Chicano Nations

Front matter

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The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature

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PART 3 American Diasporas 5 Ana Castillo’s “distinct place in the Americas”

6 Border Patrol as Global Surveillance: Post-9/11 Chicana/o Detective Fiction

Conclusion: “... Walking in the Dark Forest of the Twenty-First Century”

Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author ix

209 231 245 259

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In a 1976 interview, the poet Alurista, in a moment of uncharacteristic modesty, told Joe Torres that even though “we pose as authors, as writers, none of us is really the absolute, total creator of any of these pieces. I can’t say that I wrote all this... these words and these images come from people... many of the words that we record as ours really come from other people.” I must confess that although I understand what he was saying, Alurista’s comments never really resonated with me until I wrote this book. Many people and institutions helped me on my way by inspiring me, feeding me, and shaping my thinking. Though words can never fully express my gratitude, I nevertheless give thanks here, first, to those who fed me. The research for this book was funded by fellowships from the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California’s Institute for Mexico and the United States; the Woodrow Wilson Foundation; the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the University of California, Los Angeles. Jacques Lezra taught me how to be a good reader, and Marcial Gonzalez helped me become a responsible and committed analyzer of texts. José David Saldivar and Richard Candida Smith showed me how to bring Chicana/o studies methodologies to the nineteenth century and be gracious while doing so. I have had the good fortune to be surrounded by incredibly supportive colleagues at UCLA including, especially, Ali Behdad, Chris Chism, Liz DeLoughrey, Matthew Fisher, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Jonathan Grossman, Sarah Kareem, Eleanor Kaufman, Rachel Lee, Chris

X / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Looby, Mark McGurl, Kathleen McHugh, Sianne Ngai, Chon Noriega, Barbara Packer, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Karen Rowe, Mark Selzer, Jenny Sharpe, and Richard Yarborough. Their insights, challenges, generosity, and sense of humor have been invaluable. The members of the Southern California Americanist Group guided this book along more than they'll ever know, especially Sharon Oster, who made me see the life in Chapter 4s skeleton, and Mike Szalay, who forced me to figure out how to explain why I wasn't a cultural nationalist. Thank you, Caroline Levander and Rachel Adams, for inviting me to New York and showing me the hemispheric potential of my work. Maria Cotera has believed in this project since it was little more than a twinkle in my eye. Thanks also to Jesse Aleman and José Aranda for reading chapter drafts and offering ideas and encouragement at crucial, early moments, and to Mary Pat Brady, who has mentored me through the book’s final stages with more love and support than I ever knew existed in our profession. I could not have completed my archival research without the help of Teresa Salazar at the Bancroft Library and Carol Dodge at the Sonoma Barracks, y mil gracias a Tanya Bunson y Daisy Salazar for helping me wade through miles of archaic Spanish and bad handwriting. Thanks to my students at UCLA for keeping me on my toes. Sheri Englund is a miracle worker and helped this book be all that it could be, as did Eric Zinner, Ciara McLaughlin, my anonymous readers, and everyone at NYU Press. And finally, thanks to Mitchum, without whom, it may truly be said, I could not have written this book.

Introduction: Nuevas Fronteras / New Frontiers

Technically, I don’t qualify as a Chicano. I wasn’t born in East L.A. I wasn't born in de southwest U.S.A. I wasn’t even born in Méjico. Does dis make me Hispanic? ... Dese terms, Latino and Hispanic, are inaccurate because dey lump a whole lot of different people into one category. For example, a Mayan from Guatemala, an eSpaniard from eSpain and a Chicana/o who speaks no Spanish might all be described, in some circles, as Hispanic. And de term Latino could include people as different as right-wing Cubans living in Miami, exiled Salvadoran leftists, Mexican speakers of Nahuatl, Brazilian speakers of Portuguese, lunfardo-speaking Koreans in Buenos Aires, Nuyoricans (dat’s a Puerto Rican who lives in New York) and den dere's de Uruguayans—I mean dey're practically European... . As for me, let's just say... I’m a pachuco.

