Borderland Narratives In Contemporary Chicano Literature

Chicano literature roughly refers to the contemporary period of Mexican American literature, covering the time span from the 1940s to the present. As early Mexican American literature is written in Spanish, it remains obscure to the majority of English-speaking readers. With the progress of acculturation and also under the influence of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Mexican American literature experiences dramatic changes in theme and techniques, with an end to represent the people's multiple cultural experiences. And a majority of writers begin to write in English or bilingually, making the works more accessible to English-speaking readers. In this sense, the literature is both old and new, for it has been in existence longer than Anglo American literature, but it has not been widely recognized by the American mainstream reading community until half a century ago. After over one and a half centuries, Chicano literature has achieved some significant results. Literary works by Chicano writers have won prestigious national or even international prizes, and Chicano writers begin to be present at important national literary events.Chicano literature is highly heterogeneous with temporal and spatial diversities, which in turn is related to the respective histories in different Southwest states. Despite of the diversity, the relationship between Chicano culture and the mainstream American culture is one of the commonest themes. The conflict, negotiation and reconciliation of cultures have been the focuses of Chicano discourse. In contemporary Chicano literature, the concept of border is just a case in point. It becomes both a concept and trope, to represent the cultural in-between status and diaspora of Mexican Americans."Border" originally refers to the international border between Mexico and the Untied States, which is created as a result of the U.S.-Mexican War in the 1840s. Compared with the former border, this new one moves southward for thousands of miles on the part of Mexico, rending the vast northern frontier from its homeland and throwing it into the arms of the United States. Therefore, the border originally signifies the line of differences and consequent conflicts, since it cleaves the lives of those naturalized Mexican Americans into halves and renders them a hyphenated status of being Mexican-American. In the early years of border creation, the border area witnesses violent conflicts as a result of economic exploration and attempted cultural assimilation on the part of the dominant culture, and thus the border becomes a symbol of the troubled existence in American psyche. Contrary to the Anglo-American expectation to assimilate the ethnic Mexican American culture with the border as a baffle-wall to block Mexican force from the south, the border finally becomes a pore chain to osmosize mutual influences. Gradually, with the mutual flow of people and goods, the cultural influence of the border extends far beyond the border areas. Various expressions of the border and cultural negotiations facilitated by its existence constitute the vigorous landscape of the borderland. In retrospect of the one and a half centuries of the border, the U.S.-Mexican border has become one of the most active borders in the world, partially due to its unique history and geographical peculiarity. Various border concepts, cultural conflicts and negotiations, as well as literary representations, which are made possible due to the existence of the physical border, constitute the major landscape of the borderland.Border studies originate as a branch of sociological studies with the U.S.-Mexican border as the object of study, focusing on economics, politics, history, as well as their cultural expressions. The earliest border studies begin with the creation of the present U.S.-Mexican border, starting to exert their influences in the early 20th century, and booming into full swing in the first half of the 20th century. From the early 1980s, under the influence of cultural studies, literary border studies branch from the old style of sociological border studies, to concentrate on the literary expression of the border concept. The late Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa is one of the most prominent theorists on literary border theory. In her masterpiece Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. she establishes the framework of literary border studies, and more significantly, puts forward the notion of mestiza consciousness, a tolerant position to embrace various identities and to combine them into a new force. This "tolerance for ambiguity" is representative in borderland narratives of contemporary Chicano literature, signifying the national culture of Chicano community and inspiring to American ethnic literatures. As a result, the concept of the geographic border also gets extended to various metaphoric meanings.The conceptualization of such terms as Mexican American literature and Chicano literature are resulted from the existence of these borders. Upon the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, the northern branch of Mexican literature is transformed into hyphenated Mexican-American literature. From about the same time, the border has been exerting its influence on the psychology of Americans, especially that of Mexican Americans. Mexican American writers provide diverse expressions of the border and its influence, to reflect cultural conflicts and people's consequent reactions in the borderland. From the very moment of its existence, the border theme is characteristic of colonization and de-colonization. Although Mexican American literature exhibits spatial and temporal diversities, the negotiation between the Mexican American culture and Anglo American culture has been the focus of literary representation. Various borderland