By Lydia A. French
I come from a state (Texas) that decimated every Indian group including the Mexican indigenous. I don’t look European, but I can’t say I’m Indian even though I’m three-quarters Indian.
Gloria Anzaldúa, from “Speaking Across the Divide,” an interview with Domino R. Perez and Inés Hernández-Avila
Native scholars often make a case for engagement in discussions of nation and nationalism in Native American literary studies. Because Native peoples continue to have political status as nations, at least in the United States and Canada, many Native scholars remain committed to regarding their work in those terms. Transnational discourse has often opposed any kind of nationalism, a concept that is, of course, easy to critique from many perspectives. . . . I can say that many Native people, including Native scholars, rely on the language of nationalism, the language in which the political struggle for their actual social world is being waged.
Robert Warrior (Osage), from “Native American Critical Responses to Transnational Discourse,” Warrior’s contribution to a Modern Language Association Forum on “Ethnic Studies in the Age of Transnationalism”
1. If to theorize is to make concepts visible, then Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s borderlands/mestiza/multicultural theory visualizes through refraction.1 Imagine placing your hand in a pool of water. Looking down upon it, it appears disconnected from your arm and the rest of your body. The light travels through the water creating a space, a break, between the refracted image of your hand and what you know and feel as its actual handness. Anzaldúan theory similarly refracts the discursive and conceptual frameworks it makes visible. Articulating models of community and identity that speak to her experience and the experiences of women of color, Chicana/o communities, and queer communities, Anzaldúa takes terms already available to her, terms like “tribalism,” “mestiza,” and “multicultural,” and refracts them through the murky waters of loss, of absence that often characterize the multiply colonized geographies of the borderlands. With both the refracted discourse and her experience of it in view, Anzaldúa places herself in the space between.
2. In this essay, I trace Anzaldúa’s refractory theory as it engages the relationships between the local, as articulated in her renditions of Tejana/o indigeneity and mestizaje, and the trans- or post-national, as articulated in her understanding of “new tribalism” and multiculturalism. Among some Chicana/o and American Indian critics, Anzaldúa’s embrace of mestizaje and hybridity threatens the self-determination and autonomy of Native communities throughout North America; that the “new mestiza” emerges out of a blend of indigenous Mexican spirituality and custom on one hand and U.S. developmentalism on the other perpetuates essentializing rifts between indigeneity and modernity that fail to encompass the histories of contemporary Native experience.2 In an effort to theorize and celebrate a particular kind of Mexican-American subjectivity, these critics argue, Anzaldúa forecloses on the possibility of contemporary indigenous practice, always relegating indigeneity to some nebulous past that nevertheless influences individual personhood.
3. Anzaldúa herself, forced to reconcile her Tejana indigeneity with its colonial delegitimization, did not agree. She saw her writing as building coalitions between Chicana/o and American Indian communities, between Chicana/o and migrant Mexican (often indigenous) communities in the United States. In response to a question about accusations of appropriation of indigenous identity and thought, she urges Chicanas/os to be more critical of how we use Native culture, but she also encourages critics to read more of her work, saying:
I think it’s important to consider the uses that appropriations serve. . . . We [Chicanas/os] do to Indian cultures what museums do—impose Western attitudes, categories, and terms by decontextualizing objects, symbols and isolating them, disconnecting them from their cultural meaning or intentions, and then reclassifying them within western terms and contexts. In my own work I’ve experienced both a colonization and a decolonization by first being marginalized then by being elevated into the “mainstream.” But it’s an elevation that reproduces the dynamics of colonialism since that mainstream continues to control, to give or withhold what’s labeled art or theory. . . . I am cited by “whites” mostly for my work in Borderlands and This Bridge Called My Back, but often it’s a mere referencing and not a deep exploration. (2003-04 14)
As a corrective to the tokenizing process she describes, in the present essay I read both deeply and widely in order to candidly and rigorously address the role of indigenismo and mestizaje in Anzaldúa’s work and to unearth the decolonial strategies that may be lurking beneath what appears at times as complicity in colonial discourse. Though I am compelled to return to Borderlands, which has received by far the most critical attention of any of Anzaldúa’s works, I do so from three unique perspectives, or vistas. I first analyze Anzaldúa’s strategy of discursive refraction in the essay that concludes this bridge we call home (2002), “now let us shift . . . the path of conocimiento . . . inner works, public acts.” I continue this analysis in an understudied yet provocative part of Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), the “Notes,” which, I argue, self-consciously performs a textual evocation of borderlands theory that leads readers to the refraction of the concept of mestizaje. Finally, I unite the first two perspectives, suggesting that in its very resistance to naming, Anzaldúa’s work bridges the transnationalist-nationalist divide that Robert Warrior identifies in the passage above. In an intellectual and economic climate dominated by discourses of trans- and post-nationalism, Anzaldúa’s refractory theorization reveals strategies for forging cross-border alliances while maintaining local differences.
