By RC Davis-Undiano
During the mid-1960s and the early Chicano Movement, Mexican Americans suffered under racial discrimination and were exploited as cheap labor. Lacking a well-developed analysis and social critique for their American lives, they faced social marginalization, had a weak claim on civil liberties, and had no clear path forward toward economic success. Chicano leaders asked what could be done to remedy these problems, and the Mexican-American community responded with six highly-creative initiatives. They focused on (1) mestizo (hybrid) identity in the history of the Americas, (2) ideas about indigenous tied to land, (3) contrasting European and Mesoamerican views of the human body, (4) a unique approach to popular culture, (5) the rise of a voice that represents the Mexican American community in Chicano literature, and (6) the development of Chicano and Latino studies in higher education. It is this Mexican-American journey of creativity and the reframing of traditional values in response to adversity that I call mestizos “coming home.”
I call for Mexican Americans to complete what they began in the 1960s, to come home by consolidating their gains in American culture and society. With each area of their achievement, I contend that Mexican Americans “come home” most meaningfully by embracing their indigenous past in the Americas, the six areas in which they have changed their culture since the 1960s, and the social ills that still plague them. Never intending merely to “fit in,” Mexican Americans wanted to find a just and sustainable community in the U.S. They wanted American culture’s traditional promise of a better life--what everyone else wants. With such goals that are easy to set but never easy to achieve, they met adversity head on with unprecedented cultural creativity.
This development puts on display how Mexican Americans are changing themselves, their culture, and their country as they become full-participation U.S. citizens. They “come home” when they can act as though they are home as Americans, reconfiguring their culture, contributing to the community and the economy, and getting acknowledged as people of consequence. To gain such acceptance, especially self-acceptance, they have refused to disappear anonymously into the U.S. melting pot, in the process giving up “everything” that is distinctly theirs. Some of their critics have mistaken this sense of purpose and their commitment to the process for achieving it as a refusal of assimilation, but that notion can only be entertained by ignoring the accomplishments of the Mexican-American community, what they had done already to “come home.” It is sometimes too easy for cultural insiders to forget that assimilation is a process, and to come home in the right way, every community must advance in its own fashion and in its own time. There are no shortcuts. The six areas of creativity I’m referencing here demonstrate that Mexican Americans have already taken huge steps toward assimilation that would be difficult for any community to achieve.
The fateful history of the Americas and Spanish colonialism’s impact on this hemisphere mandate that this process of assimilation, from its earliest days in the Spanish colonial period, be fully narrated. Mexican Americans are a major part of the Americas’ story, and too much has happened, and too many lives have been damaged and lost for this whole story to be rendered only partially now. Mexican Americans are now retelling their story, always attempting to move toward truth and reconciliation, and as long as key parts of their story remain untold a significant dimension of American history, “our denied [American] history,” as Ronald Takaki warns, “’bursts with [the need of] telling.’” Until that history is known, too many historical, cultural, and social realities escape the master narratives about who America has been and who it is becoming. As Takaki suggests, the risks of living with a severely fragmented and damaged account of the cultural and historical realities that Mexican Americans face are too great and potentially costly for the whole country.
To grasp the importance of these initiatives, we must revisit the Mexican-American social backdrop, some of it ancient Mesoamerican and some of it modern Latin-American. I contend that Mexican Americans will sustain and succeed in their hybrid lives not by mimicking U.S. mainstream European immigrant culture, “Anglo-Protestant” culture, as Samuel P. Huntington calls it, forcing themselves to deny who they are, but by understanding and accepting mestizo identity. Seeing that their community must acculturate and “come home” in their own way, they have been affirming their own brown bodies and embracing the Americas’ tradition of hybrid, mestizo cultures. They will triumph by adjusting their culture to embrace American core values and social practices, all of which entails reaffirming their identity in regard to their sense of place and their U.S. lives.
Bringing into American life much of their own rich culture, Mexican Americans recognized in the 1960s that they would create a home for themselves and also contribute to being American on behalf of the national culture. Their campaign to accomplish these goals has been a work-in-progress since that period. As Tomás Rivera noted, the Americas are historically the place where indigenous, European, African, and Asian peoples have unceasingly searched for truth, and Mexican Americans are searchers, too. They have searched as people crossing the U.S./Mexican border and also as migrant farm workers moving from job to job. They came to the U.S. to find their own truth, create a new home, and contribute to the national culture. Reaching this goal a little more every day and every year, they are enriching American culture and rekindling its time-honored promise of renewal for those who reach its shores.
Mexican Americans are bringing to the U.S. a new pioneering spirit, much as the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Poles, and others in their time have done. In their manner and culture, they vividly express who they are, what they care about, and why they want to be Americans. A glance at Mexican-American literature’s vitality from 1971 on highlights the impressive results of this achievement and shows the constructive impact that they are already having on their adopted culture. It becomes apparent that their goals are centered on jobs, family, community participation, and economic and political involvement, the building blocks of every community.
For a time, some people will remain suspicious of Mexican-Americans’ success. The periodic resurgence of racial violence and slurs against Latinos remind us that the American experiment in democracy and liberty is also a work-in-progress, especially in the age of Trump. In response to such adversity, many in the Mexican-American community have responded by quietly acknowledging that when their culture and community are fully represented on the national stage, when we as Latinos finally have meaningful economic and political participation, we will strengthen existing American values and even offset some cultural gaps and weaknesses. The six initiatives show that the Mexican-American aim is nothing less than to contribute and belong to the national community, and “coming home” is neither a mere slogan nor an unfortunate accident of history, something already happening that all must reluctantly “endure.” Coming home to the U.S. is a fortunate reality, a good thing, for Mexican Americans and for the national culture. Mexican Americans are already helping to revitalize the U.S. yet once again with their community’s energy and innovation as so many other groups have done before. Such revitalization always helps to create a better future for everyone in the national culture.
