Making Knowledge with the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Papers

Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works Faculty Publications

5-2015

Messy Archives and Materials that Matter: Making Knowledge with the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Papers

Suzanne Bost Loyola University Chicago, [email protected]

Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/english_facpubs

Part of the English Language and Literature Commons

Recommended Citation Bost, Suzanne. Messy Archives and Materials that Matter: Making Knowledge with the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Papers. PMLA, 130, 3: 615-630, 2015. Retrieved from Loyola eCommons, English: Faculty Publications and Other Works, http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2015.130.3.615

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in English: Faculty Publications and Other Works by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected].

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. © Modern Language Association of America, 2015 130.3 ]

Messy Archives and Materials That Matter: Making Knowledge with the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers suzanne bost

HEN GLORIA ANZALDÚA DIED IN 2004, SHE GAVE BIRTH TO AN Wenormous archive. I was overwhelmed to learn, in the midst of writing about an author whose work I thought I knew forward and backward, that she let far more unpublished writings at her death than works published in her lifetime. What’s more, Anzaldúa was a compulsive reviser, and her archive includes ten to twenty unique drats of some works (including her disserta- tion, which she never defended). She revised some works ater publication. his collection of material thus decenters what we previously thought constituted her literary corpus. It knocks the presumed author of Borderlands / La Frontera of her axis and replaces her with an Anzaldúa whose work ranges across many media, shape- shiting as much as her characters who oscillate between human and animal, male and female, alien and ghost. My obsession with this archive has led me to rethink the function of the archive and to theorize the SUZANNE BOST is professor of English ways in which we produce, reproduce, and coproduce knowledge in and an afﬁliate faculty member in Wom- our archival work. hese messy processes of knowledge production en’s Studies and Gender Studies at Loyola constitute the matter of this essay as it sits through the contents of University Chicago. She is the author of two books—Mulattas and Mestizas: Rep- the Anzaldúa archive. In this moment when scholarship on archives resenting Mixed Identities in the Americas, has turned toward the digital, my experience has been decidedly ma- 1850–2000 (U of Georgia P, 2003) and terial.1 he messy materiality of her archive will igure here as an apt Encar na ción: Illness and Body Politics in framework for rediscovering Anzaldúa. Chi cana Feminist Literature (Fordham UP, As a literary scholar who loves to historicize, I have spent much 2010; winner of the National Women’s time getting my hands dirty in archives. Yet I’m still oten overcome Studies Association’s 2010 Gloria E. Anzal- with disciplinary anxiety as I try to explain—to myself and to others dúa Book Prize)—and she coedited, with Frances Aparicio, The Routledge Compan- in my interdisciplinary ields, Chicana/o studies and feminist stud- ion to Latino/a Literature (2012). Her cur- ies—what I do there and how my archival work is diferent from that rent work focuses on the Gloria Anzaldúa of historians. Does my disciplinary training in close reading make archive, posthumanism, and memoir. my treatment of archival material diferent from theirs? Or am I