External Borderlands
4. In “now let us shift . . . the path of conocimiento . . . inner works, public acts,” Anzaldúa mobilizes a series of concepts that extend the theoretical work of Borderlands. Nepantla, conocimiento, and the Coyolxauhqui imperative provide the theoretical apparatus with which she here approaches embodied response to change, which occurs in the form of an “arrebato,” a sudden attack or shock. Los arrebatos, which appear in the essay as earthquakes, armed robberies, disease, and feminist dissension, become crucial (in the sense of placing one at a crossroads) only when one recognizes them as such. That is, one needs the deep awareness of conocimiento to recognize the shock of an arrebato as an initiator of difference, a deeply experiential moment that demarcates an old from a new self. That recognition (reconocimiento) suggests that what Anzaldúa names the path of conocimiento has neither beginning nor end. Like the camino itself, each of the seven stages in the development of conocimiento, what in Borderlands she has called “new mestiza consciousness,” are recursive rather than teleological.
5. Anzaldúa’s structure of recursivity in “now let us shift” along with the coincidence of the seven stages on the path to conocimiento with the seven chapters of the “prose” section of Borderlands / La Frontera impels a return to the latter through the lens of the former. Reading backward from Anzaldúa’s later work also reveals some of the strategies she has used throughout her oeuvre to form and perform the development of a queer-feminist-of-color consciousness. As she continues to grapple with the dynamic between shared oppression and racialized, sexed, gendered, and classed difference in this bridge we call home, for example, Anzaldúa appropriates the term “new tribalism” to theorize what Ana-Louise Keating calls “affinity-driven identities” (13, n.6). Both the appropriation itself and how she uses the term impinges, ultimately, on how we read mestizaje and indigenismo in Borderlands.
6. When Anzaldúa first uses “new tribalism” in “now let us shift,” she says explicitly that she “borrows” the term from David Rieff’s 1991 article, “Professional Aztecs and Popular Culture,” which criticizes Borderlands’ embrace of collective rather than individual identity. Though, as Anzaldúa remarks in her note, Rieff makes the claim that “Americans should think a little less about race and a little more about class” (2002, 578 n. 17), the article itself conceptualizes “class” through uncritical faith in an emergent post-nationalism brought about by European, Asian, and impending North American economic alliances (46). Decrying the collectivist tendencies of U.S. ethnic, gender, and sexuality civil rights movements as unrealistic and anti-individualist, Rieff’s comment does not call for class consciousness as such; instead, he expresses a philosophy of bourgeois globalization. In the context of a 1991 New Perspectives Quarterly issue about the possibility of a free trade agreement between the United States and Mexico (what would, the following year, become NAFTA), Rieff professes a faith in global capitalism’s re-formation of national structures: “What is being created throughout the world, as the nation state is gradually eclipsed by multi-national capitalist structures more akin to a space age feudalism than to modernity as we have known it, is a new bourgeois world. This is why Americans should think a little less about race and a little more about class” (46). “Professional Aztecs” thus champions bourgeois individualism as the ideological vanguard of global cultural expression, which, in turn, leads him to denigrate the “new tribalism” specifically of Chicana/o art and literature.
7. Anzaldúa’s avowed appropriation of the term “new tribalism” underscores her strategic refraction of a conceptual framework completely antithetical to her political and theoretical position. As she says explicitly in the interview “Speaking Across the Divide,” “I use the term ‘new tribalism’ to formulate a more inclusive identity, one that’s based on many features and not solely on race” (9). Creating a positive conception of what was originally intended as a slur, Anzaldúa radically re-signifies “new tribalism,” shifting Rieff’s conceptual object (of derision) and positioning herself—as a nepantlera—in the break. No longer does it carry the negative connotations of “tribalism” as Rieff problematically employed the term; instead, it carries possibility for an understanding of “a social identity that could motivate subordinated communities to work together in coalition” (2003-4, 9).