narratives are employed to decenter tyranny or confirm hybrid Chicano identities.This dissertation experiments on establishing a framework of borderland studies in Chicano literature. It is designed to study various modes of Chicano and Chicana narratives anchored in Chicano cultural hybridity, with the metaphor "borderland" as the focus. Border is more than a physical entity, but a psychological and literary expression as well. It signifies differences, barriers and misunderstandings, but also possibilities of communication and prospects of understanding, which constitute the landscape in the borderland. Although writers have widely explored the implication of the border concept in literary creations, and scholars have extensively studied the literary applications of the border notion, critical studies mostly use the border as a trope. Therefore, systematic researches with border studies as the framework are comparatively scarce. The dissertation tries to study the border both as an entity and a trope, to trace the cultural extension of the border concept and its influence on the Chicano psyche. By extending the concept of "border" to the "borderland", it tries to explicate the extensive and flexible implications of the border concept. By studying various forms of border-crossings, it intends to approach the vigorous and colorful borderland of literary representation from various perspectives. By studying diverse borderland narratives as discursive representations, it seeks to reach an overall understanding of contemporary Chicano literature by tracing its growth from earlier invisibility to modern indelibility. By challengeing the binary position in former border studies on Chicano literature, it attemps to use a ternary framework to prove the permeability of the border and border representation. The first chapter provides an comprehensive study of border studies and the development of Chicano literature in relation to the existence of borders. Originally, the "border" in border studies simply refers to international borders, both the borderline and the frontier along the borderline. Gradually, the connotation extends to metaphorical meanings, to include figurative borders, such as ethnics, class, gender and sexuality. Due to this complicity, border studies are therefore highly inclusive and characteristic of multi-layered and heterogenous features. Just in the narrow sense of culture, border studies involve linguistics, sociology, anthropology, painting, music, literature, history and other branches of social science, in which the concept of border is significant. The diversity of the border facilitates the existence of borders within borders and a profound understanding of the concept helps critics to focus on in-group diversities in literary expressions. On the other hand, it helps to expand the scope of border studies to the study of American literature in general, or comparative studies of Latin American literature and American Latino literature, or between various American ethnic literatures.For Chicano literature specifically, border not only obscures Mexican American literature as a whole in the early times, but also creates obvious geocultural diversities within Chicano literature. In addition to the international border that marks the colonization of former Mexicans into Mexican Americans, in-group borders come into existence and help to facilitate spatial and temporal literary diversities. Borders push forward to penetrate into Mexican American psyche, to distinguish them from Anglo Americans, and even among Chicano subcultural groups. Indeed, even before the cession of Mexican north territory to the US, there had been a Spanish conquest of Native Americans. The culture is hybrid with indigenous and Spanish cultural elements, and Native American Pantheism miraculously combines with the Catholicism introduced by the Spaniards. The Virgin of Guadalupe, the matron of Mexicans and the symbol of Mexican/Chicano national identity, signifies the most perfect combination of these elements. With the mergence into the US territory, the land experiences a twice colonization and twice cultural hybridity. Literary expression is therefore characteristic of triple influences, namely, Native American, Spanish and Anglo American. Different degrees of hybridity of these elements account for different spatial and temporal features of Chicano literature. Language border between Spanish and English, together with border conflicts resulted from economic exploitation, accounts for the invisibility of early Mexican American literature. Corridos depicting the border hero "with his pistol in his hand" are popularly acclaimed. However, as a purely resistant mode of literary representation, they are despised and suppressed by the dominant. The time of civil rights movement signifies a boom of Chicano literature. Chicanismo becomes an important source of literary representation, and the writing of Chicano experiences becomes an alternative discourse to defy the middle-class white authority of American literature. Stylistically, Chicano writers experiment on various literary genres, adopting Chicano theme within Western classical forms and forcing their way into the territory of "American Literature". More significantly, Chicana writers explore the courage of resistance in such indigenous prototypes as la Llorona and la Malinche. and rewrite them to resist Chicano patriarchy. In the process, geographical factor emerges to account for spatial diversities.Theoretically, there are three major geohistorical camps in Chicano literature, namely Texas, New Mexico and California. Specifically, New Mexico has a longer history of Spanish influence, and the legacy of Spanish oral culture is more obvious; Texas has a distinct history of political conflicts and its literature is more characterized with literary resistance against tyranny and dominance; California