The Conceptual Dimension of the Border: The Chicana/o Experience and the Development of Chicana/o Art.
The Conceptual Dimension of the Border:
The Chicana/o Experience and the Development of Chicana/o Art.
Rupert García, ¡Cesen Deportatión!, 1973, San Francisco (CA), Fine Art Museum.
An indecisive and frightened Charlie Chaplin straddles the borderline between USA and Mexico (fig. 1) under a sign similar to the one drawn by Diego Rivera in his magazine (fig. 2): it is the final scene of the film The Pilgrim, directed and starring Chaplin himself in 1923. The protagonist, Charlot, is an American prisoner who, to escape the authorities, pretends to be a Protestant priest in a small country and, after falling in love with a girl, manages to recover some money that had been stolen. Once he learns of Charlot's true identity, the sheriff of the town decides to pardon him and, as a reward, instead of taking him back to prison, pushes him to kick on the other side of the Border. The instant Charlot breathes the freedom guaranteed to him by landing in Mexico, three locals jump out of the bushes and start shooting. Terrified, Charlot immediately returns to the borderline, where he remains until the end of the film in the balance of choosing between American security without freedom and Mexican freedom without security.
This is the most explicit scene of an entire film that ironically leverages continuities identity problems experienced by the protagonist. As a wanted man, Charlot first finds himself dressing the role of a Protestant priest and, subsequently, those of the executioner against the girl. The reality of the population of Mexican origin in the United States is similar to that of the character played by Chaplin due to the continuous identity imbalance in which it was destined. Being Mexican in the United States and American in Mexico means never belonging entirely to either this side or the other side of the Border. When he acted in 1923, Chaplin had no problem passing freely from one side of the Border to the other since, until the end of the 1900s, this did not involve climbing over a wall but simply crossing a line that existed only on maps.
However,
although it was determined only by legal and national laws, the latter had
always had the power to shape and influence the identity of men and women based
on the sole position of their bodies concerning it. We, therefore, return to
that idea of the diaspora according to which the Mexicans of America are at
the same time part of the territory but not part of the nation or live with
cultural symbols and practices that they define as "Mexicans" and
which are not accepted or shared in the USA.
This implies dealing with a series of cultural boundaries daily and ideals that distinguish a person only because they are different or come from another nation. Following the obtaining of the North Mexican territories after 1848 and 1853, the U.S. government and society raised several social and cultural borders through an entire process of "Americanization" aimed at eclipsing and suppressing the culture of the previous inhabitants of their new lands and that of those who still immigrated from the South in search of work.
Hollywood was not the only agent of distortion and demonization of the image of Mexicans, especially immigrants. Television media, radio, and journalism, for example, have often insisted on portraying Mexican immigration as an actual and own invasion for the reconquest of the American Southwest. To negatively isolate the phenomenon of Mexican immigration or, on the contrary, to make the terms synonymous "Immigrant" and "Mexican" without considering the various articulations that both of these words may have.
The less physical and more conceptual essence of the Border thus manifested itself mainly in the experience of the Mexicans of America, characterized by the protests they have undertaken for the demolition of these same borders. The objective and instrument of these struggles was the creation and consolidation of a hybrid cultural identity, strong and proud of this duality.
First
of all, consider that Mexicans felt the need to deal with a wide range of
civilizations before relating to the American culture. These make the cultural
Border an inherent and profoundly rooted factor in history, the life, and
genetics of every inhabitant of Mexico. Frida Kahlo, placing herself in her
Self-portrait on the Border (fig. 3) in a central position concerning the two
countries, also underlines the idea that, as a Mexican, her reality is
perpetually the balance between multiple cultures. This means that borders and
politics have direct repercussions on individuals, their culture, and, above
all, how they define themselves.
A flag intervenes in favor of this statement (fig. 4) which summarizes the effects of centuries of expansionist policies on Mexicans. Overall, it would be almost identical to the official one of the state were it not that in the center - instead of an eagle fighting a snake on a cactus - there is a head with three faces distinguished by different facial features. The first face on the left has the appearance of the Maya and the Aztecs, the native populations of the Mexican territory, while the second has the appearance of the Spanish conquistadors who arrived from Spain in Mexico at the beginning of 1500.
