{i}
SAIL
Studies in American Indian
Literatures
Series 2
Volume 7, Number
4
Winter 1995
David Halliburton, Guest Editor
CONTENTS
Introduction
David
Halliburton .
.
.
.
. 1
Transethnic Anthropologism: Comparative Ethnic Studies
at Berkeley
Gerald
Vizenor
.
.
.
.
. 3
Spatial Narrative: Aural and Visual Construction in the
Musical Narrative of Minority Discourse
Servio
Marín
.
.
.
.
. 9
Reflections on Manifest Destiny
Gail
Tremblay
.
.
.
.
. 35
The Anasazi Legacy Is the Light of the Jurassic Sun
William
Willard .
.
.
.
. 37
Entitlement of Women in Latin America
Helia M.
Corral .
.
.
.
. 51
Unravelling Cruelty
Gail
Tremblay
.
.
.
.
. 69
Feminist Neo-Indigenism in Chicana Aztlán
Arthur
Ramirez .
.
.
.
. 71
Teaching "Multicultural" Perspectives: All Not Present and
Accounted For
Bruce
McKenna .
.
.
.
. 79
Essentially, It's Spring
Paula Gunn
Allen .
.
.
.
. 87
FORUM
Sessions at 1995
MLA .
.
.
.
. 88
Call for
Submissions .
.
.
.
. 90
CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . 91
1995 ASAIL Patrons:
University College of the University of
Cincinnati
California State University, San Bernardino
Western Washington University
University of Richmond
Karl Kroeber
A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
and others who wish to remain anonymous
1995 Sponsors:
D. L. Birchfield
Margaret C. Kingsland
Arnold Krupat
Andrea Lerner
and others who wish to remain anonymous
{1}
Introduction
David Halliburton
In the summer of 1994 the
Program for Faculty Renewal, sponsored alternately since 1975 by the Lilly
Endowment and the Mellon Foundation, held a weeklong residential workshop at Stanford on
"Multiculturalism,
Technology, and the Arts," following a similar workshop it had held in San Diego. Gerald
Vizenor, Gail Tremblay,
and Servio Marín served as discussion leaders at Stanford. All three contribute articles to
this issue of SAIL, as do
several particip
Although both events ranged widely
in subject matter and approach, indigenous peoples, and in particular
American Indians, were leading themes in both workshops. To promote continuity of dialogue on
these themes a
significant number of San Diego participants also took part in the Stanford activities.
[Editor's Note: In April 1994 I stepped off a
plane in San Diego, traveling to a workshop funded through the
Program for Faculty Renewal, directed by David Halliburton, who is guest editing this issue of
SAIL. As I waited for
the shuttle to La Jolla, I was joined by Paula Gunn Allen and Jane Caputi, who proposed and
directed the workshop.
As we drove northward, I quizzed them about the subject for the weekend's discussion,
intriguingly entitled "Indians
and Technicity." My interest was piqued, but their first words describing their topic did little to
clarify their purpose.
It was not until the next morning-- joining colleagues from fields as diverse as accounting,
toxicology, and
philosophy, as well as literary studies--that I came to imagine the scope of the issues that were
encompassed by that
simple, innovative title.
{2}
In brief, the workshop was the first of
two to explore the history of exploitation in this hemisphere: the power of
economics and philosophy and government to combine into a behavior called, by some,
"eco-racism." This blend of
story and profit, of environment and politics, is a center for the work being accomplished in
numerous disciplines
throughout this hemisphere. The essays included in this volume, with their diverse subjects and
ways of
communicating them, are but one short piece of what Paula and Jane were really after: the
transformation of history
lessons into a call for the future, a mythology to heal the ecological state of our world today.
--John Purdy]
{3}
Transethnic Anthropologism: Comparative Ethnic Studies at Berkeley
Gerald Vizenor
The American Revolution, that
celebrated war of independence, was not the first, but the second
revolution on
this continent; these comparative chronicles of sovereignty are historical contradictions and the
everlasting cause of
resistance in a constitutional democracy.
The first revolution was
native, a war of independence from the rush of missionaries and colonial domination,
and that war was launched almost a century before the second historical revolution
of the thirteen colonies and the
formation of the United States.
The Southwestern native communities
initiated the first united revolution on August 10, 1680, and defeated the
Spanish Kingdom of New Mexico. "This dramatic episode represented one of the bloodiest
defeats ever experienced
by Spain in her overseas empire," Marc Simmons wrote in the introduction to The Pueblo
Revolt. "And, as historians
are accustomed to say, it was the first successful battle for independence fought against a
European colonial power in
what was to become the United States" (v).
The unities of that native revolution,
and others since then, are the foundational histories of survivance in this
nation; whatever the course of sovereignties, native resistance, then and now, has been contrived
too many times in
the extreme as either incertitude, necromancy, or mere victimery.
The converse histories of dominance
rather than native survivance have been secured in museums and at
universities by several generations of academic masters. The natives were studied and established
as abstruse cultures
and then embodied in motion pictures as the simulated burdens of civilization. These adversities
became moral
grievances and caused a turn in the notions, courses, and literary canons at universities, but the
treacheries and
dominance of anthropolog-{4}gism, the obsessive studies of natives by social
scientists, have not been overturned in
comparative ethnic studies.
"Anthropology's alliance with the
forces of oppression is neither a simple or recent one," wrote Johannes Fabian
in Time and the Other. "The relationships between anthropology and its object are
inevitably political; production of
knowledge occurs in a public forum of intergroup, interclass, and international relations. Among
the historical
conditions under which our discipline emerged and which affected its growth and differentiation
were the rise of
capitalism and its colonialist-imperialist expansion into the very societies which became the
target of our inquiries"
(143-44). The dominance of that alliance is evermore political in ethnic studies.
The Ethnic Studies Department at the
University of California, Berkeley, inherited, in a curious sense, a new
narrative enactment of the agonistic abstraction of two historical revolutions; three centuries later
the misnomers and
contradictions of independence are redoubled in an academic union of learned natives and
newcomers, socialists,
separatists, cultural essentialists, narcissists, anarchists, and even those shriven with aesthetic
victimery.
The Ethnic Studies Department was
constituted at the time of civil rights activism, the peace movement, ethnic
and cultural nominalism, and radical turns of racial consciousness in the late '60s. At that
moment of social
transformation this new academic enterprise embraced four ethnic programs in an uncommon
political and cultural
union, and the appearance of internal congruence soon became a national model of reciprocal
ideologies and racial
identities; the enterprise has been a crucial advance in conservative academic conventions. Since
then the academic
missions and contradictions have widened in a new comparative, or transethnic,
graduate studies program.
Comparative practices are never certain, as the ethnic narratives, subjects, objects, theories, and
methodologies are
seldom comparable; the discrepancies coalesce as ethnic similarities, or transethnic
redactions, rather than closer
studies of dissimilarities. Comparative and transethnic theories, in this sense,
transcend the significance and
diversities of native cultures.
African American Studies was the
first of the four programs to separate and reorganize two decades ago as an
independent department. Ethnic Studies, in an associable action, voted recently to recast the other
programs as
independent departments. Asian Studies, Native American Studies, and Chicano Studies would
have disconnected
with an association in a fourth department of comparative ethnic studies if the university
administration had supported
the proposal. The new scheme was seen by some as separatism, a clever partition of ideologies,
historical revisions,
and the end of ethnic studies.
Native American Studies resisted any
division of the department; {5} however, if separation
was inevitable, the
program faculty voted to choose other academic associations. The native resistance was a notable
reversal of the
political sentiments of separatism in the international shadow of ethnic nationalism. This was not
a revolution, but a
resistance that would later prove to be a wiser academic course than ethnic separatism.
Meanwhile, the other
programs persisted with the reorganization proposal, and some administrators and faculty
members maligned the
resistance and counteractions of Native American Studies.
In one generation the faculty of the
department had established a new discipline and an imperative academic
presence on the campus; the outstanding research, instruction, and publications of the faculty
have influenced the
perceptions, ideas, and interests of thousands of students. The department was assured, and the
faculty, without a
doubt, was the most eminent in the world of ethnic studies. Why then was there such a rush to
separatism in the
department? Could it have been that ethnic unities were mere poses and political
expediencies?
Native American Studies counteracted
with a proposal to establish a new academic union and commensurate
mission with American Studies. The action was denied, as were the other proposals for
independent departments, but
this new association would have been named the Center for the Study of the Americas.
American Studies was not a
theoretical contrivance but the courtesies of diverse academic interests on campus;
however, some faculty were very concerned that this new association would displace the
established acceptance of
Ethnic Studies. That substitution, however, had already been announced in the reorganization
proposal by the faculty
of Asian and Chicano Studies.
American Studies was established to
ascertain various research interests and methods "drawn from a variety of
disciplines" and "recognizes that political, cultural and economic patterns do not stop at national
borders."
Native American Studies has a similar
eclectic mission that considers the situational interpretations of resistance,
traditional oral performances, critical studies of histories, literatures, autobiographies, and other
narratives in
translation; the mission convenes diverse faculty research on comparative governments, tribal
sovereignty,
reservations, education, environmental studies, crossblood identities, and third gender tribal
communities.
Native American Studies is
comparative by reason of cultural differences not ethnic similarities. This eclectic
representation of diverse histories has been reduced by anthropologism and those
who use natives as transethnic
scapegoats. "Anthropology as the study of cultural difference can be productive only if difference
is drawn into {6}
the arena of dialectical contradiction" (144), wrote Johannes Fabian.
The Center for the Study of the
Americas would have maintained these academic interests and research as a
common mission of American Studies and Native American Studies in the Division of
Undergraduate and
Interdisciplinary Studies.
Native American cultures and
communities are the very foundational histories of the Americas. The presence
and resistance of these cultures is an immeasurable native survivance over the dominance of
colonial discoveries;
therefore, the basic academic mission of the program is inherent and sovereign in the sense of the
first revolution on
this continent and the conceivable emendations in a constitutional democracy.
"We affirm the right of individual
faculty members in the Native American Studies Program to pursue their
research interests outside of the existing structure of the Ethnic Studies Department," wrote the
departmental chair,
Margarita Melville. "Just as strongly, however, we affirm the importance of protecting the
curricular integrity of the
Ethnic Studies undergraduate major, which was designed with the course contributions of Native
American Studies
faculty in mind, and in accordance with the principle of cross-ethnic cooperation that informed
the creation of the
[Ethnic Studies Department] and its survival after the departure of African American
Studies."
Melville, an anthropologist, held a
faculty position in the Chicano Studies Program. She did not mention at the
time that Native American Studies had only three permanent faculty members, compared to twice
that number in
Chicano Studies. Native American Studies lost faculty positions while there was an increase of
faculty in Chicano Studies.
Vice Chancellor Carol Christ and the
chair of the Academic Senate at the University of California, Berkeley,
reported that there was "strong sentiment against the separate departmental status" among the
various committees that
studied the proposed reorganization. Ethnic Studies would be weakened by a separation and "it
would have
detrimental intellectual consequences. There are fixed costs to running a department. The smaller
the department, the
more time individual faculty spend meeting these costs." Native American Studies programs and
departments were
established at many colleges and universities in the past two decades. However, few of these new
programs survived
the racial politics, the criticism of academic research and publications, or the race to
transethnic studies. The Ethnic
Studies Department, once more on the rebound, has become a national graduate center of
comparative or transethnic
studies, a distinction that could be a new measure of dominance. For instance, the notions of
aesthetic borderlands
would erase the presence, resistance, and traditional histories of {7} native communities. The first native revolution
that overturned the cross and crown of colonialism would be twice silenced in
transethnic borderlands. The burdens
of discoveries, simulations, and anthropologism have roused an academic
resistance, the essence of native survivance.
Transethnic studies are travels
with the other on ethic borderlands; travel, to be sure, in the literature of
anthropologism and dominance. "Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or
of being nowhere," wrote Jean
Baudrillard in The Transparency of Evil. "Today it is the only way we have of
feeling that we are somewhere. At
home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in
the world at once, in
the midst of a universal banality--a banality that is the same in every country" (151). The notion
of a banal borderland
as "somewhere" is the transposition of native territories and resistance.
The representations of native cultural
differences are obscured as the other in anthropologism and
transethnic
comparative studies; the natural reason and contradictions of the native are transposed, but as the
simulations of the
exotic other are redoubled in museums and motion pictures, the natives and their narratives are
erased on transethnic
borderlands at universities.
In the "symbolic universe there is no
place for the otherness of difference. Neither animals, nor gods, nor the
dead, are other. All are caught up in the same cycle. If you are outside the cycle,
however, you do not even exist,"
wrote Jean Baudrillard. "Everyone wants their other. Everyone has an imperious
need to put the other at their mercy,
along with a heady urge to make the other last as long as possible so as to savour him" (159).
And this "other is the
locus of what escapes us, and the way whereby we escape from ourselves. The other here is not
the locus of desire,
nor the locus of alienation, but the locus of vertiginousness, of eclipse, of appearing and
disappearing" (159). The
other "is what allows me not to repeat myself for ever" (159).
Baudrillard argues that the simulation
of the other is a "Great Game. . . . Racial otherness survives everything:
conquest, racialism, extermination, the virus of difference, the psychodrama of alienation. On the
one hand, the Other
is always-already dead; on the other hand, the Other is indestructible" (146). The native otherness
of multiculturalism
and aesthetic victimery survives anthropologism and transethnic
studies.
The rise of
anthropologism is a banal encore of the other; the episodes of the other in the
ethnic simulations of
multiculturalism are transethnic revisions of native resistance and the
first revolution on this continent. The causes of
ethnic separatism and transethnic studies are contradictions; the basic theoretical
maneuvers are not resistance but a
{8} mere academic presence. Whatever were the
academic burdens of departments founded on the politics of racial
resistance are now the banal virtues of multiculturalism.
Perhaps, in a literary sense, an ethnic
presence in transethnic studies is an unmeant comedy; not a tragedy, but a
faux comedy of the ethnic clerisy and their incessant desire for academic recognition,
compensation, and salvation at
the university.
"Tragedies end badly," wrote George
Steiner in The Death of Tragedy. "The tragic personage is broken by forces
which can neither be fully understood nor overcome by rational prudence. This again is crucial.
Where the causes of
disaster are temporal, where the conflict can be resolved through technical or social means, we
may have serious
drama, but not tragedy. . . . Tragedy is irreparable. It cannot lead to just and material
compensation for past suffering" (8).
Comedy seems to be derived from
tragedy, a sublime contradiction. Comedy, even the faux comedies of native
trickster stories, is the credence of native survivance in literature. The trickster is nowhere when
the stories are told at
universities. Tragedy is dominance and victimery.
"Tragedy is the form that promises us
a happy ending" (36), wrote Walter Kerr in Tragedy and Comedy.
"Comedy is not a relief, it is the rest of the bitter truth, a holy impropriety. . . . Why should
tragedy have more of a
future than comedy? And why should comedy be happy enough without one?" (28, 80). The
natural reason is that the
dialectical contradiction of native survivance is more comic than tragic prudence. Comparative
studies and
transethnic comedies have no need for a future of tragic victimery.
WORKS CITED
Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia U P, 1983.
Kerr, Walter. Tragedy and Comedy. New York: Da Capo, 1985.
Simmons, Marc. "Introduction." The Pueblo Revolt. Robert Silverberg. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1994.
Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New York: Knopf, 1961.
{9}
Spatial Narrative: Aural and Visual Construction in the Musical Narrative of Minority Discourse
Servio Marín
Introduction
As a professional musician from
Venezuela, I have experienced the silent struggles and the social, cultural
tensions dividing folk music, popular music, and "classical music" or "musica culta"--a term that
some middle- and
upper-class people use to describe the music played on Sundays by the symphonic orchestra at
the "Aula Magna"
theatre in Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas. While reading this essay please keep in
mind that the five
points presented below are personal ideas and observations based on my own cultural-artistic
experience. They
constitute the framework for this paper.
1. Independently from, and regardless
of, any ideology or theory, and any postindustrial, structural, modern, or
postmodern analysis, people have to eat and, because of that, society members are divided into
power-holders and
providers. Power-holders are indeed the real minority and operate as the
divider of providers. Providers are the real
majority divided by power-holders.
The main objective of power-holders
is to differentiate providers from themselves, thus inventing providers'
identity. In urban-rural settings, differentiation is based on skin color, last name, nose shape,
accent, religion, et
cetera, while in international settings it is based on geography and the type of natural resource
found in the providers'
land. Power-holders identify and gain control of the resources for providers' needs, desires,
dreams, and fears.
Power-holders will eventually create rules, norms, canons, laws, and finally an apparatus of
consent that will maintain
their power over providers. Obviously, to a certain degree, and depending on status, social class,
race, and gender, the
same person could be both power-holder and provider since these roles can be inherited,
borrowed, achieved,
assumed, or imposed.
{10}
Minority is the qualifying term
constructed by power-holders and applied to providers. Dominant culture is the
term constructed by a real minority of intellectual power-holders who as providers,
in academic settings, need to
speak the tongue of power-holders in order to get the illusion that their "voice" will be heard and
that change will take
place.
2. I was taught that there are two
forms of art, divided into art and Art--with capital "A." The former art, I hear, is
dying. The latter (Art) is alive (?) and, I learned the hard way, it has been developed and
controlled by the dominant
culture. Most people, providers and power-holders included, were taught to think that Art
is more "elevated," "noble,"
or "dignified" than art. Not long ago, I became aware that the form of art that constitutes a
cosmology connecting
humans, land, labor, spiritual life, death, future, past, religion, animals, superstition, rain, fire,
thunder, forests,
mountains, rocks, planets, et cetera is art--the lowercase art developed by minority cultures. The
other one (Art), the
one I was told is superior, has been reduced from art-cosmology to a tool for "spiritual
contemplation" (in the
new-wave sense) and/or entertainment. Yes, Art is alive today, but in galleries, concert halls,
museums, shows,
television, radio, CD players, computers, and printed media.
3. In this article I discuss art mostly in
relation to the use of voice and body in labor activities, dance, and
instrument performance. I refer indifferently to song, dance, singing, and dancing under the
assumption that sound
and movement are integral elements of art expression. Any dance, as well as any labor activity or
any human or
animal social interaction, implies some form of choreography; this idea is further developed
below. Therefore, in my
discussion about the music of minority cultures I deliberately obliterate the traditional meaning
of sound, voice,
singing, dance, movement, and instrument performance as a way of asserting that they are
different manifestations of
the same unity.
4. Several musical examples are
discussed here including, among others, flamenco singing and dancing,
Venezuelan coplas, Colombian vaquerias, Anlo music from
Ghana, and Venda music from South Africa. My
intention is not to generalize or homogenize, with these and a few other examples, a "minority
musical discourse" but
to illustrate some common threads shared in different ways and proportions. For instance, many
musical narratives of
minority cultures express lamentation and rebellion. I recognize in the singers' voices the sound
of oppressed cultures.
