Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative (review)

Rewriting North American Borders began as a postdoctoral project in Canadian-Chicano border literature and later turned to its present emphasis as a habilitation thesis under the sponsorship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Monika Kaup's transnational interests led her to American studies, a field that has moved, in her view, "from a nationalist 'Americanist' focus to a more inclusive North American Studies, one that would include the literatures of U.S. minorities" (2).

Kaup's book, a study of post-World War II Chicano and Chicana narrative, emphasizes both the decline of Chicano cultural nationalism in the 1970s and the emergent postnational and postmodern phase of Chicana feminism in the 1980s. Its three chapters present a brief history of Chicano and Chicana literature that includes three competing narrative expressions: the resistant nation-based story (Texas), the immigrant tale (California), and the feminist plot (the transnational spaces of Chicana feminism). "Chicana feminists have achieved this decentered reconfiguration of their community," Kaup claims, "by rewriting the two major Chicano plots found in male Chicano writing, the indigenous and the immigrant stories. In some cases—the exemplary text here is Anzaldúa's Borderlands —the dismantling effect results from playing out these two plots against each other" (201).

Kaup's historical analysis suggests different ways to conceive of origins or foundational dates: 1848 for Chicano cultural nationalism, 1910 for Mexican immigrants, and 1519 for Chicana feminists. "Far from being trivial acts," Kaup argues, "conceptual starting points represent significant delimitations for any intellectual project. A beginning—1848 or 1519—is never simply given; it is a significant choice." Kaup continues:

For Chicana feminism to designate as its point of departure the traumatic birth of the mestizo nation-family is thus to return the focus from the defense of national integrity and territory to the architecture at home, to the structures of authority within the family and community. By facing inward, Chicanas face the structure of domestic oppression, which before had been obscured by an outward-oriented concern for internal unity against an exterior threat. That Malinche, the biological maternal ancestor, should occupy a victim's role reveals the subservient position to which the mother and the indigenous woman have been assigned within the mestizo nation. (222-23)

One might quibble that La Malinche is not necessarily the biological maternal ancestor of Chicanas; probably only a minority of present-day Mexicans and Chicanas could trace such Aztec ancestry. It is more important, however, to acknowledge that the act of "facing inward" (i.e., to the paternal home and its structures of domestic oppression) does not have to distract one's attention from a U.S. history of land dispossession and racism, the latter factor still active as a social barrier to Chicanos and Chicanas. The apparent suppression in Kaup's book of this crucial point in Chicano history and literature may be yet another symptom of the residual "borders" that American studies research must cross as it ventures into U.S. ethnic literatures.

In her first chapter, "The Geopolitics of Resistance in South Texas Border Writing," Kaup proposes readings of Chicano and Chicana novels, autobiographies, and essays by Américo Paredes, Rolando Hinojosa, and Sandra Cisneros, to name a few. The readings illustrate a shift from the South Texas narrative plot (i.e., the decay of the corrido -nationalist tradition) to the Chicana feminist expressions of the 1980s (Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, et al.). The historical hopelessness of Mexican Americans born in the 1930s, Kaup argues, stems from their having been born too late "to belong to the corrido world"; therefore they look "to the U.S. rather than Mexico or the border as their homeland" (45, 46). Reading Paredes's novel George Washington Gómez (1990) against this understanding of the historical conditions pressing on Mexican Americans, Kaup interprets it as a "tragic autobiography in the future...