simply playing historian without training as what documents were going to be important a historian? I oten ind myself overwhelmed for me, I felt totally illegitimate in my claims in archives, unsure what I should be looking to whatever knowledge was housed in those at or what I should be doing with the mate- thick walls designed to protect national (and rials I ind. Is archival work simply a matter implicitly patriarchal) history. What I gained of discovery? And how is discovery related to from that trip to Mexico was an impression the skills I’ve learned in my discipline? A key of the enormous signatures of seventeenth- diference between literary scholars and his- century representatives of the Spanish In- torians is the temporality of our scholarship. quisition, who sometimes filled half a page Literary scholars write in the present tense with their names, and an impression of com- and self-consciously create as they analyze, munal ecstasy-hysteria when I was caught in while conventional history is supposed to be a torrential rainstorm on top of a pyramid focused on the past.2 Yet the Anzaldúa ar- full of sightseers taking advantage of a free- chive is so new—indeed, it is still growing (as admission day. The knowledge I found was the librarians continue to process and catalog not in the content of texts but in material en- new materials)—that entering it is an encoun- counters: encounters with the bodies and sig- ter with the present, too. natures of patriarchal authority, encounters In this essay, I show how recognizing with thick-walled buildings and pyramids, the multiple material actants at work in an encounters with weather, and encounters archive transforms research, in general, and with people around me. Anzaldúan studies, in particular.3 For unrav- his experience became more remarkable eling this new way of thinking about archival to me when I found myself in the Anzaldúa work, I borrow a genre Anzaldúa developed archive years later. The Gloria Evangelina throughout her career: “ autohistoria- teoría Anzaldúa Papers are housed in the Nettie . . . a personal essay that theorizes” (“now” Lee Benson Latin American Collection at 578n). I begin with my own experiences with the University of Texas, Austin. According the particular materials of particular archives to the eighty- four- page catalog, the archive and then move outward to develop a theory of measures 125 linear feet and consists of more knowledge production that is built on the ac- than two hundred ile boxes of materials, not cidents, messes, and intrusions that disrupted including photographs, audiovisual materi- my conventional research plan. Perhaps this als, and oversized artifacts. I say “materi- is what literary scholars have to ofer archival als” because this archive pushes the limits of studies: a good story. terms like “documents” or “writings” with In my latest book, I wanted to histori- things like doorknob placards, ticket stubs, cize contemporary Chicana writers’ invoca- appointment cards, fliers, doodles, and a tions of Aztec and Roman Catholic sacriice number of recalcitrant rusty paperclips and traditions. his desire led me to Mexico City, staples that the librarian asked me to assist where these two traditions meet in nearly in- him in removing. My experience with these candescent displays of pain and the sacred. materials was in many ways literary, treating When I arrived at Mexico’s national archive, texts as created objects rather than transpar- El Archivo General de la Nación, my luency ent vehicles for recording truth. And the fact in Spanish was scared away by armed guards that I have received more training in post- demanding my certification. Having never modern theory than in archival methods been trained to read early modern Spanish certainly made it easier for me to abandon handwriting (as historians of Latin America ideas about evidence and historical fact. But usually are) and not being very certain about the research process I found/ made in the ar- 130.3 ] Suzanne Bost 617 chive exceeded disciplinary conventions. he ter “out of place.” hings are marked as dirt Anzaldúa papers taught me that the archive is when they are perceived as “a threat to good not a passive storehouse of history for schol- order.” Dirt is the “rejected bits and pieces” ars to explore; it is a setting that ignites a va- that “threaten the distinctions made” by any riety of processes. It is supposed to preserve system (161–62). It is thus rich soil for en- the past but is mired in a material present. countering repressed knowledge; it threatens As AnaLouise Keating writes, this ar- our assumptions about what is rational, good, chive “contains enough material to generate and true. Anyone who knows Anzaldúa’s a small academic industry” (“Archival Al- work well knows that she had little use for chemy” 164). “Generate” is an important verb purity or conventional reason and, instead, here, and this huge archive has the potential had tremendous faith in spirits, dreams, to produce a great variety of responses, rang- shape-shiting, and extrasensory perception. ing from critical essays to Facebook posts In my eforts to reclaim these supposedly ir- to unauthorized leaks of unpublished texts. rational phenomena, I’ve been looking at dirt Anzaldúa was the irst archivist of her library, as a metaphor for stigmatized emplacement, saving, labeling, and storing all documents stigmatized being, and stigmatized knowing.5 related to her writing career. According to Before my trip to the archive, I scoured Keating, “Anzaldúa had carefully packed and the list of titles in the catalog, trying to deter- stored these materials in every room of her mine which ones might be about dirt. Since house in Santa Cruz, California” (161). Chris- Anzaldúa is known for her published writings tian Kelleher, an archivist for rare books and about her family home in rural South Texas, manuscripts at the Benson library, traveled working in the fields when school was out, to Santa Cruz to pack up the boxes and ship and the (literal and igurative) murkiness of them to Austin.4 Keating says she was ini- the United States–Mexico borderlands, I ex- tially worried about how the “randomness” of pected to sink my hands into more dirt from Anzaldúa’s notes and Post-its would travel to Aztlán. Instead, I found things like “Puddles,” the archive and how they would be preserved a story about a waitress in Austin who catches (“Archive”). Though the library’s folders a queer sort of infectious disease from a pud- and boxes apparently standardize and pro- dle that turns her into a lizard and gives her tect all these materials, as soon as one opens the ability to read others’ minds. his story them the randomness leaks out, and outside was published in 1992, at 712 words long, but forces move in. While Keating calls the Glo- the archive contains multiple revisions in ria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers Anzaldúa’s four diferent folders, several of them written “final, and most complex, text” (“Archival ater this date, each getting longer than the Alchemy” 160), I would not call this archive previous one. he most recent version is dated inal or even solely textual; it is just the begin- 1998, is 2,800 words long (four times the ning of an uncontrollable process. length of the published story), and is retitled I went to the Anzaldúa archive with an “Velada de una lagartija” (“Vigil of a Lizard”). idea in mind for a book about reclaiming Does it thereby become a diferent story? Is dirt. hough we think of dirt as natural, what the published version still the authoritative makes it dirty is really an unnatural desig- one? here are a number of uninished sto- nation. (Ater all, the stuf I suck up into my ries, like “Werejaguar,” about a woman who vacuum is lovely when on my dinner plate, in turns into a jaguar while cleaning her house. my yard, or on my cat, but intolerable when My favorite is “Susto in the City,” about a it shows up on the dining room loor.) Mary Chicana punk dyke musician’s mysterious ill- Douglas’s famous claim is that dirt is mat- ness and wanderings through ilthy Brooklyn 618 Messy Archives and Materials That Matter [ PMLA

