José Aranda
Although an archive is an expression of an idea in its most sophisticated material mode, the experience of an archive is wholly a different matter. Ironically it is the experience of archived material, and not its content per se, that I would argue underwrites the institutional logic for having archives in the first place. Beyond the quantitative and qualitative possibilities of any knowledge set lies the web of human relationships such a knowledge set engenders. This distinction was in dramatic display for me one summer many years ago in the stacks of the Rice University Fondren Library. I was following up on a footnote by the recoverers of the nineteenth-century writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, author of Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885). Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita cited Ruiz de Burton’s attendance at Abraham Lincoln’s presidential inaugural ball and her familiarity with leading politicians of the time as evidence of her political wherewithal.1 Intrigued by such a claim, I wondered if there was any mention of her in the letters, journals, and diaries of such well-known figures. Beyond the recovery of her two novels and Ruiz de Burton’s own claims, was there a way to verify these relationships? So I embarked on what I thought was a wild goose chase. Surely Ruiz de Burton’s connections were due to her husband’s position as an Anglo American and West Point officer. There was no way that she herself enabled these relationships. After all, it was amazing enough that she, a woman born in Loreto, Baja California, who immigrated to Alta California after the U.S.–Mexico War to marry this New Englander from Vermont, had over time written two novels in English. All the same, I looked. And I looked in the manner that I was trained to look, beginning with the index. Imagine my surprise when I saw Burton, Mrs. Henry Stanton. The index was to Roy P. Basler’s The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), and this is what I found:
To Simon Cameron
Hon. Sec. of War. Executive Mansion
My dear Sir: June 1, 1861
Mrs. Captain Burton is very desirous that her husband may be made a Colonel. I do not know him personally; but if it can be done without injustice to other officers of the Regular Army, I would like for her to be obliged.
Yours truly
A. Lincoln.
In less than the minute it took for me to read this memorandum from Lincoln, I understood myself within the textual and cultural power of the archive. Again, it was not just the content of the memorandum, which was important, but the glimpse into a web of human connections made by this one author of Mexican descent. I also knew, because I had read all the scholarship at the time, that I was the first to verify Ruiz de Burton’s connection to Lincoln. That was a thrill that echoed with the thrill of the content of the memorandum itself. She had gone to Lincoln to make a request on behalf of her husband. On the basis of her request, she, not Henry Stanton Burton, was obliged. In that moment, I knew that this historical figure was unlike anyone the Chicano/a movement or Chicano/a studies had prepared me to understand. Finally, I also knew that Sánchez and Pita had “read” incorrectly her and the archive they had assembled. As I would go on to argue, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton was no “sub-altern.” She wrote and negotiated her world with a defined and sophisticated alternative history, but she was clearly a daughter of the Enlightenment and a colonialist. She was not a Chicana.2 In my mind, the emergent archive of nineteenth-century Mexican America had collided with the counternationalist, Marxist-leaning, activist archive of the Chicana/o movement. It was then that I understood that I and other recoverers were embarking on a long-term revision of Mexican American literary history.
The Recovery Project and its archive has made its way into the broader study of American literature, and nowhere has its impact been more noticeable than in studies of the U.S. nineteenth century. A substantial number of Recovery scholars contributed to Caroline Levander and Robert Levine’s 2007 collection, Hemispheric American Studies.3 Since then the complexities over language, citizenship, race, gender, class, and national belonging by this Recovery archive continue to pose major challenges to how to restructure the meaning of nineteenth-century American literature. In this regard, the Recovery Project should be viewed as an extraordinary example, if not the most important, of what Ralph Bauer calls “‘inter-American literary studies’—the comparative investigation of ‘literatures and cultures of this hemisphere’ as one unit of study” that responded to Gustavo Pérez’s question, “Do the Americas have a common literature?”4 Given the institutional and linguistic origins of the Recovery Project, its academic mission and scholarly scope floats between and around the perimeters of American literary studies on the one hand, and Latin American studies on the other, thus borrowing and informing theoretic and methodological practices on all sides, as well as making available authors and primary texts heretofore locked away in archives, or forgotten, or ignored because of hispanophobia.