—WIDELOAD MCKENNAH, FRONTERAS AMERICANAS (27)

Guillermo Verdecchia’s 1993 play Fronteras Americanas alternates between two characters, Verdecchia and his alter ego, Facundo Morales Segundo, who prefers the “more Saxonical” name Wideload McKennah (24). In the first act, Wideload interrupts Verdecchia’s learned disquisitions on Latin American history with satirical monologues about Latino stereotypes and “de Saxonian community” (40). As Verdecchia ponders his conflicted relationships with Canada and Argentina, where he was born, Wideload plays ethnographer to the exotic Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their children, Cindy and John, while earning his “doctorate in Chicana/o estudies” (35). Having arrived in Argentina by the end of the first act, Verdecchia returns “home” to Canada in the second, finding himself increasingly depressed and confused about the nature of home until he realizes, “Pm not in Canada; I’m not in Argentina. I’m on the Border. I am home” (74). Wideload, meanwhile, has traded his jester’s persona for commentary “en serio” about how “we are re-drawing the map of America because economics, [he’s] told, knows no borders” (76).

The character Verdecchia embraces his own inner borders and divisions as a defensive counter to the dehumanizing forces of globalization Wideload describes. The surprising turn in these not-so-novel ideas comes in linking them with Argentine-Canadian figures who cross pachuco cool with literary lions of the Southern Cone. Domingo Sarmiento’s

Facundo (1845) is a classic of Argentine and Latin American literature. In it, Sarmiento tells the story of the caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga and rails against the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas, while developing a theory of Latin American culture and strongman rule. The pachuco is the iconic figure of resistance embodied in Mexican American youth culture of the 19408, popularized in Luis Valdez's play Zoot Suit (1972) about the 1943 race riots in Los Angeles between Mexican and Anglo-Americans.

Besides reminding readers that pachucos wore their hair in a style referred to as the “Argentine duck-tail” (Sherrow 146), what can Verdecchia's bringing together of Facundo and pachuco cool tell us about latinidad, the hemisphere, and the future of Chicana/o literary studies? How does Facundo get to Toronto and what does it mean for him to be there? Chicano Nations: The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature takes up a similar set of questions. Before crossing an indeterminate border in Fronteras Americanas, the character Verdecchia tells the audience to set their watches to “border time” where “it is now Zero hour” (22). At the end of the play he asks the audience to reset their watches, informing them that they “still have time [to] go forwards. Towards the centre, towards the border” (78). Chicano Nations charts that centering journey and resets the literary, historical watch by pushing the boundaries of Chicana/o time and remapping Chicana/o space.

Chicano Nations tells a story about spatial thinking in the Americas. Here, I explore the confluence of space, race, and nation, as well as how the geopolitical divisions of the period immediately following the disintegration of the Spanish empire, the early nineteenth century, helped codify racial thinking in the Americas and create a de facto Latino collectivity in the United States. It is not, I argue, nostalgia for the putatively lost land of Aztlan, the imaginary homeland of the Aztecs, that grounds Chicana/o imaginings of the nation but a deeper, older, transamerican vision.’ Chicano Nations aims to reclaim and reinsert this vision into discussions of the Chicana/o cultural imaginary.

I turn to the nation in order to flesh out a Chicana/o literary genealogy grounded in hemispheric and transnational debates. Since Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain, which precipitated Mexican and Latin American independence, Mexican American writing has been grappling with what the nation means, searching for a way to work around its imperial underpinnings and racial logic, increasingly so after the Mexican-American War (1846-48). Chicana/o literature, I contend, is characterized by a deep ambivalence about the nation running through a diverse body of works. My central project is to situate that ambivalence in the history of spatial debate in the Americas. In the chapters that follow, I focus on how American space is imagined in the wake of empire. I look at how that space changes over time and through debates about nation formation and Pan-Americanism in the hemisphere, and finally, I show Chicana/o nationalism to be part of this long, transamerican conversation.

