Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire

4. Américo Paredes and the De-Mastery of Desire

HIS CHAPTER MOVES BACK in time to reconsider, from the vantage point of post-1980s Chicana feminist and queer imaginaries, the work of a Chicano writer who is widely considered to be the “father” of Chicano letters, the late “Don” Américo Paredes (1915–1999). Although my epigraph suggests that such a reconsideration would automatically take the form of feminist critique of the warrior hero and “primordial patriarchy” celebrated (and embodied) by Paredes, I am actually more interested in clearing a space for approaching Paredes and his work through a less predictable set of questions. If Chapter 1’s reading (like a queer) of Moraga’s work hinged on the disruption of teleological narratives, both her own and those she invites from her readers, this chapter goes a step further: it performs a queer transvaluation of Paredes’s work to place pressure on the very presuppositions of Chican@ literary and cultural studies. The history generated by those presuppositions—and, tautologically, the presuppositions that continue to be sustained through that history—is enmeshed with the cultural and political mobilization of Chican@s as an oppositional group beginning in the mid-1960s. We thus continue to view Chican@ literary texts through an oppositional lens shaped by the particular strategies used for politicizing Mexican Americans into Chican@s and encouraging their active participation in the decisively ethnonationalist movimiento.1 As Juan Bruce-Novoa has argued, these strategies revolve around and solidify a number of preset criteria for delineating the bounds of, and evaluating, Chicano poetics: an us-vs.-them [F]rom the perspective of feminist thought in the late 1980s, Paredes’s work now appears dated in its idealization of a primordial patriarchy . —RENATO ROSALDO, “Changing Chicano Narratives” Américo Paredes and the De-Mastery of Desire 88 READING CHICAN@ LIKE A QUEER (Chicano-vs.-Anglo) binary; an ethnonationalist ethos symbolized by Aztl án and the politically charged signifier “Chicano,” both of which, of course, invoke the indigenous; fierce resistance to assimilation; preservation of mexicano traditions, particularly all things relating to familia; and a strong identification with the working class (“Dialogical Strategies, Monological Goals”). Clearly, the comments of both Renato Rosaldo (author of the epigraph above) and Bruce-Novoa have been shaped largely in response to the proliferation of Chicana feminist critiques of the overabundance of masculinist and heterosexist characters at center stage of el movimiento and within the related Chicano literary renaissance. Because of the marginalization of women (never mind sexual Others) within chicanismo as well as their elision from the most foundational texts and histories, Chicana feminist scholars such as Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Norma Alarcón, and Emma M. Pérez have worked diligently over the past thirty years to center Chicanas and sexuality in their work, just as creative writers such as Cherríe Moraga and Ana Castillo have given us a rich primary archive of feminist and sexpositive poetry, essays, short stories, and novels. Rendering Chicanas visible has been a crucial step in challenging the foundational bedrock of Chican@ literary and cultural studies. Given the strength of that foundation and the many people who are deeply invested in maintaining it,2 however, it is hardly surprising that some (certainly not all) of these feminist interventions are apprehended as, at best, radically “new” and confounding detours in the field (Ramón Saldívar) or, at worst, markers of “the end of Chicano literary studies ” (Randy A. Rodríguez).3 The quest for Chicana visibility can only take us so far. We need more broad-based, substantive, and innovative techniques and methods in order to interrupt the inherently limiting and strongly gendered bifurcation between old and new, political and sexual, authentic and ersatz, thought and feeling, and revolutionary and bourgeois. When we queer our feminist strategies— finally letting go of those a priori criteria discussed by Bruce-Novoa, which is also to say letting go of our reliance on mastery—we can even read like a queer the most commanding figure in Chican@ Studies. A Border Man The Texas Rangers’ reign of terror; the brave resistance of corrido heroes; the 1915 sedicioso uprising; Jim Crow segregation and lynching; Anglo encroachment in the first half of the twentieth century; dramatic and violent altera- 89 AMÉRICO PAREDES AND THE DE-MASTERY OF DESIRE tions of the natural, political, and economic landscape of South Texas—all of these subjects of Paredes’s work are at some remove...