MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

of

Alisa Balestra

Candidate for the Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

______Director Kelli Lyon Johnson

______Reader Theresa Kulbaga

______Reader Timothy Melley

______Graduate School Representative Mary Kupiec Cayton ABSTRACT

SHIFT IN WORK, SHIFT IN REPRESENTATION: WORKING-CLASS IDENTITY AND EXPERIENCE IN U.S MULTI-ETHNIC AND QUEER WOMEN’S FICTION

by Alisa Balestra

This dissertation offers a more accurate and inclusive model of the working-class in the U.S., one that rejects, on the one hand, the racialization and feminization of blue collar work and its workforce and, on the other, reductive ideas about class based on outdated models of the white and male industrial worker. When the U.S. shifted away from its industrial base in the early 1970’s, women and minorities replaced the white and male industrial worker as “ideal” in an economy where labor relations were more flexible. Literary critics have been slow to acknowledge how the nature of blue collar work and its workforce shifted. The result has been twofold: women and minorities are more frequently viewed as conceptually separate from the working-class, their labor not recognized as “blue collar,” and class is often reduced to race and gender in the race/class/gender triumvirate. By examining fiction produced at the time of these global shifts but heralded for reasons other than class, I demonstrate how the fiction of Leslie Feinberg, Toni Cade Bambara, Sandra Cisneros, and Helena María Viramontes reflects shifts in the global economy as its authors respond to the consequences of these shifts. In doing this work, I aim to shift literary critics’ understanding of class in the triumvirate in light of shifts in the global economy.

SHIFT IN WORK, SHIFT IN REPRESENTATION: WORKING-CLASS IDENTITY AND EXPERIENCE IN U.S. MULTI-ETHNIC AND QUEER WOMEN’S FICTION

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

by

Alisa Ann Balestra

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2011

Dissertation Director: Kelli Lyon Johnson

©

Alisa Ann Balestra 2011 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

Abstract

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents iii

Dedication iv

Acknowledgements v

Introduction 1

Chapter One 10 White and Male Industrial Worker No More: Invisible Female and Minority Labor in the “New” Economy

Chapter Two 26 Classing Queerness: Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and the Praxis of Queer Liberation

Chapter Three 45 From Working-Class Center to Middle-Class Margins: Upward Mobility and Intraracial Class Conflict in Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love

Chapter Four 64 Space as Material Geopolitical Issues and Not “Signifying Spaces”: The Creation of House/Self in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street

Chapter Five 83 Tools to Tear Down and Rebuild: An Assault on Racist Patriarchal Capitalist Systems in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus

Conclusion 100 Towards a New Theory and Practice

Works Cited 111

iii

For my parents, Mason and Julie Balestra – that they are alive and able to bear witness to this dissertation and its commitment to working-class people.

E per mio nonno, Massimo Balestra (1913-2008) – che ha potuto vivire per vedere questo giorno. E’a lui e la sua vita che dedico questa testi.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are a number of people who assisted in some way with the development of this dissertation project. I would first like to thank my Director, Kelli Lyon Johnson, for her willingness to take on this project and for the countless hours she spent listening to ideas, reading drafts, and providing encouragement when necessary. I would also like to thank her for the license she gave me in writing this project. My readers, Theresa Kulbaga and Mary Cayton, tirelessly supported this project and provided very constructive feedback throughout the writing process. I would especially like to thank Mary for reading this project the first time around even though she didn’t have to. Her insight as a historian provided an appropriate critical lens for the first chapter. I would also like to thank Michelle Tokarczyk, Professor of English at Goucher College and past-president of the Working-Class Studies Association, for her feedback on the fourth chapter of this dissertation project. I am particularly grateful for her comments and for her continued support of this project and its contribution to working-class studies. I would also like to acknowledge the scholars/friends in working-class studies whose conversations at the 2009 and 2010 Working-Class Studies Association conferences provided me with the inspiration and momentum to write this dissertation project. Among those friends, I would like to thank Tim Libretti, Christie Launius, Michele Fazio, and Cherie Rankin. I would especially like to thank Tim for his enthusiasm about my work and for sharing with me his ideas about Marxism and radical racial and ethnic literatures. Outside the academy, I would like to thank all my friends who listened patiently when I vented about this dissertation and who shared in my joy when the writing went well, especially Laura Huffman Schultz, Justine Stokes, and Becky Vulcan. I would especially like to thank Scott Leonard, my emergency 911, for sticking by me all these years. Thanks, as well, to my parents for sharing with me their stories about class and for reminding me why I wrote this dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Kelly Walsh, for her support, encouragement, friendship, and love. She gave up our office space and took on most of our household chores all so that I could sit and write. It is to her that I give my greatest thanks.

v

Introduction

A colleague of mine once asked, “How do you respond to the accusation that ‘working- class’ is synonymous with ‘white’?” In the public imagination, the working-class is often presented as white. It is also stereotyped as predominately rural, conservative, and male. Yet the reality of the working-class is that it is, as Barbara Ehrenreich observes, more reliably liberal than the middle-class and, particularly given shifts in the last half-century in the global economy, it is increasingly comprised of women and minorities.1 Questions such as the one posed by my colleague reflect this tendency in the U.S. to associate “working-class” with white men – an association ultimately based on outdated models of the white, male, and heterosexual industrial worker. When the U.S. economy shifted away from its industrial base in the early 1970’s, the nature of blue collar work and its workforce also shifted: in a “new” economy driven by service and agricultural work and unskilled manufacturing, blue collar work is no longer stable, secure, or mainstream. Most of the individuals performing this work are not unionized and are more routinely subject to low-wage strategies that include part-time or contingent work with subsistence-level wages without benefits. White and male workers, having shifted along with the globalizing of the economy, are also subject to these low-wage strategies, yet this fact has been obfuscated by ideas about class based on outdated models. These outdated models, as they have concealed how white and male workers are exploited in the “new” economy, have also meant that as a group women and minorities are frequently viewed as conceptually separate from the working-class, their labor not recognized as “blue collar.” Many literary critics since the late 1980’s have viewed women and minorities as belonging to a class separate from the working-class, with “class” in the race/class/gender triumvirate often read (when it is read at all) as a class of the poor. What these critics do not always recognize, however, is that poverty is not a class but a condition that affects the more disadvantaged members of the working-class. Because women and minorities have historically occupied such a position, they experience poverty in greater numbers. Yet it would be a mistake to collapse class with race and/or gender as doing so disregards the many white men in poverty and leaves unexamined the low-wage strategies and un- and underemployment that cause economic inequality. It is necessary, then, that critics revise their definition of class in the triumvirate, in part because reducing class to race and/or gender further divides the working- class as it also misses the class component of exploitation and/or disenfranchisement. Moreover, it makes little sense to talk about race and/or gender without also talking about class as women and/or minorities don’t experience identity or consciousness in singular ways, as if race and/or gender can be cordoned off from class as it is lived through these categories. This study urges literary critics to realize, as they are concerned with “race, class, and gender,” how the feminization and racialization of blue collar work and its workforce (what it means to recast gender and race as more significant than class) have obscured some of the particular forms of the political and economic disenfranchisement of the working-class at a time when the reality of globalization has never been more apparent. When the U.S. economy shifted away from industry, it depended on an “ideal” (here more easily exploited) workforce to meet the demands of service and agricultural work and unskilled manufacturing. Women and minorities, who had long performed this work as sexism and racism exacerbated their economic situations, replaced the white and male industrial worker as “archetypal proletarians” in an economy where labor relations were more flexible. By the 1980’s, postmodern and post-

1 Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. 41. 1 structuralist critics agreed that something had indeed shifted in the 1970’s, and that this shift had consequences for politics and culture. For these critics, changes in the U.S. economy were matched by an epistemological break, or the death of the author and distrust of “grand narratives” such as Marxism (Eisenstein 11). The result was that discourse and ideas replaced class as dominant modes of thought and analysis precisely in the decades when women and minorities had begun to assert their agency and to call for the need to confront and reimagine existing political-economic systems. It is curious that postmodern and post-structuralist critics should declare the author dead and Marxism no longer relevant or necessary in an age of advanced global capitalism as key leaders in social politics movements of the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s recognized capitalism and the mass ideologies used to reinforce it as causes for their exploitation, particularly since in these decades capitalists increasingly targeted women and minorities as part of a new, more flexible labor pool. If we understand movements like the Stonewall Rebellion, Black Nationalism and black feminism, The Chicano Movement and Chicana feminism as social and economic in their orientation, then their connection with the Left is closer than previously realized. Critics from Nikhil Pal Singh to Tim Libretti and Bill Mullen have come to similar conclusions, turning to key leaders’ working-class backgrounds and socialist political leanings as evidence for how social politics movements were, in essence, working-class movements. Because these movements were Left-led, Libretti and Mullen have called for critics to excavate social politics movements and their “cultural wings,” e.g. Black Arts Movement, Chicano Renaissance, for their repressed proletarian content. The urgency of this critical work, I argue, comes at a time when identity politics movements have become complicit with neoliberalism, their goals compatible with the goals of corporate globalization. Urvashi Vaid put this succinctly when she said of national gay and lesbian organizations, “The economic assumptions that underlie are movement are uncritically promarket, procorporate, and probusiness than they are prolabor” (Out at Work 235). In these movements, the need to challenge central features of American capitalism has been replaced by calls for liberal policies of inclusion. The problem, of course, with inclusion by itself is that only a small minority benefit, leaving many perpetually at the margins. One of the hallmarks of social politics movements in the 1960’s through 1980’s is that they demonstrated how a progressive politics might use – and in fact be based on – identity as the basis for class struggle and social change. Any politics movement that understands racial, gendered, and/or sexual liberation as contingent on participation in the free-market will not achieve its “radical” vision, no matter how many of its members acquire access to sites from which they were previously excluded. Recent shifts in identity politics movements, among them the rise of organizations like Queers for Economic Justice in New York or SisterSong in Atlanta, have indicated that calls for liberal policies of inclusion alone have not fundamentally changed the many systems that exploit most women and racial and sexual minorities. In returning to the radical proletarian basis of social politics movements in the 1960’s through 1980’s, or in asserting that liberation requires the destruction of existing political-economic systems, organizations like Queers for Economic Justice affirm how globalization has had a disastrous effect on the lives of many women and minorities. These multiple trajectories – globalizing the economy and increased exploitation of the more disadvantaged members of the working-class – are not separate and distinct processes. Social politics movements emerged when they did because political and economic exploitation and disenfranchisement are mutually reinforcing. In other words, the state’s role in reducing many women and minorities to less than citizens is not independent of the increased influx of

2 poorer women and minorities into more flexible labor markets.2 When race, gender, and/or sexuality are recast as more significant than class, exploitation remains hidden behind stereotypes attached to each group. The problem with identity politics movements is, then, that their postmodern turn displaced class analysis as necessary at a time when many women and minorities suffer particularly hard under global systems. Social scientists have long recognized two things: that the nature of blue collar work and its workforce shifted by the early 1970’s as deindustrialization and globalization restructured the U.S. economy (processes that began as early as the 1950’s), and that global shifts coincided with increased exploitation and disenfranchisement (political and economic) of the working-class and women and minorities in particular. Literary critics, however, have been slow to acknowledge these dynamics. The turn in literary studies to postmodernism and post-structuralism by the 1980’s, a shift that further obscured how the nature of blue collar work and its workforce changed in the decade prior, has meant for literary critics that they less frequently sharpen and deepen theoretical matrixes created by Marxism and feminism, for example, and instead turn their attention to women and minorities but not also to the proletariat. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, black and Chicana feminists articulated the “real” race/class/gender situation: that workers were not raceless and sexless, and that women and minorities were not without class. Unfortunately, much literary criticism that takes the working-class as its subject reifies these distinctions. Given the political and economic realities facing the working-class at this moment in U.S. history, critics interested in much radical racial/ethnic and/or gendered/sexual literature written prior to but especially after 1960 must do more than critique the destructive aspects of a culture’s definition of gender roles, for example. The global situation of most U.S. and Third World women and minorities will not change so long as critics – literary or otherwise – continue to rely on reductive ideas about class or persist in their thinking that service or agricultural work or unskilled manufacturing is not “blue collar” and that its workforce belongs to a class separate from the working-class. What critics must examine, then, is the “real” race/class/gender situation as it has been shaped by the changing contours of work in the “new” economy and has produced a working-class that is disenfranchised to various degrees, both in the U.S. and abroad. In the tradition of 1970’s and 1980’s black and Third World feminism, which shared with traditional Marxist criticism its radical affinities even as it found Marxism lacking on matters of race, gender, and sexuality, my methodology for this study pays more of a focus to material realities than in traditional feminist criticism and grants more power to “culture” (race, gender, sexuality) than in Marxist criticism written before 1970 (Newton and Rosenfelt xix). Because much literary criticism on the texts I examine here privileges “culture” at the expense of class, this study reads class back into critical representations of identity – I prefer “consciousness” – and experience, ultimately to argue that race or gender or sexual consciousness and experience cannot be understood unless both are placed in larger class contexts. In cases where critics have granted space in the conversation to class, which is true for Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, “working-class” is not named though the issues examined, e.g. frequent moves for work, unsafe housing for migrants, are distinctly working-class issues. Recognizing how, in the “new” economy, agricultural work, for example, is blue collar and its workforce is working-class is necessary for critics as they attend to class in novels like Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus. In this study, I turn to work like Viramontes’s for two

2 For more on how state power and the contingency of global capital are mutually reinforcing, see Kathleen Arnold’s book America’s New Working Class: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2008. 3 reasons: first, this work is informed by the author’s working-class background and political concerns, the latter having emerged out of or in response to radical proletarian movements; and second, as their politics are consistent with the goals of social politics movements, these authors respond – directly or otherwise – to shifts in the U.S. economy at this time and their effect on the working-class as their writing both confronts and reimagines alternatives to racist patriarchal capitalist systems. By situating this work and the movements out of which they emerged in historically specific circumstances of deindustrialization and globalization, I demonstrate more than merely the literary production of an exploited and disenfranchised working-class. I also demonstrate how for writers aligned with radical proletarian movements “social politics” and “class politics” were not mutually exclusive, much like class and class analysis were needed to understand how transgendered and queer, African American, and Chicana women were minorities within both dominant and working-class cultures. A cursory glance at the MLA International Bibliography reveals what aspects of identity or experience critics have found significant about texts that take transgendered and queer, African American, and Chicana working-class women as their subject. Most often identity or experience has to do with gender as it intersects with sexuality, race, or ethnicity. In the case of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, a novel I explore in the second chapter of this study, critics from Jay Prosser to Madelyn Detloff have lauded the novel for its treatment of gender but have not placed gender identity in a larger class context – necessary given how the protagonist’s movement within distinctly working-class spaces produces in her a consciousness of being at once working-class, transgendered, and butch. The same is also true for the work of Toni Cade Bambara, Sandra Cisneros, and Helena María Viramontes, with critics emphasizing gender and race or ethnicity at the exclusion or obscuration of class despite these authors’ attention to class as it is lived through other categories. Because literary critics often leave out class from their many discussions of gender, race/ethnicity, and/or sexuality, I organize this study thematically to illustrate how emphasizing gender in its intersection with sexuality (Feinberg), race (Bambara) or ethnicity (Cisneros and Viramontes) but not also class partitions out identity and experience, which disables rather than fosters dialectical methods. Critics such as Paul Lauter, Janet Zandy, and Michelle Tokarczyk among others have called for the need to insert class back into the triumvirate and, in doing so, have demonstrated what is gained by reading female and racial/ethnic/sexual identity and experience from a working-class perspective. These scholars have yet to make explicit for literary critics, however, what social scientists have long understood: that women and minorities increasingly comprise a working-class that is disenfranchised to various degrees because deindustrialization and globalization changed the nature of blue collar work and its workforce. Understanding the class component of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, for example, has more to do, then, with simply Cisneros’s identification as working-class. If we read class as significant to Cisneros’s novel for what it says about identity but also for the effect globalizing the economy has had on the more disadvantaged members of the working-class, then critics must revise their ideas about class before they insert it into the triumvirate. It makes little difference if critics include class in their discussions but continue to understand it in reductive ways. This is why, for instance, I have also organized this study chronologically, beginning with Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as the novel documents the rise and fall of U.S. industry and the consequences of deindustrialization for working-class butches by 1970. Published in 1993 at the height of identity politics, Stone Butch Blues also offers a competing model for gay civil rights: one radical and proletarian in its orientation and the other

4 localized around narrowly defined interests such as sexuality. Toni Cade Bambara’s early work, as it emerged out of 1970’s Black Nationalism and black feminism, also responds to these global shifts albeit indirectly. Like Feinberg, Bambara raises the specter of class conflict within minority groups and their politics, but her work largely represses rather than says directly the effect globalizing the economy has had on working-class Blacks – in this case weakened social and cultural networks in urban black families and communities. Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street alternately reveals and represses the effects of global shifts on working-class Chicano/as, even with the turn in the 1980’s away from class and toward discourse analysis. By the time Cisneros published Caramelo in 2002, a novel that reveals those complicated issues of class Cisneros repressed in House, Chicana feminist writers had already begun to argue that figurative return to the barrio as the basis for the Chicana feminist writer’s art could not alone exact social change at a time when most Chicano/as were increasingly exploited by the state. Helena María Viramontes published Under the Feet of Jesus in 1995 in the wake of anti- immigrant and anti-bilingual education initiatives. Because the increase of state power and the contingency of global capital are mutually reinforcing, however, 1995 also witnessed an influx of immigrants into flexible labor markets. Viramontes’s novel, as it centers on the experiences of Mexicano/a and Chicano/a migrant farm workers in California of the 1990’s, most clearly reflects the reality of blue collar work in the U.S.: that is no longer stable, secure, or mainstream. The novel also offers reasons for why blue collar workers remain invisible in the political economy even as they are exploited and disenfranchised (politically and economically.) Reading these texts alongside multiple and overlapping historical trajectories should enable critics to revise their definitions of “blue collar” and “working-class” in ways organizing these texts thematically, or even inserting class into the conversation, could not quite accomplish. Because this study is at the intersection of literary studies and the social sciences, I frame a discussion of the literature with a chapter that traces how deindustrialization and globalization coincided with changes in the nature of blue collar work and its workforce by the early 1970’s. I begin this chapter with the premise that two factors have shaped how literary critics understand class in the race/class/gender triumvirate: the first of these is an obscuration in shifts in blue collar work and its workforce; and the second is the turn in literary studies toward postmodernism and post-structuralism that displaced class analysis in favor of “culture.” Using these dynamics as my starting point, I demonstrate how women and minorities replaced the white and male industrial worker as “archetypal proletarians” in an economy where labor relations were more flexible. I also illustrate, as I turn to the work of Kathleen Arnold and Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins, how the feminization and racialization of blue collar work and its workforce (not seeing predominate types of low-wage work as “blue collar” and its workforce as “working-class”) have obscured the exploitation and disenfranchisement (political and economic) of the working-class in the “new” economy. This first chapter also understands these dynamics in light of what Barbara Ehrenreich calls the “discoveries” of the poor in the 1960’s and the working-class in the 1960’s and 1970’s, or how African Americans were “discovered” as a class of the poor and white men as the working-class following the Civil Rights Movement and 1968 Democratic National Convention. For Ehrenreich, the Civil Rights Movement made poverty visible to middle-class liberals even though the majority of people in poverty were then, as they are today, white and the Civil Rights Movement did not represent the interests of only the poor as many of its leaders were of the black middle-class. Legislative measures such as former President Johnson’s Great Society programs and the War on Poverty in particular were directed to the black poor, and as liberals

5 became preoccupied with a “culture” of poverty, these new measures did not address the real causes of economic inequality. In treating poverty as a social rather than structural issue, Great Society programs did little to challenge central features of American capitalism. These programs, given their narrow scope, furthered divided the working-class and became, by 1968 and 1970, sources of resentment among working-class whites. The Democratic National Convention and hard hat riots in May of 1970, both of which led to the media’s “discovery” of the “silent majority” or working-class, confirmed for liberal media analysts that they no longer represented the “ordinary man” and his interests. What the media “discovered” in the working- class in these decades was not the greatest wave of labor militancy since the 1940’s but a working-class suited to their mood: conservative, reactionary, and bigoted (Ehrenreich 101). Given my focus on the working-class in the wake of global shifts, I emphasize in this first chapter how the “discovery” of the working-class as the bastion of white and reactionary men is undermined by the changing composition of the working-class and by working-class radicalism in these decades. My discussion of the hard hat riots, for example, takes it cue from the work of labor historians Phillip Foner and Peter Levy, both of whom have questioned why the hard hat became a stand-in for the working-class and its interests, or why the hard hat riots became reflective of the turbulence of the 1960’s and 1970’s. In drawing on these historians’ work, I briefly turn to how the 1970’s were a period of collaborative between the Old and New Left, in particular how trade-unionists and student demonstrators against the war in Vietnam marched together on picket lines and at anti-war demonstrations throughout these years. I also demonstrate how, given shifts in the nature of blue collar work and its workforce at this time, the hard hat as stand-in for the working-class was an outdated model that gave rise to reductive ideas about class. The concluding sections of this chapter place these multiple trajectories also in the context of a postmodern turn in the 1980’s, the “glimmerings” of which began as early as the 1970’s. In my discussion of postmodernism and post-structuralism, I turn to Terry Eagleton’s After Theory to illustrate the irony of turning away from class at a time when class analysis became all the more relevant. My discussion of social politics movements in the 1960’s through 1980’s highlights how these movements did what postmodern and post-structuralist critics ceased to do: they sharpened and deepened Marxism with “cultural theory.” I use historical dynamics to frame this study because they force literary critics to shift their understanding of what it means to be working-class in the U.S. in light of global shifts. If critics can begin to understand that the nature of blue collar work and its workforce shifted in the early 1970’s, then they can also begin to excavate writing by women and minorities of/from the working-class for its repressed proletarian content. In doing this work, critics will arrive at an understanding of “race, class, gender” closer to how it is lived – not as autonomous categories of socioeconomic organization but as the total set of interrelations that condition and shape identity in its many intersections. The authors whose work I examine in this study eschewed postmodern tendencies for fragmentation, which is to say that they rejected the idea that women organize their lives around discrete units, e.g. “this part is about race, this part is about class, this part is about women’s identities.” In my reading of these authors’ work, I privilege the need to see both sides of the dialectical simultaneously: not Chicana or working-class, for example, but both. In each of the “literary” chapters (the work explored here is as much literary as it is historical, as much esthetic as it is political), I begin my highlighting the author’s involvement in and contribution to social politics movements and their “cultural wings,” including how these authors revised Marxism and Anglo feminism by articulating the “real” race/class/gender situation. I begin with Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues for the way it documents the U.S.

6 economy’s shift away from its industrial base in the early 1970’s. I explore in this second chapter how the protagonist’s lived experience with class, gender, and sexuality is such that she finds work in factories typically reserved for biological males and, when the factories begin to close, passes as a man for safety and employment. (Service work is not an option for a butch.) Unlike other critics of the novel, I read gender consciousness in Stone Butch Blues by placing it within a larger class context. In other words, I understand the protagonist’s decision to pass, for example, as circumstantially motivated or how, with deindustrialization eliminating work for butches, the protagonist takes hormones only after she is left without work. This is not to suggest, however, that I ignore how hormones allow the protagonist to explore what of her seems masculine; rather, I examine this trans identity as it is informed by the protagonist’s being of the working-class. I turn to the protagonist’s experiences with class as a transgendered butch to also understand the model of gay liberation Feinberg advances by the close of the novel. The model Feinberg presents, based on union organizing and its slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all,” takes its cue not from gay and lesbian organizations localized around single-issues but from success butches achieved in factories and on picket lines. In many ways, Feinberg offered this model because it had become apparent by 1993 that national gay and lesbian organizations had lost sight of their radical vision. In the wake of corporate globalization, and as many queer and transgendered people suffer particularly hard in the “new” economy, Feinberg suggests with Stone Butch Blues that the time has come to put class analysis back on the agenda. Toni Cade Bambara offered the same charge to young Black Nationalists who tried to direct the focus of the movement away from its radical proletarian basis and toward a superficial commitment to aesthetics. In the third chapter of this study, I turn to Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love to suggest that “generation gaps” between old and young (some Black Nationalists, some not) in the stories “Gorilla, My Love,” “My Man Bovanne,” and “The Lesson” are symptomatic of class divisions within urban black families and communities. By the time Bambara published Gorilla, My Love in 1972, deindustrialization and globalization had altered social and cultural networks that had long sustained African American families and communities under segregation. The resilient black family critics read as central to Gorilla, My Love starkly contrasts, then, with what the narrative alternately reveals and represses, namely conflicts of interest between a fledging black middle-class and its working-class “center.” Because, as Patricia Hill Collins has argued, black civil society became more stratified by social class in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the problems many African Americans faced were not due solely to racial discrimination. Bambara’s “My Man Bovanne” and “The Lesson” reveal and repress these structural and cultural changes, in part why critics interested in the resilient black family of Gorilla, My Love have yet to address these stories. (Class conflict within black families and communities does little to support the idea of a resilient black family and community.) I also turn in this chapter to the collection’s title story because, even in the story most anthologized and discussed by critics, “Gorilla, My Love” represses social and cultural networks weakened by global shifts and a changed political climate of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The reason I offer as to why Bambara mostly represses or vaguely alludes to these weakened social and cultural networks is because this is a history that has hurt African Americans. If Bambara’s collection is a response to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the black family and its so-called social pathologies, as Elizabeth Muther argues, then it is also a symptom of this history, manifested in her collection between what is revealed and what is repressed. Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street invites the same method of reading as Bambara’s collection, except that Cisneros never had to defend the strength of the Chicano/a

7 family as it had not come under attack like the black family did in the 1960’s. Because Chicano/a families and communities were not the subject of liberal pathologizing in these years, Cisneros is more able to articulate in classed terms the effect deindustrialization and globalization had on urban Chicano/as and Latino/as. The fourth chapter of this study turns to Cisneros’s House from within the context of global shifts and their consequences for working- class Chicano/as, but also from within the context of postmodernism and post-structuralism. As with other Chicana feminists, Cisneros eschewed these discourses as her novel presents space as material geopolitical issues and not “signifying spaces.” I argue in this chapter that in reading space in House as Cisneros’s appropriation of the “word” in the Anglo American house of fiction, critics ignore Cisneros’s reference for “house”/House: three-floor flats and a fear of rats. In emphasizing how space in Cisneros’s novel is racialized, gendered, and classed as is the protagonist’s idea of herself, I demonstrate how the space/self Esperanza creates by the close of the novel carries with it the weight of Esperanza’s responsibility to the barrio and its residents. In House, Cisneros confronts myths of upward mobility as her protagonist does not leave the barrio, either literally or figuratively. When Esperanza says in the concluding vignette that she will leave but come back for the ones left behind, for the “ones who cannot out,” Cisneros is clear that Esperanza’s writerly “I” is not the single, solitary I of the middle-class writer but the “I/we” of the working-class-aligned writer. Esperanza’s/Cisneros’s work, then, is intended to be useful, to have agency in the life of barrio residents. Although Esperanza recognizes by the close of her narrative that she has a responsibility to the barrio, the novel ends without Esperanza having fully exchanged her shame for a celebration of being female, Chicana, and working-class. The concluding sections of chapter four address Cisneros’s most recent novel, Caramelo, because the novel more clearly brings into focus those issues Cisneros omitted or alluded to in House, namely economic diversity within families and migration to the U.S. in search of work. Furthermore, I turn to Caramelo because, in performing the work a younger writer could not do, Cisneros spares her protagonist Esperanza’s confusion, enabling her to abandon her shame. Sandra Cisneros said of Helena María Viramontes’s work that it remains steadfastly focused on the most “reviled and dispossessed of Chicanos.” What Cisneros meant in her review of Viramontes’s 2007 Their Dogs Came with Them is how Viramontes maintains an unflinching gaze on the most exploited and disenfranchised of Chicano/as: homeless people, gang members, sweatshop workers, and, as is the case in Under the Feet of Jesus, migrant farm workers. The fifth chapter of this study examines Under the Feet of Jesus for the way Viramontes assaults low-wage strategies and state measures against migrants. As I began this study with Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and the way the novel documents this shift away from industry to service and agricultural work and unskilled manufacturing, I end with Under the Feet of Jesus because the novel most clearly reflects the consequences of this shift: non-unionized contingent work without benefits, deregulation, and unsafe working and living conditions. For the protagonist of Under the Feet of Jesus, “it was always a question of work” – her family, as they move from one migrant camp to the next, is constantly moving but perpetually “stuck.” In Viramontes’s novel, the American Southwest is not the mythical Aztlán Chicano nationalists envisioned in the 1960’s. Rather, it is a landscape colonized like migrants themselves. Unlike critic Dan Latimer, who insisted that Viramontes is less concerned in Under the Feet of Jesus with “what the system has done to the Chicano” as she is with apologizing to migrants for leaving the fields, I read Viramontes’s novel as an assault on these interlocking systems of domination, primarily that of globalization/neoliberal policies and its use of migrants as “ideal” workers in an economy where labor relations are more flexible. My reading of Under

8 the Feet of Jesus privileges Viramontes’s response to these systems of domination, particularly as her young protagonist employs “tools” to “tear down, rebuild, and repair” them. I also conclude with Under the Feet of Jesus because Viramontes’s emphasis on tools suggests for critics that they, too, must employ the texts explored here as tools for social action. Because the authors examined in this study saw no demarcation between writer and audience and between esthetic and political intent, critics must understand this work for what it does, not simply for it presents about identity and experience. In the conclusion to this study, I use the premise of the previous chapters to suggest, as Leslie Feinberg and Helena María Viramontes did in the 1990’s, that the time has come to put class analysis back on the agenda – both for literary studies and for identity politics movements. I demonstrate in this conclusion, as I turn to the progressive trade-union movement and recent shifts in identity politics movements, that the need to confront and reimagine existing political-economic systems is as urgent today as it was in the 1960’s through 1980’s, if not more so. In asking what identity politics movements have done to her politics, Cathy Cohen argues that liberal policies of inclusion must be replaced by class analysis as inclusion by itself will not make things different. Hazel Carby made a similar argument in the 1990’s when she cautioned professors and university administrators not to use “multiculturalism” or multicultural curriculum as substitutes for social change. If critics invested in “multicultural” literature can excavate much of this writing for its working-class content, then they can begin to practice theorizing about identity closer to how it is lived. I end this work by proposing the classroom as one of the most revolutionary places for change to occur. My conclusion demonstrates, as it draws on working-class students’ calls to put class on the syllabus, that emphasizing class as it is lived through race, gender, and sexuality and even ability helps to redress inequalities of power. When all students can recognize themselves in the text, or when they might find in it “use,” they gain the tools needed to “tear down, rebuild, and repair” the many systems by which they exploited. In other words, they demonstrate how identity might, once again, form the basis of a progressive politics that has as its axis class struggle and social change.

9

Chapter One The White and Male Hard-Hat as Stand-In for the Working-Class: Invisible Female and Minority Labor in the “New” Economy

On November 3, 1969 then President Richard Nixon outlined to American television viewers his policy of “Vietnamization”: that the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam would be reduced but that they would continue fighting. Near the close of his speech, Nixon called upon the “great silent majority” of “honest and patriotic Americans” for support of his policy.1 That same year a Nixon aide identified this “silent majority’’ as a potential Republican voter bloc comprised of Americans who did not join in anti-war demonstrations, did not participate in the countercultural movement at the time, and did not participate in public discourse. In turning to these Americans, Nixon did more than ask for their support of “Vietnamization.” He also rhetorically constructed the “silent majority” as politically and ideologically opposed to student demonstrators, middle-class liberals, and, in his words, the “militant minorities” of the 1960’s. If the “silent majority” did not include these groups, Nixon’s rhetoric determined, then it more closely resembled a conservative white and male working-class. It is this definition of the “silent majority” that Nixon popularized in November of 1969. Two months prior to Nixon’s address, both Newsweek and TV Guide published articles on this “silent majority.”2 Understanding the media’s fascination with “Middle Americans,” or as they were later known as a small segment of conservative white working-class men, requires of critics that they acknowledge what Barbara Ehrenreich calls the “discoveries” of the poor in the 1960’s and the working-class in the late 1960’s and again in the early 1970’s. Ehrenreich’s book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle-Class offers a telling account of the way popular ideas about class were shaped in these decades. As Ehrenreich observes, the Civil Rights Movement made poverty visible to liberal policymakers and critics such that poverty became associated with African Americans while, by 1969, the working-class became synonymous with white men and, sometimes, white women. These “discoveries,” however historically inaccurate they were, both confirmed in the public imagination a conceptual split between those in poverty (African Americans) and the working-class (whites) and reified ideas that abuses against these groups were separate and distinct processes. Notwithstanding the fact that poverty is not a class but a condition that affects the more disadvantaged members of the working-class, middle-class liberals (many of whom became neoconservatives in the 1970’s and 1980’s) persisted in their thinking that African Americans belonged to a class of the poor and that whites primarily made up the working-class.3 The irony of these “discoveries” of the poor and working-class is that they emerged at a time when most people in poverty were then, as they are today, white, and the nature of blue collar work and its workforce shifted as a result of changes in the global economy. Simply put, “discovering” the poor as African American and the working-class as white and male further obscured the political and economic disenfranchisement of the working-class in the wake of global shifts. In this chapter, I turn to Ehrenreich’s central premise of Fear of Falling to explain why policymakers

1 “Nixon’s Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam: The ‘Silent Majority’ Speech.” Watergate Info. 21 April 2010. http://www.watergate.info/nixon/silent-majority-speech-1969.shtml. 2 Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle-Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. 164. 3 My use of the phrase “middle-class liberals” is not to paint a broad brushstroke of the middle-class. In much the same way white working-class men represent only a small segment of the working-class, liberal policymakers and the media from these decades represent only a fraction of the middle-class and its attitudes. 10 and critics – in both the early 1970’s and today – rely on reductive ideas about class, or why the white and male industrial worker continues to act as a stand-in for the working-class despite global shifts. I also demonstrate, by calling attention to these shifts and their consequences for the working-class, how pernicious it is to racialize and/or feminize blue collar work and its workforce, particularly at this moment in U.S. history. As a literary critic, I understand this conceptual split between the poor and working-class as cause for two things: first, that “social politics” (presumably the domain of minorities) and “class politics” (presumably the domain of white working-class men) are understood as mutually exclusive; and second, when coupled with ideological shifts toward postmodernism and post-structuralism, class is either ignored in the race/class/gender triumvirate or is reduced to race and/or gender.