However, to reduce the transcendental function that art occupies in the core of minority cultures
to a sort of "art of
protest" would be very naive. Certainly, acting from within, oppression generates the signs of
"protest" that reach the
surface of the {11} discourse but only as subproducts of
daily "telling," through a musical narrative that, while
maintaining its main role of ancestral connection, also provides catharsis. Two examples clearly
illustrate this
process: first, Brazilian carnival, by which people disguise with dance and colors the pain and
misery inflicted by
political corruption; and second, rap music, which combines electronic technology with the
traditional African music's
technique of cyclical interlocking in order to narrate current neighborhood stories conveying
anger, pride, and
rebellion. In the first case, pain is transformed into kinetic, dancing energy while strengthening
collective identity
bonds. In the second case, oppression is transcended by bridging the technology of the present
with the "old ways" of
minority musical discourse. The power and strength of minority musical discourses such as
reggae, rap, blues, jazz,
salsa, and samba influence cultural marketing and are recuperated by the dominant culture.
5. In this essay I submit that the
products of art act as seeds or embryonic representations of the past, the present,
and the future of a collective. The cultural seeds of a collective can be transported by and
disseminated through the
color and inflection of the singing voice, the stressed portions of pulsed rhythms, and the
choreographic interactions
between body and environment. Another point presented in this essay is that singing, in itself, is
a choreography
engaging voice production, body, environment, cultural heritage, social struggle, and social
status. A good singer
knows that only by combining all these materials and intangible elements can the voice reach a
spiritual level of
intimate expression.
Singing, Dancing, and Minority Discourse
Songs and dances allow
for the construction of cultural identity. Songs and dances are indeed the most used
forms of expression for most cultures around the world. Songs and dances are so deeply
embedded in the core of the
so-called minority cultures that they are inseparable from daily life--ironically, the
mainstream's rhetorical association
of bodily expressivity with "primitive" cultures corroborates this statement.1
Based on the previous thoughts, we can
assert that the construction of identity of minority cultures is largely determined by
singing and dancing. A superficial
reader, overlooking the psychoacoustic and motor-spatial implications of singing and dancing,
may think this claim
reinforces the stereotyped vision of minority cultures. I think, however, that a serious analysis of
singing and dancing
is essential. This form of analysis not only offers a complementary alternative to binary
interpretative models
(dominant-oppressed, majority-minority) as applied to culture but also, and most importantly, it
adds an extra element
to the list of shared experiences that contrib-{12}utes to
and expands the notion of "minority discourse."2
Singing, as popularly known to us
through the media, implies the melodic articulation of time and pitch, but it
also implies a participation of the human body; therefore, singing implies an articulation of
space.3 However, the
metaphorical power of melodic singing is not exclusively constrained to the domains of beauty,
expression of
emotions, and religious veneration, as we traditionally tend to think. Melody is also a tool for
communication through
time and space, in particular for members of minority cultures participating in ritual, social, or
personal experiences.
Melody, the simple articulation of time and pitch as developed by European cultures, is only one
of the many possible
forms of vocal expression. Other vocal expressions that relate to singing may include articulation
of time and timbre,
slow or fast repetitions of sounds or melodic cells, and extensive use and exploration of sounds,
noises, or
articulations created with the tongue and/or with different parts of the vocal apparatus including
nasal cavities, throat,
chest, and abdomen.
If, as indicated above, different parts
of the body are used by different cultures for singing, then obviously
different kinds of sounds are generated. Several factors such as language, needs, taste, or
religious beliefs of the
members of a group determine sound selection. As a result each particular culture articulates a
different set of vocal
sounds and this set of vocal sounds, in turn, represents the choice of the collective. In this sense,
singing is not only
the articulation of the space connected to the body but also the articulation of the cultural space
defined by the
collective. Thus, the collective's identity is represented by the set of vocal sounds used in singing.
Likewise, the
sounds produced and heard by the collective influence the forms of dance of the group, and
conversely the movement
of dance will influence the choice of sound in performance and singing. Finally, daily life
movements related to labor,
social interaction, and geography, combined with the sounds of the environment, create a form of
natural
choreography that also influences singing and dancing.
We can conclude, then, that cultural
identity, as well as singing and dancing, are ontologically defined by spatial
construction because space articulation is what makes possible human representation,
communication, and
understanding of elements from abstract and concrete worlds. Singing and dancing, in turn, are
forms of
spatial-musical narrative that help to construct the cultural identity of members of a collective.
Although singing and
dancing vary from culture to culture, by expanding the model of spatial construction it is possible
to identify common
narrative elements that unify the minority discourse.
{13}
The Spatial Construction of Singing and Dancing
Spatial construction determines the
ontological, mutual influences between singing and dancing. In fact, any
good dancer or singer knows that the spatial nature of dance permeates singing. Likewise, the act
of singing itself
implies movement. The movement of body parts involved in producing sound, as well as body
language, or gestures
that convey expressive visual meaning, are probably the obvious types of movements, but other
forms of movement
are also psychologically and culturally manifested in singing. In this sense, singing implies
moving between
imaginary landscapes as well as changing speed, slope, moving back and forward, left, right,
up-front, up, and down.
Traditional European singing may include all or some of this type of psychological, cultural, and
imaginary moving
embedded in melodic contours, or as a complementary result from the meaning of a text. But in
many other cultures,
the spatial-temporal dimension created through sound is mainly what singing is about--as
examples, see below my
discussion on the use of Colombian "vaquerias" and Venezuelan "coplas." Spatial construction in
the musical
narrative of minority cultures determines the reciprocal influences between singing and dancing,
and as an extension
of it, between sound and movement.
The Visonual and the Irreducible Multiple Aspect of Spatial
Construction
Spatial construction in minority
cultures determines a set of cultural parameters, shared by people, that
influences songs and dances. Conversely, singing and dancing is a means for spatial construction.
Apparently this
process is not unique to minority cultures, and it may look similar to that of European
music-dance traditions, but I
submit that there are two basic differences between them. First, in the musical narrative of
minority discourse, singing
and dancing function as a single identity--not separated by concert halls or ballet spectacle.
Second, the spatial
construction of musical narrative of minority discourse is predetermined by an aural-visual unity
or by what I call the
visonual.4 These two ideas are explained below.
As a form of expression, both singing
and dancing constitute shared elements of minority cultures. I would like
to stress the fact that, for most cultures in Africa and South America, for instance, songs and
dances are not only
important parts of daily life but constitute indeed an irreducible multiple. In the discourse of
minority cultures singing
and dancing blend and combine indistinctly into a unity. The unification of dancing and singing
relies on aural and
visual interrelations. Culturally speaking, aural and visual interrelations determine and are in turn
determined by
spatial construction. Spatial construction of visual-aural quality is commonly found in the use of
singing to {14}
facilitate group labor. For example, in the Atlantic littoral region of Colombia, "copla" texts are
used in cattle-herding
songs known as vaquerias (List 118). "The cattle herders of Colombia sing coplas
stanzas back and forth to each other
to keep the herd moving" (Olsen 391). In the llanos or plains region of Venezuela the
llaneros or cowboys also sing
coplas to quiet the cattle and to keep them together (Ramón y Rivera 23).
Some important questions emerge
from the previous examples. How do vaquerias help Colombian cowboys to
keep the herd moving? How do Venezuelan coplas quiet and keep cattle together? How did
cowboys and cattle
develop their communication through coplas and vaquerias? What do the melody, the inflections
and timbre of the
voices, and the rhythms of coplas and vaquerias convey to the cattle? How did the cowboys
discover this applied use
of singing? With the exception of the last question, whose answer can be "constructed" by
avoiding a real explanation
and saying that "these songs originated in Spain,"5 most of these questions may
remain forever unanswered.
Nevertheless we can advance some general explanations about them. Evidently, we are dealing
here with a form of
spatial construction between the cowboys, the cattle, the landscape or physical space where they
move, and the
cultural-mental space that determines the musical relationship between cattle and singers.
Therefore I think we can
address these questions and get a better understanding of their implications through the model of
spatial construction.
Spatial Construction and Interlocking
Like most Venezuelans, I have been
exposed to and sometimes I sing "coplas" and "tonadas." Even though I
have never participated in cattle herding, I perceive in that music a strong connection between
voice and landscape
that conveys the quietness of vast lands. We could say, and this may be true, that my
understanding and feelings about
those forms of singing have been shaped by practice, by readings, by TV and movies, and by the
lyrics of Venezuelan
songs that refer us back to the land, the llanero, and the cattle. In other words, I learned how to
feel about those songs.
This may be true and could be used, in turn, as an argument to demonstrate that there is nothing
about the copla itself
that directly relates to herding. My response to that is a question. How many books, movies, or
TV shows did the
cattle watch before the copla became meaningful to them? In conclusion, each form of music
originates from spatial
construction and carries within itself the spatial meaning from which it generated. Hence, the
coplas, resulting from
sound-movement interaction in the labor field, get impregnated by this interaction. Coplas carry
within their musical
structure, melody, and voice inflections the visonual elements that the {15} listener recognizes as visual and aural
evocations of landscapes, cattle, llaneros, and quietness.
The copla is a space shared by llanero,
cattle, landscape, people like me, and now people like you--the reader of
this essay. We all are part of the spatial construction of the copla; even if you have never heard a
copla before you are
now part of the verbal space-arrow that points to the territory of the copla,
somewhere in your mental archives of
Venezuela. I define and explain below why I called this process Spatial Narrative.
Here, I am providing you with a
glimpse of its meaning. Everyone sharing the space of the copla is at a different spatial and
temporal slot. The original
singer-cowboy is an entity that generates the actual sounds that help him to get his job done. The
sounds he learned
from other cowboys, which, of course, some historian has probably demonstrated came from
Spain, allow him to
communicate with the cattle whenever he feels it is necessary. Until we are able to conduct an
experiment in which a
group of Venezuelan cowboys would try to pacify cattle in the United States of America and in
other countries, we
cannot know for sure if the copla has universal influence or if only Venezuelan cattle understand
coplas.6 The sounds
related to herding made their ways into the melody of the copla, determining its shape, its
contour, and its tempo.
Aural and visual associations are determined by energy shape (Marín 32). It is interesting
to notice that the melodic
shape of phrases in the copla as well as in the tonada is downward-curved as is the shape of cow
mooing. Probably
cattle like to be treated with respect and they enjoy the fact that the cowboys are making an effort
in learning, or
imitating, their language. These few lines above illustrate through facts, irony, and what Deleuze
and Guattari call
"rhizomic reasoning" the different spaces interlocking the space of the copla. More than a song,
the copla is also a
representation of non-linear thinking, which is the way most minority cultures establish their
spatial constructions.
The melodies of coplas and tonadas
have travelled from rural space to urban space via local weekend parties,
yearly regional celebrations, radio, television, writers, migration, and the transformation of
llanero into citizen. These
melodies might have been changed by each of the spaces they have travelled through, but their
essence prevails,
probably because of the endurance of their structure and raw sound material as well as their
power to evoke quietness.
The coplas are seeds carrying the sounds and images of the space that generated them.
In the case of minority discourse,
visual and aural narratives blend in the rhythms and colors of the music not
through "orchestration," as it would be the case of Sibelius' sound landscapes, but rather through
the human voice. As
opposed to the Italian bel canto style, used in European opera singing, the voices of singers from
diverse cultures in
{16} the planet reveal, through their color, the drama of
their present and ancestral lives, as well as the visonual
history of stones, rivers, forests, rains, and mountains. It could be argued that this is also an
image portrayed by the
media. Even were that the case, it would confirm my claim that the voice of singers from
minority cultures is trained
to convey the aural-visual unity imbedded in their cultural, musical narratives, because otherwise
this could not have
been portrayed by the media.
Spatial Narrative: The Many Spaces Determining Spatial
Construction
Spatial construction originates from
the visonual--the unity between aural and visual perception--and
characterizes the musical narratives of minority discourse. That explains how almost all the
music produced on the
planet has derived from the combination of sound and movement. The articulation of space is
indeed the general
principle animating musical narratives of minority discourse. However, space, in the musical
narratives of minority
discourse, is irreducible-multiple. In that sense, space can be thought of as a contained element
when referred to the
body, as volume in relation to the psyche, as vector in relation to feelings, or as ancestral memory
in relation to
individual or cultural identity. In order to explain the role of spatial construction in the musical
narratives of minority
discourse, I will classify these interpretations of space-contained, space-volume, space-vector,
space-memory, and any
other forms of space which are manifested within the psychological realm of a person, and
limited by the physicality
of the body, as inner space. Outer space, on the other hand, starts at
the border of air and human skin and expands to
the surrounding environment, including the geography or places that can be read through the
senses with or without
tools. At this point this binary inner-outer classification ends, but in order to describe the
irreducible-multiple space
that defines minority narratives we still need at least a third and a fourth category. The third
category of space has
been in many instances defined with correlative terms such as magic, imaginary, real-magic,
fantastic, primitive, and
so on. I call it simply immaterial space, and I call the fourth one residual
space.
Before I explain further
immaterial space, I will describe residual space. This fourth category
encompasses the
space created by gradual but permanent change, resembling the Deleuze and Guatari "becoming
lines" but different.
This fourth category of space originates by combination of local and
legendary narratives. This space is a sort of
footprint or trace, in the poetical sense of the Spanish word huellas. This space also
represents the residue of diffuse
cultural signs resulting from the passage of oral narratives. It combines orature, rhythms, {17} sounds, and gestures
that simultaneously belong to local and legendary narratives. This is
the space where mythology and daily events
collapse and fragment. That is why I call it residual space. Immaterial
space, on the other hand, transcends the
physicality of outer space, the psychological nature of inner space,
and the temporary, cultural aspect of residual
space mainly because immaterial space transcends time. Immaterial
space transcends time because it is
simultaneously container and arrow. As container it encompasses inner, outer, and residual
spaces. As arrow, it
transverses, travels, and points indistinctly and concurrently to places belonging to the three other
space categories.
Subsequently, for the purpose of this discussion, I will use the expression Spatial
Narrative in order to represent the
irreducible-multiple spatial construction that characterizes the musical narrative of the minority
discourse. Later I will
contrast Spatial Narrative and the expression Discrete Narrative as
applied to the discourse of dominant culture.
Spatial Narrative: Visual and Aural Perception and
the Construction of Identity
As I mentioned above, Spatial
Narrative originates from the unity between aural and visual perception. This
unity is in fact musical, aural-visual, and I defined it as the visonual. Sound and
movement coexist at the core of
Spatial Narrative simultaneously as voice and actor. As voice they substantiate and
recreate the past through sound,
noise, and words. As actor they redefine the congruence between gestures and space, and
between words recounting
the past, rediscovering meaning and validating the present. Do sound and movement also define
our sense of the
future? Yes, they do, because the immaterial space of Spatial
Narrative transcends time. Sound and movement are
indeed forms of immaterial space transcending the physicality of outer
space, the psychological nature of inner space,
and the temporary, cultural aspect of residual space. Depending upon which culture
you grow up in, your notion of
the future varies. In fact, the notion of time altogether depends on your identity, but your own
identity is in turn
embedded in the sense of time generated by Spatial Narrative. In other words, what
we hear and how we move
construct our identity or Narrativity.7 Our notion of time is shaped
by spatial construction, or the narratives of sound
and movement; this is in fact our identity.
Being an immaterial
space, sound not only draws up in front of us the elements of outer space,
allowing us to
recreate a mental picture of our surroundings, but also transcends the psychological nature of
inner space. Indeed,
sound activates simultaneously multiple layers of meaning, memory, feelings, and even
physiological responses.
Through its immateriality, sound is coextensively ephemeral and {18} permanent--ephemeral, because we can hear
short or long sounds as they vanish in the outer space; permanent, because we can
remember, forget, recognize, or
discover sounds as they are, become, or were part of our inner space. In short, what
we see points to the present but
what we hear points at once to the present, the past, and the future. Whereas what we see in front
of us reminds us
where we are, what we hear reminds us where we were. The spatial-temporal duality
characteristic of sound and
movement is always expressed in the Spatial Narrative.
Linear thinking is deeply founded in a
Narrativity that negates the Spatial Narrative's spatial-temporal duality,
and thereby the duality sound-movement, as elements of cultural spatial construction. For some
reason, the dominant
culture's way of thinking in many instances reduces the Narrativity of minority cultures with
terms such as
superstitious, primitive, and, when the comment is "generous," "poetical." The fact is that a
narrow vision of the
future is an indicator of inactivity (there is not movement) and deafness (there is not sound).
Following the vision of
progress, you can move toward your pre-established goals and "construct the future" but still you
are not going
anywhere because your are ignoring the surrounding voices telling you "the way to go." Why is
that "Indian" singing
and playing a maracas? This is not going to bring down the fever or kill the microbe. Why are
those "Indians" dancing
and playing drums? This is not going to make it rain. The immediate reason is the core of
dominant culture's
Narrativity. Outside the circle of Philosophy departments, transcendental reason is not an
essential part of dominant
culture's discourse because sound and movement are "too general" terms that, actually, "can
mean anything." From
my personal, limited perspective, history and future are inscribed in sound and movement.
Naturally, the dominant culture
maintains "clean" contact with spatial-temporal duality. The contact is there in
Saturday's and Sunday's religious activities or in Friday night's dancing. It is in front of the
fireplaces, between
armchairs and novels, or between marijuana and new wave, jazz, or any other "exotic" music. It
comes and goes as an
accessory or commodity, as an electronic device that can be turned on and off.
The construction of identity through
visual-aural correlations can be an intrinsic, fundamental part or a
subsidiary part of the collective's Narrativity. Whether you are aware of it or not, your identity is
intangibly dictated
by the narratives of sound and movement. Whether you get it from Coca-Cola advertisements or
from Buddhist
meditation, the process of visual and aural construction of identity is rooted in human
Narrativity.
{19}
Time and Spatial Narrative: Sound and Movement Creating Residual Space
Sound does not allow us to predict the
future but guides us toward it. The future is connected with what we are
and with our ancestral lives through choice. Each sound we encounter confronts us with a choice:
we like this sound
better than that one, we love this sound, we hate the other, we fear this sound but we are
attracted
to it. This sound
makes us relax, the other one brings us tension. But, isn't that the same case with everything we
are confronted with?
We make choices based on the things we interact with. So, why should sound be a particular
case? We can love this
person, fear this animal, be attracted to that painting, et cetera. In fact everything that surround us
confronts us with a
choice. Besides, what does choice have to do with the future? All these questions have the same
answer: sound (or
movement) is the only vehicle between things and human beings. Does this mean that deaf
people are disconnected
from things they cannot hear? No, it does not mean that. Is sound what creates our notion of the
future? Is sound
relevant for defining our sense of time?
The Narrativity of Central European
civilizations has historically tended to separate time and space. "In the early
mythological cosmologies, time and space were not generalized, independent concepts but, like
most other mental
constructions, were human symbols carrying emotional significance" (qtd. by Szamosi 59). I
argue that, still today,
people sharing Spatial Narrative continue to endow space and time with emotional
significance. Ancient humans felt
the need to endow space with particular emotional meanings: "Day and night give to east and
west a correlation with
life and death" (qtd. by Szamosi 60). As a form of immaterial space, sound
continues to be endowed with particular
emotional meaning. Whereas the notion of past could be endowed with nostalgia or
other feelings, the notion of
future could be thought of as just a promise. In that sense, we can feel stimulated
by the sense of a better or
prosperous future, or we can be made to feel uneasy by the idea of a somber future. We could
reduce the notion of
future to a mere plan that shall be accomplished, but still this would not mitigate the emotional
bearings attached to
plan success or plan failure. Sound can convey the senses of nostalgia, promise and uncertainty,
and therefore sound
can represent the past and the future.
