VI.1.3 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 841662
In this 1990 text, the U.S.-based cultural theoreticians Juan Flores (born 1943) and George Yudice (born 1947) examine the social, political, and aesthetic construction of Latino identity and its corresponding struggle over language. The authors choose to pursue a “new social movement” approach to these issues, noting that this is better suited to considering Latino identity formation than the two prevailing scholarly trends in ethnicity theory (i.e., the 1950–60s construct of the “melting pot” and the “new ethnicity”) [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.1 BY GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEÑA FOR ANOTHER APPROACH TO THESE ISSUES]. Written at a time when the English-only movement in the United States was gaining momentum, this text underscores the fact that Latinos—in contrast to other U.S. immigrants whose language is lost when the second generation becomes assimilated—continue to use the Spanish language to overtly negotiate diverse forms of social and political enfranchisement. Through this practice, Latinos shaped a “border” identity in an Anglo Saxon society, thus affirming self-worth in the public sphere and facilitating the construction of a new multicultural America. The text is excerpted from its original publication [Juan Flores and George Yudice, “Living Borders/Buscando América: Languages of Latino Self-formation,” Social Text (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), no. 24 (1990), 57–84].
“My grandparents didn’t get special language instruction in school. In fact, they never finished high school because they had to work for a living.” Latinos hear this and similar statements every time the question of bilingual education comes up; such statements highlight an important difference—the maintenance of another language and the development of inter-lingual forms between this “new” immigrant group and the “older,” “ethnic” immigrants. The fact is that Latinos, that very heterogeneous medley of races, classes and nationalities1 are different from both the “older” and the “new” ethnics.2 To begin with, Latinos do not comprise even a relatively homogeneous “ethnicity.” Latinos include native-born U.S. citizens (predominantly Chicanos—Mexican Americans—and Nuyoricans—“mainland” Puerto Ricans) and Latin American immigrants of all racial and national combinations: white—including a range of different European nationalities—Native American, black, Arabic, and Asian. It is thus a mistake to lump them all under the category “racial minority,”3 although historically the U.S. experiences of large numbers of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans are adequately described by this concept.4 Moreover; both of these groups—unlike any of the European immigrant groups—constitute, with Native Americans, “conquered minorities.”5
If not outright conquered peoples, other Latin American immigrants, heretofore inhabitants of the “backyard” over which the United States claims the right of manifest destiny, have migrated here for both political and economic reasons, in part because of U.S. intervention in their homelands. From the time of Jose Martí [SEE DOCUMENT I.3.4], who lived in New York for over one third of his life during the 1880s and 1890s, slowly establishing the foundations for the Cuban independence movement, to the 1980s sanctuary movement for Central American refugees, U.S. actions (military incursions as well as economic sanctions) in Latin America have always generated Latin American migrations. The policies of U.S. finance institutions (supported by the U.S. government and, at times, by its military), moreover, have brought enormous foreign debt to Latin America and with it intolerable austerity programs that have induced many to seek a living in the United States.6
The result is a U.S. Latino population projected to be over 30 million in 1990, a minority population unprecedented in the history of the United States. Sheer numbers are in themselves influential but the way in which the numbers increase is more important: as a result of continuous immigration over the last 30 years, as well as the historical back-and-forth migration of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans and more recently of other national groups, Latinos have held on to Spanish over more generations that any other group in history. 90% of U.S. Latinos/Latin Americans speak Spanish.7 In contrast, speakers of Italian dwindled by 94% from the second to the third generation.8 The civil rights movement spurred new forms of consciousness and political action among Chicanos and Nuyoricans. They and other Latinos have been able to use the language issue as a means to mediate diverse types of political enfranchisement and social empowerment: voting reform, bilingual education, employment opportunities, and so on. In fact, the conditions for identity-formation, in all its dimensions (social, political, and especially aesthetic), have been largely provided by the struggle over how to interpret language needs and the adjudication and legislation, on that basis, of civil rights directed primarily (but not exclusively) to Latinos.
In recognition of these conditions, which were not in place when the two major trends in ethnicity theory (the “melting pot” of the early twentieth century and the “new ethnicity” of the ’50s and ’60s) emerged, we feel that there is greater explanatory power in a “new social movement” approach to Latino identity. By “new social movements” we refer to those struggles around questions of race, gender, environment, religion, and so on, which cannot be fully encompassed under the rubric of class struggle and which play out their demands on the terrains of the body, sexuality, language, etc., that is, those areas which are socially constituted as comprising the “private” sphere. This is not to say that the inequalities (and causes rooted in relations of production) referred to by class analysis have disappeared. On the contrary, from the perspective we adopt such inequalities (and their causes) can be seen to multiply into all spheres of life. Capitalist society does not cause racism any more than it does linguistic stratification; it does, however, make all these differences functional for the benefit of hegemonic groups. A social movement approach does not so much disregard class exploitation as analyze how racism, sexism, linguistic stratification, etc. are mobilized through “both discursive positions and control of the means of production and coercion.”9 Under these circumstances, political agency is, according to Stanley Aronowitz, “constituted in the gap between the promises of modern democratic society and its subversion by the various right-wing states. Politics renews itself primarily in extra-parliamentary forms which, given the still potent effectiveness of the modern state form, if not its particular manifestations of governance, draws social movements into its orbit. Some call this cooptation, but it is more accurate to understand it as a process related to the economic and cultural hegemony of late capitalism, which draws the excluded not only by its dreamwork, but by the political imagery that still occupies its own subjects.”10
What is particularly different about the new social movements is that they enter the political arena by “address[ing] power itself as an antagonist,” such that they must deploy their practices in the cultural as well as economic spheres. To understand Latinos, then, we must understand the conditions under which they enter the political arena. Among these conditions, which were not in place when the “ethnic” (European) immigrants negotiated their enfranchisement in the U.S., are the welfare state (which in part brought to the fore the terrains of struggle and which neoconservatives are currently attempting to dismantle) and the permeation of representation by the consumer market and the media. In what follows, we explore how Latino identity is mediated and constructed through the struggle over language under such “postmodern” conditions.
