Chicana Poetry and Music as an Act of Rebellion.

Chicana Poetry and Music as an Act of Rebellion.

Celeste De Luna Art~"Tu Cuerpo Es Una Frontera."

“To survive the Borderlands

you must live sin fronteras

be a crossroads.”

Gloria Anzaldùa

We continue our in-depth journey on the Chicana identity through poetry and music. In this context, I will involve two leading figures, the writer Gloria Anzaldua and the Chicano singer Lila Downs.

The Chicano term originally used to indicate American natives of Mexican origin, or Mexico Americans, underwent a semantic evolution, taking on an explicitly political connotation, after the Second World War, when veterans who had fought in Europe in the name of freedom and equality, when they returned to the United States, their homeland, they found that they were still considered second class citizens, discriminated against and excluded from political representation. Therefore, with the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the Mexican-American community rose against the racial discrimination that struck it, and the term Chicano came to indicate Native Americans of Mexican origin with a political conscience.

Two Chicanas who exemplify this political struggle for equality, with an approach that, while moving from the Chicano community, goes far beyond it, are Gloria Anzaldùa and Lila Downs.

Gloria Anzaldùa has enriched not only Chicano studies with her contributions but also postcolonial feminism and queer theory. In particular, with her "Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza" (1987), she defined a theoretical framework both for Chicano literature and for postcolonial feminism, giving voice to the new mestiza, the mestizo living on the border, a frontier understood as a space both physical and psychological. The term mestizaje thus enters the academic field to indicate an overcoming of Western thought based on binary either-or contrasts.

The work began as a collection of poems, while the first part, of academic prose, was only an introduction. It later became a full-fledged theoretical section considered an essential reference for Chicano and feminist literary studies, but since the theory is reflected in the poem, the sections should not be split.

The poem "We call them Greasers" is one of the most exciting and powerful because it deals with the suffering life of the Chicano after the arrival of the Americans through the narrative of the usurper gringo, whose point of view is taken:

“I found them here when I came…

They Knew their betters:

Took off their hats

Placed Them over their hearts

Lowered their eyes in my presence…."

The narrator represents himself as a god in front of the Mexicans who take off their hats and, for fear do not look into the eyes of the American who arrives and takes their land, he laughs at them and judges them inferior for their physical characteristics, assumed for them precisely as the demarcation of inferiority, and for their "different" habits.

During this period of American conquest and expansion, women were the subject of much violence, including rape in the first place, since this was a way of stealing power from men. The Mexican and Mexican-American woman was a property that, as such, could be stolen and possessed by the white man to prove to the Mexican and Mexican-American men that they were inferior: by stealing the woman's body, the white man established his control over other men.

Singer Lila Downs is a contemporary Chicano. Born in Tiaxiaco, Oaxaca, she lives between Mexico and the United States, and although she was not born in the United States as the standard definition of Chicano would like, it can still be considered as such due to the politicization of her singing activity. In her texts, she deals with the same themes as Anzaldùa that are transnationalism, the life of the migrant, racism, the search for identity, and, above all, the violence exercised on women.

In Sale Sobrando, a song by Border/La Linea (2001), Lila Downs criticizes the many contradictions and forms of oppression and repression of the mestizo: "Los hombres barbados vinieron por barco Y todos dijeron mi Dios ha llegado."

Contesting the so-called "discovery" of America, the song refers to the encounter between the indigenous population and Spanish explorers and how the latter were welcomed to Mexico and hailed as gods. Downs notes her criticisms of the homogenization of national identity, questioning the constructions of the intellectual elite of Mexico who, immediately after the Mexican revolution, began to conceptualize the mestizo as the embodiment of a universal race that would have represented a natural progression and the future of humankind. Mexican nationalism forged the myth of its identity through the concept of mestizaje.

Lila Downs notes the contradictions of this nationalism by correlating the elements that constitute the intricate web of exploitation in the current forms of modernity and progress and global capitalism.

A common theme in Andalzùa and Downs is the frontier, described differently but with the same objective of denouncing the injustices that are lived there. However, while Andalzùa refers to the frontier metaphorically to refer to the hybrid identity of the Chicano, for Downs, the frontier is a concrete physical space, more explicitly geographical. Both, however, do not fail to link the border to the limes that separate the countries of the third from those of the first world, denouncing the violence, exploitation, and oppression that go under the name of neo-colonialism.

In the poem "To live in the borderlands means you," Gloria Andalzùa describes the frontier that is both geographical but also spiritual and psychological of the Chicano, a space of hybridization in which mestiza is everything and nothing: Hispanic, Indian, Negro, Spanish, half-man, and half woman, but not even, is part of all these roots, but does not have an alliance with one of them precisely. La mestiza experiences confusion between identities. She does not feel accepted either by society or culture; due to being a woman, Mexican, indigenous, American, and queer, she lives in the balance between different worlds without knowing which to take refuge or hide.

Those who live in the Borderlands are nothing, they have no voice, but they must turn into bridges to connect the different parts of their mestizaje. Paraphrasing Antonio Machado, Anzaldùa states "Caminante no hay puentes, se hacen puentes al andar." The frontier is the place where you have to fight against assimilation and where, at the same time, you have the freedom to invent new identities every time.

Gloria Anzaldùa and Lila Downs are two "chicanas revolucionarias." Their lyrics express the desire for a change in the direction of a better world and claim equality for those who are Chicano, women, and all those who are marginal. They are composed of English, Spanish, and various indigenous languages, such as Mixtec and Mayan. With their poetry, they managed to raise awareness in a generation of Chicanas and push them to question a political reality that relegates them to the margins, in positions of inferiority concerning the codes and dogmas of the dominant culture. However, both have also challenged the Chicano universe, encouraging it not to lock itself up in separatist positions and have the courage to face an evolution that affects specific identity groups and is a common heritage of humanity.

Therefore, Chicano poetry represents a revolutionary act for all those who reject the dominant thought based on binary oppositions and fixed and immovable identities, thus choosing to live on the frontiers, whether physical, psychological, sexual, cultural, or symbolic.