The Latino Nineteenth Century by Lazo Rodrigo; Alemán Jesse; & Jesse Aleman

Author:Lazo, Rodrigo; Alemán, Jesse; & Jesse Aleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004050 Literary Criticism / American / Hispanic American
Publisher: New York University Press

Latina/o Modernities

The sick, broken, and dead bodies in The Squatter and the Don are meant to symbolize, without a doubt, the ways in which the railroad, monopoly capitalism, and Anglo racism eviscerated the Mexican Californian culture that had taken root through the first half of the nineteenth century. This formulation, however, rests on the assumption of an ideal, perfect body symbolizing national unity and political peace. Such a body does not exist in Squatter, even though the novel’s bodily logic seems to demand it. Furthermore, the veterans at the Capitol suggest the impossibility of such national bodies.

From the physical impairments in Squatter the reader deduces that nations comprise a series of faulty bodies, whose imperfections reference an intact wholeness, an impossible physical perfection, an ideal absence at the heart of the nation. Such perfection is the dream of a modernity represented in Squatter by the railroad and its regulation of space, time, distance, and bodies. In its corporate form, the railroad, according to James Mechlin, has “no heart for human pity” (296) and yet, in its corporeal form, the actual trains are all too human, as when they shriek in consort with Mercedes’ pain (154).

Squatter thus demands the possibility of physical perfection and mechanistic apathy—an intact Mexican California destroyed by the “heartless” railroad—while simultaneously proving both illusory. A dismodern aesthetic illuminates the ways in which Mexican and Anglo bodies are constituted in and through the trains cutting across the physical and abstract spaces in Squatter—San Diego and the corporate spaces of rail. Trains, feelings, and bodies are interdependent in the novel, not opposed to one another. In concert with ideas of a Latina/o, or subaltern, modernity, as articulated by Ramón Saldívar, dismodernity makes possible a metahistorical reading of the physical travails of Squatter’s characters. That is, rather than reading Mariano’s death or Tano’s crippling as Mexican American political grievance of limited scope and impact, we can read Squatter’s broken bodies and sympathetic machines as arguments about the frailty of nations. In the Latino nineteenth century, then, through this reading of Ruiz de Burton, we begin to see other stories, other frameworks emerging alongside the stories of racial oppression and opposition we’ve come to anticipate. We see the human body, the material world, capital, the natural world, and social institutions like companies and nations all taking shape and expanding simultaneously. They appear as concentric circles, or expanding networks wherein the body, as Squatter argues, is always already imperfect, and the nations that contain them are always already composite, multiform, and interdependent.

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