The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Introduction

Introduction “The American Congo” and the National Symbolic Through the centre of this unknown region, fully as large as New England , courses the Rio Grande, which can more correctly be compared to the Congo than the Nile the moment that the degraded, turbulent, ignorant , and superstitious character of its population comes under examination . —john g. bourke, “The American Congo,” Scribner’s Magazine (1894) U.S. Army Captain John Gregory Bourke (1846–1898) was one of the earliest ethnographers of the Mexican and Amerindian Southwest. His birth and death marked two of the most important years for U.S. continental and hemispheric expansion between the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and the Spanish-American War (1898). Both his ethnographic work and his experience as an army officer allowed for close, though never disinterested, observation of the borderlands between Mexico and the United States. They represented for him a contact zone where Amerindian and Mexican cultures ceded to the “American” imperial designs of nation: westward migration, colonization, and the waves of violence that characterized continental expansion.1 Published in the popular Scribner’s Magazine, “The American Congo” captured an emerging national identity that could consider Mexican difference incommensurate with American reality by naturalizing the stigma that made “Mexican” a racial term rather than one of national, cultural, or ethnic identification.2 That today we continue to view the West as a tabula rasa imbued with meaning through migration from the East is instructive of the degree to which national memory offers compelling but furtively incomplete ways to participate in a national symbolic order that excises as much as it claims to assimilate. 3 Public-sphere representations like Bourke’s did not, as many would have it, suppress an inchoate Mexican American identity: they fabricated one for public consumption by giving visual and emotive texture to a people rendered foreign in their own cultural topography. Bourke’s ethnographic work in the borderlands of the American imagination created what may perhaps be the first summative ontology of people under scrutiny by confounding the population’s being with his disciplinary knowing. Their ontological status is displaced by his epistemological errancy; their being and his knowing position the Mexican population outside the nation’s symbolic imaginary. Superimposing Africa in America, his “Congo” is both a space within the parameters of his America (“as large as New England”) and a symbolic place rendered outside reason. Bourke’s explicit purpose in “The American Congo” was to present “the readers of Scribner’s an outline description, both of the territory under consideration , and the manners, customs, and superstitions of Mexicans” along the U.S. side of the Rio Grande: “the waves of North American aggression have swept across this region, bearing down all in their path; but as the tempest abated the Mexican population placidly resumed its control of affairs and returned to its former habits of life as if the North American had never existed” (592). For Bourke, the “Mexican population” is not part of the United States because its habits of life are incommensurate with his American reality. This American Congo connotes a site of racial and ethnic disjunctures that are devoid of nuance. The Mexicans returning to their “former habits” are incompatible with national ideations of comportment as evidenced by the continuous “waves of North American aggression” that attempt to order both habitus and habits to futile ends. Mexican resistance to North American aggression can also be read, however, as a strategic unwillingness to defer to the aggressor. The Mexican resistance that Bourke notes without irony also shows the possibilities for agential transformations offered by Mexicans in the face of public contemplation, such as in the pages of Scribner’s. Though Bourke’s ethnographic work does not seek to render the native informants’ voice, we are nonetheless given a clear awareness of their unwillingness to submit. Bourke’s observations are ultimately bound to a broader cultural crisis about the nature of national identity occasioned by the Mexican-American War. That Mexicans were in their own cultural topography before the American colonization of Mexican territories is inconsequential to Bourke, not because genealogical lines of origin do little to address the nature of coexisINTRODUCTION 4 tence but because they allow him to excise Mexicans from America’s past and his own present in order to imagine a country free of a people rendered unfit for national civic life. This “degraded, turbulent, ignorant, and...