chicana.knowledge.race.history.chicano

Being a writer feels very much like being a Chicana, or being queer—a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo where I kick my heels, brood, percolate, hibernate and wait for something to happen.
—Gloria Anzaldúa

Caught like a seed unable to plant itself…
—Jimmy Santiago Baca

In her incisive Foucaultian study on the oppositional possibilities of Chicana/o feminist writing within the confines of both dominant Chicano and Euroamerican historiography, Emma Pérez asks: “What are the discursive formations that pattern the twentieth-century Chicana/o historical imagination defined as our self conscious recognition of who we are now and how we arrived here?” Contained within this question are a number of key elements and problematics that continue to constitute the desire to know and produce Chicana/o history as an object of knowledge in the contemporary moment. Central, perhaps, to the shape and scope of the various iterations of Chicana/o history writing has been the confrontation with the dense territorial superimposition of the legacy of Spanish colonialism in Latin America, the uneven formation of Mexican nationalism, and the aftermath of the formal US annexation of northern Mexico following the 1846 Mexican-American war. Formally ending the Mexican-American war in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo over night reconstituted under the purview of the US state roughly 550,000 miles of land and 60,000 Spanish-speaking residents who, in living memory, had been subjected to at least three modalities of Western colonial power (Spanish Empire, postcolonial Mexico, US imperial expansion) without moving an inch.

Even as the question posed by Pérez emerges as a product of this history, it further prompts us to interrogate the concepts and terms by which this history accrues temporal causality, territorial coherency, regional emphasis, and racial particularity within current regimes of disciplinary knowledge. Chicana/o historiography emerges in the late 1960s and early ’70s not only in conjunction with and as a response to the appearance of a series of radical Chicana/o nationalist movements, but also as an attempt to comprehend the radical social and cultural heterogeneity constituting the US-Mexican border. In their mapping of the historical trajectories that constituted the emergence and movements of Mexican-American populations, scholars such as Guillermo Flores, Carlos Muñoz, Mario Barrera, and Rodolfo Acuña also advanced dynamic critiques of prevailing social science paradigms that constituted these populations as objects of study. Marked most prominently at the time by liberal-integrationist or class-centric Marxist accounts of social transformation and historical progression, dominant sociological and historiographical discourse, according to these early Chicana/o critiques, failed to account for the centrality of race as a tactic of domination, subordination, and exploitation within the US state. As a field of counter-knowledge responding both to these disciplinary constraints and various public iterations of Chicano cultural nationalism, Chicana/o historiography deployed the model of the internal colony as a way to negotiate and shuttle between the demands of these two poles. As noted by Tomás Almaguer, early versions of the internal colony model can be condensed into three main points:

First, they explicitly reject previous historical interpretations of the Chicano experience that disparaged this population and rationalized their subordination in the American Southwest (contra liberal integrationism). Second, they placed the racial conflict between Anglo Americans and Mexicans at the center of their historical analysis (contra scientific Marxism). Although they acknowledged the importance of class factors, and capitalist development in shaping Chicano history, that experience was primarily viewed in terms of racial conflict and domination. Third, these collective works argued that Mexican Americans should be viewed as a vanquished people victimized by a classic “colonial” conquest: the United States-Mexico war. This conquest is seen as part of the global process whereby Europeans have subordinated non-white populations and established elaborate institutional structures that perpetuate a colonial situation. This colonial situation is viewed as the “domestic face” of the worldwide European colonization of the non-Western world initiated in the sixteenth century (viz. “internal colonialism”).

The significance of the internal colony model is not only the way in which it intervenes in the produced disciplinary silences within history and sociology, but the way it also cathects to more dispersed and emergent projects of Chicano cultural nationalism. In its intervention within dominant regimes of social scientific knowledge, the model of the internal colony makes two significant theoretical moves. Firstly, by deploying the analytic of colonial domination within the territorial United States, it internationalizes and re-historicizes the liberal nationalist character of US disciplinary knowledge. In its decentering of the US nationalist framework, the model of the internal colony sought to reterritorialize the marginalized historical status of Chicana/os both under a different geography of the Americas and within a global milieu of postcolonial struggles and revolts. Secondly, the model of the internal colony sought to counter-rationalize the dominance of class-centric scientific Marxism with its articulation of race as an autonomous complex of political and social meaning and utility. I use the term “counter-rationalize” to suggest that the use of race within the internal colony model both disorganized and reconstituted the primacy of sociology and historiography as disciplinary sites of knowledge. That is, even as the centrality of race within the internal colony model enabled early Chicana/o thought to reconfigure and expose the disciplinary protocols and limitations within the social sciences, it also reinscribed the centrality of the social sciences as the privileged framework for naming and studying “Chicano” history.

Juxtaposed and constellated within the larger and more dispersed public expressions of Chicana/o nationalism, we can see that iterations of the internal colony model are interacting with emergent Chicano counterpublics whose organization, in the same period, was figured most prominently through tropes of land. For the Chicana/o nationalists in the 1960s and later who constituted El Movimento, land became an important organizing and unifying trope through which they were able to publicly counter-memorialize the ahistoric logic of US imperial expansion and its strategies of territorial dispossession, as well as simultaneously imagine the liberatory spiritual homeland of “Aztlan.” Although responding to various regional and cultural pressures and in no way a monolithic national consciousness, El Moviemento nonetheless rearticulated within the larger US public sphere the hybrid racial and linguistic difference of Mexican-Americans and Chicana/os as internally excluded from the supposed universality of the white, liberal national imaginary. In outlining the conditions of Mexican-American marginalization, these groups formulated a counterpublic historical geography that accounted for the legacies and confluence of Spanish colonial rule, Mexican national belonging, and American imperial expansion that had been excised from US public memory.