On the other hand, the third profile is defined as mestizo, or a person descended from the union of Spanish and native ancestors. Therefore, the mestizaje is configured as an ethnic foothold through which Mexicans can identify themselves only as descendants of native populations, Spanish settlers, or both. These are the principal civilizations that, over time, have forged their life, language, diet, habits, customs, spirituality, and the iconographic imagery of Mexico by building its entire history. The mestizaje, therefore, consists of a particular type of ethnic Border in which multiple cultures interact, collide, mix and go beyond their cultural definitions to forge new identities.
Fig. 2- Diego Rivera, Mexicans in our Midst, Cover of the Magazine "Graphic Survey" of May 1931.
Fig. 4 - Anonymous, Flag of Aztlán.
The
flag with a tripartite face was frequent during the 60s and 70s of the last
century and is found in various works of art of the period produced by Mexicans
of America, such as the Mestizo screenprint (fig. 5) by Amado M. Peña Jr. from
1974, in which the head is stylized and accompanies a series of geometric
motifs. The reason for the recurrence of the image in that period is due to the
simultaneous awareness of the part of the Mexican minorities of the American
southwest of that Border that most influenced their reality, that is, the
boundary reproduced in the drawings of Bartlett and Pratt. These three faces
and their meaning became, in fact, one of the main symbols of the Chicano
Movement, also known in Spanish as El Movimiento or La Lucha: the activist
Movement for the recognition of the rights and cultural autonomy of people of
Mexican origin in the United States and to fight against stereotypes such as
those embodied by Chaplin.
The use of the term "Chicano/a" deserves a little reflection, as it is already an indicator of an overturning of meanings and symbols that became increasingly common to the modes of action of the Movimiento. Although the word's origin is not known with certainty, most theories confirm its derogatory character. Some theories, such as that of Philip Ortego of the University of Texas-El Paso, link the word to the Indian pronunciation of "Mexican" - "me-shi-ca-noh," in which the syllable "me" would have decayed over time in favor of a harsh pronunciation of the "schi." Others, however, link it to the name of the Mexican state of Chihuahua and suggest that the first Mexicans to emigrate to Texas would have created the term by combining the first syllable of the state of origin with the last part; of "Texan."
Other theories argue that the word arises from the addition of the suffix "ano" to the word chico (boy), according to the exact mechanism whereby "Mexico" is obtained from "Mexican." Whatever the etymological origin of the term, it is true that it remains linked to the idea of a background of "other" geographical and historical origin and that it serves as an ideal border to underline this assumption. Its function is to delineate the people of brown skin from those of light skin, and over time it acquired a strong connotation of stereotype with which the poor Mexican workers were defined; it was a pejorative concept with which, even today, dignity is denied to an essential sector of Americans of Mexican origin. "Chicano" had a class and racist connotation, which alluded to the poor immigrant who had his identity card in the color of his skin and was a farmhand in the countryside, a laborer in the construction of the railway, or an unskilled worker in urban centers.
Previously "Chicano" had the same meaning as "cholo," a term that it defined the Mexican recently immigrated to the United States. Although the term was therefore not born during the Chicano Movement, its use still today certainly originated in that particular context, thanks to the citizens who began in the Southwest of the United States, especially in New Mexico, California, and Texas. to adopt it as a personal name to eliminate the negative meaning it had maintained up to that moment. The overturning of meaning consisted precisely in transforming this derogatory term into a label of which instead to be proud and in which to be able to recognize oneself with pride. Being called Chicano also meant breaking with a series of names adopted by the U.S. government and public opinion in the twentieth century to refer to these citizens: Spanish-Speaking, Latinoamericans, Spanish-Americans, Spanish-surnamed, or simply Mexican Americans.