streets; I found variations on this theme with ual friction among discordant materials and diferent titles throughout the archive. Mostly the ambiguity of perspective that this friction what I found, then, was a mess: no clear con- produces. The archive has, then, a mestiza clusions about dirt (or about anything!) to be consciousness. drawn here. While “dirt” seems to imply clear Learning to navigate the Anzaldúa ar- lines of inclusion and exclusion, this archive, chive taught me to appreciate alternative mirroring the content of Anzaldúa’s work, boundaries, strange systems, surprise en- muddied any such boundaries. counters, and unexpected affinities. After Building on my research experience in siting through folders full of multiple drats Mexico City, I determined to relinquish my of similar, overlapping pieces of Anzaldúa’s expectations and—instead of focusing on the writings, I felt that establishing clear bound- iles I had decided in advance would be help- aries around a single work would perhaps be ful to me and thereby delimiting my archival undesirable, even if it was possible. No book pursuit to potentially misguided foreknowl- will ever be able to replicate the experience edge and speculation—to open myself to what of this mess. hough hypertextual facsimiles the archive had to ofer. Drats upon drats might be a good way of accounting for unre- are complicated enough, but these are some- solved revisions, misspellings, and handwrit- times mislabeled, split apart, duplicated or ten notations, the sense of surprise discovery partially duplicated, assembled in the wrong might be lessened. Publication or digitaliza- order, or scattered among different folders tion would preserve the material and make it and boxes. he drats of highly valued texts more accessible, but with prescripted chan- like Borderlan ds appear in multiple places, nels of discovery. (Even hypertextual read- oten undated, sometimes handwritten and ing follows paths enabled by Web design.) scribbled over by Anzaldúa and her readers he Anzaldúa papers ofer an experience of (friends, fellow writers, professors), and these disordered simultaneity in which it is impos- drats are thrown into folders with personal sible to separate literature from the author’s notes (some of which are not in Anzaldúa’s doodles, her notes, or the sometimes torn handwriting), drawings, clippings, and copies and folded napkins and fliers she wrote on of, say, American Way magazine—producing the back of. Digitalizing would also be unable a destabilizing heteroglossia. to capture the multidimensionality of cofee Perhaps this state is not so unusual for stains or the effect of reading a document an author’s archive, which typically gathers printed while the ink was running out. all her or his papers (personal and otherwise) I was initially anxious about my inability into one place. But focusing on the form of to “master” this huge and messy archive. he this particular archive seems particularly materials I encountered forced me to process appropriate for a writer like Anzaldúa, for them in unconventional ways, making my whom “nothing is thrust out, the good the research process more visible to me than the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing content of the materials I was supposed to be abandoned” (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 79), and studying. For instance, when I opened folder who claims as a homeland “una herida abi- 5 in box 5, a number of plastic- coated disks erta [an open wound] where the hird World (which the archive catalog calls “candle air- grates against the irst and bleeds. And before mations”) came spilling out onto the table. I a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the life- looked around to see if anyone had noticed the bloods of two worlds merging to form a third mess. I worried that I had violated protocol for country—a border culture” (3). Her archive, I the treatment of rare books and manuscripts. would say, replicates this process with contin- What was I supposed to do with this pile of . ] Suzanne Bost  unfamiliar objects? e disks are divided into Another might read “good promotion.” Four segments inscribed with commands, phrases, smaller pieces say “shelves,” “VCR,” “car,” or single words that appear to represent goals and, enigmatically, “Music Box.” One looks or tasks. Unlike published documents, these like “so ware” or “salt more.” ese are com- disks are not just verbal traces but also mate- pelling to me since they describe matter that rial products of the author’s hands; they are might contain the writer’s life and work and infused with her touch. Presumably Anzaldúa occupy her mind. Think about the import would place a lighted candle at the center of of the shelves that hold your books and your the disks and then—what? read them aloud? notes. ink about how your organizational pray? Or was the ritual silent, allowing the system facilitates thoughts and creates con- disks to speak for themselves? Was I (re)en- nections. ink about the time you spend in acting a rite when I held them in my hands? your car (or, perhaps, walking, if you have The disks are smudged, sometimes slightly none) and how your body in motion produces melted, giving the illusion that they offer a ideas in dialogue with the sites you pass and glimpse into an actual event, material traces the sensations of the passing. ink about all of a ritual, but the glimpse is not a clear one. the associations one could generate from this The handwriting on the disks is fre- enigmatic collection of prayers/wishes. quently illegible. Some of the photographs I Another candle a rmation is written on took cut o portions of the circles, remind- a more evenly lined circle, but some spaces ing me that my knowledge is always tempo- of this one are empty, and my camera shot ral, subject to change with future encounters. only focuses on part of it so I could show my On my favorite disk, one wedge pretty clearly graduate students “Excellent QE exam topic, says, “Finish Borderlands by Feb. 28.” “NEA questions, & biblio. Pass with impressive air for next yr.” legibly lls another large segment and become eligible and am granted a signi - ( g. 1). Other segments are crowded with less cant fellowship for next year (90–91)” ( g. 2). FIG.  legible words. One says, “Trip to TX,” which Next to this is “groundbreaking, signi cant, brings up the author’s ambivalent relationship & great collection, a ‘bestseller,’ nancially Candle affir- to her family a er she came out as a lesbian succesfull, Making Face, Making Soul / Ha- mation disc. as well as the passages in Borderlands about ciendo Caras .” ese pieces return us to the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers. her simultaneous fear of going home and desire to return home. Other parts of the disk are less obviously relevant to literary scholarship. Di- rectly across from the segment about n i s h i n g Borderlands and taking up equal space, two segments read “lose 20 lbs” and “Cut down on smoking, herbs.” Concerns with health and appearance abut nancial concerns. One piece seems to begin with “Re- member impact” and ends with “roy- alties.” (I’m tempted to read “Lute,” for Aunt Lute Press, the publisher of Borderlands , in that wedge, but there seems to be another letter a er what should be the nal e if it were “Lute.”)  Messy Archives and Materials That Matter [ PMLA