First of all, the name, “America.” Extrapolating from Edmundo O’Gorman’s [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.7] meditation on the “invention of America,”11 we might say that “America” has been conceived over and over again throughout history. The name “remains the same,” but it has had successive re-conceptualizations (it is rewritten in the Borgesian sense that Pierre Menard rewrote Don Quixote) and with each one the terrain changes. The current mass migration of Latinos to the United States engenders such a process of re-conceptualization, bringing to mind F. J. Turner’s notion of America as a moving frontier and giving it another twist so as to invent a new trope: America as a “living border.” If the “discovery” of “America” transformed the ocean into a frontier on whose other side lay a “new” world, and if that new world was subsequently defined by the westward movement and capitalization of the margin, underwriting “the record of social evolution”12 or modernity and providing a “‘safety valve’ for the discontent of a new industrial proletariat”13 largely comprised of European immigrants, then the latest re-conceptualization of America, by Latinos, is a cultural map which is all border, like the inter-lingual speech (or Spanglish) of Chicanos and Nuyoricans.
“[I] opt for ‘borderness’ and assume my role: My generation, the chilangos [slang term for a Mexico City native], who came to “el norte” fleeing the imminent ecological and social catastrophe of Mexico City, gradually integrated itself into otherness, in search of that other Mexico grafted onto the entrails of the et cetera . . . became Chicano-ized. We de-Mexicanized ourselves to Mexi-under-stand our- selves, some without wanting to, others on purpose. And one day, the border became our house, laboratory, and ministry of culture.”14
Contemporary Latino artists and writers throw back the anxiety of ambivalence cast upon them as an irresolvable perplexity of naming and placing. [The Mexican performance artist and writer Guillermo] Gómez-Peña talks of “this troubled continent accidentally called America” and “this troubled country mistakenly called America.”15 AmeRícan, announces Tato Laviera in the title poem of his third book of Nuyorican poetry, “defining myself my own way many ways Am e Rícan, with the big R and the accent on the I.”16 The hallowed misnomer unleashes the art of brazen neologism. The arrogance of political geography backfires in the boundless defiance of cultural remapping. The imposed border emerges as the locus of re-definition and re-signification. The cover illustration of AmeRícan boasts a day-glo Statue of Liberty holding aloft a huge pilón [post] of liberty, the majestic torch of comida criolla, ajo y plátano [Caribbean food with garlic and bananas]. Latino taste buds water with mofongo and mole. [Fried bananas and pork crackling with sauce] “English only Jamás!” [or] “Sólo inglés, no way!
Latino affirmation is first of all a fending off of schizophrenia, of that pathological duality born of contending cultural worlds and, perhaps more significantly, of the conflicting pressures toward both exclusion and forced incorporation. Another Nuyorican poet, Sandra Maria Esteves, thematizes this existential split in much of her work: “I am two parts/ a person boricua/ spic past and present alive and oppressed.”17 Esteves enacts the bewilderment, darting back and forth between unreal options and stammering tongues: “Being Puertorriqueña Americana/ Born in the Bronx,/ not really jíbara/ Not really hablando bien/ But yet, not gringa either,/ pero ni portorra,/ pero sí portorra too/ Pero ni que what am I?”18 She cannot “really” be both, she realizes, but she senses a unique beauty in her straddling position, and is confident in the assertion, which is the title of her poem, that she is “Not Neither.”
Contrary to the monocultural dictates of the official public sphere, the border claims that it is “not nowhere.” This first gestus of Latino cultural practice thus involves an emphatic self-legitimation, a negation of hegemonic denial articulated as the rejection of anonymity. Though no appropriate name is available in the standard language repertoires, whether English or Spanish, namelessness is decidedly not an option. Whatever the shortcomings and misconceptions of bureaucratic bilingualism, alinguality is neither the practiced reality nor a potential outcome of Latino expressive life. The inter-lingual, border voice characteristically summons the tonality of the relegated “private” sphere to counter the muzzling pressure of official public legitimation.
