Mediating Chicana/o Culture: Multicultural American Vernacular ed. by Scott L. Baugh (review)

W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 8 binary classification system of white and black has nearly effaced the history of lynchings of many Chinese, Native Americans, and Latinos in the West. Gonzales-Day’s project in this regard is to retrieve and interpret the archives to make the data more specific through informed reading. By questioning and clarifying the meaning of terms nostalgically associated with the West, he makes important paradigmatic challenges to wellknown historical tropes. Specifically, he redresses the meaning of “vigilante justice ,” “frontier justice,” and “popular tribunal.” He finds that vigilante justice was essentially lynching justified through the rhetoric of safety, control, and protection of the Anglo-Saxon race (a self-defined group of whites from north­ ern and western European regions of “respectable” socio-economic classes). Gonzales-Day calls attention to the word desperado, another term that is part of the mythology of the Wild West. He writes, “the term cannot be found in Spanish dictionaries, though desperado is the Spanish adjective for desperate. And if it derived from the Spanish term, one can’t help but wonder just why they were so desperate? ... I would like to argue that such terms became a part of a new vocabulary that evolved to meet specific needs, in this case, to efficiently communicate both the subject’s criminality and “‘Mexican’ origin” (99). In another challenge, Gonzales-Day regards lynching today through his parallel visual archive of lynching. His eerie and powerful photographic series, “Erased Lynching,” is a major contribution toward this goal of rethinking the visual archive and engaging with this disturbing history. By taking original documentary photographs of lynchings and “erasing” the bodies of the vic­ tims, Gonzales-Day forces viewers to focus on the absence, confront the often grinning crowd, and reconcile the relationship between the absence and pres­ ence of the figures. Another lasting contribution of Lynching in the West is the author’s appendices that include his recount of lynchings, summary, legal, and military executions, and pardons in the West. Mediating Chicana/o Culture: Multicultural American Vernacular. Edited by Scott L. Baugh. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. 189 pages, $69.99. Reviewed by Rodney Streng Donelson Christian Academy, Nashville, TN In Mediating Chicana/o Culture, Scott Baugh characterizes the provocative eleven essays that investigate the underlying tension between personal lexis and public manifestation in the evolving formation of Chicana/o identity in terms of the tension that exists between the artist and politics. Baugh’s introduction echoes Plato’s concerns about the poet’s role in society, his/her psychology and the nature of the artistic process, by discussing the increasingly significant contribu­ tion of the Chicano/a poet within the context established by the title’s word ver­ nacular. From Latin’s vernaculus with its root verna, meaning “estate-born slave,” b o o k R e v ie w s vernacular often refers “to things created by the slave born in the master’s house” (xi). Indeed, the voices participating in the critical dialogue captured by this slender volume represent “traditionally muted voices” seeking to “reappropriate a vernacular that decolonizes” the Eurocentric legacy (xi). The first section, “Discursive Bodies, Bodily Discourses,” proposes “con' ceptualizations of the body and various discursive relationships surrounding the body or embodied in manifestations of self” (xiv). Victor A. Sorell investigates how graffiti writing, the handkerchief, and the tattoo as popular arts practiced by Chicano pintos offer means of identity formulation. Similarly, Jon D. Rossini uses the blues score to argue that geography can be reconceptualized without the borders that restrict the Chicano/a’s sense of self. Michelle Johnson Vela’s essay interprets the personal writing process as a consciousness-building enter­ prise simultaneously establishing an autonomous voice and reaffirming a sense of community. Likewise, Carole Counihan identifies food as a material culture that nourishes both. The second section, “Public Testimonials, Honorable Demonstrations,” further develops ideas in the first by “problematizing notions of authorship and textuality” surrounding such diverse genres as personal testimonials, public demonstrations, material productions, community interaction, and oral...