Three Ballads from the 19th-Century Scottish Borderlands, edited by Francis James Child

THE WATER O' WEARIE'S WELL.

From Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, ii. 201. Repeated in Scottish Traditional Versions of Ancient Ballads, Percy Society, xvii. 63.

The three ballads which follow, diverse as they may now appear, after undergoing successive corruptions, were primarily of the same type. In the first (which may be a compound of two ballads, like the preceding, the conclusion being taken from a story of the character of May Colvin in the next volume) the Merman or Nix may be easily recognized: in the second he is metamorphosed into the Devil; and in the third, into a ghost. Full details upon the corresponding Scandinavian, German, and Slavic legends, are given by Grundtvig, in the preface to Noekkens Svig, Danmarks G. Folkeviser, ii. 57: translated by Jamieson, i. 210, and by Monk Lewis, Tales of Wonder, No. 11.

There came a bird out o' a bush,

On water for to dine;

And sighing sair, says the king's daughter,

"O waes this heart o' mine!"

He's taen a harp into his hand,

He's harped them all asleep;

Except it was the king's daughter,

Who ae wink cou'dna get.

He's luppen on his berry-brown steed,

Taen her on behind himsell;

Then baith rade down to that water,

That they ca' Wearie's well.

"Wide in, wide in, my lady fair,

Nae harm shall thee befall;

Aft times hae I water'd my steed,

Wi' the water o' Wearie's well."

The first step that she stepped in,

She stepped to the knee;

And sighing sair, says this lady fair,

"This water's nae for me."

"Wide in, wide in, my lady fair,

Nae harm shall thee befall;

Aft times hae I water'd my steed,

Wi' the water o' Wearie's well."

The next step that she stepped in,

She stepped to the middle;

And sighing, says, this lady fair,

"I've wat my gowden girdle."

"Wide in, wide in, my lady fair,

Nae harm shall thee befall;

Aft times hae I water'd my steed,

Wi' the water o' Wearie's well."

The niest step that she stepped in,

She stepped to the chin;

And sighing, says, this lady fair,

"They shou'd gar twa loves twine."

"Seven king's-daughters I've drown'd there,

In the water o' Wearie's well;

And I'll make you the eight o' them,

And ring the common bell."

"Sin' I am standing here," she says,

"This dowie death to die;

Ae kiss o' your comely mouth

I'm sure wou'd comfort me."

He louted him ower his saddle bow,

To kiss her cheek and chin;

She's taen him in her arms twa,

And thrown him headlang in.

"Sin' seven king's daughters ye've drown'd there,

In the water o' Wearie's well,

I'll make you bridegroom to them a',

An' ring the bell mysell."

And aye she warsled, and aye she swam,

Till she swam to dry land;

Then thanked God most cheerfully,

The dangers she'd ower came.

THE DÆMON LOVER.

This ballad was communicated to Sir Walter Scott, (Minstrelsy, iii. 195,) by Mr. William Laidlaw, who took it down from recitation. A fragment of the same legend, recovered by Motherwell, is given in the Appendix to this volume, and another version, in which the hero is not a dæmon, but the ghost of an injured lover, is placed directly after the present.

The Devil (Auld Nick) here takes the place of the Merman (Nix) of the ancient ballad. See p. 198, and the same natural substitution noted in K.u.H.—Märchen, 3d ed. iii. 253.

"O where have you been, my long, long love,

This long seven years and more?"—

"O I'm come to seek my former vows

Ye granted me before."—

"O hold your tongue of your former vows,

For they will breed sad strife;

O hold your tongue of your former vows,

For I am become a wife."

He turn'd him right and round about,

And the tear blinded his ee;

"I wad never hae trodden on Irish ground,

If it had not been for thee.

"I might hae had a king's daughter,

Far, far beyond the sea;

I might have had a king's daughter,

Had it not been for love o' thee."—

"If ye might have had a king's daughter,

Yer sell ye had to blame;

Ye might have taken the king's daughter,

For ye kend that I was nane."—

"O faulse are the vows of womankind,

But fair is their faulse bodie;

I never wad hae trodden on Irish ground,

Had it not been for love o' thee."—

"If I was to leave my husband dear,

And my two babes also,

O what have you to take me to,

If with you I should go?"—

"I hae seven ships upon the sea,

The eighth brought me to land;

With four-and-twenty bold mariners,

And music on every hand."

She has taken up her two little babes,

Kiss'd them baith cheek and chin;

"O fair ye weel, my ain two babes,

For I'll never see you again."

She set her foot upon the ship,

No mariners could she behold;

But the sails were o' the taffetie,

And the masts o' the beaten gold.

She had not sail'd a league, a league,

A league but barely three,

When dismal grew his countenance,

And drumlie grew his ee.

The masts that were like the beaten gold,

Bent not on the heaving seas;

But the sails, that were o' the taffetie,

Fill'd not in the east land breeze.—

They had not sailed a league, a league,

A league but barely three,

Until she espied his cloven foot,

And she wept right bitterlie.

"O hold your tongue of your weeping," says he,

"Of your weeping now let me be;

I will show you how the lilies grow

On the banks of Italy."—

"O what hills are yon, yon pleasant hills,

That the sun shines sweetly on?"—

"O yon are the hills of heaven," he said,

"Where you will never win."—

"O whaten a mountain is yon," she said,

"All so dreary wi' frost and snow?"—

"O yon is the mountain of hell," he cried,

"Where you and I will go."

And aye when she turn'd her round about,

Aye taller he seem'd for to be;

Until that the tops o' that gallant ship

Nae taller were than he.

The clouds grew dark, and the wind grew loud,

And the levin fill'd her ee;

And waesome wail'd the snaw-white sprites

Upon the gurlie sea.

He strack the tap-mast wi' his hand,

The fore-mast wi' his knee;

And he brake that gallant ship in twain,

And sank her in the sea.

JAMES HERRIES.

From Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, (i. 214.)

(See the preface to the last ballad but one.)

"O are ye my father, or are ye my mother?

Or are ye my brother John?

Or are ye James Herries, my first true love,

Come back to Scotland again?"

"I am not your father, I am not your mother,

Nor am I your brother John;

But I'm James Herries, your first true love,

Come back to Scotland again."

"Awa', awa', ye former lovers,

Had far awa' frae me;

For now I am another man's wife,

Ye'll ne'er see joy o' me."

"Had I kent that ere I came here,

I ne'er had come to thee;

For I might hae married the king's daughter,

Sae fain she wou'd had me.

"I despised the crown o' gold,

The yellow silk also;

And I am come to my true love,

But with me she'll not go."

"My husband he is a carpenter,

Makes his bread on dry land,

And I hae born him a young son,—

Wi' you I will not gang."

"You must forsake your dear husband,

Your little young son also,

Wi' me to sail the raging seas,

Where the stormy winds do blow."

"O what hae you to keep me wi',

If I should with you go?

If I'd forsake my dear husband,

My little young son also?"

"See ye not yon seven pretty ships,

The eighth brought me to land;

With merchandize and mariners,

And wealth in every hand?"

She turn'd her round upon the shore,

Her love's ships to behold;

Their topmasts and their mainyards

Were cover'd o'er wi' gold.

Then she's gane to her little young son,

And kiss'd him cheek and chin;

Sae has she to her sleeping husband,

And dune the same to him.