The emergence of Chicana feminist critique upon and within the historical surfaces of Chicano nationalism and historiography, in this sense, figures as a critique of the hetero-patriarchal logics and economies of both disciplinary regimes of knowledge and Chicano, Mexican, and US nationalism. Central to this critique is Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of Borderlands/La Frontera and the critical reconceptualization of La Malinche by intellectuals such as Norma Alarcon, Cherrie Moraga, and Jean Franco, to name a few. Taken together, both projects revealed the limits of the model of the internal colony as the dominant hermeneutic for the production of Chicana/o history. In the critiques leveled through the paradigm of the borderlands and the figure of La Malinche, the tropes of land and the body are figured as corporeal and territorial sites of social meaning that produce gendered and racialized subjects that are at once confined and without place. Rather than embodying self-possessed and coherent subjectivities, the racially sexualized bodies of Chicanas and Latinas, according to Chicana feminist critiques, emerge as vessels of exchange, contact, and dispersion that render domestic spaces (the nation, and the home) as gendered spaces of confinement. As projects that radically re-sexed the terms through which Chicana/o history and cultural memory is performed, deployed, and recovered in an era of globalized capitalism, Borderlands/La Frontera and La Malinche produced critical accounts of the gendered violence that has historically constituted the emergence and maintenance of colonial regimes of knowledge and postcolonial nationalist projects in Latin America and early Chicano discourse.

In rendering the border as an “herida abierta,” an open wound and a mutilated body, Anzaldúa exposes, to use Mary Pat Brady’s language, the “hidden microspatial practices that weave together to form the norms of gender and sexuality for women of color.” More specifically, through Anzaldúa’s insight the border’s abstract unity is disorganized as pulsating its existence through an everyday and microphysical series of gendered and racialized violences on the body. It is here that Borderlands/La Frontera significantly opens up the irresolvable crisis of bodily and national interiority as a modality through which to tell the counterhistory of the conjoined heteropatriarchal economies of Mexican, Chicano, and US nationalisms. Thus, as a decidedly flexible concept metaphor for social transformation, Borderlands/La Frontera, like the model of the internal colony, is at once a spatio-temporal metaphor, an attempt at locating and populating the psychic, epistemological, bodily, and territorial spaces previously foreclosed from historical representation in dominant regimes of knowledge production. In this sense, according to Pérez,

Anzaldúa writes oppositionally to [Rodolfo] Acuña (i.e. the model of the internal colony), issuing a ‘new’ postnationalist project in which la nueva mestiza, the mixed race woman, is the privileged subject of an interstitial space that was formerly a nation and is now without borders, without boundaries. The concept-metaphor woman, formerly known as ‘worker’ in Chicano nationalist discourse, is challenged by Anzaldúa, who critiques that discursive ‘nation’ as a space that negates, dismisses, and occludes feminists, queers (jotas y jotos), and anyone who is not of ‘pure’ Chicano blood and lineage.

In its embrace of la nueva mestiza as a figure of political, social, and cultural hybridity, Anzaldúa maps the spatial and temporal incoherencies of Chicana/o history within a discursive space that eschews the binaristic abstractions of political borders and citizenship as logics that constitute the desire for modern forms of national belonging and their attendant regimes of knowledge. It is a space, moreover, nominating Chicana/o and Latina/o history as an incoherency of superimposed and contradictory racialized meanings and markings haunted by an uneven historical articulation to whiteness. Poet and essayist Cherrie Moraga, for example, continually expresses anxiety about the amnesiatic nature of whiteness haunting her own mestiza body and consciousness. Her fully exteriorized inner race war in The Last Generation identifies whiteness as a strategy of extraction and extrication, a political technology of accumulation that names places and bodies as pliable reserves of value and labor even as it produces psychic and material shields from the series of violences that constitute its wholeness and universal meaning: “I have feared the mirror of my passivity, my orphanhood, my arrogance and ignorance in the white women I have loved” (116). At the same time, the borderlands animates visions of cross- and inter-racial affinity and affiliation by calling for a consciousness of the historical intimacies and intersections of different Chicana/o bodies with other non Chicana/o racial formations. In doing so, the borderlands trope summons the crucial question guiding my own intervention into Chicana/o cultural criticism: What would it mean to theorize Chicana/o radical thought as a sustained meditation on the politics of transamerican interracial affiliation?

The critical reevaluation of La Malinche within Chicana feminist critique further deepens this question. To paraphrase Norma Alarcón, the critical reappropriation of La Malinche seeks to lay bare the double etymology of translator/traitor surrounding her historical and textual presence within Chicano and Mexican nationalist projects that have traditionally figured women “as the spoils of war or as mediators whose bodies facilitate or threaten national unity.” Understood as the profaned double of the Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche emerges as a colonial conduit of linguistic, sexual, and racial exchange between the Spaniards and Indians, a mediator between economies of gift (Indian) and contract (Spanish Colonial), and as the veneratated and denigrated mother of Mexican national consciousness. Called el verbo de la conquista by Justo Sierra, her image at once signals the novelty of Latin American colonialism through the concept of mestizaje even as it indexes the conjoined centrality of linguistic representation and sexualized violence within the formation of the Mexican and Chicano national imaginaries. Thus, according to Norma Alarcón, in critiquing the heteropatriarchal economies of Mexican and Chicano nationalism,

Chicanas, as writers and political activists, simultaneously legitimate their discourse by grounding it in the Mexican/Chicano community and by creating a “speaking subject” in their reappropriation of Malintzin from Mexican writers and Chicano oral tradition—through her they begin a recovery of aspects of their experience as well as of their language. In this way, the traditional view of femininity invested in Guadalupe is avoided and indirectly denied and reinvested in a less intractable object. Guadalupe’s political history represents a community’s expectations and utopic desires through divine mediation. Malintzin, however, as a secularly established “speaking subject,” unconstrained by religious beliefs, lends herself more readily to articulation and representation, both as subject and object. In a sense, Malintzin must be led to represent herself, to become the subject of representation, and the closest she can come to this is by sympathizing with latter-day speaking female subjects.