How will the Mexican-American community do all of this? Much evidence suggests that Mexican Americans take up their role as “Americans,” most effectively strengthening U.S. culture in creative ways, when they affirm the truth of who they are in their mestizo lives as U.S. citizens. When they do that, they provide a critical contrast to mainstream American culture. At such times, they add to U.S. values and commitments—in effect, becoming an insightful, critical sibling to mainstream America. Having seen the culture from the inside and the outside, they can invest profoundly and realistically in a mainstream culture that, as Toni Morrison notes, is still defined as “white.” Given their sophisticated inside/outside perspective, they can contribute substantially, and possibly decisively, as America tries to find its own place in the twenty-first-century’s global community.
In the U.S. national consciousness, Mexican Americans frequently serve as this critical, important contrast to the mainstream. What appears in that contrast? Most often, Mexican Americans are English speaking, they are citizens, they are frequently European in appearance, and they know vast amounts about American popular culture, U.S. politics, sports, and fast food. At the same time, some Mexican Americans are distinctly not like the mainstream. They are as often dark-skinned and recently arrived from Mexico with accented (or little) English, an appreciation for indigenous culture and food, lovers of soccer, and celebrants of the Day of the Dead—as well as watchers of telenovellas who listen to Latin-American pop singers and Mexican bandos.
Which version is the reality? Mexican Americans are both. They are in some ways identical to those in mainstream America—with jobs, mortgages, children to put through school, and worries about the country’s future. They are also, at times, unfamiliar and exotic, like the brother or sister adopted from a far-away place, and that dual identity is who they are. For historical reasons since 1848, Mexican Americans have projected a split identity onto the national stage, a division that reflects their social reality.
We can see several moments of the country’s periodic uneasiness about Mexican Americans starting in 1848 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the year when Mexico, at the Mexican-American War’s end, ceded half of its territory to the U.S. This history, a major trauma for Mexicans, and important background for understanding the Mexican-American response to current immigration issues, has largely disappeared from U.S. consciousness. There is little awareness nationally of what Mexicans gave up for America to take its current geographical and cultural shape, an event that also established an intimate tie between the two countries. It is true, as Takaki comments, that “America has been racially diverse since our very beginning,” but the Mexican-American experience since 1848 has been shaped by especially powerful historical events that have tied the two countries together, probably permanently.
After the 1846 war, Mexicans were forced into their Mexican-American lives, creating an identity with one foot in the U.S. and another in Mexico. They eventually undertook initiatives to reconcile those two worlds. Mexican Americans did not seek this complex identity, just as New-World tribal peoples did not invite the Conquest, but the Mexican-American response has always been and continues to be forward looking, productive, and optimistic. The simple fact is that Mexican Americans have invested deeply in American culture in so many ways and are eager to further embrace their unique U.S. lives.
Another critical, creative moment for Mexican Americans came in the 1930s during the Great Depression, where mainstream U.S. culture focused on Mexican Americans taking manual-labor jobs from those already seeking scarce employment opportunities. Then from the late 1960s through the present, especially after the Bracero Program (guest-worker program) ended in 1964, there has been periodic national concern over the enforcement of immigration laws and the U.S. ability to patrol the vast Mexican-American border and deport violators. Finally, in the twenty-first century’s first decades, there has been a national backlash in response to the teaching of Mexican-American culture in public schools, including the passing of English-only laws, Arizona's 2011 ban on teaching ethic studies, and the appearance of books unfriendly to Mexican-American culture such as Huntington’s Who Are We?: The Challenges to American National Identity (2004). These events have given license in many cases to pockets of continuing racial discrimination and violence across the U.S.
Owing to continual immigration and the high Latino birth rate, each year there are more Mexican Americans in the U.S., and their participation in the national culture, especially in politics, as Latino voting patterns showed in the 2012 Presidential election, is on the upswing. It is easy to see that the Mexican-American community will one day influence politics and the national character more than it does now. Such big changes “in our nation’s ethnic composition,” as Takaki notes, or even the perception of such changes, will eventually change the way that all Americans “think about [them]selves.”.
The complex identity of Mexican Americans challenges the stereotype of a European-ancestored patriot, an Anglo-Protestant American who holds dear a certain, preconceived idea of the country as homogenous and white and fears cultural change, especially the global economy, as it reaches U.S. shores. According to Huntington, there is such a mainstream in America, and it believes in an American “Creed” of hard work, individualism, and an “Anglo-Protestant” ethic in terms of religion and community. As we can in the MAGA movement, it can be unsettling for this Anglo-Protestant contingent when demands for social change come from within mainstream America’s own ranks, from those Americans with dark skin and different facial features who seem to embody—even when we do not--the complexities of globalization, the new frontiers of foreign trade, and a vexed U.S. immigration policy.
Mexican Americans are addressing those hard realities of the national culture that are long overdue for engagement. Mexican Americans are already a part of the evolving U.S. national identity, fostering new citizenship responsibilities and a greater awareness of Latin America, the preservation of indigenous cultures, and tending more robustly to the plight of the underclass. With what has happened already, regardless of what pockets of U.S. mainstream culture choose to think about Mexican Americans, what new immigration laws get passed, what laws spring up prohibiting the teaching of Chicano literature and culture, Mexican Americans are coming home as every other immigrant community has done before them to find their niche in the American cultural landscape. For historical reasons, Mexican Americans have always had an intimate tie to American culture and are fiercely committed to being productive U. S. citizens, and for these reasons they continue to have the potential to impact the cultural status quo in the U.S. in positive ways unlike any other group. Mexican Americans are here to stay, and as I write these lines they are every day becoming more productive as citizens and professionals and more firmly a part of the U.S. future.