Although at that time, they made up 6% of the total U.S. population of one hundred and eighty million, these people were still invisible and subject to a culture strongly dominated by whites. Over time, subordination had become more and more articulated and had declined in terms of the denial of rights, gender, economic, political, and racial: all more or less indirect consequences of the Border and immigration and expulsion processes. Chicanos affected by these problems can be divided into four main groups: migrants with U.S. citizenship or dual nationality (Mexican and the U.S.); immigrants legally, with temporary or non-temporary visas, to work; those who immigrated illegally in the hope of finding a better future and, finally, the original populations of what, before 1848, were the northern regions of Mexico.
Regardless
of how these people came into contact with the culture United States, they
found themselves united by a conflictual relationship with the geographical
territory, or rather, with the earth. The activist Movement, not surprisingly,
originated among agricultural workers who initially organized workers' unions
such as Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the National Farm Workers
Association.
César
Chãvez later joined these - also a farmworker, trade unionist, and activist -
into the United Farm Workers (UFW). These workers, who immigrated with their
families to the USA through the Bracero Program, complained of subordinate
working conditions, low wages, the total absence of union representation,
frequent denial of rights, and continuous discrimination based on their skin color.
What most directly linked Chicano activism to the Border was the set of
controversies surrounding immigration and the economic consequences of the
demand for cheap labor from the USA.
Basically,
the peasants lived more than anyone else in a direct relationship with the
territory, a conflictual relationship, if we consider that they found
themselves cultivating for someone else the same land that their ancestors had
been deprived of during the war of 1846-48. The main symbol under which the UFW
workers united was a black eagle, which later became the emblem of the entire
Movement.
It can be seen in the work Boycott Grapes (fig. 6) by Xavier Viramontes from 1973. Lithography is the visual representation of one of the modes of action of the UFW, or the call for a boycott of some products, for example, grapes. What is most striking about this image is not so much the juice of the grapes squeezed with bare hands, similar to blood mixed with sweat, as much as men's clothing. He is dressed as an Aztec deity dark-skinned, with a headdress that recalls the sun's rays on the scorching and arid fields of the border regions. This is an indicator of a rich cultural background that required, through this image, to be recognized and treated with respect. In the foreground, next to the title Boycott Grapes, the two black eagles of the UFW stand out, of which César Chãvez explains the conception and origin with these words: "I wanted desperately to get some color into the Movement, to give people somethingthey could identify with, like a flag. I was reading some books about how various leaders discovered what colors contrasted and stood out the best. The Egyptians had found that a red field with a white circle and a black emblem in the center crashed into your eyes like nothing else. I wanted to use the Aztec eagle in the center, as on the Mexican flag. So I told my cousin Manuel to draw an Aztec eagle. Manuel had a little trouble with it, so we modified the eagle to make it easier for people to draw.”
From these lines emerges the need for Chicano art as a practical and straightforward trait that allowed anyone to create, reproduce and recognize the symbols of the Movement. Giving Chãvez's words also reveal a peculiar historical search for symbols of their ancestral past to be brought back to life and with which they can identify as awakened people.
The 1978 lithograph Who's the Illegal Alien, PILGRIM? (fig. 7) by Yolanda López is exemplary in this sense, as demonstrated once again by the Toltec address recovered from an ancient iconographic basket. The idea of ownership and belonging to cultivated lands for the U.S. masters is emphasized again by repeating the title below: a direct question for the observer, reinforced by a finger pointing towards it: Who's the Illegal Alien, PILGRIM? The man's left-hand wrinkles the U.S. immigration plan about deportations such as Operation Wetbacks.
Fig. 5 - Amando M. Peña Jr., Mestizo,
1974, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Fig. 6 - Xavier Viramontes, Boycott Grapes, 1973, Washington DC, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Fig.. 7 - Yolanda M. Lopéz, Who’s the Illegal Alien, PILGRIM? - 1978, Los Angeles (CA), Los Angeles County
Museum of Art.