Like the concept-metaphor of the borderlands, the critical reappropriation of La Malinche by Chicana feminism, as a site of social and cultural intersection, collusion, and dispersal, principally engages with a system of state and nationalist violence whose production and maintanence of spatial and temporal political borders figure the feminized body as the overdetermined and abject site of conquest and colonization. In its radical attempts to produce an oppositional and legible discursive space to these colonial logics of power, Chicana feminism produces a counternationalist history of the transamerican US southwest concerned with its abjections as much as with its incorporations. As a mode of writing in the gendered caesuras constituting the interlinked formations of Mexican, Chicano, and US nationalism, Chicana feminist thought produces a framework for animating the abject residue of national coherency not merely to narrate the conditions of advanced gendered and racialized marginalization. Equally as significant, rather, the cultivation of the borderlands and the redeployment of La Malinche advance a standpoint from which the violent maintenance of the national totality can be disarticulated and disorganized.

In this regard, the emergence and subsequently uneven disciplinary codification of Chicana feminist historiography in the US, as an effort to think the limits of what can be known by the disciplinary constraints of sociology, history, and literary studies, is also a project of undoing the exclusionary conditions of Euroamerican and Chicano historiography itself. For this task, it is of chief significance that Chicana feminist thought deploys literature and literary forms as alternative modes of historical recovery. The radical generic and formal heterogeneity marking Chicana feminist writing, from the multilingual assemblage of poetry and prose in Anzaldúa’s and Moraga’s work to the “mobile memory” employed within Sandra Cisneros’ “drive-by narratives,” “intervened with a treatise that presented history as only another literary genre.” At the same time, Chicana radical thought also figures literature as a method of reconstituting the subjugated traces of history whose omissions and performed silences saturate the rationalized abstractions within dominant paradigms of social science.

The stakes of literature in the counterhistorical project of Chicana feminist thought rest, in the language of Michel Foucault, as an “attempt to desubjugate historical knowledges, to set them free, or in other words to enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific discourse.” Hence, coterminous with the production of a counterhistorical discourse that names the bodies and spaces hitherto constituted as both overmarked and without historical representation within the gendered and racialized logics of Mexican, Chicano, and US nationalism, Chicana feminist writing also deploys literature as a tactic of struggle against “the power-effects characteristic of any discourse that is regarded as scientific.” In this sense, it is not a matter of emphasizing the singularity of literature in Chicana feminist thought as the container of disqualified historical knowledge that could then rectify the “error” of social science discourses. Rather, it might be more effective in thinking about how the deployment of literature, as a tactic of counter-knowledge, allows Chicana feminism to activate a rumination on the constraints, limits, and performed silences that constitute the production of and desire for disciplinary knowledge itself.

On Gayatri Spivak pt. 1

Recently, I have re-read a couple of essays by Spivak, which has been surprisingly compelling and productive. Specifically, I have returned to “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” What will follow will be some notes on her project in general and particular comments on these text.

 - A central question I had with Spivak was: what is the value of deconstruction to Marxism? Some orthodox Marxist would probably say that deconstruction is not just unproductive to a Marxist project but actually counter-productive to it insofar as deconstruction mystifies the material underpinning of social organization. I think this can be valid criticism since some deconstruction can displace the problem of exploitation and inequality into the problem of language. Yet, I would not say that she is doing this kind of move but rather engaging with the difficult issue abstraction. Specifically, how can one work on a high level of abstraction while simultaneously being attentive to particularity?

To ask this question is not to fall into a material/symbolic split but rather engage with the particular historical materiality of abstraction. For example, Stuart Hall points out Marx’s idea of “mode of production” operates on the highest level abstraction in that the concept encompasses a vast historical period and spans across the entire globe. To produce such abstractions is not necessarily intellectually irresponsible but instead it signals the necessity to grasp a political and historical totality. That is to say one needs a name for something to make interventions into it. For example, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique calls the anomie of domestic life “the problem that has no name.” This naming of an experience that assumes a universal  subject of the experience renders socially intelligible the structural inequality between men and women in social life, which precipitated second wave white liberal feminism.  The point therefore, is not about a material/symbolic dichotomy since the indexing of particular names have claims to materiality and symbolism but rather the historicity of knowledge. In short, it is question of epistomology.

Returning to Spivak, what deconstruction seems to offer for Marxism is a way to index the semi-autonomy of epistomology and history rather than a simple base and superstructure dichotomy. I want to make it clear that this is not a dialectic but instead the disjunct between the particular historical moment that gave rise to a mode abstraction and the history of a mode of abstraction delinked from its particular historical context. Spivak calls this disjunction between particularity and abstraction a “textual indeterminancy.” Once again, these “textual indeterminacies” should not be understood through a Lacanian gap between the symbolic and the real but rather the linguistic effect of historical overdetermination. For this reason, Spivak writes, “Textual criticism of this sort assumes, a) in the narrow sense, that even ‘theoretical’ texts are produced in language, and, b) that ‘reality’ is a fabrication out of discontinuities and constitutive differences with ‘origins’ and ‘ends’ that are provisional and shifting.” In using the concept-metaphor of text, Spivak is highlighting the social and historical contingencies that undergird the power of these categories. In that way, the scare-quoted words are important. First, by stressing how “‘theoretical’ text are produced in language,” she is not suggesting that all texts are the same under language but instead the form of a text’s appearance that render it to be socially intelligible as theory endows the text with the social power of theory, which, on the one hand, it can be “mere” theory, a hypothesis, or, on the other hand, it can be Theory, the accurate representation of the social forces that organize reality. Second, “reality” is not an unmediated relation to the world, as if it is just “out there,” but instead a contested social idea with material effects that is constituted through the conflicts of other ideas that are always historically, materially, and socially contingent. More importantly, these contingencies are narratives in that the “origins” and “ends” establish social legitimacy. Obviously, then, these “textual indeterminacies” are not neutral but instead mark the space of a particular knowledge/power configuration. This leads me to my next point.

 

On the joys of electoral politics and fictitious democracy

Perhaps we can reanimate our blog with a brief discussion on the drama/hollowness/allure of the presidental primaries.  I guess in a basic way I’m interested in: 1) what the hell we’re each thinking of what’s happening, and 2) what the hell we “should” be thinking of what’s happening (i.e. how should we as the abiding radical/marxian/feminist/leftist/anti-racist activist-intellectuals that we (perhaps) aspire to be theorize electoral politcs and our relationships to it/them).  Yes?

