English 270.401: The Latina/o Body

Media Responses

2008-04-14T20:51:00.000-07:00

Media Responses

Imaginary Homes, Imaginary Ethnic Elsewheres

Inland Empire, "The Imperial Accent"

The Shiftless Body

"Chicanos Love Morrisey"

Typecast and Straightjacketed

¡Viva Hollywood!

Cuban American Cultural Memory

2008-04-01T09:33:00.000-07:00

Adaptation of Oscar Hijuelo's, Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love (1990)

Balseros

Campaña Internacional "Cubanos Balseros Desaparecidos"

Immigration

2008-03-31T12:42:00.001-07:00

José Antonio Gutierrez

Information provided by: http://www.justiceforimmigrants.org

Myth: Immigrants don’t pay taxes

Fact: Immigrants pay taxes, in the form of income, property, sales, and taxes at the federal and state level. As far as income tax payments go, sources vary in their accounts, but a range of studies find that immigrants pay between $90 and $140 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants pay income taxes as well, as evidenced by the Social Security Administration’s “suspense file” (taxes that cannot be matched to workers’ names and social security numbers), which grew by $20 billion between 1990 and 1998. Source

Myth: Immigrants come here to take welfare

Fact: Immigrants come to work and reunite with family members. Immigrant labor force participation is consistently higher than native-born, and immigrant workers make up a larger share of the U.S. labor force (12.4%) than they do the U.S. population (11.5%). Moreover, the ratio between immigrant use of public benefits and the amount of taxes they pay is consistently favorable to the U.S. In one estimate, immigrants earn about $240 billion a year, pay about $90 billion a year in taxes, and use about $5 billion in public benefits. In another cut of the data, immigrant tax payments total $20 to $30 billion more than the amount of government services they use. Source: “Questioning Immigration Policy – Can We Afford to Open Our Arms?”, Friends Committee on National Legislation Document #G-606-DOM

Myth: Immigrants send all their money back to their home countries

Fact: In addition to the consumer spending of immigrant households, immigrants and their businesses contribute $162 billion in tax revenue to U.S. federal, state, and local governments. While it is true that immigrants remit billions of dollars a year to their home countries, this is one of the most targeted and effective forms of direct foreign investment. Source

Myth: Immigrants take jobs and opportunity away from Americans

Fact: The largest wave of immigration to the U.S. since the early 1900s coincided with our lowest national unemployment rate and fastest economic growth. Immigrant entrepreneurs create jobs for U.S. and foreign workers, and foreign-born students allow many U.S. graduate programs to keep their doors open. While there has been no comprehensive study done of immigrant-owned businesses, we have countless examples: in Silicon Valley, companies begun by Chinese and Indian immigrants generated more than $19.5 billion in sales and nearly 73,000 jobs in 2000. (Source: Richard Vedder, Lowell Gallaway, and Stephen Moore, Immigration and Unemployment: New Evidence, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, Arlington, VA (Mar. 1994), p. 13.

Myth: Immigrants are a drain on the U.S. economy

Fact: During the 1990s, half of all new workers were foreign-born, filling gaps left by native-born workers in both the high- and low-skill ends of the spectrum. Immigrants fill jobs in key sectors, start their own businesses, and contribute to a thriving economy. The net benefit of immigration to the U.S. is nearly $10 billion annually. As Alan Greenspan points out, 70% of immigrants arrive in prime working age. That means we haven’t spent a penny on their education, yet they are transplanted into our workforce and will contribute $500 billion toward our social security system over the next 20 years. Source

Myth: Immigrants don’t want to learn English or become Americans

Fact: Within ten years of arrival, more than 75% of immigrants speak English well; moreover, demand for English classes at the adult level far exceeds supply. Greater than 33% of immigrants are naturalized citizens; given increased immigration in the 1990s, this figure will rise as more legal permanent residents become eligible for naturalization in the coming years. The number of immigrants naturalizing spiked sharply after two events: enactment of immigration and welfare reform laws in 1996, and the terrorist attacks in 2001. Source

Myth: Today’s immigrants are different than those of 100 years ago

Fact: The percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born now stands at 11.5%; in the early 20th century it was approximately 15%. Similar to accusations about today’s immigrants, those of 100 years ago initially often settled in mono-ethnic neighborhoods, spoke their native languages, and built up newspapers and businesses that catered to their fellow émigrés. They also experienced the same types of discrimination that today’s immigrants face, and integrated within American culture at a similar rate. If we view history objectively, we remember that every new wave of immigrants has been met with suspicion and doubt and yet, ultimately, every past wave of immigrants has been vindicated and saluted. Source

