is what kind of work will be identified with Cultural studies
and what kind of social effects it will have. If not every study of culture and politics is Cultural studies, then people need to decide what difference it makes when
they adopt the term ‘Cultural studies’ to describe their work,” p. 10. That is just
what the participants do in The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum.
31. I am in dialogue here with the introduction to Culture, Media and Language, p. 1.
32. Rosa Linda Fregoso, from “The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum.”
Notes 249
33. This characterization is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa, “Una Entrada,” p. xv.
34. “Cultural Studies and the Politics of Internationalism: An Interview with
Stuart Hall by Kuan-Hsing Cheng,” in eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen,
Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, p. 397.
35. Ibid.
36. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Cultural Studies and the
Politics of Disciplinarity: An Introduction,” in their edition, Disciplinarity and
Dissent in Cultural Studies, p. 11.
37. Ibid.
38. I am drawing on “Can Cultural studies Read the Writing on the Wall?” in
ed. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader, pp. 47–
60.
Note to Session One
1. I stage a very different interpretation of the issue of whether we’ve always
(already) done cultural studies from the one that appears in Cary Nelson’s
thought-provoking essay, “Always Already Cultural Studies: Academic Conferences
and a Manifesto,” in ed. John Storey, What Is Cultural Studies? (London: Arnold,
1996), pp. 272–286.
Notes to the Intercession
1. Benjamin Lee, “Between Nations and Disciplines,” in eds. Cary Nelson and
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (New
York: Routledge, 1996), p. 232.
Notes to the Postscript
1. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 143–167.
2. Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995), and Rosa Linda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993).
3. See Feminism on the Border (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000);
Rethinking the Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Chicano
Culture, Ecology and Politics (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999); and Culture across Borders (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998).
4. Coco Fusco, “Passionate Irreverence,” English Is Broken Here (New York:
New Press, 1995), p. 33.
5. Norma Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Called My Back
and Anglo American Feminism,” in eds. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar,
Criticism in the Borderlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) p. 38.
250 Notes
6. Rosaura Sánchez, “The Politics of Representation in Chicana/o Literature,”
unpublished.
7. Antonia Darder, “The Politics of Biculturalism,” in eds. Antonia Darder and
Rodolfo D. Torres, The Latino Studies Reader (Malden: Blackwell, 1998), p. 140.
8. Deena González, “Chicana Identities Matter,” in eds. Chon Noriega, Eric
Avila, Karen Mary Dávalos, and Chela Sandoval, The Chicana/o Studies Reader
(Los Angeles: Chicana/o Studies Research Center Publications, 2001), pp. 411–426.
Also see also my edited collection, The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader, where
the works of the listed authors as well as others pertaining to Chicana/o identity,
culture, and sexuality can be found.
9. See Anna Sampaio, “Transforming Chicana/o and Latina/o Politics,” in eds.
Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez and Anna Sampaio, Transnational Latina/o Communities
(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), p. 63.
10. In ed. Angie Chabram Dernersesian, The Chicana/o Cultural Studies
Reader, p. 5.
11. Fregoso, pp. xxii–xxiii.
12. Angie Chabram and Rosa Linda Fregoso, “Introduction, Chicana/o Cultural Representations: Reframing Alternative Critical Discourses,” Cultural Studies
4:3 (1990): p. 206.
13. Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” in eds. Stuart Hall and
Paul du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), p. 4.
14. Stuart Hall, “Culture, Community and Nation,” in eds. David Boswell and
Jessica Evans, Representing the Nation: A Reader (London: Open University Press,
1999), p. 40.
15. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the Non-Unitary Subject,” Cultural Critique 28 (Fall
1994): pp. 5–28.
16. Mae G. Henderson, ed., Borders, Boundaries and Frames: Essays in Cultural
Criticism and Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 2.
17. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987).
18. Ibid., p. 58.
19. The fact that this book rereads and rewrites the borderlands of the nation
in these novel ways, does not mean that it lacks its own transnationalistic overtones or transhistorical belief systems—elements that form a sharp contrast to the
deconstructive spirit of many of the Chicana/o cultural studies interventions
viewed before. Suffice it to say, various zones of engagement are required when examining the contestatory dimensions of Borderlands. Clearly, this is a book that
appropriates movimiento aesthetics and narratives in a number of uneven ways.
These legacies are reaffirmed, they are reappropriated and transformed, they are
debunked, and at times they are displaced by utopian visions that project us into
third spaces of ethnic identification that exceed the text.
Notes 251
20. Aída Hurtado, The Color of Privilege (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1999).
21. “A Black Feminist Statement: Combahee River Collective,” in This Bridge
Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and
Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), p. 210.
22. Avtar Brah, “Difference, Diversity and Differentiation,” in “Race,” Culture
and Difference (London: Sage, in association with the Open University, 1992), p.
131.
23. Ibid.
24. Insofar as the editors propose to actively “write” class into Latina/o cultural
studies and to engage the dominant capitalist social formation, this book targets
an important area of investigation that cannot be ignored in light of the worsening social conditions of working Chicana/o, Latina/o, and indigenous populations;
the transnationalization of production; and the dramatic changes provoked by
globalization in various spheres of social life and culture. Yet the idea that capitalism works primarily through homogenization and not also through Difference—
that the international division of labor is not subjected to important fractures and
forms of specificity that call into question earlier forms of totality—has been disputed by cultural studies scholars such as Stuart Hall, who in this passage from
“The Local and the Global” suggests that the global era “capitalism” advances on
“contradictory” terrain:
But the more we understand about the development of capital itself, the more
we understand that . . . alongside that drive to commodify everything, which is
certainly one part of its logic, is another critical part of its logic that works in
and through specificity. . . . Capital is constantly exploiting different forms of labor. . . . It has always been able to work in and through the sexual division of labor . . . to work between the different ethnically and racially inflected labor
forces.
In eds. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, Dangerous Liaisons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 180.
25. The Latino bloc is further dis/articulated by Latina/o cultural studies practitioners such as Juana María Rodríguez (author of Queer Latinidad, New York:
NYU Press, 2002); José Muñoz (author of Disidentifications, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Alicia Gaspar de Alba (editor of Velvet Barrios,
Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
26. Angharad Valdivia, Latina in the Land of Hollywood: And Other Essays in
Media Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), p. 6.
27. Ibid., pp. 7–8.
28. Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “Not an Academic Subject: Latino Media Aesthetics,” in The Future of Latino Independent Media: A NALIP Sourcebook (UCLA
Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles, 2000), pp. 117–123.
252 Notes
29. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, ed., Globalization on the Line (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 147–166.
30. Rosa Linda Fregoso, “Preface,” Mexicana Encounters (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003), xvi.
31. Gloria Anzaldúa, Foreword to the second edition, Bridge, 1982.
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Kuan-Hsing Chen, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London:
Routledge, 1996), pp. 361–391.
Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo, and Mariela M. Páez, eds. Latinos Remaking America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Torres, Eden. Chicana Without Apologies: The New Chicana Cultural Studies (New
York: Routledge, 2002).
Valdivia, Angharad. A Latina in the Land of Hollywood: And Other Essays in Media
Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000).
Valenzuela, Arce, José Manuel. A La Brava Ese (Tijuana: Colegio de la Frontera
Norte, 1988).
———. El Color de Las Sombras. (Tijuana: Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1998).
Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos, and Anna Sampaio, eds. Transnational Latina/o Communities (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977).
Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: Cultural
Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the Non-Unitary Subject.” Cultural Critique, Vol. 28
(Fall 1994): pp. 5–28.
Contributors
Frances Aparicio is Professor and Director of Latin American and Latino
Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is author of Listening
to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (1998)
and coeditor of Musical Migrations: Transnationalism and Cultural Hybridity in the Americas with Candida F. Jáquez (2002) and Tropicalizations:
Transcultural Representations of Latinidad with Susana Chávez Silverman
(1997).
Alicia Arrizón is Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies at the University
of California, Riverside. Her publications include Queering Mestizaje:
Transculturation and Performance (2006) and Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (1999).
