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.

Rubén Darío, "Raza" (1907), trans. Jose-Luis Moctezuma

Hyssop and blade
have been crux,
spreading waters holy
and spilling the wine
of blood. Centuries
have thus nourished race.

Together they've nurtured offspring
of the blessed and children
of landed gentry, with 
those who carry the mark
of descent from african slaves,
or from magnific indios,
like lofty Nicarao, to whom an amiable cacique
gifted a bridge of canoes
to traverse Lake
Managua. That is what's epic, what's lyric. 

Roberto Fernández Retamar, from "Caliban" (1971), trans. Edward Baker

Caliban is Shakespeare's anagram for "cannibal," an expression that he had already used to mean "anthropophagus," in the third part of Henry IV and in Othello and that comes in turn from the word carib. Before the arrival of the Europeans, whom they resisted heroically, the Carib Indians were the most valiant and warlike inhabitants of the very lands that we occupy today. Their name lives on in the name Caribbean Sea (referred to genially by some as the American Mediterranean, just as if we were to call the Mediterranean the Caribbean of Europe). But the name carib in itself--as well as in its deformation, cannibal--has been perpetuated in the eyes of Europeans above all as a defamation. It is the term in this sense that Shakespeare takes up and elaborates into a complex symbol. Because of its exceptional importance to us, it will be useful to trace it history in some detail. 

In the Diario de Navegación of Columbus there appear the first European accounts of the men who were to occasion the symbol in question. On Sunday, 4 November 1492, less than a month after Columbus arrived on the continent that was to be called America, the following entry was inscribed: "He learned also that far from the place there were men with one eye and others with dogs' muzzles, who ate human beings." On 23 November, this entry: "[the island of Haiti], which they said was very large and that on it lived people who had only one eye and others called cannibals, of whom they seemed to be very afraid." On 11 December it is noted: "...that caniba refers in fact to the people of El Gran Can," which explains the deformation undergone by the name carib--also used by Columbus. In the very letter of 15 February 1493, "dated on the caravelle off the island of Canaria" in which Columbus announces to the world his "discovery," he writes: "I have found, then, neither monsters nor news of any, save for one island [Quarives], the second upon entering the Indies, which is populated with people held by everyone on the island to be very ferocious, and who eat human flesh." 

This carib/cannibal image contrasts with another one of the American man presented in the writings of Columbus: that of the Arauaco of the Greater Antilles--out Taino Indian primarily--whom he describes as peaceful, meek, and even timorous and cowardly. Both visions of the American aborigine will circulate vertiginously through Europe, each coming to know its own particular development: the Taino will be transformed into the paradisical inhabitant of a utopic world; by 1516 Thomas More will publish his Utopia, the similarities of which to the island of Cuba have been indicated, almost to the point of rapture, by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. The Carib, on the other hand, will become a cannibal--an anthropophagus, a bestial man situated on the margins of civilization, who must be opposed to the very death. But there is less of a contradiction than might appear at first glance between the two visions; they constitute, simply, options in the ideological arsenal of a vigorous emerging bourgeoisie. Francisco de Quevedo translated "utopia" as "there is no such place." With respect to these two visions, one might add, "There is no such man." The notion of an Edenic creature comprehends, in more contemporary terms, a working hypothesis for the bourgeois left, and, as such, offers an ideal model of the perfect society free from the constrictions of that feudal world against which the bourgeoisie is in fact struggling. Generally speaking, the utopic vision throws upon these lands projects for political reforms unrealized in the countries of origin. In this sense its line of development is far from extinguished. Indeed, it meets with certain perpetuators--apart from its radical perpetuators, who are the consequential revolutionaries--in the numerous advisers who unflaggingly propose to countries emerging from colonialism magic formulas from the metropolis to solve the grave problems colonialism has left us and which, of course, they have not yet resolved in their own countries. It goes without saying that these proponents of "There is no such place" are irritated by the insolent fact that the place does exist and, quite naturally, has all the virtues and defects not of a project but of genuine reality.
[...]
There is no doubt at this point that The Tempest alludes to America, that its island is the mythification of one of our islands. Astrana Marín, who mentions the "clearly Indian (American) ambiance of the island," recalls some of the actual voyages along this continent that inspired Shakespeare and even furnished him, with slight variations, with the names of not a few of his characters: Miranda, Fernando, Sebastian, Alonso, Gonzalo, Setebos. More important than this is the knowledge that Caliban is our Carib.
[...]
Our symbol then is not Ariel, as [José Enrique] Rodó thought, but rather Caliban. This is something that we, the mestizo inhabitants of these same isles where Caliban lived, see with particular clarity: Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood. What else can Caliban do but use that same language--today he has no other--to curse him, to wish that the "red plague" would fall on him? I know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality. From Túpac Amaru, Tiradentes, Toussaint-Louverture, Simón Bolívar, Father Hidalgo, José Artigas, Bernardo O'Higgins, Benito Juárez, Antonio Maceo, and José Martí, to Emiliano Zapata, Augusto César Sandino, Julio Antonio Mella, Pedro Albizu Campos, Lázaro Cárdenas, Fidel Castro, and Ernesto Che Guevara, from the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the Aleijadinho, the popular music of the Antilles, José Hernández, Eugenio María de Hostos, Manuel González Prada, Rubén Darío (yes, when all is said and done), Baldomero Lillo, and Horacio Quiroga, to Mexican muralism, Heitor Villa-Lobos, César Vallejo, José Carlos Mariátegui, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Carlos Gardel, Pablo Neruda, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, Aimé Césaire, José María Arguedas, Violeta Parra, and Frantz Fanon--what is our history, what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban? 

