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MILLENNIAL ANXIETIES: BORDERS, VIOLENCE, AND 1 THE STRUGGLE FOR CHICANA AND CHICANO SUBJECTIVITY Arturo J. Aldama The events of 1836 brought forth charges of Mexican depravity and violence, a theme which became pervasive once Anglos made closer contact with the state’s Hispanic population following the war. In the crisis of the moment, ¤rebrands spoke alarmingly of savage, degenerate , half-civilized, and barbarous Mexicans committing massacres and atrocities at Goliad and the Alamo. —Arnoldo de León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (1983) We were thrown out of just about everywhere, but what really made me feel bad was when we tried to go into a restaurant or a restroom downtown, and we were told, “No you can’t use it.” The police would always come and say, “This is a public place, you have to get out, you’re not allowed here.” —Maria Elena Lucas, Forged under the Sun / Forjada bajo el Sol (1993) CHICANA/O BORDER studies, devoted to understanding the complex dialectics of racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid mestiza/o cultural production, is at the vanguard of historical, anthropological, literary, cultural, artistic, and theoretical inquiry.1 This essay is an invitation to situate the diverse practices of critical U.S.-Mexican borderland inquiry in the historical moment of 2000. We hang at the precipice of the next millennium with all of the promises and anxieties that it produces. For our inquiry, one of the most important of these anxieties is the unkept promise that ensued from the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo over 150 years ago. This treaty signed at the end of the U.S.-Mexican war resulted in the formation of the U.S.Mexico border and the forced purchase of northern México for ¤fteen million dollars (California, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, and Kansas), as well as the supposed protection of property and civil, cultural, and religious rights of Chicanos and Mexican peoples.2 Disturbed and outraged by the continued prevalence of historical patterns of criminalization, marginalization, dispossession, civil rights violations, and torture in Chicana/o and other subaltern com11 munities, my essay seeks to contribute to the ¤eld of critical border studies by exploring the relationship between discourses of otherization crystallized by the U.S.-México border (racial, sexual, ideological) and stateenforced acts of violence (Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS], paramilitary, and police) on the bodies of Mexicana/o and Latina/o immigrants and Chicana/o youth. “Shifting Borders, Free Trade, and Frontier Narratives: U.S., Canada, and México” (1994), by Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, summarizes the movement of critical border studies as it responds to speci¤c geopolitical locations . Smorkaloff considers the ways in which theorists, writers, and performance artists map transfrontier social space challenging monologic sociopolitical forces that maintain national borders: “Transfrontier writers and theorists are developing a kind of syncretism of the ¤rst and third worlds in their writing that captures not only the complex reality of the border zone, but also a more profound understanding of the contemporary US and the Latin America living within” (97). In similar terms, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (1991) by D. Emily Hicks examines the dialectics of transfrontier identity and border writing. Hicks uses the concept of border crossings as a metaphor and a tool to analyze the heterogeneity of identity in Latin American writing . Even though the bulk of the text focuses on two major Argentinean writers, Julio Cortázar and Luisa Valenzuela, Hicks begins the study by discussing the U.S.-Mexico border region, and concludes it by returning to Chicano and Mexicano writing in the U.S.-Mexico border regions. Hicks argues that border writing “emphasizes the differences in reference codes between two or more cultures” (xxv), expressing the “bilingual , bi-cultural, bi-conceptual reality” of border crossers. However, Hicks is emphatic in positing that border writing is about crossing cultural borders and not physical borders. This leads to her disturbing characterization of the U.S.-Mexico border as a theater of “metaphors” where “actors”— pollos (undocumented border crossers), la migra (INS), and coyotes (contractors who bring undocumented people over the border)—act their daily “dramas.” Hicks creates a universalizing model that moves beyond concrete historical understandings of subaltern Latina/o “border-crossers” as “real people” responding to “real” geopolitical social realities and understands their experiences as a type of carnivalesque and postmodern theater. In doing...

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