Ruth Behar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
Her publications include The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village
(1991), Translated Woman (1994), and The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (1996). She is editor of Bridges to Cuba
(1996) and coeditor of Women Writing Culture with Deborah Gordon
(1996). Behar is also known for her work as a filmmaker. She wrote, directed, and produced Adio Kerida/Goodbye Dear Love: A Cuban Sephardic
Journey.
John Beverley is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and
Cultural Studies, and director of graduate studies in Hispanic languages
and literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. His books are Testimonio:
On the Politics of Truth (2004), Subalternity and Representation, Arguments
in Cultural Theory (1999), Una modernidad obsoleta: estudios sobre el barroco (1997), Against Literature (1993), and Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions with Marc Zimmerman (1990).
259
260 Contributors
Mary Pat Brady is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Latina/o
Studies at Cornell University. She is author of Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (2000).
Angie Chabram-Dernersesian is Professor of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the editor of The Chicana/o Cultural
Studies Reader (2006) and coeditor of two special issues of the international journal Cultural Studies (1990 and 1999).
Richard Chabrán is Chair of the California Community Technology Policy
Group and former Director of the Center for Virtual Research at the University of California, Riverside. His articles include “Immigrants, Global
Digital Economies, Cyber Segmentation, & Emergent Information Services” (2001) and “Place Matters, Journeys Through Global Spaces and Local Places” (2004).
C. Ondine Chavoya is Assistant Professor of Art and Latina/o Studies at
Williams College. He recently contributed to the collection, Interventionists: User’s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (2004) and
is coeditor of Women Boxers: The New Warriors, with Delilah Montoya
and María Teresa Márquez (2006).
Alejandra Elenes is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Arizona
State University West. She coedited the book Chicana/Latina Education in
Everyday Life: Feminista Perspectives on Pedagogy and Epistemology (2006)
and a special issue entitled “Chicana/Mexicana Pedagogies: Consejos, Respeto y Educación in Everyday Life” for the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2001).
Rosa Linda Fregoso is Chair and Professor of Latin American and Latina/o
Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of Mexicana
Encounters (2003) and The Bronze Screen (1993). She is also editor of the
collection, Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps (2001).
Ramón García is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana/o
Studies at California State University, Northridge, where he teaches cultural and literary studies. He is the author of “Against Rasquache” (2006)
and “New Iconographies: Film Culture in Chicano Cultural Production”
(2002).
Contributors 261
Herman Gray is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Watching Race: Television and
the Sign of Blackness (2004), Producing Jazz: The Experience of an Independent Record Company (1998), and Cultural Moves (2005).
Lawrence Grossberg is Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies; Adjunct Distinguished Professor of
Anthropology; and the Director of the University Program in Cultural
Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent
books include Media Making: Mass Media in Popular Culture (with Ellen
Wartella, D. Charles Whitney, and MacGregor Wise [2005]), New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (with Tony Bennett and
Meghan Morris [2005]), and Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and
America’s Future (2005).
Michelle Habell-Pallán is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies in the
Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington,
Seattle. She is the author of Loca Motion: the Travels of Chicana and Latina
Popular Culture (2005) and coeditor of Latina/o Popular Culture with
Mary Romero (2002).
Aída Hurtado is Professor of Psychology at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. Her publications include The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism (1996), Voicing Chicana Feminisms: Chicanas Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity (2003), and Chicana/o Identity
in a Changing U.S. Society with Patricia Gurin (2004).
Kevin Johnson is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Mabie-Apallas
Public Interest Professor of Law and Chicana/o Studies at the University of
California at Davis. He is author of How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A
White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity (1999) and The “Huddled Masses”
Myth of Immigration and Civil Rights (2004). He edited Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader (2002) and coedited Race, Civil Rights, and
American Law: A Multiracial Approach, with Timothy Davis and George A.
Martínez (2001).
George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He is the author of Rainbow at Midnight (1994), Dangerous
Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (1994),
262 Contributors
Life in the Struggle (1995), The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1998),
Time Passages ( 2001), and American Studies at a Moment of Danger (2001).
Lisa Lowe is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and affiliated with the programs in Ethnic Studies and
Critical Gender Studies. Her books include Critical Terrains: French and
British Orientalisms (1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural
Politics (1996), and The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, with
David Lloyd (1997).
Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African American Studies at Duke University and editor of The House That Race Built
(1997).
George Mariscal is Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo,
Cervantes, and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Culture (1991) and BrownEyed Children of the Sun (2005), and editor of Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War (1999).
Kent Ono is Professor of Asian American Studies, Research Director, Institute of Communications, Asian American Studies at University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign. In addition to coauthoring Shifting Borders: Rhetoric,
Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 with John Sloop (2002), he
coedited Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek (1996) with Taylor
Harrison, Sarah Projansky, and Elyce Rae Helford. He also edited Asian
American Studies after Critical Mass (2005) and A Companion to Asian
American Studies (2005).
Emma Pérez is Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at
the University of Colorado, Bolder. Her books include The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999) and the novel Gulf Dreams
(1996).
Rafael Pérez-Torres is Professor of English at the University of California,
Los Angeles. He is the author of Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against
Margins (1995), Memories of an East L.A. Outlaw: To Alcatraz, Death Row
and Back with Ernie López (2005), and Critical Mestizaje: Voice, Agency
and Race in Chicano Culture (2006).
Contributors 263
Beatrice Pita teaches in the Literature Department at the University of
California, San Diego. She coedited Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton (2001), Who Would Have Thought It? (1995),
and The Squatter and the Don (1993).
Alvina Quintana is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at
the University of Delaware. Her published works include Home Girls
(1996) and an edited collection, Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping
American Literature (2003).
Raymond Rocco is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University
of California, Los Angeles. His published work appears in Latina/o Cultural Citizenship (1997), Citizenship Studies, The City: Urban Theory at the
End of the 20th Century (1998), and The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader
(2006).
David Román is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His books include Acts of Intervention (2006) and Performance in America (2005). He is coeditor of O Solo Homo with Holly
Hughes (1998).
Renato Rosaldo is Professor of Anthropology at NYU and a Lucie Stern
Professor. He published Ilongot Headhunting, 1883–1974: A Study in Society
and History (1985) and Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis
(1993). His coedited works include The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800:
Anthropology and History with George A. Collier and John D. Wirth (1982),
Anthropology/Creativity with Smadar Lavie and Kirin Narayan (1993), and
The Anthropology of Globalization with Jonathan Xavier Inda (2001).
Vicki Ruiz is Professor of History and Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at the
University of California, Irvine, and Chair of the History Department. An
elected fellow of the Society of American Historians, she is the author of
From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century America
(1998), Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization,
and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (1987), and the
coeditor of Unequal Sisters with Ellen DuBois (1999) and American
Dreaming, Global Realities with Donna R. Gabaccia (2006). With Virginia
Sánchez Korral, she coedited Latina Legacies (2005) and Latinas in the
United States: A Historical Encyclopedia (2006).
264 Contributors
José David Saldívar is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Dialects of Our America: Genealogy,
Cultural Critique and Literary History (1991) and Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997).
Sonia Saldívar-Hull is Professor of English and Executive Director of the
Women’s Studies Institute at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is
the author of Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (2000) and the introduction to the second edition of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1999).
Rosaura Sánchez is Professor of Literature at the University of California,
San Diego and the author of Telling Identities (1995), Chicana/o Discourse:
Sociohistorical Perspectives (1983/1994), and He Came in and Sat Down and
Other Stories (2000). Her coedited works include Conflicts of Interest: The
Letters of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton (2001), Who Would Have Thought
It? (1995), and The Squatter and the Don (1993).
Lisa Sánchez Gonzalez is Associate Professor of English and Institute of
Puerto Rican/Latino Studies. Her recent publications include “Nicholasa
Mohr” in Reading U.S. Latina Literature (2003) and Boricua Literature: A
Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (2001).
