Death and Latino Ontology

Lázaro Trista, a Guatemalan immigrant, was beaten to death by three men in Plainfield, N.J., this past week for simply being a Latino immigrant, and the mainstream media doesn't seem interested in reporting this case. The local Latino press reports that Tista had purchased a plane ticket and planned to return to Guatemala for good this month. He missed his family and wanted to see his youngest son, whom he had never met.

Under what conditions does a body, any body, cease to signify its own humanity by virtue of its historical and political identity in a country that grants "minutemen" the impunity associated with justice through the category of "law"? How can a nation construe the very being of any of its inhabitants as an expendable and disposable commodity? My heart goes out to his family.

Guatemala's Prensa Libre covered it this afternoon.

Article selections below are from Courier News:

Police Chief Edward Santiago said the killing happened within a half-hour before police arrived at the scene Nov. 4. He said the three men singled out Tista to rob him.

"Based on the statements we received, the bias identifiers were established from their statements that they were targeting Hispanics," said Police Chief Edward Santiago.

Tista was a Guatemalan immigrant who worked as a landscaper. He was preparing to fly Nov. 29 to Guatemala, where his wife, mother and six of his children live. Tista has a 20-year-old son who lives in New Jersey.

Local activist Flor Gonzales, of the Latin American Coalition, and Elaine O'Neal, the victims and witness advocate at the Union County Prosecutor's Office, worked with Tista's family and were able to raise enough money so that Tista's remains can be flown home to Guatemala on Monday, Santiago said.

Tista has been given a wake at the Salvation Army in Plainfield, and he will have a funeral in Guatemala, Santiago said.

Capital Cannibals in Philadelphia: Frida Kahlo and the Consumption of Mexicanidad (as Viewed from the Global North)

Philadelphia Frida

The various representational afterlives of Frida Kahlo will be on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from February 20, 2008 - May 18, 2008. The show represents the first major exhibition in the United States of Kahlomania in nearly fifteen years. At a recent gathering of visual artists, the arts cognoscenti du jour tried to convince me that Kahlo would bring in the area's Latina/o community (the most under-served community in the area). I suggested that Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto), from the founding issue of the brilliant Revista de Antropofagia, might teach us a thing or two about capital accumulation and how the new tech barbarians are as clueless about context as Frida was cognizant of it. "Tupi, or not Tupi that is the question.... I am only interested in what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the Cannibal." The arts cognoscenti du jour are cannibals.


Philadelphia Museum of Art

Borderlands

(Sign Reads: "Danger, Unpopulated Zone")
Three new books review why the fates of Mexico and the United States are inexorably linked.

Your Own Personal Jesús: San Antonio and Jesus' Brown Latino Body?

Hundreds of devoted Latino church-goers in San Antonio, Texas, turned out for the unveiling of the city's first brown Jesús.

Depeche Mode's Chicanesca cultural intervention "Your Own Personal Jesus" brought Mexicaneity to post-pubescent heights of legitimation for me in high school. I loved the song for what I thought it represented as much as for its ability to conjure what passed for cool at the time. And how could I not inherit such impoverished imaginings when even our own present is still debating how best to render mythologies of religious origins in hues of brown? Freud's Moses and Monotheism (1939) still has a thing or two to say about Christianity's obsession with the literal referent as opposed to, say, Judaism's conceptual recourse to "the idea," but he's not supposed to be cool to read anymore. I'm glad I don't care as much about cool as I did when "Your Own Personal Jesus" meant more than it should have, and for all the wrong reasons. Still, though the Sergio Leone parody by David Gaham might have gone unnoticed, even by Gaham himself, it strikes me as phat today. Is it ever possible to get away from cool?

Juana María Rodríguez

Media Credit: Shannon Carroll


A student of mine, Diva Divina (stage name), decided to skip out and stay in Boston for some quality casa time and to attend the "Fifth Annual Queer Studies Scholar Lecture" at Tufts University. There she had the opportunity to witness the incomparable Juana María Rodríguez in action. She gave a talk related to her new book project, Queering Domesticity. DD, any video of the event?

American Cultural Memory Delivered Courtesy of U.S. Postal Service

The 1947 federal court case Mendez v. Westminster School District determined that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students into separate "Mexican schools" was unconstitutional. Mendez v. Westminster set the groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education. Brown v. Board of Education is generally credited with desegregating schools across the nation in the landmark 1954 decision that ruled that segregation was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A new stamp memorializes the Mendez v. Westminster case sixty years after that momentous decision. Enhorabuena would be an exaggeration.

Curricular Inclusion and the Latina/o Body Politic

I was reminded this past week about how important it is for many Latina/o students to see themselves reflected in the social mirror the academy both reflects and refracts. After a symposium on The Futures of Latina/o Studies at Bryn Mawr College, and the American Studies Association Conference here in Philly, I'm reminded about a lesson I learned from Walter Benjamin's "The Author as Producer" on how institutions can "assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes," and the various performances thereof, without calling into question "the existence of the class that owns it [...]." The ASA theme this year was "América Aquí: Transhemispheric Visions and Community Connections" and, I must say, the quality of some of the sessions I attended was superb, even as the program guide elided accent marks, and the topics themselves registered diversity in the stacatto rhythms of monolingualism. So what happens when the conditions under which inclusion is granted rests on the contingencies associated with proper form? My own students are grappling with this question as they untangle local and administrative histories of what Doris Sommer, in another context, called the democratic drive of "slaps and embraces." Larger academic institutions are providing, wittingly or not, the template from which to register Latina/o inclusion in the curriculum and into the communities the academy seeks to represent. The UNC-Chapel Hill Undergraduate Minor in Latina/o Studies provides one such template. Please send others as I compile my list for Mujeres along with related possibilities for course offerings.