is a state of immigrants, and stories of acculturation reflect people's experience of "becoming American". However, there is no strict demarcation in either a single writer's creation or in the works of different camps of writers. More often, writers elaborate on their experiences of "growing up Chicano" and "becoming Chicano" at the same time. In spite of this, the classification provides a useful perspective on different forms of borderland narratives, since the dissertation unfolds on the basis of a single work's expression of borderland concept and its relevance to the hybrid mestiza consciousness.Chapter two mainly examines borderland narratives in the perspective of postmodernism and studies the mestiza consciousness as a hybrid identity from the perspective of postcolonialism. In contemporary Chicano literature, the border is described through various original narrative techniques, and the most frequently used include such genres as short stories, fictional autobiography, epistolary narrative and other fragmented texts or de-centered narratives. Debra Castillo defines these postmodernist narratives as "border narrative", to highlight its subversive nature. Terry Eagleton defines postmodernism as a challenge to truth, reason and grand narrative, as "depthless, decentered, ungrounded, self-reflexive, playful, derivative, eclectic, pluralistic art which blurs the boundaries between 'high' and 'popular' cultures, as well as between arts and everyday experience". Chicano literature takes a border-crossing position and seeks to decentralize the dominance of grand narrative, so as to establish multiple voices and in turn multiple identities in contrast to the norm of homogenous white, middle-class, male identity. Linda Hutcheon defines postmodernism as the negotiation of differences that breaks the dichotomy of Western thought and blurs the border between center and margin. In this sense, such notions as identity becomes a discursive discourse, to be defined from various perspectives instead of a single privileged master narrative.Chicano writers experiment on these techniques to break down narrative authority and to set up an oppositional discourse. Especially significant is Gloria Anzaldúa's theorization of the new mestiza consciousness through a typical borderland narrative in the form of postmodernist writing. She advocates that, "The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended". Since Chicano hybrid identity can not be defined from a single dimension, this synthetic position helps border dwellers to adopt shifting perspectives to understand various aspects of their identities. A structuralist analysis of Hunger of Memory may prove Chicano identity as cultural hybridity, which is seemingly assimilative yet profoundly reconstructive. In "The Cariboo Cafe", the cultural hybridity is reflected through the employment of heteroglossia. In both cases, a reasonable recognition of Chicano borderland identities necessitates some degree of patience with differences.Based on the theoretical analysis of the former chapter, Chapter three provides a detailed study of the diverse modes of borderland narratives negotiating with mestiza consciousness. Loosely based on Franz Fanon's theorization of the three phases of national culture, namely, the assimilative phase, the imagination of indigenous past, and the fighting phase, it follows a temporal sequence to study two oppositional modes of borderland narratives: the assimilating mode and the resistant mode. The former takes two works of Californian writers as examples: Pocho and Chicano. to reflect the assimilative pressure from the dominant culture, as well as the conflict between Mexican tradition and American experiences. This assimilative mode of borderland narratives also reflects the specific historical evolution of Chicano consciousness, when the tension of cultural contestation overshadows the realistic representation of Chicano self. Without a sound attitude to reconcile multiple identities, Chicanos will fall between the dominant American culture and Mexican culture, and will be rejected by both. In comparison, the resistant mode exemplifies two Chicana works to foreground the Chicana rewriting of Mexican (American) female stereotypes to reconstruct Chicana identity. By adopting first-person narration and through fragmented structure to decenter the grand narrative, Chicana discourse gains subjectivity and takes the autonomy of narration under control. Both these two modes are reflective of Chicano borderland statuses, and are both representatives of the two stages in the development of the mestiza consciousness. They illustrate from different aspects the necessity of a reconciliatory position.Chapter four explores the synthetic mode of borderland narratives. New Mexican writer Rudolfo Anaya is one of the representatives to advocate the dialectic synthesis of various Chicano identities, especially the recognition of the Chicano's indigenous past. Anaya follows the Latin American literary tradition of "magical realism" to reflect the cultural synthesis in Chicano experiences, and uses mythopoetics as the basic technique, with an attempt to reestablish the covenants of Chicano ancestors and to restore the splendor of Chicano culture from extinction. The publication of Bless me, Ultima in 1972 signifies a big challenge to the protest literature advocated by the Chicano Movement, and arouses hated debates on the validity of the mythical representation of Chicano identity. Anaya regards myth as people's "umbilical connection" to their past, through which people can establish a connection between their past and future, and then compromise their diverse identities. Chicano myth is mainly Native American, and it stresses the totality of spirit and body, and the harmony of experience and knowledge. According to Carl Jung who advocates mythology as the collective