Chela Sandoval is Chair and Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies at
the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is author of The Methodology of the Oppressed (2000) and coeditor of The Chicano Studies
Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán, 1970–2000 with Chon Noriega, Eric Avila,
Karen Mary Dávalos, and Rafael Pérez-Torres (2001).
Michael Soldatenko is Chair and Professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. His published works include “Radicalism
in Higher Education: How Chicano Studies Joined the Curriculum”
(2001), and “Socrates, Curriculum and the Chicano/Chicana” (2006).
José Manuel Valenzuela Arce is a researcher in the Department of Cultural
Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. His publications include A La
Brava Ese (1988), El Color de las Sombras: Chicanos, Identidad y Racismo
(1998), and the edited collection, Entre la Magia y la Historia: Tradiciones,
Mitos y Leyendas de la Frontera (2000).
Contributors 265
Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez is coeditor of The Scholar as Activist with Carol Nagengast (2004) and Transnational Latina/o Communities: Politics, Processes,
and Cultures with Anna Sampaio (2002). He is author of Border Visions:
The Cultures of Mexicans of the Southwest United States (1999) and Rituals
of Marginality: Politics, Process, and Culture Change in Central Urban Mexico (1983).
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Chair
of Chicana/o Studies in The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and
Ethnicity at Stanford University. Her books include The Tradition of the
“Novela” in Spain from Pedro Mexía to Lope de Vega “Novelas a Marcia
Leonarda” (1991), Feminism and the Honor Plays of Lope de Vega (1994),
and The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga (2001). Her collaborative editions include Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (1997).
Index
Academic production, 66
Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Román), 59
Adams, Russell, 166
Additive model approach, 62
Advanced School of American Research,
185
Affirmative action, 149
African American feminism, 67
African Americans, 92, 137, 142, 149
African American studies, 12, 164–65. See
also Black studies
African studies, 208
Against Literature (Beverley), 179, 181
“Against Rasquache” (García, R.), 125, 128
Agency, 97
AIDS, 59, 60, 62, 129, 135
Alarcón, Norma, 23, 30, 39, 84, 115, 221
Alfaro, Luis, 61, 157
“Algunos usos de civilización y barbarie”
(Fernández Retamar), 85
Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster (Brimelow),
152
Almaguer, Tomás, 36, 47
Alta California, 89, 94–95, 225
Alternative (music), 54, 56, 57
Alternative discourse, reframing, 220–22
American Anthropologist (journal), 52
American studies, 59, 108, 207
Anarchism, 144–45
Anderson, Benedict, 224
“. . . And, Yes, the Earth Did Part”
(Chabram-Dernersesian), 126
Anglos and Mexicans, 96–97
Annual Review of Anthropology (journal),
116
Anthropology, 25, 46, 80–81, 108, 117, 118,
122, 161, 186–87; Chicano critique of, 18;
cultural studies and, 118–20; culture in,
175; feminist, 185; Romano critique of,
116; scholar’s position in, 58
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 26, 62, 65, 73–75, 85, 87,
110, 113–15, 127, 187, 189, 221, 229, 230–31,
233
Aparicio, Francis, 39, 197–99, 214
Arce, Elia, 157
Archeology, 123
Area studies, 20, 34, 108; creation of, 36;
cultural studies v., 52; ethnic studies
and, 172–73; Latina/o paradigm and, 84
Armendáriz, Alicia, 57
Arrizón, Alicia, 21–22, 46, 134, 136, 155–60,
213, 237
Art history, 108–9, 112
Artistic culturalism, 10
ASCO, 111, 126–28
Asian American cultural studies, 139, 140,
176, 212
Asian Americans, 92, 131, 137, 142, 177
Asian American studies, 177, 207
Asian Diaspora, 177
267
268 Index
Asian Pacific cultural studies, 142
Assimilation, 92, 152, 195
Authenticity, 110
Autobiography, 86, 152, 187, 189; Borderlands and, 230
Avalos, David, 110, 111
Aztlán and Viet Nam (Mariscal), 49
Bailey, David, 203
Baja California, 95, 161
Balce-Cortes, Nerisa, 176
Bambara, Toni Cade, 169
Bancroft, George, 18, 95
Banda music, 195
Barceló, Gertrudis, 100
Barnet, Miguel, 181
Barrio Boy, 128
Barthes, Roland, 26, 109
Bascara, Victor, 176
Bass, Fontella, 194
Beasely-Murray, Jon, 180
Behar, Ruth, 185–90
Beloved (Morrison), 35
Benjamin, Walter, 109, 174
Benmayor, Rina, 235
Bennet, Tony, 38
Bergmann, Emilie, 59
Beverly, John, 32, 90, 178–84, 215
Biblio-Politica, 103
Bildungsroman, 128
Birmingham School, 25–26, 30–31, 43, 70,
76, 101, 130, 133–34, 162, 175, 179, 191. See
also Center for Cultural Studies; Hall,
Stuart
Black America, 203–4
Black Atlantic, 204, 205
The Black Atlantic (Gilroy), 88
Black British, 16, 33, 88, 201, 203; cultural
studies of, 37–38, 45, 166, 204, 212; politics of, 140–41
Black British Cultural Studies, 204
Black feminism, 169–71, 234
Black Liverpool, 203–4
Black Noise (Rose), 199
Black Panthers, 168
Black studies, 102; Cultural studies and,
164–71
Bolton, Michael, 195
Bomba, 39
Bonfil, Guillermo, 162
Bonus, Enrique, 176
Border cultural studies, 211, 220, 227–31
Border feminism, 115, 163, 229–31
Borderland consciousness, 74
Borderlands (Anzaldúa), 23, 105, 114–15,
229–31
Borderlands, conceptualizations of, 73–74
Border Matters (Saldívar, J.), 35, 86–89,
227–28
“Borders Be Damned” (Quintana), 131
Border spaces, 155
Border studies, 161
Border thinking, 36
Border Visions (Vélez-Ibáñez), 41
The Boundaries of Blackness (Cohen), 63
Bracho, Ricardo, 61
Brady, Mary Pat, 29–30, 38–40, 81–85, 134,
136, 214, 231
A La Brava Ese (Valenzuela Arce), 160
Bricolage, 31
Bridges to Cuba (Behar), 188
Brimelow, Peter, 152
British cultural studies, 26, 139–40
British National Front, 54
The Bronze Screen (Fregoso), 57, 222–24
Brown, David Louis, 84
Brown, Jackie, 203
Broyles, Yolanda, 156–57
Burgos, Elisabeth, 181
Bustamante, Nao, 126, 157
Butler, Elliot, 102
Butler, Judith, 177
“By Lacan: From Literary to Cultural
Studies” (Beverley), 179
Index 269
Cacho, Lisa, 176
Calderón, Héctor, 61
“Calibán” (Fernández Retamar), 85
California: capitalism in, 89; xenophobia
in, 88
California Proposition 21, 49
California Proposition 187, 52, 56, 144, 151,
154, 227
California Proposition 227, 151
Camp, 125–26
Campomanes, Oscar, 176
“Can Cultural Studies Speak Spanish?”