José Martí, "Our America" (1891)

The conceited villager believes the entire world to be his village. Provided that be can be mayor, humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, or add to the savings in his strongbox, he considers the universal order good, unaware of those giants with seven-league boots who can crush him underfoot, or of the strife in the heavens between comets that go through the air asleep, gulping down worlds. What remains of the village in America must rouse itself. These are not the times for sleeping in a nightcap, but with weapons for a pillow, like the warriors of Juan de Castellanos: weapons of the mind, which conquer all others. Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stones.

There is no prow that can cut through a cloudbank of ideas. A powerful idea, waved before the world at the proper time, can stop a squadron of iron-clad ships, like the mystical flag of the Last judgement. Nations that do not know one another should quickly become acquainted, as men who are to fight a common enemy. Those who shake their fists, like jealous brothers coveting the same tract of land, or like the modest cottager who envies the esquire his mansion, should clasp hands and become one. Those who use the authority of a criminal tradition to lop off the hands of their defeated brother with a sword stained with his own blood, ought to return the lands to the brother already punished sufficiently, if do not want the people to call them robbers. The honest man does not absolve himself of debts of honor with money, at so much a slap. We can no longer be a people of leaves, living in the air, our foliage heavy with blooms and crackling or humming at the whim of the sun's caress, or buffeted and tossed by the storms. The trees must form ranks to keep the giant with seven-league boots from passing! It is the time of mobilization, of marching together, and we must go forward in close ranks, like silver in the veins of the Andes.

Only those born prematurely are lacking in courage. Those without faith in their country are seven-month weaklings. Because they have not courage, they deny it to the others. Their puny arms-arms with bracelets and hands with painted nails, arms of Paris or Madrid-can hardly reach the bottom limb, and they claim the tall tree to be unclimbable. The ships should be loaded with those harmful insects that gnaw at the bone of the country that nourishes them. If they Parisians or from Madrid, let them go to the Prado, to boast around, or to Tortoni´s , in high hats. Those carpenter's sons who ashamed that their fathers are carpenters! Those born in America who are ashamed of the mother that reared them, because she wears an Indian apron, and, who disown their sick mothers, the scoundrels, abandoning her on her sickbed! Then who is a real man? He who stays with his mother and nurses her in her illness, or he who puts her to work out of sight, and lives at her expense on decadent lands, sporting fancy neckties, cursing the womb that carried him, displaying the sign of the traitor on the back of his paper frockcoat? These sons of our America, which will be saved by its Indians in blood and is growing better; these deserters who take up arms in the army of a North America that drowns its Indians in blood and is growing worse! These delicate creatures who are men but are unwilling to do men's work! The Washington who made this land for them, did he not go to live with the English, at a time when he saw them fighting against his own country. These unbelievable of honor who drag the honor over foreign soil like their counterparts in the French Revolution with their dancing, their affections, their drawling speech!