For all of these reasons, the Mexican-American community has the potential to contribute in major ways to American culture, a creative potential that exists when new ideas and different cultural practices bring new creative energy and freshness into an established national identity. The tradition of building the national character on an amalgamation of different cultures is a pillar of the American experience and one of its greatest strengths. True, contributing to that amalgamation is not always a goal that the U.S. readily achieves, but the U.S. has always been better off for aspiring to such cultural diversity. The Mexican-American potential to contribute to U.S. culture should be a bigger part of the national conversation that is currently preoccupied with immigration policy and border security. Instead of entertaining baseless fears and anxieties about the resources that Mexican Americans might deplete or destroy, including speculation that they do not want to assimilate, there should be greater recognition of the cultural treasures that Mexican Americans are bringing to the U.S., their cultural traditions and their current values, since Mexican Americans are in numerous ways on track to reinvigorate and greatly enhance the national culture.
The Mexican-American potential to have this fortunate impact exists for a variety of reasons. Areas of strength in the Mexican-American community will enhance what it means to be an American by promoting strong families, a focus on children’s welfare, hard work, a spiritual orientation, and communal cohesiveness. The Mexican-American community is already strengthening traditional American values, and a community that arises from a mixture of indigenous peoples, Europeans, Africans, and Asians, and without having the same cultural fears and sensitivities of Anglo-Protestant culture, they will enrich the country in ways that we have not yet even discovered.
Focusing on the Spanish casta system sets the stage for appreciating Mexican-American achievements by mapping some of the journey that they have taken to be where they are. The Conquest and Spanish colonialism in the Americas were devastating for mestizos in ways that have yet to register for U.S. mainstream culture. The purpose of the casta system (a system of color coding for various ethnic identities) in New Spain was to advance a worldview that made race and racial hierarchies seem natural and inevitable, and often the means for accomplishing these goals were dark and unthinkable. With its familiar racial terminology and harsh treatment of mixed-race people, the casta system blatantly argued for racism and helped to perpetuate the racial inequality of the Americas. Without a sense of this deep connection between race and culture in New Spain, we have little chance of understanding contemporary Mexican-American or Latino social realities and the forces now shaping mestizo lives. In that there is too little public discussion of Spanish Colonial culture, even in Chicano Studies, an initial focus on the casta system will always be an attempt to right that balance in an important act of remembering.
Such acts of cultural remembering will never be easy. Eduardo Galeano notes that, as a mestizo writer exploring hemispheric culture and the Americas’ past, he has constantly struggled against his own and everyone else’s cultural amnesia about race. Cultural amnesia exists when neither those who benefit from racial hierarchies nor those whom they dominate can fully assess their complicity in maintaining racial and social injustice. There are too many ways, in other words, to re-enforce racial thinking and too few strategies for critiquing and dismissing it. Galeano combats cultural “amnesia” by staying "obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America,” the act of remembering that proclaims this hemisphere to be the “land condemned to amnesia,” and he vows to remember “that [forgotten past] of Latin America,” averring that anything less than total vigilance will erase that past all over again. The notion that history is written by the victors reflects the social processes of forgetting domination and violence, and, in every tangible way that counts, cultural and historical forgetfulness in the Americas reflects the legacy of restricted possibilities for mestizos. Galeano wagers that when we can work past cultural amnesia and name those racial hierarchies, as he and Mexican-American writers are attempting to do, we will see that culture in the Americas has happened against a backdrop of Spanish/European colonial traditions that still shape the social order.
After almost five hundred years of post-Conquest and post-Colonial history, too many people are still waiting to feel that they belong where they already come from. Replete with place names, family names, communal traditions, and holidays, layer upon layer of Spanish culture and tradition, the Americas still house the racial legacy that all live and know but too few choose to see. Pushing amnesia back will entail a wide-spread, radical remembering of what has been enculturated and driven into the heart of this hemisphere that can now be identified and removed. Until that happens, the Americas are one of the vast regions of the world that will remain “condemned” to amnesia.
A radical remembering and liberation from that colonial past are what Mexican Americans are pursuing. The lingering post-traumatic colonial amnesia will not plague this hemisphere forever. The trauma of post-colonial culture eventually, in time, will become simply culture. At some point in the near future, as acts of cultural remembering and recovery of the human body that most clearly represents the traces of that past succeed, mestizos will be free from the residue of la leyenda negra, the residue of the black legacy of Spanish colonialism in this hemisphere.
Mestizo Identity and Race
My reference to mestizo identity and cultural changes in six areas is also intended as a strike against amnesia. Such discussions are of two kinds—(1) the exploration of race and mestizo identity and (2) the discussion of culture that includes the Mexican-American innovations and achievements. Advancing the issue of identity and race is a critical first step, especially in that conventional wisdom in the twenty-first century too often pronounces the U.S. and the Americas as entering a post-racial era devoid of racial issues since contemporary culture has already (supposedly) found social justice. Huntington makes precisely this claim when he states that “one of the greatest achievements. . .of America is the extent to which it has eliminated the racial and ethnic components that historically were central to its identity and has become a multiethnic, multiracial society in which individuals are to be judged on their merits.” While I celebrate mestizo culture and am optimistic about critiquing racial practices, the U.S. and the Americas are neither in a post-racial era nor living in a time of racial equality. I can overwhelmingly show that the Americas, still fettered by racial hierarchies, will spend yet more time living with the remnants of the colonial legacy before finally achieving democracy and social justice--more time in the bitter water before reaching the sweet.