Sound, by its ephemeral-permanent
quality, is somehow inscribed between space and time. The certainty of
death instills humans' sense of duration. Human life is short in comparison to space and time.
However, time goes by
with the spatial qualities that relate to the body, so we tend to forget the transcendental aspect of
time. As we become
older our sense of duration transforms together with gray hair, wrinkles, and our collection of
memories, but space
remains relatively {20} unchanged; space becomes then
a permanent referent. For a middle-class old person, living in
an urban area, listening to the music of her teens will stir up good memories and nostalgia. For
citizens of a world in
which fashion and technology are in constant evolution, this is not a transcendental experience.
This is just
association of the sounds produced by a record player with the events, friends, and emotions of
the "times" evoked by
the music. What is the vision of this process from the point of view of a culture where such
evolution of sound,
rhythms, and melodies does not take place with the same speed of the new wave? In other words,
if the music
performed and interpreted today was the same as 150 years ago, how would this affect us? Sound
is always pointing
between space and time, and depending on each cultural approach the effect of sound will be
interpreted differently.
In conclusion, the ephemeral quality of sound makes possible the changes in style and use; its
permanent quality
defines its relation to residual space.
Sound and movement allow us to
explore outer space, to perceive and internalize time, and to transcend the
temporary, cultural aspect of residual space. In general, oral narrative, film, and
literature could be described as
having a beginning (or a referent pointer to the past), an onward movement, and a direction
toward a goal or end.
However, this concept of lineal narrative is at best incomplete because it does not account for the
hidden role of sound
and movement as the determinant factor that actually puts the narrative process in motion. The
coexistence of sound
and movement is what defines the motion and the sense of direction of narrative even before
meaning is established.
Spatial Narrative is a visonual articulation of the space where the unity
sound-image delineates areas for construction
of meaning. For example, in a European-style film if an actor says "yes" with confidence the
"narrative arrow" will
point to a different direction than if the actor says "yes" with hesitation. The sounds of
confidence and hesitation are
indeed signs belonging to borrowed narratives--human beings can feel fear or be courageous,
they can also hide the
truth, et cetera. With the exception of experienced directors and good actors, people do not pay
much attention to the
power of voice sound in defining narrative motion and direction. Some people will use triumphal
trumpets or sweet
violins to transform the meaning of "yes." Another example could be borrowed from flamenco
singing. By combining
the length of a melismatic melodic phrase with downward or upward direction, and by adding to
the pitches some
accentuated short noises created by exhaling air, the singer can convey feelings of pain, passion,
desire, anguish, and
veneration. The point here is that a very clear and strong message can be conveyed in a few
seconds without the need
for word-meaning.
{21}
Minority Discourse: Songs and Construction of Musical Narrative
A good example of the unity between
aural and visual perception is the construction of identity through songs
and dances in flamenco music. Concerning the use of the voice, the high-pitched sustained sound
of a flamenco singer
immediately connects us with the ancestral callings of Islamic voices that seem to travel through
space and time. The
color of the voice itself evokes long, faraway, open distances. The vocal production of the sounds
carries the fleeting
tension of laments. Rapid ornamental voice sounds are subtly intense, and florid, instilling
unsuspected anxiety
through their movement while the frenzied rhythm and the cheerful melodic line redefine an
ambience of jubilation.
In only a few bars of music, flamenco
singing reveals the irreducible-multiple spatial construction of a manifold
narrative. Multiplicity of meaning created by aural and visual associations characterizes flamenco
singing as well as
such different musical expressions as the blues, the Venezuelan joropo, tonada and copla, the
Colombian vaquerias,
the male choruses of robust "outdoor" voices of North American Native Music (McAllester 307),
the danced
pantomime, fire-knives, and vocal dramatizations of Polynesian music and dance (Kaeppler 135),
and the "infinite
melodic variation" of the music of Ethiopia (Pound 125), to mention only few.
We know that the highly dramatic
character of flamenco music originates from the interlocking of zapateo,
guitars, handclapping, singing and dancing. Interlocking is indeed a general characteristic of
Spatial Narrative. Many
musical cultures in the world share the principle of interlocking, which is also a strong
characteristic of
non-competitive, cooperative social interaction. In Anlo music from Ghana,
drumming, dancing, singing, and
handclapping are a single whole (Ladzekpo and Ladzekpo 221). Venda music of South Africa is
"a shared experience
founded on a rhythmical stirring of the whole body of which singing is but one extension"
(Blacking 203). Musical
interlocking during performance of flamenco music or the music of many other minority cultures
results from the
spatial construction of community interaction. In that sense a performer carries within himself the
Spatial Narrative
defined by the group he belongs to. "Venda music is obviously a shared experience, no matter
how alone a performer
may be" (Blacking 203). Spatial construction blends individual and community contributions;
"although most music
is composed by individuals whose names may not be known, it is modified by the collective
during the course of trial
performances and subsequent oral transmission" (Blacking 203). Interlocking in Spatial
Narrative is also a collective
consciousness experience. "As a special kind of communion of bodies in space and time, the
world of African music
can also promote a shared experience of becoming, in which {22} individuals venture into the reality of the world of
the spirit through the collective consciousness of the community--they both experience and
become the source of
richer cultural forms" (Blacking 203-04). The philosophy of oneness, characterizing interlocking
performance, is also
expressed through the language, as in the Nigerian proverb Igi kan kì s'igbo
(one tree cannot make a forest
[Thompson ix]) or in the Zulu version umuntu ungumuntu ngabantu (man can only
become fully human through his
relationships with his fellow men).
Spatial Narrative, Discrete Narrative, Interlocking and Collective
Direction
Interlocking and collective direction,
important characteristics of Spatial Narrative, are not exclusively
determined by social or cultural factors. They are indeed mental processes ingrained in our
nervous system and they
determine the way humans make sense of the world; scientific evidence supporting this statement
is presented below.
However, I claim that culture determines the way humans learn to interact with the environment
and this in turn
determines that some functions of the nervous system are used more frequently than others. In
order to support this
speculation I will analyze both a dominant-culture's and a minority-culture's approach to dancing
and performing.
Obviously, we all know that it is not the color or the culture of a person but all the factors of the
cultural environment
as a whole, shaping natural, personal, and learning abilities, that really determine how well a
person dances or
performs. Needless to say, I am not interested in showing the best approach to dance or
performance but in finding the
factors that create their difference.
I will start by discussing the basic
contexts that differentiate the learning and the practice of dance and
performance as related to Spatial Narrative and Discrete Narrative. I
use the term Discrete Narrative to describe the
spatial construction of dominant culture that promotes lineal thinking, individualism, and discrete
definition of
elements of the world.
Interlocking in Spatial
Narrative implies that each individual is able to internalize the collective direction of the
group. It is a basic principle of African socialism, and its musical consequences are
found all over sub-Saharan Africa
whenever different parts are combined in polyrhythm and polyphony. Such musical structures
cannot be correctly
performed unless each individual conducts himself and at the same time submits to the "invisible
conductor" of the
collective. The idea of submission to an invisible conductor could be
misinterpreted if you have never performed this
type of music. The reference to an invisible conductor here is an analogy borrowed
from European performance
techniques. It does not indicate that each performer {23}
"counts" a certain number of beats provided by the whole
group, nor does it indicate the presence of a plan prescribing how the group will proceed and
therefore bringing
coherence and synchronization. Any type of translation can create distortions of the essential
differences in music
performance. Here the idea of invisible conductor refers to a collective force that is
generated by all the individuals
participating as one.
Again, there is some danger in
interpreting collective performance without having experienced it. The wrong
question would be: How do you create a sense of unity without a set of rules? The answer is by
focusing in sound.
Intensive listening, and not just hearing, is required. In addition to the way in which a traditional
European performer
pays attention to the pitch and the exact production of sound on the beat, collective performance
requires that each
musician concentrate on and control other aspects of the sound. Some of these aspects may
include sound color or
timbre, the actual mechanical response of the material used to produce the sound, the particular
relationship between
the areas you can hit and the unexpected variations in duration introduced by the natural inertia
of such areas, and the
variations in duration introduced by combination of accents and timbre. The control of individual
sound production
plus the intensive listening to the dynamic interaction among members of the group determines
the continuous
transformation of local narratives into collective performance. This process is
explained in more detail below.
Another aspect of performance that
may be totally overlooked behind the analogy of an invisible conductor is
the
direct participation of the mechanics of the body. Most of the rhythms played by a European
performer are thought of
as a combination of actual notes plus "rests." The performer counts the values of notes and rests
in order to reproduce
the written rhythms, creating in this way a discrete narrative. In the case of
collective performance the relationship
between the body of the performer and his instrument is totally spatial. The form of the
instrument and the mechanical
act of playing are what generates the rhythm. The performer is not counting rests; rather, the rest
is automatically
created by the time it takes to go from hitting one area of a drum to hitting the next one. The
performer follows the
flow of the music and produces the sound material that matches that flow by actively engaging
himself in a
choreography between his body and his instrument. The "dancing" that pervades instrumental
and vocal performance
in collective playing gives its essential quality to this music. It is dance that imparts the sense of
direction in the
musical narrative of minority discourse.
In collective performance the sense of
attainment is determined by the balance between individual and ensemble.
"Successful performance {24} depends on the mutual
interaction of players" (Blacking 204). Interlocking in Spatial
Narrative relates to the ability each individual has for finding and being able to stay in the
right "slot" by constantly
adapting his performance to the general movement of the ensemble. "Anyone who has performed
in such ensembles
will know just how the music generates a change of somatic state when all the players or singers
of different parts
`slot into' a common movement" (Blacking 204). Interlocking in Spatial Narrative
is underlined by a cooperative
contextual space.
Generation of Local Narratives in Visonual Music, Descriptive
Analysis
Visonual objects are visual aural
entities that act as linking elements of the musical narrative and represent the
kernel of the narrative process. Each visonual object, which can be a rhythmical pattern, a
melodic cell, or a particular
movement, is endowed with a meaning within the visonual narrative. The visonual has
influenced the way music
theatre is done today.
The development of Visonual Music
is composed of four main stages: Creative Rehearsal, Observation and
Interaction, Story Creation, and Real Time Improvisation. The first of these, Creative Rehearsal,
begins with the
social interaction of performers and creators. Each performer creates a set of visonual objects. In
the Observation and
Interaction stage, the performers perceive the objects created in stage 1. Each performer becomes
familiar with the
visonual object created by the others; thus, they share a common knowledge and become
competent with respect to
these objects. This competence allows for the transformation and integration of existing objects,
and for the creation
of new objects, both of which occur within the temporal domain. At this point Story Creation is
underway. The story
is internally articulated by this system alone: there are no external elements, no plot, nor ideas
outside the system.
Then, these different types of performer interactions are systematized as patterns of behavior
which are in turn used
during the Real Time Improvisation stage. As we can see here, the performers learn these
behaviors as local social
rules and then these rules are applied as mutual responses in real time improvisation (in much the
way everyone, in
real life, uses the social rules they have learned, when confronted with a particular situation). As
a result, an
elaborated version of the piece is generated in which meaning and human experience merge. This
chain of events
regulated by Narrativity becomes a piece.
{25}
Diagram of a Creation-Performance Field
Notice that stages 3 and 4 overlap with part of stage 2 in the temporal domain. The cycle of interaction itself becomes Story when new and already existing objects are progressively transformed.
The Visonual Field of Performance: Ontology of Spatial
Construction
Traditionally the dominant culture
model of education emphasizes individualism, visual thinking, lineal
thinking, and the so-called "critical thinking." Likewise, dominant culture's research apparatus
emphasizes the
"scientific method" as almost the only legitimate method of research. Interlocking stands in
opposition to those
cultural values as a determinant of collective direction. Interlocking and collective
direction characterize the visonual
field of performance. They are determined by social and cultural
factors as well as by mental processes ingrained in
our nervous system as indicated by the philosophic and scientific evidence presented
below.
Spatial construction is based on the
visonual, which originates in the interaction of the aural and visual senses. In
order to explain that, I use and restrict the meanings of Deleuze's territorialization
and deterritorialization to the
realm of the senses. From a philosophic and cultural perspective the visonual is
originated through the mutual
deterritorialization of the visual and aural senses. In order to comprehend this
statement we must understand the
visonual from the perspective that relates the subject to his experience of the world.
First of all, it is very important to
mention that the territory of the visual and aural senses is not defined at the
level of the receptors, namely the ear and the eye. The eye captures light energy and the ears
capture sound energy.
Both forms of energy are then transduced into wave patterns that create particular "shapes" in
their neuronal paths.
{26} As indicated by Horning, "the abilities which we
usually attribute to sensation are not performed by the senses
but by higher neurological process" (170). In 1961 Nobel Laureate George von Bekesy
demonstrated that we do not
hear with our ears, we do not hear anything as it is, but rather we recreate it. The
sensation of sound only begins with
our ears. We hear very little and we make up the rest. In my opinion the functions
of making up and recreating
described by Bekesy are fundamental in defining what I call the territory of the senses.
The territory of the senses is, then, a
mental space in which we process the information patterns transduced by
our receptors. In that space, patterns are recognized, predicted (making up),
recreated and interpreted (recreating), and
even complemented by the addition of information that is not originally present at the receptor
level
(complementarity). An example that can be used to illustrate this notion of
complementarity, which is characteristic of
what I call the territory of the senses, is presented by Horning based on Helmoltz's
experiments.
Horning says that "the auditory system
is able to identify the periodic repetition rate of a given vibration pattern
even if no energy is present at that frequency and, therefore, no resonance at the
corresponding place on the basilar
membrane" (85). In other words, the territory of the senses complements the information
received, as in the case
explained by Horning in which only two tones were presented to the ear and a third tone was
created. This tone,
which happens to be the "missing fundamental" of the two tones, demonstrates the ability of the
auditory system
known as "fundamental tracking" (86). Not only absent tones can be recreated but
also the sensation of loudness. As
Horning points out, "the sensation of loudness, therefore, could not come from the ear. It must be
the product of some
higher neuro-psychological process" (86).
I claim that the territory of the
senses is the mental space where this neuro-psychological process of
complementarity takes place and also that cultural influences modify not only its
functions but also the
physio-anatomic structures of neural patterns. Evidence of this last assertion comes from Martin
Albert and Loraine
Obler. They say that "the sounds of different languages shape the brain in different ways . . . and
that people who
know different languages think in different ways and even show evidence of anatomical brain
difference" (qtd. by
Horning 91). In this sense different forms of music-making, singing and dancing, would also
affect in different ways
the structure of neuronal patterns. The best example of this is a person who has never performed
or listened to a
particular type of music belonging to a culture using very different instruments, rhythms,
melodies, and noises. This
person would be "lost" or unable to "make sense" of the music until a necessary period of
adaptation, time to allow his
brain to {27} identify the new patterns, had
elapsed.
Performance of and listening to
different musical styles require that our brain become familiar with a copious
number of events that easily overcome the capacity of the human brain--at least of the brains of
people who
participated on the experiments of Ernst Pöppel. Pöppel defined an upper temporal
limit for the identification of
events in the 30 to 40 thousandths of a second. As he points out, "our brain would be overtaxed
were it required for
example to apprehend 100 events per second, since each event would command only 10
thousandths of a second,
which would not suffice. The stream of events to be assimilated cannot flow faster than 30 events
per second in order
for us to apprehend it" (22). The lack of understanding of the music of minority cultures is due to
both the natural
incapacity of the brain to apprehend more than 30 events per second and the lack of a bank of
cultural data where
"copies" of the events are stored. If the brain has copies of the data then the time of perception is
reduced, because it
does not need to scan each event to "make up" its pattern--this can be explained through
Dennett's Multiple Drafts
model, presented below. Easily more than 100 events per second can take place in flamenco
singing alone, without
even taking into consideration the sound of the instruments and the noises of handclapping and
zapateo. The
inflections of the "vibrato" voice by itself can easily generate at least 40 events per second; add to
that the rapid
changes of color imparted to the vowels, plus the rapid movement of ornaments, plus the changes
of the melody itself,
and we are talking about a large package of information to be processed every second. For an
untrained ear, the
creation of patterns will be initially directed to patterns which are familiar, such as the surface of
the
melodic-harmonic contour. Hence, European ears will identify first the repetitions of rhythms,
melodic motifs, and the
harmonic patterns moving in the "surface" of the music, ignoring the flow of information that
overtaxes their brains
and which is an essential part of the musical structure. "It sounds always the same" is the
frequent complaint about
any music we do not understand.
Another type of aural
complementarity, or the capacity of the human brain for providing
contextual information
to what is perceived, is found in the visual field. An example of this is what Pöppel
defined as virtual contours.
Reporting on the visual perception of a square which is not actually drawn but outlined by the
brain, he indicates that
"the particular arrangement of lines creates a situation suggesting a square to the viewer. The
hypothesis that the
square is present results in its actually being seen. In order for it to be perceived, an outline is
furnished by the brain
(hence virtual contour) that is not physically present. Especially noteworthy is that
the nonexistent square is even
emphasized by greater brightness" (Pöppel 67). Pöppel explains that {28} this type of perception, called "top-down,"
is determined from the brain down to the sensory organs. In other words, our spatial construction
of reality can be
determined both ways: from the sensory organs to the brain and from the brain to the
receptors.
We are confronted here with the fact
that an increasing amount of contemporary scientific evidence is providing
means for expanding our narrow views of the art of minority cultures. Daniel C. Dennett
provides additional
information that helps us to understand top-down perception from a different perspective which
he defines as editorial
processes. Dennett says that "all varieties of perception--indeed all varieties of thought or mental
activity--are
accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of
sensory inputs" (111).
Among other things this implies that the nervous system is continuously "editing" and "revising"
the information it
receives before it reaches our consciousness. "We don't directly experience what happens on our
retinas, in our ears,
[or] on the surface of our skin. What we actually experience is a product of many processes of
interpretation--editorial
processes, in effect" (112). As suggested by Dennett's Multiple Drafts model, the "editorial
revision" only has to be
made once and "when a particular `observation' of some feature has been made, by a specialized,
localized portion of
the brain, the information content thus fixed does not have to be sent somewhere else to be
rediscriminated by some
`master' discriminator" (113). This last point is very important because it explains how very
complex music structures
carrying multiple information can be or cannot be perceived depending on the cultural
development of "multiple
drafting" and "editorial revision."
Consequently, spatial construction can
result from sequential "editorial revision" of an irreducible-multiple space
constituted by aural and visual interactions. A minority culture's singers and dancers inhabit a
territory that combines
metaphorical and physical "editorial revisions" of the actual sounds and movements they create at
instantaneous time
and the sounds and movement that constitute the symbols operating as the internal kernel of their
narrative. Each
kernel, acting as a link from one instant to the next, carries the essence of multiple levels of
information. These levels
of information include, first, the narrative of the piece itself, which moves the performance to its
end; second, the
narrative of the collective, which transforms sounds and movements into meaning or symbols
understood by the
members of the collective; and finally, the narrative of musical patterns, which informs the
performers how far or how
close they are from each other, allowing for a continuous adjusting of their movements and the
sounds they produce.
