The Mexican (American) Body

(left: Red from "Red Dead Revolver" video game, Rockstar Productions, 2006)

Reperire pax, “find peace,” is certainly a noble enough call to justice and the raison d’être of Red, the protagonist of the videogame Red Dead Revolver. But Red—pictured with this imperative call literally crowning one of his revolvers—attempts to find it through the pursuit and annihilation of Mexican General Diego and those of similar ilk who killed his family when he was a boy. Armed with his father’s revolver as a literal and metonymic emblem of forced penetrations, Red’s quest partakes of a cultural repertoire of images that have infused the American popular imagination with murderous Mexicans from the nineteenth century to the present.

But playing American in this context is about being played. From the serial western novel, to the Lone Ranger radio show of the 1940s and, later, the television show of the 1950s, and its heirs in the Hollywood and spaghetti westerns, all the way to Walker, Texas Ranger, "Red Dead Revolver" continues an investment in American national identity through a folk mythology that is neither historically factual nor ethically accountable. As an exemplar of the processes by which American cultural memory and amnesia find public expression, Red evinces the continued investment in an American national fantasy that requires continuous interrogation, resistance, and illumination. Reperire pax, indeed.

PBS and the Latino Body at War

If a Latina or Latino dies at war and there is no one around to witness it or to care, does it matter? Yes, and resoundingly so, as Latino cultural industries and agents have been proclaiming from the U.S. Mexican War (1846-48) to the present spoken word revolution. So what's taken America's professed televisual conscience so long to catch on?

From El Diario, "Latinos as sidebars in U.S. history"
EDITORIAL - 04/13/2007

Latinos welcomed the news that PBS and the Ken Burns team will include Hispanics in a documentary series on World War II. But what the quality of that inclusion will be is now the question.

On February 28, this paper ran a story and editorial about how a 14-hour documentary on the American experience of World War II failed to include Latinos.

Reflecting the Hispanic perspective is an issue of respect, not just for Latinos but for history. Accurate and complex portrayals help move audiences beyond narrow perceptions of U.S. history.

The Burns project also has implications for the fierce debate on U.S. involvement in Iraq. As El Diario regularly reports, Latino soldiers are among the mounting death count in Iraq. The voices of Latino veterans and families in the documentary would help offer a fuller version of the U.S. experience of war.

PBS has annnounced that additional content on Latinos will be incorporated and a Latino
producer will be hired. This is a step that resulted from pressure by the Defend the Honor Campaign, a Latino coalition.

What bothers us, however, is that PBS has clearly stated that the existing content will not be changed. This implies that Latino stories will be added as a footnote instead of woven into the body of the series, relegated to an “extra feature” option on a DVD menu.

Depicting Latinos as sidebars to U.S. history is unacceptable. We expect nothing less than substantive representation of Latinos in the Burns project. And as Burns has a long contract with PBS, we hope that the lesson has been learned. This episode should also be a turning point in how public television, long supported by Latino tax dollars, distributes its resources for projects.

Tex[t] Mex and the Latino Body

(left: from Anthony Nericcio's Tex[t] Mex [University of Texas Press, 2007] and amazon.com site)

Every once in a while a book or cultural artifact comes along that renders its contents and futures differently, and from that moment on it becomes a point of reference for what is to come. William Anthony Nericcio's Tex[t] Mex (University of Texas Press, 2007) is just such an artifact. The Mexican and Chicana/o bodies that populate it are imagined beyond their use value, or the pleasures taken from them, in order to lay bare how vision and the state's culture industries work hand in hand with the politics of national discrimination in the subtlest, and thereby most insidious ways. From a children's cartoon like speedy González, I mean, Gonzales, to scopophilic desires in the shape of Lupe Velez, or the Rita Hayworth we think we know, this is a special book.