Through
the memory of the Mayans and Aztecs - from heroes with sumptuous headdresses to
people submissive to the Spaniards - the Chicano workers took it upon
themselves to remind the founding fathers that once upon a time, they were
illegal immigrants. Through this exchange of roles, they also tried to go
against the story told in the schools, which often omitted some important and
sad aspects of colonialism to obscure the historical past of minorities
further.
Even
the eagle of Chãvéz did not fail in the symbolic upheaval so dear to Chicano
art: it is linked to the Mexican flag but is also the central symbol of the
U.S. coat of arms. This battle against U.S. icons is certainly more evident in
the index to Yolanda M. Lopéz's work, Who's the illegal alien, PILGRIM?, which
recalls a famous American icon, immortalized by the poster designed by James
Montgomery Flagg for recruitment of WWI and WWII soldiers: Uncle Sam. The
elderly character was the personification of the United States, and instead of
asking a puzzling question like that of López's Aztec hero, he recited the
famous phrase "I want you for U.S. Army."
At this point, the mechanism underlying the work of the Chicano artist is more explicit, who appropriated a key symbol of American history and used it as an invitation to revisit and question the history and present of the country's colonization again. Other clear examples of this are paradigmatic works such as Libertad, by Ester Hernández (fig. 8), in which we see a woman intent on sculpting the Statue of Liberty with a mallet and chisel. The act of sculpting is not accidental: through this trial "by way of taking away," the woman strips a symbol of U.S. history and makes it resurface the interior revealing its actual substance. This is again made up of symbols and elements of the ancient Mexican civilizations that transform the Statue of Freedom into an ancient spiritual totem.
The
transformation of the symbols became a real struggle in the work of the same
name by Francisco Delgado (fig. 9), in which a Lucha libre wrestler, a typical
Mexican form of wrestling, subdues the Statue of Liberty. Significant is the
book that the statue holds in the right hand, in which you can see the logo and
the title of the Border Patrol. This actually indicates that what Delgado's
luchador really fights is not so much U.S. iconography as the country's
contradictory immigration policy.
These examples suggest that the reconquest of the U.S. Southwest was not taking place literally (as journalism claimed) but with culture and the progressive consolidation of the Chicano ideology. In this regard, the Mexican scholar Luis Leal, referring to the UFW eagle, explains that, as a visual symbol, it represents the organization's victory against economic injustice, but for those who do not belong to this struggle, it loses meaning.
In other words, the symbol is built for a specific category of people, namely, the Chicano community, which was opening the trunk of memories in search of that identity of which it had been deprived along with its territories. The need for a simple and easily perceived art by all members of the community, the overturning of symbols, the search for images of one's past, and the creation of symbols intended for a small circle of people were all elements that addressed increasingly the activism of Mexicans towards a definition of themselves as something different from U.S. culture. Therefore, the Chicanos, like Chaplin, did not choose to stay either on one side or the other of the Border but remained halfway and became aware of their mestiza culture, which had its roots in ancient Mexico, passed through Spanish colonization, and arrived in the USA.
The cultural influences of the Spanish presence in Mexico had indeed been already digested and assimilated in the history of the vast iconographic repertoire of the nation, such as shows the flag of mestizaje and as it is most evident in the art of some artists. In a particular way, these influences were revealed in the iconography imported into Mexico by those pilgrim fathers interviewed by Yolanda Lopèz in Who's the Illegal Alien, PILGRIM? It is the Virgen de Guadalupe, who, in works by Alma López, such as Lupe and Sirena in Love (fig. 10) from 1999, is the bearer of a triple mental border: being Chicano, woman, and homosexual.
The
Virgin is portrayed in an intimate attitude with a mermaid under a triumph of
floral ornaments supported by winged cherubs. In the background, the U.S.
skyscrapers contrast with the dirt road on which stands the 1994 wall that
separates the two countries and on which the date of the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo appears. As evidenced by the presence of the wall, this work dates back
to 1999 - a period in which the Movimiento had subsided - but it retains the
typical features of the art produced during the protest phase. With this work,
the author did not want to highlight only the social boundary that prevents
love between people of the same sex but also between wealth (symbolized by
buildings in glass and metal) and poverty (evident in the dirt roads next to
the wall).