The attention currently given to mestizo identity and race across the Americas shows that progress in the hemisphere’s racial awareness has advanced slowly since the middle nineteenth century. Mainly in the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and the U.S. there have been bold analyses of race, and much more is needed. Testimony from these regions creates a critical body of thought about mestizo identity that Mexican-American writers are building upon. But the “coloniality of power,” the residue of Spanish colonialism woven into the cultural fabric of this hemisphere, is still there, as Huntington’s comment shows, derailing attempts whenever possible to focus on race.
We can find evidence even in the Hispanic community of racism and the defense of racial purity as a goal valued and to be “protected.” Richard L. Nostrand’s The Hispano Homeland (1992) tells the story from the early twentieth century of Hispanic families, “Hispanos,” in Colorado and New Mexico who claimed to be of purely “Spanish” descent after hundreds of years of ethnic mixing. Nostrand describes how at a certain moment in the early twentieth century the “Hispano” community, socially-affluent mestizos, found themselves sandwiched uncomfortably between recently-arrived, working-class Mexicans and wealthy whites streaming into Colorado and New Mexico to buy land, settle, and start businesses. Worried about social position, the “Hispanos” proclaimed their pure “Spanish” (criollo) identity, their lack of any racial mixing, and also their elevated social position based on their ethnic purity. Strangely enough, this racial strategy actually worked. The Hispanos claimed for themselves “a genuine [and pure] ethnic identity with overtones that were cultural and racial.” They advanced a fabricated racial identity, all the while maneuvering to gain an elevated socio-political status. In time, what the Hispanos asserted as an uncorrupted ancestral, genetic lineage played out as a social fact.
This example of establishing a new racial identity in a micro-community shows how racial oppression can work. The “Hispano-Homeland” phenomenon illustrates how asserting racial status in time can became social “reality.” Whether people claiming racial superiority manipulate Mexican Americans, Latinos, African Americans, or other groups, the result of using a racial divide to advance a socio-economic advantage is the same situation marked by injustice. (We can wonder if the obverse could be true. When people have detailed knowledge of their own mixed lineage and make that knowledge public, do they have greater sympathy for people unlike themselves? With Mexican Americans as the example, I think that they do. In New Mexico and Colorado, the current Mexican-American choice to foreground their mestizo, profoundly-mixed identity has kept people remarkably open to groups unlike themselves.)
Current genetic research and ancient DNA studies support the spirit of the Mexican-American foregrounding of ethnic diversity. Revealing a complex human and cultural reality, human genome researchers have found diverse genetic markers in the most isolated of communities, suggesting the likely genetic “mix” of being human across the whole of the genome. Genetic scientist Howard M. Cann notes that “human genome diversity studies have clearly shown that the large part of genetic variability is due to differences among individuals within populations rather than to differences between populations.” Such findings about the natural mix of genetic markers in individual people and the perspective that it fosters undercut traditional beliefs about the genetic uniqueness, certainly the ethnic purity, of any racial group, effectively dismissing the genetic foundation for “the concept of ‘race.’” With genetic diversity as the norm, genetic science clearly undercuts traditional accounts, generally origin stories, of people always living in the same place as proof of their ethnic “purity.” With no “pure” lineages in existence—no pure Africans, Aztecs, or Spaniards—it appears that the Mexican-American foregrounding of mestizo identity anticipated the genetic reality of “mixed” people long before genetic science could confirm it.
Mexican Americans continue to promote racial diversity most effectively by foregrounding themselves as the Americas’ mixed-race community, the historical and cultural heirs of the New World’s ancient peoples. Their very existence and their claiming of a both/and "border" identity inherently critique the notion of racial purity and promote a pluralistic, inclusive view of being human. Exposing “race” as an inherently false construct and denying and defying the notion that identity can ever be reduced to “race” are critical and possibly landmark steps forward that have truly been a major achievement of modern culture. This emerging consensus about the nature of race is a huge advance, a breakthrough, in the modern understanding of what it means to be human.
This recognition based on the experience of Mexican Americans gives mestizos an iconic status in the Americas, as Vasconcelos said would happen, as the hemispheric citizens. They are the human, visible signs of what has taken place in the Americas. Lest we fear that mestizos will become the new privileged class, we must remember that the designation of being Americas’ citizens has the potential to include everyone—in fact, does include everyone--as members of Vasconcelos’ "cosmic race." The self-disclosing, inherently-mixed nature of mestizo identity—which only needs to be accepted and proclaimed--undercuts the notion of an exclusive racial group and calls into question all racial platforms and hierarchies. “Brown” will not be the new “white,” and racism will surely end, or we can hope so, when all recognize that social strategies and political manipulation, and not nature or God, create the hierarchies that traditionally go under the name of race.
Mestizo Culture
All of this being so, Mexican-American writers and land activists are helping to create an important American conversation about communities of the future—ultimately raising issues that include, as Chicana philosopher Laura Pulido comments, “social injustice, growing inequality, and a looming environmental crisis.” Pulido cautions that these are “the greatest threats facing the global community as we enter the twenty-first century.” In fostering these conversations, Mexican Americans are making the U.S. a stronger community by encouraging this debate about land use and the loss of traditional ties to land.