"O sleep ye, wake ye, my husband,

I wish ye wake in time;

I woudna for ten thousand pounds,

This night ye knew my mind."

She's drawn the slippers on her feet,

Were cover'd o'er wi' gold;

Well lined within wi' velvet fine,

To had her frae the cold.

She hadna sailed upon the sea

A league but barely three,

Till she minded on her dear husband,

Her little young son tee.

"O gin I were at land again,

At land where I wou'd be,

The woman ne'er shou'd bear the son,

Shou'd gar me sail the sea."

"O hold your tongue, my sprightly flower,

Let a' your mourning be;

I'll show you how the lilies grow

On the banks o' Italy."

She hadna sailed on the sea

A day but barely ane,

Till the thoughts o' grief came in her mind,

And she lang'd for to be hame.

"O gentle death, come cut my breath,

I may be dead ere morn;

I may be buried in Scottish ground,

Where I was bred and born."

"O hold your tongue, my lily leesome thing,

Let a' your mourning be;

But for a while we'll stay at Rose Isle,

Then see a far countrie.

"Ye'se ne'er be buried in Scottish ground,

Nor land ye's nae mair see;

I brought you away to punish you,

For the breaking your vows to me.

"I said ye shou'd see the lilies grow

On the banks o' Italy;

But I'll let you see the fishes swim,

In the bottom o' the sea."

He reached his band to the topmast,

Made a' the sails gae down;

And in the twinkling o' an e'e,

Baith ship and crew did drown.

The fatal flight o' this wretched maid

Did reach her ain countrie;

Her husband then distracted ran,

And this lament made he:—

"O wae be to the ship, the ship,

And wae be to the sea,

And wae be to the mariners,

Took Jeanie Douglas frae me!

"O bonny, bonny was my love,

A pleasure to behold;

The very hair o' my love's head

Was like the threads o' gold.

"O bonny was her cheek, her cheek,

And bonny was her chin;

And bonny was the bride she was,

The day she was made mine!"

*** The following stanzas from a version of this ballad printed at Philadelphia (and called The House Carpenter) are given in Graham's Illustrated Magazine, Sept. 1858.

"I might have married the king's daughter dear;"

"You might have married her," cried she,

"For I am married to a House Carpenter,

And a fine young man is he."

"Oh dry up your tears, my own true love,

And cease your weeping," cried he;

"For soon you'll see your own happy home,

On the banks of old Tennessee."

Rudolfo Anaya, from Bless Me, Ultima

Father says that the town steals our freedom; he says that we must build a castle across the river, on the lonely hill of the mockingbirds. I think it was León who spoke first, he was the eldest, and his voice always had a sad note to it. But in the dark mist of the dream I could not be sure. 

His heart had been heavy since we came to the town, the second figure spoke, his forefathers were men of the sea, the Márez people, they were conquistadors, men whose freedom was unbounded.

It was Andrew who said that! It was Andrew! I was sure because his voice was husky like his thick and sturdy body.

Father says the freedom of the wild horse is in the Márez blood, and his gaze is always westward. His father before him were vaqueros, and so he expects us to be men of the llano. I was sure the third voice belonged to Eugene.

I longed to touch them. I was hungry for their company. Instead I spoke.

We must all gather around our father, I heard myself say. His dream is to ride westward in search of new adventure. He builds highways that stretch into the sun, and we must travel that road with him.

My brothers frowned. You are a Luna, they chanted in unison, you are to be a farmer-priest for mother!

The doves came to drink in the still pools of the river and their cry was mournful in the darkness of my dream.

My brothers laughed. You are but a baby, Tony, you are our mother's dream. Stay and sleep to the doves cou-rou while we cross the mighty River of the Carp to build our father's castle in the hills.

I must go! I cried to the three dark figures. I must lift the muddy waters of the river in blessing to our new home!

Along the river the tormented cry of a lonely goddess filled the valley. The winding wail made the blood of men run cold.

It is la llorona, my brothers cried in fear, the old witch who cries along the river banks and seeks the blood of boys and men to drink!

La llorona seeks the soul of Antoniooooooooo...

It is the soul of Lupito, they cried in fear, doomed to wander the river at night because the waters washed his soul away!

Lupito seeks his blessinggggggggg...

It is neither! I shouted. I swung the dark robe of the priest over my shoulders then lifted my hands in the air. The mist swirled around me and sparks flew when I spoke. It is the presence of the river!

Save us, my brothers cried and cowered at my words.

I spoke to the presence of the river and it allowed my brothers to cross with their carpenter tools to build our castle on the hill.

Behind us I heard my mother moan and cry because with each turning of the sun her son was growing old...

Culture Fix: Judithe Hernandez (de los Four) on the Role of Women in the Chicano Art Movement

Los Four, Murals of Aztlan: The Street Painters of East Los Angeles

Miguel Méndez, from Pilgrims in Aztlán

I FELL ON THE PLAINS that divide the border like someone falling into a no-man’s-land. In the desert, virgin in the absence of any will toward the creative, my words threaded their way among the dust storm. The sky became tinged with a black wind that cloaked the dunes with layers of pale sand. I turned to see my tightly spaced steps, and they had already disappeared. Any innovation was answered by nothingness with its dead bell towers. And I was God writing pages in the wind so that my words would fly away. In the mysterious loneliness I sought the traces of His look. I only knew it, like an unspeaking child, intuiting fire in order to form worlds, planets, galaxies, with its little hands, urging on the life with which the clay animates itself, with water the color of the dawn. I wanted Him to say something to me. Now I know that He creates life with which the clay animates itself, with water the color of the dawn. I wanted Him to say something to me. Now I know that He creates life and I invent the language with which one speaks. Nevertheless, I lose myself in the tangle of vocabulary and the words that still are not born of thought and that make one's heart ache. I lost myself among the sand drifts of the Sonoran desert, seeking Him so that he might teach me the language of silence. I sought Him so that He might tell me what He asked the stars, feeling my heart so alone on that surface so full of sand and in that sky so full of lights. I was overwhelmed with feeling, and I cried to see in the desert the dreamed-of fatherland that would take me in its bosom, like a mother who loves and watches over all of her children equally. No more would my soul be wounded by the thorns of scorn and indifference. In the future I would be a true citizen requesting and receiving justice. I was overtaken by illusion, and I saw in Yuma the cosmic solitude of the Sonoran desert, the Republic we wetbacks would inhabit, Indians sunk in misfortune and enslaved Chicanos. Ours would be the “Republic of Despised Mexicans.” Our houses would emerge from the dunes that rise up to look like tombs, and the nomadic race, its feet wounded by centuries of pilgrimages, would finally have a roof crowned by good fortune. From the immensity of the sterile sand, bread would be born like grace. The lakes that magic paints from a distance, as though they had only been lighted by the centuries, would suddenly take on the life that would return them to the reality of the movement that animates the fountains and the rivers. Scourged by the tenebrous winds that roast with the cruelty of pyres, the voices of the deceitful would flee, bearing with them tribunes of hypocrites who betray the trust of both their children and their forebears.  I was overtaken by imagination, and I saw in my pilgrimage many Indian peoples reduced by the torture of hunger and the humiliation of plunder, traveling backwards along the ancient roads in search of their remote origin. They ended up downcast, ceremonious in their gait and with the ritual gestures of beings who know the depths of human secrets. They came to seek life and the worthy embrace of the graveyards. I was overtaken by the enthusiasm of dreaming with my eyes open, and I saw that through the wide doors of the unploughed lands there entered multitudes of Chicano brothers who made paths and roads to peace and tranquility from the immense sandy plains. Their backs were bent and there was bitterness on their faces and the infinite weariness of slaves. They embrace their Indian forebears, and together they all cry in silence, burying those who have been killed, who are so many that no one can ever count them. I began to drown in feeling, and I cried over that warped wasteland with its outcroppings. Sand and moon dripped from their clothes, and driven by the thirst of the winds, the exodus of wetbacks dragged its feet because of the greed of the powerful. And behind them, the life of their families was conditioned to the adventure that they would experience in a strange land. I was hurt by the despair of feeling that utopia is ever a burning coal in consciousness tortured by the denial of sublime aspirations, and I fell to my knees begging for mercy.