(Mariscal), 31, 70
Cannibal and the Headhunters (band),
194
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak),
181
Capetillo, Luisa, 144–45
Capital, 87, 175, 208; globalization and, 78;
transnationalism and, 80
Capitalism, 87, 174, 176; difference and, 184;
geography and, 90; late, 84; monopoly,
89
Capote, Truman, 181
Carby, Hazel, 40, 165, 177
Carnalismo, 28
Casa de las Americas, 33
Castillo, Ana, 65
Castro, Fidel, 147
CCS. See Center for Cultural Studies
CDI. See Community Digital Initiative
Center for Cultural Studies (CCS), 86,
101
Center for Virtual Research, 104
Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 81
Césaire, Aimé, 26, 35
Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie, 1–13, 15, 23,
30, 39, 51, 57, 84, 86, 102, 126, 133–37, 159,
171–73, 202, 211–40
Chabrán, Richard, 16, 46–47, 101–4, 134, 135,
137
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 177
“Changing Chicano Narratives” (Rosaldo,
R.), 18
Charlesworth, Michael, 98
Chavoya, C. Ondine, 23–24, 47–48, 108–12,
134, 136
Cheng, John, 176
Chicana feminism, 22, 38, 40, 51, 57, 63, 65,
81–84, 108, 112–15, 121–22, 156, 234; border, 229–31; la conciencia de la mestiza
and, 73–76; cultural critique of, 61–62;
writings of, 67
Chicana/o cultural productions, 6
Chicana/o cultural studies, 107, 157; academic position of, 3, 11, 36, 52–53; AIDS
and, 62–63; applied practices of, 14; contexts of, 4–7; critical knowledge in, 7;
cultural studies and, 3, 5, 19, 37; culture
and, 3; disciplines contributing to, 10–11;
emergence of, 2; expression through, 4;
feminist, 40; forum on, 7–10; genealogies of, 2; identity and, 3; interdisciplinary contexts linked to, 2, 22–23; name
change of, 23; oppositionality in, 14; positions of, 4–7; public policy and, 38;
repositioning of, 11–12; representation
of, 11; social movements and, 6
The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader
(Chabram-Dernersesian), 23, 56
Chicana/o culture: AIDS impact on, 129;
dominant culture and, 15; film and,
222–25; music and, 54–57; nationalism
in, 57; paradigms of, 128; popular, 55;
transnational, 228
Chicana/o identity, 163
Chicana/o libraries, 103
Chicana/o studies, 16, 34, 108–10, 155; cultural studies and, 21, 42, 50, 117; empirical, 27–28, 77; ethnography and, 77–78,
102; feminist approach to, 27; history
and, 33; institutionalization of, 27, 46,
83; Marxism and, 42, 45; methodologies
incorporated by, 29; nationalism and,
270 Index
Chicana/o studies, (Continued)
27; pan-Latino movement and, 72; perspectivist approach to, 27; political nature of, 51; postcolonialism and, 34;
print culture of, 219–40; public policy
and, 38; race and, 50; sexuality in, 59;
social justice and, 44
The Chicana/o studies library at UC
Berkeley, 47
The Chicana/o Studies Reader, 196
Chicana/o Theater: Themes and Forms
(Huerta), 60
Chicanas/os, 142; California and, 88–89;
fantasy of, 106; identity and, 163; language and, 230–31; oppositionality and,
122; visual culture of, 110
Chicanas/os at the Crossroads, 28, 98
Chicano civil rights movement, 52
Chicano Database, 47
Chicano/Latinonet, 104
Chicano Movement, 2, 30, 31, 33, 48, 51, 57,
60, 73, 79, 101, 135, 221; feminism and,
98; film culture and, 223–25; nationalism in, 98, 102, 108, 126, 127, 159, 231
Chicano Periodical Index, 47
Chicano rock ‘n’ roll, 193–94
Chicano Thesaurus, 47
Cholismo, 160, 161
Cholos, 161
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 198
Chuh, Kandice, 176
Churchill, Ward, 142
Cinema, 128
Cisneros, Sandra, 18–19, 65, 112, 113, 115, 159,
187, 188
Citizenship, 62; cultural, 102, 111, 117; defining, 80, 236; Latina/o cultural studies
and, 235–40; multicultural societies
and, 78; politics of, 80; rights of, 151
Ciudad letrada, 32
Civil rights, 8, 52, 150–52, 154, 194–95; public policy paradigm of, 92
Class, 62, 141, 170; gendered cultures of, 215;
Gramsci and, 90; Marxism and, 20;
power dynamics of, 68; subaltern and,
93
Class struggle, 71
Clifford, James, 86, 110, 185
Clinton, Bill, 62
Coaticlue state, 35
Cochran Strikers’ Camp, 99
Cohen, Cathy, 63
Cold War, 36
Colonialism, 21, 33, 38, 116, 143, 146, 220;
history of, 123; internal, 36; language
and, 46
Colonization, 79, 225
El Color de las Sombras (Valenzuela Arce),
162
The Color of Privilege (Hurtado), 64, 66,
68, 234
The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute
to His White Mother (McBride), 153
Color, Sex, and Poetry (Hull), 169
Combahee Collective, 234
Communism, 184
Community Digital Initiative (CDI), 104
“La conciencia de la mestiza,” 73–76
Conflicts of Interest: the Letters of María
Amparo Ruiz de Burton (Sánchez, R.
and Pita), 95
Conjunto, 18, 87–88
“Con Safos: Can Cultural Studies Read the
Writing on the Wall?” (Lipsitz), 196
Coronado, Raul, 108, 221
Corporatism, 73
Cortinas, Jorge, 61
Covarrubias, Theresa, 57
Creef, Elena Tajima, 139
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 202
Crítica (journal), 125
Critical gender studies, 65
Critical interventions, 12
Critical literacy, 27
Index 271
Critical multiculture, 5
Critical race theory, 138
Critical reflexivity, 5
Criticism in the Borderlands (Saldívar, J.
and Calderón), 61, 63
Criticism, politics of, 9
Crusada del Ideal, 145
Cruz, Nilo, 61
Cuba, 32–33, 87, 147, 187–88
Cuban Marxism, 86
Cuban Revolution, 33
Cuentos (Moraga), 82
Cultural citizenship, 102, 111, 117
Cultural construction, 119
Cultural criticism, 9
Cultural Critique (Lipsitz), 194
Cultural democracy, 120
Cultural geography, 111
Cultural identity, 130
Cultural industries, 18
Cultural innovation, 56
Cultural nationalism, identity and, 177
Cultural politics, 9, 106, 126, 133, 135; Telling
Identities and, 226
Cultural productions, 58
Cultural studies, 46, 109, 110, 138, 155; American, 12; Americanization of, 142; analysis opened with, 134; anthropology and,
118–20; area studies v., 52; Asian American, 139, 140, 176, 212; Asian Pacific, 142;
Black British, 37–38, 45, 166, 204, 212;
Black studies and, 164–71; border, 211,
220, 227–28; British, 26, 139–40; Chicana
feminist, 40; Chicana/o cultural studies
and, 3, 5, 37, 43, 46, 50; Chicana/o studies and, 42, 117; critical vision and, 27;
cross-cultural representations within,
211; cultural change and, 130; decolonization and, 24; disciplines contributing to, 10–11; dynamic nature of, 16, 19,
58, 133; emergence of, 26, 70, 178–79,
205–7, 210; empirical and, 200; ethnic
studies and, 38–39, 41, 143, 172; ethnography and, 102–3; feminist, 231–35; film,
220; geography and, 133; hegemony of,
38; hemispheric affiliations and, 35; historical context and, 20; historicized, 49;
institutionalization of, 70, 130, 178–80,
191, 208; interdisciplinary foundation