The “Discoveries” of the Poor and Working-Class: How We Understand Class in the U.S. Because “helping” the poor seemed easier than addressing the issue of civil rights for African Americans, liberal policymakers and critics in the 1960’s took up the cause of ending poverty; however, the objective problem of poverty got lost in the challenge to end it as middle- class liberals, including Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, turned their attention to a “culture” of poverty characterized by dependence and helplessness. Rather than to focus on the structural inequalities of poverty, or the low wages and un/underemployment that cause it, policymakers and critics instead recognized in the poor a distinct “culture” that needed eliminating. In the middle-class liberal imagination, the poor (here African Americans) lacked the skills and behavioral traits needed to compete in an era of post-war growth and, in an effort to turn the poor into consumers, middle-class liberals directed much of their energy to social programs aimed at changing values or culture but not economics. Ira Katznelson, for example, has found Johnson’s Great Society Programs and the War on Poverty in particular as social rather than economic in their orientation. In other words, for Katznelson, the treatment of poverty as a technical rather than structural issue meant that neither economists nor social policy experts “understood poverty in terms of basic conflicts of class interest; the central issue was not one of redistribution or of conflicting interests between the poor and the better-off” (202). Thus, the War on Poverty, ironically, did not challenge central features of American capitalism. By accusing the poor of lacking ascetic values of hard work and self-sacrifice, or values apparently needed to compete in a post-war economy of growth, liberal policymakers and critics pathologized the poor as they ultimately let capitalists off the hook. When class is understood in terms of income rather than power, capitalists often disappear into the “rich” and the working- class into the lower- or middle-classes. The poor were “discovered” in the 1960’s largely because middle-class liberals like Presidents Kennedy and Johnson uncovered what Ehrenreich calls a “painful paradox,” or “an anomaly of poverty in a world of affluence” (43). Suddenly aware of poverty, highlighted albeit in conflicting ways by the Civil Rights Movement, liberal policymakers and critics felt roused to end poverty, but their need stemmed not from any signaling on the part of the poor but from their own fears of the decay of cultural investment in ascetic values. In trying to eliminate this fictive “culture” of poverty rather than addressing the objective problem of it, the Great Society represented a lost opportunity. Although most people in poverty were white and the Civil Rights Movement did not represent the interests of only the poor as many of its leaders were of the black middle-class, liberal policymakers and critics focused much of their attention on African Americans in the 1960’s, with Johnson’s Great Society Programs directed to the black poor. The “discovery” of the poor in the 1960’s as an African American “underclass” (the term did not gain currency until

11

1977) had implications for the “discovery” of the working-class in 1969 and again in the early 1970’s.4 Furthermore, theorizing about the poor as a separate class of African Americans rather than as the more unfortunate members of the working-class ensured that programs such as the War on Poverty would assist only a disadvantaged minority. Many working-class whites became resentful of black gains in the 1960’s but not because they were more inclined to racism. Given the narrow scope of liberal social programs, white working-class people felt socially invisible – feelings Richard Nixon relied on for his 1972 bid for the Presidency. Ultimately, the “discovery” of the poor as an African American “underclass” reduced the working-class rhetorically to a class separate from the poor: if the poor came to mean African Americans, then the working-class consisted of whites who did not experience poverty. The reality of the nature of blue collar work and its workforce at this time is that it had already begun to shift as U.S. interests became increasingly economic. Yet as constructed the working-class remained in the public imagination largely white and male and its work primarily concentrated in industrial sectors with unions. The ideological shift toward neoliberalism or free-market capitalism in these years accompanied a second kind of shift: some middle-class liberals became neoconservatives in an attempt to discredit the New Left. In attributing poverty with social permissiveness (liberalism in this formulation), neoconservatives blamed middle- class liberals for encouraging a “culture” of poverty among the poor. Because middle-class liberals had aligned themselves with what they thought of as the poor (African Americans), neoconservatives turned their attention to the working-class – “Middle Americans” – who, ironically, neoconservatives aligned with capitalists (but not in any Marxist sense.) By the late 1960’s, African Americans, students, and middle-class liberals were the only “newsworthy” subjects (Ehrenreich 102). All this changed, however, in 1968 and again in 1969 and 1970 when a small segment of the working-class responded indignantly to middle-class liberals and their claim, real or perceived, to represent the “ordinary man” and his interests. A poll conducted after the 1968 Democratic National Convention showed that 56% of Americans sympathized with the police who beat student demonstrators and newspaper reporters rather than students or the media (99). In response to this statistic, the media moved to correct its biases: attention now shifted to “Middle Americans,” with Newsweek and TV Guide publishing articles on the latter in September of 1969. Also in 1969, Time magazine ran a news story on the “great silent majority,” with the white working-class as stand-in for “Middle Americans.” The media’s fascination with a working-class it imagined as largely conservative and white helps explain why, by 1970, the working-class became in the media a vanguard for the Right. Despite voting patterns and shifts in blue collar work and its workforce that dismantled rather than affirmed the emergence of the working-class as white and conservative, the media continued to understand the working-class in these very terms.5 The hard hat riots in New York City in May of 1970 seemed to confirm the media’s image of the working-class as white, male,

4 The term “underclass” is problematic for a number of reasons. As both William Julius Wilson and Michael Zweig have argued, “underclass” (a class somehow below the working-class) implies the existence of a class of people who do not work or are not actively seeking work. Furthermore, in using the term to mean only African Americans, focus shifts from structural inequalities that cause poverty (the disappearance of work, for example) to race alone as cause for the current environment of the inner-city. For more on Wilson’s work on African Americans and poverty in the inner-city, see Wilson’s book When Work Disappears. New York: Knopf, 1996. xiii. 5 In her essay “The Silenced Majority: Why The Average Person Has Disappeared from American Media and Culture,” Ehrenreich maintained that “statistically and collectively, the working class is far more reliably liberal than the professional middle-class. It was more, not less, opposed to the war in Vietnam. It is more, not less, likely to vote for a Democratic president”(41). 12 and conservative, except now the media saw the working-class as also hostile towards students, the professional middle-class, and African Americans. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Joshua Freeman have argued, the hard hat riots became for media analysts the final wedge between the Old Left (labor) and the New Left (middle-class liberalism).6 The events of that day, and the media’s presentation of them, present conflicting stories, in part because media analysts did not question either the cause of the riots or the fact that this group of helmeted construction workers represented only a small segment of the working-class and its interests. In May of 1970, the media witnessed hundreds of construction workers storm Wall Street in defense of Nixon’s pro-war agenda, attacking student demonstrators and bystanders and denouncing Mayor Lindsay as a communist. At the outset, it is easy to see why the media would view the riots as the final wedge between organized labor and middle-class liberalism: rioters’ actions reflected the adamant defense for the war shown by labor leaders such as then AFL-CIO president George Meany. Yet Meany did not stand in for organized labor so much as the rioters were not stand-ins for the working-class. Historians Phillip Foner and Peter Levy have demonstrated how labor leaders initially supported the war effort because they believed that the war in Vietnam was good for economics and thus for the labor movement.7 With the exception of Meany and a small minority in the AFL-CIO, labor leaders quickly realized that the war in Vietnam would not benefit labor or a larger working-class constituency. The media, however, continued to focus on Meany as the face of organized labor and its interests, while the rioters became under the media’s watchful eye representative of their race and class. For the construction workers who stormed Wall Street, the riots satisfied working- class whites’ demands for social visibility. Their anger, much of it misdirected at African Americans and students, cannot be explained away as simply working-class whites’ “natural” inclination for racism or conservatism. Many of the rioters had sons drafted to fight in the Vietnam War and viewed the student demonstrators and their support of the Vietnamese as an affront to their sons who were dying in Vietnam while the demonstrators were free to protest. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the rioters had the most to lose when Johnson’s Great Society programs integrated the building trades. Joshua Freeman, for example, has identified increased competition between black and white workers as one cause for working- class whites’ anger toward African Americans during the riots (773). It was easy for middle-class liberals, who did not have to vie for construction jobs, to ignore the riots as a structural issue and instead the result of individual (or collective) preferences. White working-class anger or resentment toward African Americans in particular likely was far more the result of antagonisms arising out of a split-labor market than any class- specific political inclination. In the early 1970’s, sociologist Edna Bonacich suggested that ethnic and racial antagonism, as well as gendered or sexual tension, often has roots in split-labor markets, which segment the labor force along lines of ethnicity/race, pitting two distinct groups against each other as competitors for the same jobs, often for different wages.8 White construction workers should have been angry with capitalists rather than black workers, but this is not how capitalism works. In presenting to white workers the issue of integration in racial

6 For more on Freeman’s reading of the riots, see his essay “Hardhats: Construction Workers, Manliness, and the 1970 Pro-War Demonstrations.” Journal of Social History. 5:1 (June 1993): 725-44. 7 Levy, Peter. The New Left and Labor in the 1960s. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994. 41. 8 For more on split-labor market theory, see Bonacich’s essay “A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split-Labor Market” in American Sociological Review. 37 (1972): 547-59. 13 rather than class terms, building trade employers counted on racial tension to keep wages low. (After all, it is easier to hire/fire workers than pay all workers the same wage.) In the media, specifically The New York Times, class conflict as cause for the riots became lost as media analysts could not imagine actual causes for white working-class anger or resentment. The riots, then, were presented as spillovers of working-class whites’ racism and conservatism. Barbara Ehrenreich, Joshua Freeman, Peter Levy, and Phillip Foner have all agreed that following the riots the hard hat became a stand-in for the working-class and its interests. “In no time at all,” Ehrenreich observes, “the hard hat became the archetypal proletarian” (Fear 107). If Americans were not convinced that working-class men were white, conservative, and deeply reactionary, Norman Lear’s All in the Family, which premiered a year after the riots, confirmed what many Americans thought of working-class whites. Archie Bunker, the show’s lead character, closely resembled the rioters in his outlook on the war and his opinions about women and minorities. Joe Allen, a columnist for the Socialist Worker online, said of Archie Bunker that he “most solidified the popular stereotype of the white working-class man as a bastion of reaction.”9 Despite the fact that the rioters were only a small segment of blue collar workers, historically and especially by 1970, their image as made famous by Archie Bunker continued to dominate popular and critical discourses on the working-class. If the hard hat riots offered the final wedge between the Old and New Left, then it was because the riots were presented in the media as representative of organized labor and its goals. For media analysts, George Meany’s pro-war sentiment and regressive authoritarianism positioned labor as diametrically opposed to student demonstrators, middle-class liberals, and radical minority groups. This logic determined that if students, liberals, and “militant minorities” were committed to social justice and equality, then labor (now exclusively the bastion of white working-class men) was decidedly against such liberalism. Phillip Foner and Peter Levy, however, have questioned why the hard hat riots came to reflect the turbulence of the 1970’s, or why the hard hat became a stand-in for labor and a larger working-class constituency. Both historians agree that while the New Left had become critical of labor by 1970, the 1970’s were also a time of collaboration between the Old and New Left. Trade unionists and student anti-war demonstrators collaborated on picket lines and at marches throughout the 1960’s. (The 1965 Delano grape strike should come to mind). In 1969, backed by the United Auto Workers and the United Farm Workers among other unions, trade unionists and students orchestrated a Vietnam War Moratorium and, one month later, marched on Washington to speak out against the war. Like Moratorium Day, the November 15 demonstrations revealed, Foner insists, “growing unity of labor and peace forces” (90). Six month after the march on Washington, helmeted construction workers stormed Wall Street. Yet 1970 also witnessed an increase in strikes, namely “wildcat” and runaway strikes, and rejections of contracts drawn up between labor leaders and industry (93). For the first time since World War II, the working-class was in revolt – this time against union officials like Peter Brennan (the man Foner believes to have directed hard hats in the march) and labor leaders like Meany who tried to “exercise restraint” at the bargaining table. Foner has maintained, in fact, that U.S. workers were generally not in favor of the “unchanging support the AFL-CIO leadership had given to the policy of escalation” (96), in part because of rising inflation caused by the war. Throughout the early 1970’s, New Leftists realized that ending the war would require mobilizing the working-class. Returning to the spirit of collaboration with labor that marked the

9 Allen, Joe. “Television’s Buffoons and Bigots.” Socialist Worker. 14 May 2008. 14 April 2009. http://socialistworker.org/print/2008/05/14/loveable-buffoons. 14

1960’s, New Leftists brought into the anti-war movement considerable segments of trade unionists by 1973 (93). For many trade unionists, the anti-war and countercultural movements offered a way to resist the system. Stanley Aronowitz, for example, found at GM Lordstown in Ohio young workers wearing their hair long to protest the totalitarian regime of the factory. When a Nixon aide identified in the “silent majority” their resistance to anti-war and countercultural movements, he/she must have overlooked a working-class increasingly vocal about its interests. In reality, blue collar workers marched against the war, participated in the countercultural movement (in fact, Aronowitz found them to do so long after students abandoned the cause), and, during the 1970’s, went on strike in unprecedented numbers. This working-class was decidedly not the working-class “discovered” by the mainstream media.

Hard Hat No More: Shifts in Blue Collar Work and Its Workforce It is curious that media analysts should “discover” the working-class as white and male at the very moment when the U.S. economy shifted away from its industrial base and its blue collar workforce became increasingly comprised of women and minorities. Although white working- class men were “ideal” blue collar workers prior to 1970, women and minorities have long made up the working-class but have been among its most disadvantaged members. Because women and minorities have been primarily concentrated in service and agricultural sectors, in part because sexism and racism have exacerbated their economic situations, both groups replaced white men as “ideal” when the U.S. economy shifted away from industry. With this shift, the nature of blue collar work and its workforce changed – in the “new” economy, women and minorities, not the white and male industrial worker, were “archetypal proletarians.” Because policymakers and critics continue to rely on reductive ideas about class based on outdated models of the white and male industrial worker, blue collar work and its workforce have been racialized and/or gendered such that “subsistence” level work is not recognized as blue collar and its workforce as working-class. In other words, service or agricultural work is not recognized as real work and those performing it are identified by biological characteristics, e.g. women, African Americans or Latinos, but not as workers. For Kathleen Arnold, racializing and/or gendering blue collar work and its workforce further obscures the political and economic disenfranchisement of the working-class at a time when the state has strengthened its exercise of prerogative power – state action outside the law – over its more disadvantaged members (3). “In this way,” Arnold insists, “sovereign power and the contingency of global capital are mutually reinforcing” (3). The rise of free-markets, then, has necessarily accompanied more intensive economic exploitation than in the past fifty years. Deindustrialization began in the U.S. as early as the 1950’s, although social scientists generally recognize 1970 as the year the U.S. shifted away from industry and toward service and agricultural work and unskilled manufacturing. Lizabeth Cohen, for example, has challenged notions that the late 1950’s and 1960’s were periods of postwar growth for the working-class. Following the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which curbed union power and threatened workers’ collective bargaining rights, blue collar workers lost many of the gains made by unions in the previous decades. By the 1950’s and with union membership at its lowest since the 1930’s, the white and male industrial worker as icon for postwar growth sharply contrasted with the actual lives of American workers in the postwar period. As Cohen explains, “the integration of working-class Americans into the mass middle-class did not necessarily reflect the reality of working-class life, nor how working-class people viewed it” (155). Working-class people often disappear into the lower- or middle-class when class is understood in terms of income rather than

15 power. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, blue collar workers may have had middling incomes (their buying power, however, had weakened because of the war), but they did not change classes, nor did they adopt middle-class values and attitudes.10 One reason as to why liberal policymakers and critics “lost” the working-class in the 1960’s is because they integrated the working-class into a mass middle-class, leaving behind only a vast “underclass” of African Americans. While is true that the U.S. experienced sustained economic growth in the period from 1945 until the early 1970’s, working-class Americans’ wages were on the decline in these years and stable jobs began to disappear. The decline of traditional manufacturing jobs, much like increased consumerism in the 1950’s and 1960’s, did not signal the disappearance of the working-class. Instead, and as the U.S. economy underwent restructuring, blue collar work and its workforce shifted. By 1970, economic growth in the U.S. had slowed as the prolonged war in Vietnam led to gross inflation. In response to this perceived “crisis of profitability” (Eisenstein 23), the U.S. now turned away from industry in an effort to complete on a more global scale. This shift, matched by an ideological shift toward neoliberalism or free-market capitalism, ensured that many first and Third World workers would suffer particularly hard in this “new” economy. In Third World countries, women were frequently recruited to work in textile industries once housed the U.S. Because factory owners often outsourced labor overseas, a large percentage of U.S. workers were left without stable employment. From the 1940’s until the 1960’s, blue collar work often meant full-time and stable work with good wages and union benefits. With deindustrialization and globalization, however, the nature of blue collar work changed as did those performing it. White and male industrial workers, once “ideal” in the “old” economy, now found themselves in more direct competition with women and minorities for low-tier work. Because they were no longer “ideal,” former white and male industrial workers cycled in and out of poverty as blue collar work (now no longer stable, secure, or mainstream) increasingly went to women and minorities, or those workers more easily exploited in this “new” global economy. The economy the U.S. entered after 1970 did not signal, as some believe, the emergence of a “post-industrial age.” Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins, for instance, find “post-industrial” problematic, in part because labor practices used in the “old” economy are routinely applied to “new” economy worksites. For these social scientists, “the fact that manufacturing opportunities have stagnated in the United States does not mean that the ways of working that developed in the old economy are on the path to disappearing as a result” (26). Like the working-class, who did not disappear with the decline of traditional manufacturing jobs, labor practices from the “old” economy were retained in the “new” albeit now with increased deregulation. Mass production, a practice often associated with traditional manufacturing, has been integrated into other sectors of the “new” economy including the rapidly growing service sector. The difference, of course, between labor practices in “old” and “new” economies is that in the “new” economy workers often do not have the recourse to challenge these policies when they become oppressive or coercive. With union membership at its lowest since the 1930’s and many employers hostile to unions, workers in the “new” economy lack most of the protections or opportunities once provided by low-tier work. These multiple trajectories – decline in manufacturing, weakening of unions, increased deregulation of worksites – have shaped the contours of work in the “new” economy at a time when prerogative power has increased, not waned. Neoconservatives would like us to believe that economic and political deregulation is

10 For more on working-class values, see Michele Lamont’s book The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Ethnicity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. 16 the most advantageous route, but this is only true for capitalists who are free to take business across borders, disrupt local economies, and exploit cheap labor sources. Because, as Kathleen Arnold insists, sovereign power and the contingency of global capital are mutually reinforcing, globalization has come at a cost – not benefit – to blue collar workers in the U.S. and abroad. If globalizing the economy accompanied shifts in the nature of blue collar and its workforce, then it has also led to the production of “informal economies,” or economies created outside traditional labor markets, e.g. drug trades. Generally, informal economies form because work disappears or new jobs are created but require a different set of skills. Drug trades, which often retain from traditional labor markets its practices, became an epidemic in the 1980’s and 1990’s largely because work disappeared from inner-cities. William Julius Wilson, for example, has identified deindustrialization as cause for many problems in the inner-city environment.11 When Wilson published his book When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, he came under attack from critical race scholars who thought Wilson focused too much on class and not enough on race. For these scholars, racism is the primary cause of economic inequality, but for Wilson it constitutes only one outcome. In attributing poverty and crime in the inner-city to structural issues (loss of work, low wages) as well as institutionalized racism, Wilson makes clear that abuses against inner-city residents – social and economic – are not separate and distinct processes. Kathleen Arnold has suggested about the War on Drugs that those targeted, mostly African American and Latino youth, “are significant elements of a new, more flexible labor pool” (5). As such, exploitation is necessarily social and economic; it involves, as Arnold maintains, “asymmetries of power such that workers are treated as less than citizens” (5). Nevertheless, the relation between the state and global capital is obscured, as is the possibility for exploitation (5). In her book on race, gender, and ethnicity in a “biopolitical age,” Arnold offers three reasons for why the connections between state power and global capital have been obscured as the groups most affected by this relation remain politically and economically disenfranchised in the “new” economy. Arnold begins by challenging assumptions that workers are politically enfranchised – that they are full citizens who choose their workplaces, their wages, and their conditions (5). The reasoning goes that if workers are politically enfranchised, they cannot be exploited on the job. Perhaps this would be more true if the nature of blue collar work and its workforce had not shifted. Given the restructuring of the economy and changes in its workforce, the working-class is disenfranchised to various degrees. Because women and minorities are disproportionately of the working-class, and because they have been disenfranchised historically, female and minority workers suffer particularly hard in the “new” economy – both politically and economically. White and male workers also suffer in this economy even as abuses against them go unnoticed. It is difficult to imagine the cause of exploitation when blue collar work is still conceived of as stable, secure, and mainstream. It is even more difficult to imagine exploitation to occur when those most affected by low-wage strategies are not recognized as blue collar workers. Another obfuscating factor for Arnold has been the assumption that when traditional manufacturing jobs disappeared so did the industrial working-class. White and male workers, who had made up the bulk of the industrial working-class, didn’t disappear but rather shifted to sectors where labor relations were more flexible. Many white men, however, saw service work as “women’s work.” Rather than be feminized by this work, these men chose joblessness over

11 For more on the state of the inner-city, see Wilson’s book When Work Disappears in particular. See also Wilson’s book The Declining Significance of Race. 17 loss of their masculinity. One reason as to why white and male workers saw service work in this way has to do with the feminization of service work, or, on the one hand the influx of poorer women into labor markets and on the other rising prejudice against male workers and African American men in particular. Ascetic values determine that work is full-time, well paid, masculine, fixed in one place, and regulated by law (108). According to this definition, service work (and agricultural and unskilled manufacturing) is not real work, which explains why blue collar work in the “new” economy has been racialized and feminized as have those performing it. The problem, however, when blue collar work and its workforce are racialized and feminized is that focus shifts away from how and why work has changed and the effect this restructuring has had on the working-class and its most disadvantaged members in particular. The third obfuscating factor Arnold raises is a direct result of the first two in that assumptions about work and its workforce have led “the media, academics, and policymakers [to] treat welfare and workfare recipients, poor immigrants, inner-city American-born minorities, and white men as radically different groups” (6). The growing participation of these groups into labor markets is not a distinct process from either the racialization and/or feminization of their labor or the tendency to blame these groups for creating unstable social and economic conditions. Policymakers and critics perceive women, immigrants, and minorities to create problems, but separate ones – welfare mother leech off the system while immigrants steal American-born jobs. Aside from pathologizing and/or criminalizing these groups, understanding women, minorities, and the “old labor aristocracy” (white men) as conceptually separate ensures that their exploitation remains hidden behind stereotypes attached to each group. When these groups are analyzed together, however, a different perspective emerges. Notwithstanding the fact that the working-class often share the same neighborhoods, intermarry, and move back and forth between one low-wage job to the next, groups that comprise the working-class compete with one another for the same jobs, often with similar conditions (8). In this way, these groups have more in common than policymakers and critics have acknowledged. Unfortunately, those belonging to the working-class often turn on one another rather than challenge employers or neoliberal policies that encourage their competition. Like policymakers and critics (or because of them?), the working-class also obscures its own exploitation by seeing itself as discrete units. Politicians and policymakers thrive on these divisions, but they are especially pernicious for the working- class, perhaps now more than ever. If the “discovery” of the working-class as white and male obscured the political and economic disenfranchisement of the working-class at a time of global shifts, then the rise of postmodernism and post-structuralism by the 1980’s furthered this exploitation as discourse and ideas replaced class as dominant modes of thought and analysis. The “first glimmerings” of postmodern culture (to use Terry Eagleton’s phrase) began in the early 1970’s – a time that also witnessed the media’s “discovery” of the working-class and both the global shifts and working- class radicalism that undermined this discovery.12 For postmodern and post-structuralist critics in the 1980’s, something had indeed shifted by 1970, and this shift had consequences for politics

12 Terry Eagleton defines “postmodern” in this way: “By ‘postmodern,’ I mean, roughly speaking, the contemporary movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism is skeptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends towards cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity, and heterogeneity” (13). 18 and culture. Shifts in the global economy were matched for these critics by an epistemological break, or the “death of the author” and distrust of “grand narratives” such as Marxism. By the 1970’s, Marxist criticism had already come under attack by critics (especially feminist ones) who accused Marxism of silence on issues of race, gender, and sexuality. (Both Terry Eagleton and Tim Libretti have rejected this claim, insisting that while Marxist criticism written prior to 1970 had been slow to address these issues, it had by no means ignored them.) Early postmodern and post-structuralist critics didn’t attack Marxism so much as try to find a way around it without quite leaving it behind (Eagleton 35). Terry Eagleton has argued, however, that by the 1980’s postmodern and post-structuralist critics did just this – they no longer sharpened and deepened Marxism with other theoretical models but instead displaced it (37). In no time at all culture (what Marxism appeared to lack) came to replace class analysis. Critics now focused on ethnicity, the body, and desire, for example, as Marxism no longer seemed relevant or necessary. Not all critics loosely defined as “cultural theorists,” of course, eschewed Marxism in favor of merely “culture.” Yet theoretical matrices created by Marxism and postmodernism were largely dismantled by the 1980’s as even Western Marxism – the school of criticism with affinities closest to traditional Marxist politics – shifted toward culture. Eagleton has located the cause for this shift in changes in politics: if postmodernism began as a way to keep politics alive when radicalism appeared to have waned, then Western Marxists shifted to culture because it offered them a political home from which to confront capitalism and the role culture now played in that system (31). Unfortunately, for Eagleton, “Western Marxism ended up as a somewhat gentrified version of its militant revolutionary forebears, academicist, disillusioned, and politically toothless” (31). Eagleton maintains, in fact, that Western Marxists passed onto cultural theorists this political impotence – Antonio Gramsci came to mean for these theorists “theories of subjectivity rather than workers’ revolution” (31). The same is also true for much literary criticism that takes politically and economically disenfranchised people as its subjects. In much the same way Marxist criticism cannot be considered complete if differences of race, gender, and sexuality are excluded from discussions of class, cultural studies (again, I use this term loosely) cannot be considered complete if questions of class are ignored or obscured. When postmodern and post-structuralist critics declared the author dead and Marxism no longer necessary in an age of advanced capitalism, they ignored how national economies hadn’t disappeared in the face of free-markets, nor, of course, had the proletariat. Rather, the 1980’s witnessed direct and insidious attacks on many first and Third World people in unprecedented numbers. (The advance of free-markets, after all, requires increased use of prerogative power.) It is curious, then, that postmodern and post-structuralist critics should deny agency to those theorized about (many of whom were women and minorities), or assume that Marxism had little or no relevance to their battles waged over ethnicity, the body, or desire. Hester Eisenstein, for example, has been critical of postmodern and post-structuralist claims that discourse, rather than class, has been the shaping agency of politics and culture (11). For Eisenstein, claiming the author dead should raise flags for critics focused on issues of nation, race, gender, or sexuality as Third World, female, and minority subjects had only recently begun to assert their agency. There is a danger in shifting focus away from class at a time when class analysis is more necessary than ever, namely because emphasizing “culture” at the expense of class further obscures the exploitation and disenfranchisement (political and economic) of those theorized about. Eisenstein and other material-feminist critics have been clear that when issues of inequality, for example, are framed in narrowly defined terms, e.g. racism or sexism, the material

19 realities of racism and sexism become lost. Hazel Carby made a similar observation when she said of multicultural scholarship that it would not achieve its progressive vision unless it worked to dismantle the systems, including capitalism, that frequently kept out many African American students from institutes of higher education.13 The problem with – not politics of – postmodernism and post-structuralism today is that their influence on much literary criticism has meant a tendency to talk about the nation or race or gender or sexuality or even ability (“culture”) without also talking about class talking about it in reductive ways.

Social Politics Movements of the 1960’s-1980’s: De Facto Working-Class Movements Because the economic and political realities facing the working-class at this moment in U.S. history demand of critics that the expose these realities, literature that takes the working- class as its subject requires of critics that that they do more than critique the destructive aspects of a culture’s definition of gender roles, for example. The influence of postmodern and post- structuralist criticism on literary studies has been that in the race/class/gender triumvirate class is either ignored or obscured in favor of cultural markers, e.g. race and gender. Given the emphasis in postmodernism on pluralism or heterogeneity, critics have focused much of their attention in recent years on literature “from the margins,” or literature that gained a foothold in the academy following social politics movements of the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s. For these critics, social politics movements ushered in a renewed interest in race, gender, and sexuality, primarily because “class” and “class politics” no longer seemed necessary or relevant. The irony, of course, is that these movements and their “cultural wings,” e.g. Black Arts Movement, Chicano Renaissance, were proletarian in their orientation. Furthermore, these movements emerged precisely in the decades when deindustrialization and globalization turned to many women and minorities as exploitable cheap labor sources. In excavating social politics movements for their repressed working-class content, I demonstrate cause for recognizing in much literature “from the margins” its working-class-specific concerns. There is an assumption on the part of some critics that social politics movements arose in response to the Left’s supposed failure to address issues of race, gender, and sexuality. The problem, however, with this kind of thinking is that it turns social politics movements into identity politics movements, or movements based on assumptions that construct shared traits that will count as markers of identity and distinguish traits that will count as “false consciousness.” In this way, progressive movements that have social identity as the basis for class struggle become reduced to movements localized around single identity categories, e.g. race or gender. Michael Zweig has argued, in fact, that identity politics increasingly meant in the 1980’s and 1990’s a focus on race, gender, and/or sexuality at the expense of class (Working Class Majority 53). One reason for this shift has to do with the postmodern turn in these decades. The other and more complicated reason involves the multiple trajectories I’ve identified: the “discoveries” of the poor as African American and working-class as white and an obscuration of shifts in the nature of blue collar work and its workforce by the early 1970’s. It is difficult to imagine how for many women and racial and sexual minorities “class politics” and “social politics” are mutually reinforcing when policymakers and the media presented these groups in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s as opposed to labor and its goals and the working-class as hostile to female and minority gains. (Barbara Ehrenreich has found, by contrast, that while working-class whites were resentful of black gains in the 1960’s, most were

13 For more on Carby’s charge for multicultural scholarship, see her essay “The Multicultural Wars” in Black Popular Culture. Gina Dent, Ed. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992. 187-199. 20 by no means hostile to government action on behalf of African Americans.14) Yet these social politics movements were de facto working-class movements for two reasons: first, the majority of people involved in the movement were of the working-class; and second, the goals of the movement revealed working-class concerns that were at once racialized, gendered, and sexualized. Even movements that were not self-consciously working-class were proletarian in their orientation. (1970’s Black Nationalism is a good example as its racial essentialism was essentially a bid for economic nationalism.) Many leaders in these social politics movements found Marxism lacking on matters of race, gender, or sexuality even as they shared with Marxism its radical affinities. In this way, these movements did what postmodern and post- structuralist criticism ceased to do: they sharpened and deepened theoretical matrices created by Marxism and progressive identity-based movements. Unlike a Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s that did not represent the interests of only the poor as many of its leaders were of the black middle-class, the Stonewall Rebellion, Black Nationalism and black feminism, The Chicano Movement and Chicana feminism were, in essence, working-class movements. Bill Mullen and Tim Libretti have made similar observations about Black Nationalism Chicana feminism respectively, turning to their leaders’ Left-led orientations and socialist political leanings as evidence for how these movements were not simply radical in their scope.15 Importantly, social politics movements also differed from earlier identity-based movements in their focus: integration was a valuable goal but not the expense of other issues most affecting the more disadvantaged members of the working- class. (1970’s Black Nationalists, in fact, eschewed integration and instead argued for a separate and unified black state.) El Movimiento may have begun in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement for African Americans, but leaders realized early on that integration by itself would not fundamentally change the many systems that oppressed and exploited most Chicano/as. If we situate social politics movements like El Movimiento in appropriate social and economic contexts, the push to dismantle racist patriarchal capitalist systems has as much to do with institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia as it does with deindustrialization and globalization – those changes in the U.S. economy that led to increased exploitation of most women and minorities. It is not coincidental that social politics movements emerged in the wake of global shifts, or that calls to confront and reimagine central features of American capitalism and the ideologies that reinforce it came at a time when capitalists increasingly turned to women and minorities as cheap sources of labor. Understanding these movements as simply social or cultural in their orientation ignores questions of why these movements formed when they did. This kind of thinking also reduces the significance of these movements to single identity categories or issues (Stonewall and sexuality, El Movimiento and ethnicity, etc.) rather than progressive movements based on identity as the axis for class struggle. The reality is that early social politics movements were closer to the Left than previously imagined. Even the 1960’s credo that the “personal is political” represents a challenge to the private/public distinction made under capitalism. Because women and minorities have been disproportionately of the working-class historically but especially after global shifts, their

14 Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle-Class. 104. 15 For more on Left-led orientations and socialist leanings of these social politics movements and their “cultural wings” (Black Arts Movement, Chicano Renaissance, etc.), see Mullen’s essay “Breaking the Signifying Chain: A New Blueprint for African American Literary Studies.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies. 47:1 (2001): 145-63. See also Libretti’s essay “Rethinking Class from a Chicana Perspective” in Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and Women of Color. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Ed. Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. 200-27. 21 politics have been informed by their working-class experiences and political concerns. From a Marxist perspective, the rise of social politics movements and their political inclinations are best explained by the alienation intrinsic to capitalist modes of production. In his work on black Marxism and its radical tradition, Cedric Robinson maintains that Marx and Engels believed alienation and the “extension of expropriation could result in a socialist revolution led by the industrial working classes” (317).16 I address in later chapters why social politics movements stalled or disbanded by the 1990’s. The simplest explanation is that many of these movements became special-interest groups no longer concerned with international proletarian solidarity. For Marx and Engels, early social politics movements would have represented a lost opportunity. Before identity politics recast race, gender, or sexuality as more significant than class, social politics movements had a progressive politics that used – and in fact was based on – identity as the axis for class struggle and social change. Bill Mullen’s and Tim Libretti’s work on early social politics movements reveals how these movements transformed identity or consciousness into a progressive force. In the European Marxist tradition, class consciousness has a primacy over other forms of mass ideology such as racism, sexism, and/or homophobia. One of the hallmarks of social politics movements is that they sharpened (and complicated) Marxist views on alienation: if the European industrial working-class could abolish capitalism because its alienation from the system exceeded that of other workers, then the alienation of women and minorities of the working-class far exceeded that of white workers. (It is important to keep in mind that women and minorities replaced the white and male industrial worker as “archetypal proletarians” by the early 1970’s.) In this way, social politics movements challenged the idea that class consciousness should necessarily come before other kinds of consciousness or even revolution. Robinson has argued, in fact, that in radical black traditions like Black Nationalism, race consciousness often led to class consciousness. Because social politics movements correctly pointed out how Marxism articulated a decidedly Western (white) view of alienation, they raised the specter that women and minorities were the negation of Western capitalism and not white workers. Another way to understand this is to consider that black consciousness or queer consciousness, for example, is a more privileged form of working-class consciousness. If the alienation of female or minority workers exceeds that of white workers, it is because being female or being African American allows women and/or minorities to more clearly see through and outside the structures that govern their lives under racist patriarchal capitalist systems. Of course, being female or African American does not always allow one to see through and outside these structures, as apparent in black and Third World feminists’ criticism of both Anglo feminism and Black Nationalism or El Movimiento. The more one is alienated from the system or bourgeois culture, the more he/she is able to recognize the system as oppressive or coercive. This is why, for example, black feminism and Chicana feminism gave new life to a stalled Black Nationalism and El Movimiento – the misogyny of male leaders threatened their ability to recognize how black and Chicana women were doubly (or triply) oppressed as members of an already racialized working-class minority. If black or queer consciousness alters perception to see through and outside the structures that govern and normalize people’s lives under capitalist regimes, then black liberation or queer liberation stands to undermine capitalism in radical ways. Leaders in social politics movements more clearly understood that true racial, gendered, and/or sexual liberation required the replacement of capitalism with systems that met the needs of most black and/or queer people.