In contemporary popular culture, Mexican-Americans have also attempted to make creative adjustments in the tension between Mexican traditions and current social needs. The inaugurators of the U.S. (as opposed to the Mexican) Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture have tried to alter how the Mexican-American community relates to tradition and demands to conform to traditional values but also current issues. We saw this drama play out in the middle nineteenth century where Mexican Americans in San Francisco launched Cinco de Mayo to counter tides of patriotism arising from the American Civil War. They intended Cinco de Mayo to offset that fervor with an expression of Mexican-American pride. After more than a hundred and fifty years of adjustment and modification, Cinco de Mayo’s ongoing celebration continues to buffer current Mexican-American social challenges, especially the need to bolster the Mexican-American community at moments of crisis or when American society threatens to isolate or subsume it.
We see similar adjustments being made in relation to the Day of the Dead, where twentieth-century U.S. practitioners in San Francisco and Los Angeles reframed ancient practices to mediate current social and cultural problems and needs. Referencing land issues, social injustice, immigration, popular culture, sexual preference, among others, they politicized Day of the Dead festivities to address issues challenging the Mexican-American community. These celebrations show how ancient traditions and current social needs can merge creatively to become new cultural and social practices.
Lowrider-car culture also enacts strategies for symbolically bridging the gap between the Mexican-American working-class and the privileged, wealthy classes. Lowriders experiment with car technology, their perception of rich people’s transportation styles, and car design to honor their Mexican-American lives. In this famous sub-culture, lowriders put Mexican-American religious and cultural imagery on cars and create stunning displays of automotive luxury. Like all popular-culture practices, this sub-culture is making micro-adjustments in the relationship of past to present, tradition and innovation, and lowriders make such micro-adjustments as they build and display their vehicles.
These three cultural practices, especially Day of the Dead, reference U.S. culture’s hemispheric cultural and social context. In the Mexican-American practice of the Days of the Dead, a history unfolds that shows the traces of social and economic exploitation and death in seventeenth-century New Spain when millions of indigenous people died in the production of sugar and other New-World crops. This history rebuffs notions about the U.S. as the isolated nation to the north that avoids the historical compromises, social corruption, and human barbarity that mark other cultures and colonizing nations. American historian Seymour Martin Lipset argues that U.S. cultural and social principles may be “qualitatively different from [the organizing principles] of other Western nations.” And it can be argued that American prosperity and freedom from oppression have been a reality for a few social classes during certain historical periods, but the history of indigenous peoples and the Conquest in the Americas tell another story about oppression of a people, violence, exploitation, and even genocide. In light of this more complex historical picture, Gloria Anzaldúa comments wisely that such interpretation and awareness of our history “must come before inner [psychological] changes, which in turn come before changes in society.” The result in the future will be a more sophisticated and inclusive understanding of the cultural history of the Americas.
A far-reaching “inner change” in the Mexican-American community, a change in which Anzaldúa played an important role, concerns recovering the human body from a Western tradition that drastically downplays its importance and decenters it as a cultural focus. The Spanish in New Spain designated normative social bodies as blanco and Spanish, and through an elaborate social system they consigned all mestizos in New Spain to calibrated slots in the casta system. Remnants of that order have persisted for nearly five hundred years. Mexican-Americans have focused on changing this view of the body as an important strategy for reclaiming and reanimating mestizo lives. Mexican-American writers and artists understand that the focus on the body and its care cuts through social misdirection and all denials of violence and abuse. They choose to depict the body at risk, pushed beyond its limits with people plagued by disease, ignored, and sometimes destroyed. These writers and artists focus on the body to recover a sense of humanity that has been lost in the Americas through racial typing and exploitation.
Richard Sennett notes that when the human body is defined as one kind of body, the body, there is a tendency to look past the bodies that do not look that way. “Brown” bodies in Spanish Colonial New Spain and in the Americas since the Conquest have for too long been the largely unseen and transparent bodies that do the hard work of this culture with little recompense or recognition. Mexican-American writers and artists bring to their work this awareness of brown bodies being ignored and excluded, in this case, bodies that live in the shadows in poverty, as well as the bodies of people incarcerated, people “deformed,” or people “disabled.”
Susan Bordo adds that the body in the West is also silently typed as feminine, and the body as a “feminine” body is then, convenient for a post-colonial culture, where many bodies have been abused, downgraded below the importance of the mind. The feminine body in this tradition is projected as ephemeral, decaying, and unreliable--a thing to be feared and distrusted as insubordinate, an obstacle that blocks, frustrates, and betrays the mind’s highest cultural aspirations. In the Western tradition, men identify with the mind and aspire to transcend the feminine body through involvement with intellectual and cultural initiatives. Whereas being male is cast as enduring, essential, and transcendent, being female and a body is all about decay, finitude, and death. Judith Butler reflects on this Western scenario wherein “the feminine [body] is a permanent and, hence, non-living, shapeless non-thing which cannot be named” and, in so being, takes on a kind of transparency.
Mexican-American writers and artists (many of them women) have focused intently on the body’s fate to try and recover the body, especially the brown body, from this Western prison. Their aim is to recover bodily knowledge in Mexican-American literature, art, and healing as part of a strategy to “refind” the bodies lost in colonialism including the traces of their ancestors. They have searched for the mestizo body in the indigenous and mestizo, “hybrid” traditions that have come down to them amidst the debris of modern culture. These writers and artists explore the Anglo-Protestant cultural frame that has made the body invisible, what Huntington identifies as America’s “Puritan legacy,” a tradition that Huntington takes to be an expression of “the American essence.” In this tradition, in Anglo-Protestant America, brown bodies are historically of little importance, and Mexican-American writers and artists are committed to refinding and re-animating those lost bodies.