When confronted with music
produced in minority narrative {29} contexts, some
listeners, whose ears and
brains have been structured through European harmonic and rhythmical patterns, will try to
project those patterns in a
top-down fashion. They also may identify and label other patterns that look familiar in a
bottom-up fashion. History
corroborates that music which did not fit European patterns and music with patterns more or less
similar to European
ones have been dismissed as "primitive."
Based on Dennett's Multiple Drafts
model, as well as Horning's and Pöppel's models, we can say that the
territory of the senses is the mental space where neuro-psychological processes,
such as aural complementarity and
virtual contour, take place. The territory of the senses is a space for
these and other sensory interrelations but also for
spatial cultural construction. Thus, contrarily to what we may have been trained to think, the
territory of the senses is
what determines both experience and meaning.
Narrativity, Meaning, and Continuity
Each culture "fills" and inhabits the
territory of the senses with different metaphors integrating, in different
degrees of complexity, sound, images, and their narratives. In this sense, spatial representation as
well as actual
meaning become subordinated to the ways in which top-down and bottom-up interpretations of
reality interact.
Automatic associative processes are directly tied to aural and visual perception, which implies
that the metaphorical
constructions stirred by some sounds have a cultural as well as a psychoacoustical basis. "The
apparent distancing of a
sound, perceived through the signs that have just been described,8 is not the result
of a deduction, any more than the
distancing of an object is with the diminution of visual angle. It is rather the product of automatic
associative
processes" (Francès 277-78). Visual and aural domains permeate human experience and
provide the raw material for
the spatial and metaphorical construction that creates meaning. It is not a coincidence, for
instance, that children
represent the sound of an approaching or departing train by raising up or bringing down the
dynamic or loudness of
the sound. These forms of representation of images from the "visual domain" by manipulation of
sound images or the
suggestion of sound images through pantomime are frequently found in all kinds of metaphorical
constructions that
eventually reach language and create verbal meaning.
The ability of humans to create
meaning is mediated by their ability to recognize, associate, and identify
implications and applications of the patterns they perceive. This is what creates an inseparable
bond between meaning
and experience. It is paradoxical to think that meaning, as Greimas points out (187), is
undefinable. Anything we can
say about meaning has to be explained as a function of the way {30} meaning is experienced, because meaning and
human experience are dependent variables. In studying meaning, Follesdal says, we must take
into account how
meaning is connected with the whole variety of human experience. It includes the study of
sensory experience as well
as human beliefs, values and actions.
Social Interaction and the Visonual Music of Minority
Discourse
As we have discussed, visual and
aural meaning are exchangeable. This exchange of modalities can be compared
to social interaction in the sense that, like the combination of elements exchanged in social
interactions, the total
contribution of performers never equals the sum of each element--there is always a resulting
extra element that does
not account for the whole. For instance, when two new performers incorporate their playing into
a group, the nature of
the music produced by the group changes and expands into something else. The new musical
product does not follow
from the direct contribution of each individual but from the continual transformation of "musical
objects" generated
from the narrative of the group. This model could be generally applied to any kind of musical
performance. However,
while a group of European performers will influence each other's performance, they would be
committed to respect
"the score" or the rules of improvisation. In visonual music, performers' interactions define a
creation-performance
field continually changing and expanding through the interrelation of sound, movement, local
narratives, and social
rules. Analyzing this field requires a natural approach to musical creation in which the social
reality of music is what
determines a performer-creator exchange of competencies.
Some Concluding Thoughts
Searching for musical meaning
through human experience confronts us with the social reality of musical activity
defined by the exchange of competencies generated by the performer-creator interaction. Within
this exchange of
competencies the physical reality of the performers (their bodies, the particular way they perform,
and the particular
timbre or color of their instruments and voices) is connected with the physical and social realities
that surround them.
In the case of minority cultures these realities include their roots, their beliefs, their ideas, and
their feelings, as well
as the social injuries inflicted by their oppressors. Searching for musical meaning through human
experience becomes
then a powerful way to discover old and new forms of local narratives. A local musical narrative
constitutes to a
certain extent an "inner city" language because it has local social rules that have been created
through musical
meaning. In this local musical narrative, values and beliefs, as well as sensory experience and
{31} perception, are
constantly shaping the process of creation-performance as the product of a natural
interaction.
The openness toward other cultures
we are witnessing at the end of the Twentieth Century provides opportunities
for us to go back to the sources and analyze the abandoned roads of the past. However, this
poetically nostalgic
opportunity should not trick us into thinking that "change is taking place" and that the results of
searching for musical
meaning through human experience will culminate in intellectual, moral, and political
transformation for the benefit
of minority cultures. Power-holders control the rules of the game, and by the time most
minority-culture intellectuals,
who have been forced to learn the language and modes of logocentric expression of the dominant
culture, become
proficient in articulating their views and proving their point, the rules of the game will be
changed again.
The imminent devastation of our
planet inflicted by the dominant culture has pushed it to construct "global
economy"--their latest apparatus of consent. The fashion of diversity will die away soon, together
with the
opportunities of studying minority cultures' songs and dances. The power and strength of those
musical forms are only
good if they can be recuperated, reproduced, and sold in multiple millions of copies. The myth of
"discovery" that
moved from the Columbus model to "travel agency" emblems is now being transformed into
"experiencing
otherness." Since 1990 the middle- and upper-class clubs in San Diego, California, are teaching
the "counting" steps
of salsa dancing. The "burrito" and "enchilada" experience is being moved into college
experience in the form of
"cultural studies." Chicano dance courses presented in the catalogs of community colleges are
never offered because
of lack of enrollment. However, African drumming courses have become very popular among
white students at the
University of California, San Diego.
The ability to transduce social
pressure and cultural transformation into economic power is the real secret of
power-holders. It is not difficult to understand, since the real majority of races and
peoples in the world are the
providers. They provide the work force, they provide the business profit, and when
they get mad, depressed, or angry
they provide creative, social, or political energy that can be transduced into money. The music of
minority cultures
was integrated into the inner space because their culture itself was an integral part of it--they
would sing while
working, or celebrating life or death. The music of the dominant culture developed from leisure
time, "aesthetic"
pleasure and indulgence--from people who were not working in fields or mines. The music and
art of the dominant
culture remind us how good it is not to be poor. The musical narrative of minority discourse
reminds us how good it is
to be alive.
{32}
Probably the saddest aspect of writing
such essays as this one is that the people who are being exploited are not
the ones writing them --although their children and grandchildren may do it one day. On the other
hand, the real
power-holders would never read these essays. So the writer feels as if he is having a conversation
in a cafe or bar with
friends or people who may be impressed or insulted by its content without further repercussions.
Meanwhile, in our
universities, the intellectual power-holders listen to everyone's music while trying to survive and
protect their
prophylactic territory. Universities are not providing real ground for analysis and improvement of
social conditions
but a platform of absorption and diversion of the energy created by social pressures and
oppression. Most
minority-culture members who obtain university positions by learning to play the music of the
dominant culture
maintain the silent-secret desire of being accepted as one of their fellows. Likewise, silent-secret,
false promises of
acceptance restrain them from speaking "too loud."
The joyful part of writing about music
that not many people care for is the hope that new generations of scholars
will turn their interest to it. Their souls may be contaminated by the spirit of freedom found in the
melodies carved by
working bodies and voices. Their voice may eventually reach university Music departments, but
before that could be
possible it would have probably reached the Cultural Studies departments.
NOTES
1In particular the post-Enlightenment scholarly tradition developing from European sources, as Jane C. Desmond points out.
2As explained by A. R. Janmohamed, minority discourse is "a theoretical articulation of the political and cultural structures that connect different minority cultures in their subjugation and opposition to the dominant culture . . . minority groups, despite all diversity and specificity of their cultures, share the common experience of domination and exclusion by the majority . . . the common experience does not induce any kind of homogenization, but it does provide the grounds for a certain thinking in solidarity across the boundaries of different identities" (Janmohamed and Lloyd ix).
3This point, further explained below, refers to the use of air, lungs, vocal apparatus, abdominal muscles, facial expressions, etc.; in short it refers to the relation between body and environment, including mental space.
4I coined the term visonual by combining the words visual and the French word son (sound). The concept of the visonual allows for an interpretation of {33} the unifying interrelation between visual and aural perception.
5This is a very common explanation given by many researchers of folk music from Latin America. Does mentioning where the music may have originated really add anything valuable to the research? In my opinion it does not--unless serious musicological research is available on the alleged "mother music," and that is hardly the case. Most of the so-called "originating" forms of music are always reported as having disappeared. So, the reader is left with the sense that "you do not have to worry, this music came from abroad, from the mother culture, that is all you need to know." The products of minority cultures are constantly relegated to second-hand observation through dominant culture paradigms.
6This humorous note
illustrates the fundamental methodological differences underlying cultural analysis. It does not
matter at all whether the
cattle can really understand what a copla is. The point is that the llanero believes the copla
creates a bridge between his soul and his environment.
The copla empowers him. It strengthens his pride and love for working. The cattle do not get
hypnotized by the copla but they actually like it and
enjoy working with the llanero because they can feel that when he sings he is a true person in
touch with his soul. Cattle like that! By the way,
cattle in Europe give better milk when they listen to Mozart. Of course this you must believe
because it was scientifically proven.
7Within the context of this paper, Narrativity provides the common set of cultural knowledge shared by a collective. Narrativity is the common background where meaning finds its roots. Things make sense in different ways to different people depending on the Narrativity or background in which they are projected.
8Robert Francès explains that the actual "sound space" corresponds either to features of objective distance of the source with respect to the subject or to features projected on the source by the context. The former will be on a reflexive level; the latter will be what Piéron called "inferences," though this last term raises the same problems as Helmholtz's "unconscious inferences" did in the visual domain.
WORKS CITED
Albert, Martin L. and Loraine K. Obler. The Bilingual Brain: Neuropsychological and Neurolinguistic Aspects of Bilingualism. New York: Academic, 1978.
Blacking, John. "Trends in the Black Music of South Africa, 1959-1969." May. 195-215.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980.
Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Desmond, Jane C. "Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies." Unpublished paper, Duke University.
{34}
Francès, Robert. The Perception of Music. Trans. W. Jay Dowling.
Hillsdale NJ: L. Erlbaum, 1988.
Follesdal, Dagfinn. "Meaning and Experience." Mind and Language. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.
Greimas, A. J. and J. Courtés. Semiotics and Language. Indianapolis: Indiana U P, 1982.
Horning, Thomas M. "The Development of a Model of the Psychological Process which Translates Musical Stimuli into Affective Experience." Diss. Case Western Reserve U, 1982.
Janmohamed, A. R. and David Lloyd. The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. London: Oxford U P, 1990.
Kaeppler, Adrienne L. "Polynesian Music and Dance." May. 134-53.
Ladzekpo, Alfred K. and Kobla Ladzekpo. "Anlo Ewe Music in Anyako, Volta Region, Ghana." May. 216-31.
List, George. "The Folk Music of the Atlantic Littoral of Colombia, an Introduction." Music in The Americas. The Hague: Indiana U Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, 1967. 115-22.
McAllester, David P. "North American Native Music." May. 307-31.
Marín, Servio. "The Concept of the Visonual: Aural and Visual Associations in Twentieth Century Music Theater." Diss. U of California, San Diego, 1994.
May, Elizabeth, ed. Musics of Many Cultures: An Introduction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980.
Olsen, Dale A. "Folk Music of South America--A Musical Mosaic." May. 386-426.
Pound, Michael. Ethiopian Music: An Introduction. London: Oxford U P, 1968.
Pöppel, Ernst. Mindworks: Time and Conscious Experience. Orlando: Harbrace, 1988.
Ramón y Rivera, Luis Felipe. La Música Folklórica de Venezuela. Caracas: Monte Avila, 1969.
Szamosi, Géza. Inventing Time and Space. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986.
Thompson, Robert F. Flash of the Spirit. New York: Random House, 1983.
{35}
Reflections on Manifest Destiny
Gail Tremblay
Only in those bright
moments
when the hunger to shut
the dear, dark world away
is made manifest by the tortured
bodies of those who love the
land--
only then is it clear that the
destiny
at work is the destruction
of the nurturing Earth
by those whose vision
makes them meditate on the
end.
The rest of us, not working
to create some inevitable
apocalypse,
mourn and count the days.
No millenium looms on our
ancient
calendars; time rocks us
in other dreams, moon and stars
marking the moment to plant
or the weeks to hold the
ceremonies
that thank each growing thing
which roots itself or moves
across the planet in its own
special
pattern. There are a million
things we choose not to create.
Amid the chaos, we try to
remember
balance, that simple dance
that moves lightly, takes little
space, that celebrates the
possibility
for breath. We know the
conquerors'
{36}
fascination when they fondle
death;
we've seen them strip the dirt
off bones, caress grave goods,
display remains, as surely as we've
seen
them profit from sweet
fruit they tear from trees. They
rape
the ground to manufacture
impossible
dreams. Glittering nightmares
grow
up around us; each year more
guns
and bombs increase the terror.
We know the path "from sea
to shining sea" was never long
enough, and now the surface
of the water hides great, garbage
dumps where poison leaks, a
steady
drip so soundless, death
whispers
as it kills. In large cities, air
suffocates as particles hang
visible,
glowing in the sun. Confusion
dances
in this buzzing light trying to
distract
us, to make us believe that power
lives
in their desperate vision. Still,
in many nations, there are those
who cherish what makes life
possible.
Some prepare to gather where the
world
will start again, many wait for
new
revelation that will lay to rest
the memory of a tortured god
who found returning to his
torturers
was more than he could bear.
{37}
The Anasazi Legacy Is the Light of the Jurassic Sun
William Willard
The Anasazi are a people who by
300 BC had adapted to life on the high, arid Colorado Plateau. Their legacy of
the light of the Jurassic sun is in the power stored in coal, petroleum, and uranium. Beneath the
feet of the Anasazi
there were geologic layers of limestone put down in lake beds, carbonaceous sandstone, lignite,
coal and shale formed
at the edge of a sea, sandstone from wind blown deposits, petrified wood from long fallen forests,
and the fossil bones
of dinosaurs. In those sedimentary cross-bedded and conglomerite sandstone rocks of Jurassic
age (more than 130
million years old) the Morrison Formation, host rock in the southern part of the San Juan Basin,
contains the largest
known uranium deposits. This is the Anasazi legacy of the Jurassic sun.
The Anasazi had constructed
settlements at Chaco Canyon, the San Juan River Basin in northwestern New
Mexico, later at Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, at Canyon de Chelly in northeastern
Arizona, and many other
places by the end of the first millenium AD. The Plateau is not an ideal farming region. It is
dotted with isolated
mountains, mountain chains and higher mesas where precipitation is more abundant. The
superficially flat surface is
actually lined with deep canyons carved through many-colored rocks. Sparse short plants adapted
to the arid soils and
prevailing southeast winds grow in this arid region. The Anasazi farmers adjusted to the
environmental limitations of
the region through an intensive rainfall-based agriculture. Rain usually arrives in late summer
when towering
thunderstorms fill the air with lightning, thunder, and short powerful bursts of rain. The Anasazi
irrigation systems
were planned on the management of the sudden appearance of the rain, through stream diversion
and flood control to
send the water to where there was enough good soil to plant their crops.
{38}
The physical reality of the success of
their adaptations is that by archeological estimates there are more than a
hundred thousand archaeological sites built over a thousand years in this region. For over two
millenia the summer
rains allowed corn to grow on this harsh, arid plateau. Corn, the most important food source and
the provider of
sacred meal and pollen for religious worship, was their most important crop.
The Anasazi people succeeded in
developing what is called the Chaco Phenomenon between AD 900 and AD
1020. In planned stages, they reached a time of greatness between AD 1020 and AD 1120. The
remnants of the Chaco
Phenomenon remain in immense ruined towns, villages, earthen mounds, roads, and irrigation
works, which were
population, cultural, and marketing centers for the whole region.
Apparently, Pueblo Alto was the most
important crossroads or terminus for the entire Chaco road system.
It is easy to make the case for its
importance as a trading or redistribution center.
Pueblo Alto occupies a magnificent
setting two-thirds of a mile back from the rim of Chaco Canyon north of
Pueblo Bonito. Here is where The Gambler, a legendary person of great wealth and importance
lived at some time in
the past. Navajo and Pueblo legends refer to his control over Pueblo Alto and other nearby towns
through magic and
success in gambling. Many of the long, high ceilinged rooms seemed to have been used solely for
storage, most
probably for excess foodstuffs, corn, beans, dried squash and pumpkins. It looks as though much
of the space within
Pueblo Alto was given over to specialized activities. In fact, the ratio of storerooms and work
rooms to living quarters
suggests the resident population may have been fairly small. A few dates in the early 1200s
probably represent the
final use of the structure during its declining days. (Lister and Lister 162)
The Gambler could scan a grand
full-circle vista of the Anasazi world, from the lofty position of Pueblo Alto. He
saw all the uninterrupted expanses of the Chaco Plateau, to the snow-clad San Juan Mountains to
the north, the
Chuskas to the west, Hosta Butte and Mount Taylor in the south, and the Jemez Mountains in the
east (Fox 36-37).
A reality of the Anasazi legacy is that
there is a cultural core of mythology of the places of origin for some
Navajo clans and for some Pueblos. The cultural core of the legacy is transmitted through the
work of writers, poets,
historians, storytellers, folklorists, and film-makers to new generations and to new non-Anasazi
people.
{39}
Each morning the First People sang
and prayed to the Sun for bringing them to the light. They offered sacred
pollen and cornmeal from their outstretched hands. "Sunrise accept our offering. Sunrise."
The important themes of rain, fertility,
curing, and assocating with the ancestors are universally connected with
the kacina. They are ancestors, messengers, and rainmakers, coming as clouds to the villages
when they are
summoned each year:
Before dawn, southeast of the village, the bells would announce their approach, the sound shimmering across the sand hills, followed by the clacking of turtle shell rattles --all these sounds gathering with the dawn. Coming closer to the river, faintly at first, faint as the pale light emerging across the southeast horizon, the sounds gathered intensity from the swelling colors of dawn. And at the moment the sun came over the edge of the horizon, they suddenly appeared on the river bank, the Ka't'sina approaching the river crossing.
Sunrise!
We come at sunrise
to greet you.
We call you
at sunrise,
Father of the clouds
you are beautiful
at sunrise.
Sunrise! (Silko 182)
Remote sensing surveys exploring
for oil, gas, and uranium in the San Juan Basin revealed the physical evidence
of an Anasazi network of over 500 miles of roads worn into the sandstone. Chaco-centered roads
go from the towns in
the canyon, with staircases, up over the canyon walls to other villages and to dozens of
shrine-signal sites, extending
far to the south, west, and northwest of the San Juan Basin, in west-central New Mexico, eastern
Arizona, and
southwestern Utah.
