Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globilization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative

Chapter Two. Cultural Identity and Dystopia in Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues

91 Chapter Two Cultural Identity and Dystopia in Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an age that might be imaginary. George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four Debates about identity politics have had a significant impact on literary production in Latin America and the United States in recent decades, as is evidenced by the vast number of contemporary narratives on the theme of ethnicity. Inspired by the anticipation of the 1992 commemoration of five centuries of intercultural contact between Old and New Worlds, there has been a proliferation of Mexican novels that reexamine the theme of racial and cultural amalgamation during the period of conquest and colonization of the Americas;1 these include: Ignacio Solares’s Nen, la inútil (1992); Olivier Debroise’s Crónica de las destrucciones (1998); Carmen Boullosa’s Llanto: novelas imposibles (1992) and Duerme (1994); and the novellas in Carlos Fuentes’s collection El naranjo (1993). For its part, Chicano literary production since the 1970s has included a current that represents cultural mestizaje as a response to Anglocentric politics, in works such as Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1978), and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La frontera (1987). Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) continues in these trends, revalorizing the concept of racial and cultural miscegenation by tracing its evolution in the history of Mexico and within Chicano communities in the United States while adding a dose of science fiction to project the role of multiculturalism into the future.2 In The Rag Doll Plagues,3 set geographically 92 Chapter Two in both Mexico and California and chronologically in three periods —colonial past, postcolonial present, and post-apocalyptic future—the metaphor of an epidemic4 serves to call attention to ethnic divisions that have their origin in the colonization of the New World and continue to separate contemporary American and Mexican society. In Morales’s novel, for each utopia —the Garden of Eden, the American Dream, and the borderless sanitized future proposed by industrialized capitalism of the late 1990s—the narrator juxtaposes a dystopian alternative that is characterized by recurring plagues caused by ecological abuse. In this novel, the rhetoric of degeneration, colonial desire, and phobias of contact signal the presence of disciplinary forms of control based on the social construction of race, as Morales creatively combines the theme of miscegenation with medical discourses.5 In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag has pointed to the idea that “Medical imagery has been used widely in satirical attacks on society, and diseases have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust” (Illness as Metaphor 42). In The Rag Doll Plagues, Morales employs the image of epidemics to analyze societies that experience processes of crisis, transition, and growth. In this context, the metaphor of the plague serves to navigate the limits and borders of colonial, modern, and postcolonial societies, in order to demonstrate how mechanisms of control regulate subaltern communities, who, as in Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato, manage to take significant steps toward social justice through alternative cultural projects. The Rag Doll Plagues discusses the implications of mestizaje in various manners, in terms of racial mixing, intercultural and technological crossings, and relations between genders and social classes. Significantly, although racial miscegenation between different groups is suggested in each of the three sections, it never comes to fruition among the novel’s main characters. In Morales’s fictionalized past, present, and future, fear of contact predominates, provoking segregation between communities on both sides of the US-Mexican border. Morales highlights the need to create new strategies for intercultural relations beginning with, but not limited to, racial miscegenation and in multidirectional fashion, including people of Hispanic, Anglo, 93 Cultural Identity and Dystopia and Asian descent, to reflect the complex cultural composition of contemporary Southern California. Through his genealogy of the dream of mestizaje, Morales expands this concept and adds cultural reconversion from the margins as a potential answer for a nightmarish future. The Rag Doll Plagues is divided into three books, each taking place in a different time frame. The first section, entitled “Mexico City,” illustrates how in a fictionalized version of the late colonial period, the capital of New Spain falls victim to a plague that the residents call...