Alicia Arrizón, "Performing Aztlán: Mestizaje and the Native Body," from "Mythical Performativity: Relocating Aztlán in Chicana Feminist Productions

Aztlán performs the border space. Its dramatic state is an ever-evolving product of the collision, separation, and re-engagement occurring among nations, languages, cultures, and histories. I focus here on the importance of utterances as forms of exhibition underneath the representation of space. Rafael Pérez-Torres suggests that the border, which "represents a construction tied to histories of power and dispossession," determines the evolution of ideological configurations. Thus, "the construction of personal and cultural identity entailed in any multicultural project comes to the fore in Chicana/o cultural production." ¹⁵ Pérez-Torres defines Aztlán as an "empty signifier," by which he means that Aztlán reflects "that which is ever absent: nation, unity, liberation." ¹⁶ In my view, these "absences" are dynamic--they make themselves present in the in-betweenness of border space and provide strategies for individual and collective identity. Thus, Aztlán is marked performatively by processes of transformation in which time and space intersect to produce tropes of spiritual decolonization. These tropes are consonant with ideologies that intersect and often contradict each other. While Aztlán's ambivalent subjectivity draws attention to the specific value of a politics of cultural production, it also represents relations of domination in the discursive divisions between the First World and Third World, the North and the South, Mexico and the United States, the dominant and the subordinate.

Like Pérez-Torres, Laura Elisa Pérez defines Aztlán's discursive spatiality in terms of power relations. She, however, sees the dialectical forces of "order" and "disorder" (reason and deviation) as counteracting the systematic politics of domination that threaten the validity of Aztlán. She discusses mainly Chicana cultural productions, emphasizing the visual arts, and examines ways in which Chicana feminists have further altered the "logical" order of patriarchy and homogeneity. From this perspective, continuously recovering Aztlán is an act with no borders because, as Pérez explains, "[W]e occupy a nation that does and doesn't exist." ¹⁷ This illogical yearning reflects the traumatic contradictions of Chicano/a subjectivity, caught among historic, linguistic, and mythic origins. As the site of creative and political intervention, Aztlán both signals the heterogeneity of the subject and authorizes an alternative way of knowing that may offer a fantastic epistemological system. Aztlán dramatizes and enacts the complexity of power as a mode of differentiation, a hierarchical structure, and a system of defense.

The concept of Aztlán and the legacy of mestizaje are also intertwined. The idea of the mestizo performing body is key to the political imagery of Aztlán: Chicano subjectivity becomes the product of the transcultural processes consciously marked by the acceptance of blended Spanish and indigenous precolonial roots. The idea of transculturation as a form of mestizaje is best exemplified in the art movement that emerged in conjunction with the Chicano movement. In Amado M. Peña's Mestizo (1974), a tripartite head represents the cultural mixture embodied in the Mexican identity as the product of the union of the Spanish and pre-colonial cultures (see fig. 1). The tripartite face situates the Chicano male body in the middle, between the Mexican and US sides. The overlap of the faces defines mestizaje as the intersubjective and collective experience of intercultural negotiation. The dialectic embodied by the tripartite head dramatizes the relations between colonizers and the colonized, emphasizing not detachment, but rather an understanding of the plural subjectivity of mestizaje.

The notion of mestizaje has also been taken as a paradigmatic site of departure for social criticism and artistic imagination. Judith F. Baca addresses these grammars and revisits the tri-headed figure, but in her art the feminization of the subject is key. In La Mestizaje (1991), Baca places the Chicana mestiza between the Indian/Mayan configuration and the figure of the Spaniard (see fig. 2). Both Peña and Baca seek to authorize the cultural hybridities that have emerged as the result of historical transformations. While both artists reinscribe the three distinct cultural legacies (Chicano, indigenous, and European) at once, Baca goes a step further. La Mestizaje transgresses the authorial power of the genders, unseating the masculinist, dominant grammars of El Plan's marked body. As Baca explains, she deliberately chose to alter this monolithic space and draw attention to the spiritual power of the mestiza body:

This legacy has made us the children of the future as we are positioned in a world that is increasingly becoming like us: of mixed origin and international. I have begun to see the necessity of all three in my own nature. Each figure has an important relationship to my own survival as a Chicana in this time. While the figure in my drawing drops off the trap of facades, what is left is the apparition of their place in her life. The Indian has a wisdom that comes not from highly rationalized and deduced information but from the intuitive and a relationship with nature. The Spaniard appears not as a fierce, heartless European, but as the embodiment of the European rational and cool intellect. The Chicana, honed by adversity, is emerging as the dominant character in this image, as possessor of all three natures, and charged with a power of knowledge. She is no longer fierce but certainly formidable in a quiet way, armed with her ancestral mentors at her shoulders. ¹⁸

Thus, Baca portrays mestizaje as embodying spiritual demands that displace the "national" body and strive instead for an international and global sense of diversity and community. What she suggests is that we must now place the Chicana body in its national and international contexts. This movement from the local to the global is a central part of Baca's art. Her portable mural, World Wall: A Vision of the Future without Fear (1987), clearly demonstrates this transitory mood. A remarkable piece, World Wall centers on issues dealing with global interdependence, peace, and the end of racism and of gender and sex discrimination. ¹⁹ Baca has said that she intended the work to "push the state of the arts in muralism so that the mural creates its own architecture. It makes its own space and can be assembled by any people anywhere." ²⁰ This system of production is highly effective, and helps move Baca's work across different locations. It marks the performative potentiality of painting.

In another of Baca's portable murals, the Uprising of the Mujeres (1979), the indigenous side of La Mestizaje performatively echoes Gloria Anzaldúa's new mestiza consciousness (see fig. 3). As Anzaldúa makes clear in Borderlands/La Frontera, through la conciencia de la mestiza (the new mestiza consciousness), new coalitional global forces combine and relate in the formation of US Third World feminisms and in the discursive configuration "women of color." The need to mark a "third" space in US feminist movements is indicative not only of the neocolonial state of postmodernity, but also of the power relations that intervene in and transform the First World. For Chéla Sandoval, la conciencia de la mestiza "identifies all technologies of power as consensual illusions" that mediate the imperatives of the social body. ²¹ Sandoval's approach to the mestiza body and Chicana feminism is closely tied to the transnational register of US Third World politics. For Sandoval, Anzaldúa, and Baca, the transnational positioning of the subject emerges determinant but not absolute, the result of hybrid epistemologies, diasporic interventions, and border spaces. Thus, the body and embodiment of the mestiza, situated in the "beyond" of a revisionary time, holds the promise of the future for the Chicana.