One of the trails leads to
Aacqumeh:
Aacqumeh hanoh came to their valley from a direction spoken of as the northwest. The place they came to had been prepared for them, and the name Aacqu, therefore means That Which Is Prepared. When they arrived in the flat valley sheltered by red and orange cliffs, they knew they had found what had been prepared by their leaders and instructions from earlier generations of the people. The valley of Aacqu is a beautiful and peaceful place. It must have been wealthy with grass growing in the dark fertile soil nourished by the nearby volcanic mountain {40} slopes and a number of perennial springs gushing forth. It must have been cool and restful in the shade of the tall mesa which would be their eventual home. Their journey had been long and difficult from the northwest through vast experience, trials, and crises. Kaashkatruti, that's where we lived before, the people say in their oral tradition, pointing northwestward. (Ortiz 338)
An origin myth for Aacqumeh is re-told to beyond-the-pueblo audiences in the 1992 film Surviving Columbus and in the 1991 book When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away:
Before the sisters climbed up the tree from the underworld, Thought Woman taught them how to praise the Sun with prayer and song. Every morning as the Sun rose, they would thank him for bringing them to the light by offering with out stretched hands sacred cornmeal and pollen. To the tones of the creation song, they would blow the offering to the sky, asking for long life, happiness, and success in all their endeavours. (Gutierrez 3)
Pilgrimages to the places where the mythological events happened continue (see Fox, esp.
36-41).
I became aware of, but did not yet
understand, the Anasazi legacy of the light of the Jurassic sun one Saturday
afternoon at Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland, California. Some of the Navajo Club
members were painting the
first-floor rooms that day. Two men came in about the time people were having a lunch break. I
knew both of them,
but had never talked with one of them. I will call him Harrison Begay, because that wasn't his
name.
Harrison seemed to be in a trance-like
state from the interactions of sleeplessness and alcohol. We sat at a table
in the front room of the House; Harrison began talking. He said he had heard that I was getting an
education and he
wished he could, too; then, among other things, he said:
I was raised tough. I hate the way I was raised. I hate the place I was raised. I hate everything about it. I never want to see that country again. I hate the goddam Navajos. I hate my own people. I don't like to see them. I don't like to be around them. The white people always stick together. One of them gets something he helps the others out. But not the goddam Navajo. A Navajo makes out all right he is satisfied. You know why? Because they are so chicken. Sometimes when I get to thinking about how tough I have it I cry all night just thinking {41} about it. I hate people, especially I hate Navajos. If they hadn't been so goddam dumb I wouldn't have it so tough. Look at how long they had this country. What did they do with it? Nothing. Look at the white man. They just been here a little while and look at all they have now.
The way everybody scattered they must have heard this speech before. It was an interesting
speech, considering that
almost all the people within earshot were Diné.
I heard a lot about Harrison. The
technical sum of what was said was that he had a skin allergy with an erratic
pattern of remission and re-occurrence. A physician was said to have made a diagnoses of
neuro-dermatitis with a
psychosomatic origin. Some Diné thought his disorder had its source in his rejection of
his family. He had denounced
them as stupid and dumb, because they could neither speak nor read English, and never leave
their home area in
Monument Valley. They had never lived in anything but a hogan. Other Diné, including
his wife, wanted him to go
home for a traditional healing ritual sponsored by his relatives. Before he came to Oakland he
had had a traditional
ceremony which had been successful for a while. This Saturday he was resisting social pressure
to accept treatment
through Native American Church rituals. The social pressure to try the Native American Church
treatment was more
intolerable than the skin condition the Saturday he talked to me. People said that some days he
couldn't even put on a
shirt because of the pain.
Harrison's wife, Margaret (not her
name either), said she frequently was dizzy with headaches and saw double in
bright light. She had an examination which showed low blood pressure. She passed her drivers
license exam by
squinting her left eye. She said doctors do not know what is wrong with her. She thought it was
her eyes. Their
children had health problems: one child was said to have grand mal seizures, another had
impetigo, and the youngest
one had gum infections.
Margaret said that before they came to
California they lived in Arizona. Harrison had a job driving a dump truck
for a uranium mine. He had the job but the two of them drove the truck. She drove, he slept; she
slept, he drove.
Since that time I have learned that the
Monument Valley area, the country Harrison didn't want to ever see again,
is where vanadium and uranium mining went on from 1942 until the uranium boom ended
(Eichstaedt 43). One result
of the mining activity is that it is tougher to live there now than it was when Harrison lived there.
The Navajo Nation's
Abandoned Mines Land Reclamation Program lists 62 abandoned uranium mines in Monument
Valley alone.
Uranium mining began on the Navajo
reservation in 1920, stopped {42} for a while, then
resumed in 1943 to
supply the Manhattan Project. Uranium for the Manhattan Project produced the material for
the first atomic-bomb test against the backdrop of White Sands, the pale blue backcloth of the mountains and hundreds of miles of white sand--the blinding artificial light of the bomb against the blinding light of the ground. (Baudrillard 4)
Reactions to this first test were diverse. Some were frightened by the destructive power unleashed; others saw great hope in the uses of that great power. William Lawrence, because he was Science editor for the New York Times, was a selected witness to the first test explosion of an atomic bomb:
I remember saying to myself "This is the Second Coming of Prometheus, unbound at last after some half a million years, bringing down a fire from the original flame that lighted the stars from the beginning." Man had found a way to create an atmosphere of neutrons, in which he could build an atomic fire more powerful than any fire ever built before on earth. With it he could create a new civilization, transform the earth into a paradise of plenty, abolish poverty and disease, and return to the Eden he had lost. (Lawrence 6-7, sentence order reversed)
Simon Ortiz, poet and worker in uranium mines and mills, asks a question:
There should be
moments of true terror
that would make men think
and that would cause women
to grab hold of children,
loving them, and saving them
for the generations
who would enjoy the rain.
. . .
[W]ho are these scientists,
who are those soldiers
with cold flashing brilliance
. . .
Who struck aside
the sacred dawn
and was not ashamed
before the natural sun and dew?
(Ortiz, From Sand Creek 89)
The Atomic Energy Commision
began a federal uranium purchasing program in 1948, which intensified federal
exploration for uranium {43} deposits. When the
surveys located promising sites, the federal government contracted
with private corporations to open the new mines. Then the corporations produced uranium to sell
to the A.E.C.
Diné provided a ready source
of mine workers. Subsistence farming and livestock herding was a tough way to
live. One way to stay at home or at least close by was to work in the uranium mines and mills
(Dawson 392-93).
Many Acoma, Laguna, and Navajo
people whose homeland is mid-northwest New Mexico worked in the
underground and open pit mines, in the processing mills, and in the service industry in the nearby
small towns, Grants
and Milan. (Ortiz 293)
They worked to mine uranium, to send
the ore on to the mills to be ground into yellowcake. Yellowcake went on
to other places to be processed into plutonium.
There were mines all over the
Colorado Plateau, from just west of the Hopi villages on western Navajo land,
across southern Utah, southern Colorado, northern Arizona into northwestern New Mexico, to
the edge of the Rio
Grande valley. There were about 2,500 mines opened in this Four Corners area, approximately
1,104 of them on
Navajo Nation Land. In addition to the mines seven uranium processing mills operated on the
reservation. It was an
anthill society of men laboring under very dangerous conditions for very little money: "We never
made more than
$1.88 an hour. Most of the money was spent on food and transportation" (Eichstaedt 216).
The majority of the people I knew had
worked at the Jackpile and Paguate mines on Laguna Pueblo land.
When the mines came
to the Laguna and Acoma land,
the men and their families were
glad
in a way because
the men wouldn't have to go so far to
work
for the railroad in Barstow,
Richmond, Flagstaff, Needles. (Ortiz
298)
They worked in the mines during the 1950s when the uranium boom was at its height. Some
left the mines when their
health failed. One man who came on the federal relocation program to San Jose, California said
he worked for
Anaconda at the Jackpile mine, until he developed tuberculosis. Then he was in treatment for two
years in
Albuquerque. He said the doctor told him he couldn't work anymore; he had to take it easy. The
only means he had to
take it easy was a government check every month for $66. The only way he could make it at all
was if his wife had a
job. So he came as a dependent of his {44} wife on a
federal vocational training program to San Jose. His wife could
then train for a job that would pay enough for them to have a better income than $66 per
month1 (Interview
6/30/1962).2
The Jackpile and the Paguate uranium
mines are located on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, 40 miles west of
Albuquerque, New Mexico. They are three open-pit mines and nine underground mines.
Open-pit mining was done
with large front-end loaders and trucks. The overburden, topsoil, alluvium, shale, and sandstone
were blasted or
ripped, removed from the open pits, and piled in waste dumps. The uranium ore was sorted
according to grade and
stockpiled for shipment by shortline railroad to be ground into yellowcake by the mill at
Bluewater, New Mexico.
The companies just couldn't mine
fast enough
to keep up with the demand
for yellowcake the Atomic Energy
Commision
was buying and stockpiling then.
(Ortiz 297)
In 1960 there was a lay-off at the
Jackpile and Paguate mines. Men who were laid off tried and failed to find jobs
at another mine in Colorado, then any job, but they found nothing that lasted very long. When
there was nothing left
in New Mexico even to apply for, they signed up for the B.I.A. relocation program to go to
Oakland, California.
In September 1962 I went to Laguna
Pueblo as a fieldworker for the American Indian Urban Integration project,
to see what kind of a place it was that they had come from. I talked to Governor Daily of Laguna
Pueblo. He said that
the Jackpile mine had been operating six days a week, with two shifts and overtime during the
1950s. But the mine
work had been cut to eight-hour shifts and a five-day week. Governor Daily said that he told the
men who are now in
Oakland there was no use staying in Laguna, there was nothing for them here. He said that I
could tell them when I
got back that there still wasn't anything for them.
The Pueblo treasurer gave me
statistics on employment in Laguna village: 484 unemployed, 398 employed
full-time, and 201 unemployable.
On my way into the Pueblo
Administrative Building I saw a long line of people, Anglos, Hispanos, and Indians.
They were standing in the shade of the roof overhang and inside the new Pueblo government
building. Inside, people
sat on metal chairs behind tables checking through paperwork with the people at the head of the
line. Once the
paperwork had been done the line moved on to the next stops in the line, where they received
packages and cans from
cardboard boxes wth USDA markings. This was a federal surplus food commodities {45} distribution center for the
unemployed of the area. From the looks of that line, and regardless of ethnic group, it appeared
that Governor Daily
was correct: if a person wasn't working at the mine, they were not working.
The United Pueblos Agency gave me
the population figure for Laguna Pueblo. The population was located in
seven settlements:
Casa Blanca
216 in 43 family groups
Encinal
312 in 63 family groups
Laguna
1,126 in 225 family groups
Mesita
516 in 103 family groups
Paguate
1,034 in 207 family groups
Paraje
456 in
91 family groups
Seama
645 in 91
family groups
Total
4,305 in 861 family
groups
For nearly 30 years the Pueblo of
Laguna depended almost exclusively on the Jackpile and Paguate mines for
employment, because subsistence farming and livestock raising were no longer sufficient.
Laguna village, the
principle population center of the Pueblo, was an economically deprived mining-company town
dependent for cash
income on the 398 out of 884 employable persons who were working for Anaconda.
I came back to Laguna in September
1963 to interview more people for the Urban Integration project. I went out
to see what the Jackpile mine looked like. The EIS report says the Jackpile operation is about 1.5
miles long and more
than 5 miles wide. The Paguate mine is 2 miles long and several hundred feet wide. Paguate
Village was very close to
the mines (a thousand yards, the EIS report says). Paguate didn't look like 1,034 people lived
there. It appeared almost
deserted. There were some patches of corn down the hill. I followed a dirt road from Paguate to
the small Hispano
settlement of Bibo. I had heard about a bar at Bibo where miners stopped after coming off their
shifts at the Jackpile.
There were two stores here. One was the famous bar. There was a visible attempt at farming, fruit
trees, corn fields.
Further on, at the end of the road, there is another Hispano town, Seboyeta (Cebolleta). There
was a store in an adobe
building, which was also the post office. There were many fallen-in adobe ruins around to
indicate that Seboyeta used
to be a much larger settlement. Here, as around Bibo, there were the remnants of cultivated
fields. The most
noticeable thing about Seboyeta in 1963 was a large sign on a post at the edge of the settlement
that read "No
Trespassing by order of the heirs of the Chavez Land Grant!" The land grant claim is disputed by
the Pueblo of
Laguna and the Navajo Nation, on the grounds of the land grant being a forgery written long after
Spain and its
successor, Mexico, had been replaced by the United States. The case has been in federal courts
since early in this century.
{46}
Aacqumeh poet Simon Ortiz put the
reasons for working in the mines or going on the federal relocation program
in the first person:
Some Aacqumeh high school graduates went on BIA relocation or entered military service, which is another refuge of the poor, but I decided to work.
Mostly, I worked at the Kerr-McGee millsite although several times I went underground into the mines. At the mill I worked in crushing, leaching, and yellow cake, usually at various labor positions but later as an operator which was not much different or more skilled than laborer. I had a job, and for poor people with low education and no skills and high unemployment that is the important thing: a job. (Ortiz 356)
The mines are ranked as among
the world's largest uranium open pit operations covering more than 2,700 acres
of disturbed land. The mines were operated by Anaconda Minerals Company, a division of the
Atlantic Richfield
Company. Mining operations were conducted under three uranium mining leases between the
Pueblo of Laguna and
Anaconda. The leases cover about 7,868 acres.
Underground mining was conducted
by driving adits, or declines, to the ore zones; drifts were driven through the
ore zone, and the ore removed by modified room-and-pillar methods. Ventilation holes were
drilled to maintain a
fresh air supply. Mine water was collected in sumps and pumped to ponds in the open pits. Waste
rock was placed in
waste dumps, and the ore was stockpiled for shipment to the mill.
Income for the years of the mine
employment are reported as less than one half of the median income for New
Mexicans in 1950 and 1960. In 1970 the median income reported by Lagunas was $2,661, just
under 75% of the
median income reported by other New Mexicans.
In 1979 the incumbent governer (who
had been Lieutenant Governer when I interviewed him in 1962), Floyd
Correa, said:
I'm for the development of our resources. It was a decision made by our council over 25 years ago, and it is my responsibilty to follow through on that decision and to see that the proper mitigation measures and safety and health regulations are being followed. The mine is a source of income and jobs for our people. Therefore, it has affected a very positive economic development for my reservation and has met the various needs of our people.
He went on to say:
Our uranium is a world resource. If the market slows down in this country, we can sell somewhere else in the world. There's always going to be a need for nuclear {47} power and the demand for it will keep growing. (Barry 14)
Operations in the Jackpile and Paguate mines came to an end on 31 March 1982, when the
mines were closed because
of depressed world-wide uranium market conditions.
There are hundreds of abandoned
mines and tons of radioactive minewaste littering the Navajo reservation.
Water supplies are polluted with radioactive drainage from mines and tailings piles. Many
Diné families are living in
the midst of abandoned mines and tailings piles. Diné homes, land, and livestock are
surrounded by the nuclear
legacy. Diné miners and mill workers are dying or already dead. There are many
questions about the good health of
their survivors and those who live in the midst of this waste land. Research studies should answer
some of the
questions:
This study centers on Navajo men with lung cancer who were admitted to the hospital from February 1965 to May 1979. 16 of 17 patients were uranium miners. The low frequency of cigarette smoking in this group supports the view that radiation is the primary cause of lung cancer among uranium miners. (Gottlieb and Husen 449)
We performed a population-based case-control study to examine the association between uranium mining and lung cancer in Navajo men. 72% of the Navajo patients had been employed as uranium miners. These results demonstrate that in a rural nonsmoking population most of the lung cancer may be attributible to one hazardous occupation (uranium mining). (Samet et al. 1481)
Reclamation has started on the worst of the abandoned mines and mill sites, but will have to continue for years.
From 1982 to 1989 the mine lay open and exposed until the reclamation project was launched by Laguna Pueblo and its Laguna Construction Company, with about $40 million from Atlantic Richfield and the Anaconda Mining Company which merged in 1970. Although about 650 miners were employed at the peak of its operation, just 60 are used for the reclamation work. (Eichstaedt 173)
In an essentialist sense all of
them--Acoma, Laguna, Diné, and the Hispano men (with their Pueblo and Diné
ancestors, cousins, and in-laws) from the land grant villages--are heirs of the persistent cultural
core of the Anasazi legacy.
A part of that legacy is in the story
about Pueblo Alto and "The Gambler." When the ancestors of those who
became the Diné came to {48} Kin
nteel, as they call Pueblo Alto, they found the local men building a great village, a
race track, and a playing area. They were doing this work for He Always Wins, The Gambler.
The Gambler had
arrived there to issue challenges to everyone to play against him in all kinds of gambling games.
He, as his name says,
always won. He had won everything the local men had, their property, their wives, their children,
and themselves. If
they would build the things he asked for he would return some of what he had won.
The Gambler of the legend is an
individual predecessor to the great corporations which have exploited the
products of the light of the Jurassic sun: coal, gas, oil, uranium. Those corporations, unlike The
Gambler, are not
mythological. They, like The Gambler, have taken everything the children of the Anasazi had,
put them to work in
mines, mills, and oil fields, and given them back a little of what they took in the form of low
wages for their work.3
NOTES
1This couple were successful in improving their incomes. The wife did go through a training program and get a job which paid much more than her previous jobs in New Mexico. The husband began to feel better. He, too, found a training program. He went out to find a job, even working for no pay to gain work experience. He was hired and was a salesman for a design company when I last saw him.
2All of the interviews cited for 1960-64 were done as part of the Social Survey of American Indian Urban Integration project, which was funded by the National Institute of Health. The project was concerned with the impacts of the federal American Indian Voluntary Relocation program which was renamed the Employment Assistance program. The program under whichever name was a continuation of the long term federal effort to disperse American Indians into urban places as far as possible from their original communities. The origin of this population dispersal program is in the Outing Program of the carceral U.S. Semi-Industrial Indian Training School located at Carlisle, Pennsylvania from 1879 to 1918. The programs are partially responsible for the 1990 federal census figures which show that more than 60% of the American Indian population is now urban.
3Other products of the light of the Jurassic Sun have been used by corporations to profane holy places with roads, drip tanks, well heads, and pipelines. In Tony Hillerman's A Thief of Time, the Diné evangelist, Reverend Slick Nakai, says:
"Right up the highway here, right up here you have Huerfano Mesa. We have been taught, us Navajos, that's where First Woman lived, and First Man, and some of the other Holy People, they lived there. But I want you to remember some-{1}thing about Huerfano Mesa. Just close your eyes now and remember how that holy place looked the last time you saw it. Truck road runs up there. It's got radio towers built all over the top of it. Oil companies built 'em. Whole forest of those antennae all along the top of our holy place. I can't pray to the mountain no more. Not after the white man built all over the top of it. Remember what the stories tell us. Changing Woman left us. She's gone away" (48-49).
WORKS CITED
Bachman, Ronet. Death and Violence On the Reservation: Homicide, Family Violence, and Suicide in American Indian Populations. Westport CT: Auburn House, 1992.
Barker, Rodney. The Broken Circle: A True Story of Murder and Magic in Indian Country. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
Barry, Tom. "New Mexican Pueblos Confront the Atomic Age." American Indian Journal 1.12 (December 1979): 11-17.
Baudrillard, Jean. America. London: Verso, 1988.
Dawson, Susan E. "Navajo Uranium Workers and the Effects of Occupational Illnesses: A Case Study." Human Organization 51.4 (Winter 1992): 389-97.
Eichstaedt, Peter H. If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans. Santa Fe: Red Crane, 1994.
