Chicano Nations: The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature

Conclusion: “. . . Walking in the Dark Forest of the Twenty-First Century”

Conclusion: “ . . . Walking in the Dark Forest of the Twenty-First Century” That is how, in March 2002, Mexican-born, San Francisco–based performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, in conversation with Lisa Wolford, described what it felt like for him to make art after September 11, 2001 (ethno-techno 282). Parsing the events of the early 2000s one can easily understand why. In November 2005, the administration of then president George W. Bush announced the Secure Border Initiative. SBINet, through a contract awarded to Boeing, was not only to increase guards and expand the physical wall along the two-thousand-mile U.S.-Mexico border but also to wire it for the new millennium with a technologyrich array of cameras, sensors, and radar that would precisely pinpoint people crossing into the United States illegally (Archibold). This heightened security was part of the long history of the U.S.-Mexico border’s militarization, but it was also given impetus by the increasing paranoia in the United States after 9/11 about the porosity of U.S. borders and the ease with which terrorists might infiltrate the country. In the years immediately following the 9/11 attacks, collective anxieties about terror were quickly and easily cathected onto longstanding uneasiness with perceived others, and the global War on Terror came also to serve, as Mario Acevedo’s campy, detective fiction asserts, as justifiable allegory of racial and ethnic discrimination. The 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States was thought by many to indicate a turning point in the national conversation about race, immigration, and national borders. Deportations increased by 5 percent, however, in 2009, 202 / conclusion signaling a continuation rather than a reversal of Bush-era xenophobia (Kaye). It remains to be seen how much effect, if any, the hundreds of thousands of activists who crowded the National Mall on March 21, 2010, in frustration over stalled immigration reform will have. Joe Arpaio , known nationally for his aggressive anti-immigrant tactics, is still sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, suggesting that national space still, in many ways, correlates quite strongly to a national race, despite our brief moment of electoral reconciliation. Alex Rivera makes this same point in his film Sleep Dealer (2008), a futuristic dystopia depicting a world connected by technology yet divided by geopolitical borders, in which Mexican workers sell their labor by connecting their bodies, over the Internet, to robots on el otro lado (the other side). Sleep Dealer has a hopeful, if not happy, ending, however, with protagonists destroying a major dam controlling the regional water supply and vowing to continue the struggle against multinational capital. And, on March 16, 2010, Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano, who battled Arpaio when she served as Arizona’s governor, announced that her department would be pulling $50 million in funding for SBINet. To be sure, Secretary Napolitano is not advocating open borders; those funds will be redirected toward proven technologies that can be implemented immediately, such as heat sensors and night-vision goggles. We appear, though, on the cusp of this second decade of the twenty-first century , to be at a virtual crossroads at once promising and problematic. The border remains, but the irrational anxieties fueling SBINet have somewhat subsided; divisions exist, but perhaps we are moving toward more reasonable and effective means of reconciling them. In his landmark speech on U.S. racial relations, delivered during the presidential campaign in March 2008 in Philadelphia, Barack Obama made an argument about race that resonates with the argument about national space suggested by Napolitano’s 2010 announcement about SBINet . The historical legacy of race is real and divisive. Today’s disparities, he said, “can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” (4). We must, he argued, direct our energies not toward anger at past inequality but toward redressing today’s income and achievement gaps, and ending the “cycle of violence . . . that continues to haunt us” (5). The only way to do this, however, is not by ignoring our past but by confronting the historical truth of racism so that “together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds” (6). Not transcend race but move beyond “racial wounds.” We must “[embrace] the burdens of our past without conclusion / 203 becoming victims of our past,” acknowledge history...