it with a wistful glow (much like literature itself). I know from working with historians that they use archives to back up their narratives with facts, that the archive solidi es their speculations. is archive seems to do the reverse: it smudges literary history; it creates mysteries instead of answering questions. Anzaldúa was a visual artist before she came to poetry, and the archive also includes dozens of her paintings and sketches from over the decades. A page that seems to be the cover of a book in process reads “Poems and Doodles by Gloria Anzaldúa,” putting the two forms FIG.  question of what an a rmation is, where it alongside each other as allied forms of com- Candle affir- lies on the continua between desire and re- munication. is page and others near it in mation disc. ality, goal and fantasy. What is its genre? the archive blend words and images in a way Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa did indeed pass her comprehensive that highlights the harmony and the disso- Anzaldúa Papers. exams, though she never completed the dis- nance between the two forms of creativity. sertation, and she did publish Making Face, Some of these compositions look like repre- Making Soul , to some acclaim but without sentational works of art. Others combine ap- great nancial success or “bestseller” status. parently transparent or functional linguistic These affirmations are not, then, archival messages with ambiguous sketches that seem FIG.  supports, reinforcing what the scholar knows purely aesthetic, random, or impenetrably Untitled sketch. about the literature. Rather, they resonate conceptual. One particularly thick visual- Gloria Evangelina with and exceed the bounds of reality, tinting verbal sketch has apparent calendar notations Anzaldúa Papers. (“Weekends,” “W. . . . 7:30,” “$15 a session”) embedded within an amor- phous drawing that vaguely resembles a brain (fig. 3). A butterfly shape at the bottom of the page has two eyes in each of its wings; “Wed” is written on one wing and “ ur” on the other. is emplacement of measured time within natural forms creates a conceptual friction that is highlighted by the juxtaposition of the heavily lined aesthetic shapes (which look like mazes) with the blank spaces in which the letters and numbers appear. It is also noteworthy that the “Wed” and “ ur” markings on the butter y wings defy the natural symmetry of . ] Suzanne Bost  the butter y. Do we read this image as a critique of the imposition of mea- surement on nature? of work duties on free time? A comment written in the lower le , “Estás muy ocupada” (“You are very busy”), seems to con rm this interpretation. But other uses of language on the page, like “Chicken & Bl.” and “M.,” defy expectations for verbal communication. Indeed, the aesthetic function of these letters as lines and curves on the page might outweigh their potential denotative quality. Another “M,” inside a rough sketch that resembles a cat’s head, con rms this impression. Placed near this doodle in the archive is one (also FIG. with maze- like patterns) in which the word time or money to pay for the appointment?  “ e” blends into an abstract shape that re- Perhaps the dentists are not even hers. Per- Untitled sketch. minds me of coral ( g. 4). e words written haps she did not even do the paper clipping. Gloria Evangelina here—within a shape resembling a dirigible or Without further information, I cannot make Anzaldúa Papers. sea creature—are scribbled over with squiggly any claims about the signi cance of the den- lines. Perhaps the most important things to be tists’ card in relation to Anzaldúa’s life or the gained from these visual documents are the composition of “El Mundo Zurdo” (the past), experience of disorientation and the process but I can make claims about how it shapes a FIG. of determining how to handle them, making research process in the present. ose notes  up new ways of reading, getting lost in the are now forever associated in my mind with Notes for “El maze. is is not to say that these documents tooth pain and likely will be for future re- Mundo Zurdo.” Gloria Evangelina cannot be treated as conventional artifactual searchers, too. Regardless of how the paper Anzaldúa Papers. evidence, but their matter also teaches us how to do otherwise. Even the more conventionally textual materials challenge the boundaries between text and world, author and researcher. One stack of papers is clipped together (with one of those rusty paperclips) to a business card for dentists; written on the flip side is “Notes on ‘El Mundo Surdo’ [“The Left- Handed World”] Essay” (the S is crossed over with a Z because Anzaldúa was both a bad speller and a manipulator of spelling [ gs. 5 and 6]). On the dentists’ side of the card, she has written, “Cancell app. for today”—suggesting what? An end to her dental troubles? Insu cient  Messy Archives and Materials That Matter [ PMLA

is group of papers is cataloged as notes for “El Mundo Zurdo” (its spelling standardized), a title that reappears throughout the archive. In addition to the dentists’ card and pages produced in a word processor, the stack is made up of handwritten notes, doodles, and pieces of de- constructed and reconstructed text. Before taking up word processing, Anzaldúa o en pre gured its cutting and pasting functions by cutting the pages of her writing into strips and rearranging them. She continued this practice even after adopting a word processor, seemingly out of love for the ritual. She describes the pro- FIG.  clip got there, it indelibly marks the knowl- cess in an early essay, “Speaking in Tongues”: Notes for “El edge gleaned from the papers: not only does making “puzzle[s] on the oor” with her cut- Mundo Zurdo.” it create affinity among the various papers up documents “to try to make some order out Gloria Evangelina gathered in the clip (including the business of [them]” (171). Strips of paper are taped to Anzaldúa Papers. card), it also leaves a material indentation and some pages in an order apparently imposed by a slight trace of rust on the paper. If I had dis- the author. Other folders contain loose strips posed of the paper clip (which I did not), its that fell out onto the table when I opened material traces (and its absence) would invoke them, allowing me to position the strips in FIG.  an even greater mystery, of which I would be front of me however I wanted (in order to Notes for “El the author. e process of authority is thereby get as much into one photograph as possible) Mundo Zurdo.” continued into the present and future, into the and to put them back in the folder however I Gloria Evangelina work done in the reading room and beyond. wanted, to in uence the next researcher’s ex- Anzaldúa Papers. perience. What sort of order is this? In one of those juxtapositions I created with my camera, a passage about alienation, birth trauma, and psychic damage is positioned un- derneath what appears to be a list of stages of a healing process (fig. 7). Though these two scraps are both written on lined yellow paper, the absence of the red margin guide on the top piece suggests that they come from di erent sheets. Are they meant to go together? Who would be the agent of that meaning? Anzaldúa? A library employee? Gravity? Perhaps the two only seem related since I photographed them together, thereby . ] Suzanne Bost  creating a narrative with a sequence. Maybe the archive work together to form knowl- the rst piece is not about healing at all. Per- edge (21). Drawing from Baruch Spinoza and haps it’s about work, teaching, writing, or a Bruno Latour, Bennett develops a theory of rite of passage. ( e phrase “development in “vital materialism” that, by acknowledging character” would t any of these interpreta- the agency of nonhuman objects, “chasten[s] ” tions, but “development” and “character” our “fantasies of human mastery” (122). Ac- would have di erent connotations.) e lower cording to this logic, the concept of agency scrap of paper is about Prietita, the heroine of must be “distributed across an ontologically Anzaldúa’s novel in progress, while the one heterogeneous eld, rather than being a ca- on top seems to be about a general or hypo- pacity localized in a human body or in a col- thetical subject. As literary scholars, what lective produced (only) by human efforts” sorts of claims are we justified in making (23). The archive itself (re)produces knowl- about these texts other than the multidirec- edge in segments: the catalog sorts materi- tional speculations I have just o ered here? als according to a certain logic; the sizes of In another example that thwarts inter- standard le boxes and le folders necessitate pretive claims, I have placed an enigmatic folding, squishing, or bundling materials; fragment in Spanish below a quotation from and the small document-request forms, with Castellanos (probably Rosario Castellanos, which one can ask to see limited amounts of but I haven’t been able to locate the source, material, three folders at a time, fragment a again highlighting the contingency of knowl- research question to accommodate the struc- edge and ignorance [ g. 8]). e Castellanos tural limitations of the library. quotation is about the failure of those who The researcher can process the materi- hold rigidly to doctrines rather than accom- als in these folders in many different ways, modate uctuations, and the enigmatic frag- though, and some of my favorite photographs ment juxtaposes a dead cow being eaten by of the archive include my own hands, holding FIG.  vultures and coyotes with a declaration that open pages, showing the thickness of a docu- basically says, “I’m not messing around now. ment, keeping slips of paper in place. But I am Notes for “El Don’t fuck with me. Leave me alone.” The not autonomous in my access to information Mundo Zurdo.” Gloria Evangelina passages appear in the same folder; both are or the ways in which I produce knowledge Anzaldúa Papers. printed from a word processor in the same font, on the same white paper. On the level of content, however, I see nothing but dissonance between these two fragments. Yet this dissonance is institutionalized for as long as they are stored next to each other in the le. e materials of their preservation create a logic of their own. I have gained from my archival experience an appreciation for competing processes of meaning making, each with its own forms of circum- scription, expansion, and collision. One might use Jane Bennett’s theory of “distributive agency” to understand how the various material “actants” in 624 Messy Archives and Materials That Matter [ PMLA