The trope of a border culture is not thus simply another expression of postmodern aesthetic indeterminacy, along the lines of [Jacques] Derrida’s decontextualized framework or parergon: “the incomprehensibility of the border at the border,”19 or a Baudrillardian simulacrum (neither copy nor original).20 The trope emerges, rather, from the ways in which Latinos deploy their language in everyday life. It corresponds to an ethos under formation; it is practice rather than representation of Latino identity. And it is on this terrain that Latinos wage their cultural politics as a “social movement.” As such, Latino aesthetics do not pretend to be separate from everyday practices but rather an integral part of an ethos that seeks to be politicized as a means to validation and self-determination. And it is precisely the projection of this ethos into the culture at large and into the political arena that threatens the dominant “Anglo” culture with loss of control of its physical and metaphorical borders. As the shrillest voices of the English-Only movement have put it, such Latino language and cultural practices threaten national unity and security.21 Latino disregard for “our borders” may result in the transformation of the United States into a “mongrel nation.”22 “There are misguided persons, specifically Hispanic immigrants, who have chosen to come here to enjoy our freedoms, who would legislate another language, Spanish, as coequal and co-legal with English. . . . If Hispanics get their way, perhaps someday Spanish could replace English entirely. . . . [We] ought to remind them, and better still educate them to the fact that the United States is not a mongrel nation.”
Language has been accurately characterized “an automatic signaling system, second only to race in identifying targets for possible privilege or discrimination.”23 Unpack the discourse against the language of Latinos and you’ve got a panoply of racist and classist repudiations: “These children [of undocumented immigrants] will remain part of that population which never learns English, and threatens to make America a bilingual country, costing the American taxpayer billions of dollars. Token citizenship will not help poor, unskilled Hispanics when they find themselves in a permanent underclass, isolated by a language barrier. The hopes that brought them here in the first place will turn to despair as they become dependent upon government handouts. . . . Congress has presented the indigenous population of Mexico with an open invitation to walk across our Southern border.”24
Language, then, is the necessary terrain on which Latinos negotiate value and attempt to reshape the institutions through which it is distributed. This is not to say that Latino identity is reduced to its linguistic dimensions. Rather, in the current sociopolitical structure of the United States, such matters rooted in the “private sphere,” like language (for Latinos and other minorities), sexuality, body, and family definition (for women and gays and lesbians), etc., become the semiotic material around which identity is deployed in the “public sphere.” The purpose always seems to be to maintain hegemony or to negotiate empowerment of those groups which have been discriminated against on such bases.
The attack on the perceived linguistic practices of Latinos is a vehicle for attacks on immigration, bilingual education, inclusion of Latinos in the services of the welfare state, and above all, a repudiation of the effect that Latinos are having in reshaping U.S. culture. Furthermore, such attacks highlight the influence that the dominant groups in the U.S. expect Latinos to have on foreign policy. Their rhetoric harbors the fear that U.S. imperialism in Latin American countries is boomeranging and eroding U.S. hegemony.
The language question then is a smoke screen for the scapegoating of Latinos on account of recent economic, social and political setbacks for the United States. “Anglo insecurity” looks to the claims of Latinos and other minority constituencies for the erosion of the United States’ position in world leadership, the downturn in the economy, and the bleak prospects for social mobility for the next generation.25 In fact, now that dominant U.S. national rhetoric seems no longer able to project a global communist bogey, on account of political changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, this rhetoric will increasingly consolidate its weapons against Latinos as the drug-disseminating enemy within. The War on Drugs will increasingly become a War on Latinos and Latin Americans, as the recent brutal U.S. invasion of Panama has demonstrated. Furthermore, U.S. intervention in Latin America will increase as “the Pentagon searches for new ways to help justify its spending plans.”26
The effect of dominant U.S. reaction to the special language needs that Latinos project and the rights that they claim on that basis has been to strengthen the moves toward unity on the part of diverse Latino communities. Otherwise divided by such identity factors as race, class, and national origin, there are economic, social and political reasons in post-civil-rights U.S. why Latinos can constitute a broadly defined national and trans-national federation which aspires to re-conceptualize “America” in multicultural and multi-centric terms that refuse the relativist fiction of cultural pluralism. It is for this reason that we have proposed to look at Latino negotiation of identity from a social movement perspective rather than a (liberal-sociological) ethnicity paradigm.