With this rich dynamic in mind, I make the case for how to problematize and unpack what the Recovery Project has meant for the field of Chicana/o literary studies in particular, and Latina/o studies in general. Of key interest here is the transformation of a Mexican American archive that no longer solely revolves around a Chicana/o movement politic or set of poetics to organize the critical identities or keywords of the field.5 Understanding this transformation of the archive is also critically important at this historical juncture given how the terms Latina, Latino, and Hispanic are currently in use to identify the most dramatic demographic change in U.S. society since the early twentieth century. Since the conclusion of the 2012 presidential election, the renewed frequency and deployment of these terms to identify a large ethnic voting bloc for regional and national elections has reinvented perennial favorite questions to ask: Who are Latinas/os? Where do they live? Where do they come from? What do they want? How do we understand them as “American”? What is their history? Use of such of terms as markers for identities represents a political desire for coherence of a multitude of data points that can be categorized and managed toward political ends and are hence vulnerable to conservative forces and values that seek to homogenize all Latina/o communities under one rubric, thereby sacrificing difference in favor of political gains.6
In academia, there is a similar tendency to discipline emergent archival materials into already accepted and familiar tropes, patterns, identities, and historical outcomes. There is of course a politic to all archives, whether in its creation, or its maintenance, or its deconstruction. Over the past twenty years, the work of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage has presented one challenge after another to the archives of the Chicana/o movement that were absorbed and institutionalized by a variety of academic disciplines. To be sure, the Recovery Project has had a similar effect in Puerto Rican studies, Cuban American studies, and Dominican studies.7 Although the Recovery Project grew out of the efforts of activists and scholars involved in the broader civil rights movement, the contents of this emergent archive belong to other times and other politics. As a result, while much of this archive is familiar, much of it is equally unfamiliar. In order to grapple with this divergence between an institutional drive for coherence versus the diversity of difference found in the archive, I argue for the need to embrace the anarchy in the archive as an opportunity, and not something to malign or steer clear of. Despite inevitable anachronisms, these same current terms—Latina, Latino, and Hispanic—can be viewed as a point of departure for historicizing differences among and between communities of Spanish-speaking origin that were absorbed territorially through conquest by the United States or absorbed through successive waves of immigration.
Now as the Recovery Project enters its third decade, the archive of Hispanic America deepens, yes, but it also resists singular coherence. What survives in the record is as diverse as the individuals and individual circumstances that have produced that record. In the case of Mexican America, part of the anarchy of the nineteenth-century archive lies in that it intersects with the emergent national narratives of both Mexico and the United States, but these intersections are rarely acknowledged in their own times and never claimed by either the national or regional imaginaries of each country. The biography of Juan Nepomuceno Seguín of Texas, nineteenth-century landowner, soldier, and politician, reflects a contorted set of identities: Is Seguín to be remembered as one of the surviving heroic defenders of the Alamo? Or is he better remembered as the mayor of San Antonio, falsely accused of aiding and abetting Santa Anna’s failed 1842 attempt to retake Texas? Or should Seguín be lauded for his eventual political maturity when he fights on the Mexican side of the U.S.–Mexico War of 1846? Further, can an individual of Mexican descent be both hero and sellout to three countries—Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the United States—and still be hailed by a Chicana/o movement–inspired historiography? For those wishing to work on Seguín’s memoirs as a historical and literary text, all these identities come into play, especially if one engages the national and regional imaginaries that constitute the foundations of his writings.8
This chapter attempts to understand such contorted identities by understanding the meaning and effect of modernity in early Mexican American literature. My aim is to go beyond understanding modernity for Mexican Americans solely in terms of the invasion of proto-industrialized capital to regions like the Southwest or West or the border with Mexico, and to look beyond modernity’s usual negative alteration of local economies, politics, cultures, and language without denying this fact or minimizing its consequences. When contemplating the range of identities available to people of Mexican descent in the post-1848 era of the United States, one needs to account not only for the influence of the evolving border between the United States and Mexico, and not only for the broad influence of native peoples in the Southwest and West, but also for the regional differences that become visible from Texas to California over the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially as settler identities take root because of westward expansion. By the end of the nineteenth century, one can find in print culture alone all of the following possible identities: Mexican, Mexican expatriate, Mexican rebel, Mexican exile, Mexican American, Californio, Tejano, Spanish American, Latin American, Chicano/a, Pachuco/a, Cholo/a, and Pocho/a, to name a few. To navigate the differences each term entails is in the end a useful way to recover the histories of ethnic formation otherwise marginalized or, worse, forgotten, but each term in itself also has the capacity to give way to a deeper anarchy that all archives are beholden to for their meaning over time.
Such a multiplicity of identities after 1848 is, I would argue, a symptom of the broader effects of modernity on the conquered territories. To make sense of the evidence of modernity in texts made available by Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage since 1991, I am beholden to the work by Latin Americanists, like Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano, and Walter Mignolo, who have unpacked the relationship of modernity to colonialism in the Américas and who have developed terms such as coloniality and coloniality of power to better understand how the Enlightenment and liberal concepts such as the rights of man and social-change mechanisms like revolutions were compromised by their roots in territorial conquest and the rise of capitalism. Mapping the effects of this modernity on Mexican America is also key to understanding why the Recovery Project has transformed the archive, and further how this evolution is poised to trigger a transformation of U.S. nineteenth-century studies in years to come.
Among the many twists and turns in any discussion of modernity and Mexican American communities post-1848 but pre–Chicano movement lies the difficulty of understanding the role of literature for a people caught so precariously betwixt and between the nation-state. In most literary studies today, it is taken for granted in the West and its former colonies that literature was a primary mechanism and means for establishing the foundational narratives of the nation-state. By contrast and for decades after the U.S.–Mexico War, Mexican American communities existed outside the state-sanctioned narratives of nation-building. “Mexican” by language, culture, and religious habits, these people had nevertheless no binding influence on the republic of the Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Their status as “American,” as procured by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, only occasionally, and very infrequently at that, secured the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship. Despite what would seem completely debilitating circumstances, to produce outside the realm of the nation-state or to produce in a literary landscape without clear foremothers or forefathers, people wrote in most of the popular genres of the time, including the press.
