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Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage
By Alicia Arrizón Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1999 Alicia Arrizón
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02815-0
CHAPTER 1
In Quest of Latinidad: Identity, Disguise, and Politics
The contradictions embedded in colonialism shape the creative contributions of Latina artists, writers, and performers. Their work is now and always has been the result of a theatrical mestizaje which represents the ongoing conflict inherent in the merger of two worlds: Europe and America. The invisibility of women in the production of theater must be understood as connected in part to the overall powerlessness of women in Latin America. In many sectors of society, this powerlessness has been reinforced by patriarchal and Christian values. In particular, the marianismo and machismo within the margins of gender roles and their definitions are sustained by the idealization of the female subject posited in the cult of the Virgin Mother Mary and further codified by the dictates of an intensely patriarchal society.
Because it is through Latinas' identity as post- and neocolonial subjects that the political economy of theater, its practice, and its theory must be defined, I begin with a historical overview of identity formation. The framework provided in this chapter emphasizes the political and theoretical definitions of group identity, as well as its diverse racial and cultural roots. It also ties together the histories of various groups, such as Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Central Americans in the U.S. Further, in sketching a general outline of the trajectory of identity generation, this chapter makes explicit the shared transitory nature connecting the significant historical events of annexation, migration, and exile. Finally, in recognizing "Latino" as a homogeneous, male construction, the discussion simultaneously emphasizes the multiple determinants of the gendered construction "Latina."
The narrative in this chapter is intended to emphasize a common ground that brings the subjects in question together, in solidarity. I believe, however, that acknowledging distinctions embedded in the configuration of Latinidad (Latin-ness) is the most powerful way to communicate the importance of this concept. The formation of a strong, positive group identity — one that recognizes and embraces heterogeneity — is key to escaping the shackles of a colonized subjectivity. My analysis complements Chandra Talpade Mohanty's position that the notion of colonization "almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a suppression — often violent — of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question."
Histories and Politics of Traversing: Against Homogeneity
The sense of collective identity ("Latin America") stems less from a history of shared community than from the shared history of opposition to the colonial powers. Latin Americans may not all know about or like each other, but by and large they feel intense animosity toward the United States, which has become the latest in a long history of colonizers.
In this passage from Negotiating Performance, Diana Taylor draws attention to the shared history of Latinos in relation to their post-Spanish colonial subjectivity. Negotiating Performance discusses the political contestation which not only shapes the heterogeneous character of the term "Latin American" and its hybrid variants but also influences diverse modes of representation. In her "Opening Remarks," Taylor expands the categories that mark the hybridity of identity formation and theatrical and performative practices. Of special importance is the contribution Negotiating Performances makes by recognizing the centrality of border cultures as a field of study and suggesting new models for future research in the area. My book is one such effort. Latina Performance expands the conceptualization of a field that, in embodying politics and performativity, provides a site for critical discourses across disciplines. It continues the search for open-ended definitions of Latinidad and the sense of self. I am convinced that the development of Latino and Latina studies within theater and performance (and other disciplines) must start with a quest for the pluralism that necessarily perpetuates specific cultural practices that challenge both colonial and imperialist U.S. discourses and recognize the geopolitical implications of space. In this context, the idea of unidad latinoamericana must be defined as a "unity" consolidated in the struggles of liberation. The essential unity is one not of languages and origin, but of problematics. The very complexities of Latinidad may be the crucial distinguishing mark of Latino culture and identity in the Americas. For David Román and Alberto Sandoval, the development of this notion has been motivated by the "crisis of categorization and this tension between competing political ideologies; it arrives on the scene as a nostalgic reinvocation of the markers of a cultural heritage and homeland — wherever that may be — for the gente by the gente" The "reinvocation," as marked by Román and Sandoval, emphasizes the vernacular representation of Latino cultures and identities. For them, Latinidad disseminates a counteracting mediation against racism and imperialist practices.
