Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture

Notes

N O T E S I N T R O D U C T I O N 1. Among the many fine studies on this point are the following: Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America; Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest; Mario Barrera’s Race and Class in the Southwest; and Carey McWilliams’ Southern California: An Island on the Land. 2. While I believe that law and media evoke a certain self-evident or commonsense understanding as active hegemonic effects, the same may not be true of landscape. At first glance, this term may appear to designate a static object rather than an active operation or social apparatus. While law and media readily suggest agents and agency, landscape might be seen as the inert stage upon which social processes take place. Quite the contrary. For clarification, I offer Sharon Zukin’s lucid characterization of landscape as an active mechanism of power, from which I derive my usage: Landscape, as I use the term here, stretches the imagination. Not only does it denote the usual geographical meaning of ‘‘physical surroundings,’’ but it also refers to an ensemble of material and social practices and their symbolic representation. . . . . . . A landscape mediates, both symbolically and materially, between the socio-spatial differentiation of capital implied by market and the socio-spatial homogeneity of labor suggested by place. The concept landscape has recently emerged from a long period of reification to become a potent tool of cultural analysis. It connotes a contentious, compromised product of society. It also embodies a point of view . . . powerful institutions have a preeminent capacity to impose their view on the landscape —weakening, reshaping, and displacing the view from the vernacular. (1991, 16; original emphasis) O N E 1. My account of this signal historical episode is informed by various sources, but most substantially by Richard Griswold del Castillo (1979:105–115) and Edward Escobar 1983 (80–95). 2. This implicit social knowledge was by no means limited to the urbanizing zones of Southern California. Américo Paredes’ well-known study of the border balladry, With His Pistol in His Hand, offers evidence of such popularly manifest and transmitted knowledge in the rural milieu of South Texas during the same period as the early constitution of urban Los Angeles. Carl Gutiérrez-Jones’ 1995 work on the hegemonic discourses of criminality and their impact on the critical expressive consciousness of Chicano writers, Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse, treats this issue in great descriptive and theoretical detail, although the emphasis is almost entirely on Chicano literary and legal critiques of the United States’ juridicolegal ideological state apparatuses rather than on the direct repressive activities of police agents. 3. Although it refers to a very different social and temporal milieu, Avery Gordon’s treatment of ghosts and haunting in the work of Argentinean novelist Luisa Valenzuela suggests similar uses of these spectral tropes within her critical ideological discourse. I will have much more to say about this phantom element in past and present Chicano spatial discourse throughout this study. 4. I am not suggesting that apart from these print-textual manifestations of critique there were no oral expressive practices critical of mexicano subordination within an emerging American social order. The ‘‘critical common sense’’ I refer to was no doubt manifest in various popular ‘‘texts’’ such as gossip, jokes, stories, corridos, derogatory appellations (‘‘name-calling’’), and the like. However, the systematic documentation and study of these practices in late-1800s California has not been undertaken in the manner or degree that would allow me to comment substantially on these popular expressions of critical consciousness. For a summary discussion of such folkloric expressions in South Texas, see Américo Paredes’ 1978 essay ‘‘The Problem of Identity in a Changing Culture: Popular Expressions of Culture Conflict along the Lower Rio Grande Border.’’ The corrido, or ballad, of the greater Mexican borderlands has been the most well researched of these popular expressive practices, generating a plethora of studies beginning with Paredes’ foundational classic ‘‘With His Pistol in His Hand’’: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. 5. Original Spanish: ‘‘Que un pueblo civilizado . . . se converta [sic] en asesino voluntario y despreciando las autoridades . . . es realmente repugnante y escandoloso [sic]. . . . Nuestra raza en general debe abrir los ojos a la luz de la verdad y ver lo que pueden esperar de la justicia de nuestros amables primos’’ (Las Dos Repúblicas, April 9, 1893). 6. William Estrada, curator at El Pueblo...