Fronteras Americanas assumes that something called “America” or “the Americas” exists, that we can know it, understand it, and trace its genealogy. Chicano Nations builds on this assumption by asserting the Americas less as bounded space and more as an idea, or network, whose contours, meanings, and participants are constantly in flux. In Chicano Nations I emphasize process over product; I do not document the literature of the Americas so much as ask why the Americas exist, what “America” means at different points in time, how its shifting meanings inform ethnic and cultural identities in the United States, and finally, how understanding the motile terrains of space, place, and subjectivity might ground a vision of humanity's future.

Like Verdecchia, the primarily Mexican and Mexican American writers and intellectuals I turn to in these explorations have written about the racial dimensions of space; also like Verdecchia, they have articulated a transamerican imaginary that undermines a precise cultural nationalism and troubles their inclusion in Chicana/o literary history. The scope of their visions, however, as I will show in the following chapters, strengthens, bolsters, and expands chicanismo at the same time it poses serious challenges. While Chicano Nations’ concerns are rooted in a particular, material, and geopolitical place, this project is also concerned with spatial imaginings and philosophies more abstractly. After all, if we ask, “What is America?” we have also to ask, “What is a nation? How does it create national space?” Even further: “What is space? How is it represented? How do we see and imagine ourselves in it?” These questions are at Chicano Nations’ conceptual center.

Spatial Thinking

These spatial queries also have a very long, rich intellectual history in geography and the social sciences, with physical geographers searching for ever more precise means of measuring space and human geographers pondering its metaphysics. Both approaches have their limitations, of course. While they presuppose objective, spatial truths, empirical methods actually offer their own murky, subjective knowledge. Anne Godlewska has described the map, for example, as “part of an arsenal of coercive tools designed to reinforce particular aspects of the social structure” that reflect domestic and international conflict (21). Further, the impulse to define space precisely leads to spatial distortions like those resulting from the Mercator projection, which enlarges objects as their distance from the equator increases, making northern spaces such as Europe and the United States appear larger than they actually are (27). The drive toward spatial knowledge thus pushes us further from spatial truths, as Michael Goodchild admits in a discussion of recent developments in geographical information systems, which make representations of aggregate data possible. It is, however, increasingly difficult, says Goodchild, to represent data’s complexity and uncertainty (80).

Human geographers, by contrast, eschew empiricism in favor of human experiences of place and space. In the late 1970s, geography experienced an urban, sociological turn during which the idea of space as relative and relational began to take hold (Hubbard, Kitchen, and Valentine 5). In Social Justice and the City (1973), for instance, David Harvey argues that a city’s built infrastructure codifies class inequality, and Immanuel Wallerstein’s work on the world system illuminates how geopolitical divisions enforce the global division of labor. The 1991 translation from French into English of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space brought his ideas squarely to the fore of Anglo-American criticism. There, Lefebvre argues that absolute space cannot exist since the instant of humanspatial interaction renders space relative and historical.

Modernity, Lefebvre writes, produces spaces with “specific characteristics: homogeneity-fragmentation-hierarchy” (Key Writings 210). Homogeneity facilitates surveillance and social control, but it produces a false unity because this homogeneous space is actually quite fragmented and parceled out among various owner-interests. These fragmented spaces—ghettos, commercial and residential zones, and so forth—are then arranged in a hierarchy of relationships to centers of production and civic life. “This space,” Lefebvre observes, “exerts a curious logic . . . which hides real relationships and conflicts behind its homogeneity” while achieving a level of general abstraction affecting learning, culture, and social life (210).

Against these abstracting moves Lefebvre posits what Edward Soja refers to as a spatial “trialectics” in which space can be understood as perceived (through unreflective daily life), conceived (with maps and other tools of spatial abstraction), and lived (Thirdspace 61). Lived space enacts the emergence of place as a kind of space defined by conscious, social engagement. Yi Fu Tuan, whose work I take up explicitly in Chapter 6, builds on Lefebvre’s spatial trialectics to further theorize place as made space, emphasizing that people live not within geometric planes but in a rich world of mutable meanings constructed from their daily, spatial engagements. Lefebvre sees place-making as a counter to the homogenizing forces of capital, though the precise relationship between the two processes remains under-theorized in his work, as he himself admits. “Could there not emerge,” he asks, nevertheless, “through and against hierarchization, here and there, in architectural and planning terms, some thing that comes out of the existing mode of production, that is born from its contradictions by exposing them and not by covering them with a veil?” (212). Lived space, in other words, has the potential to work through capital's spatial contradictions and oppressions.