Recorded in these literary and print productions, I argue, are the pressures and reactions to living under the peculiar weight of a modernity that is itself lodged between the United States and Mexico. Early Mexican American literature thus provides a series of historical and cultural frames from which to evaluate the ongoing consequences of a modernity defined and fueled by a “coloniality of power” that serviced the imaginaries of a globalized Europe. These cultural productions also evidence a variety of regional rationales for their own existence as separate from but not ignorant of the nation states of the United States and Mexico. The “coloniality of power” that resides in these texts is often double-edged, fighting off an Anglo American colonial presence, only to hide, make natural, or complicate older Spanish–Mexican colonial narratives.
My goal here is simple. I mean to apply the logic of Walter Mignolo’s method for rendering visible what Eurocentric modernity would otherwise keep invisible. I mean to offer a thick description of a “territory” that underwent a profound reconstitution, in order to then land on another Mignolo term, colonial difference, and argue for a way to name the kind of modernity that was visited on a “territory” conquered by war and words in the mid–nineteenth century of North America. Speaking on the relationship between modernity and the emergence of the nation-state in Latin America, for instance, Rob Marsh writes: “In the national narratives of Latin American nations it has been extremely important to emphasize the modernity of the nation, to catalogue and emphasize the specificities and the qualities of its civilization and to narrate the defeat of barbarism. . . . To govern is to subject the supposedly barbarous elements of America to the rule of a civilization defined solely on European terms.”9 For Quijano, the above process of subjugating the barbaric other is always part and parcel of the growth and consolidation of labor under capitalism. All the same, modernity’s continual identification with the “something new and different” and its proliferation of “changes in the material dimensions of social life” required constant guarding and redirection by elites of those same others it sought to control and profit from.10 Quijano writes: “For those exploited by capital, and in general those dominated by the model of power, modernity generates a horizon of liberation for people of every relation, structure, or institution linked to domination and exploitation, but also the social conditions in order to advance toward the direction of that horizon. Modernity is, then also a question of conflicting social interests. One of the interests is the continued democratization of social existence. In this sense, every concept of modernity is necessarily ambiguous and contradictory.”11 Mignolo’s work on modernity and coloniality mirrors both Marsh’s and Quijano’s assessments of modernity and its construction of the “social,” but with an emphasis on the processes of exchange, transaction, accommodation, and refutation in order to dramatize the presence of colonialism as always a dynamic, multivalent, multi-situated, as well as invoking and engaging a disparate range of actors. He writes:
The history of the Americas and the Caribbean from 1492 on is not only the history of Western European linguistic, economic, and religious expansion, but also the history of the ways of life adopted by those who were there before the expansion occurred. . . . And it is finally the history of those “in-between”: the natives or immigrants who had to deal with colonial situations and the postcolonial intellectuals who had to negotiate a cognitive space between the fragments of the European legacy and the forces of Amerindian ruins.12
Altogether this body of Latin American theory agrees on the range and extent of forces brought to bear to convert, correct, and manage a “new world” in the image and aggrandizement of Europe. In this context, what we often accept as the “transnational” character of Mexican American literature has to do with processes like transition, transitoriness, and transparency imposed by coloniality. More specifically, the “trans” has to do with the transitions that occurred when one colonial matrix gave way to yet a more powerful one in 1848; it has to do with the transitory promises of a modernity that accompanied the Anglo American colonial matrix but also the sense of betrayal and confusion that the prior Spanish–Mexican order, also a product of modernity, was so vulnerable and could be defeated; and finally, it has to do more with the transparency of the raw naked power of the nation-state when you are the subject of its colonialism as its perpetual “other.” The structure of the modernity I will be describing here echoes what Dussel calls “transmodernity,” where “trans” refers to those things/processes/inventions that are related to but external, hence considered extraneous and unimportant, to the maintenance of a Eurocentric modernity.13 In what follows, modernity is linked to an analysis that posits its rise not just with capitalism and racism, but as an invention that arose from Europe’s colonization of the Américas.