The Public Life of La Alianza Federál de Mercedes

Introduction: Land, Race, and Liberal Universality in New Mexico
The territory currently known as the state of New Mexico, in addition to the majority of the southwestern United States, was formally annexed with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, a treaty whose passage over night repositioned roughly 550,000 miles of land, 60,000 Spanish-speaking residents and 10,000 Pueblos under the purview of a freshly expanded and transforming U.S. state. The already existing system of property ownership for the majority of New Mexico’s frontier land was primarily articulated through the Spanish Laws of the Indies in the 17th century. Through these laws, Spanish royalty granted large tracts of land (mercedes) to groups of settler families on the yet-to-be-annexed territory. When Mexico gained independence in 1821, the country continued the practice of granting lands, even increasing the amount of land families received per grant, in the hope of warding off growing settler expansion from the slaveholding Lone Star Republic. The system of ownership among New Mexican families consisted in the form of the ejido, a larger communal grant attached to smaller plots on which the families lived. The families held the option to sell their own plot, but the commons were not available for sale.

The first draft of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo contained, in article X, an explicit mandate recognizing and protecting the property and modes of ownership held by these settler families. As the treaty was ratified, President James Polk struck the article, fearing widespread petitioning in the region for the resurrection of extinct land grants. Although a distinct article securing the legitimacy of the ejidos was reintroduced shortly after in the Treaty of Queretero, Congress resuscitated Polk’s rhetoric and failed to ratify it. The resulting history of the New Mexican land grants is one mired in a series of juridical and political maneuvers and tactics that slowly and unevenly transferred large chunks of land to the U.S. state and its liberal modes of private and public ownership. The significance of this history of land dispossession in New Mexico finds fuller shape once we recognize it as one of the formative histories through which conceptions of property in U.S. liberal modernity produced and maintained its universal status.

Coincident with the universalizing process of liberal political technologies of ownership—the production of “development” out of displacement—within the U.S. state was the formation of growing scores of racialized U.S. subjects whose sense of political subjectivity was and remains informed by the longstanding history of land grant dispossession in New Mexico. Although attempts to form a broad, coalitional movement around the land grant issue had been undertaken by groups such as Las Gorras Blancas (The White Caps) and La Mano Negra (The Black Hand) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by the 1950s most organized efforts had lost their momentum even as sentiments of resentment and alienage heightened with the uneven expansion, in the form of the US Forest Service, of the US state’s bureaucratic and juridical network of property accumulation.

It is in this historical context of racialized contact and alienation that the militant political organization, La Alianza Federál de Mercedes (The Federated Alliance of Land Grants), qualitatively transformed the nature and terms of experience of this population with its inception in 1962. Led by an ex-evangelical preacher from Texas named Reies López Tijerina, and understood as one of the formative groups within the Chicana/o civil rights movement in the 1960s, La Alianza is most commonly known for its armed raid of the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse in northern New Mexico on July 5, 1967. A predominantly rural oppositional movement, La Alianza claimed roughly 6,000 members in its hey-day, with delegates representing 48 land grants around the state of New Mexico. With Tijerina performing as the organization’s main public figure and president, La Alianza forged a radical critique of U.S. sovereignty centered on his archival research of the Mexican and Spanish legal histories that both preceded, and were illegally elided by, the passage of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In its dissemination of this history, La Alianza articulated the land grant struggle in a larger context of civil, cultural, and political rights that aimed to establish the land grants as sovereign “free city states” recognized by international law. Cathecting the land grant struggle to the racial political signifier, Indo-Hispano—a signifier that accounted for the colonial contact and confluence of Spanish and Indian peoples in the Southwest—Tijerina sought to have the United Nations and other international agencies declare the U.S. violation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as a human rights violation.

Of principal interest for this study, then, are the ways in which the tactics and texts animating La Alianza’s critique of the U.S. state, especially its much celebrated, vilified, and fetishized act of militancy, both garnered national and international publicity and, in the process, forged a counter public premised on a newly articulated “Indo-Hispano” racial political signifier. By analyzing the tropes and narratives detailing the courthouse raid offered by the handful of articles and academic studies on Tijerina and La Alianza, I will firstly explore how the effects of the almost instantaneous injection of the organization’s critique internationalized the national imaginings and cognitive mappings of a larger U.S. public sphere in the context of the civil rights movement.

La Alianza’s Counter Public History
Although most accounts of La Alianza’s organized efforts to publicize the land grant issue focus on the events from 1966 to the courthouse raid in 1967, Tijerina’s land grant research and activism stems back to his arrival in New Mexico in 1957. Having fled a failed utopian project of Mexican American religious communalism called El Valle de Paz (The Valley of Peace) in Arizona, Tijerina arrived in New Mexico a fugitive charged with possession of stolen land and an attempt to break his brother, Margarito, from the Pinal County Jail. Throughout the following six years prior to the official incorporation of La Alianza, Tijerina embarked on a series of travels around the state of New Mexico during which he became familiar with the land grant history through conversations with community elders and local historical experts. Supplementing and punctuating these encounters was his year long trip to Mexico in 1958 where he visited the General National Archives and began to study the history and politics of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. After a failed attempt to persuade the Mexican government to internationally intervene in the land grant struggle through the United Nations, Tijerina returned to the United States and began to actively disseminate his findings of the land grant history to heirs around the state of New Mexico for the next three years.