Although the term "Latino" refers to people of Latin American descent living primarily within the United States, the word should not be interpreted as denoting a homogeneous racial or ethnic group. Latino people are as diverse as any other cross-section of the population in the U.S. In its embrace of heterogeneity, Latinidad mirrors the multiple identities that form the Latin American territory. Thus, the term "Latin American" may be seen as representing an abstract unity composed of multiple ethnicities: Mexicans, Argentineans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, to name only a few. In the United States, this eclectic unity is denied, replaced by the illusion of homogeneity implicit in the use of a single category, Hispanic, which hides the multiple experiences of what is in fact a heterogeneous community. Popular wisdom maintains that "Hispanic" was a "bureaucratic invention" of the federal government, designed to homogenize the Latino community, at least on paper. Following the recommendation of a task force on racial and ethnic categories, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) adopted Hispanic as an official category in 1973. When the Census Bureau and other government agencies, along with many large institutions and businesses, also began using the term, its mainstream acceptance was assured. Thus, the word "Hispanic" came to be associated with the Establishment and with a politics of identification that accepts the notion of the "melting pot" as a category of unity and equilibrium. A nonthreatening label that eludes negative stereotyping, Hispanic transforms the diversity of national origins into a single category. This aspect of the term — its suppression of the multiple specificities of Latin Americans in the United States — combined with its origin as a bureaucratic convention, led many groups to reject it in favor of Latino. The latter term has the clear advantage of allowing otherwise diverse individuals to signify their shared identity as post-colonial subjects, as well as their present status as members of a neo-colonial, underdeveloped, and exploited Third World community in the United States.
Despite the obvious difficulties in trying to represent in a single word the multiple experiences of Latinos, it remains a worthy goal. Assumptions about the nature of Latino identity differ, in keeping with gender and language. Of course, in Spanish, the o/a split is crucial for signifying gender. In this book, I use the gender-inflected term "Latina" to consciously mark the distinction between the masculine and feminine construction of group identity. The term Latina contests the silence and marginalization of the "feminine," not only in language but in dominant discourses. I view the term Latina as marking the in-between-ness embedded in the geopolitical spaces where identity formation occurs. My aim here is to use Latina as a broad category that embraces a political and cultural movement in the United States, where the politics of identity are crucial. As a critical site of gender deconstruction with strong political implications, Latina subjectivity deals not only with the subcultural claiming of public agency, but also with the experience of marginality as well as with the desire to become powerful and conspicuous. As a performative signifier, the construction of the Latina body is also an inquiry into the possibilities of revolutionary subjectivity. The construction of a revolutionary entity that can transform Western "democratic" social structures requires the support of cultural institutions such as theater and performance art. Thus, the construction of the Latina subject and the performative mediation are linked by necessity in the process of cultural production. In Latina Performance, the performative as grammars of identity (de)formation relays a message in favor of a politics of articulation and proclaims power and the social body. Within a binary heterogeneous/homogeneous system of representation, the performative mediation in grammars of identity intervenes in dominant discourses because it proclaims the presence of a marked differentiality. Self and Other coalesce in a performance of multiple determination. Thus, the performative as an act of speech or grammars of identification in Latina Performance is understood to describe a set of conditions that precede the subject in question as well as the accountability of that conditional state. In such a case, the "citationality" of discursive configurations serves to mediate the possibility of anti-hegemonic agency, which directs and delimits the subject in question in different ways. To use Judith Butler's notion of the performative, the term "Latina" responds to the "linguistification" of a multidelineated body that contests the ontological status of sexuality, gender, and race. For Butler, the performative registers the "linguistification" or the "verbal conduct" in the context of what she calls "sovereign performatives." Her definition of the performative questions the Foucaultian conviction on power and its contestation, which is somehow her own logic in proposing a revised sense of the performative. Butler's views seem to move into a more challenging sensory space in which different genres of "signifying" are paradoxically positioned. She is concerned not only with forms of "harmful speech" (and acts), but with the relation of speech and action: hate speech, pornography, and the homophobic declaration of the military against homosexuality. Butler's discussion of the performative considers the grammars that exercise a compelling power and significantly marks the site in which power performs.
To grasp the full meaning of Latina requires an understanding of the ongoing historical and sociopolitical processes of immigration, annexation, and exile that have formed the Latino community as a whole. The evolution of the Mexican population in the borderlands, especially in Texas and California, provides a clear example of this cycle.
Latinos: Annexation Migration and Exile
In the 1840s, westward expansion in the United States was ignited by the combined stimuli of the idea of Manifest Destiny and the discovery of gold in California. Of the two, the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which sanctified imperialism as the embodiment of the will of God, was perhaps the most devastating for Mexicans. The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) was a direct consequence of the nation's belief in its holy right "to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government. ..." In blatant disregard of Mexican sovereignty, U.S. troops precipitated a lopsided war that resulted in the annexation of a prosperous territory containing rich farmlands and natural resources such as gold and oil. Moreover, the U.S. gained control of parts of the Pacific Ocean, generating further economic development. Meanwhile, as Rodolfo Acuña has noted, "Mexico was left with its shrunken resources to face the advances of the United States."
