Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century

Introduction:

¡PELIGRO! SUBVERSIVE SUBJECTS: CHICANA AND CHICANO CULTURAL STUDIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez The decolonial imaginary embodies the buried desires of the unconscious , living and breathing in between that which is colonialist and that which is colonized. Within that interstitial space, desire rubs against colonial repressions to construct resistant, oppositional, transformative , diasporic subjectivities that erupt and move into decolonial desires. —Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary (1999) THE U.S.-México border zone is a site that is lived and expressed by those who reside in the physical/discursive margins generated by the edge of two nation states. As Gloria Anzaldúa (1999) reminds us, “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the¤rst and bleeds . . . the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” (25). In discussing the aesthetics of “border culture” in relation to juridical, linguistic, and political tensions produced by the U.S.-México border, Alfred Arteaga (1997) analyzes how the “cultural politics of hybridization” are grounded “in the material space” of the militarized borderlands. Arteaga argues how Chicana and Chicano subjects are “coming to be amid the competing discourses of nation” (91). This collection of essays re®ects how the multidimensional nature of the border fosters unique forms of Chicana and Chicano cultural productions and informs complex cultural frameworks. As “residents” of the borderlands before and after 1848, Chicana and Chicano scholars and artists are expanding the contours of a geopolitical and geocultural space that holds many rami¤cations for the new millennium. Although we, as editors, recognize the growing population of Latinas and Latinos along the borderlands and praise their contributions to American culture, we have chosen to focus on Chicana and Chicano cultural studies and gauge our development “works in progress” since that historic date of 1848, when Mexican citizens were forced to become part of the United States. With the struggle for the cultural and intellectual liberation of Chicana and Chicano border subjects, new dimensions of perception, focus, 1 and analysis have emerged since the social and cultural gatherings of the 1960s and 1970s. Many scholars have been compelled to offer visions and disclosures of a dynamic and distinctive cultural aesthetic that reaches back into precolonial México. The resulting representations and articulations of this growing terrain of cultural expression/production incorporate and extend the impact of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class, and shed light on the possibilities and complexities of Chicana and Chicano culture. The matrix of cultural collisions, disjunctures, cohesions, and hybridizations on which Chicana and Chicano culture is grounded has triggered a new wave of mestiza/o cultural workers. These “seers” into the world of “mestizaje consciousness” deconstruct, reinvent, and af¤rm the multiple subjectivities of a dynamic cultural contextualization. Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural and Literary Studies in the 21st Century is about the messages issued by those voices. They are voices that sing praises and question authorities; that recover subjugated histories and knowledge(s); that critique and contradict master narratives of racial and patriarchal orders; and ¤nally, that (re)claim space and place for Chicana and Chicano cultural discourses. Most signi¤cantly, they are voices engaged in extracting meaning from a cultural aesthetic that has long been omitted from Euro-Western cultural canons, signaling new directions in Chicana and Chicano cultural studies. Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century offers a range of interdisciplinary essays that discuss racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions. In doing so, it pulls together a body of theoretically rigorous interdisciplinary essays that articulate and expand the contours of Chicana and Chicano cultural studies. Our collection continues the prerogatives of Living Chicana Theory (1998), edited by Carla Trujillo, and Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature , Culture and Ideology (1991), edited by Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. This collection makes central the struggle to “live Chicana theory” by putting into practice a resistance to the multiplicity of oppression . We also want to continue Saldívar’s and Calderón’s commitment to provide a sustained forum for “Chicano/a theory and theorists in our global borderlands: from ethnographic to post-modernist, Marxist to feminist ” (6). In this collection, the contributors were asked to re®ect on what the new millennium means for them as critics given the 500-year legacy of...