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.

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.

Prisons and the Totalitarian Principle

Below, after much talk, are two articles up for discussion. The first, “Why Are So Many Americans in Prisons: Race and the Transformation of Criminal Justice,” by Glenn C. Loury. Money quote:

To be sure, in the United States, as in any society, public order is maintained by the threat and use of force. We enjoy our good lives only because we are shielded by the forces of law and order, which keep the unruly at bay. Yet in this society, to a degree virtually unmatched in any other, those bearing the brunt of order enforcement belong in vastly disproportionate numbers to historically marginalized racial groups. Crime and punishment in America has a color.

In his fine study Punishment and Inequality in America (2006), the Princeton University sociologist Bruce Western powerfully describes the scope, nature, and consequences of contemporary imprisonment. He finds that the extent of racial disparity in imprisonment rates is greater than in any other major arena of American social life: at eight to one, the black–white ratio of incarceration rates dwarfs the two-to-one ratio of unemployment rates, the three-to-one ration of non-marital childbearing, the two-to-one ratio of infant-mortality rates and one-to-five ratio of net worth. While three out of 200 young whites were incarcerated in 2000, the rate for young blacks was one in nine. A black male resident of the state of California is more likely to go to a state prison than a state college.

The scandalous truth is that the police and penal apparatus are now the primary contact between adult black American men and the American state. Among black male high-school dropouts aged 20 to 40, a third were locked up on any given day in 2000, fewer than three percent belonged to a union, and less than one quarter were enrolled in any kind of social program. Coercion is the most salient meaning of government for these young men. Western estimates that nearly 60 percent of black male dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 were sent to prison on a felony conviction at least once before they reached the age of 35.

The article is heavy in sociological method and not without its flaws (it fails to take into account Ruth Gilmore’s work–particularly her invaluable analysis of the state fostered shifts in the global economy that have helped spark the proliferation of US prisons–and it articulates its requisite call for reform via a widespread regime of counterfactual ethics). Aside from that, it is actually pretty informative and thoughtful.

The second article, Totalitarian Lust: From Salo to Abu Ghraib by Eduardo Subirats. It has been instrumental in my development of a critical vocabulary regarding the visual cultural politics of racialized violence. Money quote:

Torture is one among many expressions of human
dominance. It therefore needs to be considered in relation to other contemporary manifestations of the power of the modern state: for example, the technical-scientific destruction of ecosystems; the economic strategies of global genocide; or programs for nuclear and biological extermination. And yet torture is not one more among these various forms and instruments of civilizing domination. Torture is the most privileged spiritual expression of this power.

It would be similarly mistaken to trivialize torture as collateral damage or as the undesired consequence of cleanly operating apparatuses of political or military domination, be they fascist or neo-liberal. The methods and instruments of torture should be understood, rather, as means of central importance because they reveal the sub-structures of the moral, epistemological, and political systems that put torture into practice. This is then perhaps the place to recall two classic interpretations of torture. “Die Waffen sind nichts anderes, als das Wesen der Kämpfer selber,” wrote G.W.F. Hegel in his Phänomenologie des Geistes. Weapons are the essence of their bearers; they reveal the nature of the rational consciousness of the civilization that uses them; and they make manifest the significance of the bloody spirit of universal history. Torture is the intimate expression—the erotic and charismatic expression—of the logos of domination. It is for this reason that it is concealed. The other interpretation to have in mind here is In der Straflkolonie, where Franz Kafka describes the tortured body as a surface on which the rational system of the law is encoded, thus defining the concentration camp as a metaphor of modern civilization.

Torture is a microcosm. Hence, its considerable theological, philosophical, and political value. The physical and chemical techniques of destruction of the person—from the grappling irons and mutilations put into practice by the Holy Christian Brotherhood, to the electrical charges, drugs, violent contusions, prolonged asphyxia, aggressive sensorial stimulation, and sexual violation practiced in centers of military intelligence throughout the Cold War—in short, what we see before us today, is not, as the institutional watchdogs of human rights are inclined to proclaim, the vision of an inexpressible and incomprehensible horror. It is the exact opposite: the calculated expression, at once rational and necessary, that defines modernity, the global capitalist system, or Western civilization as such.

Let us discuss.