The idea of this potential informs my reading, in Chicano Nations, of the transamerican places imagined by the authors included herein as grounds for progressive social change. Their American imaginaries, I argue, offer the possibility of transcending the racial inconsistencies of the empirical nation-state. In this attention to space, place, and identity I follow in Mary Pat Brady’s and Raul Villa’s footsteps who, in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies and Barrio-Logos, respectively, address human geography’s lack of attention to race and sexuality by applying Lefebvre’s and Soja’s theories to Chicana/o negotiations of U.S. space and place. My contribution to this discussion is to use the long history of Chicana/o literature to move beyond the local spaces of chicanismo documented by Brady and Villa to show how the desire to create and contain Chicana/o spaces is part of a larger story about the partitioning of hemispheric space.

Beyond documenting a Chicana/o national imaginary, then, a fundamental task Chicano Nations takes up is constructing its genealogy, excavating its etymology, and exploring its meanings and contradictions. I ask how the contradictions of a Chicana/o national imaginary—like the spatial contradictions of capitalism Lefebvre notes—resonate with a larger network of geopolitical tensions glossed over by el movimiento (the Chicana/o civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s). My readings of relatively iconoclastic Chicana/o authors demonstrate the enduring globality of local consciousness and reveal the contradictions that emerge from a nation’s desire to obfuscate the political, cultural, and historical reality of its global interconnection.

The Space of Chicana/o Nationalism

My decision to ground chicanismo in that larger, spatial story by looking at representations of the nation in Chicana/o literature from 1834 to 2008 is perhaps counterintuitive since Chicana/o nationalism is quite narrowly defined in Chicana/o cultural studies and “Chicana/o” is understood in historically specific terms. Chicana/o nationalism is often conceived as coalescing around the imagined space of Aztlán; it is also typically thought, following Américo Paredes in With His Pistol in His Hand (1958), to have its roots in the mid-nineteenth century, during the Southwest's violent transition from Mexican to U.S. rule. The following chapters will redraw that map, however, expand the historical and geographic scope of chicanismo, and make imaginary spaces real. Aztlán is part of a broad geographic and historical continuum, a vast network of transnational latinidad, within which, I argue, Chicana/o nationalism must be understood.

In the Chicana/o cultural imaginary, however, nationalism is difficult to separate from the homophobia and sexism of 1960s and 1970s Chicana/o politics, and it is further complicated when considering the feminist critique of nationalism, as well as immigration into the United States from Central and South America during the 1980s. Chicana/o nationalism is often understood as an ethnic nationalism that makes specious claims to Aztlan, grounding Chicana/o identity in an embrace of indigeneity, working-class roots, the myth of an Aztec heritage, and the patriarchal family. Political rhetoric surrounding Aztlan and Chicana/o nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, such as “El Plan de Aztlan” formulated at the 1969 First National Chicana/o Youth Conference in Denver, was galvanizing.* The militant, masculine, and heteronormative identity it set forth, however, fractured under the pressure of internal feminist and queer critiques, diminishing its capacity as an organizing tool.’