For in what lands can men take more pride that in our long-suffering American republics, raised up among the silent Indian masses by the bleeding arms of a hundred apostles, to the sound of battle between the book and processional candle? Never in history have such advanced and united nations been forged in so short a time from such disorganized elements. The presumptuous man feels that the earth was made to serve as his pedestal, because he happens to have a facile pen or colourful speech, and he accuses his native land of being worthless and beyond redemption because its virgin jungles fail to provide him with a constant means of travelling over the world, driving Persian ponies and lavishing champagne like a tycoon. The incapacity does not lie with the emerging country in quest of suitable forms and utilitarian greatness; it lies rather with those who attempt to rule nations of a unique and violent character by means of laws inherited from four centuries of freedom in the United States and nineteen centuries of monarchy in France. A decree by Hamilton does not halt the charge of the plainsman's horse. A phrase by Sieyes does nothing to quicken the stagnant blood of the Indian race. To govern well, one must see things as they are. And the able governor in America is not the one who knows how to govern the Germans or the French; he must know the elements that make up his own country, and how to bring them together, using methods and institutions originating within the country, to reach that desirable state where each man can attain self-realization and all may enjoy the abundance that Nature has bestowed in everyone in the nation to enrich with their toil and defend with their lives. Government must originate in the country. The spirit of government must be that of the country Its structure must conform to rules appropriate to the country. Good government is nothing more than the balance of the country's natural elements.

That is why in America the imported book has been conquered by the natural man. Natural men have conquered learned and artificial men. The native half-breed has conquered the exotic Creole. The struggle is not between civilization and barbarity, but between false erudition and Nature. The natural man is good, and he respects and rewards superior intelligence as long as his humility is not turned against him, or he is not offended by being disregarded-something the natural man never forgives, prepared as he is to forcibly regain the respect of whoever has wounded his pride or threatened his interests. It is by conforming with this disdained native elements that the tyrants of America have climbed to power, and have fallen as soon as they betrayed them. Republics have paid with oppression for their inability to recognize the true elements of their countries, to derive from them the right kind of government, and to govern accordingly. In a new nation a government means a creator.

In nations composed of both cultured and uncultured elements, the uncultured will govern because it is their habit to attack and resolve doubts with their fists in cases where the cultured have failed in the art of governing. The uncultured masses are lazy and timid in the realm of intelligence, and they want to be governed well. But if the government hurts them, they shake it off and govern themselves. How can the universities produce governors if not a single university in America teaches the rudiments of the art of government, the analysis of elements peculiar to the peoples of America? The young go out into the world wearing Yankee or French spectacles, hoping to govern a people they do not know. In the political race entrance should not go for the best ode, but for the best study of the political factors of one's country. Newspapers, universities and schools should encourage the study of the country's pertinent components. To know them is sufficient, without mincing words; for whoever brushes aside even a part of the truth, whether through intention or oversight, is doomed to fall. The truth is built without it. It is easy to resolve our problem knowing its components than resolve them without knowing them. Along comes the natural man, strong and indignant, and he topples all the justice accumulated from books because he has not been governed in accordance with the obvious needs of the country. Knowing is what counts. To know one's country and govern it with that knowledge is the only way to free it from tyranny. The European university must bow to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught in clear detail and to the letter, even if the archons of Greece are overlooked. Our Greece must take priority over the Greece which is not ours. We need it more. Nationalist statement must replace foreign statement. Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but the trunk must be our own. And let the vanquished pedant hold his tongue, for there are no lands in which a man may take greater pride than in our long-suffering American republics.