Myth: Most immigrants cross the border illegally

Fact: Around 75% of today’s immigrants have legal permanent (immigrant) visas; of the 25% that are undocumented, 40% overstayed temporary (non-immigrant) visas. Source

Myth: Weak U.S. border enforcement has lead to high undocumented immigration

Fact: From 1986 to 1998, the Border Patrol’s budget increased six-fold and the number of agents stationed on our southwest border doubled to 8,500. The Border Patrol also toughened its enforcement strategy, heavily fortifying typical urban entry points and pushing migrants into dangerous desert areas, in hopes of deterring crossings. Instead, the undocumented immigrant population doubled in that timeframe, to 8 million—despite the legalization of nearly 3 million immigrants after the enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. Insufficient legal avenues for immigrants to enter the U.S., compared with the number of jobs in need of workers, has significantly contributed to this current conundrum. Source

Myth: The war on terrorism can be won through immigration restrictions

Fact: No security expert since September 11th, 2001 has said that restrictive immigration measures would have prevented the terrorist attacks—instead, the key is effective use of good intelligence. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were here on legal visas. Since 9/11, the myriad of measures targeting immigrants in the name of national security have netted no terrorism prosecutions. In fact, several of these measures could have the opposite effect and actually make us less safe, as targeted communities of immigrants are afraid to come forward with information. Source:Associated Press/Dow Jones Newswires, US Senate Subcommittee Hears Immigration Testimony, Oct. 17, 2001.)

Apropos of of our class discussion today...

2008-03-04T18:17:00.000-08:00

STOP THE HATE CAMPAIGN

Lou Dobbs attributes pseudo-rise in leprosy (Hansen's Disease) to immigration. His "source," Madeline Cosman, can be seen below.

Lou Dobbs "source" on health source and immigration said, as quoted on Lou Dobbs' show:

This is Madeline Cosman, Dobbs' source. Yes, source, Did you get that?:

4 March: John Rechy, City of Night

2008-03-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

Pre-discussion Activities
I. Rechy Reviews

David Leavitt reviews John Rechy's biography, About My Life and the Kept Woman, in today's NYT's Sunday Book Review.

In preparation for our discussion and analysis of Rechy's City of Night, read Leavitt's piece and suggest some reasons for the elision of both Latino literary history in the review, as well as the queer history it occludes even as Leavitt's own literary trajectory inheres to this history.

This is the site Leavitt refers to in his review: johnrechy.com. Leavitt's own page can be found on the University of Florida's English Department site.

The Los Angeles Times also reviewed About My Life and the Kept Woman.

II. Performances of Essentialized Latino Gender Scripts
Today we'll study some popularized public sphere renditions of Latino sexualities. To what extent are essentialized gender roles deconstructed as much as they are reinscribed in John Leguizamo's performances?

III. City of Night as Postmodern Picaresque
Prototype: Anonymous, Vida del Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades (1554)

Characteristics of the traditional picaresque novel:

1. Subaltern status. The protagonist is poor, hungry, and the child of "dishonorable" parents.

2. Origins. The narrative is structured as a pseudo-autobiography that begins with a story of origins.

3. Determinism. The pícaro, or rogue, attempts to better his or her lot through the agencies of others but always fails.

4. Moralistic. All picaresque novels tell of “aberrant” behavior that is punished one way or another.

5. Social critique. Society is criticized. The pícaro is privileged spectator of social hypocrisy.

6. Realism. Describes "grimy" facets of life in detail.

Tomás Rivera, ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him...

2008-02-25T18:26:00.000-08:00

I. Antecedents

José Antonio Villarreal, Pocho (1959)

José Antonio Villareal’s novel Pocho: A Novel About a Young Mexican American Coming of Age in California (1959) was considered to be the first Latino novel published in English prior to the archival work undertaken by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita.

II. Tomás Rivera (1935—1984)

...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971)

III. Literary history and Earth

a. Truncated Comparisons
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (1944)

B. Intertext
Nellie Campobello, Cartucho (1931)

IV.Futures

The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez

Habeas Corpus: The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez

2008-02-18T20:04:00.001-08:00

Habeas Corpus

If lynching was the sanctioned extra-juridical means through which to contain socio-racial difference in the U.S. West (Gonzales-Day), then the institutionalization of law as a category of protection bears it traces. We will study this heuristic proposition and the traces of lynching in "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez" (both the corrido, or border ballad, and the movie), the trial documents, the attempted lynching of Cortez, as well as in the various technologies of recordation that have sought to contain the memory of the law on his literal and social body.