8. Ironically, where Rieff accuses Anzaldúa of motivating a “new tribalism” that echoes, in many ways the nationalist movements of the 1960s and 70s, Anzaldúa’s use of the term resists inscription into nationalist narratives in a restrictive sense.3 Though communitarian and social in nature, Anzaldúa’s “new tribalism” bridges racial and ethnic identities, class hierarchies, and gender and sexuality categories in a move that might today be called post-nationalist.4 It is, above all, a social identity based on a political awareness of the imposition of identities. Where Rieff’s “new tribalism” denigrates ethnic collectivism in order to uphold a post-nationalist vision of a global bourgeoisie, once refracted, Anzaldúa’s “new tribalism” retains an element of post-nationalism (though, for Anzaldúa, it becomes post-U.S.-cultural-nationalism), but in order to build new collectivities through political affinity within the United States. Marking the distance between the discursive object and its refracted image is a heightened awareness of the political work of bourgeois individualism as an arrebato that enables the formation of a new body politic. In her refraction of an irrevocably loaded term such as “tribalism,” Anzaldúa thus demonstrates at once her awareness of the discourses into which her theories enter and her willingness to trespass upon the sanctity of discourse in general. Acknowledging its potentially damning effects, Anzaldúa nevertheless inhabits the discursive borderland or bridge between competing conceptual landscapes in the same way that she urges we inhabit the daily arrebatos that open up to paths of conocimiento.
Internal Borderlands
10. Such an arrebato leads us to recognize how she strategically refracts “mestizaje” in Borderlands as well. The limited scope of this essay prevents an exhaustive treatment of the “Notes”; however, as a rhetorical document this liminal section of Borderlands merits continued attention. Demonstrating her agency in creatively compiling fragmented interlocutors, there are moments when the author densely populates the text with other scholarly, musical, or poetic voices; on the other hand, there are moments when she cites nothing at all, when the only voice is her own. This attention to source material and the conventions of scholarly reference in, for instance, “Entering Into the Serpent,” which, with thirty-four citations contains the most notes of any chapter,5 makes their absence all the more notable in, say, “Movimientos de rebeldía y los culturas que traicionan,” which, despite its historical traversals only includes one citation. This dynamic in the “Notes” suggests that Anzaldúa selectively incorporates dialogue with other scholars that affects not only what she says but also how she says it.
11. Beginning with the historical arrebato that opens the book, I focus on the intertextual relationship between Borderlands and Jack Forbes’s Aztecas del Norte: The Chicanos of Aztlán. Anzaldúa’s history begins with Aztlán and a dual claim to indigeneity through continued habitation and return migration; thus, the narrative is, at least superficially, already fractured by competing notions of migration and indigeneity.6 María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo seizes on the distance between the material histories of these two distinct subject positions in her critique of Anzaldúa’s erasure of contemporary indigenous peoples and lived realities: “According to Anzaldúa,” Saldaña-Portillo explains,
Chicanas/os are originally indigenous to the area because of our biological tie to the first Indians who inhabited it some 37,000 years ago (her date), the mythical Indian tribe that traveled from Aztlán in the U.S. Southwest to Mexico City and subsequently formed the Aztec empire.7 And we are secondarily indigenous through our “return” to this homeland with the Spaniards as Indians and mestizos. . . . mestizaje is once again deployed to produce a biological tie with pre-Aztec Indians rather than a political tie with contemporary U.S. Native Americans or Mexican Indians. (2003, 281-82)
Saldaña-Portillo’s critique reveals the political stakes of indigenismo and mestizaje in general, but it also bespeaks a need to carefully examine how Anzaldúa wields mestizaje and the indigenism it entails. While I agree with Saldaña-Portillo’s assessment that Anzaldúa puts contemporary political affiliations at risk by consigning Chicana/o indigeneity to a mythical past, I want to suggest that a close examination of the source material for this early history reveals a far more sophisticated deployment of mestizaje than Saldaña-Portillo’s critique allows. In particular, the textual presence of Jack Forbes’s Aztecas del Norte highlights fissures between Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness and the political deployment of discursive mestizaje that, in Saldaña-Portillo’s words, puts indigenous subjectivity under erasure.
