Imagined Transnationalism U.S. Latino/a Literature, Culture, and Identity Edited by Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe IMAGINED TRANSNATIONALISM Copyright © Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe, 2009. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-60632-6 All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the above com- panies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-37362-8 ISBN 978-0-230-10332-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230103320 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Imagined transnationalism : U.S. latino/a literature, culture, and identity / Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe, eds. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Hispanic Americans—Social conditions. 2. Community development— United States. 3. American literature—Hispanic American authors. I. Concannon, Kevin. II. Lomelí, Francisco A. III. Priewe, Marc. E184.S75I357 2009 973'.0468—dc22 2009013902 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2013 Contents Figures and Tables v Introduction 1 Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe 1 Chicano Transnation 13 Bill Ashcroft 2 A Schematic Approach to Understanding Latino Transnational Literary Texts 29 Nicolás Kanellos 3 Para Español Oprima El Número Dos: Transnational Translation and U.S. Latino/a Literature 47 Marta E. Sánchez 4 Transnational Migrations and Political Mobilizations: The Case of A Day without a Mexican 61 María Herrera-Sobek 5 Imagining Transnational Chicano/a Activism against Gender-Based Violence at the U.S.-Mexican Border 75 Claudia Sadowski-Smith 6 Precursors of Hemispheric Writing: Latin America, the Caribbean, and Early U.S. American Identity 95 Gabriele Pisarz-Ramírez 7 Slammin’ in Transnational Heterotopia: Words Being Spoken at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe 117 Harald Zapf 8 “A Broader and Wiser Revolution”: Refiguring Chicano Nationalist Politics in Latin American Consciousness in Post-Movement Literature 137 Tim Libretti iv CONTENTS 9 With Bertolt Brecht and the Aztecs Toward an Imagined Transnation: A Literary Case Study 157 Karin Ikas 10 Travel, Autoethnography, and Oppositional Consciousness in Juan Felipe Herrera’s Mayan Drifter 171 Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger 11 ¿Dónde estás vos/z?: Performing Salvadoreñidades in Washington, DC 201 Ana Patricia Rodríguez 12 The Final Frontier: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s The Great Mojado Invasion 221 Catherine Leen 13 Writing the Haitian Diaspora: The Transnational Contexts of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker 237 Ricardo L. Ortíz Notes on Contributors 257 Index 261 Figures and Tables Figure 2.1 Hispanic cultures in the United States 32 Table 2.1 Textual characteristics of U.S. Hispanic literature 34 Introduction Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe At the beginning of Cristina García’s 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban, Celia del Pino, the family matriarch, sits on the porch of her home in Cuba, staring out into the ocean through binoculars, purportedly looking for an indication of another Bay of Pigs invasion. Celia knows that spot- ting any sign of an invasion will help her curry favor with Fidel Castro and show her support of the Revolution. At the same time, her attention on the ocean becomes a reminder that much of Celia’s family lives away from Cuba, emphasizing her troubled relationship to an island that she has sworn to protect, but that also has driven away much of her family and isolated her. Celia’s conflicted relationship with Cuba highlights the larger history of exile for many Cubans from the island who find themselves able but unwilling to return to a homeland controlled by Castro. The use of the term “exile” is complicated, since many Cubans left the island as small children or were not born on the island, as Andrea O’Reilly Herrera (2001) points out, emphasizing the way in which imagination and history inform their sense of loss and exile from the island more than personal experience. The sight of Celia looking to protect Cuba by watching the ocean around it emphasizes this construction of Cuba as an image—and less a territorially defined space—as it reminds one of how the island exists within a larger diasporic consciousness. In a sense, Celia’s role as sentry on the waters around the island underscores her role as guardian for those thousands living in the Cuban diaspora in the United States who continue to draw meaning from an island connection; she is keeping an eye on them from a distance, stretching the meaning of Cuban identity and belonging to the communities and individuals beyond Cuba’s shores. This sense of the island’s deterritorialization is emphasized by Celia’s attire while looking out into the darkness. Dressed in her “best house- dress” (García 1992, 3), and wearing the earrings given to her by her long-departed lover, Celia’s position as sentry merges into that of the jilted 2 KEVIN CONCANNON, FRANCISCO A. LOMELÍ, AND MARC PRIEWE lover waiting to welcome her lover Gustavo back from the other side of the ocean. Celia’s roles as both sentry and lover become reminders of the draw of the island to those who live beyond its shores, whether it be sus- pected traitors making plans for another invasion or long-lost lovers being encouraged to return. The island under Celia’s watch becomes translated as less a spaciousness of isolation and more a spaciousness of excess, one that moves beyond its physical and territorial borders. This sense of fluid- ity is highlighted by a vision Celia has, while on guard, of her husband seemingly emerging out of the ocean to speak to her. Ill with cancer in a New York hospital bed, Jorge appears to Celia as a sign that he has passed away, in a sense returning to the island but never really making it back. Celia’s vision becomes a reminder of the importance of the imaginary in defining Celia’s relationship to her family and to the island. Through Celia’s vision of Jorge, her husband is able to return to the island in terms of her memory, a vision that supports the continuing significance of the island in the lives of those who dwell in the diaspora. Celia’s experience on the shores of Cuba highlights many of the impor- tant themes addressed in this collection. Her role as sentry guarding the shores of the island emphasizes the ways in which migration today cannot be seen as a one-time, unidirectional event, and, at the same time, return to one’s exiled home cannot be defined always solely in terms of physi- cal movement. Celia’s experience helps us to see how the recent phases of globalization have ushered in new forms of migrations that have decisively impacted the course and flow of cultures and identities, especially in the Western Hemisphere. Even as families, or whole villages, have relocated to (and often from) the United States, many of today’s migrants are no lon- ger “at home” in one nation-state; they are often becoming transnational migrants, who live in a state of physical and intercultural transit between two or more