from the archive. he technologies I use for to communal embeddedness in the informal information gathering (digital photography, “contigo” (“with you”). his author has im- limited by the capacity of my camera battery; perfect spelling, a sometimes troublesome computer note-taking, restricted by my typ- body, and material needs and possessions ing speed; and sotware, which I understand that impede, enable, and modify her creative just well enough to collect on my lash drive productions. Her writing is shaped by friends hundreds of pages of photographed material and roommates, professors, writing comadres, as separate iles that I can only open one at a and critics. Her literary stature is not substan- time) enhance and limit the formation of my tiated by the archive but, rather, complicated, knowledge just as do my splitting headache, muddied, and sometimes dismantled by it. the light in the reading room, and the pres- he authority of this author is mediated by an ence or absence of others around me. Instead open- ended, communal process. of ighting these forces as nuisances, we might his process is also consistent with femi- better understand them as the mechanisms nist and Chicana/o historiography, producing that underlie and shape anything we feel we intersecting counterhistories that challenge know. To call these forces intrusions demon- the form and content of history. By rejecting izes everything outside the researcher as a the patriarchal or Eurocentric historical nar- corruption and creates a false ideal of mak- rative established for centuries, feminist and ing knowledge in a vacuum. It is chastening, Chicana/o scholars have changed the rules but also more realistic, to embrace the messy for evidence gathering, challenged ideas of and sometimes conlicting agencies at work chronology and authority, and discarded that in knowledge production. I see this view of which has passed as history. In its place, they archival work less as a loss (of certainty or have developed new ways of making meaning history) than as a possibility (for more contex- from the events, cultures, and names of the tual and inclusive kinds of meaning making). past. “hird Space” or “decolonizing” histo- This conclusion resonates with femi- riography, according to the Chicana feminist nist critiques of the authority of the author. historian Emma Pérez, critically recovers the Convention would seem to suggest that ar- repressed within the repressed: the queer chival research strengthens our perception and female voices that were marginalized of an author as a person of note, one whose by Mexican and Chicano histories. Chicana background presumably exerts a linear, feminist histories are triply “decolonial” in causal influence on his or her writing. The their resistance to the narratives imposed author emerges from conventional research by Spanish conquest, the forms expected by with great curlicues of authority drawing at- Anglo- American academic practices, and the tention to his or her name and importance. narratives imposed by gender- blind or mas- (The same could be said of the authority of culinist Chicano nationalism. From a Chi- the scholar, whose reputation is solidiied by cana feminist perspective, the past is not an archival “discoveries.”) One of the primary ideal to return to but a contested terrain of goals of feminist research has been to debunk competing truth claims. the gender-biased authority that has eclipsed Anzaldúa will be different by the time the achievements of women, to question the of my next research trip to Austin, depend- reality and the neutrality of what has passed ing on what ideas I have between now and as history, literary or otherwise. All truths are then, how long my grant money lasts, and contextual. The author of the Anzaldúa ar- how much time I’ll be able to get away from chive signs her name “contigo Gloria,” draw- home. My experience will depend on the en- ing attention not to her individual import but vironment of the archive (hot or cold, quiet 130.3 ] Suzanne Bost 625 or illed with talking) and what materials are the Anzaldúa archive in both of these senses. available then. It will also depend on how the Steedman concludes, “Dust . . . is about cir- preceding visitors to the archive have let the cularity, the impossibility of things disap- materials. I encountered Carolyn Steedman’s pearing or going away, or being gone. . . . he 2002 Dust: he Archive and Cultural History fundamental lessons of physiology, of cell- only ater my second trip to the archive, but theory, and of neurology were to do with this her work helped me process my reactions. ceaseless making and unmaking, the move- Steedman, a historian, examines archival re- ment and transmutation of one thing into search, and dust functions as both a material another” (164). Like the cells in a body, the object and a metaphor in her work. Materi- materials in the archive are both preserved ally, dust explains “archive fever” as not just and transformed in the research process. a state of mind but also an illness induced by Scholar, paper, and information slough bits the bacteria found in archives (most notably, of themselves onto one another. anthrax).9 According to Steedman, the book I’m drawn to dust as an organizing prin- itself is “a locus of a whole range of industrial ciple because of its materiality as well as its diseases” brought on by the decomposition of symbolic associations with dirt and margin- glue, leather, vellum, and paper (23–24). In an ality. Dust is, moreover, subject to continual enactment of Bennett’s distributive agency, motion and reorganization. Knowledge is the archive literally infects the researcher, like dust; though it lacks the obvious mate- and the researcher incorporates traces of the riality of Steedman’s examples, knowledge archive. Speaking of Jules Michelet’s desire to is a product of material, transcorporeal ex- rescue “the People,” Steedman writes: changes (Alaimo). It is formed by movements and encounters with books, people, rooms, He inhaled the dust of the animals and plants and weather. It is always subject to transfor- that provided material for the documents he mation, always ephemeral. Like dirt, what untied and read; the dust of all the workers counts as dust, what counts as knowledge, whose trials and tribulations in labour formed involves a process of valuation, a decision their paper and parchment. He did indeed, about what to discard and what to keep. But breathe in the People, giving them life by the processes of incorporation that resulted in his dust is also somewhat beyond our control: no terrible headaches, his Archive Fever, but they matter how hard we struggle, we cannot keep were not the People he named in his histories. anything clean. he wind blows in new ele- (152) ments. he documents we want to read fall on the loor, turn out to be blurry, or are checked As Steedman notes, the verb dust has a dual out by another. So we are let with a mess, a denotation: it signifies the removal of dust constantly shifting product of material ac- from the surfaces of things as well as deposit- tants, human and nonhuman, coproducing ing a “dusting” of material upon them (160). knowledge in friction with each other. Dirt, Researchers do not merely recover material of dust, and mess bear a stigma for purists, but the past (oten material they did not intend to embracing impurity facilitates the emergence ind). hey also leave a mark on the archive of resistant knowledge. and alter the material they encounter—physi- Archival work has particular signiicance cally, by adding creases and ingerprints and for scholars in Latino/a literary studies, a ield removing old dust while turning the pages, developed in resistance to dominant national and conceptually, by making materials pub- knowledge traditions (United States and lic for the irst time and ofering new frame- Latin American). In its emergence, Latino/a works for understanding them. I have dusted literary studies has been growing backward 626 Messy Archives and Materials That Matter [ PMLA

