Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (review)

Because literary and cultural studies programs tend to be defined primarily in terms of language, Latina/o studies experience an inevitable tension as to whether they are based in Spanish or English departments. Spanish departments make sense since, in the early days, most Chicano writers had an advanced command of academic Spanish and, besides, most English departments were simply not interested in anything that contradicted the high modernism in English that in the twentieth century came to constitute the identity of most such faculties. As English programs became postmodern, cross- and multi-cultural, Latina/o writers, who in many cases no longer had/ did not have a command of academic Spanish came to be acceptable under a rubric of American ethnic literature. But the accommodation continues to be a difficult one: unlike virtually all other so-called ethnic American writers, who write in English (even when it may be ethnically inflected, as is the case of a large swath of Afro-American writing), Latina/o writers retain an undiminished commitment to Spanish. Although they may not always write it on the level of Latin American writers, the language is there: it is there, as Francisco X. Alarcón says in one of his brilliant poems, as what his grandmother whispered in his ear; it is there as the grounding of cultural sustainability in a community in which major segments of private, domestic, intimate life are conducted in (mostly) colloquial varieties of Spanish (so much so that one of Richard Rodriguez's main points in opposing bilingual education is that he did not want the state, often in the form of poorly trained Anglo bilingual teachers, intruding on these intimate domains of the language); it is there in the material culture of daily life, as foods, products, practices, rituals, symbols, phatic tags (including proverbs and other sayings), all of which make the barrio the barrio; and it is there, at whatever level of usage, at whatever level of linguistic competence, as a central form of cultural resistance to the oppressive indignities of Anglo word. Walter Mignolo has written about the conversion of Spanish, in the Americas, from being the language of imperial expansion to the language of the colonially dominated, although this is a history that has not yet been adequately written, due, I would assert, to the limited familiarity on the part of most cultural studies scholars with the principles of scientific linguistics.

There has been a notable trend to create administratively Chicano Studies programs, either as autonomous academic units or as interdisciplinary centers bringing together scholars of an array of home departments. While this has led, especially in the case of the former model, to some exceptionally distinguished research bases, it is important to note that, for whatever acknowledgement there is made of the substratum, residual, iconic importance of Spanish, these programs are conducted paradigmatically in English. Moreover, to judge by the recent histories on the evolution of Chicano Studies—Chicano Studies: The Genesis of a Discipline (2009), by Michael Soldatenko; and The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe (2010), by Rodolfo F. Acuña—cultural studies generally and in literature specifically have no place in the curriculum, being given about a two-page treatment in both books. One cannot image a well-trained Chicana/o literary scholar who does not have a serious grounding in Chicano history, but the implication is unmistakable that one can be a serious Chicano sociologist without ever having read a Chicano poem.

This top-heavy introduction to Saldívar's study is necessary to frame what is really very important about his work. In the first place, this is a work of cultural analysis. Saldívar develops his proposals for a trans-American consciousness with specific reference to literature and other cultural texts. Nepantlism, the condition of being in-between (the elaboration of a Nahuatl trope), is postulated by Sald...