Lynching in the West

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

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

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

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

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

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.