in time, to establish a lost or erased tradi- was canonized (or at least tokenized) for writ- tion, at the same time that it grows forward. ings that explicitly thematize her marginal- Since 1990 the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic ization as a working-class, Spanish-speaking Literary Heritage Project has been locat- Chicana lesbian from the United States– ing, publishing, and studying early Latino/a Mexico borderlands. In the 1980s, when her literary works that were never published or work splashed into “mainstream” academic that went out of print. José Aranda has put discourse (through the writings of feminist much metacritical thought into the process scholars like Judith Butler and Donna Har- of “recovering” Latino/a authors. He writes away, the French philosopher Jean- Luc Nancy, that, given “the diiculties inherent in archi- and many others), critics needed a represen- val research on minorities and women in the tative of these identities to bridge the divide United States,” his work on the nineteenth- between what was becoming a hegemonic century Mexican American writer María postmodern mode and a resistant (and sup- Amparo Ruíz de Burton is less a recovery of posedly untheoretical) “woman of color” con- truth than a construction formed with the sciousness. And Anzaldúa stepped up to the limited archival and biographical materials plate with culturally grounded theories of hy- at hand (“Contradictory Impulses” 552; see bridity, luid margins, and nonbinary thought also Aranda, “Recovering”). Only a tiny frac- in Borderlands / La Frontera. hese theories tion of the ideas and experiences of women were embraced and applied across disciplines of Mexican descent in the nineteenth- century and across the world, from Mexico to Egypt United States was preserved. he fragments to Siberia (e.g., Belausteguigoitia Rius and that remain are not representative of history Gutiérrez Magallanes; Gomaa; Nakaznaya). as much as they are representative of what he processes of publication and critical ap- history has valued, what has been preserved plication produced an Anzaldúa that func- in libraries rather than let to decay. he de- tions as an icon for counterhegemonic theory. sire to search attics and basements rather than But that Anzaldúa is an ephemeral forma- Ivy League libraries for traces of history is the tion of a particular critical moment and will product of a value shit, a new desire to know change as materials from the archive perme- about the experiences of those marginalized ate more published scholarship. by history. he author that emerges from this his moment presents an interesting crit- noncanonical archival research is an assem- ical juncture for Anzaldúan studies, which blage of various sources put together by the will be transformed by the order in which un- researcher, and researchers like Aranda are published materials from the archive go into well aware of the contingency of this author print, by the form in which these materials and the fact that she is the product not simply become accessible, and by how scholars re- of her own time but also of the conditions of spond. Other concerns include the possibility her reassembly, which include the researcher’s that, because of her fame, these works will at- bias. As Aranda has argued, much of the in- tract large presses and, perhaps, proits. (Keat- terest in recovering Ruíz de Burton as a writer ing published The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader results from contemporary Chicana/o schol- with Duke University Press in 2009, while ars’ desire for a subaltern literary precursor. Anzaldúa’s major works in the 1980s and Though archival work claims to be looking early 1990s were published by small, strug- into the past, it is always rooted in the present gling, women- of- color and feminist presses and always subject to future transformation. like Kitchen Table and Aunt Lute—produc- This desire for a subaltern hero is cer- ing very different avenues for encountering tainly applicable in the case of Anzaldúa, who Anzaldúa.) And then what will happen when 130.3 ] Suzanne Bost 627 people discover that the content of these pre- with our understandings of race, nation, and viously unpublished works is not what they language, but is the dirt on spirits, animism, expected, perhaps not what they want to see? and sickness something we want to reclaim?11 Maybe scholars do not like what Anzaldúa Do we want to deconstruct the Chicana femi- liked to write as much as they like the ap- nist border hero whose essays from the 1980s plications and adaptations of border theo- are now standard textbook material in courses ries credited to her. he Anzaldúa that most on subjects ranging from American literature people know is limited to a few famous essays, to composition to women’s studies and queer but the poems, stories, pictures, revisions, and theory? What sort of Anzaldúa do we need other materials in the archive overturn some in 2015? he scholars who work on her today of the conclusions of those essays. I found in are partially responsible for answering these the archive a very diferent body of work, one questions. Yet the matters that collide in the that thematizes urban dwelling, spirituality, inscription of “Gloria Anzaldúa” exceed au- science iction, shape-shiting, illness, and the thor and scholar and include agents beyond author’s reluctance to share her sexuality with our control, like diabetes, computer technol- others. hough these works were written by ogy, gravity, and archival environments. the same feminist Chicana lesbian, they don’t The temporality of Anzaldúa scholar- make an issue of those sociopolitical identities ship deies movement toward greater clarity thematized in her early work.10 In fact, they and knowledge as the unpublished materials relocate her somewhat outside them. create more questions and lead us to rethink Aranda hoped to assemble “a Ruíz de our past assumptions about the author. In Burton . . . that best approximates the com- the words of the Chicana feminist scholar plexities and idiosyncrasies” of her texts Norma Alarcón, Anzaldúa’s writings “risk the (“Contradictory Impulses” 552), refusing to ‘pathological condition’ by representing . . . latten the contradictions that undermine her [a] break with a developmental view of self- critical reputation as a heroic pre-Chicana inscription” (362). We are not progressively foremother (such as her racism and her am- inscribing a clearer picture of Anzaldúa; as bivalence toward the early feminist move- scholars meet the archival materials in each ment). In the case of Anzaldúa, however, it new moment, the author (and the critic) are might not be possible to use the words “best” subject to dusting and transformation. I like or “approximate” since she so insistently Alarcón’s use of “pathology” to character- resists clear evaluation or approximation. ize the stigma that comes with such an un- While scholars have tried to iron out some clean and incoherent subject. he author that of the contradictions in Anzaldúa’s work emerges in this work is, as Alarcón suggests, and to ignore her potentially embarrassing never fully “inscribed” or “whole” but, rather, investments in things that push the bound- “a crossroads, a collision course, a clearing- aries of reason, the opening of her archive house, an endless alterity who . . . appears as makes it more difficult to imagine a coher- a tireless peregrine collecting all of the parts ent Anzaldúa. Publishing the unpublished that will never make her whole” (367). Anzaldúa will be less an act of recovery than his is not to say, in postmodern fashion, one of deconstruction. Perhaps there is a that the author is a fiction or even that she reason why the works that do not thematize is dead. For Anzaldúa’s materiality is pal- identity politics were never published. The pable in the archive: her labor, her illnesses, unpublished materials in the archive are the her friends, her writing process, her filing dirt that was repressed. Scholars seem to have system, even her computer and printer. But enjoyed the ways in which Anzaldúa messes these pieces do not resolve themselves into 628 Messy Archives and Materials That Matter [ PMLA