It would be useful to review Américo Paredes' "With His Pistol In His Hand": A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Other items of note include samples of corridos.

Bill for prosecution of Gregorio Cortez

The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982), dir. Robert M. Young

Edward James Olmos / Gregorio Cortez

James Gammon / Sheriff Frank Fly

Tom Bower / Boone Choate

Bruce McGill / Reporter Blakely

Brion James / Captain Rogers

Alan Vint / Mike Trimmell

Timothy Scott / Sheriff Morris

Pepe Serna / Romaldo Cortez

Michael McGuire / Sheriff Glover

William Sanderson / Cowboy

Barry Corbin / Abernathy

Jack Kehoe / Prosecutor Pferson

Rosanna DeSoto / Carlota Muñoz

Buddy Vigil / Skin

Zach Porter / Fly's Posse

Lynching in the West

2008-02-12T04:55:00.000-08:00

PART I

"Strange Fruit" was written by Abel Meerpool, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, about the lynching of two black men. He published it as a poem first in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine, under the pen name of Lewis Allan. Meerpool adopted Julius and Ethal Rosenberg's children, Michael and Robert, after their parents were executed for "espionage" in Sing Sing Prison on 19 June 1953. The Rosenbergs wrote a letter to their children shortly before they were executed.

"Strange Fruit," Abel Meerpool
Lyrics (as sung by Billie Holiday)

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Without Sancturay

"[M]ore Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity." -Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke, 2006)

Welcome to the past... As Ken Gonzales-Day's important new book Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 makes clear, in California and many western states the majority of lynching victims were Latino. This is a history still being told in ever varying shades of black, brown, and the white sheets and hoods that must be wrested from derelict political bodies in order to demand a literal and symbolic accounting of the corpus delicti.

PART II

Media Responses:
Counter/Memories, or the Aesthetic Agencies of Justice

The following articles proffer responses to Samuel Huntington's "thesis" in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004). Though the book's thesis is easily discountable, I'm interested in exploring how the book creates "affective communities" whose commerce of feeling make the "Latino-hating" we've studied possible by legitimating "fear" as a patriotic duty.

The Hispanic Challenge
By Samuel P. Huntington

Huntington's ... undocumented jeremiad against Latino immigration

Latinos, Cowboys, and Samuel P. Huntington: A Community Responds to ‘The Hispanic Challenge’

GHOSTING: How to Touch History

GHOSTING

"Authenticity" and Representational Agency

2008-02-05T07:18:00.000-08:00

Last week we discussed how MARB attempts to trump popular renditions of Mexican American men and women through the appeal for inclusion through "whiteness" in The Squatter and the Don. In the video below, representational agency (the mechanism through which subaltern consent is granted, disavowed, or negotiated) gains its force through the performance of Latino "authenticity," or, more specifically, the performance of Boricua racial and class "authenticity." This "authenticity" elides an exhausted but necessary question Spivak posited in another context, "Can the Subaltern Speak"?

Spivak, who took to task in this foundational essay the work of Foucault and Deleuze, noted how contemporary critical theory’s focus on the elucidation of power formations inadvertently reinscribes colonial domination by purporting to give the subaltern a voice in theory but not in practice. By requiring or suggesting that the dispossessed speak for themselves, the critic obscures her or his own imbrication in a type of knowledge production that ultimately asks the subaltern to reiterate how they have been oppressed. Spivak seems to be saying that knowledge production is neither innocent or disinterested. “Tell me how we conquered you?,” then, might be a more honest but ethically suspect question for the subaltern. This, of course, is not a disavowal of the possibility of radical left critique but merely its precondition. Spivak’s critique of Foucault and Deluze is hardly they are not committed to transformative politics, but rather that they fail to address their complicity in the very system they attempt to elucidate.

How can "representational agency" in this context help us understand MARB's consent and paradoxical disavowal of "the American 1848"? We will attempt to answer this question through analytical and analogical means. However, we will first start with the question's iteration in a very presentist context. The video below will serve as a starting point.

Keywords for MARB's Squatter and the Don:
Race
Nation
History
Gender
Capital

The Puerto Rican Body Politic

2008-02-03T15:27:00.000-08:00

U.S. Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite speaks during a debate in the House Chambers in Washington in this file photo. (ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO / March 20, 2005)

In a stunning collapse of historical, cultural and intellectual memory Ginny Brown-Waite calls residents of Puerto Rico "foreign citizens."

