Hybrid Resolutions: Liberal Democracy and Ethnic Identity in Montserrat Fontes's Dreams of the Centaur

Hybrid Resolutions: Liberal Democracy and Ethnic Identity in Montserrat Fontes's Dreams of the Centaur Roberto Canta Ï• professor of Chicano Studies and English at California State University, Los Angeles. Born in Guadakjara, Jalisco (Mexico), he has taught at CaI State, LA since 1974. He has authored articks on Latin American, Spanish, and Chicano literatures , and translated from English to Spanish José Antonio ViUarreal's novel , Pocho (Anchor Books, 1994). Cantú L· the former editor ofthe literary journal Mestet (UCLA, 197375 ), and the founder ofthe literary studies journal Escolios (Cal State, L.A., 1976-82), as well as Campo Libre: Journal of Chicano Studies (CaI State, LA., 1980-84). On April 8-11, 1999, Cantú produced a student performance of Federico GarcÃ-a Lorcds Bodas de Sangre at Cal State, L.A.. He received his Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from UCLA in 1982. One of the junctions of fiction bound up with history is to free, retrospectively, certain possibilities that were not actualized in the historical past. —Paul Ricoeur (191) Literary critics have recently proposed unexpected gen-ealogical origins for Chicano literature, thus suggest-ing a reconstruction of its history. Previously thought to be a post-World War II cultural phenomenon , Chicano literature can now claim ancestral ties to colonial litetary productions, such as Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's Historia de k Nueva México, 1610, or to Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vacas Naufragios. These foundational texts, expressive of discourses of conquest and of cultural hybridity, are considered as referential markers of post-colonialism, therefore (so the argument runs) the discursive background of a "global cultural studies movement ."1 Aware ofthe intent to explain continuity in discontinuity , Genaro Padilla nonetheless welcomes the publication and analysis of politically unfashionable and multi-ideological literary texts: It is not a matter of resuscitating the Spanish colonial literary discourse in a move to heroize a rathet ideologically problematic past; rather, we must reexplicate the formative lines of literary practice that constitute our cultural epistemology, the topology of which was broken by the dominant American hegemony and recently has been dismissed as Hispanophilic by our own Chicano scholars. (35) Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 4, 2000 142 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies These critical positions are best understood in relation to internal transformations in die field of Chicano Studies. We are now realizing that criticism, to be creative (hence truly radical and anti-dogmatic ), should have no restrictions, no "guiding" ideology. In this open critical context , the rethinking of "politically unfashionable " eras in Mexican/Chicano history may lead to productive padis: for instance, one could reflect on the manner in which preexisting paradigms for Mexican/Chicano "history" have conditioned—hence limited —the scope of Chicano cultural criticism . One should not be surprised with the findings: Chicano studies has been deeply indebted to die counterculture ofthe 1960s, and to Mexico's nineteenth-century nationalist discoutse of mestizaje, anti-Spanish sentiment , and Anglo-French democratic liberalism . In other words, the "global" has been an ideological bedrock all along. Writing about Latin American art and the debate on identities, Néstor GarcÃ-a Canclini analyses the problem of national representation as follows: The foreign 'influences' were translated and relocated in national matrices , in projecrs which united the liberal, rationalist aspiration for modernity with a nationalism stamped with the romantic, by which the identity of each people could be one, distinctive and homogeneous. The pretension of constructing national cultures and representing them by specific iconographies is challenged in our time by the processes of an economic and symbolic transnationalisation . (502) Traced back to its historical beginnings , Mexico's nationalist discourse and cultural imagery constitute the political foundation of its Wars of Independence (1810-1821), of its 1824 federal constitution , the banner of Benito Juarez's generation , and the liberal credo of revolutionary movements that overthrew the dictatorship of Porfirio DÃ-az. How is this political and cultural history reconfigured allegorically in the Chicano historical novel so as to interconnect the past with the lived present? How are we to analyze events such as the Mexico-United States war of 1848 (at the core of Chicano history, marking both the separation from Mexico and...