Migrant Sites by Kandiyoti Dalia;

Author:Kandiyoti, Dalia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1084890
Publisher: University Press of New England
Published: 2009-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE PLACES OF CHICANA/O LITERATURE

In Chicana/o cultural productions, the politics and aesthetics of place are inextricably locked together, as is befitting a literature that flowered at the very same time as a class-and ethnicity-based political movement. Writing in 1980, prominent literary historian Bruce-Novoa noted that the “recent phenomenon” of Chicano literature was “a by-product of the Chicano Movement” (Chicano Authors 4), and anthropologist José Limón emphasizes that it is “impossible to conceive of the Chicano movement from 1965 to 1972 without its artistic literature, particularly, its poetry” (84). While Chicana/o politics has changed significantly, the poetics of place and displacement remain interwoven and persist in constituting a core problematic of Chicana/o writing and politics.

The historical dispossession of the annexed Mexicans, the continued border-crossing of peoples under quasi-colonial conditions of economic dependence, and the exploitation of ethnoracialized subjects as disposable, cheap labor in the United States and Mexico—as well as resistance, rebellion, and folk, experimental, literary, and popular cultural traditions as founts of resistance and rebellion spanning borders—are the backbones of Chicana/o history and literature. The authors’ treatment of spatialized coloniality is informed by this Chicana/o history and culture, which are deployed as challenges. Specifically, while Portillo Trambley and Cisneros depict very restricted settings of small towns, they draw on the love of land, Aztlán, and the borderlands topoi of Chicana/o literature to take their stories out of their own boundaries, as it were. The enclosures of gender, race, and class are mediated by other spatialities that feed the “decolonial imaginary” (Pérez).

At the center of this imaginary is the awareness of the role of U.S.-Mexico relations in shaping Chicana/o lives and literatures; specifically, the impact of the U.S. pursuit of empire in Mexico and the domestic production of conquest and expansion through the exploitation, marginalization, and demonization of immigrants. U.S. expansion did not end with the wars, treaties, and purchases of the 1840s but has continued to inform the Mexican economy and politics, from the Mexican Revolution to NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). The removal of President Lerdo to install Porfirio Díaz, which resulted in the phenomenal spread of U.S. investments in Mexico, was the first instance of a U.S.-supported overthrow of an elected government; as historians have explained, the Revolution was the “first major political challenge to American hegemony in Latin America during the modern era” (Hart 68, 303). Since 1848, the continuing hegemonic practices of the United States over Mexico have shaped the fate of the Mexican diaspora in the U.S. territory, with Mexican-origin populations experiencing segregation and proletarianization (especially in California and Texas), as well as, more recently, “illegality,” incarceration and deportation, even though their labor is necessary and their most recent migrations in great part a consequence of NAFTA (see, for example, Horsman, David Gutiérrez). Both the legacy of the dispossessed annexed Mexicans of 1848 and the migrations that have been largely the fallout of this imperial relationship characterize the spatial discourses of Chicana/o literature. The spatializations of land, Aztlán, and the borderlands contribute, in different

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