With the rosary as our guide, our heads white and our bodies mottled, both Indians and Creoles, we fearlessly entered the world of nations. We set out to conquer freedom under the banner of the virgin. A priest, a few lieutenants, and a woman raised the Republic of Mexico onto the shoulders of the Indians. A few heroic students, instructed in French liberty by a Spanish cleric, made Central America rise in revolt against Spain under a Spanish general. In monarchic garb emblazoned with the sun, the Venezuelans to the north and the Argentineans to the south began building nations. When the heroes clashed and the continent was about to rock, one of them, and not the lesser, handed the reins to the other. And since heroism in times of peace is rare because it is not a glorious as in times of war, it is easier to govern when feelings are exalted and united than after a battle, when divisive, arrogant, exotic, or ambitious thinking emerges. The forces routed in the epic struggle-with the feline cunning of the species, and using the weight of realities-were undermining the new structure which comprised both the rough-and-ready, unique regions of our half-breed America and the silk-stockinged and frockcoated people of Paris beneath the flag of freedom and reason borrowed from nations skilled in the arts of government. The hierarchical constitution of the colonies resisted the democratic organization of the republics. The cravatted capitals left their country boots in the vestibule. The bookworm redeemers failed to realize that the revolution succeeded because it came from the soul of the nation; they had to govern with that soul and not without or against it. America began to suffer, and still suffers, from the tiresome task of reconciling the hostile and discordant elements it inherited from the despotic and perverse colonizer, and the imported methods and ideas which have been retarding logical government because they are lacking in local realities. Thrown out of gear for three centuries by a power which denied men the right to use their reason, the continent disregarded or closed its ears to the unlettered throngs that helped bring it to redemption, and embarked on a government based on reason-a reason belonging to all for the common good, not the university brand of reason over the peasant brand. The problem if independence did not lie in a change of forms but in change of spirit.

It was imperative to make common cause with the oppressed , in order to secure a new system opposed to the ambitions and governing habits of the oppressors. The tiger, frightened by gunfire, returns at night to his prey. He dies with his ayes shooting flames and his claws unsheathed. He cannot be heard coming because he approaches with velvet tread. When the prey awakens, the tiger is already upon it. The colony lives on the republic, and our America is saving itself from its enormous mistakes-the pride of its capital cities, the blind triumph of a scorned peasantry, the excessive influx of foreign ideas and formulas, the wicked and unpolitical disdain for the aboriginal race-because of the higher virtue, enriched with necessary blood, or a republic struggling against a colony. The tiger lurks again every tree, lying in wait at every turn. He will die with his claws unsheathed and his eyes shooting flames.

But "these countries will be saved", as was announced by the Argentinean Rivadavia, whose only sin was being a gentleman in these rough-and-ready times. A man does not sheathe a machete in a silken scabbard, nor can he lay aside the short lance merely because he is angered and stands at the door of Iturbide´s Congress, "demanding that the fair-haired one be named emperor". These countries will be saved because a genius for moderation, found in the serene harmony of Nature, seems to prevail in the continent of light, where there emerges a new real man schooled for these real times in the critical philosophy of guesswork and phalanstery that saturated the previous generation.

We were a phenomenon wit ha chest of an athlete, the hands of a dandy, and the brain of a child. We were a masquerader in English breeches, Parisian vest, North America jacket, and Spanish cap. The Indian hovered near us in silence, and went off to hills to baptize his children. The Negro was seeing pouring out the songs of his heart at night, alone and unrecognised among the rivers and wild animals. The peasant, the creator, turned in blind indignation against the disdainful city, against his own child. As for us, we were nothing but epaulets and professors´ gown in countries that came into the world wearing hemp sandals and headbands. It would have been the mark of genius to couple the headband and the professors´ gown with the founding fathers´ generosity and courage, to rescue the Indian, to make a place for the competent Negro, to fit liberty to the body of those who rebelled and conquered for it. We were left wit the hearer, the general, the scholar, and the sinecured. The angelic young, as if caught in the tentacles of an octopus, lunged heavenward, only to fall back, crowned with clouds in sterile glory. The native, driven by instinct, swept away the golden staffs of office in blind triumph. Neither the Europeans nor the Yankee could provide the key to the Spanish American riddle. Hate was attempted, and every year the countries amounted to less. Exhausted by the senseless struggle between the book and the lance, between reason and the processional candle, between the city and the country, weary of the impossible rule by rival urban cliques over the natural nation tempestuous or inert by turns, we being almost unconsciously to try love. Nations stand up and greet one another. "What are we?" is the mutual question, and little by little they furnish answers. When a problem arises in Cojímar, they do not seek its solution in Danzig. The frockcoat are still French , but thought begins to be American. The youth of America are rolling up their sleeves, digging their hands in the dough, and making it rise with the sweat of their brows. They realize that there is too much imitation, and that creation holds the key to salvation. "Create" is the password of this generation. The wine is made from plantain, but even if it turns sour, it is our own wine! That a country's form of government must be in keeping with its natural elements is a foregone conclusion. Absolute ideas must take relative forms if they are not to fail because of an error in form. Freedom, to be viable, has to be sincere and complete. If a republic refuses to open its arms to all, and move ahead wit hall, it dies. The tiger within sneaks in through the crack; so does the tiger from without. The general holds back his cavalry to a pace that suits his infantry, for if its infantry is left behind, the cavalry will be surrounded by the enemy. Politics and strategy are one. Nations should live in an atmosphere of self-criticism because it is healthy, but always with one heart and one mind. Stoop to the unhappy, and lift them up in your arms! Thaw out frozen America with the fire of your hearts! Make the natural blood of the nations´ course vigorously through their veins! The new American are on their feet, saluting each other from nation to nation, the eyes of the laborers shining with joy. The natural statesman arises, schooled in the direct study of Nature. He reads to apply his knowledge, not to imitate. Economists study the problems at their point of origin. Speakers begin a policy of moderation. Playwrights bring native characters to the stage. Academies discuss practical subjects. Poetry shears off its Zorrilla-like locks and hangs its red vest on the glorious tree. Selective and sparkling prose is filled with ideas. In the Indian republics, the governors are learning Indian.