Modeled primarily on the already existing Abiquiú Corporation in New Mexico—an organization primarily concerned with New Mexican land grant issues whose principal tactic involved juridical litigation against the state—La Alianza emerged publicly on February 2, 1962, the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Its first convention held that October drew representatives from fourteen land grants, and set into motion a series of efforts by Tijerina to publicize the land grant history and garner new membership. These efforts included an intensive letter writing campaign to US and Mexican governmental officials and a weekly column in a local paper, The News Chieftain, elucidating the struggles and history of the land grant claimants. Tijerina would continue to write his weekly columns until 1965, the same year he began a daily, 15-minute radio program in Spanish on KABQ entitled “The Voice of Justice” and a weekly television program on Channel 4 in Albuquerque. Tijerina, in his memoir They Called me ‘King Tiger’: My Struggle for the Land and Our Rights, describes the content and effects of these broadcasts as such:

The politicians and judges began looking for ways to get me off the air. It became clear to me that the power of the judges lies in their ability to interpret the law, which they interpreted to their liking and mentality, in order to discriminate against the original settlers, Indians and Mestizos. They are behind all the ‘decisions’ in the judicial system that have resulted in the stealing of our land. I spent well over ten years studying the world of the judges. I understood how they interpreted justice. The judges are the ones who legalized terror. They are the ones who robbed us of our culture and abused us. They opened the door to Thomas B. Catron and his allies. The judges are the ones who took the utility and value out of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I explained all this through the radio program. I explained the vitality of the Laws of the Indies. I knew that Article 6, Section 2, of the United States Constitution obligated this country to observe the commitments made to other nations, such as through treaties. It clearly states that the treaties entered into by the United States with other countries are the supreme law of the land. The community was learning more and more through my radio program and losing its fear of the unknown and of these judges.

In Tijerina’s description of his public speech acts, there exist a number of key components to what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge theorize as the tensions residing in proletarian public sphere discourse. Central to Negt’s and Kluge’s concept of the proletarian public sphere is the need to allow the proletarian to comprehend its constitutive exploited experience dialectically as the placement of individual sensation within a social context that manages, arranges, and hierarchizes sensation. “The proletarian public sphere,” in their language, “is itself a matter of the future, but at the same time it is the only opportunity available for putting historical ground under one’s feet and for structuring experience in historical temporal sequences.” The central and perpetually precarious task of proletarian public sphere, in this sense, forces the proletariat to grasp and identify its own experience in a way that would transform the legal, cultural, and historical universals that organize public conceptions of the social totality. For Negt and Kluge, the proletarian public sphere, as a counter public sphere, gains its shape through the simultaneous evasion of two immanent poles: its potential reification into the bourgeois public sphere on the one hand, and its potential stagnation as polemical camp rhetoric on the other.

With this in mind, we are able to see the tension between counter public polemics and the expression of hegemonizing public discourse in Tijerina’s passage. By articulating together the sovereignty of the Spanish Laws of the Indies, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the protection of treaty rights outlined in Article Six of the US Constitution, Tijerina’s public speech acts offer a genealogy of US property law that provincializes its universal status and reveals its racially violent and arbitrary origins. In casting racialized exclusion as the principal technology and effect of US law, Tijerina’s public speech reorganized the social experience of its (a)historic logic, figured its universal nature as a structure of dominance, and, in doing so, conferred to La Alianza its counter public authority.

Central to Tijerina’s conception of this counter public of “Indians and Mestizos” was his deployment of “Indo-Hispano” as a simultaneously capacious and specific racial political signifier whose origins he located in the Laws of the Indies. According to Tijerina, “Indo-Hispano” came into existence on October 19, 1514 as the term assigned to the children of European and indigenous unions meant to signal their status as a novel race. Contained in the same Spanish legal texts that legitimized La Alianza’s claims to the land, Indo-Hispano importantly provided, according to Lee Bebout, “a space of connection between Spanish, American, and Chicanos…that invoked a usable past” for the group’s counter public imaginings and rhetorics. Hence we can read Tijerina’s conclusion about the “community” both “learning more” and “losing its fear of the unknown and of these judges” as a description of the shifts in the social experiential terrain that Indo-Hispano counter public discourse precipitated.

The aim of these tactics of Indo-Hispano counter public discourse at this point in La Alianza’s existence was an overall engagement with the US state at the legal, institutional level. “Tijerina believed,” according to Bebout, “his historical knowledge could lead to the recovery of lost lands, but it could only do so though an agency invested with power.” These counter public tactics, in other words, were fastened to an underlying assumption that US law and its institutional forms contained a principle within itself that would willingly account for and redress its own foundational violence. Yet prompted by the memory of Tijerina’s abrupt deportation from Mexico in 1964, which bluntly made clear Mexico’s disinterest in the land grant struggle, La Alianza began to transform its public modes of address as well as its conception of state power. Invigorated by the findings of his archival research in Spain in the spring of 1966, La Alianza organized roughly 300 people on a three-day, 60-mile march from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, the state capitol. They arrived in Santa Fe only to find then New Mexico Governor Jack Campbell out of the state. After eventually meeting with and persuading Campbell to petition President Lyndon Johnson for the land grants a few days later, La Alianza’s efforts were again blunted by Dr. Myra Ellen Jenkins, the New Mexico state archivist, who advised Campbell against any further dealings with the organization.

These setbacks and institutional evasions on behalf of the US government initiated the transformation of La Alianza into a direct action group whose counter public tactics now included symbolic performances of land reclamation on dispossessed grants. The first of these public performances occurred in October 1966, when La Alianza proclaimed the 500,000 acres of the US Kit Carson forest as belonging to the legitimate heirs of the San Joaquin del Cañon del Rio de Chama land grant. With roughly three hundred members on hand, La Alianza set up camp in the forest and renamed the territory the sovereign “Free City-State” of the Republic of San Joaquin del Rio de Chama. In the process, two Forest Service rangers were seized and placed on “trial” for trespassing on Republic land before a panel of Alianza elders composed of heirs to the land grant. After the self-appointed court sentenced the rangers, they suspended punishment, impounded their vehicles, and released them. Federal officers disbanded the camp a few days later with a restraining order. In addition to the accumulation of local and national publicity, a key goal of the performed reclamation, as Bebout points out, was the arrest of Tijerina on charges of trespassing: “The Alianza was not requesting an investigation; rather, they were hoping to force one. By occupying government land and refusing to pay park fees, Tijerina hoped to be tried for trespassing. Such a charge would require the government to prove ownership of the disputed lands.”