16 Robinson defines alienation in this way: “the contradictions arising between that [capitalist] mode of production and the social relations accompanying it” (317). 22

For the lesbian transgendered trade-unionist Leslie Feinberg, the formation of this new system is contingent on a return to pre-capitalist societies where gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) people were honored and valued. As they shared in Feinberg’s criticism of capitalism as mutually reinforcing with mass ideology, Black Nationalists proposed “black capitalism” as a new solution for African Americans after integration aided in the weakening of social networks in inner-cities. (Integration provided for a more sizable black middle-class and its flight from the inner-city.) Not all Black Nationalists were convinced, however, that “black capitalism” would challenge central features of American capitalism. Bayard Rustin, for example, rejected black capitalism as new economic model because he believed it would reproduce practices that govern and normalize African Americans’ relations with one another under capitalism (455). Under “black capitalism,” Rustin surmised, a class of African Americans would replace white capitalists as the antagonists of U.S. and Third World Blacks. Rustin instead proposed that Black Nationalists organize around “liberal-labor-civil rights” coalitions as “the fundamental questions facing the Negro and American society alike were economic and social” (454). The workplace, then, represents one common ground for struggle as all African Americans regardless of class face discrimination in wage equality as a result of institutionalized racism.17 This is why, perhaps, Black Panther Fred Hampton turned his attention toward capitalists as the real enemy of black civil rights: modern capitalist relations normalize racist practices like wage inequality or segregated housing (480).18 With the exception of class-based critics, the liberal-labor-civil rights matrix Bayard Rustin and Fred Hampton offered to Black Nationalism has been obscured by criticism on the movement that emphasizes racial subjectivity (racial essentialism) over economic analysis and critique. It is important to keep in mind, as Bill Mullen reminds us, that Black Nationalism carried “the letter of black economic oppression and class struggle in the envelope of black essentialism” (151). For Mullen, racial authenticity became for Black Nationalists a barrier to and euphemism for class-based critique (152). The rise of black feminism in the 1970’s offers clues as to why racial authenticity (here racial essentialism) has its limits as a progressive force: not all African Americans experience race in the same or even similar ways. In much the same way class is lived through race, race is also lived through gender and/or sexuality. It makes little sense to separate out race from gender or race from class because people do not organize their lives around single identity categories. One of the hallmarks of black and Third World feminism is the insistence in these traditions on defining all the systems that oppress women and black and Third World women in particular. Black feminist Beverly Smith put this succinctly when she says, “I think maybe what we have defined as an important component of Black feminism is that we don’t have to rank or separate out. Women don’t live their lives like, ‘Well this part is race, and this is class, and this part has to do with women’s identities’” (Moraga and Anzaldúa, Eds. 116). The Combahee River Collective (1974) echoed Smith in its core beliefs that it is difficult “to separate race from class from sexual oppression

17 Black feminist Beverly Smith suggests a word of caution here: “In some ways [poverty] is more constant than race because, say you’re middle class and you’re a Black person who is of course subject to racism, you don’t necessarily experience it every single day in the same intensity, or to the same degree” (Moraga and Anzaldúa, Eds. 115). 18 For more on Rustin’s and Hampton’s charge for Black Nationalism, see their essays “Black Power and Coalition Politics” and “The People Have to Have the Power” respectively in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, an African-American Anthology. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, Eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 435-8, 480-8. 23 because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously” (213). Because, for black feminists, the “real” race/class/gender situation needs articulated (workers are not raceless and sexless as people of color and women are not without class), the Combahee River Collective offered the goal of its politics as “the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy” (213). When read in this way, it is difficult to ignore how black feminism is a theoretical (and practical) matrix created by Marxism and Anglo feminism. The urgency of this materialist-feminist approach of black and Third World feminism became all the more necessary by the 1980’s as globalization irrevocably altered the lives of most women in the U.S. and abroad. Like black feminism, Chicana feminism emerged as a response to the exclusionary practices of Anglo feminism on the one hand and on the other the misogyny and, in some cases, separatist tendencies of male leaders in El Movimiento. Although Chicano/a resistance started with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and continued well into the 1930’s and 1940’s, the 1960’s and early 1970’s witnessed a labor militancy and push for Chicano/a civil rights unprecedented in past decades.19 Part of the reason for this push had to do with the changing contours of blue collar work in the 1960’s and 1970’s – service and agricultural work became increasingly deregulated in this period, a dynamic that coincided with the influx of immigrants into flexible labor markets. In 1965, the recently formed United Farm Workers (UFW) organized the Delano grape strike and boycott. Under the direction of César Chávez, UFW strikes and boycotts from 1965 until 1970 provided El Movimiento with its economic basis. Yolanda Alaniz and Megan Cornish have said of the connection between the UFW and El Movimiento that raza (race) labor history is concomitant with the push for Chicano/a civil rights as both have meant “unremitting drive for equality within the U.S. working-class” (123). This connection is further elucidated by the fact that Chicano civil rights leaders were union officials as well, a fact that confirms for Alaniz and Cornish the “central role that workers have always played in the fight for Chicano/a liberation” (123). The radical impulse of El Movimiento, then, had everything to do with labor and class, not simply with racial subjectivity. It is easy to ignore the role labor played in El Movimiento when critical attention shifts away from the UFW and towards activist calls for Aztlán, that mythical place Chicano nationalists believed to exist in the American Southwest. For Alaniz and Cornish, however, this elusive vision of Aztlán did little to supersede the principal thrust of El Movimiento: multi-racial working-class solidarity (190). Even the use of the term “Chicano” affirmed the proletarian basis of El Movimiento as it “signified both the affirmation of [their] working-class and indigenous roots, and the rejection of assimilation, acculturation, and the myth of the American melting pot” (Fregaro and Chabram 203). Unlike more middle-class youth in their protests against the war in Vietnam, which divided the middle-class as parents repelled by the student movement began their rightward drift, Chicano/a youth found in El Movimiento no distinction between campus and home. Alaniz and Cornish have suggested that as a result of their working-class backgrounds (and the fact that many had parents embattled in agricultural labor disputes), Chicano/a youth “felt a special connection to la communidad and to their families who had made great sacrifices to enable them to get a higher education” (182). Because of this connection to the community, Chicano/a youth understood that support of the UFW meant advances for their families and for their own tenuous

19 For more on la raza labor history in the decades prior to El Movimiento, see Yolanda Alaniz and Megan Cornish’s book Viva La Raza: A History of Chicano Identity and Resistance. Seattle: Red Letter Press, 2008. In particular, see their chapter “The Saga of Chicana/o Industrial Labor” (97-108). 24 position in U.S. academic institutions. On college campuses across the U.S. but in the American Southwest in particular, young activists frequently organized around home-labor-campus issues. Many of those Chicano/as who gained access to higher education in the 1960’s became, by the 1970’s and 1980’s, vanguards for the Chicano Renaissance and later Chicana feminism. As a largely male-dominated tradition, the Chicano Renaissance shared with El Movimiento its focus on the experiences of the Chicano male. (With the exception of Dolores Huerta, few Chicana women assumed leadership roles in either the UFW or El Movimiento.) Chicana feminists, critical of many male leaders’ misogynist impulses, gave new life to a stalled El Movimiento when they began publishing their work by the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. At once sympathetic of Chicano men and critical of the machismo central to El Movimiento, Chicana feminists shared with black feminists the need for male leaders to recognize the “totality of experience” (to use Gloria Anzaldúa’s phrase.) In 1981, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga published This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, a collection that brought together for the first time the experiences of first and Third World women of color. This collection, which included writing from Anzaldúa’s now germinal Borderlands/La Frontera, centered on the premise that first and Third World women of color (white working-class women were also considered by some contributors) were an oppressed minority within both dominant and working-class cultures. Each essay from the collection interrogated, then, the many systems – not just patriarchy or capitalism or imperialism – that oppressed first and Third World women as members of a racialized working-class minority. For Chicana feminists, “totality of experience” came to mean that Chicanas had to resist both an Anglo feminist and Chicano discourse that saw units of experience as mutually exclusive (gender, race and class.) More specifically, Chicana feminists occupied an indeterminate space between Anglo feminism and a male-dominated El Movimiento, sharing with Anglo feminists an interest in gender but diverging from them significantly with their attention to race, culture, and class. The saga of la raza labor history has revealed the way Chicanos and Chicana women in particular have suffered under racist patriarchal capitalist systems. Chicana feminist writing, as with much ethnic writing with a radical proletarian basis, has been localized around these specific sites of oppression and has demonstrated, perhaps at no better time than the present, how Chicanas must contend with more than merely the destructive aspects of their culture’s definition of gender roles. The 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980s witnessed a working-class in revolt: labor militancy was unprecedented since World War II and women and racial and sexual minorities demanded civil rights at a time when many became “ideal” blue collar workers in the wake of global shifts. Given the current economic crisis and the state’s increased use of prerogative power over its more disadvantaged members, critics interested in issues of race, gender and/or sexuality must look beyond racism, sexism, or homophobia as sole causes for oppression or discrimination of women and/or minorities. Because state power and the contingency of global capital are mutually reinforcing, political disenfranchisement (increased raids on brown or black communities, for example) is not a distinct process from economic disenfranchisement, much in the same way institutionalized racism or sexism or homophobia is not distinct from the capitalist relations that govern and normalize these practices. It is time that critics and literary critics in particular recognize the importance of class analysis at this moment in U.S. history.

25

Chapter Two Classing Queerness: Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and the Praxis of Queer Liberation

In my previous chapter, I dismantled popular and critical associations of “working-class” with white men, in part, by excavating social politics movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s for their radical proletarian content. In other words, I demonstrated how anti-racist and anti- imperialist projects such as Black Nationalism and feminism were, for example, also proletarian in their orientation. As such, the distinction between “social politics” and “class politics” is an arbitrary one at best, particularly when one considers how class cannot be cordoned off from other areas of experience, or how race, gender, and sexuality are foundational to class struggle. When read in this way, and as Bill Mullen and Tim Libretti have argued, social politics movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s were, in essence, de facto working-class movements. For bell hooks, the class component of these movements, in particular that of black feminism, is accounted for by what hooks has called “interlocking systems of oppression,” or that matrix of domination wherein race, gender, and class exploitation coalesces (Talking Back 175). Leslie Feinberg simplified hooks’s theory of how discriminations interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, when ze said of the Stonewall riots in June of 1969 in New York City that they were the product of how “oppressions overlap” (Trans Liberation 97). 1 In the case of the Stonewall riots, sparked by homeless drag queens and working-class butches and femmes, issues such as homelessness and poverty were not tangential to those of sexuality and/or gender expression, namely because the rioters did not organize their lives by sexuality and/or gender expression alone. The modern-day gay civil rights movement in the U.S., despite its start with the Stonewall riots, has not adopted this model of intersectionality to understand gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) experience. For Feinberg, this focus on sexuality at the exclusion of race and class differences among GLBT people has meant that the politics of the movement have been abstracted from human experience. The result has been, as both Urvashi Vaid and Cathy Cohen have insisted, that calls for liberal policies of inclusion on the basis of sexuality have replaced a progressive politics that has both social identity as its basis and class struggle as its axis (Out at Work 235, 52). In asking what national gay and lesbian organizations have done to her politics, Cohen faults these organizations for the way they have become complicit with neoliberalism, their goals compatible with the goals of corporate globalization (57). When Feinberg published hir first novel Stone Butch Blues in 1993, national gay and lesbian organizations had as their praxis issues of class tied to gay and lesbian identities but had not moved beyond these issues to

1 I respect Feinberg’s preference for gender-neutral pronouns to refer to transgender persons. For more on Feinberg’s use of the pronouns “ze” for “he/she” and “hir” for “him/her,” see hir chapter “We Are All Works in Progress” from Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. 1-13). Although I respect Feinberg’s preference for these pronouns, I do not focus on them at the exclusion of more pressing issues in hir work. Unlike mainstream readings of Feinberg’s novels and criticism, I understand the use of these pronouns as secondary to Feinberg’s larger objective, a reading Feinberg supports when in Transgender Warriors ze writes, “I don’t have a personal stake in whether the trans liberation movement results in a new third pronoun, or gender- neutral pronouns. [. . .] It is not the words in and of themselves that are important to me – it’s our lives” (x). Throughout this chapter, I use “ze” and “hir” to refer only to Feinberg. I do not use these pronouns for Jess, the protagonist of Stone Butch Blues, because Feinberg has chosen to identify Jess by “she” and “her.” 26

consider those that structure queer people’s lives more generally (57). This is why, then, Feinberg offered in Stone Butch Blues a competing model for gay civil rights, one not contingent on neoliberalism or free-market capitalism. I argue in this chapter that Feinberg’s novel confronts racist patriarchal capitalist systems in an era of advanced globalization as it also imagines alternatives to these systems. Unlike mainstream readings of the novel that focus almost exclusively on issues of gender in its intersection with sexuality, I read class and its politics as significant in Stone Butch Blues, ultimately to argue that gender identity or consciousness in the novel cannot be understood unless it is placed in a larger class context. 2

Feinberg’s “Theoretical Questions”: Theoretical Matrices Created Between Marxism and Feminism My reading of identity or consciousness in Stone Butch Blues is informed, in part, by Feinberg’s contribution to “gender theory,” or what materialist-feminist critics would recognize as more of a focus paid to material realities than in traditional feminist criticism (Rosenfelt and Newton xix). In hir book Trans Liberation, Feinberg maintains that because much of “gender theory” (here traditional feminist criticism) has been abstracted from human experience, hir fiction and critical work offer instead “history, politics, and theory that live and breathe because they are rooted in the experience of real people who fought flesh-and-blood battles for freedom” (xiii). 3 Shaping Feinberg’s “theoretical questions,” then, is the way gender identity or consciousness is fundamentally altered by one’s position in the global economy. “Sisterhood: Make it Real,” a chapter from Feinberg’s book Transgender Warriors, more fully clarifies what Feinberg finds problematic about traditional feminist criticism: myths of shared oppression do not account for how, as Feinberg insists, “women are not the only victims of oppression” and “common bodily experiences shared by most women are hauling water or carrying firewood or working on an assembly line – those are class experiences” (113, italics Feinberg’s). It would be a mistake to reduce Feinberg’s focus on class to hir identification as a “secular Jewish communist, a working-class, lesbian transgender Marxist.”4 Importantly, this use of class to dismantle shared myths of oppression for women speaks to historical dynamics with

2 For more on critics’ focus on gender in its intersection with sexuality but at the exclusion of class, see Madelyn Detloff’s essay, “Gender Please, Without the Gender Police: Rethinking Pain in Archetypal Narratives of Butch, Transgender, and FTM Masculinity.” Journal of Lesbian Studies. 10:1/2 (2006): 87-105. See also Jay Prosser’s work on Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues in Modern Fiction Studies (41:3/4 (1995): 483-515) and in Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. Gender theorist Judith Halberstam has also examined Stone Butch Blues but has not placed the novel in a larger class context. For more on Halberstam’s work on Feinberg’s novel, see her chapter, “Lesbian Masculinity: Even Stone Butches Get the Blues” in Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 111-39. 3 It is important to clarify here that by “gender theory,” Feinberg speaks only of traditional feminist criticism. In recent years, and with the advent of black feminism, Chicana feminism, and Third-World feminism, “traditional feminist criticism” has been under attack for its emphasis on gender at the exclusion of class, race, and sexual differences. Feinberg’s contribution to “gender theory,” then, shares with these other feminisms an emphasis on the totality of experience, or a materialist-feminist approach to gender. For more on Feinberg’s “analytical work” on gender as it is contrasted with that of mainstream feminist criticism, see hir acceptance speech of the honorary doctorate at Starr King School for the Ministry titled “Which Side Are You On?” at http://www.transgenderwarrior.org. 4 Feinberg, Leslie. “Solidarity in the Struggle for Social Transformation.” Workers World. 31 October 2007. 10 April 2009. http://www.workers.org/2007/us/feinberg-1108/index.html. 27

which Feinberg would have been familiar: first, that women and minorities replaced the white and male industrial worker as “ideal” when the U.S. shifted away from its industrial base in the early 1970’s, and second that women and minorities were more easily exploited in the “new” economy, in part, because neoliberalism co-opted the goals of mainstream feminism (equal access in the workplace, elimination of special protections for women workers, etc.) When read in light of these dynamics, Feinberg’s assault on traditional feminist criticism highlights what had become a reality for many women by 1973: that as middle-class feminists achieved access in the workplace, globalization had a disastrous effect on the lives of working-class women. This is why, perhaps, Feinberg identifies class as the category that breaks down shared myths of oppression – the real enemy for most women is not patriarchy but the capitalist systems that maintain this ideology, including how modern capitalist relations have been reproduced by the heterosexual patriarchal nuclear family. Feinberg is quite clear in hir writing that capitalism is the real enemy of women’s and gay civil rights. As a transgender historian, Feinberg has recorded the rise of capitalism as concomitant with trans- and homophobia and violence. In a chapter of Transgender Warriors, Feinberg explains how capitalism has lead to the production of violence against women and GLBT people when ze noted how, “Hostility to transgender, sex-change, intersexuality, women, and same-sex love became a pattern whenever class antagonisms deepened. I can’t stress enough how the rise of patriarchal class divisions were to blame [for this hostility]” (53). Feinberg’s criticism of mainstream feminism and the modern-day gay civil rights movement has largely to do with their having missed the mark: as Feinberg suggests in Transgender Warriors, true sexual and gender liberation requires the abolishment of capitalism and not a “fight back consciousness” complicit with neoliberalism. Because, for Feinberg, capitalism has produced oppressive conditions under which many women and GLBT people live, this fight back consciousness must be in the advance of alternatives to modern capitalist systems.5 The rioters outside the Stonewall Inn in June of 1969, among the most oppressed of all GLBT people, galvanized Feinberg’s brand of fight back consciousness with their recognition that they were “fighting for [their] lives,” as combatant Sylvia Rivera told Feinberg in the 1990’s.6 Feinberg has understood Rivera’s declaration not as an articulation of a GLBT identity or a gay community that “represents sexual liberation in a [limited form]” but as a reflection on how Stonewall was the product of how “multiple burdens (capitalism, racism, transphobia) overlapped to create strength” (Ibid). 7 Lucian Truscott, the reporter whose 1969 article in the Village Voice helped create a history of Stonewall, similarly acknowledged in 2009 that the riots were neither planned nor the work of a gay community, at least not in the sense as it was then

5 The recently formed organization Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ) in New York shares Feinberg’s opinion as to the direction gay and lesbian organizations must take if they are to achieve their “radical” vision for a just society. As QEJ insists, gay and lesbian organizations must “challenge and change the systems that create poverty and economic injustice in our communities and promote an economic system that embraces sexual and gender diversity.” QEJ, as it represents a return to the radical proletarian basis of 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s social politics movements, demonstrates how identity politics can have – once again – a progressive politics that uses and, in fact, has identity as its basis. For more on QEJ, see the organization’s Web site at http://www.q4ej.org. 6 Feinberg includes Rivera’s commentary on the Stonewall riots in a chapter of hir book Trans Liberation titled, “I’m Glad I Was in the Stonewall Riots” (106-9). 7 Feinberg, Leslie. “Many Histories Converged at Stonewall.” Workers World. 24 August 2006. 10 April 2009. http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-71/index.html. 28

defined. Rather, the riots were spontaneous uprisings against police by working-class butches and femmes and homeless Latina drag queens like Rivera who squatted near the Stonewall Inn.8 These distinctions in the way Stonewall has been recorded and celebrated by GLBT people are not arbitrary but indicative of how GLBT identity and experience have been hegemonized such that class and race differences are erased from this history. In part, this hegemonizing of GLBT identity and experience is why Feinberg understands gender theory as abstracted from human experience, or why ze offers in hir work a competing model of gay civil rights. At stake for Feinberg is neither the maintenance of a GLBT community or consciousness that exists independently of social justice for all oppressed people, nor the advance of a trans movement in which liberation is contingent upon widespread acceptance of gender-neutral pronouns. Instead, Feinberg identifies in hir role as GLBT activist and trade-unionist the need for collective organizing of GLBT and heterosexual workers since, for Feinberg, the workplace itself represents common ground and struggle. The successes GLBT workers have achieved on shop floors and picket lines have reinforced for Feinberg how gay liberation should have as its praxis class struggle. In an article from Workers World, Feinberg is quite clear about how GLBT struggle is an essential working- class struggle: “[when] LGBT workers are denied same-sex benefits for their partners, they are being paid less than their co-workers, which drives down wages and benefits for all workers.”9 It is in the interest, then, of heterosexual workers to support domestic-partner benefits; however, when the issue is presented as a GLBT-struggle only, the threat of competition increases thereby weakening potential links of solidarity between GLBT and heterosexual workers. Feinberg resolves this issue when ze presents domestic-partner benefits, for example, not as a threat to heterosexual workers and their wages and benefits but as a struggle that has “helped win gains for unmarried heterosexual workers as well” (Ibid). As a transgender trade-unionist, Feinberg stands at the intersection of GLBT and working-class movements; hir call for collective organizing is reflective, then, of hir unique position as it demonstrates how gay liberation is not an either/or of social or class politics but is, as GLBT experience is lived through class, a politics where social identity is foundational to class struggle.10 Feinberg said in a 2008 podcast that hir “life’s work is about elevating collective organizing, not elevating individuals.”11 Included in this “life’s work” is, of course, Feinberg’s writing, which should not be read as separate from hir work as a trade-unionist and organizer. In this way, the distinction made by bourgeois aesthetic theory between esthetic and political intent is an arbitrary one for Feinberg, as it is for the other writers examined by this study. What bourgeois aesthetic theory dismissed as a useful category of analysis, namely the “usefulness” of

8 Truscott, Lucian. “The Real Mob at Stonewall.” 25 June 2009. 25 August 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/opinion/26truscott.html. 9 Feinberg, Leslie. “LGBT Liberation: An Essential Working-Class Struggle.” Workers World. 24 June 2006. 10 April 2009. http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lfeinberg-00629/index.html. 10 This point goes, of course, two ways. The first is that GLBT identity is foundational to liberal policies of inclusion whereby white and wealthy gays and lesbians benefit at the expense of GLBT people on the margins; in other words, a politics of gay civil rights where liberation is contingent upon neoliberalism and free-market capitalism. The second is a politic advanced by Feinberg and others where GLBT liberation requires a fundamental assault on the economic systems that create and maintain GLBT oppression; in other words, a project of gay civil rights that once again has a progressive politics that uses – and in fact is based on – GLBT identity. 11 Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Warrior. 9 April 2009. http://www.transgenderwarrior.org. 29

a fictional text, Feinberg locates as central to hir writing and its goals, saying of hir first novel that ze “wrote Stone Butch Blues as a working-class organizer mimeographing a leaflet, a call to action” (Ibid). Despite Feinberg’s rather overt emphasis on class and its politics as significant to hir writing, literary critics interested in Stone Butch Blues often leave out class from their many readings of the novel. With the exception of critic Cat Moses, literary critics to address Stone Butch Blues celebrate the novel for its production of a transgender subjectivity, yet in their readings of the novel this subjectivity is often presented as unmediated by class difference. 12 There is the suggestion with Madelyn Detloff’s essay on butch, female-to-male (FTM), and transgender subjectivity in Stone Butch Blues, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, and Kimberly Pierce’s 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry that Detloff will resolve this lacuna in criticism on Feinberg’s novel since she acknowledges how only Stephen’s wounds of Well are, as they are more psychological than physical, benefits of class privilege (97). Such a distinction of how pain is articulated in these texts is, however, no more than a parenthetical aside and has little bearing on how Detloff reads pain and butch/trans subjectivity in Stone Butch Blues. For Detloff, suffering in these texts is a “barometer of masculine authenticity” (88). Simply put, the more a butch or FTM/transgender guy suffers, the more masculine she/ze/he is. In this reading, the class component of violence in both Stone Butch Blues and Boys Don’t Cry (also a working- class text) remains hidden as gender become the organizing principle around which identity or consciousness takes shape.13 Detloff is not alone in her privileging of gender at the expense of class in Stone Butch Blues; both Judith Halberstam and Jay Prosser have understood Stone Butch Blues as a novel about gender identity, specifically, for Halberstam, the expression of female masculinity and, for Prosser, the production of transgender subjectivity. Certainly these readings of Feinberg’s novel have provided an important and necessary discussion of how female masculinity and transgenderism call into question seemingly fixed categories such as sex and gender; however, in light of both Feinberg’s contribution to “gender theory” and the “tool of historical materialism” that has “sharpened and deepened [hir] analytical work as a transgender lesbian,” this focus on transgenderism as an affront to heterosexualism and patriarchy (and what of the capitalist systems that maintain these ideologies?) has ignored the material realities that made possible both GLBT identity and oppression against GLBT people. 14 As a part of hir “Lavender and Red” series from Workers World, Feinberg clarified that “while same-sex affection and [transgender expression] appear to have existed in all epochs of human society, the conditions of capitalism were required for the development of a distinct political and social minority identity: gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender” (“Many Histories”). Feinberg’s explanation for how distinct GLBT identities formed under capitalism has to do with how “[the] organizing of a large-scale workforce also centralized laborers, creating large-scale industry and dense urban living with same-sex living situations and relative anonymity” (Ibid). In other words, the ascendency of capitalist production drove workers into cities where living and working conditions provided for the possibility of GLBT as an identity. I labor on capitalism’s

12 For more on how Cat Moses reads class as significant to Stone Butch Blues, see her essay “Queering Class: Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues” in Studies in the Novel. 31:1 (1999): 74-98. 13 I will return to how being of the working-class increases the threat of violence for transgender and same-sex oriented people in my reading of Stone Butch Blues later in this chapter. 14 Feinberg, Leslie. “Which Side Are You On?” Speech delivered to graduates of Starr King School for the Ministry. Transgender Warrior. May 2007. 10 April 2009. http://www.transgenderwarrior.org. 30

role in the production of GLBT identities because mainstream readings of Stone Butch Blues that focus on gender identity at the exclusion of class overlook two important features of Feinberg’s novel: the way butch and/or transgender identity is expressed through working-class experience, and how by the close of the novel Feinberg suggests the need to return to pre-capitalist societies. Feinberg’s focus on class in fiction such as Stone Butch Blues has largely to do with the historical-materialist approach ze takes to GLBT identity and experience; however, and in spite of hir identification as a Marxist, Feinberg also grants more power to ideas and discourse than in traditional Marxist criticism written before 1970. Although Feinberg understands hir theoretical model as Marxist in its orientation, hir work presents class not as a pure or unmediated concept but as it is lived through categories such as gender and sexuality. My reading of Stone Butch Blues examines, as it borrows from Feinberg’s model its premise that identity is not abstracted from human experience, how GLBT identity or consciousness is shaped by one’s position in the global economy. While my approach to identity or consciousness in Stone Butch Blues is intersectional, I grant more power to class, not because it is more significant than gender or sexuality, but because it is the least explored category by critics of the novel. This is why, then, I contend that gender identity or consciousness in Stone Butch Blues cannot be understood unless it is placed in a larger class context: were it not for the working-class specific circumstances that direct the protagonist’s course in the novel, GLBT subjectivity and politics would more closely resemble that of white and wealthy GLBT Americans.

The Production of a Classed Butch and Trans Identity: Movement through Working-Class and/or Queer Spaces A cursory glance at Stone Butch Blues reveals how GLBT identity and experience in this novel are markedly different from those of a class-privileged cross-dresser such as Stephen in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Madelyn Detloff begins her essay on both novels by commenting on how Stone Butch Blues is “a text that is arguably The Well of Loneliness of transgender FTM subjectivity” (89). Late in her essay, Detloff reinforces similarities between Well and Feinberg’s novel when she rejects the latter’s conclusion – that the protagonist’s consciousness as a working-class and transgender butch comes most clearly into focus – in favor of the “excruciating” letter than begins Stone Butch Blues, written after the novel’s “temporal ending” (104, fn 27) and consistent with Well in the consolation writing offers to a suffering Jess. By focusing on Jess’s suffering as motivated by gender constraints, particularly as it shares with Stephen’s a basis in both female masculinity and transgender subjectivity, Detloff circumvents how suffering is mediated by class difference in Stone Butch Blues. In Detloff’s reading of the novel, suffering is the result of gender policing, both by police in the 1960’s and 1970’s and by lesbian-feminists who mistook butch/trans expression to mimic heterosexual hypermaculinity. What is significant about the gender policing Detloff reads as central to Stone Butch Blues is its class specificity. Unlike gays and lesbians of privilege who congregated in private homes and therefore were removed from the violence of the bars, working-class transgender butches such as Jess lacked the class-privilege that made transgender subjectivity permissible in many middle-class circles, turning instead to the bars as they offered one of the few available spaces for working-class butch/femme community. With the overhaul of these bars by lesbian- feminists in the 1970’s, working-class butches and femmes were forced to make a choice: either “clean up their act,” that is become more middle-class, or abandon spaces intended for same-sex oriented females. In the letter that begins Stone Butch Blues, Jess laments the loss of this 31

butch/femme community formed in the bars. For Detloff, this letter provides an occasion for Jess to “bemoan the gender-policing that drove transgendered butches such as [herself] out the safe(r) circles of lesbian community into the lonely and perilous world of passing in homophobic, transphobic, and butchphobic dominant culture” (89). Left out of Detloff’s reading is how Jess’s passing is the result of specific historical circumstances, namely increased violence in the bars following the birth of “gay pride” and deindustrialization as it eliminated work for butches in factories with a union. Stone Butch Blues, as it is a lamentation on the loss of butch/femme culture, is also a novel that reflects and responds to shifts in the global economy by the early 1970’s. Documenting the rise and fall of industry in the U.S., Feinberg parallels this shift with hir protagonist’s movement through distinctly working-class spaces, wherein each space produces in Jess a consciousness of being differently gendered and working-class: the bars, the factories with and without a union, and the tenement apartment in New York City that allows Jess’s consciousness to come most clearly into focus. Jay Prosser has examined movement in Stone Butch Blues but has done so as it informs the trans subject on hir journey home, one housed at times, for Prosser, in the body following gender reassignment surgery and/or hormones (“No Place” 483). I want to suggest, given the class dimensions of the novel, that Jess’s journey “home” also rests with the formation of GLBT space that can accommodate her being transgender and working-class. (The bars and factories already provide for Jess a working-class space that accommodates her as a transgender butch.) Because the novel ends without Jess having found this trans and working-class space in the modern-day gay civil rights movement, Feinberg uses the letter that begins hir novel (written after the novel’s “temporal ending”) as an occasion for Jess to advance the model of gay civil rights Feinberg considers necessary if GLBT people are to achieve true gender and sexual liberation: based on her success on shop floors and picket lines as a transgender butch, Jess’s model is consistent with the goals of union organizing and its slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” In this way, Jess’s letter offers a competing model of gay civil rights: one localized around narrowly defined interests such as gender and sexuality, the other more Marxist in its orientation. Jess recalls in her letter to an estranged lover, Theresa, a recent meeting with a lesbian-feminist, which confirms for Feinberg’s protagonist how the modern-day gay civil rights movement has failed to achieve the “radical” vision it intended: “I had coffee in Greenwich Village earlier with a woman. A mutual friend fixed us up, sure we’d have a lot in common since we’re both into ‘politics.’ Well, we sat in a coffee shop and she talked about Democratic politics and seminars and photography and problems with her co-op and how she’s so opposed to rent control. Small wonder – Daddy is a real estate developer” (SBB 5). For Jess, this woman’s politics fail to offer an effective model for social change as the economic assumptions that underlie them are more probusiness than they are prolabor. In contrast, Jess’s politics have roots in trade-unionism and its goals, a distinction Feinberg makes when hir protagonist “mouth[s] off to some copy laying into a homeless man” while the lesbian- feminist “tug[s] on [Jess’s] belt to pull [her] back” (6). Significant about Jess’s meeting is Feinberg’s suggestion that hir protagonist’s exclusion from the gay rights movement has to do with both Jess’s politics – her call to action on behalf of the homeless man – and her appearance as a masculine female, the latter of which is reduced by the lesbian-feminist to a problem with society and not an identity in its own right. Like Feinberg, Jess neither demands inclusion in lesbian-feminism nor does she align herself with its members. Rather, Jess envisions herself “falling back into another world, a place she wanted to go to again” (6). 32

In a larger context of the novel, Jess’s longing here is to return to the bars and factories with a union as these spaces were, paradoxically, sites of both safety and violence – safe in that they offered protections and opportunities to butches and femmes in ways the presumably “liberating” world of professional class lesbian-feminism could not. When lesbian-feminists overhauled working-class bars in the early 1970’s, a shift that coincided with the rapid decline of industry in the U.S., butches such as Jess were left without community or stable work. Many butches, including Jess, made the difficult decision to pass as men in order to survive. When read in this way, Jess’s passing is more circumstantially motivated than critics have been willing to acknowledge, as is her exile and subsequent transgender subjectivity.15 Were it not for the impact of lesbian-feminism on butch/femme community or deindustrialization as it eliminated work for butches, Feinberg seems to suggest, Jess may have avoided her painful 20-year exile as a transgender butch. It is appropriate that Jess should address her letter of exile to Theresa, as it is with Theresa’s leaving at Jess’s decision to pass that the two are separated and later estranged. Although Jess laments the loss of her relationship with Theresa in her letter to her, the criticism she lobbies at Theresa is the same as the one she directs to lesbian-feminists: lesbian-feminists may have driven Jess out the bars, but it is Theresa who leaves because she cannot reconcile her newfound identity as a “lesbian” with Jess’s decision to pass. Near the close of Stone Butch Blues, Jess learns of Theresa’s relationship with a “Saturday-night butch,” or a butch who performs female masculinity on the weekends (as her title suggests) but does not embody it. When Jess uncovers the source of Theresa’s desire, she thinks, “What could Theresa possible see in that Saturday-night butch? It was so much harder to be me” (223). In her letter to Theresa, Jess wonders what became of her former lover. She asks of Theresa where her desire lies: with a “Saturday-night butch” who is more like the lesbian- feminists who drove Jess and Theresa out the bars, or with an “unemployed auto worker who is much more than [Jess] than the [lesbian-feminists] are” (11). The question Jess ultimately asks of Theresa is what side she now stands on: that of workers or a lesbian-feminism that demanded inclusion at the expense of gender and class differences. As ze highlights the gender policing that left Jess without community, Feinberg also presents in this opening letter the parameters of Jess’s politics. When Jess asks of Theresa her choice between lesbian-feminist or unemployed auto worker, Feinberg makes clear that when faced with the option, Jess will side with the working-class, even if it means siding against her partner or others who similarly identify as same-sex oriented and/or transgendered. Jess’s politics, then, are informed by her experiences as a disadvantaged member of the working-class. When I situate Jess within the working-class, I do so not because Jess’s queerness or transgenderism has “declassed” her, but because Jess is born into the working-class and remains in this class, in part, because homo- and transphobia have exacerbated her economic

15 Feinberg might support this reading of Jess’s passing, exile, and transgender subjectivity when ze writes in the letter that begins the novel, “The plants closed. Something we never could have imagined. That’s when I [Jess] began passing as a man. Strange to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home” (11). What is significant about Jess’s comment is twofold: first, that Jess decides to take male hormones only after she is left without stable work in the factories; and second, that the FTM (female-to-male) subjectivity Madelyn Detloff and Jay Prosser celebrate as central to Stone Butch Blues is an identity with which Feinberg’s protagonist is not entirely comfortable. Jess’s journey may resemble that of transsexual, as Prosser argues in his work on Feinberg’s novel, but passing was not the “coming home” Prosser understands it to be; with passing came Theresa’s leaving, alienation by butches who refused to take male hormones, and the sense that Jess as “he-she” was buried under Jess as “he.” 33

situation. As a working-class bildungsroman, Jess comes of age cognizant of how being of the working-class makes queerness or transgenderism doubly difficult. Her encounters with others – the teacher in her hometown of Buffalo who regards her with contempt or the children of scabs who pull down her pants and lock her in a coal bin – serve as frequent reminders for Jess that she is differently gendered and working-class. In his chapter on Stone Butch Blues in Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, Jay Prosser capitalizes on Jess’s run-in with the gang of boys who call her a “pansy” (16) and ask, “Let’s see how you tinkle” (18). For Prosser, this incident in which the boys put Jess’s body on display – the “important half” – is significant “for it reveals Jess’s sexed difference both from the boys and from what she herself appears not to be” (180). While on the one hand Prosser identifies an early moment in the novel of others’ dis- ease with Jess’s gendered appearance (“are you a boy or are you a girl?”), he makes no mention of the dis-ease Jess feels because the boys are children of scabs: “scabs. Just the word itself was enough to make me shy away from their house” (SBB 16). Even at this young age, Jess dis- identifies with those who stand against workers, going so far as to punch one boy in the nose – an act that makes her father, a union man, proud (18). Feinberg suggests with Jess’s run-in with the “Scabbie gang” that being of the working- class increases the threat of violence for same-sex oriented females or transgendered people, a point ze returns to when Jess is raped on the football field by boys from middle-class homes. In Jess’s high school, invisible dividing lines are drawn by race, class, and religion: “Almost half the school was white, Jewish, and middle-class. The other half was Negro and working-class” (40). Because Jess is Jewish and working-class, Feinberg’s protagonist insists that she “fell into a lonely social abyss” (40), eschewing the friendship of middle-class Jews for those from “families to worked to make ends meet” (40). The boys who rape Jess on the field, all of whom are white and presumably middle-class, taunt Jess for her butch gender expression, but they also make visible her difference on the basis of other minoritized categories: one of the boys proclaims, in a moment of anger at Jess’s inattention to the rape, “you dirty Kike bitch, you fucking bulldagger” (41). With this germinal moment, Feinberg posits the violence Jess endures with more than her being differently gendered or butch; Jess is also “dirty” (working-class), a “Kike” (Jewish), and a “bitch” (female.) It is at this moment on the field, as well, that Feinberg identifies a key component of what will become the “stone” of Jess’s “stone butch” identity – the emotional or sexual hardening that results from repeated beatings and/or rapes. Following the rape, Jess longs to tell her friend, Karla, what happened on the football field but instead shuts down emotionally, “feeling the last brick of the wall go up inside [her] that might never come down again” (47). Queer and gender theorists such as Judith Halberstam have read the “stone” of “stone butch” as sexual inaccessibility, or a butch’s desire to dominate her partner sexually.16 Jess’s discovery that a butch desires another butch leaves her wondering, “Who was the femme in bed?” (Frankie’s answer is that neither is the case.) In many ways, Jess’s question reflects assumptions about

16 See Halberstam’s chapter, “Even Stone Butches Get the Blues,” in Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 111-39. Halberstam clarifies her definition of “stone” when she writes, “Historically, the term ‘stone butch’ has been used for a butch lesbian who would make love to her femme partner but would not allow herself to be ‘touched.’ Historically speaking, ‘stone’ referred to those butches who were unmistakably masculine in appearance and felt compromised by being made love to as women” (124-5).