It is a commonplace among contemporary theorists of ethnicity in the U.S. that the assimilation-ist or “melting pot” paradigm of the first half of the century “failed to explain what it most needed and wanted to explain— the persistence of racial stratification . . . .”27 The “new ethnicity” paradigm, which emerged to remedy the failure of assimilation theory and, as we stated above, to counter the gains made by blacks and other “racial minorities” in the wake of civil rights activism, makes the basic claim that ethnicity becomes the category around which interests are negotiated when class loses its moorings in postindustrial society. The “new ethnicity” can be understood to form part of what [Jürgen] Habermas has posited as a “neoconservative postmodernism,” that is, the rejection of “cultural modernism,” because it has eroded traditional moral values, and the continued espousal of infrastructural modernity or capitalism cum technical progress and rational administration.”28 The false premise of this argument, of course, is that the economy can be independent of culture; this theory thus serves the purpose of providing a cultural (or ethnic) politics in postindustrial society with no need to resort to economically based categories such as class: “In trying to account for the upsurge of ethnicity today, one can see this ethnicity as the emergent expression of primordial feelings [or “re-enchantment”], long suppressed but now reawakened, or as a ‘strategic site’ chosen by disadvantaged persons as a new mode of seeking political redress in the society.”29 The falsity of the model, of course, is that blacks and other “racial minorities” can be equated with white “ethnic” groups.30 The result is reinforcement of existing class inequalities expressed in ethnic/racial terms.31
“Racial” movements could be understood to be the first of the “new social movements” or “new antagonisms” that call into question forms of subordination (bureaucratization and consumer commodification of “private” life) in the post World War II U.S. They do not, however, retreat from “cultural modernism”32 (the erosion of traditional moral values undergirded by class, race, and gender discriminations) but rather extend it to the point of questioning “infrastructural modernism.” Among the challenges is the push to legitimate the adjudication and legislation of rights on the basis of group need rather that the possessive individualist terms that traditionally define rights discourse.33 “New ethnicity” theory is only one of a panoply of strategies by which neoconservatives have sought to contest the extension of rights on the basis of group criteria (affirmative action, Head Start programs, anti-discrimination statutes, and so on). The result has been the acknowledged loss of foundations for rights and the shift to a paradigm of interpretability. Group rights must take place, then, in a surrogate terrain, like language or the family. According to [Martha] Minow: “One predictable kind of struggle in the United States arises among religious and ethnic groups. Here, the dominant legal framework of rights rhetoric is problematic, for it does not easily accommodate groups. Religious freedom, for example, typically protects individual freedom from state authority or from oppression by private groups. Ethnic groups lack even that entry point into constitutional protection, except insofar as individuals may make choices to speak or assemble in relation to a chosen group identity.”34
If the framework of rights is an impoverished one for the struggles of the new social movements, then what has been the means to greater political participation? One alternative has been to engage in the struggle of needs interpretations. According to Nancy Fraser, “political issues concerning the interpretation of people’s needs [are translated] into legal, administrative, and/or therapeutic matters,”35 differentially according to the identificatory features (race, class, gender, religion, and so on) of the group.
. . .
Arguments for and against bilingual education aside, our point is that the struggle needs interpretations—in this case around the need for special language education—and is what in the present historical conjuncture in the U.S. mediates accumulation of value politically, economically, and socially. Latinos, after all, have made significant gains (they have professionalized) in the educational system because they can more easily qualify for the job requirements (Spanish language literacy) of bilingual education. Language, as we shall demonstrate below, is also the terrain on which Latino “aesthetics of existence” or affirmative self-formative practices operate. According to [Jürgen] Habermas, oppositional, resisting discourses emerge when the validity of legal norms is questioned from the perspective of an everyday practice that refuses to be depoliticized by the “steering mechanisms” of law, bureaucracy, and consumerism.36 Through such resistant everyday practices, Latinos have contributed to reshaping the public sphere of American society. Or perhaps it would be more exact to say they have contributed to the emergence of a contestatory “social sphere” which blurs the public/private dichotomy because needs “have broken out of the domestic and/or official economic spheres that earlier contained them as ‘private matters’.”37 Another way of conceiving this contestation is to imagine social space as networks of conflicting and allied public spheres. What is defined as “private” from the purview of one is “public” or political from the purview of another.
The relevance of casting Latino negotiation of identity as a contribution to the creation of an alternative public sphere can be brought out by situating it within Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s expanded understanding of the concept. They do not limit it to (1) the institutional settings of public opinion (media, parliaments, etc.) but extend it to (2) “the ideational substance that is processed and produced within these sites,” and (3) “a general horizon of social experience,”38 or “drive toward self-formation and self-reconstruction” (in the collective sense of “self”) which is limited or crippled by the first sense.39 An alternative model can be culled from [Mikhail] Bakhtin’s writings on “behavioral ideology” and the constitution of identity through the re-accentuation of speech genres. Ideological or discursive production is institutionally bound but is generally (except in cases of outright force) open to modulation whereby persons “author themselves” or make discourse “one’s own” in the media of speech and behavioral genres.40 Our utterances are necessarily enunciated and organized within such genres, which bear institutional marks. Self-formation is simultaneously personal and social (or private and public) because the utterances and acts through which we experience or gain our self-images are re-accentuated in relation to how genres have institutionally been made sensitive or responsive to identity factors such as race, gender, class, religion, and so on.
In postmodernity, “private” identity factors or subject positions may become unmoored from institutionally bound generic structures, turning “intimacy . . . the practical touchstone for the substance of the public sphere.”41 Experience, situated thus, is what fuels the utopian and contestatory potential of self-formation. What is even more significant is that subjective or psychological phenomena are now increasingly seen as having epistemological and even practical functions. Fantasy is no longer felt to be a private and compensatory reaction against public situations, but rather a way of reading those situations, of thinking and mapping them, of intervening in them, albeit in a very different form from the abstract reflections of traditional philosophy or politics.42
Alternative public spheres, with their different, situated knowledges, are, for Negt and Kluge, constituted by the conflicting back and forth crossover of everyday experience and fantasy over the boundaries of the hegemonic public sphere.43 On the other hand, the hegemonic public sphere itself “tries to develop techniques to reincorporate fantasy in domesticated form.” This is precisely the function of “new ethnicity” theory: to co-opt the alternative public sphere of a multicultural society in such a way that ethnic difference is reduced to its superficial signs, or from Negt and Kluge’s perspective, a sublimation of the “unconscious practical criticism of alienation.”44
. . .
Rubén Blades has insisted that a culturally effective crossover, which he prefers to call “convergence,” is not about “abandonment or sneaking into someone else’s territory. I propose, rather, convergence. Let’s meet half way, and then we can walk either way together.”45 At the end of the interview he adds that he does “not need a visa” for the musical fusion which he seeks. He does not want “to be in America” but rather participate in the creation of a new America. The lyrics of the title piece of his Buscando América (Elektra/Asylum, 1984) make this point. . . .
