Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art

Epilogue

181 Q Nativist and anti-immigration policies, as exhibited by the passing of SB 1070, or the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, in Arizona in 2010 and similar calls to enforce such legislation nationally, recycle and extend the racialized binaries of domestic/foreign and legal/illegal, which have framed the dominant narrative of Mexicana, Chicana, and Latina domesticity that I have analyzed throughout this book.1 SB 1070 affirms the requirement that immigrants register with the US federal government and makes it a state misdemeanor to not have registration documents in one’s possession at all times. It requires local law enforcement, during a lawful stop, detention, or arrest, to determine a person ’s immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person is an undocumented immigrant (Arizona State Senate, 2010).2 While SB 1070 focuses on the public space of the law, rhetoric surrounding the bill targeted the Latina body and domestic spheres of Latina/o immigrant communities. In this way, the bill echoes nativist discourse prevalent during the debate over Proposition 187 in California in 1994, which configured Mexicanas as invading the nation through their fertility. As many commentators have noted, SB 1070 was introduced by Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, who worked with Kris Kobach, a Kansas attorney who has connections with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The organization has a long history of seeking to regulate the reproductive rights of Mexicanas and Puerto Rican women, as represented by the founder and board member of FAIR, Dr. John Tanton, whose writings have linked population growth and immigration since the 1970s (Gutiérrez 2008). As C. Alejandra Elenes argues, “Laws such as SB 1070 not only create a hostile environment for Latinas/os in Arizona but are part of a national narrative of race and gender in the United States resulting from demographic changes and fears about the ‘browning’ of America. In this climate, the female brown body Epilogue denaturalizing the domestic 182 Domestic Negotiations is particularly targeted and objectified.”3 Given the persistence of rhetoric that continues to render women of Mexican descent—regardless of class and immigration status—as threatening the cohesion of the nation through their biological and cultural reproduction, the Chicana artistic project of denaturalizing the associations of Latinas to the domestic is now more crucial than ever. In this epilogue, I turn to Alma López’s digital print California Fashions Slaves (1997)—an iris print on canvas, and part of her series “1848: Chicanos in the US Landscape After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo” (fig.12).4 Produced just three years after the debate over Proposition 187, on the ballot in California in 1994, the print comments on another moment of heightened anti-Latina/o and anti–Latina/o immigrant rhetoric and nativist climate. Proposition 187 sought to deny undocumented immigrants healthcare and education, a goal shaped by the popular belief that Latina/o immigrants were a menace to the California economy. Supporters of the proposition depicted Mexicans as invading the nation through their fertility and domestic spaces (Chávez 2007, 2001; Gutiérrez 2008).5 López indicates how her print “directly relates to the whole misconception that immigrants are a drain on the economy. For me growing up everybody including my mother were hard-working people. More than anything they’re Figure 12. Alma López, California Fashions Slaves, 1997. Digital iris print on canvas, created in Photoshop, 20 × 24 inches. Thanks to Macrina López Ureña. Courtesy of the artist. Epilogue 183 working poor, working really hard at less-than-minimum-wage salaries. If anything , they’re contributing to the economy” (qtd. in Knight 2001). López further suggests how these women are “part of a working poor community racially stereotyped and vilified for allegedly draining the United States economy” (2002, 90). The print visually links contemporary political moments with the historical periods that precede them, including the colonization of the US Southwest and the many programs that sought to disenfranchise and circumscribe Mexicanas and Chicanas to domestic labor, such as Manifest Destiny, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Americanization, immigration policies, and globalization. The print therefore functions as a powerful commentary on the persistence of xenophobic rhetoric against Latinas in the United States. California Fashions Slaves depicts Macrina López, López’s mother and a seamstress , alongside Mexicana garment workers and union organizers from the 1930s and 1940s in...