national communities. The increasing permeability of bound- aries between nation-states has threatened the traditional definition of an identifiable “homeland” from which to migrate and points instead toward a burgeoning transnational spaciousness crisscrossed by, among other things, movement, investment, TV images, text messages, cell phones, and videoconferencing. In this way, much migration to the United States has, in a sense, already occurred, either as a result of the growing global media and marketing strategies that turn other parts of the world into a U.S. subsid- iary, or through a culture industry that stereotypes the future existence of migrants in the United States. Many migrants, it seems, are caught within a nebulous and paradoxical spaciousness where arrival is indefinitely post- poned, and where one seems already “there” without ever leaving home. We are thus witness to an increasingly global phenomenon vari- ously called “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (Bhabha), “transmigrancy” INTRODUCTION 3 (Glick Schiller et al.), or “globalization from below” (Falk). These terms, among others, have now become part and parcel of an ever-increasing ensemble of signifiers that point to new cosmopolitan practices in which people on the move retain certain elements of their national identities and modes of cultural interaction, while also negotiating the demands of their host cultures. More popularly conceived today as the transnational, these bifurcated experiences of the migrant and the native emphasize a changing understanding of how we define mobility, belonging, and the nation. In the U.S. context, such an understanding dates back to Randolph Bourne’s use of the term “transnational” in his famous essays “Trans-national America” and “The Jew and Trans-national America,” both originally published in 1916, in which transnational refers to the importance of a more international understanding of American identity. Arguing against those who believed that immigrants held too tenacious a grip on their past homelands, Bourne was convinced of the benefits of dual identities and simultaneous space construction, maintaining that immigrant populations represented “threads of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves into a novel international nation, the first the world has seen” (Bourne 1916/1964, 120). Within this celebratory image one finds the outlines of much of the current discussions of the transnational as a critical methodology. Much as Bourne sees the transnational as a means of undermining certain myths of the nation, most notably the melting pot, critics today conceptualize the transnational as a means of challenging those myths of the nation that seek to marginalize others based upon race, gender, or sexual orientation. In doing so, a transnational approach can sometimes be mistakenly believed to be a libratory one, as conceiving of the world in terms of a mixture of flows of capital and individuals, and less in terms of boundaries, not recognizing the challenges faced by immigrants being forced to leave their home or being confronted with material and metaphorical barriers. Bourne’s vision of the transnational as rooted in the nation-state chal- lenges more current conceptualizations of transnationalism that often denote and celebrate identities and cultural representations “beyond the nation.” To Bourne, distant conviviality or coexistence is very much an “American” experience, only to be understood by those who have been to the United States. As such, the nation and the transnational become inextricably linked, so much so that the transnational in Bourne’s essays becomes a means of celebrating the United States in terms of its difference with other nations, refiguring mythical national narratives of the United States as the city on the hill through a transnational perspective. It is this concern that has been voiced by many critics today, questioning how one can navigate between the terms “nation” and “transnational,” without also recognizing the different ways in which the transnational can also work 4 KEVIN CONCANNON, FRANCISCO A. LOMELÍ, AND MARC PRIEWE to reaffirm the nation-state. As many scholars in American Studies argue, it is difficult to undertake seemingly transnational work outside of the shadows of America, an often unrecognized furthering of Bourne’s legacy (cf. Briggs et al. 2008). In a similar vein, the ethnic referent “Latino/a” in part replicates both the U.S. cultural mirage of melting pot unity and its Bournean counter-model by assimilating members of various Latin American subgroups living in the United States into an imagined, transnational cultural and communal formation (cf. Rodriguez 2002, 109). That is, the label “Latino/a” subsumes a variety of nationals from the Western Hemisphere (or their descendants) who moved to the United States and who share an ostensibly common language, culture, and history. Although such a broad and highly contested definition raises more questions than it answers—for instance, exactly which linguistic, cultural, or historical features are sufficient, and which are necessary, in applying this particular ethnic label?—“Latino/a” remains a useful shorthand for designating specific minoritarian experiences in the United States. Obviously, Latino/a social, political, and cultural experi- ences are in many respects similar to those of other ethnic groups in the United States; however, the ways in which “transnationalism” suffuses and shapes these experiences are unprecedented. For the contributors of this collection, then, “Latino/a” is a valuable category of investigation pre- cisely because it represents transnational features of specific and salient movements and connectivities: temporary or permanent migrations to and from the United States; cultural exchanges among and beyond U.S. Latino/a subgroups; the imagination of manifold ties, in the past, present, and future, within transnational spaces across the Western Hemisphere. These transnational spaces between the United States and Latin America foster the emergence of pluri-local identities that are no lon- ger subject to a unified, national imaginary. As a result, the dichotomy between acculturation and alienation in/from the United States has sig- nificantly changed toward various forms of transculturations, as migrated cultural practices are being filtered and recontextualized transnationally. Experiences of many so-called transmigrants in the United States, espe- cially in “global cities” (Sassen), differ substantially from earlier migra- tory patterns in that assimilation to or estrangement from the culture of dominance has ceased to constitute the core of the migratory experience. Moreover, the plural experiences (and the representations) of migrant communities in the United States are no longer contained nor constrained by the “Manichean delirium” (Fanon) established by colonialism and postcolonialism. Instead, over the past two decades, migrants who come to the United States, especially from Latin American countries, are fre- quently finding themselves multi-positioned, involved in relations to more