For Homi K. Bhabha the "beyond" is the "space of the intervention in the here and now." ²² According to him, the beyond "touches" the past, recapitulating the present and imagining the future of human agency. The beyond marks space and time. The act of going beyond figures the process of subjecthood performatively, disrupting the grammars of nationhood and extending its domain to a broader sense of locality, the transnational. Through its racialized and gendered identity, the mestiza body transcends space and time, enacting the site of difference where the discursive practices of performativity might be imagined. Neither Anglo-American nor indigenous, the mestiza body troubles the borders of feminist practices, nationalism, and colonial discourses. These performative practices, Norma Alarcón explains, "enable both individual and group Chicana positions previously 'empty' of meanings to emerge as one who has to 'make sense' of it all from the bottom through the recodification of the native woman." ²³

Alarcón's examination of the native woman not only attempts to trace the genealogy and legitimacy of the term "Chicana" within the nationalist movement, but also places the formation of identity and subjectivity as contested paradigms of multiple signifying practices. Alarcón demarcates, as well, the transnational setting of a new economy that provokes the dramatic state of identity. In her view, the subject's migratory conditions "are continuously transformed into mestizas, Mexicans, émigrés to Anglo-America, Chicanas, Latinas, Hispanics--There are as many names as there are namers." ²⁴ Alarcón defines the native woman as the product of an international economy influenced by the intervention of the US-Mexican border. She speaks of "new women subjects" who, in their roles as workers (domestics, cannery workers, field workers), "find themselves bombarded and subjected to multiple cross-cultural and contradictory ideologies." ²⁵ As I note in Latina Performance, the particular cross-border subjectivity Alarcón alludes to provides an opportunity to examine the US-Mexican border as a cultural and political site through which new kinds of identities are forged. ²⁶

The body of the native woman does not necessarily assert the presence of an authentic self because it challenges cultural "purity." The "native" body's presence in Chicana (and Latina) cultural productions and critical theory becomes a metaphor for the processes of the political unconscious. Theoretically speaking, the "political unconscious," particularly as noted by Fredric Jameson, proposes in every "text" (visual, written, or performed) a level of political fantasy which marks the actual and the potential social relations of "bodies" within a specific political economy. ²⁷ In this context, this knowledge of the "native" body returns to its genealogy, cultural identity, and historical origination, resisting the type of authenticity that performs universal standardization, thus creating a productive way to eradicate and silence racial oppression. Trinh T. Minha-ha presents this argument in Woman Native Other very clearly. In considering authenticity, she rejects the absolutisms of the "real" self, characterized by the epistemology of Western metaphysics. To explain the endless interchange that conveys the typographic conventions of the self, "or that solid mass covered with layers of superficialities," Minha-ha speaks of authenticity poetically, in relation to its indeterminacy and indefinite processes of subjectivity. ²⁸ Rather than an absolute and authentic self, she believes in its logical displacement and fragmentation. Minha-ha believes in authenticity when an "'undisputed origin' is prey to an obsessive fear: that of losing a connection." ²⁹

By separating the "real" from its representation, Minha-ha claims that the performance of origin follows a clear trail in search of the "genuine" layer of the self. In her symbolic logic, the ambivalence of origin remains caught between the "infinite layers" of human diversity and the postcolonial imagination. Thus, the eternal attempt to unify the impossibilities of subjecthood becomes the incentive for shifting oneself out, for blending with space, for becoming space. By rejecting appearance, the "native woman" becomes nothing other than representation because her origin is both mythical and real. The myth requires both legend and a coherent belief in a given reality. For Alarcón, Anzaldúa, Baca, and many other Chicana artists and theorists, the discursive configurations of the native woman alter the space of the authentic body in the process of confronting the simultaneity of marginality and privilege. This confrontation attests to imbalances created by the dislocation of a centered hegemony, influencing the convergence of new cultural topographies in the process of "borderization" and the interruption of the dominant.

These motifs are also exemplified in Laura Aguilar's self-portrait, Three Eagles Flying (1990), in which she expresses rage and confusion (see fig. 4). Aguilar places her body in between the Mexican and US flags, neither here nor there. She is trapped by constructs of the cultural borderization of space. Covered with the Mexican flag, her face embodies the strength of the eagle, which represents a layer of the ethnic self. The US flag covers the lower part of Aguilar's body, subjecting it to force hybridization implicit in the representations of the divided self. In reading the lower part of the body, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano places Aguilar's majestic figure in connection with her queer sexuality. She has pointed out that while the US flag confines Aguilar's body below the waist, it also represents "a critique of the exclusionary constructions of lesbianism as white." ³⁰ Both her sexuality and her ethnic background intervene in a performance in which the concepts of homogeneity and space are in a profound process of dislocation. In "Portrait from the Latina Lesbian Series," Aguilar suggests that she is more comfortable with the word "Laura" than with the word "lesbian." ³¹ The act of self-representation, however, displaces both the United States and Mexico, and discloses her queer body as evidence of a more complex sense of identity. Displacement and detachment inspire Aguilar to capture in her art (with her body) the estranging sense of space relocation that is the condition of the cross-border subject. Yarbro-Bejarano suggests that the ways she "performs" her body are closely connected to the estrangement the artist expresses: "where do I/we fit in--seems to be nowhere." ³² In this displacement, the Mexico-US border becomes a site of confusion but each is always dependent on the other, forcing upon the subject a location that is as divided as it is mystifying. The subject's performing identity becomes the result of sensibilities that resonate with an intervening space in constant transformation.

Aguilar is obviously playing with the linguistic constructs of her surname as equivalent to "águila" (eagle)--which in the Mexican culture symbolizes freedom and power. At the same time, her body seems to be subjugated by constraints beyond her own determination (the rope goes around her neck and binds her hands). The US flag, and the imperialism it signifies, marks another layer of the construction of the self: Aguilar's body is part of an occupied and complex space. Thus the lack of an authentic layer of the self forces the artist to posit herself in a performance of cross-cultural representations, separated from the absolute authority of both nations, but marked by the constitutive power of the body itself as it produces knowledge and disobedience. Aguilar's body and the many layers of the self negotiate the powers of hybridity in particular and dramatic ways. The subject's material presence is precisely the site in which the conventions of embodiment may be located. It is where the relation of sameness and difference does not obey any regulations. From this position, the performing body erases borders, allowing both nations to become significantly adjacent. Similarly, Luis Alfaro, a Los Angeles-based poet, playwright, and performance artist expresses this dialectic clearly in his performative pose on the cover of the 15 November 1998 issue of Los Angeles Times Magazine (see fig. 5). Both portraits--Aguilar's half-naked body and Alfaro's sardonic pose--involve a body mediated by two (and perhaps more) different worlds. ³³ Both artists' performing identities delineate an unstable space, one that by definition is merged and mixed. The strategic use of the Mexican flag on one side and the US flag on the other dramatizes and enacts the performative hybrids of neocolonial processes as an act of the transcultural body. Such performances demarcate simultaneously the subject position of transgressive bodies, an unstable location, degrees of commodification, and contestation.