American is escaping all its dangers. Some of the republics are still beneath the sleeping octopus, but others, under the law of averages, are draining their land with sublime and furious haste, as if to make up for centuries lost. Still others, forgetting that Juarez went about in a carriage drawn by mules, hitch their carriages to the wind, their coachmen soap bubbles. Poisonous luxury, the enemy of freedom, corrupts the frivolous and opens the door to the foreigner. In others, where independence is threatened, an epic spirit heightens their manhood. Still others spawn an army capable of devouring them in voracious wars. But perhaps our America is running another risk that does not come from itself but from the difference in origins, methods, and interests between the two halves of the continent, and the time is near at hand when an enterprising and vigorous people who scorn and ignore our America will even so approach it and demand a close relationship. And since strong nations, self- made by law and shotgun, love strong nations and them along; since the time since the time of madness and ambition-from which North America may be freed by the predominance of the purest elements in its blood, or on which it may be launched by its vindictive and sordid masses, its tradition of expansion, or the ambition of some powerful leader-is not so near at hand, even to the most timorous eye, that there is no time for the test of discreet and unwavering pride that could confront and dissuade it; since its good name as a republic in the eyes of the world's perceptive nations puts upon North America a restrain that can not be taken away by childish provocations or pompous arrogance or parricidal discords among our American nations-the pressing need of our America is to show itself as it is, one in spirit and intent, swift conquerors of a suffocating past, stained only by the enriching blood drawn from the scarfs left upon us by our masters. The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is our America's greatest danger. And since the day of the visit is near, it is imperative that our neighbor know us, and soon, so that it will not scorn us. Through ignorance it might even come the lay hands on us. Once it does know us, it will remove its hands out of respect. One must have faith in the best in men and distrust the worst. One must allow the best to be shown so that it reveals and prevails over the worst. Nations should have a pillory for whoever stirs up useless hate, and another for whoever fails to tell them the truth in time.

There can be no racial animosity, because there are no races. The theorist and feeble thinkers string together and warm over the bookshelf races which the well-disposed observer and the fair-minded traveller vainly seek in the justice of Nature where man's universal identity springs forth from triumphant love and the turbulent huger for life. The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies of different shapes and colors. Whoever foments and spreads antagonism and hate between the races, sins against humanity. But as nations take shape among other different nations, there is condensation of vital and individual characteristics of thought habit, expansion and conquest, vanity and greed which could-from the latent state of national concern, and in the period of internal disorder, or the rapidity with which the country's character has been accumulating-be turned into a serious threat for the weak and isolated neighbouring countries, declared by the strong country to be inferior and perishable. The thought is father to the deed. And one must not attribute, through a provincial antipathy, a fatal and inborn wickedness to the continents´ fair skinned nation simply because it does not speak our language, nor see the world as we see it, nor resemble us in its political defects, so different from ours, nor favourably regard the excitable, darkskinned people, or look charitably, from its still uncertain eminence, upon those less favored by history, who climb the road of republicanism by heroic stages. The self-evidence facts of the problem should not be obscured, because the problem can be resolved, for peace of centuries to come, by appropriate study, and by tacit and immediate union in the continental spirit. With a single voice the hymn is already being sung; the present generation is carrying industrious America along the road enriched by their sublime fathers; from Rio Grande to the strains of Magellan, the Great Semi, astride its condor, spread the seed of the new America over the romantic nations of the continent and the sorrowful islands of the sea!

