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d r e a d e d ฀ n o n - i d e n t i t i e s ฀ o F ฀ n i g h t ฀ • ฀ 1 7 chaPter฀one DreaDeD non-iDentities of night: night anD shaDows in฀chicana/o฀cultural฀Production How do you make the invisible visible? You take it away. —Lila Rodriguez in A Day Without a Mexican The Nighttime of a Day without a Mexican Of the more than fifty million Latina/os currently within the continental borders of the United States, Mexican Americans have had a long borderlands history—defined by military battles and treaties in the name of U.S. national expansion, by laws, and by daily discriminatory practices—of being treated as the other Americans, los otros americanos. They became aliens in their own land with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that officially concluded the Mexican -American War and in the years subsequent to that treaty, which involved an Anglo landgrab of previously Mexican areas. In 1971, Chicano attorney, writer, and political activist Oscar “Zeta” Acosta pointedly summed up the situation: The American government took our country away from us in 1848, when the government of Mexico sold us out. They sold not only the land, but they basically sold us as slaves in the sense that our labor and our land was [sic] being expropriated. The governments never gave us a choice about whether to be American citizens. One night we were Mexican and the next day we were American . This historical relationship is the most important part of the present day relationships, but it’s totally ignored or unknown or rejected by the Anglo society . [emphasis mine]1 As Chicano critic Raymund A. Paredes observed over a quarter of a century ago, “According to Guadalupe Hidalgo and succeeding documents, Spanish and ฀ 1 8 ฀ • ฀ b u e n a s ฀ n o c h e s , ฀ a m e r i c a n ฀ c u l t u r e Mexican land grants were to be honored by the American government, but after the war, Mexican Americans were systematically stripped of their property.”2 They were not only dispossessed of their property; they were (and still are) systematically discriminated against in terms of education, employment, the law, health services, and many other areas of daily experience. This systematic discrimination is described in great detail and without apology in Julián Segura Camacho’s 2005 manifesto The Chicano Treatise.3 Traces of this alienation can be found everywhere in Mexican American and explicitly politicized Chicana/o cultural production, from early- to mid-nineteenth-century corridos (or narrative ballads that serve as a musical form of news) to the latest comic strips. Those traces are composed of a proliferating network of signs that denote or connote socioeconomic and psychosocial marginalization, erasure, and invisibility , ranging from masks to utter darkness. Night is the ur-sign, the penumbral trope, for this repressive Othering. Night is also a response to the Othering that challenges it with a dissolution of the terms and conditions of containment and subordination encapsulated by the concept of “illegal alien.” Contemporary Mexican visual artist and political cartoonist Sergio Arau’s 2004 mockumentary A Day Without a Mexican (co-written with Sergio Guerrero and Yareli Arizmendi) demonstrates the extent to which Mexicans in the United States have been turned into aliens, non-citizens, and hardly residents in the United States generally and in land once Mexican (such as California) specifically . In response to the alienation, “illegalization,” and dehumanization of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, the film depicts the massive disappearance of Mexican and other workers from the United States one dark, foggy night and examines how U.S. society would be helpless without the presence of the Mexicans and other Others whose labor thoroughly supports it. The film renders meaningless nativist claims of insider status in contrast to the supposed alien status of Mexicans, dissolving these claims in the nightmarish reality of having no more Mexican and Latin American labor on the highways, in the kitchens, in the factories, in the vineyards, or anywhere else in the infrastructure of Gringolandia . The dominant metaphor for this suspension of business as usual is a dense wall of fog that arises one night and surrounds California, cutting it off from telephone, internet, and radio communications and thus “isolating the population from the rest of the world,” as one reporter observes during one of the film’s news reports. Inside the state, more and more...

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