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?
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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.
01
Nov
07
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”
20
Oct
07
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.
Having just read Michael Ignatieff’s spectacularly inane article, “Getting Iraq Wrong,” in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I am impelled to respond to the sheer lameness of his political vision as a “professor” turned “politician.” Ignatieff, as he is clear to point out in his article, is a former Political Science professor/liberal critic at Harvard and the author of “The Lesser Evil,” a meditation on the types of compromises liberal democracies should be willing to make in order to maximize “freedom” and maintain stability. He is perhaps best known for his essays in support of the Iraq war, within which he argued that the invasion represents a fundamentally different and moral form of American empire, one committed principally to the expansion of “freedom.” His arguments in favor of the war ultimately, as Nikhil Singh notes in the “Afterlife of Fascism,” resurrect the historical disavowal of racialized conquest central to the logic of American exceptionalism. He is currently a member of the Canadian Parliament, and Deputy Leader of its Liberal Party.
Normally, I would read any other liberal analysis of the Iraq war, sigh, and move on. With a title like “Getting Iraq Wrong,” however, I was initially curious about what he would categorize as an error in judgement regarding his support of the war.
Unfortunately, Ignatieff never actually details what this looks like beyond stating:
The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions. I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds. From that moment forward, I believed he had to go. My convictions had all the authority of personal experience, but for that very reason, I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and argument.
Hence, his article is much less a commentary on the Iraq war itself, but rather about the differences between the thinking he used to do as a member of academia and the thinking he must now do as politician enmeshed in the strifes and struggles of the “real world.” As such, Ignatieff begins his article by making the distinction between the intellectual labor required by what he calls “academics and commentators” and “politicians.” Paraphrasing Isiah Berlin, Ignatieff states:
the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.
I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.
The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a sense of reality.
I would like to route my critique of Ignatieff through an exposition of Robin Kelley’s “Freedom Dreams,” a brilliant genealogy of the black radical tradition’s articulation of politico-intellectual labor, for it strikes me that Ignatieff’s conception of a “political reality” is profoundly structured in racialized terms. To explain: the black radical tradition, according to Kelley, offered a revolutionary critique of the simultaneously universalizing and exclusionary character of both liberal and Marxist rhetorics and histories. Within these histories, they argued, resides a disavowal of the interlocked racist and sexist practices that have actually given them their shape and global meaning. The conceptions of freedom, reality, and normative politics within these discourses, in other words, are doubled and troubled by a conjoined history of chattel slavery, colonial domination, and capitalist exploitation. In revealing the trace of racialized oppression attending the conception of freedom within U.S. liberal democracy, the black radical tradition released a vision of political practice, grounded in the material conditions of everyday existence, that accounted for the differential forces of social inequality. They thereby framed their visions (dreams) of political collectivity in radically global terms and in radical excess of the parochial scope of political cognition furnished by the form of the nation-state.
While I agree that intellectual labor is distinct from the labor performed within party politics, the black radical tradition sought to undermine the profoundly racialized character of this distinction. (I should state at this point that I consider intellectual labor, broadly conceived, to be concerned with the relationship between power and ideas, and therefore possessed with an account of social inequality). Their radical intellectual labor was twofold: the production of new political universalities, global in shape and scope, that eschewed capitalist hierarchies, as well as a rigorous and widespread organized activism levelled primarily against the U.S. state.
In other words, the (neo)liberal, politico-cognitive conditions that allow Ignatieff to think of the distinction between “theory” and “politics,” or to feel confident enough to state that politicians must have a good sense of reality, are the very same conditions that posit and disavow the persistence of racialized social inequality as “reality.” Or, more directly, “reality” itself is a semiotic disposition of racialized social inequality. Hence, Ignatieff’s account of a “political” reality cannot register the “facts” of the racial state, while his notion of “intellectual” abstraction cannot conceive of the possible modes of social existence released once racialized inequality becomes the object of both intellectual and political labor instead of its disavowed precondition.
