Ethnicity, Ethics, and Latino Aesthetics

But now one day Bellerophon too
Incurred the gods' wrath--and alone he moped
On Aleian plain, eating his heart out,
Shunning the beaten track of men.

Homer, The Iliad

Wandering homeless, desolate, speaking only to the wind and his self, Bellerophon comes down to us as the image of man in perpetual exile. He haunts the very heart of Western philosophy. The melancholic thinker, meditating on his own fate and that of his now alienated companions, is an image that appears in the writings of René Descartes, Walter Benjamin, and Julia Kristeva. Bellerophone as a figure of perpetual homelessness hovers in the shadows of Georg Lukács's first--arguably most nuanced--work, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (1920). Writing during World War I, Lukács meditates on the fate of civilization come armistice. In his preface, he recalls thinking during those dark hours of 1915 that Russian tsarism might fall and the West might defeat Germany. "But then," he writes, "the question arose: who was to save us from Western civilisation?" (11).

This question, raised at the onset of the twentieth century, is still asked now at the cusp of the twenty-first. The last half-century has seen the legacy of European and American imperialism come to fruition. Both the intensified battles of anticolonialism and the intense struggle over unequal development wrought by modernization form a part of this legacy. The question Lukács posed to himself in 1915 proves yet a pressing one. Today, however, the question is most often asked by the offspring of Western civilization's past: migrants and immigrants, resident aliens and illegal aliens, the diasporic and the exiled, the minority identified and the ethnically marked. The ringing question "who is to save us from Western civilization?" sounds still and resonates with the vexed and difficult problematic sometimes termed "identity politics."

This problematic is marked out by the root of the term "ethnic," deriving from the Greek ethnos, denoting nation or group, and ethnikos, denoting national or foreign. The distinction between "us" and "them" is already inscribed in the very term of ethnicity. The contradictory nature of the term is teased out by Werner Sollors in his work Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986): "[T]he very assertion of the ethnic dimensions of American culture can be understood as part of the rites and rituals of this land, as an expression of a persistent conflict between consent and descent in America" (15). The naming of an ethnic self is implicated in a twin desire. One consents to a constructed self-identification, the other relies on a claim to some biological or cultural descent. Sollers's discussion of ethnicity as a cultural construct is powerful in its anti-essentialist analysis. However, as Ramón Saldívar has noted, Sollers's discussion of consensus and dissensus does "not apply to those outside the ruling group or their educational, cultural, and political state apparatuses: working-class people, people of color, gays and lesbians, women" (Chicano 216). The problem with naming a fully inclusive public space--even a discursive one--is ever vexed.

Discussions of Chicano identity and identification are marked by this difficulty. In naming difference and sameness simultaneously, the nature of Chicano identity is perpetually problematized. Out of this turmoil, there is a productive result.

These discussions tend to invoke an ethical dimension, focusing on the ethos of the ethnos, making ethics central to the deployment of ethnic labels. In his essay "Towards a Chicano Poetics: The Making of the Chicano Subject, 1969-1982" (1986), José Saldívar points to the corrido, the border ballad as the poetic form most influential in the development of Chicano poetry. Anticipating José Limón's 1992 discussion of Chicano poetry in Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry, José Saldívar argues that the aesthetic form of the poem draws up the...