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desire in butch/femme communities: a butch, as Jess understands this role, should desire a femme and should be, therefore, the one who dominates. The “stone” of “stone butch,” then, has to do with Jess’s assumptions about desire, but, I argue, it has also to do with Jess’s fear of being touched – not because Jess’s dis-identifies with her genitals but because her genitals serve as a locus of pain as a result of repeated rapes. The same is true for other characters in the novel though they are not butch: pros or working girls, exotic dancers, and even heterosexual men such as Ben who was raped by prison guards.17 Frankie’s desire, as it contrasts with Jess’s, locates butchness or female masculinity not exclusively with sexual dominance or being stone – here defined as “sexual aggression or courage” (274) – but with embodiment. Frankie makes clear this point when in response to Jess’s earlier question of “who was the femme in bed?” she claims: “Neither of us [was] [the femme in bed]. What you meant was who does the fucking and who gets fucked? Who ran the fuck? That’s not the same as being butch or femme” (274). Being butch in Feinberg’s novel means constant visibility as a butch – not, as Jess insists with “Saturday-night butches,” merely cross-dressing on the weekends. For Jess and other butches, men’s clothing is only part of what it means to be butch. In Stone Butch Blues, men’s clothes are not a masquerade for the self, as they are in queer theory, but are a reflection of the self. Being a working-class butch also means living daily as a butch (being susceptible to violence because of one’s butchness) and working as a butch (performing physical labor typically reserved for biological males.) Working-class butches such as Jess suffer particularly hard when police raid the bars or when competition for low-tier work increases. By insisting upon “working-class” as a component of this suffering or violence, Feinberg demonstrates how being of the working-class makes butch gender expression doubly difficult. Jess does not have, unlike professional class gays and lesbians do, the economic and social means to move into middle-class spaces free from the violence of the bars or from unsafe work conditions. As I suggested earlier in this chapter, Jess makes the difficult decision to pass as a man when she is left without community or work following the overhaul of gay bars by lesbian-feminists and shifts in the global economy that eliminated stable work for butches in factories with unions. Jay Prosser has understood Jess’s passing as a gift to Feinberg’s protagonist, a way to return “home” to her body. Yet hormones and surgery were also the means by which Jess found herself homeless until the novel’s close as with them came Theresa’s leaving and alienation by butches such as Grant who refused to pass. This is not to suggest, however, that Jess did not find community in working-class spaces outside the bars, but it did mean that passing erased Jess’s past as a masculine female and made it so that any revelation of this former self might very well lead to literal homelessness for Feinberg’s protagonist. In this way, “home” in Stone Butch Blues does not reside simply in the body or with butch/transgender embodiment. It also has to

17 Feinberg uses the language of “stone” to also describe Ben, a heterosexual white man with whom Jess works when passing as a man. After telling Jess about his arrest for grand theft auto, Ben says, “I was a tough guy. You think jail’s nothing, those guards can’t break me” (184). It is at this moment that Jess “leaned toward him. [She] already knew” (184). What Jess knows, and what Ben can only articulate with the shame in his eyes, is how guards raped Ben while in prison. In response, Jess narrates: “I didn’t look away. Instead, I let him see himself in my own mirror. [. . .] In his own way he had done what I had never been able to do – reveal the humiliation” (184). When read in this way, the sexual violence Ben experiences hardens him – until this moment it has made him emotionally inaccessible. Given this shared violence, it is not surprising that Jess recognizes herself in Ben in much the same way Angie will recognize herself in Jess. 35

do with a literal home – where Jess will stay when her apartment manager decides to burn down the tenements in which she is living, for example – and a home created in working-class spaces. In Stone Butch Blues, “home” is both place and idea; it is found in spaces where Jess feels “at home” with herself and others, and it is a site of community or a place where Jess might come into her own as a working-class transgendered butch. The places in which Jess finds a home – the bars, the factories, the spaces she shares with now estranged lovers, and the few tenement apartments in New York City she fixes up – are largely sites of pleasure for Feinberg’s protagonist. In this way, not all enclosed spaces signal danger for Jess in Stone Butch Blues, as Cat Moses has suggested (82). Feinberg makes clear this point when in describing these spaces ze employs a language of home: hugging another butch in the bar “felt like coming home” (SBB 55); the apartment shared with Theresa “felt like a home” (123); before it burned down, the apartment Jess fixes up in New York City had become a home (237); and finally the coming home Jess feels in a tenement apartment near Ruth, another transgendered person, by the novel’s close (267). “Home,” then, is not simply located in the body or in open spaces but is also found in enclosed, working-class spaces such as the bar, factory, or tenement apartment.

Dialectics of Pain and Pleasure: The Working-Class Gay Bar Scholars such as Cat Moses have read the working-class bar of Stone Butch Blues in terms of what it lacks: the safety of private homes in which gays and lesbians of class-privilege gathered and, as Moses maintains, the community Jess might find elsewhere were it not for class constraints (87). Rather than to examine the working-class bar for what it fails to provide Jess, I understand this space as significant for the necessary home it affords her – one for which Jess longs during her 20-year exile as a working-class and transgender butch. From the moment Jess arrives at Tifka’s in Toronto she thinks, “There was no turning back, and I didn’t want to” (SBB 27). Later Jess conveys a similar sentiment in her letter to Theresa: “I stood there [on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village] remembering you like I didn’t see the cops about to hit me, like I was falling back into another world, a place I wanted to go to again” (6). Despite the threat of violence (or actual violence) that comes with being a working-class butch, Jess relishes in the community of the bars, going so far as to become emotional at the sight of other masculine females. It is here in the bars that Jess learns important lessons: “I learned to fear the cops as a mortal enemy and to hate the pimps who controlled the lives of so many women we loved. And I learned to laugh. That summer, Friday and Saturday nights were full of laughs and mostly gentle teasing” (29). By juxtaposing the disciplinary power of police and pimps with the pleasure Jess derives from the bar, Feinberg suggests that this working-class site is as painful as it is pleasing – a dialectic ze will apply to subsequent working-class sites through which Jess moves in the novel. Much of what is pleasing for Jess about Tifka’s is having the license to ask a femme to dance there. Yet Jess also takes pleasure in what Tifka’s offers working girls like Yvette: a safe space away from their pimps and the violence of the streets. Jackie, a former working girl and Butch Al’s femme, tells Jess upon Yvette’s arrival at Tifka’s that, “[Yvette] doesn’t want one more person in this goddamn world to ask anything from her tonight” (33), except for, perhaps, a butch to “just ask her to dance” (33). Jess’s dance with Yvette is but one of the many moments of pleasure in Stone Butch Blues. Here, Feinberg articulates the desire Jess feels for femmes and the tenderness with which Jess treats working girls like Yvette. Jess narrates: “We danced a few slow songs in a row. I never ground my thigh into her pelvis. I knew she had been wounded 36

there. Even as a young butch that was the place I protected myself. I felt her pain, she knew mine. I felt her desire, she aroused mine” (33-4). In much the same way a stone pro will see her pain reflected in Jess’s eyes, Jess identifies with Yvette; their shared history of violence dictates the rules of their dance, but it also produces in Jess the tenderness or empathy she needs in her interactions with femmes, many of whom are also stone. This is why, for example, Jess understands that a good butch lover must always come from a “place that’s gentle” (33). In other words, even as a young butch Jess understands what is meant by strapping on a dildo: either, as Jackie insists, “[making] a woman feel really good” or “remind[ing] her of all the ways she’s ever been hurt in her life” (33). The kind of pain Jackie describes here is not the result of gender policing alone. Without the social and economic means to move into middle-class spaces free from violence, Yvette circulates in an economy where her body is a commodity bought and sold by police, tricks, and her pimp. Much of her pain, then, is class-specific, as it is because of Yvette’s work as a prostitute that she is subject to the violence of the streets. In this way, suffering is not unique to butches in Stone Butch Blues. Were this is the case, only butches would be “stone” in the novel. Yet, as Jackie and Yvette attest, femmes can also be “stone,” particularly if they are susceptible to rape because of their profession.18

The Factory as Dialectical Space If pain is a “barometer of masculine authenticity” for butches, as it is for Detloff, then it is also a commodity for butches fortunate enough to find work in factories with a union. Because being butch in Feinberg’s novel means performing physical labor typically reserved for biological males, pain in the form of strained or sore muscles marks a butch’s skill in the factory. If a butch can suffer as a biological male does, then pain may very well be a barometer of a butch’s masculinity, but this kind of masculinity is circumscribed to the factory where pain is prized for the livelihood it provides to working-class butches. Even before she is brought out as butch in the bars of Toronto in the 1960’s, Jess commits herself to a life in the factory. Without an extended formal education, factories with a union were among the few places to offer a living wage with benefits. Following her visits to Tifka’s, Jess discovers another reason for wanting a unionized factory job: “With union protection, all the butches agreed, a he-she could carve out a niche, and begin earning valuable seniority” (75). For Jess and other butches, securing a factory job with a union means important gains for butch respectability. In Stone Butch Blues, those who try to deny butches this respectability are rarely other working-class laborers. Rather, as Feinberg makes clear throughout hir fiction and critical work, those who stand against butches are also those who stand on the side of capitalists: the police, factory owners, and foremen. It is because of such antagonisms that Feinberg takes great pains to include moments of class unity across dividing lines in Stone Butch Blues – not, as Cat Moses insists, as a “limited and problematic possibility” (77) but as a reality for many

18 Roberta Victor’s description of prostitution is strikingly similar to Feinberg’s, particularly in the way both locate pain – being “stone” – with prostitution: “You become your job. I became what I did. I became a hustler, I became cold, I became hard, I became turned off, I became numb. Even when I wasn’t hustling, I was a hustler. I don’t think it’s terribly different from somebody who works on the assembly line for forty hours a week and comes home cut off, numb, dehumanized” (Terkel, Working, 102).

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workers. Furthermore, I want to argue that what Moses finds limited and problematic about class unity, namely the kind Jess fails to attain with butches such as Edwin, Feinberg attempts to resolve in the working-class space of the factory. In this way, Feinberg employs the unity achieved in the factories as an effective model for solidarity elsewhere. The factory is curiously absent from much critical discussion of Feinberg’s novel, expect for when it accounts for the economic opportunities afforded to Jess because of her gender expression, as it does in Moses’s essay. My interest in the factory of Stone Butch Blues is twofold: first, it is with this site and the successes butches achieve there that Feinberg is able to advance hir model of gay civil rights by the novel’s close; and second, plant closures in the U.S. by 1973 mark the start of Jess’s passing in the novel and subsequent exile as a transgendered butch. The sections in which the factory figures prominently in Stone Butch Blues are organized, then, around Jess’s movement in the novel from working as a butch in factories with a union to passing as man to secure work in factories without union representation. In the first of these sections, Jess’s battles are largely the result of her gender expression; as a “he-she,” the foreman frequently pits Jess against other workers, with this baiting culminating in a work “accident” that leaves Jess disfigured. When Jess passes for a man, the nature of these battles changes from one of gender to a psychological war where Jess is the only combatant. In the factory of Stone Butch Blues, lines are clearly drawn between those who move in solidarity with their class and those who leave it behind. Here in the working-class space of the factory it is the foreman (or a worker set on advancement at the expense of other workers) who becomes suspect. In this way, Feinberg places blame where it belongs in hir novel: on an economic system that demands competition and not on workers themselves. This is not to suggest, however, that Feinberg unproblematically depicts Jess’s relations with others of the working-class, as Moses makes clear with Jess’s lack of effort to understand the DuBoisian double-consciousness Edwin feels (77). In Stone Butch Blues, these divisions provide a larger narrative function for Feinberg: they reinforce hir argument that capitalism’s method of divide- and-conquer hinders solidarity between workers, not that butches were organized on opposite sides of what was, at this time, a more mainstream working-class. Despite conflicts of interest, class unity occurs with some regularity in Feinberg’s novel, often as a response to either a foreman’s discriminatory practices or his attempt to pit workers against one another. Workers realize more frequently, even if academics do not, that to improve their lot they must move in solidarity with others of their class.19 This need to improve her lot is why, for example, Jess slows down her pace a bindery after the first day of work. “If quota was made too effortlessly,” Jess insists, “the foreman would raise it” (SBB 77) – a move that affects Jess and other workers. It is here at the bindery that Jess is able to locate community in sites not designated for working-class butches, though she is at this plant “the only ‘he-she’” (77). Despite her differences, Jess maintains that “kindnesses were not withheld” (77). What Moses finds

19 Paul Lauter came to this conclusion as early as 1980 when he simplified Marx’s definition of the proletariat: “I refer to people who, to improve their lot, must either move in solidarity with their class or leave it (for example, to become managers)” (Politics of Education, O’Malley, Rosen, and Vogt, Eds. 111). Evidence of this solidarity or working-class revolt extended long past the 1930’s and 1940’s, with Philip Levy having documented the 1960’s as a decade of labor militancy unprecedented since World War II in The New Left and Labor in the 1960s. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994. 9. See also Terkel’s Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. 38

problematic about Jess’s interactions with Native women at the bindery is how Jess “benefits from stereotypical Native beliefs and practices involving nature and community without working to understand them or interrogating the privilege her whiteness bestows” (77). Although I agree with Moses’s reading, I might also emphasize how, for Feinberg, Jess’s “differences were taken into account” (78). This rhetorical move, I argue, enables Feinberg to emphasize what workers have in common despite their many differences: “that we worked cooperatively, day in and day out” (78). In Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg makes clear that these differences matter more to the foreman who, in fearing solidarity among workers, invents new forms of sabotage: “It was done in little ways, all the time: a whispered lie, a cruel suggestion, a vulgar joke. But it was hard to split us up. The conveyer belt held us together” (78). In Feinberg’s novel, the foreman closely resembles his historical counterpart: he fosters racial, gendered, and/or sexual divisions among workers who, for all their differences, share in the nature of production – the meaning, in part, behind Jess’s comment, “the conveyer belt held us together.” Implied by this comment, as well, is the power workers have over the foreman, namely the strength in numbers Feinberg describes when in Trans Liberation ze writes, “When we [fight] a list of demands together, [keep] each other’s spirits high on the picket lines, and [defend] each other from attacks by cops and company goons, we frequently [win]” (103). In my discussion of the factory, I focus on Jess as a part of a collective history of working-class struggle. I understand Jess’s experiences with class in the factories to be the result of specific historical, social, and economic circumstances – circumstances I later use to demonstrate why Jess turns to union organizing as a model for liberation by the novel’s close. Here in the space of the factory, Jess informally serves as union leader for fellow butches: in an “unprecedented reversal of roles” (81), older butches come to Jess for help with problems on the shop floor or with the union. Jess may find only enjoyment in this role reversal, but Feinberg posits it as the start of hir protagonist’s union organizing in the novel. For Jess, it is not until she is promoted over a black male worker that she begins to realize how capitalism and institutionalized racism function to divide workers. In this way, Jess locates herself among a collective, a point she reinforces when she implores Grant and other butches to “make the guys see that they need us too” (84): without butches, men at the plant lack the strength in numbers necessary to win on the picket line; without the support of these men, butches are left to negotiate with the foreman on their own, which is rarely, if ever, effective. It is at the moment in which Jess rallies butches to the cause of the union – which is to say that Jess also rallies butches to the cause of other workers, many of whom are heterosexual white men – that Feinberg’s protagonist makes her transition in the novel from informal union leader to union organizer. In the bindery of Stone Butch Blues, Jess as union organizer is uniquely positioned in what becomes in the novel another intersection of “working-class” with other areas of experience. To put this differently, Jess being of the working-class provides her with a platform from which to demand butch respectability in working-class spaces outside the bars. The factory becomes, then, a space where, as Feinberg suggested in an article of Workers World, “sex and gender issues are increasingly discussed and fought on the shop floor.”20 When Jess is promoted over Leroy to grade five, she learns from Duffy, the heterosexual man who fosters her

20 Leslie Feinberg, “Transgender Leader Connects with Young Unionists.” Workers World. 12 September 2006. 9 April 2009. http://www.workers.org/ww/leslie.html. 39

organizing, that the foreman, Jack, would rather promote a “he-she” than work with a black man. In response, Jess sides with Duffy and the union as she refuses promotion and instead supports Leroy’s advancement. At the bindery, Jack uses Jess to create to create divisions among butches and minority workers. Yet Jess’s refusal of promotion works to undo this division as it garners Jess respect from other men in the factory who also appropriately identify Jack as the enemy. Feinberg emphasizes this solidarity when after the incident men at the plant recognize Jess for siding with workers: “Sammy, the truck driver, patted my shoulder,” while “Walter, the repairman, caught my eye and nodded his head once in my direction” (85). Importantly, Feinberg uses this moment to downplay differences among workers in favor of what they have in common, namely their distrust of Jack. This decision is largely consistent with Feinberg’s own experiences in the factories of Buffalo; Feinberg writes in Transgender Warriors that when the foreman tried to pit workers against hir, ze would remind them that he cared little for their misery (11). Jess provides a similar function in Stone Butch Blues: she demonstrates for other workers how “butch” and “working-class” need not be mutually exclusive terms. While at work in the bindery that began this section, Jess details the foreman’s many attempts to sabotage worker solidarity; largely this sabotage involved pitting workers against one another along lines of race, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality. At the second bindery, however, sabotage results not in insults or jokes about Jess but rather industrial violence: Jack, angry over the solidarity that results from Jess’s refusal of promotion, coerces Jess’s coworker to remove a safety pin on a machine operated on by Feinberg’s protagonist. Jess narrates not only the pain that follows but also the support she receives from her coworkers: It happened so fast. One moment my fingers were all connected to me. The next moment I could feel my ring finger lying against my palm. [. . .] The next thing I remember was being in a car. Walter had his arm around me. Duffy was driving and he kept turning around for a sign from Walter. [. . .] Walter lifted my injured hand up high with one of his large, gentle hands, and held me tightly against him with the other. I shook violently. “It’s gonna be OK, honey,” he crooned. “I seen a lot of these things happen. It’s gonna be alright.” (92) What is significant about this scene is twofold: first, it further illustrates the dialectic Feinberg employs in hir descriptions of working-class spaces such as the factory; and second, it attends to what Janet Zandy calls the “physicality of work” that figures prominently in working-class writing (Hands 43). In other words, Jess’s work “accident” reflects a larger history of writing in which, as Zandy insists, “[injuries] and deaths accumulate” (43). Consistent with this dialectic in Stone Butch Blues, Jess’s experience with industrial violence is at once painful as it is pleasing – pleasing because of the unexpected support she receives from her coworkers. Jess says, after Duffy demands an investigation of the “accident,” “I marveled at the idea that a straight person would stand up for me, or for any he-she” (SBB 93). Cat Moses may read Stone Butch Blues as a narrative in which Jess can only yearn for class unity, but the details of these factory scenes suggest otherwise. Here, and precipitated by a shared experience with violence, Jess finds community among butches as well as among men like Walter– the latter of whom repeatedly sides with Jess against foremen such as Jack. Feinberg demonstrates throughout these factory scenes how workers, despite their many differences, stand against a common enemy: the foreman and later, in a strike scene, the police. The police resurface at the strike though not to police gender. This kind of policing happens in enclosed spaces such as the working-class bar and police interrogation room. Jess remarks after 40

her “accident” at the plant that “the police really stepped up their harassment after the birth of gay pride” (135). Implied by Jess’s comment is how working-class butches and femmes were not “liberated” by gay pride as they lacked the class-privilege needed to move into middle-class spaces free from police violence. When the gay liberation movement formed in 1970, “gay pride” afforded middle-class queers a distinct identity as gay or lesbian. For working-class butches and femmes, however, embracing the word “gay” merely intensified police violence, as police were now able to more clearly identify which bars catered to gay patrons. Jess wonders at this point in Stone Butch Blues if the revolution has come. “Everything was changing so fast,” Jess remarks, and yet gay liberation remains “another world” (135) to butches and femmes as they circulate within proscribed working-class spaces such as bars and factories. Only Theresa has direct contact with lesbian-feminists, her university job the reason why Jess and the others “[hear] about weekly gay liberation and radical women’s meetings at the university” (135). Theresa’s university job is a salient one in Stone Butch Blues: it marks the introduction of lesbian-feminism into formerly working-class spaces in the novel, among them the home Theresa shares with Jess. In what was once a site that offered protection to Jess, the home shared with Theresa now stands-in for lesbian-feminism and its goals since Theresa’s need for inclusion in lesbian-feminism precludes her sensitivity towards Jess’s situation as butch. With the bars unsafe for butches and global shifts having eliminated much factory work in and around Buffalo, Jess finds herself without community or work. What follows is Jess’s conversation with Grant and Edwin about how to survive now that blue collar work is increasingly service-oriented. (Department store work is not an option for butches.) Feinberg makes very clear throughout this conversation that choosing to take male hormones results not from feeling differently sexed – what Grant means when she says, “I’m not a guy” (143) – but from a real need to pay the rent (144) and to be safe from police violence (145). Unlike Jimmy, the only FTM transsexual in the novel, Jess intends hormone use for passing, not a transition, a point she emphasizes when she asks Grant, “What happens? Does it just last for a little while? I mean can you go back to being a butch later, when it’s safe to come out?” (145). I make this distinction between passing and transition because locating Jess’s decision with embodiment, as Jay Prosser does, ignores the class-specific circumstances that necessitate her passing. Jess decides to pass because the plants close, not because she feels differently sexed – a reading Jess confirms when she writes to Theresa: “The plants closed. That’s when I began passing as a man. Strange to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home” (11). Male hormones may open a window for Jess, but they do not provide for her access to less dangerous and better paying work – luxuries often afforded to those with college degrees. In the latter half of Stone Butch Blues, Jess resorts to temp labor until she is able to secure work in a factory without a union; she takes this job, despite union representation, because of her skill as a laborer but also in an effort to reclaim the community lost with Theresa’s leaving and Grant’s alienation. The difference, however, between working as a butch and passing as a man in the factories is how with the latter Jess becomes the invisible man: one who is seen but not seen, a man without a past. Jess may find community in the factories, but passing restricts how close Jess may become with another worker, made evident with Jess’s eventual estrangement from Ben and her feelings of isolation from femmes while at work (Jess cannot make her desire known if she is taken for a man.) Despite problems posed by passing, I argue, Jess forges alliances with coworkers for the same reason she did while working as a butch: because the circumstances of plant life demand such alliances. Feinberg makes this need apparent when Jess 41

reluctantly agrees to serve on a union organizing committee at the third bindery where she works after a coworker’s lung is pierced in a work “accident” (204). In hir description of the “accident” and the unsafe work conditions that caused it, Feinberg highlights the class-specific circumstances that necessitate class unity as ze also reinforces Jess’s call to union organizing despite her fear of being unmasked as female. Shortly after her work in the bindery ends, Jess decides to stop hormone treatment. For Prosser, this decision coincides with a narrative shift in Stone Butch Blues from transsexuality to transgender embodiment, wherein “Jess’s inner (trans)gender identity is determining her sense of herself, not her ‘performance’ – sexual and social – as a man” (“No Place” 498). Unlike Prosser, I would argue that at no point prior to, during, or after her passing does Jess identify as anything other than a “he-she.” In other words, I do not read Jess’s decision to stop hormones as the moment when she beings to see herself as transgendered. Rather, throughout Stone Butch Blues, Jess identifies as differently gendered – she is not a “Saturday-night butch” – and only stops hormones because she can no longer see the complexities of her gender (SBB 222). It may not be safe for her yet as transgendered butch, but Jess can no longer be the exile, both from her biological sex and from the working-class community she found in the bars and the factories. She realizes, despite her want, that Buffalo might never provide for her a permanent home, and so, in an attempt to end her lonely exile, Jess continues on her journey to New York City – a place where she hopes to find “jobs and others like [her]” (225).

Bringing Jess’s Gender and Class Consciousness into Focus: New York City New York City, perhaps more than any other site in Stone Butch Blues, produces in Jess a desire to integrate successfully two different but overlapping areas of experience: that of being working-class and that of being a transgendered butch. Shortly after her arrival to the city, Jess makes a list of “things she’d like to accomplish: join a gym, learn more about [her] aunt who had been a union organizer, and have [her] picture taken in front of the Stonewall bar where the rebellion took place” (242).21 Here, Jess envisions herself in a larger history – one that reflects her developing consciousness as working-class and transgendered. Jess spends the remainder of the novel searching, then, for a queer space that can accommodate her being working-class (Jess has already found working-class spaces that accommodate her being transgendered and butch in the bars and factories of Buffalo.) I would like to suggest that Jess finds this space, in part, in a tenement apartment near Ruth, a transgendered female. I use “in part” here because by the close of Stone Butch Blues, it is apparent that Jess has not found a space outside the tenements where working-class and transgendered butches – or femmes – are included. By the time Jess meets Ruth, she has already identified with a number of society’s “Others”: black students at her high school, Native women at the bindery, a deaf mime, and a homeless man whose clothing conceals his gender. Despite their many differences, these characters are also of the working-class – a point absent from other readings of the novel. Ruth is no exception; she further develops Jess’s working-class consciousness as she simultaneously creates a necessary space where Jess can come into her own as a working-class and

21 Feinberg alludes to two historical references here: the first is what has been called “The Uprising of 20,000,” or the garment strike of 1909-10 in New York City. The second is the Stonewall riots, which took place at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in 1969 when homeless drag kings and butches fought back against the police in what later sparked the gay pride movement. 42

transgendered butch. Yet Ruth also satisfies a larger objective for Feinberg: she represents the return to communalism and cooperative labor Feinberg regards as imperative if oppressed peoples are to be liberated. Thus, Ruth’s relationship with Jess becomes the most significant one in the novel, not simply for the coming home it provides Jess, but also because it precipitates Jess’s call to action at the novel’s close. If New York City serves as a site where Jess’s class and gender consciousness comes most clearly into focus, then the tenement shared near Ruth provides the locus for Jess’s coming to voice in the novel, or her insistence on the right to be working-class and transgendered in the fight for gay liberation. The moment when Jess realizes that Ruth’s experiences with cooperative labor and communalism are consistent with the class unity achieved in factories and on picket lines in and around Buffalo occurs when Jess expresses nostalgia for a Buffalo wherein work in the plants was steady and working-class people lived and worked cooperatively alongside one another, and Ruth agrees that relying on each other made it possible for her to survive as a working-class trans female (251). Feinberg demonstrates in much of Transgender Warriors how trans people were respected and honored in pre-capitalist societies (52). The inclusion of Ruth, then, represents the possibility of return to such a society in the same way the novel imagines a future in which the histories of working-class transgendered persons figure prominently in that of the gay rights movement. Late in hir narrative, Feinberg uses a Christmas spent with Ruth as the start of hir protagonist’s coming to voice in the novel; on this night, Jess receives a book on gay American history in which she discovers a history of trans people like those Feinberg examines in Transgender Warriors (SBB 266). For Jess, this history is made real when she can finally recognize herself in her own reflection after hormones and surgery – here in a watercolor portrait of herself Ruth has made. It is at this point along her journey that Jess can begin to insert herself into a collective transgender history. Importantly, this insertion occurs not at the exclusion of Jess as working-class: Jess tells Ruth that she spends her lunch break “typesetting all the history [she’s] found, trying to make it look as important as it feels to [her]” (271). Throughout Stone Butch Blues, Jess refuses to separate out “working-class” from other areas of experience – a point she makes most clear when she demands the right to be working-class and transgender at a Christopher Street gay pride rally.

The Praxis of Queer Liberation Critics have read the significance of Jess’s emergence onto Christopher Street from the subway in divergent ways, with Jay Prosser insisting that this emergence symbolizes Jess’s reemergence into the gay and lesbian world as a whole (“No Place” 500). Cat Moses, on the other hand, capitalizes on Jess’s feelings of alienation from the gay rights movement, despite its being sparked by working-class butches and homeless drag queens (92). Moses’s reading, with its attention to the class dimensions of Stone Butch Blues, more appropriately explains what Feinberg intends for Jess’s taking the stage at the rally. As Moses suggests, this is not the first rally Jess has stumbled upon; in the past, Jess has seen other rallies but has “always walked away feeling outside the movement and alone” (SBB 296). It is not until she hears a young woman testify to being raped by men in her neighborhood because of her sexuality that Jess finds her voice and the language with which to talk about her experiences as a working-class transgendered butch: “There’s lots of us who are on the outside [of the movement] and we don’t want to be. We’re getting busted and beaten up. We need you – but you need us, too” (296).

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The “us” to whom Jess refers are not simply transgendered persons whose experiences have not found, until recently, inclusion in a history of gay civil rights. Rather, Jess intends for the “us” to mean both trans persons and working-class butches and femmes such as herself. As if to emphasize how butches and femmes have been on the margins of – or outright excluded from – the gay rights movement, Feinberg has Jess recognize while on stage first a femme “near the back of the crowd” (296) and then an older drag queen “on the edges of protest” (296). These working-class femmes offer Jess the support she needs to continue speaking, in much the same way they once provided for her a community in the bars and factories. When Jess argues that gays and lesbians of privilege need such people, she moves the femmes from the periphery of the movement to its center. Her insistence that gays and lesbians must fight the battles of all those oppressed speaks, then, to the model for liberation Jess alone uses in the letter that begins Stone Butch Blues: that of union organizing and its slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” I might suggest, however, that Jess can only speak of this model by the novel’s close; her conversation with Duffy following the rally reveals how Jess takes the stage not to implement this model but to offer it as a possibility worth working toward (299). It is high time, Feinberg insists with Stone Butch Blues, that the gay rights movement heed Jess’s charge.

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Chapter Three From Working-Class Center to Middle-Class Margins: Upward Mobility and Intraracial Class Conflict in Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love

In cities such as Feinberg’s New York City of Stone Butch Blues, deindustrialization and globalization fundamentally altered social and cultural networks that had long sustained African American families and communities under segregation. When the U.S. shifted away from its industrial base in the early 1970’s – a process that began as early as the 1950’s in many cities – the black industrial working-class that formed after World War II experienced these global shifts through job loss and resulting poverty, but also through the weakening of family and community networks that had begun a decade prior. Understanding the effect deindustrialization and globalization had on working-class African Americans in the 1970’s requires, then, a more nuanced reading of the 1960’s, particularly because black civil society became more stratified by social class in this decade. Patricia Hill Collins has argued, for example, that while many African Americans experienced upward mobility into the black middle-class in these decades, much of the working-class “center” that formed the core of black civil society did not. For Hill Collins, this upward mobility made clear in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s that “many problems U.S. Blacks faced were not due solely to racial discrimination” (59). Both William Julius Wilson and Robin Kelley have made similar observations, attributing current problems facing African Americans in inner-cities with structural and cultural changes that began in the late 1960’s such as deindustrialization and black middle-class flight from the city.1 This third chapter is, in many ways, an extension of Kelley’s and Wilson’s scholarship in that I am concerned with the black working-class as it has been obscured in much history of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Yet I diverge from these scholars in my attention to fiction rather than simply history, specifically fiction as a symptom of what Jameson calls a “history that hurts.” More pointedly, I understand the connection between a history of the black working-class and select literature from this period as Marcial González has done in his recent work on the 1960’s and migrant farm workers: that in the absence of documentation of capitalism’s abuses in literature by migrants, critics are left to uncover this history in what the text represses or in what is left unsaid.2 For González, there has been a tendency among migrant worker-writers to offer in their narratives a very personal and almost “touching” story of migrant life, which González considers not a representation of history but a symptom or effect of this history. The dynamic González identifies in migrant worker writing is similarly at work in the many studies published by African Americans following Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the so-called social pathologies of the black family. In these studies, as William Julius Wilson argues, “the elements of ghetto behavior described as pathological in Moynihan’s report

1 For more on the effect deindustrialization and globalization had on the black working-class, see Robin Kelley’s Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working-Class. New York: Free Press, 1994. See also William Julius Wilson’s When Work Disappears. New York: Knopf, 1996. 2 González, Marcial. “Farm Workers in Chicano Literature: The Making of Racial-Class Subjects.” Paper presented at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles, 8 January 2011. I would like to thank Professor González for sharing a copy of his talk with me.