Tierra Amarilla and the Crisis of the International
Although no arrest resulted from the San Joaquin takeover, its performance brought both a heightened level of urgency within La Alianza and an intensified campaign of surveillance and scrutiny from both the federal and local governments. La Alianza continued its intensive letter writing campaign to the White House and staged a large protest in Albuquerque’s Old Town Plaza in April of 1967. At the same time, NM District Attorney Alfonso Sánchez filed an order in the US District Court that required La Alianza to submit its internal files and membership list. At this point, Sánchez resorted going on local radio stations declaring La Alianza as a “bunch of commies” who are sending “the wrong image of our people.” In response, Tijerina immediately resigned as the president of La Alianza, disbanded the organization, and reconstituted the group as La Alianza Federál de Pueblos Libres (The Federal Alliance of Free City States). Under its new moniker, La Alianza announced plans for an upcoming convention in Coyote, a small northern New Mexican town, to take place on June 3, 1967.

On June 1, Sánchez intensified the regime of surveillance placed on La Alianza and authorized a statewide search for Tijerina and established blockades on the roads leading to Coyote. As a result, 11 Alianza members were arrested by State police on counts of “unlawful assembly and extortion.” Frustrated by the arrest of the Alianza members, Tijerina relocated the convention through word of mouth to the nearby town of Canjilón. While there, Tijerina heard over the radio that Sánchez was scheduled to appear at the Tierra Amarilla courthouse to formally charge the 11 Alianza members arrested days earlier. With this news, Tijerina proposed, to the unanimous vote of the male heads of the families, to place Sánchez under citizen’s arrest. Accompanied by 20 armed “People’s deputies,” Tijerina stormed the building and for roughly two hours took possession of the Rio Arriba County courthouse. Although Sánchez had never actually attended the courthouse on that day, in addition to the fact that the 11 Alianza members had made bail before Tijerina and company arrived, the raid resulted in the non-fatal shooting of two courthouse employees and the kidnapping of Albuquerque Journal reporter Larry Calloway and Deputy Sheriff Pete Jaramillo. At the end of the raid, after having fended off mild advances from local police, the Alianza members released the hostages unharmed and fled into the nearby mountains. The state of New Mexico deployed the National Guard and rounded up the Alianza members camped out at Canjilón. Tijerina was eventually arrested three days later and charged with “leading the raid and ordering hostages to be taken. When his charges come to trial the following year, Tijerina, acting as his own defense in court, is acquitted on all counts.

What is interesting about the courthouse raid, in addition to the long and torturous history to which it was responding, is the way in which it has found subsequent narration in the handful of academic studies on Tijerina and La Alianza. More specifically, what seems to be a favorite trope used to describe La Alianza’s courthouse raid is that of a larger, televised U.S. public who, in the context of the Vietnam war and other international events, is perplexed by the reception of the news of an act of domestic militancy against the US state. For our purposes, Peter Nabokov’s opening of the first chapter of Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid is sufficiently exemplary:

For most Americans the drowsy little village of Tierra Amarilla in northern New Mexico was first place on the map June 6, 1967. On the second morning of the Arab-Israeli six-day war, newspaper readers all over the United States turned from the Sinai struggle a national item that made them hastily recheck the dateline to be sure they were still in the twentieth century.

The “Americans” Nabokov portrays are initially forced to reconceptualize their sense of national space by “mapping” the Tierra Amarilla conflict within the territorial United States amid a flurry of “foreign” conflict. The juxtaposition of this “national” news item alongside other “international” events further instigates a crisis of temporality for “newspaper readers all over the United States.” Forced to “hastily recheck the dateline” of their newspapers, American readers are no longer certain of their placement in historical time. This momentary loss of geographic and historical equilibrium at once cognitively internationalizes the “domestic” territory of the US state and places in crisis the constitutive racialized intellectual abstractions that give the modern “American” (i.e. white, liberal) public its horizon of being. Central to the dominance of the white liberal public imaginary, these intellectual abstractions at once cast Mexican American and Indo-Hispano racial difference as “foreign” even as it figures the land they inhabit as always already “national” and “domestic.” As evidenced by Nabokov’s passage, this dominant mode of public imagining both excises the history of US imperial expansion in the southwest and subdues the racial, cultural, and historic heterogeneity of the social totality. As such, the eruption of La Alianza’s counter public critique and tactics within the larger US public sphere rearticulated the hybrid racial and linguistic difference of Mexican-Americans and Indo-Hispanos as internally excluded from the supposed universality of the white, liberal national imaginary. Confronted with the disavowed legacies and confluence of Spanish and American imperial expansion, the universal wholeness of the dominant US public sphere itself is rendered a hybrid entity and forced to imagine a new historic and geographic terrain from which to abstract itself.

On “Rule of Experts”

In contrast to accounts made by Michel Foucault and Karl Polyani, Timothy Mitchell argues that the emergence of “the economy” as an object of knowledge and sphere of social practice occurred in the early 20^th century rather than the 18^th and 19^thcentury. Using Egypt as his case study, Mitchell wants to highlight how the history of colonialism was formative of “the economy” through the development of technical knowledges (i.e. statistics, maps) necessary for colonial administration. In particular, he highlights how four techniques that precipitated “the economy.” First, maps led to a territorially bounded space of economic exchange. Second, the discourse of political economy organized exchange around a single commodity, which led to the measurement of economic standing of a territorial bounded space. Third, national currency enabled a exchange to be imagined as territorially bounded. And fourth, colonialism was the condition of possibility for these techniques insofar as delinked space from international exchange. These knowledges did not lead to absolute division of exchange for every nation-state but rather produced a sphere knowledge/power that constantly needed to be regulated. For that reason the contemporary uses of these knowledges by non-governmental and transnational organization for managing “postcolonial” states mark the enduring afterlife of western colonialism. Besides the explicit intervention in historiography on the “economy,” Mitchell makes two inter-related theoretical interventions. First, he critiques social constructivist thought for an underlying reproduction of a material-symbolic dichotomy. Rather than conceiving of them to be apriori distinct, the critical question is to analyze their particular historical bifurcation as a symptom of shifting relations of power/knowledge. Second, he critiques Marxist political economy for attributing to capitalism a coherence and logic it does not have, which, in doing so, obfuscate the “non-capitalist” elements necessary for its reproduction.