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which formally ended the war, guaranteed Mexicans who remained on the northern side of the border U.S. citizenship, with all of its attendant rights (including the right to own property and the political liberty to preserve ones language and cultural values). However, the treaty, like others that the federal government signed with the indigenous peoples of North America, was never upheld. The government breached its agreement by violating the clauses that guaranteed respect for the cultural autonomy and material property of Mexicans living in the U.S. In the aftermath of the war, when the U.S. was rapidly developing as one of the most powerful empires in the world, Mexicans who chose to remain in the U.S. were subjected to the power and domination of Anglo expansionists. Lured by adventure and capitalist ideals, these Yankee explorers justified their imperialism as the will of "God." They believed themselves to be the "chosen people." Indeed, it was the alleged superior "racial" traits of Anglo-Saxons which became the impetus for American expansion and empire-building. Later, this same self-representation would provide the basis for white supremacy. Most Mexicans living in the U.S. during the nineteenth century were considered a class apart, separate from the Anglo-Saxons, who increasingly insisted upon themselves as a homogenous biophysical entity. The myth of racial purity and superiority became consonant with prevailing beliefs that each race had a unique quality, ordained by God. Thus, the relations between the "dispossessed" people and their "conquerors" came to be understood as "forever" fixed. In this way, the conquest of the Mexican Southwest transformed the Mexicans into a doubly, triply conquered people — subjugated militarily, they were also vanquished commercially, administratively, and culturally.
Overt acts of discrimination against the mestizo people increased as the Mexican population in the Southwest grew. With the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915, the ideology of white supremacy found a near-perfect vehicle. Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color: Against White World-Supremacy (1920) identified brown people such as Mexicans as a threat to white supremacy. This type of literature, which helped shape the politics of racial hatred practiced by the Klan, continues to find an audience today. In California, the passage of Proposition 187 in the 1994 gubernatorial election cycle and Proposition 209 in the 1996 presidential election cycle are clear manifestations of a discriminatory politics aimed at an ethnic minority that is fast becoming a demographic majority.
Mexicans who lived in the United States at the start of this century felt compelled to assimilate, to accept the host country's political and cultural systems, despite their repressive and discriminatory aspects. One outgrowth of the earliest efforts to adapt and accommodate to mainstream American society was the development of a politically conservative, middle-class Mexican American identity, epitomized by LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens. Founded in 1929, LULAC championed the twin causes of education and equality throughout the 1930s. LULAC members fought for state laws that would end discrimination against Mexicans and claimed to speak for the Latino population. Nevertheless, the organization's ideology was that of a rising middle class who saw assimilation as a necessary strategy for advancement. LULAC members felt threatened by the radicalism embraced by other groups and their organization did not, according to Rodolfo Acuña, serve the interests of the poor: "[T]hey felt they could achieve their goal — which was to become capitalists — in a dignified manner like 'decent' people. Their method was to work within the system and not in the streets." Indeed, LULAC's constitution clearly defined the group as nonpolitical. The time would come, however, when political activism among minorities would not be restricted to "radical" fringe groups.
During and immediately following World War II, increased opportunities for ethnic and racial minorities helped promote a sense of political awareness in these communities. By the early 1960s, among blacks, the call for equal rights was in full swing and Mexican Americans were not far behind. El movimiento, which gave voice to the community's opposition to entrenched political and social discrimination, may be characterized in terms of its two main stages: the early period, from the mid-1960s to 197 3, and the "post-Chicano movement" period, from the mid-1970s to the present. During the first stage, characterized by radicalism, nationalism and social protest unified the struggle for civil rights. Hidden within this unity, however, was an age-old, patriarchal and heterosexist hierarchy that placed women in el movimiento far below their male counterparts. This was the fault line along which the movement divided, marking the advent of its second stage. Women and queers, committed to developing a politics of visibility and difference within a dynamic movement, helped usher in the postnational period by displacing the static predicament of chicanismo. Women activists, writers, dramatists, and other cultural workers are now much more visible in the continuing struggle of Mexicans and other Latinos to counter white, Anglo cultural domination. Some critics deny the existence of this second stage, maintaining that the Chicano movement died out in the 1970s. I join Cherríe Moraga in asserting otherwise; the movement did not die, it "was only deformed by the machismo and homophobia of that era and coopted by [the] 'hispanicization' of the eighties.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage by Alicia Arrizón. Copyright © 1999 Alicia Arrizón. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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