In attempting to recover the body, Mexican-American writers and artists move the body to the center of the world and all that is important to being human. What they recover, or on occasion reinvent, as needed, is the Mesoamerican model of the body, in which “the body,” as Ana Castillo notes, “is never separate from the spirit or mind.” In Woman Who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health (1999), Elena Avila attempts to reinstate the Mesoamerican sense of the body and strategies for keeping human life centered there in a way almost completely foreign to Western thinking. She shows that, using protocols and various insights about the body’s interaction with its environment and its own functioning, the Aztecs created a specific approach for conceptualizing how a body’s energy works to connect most effectively with other people and the environment.
Critiquing the Western idea of the body using the body-centered, Mesoamerican model, Mexican-American feminist writers and artists show that caring for the body is a critical issue, and not one that mainstream Americans necessarily have much understanding of. Our ability to care for the body, especially bodies that are not the official white body, is an index that informs who we are as people in a particular social and political environment. This project to “recover” the body is a far-reaching cultural undertaking, and Chicana writers and artists deserve recognition for their work toward this visionary initiative.
For them, the importance of remembering and reclaiming the body starts with centering life in the body. Claiming the body opens insights for the consequences social and political engagement and is possible only when a person’s emotions and beliefs are aligned with bodily interests in regard to health and well-being. By contrast, when the body’s importance is downplayed, it is far easier to justify physical and political violence, torture, and abuse, practices fully evidenced in societies where unofficial bodies are devalued, marginalized, and go unseen. Recovering the body is a profoundly human act that entails acknowledging the effects of political, commercial, and social forces and who a community is striving to be.
Sanuel P. Huntington observes that in America “the Puritan legacy became the American essence,” and in terms of the U.S. Puritanical approach to the body, that seems to be true. French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard sees the American, Anglo-Protestant approach to the body as having “an ensuing effect of undernourishment.” He is saying that in the U.S. the body too often has been disconnected and kept from spheres of public importance. Braudrillard asserts that the body in the U.S., frequently confined to trivial cultural spheres, clearly true for brown bodies, “takes on a transparent form, a lightness near to complete disappearance.” His insight is that in America the body, perennially relegated to inconsequence, is little evident when corporations make decisions about the environment, waste disposal, and when local governments make decisions about the support of children’s health and the quality of education. Consistent with Mexican-American attempts to reinsert the body in spheres of importance regarding health, the well-being of children and the poor, Baudrillard comments that in America bodies foregrounded as bodies—brown bodies, the bodies of the homeless, people with disabilities and health impairments, people with physical “deformities,” and incarcerated people--are kept hidden so as to foreground prosperity and an idealized spectre of mass well-being. The resulting trivialization of the body in American public life is simultaneously a story of bodies over-exposed in sports, entertainment, and pornography, venues in which the social and cultural significance of having a body is of little consequence and otherwise largely ignored.
Mexican-American writers and artists advance that the body’s status as body, especially the brown body, must be recovered so that it can become a vital site for reconnecting what is personal, spiritual, and political in U.S. public life. Even in complex, bureaucratic cultures, and in historically Puritanical cultures, the body needs to matter for the culture as a whole to be healthy. Without reclaiming the body, without taking possession of issues of health in the public sphere, without the willingness to understand what the body’s fortunes can convey and what they mean, without the full acknowledgment and willingness to look at the needs of the poor and disempowered, America “suffers.” Baudrillard judges that “suffering” to be a needless “desertification” in American culture and a reckless draining away of human resources. Without reclaiming the body, embracing it, and learning how to care for it in public and in private life, with the tremendous political and social implications of that recovery, there can be little progress toward social justice for anyone in the Mexican-American or the U.S. national community.
What would an America in touch with the human body look like? It would be an America with a renewed sense of community, better health, and a stronger sense of national purpose. It would be an America that has escaped the Anglo-Protestant restraints and the “desertification” that results from ignoring and denying what is implied politically, socially, and culturally in caring for brown, white, young, and old bodies. Such a recovered body could help to create a reinvigorated, robust, and healthy America. Even if Mexican-American women writers and artists are only partially successful in this quest to reclaim the human body for Mexican-American and U.S. culture, they are inaugurating a critical and timely conversation about what binds people together as a community, how people are oppressed, why education and health should be our foremost national priorities, and what connects our individual lives with our national sense of who we are, who we can and want to be, as a community.
A Creative Future For America
The bold reclamation of the body for American culture, along with Mexican-American meditations on mestizo identity, the homeland, and popular culture, have contributed to the rise of a Chicano “voice” in Mexican-American literature and culture, a voice that expresses a renewed and reinvigorated sense of Mexican-American cultural identity and values. That cultural voice has grown stronger in the Mexican-American community since its inception in the rise of Chicano literature. Along with other instances of powerful “voices” in American literature—in Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), The Awakening (1899), The Waste Land (1922), and Invisible Man (1952)—Chicano literature signals the crossing of a cultural threshold. In the 1970s, Mexican Americans arrived at the door of cultural and social maturity and were ready to impact the nation, and that is the story of Mexican-American cultural creativity.
It is truly remarkable that by the late 1970s Mexican Americans had created a new sub-category of American literature and made literature a way to reflect, as never before in their brief history, on their social and economic lives. Going forward with a literary tradition in the making, Mexican Americans were quickly examining their interactions with the larger culture and re-evaluating common values and goals on behalf of the whole country.
Following on the heels of this literary development, new Chicano Studies’ programs began exploring evolving aspects of Mexican-American identity and community, especially assimilation into American culture and a loosening of cultural ties to Mexico. Chicano Studies programs today still fulfill this responsibility of watching over the community and advancing community-building approaches to culture and promoting Mexican-American cultural values. That responsibility will evolve as Chicano and Mexican-American Studies programs reshape themselves as Latinos become America’s majority community at mid-century, even as laws like Arizona's ban on ethnic studies attempt to thwart the potential of such programs to educate widely for creative and locally effective social-activist strategies.