Latinos, then, do not aspire to enter an already given America but to participate in the construction of a new hegemony dependent upon their cultural practices and discourses. As argued above, the struggle over language signals this desire and the opposition to it by dominant groups. This view of language, and its strategic operationality in achieving a sense of self-worth, is the organizing focus of Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza.46 “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.”47 Like [César Miguel] Rondón’s arguments about salsa,48 the language of the new Mestiza is the migratory homeland in which “continual creative motion . . . keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm.”49 Anzaldua acknowledges that her projection of a “new mestiza consciousness” may seem cultureless from the perspective of “male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos;” for her, on the contrary, she is participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet.50
Another way of constructing Anzaldua’s mestiza poetics is as follows: all cultural groups need a sense of worth in order to survive. Self-determination, which in this case focuses on linguistic self-determination, is the category around which such a need should be adjudicated and/or legislated as a civil right. In order for this right to be effective, however, it would have to alter the nature [or, to be more exact, the social relations] of civil society. Such a claim, constructed in this way, only makes sense in a social structure that has shifted the grounds for enfranchisement from one of rights discourse to the interpretations that underpin such discourse. What is the justification, however, for needs interpretation? Our claim is that group ethos, the very stuff (or the “ethical substance,” in [Michel] Foucault’s terminology)51 of self-formation, is what contingently grounds the interpretation of a need as legitimate so that it can be adjudicated or legislated as a right. Another claim is that group ethos is constituted by everyday aesthetic practices such as the creative linguistic practices of Latinos which in the current historical conjuncture do not amount to subalternity, but rather to a way of prying open the larger culture, by making its physical, institutional and metaphorical borders indeterminate, precisely what we have seen that the dominant culture fears.
Latino self-formation as trans-creation—to “trans-create” the term beyond its strictly commercialist coinage—is more than a culture of resistance, or it is “resistance” in more than the sense of standing up against concerted hegemonic domination. It confronts the prevailing ethos by congregating an ethos of its own, not necessarily an outright adversarial but certainly an alternative ethos. The Latino border trans-creates the impinging dominant cultures by constituting the space for their free intermingling—free because it is dependent on neither, nor on the reaction of one to the other, for its own legitimacy. Dialogue and confrontation with the mono-cultural other persists, but on the basis of what [Michel] Foucault has called “the idea of governmentality,” “the totality of practices, by which one can constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have in regard to each other.”52
. . .
Ethnicity-as-practice is primordially genealogical, intent as it invariably is on a recapturing and re-constituting of the past. It relies, as Michael M.J. Fischer terms it, on the “post-modern arts of memory,” the collective power of recall that is only a power if it functions actively and constitutively. This retrospective, testimonial search is for Fischer “a (re)invention and discovery of a vision, both ethical and future-oriented. Whereas the search for coherence is grounded in a connection to the past, the meaning abstracted from that past, an important criterion of coherence, is an ethic workable for the future.”53 The “alternative chronicle” is more than merely recuperative: it is eminently functional in present self-formative practice and anticipatory of potential historical self-hood. Sandra Maria Esteves, in a poem cited earlier (“I am two parts/a person boricua/spic”), bemoans the forcible, physical loss of her antecedence: “I may never overcome the theft of my isla heritage... I can only imagine and remember how it was.” But that imagination and remembrance enliven her dreamwork, which in turn “realizes” that lost reality in a way that leads to eventual and profound self-realization. Her poem ends, “But that reality now a dream teaches me to see, and will bring me back to me.”54
In the post-modern context, the mnemonic “arts” of border expression are conducted in “inventive languages,” a key phrase of Gómez-Peña signaling the characteristic expressive tactic of this process. Language itself, of course, is the most obvious site of Latino inventiveness. Whether the wildest extravagance of the bilingual poet or the most mundane comment of everyday life, Latino usage tends necessarily toward inter-lingual innovation. The interfacing of multiple codes serves to de-canonize all of them, at least in their presumed discrete authority, thus allowing ample space for spontaneous experimentation and punning. Even for the most monolingual of Latinos, the “other” language looms constantly as a potential resource, and the option to vary according to different speech contexts is used far more often than not. “Trans-creation,” understood in this sense of intercultural variability and transferability, is the hallmark of border language practice.
The irreverence implicit in trans-creative expression need not be deliberately defiant in motive; it reflects rather a largely unspoken disregard for conventionally bounded usage insofar as such circumscription obstructs the need for optimal specificity of communicative and cultural context. The guiding impulse, articulated or not, is one of play, freedom, and even empowerment in the sense that access to individual and collective referentiality cannot ultimately be blocked. Inter-lingual puns, multi- directional mixing and switching, and the seemingly limitless stock of borrowings and adaptations attest to a delight not only in excluding and eluding the dominant and exclusionary, but in the very act of inclusion within a newly constituted expressive terrain. Rather than rejecting a language because of its association with a repressive other, or adopting it wholesale in order to facilitate passage, Latino expression typically “uses” official discourse by adapting it and thereby showing up its practical malleability.