The Weather Underground and (Re)Telling Histories

No real time to write on this at the moment, but I re-watched The Weather Underground last night and was struck again by 1) How interesting and potentially inspiring (if deeply flawed and contradictory) were the group’s projects/actions and the (partial) analyses of state power, racism and near-global revolutionary conditions that engendered them; and 2) By how deeply “sympathetic” and compelling was the filmmakers’ portrait of the group, even as they fail pretty miserably in terms of thinking through what it might mean to take seriously in the present moment the questions the Weathermen/Weather Underground were raising. The latter is all the more striking given the grotesque similiarities between (and continuities from) the historical conjuncture the group was addressing and our own. The questions I have in mind include, but aren’t limited to: Through what channels, actions or modes of address can people approach a (US) state power that makes no pretenses about its lack of concern for whatever publics/populations might oppose its wielding of terrorist violence “at home” and “abroad”? How can/should (middle class or bourgeois) white people, particularly young people and students, begin to dismantle and work against their various forms of privelege and attempt modes of mutual struggle with, say, “Third World” social movements or subaltern (inevitably racialized) populations in the US? What kinds of “public appeals” can/should be made by groups struggling against oppression?

I won’t elaborate here the ways in which I think the Weathermen [sic] themselves variously failed and occasionally partially succeeded in answering such questions — though it’s certainly the case that they seem to have had too much faith in their own abilities to answer them and to have thought somewhat too little about the ever-shifting and contingent character of historical conjunctures and the need to construct theoretical/political practices accordingly — but I do think the film’s failures are symptomatic of the larger tendency to look at moments of political struggle — particularly “extreme” moments — without inquiring seriously how they might speak to and through the present, how sediments of the histories of peoples’ struggles be might learned from and reanimated in ways that unsettle and potentially transform the moment(s) in which they’re recalled and retold.

Oh, and they should have relied on someone besides Todd f-ing Gitlin as their historical/intellectual commentator.

Notes on MIA, Neoliberalism and State Violence

(As promised, what follows is a brief sketch of a potential project on MIA, neoliberalism and state violence, which might — rather counter-intuitively — connect up w/a reading of The Bourne Ultimatum.)

Sri Lankan-born British hip-hop artist M.I.A.’s second album, Kala, samples, steals and otherwise appropriates musical traditions from all over the globe. Beginning with a reading of the track “Paper Planes,” I want to outline the ways in which I see M.I.A.’s work as offering a series of adept readings of the neoliberal state, or, more precisely, of the inseparability of (and the articulations between) the operations and logics of “globalized” late capitalism and state violence.

The backbone of “Paper Planes” is a sample of The Clash’s “Straight to Hell,” a scathing seven-minute indictment of the interconnections of early Thatcherite neoliberalism–and the xenophobia, racisms, imperial nostalgia and particularized (white) “Englishness” that were central to Thatcher’s support amongst the white British working classes–and US state violence in Southeast Asia and its legacies (both in Southeast Asia itself and in the experience of multi-racial immigrant populations in “the West”). In short, the song’s most obvious inter-text already requires that we think of the financialized/market-based policies and practices of neoliberal “globalization” alongside the state violence which is alleged to be a separate and, perhaps, even antiquated feature of the world-system (as though the Cold War days of nation-state-driven conflict and ideological contestation have been surpassed by global market rationality).

To that backdrop M.I.A. adds a few brief, enigmatic stanzas and the now-popular chorus, “All I wanna do is [sound of four gunshots]/ And [sound of cash register]/ And take your money.” The song shifts, I suggest, almost seamlessly between two distinct but related speakers: the first is a kind of representative of what Eva Cherniavsky terms a global “ruling caste” (rather than traditional national ruling class or historic bloc, in the Gramscian sense) under late capitalism, “whose restricted ranks are visible not only in the increasing concentration of wealth among an increasingly minute fraction of the global population but also in the transfer of a tiny roster of personnel between key corporate and state postings” (Cherniavsky 29). In other words, one speaker is an imagined representative of the neoliberal world-makers that make up what some have termed the “Party of Davos”–a party quite unlike the conventional understanding of political parties in liberal democracies in that they do not inhere in any one national form and do not adhere–and often don’t pretend to adhere–to the dictates of any articulatable or coherent (national) public.

Simultaneously, in my reading, the speaker is a kind of outlaw figure: not quite the persona of M.I.A., herself already a persona of Maya Arulpragasam, but a figure that employs and embodies and reproduces the very logic(s) of the global ruling caste against it, a pirate figure who rejects the state’s monopoly on violence in the name of private capital accumulation. The suggestion of piracy is made explicit when she intones and repeats, “Pirate skulls and bones/ Sticks and stones and weed and bombs/ Runnin’ when we hit ‘em/ Lethal poison through their system.” The lines speak to the systemic and requisite violence of global capitalism; the neoliberal state is understood here as a kind of accumulation-by-dispossession machine, which, having given up on any national incorporative project and any accompanying conception of social welfare, is merely concerned with the protection of the (increasingly unequal and uneven) system of private property and all the attendant violence and coercion that enable different modes of capital accumulation. It becomes, then, the conditions of possibility for the piracy of global capitalism.

That understanding denies and disavows the seductive shimmer of late capitalist logics–signaled by lines like “Everyone’s a winner/ Now we’re making that fame”–even as it recognizes the pervasiveness and inescability of such logics. So, the outlaw/pirate figure whose voice is layered on top of the voice of the global ruling caste (and can never been fully distinguished or disarticulated from it) both represents the logic of the system and exists as a perpetual threat to it.

The song’s ability to cohere the voices of both speakers and the persona of M.I.A. herself (since, of course, the verses also apply in various ways to the itinerant performer herself) might be usefully connected back to the wealth of punk references that appear in Kala, of which The Clash sample is just one example. Unlike some punk cultures, M.I.A. seems to continually undercut any claims to forms of authenticity. This is manifest at a most basic level in her styles of dress, her album covers and promotional materials, her website, blog, and MySpace page, and in her videos, all of which are works of obvious pastiche which combine different elements of contemporary hip-hop chic with a nearly-unidentifiable range of Bollywood references, over-the-top color schemes, retro ’70s and ’80s-derived hip-hop styles, anachronistic graphics, military imagery, and a seemingly endless variety of cross-cultural and “global” artifacts and images. The effect, in part, is that M.I.A. is always pointing up the constructed-ness, the inauthenticity, of her persona.

