Borderlands: Physical and Cultural Frontiers of the Chicano Identity.
Borderlands:
Physical and Cultural Frontiers of the Chicano Identity.
“The actual physical bordedand that I'm dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where peopIe of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.”
With these words, Gloria Anzaldúa opens the preface to her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a semi-autobiographical text in which the author talks about what it is like to be a Chicano American and grow up on the border between Texas and Mexico, and everything, what this entails as a "middle ground," in-between two languages, two cultures, two peoples. And precisely this plurality of identities characterizes not only the lives of those who, like her, live on the border, in any border, physical or otherwise, as she points out in the passage quoted above, but also the text itself: Borderlands/La Frontera is written in a mixture of two languages, English and Spanish (with relative variants and dialects), like a stream of consciousness, to reflect thoughts with the same naturalness with which they come to mind.
The
author does not try to translate these thoughts into one language or another,
but writes them as they come, making extensive use of code-switching and, in
this way, she does not limit herself to giving equal dignity to both the
dominated language (Spanish) than to the dominant one (English). However,
she wants to reproduce that mestizaje, that linguistic and cultural mixture
based on contamination and syncretism.
Furthermore,
the result is this: a mix of languages, cultures, and visions that fully
reflects the very identity of Anzaldúa and all borderlanders like her. For
them, this mixing is an integral part of their identity.
Being
a U.S. citizen Xicanx and living on the border means not feeling or being
considered entirely American, but not even Mexican; it means enduring
continuous discrimination and stereotypes, being victims of racism, but it also
means living with the tension and anxiety of being killed or arrested by the
immigration police, as they are mistaken for immigrants trying to cross the
border illegally. In this regard, I report a testimony of Anzaldúa, taken from
Borderlands:
"In the camps, the immigration police. My
aunt shouted, Do not run, do not run. They will think you are on the other
side. In the confusion, Pedro ran, fearing he would be caught. He could not
speak English; he could not tell them he was a fifth-generation American.
Undocumented, he had not brought his birth certificate with him to work in the
fields. The police took him away before our eyes."
Gloria
Anzaldúa was a writer and academic of Chicano, feminist and queer cultural
theory, and the text mentioned above is a sort of spiritual testament in which
her experience, beliefs, and theories emerge and merge.
But
if by now concepts such as feminism and queer are known to almost everyone, the
same cannot be said of the Chicano identity, or rather, to use an inclusive
term, Xicanx. It is a cultural identity that belongs to those people whose
natural land, to quote Anzaldúa, is Aztlán, the region that corresponds to
today's U.S. southwest and is the place of origin of the Aztecs.
Around
1000 BC, part of this population moved to what are now the lands of Mexico and
the states of Central America, becoming the direct ancestors of many Mexicans
and Mexicans today. When the Spaniards conquered Mexico in the 16th century, a
new hybrid "race" (term used by Anzaldúa) was born, mestiza, from the
union of Indian and Spanish blood. The Chicanos and the Chicanas are the fruit
of those first pairings.
A
critical date that will mark a turning point is February 2, 1848, the year in
which the Mexican and U.S. governments signed the famous Treaty of
Guadalupe-Hidalgo, to put an end to two years of violent conflicts (Mexican-US
War 1846-48) in the who lost their lives more than 63 thousand people of both
nationalities (Gutiérrez, 1995). After the U.S. victory, the Treaty established
new borders between the two countries. Mexico will be forced to cede much of
its territory to the United States: Texas, California, New Mexico, most of
Arizona, a large part of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, and, finally, a part of
Wyoming. All this will indirectly mark the fate of about 100,000 Mexicans, who
will suddenly find themselves living within a new state.
At
least formally, an attempt was made to guarantee them the same rights enjoyed
by other U.S. citizens, but in everyday reality, these remained only good
intentions imprinted on paper. Indeed, the new Mexican-American population will
soon become an ethnic minority, often the victim of discrimination and
exploitation.
However,
who are the Chicanos? Chicanos are individuals who, through the migratory
process, regain possession of their lands. Lands once belonged to the great
Mexican empire: that famous Southwest that many Chicanos still consider today
as their country of origin. They, therefore, do not feel like immigrants, at
least not in the etymological sense of the term; it is the U.S. company that
perceives them as such.
It was above all starting from the 1960s that the Chicans will try, on the one hand, to reconstruct the origins and history of their people, on the other, to recover all those pre-Columbian symbols or, in other words, those "figures of memory" that they will connote, in an even more specific and incisive way, the identity and sense of belonging of the people of La Raza. It will be with the myth of Aztlán and that of the Raza Cósmica, elaborated by the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos in 1925 (esmexico.com, youtube) that the Chicano people will become aware of their historical and cultural identity.
The
symbolic reference to Aztlán, therefore, reveals the need on the part of many
Chicanos to find a founding tale of indigenous origin, which represents a solid
point from which to proceed for the construction of a cultural and political
identity alternative to that of the United States, but also in the same time to
the Mexican one. Therefore, from the construction of this social memory, their
complex identity as Mexican-Americans will take shape, and they will begin to
claim their belonging to the people of La Raza proudly.