Although Marsh, Quijano, Mignolo, and Dussel are speaking of modernity in relation to Latin America, I deploy them here in order to consider the status of modernity in those territories lost by Mexico and gained by the United States in 1848, and to take up more concretely Mignolo’s sense of those caught “in-between.” Up to that moment in history in 1848, one can and should claim that Mexico was on the road to its own definition of modernity and nationalism from the moment Padre Miguel Hidalgo launched a war of independence in 1810. Mexico secured independence from Spain in 1821, but it was not until 1824 that the Mexican political process codified its first constitution as a republic. It was the Constitution of 1824 and its liberal policies that drew American and European settlers to Mexico’s northern territories like Texas. It was in this relatively secure period that Mexico began to develop and deepen the instruments of its national identity. For example, Raymond Craib writes: “Mexico’s first geographic society—Instituto Nacional de Geografía Estadística (later to become Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística)—had been created in 1833 by Valentín Gómez Farías, a president who believed that the accumulation of a production of geographic and statistical knowledge of the nation’s territory was critical for national development.”14 In the context of the perceived “horizon of liberation” such documents offered and imagined, it is no wonder that the repeal of the 1824 Constitution by President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna later in 1833 ushered in a series of secessionist movements in Mexico, including the successful Texas War of Independence in 1836. Ten years later the various regional nationalist agendas that were set in motion in 1776 and 1810, respectively, came to a head during the U.S.–Mexico War. Using Texas as fulcrum, the United States was able to consolidate and expand its territorial claims on the continent, thereby superimposing its own narratives of nation-building (Manifest Destiny) over lands and peoples that up to that point in time had also proceeded under the sign of modernity, but a modernity that was only weakly supported by a nationalist superstructure called Mexico. Nevertheless, the signs and artifacts of the previous Spanish–Mexican colonialisms and modernities were many and deep, from language to religion, from land use practices to land grant documents, from racial practices according to a “castas system” to architecture, the arts, and print culture, the residual presence of things Spanish, Mexican, Mestizo, and Indio, could not be Americanized overnight.
Yet, and despite the dizzying multitude of examples of this residual past from Texas to California, February 2, 1848, marks the official narrative of separation from the nation and modernity that continues under the sign of Mexico. For those people, communities, and cultures that remained and survived in the years after 1848, another colonialism and a different iteration of modernity becomes their burden to negotiate, just as it becomes a burden, an experience to witness the slow erosion, the fading of their residual shared cultural past. And perhaps these twin burdens could have been acceptable under the logic of democracy and citizenship, but the “horizon of liberation” that Quijano speaks about as constitutive of modernity was actively opposed and obstructed by Anglo American ideologies of racial superiority and by the industrial and agricultural economies of the United States and their desires for cheap and ever-available labor. As they were for other ethnic and immigrant groups, institutions were set up to require former Mexican nationals to assimilate into a nationalist set of American identities but also to discipline, punish, and alienate those deemed beyond the reach of civic incorporation. This alienation from the modernity of America was never completely totalizing but almost so. During moments of crisis, like war, people of Mexican descent have always been deemed appropriate for the military. This has been true since the Civil War and repeated ever since. Conversely, during other moments of crisis, like the Great Depression of the 1930s, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have been rounded up like criminals and without due process deported to Mexico. Other institutions, like the courts, the schools, banking, and voting, were notoriously steeped in the racism of their day.15 Were conditions like these the only thing to deal with under the regimes of Anglo American modernity, the Mexican American community would have been one thing, but the economic and political instability of the waning years of Porfirio Diaz’s dictatorship in early 1900s, followed by the Mexican Revolution, introduced successive waves of Mexican refugees that had the effect of destabilizing local strategies to Americanize the population of Mexican descent in the United States, as well as ironically re-Mexicanizing large areas of the Southwest and West by people in exodus. What is important to notice about this Mexican immigration is that it imported the competing modernities of Mexico itself, and over time the sustained movement of people, goods, technologies, and ideas created an uneven but palpable circuit between the conditions of modernity affecting Mexican Americans and those affecting Mexican nationals.
Without a doubt, this competing and conflicted circuit is a regional expression of the “alternative modernities” first explored by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonker in the late 1990s, but with one sharp difference: The status of the “nation-state” does not cohere in any normal sustained manner.16 To be more precise, whereas “state” functions and institutions, like laws, courts, and taxes, abound whether north of the border, or even south of the border during a civil war, the concept of the nation, la nación, existed as a practical imaginary for most, something to move toward, and for some as a memory of a dream never quite realized. By comparison to Anglo Americans or Mexicanos who inherit the Mexican Revolution, national belonging is continually questioned and questionable on either side of the border. As a result, regional identities become all the more important to communities of Mexican descent and all the more diverse given the 2,000-plus-mile border shared with Mexico. Over time in Texas, Mexican American life becomes symbolically and politically organized around the Texas Revolution (1836), and “remembering” the Alamo colors everything about being Mexican in the state; in New Mexico, centuries of an aristocratic landed gentry survive the Anglo American invasion by transforming themselves into Spanish Americans; in California, extreme demographic shifts, first introduced by the Gold Rush in 1849, succeed in “minoritizing” the once-combined majority of Californios and Native Americans to such a degree that by the early twentieth century Spanish California with its deteriorating missions and fake folklore like Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) becomes a commodity for tourists, land speculators, and easterners looking for a new life; in this environment, one could only be “Mexican,” a pejorative.