Each of these boundaries - be it gender, sexual orientation, or nationality - embodies the concept of Nepantla. This word of the ancient Aztec language Nahuatl indicates precisely that "being in the middle" that Charlot felt in playing the role of a priest, doing good deeds for the girl, and in the difficult choice of the state in which to live. Nepantla became a distinctive trait of the Chicano people, also known as La Raza, as indicated by the inscription surrounding the black eagle by Chãvez in the 1969 work Viva la Raza (fig. 11) by Salvador Roberto Torres. Once again, the image is synthetic, composed of a few simple elements, but full of powerful messages. The sentence was another critical motto of the revolution: "Long live our people!" It consisted of a literal ed enthusiastic hymn of encouragement for the Mestizo people with many faces in the continuous state of Nepantla. It helped create a sense of symbolic cohesion in spiritual unity with the civilizations preceding the European conquests.
Fig. 9 - Francisco Delgado, Libertad, 1998.
Fig. 11 - Salvador Roberto Torres, Viva la Raza! Long Live Humanity!, 1979.
These three words - ¡Viva la Raza! - help introduce the fundamental breakthrough that the Movement started when, following the strikes for the work of the land, the Lucha began to focus on the frequent racial disparities in the U.S. education system, one of the leading agents in the suppression of the Chicano identity. Let us consider contemporary or slightly earlier events, such as the Cuban Revolution, the anti-war protests against the Vietnam War, the speeches of the Reverend Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks' famous refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. It is understood that the activist and revolutionary spirit would not fail to strike even the Mexican youth of the United States.
Young people and students were, in fact, active protagonists, as evidenced by the events in southwest California, especially Los Angeles, where inequality hovered in the education and training systems of major universities, such as California State University and numerous secondary schools. The protests consisted of the famous strikes known as the Los Angeles Blowouts (or Walkouts) of 1968, in which, for the first time, students demonstrated en masse against the racism that prevented equal education for all.
The
first impediment for Mexican students was, in fact, the prohibition of school
education in Spanish, according to a law passed as early as 1855. Language is
one of the essential elements for developing a culture and, above all, a shared
identity. Furthermore, it is also the primary means of communication and
learning in schools. Therefore, punishments were applied to students who
adopted this language in an attempt to induce them to speak only in English.
As I have highlighted so far, art necessarily became the main answer to the impossibility of being able to express oneself with language: the overturning of symbols, the search for iconographies from the past, the awareness of the ethnic boundaries of the Mexican people, the tendency to analyze all types of discrimination in terms of Border are configured as the guidelines of art increasingly aimed at making Nepantla a distinctive trait. This was emphasized in 1969 at the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference. This occasion included in an official document the main terms through which El Movimiento should have acted to ensure that Mexican Americans could see their dual culture recognized. At that moment, a fundamental concept for the Chicano movement and art was theorized: Aztlán.
I
will address this theme in my following speech related to muralism, the art
form that most of all seem to have a close relationship with both types of
borders seen so far, the geographical and the mental one, and which, more than
all, enhances the peculiarities of Chicano art.
Malaquias Montoya, Undocumented, 1981, Washington D.C., Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Works Cited
Austin Revealed: Chicano Civil Rights, “Role of Chicano Identity in Arts.” March 24, 2016.
Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx6vh4hJl_c
“Chicano Art.” May 13, 2013. Retrieved from
Goldman, Shifra M. and Ybarra-Frausto Tomás. “The Political and Social Contexts of Chicano Art.” Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology. Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985. Edited by Richard Griswold Del Castillo - Wright Art Gallery - University of California. Los Angeles, 1991.
“Los Tres Grandes. Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945.”
Whitney Museum of American Art. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjxVSc9M08
Mulford, Marilyn. “Chicano Park.” Mario Barrera & Marilyn Mulford. (1988) Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXwZLo8hrp4
UntoldEdu. “Chicano Art Movement.” April 21, 2021. Retrieved from
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