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Re-Routing Chicana/O Identity in Rudolfo A. Anaya‟S Bless Me, Ultima

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Re-Routing Chicana/O Identity in Rudolfo A. Anaya‟S Bless Me, Ultima Re-Routing Chicana/o Identity in Rudolfo A. Anaya‟s Bless Me, Ultima and Heart of Aztlán: Community, Hybridity, and Transformation Submitted by Toliou Foteini A thesis submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English and American Studies. Supervisor: Dr. Lydia Eftymia Roupakia March 2021 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS: Abstract………………………………………………………………………………iii CHAPTERS Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1 1.1 Historical Context…………………………………………………………2 1.2 Theoretical Framework……………………………………………………4 1.3 Rudolfo A. Anaya‟s Literature…………………………………………...11 Chapter Two “The Great Cycle that Binds Us All”: Cultural Syncretism in Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) 2.1 Introduction……..................................................................................13 2.2 Dialectical Conflicts in the Borderlands……………………………..14 2.3 The Dialogic Interplay of Voices in the Borderlands………………...22 2.4 Ultima‟s Magic: Transcending Binaries and Moving towards a New Borderland Consciousness…………………………………………...33 Chapter Three Barrio Being and Chicana/o Cultural Transformation in Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Heart of Aztlán (1976) 3.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………44 3.2 The Dialectics of Barrio Being……………………………………..48 3.3 The Dialogic Interplay of Voices in the Borderlands………………59 3.4 The Vision of Aztlán as Movement towards a New Borderland Consciousness…………………………………………………………..67 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...............78 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………..81 iii Abstract The artistic and literary productions of Mexican Americans have repeatedly been excluded from the ideological apparatus of the United States society and from the field of American literary studies. Rudolfo A. Anaya‟s novels Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Heart of Aztlán (1976), two Chicana/o texts published during the height of the Chicano movement, foreground the Chicana/o people‟s multifaceted experiences and interstitial heritage, in order to remedy the marginalization of this ethic community. This thesis argues that Anaya‟s two early texts already escaped the rigid definitions of Mexican-American selfhood that the Chicano movement politics have devised, and transcended binary ways of thinking about identity that trap Chicanas/os between either U.S. acculturation or group-related cultural determinism. Anaya‟s novels unfold how the subjectivities of Chicana/o characters waver between diverse cultural impulses that operate in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and address the need to conjoin antithetical ways of being-in-the-world. Ramón Saldívar‟s concept of „the dialectics of difference‟ is employed to illustrate how Anaya‟s Chicana/o characters dialectically confront U.S. hegemony and form new, alternative conceptions of identity. Mikhail Bakhtin‟s dialogism is used to explore how the dialogic interactions between diverse cultural narratives gradually foster the re-adjustment of Chicana/o identities. Drawing upon Gloria E. Anzaldúa‟s borderland theory, the thesis further points out how the Chicana/o characters of the two novels creatively merge diverse narratives of experience in order to create their new, fluid, and hybrid identities. Anaya‟s texts communicate how the retrieval and the imaginative re-signification of the Chicana/o people‟s ancestral cultural practices and mythologies chart the on-going „re-routing‟ of Mexican-American selfhood, and enable Chicanas/os to adjust and progress in the ever-changing U.S. landscape. Toliou 1 INTRODUCTION Chicana/o literature and literary criticism is, nowadays, internationally recognized as an interdisciplinary field of studies that brings to the foreground the experiences and the artistic representations of Chicanas/os, an ethic group of Mexican descent that lives in the United States. According to the 2016 U.S. Census Bureau, Mexican Americans are “one of the largest and fastest growing racial-ethnic groups in the United States” (Lomelí et al. 3). Yet, the dominant U.S. society, which proclaims a multicultural, pluralistic, and democratic ethos, has constructed the Chicana/o image “as its contrastive personality, idea, and experience,” thus underwriting the socio- political and cultural subordination of this ethnic community (Saldívar, “Introduction” 4). Chicana/o literary works “have . been largely excluded from the canon of North American literature” (3), and have often been studied “as a „regional‟ or a „marginal‟ literature” (6). In this light, early Chicana/o texts, which emerged during the militant atmosphere of the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s