12. The epigraph from Aztecas that prefaces the chapter “The Homeland, Aztlán: El Otro México” anchors the path toward new mestiza consciousness in Chicanas/os’ indigenismo. Anzaldúa quotes for the epigraph from the lines that open Aztecas:
The Aztecas del norte . . . compose the largest single tribe or nation of Anishinabeg (Indians) found in the United States today . . . . Some call themselves Chicanos and see themselves as a people whose true homeland is Aztlán [the U.S. Southwest]. (1987, 24)8
In a fascinating move, Anzaldúa cites the appropriate page number from Aztecas, page thirteen, but she then follows it with an ostensible non-sequitur, a reference to Forbes’s page 183. Seemingly inconsequential, this brief citation takes the interested reader to one of the most incredible documents in Forbes’s compilation of Movimiento-era essays, poems, and manifestos: his own essay, “The Mestizo Concept: A Product of European Imperialism.”
13. In “The Mestizo Concept” Forbes (Powhatan, Delaware) argues that mestizaje is an imperialist imposition on nations with significant indigenous populations, ultimately claiming that Spain is more mestizo than Mexico. In a move that resonates with Simon Ortiz’s (Acoma Pueblo) 1981 essay, “Towards a National Indian Literature,” which for many contemporary Native scholars inaugurated the nationalist turn in American Indian literary studies,9 Forbes claims that Mexico, like the Cherokee Nation which has also been subject to discourses of mixed-blood, is an Indian nation. Contrasting Mexicano and Chicano identities with Spaniards’, Forbes contends that only because of the colonial history of the New World are the former interpellated as “mixed” while the latter are considered unmarked.
14. Indeed, on the very page to which Anzaldúa directs us, Forbes lays out some of the contradictions in naming a certain ethnic group or nation “mestizo” while refuting the designation for others. To cite only the two examples that appear fully on that page:
(1) The Mexicans and Chicanos of today are perhaps eighty percent native Anishinabe descent, while only twenty percent of their ancestry is of European-North African, African, and Asian descent. In contrast, it is likely that Spaniards possess relatively little pre-Roman ancestry (native Iberian), certainly less than eighty percent.
(2) The Mexican and Chicano peoples’ modern language, Spanish, possesses several thousand native Mexican words, while the Spanish of Spain is wholly non-Iberian in origin. (183)
Contrasting Mexico with Spain as a European nation that remains historically more “mixed” and less indigenous, Forbes makes visible the power dynamics that accompany the practice of colonial naming. Positing Mexico as one of many nations in Anishinabe-waki (the Indian world), Forbes locates in the mestizo concept a colonial desire for indigenous erasure through equation of mestizaje with proletarianization (195, 198, 200), exclusion (185, 188, 202), and, ultimately, nothingness (202). Mestizaje’s nihilism results from its discursive embrace of a “confused in between” state on the one hand and the recognition that because all peoples are mixed to varying degrees, “to be mestizo is to be nothing in particular” (202).
15. Anzaldúa’s citation of this particular essay is significant insofar as it indicates that she continues to use the term “mestiza” in spite of Forbes’s critique of its colonial tenor. Here again, Anzaldúa appropriates and refracts a term the discursive violence of which she implicitly recognizes. Though Forbes argues that the interpellation of mestizo states relies on the absence of indigenous citizens in the naming process, Anzaldúa elects to foreground mestizaje in her borderlands theory. The question is: why continue to use a concept that one of your documented sources has decried as an imperial tool? Though I can only speculate about her intentions, Anzaldúa’s evocation of the “new mestiza” in the company of “The Mestizo Concept” has the effect of directing our attention to the similarities and differences between “old” (read colonial) and “new” (read decolonizing) discourses of mestizaje.
16. One such “old” discourse comes from the usage to which Mexican nationalists have put the concept of mestizaje in the interests of state formation. In post-revolutionary Mexico, that is, mestizaje and indigenismo formed the twin discourses through which architects of nationalism such as Manuel Gamio and José Vasconcelos sought to reconcile the promises of the Revolution with a modernizing economic project. In art, music, commemorative history, anthropology, and education, the story of Mexicanidad was one of a glorious Aztec past and a modernizing mestizo future.10 As the governing tropes of the post-revolutionary nation-state, mestizaje and indigenismo confined indigeneity to history, archaeology, and anthropology, thus erasing indigenous (political) presence. As Sheila Contreras contends, “critical understandings of indigenista policies reveal the strategies of inclusion to be aimed at deracinating Indians, rather than redefining social legitimacy to include Indigenous communities and rectify the deep inequities in Mexican society” (24). Like Saldaña-Portillo, Contreras argues that the evolution of a similarly indigenist mytho-poiesis in Chicana/o visual culture, literature, and theory implicates Chicanismo in the denial of indigenous political efficacy across the Americas.