Chicana/o nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s sought to reify Chicana/o identity in ways similar to the workings of most ethnic nationalist movements, as Etienne Balibar describes them in his essay “Racism and Nationalism.” In Balibar’s analysis, the objectification of such identities ignores the fact that they emerge over time. Ethnic and racial categories are neither monolithic nor objective, and their very subjectivity undermines an ethnic nationalist project, he argues. Chicana/o studies has made similar arguments, the most well-known appearing in Gloria Anzaldúa's groundbreaking work Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Since the queer, feminist theoretical moment crystallized in Anzaldua’s work, invocations of the nation in Chicana/o literature are seen as reflecting one of two things: a militant, separatist politics or a disavowal of ethnic solidarity in favor of assimilation into U.S. culture. The productive and galvanizing force of the national idea has since, however, been dismissed, as Miguel López notes in Chicano Timespace (2001).*

Thus, the story of nationalism in Chicana/o cultural studies works as a progress narrative in which we move from patriarchal nationalism to an enlightened inter- or transnationalism in which Chicana/o subjectivities correlate to hybrid Chicana/o spaces, or border zones. Chicano Nations asks what happens to this story when we shift perspective and see Chicana/o nationalism developing in other times and other spaces. What happens when the space we want to identify as “Chicana/o” or “Mexican” or “Aztlán” emerges as transnational and multivalent, not newly so but historically and constitutively?

Thinking of globalization as a process beginning long before the 1947 international conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, forces us to think about earlier periods of Chicana/o history much differently and to see their relationship to our contemporary moment in increasingly complex terms. The nineteenth century appears much more inter- American and transnational when we understand the southwestern United States as part of a hemispheric, even global, network of market forces. We also see, in this period, Mexico and Latin America resisting U.S. continental and hemispheric rhetoric in ways that closely resemble Chicana/o responses to U.S. racial realities post-9/11. This dual embrace and resistance of hemispherism is evident throughout the long history of Chicana/o literature and culture. The transnation has always held power and promise, the threat of imperial dominance and the possibility of transcendence; and the ambivalence about the nation so characteristic of Chicana/o literature must be understood in terms of a hemispheric and global resistance to the racializing and excluding work of nations.

Negotiating Movimiento Nuance

Such a reading of Chicana/o nationalism as grounded in a hemispheric history of ambivalence and uncertainty is difficult to negotiate, however, in Chicana/o literary studies, and in many ways my hemispheric approach takes issue with the geographic parochialism of Chicana/o studies, which has its roots in movimiento ideological conflict. José Limón's impassioned defense of “critical regionalism” as an alternative strategy to José Saldivar’s “critical globalization” (“Border Literary Histories” 166) reflects longstanding intellectual and organizational fissures within Chicana/o scholarship and activism clearly evident in Chicana/o cultural production of el movimiento. El movimiento and its writers have been mythologized and vilified in such a way as to obscure the very real debates concerning political philosophy and cultural production that preoccupied movement activists. These are the same tensions between the global and the national grounding the long history of Chicana/o literature, a history that begins long before Gregorio Cortez ever picked up a pistol or Zachary Taylor crossed the Nueces,” tensions beautifully exemplified by Buffalo Zeta Brown, the charismatic lawyer-activist who is Oscar Acosta’s literary alter ego.

In The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) Brown connects the Chicana/o struggle in Los Angeles to the conflict in Vietnam and develops a global vision of “the Cockroach people” as “the little beasts that everyone steps on” (135). Yet, at a student rally at UCLA, he berates the mostly white crowd for the attention it pays, from a position of unthreatened privilege, to a distant Vietnam at the expense of local inequities right down the road. “When the fires start up,” he asks the crowd angrily, “when the pigs come to take us all, what will you do? Will you hide behind your skin? ... Will you join up with the Chicanos and blacks? Or will you run back to the homes of your fathers in Beverly Hills, in Westwood, in Canoga Park?” (180). Limón's criticisms of Saldivar’s very influential book Border Matters (1997), with its “hurried globalizing reading of this complex regional experience [of life in south Texas]” (Limon, “Border Literary Histories” 164), finds its antecedent in Brown’s critique of the UCLA protestors and the Chicana/o Militants’ anger at Brown, later in the novel, for disappearing to Mexico at a crucial time in their organizing (Acosta 196-97). Throughout Chicana/o scholarship and culture runs the suspicion that a shift in focus from the immediacy of Chicana/o experiences in the United States, or on the border, signals a shift away from “real” Chicana/o concerns.