Fox, Steve. "Sacred Pedestrians: The Many Faces of Southwest Pilgrimage." Journal of the Southwest 36.1 (Spring 1994): 33-53.
Gottlieb, L. F. and L. A. Husen. Chest 4 (April 1981): 449-452.
Gutierrez, Ramon A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Stanford CA: Stanford U P, 1991.
Hillerman, Tony. A Thief of Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
House of Representatives. One Hundred Third Congress. "First Session on Cleanup of Abandoned Uranium Mines and Mine Waste on the Navajo Reservation." Hearings held in Washington DC, 4 November 1993. Serial No. 103-58. Washington DC: GPO, 1994.
Lister, Robert H. and Florence C. Lister. Chaco Canyon: Archaeology and Archaeologists. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1981.
Ortiz, Simon J. From Sand Creek. Oak Park IL: Thunder's Mouth, 1981.
---. Woven Stone. Tucson: U of Arizona P 1992.
Samet, J. M., D. M. Kurtvert, R. J. Waxweiler, and C. R. Rey. "Uranium Mining and Lung Cancer in Navajo Men." New England Journal of Medicine 310 (1984): 1481-84.
{50}
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977.
US Department of the Interior. Bureau of Land Management Albuquerque Office. Bureau of Indian Affairs Albuquerque Area Office. "Draft: Jackpile-Paguate Uranium Mine Reclamation Project. Environmental Impact Statement." February 1985.
{51}
Entitlement of Women in Latin America
Helia M. Corral
I. Introduction
Another title for this work might have
been "Women's Rights in Latin America," a topic extremely difficult to
approach without first clarifying at least a couple of points, the first one being a common
misconception regarding
Latin American women, who to some extent are perceived as incapable of taking care of
themselves. The next one
recognizes the need to point out some of the basic differences between Latin American and
American realities, which
render quite different the respective perceptions of the meaning of the word entitlement in both
geographical areas,
making it impossible to discuss the subject in the same light.
The first factor to consider about Latin
America is that it often is mistakenly perceived as a single geographic,
political, and ethnological unit. Latin America does not always represent such a unit, but
twenty-one socio-political
and geographical identities. It is, in fact, so diverse that the word "entitlement" may have totally
different meanings to
an Argentinean, a Mexican, a Bolivian, a Cuban, an Equatorial, etc., and all of these meanings
will differ from the one
in the United States.
Rather than discuss specific problems
of entitlement in Latin America at this point, it is necessary to focus on
both the role of Latin American diversity and its repercussions on some prominent historical
figures that challenge the
belief that Latin American women are by nature submissive and/or incapable of taking care of
themselves.
II. Diversity of Latin America
Let us begin, then, by establishing the
fact that Latin America is extremely diverse. One could say, in fact, that
there are many Latin Americas, and that they differ greatly. For instance, only one Latin {52} American nation,
Mexico, is in North America. There are five countries in Central America, three in the West
Indies and ten in South
America. These areas represent varied geographical environments: the tropical jungles and rain
forests; the Caribbean
islands; the high elevations of the Andean countries; the Pampa of Argentina and
the Llano of Venezuela; the
Riverplate region of Argentina; the great deserts of Mexico; and the immense coastal areas of
Chile and Peru. The
linguistic diversity is also great: Spanish, Indian languages and dialects, Portuguese, French,
Italian, German, Dutch,
English, and Papiamento (a combination of Spanish, Dutch and English spoken in the island of
Aruba) are enough to
suggest the cultural and ethnic diversity of Latin America, along with the extremely diverse
indigenous populations
and the degree of their intermingling or mestizaje, cultural and ethnic.
But one cannot forget that diversity
also exists when it comes to socioeconomic classes, as in the oligarchy of
Argentina, Bolivia and other countries; the landowners of Nicaragua and Mexico; the growing
middle class of most
countries; the poor of all countries. In sum, when attempting to understand Latin America one is
to keep in mind what
a very well-known American anthropologist (Lesley Bird Simpson) who studied Mexico
discovered: that just as there
are Many Mexicos so there are many Latin Americas.
Nevertheless, these nations have many
characteristics in common, one of them of extreme importance: that it
was in their land that Western Civilization was first transplanted to this continent in 1492 when
the arrival of
Christopher Columbus and his men, and later on the arrival of Cortés and his men,
initiated the mingling of different
races, cultures and traditions of Europe with the indigenous cultures of the "New World."
As we speak of Columbus, we are
transported to fifteenth-century Spain where we contemplate the impressive
personality of Isabella of Castille, one of the best feminine figures in world history, whose
marriage to Ferdinand of
Aragon consolidated their kingdoms into the single kingdom of Spain. It is worth noting that
Isabella brought more to
the marriage than Ferdinand, making her his equal rather than his subordinate by virtue of her
being a woman. Their
motto, displayed on the canopy of the royal throne, was tanto monta, monta tanto, isabel como
fernando, which
reveals the fact that the worth and the power of each of the Catholic kings was exactly the same.
No one was superior
in power or personality to the other.
While the power and responsibility
were to be shared equally by both royal figures, it is important to point out
that Isabella was largely responsible for sponsoring the enterprise of discovering the "New
World." Tradition has it
that she sold her jewels to finance Columbus' {53}
ambitious undertaking. But it has also been said that she needed
the money to recover Granada from the Moors in order to complete the reunification of Spain and
that, therefore, that
money did not serve the purpose of Columbus' enterprise. Nevertheless, if one considers that the
fall of Granada took
place in January 1492, there doesn't seem to be a contradiction to the original theory. And it was
then, and only after
the fall of Granada, on the third day of August of the same year, that she was able to provide the
financial support
Columbus needed for his expedition. If successful, the project offered a great deal of financial
and political gain.
Isabella, a well-informed, intelligent and ambitious woman, thought Columbus' project made
sense.
III. Seventeenth-century Spain
But Isabella's display of a tremendous
vision and ability is not an isolated case in Spanish history. Her
personality represents, in fact, a culmination of a series of Spanish feminine personalities of
strong political and
historical influence. Her character is an integral part of Spanish tradition as she also succeeded in
endowing her
ill-fated daughter Catherine of Aragon with the same qualities, as attested by her historical role
and personality,
revindicated by Salvador de Madariaga, the great Spanish essayist, in his book Mujeres
españolas.
Based on these Spanish historical
facts and traditions, the male dramatists of seventeenth-century Spain wrote
historical as well as fictitious plays that can be considered today as strongly feminist, creating a
typical character of
the theater of the Seventeenth Century, the "mujer varonil" (the manly woman).1
In Lope de Vega's The Sheepwell
there is a heroine who rebels against the whole town, calling on her fellow women to stand up for
their rights and to
challenge, in no uncertain terms, the neglectful attitude of the men of the town whom she calls,
among other things,
cowards and sheep.
In Life is a Dream by
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, another one of the giants of Spanish drama, one finds the
character of Rosaura, another "mujer varonil" who dresses as a man and leaves not only her own
home but her own
country in order to vindicate her honor and her name. She, in fact, speaks to her King,
Segismundo, as both a man and
a woman in her self-defense:
As a woman, I persuade you
to mend my honor,
as man I come to encourage you
to recover your crown.
I come to move you as a
woman,
when I place myself at your feet.
As a man, I'm here to serve you
{54}
with my sword and my life.
And now think that if today,
you woo me as a woman,
I shall give you, as a man,
death in honest defense
of my honor,
because I shall be
in its loving conquest,
a woman to beg your kindness,
a man to win my honor. (783)
If Rosaura's words are impressive,
one must not forget the famous Trickster of Seville by Tirso de Molina, based
on the medieval legend of Don Juan, which condemns male infidelity and deceit of women,
making this male
stereotype a universal depiction, and one of the strongest condemnations of masculine abuse of
power.
Not only the playwrights of that era
portray these characters. Cervantes in his Exemplary Novels depicts
Preciosilla, the wise Gypsy, as extremely bright and in possession of her free will, and in
Don Quijote portrays the
shepherdess Marcela, who refuses to give her love to someone who loves her but she does not
love back. Cervantes is
always respectful of women and often portrays their ability to defend their own rights.
If there are many such examples of
feminine exaltation in the Golden Age of Spanish literature, Spanish social
reality provides us, among others, with an outstanding example of feminine ability,
self-confidence, and respect: Saint
Teresa of Avila, a reformer of the Carmelite religious order, a founder of numerous convents, a
promoter, a rector, a
poet, a theologian, and a doctor of the Catholic Church, is an extraordinary example of true
human greatness.2
IV. Malintzi
While it may not be too difficult to
think of strong capable women in the European world, it may be almost
impossible for some to think of any such personality in the New World, particularly in
indigenous Mexico. But indeed
there is, at the very beginning of the conquest of Mexico, an Indian noblewoman born in Painala
who learned Spanish
so rapidly that she played an instrumental role in the dramatic changes that European contact
brought. Her personality
has been surrounded by controversy. But much has to be reassessed regarding Mexican history
and much more when
it comes to the topic of women. Malintzi propitiated the conquest and bore a child of
Cortés, but her merit was not
fairly recognized then or now.3
{55}
V. Seventeenth-century Colonial Mexico (New Spain)
If sixteenth-century indigenous
Mexico had Doña Marina, the Seventeenth Century had Sor Juana. Born in San
Miguel Nepantla, near Mexico City, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695), a Creole
nun, is not only considered the
greatest lyric poet of the Colonial period but the first feminist of the New World and among the
greatest poets of her
time. Octavio Paz compares her poetry to the poetry of John Donne, closing his remarks with the
following words:
"The English poet is incomparably richer, freer and sensual but, I shall dare say, he's neither more
intelligent nor more
acute" (44). Paz also states that her poetry, except in "El primero sueño," does not go
further than her time and that
what distinguishes her is her intellectual perspective, her inquisitiveness: "She sees the world as
an object to be
known, to be studied. Some of her finest poems deal with religious and profane love placing her
as the foremost
feminist of her age" (56). In addition, Sor Juana composed many musical pieces and sacred and
secular plays.
Of special interest and a typical
example of Sor Juana's prose is the candid epistle entitled Respuesta a Sor
Filotea de la Cruz (Response to Sister Filotea of the Cross) dated at the convent of San
Heronimous in Mexico City,
March, 1691. "Sor Filotea de la Cruz" is said to have been a pseudonym of the Bishop of Puebla
who had written to
Sor Juana asking her to stop reading, studying, searching and researching subjects that were
mundane rather than
devoting herself to the exclusive reading of the Bible as was suited to a nun. Sor Juana gave up
her books. In this
letter she states, among many other things, that she found in the most trivial things reasons to use
her intellect, that
she learned to read at three and that she was so interested in learning as a young girl, that she
would not eat cheese
because it was believed to decrease the ability to think, that she disciplined herself buy cutting
her beautiful hair so
her head would not be occupied with vain thoughts. At six she wanted to attend the University.
She dressed herself as
a boy in order to be admitted and, of course, she would have not been admitted. In sum, Sor
Juana answered by
defending her calling, not so much as a nun as an intellectual.
As an intellectual, Sor Juana not only
understood that the prejudices regarding the supposed inferiority of women
were caused, to a great extent, by the socioeconomic structure of the colonial period, but that
they
were also caused by
the shortsightedness of men. In 1982, Octavio Paz wrote a long-promised work, Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz or The
Traps of the Faith, in which he discusses Sor Juana's personality and its relevance to the
understanding of colonial
Mexico by careful speculation on how she, the genius, allows her reader to know this extremely
important period of
Mexican history by what she says and does and by what she fails to say and do, as a consequence
of her {56}
surrounding environment and the opportunities and limitations society placed upon her.
VI. Modern Times
While Sor Juana's true genius could
not be totally suppressed in seventeenth-century colonial Mexico, the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Latin America are nearly devoid of written evidence of
intellectual feminism,
but are not lacking in feminine socio-political action. It is a widely known fact that women
participated directly, and
indirectly, in the wars of independence of Latin America from Spain. Inspired in the wars of
Independence of the
United States and the French Revolution, Latin America pursued the ideals of these two great
countries:
constitutionalism, federalism, republicanism, democracy. These ideals prevailed in Latin
America and propitiated the
wars of Independence from Spain. Most of them took place between 1810 and 1821.
Many women in Latin America helped
their husbands in their tasks of liberation. In New Spain, now Mexico, we
find such names as Josefa Ortíz de Domínguez, Leona Vicario, María
Petra Teruel de Velasco, Gertrudis Ruedaravo,
Altagracia Mercado, Josefa Martínez, María Soto la Marina, Rafaela
López Aguado de Rayón, Manuela Medina,
Manuela Taboada, Mariana R. del Toro de Lazarín, and others.4
Time and space force us to skip the
period of legal and social Reform and the defense of the new Latin American
nations against European invaders in which women helped and supported their men. We must
move toward the time
in history when, after thirty years of dictatorship, in 1910, one of the most outstanding historical
wars of Latin
America took place: the Mexican Revolution. This social revolution had a far-reaching
socioeconomic and political
impact, not only on Mexico but on Latin America and the world, that cannot be discussed here,
but the famous
soldaderas (soldier women) supported and fought in this war along with their
men.
In the Nineteenth Century, as well as
the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Latin America lived a period of
tremendous political and social unrest. Perhaps the best way to assess entitlement of women in
Latin America is to
point out when Latin American women first demanded the right to vote. It is important to keep in
mind that ideas of
political entitlement of women arose in Europe in the Nineteenth Century and that, in the United
States, women first
received the right to vote in 1919. Latin America, disturbed by multiple social struggles such as
the Mexican
Revolution and coups d'etat to overthrow dictatorships throughout the area, was slower in
granting individual
independence as symbolized by the ballot.
{57}
VII. Twentieth-century Ecuador and Mexico
It is often the case that
there is an enormous distance between the legal and the political realities in Latin
America and it may come to the reader's surprise to know that the first country in Latin America
to allow women to
vote was Ecuador in 1926, but that Mexico did not take the same step for all elections until over
25 years later. The
Revolution had been slow in entitling women. It is important to remind ourselves of the fact that
during a revolt
everything deteriorates or comes to a standstill. The sources of labor decline and, if there isn't
enough work for men,
there are less working opportunities for women.
On 12 December 1914, Carranza's
decree gave women new rights. In 1928 married women were allowed to
dispose of their own patrimony. For the first time, in 1931, the First Convention of Factory and
Country Women
Workers, took place in Mexico City, followed by similar conventions until all was interrupted by
World War II.
In 1940, Mexican President
Lázaro Cárdenas approved the Judicial Decree that protected Mexican workers,
women included. Cárdenas had taken a step in the right direction, but it wasn't until 17
October 1953 that women
received the privilege to vote. In 1955, four million women and five million men voted in the
first Mexican election
in which women could take part. President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines had given women the right to
vote and Adolfo
López Mateos, the next president of Mexico, who was married to a highly educated
woman, assigned women to
important posts in his cabinet and approved labor laws for their protection.5
VIII. Argentina, Nicaragua, and El Salvador
The previous examples illustrate that
not only do national socio-political conditions have an impact on the
implementation of laws protective of and entitling women, but that it is also important to stress
the fact that
economic, financial and industrial development play an important role as they have a
repercussion on employment.
Argentina, which in many respects parallels the United States, and is without a doubt one of the
most progressive
Latin American countries, has nevertheless been plagued with unfair labor practices, a poor
record in human rights in
general as well as in the area of women's rights, in spite of their having had women rulers, such
as the two women
supported by Juan Domingo Perón: Evita and Isabelita.
Yes, Argentinean women have
enjoyed greater freedoms, but their country has failed to sustain the march
initiated by Perón. One of the most interesting examples of this prevailing condition is
Argentina's best representative
of a woman of letters: Victoria Ocampo (1891-1977).
Best known as a cultural entrepreneur
and founder of the influential {58} literary review
SUR and of the
publishing house of the same name, Victoria Ocampo, highly regarded by great men and women
of universal
recognition, wrote ten volumes of Testimonies (essays about her personal
experience) in which she expresses some of
her concerns about Latin America. Her list of friends included Rabindranath Tagore, Gabriela
Mistral, Albert Camus,
Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, José Ortega y Gasset, Alfonso Reyes and Igor
Stravinsky. She devoted her life to
promoting cultural understanding between Latin America and the rest of the world, especially
Europe and the United
States, and was the first woman to belong to the Argentine Academy of Letters. Ironically, she
was often criticized for
her cultural interests, and many of her honors did not come to her until shortly before her death
(Lyn and Heyck 51).
As the reader knows, there are great
differences between Argentina, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and for the
purpose of this work it has been decided to single out the personality of Miriam Laso Laguna
(1946- ) from Nicaragua
and of Claribel Alegría of El Salvador. These outstanding women differ greatly from
Victoria Ocampo both in
generation and in personality, but they are also women of letters.
Let us consider first Miriam Laso
Laguna, who was a professor of literature at the University of Nicaragua in
1979. Her career has changed greatly as she is now the Director of Technical and Financial
Cooperation of the
Nicaraguan Institute of Social Security and Welfare. While not a militant Sandinista, her
motivation stems from a
religious attitude, and she identifies with the social goals of the Nicaraguan revolution. Her
sympathy toward the
needy singles her out as an outstanding defender of a class to which she does not belong, since
she recognizes that
only social and economic stability can allow culture to flourish. She believes that favorable
changes have taken place
since the revolution and that, in time, Nicaragua will move toward democracy. It is also
interesting to point out that
women have been appointed to public positions since the revolution (Mirandé and
Enríquez 24-27).
It is ironic that the land named after
The Saviour is soaked with the blood and bodies of those who die in their
strife. But Claribel Alegría speaks of another phenomenon of Latin America, the adverse
environment that does not
contribute to socioeconomic stability, in her poem "Flowers from the Volcano":
Fourteen volcanos rise
in my mythical country.
Fourteen volcanos of foliage and
stone
where strange clouds hold back
the screech of a homeless bird.
Who said that my country was
green?
It is more red, more gray, more violent:
{59}
Izalco roars,
taking more lives.
Eternal Chacmol collects blood,
the gray orphans
the volcano spitting bright lava
and the dead guerrillero
and the thousand betrayed faces,
the children who are watching
so they can tell of it. (43)
IX. Women of Color from Puerto Rico and Brazil
If anyone tells us that Latin America
does not have its share of racial problems, we can't help but know that it is
not true. If being Indian or black is a source of pride, it may also be under certain circumstances a
source of grief.
Julia de Burgos (1914-53) is a famous
Puertorrican poet who exalts the black race in Latin America. In her poem
"Ay, ay, ay" she speaks about the pride of being black: "I laugh, I cry, my body trembles out of
pride of being a black
statue. Ay, ay, ay. My grandfather was a slave, and he is my pride. Had he been the master, he
would be my shame"
(Lyn and Heyck 77). Carolina María de Jesús (1914-1977), a black writer from
the slums of Sao Paulo, Brazil, speaks
in her diary of how she would look for paper to write on by picking up trash from the streets.
Hers is an example of
love for writing, and of the poor: "There are times when I rebel against all the injustices of life.
And then, I discover
that a white woman who is bringing up a colored baby, really loves her. In the past the blacks
took care of the white.
Today the white take care of the blacks" (Lyn and Heyck 83).