of, 48; investigations in, 30; issues overlapping in, 171; knowledge formation
and, 75; Latina/o, 157, 235–40; latinization of, 86; literary criticism and, 27;
Marxism and, 17, 215; networking in,
173; political action and, 20, 51, 58, 71;
politics around, 209–10; popular culture and, 139–40; postcolonialism and,
104; practice of, 209; process of, 54; as
public engagement, 9; race and, 21, 41;
remapping of, 85, 89; repositioning of,
8, 11–12; self-reflection and, 215; social
historical, 220; social reality seen
through, 19–20; social relations and, 55;
sociology and, 201; space and, 25; subaltern studies and, 183; subcategories of,
220; traditional disciplines transformed
by, 25; as white theoretical construction,
42, 45; women’s studies and, 41
Cultural Studies (journal), 15, 29, 39, 57,
102, 106, 129, 131, 148, 172, 208, 220–22,
225
“Cultural Studies, Difference, and the
Non-Unitary Subject” (Yarbro-Bejarano), 105
“Cultural Theory in the Borderlands”
(Saldívar, J.), 45
Culture: borderlands and, 230; class, 187;
commodification of, 215; cyber-, 8, 215;
ethnic, 187; family and, 231; feminism
and, 233; high, 38, 175; homogenization
of, 235–36; hybrid, 238; identity constructed through, 196; immigration
and, 216; meanings of, 174–75; as mediation, 174; nature of, 117–18, 129–30;
272 Index
Culture (Continued)
politics and, 195; popular, 38, 101, 175,
193–94, 197; power and, 76; public policy and, 215; sociology and, 200
Culture and Truth (Rosaldo, R.), 18, 115, 117,
118
Culture, Media, Language (Center for Cultural Studies), 101
Cyberculture, 8, 215
Dalton, Roque, 181
Dangerous Crossroads (Lipsitz), 192
Darder, Antonia, 221, 236–37
The Darker Side of the Renaissance
(Mignolo), 36
Dávila, Arlene, 238
Davis, Angela, 110, 168, 170
The Decolonial Imaginary (Pérez, E.), 121,
124
Decolonization, 24, 25, 34–35, 74, 136
Deep structures (tradiciones profundas),
162
de la Peña, Terri, 82–83
Delgado, Fernando, 86, 151
Delgado, Richard, 149
Democracy, 78; cultural, 120; educational,
117; racial, 194
Denning, Michael, 191
Descriptive writings, 67
Determinism, 71
Deterritorialization, 230
Deukmejian, George, 88
The Dialectics of Our America (Saldívar, J.),
34, 85
Diaspora, 88, 111, 131, 141, 144, 145, 147, 163;
Asian, 177
Diawara, Manthia, 204, 208
Díaz, Paul Timothy, 61
Difference, cultural politics of, 106
Differences (journal), 62
Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire), 26
Disidentifications (Muñoz), 108
Dominant, 17, 26
Domination, 116, 117
Du Bois, W. E. B., 191, 203
Dueña, 100–101
East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio, 96
Economic justice, 64
Economy of knowledge, 39
Educational democracy, 117
Elenes, Alejandra, 42, 129–30, 134–35
Elitism, 31
El Vez, 56, 88
Emergent, 17
The Empire Strikes Back (film), 23
Empire Zinc Mining Company strike, 99
Empirical method, 16–17, 200; Chicana/o
studies using, 27–28, 77; gender studies
and, 65; as male-centric construct, 28
Engagement, zones of, 219
Eng, David, 139, 176
¿Entiendes?: Queer Readings, Hispanic
Writings (Bergmann and Smith, P.),
59–60
Epistemic privilege, 87
Equality, 120
Essentialism, 42, 160
Esteves, Sandra María, 157
Ethics, 25
Ethnic affinities, 72
Ethnic cleansing, 217
The Ethnic Eye (Chavoya), 110
Ethnicity, 207
Ethnic studies, 34, 51, 64, 138, 171, 192, 207,
217; area studies and, 172–73; critical
race theory and, 149; cultural studies
and, 38–39, 41, 143, 172; development of,
42; gender and, 158; identity politics
and, 213; Marxism and, 45; safeguarding of, 53; sexuality and, 59, 158
Ethnography, 185, 187, 210; Chicana/o studies and, 77–78, 102; cultural studies and,
102–3; descriptions from, 78–79; experi-
Index 273
mental, 41; Puerto Ricans and, 102; vulnerable, 189
Eurocentrism, 79, 85, 163, 211
Exclusion, 28
La familia, 28, 114, 231
Family: foregrounds of, 106; forms of, 28;
as normative space, 28
Fascism, 88
Faulkner, William, 68
Federación Libre de Trabajadores, 145
Félix, María, 43
Female subordination, 217
Feminism, 28, 37, 46, 130, 155, 161, 164, 169,
171, 216–17; African American, 67; AIDS
and, 63; Anthropology and, 185; Black,
169–71, 234; border, 115, 163, 229–31;
Chicana, 22, 38, 40, 51, 57, 61–63, 65, 67,
73–76, 81–84, 108, 112–15, 121–22, 156,
229–31, 234; Chicana/o studies and, 27;
cultural studies and, 231–35; culture
and, 233; film culture and, 224; gender
consciousness and, 100; identity politics and, 213; mestiza, 229; quantitative
data and, 66; salsa and, 198–99; social
justice and, 100; third space, 124; Third
World, 63, 232, 234; transfrontera, 112;
U.S. Third World, 20–21, 63, 74, 224;
white, 65–66; women of color, 231–35;
writings of, 67
Feminist Theory and Human Nature (Jaggar), 67
Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 33, 34, 85
Film cultural studies, 220
“The Flapper and the Chaperone” (Ruiz,
V.), 99
Flores, Juan, 237
Flores, William, 235
Formal visual analysis, 108
Foucault, Michel, 116, 124
Franco, Jean, 32, 127
Frankfurt School, 128
Fregoso, Rosa Linda, 1, 15, 19–21, 23, 30,
50–51, 57, 86, 102, 134–35, 137, 171–73, 177,
191, 202, 209, 219–24, 234, 240
Freire, Paulo (Pablo Friere), 49, 76, 102
From Bomba to Hip Hop (Flores, J.), 237
From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women
in Twentieth Century America (Ruiz,
V.), 97–99
From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of
the Black Community (Rawick), 192
Fundamentalism, 135
Fusco, Coco, 112, 221
Galarza, Ernesto, 18–19
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, 12
García Canclini, Nestor, 163
García, Ignacio, 28, 98
García, Ramón, 1, 42–43, 124–29, 134,
136–37
Garvey, Marcus, 203
Gates, Skip, 165
Gay and lesbian studies, 47–48, 155
Gays, 28
Gay writings, 22, 61
Gender, 14, 30, 40, 50, 62, 106, 140–41, 156,
217; borderlands and, 230; categorization of, 216; consciousness of, 100; Ethnic studies and, 158; film culture and,
223; history and, 123; power dynamics
of, 68
Gender studies, 138, 144; empirical data
and, 65
Geography, 80, 84; capitalism and, 90; categorization of, 216; critical, 82; cultural,
111; cultural studies and, 133
Gilroy, Paul, 35, 40, 45, 70, 88, 191, 203, 204
“The Girl in the Cast” (Behar), 189
Giving Up the Ghost (Moraga), 158
Globalization, 71, 78–79, 87, 135, 141, 172,
183, 189–90, 235; capital and, 78; dissident, 75; Latino identity and, 238; postmodern, 75; race and, 208
274 Index
Gómez, Juan, 21, 123
Gómez, Marga, 158
Gomez-Peña, Guillermo, 197
Gonzalez-Chabram, Angie, 102
González, Deena, 100, 221
González, Rita, 127
Gopinath, Gayatri, 176
Gordon, Deborah, 185, 186
Gramsci, Antonio, 30, 31, 49, 76, 81, 90,
93–94, 124, 162, 179–80
Grassroots movements, 8–9