sought to challenge the stereotypical representations of Mexican Americans in the mainstream culture. Early Chicana/o writings defined the group strictly in relation to its Native American roots or to spaces such as the labor field and the barrio. Contemporary Chicana/o literature looks beyond the militancy and the cultural nationalism echoed in the Chicana/o texts of the 1960s and 1970s. In recent years, Chicana/o writers explore questions of hybridity, locatedness, migration and mobility, and approach the Mexican-American experience as paradigmatic of the identity quandaries that various ethnic groups around the globe grapple with. This thesis analyzes Rudolfo A. Anaya‟s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Heart of Aztlán (1976), two novels written during the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. I aim to argue that these two Chicana/o texts articulate a resistance Toliou 2 to the underrepresentation Mexican Americans experienced in U.S. society in tune with the Chicano movement impulse. Yet, at the same time, Anaya‟s novels transcend binary ways of thinking that entrapped Chicanas/os within rigid identity politics, as they envision a movement from ethnocentrism and cultural determinism towards a fluid, and pluralistic notion of Chicana/o selfhood. The two novels communicate the identity crises that Chicana/o characters experience, due to a series of dialectical conflicts that transpire in the cross-cultural landscape of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Yet, the works display how the multiple diverse cultural narratives that co-exist in the characters‟ interstitial context dialogically interact with one another. This on-going process of dialogic negotiation and „re-routing‟ enables the characters to move towards cultural transformation, while retaining contact with their ancestral cultural heritage. In Anaya‟s novels, Mexican-American characters gradually construct their new hybrid identities and, thus, acquire the power to resist the authoritative discourses of U.S. society and, at the same time, escape entrapment into ethnocentrism and group-related cultural determinism. 1.1.Historical Context A brief account of the historical circumstances that gave rise to the interstitial Chicana/o identity can facilitate the analysis of the power relationships and the identity conundrums that transpire in the primary texts. More particularly, Chicanas/os are people of Mexican descent that came to be U.S. citizens due to intricate historical circumstances. Mexicans are mestizas/os (racially mixed), since they are “largely made up of an indigenous class, former African slave communities, and the Spanish conquerors” that intermingled during the Spanish colonial era (1598- 1821) (Escobedo 184). Yet, according to the historian Mario T. García, “the first- generational historical cohort” of Mexican Americans “encompasses those Mexicans Toliou 3 who after the U.S.-Mexico War found themselves on the new American side of the border” (28). The Mexican American war (1846-1848) ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which foresaw the annexation of Mexico‟s northern provinces to the U.S. and turned the mexicano populations of the Southwest1 into U.S. citizens overnight. García identifies this first generation of Mexican Americans as “the Conquered Generation” based on Rodolfo F. Acuña‟s argument that the Chicanas/os of the Southwest were subjected to “internal colonialism” (qtd. in García 28). Acuña‟s theory of “internal colonialism” proposes that “Chicanas/os are colonized similar to other Third World people but with the caveat that they represent a colonized people within the colonizing power” (qtd. in García 28). Indeed, in the years after the American conquest of Mexico‟s north, the dominant American society treated Chicanas/os as colonized subjects. The rights of citizenship and land that the Treaty bestowed upon Chicanas/os were denied them in reality. They suffered economic deprivation due to the usurpation of their lands by Anglo Americans and they were granted “second-class citizenship,” which entailed their cultural subordination (30). In fact, the „manifest destiny‟ ideology, a discourse which proclaimed that Anglo Americans were elected by Godly Providence to disseminate the democratic liberal ideals across the American continent has been utilized to legitimize the annexation of Mexico‟s north and the subsequent subjugation of Mexican Americans (Escobedo 178-79). Yet, Chicanas/os defied Anglo-American authority and the impending forces of assimilation both through explicit rebellion, as well as implicitly, through retaining contact with their Mexican cultural heritage within the U.S. context (García 30). 1 The historian John R. Chávez states that “the Southwest is . a land including California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado, the states
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