Miguel Montiel, Tomás Atencio, and E.A. Mares believe that resolana, the Mexican-American tradition of members of community sitting together by a warm wall on a sunny day, with an emphasis on participatory, dialogic knowing, can be part of that re-invigoration of community. Montiel, Atencio, and Mares show how resolana can be the channel for valuing folk ways and traditional wisdom alongside new knowledge and emerging technologies. Resolana can be taken as a metaphor for a new sense of openness about the possible merger of traditional and emerging cultural knowledge. Resolana not only encourages community participation but validates “the wisdom [that] traditional societies bring to bear in their adaptation to the industrial age.” With this reframing of digital knowing in the context of community building, future Latino Wikipedia and other communal information sites will facilitate these old/new conversations in ways that benefit all of American culture.
Not everyone is equally pleased with these innovations and potential changes in Mexican-American and American culture. Samuel P. Huntington in Who Are We? (2004) describes in some detail a version of the six changes that I discuss but without any sense of a potential for renewal and re-invigoration. On the contrary, believing that the Mexican-American community is on a course only to hurt and degrade America and its potential to prosper, much as Trump believes, he acknowledges the distinctiveness of Mexican-American identity but fears that Mexican Americans will remain separate within the U.S. He grants the Mexican-American strong relationship to land, in that the Southwest used to be Mexico, but sees in this fact the “serious potential for conflict,” wherein the “Southwest could become America’s Quebec”--the land that Mexican Americans see as separate from the U.S. and could try to reclaim through secession. He hears the distinctive “voice” of the Mexican-American community, particularly the use of Spanish, but sees a destructive trend if bilingualism “become[s] institutionalized in the Mexican-American community, reinforced by the continuing inflow of new immigrants speaking only Spanish.” He sees the robust Mexican-American engagement with culture but fears that Mexicans and Latinos will focus exclusively on themselves and will neglect the national community that has been so important for American communal cohesiveness.
In a word, as an early version of Trump, Huntington doubts Mexican-American interest in the American “Creed,” by which he means the core of values and cultural references reflecting the Anglo-Protestant character--the work ethic, individualism, and a religious orientation. He writes that “the [American] Creed is unlikely to retain its salience if Americans abandon the Anglo-Protestant culture in which it has been rooted” (2004, 340). Insisting that Anglo-Protestant values have made America great, he fears that Mexican Americans and Latinos will abandon this time-honored national tradition of believing in those values and nurturing America’s “greatness.”
His key concern is that Hispanic immigration into the U.S. will ultimately dilute American values and “The Creed” to the point where the country as a whole will become unrecognizable and, henceforth, will become something altogether new and less grand. As Hispanic population numbers reach threshold levels, Huntington and Trump see that American identity and culture could become permanently bifurcated into two Americas--a Hispanic America and a traditional Anglo-Protestant America. They reason that if Mexican Americans bring little of value to traditional American culture, but use their presence to dilute the national culture’s traditional identity, then they are simply destroying a great country for short-term employment and economic gains. Their derogatory comments about Mexican Americans are intended as a warning to America about the impending disaster of the U.S. Mexican-American presence. Since “there [can be] no Americano dream created by Anglo-Protestant society,” Huntington adds, ominously, with the hint of a threat, “as the racial balance continues to shift and more Hispanics become citizens and politically active, white groups may look for other means of protecting their interests.” There have been similar threats from Trump.
I am guessing that no response is needed for Huntington’s baseless fears that Mexican Americans want, or will want, the Southwest to secede from the Union or that Spanish will supplant English as a world language, or that Hispanics will remake the U.S. unrecognizable to all but themselves. These ideas and the underlying fears for which they are symptomatic have gotten no traction with Latinos, who, as I have been trying to show, have been busy taking significant steps to belong to American culture and to fashion precisely an “Americano” dream, a sign of their own belonging to national experiences much bigger than themselves. If we set aside Huntington’s and Trump’s somewhat excentric concerns, what is left are surprisingly strong connections to traditional American values in the Mexican-American respect for family, religion, hard work, home, and communal cohesion. Mexican Americans are famous for their general assent to these values and, finally, would have great trouble, and probably some alarm, seeing themselves or any of their concerns inserted into the dystopian vision of the near-term Latino future that Huntington describes.
On the contrary, we see Mexican Americans working to live by the very values that support home, family, children, hard work, and a healthy community. From 1848 onward, their greatest resources have been their cultural energy, their work ethic, their willingness to innovate and create, and their unshakable belief in a brighter future. History teaches that the American story is about immigration, aspiration, struggle, denial, betrayal, persistence, and, on occasion, communal success. Each area of Mexican-American achievement tells this same story of unshakable commitment and continuing struggle as Mexican Americans create better lives for themselves and others in the U.S. There is no one way to tell that story, and the Mexican-American version is their own.
A specific message of this journey home is the mandate to reset the cultural compass toward the future of the U.S. but also toward the whole of the Americas as the proper reference for U.S. cultural and demographic developments in a global age. Mexican Americans are living proof that in the midst of U.S. culture Americans are living in a globalized world. This reorientation from an east/west view, fostered by a narrow band of British and Dutch settlement on the eastern seaboard, and toward a north/south orientation, prompted by the need to see more of the Americas over greater spans of time, is an appropriate perspective in the age of globalization and is not a sign of America’s downfall. This perspective also breaks through all constraints against seeing the U.S. as a part of the Western hemisphere and not merely as the “exceptional” and isolated nation to the north.