X. The First Indigenist (Pro-Indian) Novel in Latin America
A number of books have been written
in defense of the Latin American Indian. We must not overlook the fact
that a woman, a Colombian author, Clorinda Matto de Turner (1909- ), wrote the first
indigenist--i.e.,
pro-Indian--novel in Latin America, Aves sin nido (Birds Without a
Nest), published in 1889. And some of the best
examples in this genre in the Twentieth Century are Balún Canán
and Oficio de tinieblas, two novels by the novelist,
essayist, poet, and diplomat Rosario Castellanos, from the State of Chiapas, Mexico. The author
protests the form in
which Indian people are treated and in Balún Canán she protests the
manner in which her own mother treats her
Indian nannie. She laments the attitude of superiority that prevailed among the
mestizos of the time of her parents and
how, though she loves her nannie very much, her nannie chooses not to speak to her when she
meets her in the Plaza
of San Cristóbal de las Casas,{60} Chiapas.
Castellanos disapproves of this attitude that brings about a separation,
based on discrimination, of two beings who love one another.
XI. Latin American Realities
While concentrating on our goal of
depicting the gradual implementation of the right of women to vote in Latin
America, we have also introduced our reader to a few of the most outstanding Hispanic women
of all times and have
shown the prevailing distance between decreed laws that protect and elevate women's rights to
vote and their
implementation. Some historical and political problems have been illustrated.
Lourdes Arizpe, studying the
correlation between economical marginalization, cultural identity, and ethnicity,
concluded that sub-employment has nothing to do with any of these factors, but that they do
relate to economic
conditions. Her work focuses on Mexican marginal populations, specifically on women known as
"Marías" who walk
the streets of the capital and who supplement their family income by working as street
vendors.
Ms. Arizpe has discovered that it is
meaningless to speak of sex discrimination in marginal populations since the
"Marías" are usually married to men who are also underemployed or unemployed and
unless economic conditions are
improved, both genders will continue to be equally affected. There is no doubt that it is necessary
to make available to
them some educational opportunities. At this time some are offered through the Department of
the Federal District,
which also has many centers of occupational training, but they are insufficient (Lyn and Heyck
149).
Alejandra Rangel, Professor of
Philosophy and Letters in Monterrey, Mexico, offers in one of her short-story
collections a number of considerations regarding the life of women of marginal groups. These
stories are the product
of Alejandra's contact with these groups, of her intense research and of her caring attitude and
fine education.
Feminine reality is approached from
the historical, philosophical, and sociological standpoints. In "The souls of
the river" the problem of alcoholism is discussed, while in "Newborn" the central character
states: "Ah, darned life!
Woman, alone, lost with sixteen children and without a husband" (Rangel 69). Both Lourdes and
Alejandra conclude
that the cultural identity of these women affects them mildly and that their main problem is
economic.
XII. The Nobel Prize
One should not overlook the fact that
the first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize, in 1945, was a woman:
the Chilean poet {61} Gabriela Mistral. A rural teacher
herself, Ms. Mistral exalted the teaching profession. Her true
merit, according to the critic Fernando Alegría, rests in her prose writings from which her
doctrine of human rights
emerges with clarity and courage. She never married but adopted her nephew and she exalted the
maternal role in one
of her best works dedicated to her own deceased mother:
Mother: I have grown like a fruit in a thick branch, on your knees. They carry the shape of my body; another child has not altered it. There is no softer rhythm, among the first hundred rhythms esparced by the first musician than that of your rocking chair, mother, an all pleasant feeling in my soul jelled with that swing of your arms and your knees. . . .
Everyone else who follows in your footsteps, mother, teaches about that which you have taught and says with many words that which you said with only a few; they tire our ears and blur the joy of hearing your voice. (F. Alegría 94-95)
XIII. The Andean Region
Another tremendous leap takes us
from Chile and the Nobel Prize to the dramatically different geographic and
social environment of Bolivia. There, Domitila Barrios de Chungara, born in 1937 in a mining
town, addressed the
problems she had when, after her mother's death, she took care of her little sisters. Later, she
founded the Committee
of Housewives of the Twentieth Century and negotiated a number of socioeconomic benefits for
women workers in
her country, one of the poorest in Latin America. Young Domitila, in order to continue her
education, which her
father could not afford, had to take her little sisters along as she continued her education in spite
of the fact that she
did not even have enough money to buy her books. Her father's moral support encouraged her as
he would tell her and
her sisters that women were as entitled to an education as men (F. Alegría 172).
XIV. The Portuguese-speaking
From the Portuguese-speaking world
we have chosen the internationally acclaimed novelist and short story
writer from Brazil, Clarice Lispenor, whose work, among other topics, discusses the problem of
middle class women
who find themselves trapped in a senseless domestic situation and who live totally dependent on
their husbands and
family, without ever exerting their own will.
In "Happy Birthday," the author
discusses the dynamics of a Brazilian family. In this short story, the relationships
between a {62} daughter-in-law and her mother and
sisters-in-law stress the fact that human relations within the
family can be extremely destructive, specially among women. At the birthday celebration, Olaria,
the daughter-in-law,
assumes her role of victim in front of everybody in order to make her position clear to the world.
Everyone is
unhappy, even the children are affected by the situation. Needless to say that, although this may
not be an exclusive
characteristic of a Brazilian family, this kind of dysfunctional behavior does not help the
feminine cause anywhere in
the world.
XV. Machismo and Marianismo (or Hembrismo) in Latin
America
One of the functional imperatives of
human society is a division of labor according to a set of criteria generally
accepted by most members of the group. Some of the most obvious and widely used criteria for
deciding who shall do
what are age, sex, and class. But these categories may be manipulated in different ways by
societies in different parts
of the world. Perhaps one of the best ways of approaching the topic of machismo is
by mentioning that this
phenomenon is sometimes codependent with Hembrismo (or Marianismo).
The passive female image is also the
concern of political scientists. Some of them state that "Latin American
women have been more comfortable in their roles than their Anglo-American counterparts"
(116). Hembrismo (or
Marianismo) or the cult of feminine spiritual superiority is as prevalent as and symbiotic with
machismo. Less
understood, and far from being victims, Latin American women are conscious beneficiaries of
that cultural tradition.
It is important to note that
machismo, a term familiar to area specialists, has passed into the vocabulary of the
general public, where it has suffered a semantic deformation. In the Spanish language and
particularly in Mexico, the
term does not always have a negative connotation. It may be safely said that
machismo is the cult of virility. A man is
a macho to the extent of his possessing all the virtues attributed to being a man, and
the negative connotation that is
almost exclusively assigned today to this word, particularly in the United States, is not
exclusively so in Mexico.
The chief negative characteristics of
being a macho may be exaggerated: aggressiveness and intransigence in
male-to-male interpersonal relations, and arrogance and sexual aggression in male-to-female
relations. Another side to
the picture is the fact that women generally have maintained a discreet reserve with respect to the
subject of
Hembrismo. They have also enjoyed a certain degree of protection from men, due
to their attributed spirituality, that
they sometimes hesitate to lose.
Maruja Barrig, Peruvian feminist,
criticizes the system that {63} supports
machismo by describing the significant
changes that took place in the decade of the '60s in Peru. She mentions the progressive attitude of
the Church, the
social programs of the military junta, the democratic reforms in education, the
expansion of the urban sector and the
opportunities for women, along with the birth control pill. In "Chastity Belt" Maruja Barrig states
that Latin American
women suffer from a mental chastity belt that does not allow them to discuss freely and openly
some of their
problems. But she also regrets the fact that mass communication seems to be replacing the social
control exercised by
parents and family in the past. Many freedoms are supposedly open to women but there are also
many contradictions
to these freedoms. In the first place it is important to remember that if there isn't enough
employment for men, there is
going to be less work for women.
XVI. From Chaos to Order?
In Las buenas mujeres, a
fragment from her poetic collection Circuito Amores y Anexas, Elena
Milán, from
Mexico, rejects the Hembrismo that spoiled the full development of women of the
generation of her mother and her
grandmother (Lyn and Heyck 343), and in her poem "Valium 10" Rosario Castellanos expresses
the conflict of
contemporary women of the middle class who leave work to return home tired but unable to rest,
because more work
is waiting for them. "Valium 10" expresses the solitude and the internal conflict of a professional
woman who leads
an unfulfilled life:
Sometimes, (and don't try to
diminish its importance
saying that it does not happen
often)
your measuring stick breaks,
you misplace the compass
and you have nothing left.
The day turns into a mere
succession
of incoherent facts and
functions
that you perform through habit and
inertia.
And you live it. And you dictate
the letter
to whom it may concern. And teach
the class,
the same, to the auditor as to those
who are registered.
And that same evening you write the
text
the printing press will devour the next
morning.
And you keep an eye (Oh, just
superficially)
on how things are running at home,
the perfect
coordination of multiple
programs
--because your oldest son now
dresses
up in order to attend a
"quinceañera" dance
and the youngest wants to be a
football player
and the middle one has a poster of
Che near his record player.
{64}
And you go over the expense account
and reflect
with the cook, about the cost of life
and the
"ars magna combinatoria" from which
the daily menu emerges.
And you still have strength left to
remove your make-up
and to put on the nurturing creme and
even read
a few lines before turning off the
lamp.
And in the dark, at the beginning
of your sleep,
you realize what has been lost:
the most expensive diamond,
the navigating map, the book
with one hundred basic questions (and
its respective answers)
for at least a basic, simple, elemental
dialogue with the Sphinx.
And you have the painful
sensation
that in the crossword puzzle
an error slipped,
that made it impossible to solve.
And you spell out the name of
Chaos,
unless you take the cap off the pill
container and
swallow the one that condenses,
chemically pure, the order of the
world. (Lyn and Heyck 191)
Rushed, anxious, frustrated, the professional woman and housewife has been depicted. Diplomat, poet, and author of fiction, essays, and drama, Castellanos uses irony to express her concem with issues linking women to the realities of gender, race, and class. In her poem "Meditation on the Brink," Castellanos rejects methods which real women, as well as female fictional characters, have devised to respond to the limitations placed upon them by society:
No, it's not a solution
to throw oneself under a train like
Tolstoy' s Anna
or gulp down Madame Bovary's
arsenic
or await on the barren heights of
Avila
the visit of the angel with the fiery
dart
before finding the cloak back over
one's head
and starting to act.
Nor to deduce geometry laws by
counting
the beams of one's solitary
confinement cell
like Sor Juana did. . . It is not a
solution
to write while company arrives,
in the Austen family living
room
or to shut oneself up in the attic
of some New England house and
dream,
with the Dickinson's family
Bible
{65}
under a spinster's pillow.
There must be another way that's
not named Sappho
or Mesalina or Mary of Egypt
or Magdalene or Clemencia
Isaura.
Another way to be human and
free.
Another way to be. ("Meditation"
49)
Rosario Castellanos taught at the University of Mexico, worked for Excelsior,
one of the most important newspapers
of Mexico, wrote two novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of essays and
criticism, several plays,
and a dozen books of poems. She expresses her concerns about the many varieties of domination
around her, such as
men over women; whites over Indians; North Americans and Europeans over Mexicans; the
upper classes over the
lower classes; parents over children.
One of the themes that had literally
been buried in Latin American literature is the status of women as expressed
by women in protest. Castellanos' poetry voices a protest about the condition of women. In
poems such as "Meditation
on the Brink," the message of Castellanos is quite clear and without a doubt one of the strongest
feminist protests of
Latin America, to the degree that she has been compared to her fellow feminist of the
Seventeenth Century, Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz.
Entitlement is still, to a great extent,
something hoped for and it has been long in coming to Latin America.
Many young men and women writers, politicians and promoters are working diligently to make it
a reality. The
harmonious reconciliation and mingling of different socio-cultural, political, and ethnic traditions
does not happen
from one day to the next. Neither does an area of rapidly increasing population readily avail itself
of financial and
economic means. In this essay it has been argued that there is no innate incapacity in Latin
American women to exert
and to know their rights and their place in Latin American society.
NOTES
1See Melvina McKendrick's study of the "mujer varonil," Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age.
2See Angel del Río, "Santa Teresa de Avila."
3For a good biography of Malintzi, see Gustavo Rodriguez' Doña Marina.
4See Mujeres mexicanas.
5See Mujeres mexicanas.
{66}
WORKS CITED
Alegría, Claribel. Flowers from the Volcano. Trans. Carolyn Forché. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1982.
Alegría, Fernando. Retratos contemporáneos. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.
Barrig, Maruja. "Chastity Belt." Lyn and Heyck. 337-41.
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. La vida es sueño. del Río and del Río. I: 765-87.
Castellanos, Rosario. Balún-Canán. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1968.
---. "Meditation on the Brink." Poesía no eres tú. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1972. 49.
---. Oficio de tinieblas. México: J. Mortiz, 1962.
---. "Valium 10." Lyn and Heyck. 191.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. México: Porrúa, 1985.
---. Novelas ejemplares. México: Porrúa, 1983.
Lispenor, Clarice. "Happy Birthday." Lyn and Heyck. 177-86.
Lyn, Denis and Daly Heyck, eds. Tradición y cambio. New York: Random House, 1988.
Madariaga, Salvador de. Mujeres españolas. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1972.
Matto de Turner, Clorinda. Aves sin nido. 1889. Caracas: biblioteca Ayacucho, 1994.
McKendrick, Melveena. Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A Study of the "Mujer Varonil." Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1974.
Milán, Elena. "Las buenas mujeres." Lyn and Heyck. 343-46.
Mirandé, Alfredo and Evangelina Enriquez. La Chicana. The Mexican-American Woman. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.
Molina, Tirso de. "El burlador de Sevilla." del Río and del Río. I: 565-80.
Mujeres mexicanas. México: Publicación del Partido Revolucionario Institucional, 1971.
Paz, Octavio. "Orfandad y Legitimidad." El ogro filantrópico. Barcelona: Seix-Barral, 1990.
---. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o Las trampas de la fe. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983.
Rangel, Alejandra and Lidia Rodríguez. De mujeres y otros cuentos. Monterrey, N.L., México: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 1989.
del Río, Angel. "Santa Teresa de Avila." del Río and del Río. I: 378-87.
---, and Amelia A. de del Río, eds. Antología General de la Literatura Española. 2nd edn. 2 vols. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.
{67}
Rodríguez, Gustavo. Doña Marina. México: Imprenta de la
Secretária de Relaciones Exteriores, 1935.
Simpson, Lesley Bird. Many Mexicos. 4th edn. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966.
Vega, Lope de. Fuenteovejuna. Clásicos Ebro. Madrid: Ebro, 1972.
{68}
{blank}
{69}
Unravelling Cruelty
Gail Tremblay
Sometimes I wake; there is so
much
wanting in me, hunger, an
insatiable
dance rocking more need than could
ever
make sense. No taste or touch or
intimate
explosion between my legs could
fill
the empty well of my being. I
stare
into space and shiver before the
hollow
throats of thousands starving on an
earth
parched by too much pillaging. I long
for
clean rain, for living water not
killed
by chemicals, to wash all this sorrow
away,
to quench the thirst of this circling
planet
so that every creature could
drink
the titillating nectar that makes life
possible.
It worries me that so much of human
work
has become an irrational act done
without
thought to profit a few. So many of
those
that nurture the land are hunted,
rounded up,
punished for daring to remember how
to love,
how to maintain ancient
relationships
between themselves and other beings
who allow
community to live in balance. I
fear
those that don't recognize the
sacredness
in plants, who create deserts, mowing
trees
so ancient that their knowing has
sheltered
generations of lovers from
hundreds
of species. So often, I see my own
complicity,
my inability to simplify my life in
holy ways
{70}
that will free us from this galloping
plunge
toward oblivion. I long to give an
image,
to sing a rich, convoluted song that
vibrates
until knowing is born, until we learn
the thing
we need will entail a patient
unravelling
of this cruelty some think is human
nature.
{71}
Feminist Neo-Indigenism in Chicana Aztlán
Arthur Ramirez
The resurgence of Indigenism in
Latin America, particularly in the arts and humanities, has had wide-ranging
ramifications in Mexico and Latin America for over a century. Archaeological excavations in the
late Eighteenth
Century and early Nineteenth Century first gave the impetus for a re-evaluation of the
Pre-Columbian past of Latin
America. The discovery of antique ruins and art, remnants of an indigenous legacy that had
previously been ignored,
neglected, or even unknown, stirred an emerging and well-founded revision of Native American
cultures that had
been ruthlessly marginalized, suppressed, or destroyed.
The publication in the 1880s of
Aves sin nido (Birds Without a Nest) brought forth the first truly
Indianist work
in Latin America. A new perspective, full of sympathy and empathy, continued the revisionism
and reevaluation.
From this point, for this last century, important cycles of indigenist art and thought have
generated more and more
works that have transformed the Europeanized cosmovision securely in place among the power
elite and the educated
circles of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century.
The result has been a significant
diffusion of Indigenism, contending with the formerly secret, hidden Latin
American self. The idols behind altars that had been there all along became manifest. The great
influence of
Indigenism is ever more clear in many realms of contemporary life, including political rhetoric
and ideology,
revolutionary thought, and attempts to return to an Indigenist past that encompass, for example,
land reform,
collectivism in working the land, and an almost mystical telluric attachment to the land. Yet,
beyond such
"practicalities," there are deep-structured essences that serve as underpinnings, ideologically and
philosophically.
{72}
In Mexico in 1904, several years
before the Mexican Revolution, Dr. Atl (Gerardo Trujillo, who renamed
himself using the Nahuatl term for "water") served as a catalyst, a pioneer, and began to define an
Indigenist
philosophy and ideology and how it could concretely be implemented. After the end of the
Mexican Revolution in
1920, various aspects of Indigenism moved from the realm of ideals and ideology to practical
applications. José
Vasconcelos, as Secretary of Public Education, author of Indology (1925) and of
The Cosmic Race (1927), promoted
miscegenation, while still holding deep reservations about the Indigenist past and present.
Nevertheless, it was
Vasconcelos who in 1921 first commissioned a mural from Diego Rivera, who was to become
the leader for the next
twenty years of a very significant transformation in aesthetic thought and art works in Mexico.
Broad areas of
intellectual life were also to be affected.
A generation later, in the 1960s,
Chicanos resurrected Indigenism as a powerful force. The influence of Jack
Forbes and his book Aztecas del Norte spread far and wide among Chicano artists
and intellectuals. The concept of
Aztlán, the original historical, legendary, mythical, and symbolic homeland of the Aztecs
to the north of the Aztec
Empire as it was established in the Valley of Mexico in 1325, was revived among Chicanos. Old
links with the glory
and grandeur of ancient Mexican civilizations were reborn. Perhaps it was Alurista who best
embodied this influence
in his poetry. Cultural nationalists such as Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales also began to develop an
indigenous perspective
in thought, literature, and social-political-cultural programs. Particularly in California, but later
spreading to other
parts of the Southwest and the Chicano Diaspora, Indigenism, as art and philosophy especially,
was revitalized.
Chicanos felt empowered in the very real force of Indigenism and its continuing permutations
and present-day vitality.
Indigenism persists as an outburst that coincides with radical views, the "New Age," ecological
concerns, and a
renewed interest in spirituality and the significant connections between mind and body and the
filling in of gaps left
by science and technology.