By historicizing and mapping the whole of the territory, not just focusing on the border, or borderlines, or borderlands ceded to the United States by the U.S.–Mexico War, but nonetheless open to and engaging in dialogue with the evolving nation-states of both Mexico and United States, one can understand what Mignolo means by “colonial difference,” and why cultural production within this identified space carries so much import. He writes:
The colonial difference is the space where the coloniality of power is enacted. It is also the space where the restitution of subaltern knowledge is taking place and where border thinking is emerging. The colonial difference is the space where local histories inventing and implementing global designs meet local histories, the space in which global designs have to be adapted, adopted, rejected, integrated, or ignored. The colonial difference is, finally, the physical as well as imaginary location where the coloniality of power is at work in the confrontation of two kinds of local histories displayed in different spaces and times across the planet.17
In essence, all cultural production within this space appears embedded with its own relationship to modernity and coloniality of power. In the case of cultural production by people of Mexican descent, and because it comes from a dominated context and precisely exterior to any nation-building outcome, it is a production in search of naming its own historical conditions, but because of the heterogeneity of its communities and the political and economic contingencies these communities had to deal with, it is one that never came to fruition.
All the same, and in retrospect, and because of the accumulated attempts to recover a history of Mexican Americans, it is now possible to name this modernity and thereby complete the analysis that is made possible by understanding the relationship of modernity and coloniality to each other. Quijano writes: “And since ‘modernity’ is about processes that were initiated with the emergence of America, of a new model of global power (the first world system), and of the integration of all the peoples of the globe in that process, it is also essential to admit that is about an entire historical period. In other words, starting with America, a new space/time was constituted materially and subjectively: this is what the concept of modernity names.”18 Thus, I take up Quijano’s definition of modernity as an imperative to describe the “new space/time [that] was constituted materially and subjectively” on the territories the United States won by war, but equally important I take up Quijano’s optimism that these more shadowy, darker, and troublesome modernities of the periphery can be named, and that the naming itself is essential to any critique. It is within the contact zone of evolving and competing modernities associated with those lands re-territorized by the United States that I like to name its experience and negotiation by people of Mexican descent in the United States as a modernity of subtraction, a subtraction whose point of origin and evolution is the territorial designs of coloniality beginning in 1492, but whose consequences take on an additional traumatic turn in 1848.
I would argue that Mignolo’s colonial difference underwrites how we might apply a geographic vision to analyzing histories and interpreting texts that are themselves imbued by their communities and their writers with a differential awareness of recolonized terrains. It is within this differential awareness that a modernity of subtraction for Mexican Americans becomes visible. With such a method, we can notice in the available primary and secondary sources about and by Mexicans and Mexican Americans several broad trends of historical and cultural value in this early period. Foremost among these is that despite the hegemonic pull to see all historical matters as a confirmation and validation of the United States, North America was the site of not one or two but multiple European-inspired colonial enterprises, from roughly 1492 to 1898. And further, these colonial enterprises often conspired against one another for New World domination. This observation should guide our thinking when considering how we might identify the archives deemed central to Mexican Americans. Specifically, it is important to understand that the United States and Mexico became part of a prolonged colonizing contest over territories, now regarded as the Southwest and West, roughly beginning in 1821 and culminating in 1848. Despite our nationalist conditioning since 1848, these disputed territories were not “tierras incognitas.” On the contrary, these territories had been under colonial scrutiny and pressure ever since the Ponce de Leon and Coronado expeditions and subsequently colonized and “civilized” to various degrees up to the start of the U.S.–Mexico War in 1846.19
In the context of archives that have competed and continue to compete with ethnic minority versions of U.S. history, it is critical to keep center stage that the U.S.–MexicoWar was not over empty, unpopulated spaces, or under-utilized land. The war was about peopled lands, deep harbors with towns long used to exporting and importing to a global market whether on the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific from San Diego to San Francisco. It was over natural and mineral resources. And it was most certainly about markets and the expansion of markets—as I have learned so well from Stephanie Le Manager.20 This is a long way of saying that the war was predicated on the fact of what already existed in the coveted territories west and south of the Mississippi River. The Anglo American territorial impulse was in part, I argue, a political unconscious that coveted what Spanish and Mexican colonialisms had been able to construct over three centuries of effort. What the United States gained came at the expense of what Mexican America came to lose, but also lose substractively over time by existing at the periphery of the nation-states of Mexico and United States.
Nonetheless, the remnants of these prior colonial domains often enter our critical discussions, whether in Chicana/o studies or postnational studies, by way of language centered on such terms as oppositionality, or alterity, or resistance, and yet almost never through historical narrative or historical treatments of archives. Rarely are the analyses attuned to the particularities of a prior historical moment—with all the structures of feelings and materiality one assumes with any historical moment of any particular people in any one particular place and time. In the absence of a thoroughly shaped knowledge project of Mexican Americans, postmodern, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories have been very useful, giving us means to comprehend the social and political conditions of a minority community in era of late capitalism. But the very contemporary origin of these theories has given us only a provisional comprehension of the order of things.