Brown’s desire to connect the local with the global is not usually addressed in scholarship on the novel. A similar critical myopia has informed the reception of movimiento poet Alurista (the pen name of Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia), who began publishing his poems in the 1960s, is still publishing in the twenty-first century, and is referred to by some as the Chicana/o poet laureate. Alurista’s work epitomizes the central conflicts in Chicana/o literary studies, as well as the tension between locality and globality expressed in the critical dispute between Limon and Saldivar. His early poetry gives voice to Chicana/o experience, yet as his writing develops he begins to critique and problematize the nature of the individual, experience, history, and culture, even the existence of a discrete speaking subject, the very terms upon which affirmations of chicanismo were built. The nation, both real and imagined, is a primary metaphor through which this shift in Alurista’s poetics is evident. It surfaces again and again in his work as a paradoxical signifier of colonial capitalist enterprise and grassroots international unity. Alurista exploits this paradox in order to put forth a global perspective that privileges national differences. This paradox is manifest in the concept of Aztlan, which, through the preamble to “El Plan,” Alurista is widely credited with introducing into the Chicana/o lexicon.* “El Plan,” which has been roundly criticized for its silencing of Chicana and queer concerns with specious claims to communal homogeneity, actually puts forward experiential notions of Aztlan that argue for the national imaginary as a global humanizing force, a nuance that, like Brown’s internationalism, is often lost on Alurista’s detractors.

Alurista’s unpublished poem “History of Aztlan” illuminates his political and poetic aims for Aztlan.’ The poem offers visions of mestiza nations, independence on a bronze continent, and the connections between blood, labor, nation, and North America to which “El Plan” alludes but does not elaborate. “History of Aztlan” describes the historical progression of Aztlan from that which unified pre-Columbian, artistic Toltecs with the warlike Chichimecs to that which will unify contemporary Latin American nations in their fight against multinational capital.

While Alurista may have intended Aztlan to serve as an abstract concept, other activists understood Aztlan materially, as the Aztec homeland. Alurista’s transformative, unifying metaphor is lost in the struggle between the two positions. But a lexical shift in “History of Aztlan” gives powerful voice to Alurista’s unifying metaphor and shows how separate nations can come together as a collective, humanizing force. Toward the end of the poem, Aztlan becomes Amerindia, a term Alurista also uses freely in interviews. This slippage from Aztlan to Amerindia (indigenous America) in the poem and Alurista’s colloquial use of Amerindia are significant, often overlooked elements of how Alurista understands Aztlan. If Aztlan is the Chicana/o homeland, then it is also something more; it is the idea of unification in the face of divisive, colonialist control.

Aztlan, as Alurista theorized it, is local and global, yet Chicana/o studies has a difficult time reconciling this complexity, as evidenced in the debate between Limón and Saldívar, as well as the field’s critical turn away from nationalism. Recent work in Chicana/o studies has placed much emphasis on the global or transnational dimensions of Chicana/o culture. Ellie Hernandez’s Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and

Culture (2009), for example, correlates the global to a series of flexible, novel identities unavailable within a rigid, patriarchal, national structure. Hernandez’s work exemplifies the attraction of Limón's “critical globalization” for Chicana/o studies scholars who have embraced the transnation as a way to work around the conceptual difficulties posed by the nation, both real and imaginary. In Chicano Nations I seek to restore the critical multivalence of Alurista’s Aztlan, of the nation, to the study of Chicana/o literature. Aztlan and the Chicana/o national imaginary it has come to reference are part of the interactional space of the transnational latinidad traced in this book.