To be sure, Indigenism itself has also
been at times overly idealized, romanticized, made to hark back to a
"paradise lost" that never was. For some it provides a refuge from a harsh reality, affording
escapism, at times more
cosmetic than concrete. Some Marxists charged that past glories among indigenous cultures were
built on the backs of
slave labor. Also looming was that scorned image of the noble savage, of a pristine purity
incarnate, that patronizingly
scorned the indigenous way of life just as it held it up as an inspiring model. In addition, the
difference between an
Indigenist political rhetoric, as in the case of the Mexican government, and the reality of its lack
of implementation,
has been only too real.
{73}
Nevertheless, a deeply rooted desire
on the part of many Chicano artists, humanists, and intellectuals to return to
the ideals of the origins of the indigenous past represented an urgent desire and even need. Yet,
idealism endured.
Indigenism could raise an individual or collective self-esteem while combating alienation.
Indigenism offered an
inspiring role model and guide. The generalized amnesia obscuring history could began to lift.
The creation of an
identity, the resolution of an identity crisis, could not but be helped by an awareness and
appreciation of the links to
the past. How else to understand the present and forge a future? However, after a while,
Indigenism among Chicanos
seemed to fade, the trend became a self-parody, the distortions too excessive to even possibly
serve as a legitimate
trend, much less as a possible path toward a return to authenticity.
Though never completely fading
away, Indigenism barely persisted. It was more a question of nuance and
impact, of relative importance or perhaps lesser impact, of the degree of its significance or the
intensity of its
expression. Isolated instances of an undercurrent continued, but the great, and perhaps overly
serious manner in which
it had been taken before, was no longer present. The viability of Indigenism withered, its vitality
virtually as
marginalized as it had been before.
However, in recent Chicana literature,
Indigenism has reappeared with force, power, vigor, and intensity. A new
Chicana Renaissance has emerged in recent years to add to the development of the Chicano
Renaissance of the '60s
and its original adoption of Indigenism as a significant force in art, literature and philosophy. The
impact of such
seminal books as Alurista's Floricanto en Aztlán or NationChild
Plumaroja which had been softened with time, with
an inevitable cooling urgency, has now been taken up once again by feminist writers seeking
similar impact and
empowerment on their own terms.
By the mid-'80s in Chicano/-a
literature, then, the Indigenist theme seemed to have run its course, but a new
re-emergence among Chicana feminist writers would carry the theme forward toward a new
development as it became
a main element appropriated for specific purposes. Present long before, Chicana feminist writers
in fact became
overwhelmingly important in the mid-'80s. As Nicolás Kanellos, editor of the
Americas Review and publisher of Arte
Publico Press put it in the 1986-87 Arte Publico brochure, "The best thing about Chicano
literature is Chicana
literature." And Chicanas were taking up the Indigenist theme as their own and in an entirely new
way.
Already a pioneer Chicana feminist,
Estela Portillo, who had first come to the fore in the early '70s, had included
Indigenism in her works. For example, her play Blacklight, focusing on poor
Mexican migrants, incorporates quite a
few references to Mayan thought and culture. At a reading of the play, Portillo was asked how
this could {74}
possibly be: it was unrealistic to consider that these underclass characters would hark back to
Mayan references,
which had in more recent times become part of the domain of the intelligentsia. The question
was: how can these
characters show these links? How can the play sustain these "intellectual" references? Portillo, on
the advice of the
director, Ruben Sierra, stated, "Why not?" After all, there are ancestral links, a part of the Mayan
legacy that persists,
that still lives.
Especially important to this
neo-Indigenist trend in Chicana literature was the emergence of highly significant
Chicana writers, such as Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chavez, and Lorna Dee Cervantes. The latter's
first collection of
poetry, Emplumada (Plumed; Feathered), demonstrated
many subtle references to neo-Indigenism, glimmerings
indicating Cervantes' affinity for and identification with a renewed, revitalized sense of
neo-Indigenism. Cervantes'
sense of identity was intertwined with both feminism and neo-Indigenism, each elaborately
expressed as a means to
pursue not ideology but poetic truth. Cervantes expressed a deep subjectivity by means of an
objective heritage
embodied in neo-Indigenism.
By such means Indigenism took a new
turn, strongly nuanced with feminism and advancing the argument further
of how neo-Indigenism could have a vital function in Chicano/-a literature. Simultaneously,
feminism took a vivid
new direction and a dramatically enhanced expressiveness.
Neo-Indigenism arose again in a new
and transformed way as part of a resurgence in feminism, and vice versa.
The two, it turned out, fit together because Chicana feminist writers had re-interpreted
Aztlán to join these two trends
in a synergistic manner. The two became greater when together. How, one might ask, could these
two concepts and
literary currents be interrelated to form a powerful new reinterpretation, a strong innovative
force? To answer that we
must go back to history and revisionism, to ideology and scholarship, and, ultimately, to
advocacy.
Chicana feminists in various
disciplines had begun a major study, largely revisionist, of women and their roles in
history, individually and as a collectivity. In the late '70s La Chicana, a book by
Alfredo Mirandé and Evangelina
Enríquez, took a multi-focal approach to the study of Chicanas in several areas, including
history, literature, and the
social sciences. Idealization was everywhere present, advocacy scholarship prevailed, and points
were scored in favor
of an Indigenist-based origin to feminism; i.e., an original matriarchal system; the importance of
fertility goddesses; a
male and female dualistic principle as central to Aztec thought; unrealistic, overstated
interpretations of female
equality in the structure of the family, or in the Aztec social order. Research was clearly
exploited to support ideology,
to score {75} points as part of advocacy
scholarship.
Something similar occurred around
the same time in the groundbreaking article by Adelaida del Castillo on La
Malinche, who was the lover and translator of Hernán Cortez and who helped in
overthrowing the Aztec Empire.
Previously considered by most Mexicans and Mexican intellectuals such as Octavio Paz (in
The Labyrinth of
Solitude) as a traitor, a betrayer of her own people, La Malinche in Del Castillo's
revisioned view in her
self-proclaimed "mystical" history turned the tables. In the absence of documentation, Del
Castillo undertook a bold
and innovative revisionist view: La Malinche was not evil, not a traitor, but, on the contrary, an
idealist, unselfishly
converting the Indians to a more "compassionate" religion, propelled by the zeal of her recent
conversion. La
Malinche, according to Del Castillo, was her own person, not a puppet, not an exploiter, but
nobly accomplishing her
own purposes. La Malinche, by means of Del Castillo's speculation and a kind of literary analysis
based on very
sketchy historical documentation, emerges as an embodiment of a new feminist neo-Indigenist
ideal role model:
talent, intelligence, resourcefulness, resilience, strength of character, charisma, power, vision,
idealism,
independent-minded thinking, and strong individualism. La Malinche, then, represents the
perfect union between
feminism and neo-Indigenism. The two, in short, are joined together to overthrow the shackles of
at least 500 years of oppression.
Chicana feminists were able to move
south of the border with their revisionism and act as powerful catalysts in
bringing about a complete turnabout in the image of La Malinche in Mexican feminist literature
as in Chicana
literature. The powerful and pervasive folk figure of La Llorona also underwent a similar
reinterpretation. Outmoded
notions were swept aside; passé references were no longer congruent with the new
cosmovision posited by Chicana
neo-Indigenist feminists.
Yet another different adaptation
emerged, especially among lesbian feminist Chicana writers who militantly
promote a neo-Indigenist point of view. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga in
This Bridge Called My Back (and
later in Making Face) tie together the power and autonomy of feminists with the
feminist principle of indigenous
earth goddesses. The emphasis is on the positing of a "Coatlicue state," something Gloria
Anzaldúa incorporates into
her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), where Coatlicue, the
Aztec earth goddess, promotes the
creation of work in the "deep, dark earth of the unconscious. . . . A seeming stasis or immobility
is broken by
underground activity that bursts through, a highly dynamic energy that cannot accept interference
from the conscious
mind" (47). Such evocations of goddesses represent the creative process, or by extension, an
individual's Life
Force--which ultimately cannot be repressed. A {76}
new world view emerges, generated by feminist neo-Indigenism.
From poetry and bold, even
aggressive, originality to ideology and philosophy, a new weltanshauung is
imaginatively created: a matriarchal point of departure emerges from an evocation of indigenous
cultures.
Neo-Indigenism implies a profound transformation of identity and consciousness, a
neo-Indigenism that is far from
cosmetic; it is fundamental, totally integral. It is a matter of conviction, as much a constituent
element as culture and
religion, with a new epistemology, a new aesthetics, a new politics, all elements fusing in
neo-Indigenist feminism, a
non-Western, non-empirical innovative essence that stresses mysticism, intuition, a sensibility
full of feelings and
nuances, of a virtually intangible yet bold feminist attitude, a vindication and validation of a
feminist underclass that
has boiled to the surface. Aggression in this case implies the exploration of previously
unrecognized realms of reality.
A spiritual and emotional subjectivity pervades this revisionist union of feminism and
neo-Indigenism.
The feminism carried forward by
Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/ La Frontera is far more encompassing
than
lesbianism. Coatlicue, as Anzaldúa states, "da luz a todo y a todo devora" ("sheds light
on everything and devours
everything"). Coatlicue is a powerful archetype "that inhabits, or passes through my psyche," in
the words of
Anzaldúa. She continues, Coatlicue is "a consuming internal whirlwind, the symbol of
the underground aspects of the
psyche," "the incarnation of cosmic processes" (46). Coatlicue represents duality, and even
beyond that, a third
perspective--she is "life-in-death" and "death-in-life"--"life and death together as one process"
(47). Coatlicue is the
contradictory "fusion of opposites, similar to the Greek Medusa, the Gorgon" (47).
Anzaldúa's artistic and
philosophical construct, then, is more than the mere positing of a concept--it is incarnate.
Feminist neo-Indigenism is a way of life. If this sounds like a new Eden, a new return to paradise
in an archetypical
unconscious, so be it.
Feminist neo-Indigenism in this sense
is not an "alternative" means of interpretation but a new central hypothesis
with ancient roots. Power and feelings create a new ambiance from which to view feminist
neo-Indigenism. Its
potential substantive nature is creative, forceful, significant. The very union of widely varied
elements serves to
generate strength and vitality. Sophistication of an artistic and philosophical nature join in a
framework of life,
vitality, authenticity.
Heterogeneity, contradictions, and
ambiguities only serve to bolster this reinterpretation because that is the
nature of life itself. Hidden memories, barely palpable, perhaps intangible, impinge on the
moment, as Anzaldúa
makes clear. A harmonious ideology is given impetus to go beyond the seeming (and real)
contradictions.
Interestingly, a tabula rasa sort of empty mind and stasis are the necessary conditions for {77} creativity. Insights,
epiphanies, incisive revisionism make conventional "common sense" nonsense--or, at least,
common sense is marked
as an obstacle to new revelations and discoveries, to linkages previously ignored.
Not surprisingly, neo-Indigenism as a
resurgent force is also a part of the work of Chicano writers. However, it is
Chicana feminists who have seized the essence of what may merely constitute, in the broad
scheme of things, another
cyclical development of neo-Indigenism. Meanwhile, the influence is full of impact and vitality.
Is there, still, one
wonders, a new kind of idealization? How would one judge matters of balance and "authenticity"
(whatever that is)
with distortion and exaggeration? Does more fruitful contextualization transcend notions of
escapism? Does a sense
of proportion overcome the narrower feminist focus? Is the depth of feminist neo-Indigenism
congruent with not just
an internal, universal essence of being, ontologically speaking, but with a scrupulous historical
accuracy? In short, do
the old gods encounter the New Age, though not without a little sham mixed in with
shamanism?
Linking ancient roots with the present,
illuminating the contemporary era with old traditions, feminist
neo-Indigenism contributes significantly to Chicana Aztlán.
WORKS CITED
Alurista [Alberto Urista de Heredia]. Floricanto en Aztlán. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Center Publications, 1971.
---. NationChild Plumaroja. San Diego: Toltecas en Aztlán, 1972.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.
---, ed. Making Face, Making Soul/ Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990.
del Castillo, Adelaida R. "Malintzin Tenépal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective." 1974. Between Borders: Essays on Mexican American/ Chicano History. Adelaida R. Castillo et al., eds. Encino CA: Floricanto, 1990. 124-49.
Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1981.
Forbes, Jack. Aztecas del Norte. Greenwich CT: Fawcett, 1973.
Matteo de Turner, Clorinda. Aves sin nido (Birds Without a Nest). Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1994.
Mirandé, Alfredo and Evangelina Enríquez. La Chicana. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
{78}
Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge
Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Latham NY: Kitchen Table,
1984.
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove, 1989.
Trombley, Estela Portillo. Blacklight. Sor Juana and Other Plays. Ypsilanti MI: Bilingual P/Editorial bilingue, 1983. 101-42.
Vasconcelos, José. Indologia: Una interpretacion de la cultura ibero-americana. (Indology). Paris: Agencia Mundial de Libreria, 1925.
---. La Raza Cosmica: Mision de la raza iberoamericana; notas de viajes a la America del Sur (The Cosmic Race). Paris: Agencia Mundial de Libreria, 1927.
{79}
Teaching "Multicultural" Perspectives: All Not Present and Accounted For
Bruce McKenna
{87}
Essentially, It's Spring
Paula Gunn Allen
for David Halliburton
{88}
FORUM
Upcoming Sessions at MLA (Chicago, December 1995)
The following are MLA sessions that have been scheduled by both the MLA Division on American Indian Literatures (Ken Roemer, Chair, Division Executive Committee) and ASAIL. Special thanks to Kim Blaeser, Jim Ruppert, LaVonne Ruoff, and Betty Bell for organizing these sessions.
25. Native American Voices of the Midwest: Readings. Wed.
27th, 7-9 p.m., Newberry Library.
Presiding: A. LaVonne Brown
Ruoff, U of Illinois at Chicago (emerita)
1. Betty Louise Bell, U of
Michigan.
2. Kimberly M. Blaeser, U of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
3. William Penn, Michigan State
U.
4. Roberta Hill Whiteman, U of
Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
5. Carter Revard, Washington U.
198. Native American Literature: Seeking a Critical Center. Thu.
28th, 12:00-1:15, Truffles, Hyatt Regency.
Presiding: Kimberly Blaeser, U
of Wisconsin--Milwaukee.
1. "Heart Metaphors in American
Indian Thought and Literature," Kathryn Shanley, Cornell U.
2. "American Indian Centers: The
Unacknowledged Requisite for Concentric American Literatures," Gordon
Henry, Michigan State U.
{89}
Joint Business Meeting: American Indian Literature Division & Assn. for the Study of
American Indian
Literatures. Thu. 28th, 7:15 p.m., Stetson B&C.
Presiding: Kathryn Shanley,
Cornell U and Kenneth Roemer, U of Texas at Arlington.
391. Identity and Intentionality: Native Language Presence in Contemporary
Texts. Fri. 29th, Columbus Hall B,
Hyatt Regency.
Presiding: Frederick H. White,
Azusa Pacific U.
1. `Ark' Idáá
Jiní': Conversive Language Use in Contemporary Navajo Poetry," Susan B. Brill, Bradley
U.
2. "`I'll Talk Indian': The Addition of
Ojibwa Language and Mythology in Erdrich's Love Medicine," Karah
Stokes, U of Miami.
3. "Louise Erdrich's
Tracks: Anishinabe Storytelling," Niki Lee Manos, Marymount College.
4. "A Native American Aesthetic
Approach to Native Language Texts: An Introduction to the Dauenhauers' Haa
Shuka, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives," Gloria Bird, Inst. of American Indian
Arts.
409. Teaching Native American Texts in Introductory Literature
Courses. Fri. 29th, 10:15-11:30 a.m., Atlanta,
Hyatt Regency.
Presiding: James Ruppert, U of Alaska, Fairbanks.
1. "Breaking Our Necks:
Incorporating Native American Texts in American Literature Surveys," Chris LaLonde,
North Carolina Wesleyan
2. "Ants in the System: Beginning to
Think Strongly about Stories," Robert Gregory, U of Miami.
3. "The Multicultural Canon,
The Sacred Hoop, and Ceremony: Teaching the Native American
Novel," Lou
Caton, U of Oregon
4. "Chona and Thoreau: The View
from Another Culture," Cheryl Brown, U of Texas at Arlington.
738. Regionalism in American Indian Literature. Sat. 30th,
1:45-3:00 p.m., Columbus Hall A, Hyatt Regency.
Presiding: Melissa Hearn, Northern Michigan U.
1. "Nature and the Land in Pauline
Johnson's The Moccasin Maker," Lee Schweninger, U of North Carolina.
2. "Anishinaabe Tradition versus
Anglo-American Law in Gerald Vizenor's Heirs of Columbus," Stephen
Osborne, U of California, Los Angeles.
{90}
Call for
Submissions
CIMARRON REVIEW SPECIAL ISSUE
The Cimarron Review, a
national journal of arts, letters, and opinions published at Oklahoma State University,
will devote an issue to American Indian poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays in the Fall of 1996.
In this issue, the
editors hope to combine the works of established writers with the works of emerging
contemporary American Indian
writers. The editors therefore strongly encourage poets and writers with little or no publication
experience to submit
their work for this upcoming issue.
Please send your work to the
following address before July 1, 1996:
Michael Wilson
Dept. of English and Comparative Literature
P.O. Box 413
The University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201
mwilson@csd.uwm.edu
Manuscripts will be returned when accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
{91}
CONTRIBUTORS
Paula Gunn Allen, professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, is known primarily as the author of several volumes of poems, many gathered in Shadow Country (1982); a novel entitled The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983); and a feminist study of American Indian culture, The Sacred Hoop (1986).
Helia M. Corral teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages, California State University, Bakersfield, where she does research on and teaches women's experiences in Hispanic and especially Latin American contexts.
David Halliburton, Stanford professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Modern Thought and Literature, is the founder of the Program for Faculty Renewal. His most recent book is The Fateful Discourse of Worldly Things (forthcoming from Stanford U P).
Servio Marín, who teaches at National University, San Diego, is a Venezuela-born musician and musicologist. He is perhaps best known for installation-cum-performance activities that he composed and conducted at Stanford and in Caracas.
Bruce McKenna is a Sacramento-based teacher of writing and a veteran of the multicultural classroom and the multicultural curriculum.
Arthur Ramirez, a professor in the Department of Mexican-American Studies at Sonoma State University, is interested in approaches to the study of indigenous culture, with emphasis on recent Chicana developments.
Gail Tremblay is an artist and poet teaching at the Evergreen State College. For the workshop at Stanford she created, and recorded for posterity, a large multimedia installation on environmental pollution from an American Indian perspective.
{92}
Gerald Vizenor, novelist, fiction writer, poet, essayist and playwright, teaches in,
and here writes about, ethnic
studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In the fall issue of 1993 SAIL
published Vizenor's screenplay Harold
of Orange. Other of his writings include the novel Griever: An American Monkey
King in China (1987) and the
non-fiction Wordarrows (1978), Earthdivers (1981), and The
People Named the Chippewa (1984).
William Willard, who teaches in the Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University (Pullman), has studied firsthand the effects of industrial "progress" in areas of the Southwest long inhabited by American Indians.
Contact: Robert Nelson
This page was last modified on: 04/25/03