Like Raymond Williams’s use of the term residual, early Mexican American literature is full of deep remnants—prior moments of another world that was already full, fully present in its own cultural and political underpinnings—and, equally important, also always, already evolving into future states of an evolving colonial ideology that was Mexico’s political discourse in 1846.21 What we find in early Mexican American literature, then, are these rare glimpses into a state of collective being that was “anterior,” “antes,” before the reality that began in 1848 with the signing of the peace treaty. Because of the war, though, this anterior state becomes fragmented, demoted in social value, and displaced to the peripheral of the newly arrived official history of the United States. For the newly constructed class of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, “el tiempo anterior,” the time before, which had been everything, suddenly becomes an irretrievable past, and not just the basis for nostalgia of a golden age, but a past whose recalling cannot help but create a bifurcated sense of well-being, and at the center of that split is the issue of lost lands and, more significantly, an erosion of a sense of place—a sense of place that was timeless, if far from perfect, under a Spanish–Mexican cosmology. Thus loss, erosion, and dislocation anchor the significance of a modernity of subtraction for Mexican Americans. Within this particular rendering of colonial difference, the anteriors we find in early Mexican American literature cannot help but do war against an Anglo-Puritan world order. The anterior of early Mexican American literature here opposes, yes; resists, yes; and even proposes itself as an alternative to many a drifting son or daughter of latter-day Congregationalists, but never do these “anteriors” achieve a confidence in themselves, because the future for Mexican Americans, despite the U.S. Constitution and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, is not about belonging to the conquering nation. Instead, for well over one hundred years, the conquering nation treats its citizens of Mexican descent as barely tolerated foreigners. Because this modernity of subtraction is so tied to territorial loss, one can imagine the cultural work at play whenever these anterior states are represented or articulated, especially in the case of geography.
All the same, to claim territorial loss as the epicenter of a modernity of subtraction for post-1848 communities of Mexican descent, including those communities that form as a result of successive waves of Mexican immigration into the United States, is to decry the injustice of that loss but also to claim the lighter side of the coloniality of power that would justify one colonial enterprise over another. Because the matrix of modernity/coloniality, especially its darker elements, always seeks to make itself invisible to notice, hence impervious to critique and intervention, how does the burden of modernity ever get expressed and exposed by these same communities? This question returns us to the archive where the flows, and in particular the excesses, of modernity/coloniality are recorded and preserved but also very often in contest and conflict with its own formation. Like water poured into a cup, one can perceive the work of modernity/coloniality when it flows and fills a space previously empty of its influence, but because this flow is never content, very often this space is filled to excess, and this excess then flows layers upon layers of modernity/colonialty over the same space of colonial difference. Because these overflows happen in specific spaces at specifics times, the matrix of modernity/coloniality is always most visible at the point of excess, especially when the point of excess is the space of overlapping and competing colonialisms.
It is here at a point of excess—in a space that was already territorialized, cultured, racialized, and gendered once by Spain and then again by an independent Mexico—that the post-1848 writer of Mexican descent in the United States, for instance, appears as both colonizer and colonized, as beneficiary and victim of settler colonialism, as white and nonwhite, and as gendered, and therefore disciplined, in accordance with a European patriarchal system. Excess, I would argue, is what symbolically, figuratively, and rhetorically characterizes the writings of such individuals, and to some extent the individuals themselves. From María Amparo Ruiz de Burton to Sandra Cisneros, one finds in Mexican American literature a surplus of representations of excess, be it of violence, or poverty, or sadness, or irrationality, or silence, or death. Thus, the excess of one time/space continuum will very often reveal a history of excesses. In this sense, to remember the Alamo vis-à-vis Juan Seguín, who wrote unsuccessfully to set the official record straight, can never just be about Anglo Texans in 1836, but also about the mission system that constructed it in the first place, and the native peoples the Catholic Church subjugated and converted. Perhaps not surprising in this context, an anarchy of the archive is frequently at play when contemplating the collisions between excesses that occurred in the transformation of a Spanish–Mexican colonial space into the Manifest Destiny of Anglo America.
As with the example of the Alamo, nowhere are the intersections of geography, modernity of subtraction, and excess more provocative than in colonial place names. Although to glimpse a modernity of subtraction at work one could start reading geographically anterior moments anywhere in the Mexican American archive, Spanish place names have become over time active archival sites in themselves and illustrative of what is at stake when studying modernity/coloniality post-1848. Why, for example, is San Francisco called San Francisco? For that matter, why is California California? To put it more broadly, why didn’t the state constitutional convention of 1849 rename everything in California with place names more in keeping with an Anglo-Saxon Protestant colonial imaginary? To the victors go the spoils, right? What happened to the European zeal of renaming conquered lands? Everything began seemingly so briskly with New Spain, New England, and New France. Did nineteenth-century colonialism just wear itself out? Should we charge the “Forty-Niners” with laziness, or were they just too focused on the gold to be bothered with a few Spanish place names? Here a lack of obvious excess turns out to be an excess of a different order. To go down the path of answering the foregoing questions, one will invariably need to think postnational, transnational, and postcolonial. Further, one will have to think about the implicit and explicit instrumentality of language that institutionalizes social relations around any given geographic location with but the drop of a name. Then coupled with cartography, one will have to imagine how language transfers, supports, and maintains the cultural and political imaginaries that are imparted to any named place but especially colonized and recolonized locales. Here, the naming of place symbolizes the power of the colonizer, the power to set in motion a set of usable histories and fictions for an evolving colonialist community. For such a community, the naming of place feeds the desire for a shared symbolic narrative of purpose, and with this purpose in place, geography then becomes a virtual springboard toward the future.