A person born when the first son of Hernán Cortés and his mistress-translator, the famous Malinche, was born. Although we are on a purely theoretical and speculative terrain, I consider the creation of this theoretical-mythological corpus to be of fundamental importance for the emergence of the Chicano cultural construction. Before the birth and spread of Chicanoism, in the decade from 1930 to 1940, young Mexican-Americans had given birth, especially in the Southwest of the United States, to the subculture of the so-called pachucos, boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen who stood out for their way of dressing and the dialect they spoke.
The pachucos generally grouped into rival
bands, showing obvious signs of recognition. What stood out most was undoubtedly
the clothing, particularly the famous zoot suits. The dominant society will
identify anyone with such characteristics as a gang member. As such, their
identity could not be reconciled either with the environment and culture of
origin, that is, Mexican, or with the new American culture. That pachuco was,
therefore, the first form of hybrid identity. As we will see, this subculture
will give way to that of the Chicanos, who will retain part of the old slang,
but give it a strong political connotation. Initially, the Chicano term was
used negatively, and it will only be starting from the 1960s that it will be
assumed in the process of self-determination, which led to an overturning of
the meaning.
Thus
began a series of battles fought in the name of civil and political rights in
the 1960s. The first to mobilize were the white students, who marched along the
streets against the Vietnam War; then followed the feminist movements and those
for the civil rights of African Americans; finally, the movements of liberation
and social justice of the Chicanos, as well as of the other ethnic minorities
of the United States: Puerto Ricans, Asian-Americans, and Native-Americans
("Fuimos desde todos los E.U. - raza, negros, indios, anglos - demandando
justicia." Martínez, 1991, p. 128).
We
can say that the assumption of the name "Chicano" represented the
starting point from which, on the one hand, an awareness of identity will
develop and, on the other, the awareness of the need to pursue a series of
socio-economic issues, political, cultural, economic, and educational.
At
that time, the Chicano identity was claimed within the Chicano Movement, also
called El Movimiento, born in the USA to express the pride of being of
indigenous descent, fight the racism suffered, discrimination and stereotypes,
and to encourage a cultural revitalization against assimilation to U.S.
culture. However, it was a broader movement and, therefore, the demands put
forward involved various issues also on the political and social level. Basically,
it is a protest born with the same purposes and for the same reasons as the
African-American one, except that no one talks about it, and few know its
existence and history.
"In the spirit of a people aware not only of their proud historical heritage, but also of the brutal 'gringa' invasion of our territories, we, Chicanos, inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán from whence came the our ancestors, redeeming what was their native land and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, we declare that the voice of the our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny."
With these words, the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, an ideological manifesto, opens and political program is drawn up by Alurista, one of the most significant leading poets of Renacimiento Chicano, presented in 1969 in Denver at the first Annual Chicano Youth Conference, which saw crops, young activists, from all over the U.S. Conceived as a plan of liberation, it constituted one of the fundamental acts of Movimiento Chicano, which developed two years earlier in the south of California and quickly spread to the Mexican community Americans, an official term by which the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recognized Mexicans "de este lado" until 1971.
The Movement also represented an essential contribution to the condition of women since, within the Movement itself, Chicana feminism, also called Xicanism, was born: the women who took part in the Chicano Movement (Allyn, 2019), in fact, soon realized that the fact that they were Chicano and women at the same time penalized them doubly, even concerning their battle mates and not only for white Americans.
Their goals thus became to question the traditional role they
had within the family, including issues relating to women and the LGBTQ
community, hitherto unknown identities, in the Movement, and recover and
reclaim their indigenous roots, giving you back the respect they deserved. The
Chicanas claimed to be oppressed by racism, sexism, and imperialism (which is
valid for all non-white women in the United States), while the same could not
be said of their male counterparts, so sexism was not a problem.
Chicana
feminism, therefore, proposed itself as a response to patriarchy, racism,
classism, and colonialism.
In
this reconstruction of the historical and political and, above all,
psychological and cultural processes that led to the formation of the Chicano
identity, the Movement of the Sixties and Seventies, as we have been able to see,
certainly played a central role.
In
the following interventions, we will see the evolution, the reference models,
and the leaders who will lead the Movement.
Works cited
Allyn, Noah. “Chicana Power: Female Leaders in el Movimiento and the Search for
Identity.” History Colorado. (June 12, 2019) Retrieved from
Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” San Francisco, Aunt Lute
Books. (1987)
Davis, Mike. “Magical Urbanism. Latinos Reinvent the US City.” London-NewYork,
Verso
(2000)
esmexico.com.
“La raza cósmica de José Vasconcelos”. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7vBbN6qxPw
Gutiérrez, G. David. “Walls and Mirrors, Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrant, and the
politics
of Ethnicity.” Berkeley, University of California Press. (1995)
Martinez, Elizabeth. “500 Anos del Pueblo Chicano 500 years of Chicano History
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