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TEKI LENGUAS DEL YOLLOTZÍN (CUT TONGUES FROM THE HEART): 18 COLONIALISM, BORDERS, AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE Delberto Dario Ruiz I accept the assumption that “all relations are relations of power” (Touraine 1981), and am therefore analytically compelled to understand the dynamics of social relations as relations of power. —Teresa Córdova, “Power and Knowledge: Colonialism in the Academy” (1994) Far from the blinding light of Europe’s Enlightenment, among people who wear the scars of modern violence as a second skin, it becomes dif¤cult to clear from sight or to displace onto foreign Others the barbarous underside of modern civilization. —Fernando Coronil, The Magical State (1997) . . . as history constantly teaches us, discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle. —Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse” (1981) AS A Yaqui/Huichol/Xicano, the realities of a cut tongue are especially disturbing. When I was young, my great-grandmother, Rita Cubedo (later “cut” to Diaz as a stratagem for surviving the inquisition against Yaquis in the late 1900s), would speak to me in our native Yaqui language. Though quite young, I nonetheless retain vivid recollections of those interactions. One image I remember in particular is of my great-grandmother and me speaking to each other in Yaqui, Mexican Spanish, and bits of English while she made tortillas on a wood-burning stove. After I enrolled in school, I learned to leave such stories and language skills behind. Tongues were cut from my heart. “Speak English, you are in America now!” is a statement forever embedded in my psyche. Such utterances can be heard throughout pedagogical practices across the United States, functioning to occlude anyone and anything deemed outside of mainstream discourse. My project thus implicates colonialism and its machinations: the theft of lands, the demonization of native inhabitants, and the creation of borders. Foremost for this essay, “Teki Lenguas del Yollotzín,” my project reclaims cut tongues 355 and offers an analysis of how dominant discourses and languages relegate Xicanas/os to lives with “cut tongues.” Such domination contributes to the displacement of a people, their cultures and languages. I show how subaltern cultural practices create alternative discourses and serve to counter Eurocentric intellectual and cultural hegemony. The heterotextual and hybrid literatures created by writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Alfred Arteaga , Francisco Alarcón, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and José Montoya challenge , I argue, the hegemonic critical apparatus which silences and buries Xicana/o concepts, languages, and cultural productions. These authors speak to the varying ways gente de las Américas (people of Latin American ancestry) create identities in opposition to colonialism and borders by articulating alternate political spaces. By interweaving analysis of border cultures, pedagogical and juridical systems, and examples of subaltern productions , my essay reveals alternative modes for reading the oppressive nature of Western modernity. Colonial powers, ¤rst Spain and then the various nations that followed , controlled institutions, while legitimizing subordination under the guise of a “natural ordering” of the universe. One of the darker sides of this colonialist “natural ordering” has been the psychological effects on colonized people, embedding in them a subordinate and submissive sense of being and place. The violent psychological and cultural imperialism of colonial domination is dif¤cult to gauge. However, Jean Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963) summarizes the how the colonial balance of power operates: “Not so long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants; ¤ve hundred million men, and one thousand ¤ve hundred million natives. The former had the World; the other had the use of it.”1 Alfred Arteaga, professor of ethnic studies at the University of California –Berkeley, opens his work, Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities , by referring to a few lines in his poem “Cantos”: Another Island A continent A line, half water, half metal. The last line, “A line, half water, half metal” reads to him in two ways. “[O]n the one hand, [the line serves] to point to the intersection of the personal and the social and, on the other, to point to something else” (6). For Arteaga the line not only signi¤es borders metaphorically, “but the actual physical and political borderline” demarcating the United States from Mexico, “which is, after all, Rio Grande water that runs from the Gulf of Mexico to Juaréz / El Paso and a metal fence from there to the Paci ¤c...

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