Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature

Chapter 2: The Mesoamerican in the Mexican-American Imagination: Chicano Movement Indigenism

ChAPter 2 The Mesoamerican in the Mexican-American Imagination: Chicano Movement Indigenism C hicana/o poetics encompasses a range of textual expressions, including fiction, drama, poetry, and political manifestos. The movement period of this literary history is marked by the thematic recurrence of particular iconic images. For example, student and offcampus activist participation in the farmworker unionization movement helped create public awareness of the material conditions under which many agricultural workers labored.1 This movement was also popularized through the work of El Teatro Campesino, an organizing tool founded in 1965 to stage performances in the fields and recruit workers for the union.2 Characterizing farmworkers as “the least acculturated and most economically exploited members of Mexican-American society,” José Limón considers them “an ideal resolving symbol” for movement discourse (Mexican Ballads 83). Within the farmworker movement itself, however, it was the image of la Virgin de Guadalupe that graced the march banners, a unifying image from the shared culture of Catholicism. In addition to migrant agricultural laboring forces, literary attention focused on the urban conditions of Chicana/o communities and politicized the figure of the pachuco. Long considered by both MexicanAmerican and Anglo-American societies as little more than a gangster or hoodlum, the pachuco was reclaimed by movement poetics as a countercultural figure of resistance. José Montoya’s 1972 poem “El Louie” has received significant attention in Chicano literary criticism and is perhaps the most highly regarded treatment of the theme of urban pachuco life.3 The language of indigenism and the theme of Chicana/o indigenous ancestry are thus but one set of iconic signifiers deployed within movement rhetoric. Articulated within a matrix of recovered Mesoamerican mythology, Chicana/o indigenism mobilizes the story of the Aztec mi- 72 Blood Lines gration from the ancestral homeland of Aztlán, the cosmogonic narrative of el Quinto Sol/the Fifth Sun, and the cross-culturally significant figure of the plumed serpent, also known as the god-king Quetzalcoatl. Indigenism found outlets in fiction and poetry, in public mural art of the period, and in the drama productions of El Teatro Campesino.4 Aztlán and Chicano Indigenism Very often, indigenism elaborated the mythic beginnings of Chicanas/os through the Aztlán myth, which has figured prominently in some writings . Analyses of the poetics of movement indigenism have been characterized both by an acknowledgment of its positive force, as well as by a dismissal of its political value, with a few exceptions. Even as they critique the homogenizing effects of movement discourse, for example, Rosa Linda Fregoso and Angie Chabram-Dernersesian recognize it as “a space where an alternative cultural production and identity could flourish ” (204). They present Aztlán as a case in point in that it “provided a basis for a return to our roots, for a return to an identity before domination and subjugation—a voyage back to pre-Columbian times” (204– 205). And Genaro Padilla writes that myth was a strategy to “maintain group cohesion . . . and a heroized national past distinct from that of the United States” (“Myth” 116). More recently, Pérez-Torres has contended that “[i]dentification with the Indian gave birth to a Chicano/a critical subaltern identity in solidarity with other indigenous groups throughout the Americas” (Mestizaje 9). Gustavo Segade, in his introduction to the 1976 Festival de Flor y Canto: An Anthology of Chicano Literature, characterized Aztlán as a “mythic timespace,” (3) and, indeed, it is a term that cements myth, history, and geography in a continuum that enables nationalist consciousness. Both Alurista and Armando Rendon were committed to the idea of Aztlán, with Alurista retaining credit for having imported the term into an emergent Chicano nationalism. Alurista also explicitly rewrote the Aztec migration story as a Chicano narrative of origin that linked ancient Indigenous travelers to present-day mestizo communities in the United States.5 He presented a poem to attendees at the 1969 Denver Youth Conference, which eventually became the preamble to “El Plan de Aztlán.” According to the poet’s account, documented in an interview collected in the first installment of the pbS series Chicano!, he was startled at how quickly people seized upon the idea of Aztlán and how readily the poem was in- the Mesoamerican in the Mexican-American Imagination 73 corporated into a founding document of the Chicano movement.6 The tale of southward migration became the basis for...