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)
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
"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.
"[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.
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
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.
