Strategic Performances of Race in African American and Chicana/O Literatures
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Border Crossings: Passing and Other[ed] Strategic Performances of Race in African American and Chicana/o Literatures Melanie A. Hernandez A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Sonnet Retman, Chair Michelle Habell-Pallán Habiba Ibrahim Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English Hernandez 2 ©Copyright 2013 Melanie A. Hernandez Hernandez 3 University of Washington Abstract Border Crossings: Passing and Other(ed) Strategic Performances of Race in African American and Chicana/o Literatures Melanie A. Hernandez Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Sonnet Retman, Associate Professor Department of American Ethnic Studies This project begins with an analysis of racial passing narratives, and considers the ways that the genre provides a useful deconstructive tool to better understand essence-based productions of race and racial authenticity within Chicana/o assimilation narratives. Through their critical exploration of the performative aspects of race, passing novels expose the fissures within these essentialist logics and in so doing they lodge their protest against the conditions under which passing could occur. I explore the ways that writers and artists have strategically used genre, knowing that readers will approach the text with a set of expectations, only to complicate the narrative while still operating within its formal conventions. This project maps strategic manipulations of genre as the primary tool to produce racial identities or exploit preexisting notions of race and gender with the aim to Hernandez 4 resist marginalization. I focus on the political discursive practices within both genres that judge passing and assimilation at the level of the individual. Such judgments stem from in-group policing that defines group belonging on the basis of racial or ethnic authenticity, rooted in notions of folk culture. This dissertation combines multiple artistic forms including literature, visual culture and theater. I begin with an analysis of Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), which I place in dialogue with W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1900 Paris Exposition Photo Exhibition, “The American Negro,” and Currier & Ives 1870s/80s comic lithograph series, Darktown. I then shift the disciplinary vantage to Chicana/o texts including María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), El Teatro Campesino’s acto, Los Vendidos (1967), and Américo Paredes’ novel, George Washington Gómez (1990). Hernandez 5 Acknowledgment I would like to thank all those who contributed to the development of this dissertation and who contributed to my success in graduate school. First, I wish to thank the Department of English at the University of Washington for years of scholarly and financial support, guidance, and camaraderie. In particular, I would like to recognize Kathy Mork for walking me through this entire process step by step, and for taking a personal interest in my livelihood. In addition, thank you to my amazing support network at California State University, Dominguez Hills for providing a strong foundation from which to launch my doctoral study and for allowing me to engage literature both critically, but joyfully as well. I wish to acknowledge the Simpson Center of the Humanities for fostering a rich environment of scholarly collaboration and interdisciplinary inquiry, and most of all for connecting me with my Certificate in Public Scholarship mentor (and friend), Ralina Joseph. Ralina, you have shown me new pedagogical possibilities and been a wonderful source of inspiration. On the note of possibility, this project exists in part because of the generous financial support of on-campus endowments and private donors including GO-MAP’s Presidential Dissertation Fellowship, Allen and Mary Kollar for their Endowed Fellowship in the Humanities, The Simpson Center for the Humanities for their Borderlands Fellowship and Borderlands working group initiative, the Joff Hanauer Endowed Fellowship in Western Civilization and, finally, the American Antiquarian Society for their Jay T. Last Fellowship. I also thank the Department of American Ethnic Studies for welcoming me into their department as a teaching assistant, and for opening my eyes to the challenges that lie ahead. Thank you to all the folks who made coming to campus so much fun every day. My students remind me why this work matters—you’re the reason scholars from underrepresented Hernandez 6 communities strive to effect change in and through the academy. To that end, I am also indebted to the community partnerships that showed me the importance of publicly-engaged pedagogy, and taught me that scholarship and activism are always connected: University Beyond Bars, Women Who Rock, and the Northwest African American Museum. On the home front, Jennifer Siembor and Brian Reed always kept the English graduate office lively. I was happy to share my hallway with you. The “Amazing Gillian Harkins” brings her own flair and determination to Padelford and beyond. I thank the Women of Color Collective and the WIRED group for their ingenuity and cupcakes. I leave a piece of my heart to the community that has been dearest to me—my support system and partners in crime: the “mythical chicana/os” of UW, most notably to Allen Baros and Monica De La Torre for listening to me joke, gripe, criticize, and sometimes snarl, amongst a host of other colorful gestures. Thank you for feeding my gut and my soul. Grad school wouldn’t have been the same without you. I extend a special thank you to the professors on campus who nurtured this project from its earliest stages through its current iteration and beyond. In addition to being a constant cheerleader and damned good cook, Leroy Searle taught me rigorous close reading skills. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Bob Abrams for having the foresight to recognize the direction my project was taking, and for forcing me into interdisciplinary research so that I could more adequately answer the questions I was afraid to broach. LeiLani Nishime gave me my grounding in visual culture, for which I am forever in her debt. Habiba Ibrahim has been an example of poise, rigorous scholarly engagement, and good humor. Michelle Habell-Pallán has repeatedly proven her personal investment in my professional development by calling me out on bad scholarly habits. I continue to learn from you, Michelle. You’re like a tía who whips me into shape—even if it comes from a place of love! Finally, I owe my survival to Sonnet Retman. Hernandez 7 You always amaze me with your unsurpassed ability to distill massive volumes of complicated information into clear, manageable statements. You could see my vision even when I couldn’t fully articulate it. Thank you for your patience and for that reassuring little wink that reminds me that everything will be okay. Your mentorship and friendship have made all the difference. Hernandez 8 Dedication For my family, past and present, on whose shoulders I stand… and for Meredith, whom half of the time I detest, and the other half I am indebted. Hernandez 9 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………........10 Chapter 1: “Dese White Folks Don’t Know Eberything”: Public Sphere(s) and Racial Performance Strategies in Late Nineteenth-Century Uplift Literature ………….23 Chapter 2: “Ain’t that patriotism and Christian Faith for you?”: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton Writes Californios into the Literary U.S. Body Politic………………..…67 Chapter 3: Access, Assimilation, Anti-Feminism: Malinchismo in the Cultural Production of El Teatro Campesino’s Los Vendidos, 1965-1978……………………………...101 Chapter 4: Gringos, Rinches, “Spaniards,” and the Vendido Sanavabiches Who Love Them: Assimilative Performance in Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez ……………………………………………………………………......................128 Chapter 5: With His Pistol in Her Hand: Race, Gender, and Strategic Accommodationism in George Washington Gómez……………………………………………...……..161 Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………………..212 Hernandez 10 INTRODUCTION “American is a land of masking jokers. We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense; when we are projecting the future and preserving the past. In short, the motives behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals.” -Ralph Ellison1 “Just as tricksters redefine American culture, they reinvent narrative form. The trickster’s medium is words. A parodist, joker, liar, con-artist, and storyteller, the trickster fabricates believable illusions with words—and thus becomes author and embodiment of a fluid, flexible, and politically radical narrative form.” -Jeanne Rosier Smith2 Border Crossings: Passing and Other(ed) Strategic Performances of Race in African American and U.S. Chicana/o Literature begins with an analysis of racial passing narratives, and considers the ways that the genre provides a useful deconstructive tool to better understand essence-based productions of race and racial authenticity. Through their critical exploration of the performative aspects of race, passing novels expose the fissures within these essentialist logics and in so doing they lodge their protest against the conditions under which passing could occur. While the passing genre at once reveals the constructedness of race, it also demonstrates the persistent beliefs that race is product of Nature—and these expectations provide the opportunity for a successful pass. The comparison between “reading” race on the body and the operations of literary genre stem from shared practices. Both train readers to recognize and label what they see before them by providing the taxonomic hallmarks to view the object of study as stable and a product of Nature instead of ideology. Genre first trains readers to recognize familiar patterns through scripted tropes and literary devices, but it also trains readers to expect these patterns as unspoken contractual recompense between writer and reader. Stated another way, the pleasure in reading genre fiction comes from the payoff of getting exactly what one expects. 1 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1965), pg. 55. 2 Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature, pg.