Nuyorican vernacular includes the verb “gufear,” from which has derived the noun “el gufeo.” The colloquial American word “goof” is clearly visible and audible, and certainly the Spanglish usage has its closest equivalent in the phrase “goofing on” someone or something. But as a cultural practice, “el gufeo” clearly harkens to “el vacilón,” that longstanding Puerto Rican tradition of funning and funning on, fun-making and making fun. Popular culture and everyday life among Puerto Ricans abound in the spirit of “el vacilón,” that enjoyment in ribbing at someone’s or one’s own expense, for which a wider though overlapping term is “el relajo.” . . . “El gufeo” takes the process even one step further: Latino “signifyin(g)” in the multicultural U.S. context adds to the fascination of its home country or African-American counterparts because of its inter-linguality. Double-talk in this case is sustained not merely by the interplay of “standard” and vernacular significations but by the crossing of entire language repertoires. Border vernacular in fact harbors a plurality of vernaculars comprised of their multiple interminglings and possible permutations. The result is not simply an extended range of choices and juxtapositions, the kind of “splitting of tongues” exemplified by border poet Gina Valdés at the end of her poem “Where You From?”: soy de aqui y soy de alla/ I didn’t build this border/ that halts me the word fron/ tera splits on my tongue.”55 . . .
For, as Gómez-Peña suggests, in order for the “multicultural paradigm” to amount to more than still another warmed-over version of cultural pluralism, the entire culture and national project need to be conceived from a “multi-centric perspective.” It is at the border, where diversity is concentrated, that diversity as a fact of cultural life may be most readily and profoundly perceived and expressed. It is there, as Gloria Anzaldua describes it in her work Borderlands/La Frontera, that the Mestiza “learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode. . . . Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.”56 Renato Rosaldo sees in Anzaldua’s Chicana lesbian vision a celebration of “the potential of borders in opening new forms of human understanding”: “She argues that because Chicanos have long practiced the art of cultural blending, ‘we’ now stand in a position to become leaders in developing new forms of polyglot cultural creativity. In her view, the rear guard will become the vanguard.”57
Understood in this sense, multiculturalism signals a paradigmatic shift in ethnicity theory, a radically changed optic concerning center and margins of cultural possibility. The presumed “subcultural” tributaries feel emboldened to lay claim to the “mainstream,” that tired metaphor now assuming a totally new interpretation. Tato Laviera once again is playing a pioneering role in this act of re-signifying: in his new book, entitled Mainstream Ethics, Laviera demonstrates that it is the very concurrence of multiple and diverse voices, tones and linguistic resources that impels the flow of the whole culture of “America.” The challenge is obviously aesthetic and political in intent, but it is also, as the title indicates, an eminently ethical one. “It is not our role,” the book’s introduction announces, “to follow the dictates of a shadowy norm, an illusive mainstream, but to remain faithful to our collective and individual personalities. Our ethic is and shall always be current.”58 Appropriately, the Spanish subtitle of the volume, “ética corriente,” is more than a translation; it is a “trans-creation” in the full sense, since “current” or “common,” with its rootedness in the cultural ethos of everyday life, stands in blatant contrast to the fabricated, apologetic implications of “mainstream” in its conventional usage. The Chicano poet Juan Felipe Herrera has an intriguing gufeo fantasy. “What if suddenly the continent turned upside-down?” he muses. “What if the U.S. was Mexico?/ What if 200,000 Anglosaxicans [sic]/ were to cross the border each month/ to work as gardeners, waiters,/ 3rd chair musicians, movie extras,/ bouncers, babysitters, chauffeurs,/ syndicated cartoons, feather-weight/ boxers, fruit-pickers & anonymous poets?/ What if they were called waspanos,/ waspitos, wasperos or wasbacks?/ What if we were the top dogs?/ What if literature was life, eh?”59
The border houses the power of the outrageous, the imagination needed to turn the historical and cultural tables. The view from the border enables us to apprehend the ultimate arbitrariness of the border itself, of forced separations and inferiorizations. Latino expression forces the issue which tops the agenda of American culture, the issue of geography and nomenclature. . . . For the search for “America,” the inclusive, multicultural society of the continent has to do with nothing less than an imaginative ethos of re-mapping and re-naming in the service not only of Latinos but all claimants.
1
We agree with Guillermo Gómez-Peña that “[t]erms like ‘Hispanic,’ ‘Latino,’ ‘Ethnic,’ ‘minority,’ ‘marginal,’ ‘alternative,’ and ‘Third World,’ among others, are inaccurate and loaded with ideological implications. . . . In the absence of a more enlightened terminology, we have no choice but to utilize them with extreme care.” See “The Multicultural Paradigm: An Open Letter to the National Arts Community,” High Performance (Fall 1989): 20 [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.1].