These notions of authenticity, when situated in conjunction with these explorations of native bodies and geopolitical spaces, resonate with the mythical performativity of Aztlán. In performance art, the staging of the native woman is especially remarkable in the productions of the sisters Elvira and Hortensia Colorado, the founders of Coatlicue Theatre Company. ³⁴ These dynamic performers draw on the narratives of the precolonial legacy, weaving stories of the indigenous goddesses along with their own personal and familial tales. In addition to alluding directly to the Aztec goddess of the earth Coatlicue in their artistic name, the two women frequently incorporate the Nahautl language into their work. This tactic helps affirm their survival as urban mestizas in contemporary New York City. The Coatlicue Theatre Company's performance repertoire, which includes Open Wounds on Tlalteuctli, Huipil, Coyolxauhqui: Women Without Borders, La Llorona, Walks of Indian Women--Aztlán to Anahauk, and Tlatilco: The Place Where Things are Hidden, blends ancient myths with current social and political issues, including racism and sexual oppression. The affirmation of  pre-Hispanic symbols in their work counteracts a dramatic space embedded in interculturalism itself. The legacy of the native woman is implicated in discursive configurations of the neocolonial, precolonial, and postcolonial subjects. In the following poem the women use language itself to perform the various representational options of the intercultural body. By combining dominant English, Nahautl signifiers, and Spanish grammars, the Coatlicue group configures the intercultural location of the "new" native woman (see fig. 6):

I Cihuacoatl, Snake Woman, Mujer Serpienta,
of the coiled serpents and severed hearts.
I Cihuacoatl, the shape forms in my mouth as
I emerge from the earth and shed the skin and
scales of my dead ancestors. Don't come too
close, I'm dangerous. They covered me with a
white sheet--chalk white--and they bound my
hands behind my back and I spurted blood from
my severed head, my eyes, my mouth.

This is my space. I take these hands, these
eyes and this voice and I rip off the mask
of racism and ignorance. I lick my open
wounds and with my blood and spirit I create
a new universe where there are no borders. ³⁵ 

Here, the Coatlicue duo creates the "new" native woman as a rebellious act of cultural translation. Such an act renews the place of origin, innovating and interrupting the present time in which their bodies are performing. They disclose the wounds of their permanent exile, hoping to transcend the abstraction of their colonial and neocolonial subjectivity. By envisioning "a new universe" without borders, the Coatlicue women bear witness to the vitality of space and bodies within and beyond the historical past. The aesthetic motivation and ideological impulses behind their photography expose the theatricality of the mestiza body, at least the way they make sense of it.

The sisters' decision to use the name Coatlicue testifies to the fervor of the cult of the gods as an inheritance from the precolonial period. Coatlicue, like the Virgin Mary in Christianity, is said to have conceived a child without carnal contact. According to an Aztec legend, a divine messenger in the form of a bird dropped a feather into Coatlicue's lap, and thus Huitzilopochtli, the warrior of the south, was born. Another deity born of Coatlicue was Cihuacoatl, the serpent goddess. Cihuacoatl then split into Tonantzin, a goddess similar to the Christian Virgin Mother, when she is referred to as "Our Lady." ³⁶ Later, Tonantzin became embodied as the chaste, protective mother of the mestizo nation, La Virgen de Guadalupe (see fig. 7).

For the Coatlicue duo, Cihuacoatl's rebellious attitude represents more than the origin of the "new" native woman. Cihuacoatl and Tlazolteotl (another deity who sprang from Coatlicue) were disempowered and given evil attributes during the transformation of Coatlicue's good spirit, Tonantzin, into the chaste "dark" mother. After the conquest, Tonantzin/Guadalupe was established as the "good" mother, while Coatlicue and her female deities Cihuacoatl and Tlazolteotl were rendered into defiant beasts. They are the transgressors of marianismo (the cult of the Virgin Mary and her subject position as the mother of God), imposed by an entrenched Christianity. Thus, as an opposing force, Cihuacoatl's legacy helps to explain the whore-virgin dichotomy that has shaped gender relations and sexuality in post-Spanish colonial sites.

Coatlicue Theatre Company performs Cihuacoatl's rebellious origin as a way both to vindicate and problematize the context of colonial history. In their present situation as neocolonial subjects in the United States, performance artists such as Elvira and Hortensia Colorado and many Chicana/Latina artists look at the symbols of the indigenous as a form of resistance and cultural reaffirmation. Consequently, their situation must be marked from the situation of the dominant because they still feel caught in some way within systems of colonial subject-production. The result involves processes in which the body (and knowledge) symbolically seeks the attainment of decolonization. Thus by embodying the rebellious deity of the goddess Cihuacoatl, the Coatlicue women not only transgress tradition but direct attention to the particular formation of subjectivity constructed as counteractions of colonial history.

Similarly, in "Guadalupe the Sex Goddess," author Sandra Cisneros connects her own rebellious attitude to the defiant spirit of Cihuacoatl: 

Coatlicue, Tlazolteotl, Tonantzin, la Virgen de Guadalupe. They are each telescoped one into the other, into who I am. And this is where la Lupe [short for Guadalupe] intrigues me--not the Lupe of 1531 who appeared to Juan Diego, but the one of the 1990s who has shaped who we are as Chicanas/mexicanas today, the one inside each Chicana and mexicana. Perhaps it's the Tlazolteotl-Lupe in me whose malcriada (brat) spirit inspires me to leap into the swimming pool naked or dance on a table with a skirt on my head. Maybe it's my Coatlicue-Lupe attitude that makes it possible for my mother to tell me, No wonder men can't stand you. Who knows? What I do know is this: I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin. ³⁷

The transgressive spirit Cisneros invokes in this embodiment of Cihuacoatl, like the Colorado sisters in their Coatlicue convocation, dislocates the purity and passivity of the Mother of God. This attitude reflects the affliction, rage, and pure desires of cultural decolonization and renovation. The transgression within transgression functions as a way to counteract an oppressive system that has perpetuated the passive role of women in Christian values and colonial sites. Such a critical configuration is one of the clearest examples in evidence of a revisionist interference in contemporary Chicana and Latina feminist cultural productions. While Cihuacoatl transgresses purity, her body, as metaphor for the structure of feminism, functions as a self-conscious act in itself.

In visual art, the transgressive iconography dedicated to the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe presents a startling invocation of Coatlicue's revolutionary deity. The art of Ester Hernandez and Yolanda M. Lopez is radically performative, complicating the "authentic" claim of Guadalupe to reproduce mimetic altered bodies (see figs. 8 and 9). The performative emerges in the manipulation of the surface of the iconographic image and in the surface of the altered body. In Hernandez's La Virgen de Guadalupe defendiendo los derechos de los Xicanos (The Virgin of Guadalupe Fighting for the Rights of Chicanos, 1975), the aggressiveness resides in the body in action, ready for combat. The "new" gesture, costume, and combative expression manipulate the passive eloquence of the traditional mestizaje icon. The essential body is transformed, exposing a fundamental desire to stage an image of the whole nature of the self. This fundamental desire also motivates Lopez in her Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe (1978). As a signifier of the transcultural body, Lopez's act of self-representation accepts the power of divine knowledge (holding the serpent) and also embraces the "American" side of her subjectivity (the coloring and design of the US flag in the cape). Both artists' work expresses the contradictions of the divided self, the fusion of opposites: virtue and evil.