One might reasonably ask, then, why I argue so strenuously for a flexible chicanismo rather than abandoning a moniker whose inconsistencies and philosophical limitations I have taken pains to enumerate. It is vitally important to think of the authors in this study as Chicana/o because they are of Mexican descent and that mexicanidad engenders a unique relationship to the United States that is very similar to that of Latin America but historically very different as well. The United States absorbed nearly half of Mexico in 1848, and the essence of chicanismo lies in negotiating that engulfment. I intend “Chicana/o” as the lexical equivalent of the serpent eating its own tail or of the two-headed serpent’s confrontation with its own other as it emerges from Coatlique’s neck.* Insisting on “Chicana/o” illuminates the theoretical problem this book takes on: the local’s imbrication with the global. The Chicana/o struggle in the United States is intimately connected with the global struggle against oppression, as Buffalo Brown passionately argues, and Chicana/o studies must understand that globality in order to parse the ever-changing dimensions of chicanismo. We must also understand that a global, Chicana/o consciousness is not simply a function of a putative post-NAFTA, postmodern enlightenment but very much a part of a hemispheric, Latina/o sensibility and a function of the transnational latinidad that lies at the heart of this study.

As the Hemisphere Turns?

My hemispheric approach to the study of Chicana/o literature has its dangers, however. Just as Chicana/o studies scholars embraced the transnation as a way to work around patriarchal nationalism, so too have U.S.-based American studies scholars embraced a hemispheric framework as a critical evasion of U.S. hegemony. But, just as Chicana/o studies has a tendency to repress its own troubling prehistory, so too does the hemispheric turn in U.S.-based American studies scholarship, of which Chicano Nations can be considered a part, run the risk of falling into an intellectual solipsism that mirrors U.S. geopolitical dominance.

Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease heralded the beginning of American studies’ hemispheric turn with their anthology Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993), which examined U.S. culture through the lens of U.S. imperial conflict abroad. A range of provocative studies of U.S. literature followed in Kaplan and Pease's wake.? As Ralph Bauer cogently reminds us, however, this hemispheric turn, while new to U.S.-based American studies, is hardly novel. Its critical tradition stems from the moment Herbert Bolton, in his 1932 presidential address to the American Historical Association, challenged that organization to consider whether or not the Americas had a common history (Bauer, “Hemispheric Studies” 234). Since then, inter-American scholarship that considers the hemisphere from across the disciplines has flourished with, as Bauer notes, a sharp increase in the late 1990s when U.S.-based American studies shifted its perspective from “a United States centered multiculturalism toward a trans- and postnationalism” (“Hemispheric Studies” 235).

The new hemispheric American studies that followed from Janice Radway's exhortation, in her 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association, to cease conflating “America” with the United States, was based largely in English and American studies departments, had its methodological roots in U.S. multiculturalism, and, as Bauer recounts, irked Latin Americanists and others who had been engaged in inter-American scholarship for many years, with its pretensions to novelty and its focus on the United States in a hemispheric context (“Hemispheric Studies” 236-37). This focus foregrounds the hegemony of the U.S. nation-state and the artificiality of borders, coalescing around postcolonial readings of race. Hemispheric American studies thus differs substantially from inter-American or Latin American scholarship in that the former seeks to leave behind an imperial nationalism while the latter has tended to see the nation as a protective counter to U.S. dominance.

Conceptions of the Americas thus can differ subtly yet substantially, as the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos argues in his essay “Bolivarismo y monroismo” (1934). “Bolivarism is the Hispanic American idea of creating a Spanish cultural federation,” he writes. “Monroism is the Anglo Saxon idea of incorporating the twenty Hispanic nations into a Nordic empire by means of a panamerican politics” (1305). Vasconcelos emphasizes the political histories of critical language, a point Walter Mignolo also makes in The Idea of Latin America, where he describes latinidad as a nineteenth-century French ideological project designed to assert control in the region and identifies “Latin America” less as a material space and more abstractly as a political tool of elite criollos (colonists born in the “new” world) as they established a postcolonial identity (58-59). Similarly, Arturo Ardao traces the term “latinoamericanismo” to France and, like Vasconcelos, describes “panamericanismo” and “Pan-America” as part of U.S. efforts to dominate the Americas (157). Ardao sees “interamericanismo” as a variant of Pan-Americanism (170) and extends his list of problematic terms to include “Panamericana” (158), “americanismo” (166), and “hispanoamericano” (166), each of which connotes, to some extent, the region’s continuing subordination to Western powers.