Gray, Herman, 200–210, 213, 215–17
“The Greasers” (Anzaldúa), 114
El Grito, 116
Grossberg, Lawrence, 140, 171–74, 212
Guerra, Angela, 153
Guevara, Ché, 89
Guha, Ranajit, 90, 94, 182–83, 184
Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl, 221
Gutiérrez, Ramón, 100
Habell-Pallán, Michelle, 15, 37–38, 39, 111,
133
Halberstam, Judith, 177
Hall, Stuart, 2, 5, 11–12, 16, 20, 23–26, 30, 38,
43, 45, 50–51, 76, 81, 130, 134, 140–41, 165,
168, 171, 174–75, 191, 201–3, 206, 209–10,
212, 221, 227; on identity, 167
Hamlin, Rosie, 194
Harlem Renaissance, 169–70
Harlow, Barbara, 112
Harvard Law Review, 154
Health care, 62
Hebdige, Dick, 140, 203
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 123
Hegelianism, 90
Hegemony, 30, 162, 191; language and, 31,
134; political, 184; subaltern v., 94; U.S.,
85
Heisley, Michael, 101
Hemingway, Ernest, 68
Hemispheric affiliations, 35
Hernández, E. D., 47
Herrera-Sobek, María, 221
Heterosexuality, 83, 106, 126–27
High culture, 38, 175
Hinojosa, Rolando, 85
Hispanic Cultures in the United States, 102
Hispanic identity, 71
Hispanic studies, 72
Historical materialism, 44
History, 25, 69–70, 122, 161; art, 108–9, 112;
colonialist, 123; gendering of, 123; labor,
191–92; literary, 146
HIV, 62–63, 148
Hock, Louis, 110
Hoggart, Richard, 162, 210
Homosexuality, 63
Hong, Grace Kyungwon, 176
hooks, bell, 202–3
Household life histories, 78–79
The House on Mango Street (Cisneros),
113
The House that Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (Lubiano), 167, 170
How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A
White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity
(Johnson, Kevin), 151
Ho, Wendy, 139
Huerta, Jorge, 59–60
Hull, Gloria, 169
Human rights, 8, 196
Hunger of Memory (Rodríguez, R.), 181–82,
184
The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea
(Moraga), 159
Hurston, Zora Neale, 185, 191
Hurtado, Aída, 44–45, 63–69, 134–35, 219,
234
Hybrid cultures, 238
Hybrid identity, 102, 153
Hybridity, 14, 16, 38
Hybridization, 14
Hyun, Laura, 176
Index 275
I Am Joaquín (film), 223
Ice Cube, 195
Identity, 42; Chicana/o, 163; la concienca
de la mestiza and, 76; cultural, 130;
cultural construction of, 196; cultural
nationalism and, 177; definitions of,
130; formation of, 28, 156, 221; globalization and, 238; Hall on, 167; Hispanic, 71; hybrid, 102, 153; Latina, 156;
Latina/o cultural studies and, 235–40;
lived experience and, 29; politicized
modes of, 26; race and, 107; sexuality
and, 65, 107
Identity politics, 143, 167, 179, 207, 236;
Ethnic studies and, 213; feminism and,
213
Iglesias, Lisa, 149
Iglesias, Santiago, 145
Illegal alien, 47
Immigrant Acts (Lowe), 131, 142, 175–77, 208
Immigrant communities, 59
Immigrant workers, 47, 88–89
Immigration, 40, 131, 135, 151, 195; cultural
homogenization and, 236; culture and,
216; law and, 149, 150, 152; public policy
paradigm of, 92
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,
177
Immigration and Naturalization Service
(INS), 111, 151
Imperialism, 25; critiques of, 33; knowledge
and, 21–22; Latin America and, 91;
space and, 84
“Imperialist Nostalgia” (Rosaldo, R.), 118
INS. See Immigration and Naturalization
Service
Institutionalization: of chicana/o studies,
27, 46, 83; of cultural studies, 70, 130,
178–80, 191, 208
Internal colonialism, 36
Intertextuality, 217–18
Irony, 126–27
“Is Cultural Studies Inflated?” (Gray), 205
“I Throw Punches for My Race, but I
Don’t Want to be a Man” (ChabramDernersesian), 159
Jaggar, Alison, 67
Jameson, Fredric, 84, 184
Jazz, 200
Johannes, Fabian, 186
Johnson, Ken, 153
Johnson, Kevin, 149–55, 214
Jones, Kellie, 112
Julien, Isaac, 112, 140, 203, 204, 206
Kanellos, Nicolas, 59
Kang, Laura, 139
Kang, Yi, 176
Kauanui, J. Kehaulani, 176
Kelley, Robin D. G., 177
Kim, Elaine, 177
King, Albert, 194
Klor de Alva, Jorge, 32
Knowledge: economy of, 39; empiricism
and, 27; formation of, 37, 75; imperialism of, 21–22; production of, 39
KROQ, 54
Labor migrations, 78
La chicana, 28
Ladies of LULAC, 100
Land Act, 95
Language: Chicanas/os and, 230–31; colonialism and, 46; hegemony and, 31, 134;
racialization of, 68
The Last Generation (Moraga), 72, 107–8
Latina identity, 156
Latina in the Land of Hollywood: And
Other Essays in Media Culture (Valdiva), 237
Latina/o critical race theory, 149–51
Latina/o cultural studies, 157; citizenship
and, 235–40; identity and, 235–40
276 Index
Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage
(Arrizón), 155
Latinas on Stage: Practice and Theory
(Manzor and Arrizón), 156
Latinas/os, 5; category meaning of, 84
Latinas Performance: Traversing the Stage
(Arrizón), 237
Latino Cultural Citizenship, 102, 235
Latino studies, 72
The Latino Studies Reader (Darder and
Torres, R.), 236
de Lauretis, Teresa, 110
Law: immigration and, 149, 150, 152; race
and, 149
Learning to Labor (Willis), 77
Lee, Benjamin, 137
Legacy of Conquest (Limerick), 97
Lesbians, 28, 62; Chicana, 82–83; sexuality
and, 107; writings of, 22
Liberation Theology, 183
A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the
Culture of Opposition (Lipsitz), 192
Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a
White Boy Who Discovered He Was
Black (Williams, G.), 153, 154
Limerick, Patricia, 97
Linguistic terrorism, 73
Lipsitz, George, 13, 40, 177, 190–97, 213, 216
Listening to Salsa (Aparicio), 197
Literary criticism, 80–81, 122; cultural studies and, 27; Marxism and, 20, 76
Literary history, 146
Literary studies, 113, 120
Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions (Beverley and Zimmerman), 180
Lived experience, identity and, 29
Living Chicana Theory, 73
Lloyd, David, 177
Lomas Garza, Carmen, 35
Lo Mexicano, 21
López Tijerina, Reies, 48
Lorde, Audre, 26
Lott, Tommy, 202
Loving in the War Years (Moraga), 23, 105,
112–13
Lowe, Lisa, 131, 139, 141, 142, 174–77, 208, 215
Lubiano, Wahneema, 6, 164–71, 213–14,
216–17
Lugones, Maria, 102
Macdonaldization, 91
Maciel, David, 221
Mailer, Norman, 181
Making Face, Making Soul (Anzaldúa), 189,
231–35
The Making of Texas, 97
Male heroism, 43
La Malinche Tortilla Factory, 99
Manalansan, Martin, 176
Manzor, Lillian, 156
“Mapping Latinidad: Spanish Language
and Culture in the Spanish TV Battlefront” (Dávila), 238
“Mapping the Interstices between AfroAmerican Discourse and Cultural
Studies: A Prolegomenon” (Lubiano),
164
March on Washington for Jobs and Justice,
196
Marcus, Clifford, 185
Marcuse, Herbert, 168
Marginality, 155
Marginalization, 106; double, 124; examining, 125
Margins (de la Peña), 82–83
Mariscal, George, 1, 30–33, 48–50, 69–73,
134–36
Márquez, García, 85
Martí, José, 34, 85, 89
Martín Babero, Jesús, 163