any circumscribed glimpse of the author, mad, the child, the hird World” (3). he historiography who, at every turn, mutates and exceeds the of Chicana/o literature, however, denies this sort of “progress,” claiming the repressed past, the “hird World,” and boxes that contain her materials. Entering “the Indian” as its present from which it was never rup- her archive does not take us down a passage- tured. Identiication with premodern Aztec culture began way toward the author, not even a dusty and in the early days of the Chicano movimiento; Anzaldúa circuitous passageway. We enter an open cir- adapted this atemporal (or dually temporal) trend with a feminist bent, developing her theories from the models of cuit full of mirrors and rabbit holes. Instead Aztec goddesses like Coatlicue and Coyolxauhqui. of inding Anzaldúa, we ind ourselves, amid 3. I use actant in the sense that Latour does, to describe many other surprising materials, boundaries, action in a nonindividualistic and nonanthropocentric and weird actants, and then we lose our train way. I hesitate to use the terms agent and agency, which of thought. I have learned from the Anzaldúa evoke autonomy and will (qualities the nonhuman actants of an archive lack). Latour’s account of actants, in actor- archive how to embrace permeability, mul- network theory, is distinct from earlier structuralist uses tiplicity, and uncertainty in my scholarship. of the term. Latour differentiates actor-network theory Rather than insist on clarity or singularity of from models of communication that “begin with well de- discourse, we should risk ambiguity so as not ined movers and moving objects” (379). By contrast, actor- network theory focuses on the “world- making” activities to exclude other sources of knowledge that of networks in which “what is doing the moving and what might turn out to be more useful than the is moved have no speciic homogenous morphism” (380). status quo. Making meaning should be a rad- While actor conventionally suggests a “human intentional ically inclusive and continually open process, individual” who “extends his power” by doing something, looking forward rather than back, welcoming an actant “can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action” (372–73). Since actants func- surprises rather than searching to have the tion in the luid relations of networks, their agency is con- same “truths” conirmed again and again. textual (rather than intrinsic), the product of intersecting forces (human, environmental, technical). heir actions (like distributing information) are coconstituted with other actants rather than discrete. I take this activity to be literal, material, or perhaps material-semiotic but not NOTES solely semiotic. Latour, too, rejects the ways in which semiotic accounts of actants are limited to discursive reference. 1. See, e.g., Collins; Drucker; and the other essays in 4. According to Keating, the archivists have made every the section “Reading in the Digital Age” in the January efort to replicate Anzaldúa’s system of organization within 2013 issue of PMLA. My investment in matter here is not the limits of their storage capacities. hey rejected certain based on any resistance to new media or digital technol- large nontextual objects (like Anzaldúa’s altars, which are ogy. Indeed, digital media have a materiality and sensory now on rotating display at the University of California, qualities that are not altogether distinct from those of Santa Cruz) and are struggling to ind space to store the archives made of paper, boxes, and shelves. (Drucker’s marked- up books from Anzaldúa’s extensive personal li- analysis of digital interfaces offers an example of the brary (“Archive”). hough their aim is neutrality, the archi- ways in which software replicates and elicits material vists have helped to shape knowledge production with the processes.) My attachment to the palpable qualities of catalog they created, especially its biographical narrative, the Anzaldúa archive is probably romantic, but it is also and the organization of materials into folders and boxes. related to Anzaldúa’s focus on corporeal and geographic 5. his metaphor is particularly apt for feminists (in matter. Digitizing the archive would beneit preservation terms of questioning the domestic tasks that occupy many and access, but I would miss the reading room, the ways women’s time and the unnatural policing of our bodies in which papers shuffle around unexpectedly, and the and homes) as well as for Chicana/o studies (in terms of hominess of sitting in Austin reading about Anzaldúa’s analyzing how shiting borders and nationalist anxiety experiences in that city. Also see McGann’s discussion of have deemed Mexicans in the United States people out of digital and material archives. place even when their families have resided in the same 2. In he Writing of History, Certeau argues, “Modern place for generations). Dirt is about border crossings. Western History essentially begins with diferentiation be- 6. hese segmented circles resemble the Aztec calen- tween the present and the past” (2). he “intelligibility” of dar as well as the “natal charts” collected in the Anzaldúa “modern Western culture . . . is established through a rela- archive. Maybe the disks were part of a ritual designed to tion with the other . . . the Indian, the past, the people, the mimic these graphic predictions. 130.3 ] Suzanne Bost 629