San Francisco is as good an example as any. To ask about its origins is to remember its full name: La Misión de San Francisco de Asis (Mission Dolores). To know this origin is to acknowledge the Franciscan mission system that colonized and pacified the native populations of California, who were converted to Catholicism and forced to perform feudal labor for the mission lands.22 To place San Francisco on the map of “El Camino Real” is to link it to all the other surviving Spanish place names from here to San Diego. And eventually, one might be motivated by sociology or economics to wonder how these missions sustained themselves, and why the nearby harbors became even more attractive in the latter days of the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City. To ask and know these facts is to awaken to the lucrative trade that sprung up in the early 1800s between Yankee ship captains, early Californio colonists who commandeered mission lands from the Franciscan order beginning in the 1790s, and Cantonese merchants who traded spice for cattle hides, tallow, and foodstuffs from the Yankee captains who themselves had traded with or bought from the ranching “dons” of California. In short, San Francisco is San Francisco because during the nineteenth century’s own era of globalization, this city became a port of entry and egress for the world. The Gold Rush in 1849 only magnified what was already a reality: San Francisco was a global city, and little has changed that status. Today, to stroll its streets is to walk into its past, confirm it, and propel its reality into the future. For example, have you ever wondered why Gene Roddenberry, creator of the television series Star Trek, located the fictional headquarters of Starfleet in San Francisco? It’s not a coincidence. It’s because of geography, real and imagined, and the role that cultural geographies of the nation-state play in conjecturing the future.
The survival of Spanish place names after 1848 must be evidence, however subtly, of the imaginative power of the former colonialisms that dominated the Southwest and West, an excess that prevailed. Yet, it also behooves us to entertain the possibility that their survival was part of a coloniality of power that ushered in a new phase of colonialism in the Americas. In other words, 1848 Anglo American colonialism could not at some global level risk invalidating the logic of a former European colonialism that held sway in one manifestation or another for almost 400 years. It might be easier to see now that 1848 necessarily required some acknowledgement of the global colonialism that was already in place—a globalism that in actuality had fed and propelled the variant known as the United States of America. Here, San Francisco survives once as a place name because of its role in the “futuring” of a superior colonialism, and then again through a highly selective and nuanced cultural-political process that insists on some vestiges of prior colonialisms worthy of institutional memory. Over time, tourist sites that feature “old California” become appealing because their static presence confirms rather than deconstructs the inevitability of an Anglo California. Even historical curiosity is dulled by a nostalgia that is ironically in the service of the future not the past. This selective process of remembering prior colonial histories and/or non-European indigenous histories in the case of Native America might be a distinctive feature of settler countries like the United States. If so, the unevenness that appears through any casual geographic reading of place names should be understood, I argue, as continuous with the logic of 1848, and not some aberration due to local demographics or weakness in the power of colonialism itself. Instead, the unevenness that appears graphically on maps of North America since 1848 is part and parcel of a global colonialism that conditioned, shaped, and to some real degree disciplined the evolution of Manifest Destiny of the United States, at least until 1898—that other historic moment when the premiere colonialism of North America was undisputedly confirmed as south of Canada but north of Mexico. Nonetheless, people of Mexican descent residing in the United States were disenfranchised by one nation and abandoned by the other legally, culturally, and linguistically from participating as elites in the global colonialism that consolidated in the nineteenth century. Theirs was (has been) a subtractive experience of post-1848 modernity/coloniality. Hence, their relationship to surviving place names like San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or Albuquerque, or El Paso, or San Antonio is like the darker effects of modernity/coloniality in all of the Américas, an evolving legacy, rooted in the past to be sure, but also equally moving toward a future of uneven consequences, uneven fates.23
Because of the past twenty years of the Recovery Project, one vital reason for pursuing a study of modernity in early Mexican American literature lies in the various strategies and philosophies developed in the long period after the U.S.–Mexico War. There is in this archive a solace and inspiration one can derive from how and why people of Mexican descent chose to experience the aftermath of war by staying north of the border. These people chose not to emigrate south according to the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Later the archive is filled by the experience of others who fled the devastations of another war by making el Mexico de afuera, despite all its complications, their new home. From 1848 on, one is able to note in folklore, letters, print culture, and literary production an apprehension not just of the political realm but of the new Anglo American political imaginary that is revising and realigning centuries old discourses on race, gender, class, religion, citizenship, power, sovereignty, and more. For Mexican Americans, modernity is less about any particular angst over imperial designs or dread about cultures of capitalism, as it might be for Anglo Americans and more about the anxiety and frustration of becoming/being the unrecognized underclass other for two nation-building projects: the United States as it emerges as an imperial world power, and Mexico as it stages a hemispheric socialist response to the imperial impulses of the West.