17. Problems arise, however, when we consider the multiply colonized space of the United States that allows a borderlands theorist like Anzaldúa to pit “Chicanas/os in the borderlands as the ‘us’ against the Anglo ‘them’” (Saldaña-Portillo 2003, 281). We might consider, for example, the contradictory deployments of Indianness in the revolutionary periods of colonial-to-national emergence, deployments which ultimately dictated who was defined as Indian and how. When the United States was fighting the British colonial power, it joined forces with Native communities as nations; theirs was a diplomatic accord between “white” and “red” sovereign political bodies.11 When Mexican Creole elites began fighting for independence from Spain, on the other hand, their stake in the New World led them to appropriate indigeneity through mestizaje, conflating race and rebellion.12 In the multiply colonized space of the Texas-Mexico borderlands, each trajectory of state-defined Indian identity overlap to exclude the possibility of defining many Native Texans as indigenous peoples.
18. In the absence of legal recognition that can unify and encode specific indigenous identity, Anzaldúa legitimizes her identity through other political means, namely utilizing the political discourses of the Mexican nation, in the face of erasure. In combination with her citation of Forbes and the oppositional critical stance she seems to take with respect to his disavowal of mestizaje in the interests of self-determination, this critical awareness suggests that instead of a one-to-one correlation between Anzaldúa’s elaboration of a new mestiza consciousness and Mexican republican or nationalist mestizaje, for instance, the former refracts rather than reflects the latter. By using the “master’s tools” at the same time that she announces her expulsion from the master’s house, Anzaldúa implicitly refers to the process(es) of colonization that have, in her words, “decimated” the knowledge bases of Texas Natives.
19. Here again, she makes visible the political work that marks the distance between the discursive object and its refraction through the multiple colonial histories of the borderlands, but only when we view it as such. That distance traces the migration of mestizaje from a Mexican nationalist context to a U.S. borderlands context through the pairing of indigeneity and migration. This tropic coupling of migration with indigeneity allows Anzaldúa to contemporize the latter in a manner that speaks back to her mytho-poetic rendition of the indigenous “half” of the new mestiza as evoked by “the” Indian woman. Or rather, the two speak to each other across a divide that Anzaldúa recognizes as herself, her own bridged subjectivity. In the poem that itself bridges the epigraphs and the opening of the chapter proper, Anzaldúa writes:
Yo soy un puente tendido
del mundo gabacho al del mojado,
lo pasado me estra pa’ ‘tras
y lo presente pa’ ‘delante
Que la Virgen de Guadalupe me cuide
Ay, ay, ay, soy Mexicana de este lado. (25)
If we read “back” as toward el “mundo gabacho,” the white world, and “forward” as el mundo “mojado,” the migrant world, then the pastness of Anzaldúa’s Aztec-Mexica mytho-poeisis belongs in the white world, a move that links Borderlands to both Forbes’ denunciation of mestizaje as an imperial imposition and to Saldaña-Portillo’s critique. By reversing the temporal movement of Mexican nationalist discourses of indigenismo-mestizaje, Anzaldúa refracts the terms through the whitewater of colonial history, allowing her to reposition them as mestizaje-indigenismo.
