Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging

2. Mestizaje in the Midwest: Remapping National Identityin the American Heartland in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo

2 / Mestizaje in the Midwest: Remapping National Identity in the American Heartland in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo As the introduction demonstrated, U.S. anxiety about nationhood and citizenship has long been expressed through a rhetoric of unbelonging whereby the spatial, political, and cultural separation of the United States from Latin America has often rendered Latinos/as within the United States into outsiders, no matter their place of birth or historical continuity on the land. In this chapter the central exploratory question of the book—how Latina writers have challenged this rhetoric of unbelonging—is directed more closely at the concept of the “thickening borderlands” discussed in the introduction. The legitimation of Mexican Americans that we saw in chapter 1 clearly emerges out of a new geopolitical identity that reimagines the United States’ geographical and cultural identity as part of a collective with Mexico, decolonizing the nation-space and the political border of the Southwest, and allowing it to be recognized as a transnational space, a former—and ongoing—part of Mexico. In this chapter the midwestern settings of Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo need to be understood not only in relation to the southwestern settings of Denise Chávez’s texts, and not only as relatively new destinations for Latinos/as in the United States, but also as complex representations of Latino belonging in a “thickened” physical and cultural borderland that has extended northward, into the heartland of the United States.1 The “thickening borderlands” discussed by Gilberto Rosas refers to various particularities of the borderland condition that are no longer necessarily fixed in the southwestern United States.2 Rosas’s interest lies 62 / mestizaje in the midwest in the ways that the state’s power, demonstrated through militarized policing practices along the geographical U.S.-Mexico border, functions under a condition of “exceptionality” in that physical location, constituting an exemption from the normal constraints of the law that permits the state to practice violence upon immigrant bodies (or those that appear to be immigrants) in the borderland area.3 Such “policeability” not only militarizes the border but also elaborates notions of undocumented “illegality,” and renders race, in the borderlands, into an ideologically charged social and political relation instead of an attribute or simply a “color.”4 For Rosas, an interesting (and alarming) consequence of such exceptionality is not only the number of violations that occur against U.S. citizens on the border but also the fact that when the border is “thickened,” such acts of vigilantism and policing become legitimated throughout the space of the nation. However, Rosas does contend that “suggestive of the thickening of the borderland condition, potent new political imaginaries have likewise emerged in conjunction with this intensified exceptionality.”5 In the introduction I briefly discussed some contemporary examples of this extended vigilantism (such as the Texas Virtual Border Watch Program); here, I am interested in how Castillo’s and Cisneros’s novels challenge the nation’s identity by depicting this midwestern landscape of the border (this “thickened borderland”) as a newly imagined site of political empowerment. Without the more obvious geopolitical markers that we saw in Chávez—the contiguous border with Mexico and the ancestral topography—this chapter asks how the texts trouble the United States’ political borders, its understanding of citizenship, and its definition of certain bodies as legal or illegal. How does the U.S. heartland become reimagined as part of Latin America, embedding the two nation-spaces within one another? And, finally, what kind of “potent new political imaginary” has emerged in this space? I argue that while the novels (particularly Castillo’s) show the marked extension of policing and racial governance in the Midwest, they also challenge this geopolitical extension of a policed space by infusing and empowering the thickened borderland with practices of mestizaje, thus troubling and radicalizing normative definitions of nationhood. Both the introduction and chapter 1 explored how the literature undermines the United States’ sense of nationhood based on geographical borders; clearly the southwestern narratives imagine the healing of colonized topographical spaces through the conjoining of Mexico and the United States. In this chapter Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia and Sandra mestizaje in the midwest / 63 Cisneros’s Caramelo also remap Latin America as part of the United States, but use mestizaje as the predominant geopolitical strategy, displacing and deconstructing the political borders of the United States...