unconscious of a people, the reconstruction of mythical past reflects an understanding of history for the Chicano community. On the individual level, the wisdom embodied in the mythology represents the truth in human hearts, the sediment of self-knowledge collected through the passage of time. In fact, mythopoetics is not peculiar to New Mexican writers. The wisdom of synthesis is embodied in different degrees in the other two modes as well, although not that obviously. More specifically, in the resistant mode of Chicana reinterpretation of Mexican American stereotypes, such as la Malinche and la Llorona. the reconstruction of new Chicana identity depends on the dialectical synthesis of the American experience, the Spanish influence and the indigenous past. Therefore, the synthesis of conflicts is impregnate in Anzaldúa's radical resistance against tyranny, in Cisneros's lyric account of Chicana growth, as well as in Denise Chavez's monologic celebration of Chicana effort to autonomy and independence.The dispute focusing on the mythic reconstruction of Chicano indigenous past aroused by Bless Me. Ultima is far beyond the debate over a specific novel. Instead, it exemplifies the feasibility of a harmonious negotiation between Chicano indigenous past and multicultural present. Specifically, Bless Me. Ultima is more than an example of the mythical representation of Chicano borderland status. It is also representative of a wise reconciliation of conflicts in human experience, and is illustrative of the effectiveness of borderland representations. The protagonist Antonio Márez, under tutelage of the old curandera Ultima, accepts the various conflicts as the reality of his life, and chooses to understand them instead of escaping from them. This bildungsroman in some degree represents a Chicano odyssey from innocence to experience and from ignorance to knowledge. More significantly, the protagonist understands the dialectic relationship between good and evil, and transcends the mundane conflicts and vulgar concerns. His tolerance for differences shapes him into a modern "shaman" to connect different dimensions of reality. This wisdom of harmony echoes the author Anaya's "Chicano consciousness", or "the New World view", and it is a twin of Anzaldúa's mestiza consciousness. Bless. Me. Ultima is thus a typical fictitious writing of the syncretic mode of borderland status, in resonance with Gloria Anzaldúa's theoretical elaboration. Anaya's mythopoetics combines European framework of collective unconscious and Native American content of mythology, while Anzaldúa's new mestiza consciousness revealed through code-switching and collage reflects different layers of realities as if she is "peeling open layers of corn husks to expose the core".Taken as the different modes of Chicano borderland narratives as a whole, the synthetic mode also helps to negotiate and balance the former two modes. It resonates with the cultural conflicts foregrounded in the assimilative mode, and the validity of redefinition in the resistant mode. The imagination of the indigenous past is in essence a symbolic effort to constitute a self based on the dialectic understanding of binary effects of borders: borderlands as homes and borderlands as conflicts.Based on the discussion conducted in these chapters, the dissertation comes to the conclusion that, the border is an important notion in contemporary Chicano literature, and borderland a spectacular place. The border concept originates from the physical U.S.-Mexican border, and gets permeated all through economic and cultural expressions in American life. Borderland narratives, in diverse modes of representations, in fact constitute a discursive discourse to explore the influence of borders in Chicano life and psyche. Its various modes depend on individual writers' experiences, knowledge and preferred techniques, and also on the temporal or spatial diversities of Chicano literature. The postcolonial representation of cultural hybridity, frequently in the form of the postmodernist representation of fragmented self, becomes a significant theme of description. The hybridity is either accepted unconditionally at the cost of cultural past, or resisted as the challenge to hegemony or patriarchy, or celebrated as a reality with the dialectical negotiation and cultural reconciliation of various aspects of Chicano identity. The three modes in fact indicate the process of Chicano exploration for self-knowledge, although not necessarily in a clear-cut temporal sequence sometimes.The new mestiza consciousness advocated by Gloria Anzaldúa typically illustrates the syncretic position based on the recognition of various Chicano identities. In some degree, it embodies the mature self-understanding of Chicanismo. It is originally Chicana feminism-orientated, but gets extended to Chicano writing, or even other ethnic American discourses; it is Mexican-American-based, but is employed to understand American multicultural experiences in general. It is compatible with Juan Bruce-Novoa's "literary space" and "freedom of creation", or Anaya's "Chicano consciousness". Its syncretic wisdom buds from the Chicano effort to resist secondary status and gets nurtured by the gradual understanding of Chicano borderland experiences. Although it has been indicated in the assimilative mode and the resistant mode in different degrees, it is mainly embodied in the synthetic mode of borderland narratives. Gloria Anzaldúa's theorization and conceptualization helps to clarify its syncretic wisdom that Chicano literature needs for an effective self-representation.In the broader background of American literature, the new mestiza consciousness provides an alternative way to understand the Americanness as cultural hybridity. In turn, it helps to redefine American literature as multicultural and multiethnic, no longer the homogeneous "middle-class white male" culture.