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were seen as functional in this new interpretation because, it was argued, inner-city blacks, and especially the black family, were resilient, able to survive and even flourish in a racist environment” (xvii). Wilson may not read these studies as symptoms of a history that has hurt African Americans, but he echoes González in remarking on how “the devastating effects of the inner-city environment were either ignored, played down, or denied by U.S. Black scholars” (xvii). In other words, both Moynihan’s report and the revisionist arguments of his African American critics repressed the “racial isolation and economic class subordination” (xvii) that has characterized the inner-city environment since the late 1960’s. I find Wilson’s criticism significant for this chapter because in reading the resilient black family of Toni Cade Bambara’s early work as a response to Moynihan’s report, literary critics have made the same error as Moynihan’s critics, shifting focus from social pathologies to the resilient black family but not interrogating the effects of the inner-city environment on the black working-class. Elizabeth Muther, for example, has contested critics’ claims that Bambara’s 1972 collection Gorilla, My Love is both ahistorical and apolitical, pointing to the strength of Bambara’s black families as evidence against the elements of Moynihan’s report that pathologized black families and black women in particular.3 Unlike Muther, I do not read the resilient black family of Bambara’s collection as a representation of history of the black working-class in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, even if Bambara intended for it to challenge the basic premise of Moynihan’s report, as Muther argues. Rather, I understand the insistence on the resilient black family as a symptom of this history, manifested in Bambara’s collection as narrative tension between what is said or revealed and what is omitted or repressed. In focusing on the resilient black family of Gorilla, My Love, critics have examined only the surface content of Bambara’s narrative. By contrast, I read Bambara’s collection as significant for what it also represses, specifically the structural and cultural changes that reorganized black working-class life in the wake of global shifts and a changed political climate of the 1960’s. I argue in this chapter that Gorilla, My Love represses these changes even as historical “truths” surface in the narrative; in both “My Man Bovanne” and “The Lesson,” two stories generally unexamined by critics, a generation gap between old and young is symptomatic of race and class divisions resulting from changes in black families and communities since the late 1960’s. My method of reading Bambara’s collection comes from Marcial González’s work on migrant literature and the histories that narrate migrants’ lives. In his essay “Farm Workers in Chicano Literature: The Making of Race-Class Subjects,” González admits being troubled by Elva Treviño Hart’s 1999 autobiography Barefoot Heart: Stories by a Migrant Girl because despite Hart’s background as a migrant who came-of-age in 1960’s Texas, histories of militant migrant struggles do not enter Barefoot Heart directly. González concludes that despite its problems, Barefoot Heart conveys a truth about history, “but that it is not conveyed in the narrative’s surface content, or exclusively in the thoughts and opinions of the narrator, but in the narrative’s formal contradictions – what might be described as the political unconscious of the text” (3). In fact, González goes so far as to insist that the central conflict of Barefoot Heart is

3 Muther, Elizabeth. “Bambara’s Feisty Girls: Resistance Narratives in Gorilla, My Love.” African-American Review. 36:3 (2002): 447-60.

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this narrative tension between what is revealed – personal suffering and individual resistance – and what is repressed – social critique and collective action. Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love invites González’s method of reading because the collection alternately reveals and represses histories Bambara knew, claimed to revise, and helped to create. I am referring, of course, to Moynihan’s report but also to long-standing histories of Black Nationalism and black feminism. Simultaneously, Gorilla, My Love reveals Bambara’s preoccupation with the resilient black family following Moynihan’s report (itself a symptom of how this history has hurt African Americans), and represses structural and cultural changes that reorganized black working-class life after the late 1960’s. Even when these changes surface in the collection, as they do in “My Man Bovanne” and “The Lesson,” Bambara’s narrative offers only an implicit social critique. Given Bambara’s involvement in anti-racist, anti-imperialist and proletarian movements such as Black Nationalism and black feminism, and her consistent focus on the black working-class in her fiction, why does Gorilla, My Love repress or allude to changes in the black family and community with which Bambara would have been aware? Unlike Hart’s Barefoot Heart, which remains silent on histories of migrant struggles, two of Bambara’s stories from Gorilla, My Love raise the specter of history, but this is a history that hurts – in many ways why these stories repress or vaguely respond to changes in black working-class life. In examining Gorilla, My Love for what is said and not said, Bambara’s orientation to the black working-class and to Black Nationalism and black feminism becomes, paradoxically, more clear.

The 1960’s and 1970’s: Decades of Structural and Cultural Change in Black Working- Class Families and Communities The Civil Rights movement in the United States made poverty visible to middle-class liberals despite how the majority of people in poverty were white, and the movement did not represent only the poor as many who directed the movement were of the black middle-class.4 In the middle-class liberal imagination, however, poverty had a non-white face (except for, of course, whites in Appalachia but nowhere else), with former President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs narrowly focused on African Americans. Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in the wake of Johnson’s social programs. Like his contemporaries, Moynihan understood poverty and its cause as a “culture” of dependence and helplessness specific to the poor. This rhetoric dictated that if the “culture” of poverty could change, then the problem of poverty would cease to exist. The issue, of course, with such rhetoric is that the objective problem of poverty got lost in the challenge to end it. By 1965, the year Moynihan published his report, the U.S. economy had already begun its eventual shift away from industry and toward service and agricultural work and unskilled manufacturing. Sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose work has focused almost exclusively on the urban black working-class, has found the elements of Moynihan’s report that pathologized black families and black women in particular symptomatic of structural changes occurring in black families and communities at this time. For example, Moynihan’s attack on black women

4 For more on middle-class liberals’ “discovery” of poverty as non-white, see Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. Ehrenreich put this “discovery” succinctly when she said, “The War on Poverty was, above all, a response to the civil rights movement. It was, at best, an oblique response. After all, the poor were, as they are now, mostly white; and the civil rights movement did not represent only the poor” (47). 47

ignored how deindustrialization and globalization forced industry out of the city, with many African American men leaving cities to find work elsewhere. For Wilson, the decline of industrial work in cities has been directly the cause of increased crime among black men and delayed marriage for young black women.5 Scholars and policymakers who have ignored, denied, or repressed these structural changes wrongly attribute poverty with moral degeneracy, an error in thinking that has retarded national efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged. Despite liberal pathologizing, Johnson’s Great Society programs helped break down sex and race barriers in employment and provided low-income students with grants to attend college. From the mid-1960’s to 1973, African Americans acquired unprecedented access to education, jobs, and housing long denied under segregation (Hill Collins 58). Like Wilson, Patricia Hill Collins has found the 1960’s significant, in part, because this decade witnessed African American civil society becoming more stratified by social class (58). From the working-class “center” that had long formed the core of black civil society, many African Americans experienced mobility into the black middle-class. For Hill Collins, this upward mobility made clear “that many problems U.S. Blacks faced were not due solely to racial discrimination” (59). Certainly many African Americans, including Toni Cade Bambara, benefitted from the changed political climate in the 1960’s, but many did not. Class factors, Hill Collins insists, were equally important. As with Wilson, Hill Collins rejects both the pathologizing rhetoric of Moynihan’s report and the revisionist arguments of his African American critics when her focus shifts to changes in the global economy as a significant cause for changes in black civil society. During this period, “work for Black men in manufacturing disappeared. Black women could find work, but it was often part time, low paid, and lacking in security and benefits. Extended family networks weakened” (59). When read in light of these structural changes, Moynihan’s report on black families and black women in particular did little to explain why family networks had begun to dissolve. Of course, the many studies by African Americans following Moynihan’s report did not offer a corrective lens to this problem, including, at least in its surface content, Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love. Bambara’s collection might very well provide an “almost point- by-point, comic, and kid-powered refutation” (450) to Moynihan’s report, as Elizabeth Muther argues, but this intervention in national dialogue is not a presentation of history but a symptom of it. Bambara’s real intervention in national dialogue is in a history from below – below the narrative’s surface content and the changes in black civil society it represses and responds to.

History from Above and Below: Narrative Tension in Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love Bambara published Gorilla, My Love in the wake of her 1970 anthology The Black Book, a collection of black feminist writing that predates the work of the Combahee River Collective by four years. In The Black Book, Bambara outlines the “two revolutions” of the early 1970’s: Black Nationalism and Anglo feminism. Drawing from Anglo feminists an emphasis on gender- specific concerns but diverging from them in their attention to race and class differences, Bambara and other black feminists made clear in The Black Book how “oppressions overlapped,” to use Leslie Feinberg’s phrase, in the lives of black women. At once critical and supportive of Black Nationalism, the brand of feminism advanced by The Black Book incorporated central

5 For more on these dynamics, see the following chapters in Wilson’s book When Work Disappears: “From Institutional to Jobless Ghettos” (3-24) and “The Fading Inner-City Family” (87-110). 48

tenets of Black Nationalist thought – anti-racist, anti-imperialist, proletarian – with the gender- consciousness raising that occurred in feminist circles. If, as Richard Wright insisted in the 1930’s, African Americans were the negation of Western capitalism and thus the only ones to undo it, then black women were most able to do this political work as their alienation from Western capitalism far exceeded that of black men or white workers. 6 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Bambara and other black feminists demanded leadership roles in Black Nationalism – they understood all too clearly that if African Americans were to undo racist capitalist systems, black women were needed for the project as their alienation from bourgeois culture enabled them to more clearly see through and outside the structures that governed African Americans’ lives under capitalism. By the time Bambara published Gorilla, My Love in 1972, she had already made an important intervention in the two revolutions of the period. In this way, Bambara’s collection is historically significant for more than its “point-by-point” and “comic” refutation of the pathologizing elements of Moynihan’s report. With Gorilla, My Love as an almost corollary to The Black Book, Bambara offers readers young black girls and women as feminist models. Their resistance – and Bambara’s – emerges in what is said and not said, in what appears on the surface as a young girl’s defiance to adults but beneath reveals the many histories that narrate resistance and change in the lives of working- class African Americans. The preface that begins Gorilla, My Love invites multiple ways of reading: the first, situated in autobiography studies, raises questions about the politics of autobiography, specifically for African American women and women from the working-class in particular. bell hooks, writing about Bambara’s legacy in Remembered Rapture, remarks on how writers like Bambara “struggled to maintain allegiance to [their] class of [their] family of origin and were continually faced with issues of accountability and responsibility” (102-3). As hooks suggests, it is a fear of being cut off from family or friends – those who often do not have the recourse to “talk back” – that problematizes the working-class woman writer’s relationship to history, both personal and familial or collective. In “A Sort of Preface,” Bambara confirms hooks’s concern about autobiography when she opens the preface with: It does no good to write about autobiographical fiction because the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death where is they sting and she snatches you up out your bed to grill you about what was going down back there in Brooklyn when she was working three jobs and trying to improve the quality of your life and come to find on page 42 that you were messin around with that nasty boy up the block and breaks into sobs and quite naturally your family strolls in all sleepy-eyed to catch the floor show at

6 Wright made this point clear when he urged African Americans to transform the Marxist critique of capitalism into an expression of their emergence as the negation of Western capitalism. To Wright, it was clear that “the alienation of Black workers from American society was more total than that experienced by the ‘white’ working classes formed in Europe and America” (Robinson 429). Furthermore, for Wright, this alienation was the more profound significance of Black Nationalism, recognizable in a nationalism that carried with it “the highest possible pitch of social consciousness” (Wright 59 as quoted in Robinson 429). For more on Wright’s intervention in Black Nationalism, see Cedric Robinson’s chapter on Wright in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Press, 1983. 416-30. 49

5:00 A.M. but as far as your mama is concerned, it is nineteen-forty-and- something and you ain’t too grown to have your ass whipped. (ix) In a language characteristic of the black working-class, Bambara claims to “deal in straight-up fiction” (x), namely for the reasons hooks identifies in Remembered Rapture, but there is an underlying tension in her preface between what is said – Bambara deals with fiction only – and what is omitted – that elements of Bambara’s life and the lives she recognized as a child are present in Gorilla, My Love albeit under the guise of fiction and “lies.” When Bambara admits to “lying a lot” (x) in a preface about autobiographical fiction, she lays claim to the two-sided formal narrative structure of revelation and repression that marks the stories in her collection. In this chapter, I am interested in only three of these stories: the first, “Gorilla, My Love,” has been regularly anthologized and discussed by critics of Bambara’s collection, while “My Man Bovanne” and “The Lesson” have fallen under critics’ radar, in part, I argue, because these stories clearly complicate critics’ reading of the resilient black family of Gorilla, My Love. Bambara’s title story from the collection centers on a young Hazel – the name the protagonist uses when she means business – and her conflict with both “Hunca Bubba,” her uncle, and the matron and manager at a Harlem movie theater. In her reading of this story, Elizabeth Muther dismisses Hazel’s conflict with her uncle as merely the naivety of a child, heart-broken by her uncle’s having lied about marrying young Hazel when she is older (453). For Muther, Hunca Bubba’s dishonesty – that he has made plans to marry another – does not prefigure the loss of community that Mary Willis reads as central to “Gorilla, My Love” (Ibid). Instead, Muther regards Hunca Bubba’s “gentle and affectionate teasing” (what Hazel considers treachery) as Bambara’s challenge to the premise of Moynihan’s report (457). Unlike Muther, I want to entertain Willis’s notion that in “Gorilla, My Love” gentle teasing might very well signify treachery or, here, loss of community. Given the two-sided formal narrative structure of Bambara’s stories, what appears in surface content as teasing might actually repress the structural changes occurring in black families and communities at this time. More specifically, Hazel’s conflict with Hunca Bubba represses family networks weakened by these changes. “Gorilla, My Love” begins with Hunca Bubba and the suggestion that he has changed or, if we examine the story for its formal contradictions, that black men’s relationships with black women have changed: “That was the year Hunca Bubba changed his name. Which was news to me cause he’d been my Hunca Bubba my whole lifetime, since I couldn’t manage Uncle to save my life” (13). Immediately after his introduction, Hazel tells us that her uncle’s renaming “was a change completely to somethin sounding very geographical weatherlike to me, like somethin you’d find in an almanac” (13). It is almost as if Hunca Bubba’s name change, or his change from Hunca Bubba to Jefferson Winston Vale, is on record – a change Hazel can register in the same way she can a farmer’s prediction of rain. In linking personal with formal history, Hazel’s pronouncement represses the family dissolution that reorganized black working-class life at this time. This is why, for example, Hunca Bubba changes “so completely.” Yet Hazel can distinguish Hunca Bubba’s act of renaming from the many names she is called throughout the story (“Scout,” “Miss Muffin,” and “Peaches” are but a few). If anyone in Bambara’s story is resilient, it is Hazel. With Hunca Bubba leaving her to integrate into a system that maintains capitalist regimes, Hazel is left to do the “fiercesome things” (14) – her resistance, for example, against the theater matron and manager, representative here of coercive capitalist systems. Alternating between Hazel’s conflict with Hunca Bubba and her conflict with the black theater matron and white manager, Bambara’s narrative presents these conflicts as mutually 50

reinforcing, not, as Muther insists, as one conflict over Moynihan’s liberal pathologizing. The connection between these conflicts is made clear when Hazel’s narrative about Hunca Bubba’s impending marriage, which Bambara conveys to both Hazel and her readers through a photograph of Hunca Bubba’s fiancé standing in front of a movie theater, immediately precedes Hazel’s outer narrative of conflict at the theater. In contrast to Hunca Bubba’s complicity with capitalism (the heterosexual nuclear family in its reproduction of modern capitalist systems), Hazel locates in the system the ability to do “fiercesome things” even under conditions that she does not control. The idea that Hazel can engage in class struggle but only under coercive or oppressive conditions is, as Marcial González suggests in his reading of migrant histories, “a conceptual conundrum – a brain twister that requires us to think in dialectical rather than absolute either/or terms” (2). In other words, we must think of both sides of the contradiction simultaneously: even within the limitations posed by racist economic structures, Hazel is capable in “Gorilla, My Love” to change the conditions of her existence, at least as much as a child can. Hunca Bubba is not the only African American man in Bambara’s story to abandon Hazel in her political work against the system. Although Mary Willis is silent on Hazel’s political work, in part because she misreads Gorilla, My Love as apolitical, Willis identifies in Hazel’s immediate and extended family a “fragmented and besieged nucleus of a once-thriving community” (149 as quoted in Muther 453). Willis may not attribute the cause of this dissolution or weakened communal networks to structural changes occurring in black families and communities by the late 1960’s, but her suggestion of change demands critical attention. Even if black men are not the “betrayers” in “Gorilla, My Love,” as they are not in Elizabeth Muther’s reading of Bambara’s story (453), they do not share in Hazel’s political work, either because they are not there or because they desire, however unconsciously, integration into systems that have long denied them entry. The same dynamic was also true for many male nationalists who, despite their ideological aims for a unified black state, ended up reifying racist patriarchal capitalist systems by replacing white men as antagonists of black women. Bambara’s story bears out some of the isolation black women felt from black men, both in what the narrative reveals and in what it represses. Despite their presence in the story, Hazel’s brothers do not participate directly in her resistance work, which is to say that even as they are with Hazel in the theater they neither confront nor challenge the manager’s abuses against them. In “Gorilla, My Love,” black men such as Hazel’s brothers are capable of resistance but not against whites or racist capitalist systems; instead, Bambara’s narrative turns the boys’ resistance on black women (the theater matron) and, in the end, renders it impotent (they do not act.) Hazel informs us in her second, outer narrative of conflict at the theater that her brothers “egg her on” to “turn the place out” (14), but that she alone does this work: “With Baby Jason kickin at the seat in front, egging me on, and Big Brood mumblin bout what fiercesome things we goin do. Which means me” (14). In a moment of recollection, Hazel affirms her ability to act in the face of her brothers’ inaction at the theater when she admits, almost boasts, to having already laid the groundwork for effective resistance – fighting a while with “bad boys when they take Big Brood’s Spaudeen way from him” (14-15). Hazel cannot control the conditions in the park or at the theater as both the “bad boys” and theater matron and manager have set the terms of these conditions. (The boys take Big Brood’s bike, for example.) This does not mean, however, that Hazel is unable to attain some level of success to change the conditions of her own – and her brothers’ – existence. When the movie begins in the theater, Hazel and her brothers realize that the white manager has deceived 51

them; instead of the gorilla picture promised on the marquee, the manager shows a movie about Jesus, which Hazel reacts to vehemently. “And I am ready to kill,” Hazel proclaims, “not cause I got anything gainst Jesus. Just that when you fixed to watch a gorilla picture you don’t wanna get messed around with Sunday School stuff” (15). Hazel attributes the indignity to the manager but also to all adults in their exercise of disciplinary power over children: “Grownups figure they can treat you just anyhow. Which burns me up” (15). As a vulnerable population, children often do not have the recourse to fight back against the system, and yet Hazel finds in the system the means to undo it, if only temporarily. In “Gorilla, My Love,” Hazel confronts the system through both rhetoric and action. Like Estrella of Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, a novel I explore in the fifth chapter of this study, Hazel understands that there’s “no sense talking tough unless you do it.” This is why, then, Hazel follows her “yellin, booin, stompin and carryin on” (15) with slipping under the rope of the children’s section to “run up and down the aisle just to show it take more than some dusty ole velvet rope to tie us [children] down” (15). If we attend only to the narrative’s surface content, then Hazel’s acts of defiance read as the work of a child, a “feisty” girl, as Muther describes her, who exercises her might without being conscious of the weight it affords to her. However, in examining what the narrative represses, the roped-off children’s section and Hazel’s response to it take on new significance. As a cognitive map that stresses the gap between what Jameson calls the “local positioning of the individual subject position and the totality of the class structures in which he/she is situated” (353 as quoted in González 6), the roped-off children’s section represents not history exactly but a symptom of history. At the same time that Hazel can get out from being tied down by the rope, indicative, perhaps, of how a changed political climate helped end formal segregation, Bambara’s protagonist finds herself back in her seat when the theater manager brings out “Thunderbuns,” the black matron used “in case of an emergency” (15). The black matron’s inclusion in “Gorilla, My Love” operates, I might suggest, on dual and conflicting levels: Hazel heeds to the matron’s power but in doing so is again placed within, rather than outside, the system that also consigns “Thunderbuns.” This is why, then, the black matron can present Hazel with a model for resistance but not an entirely effective one as she resists the children rather than the white manager. From where, then, does Hazel ultimately derive her fighting spirit as it enables her to confront and reimagine the system by the story’s close? The answer Elizabeth Muther provides rests with Hazel’s nurturing and resilient family – contrasts, for Muther, to the family Moynihan pathologized in his 1965 report. In its surface content, Hazel’s outer narrative of conflict at the theater reveals, as it is mutually reinforced by Hazel’s inner narrative of conflict with Hunca Bubba, how the family acts as a site for both love and strife, with Hazel’s retelling of the Jesus movie to include Big Brood on the cross reminiscent of the contradiction implied by Hunca Bubba’s “gentle teasing.” Yet the problems Hazel’s outer narrative omits (disguised as good- natured family conflict) are the same as in her inner narrative of conflict with Hunca Bubba: men are either not present, do not act, or can only talk of action. In her retelling of the Jesus movie, Hazel accuses Daddy, Granddaddy Vale, and Hunca Bubba of the same crime as her brothers: egging on the women but impotent to act, in part because of their desire, however unconscious, to integrate into the system. Hazel says of the men in her family that Daddy “yellin to Granddaddy to get him a ladder” (16), while Hunca Bubba “tellin them folks on they knees they better get help” (16) and Granddaddy Vale “saying Leave the boy alone, if that’s what he wants to do with his life we ain’t got nothin to say about 52

it” (16). By contrast, Hazel describes the women in her family as active agents, with “mama and her sister Daisy jumpin on them Romans and beatin them with they pocketbooks” (16). In Hazel’s story of Big Brood on the cross, men do not act but instead yell, ask others to get help, or are complicit with a system that oppresses and even crucifies them. Only the women, Hazel included, perform the political work that Bambara and other black feminists considered necessary if African Americans were to undo racist patriarchal capitalist systems. Hazel confirms the role black women will play in this project when she says of her mother, not her father, that when whites “play the dozens behind colored folks” (17) it is Mama who goes to school and “undoes” the teacher (17). For Elizabeth Muther, lines are clearly drawn in Bambara’s story, except that in Muther’s reading black men are not on opposite sides of the battle line (453). Certainly Bambara did not consider black men as the enemy, but her narrative resists neat demarcations between white and black and between capitalist and communal or corporative systems. In “Gorilla, My Love,” black men can or do stand with black women, but they ultimately stand down to the systems by which they are oppressed. Hazel’s refrain in the story of “that’s how I was raised” (18), or her justification for her “fiercesome things,” concerns, then, Mama and her undoing of the systems that “play the dozens behind colored folks.” This is why, for example, Hazel’s aside of Mama at school intervenes in the narrative when Hazel acts, first against the theater manager and later against capitalism itself. In the first of these instances, Hazel admits to heeding the black matron’s demands to watch the Jesus movie, but she follows this defeat with a triumph of her own: getting the other children in the theater to join in her rallying cry of “we want our money back” (16). The problem, Hazel quickly realizes, is that the projectionist has set the terms of her condition at the theater by turning up the volume of the film thereby drowning out her voice. From within the limitations imposed by the system, Hazel and her brothers are again presented with the opportunity to change the conditions of their existence. Big Brood says after being drown out by the projectionist, “Awwww sheet, we goin to see the manager and get out money back” (16). Hazel, prepared and ready to do battle, marches up the aisle “to deal with the manager who is a crook in the first place for lyin out there saying Gorilla, My Love playin” (16). Yet Bambara’s young protagonist enters the battlefield alone for the second time in her narrative. Hazel informs us that when she knocks on the manager’s door she is furious and alone, her anger directed at both the white manager and her brothers: Baby Jason for his abrupt disappearance and Big Brood for “suddenly [having] to go so bad even though my mama told us bout going in them nasty bathrooms” (17). Left to do the difficult work by herself, Hazel reaffirms her ability to act in recollecting her mother’s undoing of the teacher, who becomes indistinguishable in Hazel’s imagination from the white manger (17). “I get so tired grownups messin over kids just cause they little and can’t take em to court” (17), Hazel thinks as she kicks open the manger’s door to demand her money back. Without formal recourse against a system that aims to turn the working-class into consumers, Hazel first turns to abstract speech to convey to the manager why she wants her money back. When this fails and Bambara’s protagonist is “forced to leave” (17) the manager’s office, Hazel abandons abstract speech for direct action, “taking the matches from under [the manager’s] ashtray” to set a fire under the candy stand that “closed the raggedy ole Washington down for a week” (17). Immediately after her own undoing of the system, if only temporarily, Hazel’s narrative returns to her conflict with Hunca Bubba, who also becomes, at times, indistinguishable from the manager. Hazel says of the men in her family that they, too, should mean what they say: “Cause 53

if you say Gorilla, My Love, you suppose to mean it. Just like when you say you goin to give me a party on my birthday, you gotta mean it” (17-18). It is difficult in these moments of Hazel’s narrative to read the men’s interactions with Hazel as simply “gentle and affectionate teasing.” In fact, even as it parallels the white manager’s, Hunca Bubba’s treachery is the one that ultimately hurts Hazel. “I’m hurtin and I can hear that I am screaming” (19), Hazel informs us, repeating back to Hunca Bubba his refrain of “And I was just teasin” (19). When Hunca Bubba doesn’t respond with an apology as Hazel thinks he should, Bambara’s protagonist finds herself “crying and crumplin down in the seat [of Granddaddy’s truck] and just [doesn’t] care” (20). Bambara, however, does not close her story with Hazel’s seemingly insurmountable sorrow. Instead, “Gorilla, My Love” recoups the possibility of black male resistance vis-à-vis that of black women’s when the narrative ends with Baby Jason crying along with Hazel. Hazel explains her brother’s crying in this way: “Cause he is my blood brother and understands that we must stick together or forever be lost, what with grownups playin change-up and turnin you round every which way so bad” (20). Another way to understand Baby Jason’s solidarity is to read his act as emblematic of a turn away from capitalist systems (adults) toward the communal, and a hope for black feminists that male nationalists would share in their political work. In this way, Hazel concludes her narrative by redirecting it back toward the goals of these two movements.

Raising the Specter of History: Class Divisions in “My Man Bovanne” and “The Lesson” Bambara published “My Man Bovanne” in the same year as “Gorilla, My Love” (1971). Despite the year of its publication, literary critics have not yet addressed “My Man Bovanne” even as it immediately precedes the collection’s title story and centers on yet another Hazel. One reason for this silence is, I might suggest, because “My Man Bovanne” more clearly alludes to changes in black civil society than do other stories in the collection. It is difficult to maintain the fiction of a resilient black family in Gorilla, My Love when Bambara’s narrative alternately reveals and represses how black civil society had become more stratified by social class by 1971. In “My Man Bovanne,” the central conflict between Hazel and her children underlies a fundamental conflict in the narrative between an economically depressed black working-class and a black middle-class that has effaced the needs of its working-class “center.” In this way, in what appears in surface content as a “generation gap” between old and young might actually repress changes in black civil society that weakened family and community networks. Bambara alludes to these changes in “My Man Bovanne” from within the context of a second conflict over how best to “undo” the system: either through a movement largely reduced to aesthetics, or through the everyday acts of resistance characteristic of the black working-class. “My Man Bovanne” is only one of two stories in Gorilla, My Love to mention directly Black Nationalism, but this is not a Black Nationalism historically consistent with the movement and its goals. Because young nationalists in “My Man Bovanne” have lost sight of the movement’s orientation to the black working-class, Bambara’s narrative renders impotent their efforts to undo the system, redirecting the focus of Black Nationalism back toward its anti-racist and proletarian underpinnings with Hazel’s model of female resistance. The young nationalists of Bambara’s story are among those African Americans who experienced upward mobility into the black middle-class following Johnson’s Great Society programs in the late 1960’s. (Bambara’s narrative signals this mobility with the nationalists’ language, distinct from the black working-class vernacular Hazel uses throughout the story.) The 54

nationalists’ conflict with Hazel and other “ole folks” is, then, intricately linked to this history even if Bambara only alludes to it in “My Man Bovanne.” From its start, Bambara’s narrative highlights the central conflicts of the story with the children’s disregard for “ole folks” like Bovanne, which Hazel wrongly attributes to the Black Power movement of Black Nationalism: the young nationalists used to like Bovanne until “Black Power got hold their minds and mess em around till they can’t be civil to ole folks” (3). In the early 1970’s, Black Nationalists remained focused on the black working-class and its needs, particularly because they were ill addressed by a Civil Rights Movement largely directed by the black middle-class. Hazel’s pronouncement about Black Nationalism signals not its failure, then, so much as its misappropriation by these young nationalists. Importantly, this pronouncement also suggests possible an alternative to the nationalists’ politics. Bambara’s narrative introduces an oppositional politics primarily through Hazel’s conflict with her children. This is why, for example, Hazel says of Bovanne “that’s how come I asked [him] to dance” (3) at the very moment she denounces her children for “steppin” without stopping a minute “to get the man a drink one of them cute sandwiches or tell him what’s goin on” (3). The irony in “My Man Bovanne” is that as Hazel’s children reprimand her for not adhering to the movement and its goals, Bambara’s protagonist comes closest to Black Nationalism’s orientation in her interactions with Bovanne and her children. Alternating between these interactions, Bambara’s story begins with Hazel’s treatment of Bovanne as it sharply contrasts with the treatment he and Hazel receive from her children. When Hazel pulls Bovanne onto the dance floor, she admits to doing so because “people standin round up in each other face talkin bout this and bout that but got no use for this blind man who mostly fixed skates and scooters for all these folks when they was just kids” (4-5). “I was just talkin the drums” (5), Hazel explains to her children when pulled aside for dancing too close to a blind Bovanne. Bambara’s protagonist insists that the drums were her “best defense” because her nationalist children can “get ready for drums what with all this heritage business” (5). The business of heritage – the business of history – becomes a site for contestation in “My Man Bovanne.” For both Hazel and the nationalists, the drum communicates a history about African and African American culture, but in Hazel’s reading the drum has a material, even bodily, history otherwise absent for the nationalists. This is why, then, Hazel lays claim to “talkin the drums” with Bovanne – she assumes of her children that they will understand how her drum and Bovanne’s, or the chest vibrations produced by their humming, communicate a history about heritage, namely that they are heritage. The nationalists, however, read Hazel’s dance with Bovanne as an affront to the movement, her drumming with Bovanne no more than the work of a “bitch in heat” (5). Bambara’s narrative sets up in its surface content a conflict between Hazel and her children over Hazel’s sexuality, which the nationalists try to police throughout “My Man Bovanne.” If we attend to what the narrative represses, however, this conflict over Hazel’s sexuality more closely represents how black working-class men and women used sexuality as a form of class conflict, particularly in black dance halls in the 1940’s. Robin Kelley, for example, has demonstrated how the black working-class found pleasure in black dance halls, which undermined labor discipline (50). The same might said of Hazel’s resignification of the banquet hall, or how Hazel finds in this space intended for the nationalists the means for class struggle. In “My Man Bovanne,” Hazel has not set the terms of her conditions as her nationalist children have designated the banquet hall as a space for formal politics and, as such, have exercised disciplinary power over Hazel when they believe her to comprise their political work. 55

Hazel remarks twice in Bambara’s story how her children “hustle” her into the back of the hall’s kitchen as if they were the “damn police” (6). For the nationalists, Hazel’s dancing with Bovanne has no place in the banquet hall as it reifies rather than confronts restricting racist economic structures. Elo, Hazel’s daughter, says of Bovanne that as a “tom” his “feet can smell a cracker a mile away and go into their shuffle post haste” (6). Hazel’s dancing with a tom like Bovanne suggests for the nationalists, then, that Hazel does not participate in the work of Black Nationalism – she is “apolitical” – because like Bovanne she does not challenge the system. Bambara’s narrative makes clear, however, that it is not Hazel but the nationalists who reify racist economic structures, in part because they desire, however unconsciously, to integrate into the system. Hazel recognizes the error in Elo’s charge that she is “apolitical” when her narrative sets off “apolitical” with quotation marks and immediately follows this charge with one of Hazel’s own: that her dance with Bovanne is political precisely because it retains the pulse of black culture, in this case Bovanne’s drum of a stomach and the vibrations it produces (5). Hazel’s dance with Bovanne and the pleasure she derives from it at the banquet hall undermine labor discipline as in this space Hazel can fashion for herself an identity other than worker. It is particularly significant that Hazel’s children take offense to their mother’s dance, as their desire to stop it reinforces their complicity with capitalist systems – not a very political act for nationalists who understand their work to resist capitalist white supremacy. Hazel says that she, Bovanne, “Sister Traylor and the woman who does heads at Mamies and the man from the barber shop” (4) have been invited to the banquet because they are “grass roots” (4). The irony, of course, is that the nationalists take interest in Hazel and the old folks because of their ground- up resistance – in work sites no less – but police this resistance when it calls into question the efficacy of formal politics. Hazel’s children admit pulling her away from Bovanne because they fear other nationalists will question their commitment to the movement if they see Hazel “grindin with the blind dude” (7). Ultimately, Hazel’s children fear their mother’s pleasure, particularly as it interferes with and later renders impotent their own political work. This is why, for example, Hazel’s many “offenses” provoke in her children such a negative response; for the nationalists, Hazel’s drinking, her dancing, and her dress with its “hem up to [her] ass” (6) threaten the ability of the old folks to advise young nationalists. If we read Hazel’s drinking and sexual license for what it represses, then her children’s fear about appearing apolitical in front of other nationalists reveals the extent to which their work cannot appropriately confront and reimagine racist patriarchal capitalist systems. Given how, as Robin Kelley insists, “dressing up” for black working-class men and women “was a way of shedding degradation of work and collapsing status distinctions between themselves and their oppressors” (50), Hazel’s manner of dress affronts a system that relegates her to its bottom. The only workers in Bambara’s story, we are told, are the old folks – Bovanne who fixed skates, the woman at Mamies who does hair, and the man from the barber shop. It is appropriate, then, that in Bambara’s story only the old folks act. While Hazel engages in “grass roots” resistance on the hall floor, the nationalists stand around talking with one another, having ignored Bovanne because they no longer have use for him (4-5). Bambara’s narrative bears out this contradiction of how the nationalists seek out the old folks for their grassroots activism but render them invisible in the movement, primarily because their interest in the old folks is superficial at best. Hazel’s children make clear in their treatment of their mother and Bovanne that they care not for the issues most affecting the old folks – weakened family and community networks, loss of work or low-wage work, for example. Rather, the nationalists work to maintain the fiction of a 56

cohesive and resilient black family and community, which Bambara’s narrative challenges with Hazel’s question of a “generation gap” between Hazel and the nationalists. The idea of a cohesive black community that persisted after formal segregation ended is a problematic one, especially for African Americans. With the rise of a fledging black middle- class and deindustrialization eliminating much work for the industrial black working-class in most urban areas, family and community networks weakened by the late 1960’s. Class factors were important for understanding these dynamics. In “My Man Bovanne,” Hazel recognizes that something has indeed shifted in the black community. She says of her children that it is a “terrible thing” (5) for them to talk about her as they do, with Trask calling her a “sex-starved lady” (5) for dancing with Bovanne. Earlier, Hazel remarks on how Trask cannot speak to her directly after an argument about her wigs. Like a younger Hazel of “Gorilla, My Love,” this Hazel feels most sad because of her family’s treachery. “I don’t answer cause I’ll cry” (5), Hazel thinks after Trask’s accusations. In both “Gorilla, My Love” and “My Man Bovanne,” the black family isn’t so much resilient as it is, at times, indistinguishable from the systems that oppress African Americans. Bambara’s narrative makes clear this point when Hazel follows her comment about crying with an association between her children and the police. In Hazel’s imagination, her children stand in for the police in their exercise of disciplinary power over her. As such, theirs is a treachery that hurts Hazel “to [her] heart” (7). Because this change in her family and community is one that hurts Hazel, Bambara’s narrative represses more than it reveals the link between Hazel’s abuse and the history that gave shape to it. Hazel lacks the language to articulate such a history, but she alludes to it when she asks of her children, “Is this what they call a generation gap?” (6). Given the formal contradictions of Bambara’s narrative, what appears as a generation gap between old and young actually represses the cause for this gap, in this case that the nationalists have experienced upward mobility into the black middle-class as a result of higher education. (Hazel alludes to this shift when she says of Elo that she “left” and has recently returned to the city.) Elo may adamantly insist that “there’s no generation gap among Black people” (6), but the narrative resists such neat formulations of a resilient black family and community in its syntactical disruption of Elo’s “collective”: “We are a col—” (6). It is as if Bambara’s narrative dismantles with this syntactical disruption any pretension of a monolithic black family or community unmediated by class difference. What follows from Elo’s fragmented collective is the source of this fragmentation, both in what the narrative reveals and in what it represses. Trask tells Hazel that he and his siblings have pulled her aside because her dress conflicts with their idea of how “elders” should look. At stake for the nationalists, then, is how Hazel can’t act politically with “[her] boobs out and that wig on [her] head and that hem up to [her] ass” (6). If Hazel’s appearance contrasts with how her children want her to look, from where then do the nationalists derive their idea of the elders and dress? Bambara’s narrative hedges a response with Hazel’s question of Trask about Nisi, her daughter. “She change her name?” (6), Hazel asks after being told that “Tamu” (Nisi) will introduce her and urge her to form a council of elders. Trask tells Hazel that “Norton was supposed to tell [her] about” (6) the name change and council. It is not by accident, I argue, that Trask intends for Norton to convey to Hazel her lineage/heritage. In answering the question of from where the nationalists derive their sense of heritage, Bambara’s narrative suggests that they receive it from an incorrect source: Norton (emblematic here of the Norton anthology) rather than Hazel and the old folks.