Another strong theme in Mexican-American literature is the power of self-determination, the need for the community to chart its own course in creative ways. From Rivera’s . . .And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him, Helena Maria Viramonte’s Under the Feet of Jesus, Anaya’s Randy Lopez Goes Home, and to Denise Chávez’s The King and Queen of Comezón, this theme says that the Mexican-American community is building its own better future in partnership with mainstream America. The Mexican-American community’s call to action, as we saw in the Chicano Movement, was a traditional American promise of renewal--the tradition of a people coming to the U.S. to find a new beginning. Coming home and becoming part of American culture were never intended by the founders to work only for the Anglo-Protestant line of descent. In fact, they specifically feared and wanted to guard against the tyranny of such overly-narrow political developments. They saw America as receiving all who seek its shores, what Barry Lopez terms a rolling cultural and social re-start that can be called “the [continual] Rediscovery of North America.” In choosing to “come home” to the U.S., and then choosing America all over again and resetting the markers of that promise for a new beginning, Mexican Americans are rekindling a sense of possibility that goes much deeper in American culture and is far more inclusive than “The Creed” or the Anglo-Protestant ethic. The American experiment is a bigger conception and is more encompassing that Huntington and Trump are willing to imagine.
Mestizos coming home is also about the cultural relationships and practices that have been evolving, in many cases, for as long as people have been in the Americas. These stories about mestizaje and liberation could not be told fully for five hundred years, but these once-forbidden mestizo stories about identity, land, bodies, social exclusion, popular culture, and voice (the true histories and accounts of what has happened in the Americas) are now being told in many ways. These are stories about the Conquest’s legacy and the colonial, racial categories in the Americas that still divide people against each other and against themselves. These are stories about liberation, social change, and communal cohesion for which there were previously no tellers and no hearers.
There are also new stories to be told about the lifting of racial barriers and the exposure and canceling of the logic of racial practices that for so long have shaped the New World’s cultures. Coming home in this deliberate and calculated way, Mexican Americans have created for themselves a moment of freedom, a kind of turning room, in which the telling of new stories becomes possible. Telling stories about race and mestizo peoples is critical to make way for the as-yet unknown stories, the unwritten stories, that will be told about culture in the Americas and about those who come after us.
At a similar turning point in Anaya’s Shaman Winter, when Spanish soldiers were mobilizing to enter New Mexico, and a new epoch was opening in the Americas, Anaya identifies his version of the greatest threat to life in this hemisphere. His villain, an evil figure called the Raven (an anagram for “never,” as in the radical canceling of memory), embodies the destructive threat of amnesia, forgetfulness about the Americas’ cultural past. Anaya sites the untold stories of los antepasados, the ancestors, and the possibility of losing parts of the Americas’ past before those stories can be saved and retold. Shaman Winter’s Calendar of Dreams, the fabled instrument for the recording and telling of everyone’s story, is his mythical counter to forgetfulness. This is precisely Eduardo Galeano’s warning, too, about cultural amnesia as the devastating enemy of cultural and social renewal. Anaya and Galeano are right to fear the loss of connectedness to the ancestors and to all that they struggled for in this hemisphere. They particularly fear losing the ability, and perhaps even the desire, to tell stories about the vital and enduring dimensions of everyone’s life in the Americas.
The cultural challenge of being a mestizo in this difficult age should not be taken as a sign of living under a curse, the fallen condition of all who have lived the legacy of post-colonial culture. We must not forget that since 1848 many Mexican Americans have been in their ancestral home, exactly where they belong, and since the 1960s they have been coming home again by creatively affirming their past and their identifies afresh. They have taken stock of their creative resources and have recounted what they bring to America’s cultures, what Jane Roland Martin calls “cultural bookkeeping,” a reorientation based on their past and their current cultural situation in the U.S. They have accomplished this cultural update, this keeping of accounts, in the six ways that I have referenced, and their understanding has moved them past many of the barriers that created their invisibility to begin with.
We are right to celebrate mestizos coming home to who they are and reclaiming their place in the U.S. and in the Americas. They are seeking truth and reconciliation, and their testimonies, as I have presented them here, are critical accounts of the past and of everyone’s future in the U.S. and in this hemisphere. Mexican Americans should not fail to come home when they can, to re-create and renew who we are in community while the opportunity for meaningful action is within our reach. Those who live in the Americas must recognize the importance of creatively seizing this cultural opportunity when it is available, as Anaya comments in Shaman Winter, for helping “the human dream” in the Americas to be “born again.” Refusing to be bystanders or passive readers of our own narratives, we must be thoughtful, creative authors of change. Mexican-Americans are now telling their stories in the ways that I have described, and their continuing struggle in these quests to find social justice is a sign that these six topics are touchstones in the journey homeward to find their new American lives.
This essay is a revised version of pp. 247-266 in Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
In the age of Donald Trump, focusing on the arts is an act of resistance. The arts help us to center ourselves in our own experience and to be capable of feeling the resonance with other people's experience. Without creativity and the arts, we are already in the prison that tyranical government forces want to use to control people.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
As a Mexican-American, I have felt the necessity of understanding the layers of oppression that have isolated us from the cultural history of this hemisphere. That isolation creates a kind of amnesia about our past, and it has been my goal to overcome that amnesia with historical/cultural truth telling.
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
The ties to land that our culture has lost signal lost ties to so many parts of our lives. We have lost those ties by allowing land to be defined as an alien object mainly useful as a commodity to exploit and sell on the open market. We need to regain the view that land embodies the potential to know our past and how we relate to others unlike ourselves. Only when we have a living tie to land can we sustain cultural over generations and learn to protect the envirnoment.
