[On July
11th, 1960 Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a
Mockingbird was first published. One of the most
taught books in American classrooms, Mockingbird
offers (among other things) a flawed but vital representation of race in American
society and history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such complex
racial representations, leading up to a weekend post on mystery fiction and
race!]
On the tough but
vital book that represents an ambiguous American setting and history.
Of the many things I wish we
included more fully and with more nuance in our narratives of the Mexico-United
States border and the many issues that surround it, the most fundamental is the
incredibly complicated
and contested history of that border’s existence and location. It’s true
that the border has been more or less the same since the middle of the 19th
century, but what we almost never acknowledge is the multi-decade, deeply
debated process by which it reached that identity. A more full narrative of
that process would include, among other things, the secession
of Texas from Mexico in 1836 to form its own independent Republic for
almost a decade (a secession that the Mexican government treated almost exactly
the same as the US government did that of the Confederacy before the Civil
War); the process by which the US
subsequently annexed Texas in 1845, a process that (because of that ongoing
debate over secession) the Mexican government did not recognize; the highly
suspect premises by which the US then found cause to declare war on Mexico;
the details of that war itself, and of the multiple 1848
treaties that ended it and resulted in the US expanding to include New
Mexico and Arizona and their borders; and the similarly contested annexation of California
in 1850.
None of that history makes the
existing border any less of a legal boundary, but it certainly would (I
believe) inform our narratives on the relationship (historical and present)
between the two nations, as well as on the multi-century histories
of migration and movement between and through Texas, the Southwest, Mexico,
and the United States. Even more significantly, such awareness would force us
to engage with just how interconnected and intertwined the identities and
histories of (for starters) Texas and Mexico have always been, and through them
how much the cultures and communities of the two nations have blended into one
another throughout the Southwest and beyond. Fortunately for such engagement, the
meanings, stages, and effects of that blending, as well as its pains and
promises, darkest realities and most ideal outcomes, have already been captured
in one of our most challenging and difficult and disorienting and vital texts,
the
autobiographical-historical-psychological-anthropological-spiritual-philosophical-scholarly-poetic
masterpiece that is Gloria
Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The
New Mestiza (1987). Anzaldúa’s book is written in at least three
languages (English, Spanish, and Mexican Indian, although she uses multiple
variations on each of the latter two), moves without warning between all of the
genres contained in my hyphenated adjective, and delves into some of the most
dark and uncomfortable elements of her own psyche, both nations’ histories,
gender and sexuality and identity, and the most violent and hateful kinds of
discrimination and injustice. And it’s one of the most inspiring and powerful
books I’ve ever read.
There are lots of moments or
passages which I could highlight in support of that final point, but none are
more concise and powerful than two poems from the sixth and final chapter of
the book’s poetic second half. “To Live in the
Borderlands Means You” is perhaps Anzaldúa’s clearest statement of her
book’s most central idea, the concept of a mestiza (mixed) identity that she
grounds in the experiences and worlds of the border but argues is a defining
attribute of national existence (especially in the late 20th
century) beyond any specific geographic setting. The poem includes some of the
book’s darkest phrases (“the rope crushing the hollow of your throat”) and yet
some of its funniest (“To live in the Borderlands means / to put chile in the
borscht”), and ends with a very evocative and inspiring image: “To survive the
Borderlands / you must live sin fronteras / be a crossroads.” And the chapter
and book’s final poem, “Don’t
Give In, Chicanita” (which Anzaldúa translates into both Spanish and
English), connects this complicated and vital identity to a very personal and
intimate subject, Anzaldúa’s realistic and unflinching but hopeful and loving
advice to her niece Missy. Nowhere else in the book does Anzaldúa make more
plain nor more moving her sense that an optimistic perspective depends
precisely on an understanding of the histories that comprise the borderlands,
what she calls in the poem’s first stanza “your roots like those of the
mesquite / firmly planted, digging underground / toward that current, the soul
of tierra madre— / your origin.” An ethnic, racial, and national origin we
would all do well to better remember!
Next
representation tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other representations of race you’d highlight?
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