The borderlands evoke powerful images in the Southwest. California's recent passage of Proposition 187, cuts in aid to immigrants as part of the Republican "Contract With America," and renewed building of fences and trenches along the Mexican border all speak to the racial and cultural tensions in the borderlands. Moreover, "Chicano history is the story of territorial occupation through legal manipulation working in concert with violence" (100). Yet as Gutierrez-Jones ably demonstrates in this book, borders are not only geographic and political sites. Beyond these obvious borderlands, Gutierrez-Jones is concerned with the border as a site where Chicano and Chicana responses to institutional dependency are played out. Accordingly, he explores the borderlands between material and cultural experiences, between institutions and ideologies, between cultural studies and legal studies, and between artistic discourse and legal discourse.
The dialects of conflict and negotiation, force and consent, coercion and hegemony constitute a central theme in the book. Gutierrez-Jones seeks to demonstrate how various institutional mechanisms help to maintain subordinated social groups in a fundamental and systematic dependency relationship. Having established this, he goes on to articulate ways in which particular Chicano and Chicana artists project their own versions of legal culture and legal rhetoric as a critical arena of resistance to dominant institutional power, including but not limited to legal institutions. Like the artists he analyses, he draws on typical cultural symbols and representations such as La Malinche and La Llorona, as well as the corrido tradition.
Gutierrez-Jones begins in the first chapter with brief overviews of Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, neoconservative cultural strategies, and resistance strategies evidenced in Chicano art. In the next chapter, he explores reformist narratives that contribute to a national historical amnesia with regard to Mexican and Chicano world views. This amnesia serves assimilationist goals of bringing the disenfranchised into the mainstream political, economic, and cultural arenas. In chapter three, he deconstructs magical realist responses to this amnesia, drawing heavily on Foucauldian disciplinary techniques and dependency theory.
While issues of sexuality and gender are raised in earlier chapters, it is in chapters four and five that they are explicitly addressed. These chapters tackle questions about the manipulation of desire and coercion, focusing particular attention on rape, shame, homosocial bonding and mourning. I found these chapters to be the most thought provoking, particularly as he reworked machismo as instances of a homosocial economy of desire which contributes to the oppression of Chicanas. His emphasis on the psychoanalytic literature on pathological mourning and sublimation, however, was less compelling. In developing his genealogy of Chicana activist mourning he notes in passing that this is "a focus not often pursued
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by Chicana cultural critics who have worked hard to write themselves out of the stereotypes that can be associated with mourning as a Chicana's gender-bound work" (152). Beyond writing themselves out of these stereotypes, my reading of the original sources suggests that the women were trying to carve out some autonomous space for themselves apart from their husbands and lovers.
Gutierrez-Jones approaches his study of Chicano culture by bringing a myriad of theoretical perspectives to bear on his analysis of Chicano and Chicana literature and film. He weaves together insights from Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, dependency theory, feminist theories, psychoanalytic theories, and Foucauldian discourse analysis. While each of these perspectives aids in the inquiry, it is very difficult to adequately integrate them, along with critiques of a dozen or so narratives, into a short book (the text is only 172 pages).
As a result, Gutierrez-Jones's discussion of each perspective remains superficial and rests on his reading of one or two sources in the area. For example, the discussion of Critical Legal Studies rests almost solely on Mark Kelman's overview. Similarly, and of greater concern to me, Gutierrez-Jones's discussions of Critical Race Theory rely solely on the work of Kimberle Crenshaw and Patricia Williams. While their work has been central to development of this perspective and while I admire them greatly, in focusing solely on them Gutierrez-Jones has ignored writings by other Critical Race scholars, including Chicanos and Chicanas. Indeed, the only Chicano legal scholar discussed is Gerald Lopez, and I would not categorize his book as Critical Race Theory. Perhaps because Gutierrez-Jones is trying to incorporate so many perspectives into his analysis, the linkages between the theories and the narratives are not as carefully developed as they might be.
I enjoyed much of RETHINKING THE BORDERLANDS. It will be interesting reading for anyone familiar with the Chicano and Chicana narratives analyzed and with the literature in legal and cultural studies. Readers who are less familiar with Chicano/a literature and films, however, will be forced to rely on Gutierrez-Jones's deconstruction of them and, as he notes in places, such interpretations are often contested. Similarly, readers unfamiliar with the literature in cultural studies and legal studies will likely get lost in the jargon.