This attitude of resistance is indicative of the political unconscious that transgresses traditional values and symbolizes the embodiment of mythical cognition. For Gloria Anzaldúa, it is these processes of knowing that produce the "Coatlicue state" in her Chicana psyche. The body of Coatlicue--and all its split subjectivities--represents the power that induces Anzaldúa's Chicana self to heal the wounds, to allay the fears of not knowing what she must know. For her, Coatlicue "is the mountain, the Earth Mother who conceived all celestial beings out of her cavernous womb. Goddess of birth and death, Coatlicue gives and takes away life; she is the incarnation of cosmic processes." ³⁸ For Choctaw/Chicana Marsha Gomez, Coatlicue is the Earth Mother who attempts to save the world. Her sculpture Madre del Mundo (1988; see fig. 10) was originally installed on US-occupied Shoshone land, across from the entrance to the missile test site in Mercury, Nevada (fifty miles outside of Las Vegas). The exhibition of the sculpture was part of a Mother's Day peace action opposing the bombing and desecration of land. ³⁹ In response to the atrocities committed against the Shoshone Indian land, the Foundation for a Compassionate Society and Grandmothers for Peace commissioned Gomez to sculpt a piece that would symbolize the nurturing aspects at work opposing the atrocities of land abuse. In creating Madre del Mundo, the artist embodied the demand to "save the land, honor treaty rights, stop nuclear testing on our sacred earth." ⁴⁰

From the Chicano nationalist art and theatre movements of the 1960s to the emergence of feminist queer bodies and discourses, the racialized configuration of the mestiza is cast in remarkable ways in Chicana (and Latina) cultural productions. The body and embodiment of the mestiza as the specter of the native woman underlies different ideologies, sustains the visibility/invisibility of power relationships, and supports the power of colonial and postcolonial discourses. The contradictions embedded in colonialism have shaped the positioning of the subject caught in the desire for an origin, which is again implicated by the differences of race (racism) and resistance to dominant systems of cultural production.

By relocating their subject position as descendants of the Coatlicue legacy, Chicanas not only detach themselves from the Anglo-American reality of whiteness and "racial purity," but also, by claiming mestizaje, invoke the unconquered spirit of Aztlán. As envisioned in Libertad by Ester Hernandez (1976), this unconquered spirituality represents space as the product of a democratic union where the female body is essentially the creator and instigator of freedom (see fig. 11). The multiplicity of female pre-Hispanic bodies embodied in the Statue of Liberty invokes transculturation and its potentially counterhegemonic function. The deceptive familiarity of the statue is in part disembodied, enacting and transforming the physical space into the complex transactions of the native exchange.

Hispano Comanche Dancers

Rafael Pérez-Torres, from "Refiguring Aztlán"

The refusal to be delimited, while simultaneously claiming numerous heritages and influences, allows for a rearticulation of the relationship between self and society, self and history, self and land. Aztlán as a realm of historical convergence and discontinuity becomes another source of significance embraced and employed in the borderlands that is Chicana/o culture. The tendency in these figurations and refigurations of Aztlán recast it variously as an ontological reality or an epistemological construction. Aztlán thus is repositioned and refigured as a shifting, and thus ambiguous signifier. Ambiguity suggests—problematically—a sense of equivalence. Rather than think of Aztlán as an ambiguous signifier, we might consider it “empty,” a signifier that points, as Ernesto Laclau argues, “from within the process of signification, to the discursive presence of its own limits.”

[...] 

As an empty signifier, Aztlán names not that which is or has been, but that which is ever absent: nation, unity, liberation.

[...] 

The discourses surrounding Aztlán present themselves as the incarnation of the term: the articulation of unity, of nation, of resistance to oppressive power. Each articulation offers its particular understanding of Aztlán as its fulfillment. This is precisely the reason that Aztlán never adds up. As a sign of liberation, it is ever emptied of meaning just as its meaning is asserted, its borders blurred by those constituencies engaged in liberating struggles named by Aztlán.

Luis Figueroa, Eulogio Nishiyama, and César Villanueva, Kukuli

Ramón Saldívar and Alejandro Saenz, "The Chicano Novel"

Part One: http://www.laits.utexas.edu/onda_latina/program?sernum=000511535&term=

Part Two: http://www.laits.utexas.edu/onda_latina/program?sernum=000510982&term=

Oscar Zeta Acosta, from Revolt of the Cockroach People

Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), "Gone to Croatan"

WE HAVE NO DESIRE to define the TAZ or to elaborate dogmas about how it must be created. Our contention is rather that it has been created, will be created, and is being created. Therefore it would prove more valuable and interesting to look at some TAZs past and present, and to speculate about future manifestations; by evoking a few prototypes we may be able to gauge the potential scope of the complex, and perhaps even get a glimpse of an "archetype." Rather than attempt any sort of encyclopaedism we'll adopt a scatter-shot technique, a mosaic of glimpses, beginning quite arbitrarily with the 16th-17th centuries and the settlement of the New World. 

The opening of the "new" world was conceived from the start as an occultist operation. The magus John Dee, spiritual advisor to Elizabeth I, seems to have invented the concept of "magical imperialism" and infected an entire generation with it. Halkyut and Raleigh fell under his spell, and Raleigh used his connections with the "School of Night"--a cabal of advanced thinkers, aristocrats, and adepts--to further the causes of exploration, colonization and mapmaking. The Tempest was a propaganda-piece for the new ideology, and the Roanoke Colony was its first showcase experiment. 

The alchemical view of the New World associated it with materia prima or hyle, the "state of Nature," innocence and all-possibility ("Virgin-ia"), a chaos or inchoateness which the adept would transmute into "gold," that is, into spiritual perfection as well as material abundance. But this alchemical vision is also informed in part by an actual fascination with the inchoate, a sneaking sympathy for it, a feeling of yearning for its formless form which took the symbol of the "Indian" for its focus: "Man" in the state of nature, uncorrupted by "government." Caliban, the Wild Man, is lodged like a virus in the very machine of Occult Imperialism; the forest/animal/humans are invested from the very start with the magic power of the marginal, despised and outcaste. On the one hand Caliban is ugly, and Nature a "howling wilderness"--on the other, Caliban is noble and unchained, and Nature an Eden. This split in European consciousness predates the Romantic/Classical dichotomy; it's rooted in Renaissance High Magic. The discovery of America (Eldorado, the Fountain of Youth) crystallized it; and it precipitated in actual schemes for colonization. 

We were taught in elementary school that the first settlements in Roanoke failed; the colonists disappeared, leaving behind them only the cryptic message "Gone To Croatan." Later reports of "grey-eyed Indians" were dismissed as legend. What really happened, the textbook implied, was that the Indians massacred the defenseless settlers. However, "Croatan" was not some Eldorado; it was the name of a neighboring tribe of friendly Indians. Apparently the settlement was simply moved back from the coast into the Great Dismal Swamp and absorbed into the tribe. And the grey-eyed Indians were real--they're still there, and they still call themselves Croatans. 

So--the very first colony in the New World chose to renounce its contract with Prospero (Dee/Raleigh/Empire) and go over to the Wild Men with Caliban. They dropped out. They became "Indians," "went native," opted for chaos over the appalling miseries of serfing for the plutocrats and intellectuals of London. 

