Marissa K. López - Racial Immanence: Chicanx Bodies beyond Representation

RACIAL IMMANENCE

Racial Immanence

Chicanx Bodies beyond Representation

Marissa K. Lpez

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lpez, Marissa K., author.

Title: Racial immanence: chicanx bodies beyond representation / Marissa K. Lpez.

Description: New York : New York University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018046201| ISBN 9781479807727 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479813902 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH : American literatureMexican American authorsHistory and criticism. | Race in literature. | Ethnicity in literature. | Mexican Americans in literature.

Classification: LCC PS 153.M4 L665 2019 | DDC 810.9/86872073dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046201

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Also available as an ebook

Como todo, pa mis hijos, quienes me ensearon el milagro de mi propio cuerpo

Go on, indulge your senses

(Lower defenses)

Skip the simulation

Dare to live in your body

(You wont be sorry)

Its a thrilling sensation

Alice Bag, Incorporeal Life

CONTENTS

Introduction

Santa Annas Wooden Leg and Other Things about the Chicanx Body; or, What Are We Really Talking about When We Talk about Chicanx Literature?

You know, you have a lot of academics and you have a lot of politicians, and you have a lot of people sitting around saying, theres no such thing as a Latino identity. And then you look around and youre like, Nah thats nonsense. I think that I belong, and you all belong, to a moment when our community is knitting a larger identity in a really interesting and nuanced way. It completely escapes the politicians and the intellectuals.

Junot Daz

In conversation with hosts Felix Contreras and Jasmine Garsd on NPRs music podcast alt.Latino , Junot Daz, a Dominican American author, argues that despite diversities of class, race, and geography, there is still a tie that binds US Latinxs. That was not the case in the 1980s, he continues, when he was growing up listening to primarily English-language hip-hop. In 2016, Daz marvels, his young goddaughters have plenty of Spanish-language music in their collections and feel free to embrace the salsa, merengue, and bachata upon which Daz and his friends turned their backs in their youth.

For Daz this is a sign of something that politicians and intellectuals cannot see, something that transcends market shares and voting blocs. To those, for example, who would argue that a Cuban American politician from Florida could never speak to the concerns of, let alone be embraced by, Chicanx activists in the Southwest, Daz presents the language of music and the intangible filiations it conjures. There is something that unites us all, Daz asserts, even though Latinxs come from many different places. But what is this thing that evades the intellectuals grasp? What does nuanced knitting entail, and what is Daz referring to when he talks about identity? What, most importantly, are the stakes of, and what role do the arts play in, pulling identity together?

These questions motivate Racial Immanence . In the following chapters I explore what it means to talk about Chicanx literature in a political and intellectual climate that minimizes at the same time it dangerously maximizes the value of human difference. Despite increasingly visible state violence against people of color as we move further into the twenty-first century, many still believe that the election of an African American president in 2008 heralded the dawn of a post-racial United States, a belief the US Supreme Court reinforced in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). Our country has changed, wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion for that case (Roberts). Critical theory has changed, too. Having confronted the internal contradictions of humanism, scholars now explore the posthuman. The planetary consciousness of the anthropocene, cyborgs, technoculture, and the formal utopias of object-oriented ontology are all philosophical domains where race, ethnicity, and inequality appear to have little purchase.

Alongside these political and intellectual attempts to render raced bodies invisible or insignificant, the number of Latinx bodies in the United States has been steadily increasing. In 2014 Latinxs accounted for 17.3 percent of the total US population, compared to just 6.5 percent in 1980 (Stepler and Brown). Latinxs are currently the largest minority group in the United States, and by 2060 the US Census Bureau expects Latinxs to make up 28.6 percent of the total US population (US Census Bureau). This population growth, moreover, has since the early 2000s been fueled more by US births than by immigration, inflammatory rhetoric notwithstanding. Latinxs are a constitutive and increasingly unavoidable segment of the US population, and they are overwhelmingly (63.9 percent) of Mexican origin (Stepler and Brown).

These statistics have, since the 1980s, motivated a range of projectspolitical, commercial, and intellectualaimed at generating knowledge about this growing population. The data motivate me as well and illuminate my approach to untangling the questions raised by Dazs observations about Latinx identity and the stakes of Latinx cultural production. Data show both that there are many Latinxs in the United States and that our numbers will continue to grow. We must, therefore, pay attention to Latinx voices, and, comprising the significant majority they do, in the general population if not in academia, Chicanx voices can be taken as illustrative, if not exemplary, of broader Latinx trends. Beyond pure numbers, though, the historical, social, and political connections between the United States and Mexico condition twenty-first century latinidad . I am thinking here specifically of the militarization of the US-Mexico border, which I turn to in the fourth and final chapter of this book, and the structural impact it has had on what it means to be Latinx (not just Chicanx) in the United States, regardless of national origin. If for no other reason than this, it behooves us to attend to Chicanx voices in particular. But how can we listen if, as Daz contends, Chicanxs and Latinxs are speaking at inaccessible frequencies? How do weand why should weattend to the invisible and the inaudible?

Problems

Our current strategies for reading literature by people of color do not directly answer this challenge. In The Social Imperative , for example, Paula Moya argues that textual analysis is key to racial understanding. In her introduction she describes being challenged by faculty colleagues working in the social and natural sciences to demonstrate how literary criticism might contribute to an understanding of race and gender, and even to explain the value of literary criticism for the production of knowledge generally (1). This she connects to a general sense of the humanities in crisis, especially in literary studies, where scholars struggle with increasing doubts that literature or its criticism can provide the keys to our liberation (5). In response to this crisis Moya proposes a return to basic principles, asserting the value of close reading in the context of a changing American society in which literacy about race and ethnicity will be needed more than ever (5). Close reading, she argues, is key to understanding how race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality structure individual experience and identity, and this, in her final analysis, is why it is important to read and study literature (6).