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While it is possible to read Norton’s inclusion in “My Man Bovanne” as representative of how African American history has been written largely from the perspective of white and middle-class men, it is also significant that in Bambara’s narrative Trask is complicit with Norton’s telling of Hazel. Bambara’s narrative renders impotent the nationalists’ ability to act, in part, because Hazel’s children desire, however unconsciously, integration into systems that oppress them. Even as the nationalists reject white capitalist supremacy, arguing instead for a unified black state separate from white America, their narrative reveals the inefficacy of their politics because theirs is a politics abstracted from lived experience. Bambara’s narrative alludes to the inability of the nationalists to see through and outside the structures that govern their lives under capitalism when Hazel emphasizes how for the nationalists “grass roots” has little do with the issues most affecting the black working-class. In the hall’s kitchen, Hazel’s children inform her that her role in their politics requires, aside from standing in for the “countrified” aesthetic of the movement, that Hazel organize the old folks and form a council of elders. This means for the nationalists that instead of dancing with Bovanne, Hazel should have been talking with Reverend Trent about the nationalists using his basement for the movement’s headquarters. Hazel’s response to her children is telling for it reveals and represses how far removed the nationalists’ politics are from lived experience, or how unaware they are of the needs of most African Americans at this time. Hazel says to her children that she “can’t use” (8) their politics because this politics has kept her “in the dark” (8). Although the nationalists have tried to pull the wool over Hazel’s eyes and convince her that their politics will effectively “undo” racist economic structures, Bambara’s protagonist knows the limitations of her children’s politics even if Hazel does not articulate the inefficacy of this politics in classed terms. Hazel does not understand why her children would ask her to involve Reverend Trent in the movement because he has neglected, like Hazel’s children, the needs of the larger community: “And Reven Trent a fool anyway the way he tore into the widow man up on Edgecomb cause he wouldn’t take in three of them foster children and the woman not even comfy in the ground yet and the man’s mind messed up and –” (8). Hazel’s declaration ends abruptly because Task interrupts his mother to call for a “family conference” to settle the matter of Reverend Trent. Bambara raises with this family conference the possibility that Hazel’s children will heed their mother’s wisdom, yet her narrative turns, once again, to how the nationalists dismiss any resistance that comprises their political work. Immediately following his suggestion of a family conference, Task again asks Hazel to “see if [she] can’t get to Reverend Trent” (8). It is almost as if Task has not heard Hazel and the criticism she lobbies at the Reverend. For the nationalists, it matters not if the Reverend has acted a “fool” because his role as spiritual leader precludes any possibility that he might not know what is best for the community and its members. The same is also true of Hazel’s children and their brand of Black Nationalism. After Hazel tells her children that she has no use for their politics, Bambara’s protagonist thinks of staying at the banquet hall to hear Nisi speak but instead “hauls [Bovanne] out of there” (9). As she did by dancing with Bovanne, Hazel affronts the nationalists’ politics by using her sexuality as a form of class conflict and thereby reorients Black Nationalism back toward its anti-racist and proletarian underpinnings. Hazel says when she leaves the hall with Bovanne that her son, Joe Lee, and his wife “look at [her] like [she’s] terrible” (9). Hazel, however, understands her leaving with Bovanne – and the loving way she will treat him once at her apartment – as taking 58

care of the old folks (9). Bambara spends a good deal of time describing Hazel’s care of Bovanne (a massage for the “worrying part” of the face, for example), particularly as it contrasts with the nationalists’ treatment of him. On the surface, Bambara’s narrative links Hazel’s treatment of Bovanne with Hazel reclaiming her sexuality as her own, with Hazel responding to Bovanne’s charge that she “must be a pretty woman” with, “ I surely am, I say just like the hussy my daughter say I was” (10). Yet it would be a mistake to read Hazel’s resistance only in gendered or sexual terms. Throughout Bambara’s narrative is the suggestion that Hazel resists more than her children’s efforts to police her sexuality. When Hazel leaves the banquet hall with Bovanne, she exposes her children’s politics for what they are: complicit with oppressive and coercive systems. This is why, then, Hazel concludes her narrative by offering an alternative to these systems; in linking “old folks is the nation” (10) with Hazel as “hussy,” Bambara’s narrative calls for a system where race consciousness (race and nation) has as its basis class struggle (Hazel’s sexuality.) Published a year after “My Man Bovanne,” “The Lesson” from Gorilla, My Love shares with other stories in the collection a two-sided formal narrative structure of revelation and repression where in surface content a lesson for children at FAO Schwartz represses a second lesson of inter- and intraracial class conflict. As with “My Man Bovanne,” critics have not yet addressed “The Lesson,” in part, I argue, because the story more clearly alludes to structural and cultural changes occurring in black urban communities by the early 1970’s. And like “My Man Bovanne,” “The Lesson” presents a problem for critics who read Gorilla, My Love as a response to liberal pathologizing of black families because the story alternately reveals and represses how the rise of a black middle-class helped weaken family and community networks. At its outset, “The Lesson” anticipates the central conflicts of the story with the protagonist Sylvia’s description of Miss Moore and her arrival to the neighborhood in Harlem. Sylvia says of Miss Moore that she “moved onto our block with nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup. And we kinda hated her, hated the way we did the winos who cluttered up our parks and stank up our hallways and stairs so you couldn’t halfway play hide-and-seek without a goddamn gas mask” (87). Importantly, Sylvia’s description of Miss Moore underscores her difference from others in the community, particularly as it stands to undermine existing communal networks. To Sylvia, Miss Moore is no different than the winos who clutter up her parks or stink up her hallways because both make Sylvia painfully aware of her class difference. It is easy to dismiss Sylvia’s defiance of and indignation toward Miss Moore as but the work of a child, “feisty” in her resistance but not conscious of why Miss Moore resembles for Sylvia the winos except that both are adults. Sylvia clearly articulates, however, why she “kinda hates” Miss Moore: not only does Miss Moore present herself differently than Sylvia and her immediate family and community, but Miss Moore is the “only woman on the block with no first name” (87). Miss Moore’s hair, proper speech, and no first name are class markers, which Sylvia recognizes and later articulates with her narrative’s second lesson. Even at this early moment in Bambara’s story, Sylvia describes Miss Moore’s difference in classed terms, with Miss Moore’s “goddamn college degree” (88) a constant source of conflict in the story. In fact, it is Miss Moore’s having gone to college that sets up the conflicts of “The Lesson.” Sylvia remarks on how Miss Moore had “been to college and said it was only right that she should take responsibility for the young ones’ education, and she not even related by marriage or blood” (88). Like the young nationalists in “My Man Bovanne,” Miss Moore derives her lesson for the children about history and African American culture from formal education rather than lived 59

experience. This is why, then, Bambara’s narrative represses a second lesson about class as it is lived through race and gender, with this second lesson a commentary on the inefficacy of the first to “undo” racist capitalist systems. Alternating between these two lessons, Bambara’s narrative parallels Miss Moore’s lesson about class and money with Sylvia’s acute awareness of both as lived realities rather than merely abstract concepts. Sylvia implies with Miss Moore’s need to educate the children that Miss Moore has not considered how living in Harlem has been instructive. Perhaps it is because Miss Moore moves to Sylvia’s block rather than from it that she does not take into account Sylvia’s education by the winos, namely their signaling of the neighborhood as a distinctly racialized working-class space. In “The Lesson,” Sylvia appropriately recognizes the contradiction implied by Miss Moore’s move to her block in Harlem. She questions throughout Bambara’s story why a college educated Miss Moore would move to the slums if she had the means to live elsewhere. In asking these questions, Sylvia identifies an important problem with Miss Moore’s lesson: that a lesson about class and money is not truly instructive if it does not allow for how some African Americans have more money than others. When read in light of these class dynamics, Sylvia learns from Miss Moore not that she is of the black working-class, which she already knew, but that class divisions exist among African Americans. In Bambara’s narrative, this tension over how best to instruct on class and money becomes significant from within the context of classed spaces: first Harlem slums and later FAO Schwartz. Sylvia says while at wait for Miss Moore’s lesson to begin that “Miss Moore asking us do we know what money is, like we a bunch of retards” (88). With this brief observation, Sylvia affirms her own racialized class consciousness even as Miss Moore overlooks it. This is why, then, Sylvia follows her observation with a lesson of her own: “I mean real money, she [Miss Moore] say, like it’s only poker chips or monopoly papers we lay on the grocer. So right away I’m tired of this and I say so” (88). What appears in Bambara’s narrative as Sylvia’s willful resistance to Miss Moore might actually connote Sylvia’s class conflict with Miss Moore, particularly because, as they are intricately linked, Sylvia’s lesson undermines Miss Moore’s. At every stop on Sylvia’s field trip, then, Bambara’s narrative reveals the inconsistencies of Miss Moore’s lesson. Sylvia remarks on how, for the second time in the story, Miss Moore turns to the subject of money and class without interrogating her own class privilege. Bambara’s protagonist clearly articulates this contradiction when she informs readers: So we heading down the street and she’s [Miss Moore] boring us silly about what things cost and what our parents make and how much goes for rent and how money ain’t divided up right in this country. And then she gets to the part about we all poor and live in the slums, which I don’t feature. And I’m ready to speak on that, but she steps out into the street and hails two cabs just like that. Then she hustles half the crew in with her and hands me a five dollar bill and tells me to calculate the tip for the driver. And we’re off. (89) In these instances where Sylvia questions how Miss Moore can effectively teach the children about class and money without also acknowledging her class difference from them, Bambara’s narrative performs the same rhetorical move it does in “My Man Bovanne” when Miss Moore tries to police Sylvia for revealing the problems inherent to her lesson. In other words, like the nationalists who pull Hazel aside when she threatens to expose the inefficacy of their politics, Miss Moore cuts off Sylvia when she tries to speak about how Miss Moore lives in the slums (on her own volition, no less) but has five dollars to spend on cab rides into Manhattan. 60

Sylvia again reinforces, in contrasting Miss Moore’s situation with her own, how her family’s relationship to money and class is more complicated than it is presented in a lesson for neighborhood children. “And I decide he [the cab driver] don’t need the money as bad as I do” (89), Sylvia resolves when she thinks of what five dollars can buy for her family. Having already been made aware of her class difference by Miss Moore, Sylvia arrives at Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and is immediately confronted with a second way that class is racialized; Sylvia says of passerby on Fifth Avenue that, “everybody dressed up in stockings. One lady in a fur coat, hot as it is. White folks crazy” (89). The stockings and fur coat Sylvia sees are, like Miss Moore’s hair, proper speech, and no first name, class markers. In making these connections, Bambara’s narrative represses how Miss Moore is, at times, indistinguishable from the white lady with the fur coat even though Miss Moore is not white. Throughout “The Lesson,” Miss Moore tries to frame the children’s narrative about class and money, using observations such as “white folks crazy” as the subject for how money isn’t “divided up right” in the U.S. (And what of how Miss Moore has more money than the children’s parents?) When the children arrive at FAO Schwartz, Miss Moore tells them, “Let’s look in the windows before we go in” (89). In this moment, Miss Moore frames the children’s experience, but her authority on matters of class is questioned when Sylvia’s cousin, Sugar, asks “can we steal?” (89). Rather than to consider seriously Sugar’s question, Miss Moore dismisses Sugar (“I beg your pardon”) as she affirms the dominant idea of theft as “criminal” or deviant behavior. When placed in an appropriate historical context, however, Sugar’s question represses how, as Robin Kelley has argued, “theft was a more common form of working-class resistance” (18). Like Hazel’s sexuality in “My Man Bovanne,” Sugar’s intentions to steal might very well represent a form of class conflict – in this case against both white folks and Miss Moore. (After all, it is Miss Moore’s authority that Sugar questions.) By disregarding Sugar’s question, Miss Moore reveals how her lesson about class and money is really only a lesson about money. The problem with such a lesson is, as Bambara’s narrative suggests by offering a second lesson, that capitalists disappear into the “rich” when class is defined in terms of income only.7 Another way of understanding this problem is that in focusing only on money, Miss Moore presents racism (white folks) rather than capitalism as cause for economic disadvantage, not one outcome. Sylvia recognizes the error in Miss Moore’s thinking through what appears in surface content as her continued defiance of Miss Moore and her lesson. When Miss Moore asks the children how long it would take to save their allowances and buy a paperweight priced at $480 dollars, Sylvia thinks, “But for $480 dollars it don’t make sense” (90). Instead of asking how long it would take to purchase the paperweight, Sylvia questions why the paperweight costs as much as it does. She also inserts class into Miss Moore’s lesson on money when, as Miss Moore explains the paperweight’s purpose, Sylvia identifies a material history for the paperweight’s production: “all the mining and all the factory work” (90). The paperweight is an important object in “The Lesson” because it alternatively reveals the children’s resistance to Miss Moore and represses the second lesson of Bambara’s story. Miss Moore says of the paperweight that “it’s to weigh paper down so it won’t scatter and make

7 Zweig, Michael. What’s Class Got to Do with It?: American Society in the Twenty-First Century. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004: 19-20.

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your desk untidy” (91). In response, Junebug tells Miss Moore that she does not keep paper on her desk at school, which prompts Miss Moore to ask, “Don’t you have a calendar and a pencil case and a blotter and a letter-opener on your desk at home where you do your homework?” (91). Bambara’s narrative again intervenes in Miss Moore’s lesson when the children reinforce how class and money are not abstract concepts but lived realities: Junebug doesn’t have a desk at home and “Flyboy” lives on the streets (91). The only child in the group who shares in Miss Moore’s idea of class as money is Mercedes, a young girl excluded from the children’s “brotherhood” because of her class difference. Mercedes follows Junebug’s and Flyboy’s comments with how she not only has a desk at home, but she also has “a box of stationary on [her] desk and a picture of [her] cat” (91). The children’s reaction to Mercedes mirrors their reaction to Miss Moore, which is why, perhaps, Miss Moore fails to entertain the children’s resistance and instead continues with her lesson: when Rosie Giraffe asks Mercedes, “Who wants to know about your smelly-ass stationary?” (91), Miss Moore simply says that “it’s important to have a work area all your own so that . . .” (91). Miss Moore trails off because Flyboy interrupts her, reorienting the focus of the lesson back toward the children’s experiences. In his attempt to reframe the children’s narrative about class and money, Flyboy directs the children to a fiberglass sailboat in the window of FAO Schwartz priced at $1,195. Because Flyboy, not Miss Moore, assumes command over this lesson, he does not ask the children how long it would take for them to purchase the sailboat. Instead, he asks the children to consider why someone would pay $1,195 for a sailboat when Pop’s sells a plastic one for only fifty cents (92). Implied by Flyboy’s question is the use value of the sailboat, important for Flyboy and the other children because they belong to that class of people for whom objects have use in more than aesthetic ways. Sylvia and the others echo Flyboy when they take turns recalling how their sailboats either broke or fell apart after taking them on the water. This recitation of the sailboats prompts Rosie Giraffe to say, “Parents silly to buy something like that [the fiberglass sailboat] just to get all broke up” (92). What follows from Rosie’s observation is telling because it reveals for the first time in Bambara’s narrative how the children are able to articulate their conflict with Mercedes in classed terms. Q.T. makes the connection that “rich people shop here [FAO Schwartz]” (92) immediately after Mercedes boasts that her father can buy the sailboat for her “if [she] wanted it” (92). Whether or not Mercedes’s father can actually buy the sailboat is irrelevant. In “The Lesson,” Mercedes’s difference (actual or perceived) is significant because like Miss Moore she also tries to frame the children’s narrative about class. The point at which Mercedes frames the children’s narrative is when Miss Moore decides that the children should enter FAO Schwartz. Sylvia remarks on how Miss Moore says, “Let’s go in” (92) but “doesn’t lead the way” (92), which allows for the children to narrate their own experience at the store. However, when the children get the door of FAO Schwartz, Sylvia tells us that she “hangs back” from entering, though she does not know why. Yet Sylvia knows why she does not enter FAO Schwartz as she admits to feeling not afraid but “funny, shamed” (93). Although Sylvia corrects herself by saying that she has just “as much right to go in as anybody” (93), her class shame gets the better of her as she does not enter the store. Neither does Sugar, Flyboy, Rosie, Junebug, or Q.T. Sylvia observes that with all the children stuck in the doorway of FAO Schwartz, “only Mercedes squeezing past us, smoothing out her jumper and walking right down the aisle” (93). “Then the rest of us tumble in like a glued-together jigsaw done all wrong” (93), Sylvia says after Mercedes enters the store. This moment in the toy store is perhaps the closest Bambara comes in Gorilla, My Love to revealing a history of structural and 62

cultural change in black communities otherwise repressed in much of her collection. Readers do not encounter in FAO Schwartz a resilient black family (a “brotherhood” of children) or community, but a community weakened (“done all wrong”) by class stratification. Once Sylvia enters FAO Schwartz, she admits to only tiptoeing around the store as her racialized class shame stops her from “touchin the games and puzzles and things” (94). Unlike Mercedes, Bambara’s protagonist does not have a sense of entitlement. Instead, Sylvia has a consciousness of her class difference, which is expressed in Bambara’s narrative when Sylvia becomes angry at Sugar for running her finger over the sailboat; Sylvia says upon watching Sugar, “I want to hit her. Maybe not her, but I want to punch somebody in the mouth” (94). Bambara’s narrative answers the question of who exactly Sylvia wants to punch when Sylvia turns her attention from Sugar to Miss Moore, asking her, “Whatcha bring us here for?” (94). Rather than to entertain Sylvia’s question, Miss Moore hustles the children into cabs bound for Harlem, in part, I argue, because to answer Sylvia’s question would require Miss Moore to admit her difference from the children. Sylvia thinks to herself in the cab, “Who are these people who can spend $1,000 dollars for toy sailboats?” (94). Near the close of “The Lesson,” Miss Moore asks a question similar to Sylvia’s when she says to the children, “Imagine what kind of society it is in which some people can spend on a toy what it would cost to feed a family of six or seven” (95). The difference, however, between Sylvia’s question and Miss Moore’s is that Bambara’s protagonist follows her question with, “What kinda work they do and how they live and how come we ain’t in on it?” (94). In other words, Sylvia does not simply ask why some folks have more money than others. Unlike Miss Moore, who uses money to define her lesson on class, Sylvia understands inequality to have a material basis – where people work and how they live. This is why, then, Sylvia’s anger with Miss Moore concludes “The Lesson.” In having Sylvia say, “Ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin” (96), Bambara’s narrative affirms its second lesson as it enables Sylvia to frame her own experience with class as it is lived through race and gender. What Sylvia ultimately learns about class and money at FAO Schwartz is what readers must learn from Bambara’s collection: that a lesson about inequality in the U.S. must necessarily involve the material realities of racism and sexism (where people work and how they live.) It is not enough to suggest, as Miss Moore does, that inequality is due solely to racial discrimination, or, as Elizabeth Muther would have us believe, that it is because of liberal pathologizing. If we examine Gorilla, My Love only for what it says, then Miss Moore’s lesson and Muther’s reading confirm how racism causes economic disadvantage and yet produces an environment characterized by resiliency and achievement. Beneath its surface content, however, Bambara’s collection resists any neat formulations of a resilient black family and community. It is painful for some to admit how black family and community networks weakened by the late 1960’s, or how black civil society became more stratified by social class in this decade. Yet if critics are to avoid repeating Miss Moore’s error, they must begin to address these structural and cultural changes. Otherwise, like Miss Moore, critics risk furthering the invisibility of the black working-class and its needs at a time when its presence as a working-class must be keenly felt.

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Chapter Four Space as Material Geopolitical Issues and Not “Signifying Spaces”: The Creation of a House/Self in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street

The liberal pathologizing of women and minorities that characterized much public policy in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s gave way in the late 1970’s and 1980’s to more direct and insidious attacks on U.S. people in poverty. Both middle-class liberals in the 1960’s and 1970’s and neoconservatives in the 1970’s and 1980’s identified in “the poor” (as if poverty were a class) a “culture” of helplessness and dependence specific to the poor; however, unlike middle- class liberals, neoconservatives understood the cause of this culture as social permissiveness and not personal despair. In other words, the poor did not create their own poverty. Yet, for neoconservatives, neither did capitalism. Rather, the poor were in poverty because of liberal social programs. If poverty existed, neoconservatives argued, then it was because welfare or other forms of public aid, for example, encouraged in the poor a “culture” of dependence. Like middle-class liberals, neoconservatives lost sight of the objective problem of poverty in their efforts to end it. And like middle-class liberals, neoconservatives shifted focus away from deindustrialization and globalization as causes of poverty at a time when changes in the U.S. economy fundamentally reorganized the lives of most Americans. The ideological shift toward neoliberalism or free-market capitalism in these decades further undermined any serious challenge to capitalism as a system. By the 1980’s, postmodern and post-structuralist critics agreed that something had indeed shifted, and that this shift had consequences for politics and culture. For these critics, changes in the economy were matched by an epistemological break, or the death of the author and distrust of “grand narratives” such as Marxism (Eisenstein 11). As a result, discourse and ideas replaced class as dominant modes of thought and analysis precisely in the decades when critics and policymakers needed to put class back on the agenda. It is perhaps not surprising that radical proletarian movements such as the Stonewall riots or Black Nationalism and black feminism emerged at these moments when structural changes in the U.S. economy led to job loss and poverty for many women and minorities (racial and sexual), as women and minorities were, as they are today, more disproportionately of the working-class. While middle-class liberals and neoconservatives remained silent on capitalism as cause for these changes, women and minorities involved in these radical proletarian movements denounced capitalism as an oppressive and coercive system reinforced by ideologies such as racism, sexism, and homo- and/or transphobia. The movement for Chicano/a civil rights, which began in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement for African Americans in the 1960’s, shared with these other movements their anti-racist and proletarian orientation. Yet El Movimiento, or “The Movement,” also differed in its awareness of how race and class barriers were often compounded by linguistic obstacles. By the 1970’s, El Movimiento had stalled, in part because male leaders had not considered seriously how race and class barriers were also compounded by cultural obstacles, or what Chicana feminists in the 1970’s and 1980’s recognized as the destructive aspects of their culture’s definition of gender roles (Yarbro-Bejarano 733). Because their alienation from bourgeois culture far exceeded that of male leaders in El Movimiento, Chicana feminists were able to more clearly see through and outside the structures that governed Chicano/as lives under capitalism. Even the very terms “Chicana” or “mestiza” communicate how Chicanas were better positioned to “undo” Western capitalist systems as these terms signify “historical adumbrations of class and cultural membership within the economic structure” (733) as each is compounded by color and femaleness. When El Movimiento stalled in 64 the 1970’s, Chicana feminists restored to the movement its emancipatory thrust as their emphasis on the “totality of experience” fostered rather than disabled dialectical methods. In other words, unlike male leaders who partitioned identity and experience by ignoring how race and class are lived through gender, Chicana feminists understood their position as a racialized working-class minority as mediated by their position as women within both dominant and Chicano cultures. Since the 1970’s, Chicana feminists have sharpened the theoretical matrix of Marxism and Anglo feminism, which is to say that they have offered a method for understanding identity and experience that rejects absolute or “either/or” terms, e.g. working-class or Chicano/female or Chicano. In much the same way black feminists in the early 1970’s urged male nationalists to see both sides of the race-gender dialectic simultaneously, Chicana feminists required of both Chicanos and Anglo feminists that they recognize how “a Chicana’s experience as a woman is inextricable from her experience as a member of an oppressed working-class racial minority” (733). Critics, too, must recognize how in work by Chicanas elements of race, gender, and class coalesce. Too often critics have focused only on gender or race, which disables dialectical methods. It is important to bear in mind that even as Chicana feminism coincided with ideological shifts toward postmodernism and post-structuralism, Chicana feminists eschewed these discourses. Sonia Saldívar-Hull, for example, has argued that “the Chicana feminist does not present ‘signifying spaces’ but material geopolitical issues that redirect feminist discourse,” and that “Chicana feminism develops from an awareness of specific material experience of the historical moment” (203 as quoted in Libretti “Rethinking” 200). Of these Chicana feminist writers, Sandra Cisneros offered perhaps the most significant intervention in both El Movimiento and Chicana feminism, with her 1984 publication of The House on Mango Street a radical departure from any previous work by Chicano/a writers involved in the two movements of these decades. While many Chicano writers understood the mimetic boundaries of Cisneros’s House to preclude any political work her novel might perform, Cisneros’s close attention to the everyday lives of Chicano/as in Chicago in the 1980’s prompts the same method of reading I used for Toni Cade Bambara’s collection Gorilla, My Love. As in Bambara’s collection, what appears in surface content as the mundane in House might actually repress an oppositional politics formed against racist patriarchal capitalist systems. Cisneros said as much by claiming that her politics with House were “as clear to [her] as if [she] were tossing a Molotov.”1 The difference, however, between Gorilla, My Love and House is that Cisneros more clearly articulates in classed terms the effect deindustrialization and globalization had on urban working-class Chicano/as even as her narrative omits or alludes to these global shifts. Cisneros is able to do this work, in part, because the Chicano family and Chicanas in particular did not come under attack as the black family and black women had in the late 1960’s. Unlike Bambara, who found it necessary, as Elizabeth Muther argues, to insist on a resilient black family that could counter Moynihan’s liberal pathologizing, Cisneros did not need to prove the strength of Chicano/a families and communities. William Julius Wilson has shown that while black family and community networks weakened by the late 1960’s, Mexican and Chicano/a families in Chicago, for example, had greater levels of social organization (51). One reason for this dynamic had to do with how “upward mobility” into the middle-class did not accompany for many Chicano/as moves up and out of the working-class home and community.

1 Cisneros, Sandra. “On Writing the House on Mango Street (1994).” 26 March 2009. http://www1.ccboe.net/Gths/Departments/Summer%20Information/Documents/On%20Writing%20A%20House%2 0on%20Mango%20Street.pdf 65

Because young Chicano/as involved in El Movimiento and/or Chicana feminism less frequently distinguished between the working-class home and middle-class world of the university, their movements did not reflect the kind of social dislocation Bambara represses in “My Man Bovanne” with her narrative’s conflict between Black Nationalists of the middle-class and its working-class “center.” This is not to suggest, however, that Chicano/a writers such as Cisneros endorsed a monolithic view of the Chicano/a family and community. Rather, Chicana feminist writers in particular were acutely aware of how the Chicano family often acted as a repressive apparatus against Chicana women – its “strength,” at times, more closely resembling the oppressive conditions created by other kinds of systems. The problem with much criticism on Chicana feminist writing since the 1970’s is that it often conceives of oppression in narrowly defined terms, e.g. race and gender. By contrast, I argue in this chapter that being female and Chicana is inextricable for Cisneros from being working-class – why House reveals these subject positions as interlocking and thus integral to understanding the space the protagonist creates in the novel, itself Cisneros’s affront to racist patriarchal capitalist systems.

Umbrellas and Artichokes Rather than Closed Fists: Cisneros’s Intervention in El Movimiento and Chicana Feminism Although it shared with El Movimiento its emancipatory thrust for Chicano/a civil rights, the literary “Chicano Renaissance” that began in the late 1960’s centered largely on the experience of the Chicano male, with Rodolfo González’s epic poem I am Joaquin/Yo Soy Joaquín and Tomás Rivera’s Y No Se Lo Tragó la Tierra notable works from this period. In general, the thematics of much Chicano Renaissance writing (and, in fact, much racial and ethnic literature) reveal content strongly informed by working-class experiences and political concerns (Libretti “Is There” 23). Sandra Cisneros has described the political nature of this writing as raising flags and casting stones, or performing the work of revolution with hands closed in angry fists (Binder 68-9). By the time Chicana feminist writers began publishing in the 1970’s, their work revealed similar political concerns, except that as Chicanas they found it necessary to question what has been called the machismo central to both El Movimiento and Chicano culture. Lorna Dee Cervantes, for example, used a young male’s ambivalence about a hunting trip in “Uncle’s First Rabbit” to implicitly challenge the masculine agenda of El Movimiento and its literary wing (Libretti “Rethinking” 209). In expanding the coordinates of this agenda, Cervantes illustrated how just as the Chicano male of “Uncle’s First Rabbit” cannot “fulfill his utopian vision of breaking out of the socially constructed gender identity that imprisons him, the poem suggests that the Chicano movement cannot achieve complete liberation until it both becomes conscious of the gender inequality informing Chicano culture and overcomes it by creating cultural forms capable of the utopian expression sought by the boy in the poem” (210). Both sympathetic to and critical of Chicano men, Cervantes retained from their writing its political impulse, yet her construction of a class- conscious subjectivity reformulated a class and class consciousness that takes into account gender and includes a “reterritorialization of the imaginative geography of Chicano and working- class culture” (203). Other Chicana feminist writers in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, such as Pat Mora and Evangelina Vigil, shared in Cervantes’s feminist intervention to reposition the Chicano political class. Sandra Cisneros stood out among these Chicana feminist writers precisely because her feminist intervention did not rely on the poetic conventions Cervantes and others used to communicate the Chicana woman’s role in the project of Chicano/a civil rights.

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By using prose rather than poetry, Cisneros signaled with The House on Mango Street the emergence of new territory for Chicana feminist writers. Yet Cisneros’s creation of this distinct Chicana literary space resulted from more than simply her innovative use of genre. In responding to accusations by Chicano male writers that House lacked any political content, Cisneros insisted that politics assumed many forms in Chicano art. Instead of the flag raising practiced by many Chicano male and Chicana feminist writers, Cisneros conceived of revolution as what she calls “clouds and la migra and artichokes and brown skin and umbrellas” (Binder 69). For Cisneros, the personal or everyday experiences of Chicano/as do not preclude the political work House performs. In fact, in locating her politics in the personal, Cisneros may have come closer to challenging the public/private distinction under capitalism than Chicano male writers realized. On the one hand, it is easy to dismiss Cisneros’s focus on the inner-lives of working-class Chicano/as as apolitical, particularly since House lacks the militancy of much Chicano male and Chicana feminist writing. However, if we examine House for what it reveals and represses, Cisneros’s narrative clearly reflects the experience of Chicano/as as a racialized working-class minority, specifically in the wake of global shifts, at the same time that it implicitly offers a critique of the very systems that produce for many Chicano/as this marginalized position.