Locating Borders
20. Although I argue here that her later work, particularly “now let us shift,” offers insights as to the theoretical strategies of Borderlands, I also recognize that, far more than in her later work, Anzaldúa locates her theory in the geographical space that is the Texas-Mexico border. Indeed, much of her post-Borderlands writing moves away from the explicitly local experiences of South Texas. In another essay, begun in 1992 and revised into the early 2000s, however, Anzaldúa bridges the new mestiza concept envisioned out of her Tejana border experience and the later, more cosmopolitan “new tribalism” through the interpolation of two equally loaded terms: nation and multicultural. Although Anzaldúa refracts mestizaje and indigenismo in order to claim them as Native Tejana or Native borderlands characteristics, her usage nevertheless maintains a border between nationalism, both state- and cultural, and multiculturalism. As it has frequently been understood, the “new mestiza” represents an idealized hybrid subject(ivity) more in line with a multiculturalist perception of contemporary U.S. national identity, or, indeed, with a post-national framework. Although her strategic deployment of mestizaje and indigenismo intervenes in the sometimes binaristic dissensions between liberal multiculturalism (as state-nationalism) on one hand and ethnic or cultural nationalism on the other, Anzaldúa remained deeply skeptical of nationalisms of any variety because of their frequent exclusion of women and queer people of color. But Anzaldúa linked both nation and multicultural in her essay, “The New Mestiza Nation: A Multicultural Approach.” The conjoining of the terms “mestiza,” “nation,” and “multicultural” again threatens a return to the pluralistic discourses of both Mexico and the United States; however, the work of refractory theorization that I have thus far identified in her writing allows us to hear in those words not neo-liberalism, but a radically new articulation of one’s role in her/his community, a community recognized to extend across borders.
21. “The New Mestiza” reclaims “multiculturalism” from what Anzaldúa identifies as the movement’s co-optation into a commodification of ethnic differences. As opposed to the diversity initiatives that have come to define multiculturalism, Anzaldúa maintains that “these radical multiculturalists seek to split open the fantasy of a monocultural nation, interrogate the history of internal and external colonialism by the U.S. government, and protest U.S. wars against the Third World and imperialist domination of the Americas. We stress that Others can’t be lumped together, our issues collapsed, our differences erased” (203-04). Invoking a hemispheric vision of las Américas in the context of a critique of U.S. melting-pot ideology implicitly imbues the world “multicultural” with the tenor of “multi-national.” That is, Anzaldúa here defines multicultural according to a political stance that, in an earlier era, would have been described as nationalist.
22. By refracting the words “nation” and “multicultural” in this context, Anzaldúa implicitly enters into contemporary debates about the line between ethnic or cultural nationalisms and the post/transnationalist turn in American studies today. The essay poses the question: Is there a border between nationalism and post/transnationalisms that a contemporary Chicana/Tejana scholar can inhabit? The short answer that Anzaldúa’s refractory theorization suggests is, yes, the theoretical space that we inhabit is precisely on a border between the two discourses. To borrow from one of Anzaldúa’s poems, “to live in [this discursive] borderlands means you” must make meaning out of the space between the discursive object and its refraction through experience (1987, 216). Recognizing that refraction means also accounting for the historical and material specificity of the political, social, and cultural losses and absences that encode certain terms.
23. For instance, in his summary of Janice Radway’s 1998 Presidential address to the American Studies Association, Donald Pease quotes her as saying, “The United States ‘is relationally defined and historically and situationally variable . . . because it is dependent upon and therefore intertwined with those affiliations, identities, and communities it must actively subordinate’” (79). Pease cites this relationality as one of the reasons Radway gives for promoting a post-nationalist American studies; the logic of the argument suggests that while absolute autonomy and independence are requisites for nationalism, the fact of interdependence means that the United States is actually post-nationalist. On the other hand, Muskogee Creek scholar Craig Womack makes the claim that “sovereignty (by definition, government-to-government relations) has a profound cosmopolitanism at its core—a genuine cosmopolitanism that can be claimed for its Indian integrity rather than as a hybrid mess that is constantly measured in relation to other ethnographic rather than legal criteria” (2006, 37). In this sense, the kind of interdependency that Radway describes is actually highly nationalist; to claim it as post-nationalism is to ignore the histories of nations both within the legal contours of the United States and across the Americas. The distance between nationalism as independent and nationalism as interdependent is one that demands continued measurement. That there remain differences in how historically subordinated communities define “nation” bespeaks a need to further interrogate the national as such; Anzaldúan refractory theory offers a means of continuing dialogue and debate about precisely such discursive disjunctures.
