Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art

Redirecting Chicana/Latina Representation

156 Q In December 2003, Home and Garden Television (HGTV) featured director and actor Diane Rodríguez’s home in Echo Park, Los Angeles, in a segment titled “Mexican Holiday Décor” for their annual program Handmade Holiday with Kitty Bartholomew.1 In the episode, the host, Kitty Bartholomew, guides audiences on a multicultural tour of twelve houses, spotlighting homeowners who have created “handmade objects reflecting their heritage and family traditions” for the holiday season.2 Only three homes are assigned an ethnic and racial designation , including Rodríguez’s and two others with the labels “African American Holiday” and “Japanese Style Wrapping.”3 The piece on Rodríguez’s home features panoramic and close-up views of her various decorations; Bartholomew’s voiceover describes them as quintessentially Mexican, using descriptions such as “typical of a Mexican color palette” and “Mexican folk art.” While the camera pans across these various objects, Spanish flamenco guitar plays in the background , and in one scene, Rodríguez demonstrates the craft of decorating a small Christmas tree. As the camera focuses on Rodríguez topping the tree with a bright, colorful star, Bartholomew exclaims that it “is reminiscent of a colorful Mexican piñata!” At the beginning of the segment, Bartholomew provides an explanation for Rodríguez’s decorative choices: “Homeowner Diane Rodríguez resides in Los Angeles and since it’s so close to the Mexican border it’s easy for her to find décor that celebrates her heritage.”4 The holiday special’s depiction of Rodríguez’s home and décor references popular discourses of Latina/o cultures and domestic spaces that I have described throughout this book. The HGTV special renders Latinas in the United States as nurturers and laborers of the domestic household and domestic nation, while locating Mexican culture and identity outside of the United States’ literal and figurative borders. First, the program elides Mexican culture and identity as a c h a p t e r 6 Redirecting Chicana/Latina Representation diane rodríguez’s performance and staging of the domestic Redirecting Chicana/Latina Representation 157 hybrid, living cultural form in the space of Los Angeles and the nation. When Bartholomew asserts that it’s “easy for [Rodríguez] to find décor that celebrates her heritage” since “it’s so close to the Mexican border” (emphasis mine), she implies that Southern California’s proximity to Mexico makes it easy to find Mexican items in Los Angeles. Yet with the statement, she locates Mexican culture south of the US-Mexico border, and not as a lived experience and identity shared by those of Mexican descent in the space of Los Angeles. Furthermore, while Rodríguez’s voiceover expresses the plurality of cultures that informs her holiday décor, Bartholomew’s narrative isolates Rodríguez’s décor as typically “Mexican,” particularly through her labeling of the Christmas tree star as a “colorful Mexican piñata” and other references to her décor as “typical of a Mexican color palette.” This view contrasts with Rodríguez’s description of her decorations in her voiceover, where she states: “The decorations, most of them are from Mexico, but a lot of what I have in my home is not strictly Mexican.”5 Rodríguez continues, “That’s the tradition of Southern California: we have all this color to pull from, we have all this color swirling around us.”6 In my interview with the artist, Rodríguez describes how she “took Mexican folk art and color and mixed it with Asian, Moroccan, and Afghan art to create a pastiche of a Southern California look.”7 Here, Rodríguez expresses a postmodern view of Mexican American identity and culture, affirming what Victor Hugo-Viesco explains in another context: “Neither assimilationist nor separatist, th[e] site of contemporary Chicano cultural production affirms its cultural heritage and its history of place in Los Angeles while creatively engaging in the adaptation of the diversity of cultural forms that cross the city” (2005, 486). Additionally, with the Spanish flamenco guitar soundtrack, the special evokes Spanish Fantasy Heritage discourse, which conflates Mexican and Spanish cultures and fixes Latina/os in an “idyllic nation-based past,” privileging Spanish identity and eliding mestizaje, or cultural and racial mixture (Habell-Pallán 2005, 10). Finally, by marking only three homes out of the twelve with an ethnic and racial designation, the special signifies the other homes, presumably Anglo American, as normative representations of US identity and culture.8...