Marxism, 44, 71, 90, 108, 123, 125, 145, 162,
168–69, 179; British, 31; Chicana/o studies and, 42, 45; contradiction studied
Index 277
in, 49; Cuban, 86; cultural studies and,
17, 215; culture in, 174; Ethnic studies
and, 45; Latin American, 33; literary
criticism and, 20, 76; subaltern studies
and, 93; Western origin of, 142
Marxism and Literature (Williams, R.), 76,
101
Marxism and Native Americans
(Churchill), 142
Marx, Karl, 26, 87, 123, 124
Masculinity, 69
Mayo (mecha), 109, 110
McBride, James, 153
McLaren, Malcolm, 109
McRobbie, Angela, 20, 191
Mecha, 108–10
Menchú, Rigoberta, 181
Mendiola, Jim, 56–57
Mercado, Manuel, 89
Mercer, Kobena, 45, 140, 201, 203–4, 206
Mestizaje, 14, 29, 135, 224, 230
Mestiza/o, 73, 94, 182, 229
Metacriticism, 16
Methodology of the Oppressed (Sandoval),
75
Mexicana Encounters (Fregoso), 240
The Midnighters (band), 194
Mignolo, Walter, 33, 36, 90
Migrant Souls, 35
Milton, Little, 194
MLA. See Modern Language Association
Modernism, 43, 194
Modernity, 58
Modern Language Association (MLA), 36,
52, 173, 212
Modern Tragedy (Williams, R.), 58
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 87
Molina, Gloria, 150
Monopoly capitalism, 89
Monsiváis, Carlos, 43, 127, 128, 163
El Monte, 100
Montoya, Malaquías, 220
Montoya, Margaret, 149
Moraga, Cherríe, 23, 47–48, 60, 62, 72, 82,
87, 105, 107, 113, 158, 159
Moral/ethical scholarship, 25
Moran, Rachel, 92
Morely, David, 201
Morieras, Alberto, 90
Morrison, Toni, 35, 68
The Moths (Viramontes), 82, 114
Multiculturalism, 87, 184, 186, 217, 237
Multiracialism, 155
Muñoz, José, 36, 108
Music, 18, 87–88, 191; Chicana/o culture
and, 54–57; liberatory potential of, 147;
pop, 56. See also specific genres
Mutualistas, 99
NACCS. See National Association for Chicana/o Studies
Nahuatl, 31
Nakayama, Thomas, 139
Narrative: ethnic studies and, 38–39; social
science and, 40
National Association for Chicana/o Studies (NACCS), 23–24, 32, 47–48, 71, 107,
108
National Communication Association, 140
Nationalism, 27, 33, 43, 57, 83, 88, 188, 231;
Chicana/o, 98, 102, 108, 126, 127, 159; patriarchal, 159
National popular, 180
Nation, state and, 79
Navajo, 31
Nava, Mike, 140
Necessary Theater: Six Plays About the Chicano Experience (Huerta), 60
Negritude movement, 205
“Negro Bembón” (Rivera, I.), 147
Negrón-Muntaner, Frances, 238
Nelson, Cary, 12
Neoliberalism, 71, 160, 184
Neonativism, 135
278 Index
New left, 171
New wave (music), 54–55, 109
“The New Western History,” 97
Nicaraguan Revolution, 179
Nkrumah, Kwame, 204, 205
Noda, Barbara, 26
No-movies, 128
Norte, Marisela, 158
Nuestra América, 32, 34
“Nuestra América” (Martí), 34, 85
“Nuestra América y Occidente” (Fernández Retamar), 85
Objective scholarship, 25
Occidentalism, 85
Okihiro, Gary, 177
Oliver, Melvin, 202
Omi, Michael, 177
“On Ethnographic Work among Minority
Groups” (Paredes), 116
Ono, Kent, 139–44, 212, 213, 214
Oppositional consciousness, 75
Oppositionality, 122
Ortiz y Pino, Concha, 99
Ortner, Sherry, 185
“Our Asia” (Spivak), 34
Pacific Electric Railway strike, 99
Palacios, Mónica, 157, 158
Palumbolin, David, 139
Pardo, Mary, 102
Paredes, Américo, 18–19, 85, 116, 191, 196,
214
Patton, Cindy, 63
Paz, Octavio, 123
Peek, Billy, 194
Peña, Devon, 221
Pérez, Emma, 40, 107, 121–24, 135, 136, 216,
221
Pérez, Laura, 84
Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 14, 38, 134
Performance studies, 46
Perspectivism, 27
Photo-ethnography, 8
“Pickets, Baskets, and Ballots” (Ruiz, V.), 99
Pico, Pio, 95
Pire, Felix, 61
Pita, Beatrice, 89–90, 93–96, 125, 134–36
Playing in the Dark (Morrison), 68
Plena, 39
Pocho, 128
Political correctness, 38, 155
Political economy, 17, 77
Political hegemony, 184
Political science, 25, 76, 80–81
Political voice, 27
Politics: Black British, 140–41; cultural, 9,
106, 126, 133, 135, 226; cultural studies
and, 209–10; culture and, 195; identity,
143, 167, 179, 207, 213, 236
Politics of difference, cultural, 106, 126
Pop music, 56
Popular culture, 38, 162, 175, 193–94, 197;
appropriation of, 101; Chicano, 55,
125–28; cultural studies and, 139–40;
Mexican, 126–28; sexuality and, 125–26;
television and, 202
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
(Lipsitz), 192
Postcolonialism, 33, 85, 104, 121, 137, 173,
188, 212; Chicana/o studies and, 34; film
culture and, 224; hemispheric affiliations and, 35; subaltern and, 90
Postmodern Geographies (Soja), 82
Postmodernism, 188, 194; globalization
and, 75; mass media and, 228; space
and, 84
Post-Movement film, 51
Postpositivist realism, 87
Poststructuralism, 46, 82, 130; autobiography and, 86; film culture and, 224; oppositional forms of, 179
Pratt, Mary Louise, 185
Presley, Elvis, 56
Index 279
Pretty Vacant (film), 56–57
Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 90
Progressive movements, conservative
backlash against, 8
Propaganda (band), 109
Public charge exclusion, 149
Public policy: Chicana/o studies and, 38;
civil rights paradigm of, 92; culture
and, 215; immigration paradigm of, 92
Public space, 111
Puerto Rican studies, 34
Punk, 54, 57, 109
Quantitative measurement, 40; feminism
and, 66
Queer studies, 44, 59, 61, 106. See also Gay
and lesbian studies
Quintana, Alvina, 15–16, 130–32, 134–37
Rabinow, Paul, 185
Race, 21, 30, 40, 41, 62, 140, 170, 207; borderlands and, 230; categorization of,
216; context and, 131; Ethnic studies
and, 158; globalization and, 208; identity and, 107; language and, 68; law and,
149; power dynamics of, 68
Race studies, 41, 138, 144
Race theory, 50; critical, 149, 167, 171, 201;
Latina/o critical, 149–51
Racial democracy, 194
Racial justice, 64
Racial memory, 72
Racism, 31, 143, 160, 170, 217; institutional, 70
Radway, Janice, 191, 199
Rainbow at Midnight (Lipsitz), 192
Rampersad, Arnold, 165
Randolph, A. Philip, 196
Rap, 18
Rasquache, 73, 75–76, 125–26, 128, 148
Rasquachismo, 21
Rawick, George, 192–93
Reading the Romance (Radway), 199
Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping
American Literature (Quintana), 132
Reagan, Ronald, 88, 201
Reception, 120
Recovering the Hispanic Literary Tradition,
144
Red-baiting, 168
Reddy, Chandan, 176
Religion, 83
Remapping American Cultural Studies
(Saldívar, J.), 85
Residual, 17
Rhythm and blues, 191, 209
Richardson, Bill, 154
Riggs, Marlon, 201
Rights-claims, 80
Rio Bravo, 32
Rivera, Ismael, 147
Rivera, Tomás, 85, 182
Robeson, Paul, 203
Rocco, Raymond, 22, 76–81, 134, 135, 136
The Rodrigo Chronicles: Conversations
about America, 149
Rodríguez, Ileana, 90
Rodríguez, Jesusa, 127
Rodríguez, Richard, 97, 181–84
Roediger, David, 167
Rogers, Ginger, 99
Román, David, 6, 16, 41, 58–63, 133–36, 221
Romano, Octavio, 116, 118