We need books like these in order to understand broader cultural phenomena like, say, artist John Sonsini's appropriation of the Latino body, as his recent fascination with Mexican and Central American (im)migrants makes clear. Sonsini cruises and picks up day laborers on the street corners East L.A. Through hand gestures, movements, and the flashing of green some of them eventually "sit" for him in his studio, he paints their image, and the art world then celebrates these bait and tackle switches for the "honest" representation of "the common man." But I wonder in amazement about the Latino body, endlessly recycled, but never quite at home in this piece of earth whose borders render it "illegal" when convenient, "art" when profitable. We need more books like Nericcio's.

Précis of book review I would have written were it not for the fact…

Walter Benn Michaels' The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006)

It seems that many left progressives seem to be stuck on the concept of identity politics as it has been complicated by diversity initiatives or, worse, as they've come to understand the concept of identity politics from their armchairs. These narratives usually involve a “controversial” book with vision and myopic people of color who demand inclusion through guilt and liberal sympathy but leave the status quo and inequality largely untouched, and intellectually unexamined.

Within the expressed constraints of this academic subgenre, the protagonist (usually an English professor) is endowed with a spell-breaking and “visionary” acumen that enables him (the protagonist is usually male) to blame diversity, identity politics and political correctness for “true” inequality and the ensuing emergence of an extremely popular and literal conservatism that ultimately separates us all. Astoundingly, these modern day Delphic oracles pretend to be unaware of the ammunition they are providing to conservatives of all colors (as might be gleaned from the current banter that passes for political critique in the related video below.)

Most often, the expressed truth-bearing qualities of such exercises neglect to consider, much less ask, “people of color,” especially those whose lived and theoretical sophistication comes from direct community engagement, how the practice of "equality of opportunity" is experienced on various fronts. The self-proclaimed Delphic oracles are like Dostoyevskian leftists: they love humanity abstractly but presume to know the other better than she knows herself. In so doing, they avoid a series of ethical questions that would otherwise move them to consider the conditions under which the subaltern can speak and even talk back.

And so I propose a new subgenre of the review that refuses easy identifications with authors who claim to be saving democracy or liberating the working classes from the people of color who implicitly don’t know any better and who are coddled by the spineless sympathizers who should know better; the ones who, through their largesse, purportedly allow it all to happen.

(Also see: The Twilight of Affirmative Action or the Trappings of the WSJ's Rhetorical Storehouse of Editorials?)

And now, as promised, to the banter that attempts to pass for political critique...

Subaltern Body Politics: How the Right Uses "Colored" Bodies

"White supremacy, sensing the need to repackage itself for consumption in polite company, partially fills the demand for racist bile by outsourcing to mercenary writers of color." See Margret Kimberley's timely, "How the Right Uses People of Color to Foster Racism." My thanks to William Anthony Nericcio's post for alerting me to this.

The Latino Body: Moving to the Rhythms of Hip Hop

(left: Raquel Rivera, photo by Annabellie Rivera)

Raquel Rivera's New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (2003) is one of the first books to account for the synergy between Boricua hip hop and its more visible and lucrative African American expressions.

See Libero Della Piana's Interview with Raquel here where she's asked, "Why has the influence of Puerto Ricans on hip hop been so often overlooked and overshadowed in the public eye by the African American role in hip hop?"

Her poignant reply is telling, "The reasons are interrelated and there have been many. But there is one overriding reason above all others: We are all so used to accepting myths of cultural purity and ethnic separation, that its hard to see the truth even when its standing right in front of you. Ethnic groups have a history of struggle over 'cultural property' and this is no different. Take for example the longstanding argument among those that proclaim salsa to be 'really' Puerto Rican, or 'really' Cuban, or 'really' Latin American, or 'really' US Latino."

It would worthwhile to explore the Boricua hustle-dance scene as precursor to break-dancing, as well as the music that went with it, with the pan-ethnic forms of performance that developed into what is understood today as hip hop. Maybe my former student and hip hop scholar Wilfredo Gómez will write that book.

Antonio José Guzmán's Zero Gravity Installations

Antonio Guzmán's emphasis on "diaspora," in the context of Latino cultural production, seeks to link the Atlantic Crossing with the obviated history of Latino cultural identity in the United States, and its relation to the Black Atlantic polemic.



See his Hip-Hop Latino inquest, unanswered.