As America came into being where once there had been "Turtle Island," Croatan remained embedded in its collective psyche. Out beyond the frontier, the state of Nature (i.e. no State) still prevailed--and within the consciousness of the settlers the option of wildness always lurked, the temptation to give up on Church, farmwork, literacy, taxes-- all the burdens of civilization--and "go to Croatan" in some way or another. Moreover, as the Revolution in England was betrayed, first by Cromwell and then by Restoration, waves of Protestant radicals fled or were transported to the New World (which had now become a prison, a place of exile). Antinomians, Familists, rogue Quakers, Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters were now introduced to the occult shadow of wildness, and rushed to embrace it. 

Anne Hutchinson and her friends were only the best known (i.e. the most upper-class) of the Antinomians--having had the bad luck to be caught up in Bay Colony politics--but a much more radical wing of the movement clearly existed. The incidents Hawthorne relates in "The Maypole of Merry Mount" are thoroughly historical; apparently the extremists had decided to renounce Christianity altogether and revert to paganism. If they had succeeded in uniting with their Indian allies the result might have been an Antinomian/Celtic/Algonquin syncretic religion, a sort of 17th century North American Santeria. 

Sectarians were able to thrive better under the looser and more corrupt administrations in the Caribbean, where rival European interests had left many islands deserted or even unclaimed. Barbados and Jamaica in particular must have been settled by many extremists, and I believe that Levellerish and Ranterish influences contributed to the Buccaneer "utopia" on Tortuga. Here for the first time, thanks to Esquemelin, we can study a successful New World proto-TAZ in some depth. Fleeing from hideous "benefits" of Imperialism such as slavery, serfdom, racism and intolerance, from the tortures of impressment and the living death of the plantations, the Buccaneers adopted Indian ways, intermarried with Caribs, accepted blacks and Spaniards as equals, rejected all nationality, elected their captains democratically, and reverted to the "state of Nature." Having declared themselves "at war with all the world," they sailed forth to plunder under mutual contracts called "Articles" which were so egalitarian that every member received a full share and the Captain usually only 1 1/4 or 1 1/2 shares. Flogging and punishments were forbidden-- quarrels were settled by vote or by the code duello. 

It is simply wrong to brand the pirates as mere sea-going highwaymen or even proto-capitalists, as some historians have done. In a sense they were "social bandits," although their base communities were not traditional peasant societies but "utopias" created almost ex nihilo in terra incognita, enclaves of total liberty occupying empty spaces on the map. After the fall of Tortuga, the Buccaneer ideal remained alive all through the "Golden Age" of Piracy (ca. 1660-1720), and resulted in land-settlements in Belize, for example, which was founded by Buccaneers. Then, as the scene shifted to Madagascar--an island still unclaimed by any imperial power and ruled only by a patchwork of native kings (chiefs) eager for pirate allies--the Pirate Utopia reached its highest form. 

Defoe's account of Captain Mission and the founding of Libertatia may be, as some historians claim, a literary hoax meant to propagandize for radical Whig theory--but it was embedded in The General History of the Pyrates (1724-28), most of which is still accepted as true and accurate. Moreover the story of Capt. Mission was not criticized when the book appeared and many old Madagascar hands still survived. They seem to have believed it, no doubt because they had experienced pirate enclaves very much like Libertatia. Once again, rescued slaves, natives, and even traditional enemies such as the Portuguese were all invited to join as equals. (Liberating slave ships was a major preoccupation.) Land was held in common, representatives elected for short terms, booty shared; doctrines of liberty were preached far more radical than even those of Common Sense. 

Libertatia hoped to endure, and Mission died in its defense. But most of the pirate utopias were meant to be temporary; in fact the corsairs' true "republics" were their ships, which sailed under Articles. The shore enclaves usually had no law at all. The last classic example, Nassau in the Bahamas, a beachfront resort of shacks and tents devoted to wine, women (and probably boys too, to judge by Birge's Sodomy and Piracy), song (the pirates were inordinately fond of music and used to hire on bands for entire cruises), and wretched excess, vanished overnight when the British fleet appeared in the Bay. Blackbeard and "Calico Jack" Rackham and his crew of pirate women moved on to wilder shores and nastier fates, while others meekly accepted the Pardon and reformed. But the Buccaneer tradition lasted, both in Madagascar where the mixed-blood children of the pirates began to carve out kingdoms of their own, and in the Caribbean, where escaped slaves as well as mixed black/white/red groups were able to thrive in the mountains and backlands as "Maroons." The Maroon community in Jamaica still retained a degree of autonomy and many of the old folkways when Zora Neale Hurston visited there in the 1920's (see Tell My Horse). The Maroons of Suriname still practice African "paganism." 

Throughout the 18th century, North America also produced a number of drop-out "tri-racial isolate communities." (This clinical-sounding term was invented by the Eugenics Movement, which produced the first scientific studies of these communities. Unfortunately the "science" merely served as an excuse for hatred of racial "mongrels" and the poor, and the "solution to the problem" was usually forced sterilization.) The nuclei invariably consisted of runaway slaves and serfs, "criminals" (i.e. the very poor), "prostitutes" (i.e. white women who married non-whites), and members of various native tribes. In some cases, such as the Seminole and Cherokee, the traditional tribal structure absorbed the newcomers; in other cases, new tribes were formed. Thus we have the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, who persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, adopting runaway slaves, functioning as a way station on the Underground Railway, and serving as a religious and ideological center for slave rebellions. The religion was HooDoo, a mixture of African, native, and Christian elements, and according to the historian H. Leaming-Bey the elders of the faith and the leaders of the Great Dismal Maroons were known as "the Seven Finger High Glister." 

The Ramapaughs of northern New Jersey (incorrectly known as the "Jackson Whites") present another romantic and archetypal genealogy: freed slaves of the Dutch poltroons, various Delaware and Algonquin clans, the usual "prostitutes," the "Hessians" (a catch-phrase for lost British mercenaries, drop-out Loyalists, etc.), and local bands of social bandits such as Claudius Smith's. 

An African-Islamic origin is claimed by some of the groups, such as the Moors of Delaware and the Ben Ishmaels, who migrated from Kentucky to Ohio in the mid-18th century. The Ishmaels practiced polygamy, never drank alcohol, made their living as minstrels, intermarried with Indians and adopted their customs, and were so devoted to nomadism that they built their houses on wheels. Their annual migration triangulated on frontier towns with names like Mecca and Medina. In the 19th century some of them espoused anarchist ideals, and they were targeted by the Eugenicists for a particularly vicious pogrom of salvation-by-extermination. Some of the earliest Eugenics laws were passed in their honor. As a tribe they "disappeared" in the 1920's, but probably swelled the ranks of early "Black Islamic" sects such as the Moorish Science Temple. I myself grew up on legends of the "Kallikaks" of the nearby New Jersey Pine Barrens (and of course on Lovecraft, a rabid racist who was fascinated by the isolate communities). The legends turned out to be folk-memories of the slanders of the Eugenicists, whose U.S. headquarters were in Vineland, NJ, and who undertook the usual "reforms" against "miscegenation" and "feeblemindedness" in the Barrens (including the publication of photographs of the Kallikaks, crudely and obviously retouched to make them look like monsters of misbreeding). 

