The Chasers by Renato Rosaldo (review)

Renato Rosaldo. The Chasers. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 144 pp.

In a recent radio interview on the topic of his book of poetry, The Chasers, Renato Rosaldo remarked, "There is a subtext in this text. The book could be called—if it were just focused on me, which it's not—'the making of an anthropologist.' There is a lot of close observation." Following these words, Rosaldo moved on to tell of the transnational and bi-cultural world of his upbringing chronicled in The Chasers—Mexican father and Anglo mother with roots along the circum-Caribbean of Veracruz, Mexico and the US Midwestern heartland, respectively. Two worlds seemingly distant, yet both intimately at home in him, though often in contradiction—the fault lines lived along the divides of language, culture, and race. Reflecting on his move to the US Southwest after spending his early childhood in Wisconsin, he writes in the poem "Not from Tucson":

A new friend calls Mexicans dirty, looks my way, says he doesn't mean me. I see what I'm up against, where I have to stand, decide I must re-learn Spanish, must become Mexican-American.

(55)

These experiences cultivated in Rosaldo a keen sense of bearing witness, of understanding and grappling with difference—all necessary for conducting good ethnography. These experiences, as he comments, prepared him for a life of anthropological inquiry, at the heart of which has been critical attention to liminal spaces and the lived experiences of allegorical social divides, or what he refers to in his work as the "borderlands." This analytic, however, is also a literal placial reference to the complexities of living along the US–Mexico border region.

At the crossroads of poetry, prose, and anthropology, The Chasers offers an historical auto-ethnographic glimpse of life on the borderlands of nations and cultures, chronicling Rosaldo's deep and formative experiences of growing up in Tucson, Arizona and those of his twelve Mexican American Tucson High School friends—a group known as the Chasers (1956–1959)—as they came of age, graduated, and fell out of touch. Sourced from memory and interviews with the Chasers following their fiftieth high school reunion, Rosaldo's prose poetry offers up a collective, multi-layered portrait of borderlands living—crossing between identities, languages, and institutions over decades. He evocatively assembles events, stories, and descriptions with ethnographic acumen and poetic intuition, or as he writes in "Never Chicano Enough":

Can't sort what I invented from what I remember or what I lived—who we were, what we did.

(5)

This work begs us to consider how creative genres allow us to rethink the possibilities of ethnographic narrative within the context of anthropological research. In other words—and with further specificity—what is the relationship between ethnography and poetry? And what might ethnography bring to poetry and vice versa as forms that lend attention to the senses, while attending to certain conventions about structure and genre? Indeed, anthropology has long been preoccupied with poetry in one way or another. From Boas's discussion of the importance of investigating poetry in Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911) to Sapir's (1921) emphasis on the role of sound and aesthetics in poetic practice; from Zora Neale Hurston's (1935) creative play with genres and poetics in her own ethnographic practice, to the ethnopoetic analysis of Tedlock (1983) and Hymes (1981); and most certainly the work of Bauman (1984) and Feld (1982) on performativity, genre, interdiscursivity, and the voice. And yet, it seems anthropologists have often kept their own poetic voices hidden—Ruth Benedict comes to mind, who published her poetry under pseudonyms as a way of concealing it from her anthropology colleagues. While an object of analysis, poetry has traditionally been accepted less as a mode of ethnographic writing. Presently, however, lyrical prose is more commonplace within anthropology, in part, due to the pioneering work of Rosaldo.

Writing poetry with an ethnographic sensibility is not new for Rosaldo. In 2013, he published The Day...