Understood in this broad context, the archive of the pre-movement era might collide with that of the Chicano movement because of the differences I have highlighted, but these collisions are momentary, and demonstrative of an archive still very much under construction. Like my archive moment with María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Abraham Lincoln, which was momentarily disorienting but nonetheless thrilling, these archival collisions should be seen as vehicles by which both the familiar and the unfamiliar are rendered strange and new, and thus available for new interpretations, new methodologies, all linked by the conditioning forces of coloniality and modernity in the Américas.
Thus, the Recovery Project provides opportunity after opportunity to recover the effects of modernity in early Mexican American literature. Precisely because this period of texts and contexts is self-consciously rendered/situated in place and region, we ourselves are situated to understand modernity for early Mexican American literature as an alternative political unconscious that is trying to narrate the uneven erosions and fusions of two historically competing colonialisms. It is a narrative nonetheless advancing the politics and poetics of an “in-between” community, a community between Mexico and the United States that also struggles to deal with its orphan status, unclaimed by either nation-state. It is from this “in-between” continuum of location/dislocation that we can access the modernities captured by the cultural production in early Mexican American literature. It is from a modernity of subtraction that we can appreciate those aspects of the archive that seem by comparison, to either modernist figures in the United States or Mexico, out of place, forever anomalies. Instead of reading negatively the disconnection or isolation of Mexican American writers from María Amparo Ruiz de Burton to María Cristina Mena to Daniel Venegas, and of course, to Jovita González and Américo Paredes, their lack of connection is a symptom of their modernity rather than a comment on their fitness to chronicle the world they lived. A modernity of subtraction encourages us to resist hegemonic normalizing tendencies to pacify and discipline the archive to a narrow set of identities and to embrace instead the messy, contradictory, volatile character of the Mexican American archive.
A special thanks to Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán for their wisdom, skill, and patience in shepherding this chapter to fruition. And to all my C19 colegas for your support and comments mil gracias.
1 Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, introduction, The Squatter and The Don (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992 [1885], 5–51.
2 See José F. Aranda Jr., “Contradictory Impulses: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Resistance Theory, and the Politics of Chicano/a Studies,” American Literature 70.3 (1998): 551–79.
3 Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds., Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
4 See Ralph Bauer, “Hemispheric Studies,” PMLA 124.1 (2009): 234–50.
5 José F. Aranda Jr., “Grappling with the Archive of Mexican America,” in Special Issue, The Specter of the Archive, ed. John-Michael Rivera, English Language Notes 45.1 (Spring/Summer 2009): 67–78.
6 See Sophia J. Wallace, “It’s Complicated: Latinos, President Obama, and the 2012 Election,” in Social Science Quarterly 93.5 (December 2012): 1360–83.
7 See José F. Aranda Jr., “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage,” in The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, ed. Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio (New York: Routledge, 2013), 476–84.
8 For more on Seguín and similar figures of Mexican descent, see B. V. Olguín, “Sangre Mexicana/Corazón Americano: Identity, Ambiguity, and Critique in Mexican-American War Narratives,” American Literary History 14.1 (Spring 2002): 83–114.
9 See Rob Marsh, “Lecture on Ariel (1900) and Calibán (1971),” http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/spanish/SPS/nation/Ariel-Caliban.html (9/29/09): 1.3.
10 See Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2000): 546, 547.
11 Ibid., 548.
12 See Walter Mignolo, “Afterword: Human Understanding and (Latin) American Interests—The Politics and Sensibilities of Geocultural Location,” Poetics Today 16:1 (Spring 1995): 180.
13 See Enrique Dussel, “World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity,” Nepantla: Views from South 3.2 (2002): 221–44.
14 See Raymond B. Craib, “A Nationalist Metaphysics: State Fixations, National Maps, and the Geo-Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82:1 (2002): 35–36.
15 For a classic rendering of such historic moments, see Rodolfo F. Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Seventh edition (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, 2010).
16 See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonker, “On Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture, 11.1 (1999): 1–18.
17 See Walter Mignolo, “Preface,” Local Histories/Global Design (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 2000), ix.
18 See Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2000): 547.
19 David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).
20 Stephanie LeMenager, Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004)
21 See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1978).
22 See Edna Kimbro, Julia G. Costello, and Tevvy Ball, The California Missions: History, Art, and Preservation (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2009).
23 For a thorough treatment of a similar phenomenon but on a much broader scale, see Andrew Sluyter, “Colonialism and Landscape in the Americas: Material/Conceptual Transformations and Continuing Consequences,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91.2 (2001): 410–28.