Rony, Fatimah Robtug, 139
Rosaldo, Michele, 185, 219
Rosaldo, Renato, 18–19, 47, 52–53, 86,
115–21, 134–36, 221
Rose, Tricia, 177, 199
Ruiz de Burton, Maria Amparo, 84, 89,
95–96
Ruiz, Vicki, 96–101, 134–36
Said, Edward, 36, 178, 215
Saldívar-Hull, Sonia, 39, 84, 112–15, 134–35,
214, 221
280 Index
Saldívar, José David, 33–36, 43, 45, 61, 82,
85–92, 134–37, 177, 197, 217, 221, 227–28
Saldívar, Ramón, 177
Salsa, 39, 146–48, 197–99, 209
Sampaio, Anna, 221
Sánchez, Elba, 65
Sánchez González, Lisa, 144–48, 214, 216
Sánchez, Rosaura, 17–18, 84, 89–90, 93–96,
125, 134–36, 177, 221, 223, 225–26
Sandinistas, 182
Sandoval, Chela, 23–26, 73–76, 134–37, 159,
214, 221, 232
Sarlo, Beatriz, 163
Scholarship: objective v. moral/ethical, 25;
social action and, 63–64
Sedgwick, Eve, 39
Selena, 121
Self-consciousness, 76
Self-criticism, 43
Self-examination, 26
Self-reflection, cultural studies and, 215
Serrano, Irma, 43
Sexism, 101
The Sex Pistols (band), 57, 109
Sexuality, 14, 30, 40–41, 50, 59, 62, 68, 82,
106–8, 113, 119, 129, 136, 140–41, 156;
AIDS and, 60; borderlands and, 230;
categorization of, 216; Ethnic studies
and, 158; film culture and, 223; identity
and, 65, 107; lesbian, 107; popular culture and, 125–26
Sexual orientation, 113
Shah, Nayan, 176
Shakespeare, William, 19
Shange, Ntozake, 85
Shifting Borders (Sloop and Ono), 144
Shimakawa, Karen, 139, 176
The Sidewalks of St. Louis (Lipsitz), 192
“Silences: ‘Hispanics,’ AIDS, and Sexual
Practices” (Román), 63
Sisco, Elizabeth, 110
Sitio y lengua (site and discourse), 122
Ska (music), 54–55
Slavery, 193
Sloop, John, 144
Smith, Neil, 84
Smith, Paul Julian, 59
Smith, Val, 202
Social action, scholarship and, 63–64
Social analysis, 62, 118, 134, 135
Social construction, 119, 229
Social description, 120
Social historical cultural studies, 220
Social inquiry, 54
Socialism, 71, 184
Social justice, 44, 69, 117, 120, 154, 221; feminism and, 100
Social networks, 78
Social psychology, 63
Social relations, 55
Social restructuring, 79–80
Social science, 40
Sociology, 25, 108, 122, 161; cultural studies
and, 201; culture and, 200
Soja, Edward, 82
Soldatenko, Mara, 102
Soldatenko, Mike, 27–29, 51–52, 134–35
Solidarity of difference, 221
Sommer, Doris, 32
Space: border, 155; cultural studies and, 25;
family, 28; for peripheralized, 28–29;
political voice and, 27; public, 111
Spain, 32
Spivak, Gayatri, 34, 39, 90, 177–79, 181
Spoken word, 55
Springsteen, Bruce, 65
The Squatter and the Don (Ruiz de Burton), 89, 93
State, nation and, 79
Steinberg, Stephen, 167
Storey, John, 130
Structuralism, 97
Subalternity and Representation: Arguments
in Cultural Theory (Beverley), 184
Index 281
Subaltern Latin American Studies group,
105, 182
Subaltern position, 87, 89–90, 162, 182; categories of, 90; class and, 93; cultural
production and, 93; hegemony v., 94;
postcolonialism and, 90; representational space and, 226; voice of, 181
Subaltern studies, 34, 87, 93–94, 137–38;
cultural studies and, 183; Latin American, 90–91, 105
Subaltern Studies Group, 178
Subjectivity, 42
“Subjects in History: Making Diasporic
Identities” (Hall), 171
Tafolla, Carmen, 158
Taylor, Clyde, 202
Teatro Campesino, 60
El Teatro Campesino, 156, 157
Teatro Viva (Live Theater/Theater Life),
59–60
“Teatro Viva: Latino performance and Politics of AIDS in Los Angeles” (Román),
59–60, 63
Telemundo, 238
Telenovelas, 112, 178
Teleology, 71
Television, 200–202, 210, 238–39
Televisual analysis, 120
Telling Identities (Sánchez, R.), 17, 89,
225–27
Testimonios, 8, 17, 49, 84, 181, 188, 227; as
mediation, 182
Text: as commodity, 18; as social/political
product, 18
Thatcherism, 88
Thatcher, Margaret, 88
Theater and performance studies, 60, 155
Theatre Journal, 160
Theoretical apartheid, 75
“Theorizing the Frustration” (Valdiva),
238
There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: Race
and Politics in the Nation (Gilroy), 88
Third space feminism, 124
Third World feminism, 63, 232, 234. See
also U.S. Third World Feminism
This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and
Anzaldúa), 6, 23, 26, 29, 61, 81, 105, 107,
112–13, 169, 186, 217, 232, 234
Thompson, E. P., 116, 162, 210
Los Tigres del Norte, 87–88
Time and the Other (Johannes), 186
Time Passages (Lipsitz), 192–94
Torres, Jesusita, 98, 101
Torres, Pasqauala, 98
Torres, Rodolfo, 236–37
Tradiciones profundas (deep structures),
162
Transfrontera feminism, 112
Translated Woman (Behar), 187, 190
Transnationalism, 37, 78, 141, 216, 239; capital and, 80
Treaty of Westphalia, 79
Treichler, Paula, 63
True Story, 101
Turner, Ike, 194
Two-Tone, 54
Undocumented immigrants, 227
Undocumented labor, 110–11
Unionization, 99, 195
Univisión, 238–39
U.S. hegemony, 85
U.S. Third World Feminism, 20–21, 63, 74,
224
Utopian impulse, 107
Valdés, Frank, 149
Valdez, Luis, 157
Valdiva, Angharad, 237–38
Valens, Richie, 194
Valenzuela Arce, José Manuel, 160–64, 211,
215
282 Index
Valenzuela, Tony, 61
Vega, Isela, 43
Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos, 41, 135, 137
Vernet, Madeline, 145
Viramontes, Helena, 82, 113, 114
Virno, Paulo, 183
Virtual spaces, 103–4
Visual analysis, formal, 108
Voicing Feminisms: Young Chicanas Speak
out on Sexuality and Identity (Hurtado), 65
The Vulnerable Observer (Behar), 188–89
War for positions, 30, 81
Watching Race: Television and the Struggle
for Blackness (Gray), 201
Waters, Maxine, 62
West, Cornel, 126, 202–3
What I Came Here to Say (Williams, R.),
101
White feminism, 65–66
White, Hayden, 110
White, Richard, 23
“Whose Cultural Studies?” (Rosaldo, R.),
52–53, 118–19
Who Would Have Thought It? (Ruiz de
Burton), 93
Williams, Greg, 153, 154
Williams, Raymond, 7, 17, 20, 49, 58, 76, 81,
88, 101, 116, 140, 162, 174
Willis, Paul, 77, 203
Wilson, Pete, 88, 154
Winant, Howey, 167
With His Pistol in His Hand (Paredes), 196,
214
Women Hollering Creek (Cisneros), 159
Women of color feminism, 231–35
Women of Color Research Cluster, 57
Women, Race, and Class (Davis), 170
Women’s movement, 112
Women’s rights, 8
Women’s studies, 15, 34, 51, 59, 64, 130, 185;
cultural studies and, 41; development
of, 42; HIV and, 63
Women Writing Culture (Behar and Gordon), 185–86
Wood, Meiskins, 93, 236
Writing on Cherríe Moraga (Yarbro-Bejarano), 107
Xenophobia, 88, 110
Yarborough, Richard, 202
Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 22–23, 41, 47–48,
59–60, 104–8, 136, 137, 221, 229
“Ya Soy Mujer” (Saldívar-Hull), 112
Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás, 29
Yúdice, George, 172
Zapata, Emiliano, 121
Zimmerman, Marc, 180
Zoot Suit (film), 223

Angie Chabram-Dernersesian

Transcription

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