Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature

Coda

Coda C hicana/o indigenism emerges in relation to the complex histories of “discovery,” theft, and exhibition that made popular knowledge of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica possible. State and private economic sponsorship of excavation, removal, and preservation of artifacts, and the global circuits through which these objects moved, enabled European and Euro-American pursuit of the pre-history of Mexico, whether from the floor of the museum space or the trenches of the archaeological site. Before the institutionalization of archaeology and anthropology, the production of this knowledge was first the province of Spaniards present at the time of the Conquest, or those who arrived in post-Conquest “New Spain” to govern, missionize, and militarize. Mexican prehistory also became the domain of usually very wealthy men who cast themselves in the role of the “lone explorer,” setting off into the jungle, the desert, the lowlands, and the highlands of the Other.1 When Mexico achieved independence in 1821, this field of inquiry that had been dominated by Europeans was reorganized in the pursuit of a national identity that would unify and distinguish creole and mestizo populations struggling to define themselves against the colonial power. This state ideology, the beginnings of which Florescano and Bernal locate in “Creole anxiety” of the seventeenth century, would eventually become known as indigenismo, and in the Mexican post-Revolutionary period, it achieved some of its most famous expressions in the work of artists and intellectuals such as Diego Rivera and Manuel Gamio. Leading up to this period, European artists had been taking note of pre-Columbian artifacts, visually impressed by monumental sculptural forms and oddly seduced by the exoticism of human sacrifice, with Georges Bataille as the most prominent example of the latter.2 In the era of Modernism, writers and visual 164 Blood Lines artists launched a version of primitivist thinking that began to include ancient Mesoamerica. The pantheons and plastic arts of the Aztecs reached new audiences through the work of figures such as D. H. Lawrence and Henry Moore, at the same time that the Mexican state was solidifying the centrality of Tenochtitlan in Mexican nationalist self-fashioning. The Mesoamerican imaginings of Chicana/o writers both disrupt and continue a history of narrative absorption with pre-Conquest civilizations of the Americas that has accounted for particular strains of primitivist cultural expression. The sources of the pre-Columbian material accessed by Chicana/o indigenist writers have not been confined to the elite spaces of the academy. Indeed, since the Conquest, chronicles and interpretations of Mesoamerican cultures have been made available for popular consumption, creating and nourishing the desire to capture the mystique of civilizations believed to be at once fundamentally barbaric and eminently advanced.The indigenism of writers like Alurista, Rendon,Valdez, Anzaldúa, and del Castillo were at times developed in academic contexts. During the period of movement indigenism, Alurista was studying at San Diego State College, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1970 and helped to found Chicano Studies in 1968–1969. Similarly, Anzaldúa worked on Borderlands while in graduate school at the University of California Santa Cruz. Clearly, the work of Adelaida del Castillo conforms to particular conventions of academic scholarship, and her essay was presented at an academic conference. Yet, the academy is not the only environment in which to pursue a curiosity in pre-Columbian religion and culture. Anzaldúa saw the Coatlicue statue in a Museum of Natural History.Teatro Campesino pursued their Theater of the Sphere outside of the academy, consulting sources that challenged traditional Mesoamerican scholarship, although other material, such as the Popul Vuh, was made available precisely because of academic interest. The pre-Columbian anthropological and archaeological archive is not the sole influence on Chicana/o literary indigenism, yet it is time to acknowledge its presence. Doing so will certainly alter the cultural constellation of indigenism. It will also resituate Chicana/o literary discourse, illuminating intertextualities and creative borrowings that complicate the practices, old and new, of identity construction. Hal Foster has called for a counterdiscourse to primitivism that would anchor what conventional primitivism “sets adrift” (52). Chicana/o indigenism has tried to anchor itself in the history of conquest, a project that has at times been thwarted by the constraints of primitivist discourse. Chicanas/os occupy a peculiar place as a mestiza/o population in the Coda 165 Americas, which alerts us to the multiple forms that indigeneity takes...