House as Working-Class Space and Not “Signifying Spaces” Space in The House on Mango Street has been a frequent subject for criticism on Cisneros’s novel. Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, for example, has found House significant for the way it represents a female minority writer struggling “to appropriate the word in the Anglo- American house of fiction” (193). Other critics of Cisneros’s novel share in O’Reilly Herrera’s post-structuralist reading of space in House.2 For these critics, Cisneros and her young protagonist Esperanza are primarily concerned with housing Chicana writers in the proverbial house of fiction, with “house” to signify the space that houses these writers. Certainly Cisneros created with House a distinct Chicana literary space. However, space is significant in House for more than the house it creates for Chicana writers in the house of fiction. Cisneros has made clear in a number of interviews how her frame of reference for “house”/House consisted of the three-floor flats she and her family shuttled between in the barrios of Chicago (“Ghosts” 73). In this way, space is also literal in the novel: where Esperanza and her family will live when the pipes burst in their flat and they are forced to leave, or how by the close of House Esperanza does not leave the barrio. In Cisneros’s novel, writing does not produce for Esperanza a “ticket out” of the barrio, which is to say that Esperanza’s imaginative space does not actually free her from the racialized class and gender constraints imposed by living on Mango Street. Cisneros begins and ends her novel with Esperanza’s house on Mango, but what frames the novel is the instability of home. The story Esperanza tells at the start and end of House is the same story about frequently moving, except that in the concluding vignette Esperanza adds that she belongs and does not belong to Mango Street (110). Esperanza reluctantly admits in the title vignette that opens House, “We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and

2 For more on criticism of Cisneros’s novel that examines “space,” specifically the creation of a Chicana literary space forged by “the forces of ethnicity and gender” (and what of class?), see Robin Ganz’s essay “Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossing and Beyond” in MELUS 19:1 (Spring 1994): 19-29. Ganz is a typical reader of Cisneros’s fiction as she collapses ethnicity with class and discusses economic deprivation without naming class. 67 before that I can’t remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot” (3). Even at a young age, Esperanza understands that for her family “house” means instability or the threat of homelessness. This is why moving to Mango has added significance for Esperanza: the house is not the house she thought her family would get (3), but it is a house the family owns. Readers learn from Esperanza’s story about moving that the Cordero family left the flat on Loomis because the pipes burst and their landlord refused to fix them. Rather than carry water into their flat from the washroom next door, the family moved across town to Mango. Cisneros makes clear here that Esperanza’s family moved (and presumably kept moving) because of necessity. The urgency with which the Cordero family left the flat on Loomis accounts for why, in part, Esperanza considers the two-floor bungalow on Mango not exactly the house the family wanted. The other and more complicated reason for Esperanza’s opinion of Mango has to do with shame Esperanza feels because her parents are not upwardly mobile despite a lifetime of hard work and dedication.3 In their study that became The Hidden Injuries of Class, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb found that working-class people like Esperanza often blame themselves for not changing their class status after many years of work, primarily because they have internalized the moral failings associated with being working-class in a country founded upon the belief that anyone who works hard can “make it.”4 Throughout much of Cisneros’s novel, Esperanza’s feelings about the house on Mango Street accompany her desire for a new home. In this way, the central tension of House is Esperanza’s need for a new home because of the class shame she feels about living on Mango Street. Cisneros implies in her title vignette that Esperanza might have avoided her class shame had the dominant culture not reinforced this myth of meritocracy in the U.S. By the 1980’s, the number of poverty-tract neighborhoods such as Esperanza’s increased as a result of loss of employment and flight from the city (two dynamics implicitly addressed by House). The image of house Cisneros presents with the bungalow on Mango is, then, not the image Esperanza sees on television. Esperanza says of houses on television that they have “real stairs, not hallway stairs” (4) and lawns with grass growing behind a white fence. The house on Mango Street, by contrast, has only hallway stairs and, instead of a lawn, only four elms planted by the curb by the city (4). To Esperanza, the house on Mango does not tell the same story as the ones on television – it is “not the way they told it at all” (4). Esperanza clearly recognizes in these stories that the class norm is superimposed on her television screen, and that her house on Mango lacks any of the privilege implied by these other homes. Her class shame, painfully highlighted with these contrasting images of house, looms large in Cisneros’s title vignette. Esperanza admits in the same reluctant way she did in recalling her family’s constant moves that she “feel[s] like nothing” (5) every time she looks at or remembers her family’s many flats. In Cisneros’s narrative, the image of house does not exist independently of Esperanza’s image of herself. When Esperanza desires a new house, she desires, in effect, to stop defining herself in working-class terms. For critics such as Juan Rodríguez, Esperanza desires a new house at the expense of her family and community – what amounts to Esperanza’s ready endorsement of the American Dream (Olivares 242). Yet Rodríguez overlooks in his reading the transformation that

3 Cisneros explained the source of this disappointment and embarrassment when in her essay “Ghosts and Voices: Writing From Obsession” she maintained: “As a working-class person growing up in a society where the class norm was superimposed on a t.v. screen, I couldn’t understand why our home wasn’t all green lawn and white wood like the ones in ‘Leave it to Beaver’ or ‘Father Knows Best’” (72). 4 Sennett, Richard and Jonathan Cobb. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Knopf, 1992: 12. 68 occurs in Esperanza near the close of House, whereby her image of house has at its center the barrio that includes Mango Street. Because Esperanza’s idea of Mango is tied to her idea of herself, the moment when Esperanza no longer dis-identifies with Mango exclusively is the moment when she begins to celebrate her experiences as a working-class Chicana. Yet Cisneros’s narrative performs this work even before Esperanza claims Mango as her own. In juxtaposing the dominant culture’s image of Mango (which Esperanza has internalized) with the inner-lives of its residents, Cisneros’s novel sets up in its surface content a conflict between dual and competing portrayals of Mango. This is why, then, Esperanza can reject the house on Mango even as her narrative celebrates what Mango provides for her, e.g. “all brown all around we are safe” (House 28). Cisneros follows her title vignette with “Hairs,” a story that contrasts the instability caused by moving with the safety Esperanza feels in her mother’s arms. In a story that reads as Esperanza’s cataloguing of the different hair types in her family, Cisneros offers an implicit challenge to the systems that cause the family to move frequently as she ends the vignette with the stability of Esperanza’s immediate environment: the reassurance of the mother’s hair that smells like bread (6) and the safety of her arms as she holds Esperanza. Throughout House, Cisneros contrasts in her narrative what is painful about the barrio with what is pleasing about it, a rhetorical move that exposes the damaging effects of global shifts on inner-city Chicano/as and affirms the strength of Chicano/as without closing the hand in an angry fist. Cisneros begins the vignette “Boys & Girls” with Esperanza’s desire for friends. Esperanza says that “someday [she] will have a best friend all [her] own” (9), but until then she is a “red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor” (9). In its surface content, “Boys & Girls” conveys a young girl’s desire for friends other than her siblings; however, in using the same language to describe the balloon and the house on Mango (they are both red), Cisneros’s narrative links Esperanza’s desire for friends with the instability caused by her moving. Esperanza’s personal tragedy – that she does not have friends other than her siblings – might actually repress, then, the state as repressive apparatus against Chicanos historically. Cisneros is careful not to suggest, however, that the state has repressed Chicano/as equally. Like other Chicana feminists, Cisneros is very aware of how often Chicano men have been complicit with the state in its repression of Chicanas. This is why it is significant that in “Boys & Girls” only Esperanza has this personal tragedy, not her brothers. With this vignette, Cisneros complicates Esperanza’s class shame – what is painful about the barrio – with her femaleness. In Cisneros’s novel, Esperanza’s class shame is both gendered and racialized. Cisneros follows the vignette “Boys & Girls” with two vignettes that illustrate how Esperanza’s idea of herself in relation to the barrio is compounded by her femaleness and ethnicity. “My Name” tells the story of Esperanza’s great-grandmother, a wild woman who refused to marry until Esperanza’s great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off (11). Elsewhere in House, Esperanza says of women in the barrio that they often meet the same fate: “factory or rolling pin” (32). When Esperanza wonders of her great-grandmother whether or not she “made the best with what she got, or was sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be” (11), Cisneros implies that the female Bildung for Chicana working-class women has only two outcomes: marriage or low-wage work (often both). Esperanza’s shame about her name, which she has inherited from her great-grandmother, represses both Esperanza’s shame about being working-class and Chicana and her fear of becoming either factory worker or mother. In “Cathy Queen of Cats,” a white working-class Cathy heightens Esperanza’s shame when she reinforces an image of the barrio as dangerous and its residents as “raggedy” (12). The irony is that Cathy also lives in the barrio but only until “next Tuesday” when her family will move away. 69

With Cathy’s impending flight from the barrio, Cisneros alludes to economic class subordination as an effect of deindustrialization and globalization on the inner-city, but in keeping with this contrast between what is painful and what is pleasing about the barrio, Cathy’s flight accompanies another kind of meeting for Esperanza. Lucy and Rachel, the sisters across the street from Esperanza who Cathy calls “raggedy,” are Chicana girls who do not make Esperanza feel ashamed about her name (15) and thus her being working-class and Chicana. Cisneros has readily acknowledged in interviews that alliances exist between white and Chicana working-class women (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock, Eds. 303). The problem Cathy poses is not that she refuses an alliance with Esperanza (they are friends but only until next Tuesday), but that she requires of Esperanza that she forge this alliance against others in the barrio. Cathy tells Esperanza not to talk to Lucy and Rachel because, “Can’t you see they smell like a broom” (14). Esperanza, however, recognizes in Lucy and Rachel her own situation. She says of them that their clothes “are crooked and old” (14), much like the steps of Esperanza’s own house. Because Cisneros’s narrative sets up a conflict between Esperanza’s view of her house and what the barrio provides to her, Esperanza can associate Lucy and Rachel with her house but can also recognize in them a familiarity or safety similarly found in her mother’s arms as in “Hairs.” On a shared bike ride around Mango in “Our Good Day,” Esperanza charts a geography of the barrio as she sees it, but her description of Mango as “sad” and “dangerous” is undermined by the pleasure Esperanza derives from riding the bike with Lucy and Rachel. Esperanza says on her ride that she and the sisters first pass her house, “sad and red and crumbly in places” (16), and later “Laundromat, junk store, drugstore, windows and cars and more cars” (16) on their ride back to Mango. Cisneros immediately follows Esperanza’s description with one of her own: the image of Esperanza on the bike with Lucy and Rachel is of the girls “laughing the crooked ride back to Mango” (16). Lucy and Rachel’s clothes, Esperanza’s house steps, and the girls’ bike ride are all “crooked” – they are, as the image suggests, not either/or but both. In charting her own imaginative geography of Mango, Cisneros requires of critics that they consider both sides of the dialectic simultaneously: that even within the limitations posed by racist economic structures – having to live in the barrio, for example – residents are able to change the conditions of their existence, just not in the way they would like. (Louie’s cousin of “Louie, His Cousin, and His Other Cousin” steals cars rather than perform low-wage work, for example.) In what is an easily overlooked vignette in Cisneros’s novel, “Meme Ortiz” personifies in the title character and his house/yard this “conceptual conundrum” (to use González’s phrase) implied by dialectical methods. Esperanza tells us that Meme (who is also called Juan) moved into Cathy’s house after she and her family left, and like Meme/Juan who is not either/or but both, his house has floors that slant and steps “all lopsided and jutting like crooked teeth” (21-2). Despite these conditions (or in spite of them), Meme/Juan and other barrio children locate in this space an opportunity to change their existence, if only momentarily. (The idea that children like Meme and Esperanza use imaginative play in an effort to change their existence will become important for understanding the space Esperanza creates at the close of House.) In the language of her first story (“what I remember most is moving”), Esperanza insists that “what you remember most” (22) about Meme’s backyard is his tree. This tree, which sits in the middle of a yard of mostly dirt and “greasy boards that used to be a garage” (22), serves as the site for the children’s First Annual Tarzan Jumping Contest. There is danger, however, in using imaginative play to create a world simultaneously within and outside the barrio – Esperanza informs us in “Meme Ortiz” that Meme won the jumping contest but “broke both arms” (22). This dialectic is also at work on Esperanza in “The 70

Monkey Garden,” a vignette in which Esperanza delights in imaginative play in found objects (clubhouses made of junkyard cars) but finds in this space abandoned by the city the threat of physical and psychical violence. For Esperanza, the monkey garden provides her and other barrio children a place far away from their mothers’ watchful gazes. In the garden, we are told, Esperanza and the others chart a new cartography of the landscape: junkyard cars become clubhouses and springboards for jumping contests (96-7). Some of the children, like Sally, also inscribe their sexuality onto the landscape. Because the monkey garden permits the children to play without interference from their mothers, Sally is able to create in the garden her own game of sexual license and adventure. When Sally follows the boys behind the junkyard car once used for a clubhouse with the promise of a kiss for her keys, Esperanza resolves to save her. Esperanza says about Sally’s game that “something wasn’t right” (97), yet it is Esperanza, not Sally, who feels ashamed about the game. Esperanza recognizes, even if Sally does not, that the game carries with it the threat of sexual violence. This is why, then, Esperanza does not return to the garden – her delight in charting a new cartography of the landscape has been transformed into a fear of the sexual license also inscribed there. On the one hand, Esperanza’s decision not to return to the garden represents her coming-of-age, or her realization that her idea of the garden has been compromised by Sally’s game. Yet Esperanza also identifies in this space its limitations – it can change Esperanza’s existence but only momentarily because in the garden, as well as out of it, Esperanza operates under the same constraints, namely her shame of being female, Chicana, and working-class. If something changes in Esperanza in “The Monkey Garden” it is that Esperanza more fully understands the weight of being female, Chicana, and working-class: for many working-class Chicana women, keys open doors to marriage and making do with what is present. Throughout House is the suggestion that all characters, not just Esperanza, understand the weight of their situation in the barrio. There are no fairy tales in Cisneros’s novel, which is to say as Cisneros does in her poem “Still Life” from Loose Woman, “Hunger is not romantic to the hungry. Fear is not so thrilling if you’re the one afraid. Poverty’s not quaint when it’s your house you can’t escape from. / Decay’s not beautiful to the decayed” (109). Contrary to the title of the poem, life in the barrio isn’t a still life fit for romanticization. For Sally and young girls like her, marriage seduces with the promise of an out from the barrio, a way to gain respectability when other avenues are closed to them (a college degree, for example.) In the vignettes “Marin” and “Sally,” both girls wish for someone to take them to a “big-house far away” (House 26), but Marin is sent back to Puerto Rico, and Sally exchanges an abusive father for an abusive husband. Esperanza learns from Marin and Sally that marriage will not liberate her from her racialized and gendered class constraints, only tighten them. The same is also true for work. In Cisneros’s novel, women do not work (in or outside the home) to recover the agency lost with motherhood. Esperanza takes a job at Peter Pan Photo Finishers to help pay for her Catholic school tuition and, before she left, Marin sold Avon to supplement her aunt’s income. Women work in House because they have to, not because they want to.5 By the time Cisneros published House in 1984, the nature of blue collar work had already shifted to service and agricultural work and unskilled manufacturing. The people performing this work were increasingly women and minorities, including immigrants from countries in Latin America. With the exception of the young boys on street corners without jobs, everyone in

5 Cisneros echoed this reading of women’s work in House when she said in an interview on writing and necessity, “Unless you are born into affluence you have to work” (Badikian 6). 71

Cisneros’s novel works, including Esperanza. Some of these characters, like Esperanza’s father the gardener and Geraldo the dishwasher with “no last name,” have been slotted for these jobs. Others like Elenita the witch woman work within the home, their paid and unpaid domestic work overlapping. When Esperanza says of Chicana women in the barrio that their fate is either the rolling pin or factory, Cisneros alludes to how participation in the free-market did not liberate many Chicana women as their work remained low-wage and largely concentrated in home-work or unstable worksites, e.g. no union representation, few protections for women, etc. The only female character in House to avoid low-wage work and/or marriage is Alicia, the young girl who sees mice because she stays up late studying for her university courses. Alicia’s vignette is a significant one in House, not simply because her narrative mirrors Cisneros’s own. (Cisneros has admitted that she is both Alicia and Esperanza in House.) Cathy queen of cats says of Alicia that she is “stuck-up ever since she went to college” (12). On the one hand, Cathy’s assessment of Alicia, which reads here as merely resentment, reveals the disconnect many students from the working-class experience as they transition from home to university and back. Yet Cathy leaves out of her introduction of Alicia that Alicia studies to avoid low-wage work or marriage but not at the expense of her family and community. Near the close of House, Alicia facilitates Esperanza’s change in the novel, which is to say that she demonstrates to Cisneros’s protagonist how studying at the university – a track that presumably leads to mobility into the middle-class – need not accompany alienation or separation from the barrio. Alicia may take two trains and a bus for the university, but she knows who she is and where she comes from – a lesson Esperanza learns only late in her narrative. In the vignette “Alicia & I Talking on Edna’s Steps,” Esperanza wrongly assumes that for Alicia “home” is merely her house in Guadalajara, Mexico, where Esperanza believes Alicia will go back to once she graduates from college. Because Esperanza’s idea of herself is intricately tied to her idea of “house,” Cisneros’s protagonist is not yet able, as Alicia is, to imagine a self that includes Mango Street. Esperanza says in this vignette with Alicia that her only house is a house that she dreams of, not the house she can point to on Mango (107). This is why, for example, Esperanza seeks out Elenita the witch woman earlier in the novel: she hopes that Elenita will confirm her dream of a house far away from Mango. Esperanza is disappointed to learn that the future Elenita sees for her is one where she will “lose an anchor of arms” and find a “home in the heart” (64). When Elenita reads Esperanza’s Tarot cards, she predicts how Esperanza will begin to celebrate being working-class and Chicana, except at this point in the novel Esperanza just doesn’t “get it” (64). The turning point for Cisneros’s protagonist comes in “Bums in the Attic,” a vignette in which Esperanza finally recognizes her dream house/self for what it is: nothing more than a ready endorsement of the class norm superimposed on her television screen. Cisneros begins her vignette with Esperanza’s idea of the dream house: “I want a house on hills like the ones with the gardens where Papa works” (86). Yet Cisneros immediately follows Esperanza’s desire for a new house with the reason that Esperanza stops going with her family to see these houses on hills; Esperanza says that she feels ashamed, but her shame here is not the same as earlier in the novel when Cathy made her feel bad about living on Mango. Instead, Esperanza’s shame has to do with the way her family “[stares] out the window like the hungry” (86). For the first time in her narrative, Esperanza admits that she is “tired of looking at what [she] can’t have” (86). Cisneros implies here that what Esperanza tires of is both the image of the house reinforced by the dominant culture and her internalization of this image.

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It is important that Esperanza follows her admission with another, the second representing Cisneros’s criticism of people who live in houses on hills. Esperanza says of these people that they “sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don’t look down at all except to be content to live on hills. They have nothing to do with last week’s garbage or fear of rats. Night comes. Nothing wakes them but the wind” (86-7). In “Notes to a Young(er) Writer,” Cisneros echoes Esperanza’s anger by chiding her college classmates for not feeling “guilty and sad when they look out the window of their sportscar [sic] and pass the poor tenement apartments of Uptown” (76). For both Esperanza and Cisneros, the problem with many people who live on hills is that they think only of themselves, which is to say that they feel little responsibility to the people who live “too much on earth.”6 Until “Bums in the Attic,” Esperanza has been primarily concerned with having a house she can point to/self she can celebrate that more closely resembles the house on hills/people who live there. When Esperanza exposes people who live on hills for what they are, she replaces her image of the dream house/self with a new image: “One day I’ll own my own house, but I won’t forget who I am or where I come from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I’ll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house” (House 87). If it has not been clear to post-structuralist critics of House how “house” is literal and the threat of homelessness real to Cisneros’s protagonist, Esperanza makes this painfully obvious with the bums she will ask to stay in her attic. The sense of responsibility Esperanza feels for these bums accounts for why, in part, Esperanza’s idea of the dream house/self changes. The other reason for this shift involves Esperanza’s recognition that she is different from the people who live in houses on hills, and that this difference isn’t something for which she should feel ashamed. Esperanza appends to her new idea of the dream house/self that when future guests question the source of “grumbles” in the attic she will say, “Bums, and I’ll be happy” (87). Although Esperanza’s idea of the house/self now carries with it the weight of responsibility to others, this house/self does not yet comprise the “I/we” Esperanza adopts at the close of House, or her consciousness of the many histories and lives that comprise the self.7 Cisneros follows “Bums in the Attic” with “Beautiful & Cruel,” a vignette critics have heralded as Esperanza’s resistance to patriarchal authority and resolve to circumvent the traditional female Bildung of marriage or death. Esperanza says that she has decided “not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain” (88). Instead, Esperanza commits to keeping her power all her own like the women in movies who drive men crazy and then “laugh them all away” (89). While it is not problematic that Esperanza begins a “quiet war” (89) against proscribed gender roles in the Chicano community, it is problematic that Esperanza’s quiet war requires her to “leave the table like a man” (89). When Cisneros’s

6 Cisneros said this directly in “Notes to a Young(er) Writer” when she prefaced her comment about her classmates passing by the tenements with, “How nice to think of no one but yourself” (75). Later in her essay, Cisneros said that when she thinks of her classmates, the ones who “are now the people changing history, the ones in government and business, altering and making our laws” (76), she feels sad. She feels sad because these people “never feel compelled to change the world for anyone but themselves” (76). Perhaps this is why Cisneros/Esperanza and the other writers explored in this study consider writing a political act – writing to readdress social inequalities of class as it is lived through race, gender, and sexuality is a responsibility for these writers. 7 Janet Zandy has described the writer’s “I/we” as the way working-class writers are conscious of “[their] own ghosts, of the multiple, competing, contradictory voice that inhabit the ‘we’ inside the individual writer’s ‘I.’ The fiction or autobiographical Bildung leads not to separation or alienation but to a consciousness of” (Hands 90) these lives that comprise the self. For more on Zandy’s “I/we,” see her book Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. 73 protagonist claims not to put back the chair or pick up the plate, she reifies patriarchal systems rather than help dismantle them. In this way, Esperanza replaces her father or brothers as antagonists of Chicana women as her mother is left to put back the chair and pick up the plate. Elvira Cordero is in House what Tillie Olsen calls an “essential angel,” the person in Esperanza’s life who assumes the physical responsibilities for daily living all so that Esperanza might later write of her dream house. Cisneros has said in interviews that she became a writer, in part, because her mother sacrificed her life so that she could live hers (“Notes” 75). In House, Esperanza’s mother is this sacrificial lamb (cordero means “lamb” in Spanish). Her vignette, as it follows Esperanza’s and the resolve she has to act as a man, makes clear for Esperanza how she cannot wage a quiet war with her father’s or brothers’ tools. Elvira Cordero says in “A Smart Cookie” that she “could’ve been somebody” (90), presumably if she hadn’t married. If this were the case, that Elvira could have been an artist had she not married, then the lesson she presents to Esperanza is the same as the one Esperanza is taught by the women in the movies. Yet Elvira is not like the “beautiful and cruel” women Esperanza admires. Unlike them, Elvira suggests to Esperanza that she direct her course not by acting like men but by taking care of her own (91). Elvira’s feminism, then, starkly contrasts with that of Anglo middle-class feminists. Readers learn from Elvira Cordero that she did not become that somebody because of class shame, not because she married. Elvira says that “shame is a bad thing. It keeps you down. You know why I quit school? Because I didn’t have nice clothes. No clothes, but I had brains” (91). Because Esperanza has not yet begun to celebrate being female, Chicana, and working-class, she does not understand the meaning of Elvira’s lesson. It is because Esperanza is not yet able to articulate in classed terms how her mother’s lesson offers a more appropriate method for fighting this “quiet war” that Cisneros concludes “A Smart Cookie” by reinforcing for her protagonist how being female need not require separating out Chicana and working-class. Cisneros returns to Elvira’s brand of feminism in “The Three Sisters,” a vignette in which Cisneros affirms these three categories – female, Chicana, and working-class – as interlocking and thus integral to understanding the house/self Esperanza will create by the close of House. Esperanza says of the three sisters, the comadres, that they “came with the wind” (103) after Lucy and Rachel’s baby sister died, and that they sensed the baby’s death because they knew “what was what” (104). Armed with this other sense, the comadres confirm Elenita the witch woman’s prophecy for Esperanza: that she will lose an anchor of arms and find a home in the heart. When Esperanza encounters the three sisters at Lucy and Rachel’s house, Cisneros sets up in her narrative’s surface content a conflict between what Esperanza rejects about the house (“It was hard to keep the floors clean”) and the safety her protagonist feels near the comadres (“I didn’t feel afraid.”) In seeing both sides of the dialectic simultaneously, Cisneros again suggests in the novel that even within the limitations posed by racist economic structures, Esperanza is able to change the conditions of her existence, if only she would recognize these structures as oppressive and/or coercive. Esperanza tells us that the comadres ask her to make a wish, but that her wish for a house/self independent of Mango is met by a “long silence” (105) from the comadres. Despite recognizing people who live in houses on hills for what they are and listening to the truth about her mother’s sadness, Esperanza still cannot clearly see through and outside the structures that govern her life under racist patriarchal capitalist systems. In “The Three Sisters,” Esperanza is left with her shame for a “selfish wish” but not the understanding that comes with the sisters’ hope for Esperanza: that she will leave Mango but come back for the others, and that she will finally realize that she “will always be Esperanza. [She] will always be Mango Street” (105). 74

Esperanza walks away from the comadres at the close of their vignette confused about how to be the self she imagines without erasing what she knows. Cisneros said in a lecture at Indiana University that if asked what it is she writes about she would say that she “write[s] about those ghosts inside that haunt [her], that will not let [her] sleep, of that which even memory does not like mention” (“Ghosts” 7). In House, Esperanza learns from Aunt Lupe and Alicia that writing will produce for her the house/self she imagines, except that this house/self must include Mango, even if Mango is a ghost that continues to haunt her. “Born Bad,” Lupe’s vignette, tells of Esperanza’s aunt before and after she became paralyzed from diving into a city pool. Esperanza says of Lupe that she had strong legs but now it is difficult to imagine them as strong when they are “bent and wrinkled like a baby” (59). For her aunt who once had strong swimmer legs, Esperanza recites to Lupe a poem she has written about the sea and the person she wants to become: “I want to be / like the waves on the sea, / like the clouds in the wind, / but I’m me. / One day I’ll jump / out of my skin. / I’ll shake the sky / like a hundred violins” (60-1). Esperanza realizes that she is Esperanza but does not understand that this Esperanza can “shake the sky like a hundred violins” without jumping out of her skin. Lupe suggests to Esperanza how to do this work but not without a caveat. When Lupe dies and Esperanza feels ashamed because she imitated Lupe and her bent legs during a game with Lucy and Rachel, Lupe’s request for Esperanza to keep writing as it will “set [her] free” (61) accompanies what Bakhtin calls “answerability,” adapted by Peter Hitchcock to mean the form of social responsibility working-class-aligned writers have to their readers.8 In House, Lupe’s death indicates for Esperanza – or should indicate for her – that writing will set her free but only if she carries with her out into the world her Chicana working-class experiences and memories as they “speak” to readers (or Lupe as listener) across a range of these discourses. Late in Cisneros’s novel, Alicia tells Esperanza, “Like it or not you are Mango Street and one day you’ll come back too” (107). Esperanza, however, rejects Alicia’s prediction, saying to her that she will not return to Mango until “somebody makes it better” (107). The question Alicia asks of Esperanza as to who will make Mango better raises the possibility that it is not the mayor but Esperanza who will do this work, even if she does not physically leave the barrio. Cisneros follows “Alicia & I Talking on Edna’s Steps” with “A House of My Own,” the vignette critics recognize as Esperanza’s “room of one’s own,” the place she will use to metaphorically create in the house of fiction this space for Chicana writers. For Robin Ganz, Esperanza/Cisneros forges this space out of the forces of ethnicity and gender that have traditionally “bound and muted” Chicana writers (19). In other words, Esperanza creates her house/Cisneros creates the house for Chicana writers in the house of fiction because both Esperanza and Cisneros have converted the “unyielding forces” of gender and ethnicity into stylistic strengths (19). Ganz is a typical critic of Cisneros’s House as she collapses class with ethnicity and gender without considering how class is lived through these categories. In suggesting that Esperanza’s house/Cisneros’s house resembles that room Virginia Woolf argued all women writers must have (12), Ganz ignores what Woolf had that Esperanza/Cisneros did not. Cisneros said in “Notes to a Young(er) Writer” that women like

8 For more on Hitchcock’s adaptation of answerability, or his theoretical frame for naming encounters between working-class-aligned writers and readers, see his essay “They Must be Represented?: Problems in Theories of Working-Class Representation” in PMLA 115 (January 2000): 20-32. Janet Zandy has understood “answerability” as significant for understanding how working-class writers “speak” to other working-class-aligned writers and readers across “a range of discourses, discourses of memory, of experience, of alienation, of solidarity” (Hands 86). 75

Woolf were able to write because they had the time and money to write, their housekeepers taking over the chores so that they could stay locked in that room of one’s own (75). Because house serves as a reminder for Esperanza and her family that they are frequently one step away from homelessness, the house Esperanza imagines is a house she owns (not simply a room). It is a house that is “not a flat, not an apartment in back” (House 108). The house Esperanza imagines, then, is a house that will provide for her stability and safety, which, at present, only Esperanza’s family can provide. Understanding Esperanza’s need for this space requires of critics that they return to the instability that frames Cisneros’s novel. If Esperanza had a house she could point to, Cisneros suggests, her protagonist wouldn’t need a house of her own. It is a mistake, however, to read Esperanza’s desire for a house only in classed terms. Esperanza says in her vignette that the house she imagines is also “not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s” (108). In this way, Esperanza’s image of house is racialized, gendered, and classed, which Cisneros reinforces with Esperanza’s desire for a house with “nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after” (108). Throughout House, Esperanza tries to forget about her family’s constant moving and their many flats where the landlord did, in fact, shake a stick at them (3), or where Esperanza had to pick up the dinner plates. Yet Esperanza cannot forget about the many images of house that contrast with the one she now imagines. In “Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes,” the concluding vignette of House, Cisneros plays on “sometimes” to suggest that for Esperanza Mango is a conceptual conundrum as it is at once absent and present – Esperanza can leave behind Mango and claim it as her own, or can simultaneously abandon her shame and be painfully aware of it. When critics read this vignette as an either/or – Esperanza readily endorses the American Dream or creates in the house of fiction a space for Chicana women writers – they ignore its central tension of how Mango says goodbye “sometimes.” Cisneros opens her final vignette with the same dialectic at work on other spaces and characters in the novel as Esperanza tells her story about a girl who belongs but does not belong to Mango Street. Before she begins her story, Esperanza prefaces it by saying that the girl didn’t want to belong; however, her narrative resists this tendency to disable dialectical methods as it follows Esperanza’s preface with the story Esperanza actually tells. Esperanza says, as she did in the vignette the began House, “We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina” (109). The line that follows in the first vignette, “but what I remember most is moving,” is rewritten in “Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes” as “but what I remember most is Mango Street, sad red house, the house I belong but do not belong to” (109-10). Not simply a matter of syntax, this change in Esperanza’s story signals the shift in House from the house/self Esperanza desires to the house/self Esperanza creates. Because the girl – Esperanza – belongs but does not belong to Mango, the house/self of her story is at once a source of celebration and shame. As readers and critics, we want Esperanza to exchange her shame for a celebration of being female, Chicana, and working-class, but by the close of House Esperanza never fully does this work even as her narrative sustains moments where Esperanza begins to exchange shame for celebration as in “Bums in the Attic.” Esperanza says as an aside to her story, “I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I put it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free” (110). The “ghost” has been a fitting subject for Chicana writers, from Esperanza/Cisneros to Cherríe Moraga. In her essay “Ghosts and Voices,” Cisneros considers of Moraga’s novel Giving up the Ghost that she and Moraga share the same ghost of shame, and that by writing both she and Moraga are constantly “attempting to give up the ghost, to put it to sleep once and for all” (7). Esperanza 76 intends for her story that it, too, will allow her to give up the ghost, but Mango says goodbye only “sometimes.” In other words, although Esperanza begins to celebrate her experiences as a working-class Chicana, her shame persists, in part because Esperanza continues to operate under the same constraints she has throughout the novel. Esperanza may insist that Mango sets her free, but Cisneros’s protagonist has not yet lost her anchor of arms, at least not entirely. When Esperanza informs us that one day she will “go away” and “say goodbye to Mango” (110), readers – and critics – must remember that Cisneros’s protagonist does not actually leave the barrio by her the end of her story. The “out” Esperanza finds from Mango comes, then, only in the stories she writes, in giving up the ghost by picking up the pen. Importantly, Cisneros does not end House with Esperanza’s figurative flight from the barrio. In remembering what her mother, Aunt Lupe, Alicia, and the comadres have told her, Esperanza says that with her pen – here her “books and paper” – she will go away to come back “for the ones left behind. For the ones who cannot out” (110). Esperanza’s new house/self is not the same as the ones she creates in “Bums in the Attic,” “Beautiful & Cruel,” and “A House of My Own” as it carries with it the communal sensibility implied by the writer’s “I/we.” In her book Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work, Janet Zandy understands the “I/we” to mean that a working-class writer “is conscious of his or her ghosts, of the multiple, competing, contradictory, and demanding voices that inhabit the ‘we’ inside the individual writer’s ‘I’” (90). Because, for Zandy, the fictional or autobiographical Bildung “leads not to separation and alienation but from a consciousness of connective tissue and multiple histories and lives that comprise the self” (90), Esperanza’s final idea of house/self does not preclude Mango. In insisting that she will leave to come back for the ones who cannot out, Esperanza demonstrates how being a writer need not require alienation or separation from the barrio. It is significant that in House Esperanza does not leave Mango Street, either literally or figuratively. One reason as to why Esperanza does not leave Mango by the close of House is because House is not a novel of upward mobility so much as it is a novel that questions the premise of this mobility, or the myth that anyone who works hard can “make it.” The other reason why Esperanza does not leave, of course, involves the house/self she creates: at the center of her story about a girl who belongs and does not belong to Mango is Mango itself. Because Esperanza does not leave the barrio, either literally or figuratively, Cisneros uses the space her protagonist creates to both confront and reimagine racist patriarchal capitalist systems. In House, writing does not offer Esperanza a “ticket out” of the barrio, which is to say that Esperanza as writer signals neither upward mobility nor writing for personal gain and at the expense of the larger community. Contrary to Walter Benn Michaels’s assumption that some people only become writers because they overcome the obstacle of poverty, Esperanza is not actually set free from her racialized and gendered class constraints when she puts a pen to paper.9 Neither, of course, was Cisneros. In fact, it is only with the growing popularity of House that Cisneros has lived in more middle-class conditions. Prior to becoming a “mainstream” writer – a phrase Cisneros finds problematic for its association with the dominant culture – Cisneros struggled financially, at one time living with her brother and sister-in-law while at work on Woman Hollering Creek (“Sandra Cisneros in Conversation”).

9 Michaels, Water Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. 201. 77

Understanding Esperanza’s/Cisneros’s situation is necessary, therefore, for understanding the space Esperanza/Cisneros creates in and with House. Too often critics have read space as simply the space Cisneros creates for Chicana writers in the house of fiction. Yet in considering the constraints at work on both Cisneros and her protagonist, particularly as they persist even as Esperanza and Cisneros covert these “unyielding forces” into stylistic strengths, the space created in and with House more clearly presents material geopolitical issues than it does signifying spaces. When critics such as Andrea O’Reilly Herrera read space as significant only for Cisneros’s appropriation of the “word” in the Anglo American house of fiction, they reduce it to a signifying space that ignores Cisneros’s own frame of reference for House: not space as “felicitous space” but space as three-floor flats and her fear of rats. In “On Writing The House on Mango Street,” Cisneros made clear that her discomfort with Bachelard’s Poetics of Space while a graduate student at the University of Iowa had to do with the way house for her did not resemble the “familiar and comforting house in the house of memory” (1) as it did for Bachelard. It became clear to Cisneros in this graduate seminar that when Bachelard wrote about space he didn’t mean houses such as hers: “It was obvious he never had to clean one [a house] or pay the landlord for rent like ours” (1). The difference Cisneros articulates here suggests that for Cisneros the forces that “bound and muted” her as a writer – even a young one – were primarily those of class as it is lived through ethnicity and gender. In this way, the space that Cisneros creates with House is a space in the Anglo American house of fiction with a material history that is both personal and political for Cisneros. Cisneros said in “On Writing” that she began House at the moment when she realized that “none of the books in this class or in any of my classes, in all my years of education, had ever discussed a house like mine” (1). Rather than to give up or continue to imitate the writers she read in that seminar, Cisneros waged her own “quiet revolution” (2) while at Iowa by writing about “ugly” subjects in “un poetic” language (2). Cisneros’s challenge to a class-privileged Bachelard extends beyond Cisneros’s need to write a book she had not yet read. When Cisneros admits to seeking out “ugly” subjects, ugly only because the dominant culture makes “presumptions” about what is “normal,” “American,” and “valuable (2), she raises the possibility that writing about three-floor flats is a political act that confronts the class norm and challenges dominant assumptions about aesthetics. If Cisneros created with House a space in the house of fiction for Chicana writers, then it is because she widened this space with her own experiences as a working-class Chicana, even those experiences that read in House as merely Esperanza’s cataloguing of different hair types. My issue with critics’ readings of House and the space it creates is not over how Cisneros reterritorialized the landscape of Chicano and feminist writing, which she did. Instead, I find critics’ attention to space problematic because in addressing economic deprivation without naming class (where Esperanza lives), or by conceiving of literary space in narrowly defined terms (gender and ethnicity), critics overlook what Cisneros intended for House to accomplish. It is not enough to present Esperanza’s/Cisneros’s writerly “I” as female and Chicana but not also working-class, or to understand the space created by House as new territory without also considering the kind of racialized and gendered class space Cisneros creates in and with House. For Cisneros, as for Esperanza, the idea of house is intricately linked to the idea of self. When Cisneros admits to her desire to create a house unlike the ones she read about, she affirms her need to celebrate her “otherness as a woman, as a working-class person, as an American of Mexican descent” (2). The space she creates, then, is a space made up by all these categories. In reflecting on House as an older writer, Cisneros said that because her idea of house (and Esperanza’s) had everything to do with her “otherness” as a working-class Chicana, writing 78 about houses that resembled her own enabled her to “name that thing without a name and examine where it had come from and why so [she] could exchange shame for celebration” (3). Esperanza may not have been able to fully do this work, but Cisneros did it for her, saying of House that Esperanza, her house, and her story changed people’s lives other than merely her own. As with the other writers examined by this study, Cisneros intends for writing to be useful, to have agency in and for the world. This is why, then, Cisneros considers her “affirmations and blessings” (3) to come not from prestige and awards but from reading letters from people “of all ages and colors who write to say [she has] written their story” (3). For both Cisneros and Esperanza, writing is not a solo, solitary act done in that proverbial room of one’s own but the means for personal and collective survival. Without the barrio there is no Cisneros or Esperanza.