2
We have decided to emphasize “Latino” for, unlike “Hispanic,” it is not an identity label imposed by the politicized statistics of the Census Bureau and the market who seek to target particular constituencies for political and economic manipulation. As for the shortcomings of “Latino,” we hope that this article contributes to their critique. In a nutshell, the term “older immigrants” refers to the way in which assimilationist or “melting pot” sociologists (from Robert Park to Milton Gordon) constructed the experiences of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants according to a dynamic of contact, accommodation, and assimilation that eventually amalgamated them into the dominant culture. The term “new ethnics” refers to the period of (white) ethnic revival, largely coinciding with civil rights struggles and their aftermath, in which “racial minorities and white ethics became polarized on a series of issues relating to schools, housing, local government, and control over federal programs.” This revival has also been understood as the dying flash of white ethnicity in a longer historical process of acculturation. Cf. Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth. Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 48–51. See also Richard H. Thompson, Theories of Ethnicity. A Critical Appraisal (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989), for whom the “rediscovery of ethnicity [by its American observers] is largely a response to the black protest movement of the 1960s, the state’s subsequent definition and legitimization of that movement as an ethnic (but not primarily a class) movement, and the resulting increase in the United States of other ethnically defined movements by Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and “white ethnics,’ who, observing the ‘success’ of black organization and the state’s receptivity to it, have quite un-mysteriously followed a similar tack.” (p. 93).
3
“Racial minority” is a term used to distinguish the historical experiences (enslavement and/or institutional exclusion from political, economic, and especially social enfranchisement) of certain groups (viz. African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and Native-Americans) from those of European immigrant groups for whom the dynamics described by ethnicity theories made possible the enfranchisements denied to the former. Cf. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
4
The historical discrimination against Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans is an experience that cannot be permitted to disappear by projecting Latinos as an overarching group. Such discrimination involves a complex of racial, class, and “otherness” factors that often make middle-class sectors of other Latino groups anxious and seek to dissociate them. On the other hand, the fact that discrimination has been directed at all Latino groups contributes to a pan-Latino rejection of discrimination aimed at any particular group.
5
Cf. Steinberg, The Ethic Myth (1982), 24, 40, et passim.
6
The increase in the Latin American population in the United States can be more accurately compared with the overall European influx rather than with the numbers of any one particular group. If Latin American immigration, in conjunction with the high fertility rate of U.S. Latinos, continues into the next century (which is likely), then proportionately the number of Latinos will rival or supersede that of the European immigrants since the turn of the nineteenth century. From 1820 to 1930, the estimated “net immigration of various European nationalities” is as follows: Germans, 5,900,000; Italians, 4,600,000; Irish, 4,500,000; Poles, 3,000,000; Canadians, 2,800,000, Jews, 2,500,000; English, 2,500,000; Swedes, 1,200,000; Scots and Scots-Irish, 1,000,000.
7
Cf. Michael Lev, “Tracking The Hispanic TV Audience,” The New York Times (Dec. 13, 1989): D 17. Lev’s figures are taken from a Nielsen Hispanic Television survey funded by two of the largest Spanish TV networks, Univisión and Telemundo Group, Inc.
8
Such decreases are comparable to other European immigrant populations in the United States. Cf. Joshua Fish-man, et al., Language Loyalty in the United States (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 42–44.
9
Stanley Aronowitz, “Postmodernism and Politics,” Social Text, 18 (Winter 1987/88): 108. Re-printed in Andrew Ross, ed., Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 46–62.
10
Ibid.
11
Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America. An Inquiry into the historical nature of the New World and the meaning of its history (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961). [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.7]
12
Frederick Jackson Tuner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1920), 11.
13
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment. The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York, NY: Atheneum, 1985), 40. In the case of African-Americans, of course, it was not such a “safety valve” but the racist state that contained their discontent.
14
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Documented/Undocumented,” in Multi-Cultural Literacy. Opening the American Mind, eds. Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1988), 127.
15
Gómez-Peña, “The Multicultural Paradigm,” (1989): 20.
16
Tato Laviera, AmeRícan (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1984), 95.
17
Sandra Maria Esteves, Yerba Buena (Greenfield Center, NY: Greenfield Review, 1980).
18
Sandra Maria Esteves, Tropical Rains (New York: African Caribbean Poetry Theater, 1984).
19
Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” October, 9 (Summer 1979): 20.
20
Cf. Jean Baudrillard, De la Séduction (Paris: Galilée, 1979). Apropos of the simulacrum, Latin Americans have dealt with problems of cultural identity in terms of the “neither-nor” since the conquest. The difference between “neither-nor” and “not neither” (or “not nowhere”) is that the former is usually expressed by elites who feel in an ambivalent position vis-à-vis metropolitan cultural valuation while the latter is situated in the struggles of subordinated groups against a cultural “nonexistence” which elites are too often willing to exploit. [Chilean poet, playwright and novelist] Enrique Lihn has parodied the ninguneísta discourse in El arte de la palabra (Barcelona: Pomaire, 1979). “We are nothing: imitations, copies, phantoms: repeaters of what we understand badly, that is, hardly at all: deal organ grinders: the animated fossils of a prehistory that we have lived neither here nor there, consequently, anywhere, for we are aboriginal foreigners, transplanted from birth in our respective countries of origin” (p. 82; our emphasis). This is a parody of the anxious discourse of those elites who seek to define the nation. Roberto Schwarz has written an in-depth critique of this kind of “national problem.” “Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination,” New Left Review 167 (January/February 1988): 77–90.
21
Cf. R. Butler, “On Creating a Hispanic America: A Nation Within a Nation?” quoted in Antonio J. Califa, “Declaring English the Official Language: Prejudice Spoken Here,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 24 (1989): 321.
22
Terry Robbins, Presentation at Florida International University (Oct. 8, 1987), quoted in Califa, 321. Terry Robbins is a former head of U.S. English operations in Florida.
