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7 Imagining Identity/Seeing Difference Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue The fundamental necessity of recognizing difference, as a prelude to the forging of “solidarity” or of coalitions, is at the heart of Demetria Martínez’s novel Mother Tongue. This novel is primarily concerned with the debunking of idealized , romanticized conceptions of essential connectedness between peoples of vastly different experiences, and with the substitution in its place of a carefully forged solidarity based on learning, listening, and, ultimately, activism. The novel’s implications for the concept of a natural panethnic “Latino” identity are significant—although almost never explicit. As Dalia Kandiyoti observes, Mother Tongue “speaks to our contemporary obsessions with globalized, transnational identities and to borderless, pan-Latino ideals” (426).1 Juan Gonzalez has pointed out that, by the time Salvadorans and other Central Americans began to arrive in the United States in massive numbers during the 1980s, as a result of civil wars, human rights abuses, and massacres (sometimes U.S. backed) in their own countries,2 “the [U.S.] Latino immigrants of prior years had built stable ethnic enclaves, had perfected their English-speaking abilities, and even boasted an embryonic professional class with a basic grasp of its civil rights. The average Central American, on the other hand, spoke no English, was undocumented, unskilled, and desperate for any kind of work” (140). On a similar note, Suzanne Oboler has suggested that part of the problem with the term “Hispanic” is that it “lumps together recent political refugees from El Salvador with past political exiles like the first wave of Cubans who arrived in the early 1960s [whose] upper- and middle-class status and racial composition” resulted in some significant “differences between their entry process and experiences and those of” other immigrant “Hispanic” groups (1). Martínez’s novel testifies to the difficulty of obtaining legal residency for Salvadorans, not only because they were generally poorer and darker skinned than their first-wave Cuban counterparts, but (perhaps even more important) because the Salvadorans were escaping a U.S.-backed regime and were per- Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue 197 ceived by the U.S. government as aligned with communism, while the whiter and more well off Cubans were escaping communism itself.3 Mother Tongue is virtually silent on the subject of Cuban immigration and the relationship of Cuban immigrants to Salvadoran ones;4 but Martínez is at pains to note the vastly different experiences of her Salvadoran political refugee and the novel’s narrator, a U.S.-born Chicana. Mary, the narrator, falls in love with José Luis (the Salvadoran) before even meeting him, spinning romantic fantasies about the almost mystical connections between them. Though these connections are not at any point put specifically in terms of their common “Latino” heritage, it is clear that in Mary’s mind this is part, at least, of their affinity. Mary comments retrospectively on their first meeting: “I don’t know why I had expected Olmec” (4). As Debra Castillo astutely notes in Border Women (2002), “In her first impression upon seeing the Salvadoran refugee there is a curious superimposition of expectations and the frustration of these expectations. José Luis initially represents for Mary a particular cultural site associated for her with her own incompletely understood, romanticized Mexican past.” Thus Mary projects her own imagined past onto José Luis, even though the Olmecs are “entirely unrelated to El Salvador” (Castillo and Tabuenca Córdoba 173).5 At another point, in dealing with tensions that arise in their later relationship , Mary refers to her “credentials, the fact that I am Mexican American” (124). The use of the word “credentials” is both peculiar and telling. In response to José Luis’s insistence that “you don’t know what it’s like” (123) to be a political refugee (or, worse, to see your people being murdered), Mary seems to be making a claim to be able to understand via her identity, as opposed to her experience—she, like José Luis, is Hispanic.6 At the same time, she notes that José Luis rejects her claim to an essential understanding. At certain key moments (such as when he learns of the murder of two nuns who worked with El Salvador’s poor), he sees Mary more as American than as in any way “related” to him and his experience:7 “He saw in me an image of a gringa whose pale skin and tax dollars are putting his compatriots to death. My credentials...

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