Review by T. Jackie Cuevas
Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture
by María Eugenia Cotera
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
ISBN: 9780292718685.
286 pp.
1. Nepantleras, the Nahuatl term for liminal border-crossers, seems fitting for describing the primary concern of María Cotera’s project, which is to examine how early women-of-color anthropologists such as Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jovita González crossed borders to break down binaries such as insider/outsider, academy/community, researcher/informant, and ethnography/fiction. In this groundbreaking study, Cotera puts the lives and works of these three key figures of early twentieth-century academic feminism into conversation with one another. Cotera examines what it meant for Deloria, Hurston, and González to engage in anthropological studies of their own “folk” and the significance of how and why each of them turned to writing fiction.
2. Cotera divides the book into two parts, the first focusing on her subjects’ ethnographic work, the second on their fiction. Because their fieldwork informed their fiction, the writers faced criticism from anthropologists for fictionalizing ethnographic data. However, in Cotera’s treatment, Deloria, Hurston, and González emerge as feminist ethnographers employing innovative rhetorical strategies for documenting women’s experiences among their Indigenous (Yankton Sioux), African American, and Mexican American communities. Each in her own way puts women’s narratives at the center of her ethnographic and literary writings, infusing them with gendered critiques of their own communities and countering the white hegemonic masculinist discourse of a colonialist anthropological project.
3. In navigating their academic disciplinary training, they worked against the grain of their renowned mentors. Deloria’s work was supported by Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Hurston initially worked with Boas but distanced herself from his anthropological school of thought over methodological differences and as she sought affinity with literary writers. González worked with Frank Dobie, who used his influence as a regional folklorist of the U.S. Southwest to help propel her into a career researching Mexican American folklore on the South Texas border.
4. In the case of Deloria, Cotera asserts that her cultural insider status was both boon and bane: “[W]hile Deloria was celebrated among the Boasians for her intimate knowledge of the Dakota, her authority as an ethnographer was also frequently undermined among them by lingering doubts regarding her objectivity” (43). Hurston and González also held such tenuous positions, as their authority as ethnographic storytellers was often either exoticized as authentic or devalued as too subjective by their contemporaries.
5. Cotera describes how each ethnographer re-appropriated the tools of anthropology to produce ethnographic narratives with the communities as their imagined audiences. She also contextualizes the three similar yet distinct careers by considering how each lived within moments of historical and ideological rupture. Deloria was born two years after the passage of the General Allotment Act and a year before the Wounded Knee massacre, and her family was among those who were deeply affected by forced relocation and dispossession. Born into an extended family facing genocide and displacement instilled in her a desire to document her people’s traditions with a crucial urgency: “It was into this world of ‘empty leavings’ that Ella Deloria was born, and it became her life’s work to document the traditions of the Dakota people and to reveal the ways in which public policy and cultural misunderstanding had destroyed a ‘scheme of life that worked’” (45). Hurston, whose life was marked by familial loss and migration from the rural south to the urban northeastern U.S., played an integral role in the intellectual life of the Harlem Renaissance, even as she was ostracized by peers for her radical Black nationalist views. Likewise, Gonz ález sought throughout her career to issue correctives to the popularized narratives of Texas history that overlooked or denigrated Mexicans.
6. In analyzing their careers alongside each other, Cotera reveals the contours of early twentieth-century anthropology as a gendered, racialized, colonial practice seeking “authentic” narratives of folk traditions and uneasy with the emergence of “native informants,” particularly women of color, among its institutional ranks. The lack of support for their forms of knowledge production as cultural insiders as well as their frustrations with the limits of ethnography ultimately drove each to turn to writing fiction. From a literary standpoint, Cotera is particularly interested in the production histories of Deloria’s Waterlily, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Jovita González’s Caballero and the relationship these texts bear to the writers’ intellectual work conducting ethnographic fieldwork in their own communities.
7. Drawing on Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s critique of the “discursive colonization” of scholarship produced by varied women of color, Cotera painstakingly avoids the tendency to lump the scholarship of all women of color together, remaining wary of any critical approach that “erases the historical and ideological differences between women of color in the interests of promoting a liberal vision of feminism” (7). Rather, Cotera seeks to consider the three authors and their works by using a “comparative approach to the writing of women of color that explores the borderlands of difference.”
8. In examining the intellectual paths of the three authors, Cotera emphasizes that she seeks not only convergences but also divergences in their approaches to interfacing between scholarly and community discourses: “I hope to elaborate a more complex and more suitable practice of comparison: one that honors the particularities of Deloria, Hurston, and González’s historical experiences as well as their similar yet distinct strategies of engagement with neocolonial forms of meaning making” (7). Although other scholarly studies have compared Deloria and Hurston, Cotera challenges the critical tendency to over-rely on similarities and instead pays attention to each writer’s specific history. In its attention to difference, Cotera’s book offers a crucial contribution to comparative ethnic studies and to the multiple histories of U.S. women of color in the early twentieth century. Cotera sees her work as filling a particular gap in historiographies of women-of-color knowledge production. Cotera deploys Paula Gunn Allen’s use of the term “the disappeared” to describe women-of-color writers whose ability to cross multiple cultural borders fluidly is devalued and erased in dominant forms of knowledge production. For Cotera, “the disappeared” becomes “a metaphor that also ironically encapsulates Deloria, Hurston, and González’s invisibility in anthropological, ethnic nationalist, and feminist literary canons” (14). As Deloria and González’s only novels were published posthumously, their fiction was nearly disappeared from the ethnic and feminist canons to which they rightly belong.
9. Through the lives and works of these thinkers, Cotera delves into the experiences of women of color in the U.S. academy in the early twentieth century. It should be noted that while Cotera’s project speaks to multiple disciplines and multiple ethnic canons, it is especially significant in the realm of Chicana/o studies. Just as Alice Walker helped recover the significance of Hurston’s work for African American feminist literature, Cotera, in her thorough analysis, continues to firmly position Jovita González into a place within Mexican American letters.
10. Throughout Native Speakers, Cotera remains deeply attentive to the specific histories and the tribal, racialized, and ethnic social locations of each author. Cotera’s rigorous nepantlera project offers a significant contribution to the borderlands of anthropology, literary criticism, and the intellectual histories of women-of-color writers.