In this sense we might compare her work not to early UK punk artists but to the heady post-punk of bands like Talking Heads, who mixed punk idioms and ideas with a kind of performance art aesthetic and practice that was always intent on self-reflexivity and making explicit the artificiality of its own performance (and I’m thinking here specifically of Talking Heads songs like “The Big Country” and “Life During Wartime” that seem to involve a mixing of speakers similar to the one we find in “Paper Planes”). Thus, unlike some punk cultures–and, for that matter, unlike many leftist hip-hop artists–M.I.A. doesn’t seem to posit any notion of a pure, oppositional critique somehow outside the logics of late capitalism and the machinations of state power. For the most part, then, the specter haunting the neoliberal state is not an external enemy but a kind of terroristic, anti-systemic and often arbitrary violence (re)produced within and according to the prevailing logics of the world-system. If, in other words, the neoliberal state leaves off the production of consent and produces instead populations of “disposable labor” and abandons a newly-”surplus humanity” of billions no longer reincorporatable into global labor populations, the only return it can tangibly anticipate is one whose scale and extremity is commensurate with the neoliberal project itself.

Thus, in spite of her frequent references to categories like “the people” and “the poor,” M.I.A.’s lyrics do not seem to carry any sense of an articulatable public which might cohere within any particular social formation (or between them) in order to address state power. The one moment in “Paper Planes” where the slide between the two kinds of pirate figures is broken includes a vocal shift and the lines, “M.I.A./ Third World Democracy / Yeah, I got more records than the KGB / So, uh, no funny business.” In one sense, of course, this is a reassertion of the M.I.A. persona, but “Third World Democracy” as a category seems to be removed both from the workings of the neoliberal order and from any referentiality to contemporary social formations. Precisely because M.I.A. doesn’t seem to address herself to any particular, coherent public that might critique or upend late capitalism, the category remains not a reference to a particular form of postcolonial, “Third World” social order — though perhaps here a discussion of Tariq Ali’s idea of Chavez et al. as anti-neoliberal pirates would be worthwhile — but a kind of imagined and as-yet-unidentifiable response to and way out of our disastrous present and the bleak futures it currently promises.

On “Literature”

In response to Jed’s last post, I wanted to raise some general thoughts on a dilemma that I think that we might all be sharing. Considering our shared political commitments and desires why is “literature” THE site (based on our share institutional placement) for investigating/exploring/interrogating the issues that we mull over constantly? It seems like we (or maybe just me) are stuck in a bind between “literature” as an autonomous transcendent sphere of “sweetness and light” (Arnold) or “literature” as an activity that does nothing. In the former we have a grandiose and universalist conceit and in the latter we have action that does not do enough. And so why would we look at it? Why look at “literature” when other institutional disciplines (after the cultural turn) have just as much claim to culture as an analytic for inquiry as English departments. After talking to Sooja, she brought up a good point to ask us why this is an issue in the first place. The above setup forecloses possibilities for thinking about our intellectual work since both are predicated upon an idea of the transhistorical value of “literature” as either too much or just not enough. Thought in this way, “literature” should neither be elevated nor dismissed but instead situates a type of intellectual responsibility on us in relation to whatever intellectual project we pursue. In other words, we must be accountable to the archive we produce, situating “literature” as one site of knowledge among others that are necessary for our projects. I am sure that we all know this point but it is comforting to have it made explicit through writing.

 With such a setup, it might be valuable to enumerate ways in which “literature” seems valuable for us in terms of its claim to knowledge. Here is a list, I thought up which we can elaborate on as a topic of discussion. 

- “Literature” for how “the Future haunts the Present”

- “Literature” as a “Structure of Feeling”

- “Literature” for how the ”past is not dead, it is not even past” 

Zizek on Children of Men

Just watched this clip of Zizek discussing Children of Men. I find his reading of the film very compelling, and it would be interesting to think of in relation to Simon’s more specific and textured reading, but I just want to comment on the final statement he makes. He seems to offer a kind of meta statement on the significance of the rather grand reading he’s just recited, saying, “This is [the] future. Only films like this can guarantee that cinema as art will really survive.” What’s striking to me about the statement is that it seems to presuppose a kind of autonomous world of artistic production (in this case, film), which we ought hope will survive, but in doing so it seems to advertise a disbelief in the reading that led to this conclusion. More specifically, if the film asks us to think about the degeneracy, the violent unraveling, the erasure of history, etc., wrought by late capitalism, then a question like, “Will cinema survive or not survive as an art form?” seems at best rather hollow and, more likely, simply irrelevant.

Higher Education and Financialization

I realize I’ve been on a Vijay Prashad kick lately, but, well, he’s amazing. I had some nostalgic feelings listening to this talk since it was given among my old friends and comrades at UMass. (The Graduate Employee Org. (GEO)–my old union–hosted this year’s Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) conference and Prashad was invited to give the keynote.)

His subject, broadly speaking is the financialization (as opposed to “privitization” or “corporatization”) of higher ed. in the US. His analysis is a striking one in several respects. I’m particularly interested in: 1) his contextualization of the cultural/economic shifts in higher education vis-a-vis the return of finance capital to “the West” and the cannibalization of the state under neoliberalism in a wide range of sectors; 2) his discussion of students as consumers and multiculturalism vs. anti-racism and anti-systemic thinking; 3) his understanding of the shifting–rather than shrinking–state in the contemporary moment, particularly with the respect to the state’s role as dispenser of “justice,” from the classroom to the prison; 4) his argument about the necessity of a major cultural shift which would mean defeating the terms of financialization (rather than acceding to neoclassical/financialized logic and being forced to constantly struggle within the warped terms of debate it presents as the “reality” of the situation); and 5) his assertion that we cannot deal with financialization unless we deal with the ways that race is fractured through it, including understanding why concepts like “meritocracy” are fundamentally racist.

Enjoy:
http://www.traprockpeace.org/edrussell/VijayPrishad11Aug07_AImedia.mp3

(Prashad talk actually begins about 2:30 into the file.)