The "isolate communities"--at least, those which have retained their identity into the 20th century--consistently refuse to be absorbed into either mainstream culture or the black "subculture" into which modern sociologists prefer to categorize them. In the 1970's, inspired by the Native American renaissance, a number of groups--including the Moors and the Ramapaughs--applied to the B.I.A. for recognition as Indian tribes. They received support from native activists but were refused official status. If they'd won, after all, it might have set a dangerous precedent for drop-outs of all sorts, from "white Peyotists" and hippies to black nationalists, aryans, anarchists and libertarians-- a "reservation" for anyone and everyone! The "European Project" cannot recognize the existence of the Wild Man-- green chaos is still too much of a threat to the imperial dream of order. 

Essentially the Moors and Ramapaughs rejected the "diachronic" or historical explanation of their origins in favor of a "synchronic" self-identity based on a "myth" of Indian adoption. Or to put it another way, they named themselves "Indians." If everyone who wished "to be an Indian" could accomplish this by an act of self- naming, imagine what a departure to Croatan would take place. That old occult shadow still haunts the remnants of our forests (which, by the way, have greatly increased in the Northeast since the 18-19th century as vast tracts of farmland return to scrub. Thoreau on his deathbed dreamed of the return of "...Indians...forests...": the return of the repressed). 

The Moors and Ramapaughs of course have good materialist reasons to think of themselves as Indians--after all, they have Indian ancestors--but if we view their self-naming in "mythic" as well as historical terms we'll learn more of relevance to our quest for the TAZ. Within tribal societies there exist what some anthropologists call mannenbunden: totemic societies devoted to an identity with "Nature" in the act of shapeshifting, of becoming the totem-animal (werewolves, jaguar shamans, leopard men, cat-witches, etc.). In the context of an entire colonial society (as Taussig points out in Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man) the shapeshifting power is seen as inhering in the native culture as a whole-- thus the most repressed sector of the society acquires a paradoxical power through the myth of its occult knowledge, which is feared and desired by the colonist. Of course the natives really do have certain occult knowledge; but in response to Imperial perception of native culture as a kind of "spiritual wild(er)ness," the natives come to see themselves more and more consciously in that role. Even as they are marginalized, the Margin takes on an aura of magic. Before the whiteman, they were simply tribes of people--now, they are "guardians of Nature," inhabitants of the "state of Nature." Finally the colonist himself is seduced by this "myth." Whenever an American wants to drop out or back into Nature, invariably he "becomes an Indian." The Massachusetts radical democrats (spiritual descendents of the radical Protestants) who organized the Tea Party, and who literally believed that governments could be abolished (the whole Berkshire region declared itself in a "state of Nature"!), disguised themselves as "Mohawks." Thus the colonists, who suddenly saw themselves marginalized vis-·- vis the motherland, adopted the role of the marginalized natives, thereby (in a sense) seeking to participate in their occult power, their mythic radiance. From the Mountain Men to the Boy Scouts, the dream of "becoming an Indian" flows beneath myriad strands of American history, culture and consciousness. 

The sexual imagery connected to "tri-racial" groups also bears out this hypothesis. "Natives" of course are always immoral, but racial renegades and drop-outs must be downright polymorphous-perverse. The Buccaneers were buggers, the Maroons and Mountain Men were miscegenists, the "Jukes and Kallikaks" indulged in fornication and incest (leading to mutations such as polydactyly), the children ran around naked and masturbated openly, etc., etc. Reverting to a "state of Nature" paradoxically seems to allow for the practice of every "unnatural" act; or so it would appear if we believe the Puritans and Eugenicists. And since many people in repressed moralistic racist societies secretly desire exactly these licentious acts, they project them outwards onto the marginalized, and thereby convince themselves that they themselves remain civilized and pure. And in fact some marginalized communities do really reject consensus morality--the pirates certainly did!--and no doubt actually act out some of civilization's repressed desires. (Wouldn't you?) Becoming "wild" is always an erotic act, an act of nakedness. 

Before leaving the subject of the "tri-racial isolates," I'd like to recall Nietzsche's enthusiasm for "race mixing." Impressed by the vigor and beauty of hybrid cultures, he offered miscegenation not only as a solution to the problem of race but also as the principle for a new humanity freed of ethnic and national chauvinism--a precursor to the "psychic nomad," perhaps. Nietzsche's dream still seems as remote now as it did to him. Chauvinism still rules OK. Mixed cultures remain submerged. But the autonomous zones of the Buccaneers and Maroons, Ishmaels and Moors, Ramapaughs and "Kallikaks" remain, or their stories remain, as indications of what Nietzsche might have called "the Will to Power as Disappearance." We must return to this theme.

Gloria Anzaldúa, "The Coatlicue State/La Herencia de Coatlicue"

protean being

dark     dumb     windowless     no moon glides

across the stone     the nightsky     alone     alone

no lights just mirrorwalls     obsidian     smoky     in the

mirror she sees     a woman with four heads     the heads

turning round and round     spokes of a wheel     her neck

is an axle     she stares at each face     each wishes the

other not there     the obsidian knife in the air     the

building     so high     should she jump     would she feel

the breeze     fanning her face     tumbling down the steps

of the temple     heart offered up to the sun     wall

growing thin     thinner     she is eyeless     a mole

burrowing deeper     tunneling here     tunneling there

tunneling through the air  in the photograph a double

image     a ghost arm alongside the flesh one     inside her

head     the cracks ricocheting      bisecting

crisscrossing     she hears the rattlesnakes     stirring in

a jar     being fed with her flesh      she listens to the

seam between dusk and dark     they are talking     she hears

their frozen thumpings     the soul encased     in black

obsidian     smoking     smoking     she bends to catch a

feather of herself     as she falls     lost in the

silence     of the empty air     turning      turning

at midnight     turning into a wild pig     how to get back

all the feathers     put them in the jar     the rattling

full circle and back     dark     windowless    no moon

glides across the nightsky     nightsky     night

Augusto Monterroso, "El Dinosaurio"

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.

Hermeto Pascoal, Música da lagoa

Rubén Darío, "Tutecotzimí" (Fragment) [1890], trans. Greg Simon and Steven F. White

Digging in the topsoil of the ancient city
the pick's metallic point strikes something very hard:
some golden gem, perhaps, a stone that's been carved, 
an arrow, fetish, some god's ambiguity, 
or the enormous walls of some temple. My tools
open America's still undiscovered lands.

Let poetry's tools sing like harmonious jewels!
Let them discover fine, rich stones, gold, or opal, 
temples, or statue's hands.
And mysterious hieroglyphics that foretell
my own Muse. 

From the thick mist of time emerges the strangeness 
of annulled peoples' lives, and legends, once confused,
now shine. The mountain reveals its secret access 
to ruins underneath the plants of the jungle...

Then the ferocious cry
of the oppressors stopped. Their reviled leader's heart
would beat no more, his bloody body torn apart. 
And then, singing loudly, a person journeyed by.
He sang to earth and sky and used an Aztec song
to praise the gods and curse all wars as being wrong.
The people cheered: "Can you bring peace and work?"
"I can."
"Take this palace, these fields, arms, and huepiles, please; 
lead the Pipil nation and praise our deities."

That's how the reign of Tutecotzimí began.