Los Jaivas, "Los Sueños de América"

Edward Dorn, "El Peru/Cheyenne Milkplane"

Prolag

Th'acetyline sun hung over the Ocean of Oceans
Flooding the quick afternoon of El Peru,
Casting the World shade on the gasaer jungle of Amazonas
Putting to bed the gene meat of the protein chains
Fueling the epidemia of cheap labor,
Cooking the slummy stews of cholera, cooling
The constrictors with its withdraw', slowly deepening
The tone of the washed out neon, mocking
The fitful tungsten strung along in the shadows where
The Luminosa don their Chinese hardware.

Across the tierra helada the temperature
Plummets and cracks, beyond the altiplano
And the Eastern Cordillera and the Plains
The stranglers take another hitch, and the Lianas
One last jack and hoist as they reach for the fleeing light.
Everything trends toward gigantism, giant spiders
[Theraphosidae] "the bird eaters," 
Roam the forest gloom, centipedes a metre long
Who feed on native children drop from the canopy
Onto the sanguinolent commerce of the jungle floor.
Dynastes beetles the size of a fist, Water Boa
With the girths of court eunuchs haunt the galleries.
Butterflies, like the spectacular blue morphos 
With a span of 50 centimetres, whose flash
Can be seen from more than a kilometre away
Send errant heliographs in the twilight shade
While within it swim fishes too terrible to class.
The Nazca Plate subducts this neozoic mess
Scorching the continental basement with frictional stress
As out of this tectonic scene magmatic froth
Erupts with showers of 'candescent trash
And the expulsion mixing with an assualt of basalt
Spoils the thin wake of the El Peru/Cheyenne flight,
And the passengers crowd the windows of our craft 
To ponder and growl and hail this mighty sight. 

Donald Wellman, "Hands"

When he reached out to receive me, I recognized 

his hands as mine. Short fingers and square palms.

I had seen similar hands in a photo of a mestiza mother by Tina Modotti.

The woman cradled her brown skinned child’s bottom,

chunky quadrilaterals

as if elements

of a Mayan glyph.

Oblong breasts pillowed his face.

I’ve slept on the lawn at Tulum

and heard the drone of Ah Muzen Cab.

Fermented honey inspired the poets of Heorot

and the poets of the Talamanca and Penobscot.

In a crevice within a garden wall

in Liberia, Melipone costarricense produce

treasured miel de jicote.

Beekeeper gods sing to a honey pot, held like a bass drum, Mol Ko Chi’.

Of bearded jaguars, it is said, many ancestors display

a pencil thin mustache. Of native American square hands, she wrote

in her ethnography of California Mission Indians:

bad Indians who beat their children,

tender Indians who cried from fear,

seeking a source in caves and mountain tops.

They fled to survive, as I have, inwardly, across the river bottom.

A cloud, melanin pigmentation on the retina is also common.


(written in response to Bad Indians by Deborah A. Miranda, Heyday, 2013)

Santiago Álvarez, "L.B.J." (1968)

Lynette Roberts, "Xaquixaguana"

In the lake of pools
Where icebergs stand firm on the ground,
And refrain to move for beauty of their image,
Five Temples lie wounded on their sides
Each plundered and more progressive than the last.
I speak of the one with the grey-crusted sleepers
Sitting in the splint-blue cave.
Especially he, of the up-side-down burial
With arrows set like buhls in the rib of the wreck:
Who was this white man of Peru?
And what flat burial did he deserve
To stir their sandstone agave? To face emerald sky
And snarling rocks where the sun's tied up:
Lying stiff among gold filaments and animate clay
Snouting Azrael forms and intricate beads:
Those Huacas spread and exposed under cacti waterbeds
Green as tunas, weathered with poisoned alizarin darts
Who was this man who stole their store of gold?
Who found down here down Pilcomayo way,
Near lion grass and glass birds sailing the lake,
Who was he, that lies buried at the Haravec's feet
Aggrieved by this ice and basaltic sheet?