". . . The bill sends hundreds of millions of dollars to people who do not pay federal income taxes, including residents of Puerto Rico and territories like Guam. I do not believe American taxpayer funds should be sent to foreign citizens who do not pay taxes. Americans want an economic stimulus for Dunnellon, Brooksville and Clermont, not for San Juan or Hagatna. As the legislation moves forward, it must be changed to ensure that only federal taxpaying American citizens receive rebate checks."

Dead Citizenship: Guam residents received citizenship in 1950. Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917 when the U.S. needed additional "bodies" at the end of WWI.

29 January

2008-01-29T09:42:00.000-08:00

Gadsen Purchase 1853

Mariano Vallejo and the Emergence of the Latino Body as Juridical Subject

The character of Don Alamar in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Squatter and the Don is modeled after Don Mariano Vallejo. Vallejo was instrumental in getting the landed Californio elite to accept "American" rule after the American 1848. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo formally protected the legal rights of Mexicans, long legal challenges to Vallejo's land titles cost him his fortune and finally deprived him of almost all his land. Most Californios could not afford the legal expenses to claim their lands, which was thus lost to wealthy Americans and the flood of immigrants, beginning with the Gold Rush, which left the Californios outnumbered and unable to protect their political power.

Articles Pertaining to Mexicans in Newly Consolidated U.S.:
VIII
IX
X

First Class Meeting and Discussion: 22 January 2008

2008-01-21T13:24:00.000-08:00

John Gast, "American Progress" (c1872)

Emanuel Leutze, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (1861). The title was inspired by a line from the philosopher George Berkeley’s poem, “On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” (1726) which resonated with Leutze as emblematic of “American” enterprise through westward migration.

by George Berkeley (1685-1753)

On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America

The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime
Barren of every glorious theme,
In distant lands now waits a better time,
Producing subjects worthy fame:

In happy climes, where from the genial sun
And virgin earth such scenes ensue,
The force of art by nature seems outdone,
And fancied beauties by the true;

In happy climes, the seat of innocence,
Where nature guides and virtue rules,
Where men shall not impose for truth and sense
The pedantry of courts and schools:

There shall be sung another golden age,
The rise of empire and of arts,
The good and great inspiring epic rage,
The wisest heads and noblest hearts.

Not such as Europe breeds in her decay;
Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heavenly flame did animate her clay,
By future poets shall be sung.

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

[See original for accurate stanza breaks as they don't render well on blogger.]

Jorge Luis Borges wasn't as thrilled with Berkeley's philosophical idealism as Leutze was. In his story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940) Borges renders the country of "Uqbar"as an invention deprived of ontological substance and, thereby, incomplete. The story begs to be read as emblematic of the creation of "America," and of Berkeley (whose name graces the city where UC has its flagship campus) as a mere peddler of philosophical curios. (I understand Borges could be harsh, very harsh.)

The Latino Body

2007-11-20T22:39:00.000-08:00

University of Pennsylvania
English 270.401
Topics in Latina/o Literature: The Latina/o Body in American Literary and Cultural Memory
Lazaro Lima
llima@brynmawr.edu
T 1:30-4:30
Fulfills Sector 2 of the English Standard Major
Fulfills Sector 6 of the English Standard Major
Fulfills Elective Seminar of the English Standard Major

The Latina/o body is often represented as a recent historical intrusion into the geographic fold of the United States even though Latina/o forms of personhood and cultural production both predate and are coterminous with the consolidation of the country’s geopolitical borders and spheres of influence. Despite this history of participation and presence, a haunting absence overwhelms the literary, cultural, and affective landscapes of the nation that cannot account for the Latina/o body or explain why the nation’s largest “minority” is also the most politically disenfranchised. How have Latina/o literary and visual technologies of representation attempted to account for this historical elision? How are the categories of sexual, racial, linguistic, and ethnic difference negotiated in the construction of (anti)essentialist renderings of the Latina/o body politic? In this course we will analyze how Latina/o identity projects have attempted to engage these questions and the politics of national belonging by positing the Latina/o body as a constitutive subject of American cultural history from the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-48) to the present. In the process, we will study and critique the conditions under which Latina/o texts and bodies have been granted, denied, or resisted cultural inclusion. Primary texts across genres and major literary movements by Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban American writers will be complemented by theoretical and interdisciplinary examples from the broader tradition of Latina/o, African American, and Asian American anti-hegemonic writing.