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Millennial Anxieties: Borders, Violence and the Struggle for Chicana/o Subjectivity Arturo J. Aldama Arizona State University The events of 1836 brought forth charges of Mexican depravity and violence, atheme which became pervasive once Anglos made closer contact with the state's Hispanic population following the war. In the crisis of the moment, firebrands spoke alarmingly of savage, degenerate, half-civilized, and barbarous Mexicans committing massacres and atrocities at Goliad and the Alamo. —Amoldo de León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 (1983) We were thrown out of just about everywhere, but what really made me feel bad was when we tried to go into a restaurant or a restroom downtown, and we were told, 'No you can't use it.' The police would always come and say, 'This is a public place, you have to get out, you're not allowed here.' —Maria Elena Lucas, Forged Under the Sun/ Forjada Bajo el Sol (1993) Chicana/o border studies, devoted to understanding the complex dialectics of racialized, subaltern, feminist and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid mestiza/o cultural production, is at the vanguard of historical, anthropological, literary, cultural, artistic and theoretical inquiry.1 This essay is an invitation to situate the diverse practices of critical US/Mexican borderland inquiry in the histotical moment of 1998-1999. We hang at the precipice of the next millennium with all of the promises and anxieties that it produces. For our inquiry, one of the most important of these anxieties is the unkept promise that ensued from the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo over 150 years ago. This treaty signed at the end of the US/Mexican war resulted in the formation of the US/Mexico border, the forced purchase of Northern México for 15 million dollars (California, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 2, 1998 42 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Utah and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma and Kansas) as well as the supposed protection of property and civil, cultural and religious rights of ChÃ-canos and Mexicana/o peoples.2 Disturbed and outraged by the continued prevalence of historical patterns of criminalization, marginalization, dispossession, civil rights violations and torture in Chicana/o and other subaltern communities, my essay seeks to contribute to the field of critical border studies by exploring the relationship between discourses of otherization crystallized by the US/México border (racial, sexual, ideological ) and state-enforced acts of violence (INS, paramilitary and police ) on the bodies of Mexicana/o and Latina/o immigrants and Chicana/ o youth. "Shifting Borders, Free Trade, and Frontier Narratives: US, Canada, and México, American Literary History" (1994) by Pamela Maria Smorkaloff summarizes the movement of critical border studies as it responds to specific geo-political locations. Smorkaloff considers the ways in which theorists, writers, and performance artists map transfrontier social space challenging monologic socio-political forces that maintain national borders: "Transfrontier writers and theorists are developing a kind of syncretism of the first and third worlds in their writing that captures not only the complex reality of the border zone, but also a more profound understanding of the contemporary US and the Latin America living within" ( 97). In similar terms, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (1991) by D. Emily Hicks examines the dialectics of transfrontier identity and border writing. Hicks uses the concept of border crossings as a metaphor and a tool to analyze the heterogeneity of identity in Latin American writing. Even though the bulk of the text focuses on two major Argentinean writers, Julio Cortázar and Luisa Valenzuela, Hicks begins the study by discussing the US/México border region, and concludes it by returning to Chicano and Mexicano writing in the US/México border regions. Hicks argues that border writing "emphasizes the differences in reference codes between two or more cultures" (xxv) expressing the "bilingual , bi-cultural, bi-conceptual reality" of border crossers. However, Hicks is emphatic in positing that border writing is about crossing cultural borders and not physical borders. This leads to her disturbing characterization of the US/México border as a theater of "metaphors...

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