23
Deutsch, “The Political Significance of Linguistic Conflicts,” in Les États Multilingues (1975), quoted in Antonio J. Califa.
24
An English First analysis of Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, Pub. Law No. 99–603, 1986 U.S. Cong. Code & Admin. News (100 Stat.) 3359, quoted in Califa, 313. Califa, “Declaring English the Official Language: Prejudice Spoken Here,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 24 (1989): 328.
25
Cf. Joshua Fishman, “‘English Only’: Its Ghosts, Myths and Dangers,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 125, 132 (1988), quoted in Califa, 329.
26
“Government and private experts agree that the threat of war with the Soviet Union is diminishing. As a result, the nation’s military services argue that a portion of the Pentagon budget in the 1990s must be devoted to combating drugs and being prepared to bring American military power to bear in the third world.” Stephen Engel-berg, “In Search of Missions to Justify Outlays,” The New York Times (Jan. 9, 1990): A14.
27
Thompson, Theories of Ethnicity (1989), 90.
28
Cf. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity-An Incomplete Project,” in The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 14.
29
Daniel Bell, “Ethnicity and Social Change,” in Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975), 169, as quoted in Thompson, (1989), 99.
30
According to Michael Omi and Howard Winant, the formation of the concept of ethnicity in the United States is rooted in a different historical conjuncture than ours and, thus, occludes this difference if invoked to account for the negotiation of value by non-European immigrants: “But both assimilationist and cultural pluralism had largely emphasized European, white immigrants, what Kallen called ‘the Atlantic migration.’ The origins of the concepts of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic group’ in the U.S., then, lay outside the experience of those identified (not only today but already in Park’s and Kallen’s time), as racial minorities: Afro-Americans, Latin Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans (blacks, browns, reds and yellows). The continuity of experience embodied in the application of the terms of ethnicity theory to both groups—to European immigrants and racial minorities—was not established; indeed it tended to rest on what we have labeled the immigrant analogy.” Racial Formation in the United States (1986) 16–17.
31
As Stephen Steinberg argues, “Kallen’s model of a ‘democracy of nationalities’ is workable only in a society where there is a basic parity among constituent ethnic groups. Only then would ethnic boundaries be secure from encroachment, and only then would pluralism be innocent of class bias and consistent with democratic principles.” The Ethic Myth, (1982), 260–61. The reference is to Horace Kallen, “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” in Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924). This critique extends to later studies like Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
32
“[N]umerous new struggles have expressed resistance.”
33
Emesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 184. See also Martha Minow, “We, the Family: Constitutional Rights and American Families,” in The Constitution and American Life, ed. David Thelen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 319.
34
Minow, “We, the Family,” (1988), 332.
35
Nancy Fraser, “Women, Welfare, and Politics,” in Unruly Practices. Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 154.
36
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I. Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 365.
37
Fraser, “Women Welfare and Politics,” (1989), 156.
38
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, “The Public Sphere and Experience: Selections,” trans. Peter Labanyi, October, 46 (Fall 1988), 60, translator’s note.
39
Fredric Jameson, “On Negt and Kluge,” October 46 (Fall 1988): 159.
40
Cf. V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (New York, NY: Seminar Press, 1973), 91–97 and M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vem W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 61–102.
41
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn (Frankfurt an Main: Zweitausendeins, 1981), 944, quoted in Jameson (1988), 172.
42
Jameson, “On Negt and Kluge,” (1988): 171.
43
Jameson (1988): 78.
44
Ibid.
45
An interview with Rubén Blades, Chicago Sunday Times (Jan. 26, 1987).
46
Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunte Lute, 1987).
47
Anzaldua, Borderlands (1987), 59.
48
“[E]l barrio es el hilo conductor”; “[la salsa] representa plenamente la convergencia del barrio urbano de hoy [porque asume] la totalidad de ritmos que acuden a esa convergencia”; “La salsa no es un ritmo, y tampoco es un simple estilo para enfrentar un ritmo definido. La salsa es una forma abierta capaz de representar la totalidad de tendencias que se reunen en la circunstancia del Caribe urbano [incluyendo Nueva York] de hoy; el barrio sigue siendo la única marca definitiva.” Cf. César Miguel Rondón, El libro de la salsa. Crónica de la musica del Caribe urbano (Caracas: Editorial Arte, 1980), 32–64 passim.
49
Anzaldua, (1987), 80.
50
Anzaldua, (1987), 81.
51
The “ethical substance” is one of the four dimensions that comprise “ethics.” It delimits what moral action will apply to: for example, the pleasures among the Greeks, the flesh among the early Christians, sexuality in Western modernity, and, we argue, group ethos-ethnic, feminist, gay, lesbian, etc. in multi-cultural societies. Cf. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York : Vintage, 1986), 26-28.
52
Michel Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in The Final Foucault, eds. James Bemauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 19.
53
Michael J. Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory,” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 196.
54
Gina Valdés, “Where You From?” The Broken Line/La Linea Quebrada 1, 1 (May 1986).
55
Anzaldua, (1987), 79.
56
Renato Rosaldo, Truth in Culture: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 216.
57
Tato Laviera, Mainstream Ethics (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1988).
58
Juan Felipe Herrera, “Border Drunkie at ‘Cabaret Babylon-Aztlan,’” The Broken Line/La Linea Quebrada 1, 1 (May 1986).