7. his sketch is undated, but a similar one placed near Gabriela F. Arredondo et al. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. it in the archive folder, “Sleeping on the Wing,” is dated 24 354–69. Print. September 1988. Of course, I don’t know whether Anzaldúa Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera. San Fran- or an archivist iled the two together, but the sketch I’m an- cisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Print. alyzing might have been produced around 1988. ——— . he Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Ed. AnaLouise Keat- 8. his literal cutting and pasting is certainly more ing. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Print. messy than its Microsoft counterpart, and the slips of ———. Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942–2004. paper frequently become detached from the whole in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, U of archive. Indeed, many scraps were never pasted in a per- Texas, Austin. manent home, and they loat around loosely, unmoored, ——— . e d . Making Face, Making Soul = Haciendo Caras: until someone writes them into a document, such as this Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of one. It’s entirely possible that slips of paper are getting Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990. Print. lost or even being purposefully removed by visitors to ———. “now let us shit . . . the path of conocimiento . . . inner the archive; they then become permanently unmoored work, public acts.” his Bridge We Call Home: Radical (rather than saved on a “clipboard” as in Microsot Word), Visions for Transformation. Ed. Anzaldúa and AnaLou- and the content of the archive is thereby reduced. his is ise Keating. New York: Routledge, 2002. 540–78. Print. one of the ways in which the Anzaldúa papers in material ———. “Puddles.” New Chicana/ Chicano Writing 1. Ed. form difer from any potential digital replication. Charles M. Tatum. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992. 9. My essay is also influenced by Derrida’s Archive 43–45. Print. Fever, especially his claims that “the limits, the borders, ———. “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to hird World and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake Women Writers.” his Bridge Called My Back: Writ- from which no classificational concept and no imple- ings by Radical Women of Color. Ed. Anzaldúa and mentation of the archive can be sheltered” and that “the Cherríe Moraga. New York: Kitchen Table, 1983. archiving archive also determines the structure of the 165–73. Print. archivable content even in its very coming into existence Aranda, José. “Contradictory Impulses: María Ampario and in its relationship to the future. he archivization Ruíz de Burton, Resistance heory, and the Politics of produces as much as it records the event” (5, 17). Yet Der- Chicano/a Studies.” American Literature 70.3 (1998): rida’s analysis of Freud’s archive focuses on the private- 551–79. Print. public binary and the “psychic archive,” while my work is more invested in feminist theory, material archives, and ———. “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage.” Chicana/o theoretical frameworks. Bost and Aparicio 476–84. 10. Likewise, her later writings resisted identity labels Belausteguigoitia Rius, Marisa, and María del Socorro (“boxes” she called them) as she developed her theory Gutiérrez Magallanes. “Chicano/a and Latino/a Lit- of “new tribalism.” he last essay published in her life- erary Studies in Mexico.” Bost and Aparicio 95–106. time, “now let us shit,” begins with diabetes as a source Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of of meaning about identity and moves away from identity hings. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print. politics and toward an “interplanetary new tribalism” Bost, Suzanne. Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in that “step[s] outside ethnic and other labels” to discover Chicana Feminist Literature. New York: Fordham UP, that “identity has roots you share with all people and . . . 2009. Print. all planetary beings” (560). his call to recognize new ili- Bost, Suzanne, and Frances Aparicio. The Routledge ations could bridge the new and old Anzaldúas, bringing Companion to Latino/a Literature. London: Rout- more issues (and more scholars) into the evolving ield of ledge, 2013. Print. Anzaldúan studies. Certeau, Michel de. he Writing of History. 1975. New 11. For a discussion of how illness (diabetes, in par- York: Columbia UP, 1988. Print. ticular) relates to Anzaldúa’s identity theories, see my Collins, Jim. “Reading, in a Digital Archive of One’s Encarnación. Own.” PMLA 128.1 (2013): 207–12. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. WORKS CITED Print. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Con- Alaimo, Stacy. “ Trans- corporeal Feminisms and the cepts of Pollution and Taboo. 1966. London: Rout- Ethical Space of Nature.” Material Feminisms. Ed. ledge, 1988. Print. Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana Drucker, Johanna. “Reading Interface.” PMLA 128.1 UP, 2007. 237–64. Print. (2013): 213–20. Print. Alarcón, Norma. “Anzaldúa’s Frontera: Inscribing Gy- Gomaa, Dalia. “Latina/o Literature in the Arab World.” netics.” Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader. Ed. Bost and Aparicio 124–30. 630 Messy Archives and Materials That Matter [ PMLA

Keating, AnaLouise. “Archival Alchemy and Allure: he McGann, Jerome. “Database, Interface, and Archival Fe‑ Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers as Case Study.” ver.” PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1588–92. Print. Aztlán 35.2 (2010): 159–71. Print. Nakaznaya, Elena. “Latino/a Literary Studies in Siberia.” ———. “he Archive, Again.” Message to the author. 18 Feb. Bost and Aparicio 116–23. 2014. E‑mail. Pérez, Emma. he Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Latour, Bruno. “On Actor‑Network heory: A Few Clari‑ into History. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. Print. ications.” Soziale Welt 47.4 (1996): 369–81. JSTOR. Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: he Archive and Cultural His- Web. 3 June 2015. tory. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002. Print.