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  • Fiesta on the Border
  • Ilan Stavans (bio)

Vol. 9, No. 1. 1994.

Becoming Mexican-American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945, by George J. Sanchez.

Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story, by Ruth Behar.

A refreshing new concept has emerged in academic circles and beyond: to live in the cultural hyphen, to inhabit the borderland. Nowhere is the debate surrounding it more candid and more historically enlightening than among Hispanics in the United States. …

In the 1960s and ’70s, most Latino intellectuals resisted the very idea of integration into mainstream American culture. Influenced by Juan Gómez-Quiñones, dean of Chicano history, the discussion centered on what theoreticians called “negative assimilation.” Immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries, it was asserted, wanted to retain their ancestral heritage against all odds and costs; their daily existence in the United States was a painful chain of struggles against the Anglo-Saxon milieu. … The Chicano movement, inspired by César Chávez and Rodolfo González (among others) and linked to protests for Black power and against the Vietnam War, became, for many Latinos, the apex of opposition. To affirm collective traditions, to remain loyal to the immigrant culture, was deemed the crux of political virtue.

How things have changed. Led by feminist writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga—who analyze “the mestizo worldview” (one composed of both European and native identities)—interpreters today are engaged in an altogether different discussion. Living in a universe of cultural contradictions, Latino thinkers have ceased to revel, militantly, in their separateness. They have decided to embrace an ambiguous, labyrinthine identity—to enjoy their transactions with the Anglo environment. Down with political activism and radical rage, welcome to fashionable exoticism. … The fever that once surrounded Latin America’s magic realism … has been eclipsed by barrio nightclubs and street jargon.

Read the entire article at www.tikkun.org/tikkunat30

Ilan Stavans

ilan stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. This article was reprinted with his permission.

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