24. What Anzaldúan theory and contemporary American Indian nationalist theory share is a commitment to challenging the similitude of language. Linguistic similitude relies on a recognition of sameness in language usage. Like Simon Ortiz, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, and a cadre of other contemporary Native scholars for whom re-assessing the meaning of “nation” for Native communities has become imperative to American Indian studies, Anzaldúa not only revisits familiar colonial terms, she refracts them through difference. She defines her political and pedagogical project as such in “The New Mestiza Nation”: “I am involved in the anti-colonial struggle against literary assimilation, claiming linguistic space to validate my personal language and history” (204). Though Anzaldúa may ultimately articulate a position more akin to post-nationalism in its reclamation of multiculturalism as mestiza nationalism while some (though certainly not all) Native scholars would counter the hegemony of post/transnationalist discourse in their advocacy of nationalism, the two positions share in common a decolonial practice that embraces recognition of local linguistic differences encoded in the single word: nation.
Notes
1. From the Greek θεωρία, to view or contemplate. See, for instance, Eric Havelock’s discussion of the the visible object-as-thought in Platonic theory (270-71).
2. For extended discussions of these threats both in general and as specifically related to Anzaldúa, see Simon Ortiz (1981), María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (2001, 2003), Craig Womack (2006), and Sheila Marie Contreras (2008).
3. Eschewing historical specificity, Rieff claims at one point in the essay that all movements for the civil and political rights of ethnic minorities, women, and queer communities are derivative of Black nationalism: “Just as all subsequent movements have modeled themselves on radical black politics—there is even a gay splinter faction in New York at present called ‘Queer Nation’—so the entire tendency of radical politics (and, naturally enough, of art that seeks to be ‘politically correct’) has been to think in terms of groups, whether collectivities of oppression or collectivities of the oppressed, rather than in terms of individuals” (43).
4. Ellie D. Hernández (2009), for instance, defines postnationalism as a “global framing of U.S. people of color” (4), but also as “those ideas, experiences, or cultural works in which the connection between two nations plays a central and vital role by offering a new critique” (15). Though her use of the term alludes to the international economic alliances of the late 1980s-1990s that set the stage for twenty-first century global capitalism, Hernández does not address its original provenance in that historical moment, characterized by such optimism over international cooperation.
5. There is also an interesting volley between Geoffrey Parrinder’s encyclopedic volume World Religions: From Ancient History to the Present and June Nash’s feminist intervention, “The Aztecs and the Ideology of Male Dominance” as Anzaldúa narrates Aztec cosmology and the subsumption of balanced duality and the feminine deities.
6. Notably, the epigraph that shares space with Los Aztecas is Los Tigres del Norte’s popular song, “El Otro México,” a song about migration and migrant imaginaries. Thus, even in the paratext, Anzaldúa articulates indigeneity to migration.
7. Note that Anzaldúa references Chávez (1984) as the source for “her date.” See p. 114, n. 3.
8. Anzaldúa excises the following sentences, which occur in the respective ellipses above: “(an Azteca is a person of Aztlán or ‘the Southwest’)”; “Like other Native American groups, the Aztecas of Aztlán are not completely unified or homogeneous people” (Forbes 13).
9. See, for example, Warrior, Weaver, and Womack (2006).
10. See especially Gamio (1916/2010) and Vasconcelos (1925/ 1997). Indeed, Anzaldúa herself explicitly uses Vasconcelos’ racialist, if not racist, framework of the cosmic mixed race in the opening of “La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness.” Though she reads in Vasconcelos a “theory of inclusivity” in opposition to “the policy of racial purity that white America practices,” she explicitly refracts Vasconcelos’ theory through a feminist lens (100). She translates his “por mi raza hablará el espíritu” into “por la mujer de mi raza / hablará el espíritu” (100), noting that this is her “‘take off’ on José Vasconcelos’ idea” (119 n. 1). The gendering of the idea, I find, does little to ameliorate the erasure of indigeneity in Vasconcelos’ promotion of una raza cósmica. Perhaps, as I suggest below with mestizaje more generally, it is in the migration of the concept into a U.S. discursive framework that Anzaldúa locates the political potency of Vasconcelos; however, Anzaldúa never makes this claim explicitly. She continues to allude to the cosmic race in “The New Mestiza Nation” (2009).
11. See, for example, Jennings C. Wise (1931/1971) and Alan Taylor (2006). Philip Deloria’s (1999) discussion of the Revolutionary Americans’ “playing Indian” as an evocation of desire for national liberty also offers an interesting insight into the unspoken recognition of overlap between indigeneity, tribal-national sovereignty, and American liberty.
12. See, for example, Paz (1961/1985), especially pp. 117-128.
Works Cited
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