Accomplishing What Esperanza Could Not Quite Do: Cisneros’s Caramelo, or Puro Cuento Although the focus of this chapter is on Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, any study of class in Cisneros’s fiction requires careful attention to Cisneros’s work in progression as the young child-voice of House gives way in later poetry and fiction to a more mature, politically motivated, and class conscious Cisneros. This is not to suggest that House lacks any political content or that Esperanza/Cisneros is not class conscious, but rather that House offers an implicit critique of racist patriarchal capitalist systems, in part because Cisneros considered herself “too young a writer” to address more fully that slippery concept of class (Dasenbrock, Ed. 296). Class is not an abstract concept in House as Esperanza lives class daily, but because Esperanza is not always able to see through and outside the structures the govern her life under capitalist systems, the lessons taught to her (by Lupe, by Alicia, by the comadres) are often met with confusion. It is only at the close of her narrative that Esperanza understands the meaning of these lessons. Cisneros’s protagonist of Caramelo (2002) does not share in Esperanza’s confusion as the novel brings more clearly into focus issues Cisneros omitted or alluded to in House, namely economic diversity within families and migration to the U.S. in search of work. I turn to Caramelo, however briefly, because the protagonist of this novel, Lala, accomplishes what Esperanza could not quite do: exchange her shame for a celebration of being female, Chicana, and working-class. Cisneros claims to have written Caramelo for two reasons: first, she could not find in American literature people like her father, who worked as an upholster (Tokarczyk 135). Second, his history of migration from Mexico to the U.S., although not spurred by economic necessity, tells a larger story about the influx of Latin American immigrants into the U.S. in the wake of global economic shifts. My reading of Caramelo, a novel inspired by Cisneros’s saga with her parents’, her grandparents’, and her own life, focuses specifically on those dynamics Cisneros omitted or alluded to in House. In particular, I am interested in how Cisneros’s/Lala’s consciousness as female, Chicana, and working-class develops more fully as it is shaped by her own and others’ position in the global economy. Caramelo begins with the possibility that Lala will (re)frame her family’s history – Lala’s version of storytelling – when Cisneros’s protagonist is left out of a family photograph while vacationing in Acapulco (4). As an almost preface to the novel, this photograph and Lala’s absence from it allow Lala to frame her family’s history and to get out from being framed by it. Lala is left to frame this history because it has been erased or altered by another history, namely one of colonization. In Caramelo, Lala frequently moves between the U.S. and Mexico because of her father’s close bond with his mother, the “Awful Grandmother,” who lives in Mexico City. However, unlike many Chicano/as, Lala’s connection to Mexico is a more complicated because she lives in 79

Chicago and not the American Southwest. Readers learn that Lala’s father, Inocencio Reyes, left Mexico rather than face his father’s anger over his leaving college, and that Inocencio stayed in Chicago because of Lala’s mother, a working-class Chicana whose family history of migration starkly contrasts with Inocencio’s. Lala’s family history, specifically the class divisions within her family, becomes a central conflict of Caramelo, particularly when Lala’s grandmother moves with the family to San Antonio after her husband’s death. On the family’s journey from Mexico City to San Antonio, the Awful Grandmother epitomizes this conflict when she says of Lala’s mother, “You climbed up in life marrying my son, a Reyes, and don’t think I don’t know that. My son could have done a lot better than marrying a woman who can’t speak proper Spanish. And to make matters more sad, you’re as dark as a slave” (85). Here, Ziola’s difference is both racialized and classed. Despite the fact that the Awful Grandmother shares with Ziola her ancestry (readers learn that the Awful Grandmother escaped poverty and her Indian family by marrying), Ziola is signaled out as “Other” in a family from the Mexican middle-class. Much of the saga of Cisneros’s Caramelo has to do with the Awful Grandmother and her overwhelming presence in the novel. At the center of the Awful Grandmother’s story is her caramel rebozo, the shawl passed down to Lala that is also the color of Lala’s half-sister, a mestiza by the name of Candelaria. Late in her narrative Lala learns of her father’s illegitimate daughter and, with Candelaria’s abrupt disappearance from the story, Cisneros reinforces how history erased Candelaria as it did other Indian women “who had affairs with Spanish men, were denied by their fathers, and left to work out their own lives” (Tokarczyk 137). The strands of the rebozo, then, represent Lala’s many family histories, including Candelaria’s. Candelaria’s story, as it is intricately linked to both Lala’s and her grandmother’s, requires of Lala that she rethread the strands of the rebozo to weave Candelaria into the Reyes family history. Yet to do this work Lala must first unravel both her grandmother’s story and her father’s. Working at the intersection of these stories, Lala uncovers the truth about her grandmother’s Indian ancestry and the reason why her father left Mexico. Lala says, in retelling her grandmother’s story, that the Awful Grandmother married Narciso Reyes, in part, because she liked the way he demonstrated to others his class (important for the Awful Grandmother given her own peasant ancestry.) In a moment that is at once gendered and classed, the Awful Grandmother recalls how Narciso “was a man” (Caramelo 121) because of two things: first, he never entered the kitchen and, related to this, he never ate like a peasant. Narciso, in other words, did not traverse male-female and middle-working-class spaces. The Awful Grandmother says of Narciso that he “was accustomed to each course being served on a separate plate. He did not hold his knife and fork in a fist, or scoop up his food with tortillas in place of silverware as they did at Aunty Fina’s” (121). Narciso’s “manners,” then, distinguish him from other Mexican men, much in the same way Inocencio’s manners, which Lala appropriately recognizes as class markers, help him stand out to Ziola in a crowded Chicago dance hall. In describing Lala’s mother, Cisneros highlights Ziola’s “crooked Spanish,” or Spanish characteristic of working-class Chicano/as, as it contrasts with Inocencio’s: “A Spanish luxurious as gold silk wrapped in tissue, an English crisp and creased as a pocket handkerchief” (224). At the dance hall, Ziola first notices Inocencio’s Spanish and later his leather shoes with “toe taps” and his tux with tails (224). Ziola says of Inocencio that he does all the talking on the hall floor, taking care to emphasize his family’s grand history – “My family very important. My grandfather a composer who played for the president” (225). At the time Ziola thinks little of Inocencio or his family, but both become significant to her own story as Ziola marries Inocencio and, as he is like his father, her marriage to him parallels the Awful Grandmother’s marriage to 80

Narciso. The difference, however, is that Inocencio stays in the U.S., where he quickly learns that Chicano/as do not always respect Mexicans, where his national affiliations to Mexico make him a target for suspicion, and where the legitimacy of his family history (undermined later with the discovery of Candelaria) is compromised by linguistic obstacles. Inocencio’s “rude awakening” in the U.S. mirrors his mother’s when she and the family cross the U.S./Mexico border into San Antonio. Lala remarks on how “something happened when they [her father and grandmother] crossed the border. Instead of being treated like the royalty they were, they were after all Mexicans, they were treated like Mexicans, which was something that altogether startled the Grandmother” (289). In the U.S., Inocencio and the Awful Grandmother are “declassed” simply because they are Mexicans, a lesson Inocencio learns when he is jailed following a fight at a soccer match. Although Inocencio tells the police in the best English he can muster, “I am a Mexican national by birth, but my father’s family was born in Seville” (216), the police dismiss him as a “drunk and an irresponsible and haul [him] in with a carload of criminals” (216). In recalling the fight to his cellmate, Inocencio says that the police haul him in because of “honor,” because he defended Mexico against Chicanos whose families have crossed the border too long ago to remain loyal to their home country. Unlike in House, where “all brown all around we are safe,” the conflict Inocencio describes here is not interracial but intraracial: “People think because we carry the same blood we’re all brothers, but it’s impossible for us to get along, you have no idea. They [Chicanos] always look down on nationals, understand?” (216). Inocencio explains further that Chicanos are “more American than anything, and us Mexicans from over there even more Mexican than Zapata” (217). In Caramelo, Inocencio’s insistence on his “Mexicanness,” which for him has everything to do with his class, makes him an easy target in a country that refuses to see him as anything but a Mexican and, therefore, polices him (politically, economically) for this very reason. Throughout the novel Lala must confront her father’s treatment in the U.S., particularly when la migra makes a “surprise” appearance at Inocencio’s upholstery shop, threatening its close although Inocencio has his papers. In connecting the many threads of her father’s history from Mexico to the U.S., Lala becomes conscious of how Inocencio’s past shapes his present, or why his “Mexicanness” compromises her family history and later Inocencio’s business simply because he is of a racialized working-class minority. Inocencio may find value in his work as an upholster, a job he secured after other kinds of work were closed to him, but the pride he feels in his craft is threatened each time la migra shows up at his doorstep. As Cisneros makes clear in Caramelo, the “experience of conquest,” as Michelle Tokarczyk has called it, does not end with Cortez’s colonization of Mexico (Tokarczyk 139). Yet in Cisneros’s novel, this experience of conquest is most keenly felt by women – the Awful Grandmother is “startled” by barrio conditions (“This is a slum, that’s what it is”), for example. The irony of the grandmother’s experience is that she has been complicit in another woman’s colonization, employing Candelaria and her mother as washerwomen despite knowing that Candelaria is her granddaughter. When Ziola tells Lala of her father’s illegitimate child and subsequent abandonment of her – a story that forces Lala to revise her image of her father as “perfect” – Cisneros illustrates how Inocencio, too, has acted as colonizer. By the close of the novel, Inocencio reveals to Lala not his story of abandoning Candelaria and her mother, but his father’s story of not abandoning the Awful Grandmother when she became pregnant with Inocencio before she and Narciso married (Caramelo 427). Even as he lays dying in a hospital bed, Inocencio is not able to admit to Lala how he left Candelaria and her mother to work out the details of their own lives while he lived his in the U.S. 81

Shortly after Inocencio tells Lala about her grandmother, Cisneros’s protagonist says that maybe her father isn’t the one to tell the real story of Candelaria, or that maybe the Awful Grandmother doesn’t need to apologize to Ziola for her racism and classism. Instead, Lala thinks, holding the caramel rebozo to her lips, “maybe it’s my job to separate the strands and knot the words together for everyone who can’t say them, and make it all right in the end” (428). Lala’s realization, which comes after she, too, abandons her family briefly in order to escape the “sad red house” in San Antonio, signals the moment in Caramelo when Lala exchanges she shame for celebration of being female, Chicana, and working-class. Reminded with the rebozo that she is “connected to so many people, so many” (428), Lala desires to unite all those who can and cannot “out,” but her desire comes because she has left and come back. Cisneros ends Caramelo not with Lala’s impending leave-taking from the barrio as writer but with Lala as barrio writer, a storyteller who is comfortable with her own story and the history she has yet to write. Lala or Cisneros (it is not clear in the concluding section “Fin” whether or not Cisneros takes over for her protagonist’s storytelling) admits in the final sentences of Caramelo that the space between Mexico and the U.S. – the borderlands – is a space already inscribed with history, but that it is a history ready for revision. In this way, Lala becomes the storyteller/cartographer Esperanza could not – informed by her grandparents’ life, her parents’ life, and her own, Lala inserts herself into history only to rewrite it, staking out a claim to Mexico, the U.S., and the space in-between without questioning whether or not she belongs or wants to belong to all these spaces. Cisneros once envisioned herself as a cartographer, charting new territory for Chicano/a writers with her stories about clouds and la migra and artichokes. It seems that Cisneros intends for Esperanza of House and Lala of Caramelo that they share in her fate. As working-class Chicana writers, Cisneros and her protagonists recognize, even if Esperanza is not able to do so until the close of House, that writing carries with it a communal sensibility – an urgency to expose the economic and political realities facing Chicano/as today. If readers had doubts as to the cause of these realities, the exhaustive chronology of conquest and scapegoating and exploitation of Chicano/a workers at the close of Caramelo would certainly assuage them.

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Chapter Five Tools to Tear Down and Rebuild: An Assault on Racist Patriarchal Capitalist Systems in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus

Labor historians could learn a great deal from the work presented in this study as such writers as Leslie Feinberg, Toni Cade Bambara, and Sandra Cisneros detail all too clearly the effect deindustrialization and globalization has had on the more disadvantaged members of the working-class. The global shifts that began in the early 1970’s came to a head by the 1990’s as the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc (1989-1991) marked the end of any serious challenge to capitalism as a system.1 International debates about globalization following the fall ensured that ideologies of neoliberalism and free-market capitalism would spread across the globe and thereby replace pro-union or pro-worker sentiments. In other words, these ideologies would effectively eliminate any protections and opportunities blue collar workers once enjoyed. When Chicana feminist writer Helena María Viramontes published Under the Feet of Jesus in 1995, the nature of blue collar work as part-time or contingent with subsistence level wages without benefits left little speculation as to how globalization had had a disastrous effect on low- tier workers and women and minorities in particular. Yet the reality of blue collar work remained invisible in the political economy as its workforce increasingly became politically and economically disenfranchised. Migrant farm workers, the subject of Viramontes’s 1995 novel, are among those blue collar workers who remain invisible in the political economy and yet are policed by the very forces that encourage and maintain their labor. Exposing state measures against migrants, Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus offers a guided critique of cultural and economic inequalities against Mexicano/a and Chicano/a farm workers in the U.S. In this way, Viramontes’s novel performs the kind of work critic Sonia Saldívar-Hull considers necessary for Chicano/a writers: it “exposes institutionalized racism and records the people’s struggle against economic exploitation” (156). For Saldívar-Hull, the political and economic realities faced by U.S. people of Mexican descent have meant for Chicana writers in particular that they do more than critique the destructive aspects of their culture’s definition of gender roles. Given these realities, Chicana feminist writers have had to increasingly confront how race, gender, and class exploitation coalesces. Sharpening and Deepening Marxism and Anglo Feminism: Chicana Feminism As a proletarian and Chicana writer with an unflinching gaze on Chicano/as most dispossessed by restrictive economic structures, Viramontes puts “literature to work” (156) as Saldívar-Hull insists, namely in the way her writing “explodes the false dichotomy between the aesthetic and political” (156). Implied by the phrase “putting literature to work” is the way Viramontes’s fiction challenges supposed demarcations between writer and audience and between aesthetics and “use,” or what Paul Lauter understands as the function of working-class art: “it [is] a means of making working people conscious of their world and actions within it, of extending their experiences of that world, indeed of enlarging the world they could experience”

1 Despite U.S. interests as increasingly economic following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, labor leaders, environmentalists, and various activist groups challenged the ideology of free-market capitalism as a progressive system, with the 1999 protests of the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle a watershed moment in the advance of alternatives to neoliberalism. “Declaring globalization a recipe for impoverishment and economic disaster,” Hester Eisenstein observed, “activists stood for the creation of an alternative economic and social system” (3). By 1999, however, neoliberalism had already co-opted the goals of most activist organizations, e.g. feminism and gay civil rights and liberation remained contingent on participation in the free-market. 83

(O’Malley, Rosen, and Vogt, Eds. 116). Janet Zandy offered a similar explanation for working- class art and its “use value” when she said of writing such as Viramontes’s that it is intended to be useful, to have agency in the world (Hands 91). In this chapter, I understand Viramontes’s Under to be “useful” in the way it reflects most clearly the nature of blue collar work in the U.S. as it is no longer stable, secure, or mainstream. Situated in a historically-specific circumstance of advanced global capitalism, Under responds to global shifts by confronting and reimagining existing political-economic systems. I argue in this chapter that Under makes visible to consumers the material conditions of migrant farm work as it simultaneously posits reasons for, and alternatives to, prepackaged epistemologies of this labor and its use. Viramontes is quite clear about the political work her novels perform, specifically as critiques of racist patriarchal capitalism.2 In an interview with Juanita Herida and Silvia Pellarolo in 1994, Viramontes emphasized the proletarian orientation of her fiction, and Chicano literature more generally, when she insisted that “this literary body has in common that we [Chicano/a writers] all come from a specific social situation, a working-class background. We have a social consciousness of the sixties and the impact that those radical days had on us” (179). Implicit in Viramontes’s response is how gender and race consciousness are fundamentally shaped by one’s position in the global economy. Because the realities of class demand that Chicano/a writers use their work to expose such realities, Viramontes’s Under shares with Chicano/a literature an emphasis on working-class specific concerns. For Viramontes and other Chicano/a writers like Sandra Cisneros, these concerns involve more than where Chicanos must live; they also involve the way class is a necessary component of an identity constructed on the bases of race, gender, and sexuality. Any reading of Under, then, must not collapse ethnicity with class (what Cisneros warns against in Caramelo) but must explore how class is lived through ethnicity and gender. Although Viramontes helped usher in this emergent Chicana literary tradition with her 1985 publication of The Moths and Other Stories, it was her 1995 novel Under the Feet of Jesus that proposed action as the only available course for Chicano/as. For Viramontes, figurative return to the barrio as the basis for the Chicana feminist writer’s art – the subject of Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street – cannot alone exact social change at a time of anti-immigrant and anti-bilingual education initiatives. The gains made by Chicano/as during the rise of a Left-led El Movimiento in the 1960’s were largely lost by the 1990’s, particularly after the 1994 passage of Proposition 187, an initiative that attempted to refuse state services such as medical care and education to undocumented people and their children in California (Burford 16). Although Prop 187 targeted “illegals,” the initiative made the Chicano/a migrant farm worker’s experience in the U.S. especially tenuous. Critics interested in Under such as Arianne Burford have usefully examined these political realities and the way Viramontes addresses them in her novel.3 As I draw on the limited body of scholarship Under has generated, my interpretation also diverges from critical work such as Burford’s when it posits shifts in blue collar work and its

2 Viramontes extended further this idea of her work as critiques of the state when she said of Under and her most recent novel Their Dogs Came with Them (2007) that both respond to “this country’s [U.S.’s] enslaving of low-wage workers” (Mermann-Jozwiak 93), or the state’s role in reducing workers to “just bodies, working bodies” (93). 3 For more on Burford’s discussion of Proposition 187 and the state of the migrant farm worker in the 1990s, see her article titled “Cartographies of a Violent Landscape: Viramontes’ [sic] and [Cherrie] Moraga’s Remapping of Feminisms in Under the Feet of Jesus and Heroes and Saints” in Genders 47 (2008):1-36. 84 workforce as an additional historical dynamic to which Under responds. 4 To put this differently, I regard the shift from industrial to service and agricultural work and unskilled manufacturing as a political and economic reality with which contemporary critics of Under must contend. Early Chicana feminist critics such as Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano maintained that Viramontes’s fiction made sense only when social and economic issues were explored alongside those of race and gender (Yarbro-Bejarano “Introduction” 8). Certainly critics such as Burford have focused on institutionalized racism and economic exploitation of migrants; however, like Viramontes who understood by 1990 that representing the barrio was not enough for Chicana feminist writers, I maintain that criticism on Under must do more than merely record racially motivated injustices against migrant farm workers in the U.S., particularly if critics are to understand the demand for migrant farm work at the time of the novel’s production and how this demand coincided with California’s measures against Mexicano/a and Chicano/a migrants.

Migrants as Tools of Agricultural Production: Histories of Exploitation and Disenfranchisement Under the Feet of Jesus begins with an image that reflects both migrants’ immobility and the reality of their situation: “The silence and the barn and the clouds meant many things. It was always a question of work, and work depended on the harvest, the car running, their health, the conditions on the road, how the long the money held out, and the weather, which meant they could depend on nothing” (4). In Under, the American Southwest resembles not the mythical Aztlán as it did for Chicano/a nationalists in the 1960’s but rather an anti-pastoral landscape that has been colonized like migrants themselves. 5 As she does throughout her fiction, Viramontes intends for the landscape in Under to reproduce the violence done to Chicano/as as an increasingly disenfranchised working-class. This is why, for example, Viramontes’s description of trees that mark the side of the road as “amputated” (3) will similarly describe migrants’ bodies, as in the mother Petra’s legs choked by veins (vines.) Moving from an image of instability or immobility provided for by the reality of migrant farm work, Viramontes performs a rhetorical move not unlike Sandra Cisneros’s in The House on Mango Street when she rejects Bachelard’s formulation of “house” as “felicitous space” and instead details a labor camp bungalow with “dingy” rooms, “swollen panes,” and the “stink of despair” (8). As with the two-room bungalow that is the subject of Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, the labor camp bungalow that houses Viramontes’s protagonist is a distinctly working-class space absent of any privilege implied by Bachelard’s image of house. In House, Esperanza foregrounds movement in the lines that begin the novel – “We didn’t always live on Mango Street. [. . .] What I remember most is moving” (3). Movement functions similarly in Under as it serves to illustrate the desperate economic situation of these characters: moves from barrio to barrio (or from one labor camp to the next) denote not upward mobility but the instability (of jobs, of safe housing) that is all too often a hallmark of working-class life. As for others examined in this study, for Viramontes the representation of social space is a central preoccupation; in Under, space is dually significant: as working-class specific it limits the

4 For more on scholarship on Viramontes’s Under, see Dan Latimer’s essay “The La Brea Tar Pits, Tongues of Fire: Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus and Its Background” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 85:3/4 (Fall/Winter 2002): 323-46. See also work on “home” by Lene Johannessen and Cecelia Lawless. 5 For more on the American Southwest as not Aztlán or utopia for Chicano/as but a violent landscape, see Burford’s essay “Cartographies of a Violent Landscape” in Genders. 85 movement of her characters; and, importantly, it acts as a site from which Chicano/a migrants can stake out a new cartography of the landscape, or can remap their claims to the land. In what follow from the initial description in Under of migration as immobility, a move from one labor camp to presumably something worse, Viramontes continues to present migration for the farm worker as marked by instability. Estrella, Viramontes’s young protagonist, reinforces this description with her insistence that “she remembered every job was not enough wage, every uncertainty rested on one certainty: food” (14). For migrants such as Estrella and her family, movement to and from working-class spaces – labor camps, tenements in the barrio – produces in migrants a sense of dislocation similarly experienced by exiles, best represented by Estrella’s image of migrant life as “all night packing in trash bags” (14). With Viramontes’s attention to the economic and social realities that migrants face, among them poor living conditions, “home site” is literal in that movement from one labor camp to the next demands of migrants a real need for stable ground, however unsatisfactory the labor camp bungalow. This is why, for example, Estrella tells another migrant that “stay[ing] put” (Under 86) implies both migrants’ immobility and the security – of work, of housing – traditionally associated with blue collar labor prior to the 1970’s. That Estrella and her family must continually seek out a stable home site is best explained in Under by Estrella’s understanding that movement for the migrant is always a matter of “not enough wage” (14). From within the context of this chapter, I want to argue that Viramontes posits the cause for migration as, in part, competition between migrants for low-wage work. In many ways, this competition for work helps explain Viramontes’s inclusion in Under of a white Maxine: her conflict with Estrella leads to the family’s migration to the grape fields. Were it not for this conflict, Viramontes seems to suggest, Estrella and her family could have established a home site in the labor camp bungalow of the tomato fields. Critics interested in Maxine, among them Dan Latimer, read her conflict with Estrella as resulting from Maxine’s being “white trash” (337). In other words, Latimer understands this conflict – and resulting move for Estrella’s family – in racial rather than economic terms: the issue for Latimer is that Maxine has a “natural” inclination for racism (what is implied by his use of the term “white trash”) and not that her family devalues migrant farm work by accepting lower wages and by stealing crops for sale outside the camps (Under 29). As I demonstrate later in this chapter, Viramontes is not so quick to vilify Maxine; unlike Latimer, I regard Maxine as significant for the feminist model she presents to Estrella, one not circumscribed by proscribed gender roles in the Chicano community. Had Viramontes intended Maxine to resemble Latimer’s “white trash” migrant, Estrella’s description of the move away from the tomato fields would not have accompanied an image of Maxine as the friend with whom Estrella used to read on “lazy Sundays when they were supposed to be in church” (38). Viramontes demonstrates throughout Under Maxine’s significance for Estrella’s having replaced a belief in patriarchy and the church with female empowerment by the novel’s close. The narrative of Under for Scott Beck and Dolores Rangel, that it is an anti-colonial understanding of Christianity as a colonizing religion (17), must then incorporate Maxine for what she reveals to Estrella about getting out from “under the feet of Jesus” and patriarchy. I labor on Maxine’s role in Under because she reflects more than the changing composition of the working-class in the wake of global shifts. She also provides for Estrella the working-class specific feminism – or model of female empowerment – that Estrella adopts at critical moments in Under. My reading of Maxine restores to Under as an anti-colonial narrative of Christianity,

86 then, an emphasis on working-class, given that Maxine is not constrained by Christianity and patriarchy as is Viramontes’s protagonist. The events in Under that suggest an anti-colonial reading of Christianity as a colonizing religion, among them the decline of a migrant’s health after being sprayed with poison by a biplane that casts a cross-shaped shadow (Under 76), have also to do with the state’s role in deregulating migrant farm work and, therefore, increasing political and economic exploitation of migrants such as Viramontes’s Alejo. Although Estrella lacks the language with which to condemn the state for its complicity in mistreating migrants, Viramontes offers guided critiques of how the state, with pressure from agribusiness lobbyists, obscures to consumers the reality of migrant farm work. What Estrella questions then is the image of the migrant farm worker reinforced by the rhetoric of consumerism: “Carrying the full basket [of grapes] to the paper was not like the picture on the red raisin boxes Estrella saw in the markets, not like the woman wearing a fluffy bonnet, holding out the grapes with her smiling, ruby lips, the sun a flat orange behind her” (49). Detailing the inconsistency of this image with the severity of migrant life, Viramontes instead denounces the consumer and the state for failing to dismantle the image of the migrant woman as she is presented on the Sun Maid Raisin box: what the consumer does not know is that “the sun was white and it made Estrella’s eyes sting like an onion, and the baskets of grapes resisted her muscles, pulling their magnetic weight back to the earth” (50). For Viramontes, consumers’ ignorance of how farm work is painfully inscribed on migrants’ bodies is best explained by the system’s prepackaging of a romanticized epistemology of migrant farm work. That consumers fail to question this epistemology, which Viramontes challenges when she reappropriates it as an epistemology of laboring bodies (how bodies may be read for what they reveal about the effect of physical labor on the body), indicates that the system has concealed measures against migrants such as deregulation of migrant farm work and intolerable living and working conditions. Burford has already emphasized these conditions as they are made invisible by consumers’ lack of awareness or concern for migrants. While her focus is on the Anglo feminist as consumer and the limitations of an Anglo feminism to expose harsh realities faced by migrants (13), Burford aptly identifies Under as Viramontes’s critique of the state and its role in obscuring these realities to consumers. Yet, as I suggest in this chapter, the system has done more than fail to establish safe guidelines for migrants. It has also actively created low-wage strategies and has ensured a constant supply of low-wage workers, the result of which has been increased competition for low-wage work and an epistemology of migrants as tools of agricultural production. Estrella’s description of the daily reality of migrant farm work, such as children laboring in the hot sun without enforced breaks, gives shape to the contours of agricultural work in the United States and abroad. In addition to declining health and death caused by pesticide exposure, the effect of deregulation of farm work on migrants is a greater demand for production such that migrants must work longer hours for less pay with these hours recorded not by a time clock but by a foreman who “scribbled rows completed” and “erased calculations” (Under 57). Given the demand for migrant farm work in the U.S., migrants such as Viramontes’s Alejo and Gumecindo work as piscadores because they have been brought to California by the U.S. government (45). It is, in part, this constant oversupply of migrants (and competition between them) that devalues migrants’ wages; when wages are devalued even as the demand for production increases, migrant farm work is more readily viewed as subsistence labor. In Under, Viramontes demonstrates, beyond the state’s failure to establish safe working conditions for

87 migrants, how farm work has been delegitimized as productive working-class labor and what this delegitimizing does to migrants who identify as workers. The issue of how, as a result of shifts in low-tier work since the 1970’s, migrants are increasingly viewed not as workers but as Mexicano/as or Chicano/as is similarly explored by Viramontes’s Under, particularly at moments when migrants have internalized moral failings associated with farm work. 6 Understanding the image of migrants as “tools,” then, requires an attention to labor shifts that provided for such delegitimizing of migrant farm work, or how migrant farm work is not recognized as real work. Gumecindo and Alejo, the migrants of Under brought to California to work as piscadores, are among those workers who have internalized the image of farm work as subsistence labor and, as a result, have failed to take pride in their work or consider it valuable. Unlike the many migrants who find value in migrant farm work though they may not have a stake in its production, Gumecindo and Alejo consider farm work as labor performed by cabeza de burro or donkey-headed people like that of Alejo’s father (54). 7 For Viramontes’s migrants, farm work requires not intelligence (the implication here is that migrants necessarily choose farm work over other kinds of labor) but able hands. In part, it is this understanding of farm work that reinforces the image of migrants as “tools” of production. Yet Gumecindo and Alejo’s suggestion also ignores the state’s role in reinforcing this image – why it is significant that Viramontes has the U.S. government bring her migrants to California to work. That Gumecindo must invent control over his labor – his having “accepted” work as a piscador rather than being slotted for such a job (40) – is indicative of just how little control migrants have over the nature and pace of their work. If, as Gumecindo suggests, migrants could control the kind of work they perform and how often they perform it, then they would be intelligent people who perform productive or valuable labor and not piscadores. Alejo, but not Viramontes, shares in Gumecindo’s sentiment as he spends much of the novel faulting himself for his work in the fields rather than the system and its strategies for ensuring a constant supply of low-wage workers. In a moment of Under that details the extent to which migrants have internalized moral failings associated with farm work, Viramontes relays the following: from Alejo’s question of Estrella, “You always gonna work in the fields?” (117), Viramontes has the mother Petra think, “What a stupid boy! [. . .] What right did he have to ask that? If Estrella wasn’t working, there would be nothing for him to eat” (117). Estrella goes one step farther than Petra when she asks Alejo, “What’s wrong with picking the vegetables people’ll be eating for dinner?” (118). As Viramontes’s response to this delegitimizing of migrant labor, Estrella’s question reveals none of the moral failings Alejo has internalized about farm work. On the one hand, it is easy to suggest, as Dan Latimer might, that Estrella has internalized job-slotting prophecies, or that Viramontes’s protagonist will continue to work as a piscador because she believes farm work to be the only available labor for working-class Chicano/as. Yet Viramontes is clear, even as she has her protagonist find value in farm work, that Estrella imagines an alternative to work in the pisca or harvest (118). Estrella’s “hope” for a future that does not involve migrant farm work does not suggest, as Latimer does, that by the close of

6 In the collection Voices from the Fields: Children of Migrant Farmers Tell Their Stories, migrant Reina Quintanilla calls attention to the tendency among many in the U.S., including critics, to racialize, feminize, or immigrationize migrant bodies, which is to say the tendency to see migrants not as workers but as Mexicano/as or Chicano/as: “Even though they [the dominant culture] see Mexicans working in the fields, they never think of Mexicans as workers. [. . .] It makes me angry. We’ve come here to work” (41). 7 For more on migrants who take pride in farm work, see the narratives of José Luis Ríos in Voices from the Fields: Children of Migrants Tell Their Stories (11-17) and poems by Alfonzo Saenz (“Friends Don’t Lie”) and Humberto Hernández (“Untitled Poem”) in Estamos Aquí: Poems by Migrant Farm workers (55 and 88-9 respectively). 88

Under Estrella has left the fields or that she is upwardly mobile (333). Rather, the reality of Estrella’s situation as a migrant farm worker in rural California is such that Estrella can only make to do with the tools she is provided. (She can change the conditions of her existence but only under oppressive and/or coercive conditions.) For Viramontes, these tools are, as they are reappropriated by migrants in Under, the result of what racist patriarchal capitalism has done to Chicano/as. To put this differently, for migrants to be tools of historical excavation requires that they first be colonized like the land itself. 8 Throughout Under, Viramontes exposes the treatment of migrants as just bodies or less than citizens in salient ways, among them how the U.S. government is concerned more with economic profit than with the health and safety of migrants. Perfecto, the character Viramontes intended to remake the Chicano/a family, makes clear how he lives a “travesty of laws” (Under 83), or how his very existence “contradicted the laws of others, so that everything he did like eat and sleep and work and love was prohibited” (83). 9 What Perfecto identifies here is how the system exercises control over migrants in such a way that they are reduced to bare life or are viewed as tools of the state rather than agents directing the course of their own lives. I argued earlier in this chapter that Viramontes’s preoccupation with “working bodies” has largely to do with their being reflective of social space, or in Under how an image of migrants as tools is reproduced by the violence done to the land. Perfecto, emphasizing for the second time in the novel the state’s measures against Chicano/a migrants, corrects Estrella’s suggestion that the state’s interest in migrants is merely economic: when a biplane sprays pesticide earlier than scheduled and without warning to migrants, Perfecto understands this not as accidental (as does Estrella) but as the system’s use of power to further reduce migrants to bare life or mere working bodies (73). Such an epistemology of migrant bodies is advanced in Under by interlocking systems of domination: here the state as active agent of political and economic exploitation and a colonizing history whereby violence done to the land parallels a history of violence against migrant farm workers and their bodies. The image Viramontes uses to begin Under, that of “amputated” trees lining a side road to the labor camp bungalow, aptly describes subsequent images of an anti-pastoral landscape that reproduces the reality of violence done to migrants as tools of agricultural production. Among these many images, all of which reinforce Viramontes’s attention to an epistemology of laboring bodies, those of the tar pits and the mother Petra’s body best illustrate the way migrant bodies are representative of colonization (itself an economic issue.) Critics such as Burford and Latimer have already examined the tar pits of Under, and Alejo’s connection to them, as a metaphor for this colonizing history. Rather than to rehearse Burford and Latimer’s argument, namely that the tar pits Alejo envisions as he is sprayed with pesticide represent how migrants are used by the

8 In an interview with Elizabeth Mermann-Jozwiak, Viramontes offered the following explanation for “historical excavation”: the writer’s “responsibility to engage with history” (80). This responsibility, Viramontes insisted, entails for the Chicano/a writer that he/she excavate or dig up history for the results of colonization on the Chicano/a imagination, or the cultural and linguistic insecurities that affect how Chicano/as regard the self. 9 In The Moths and Other Stories Viramontes more closely adhered to an image of the Chicana woman as “good.” If, for Viramontes, the Chicana woman was good, the Chicano male was not. In her testimono “Nopalitos: The Making of Fiction”, Viramontes resolved that her conclusion – “If my mother showed all that is good in being female, my father showed all that is bad in being male” – has since demanded that she “[make] a serious effort to erase this black and white. See the good and bad in both sexes” (169). In part, it is this resolve that enabled Viramontes to remake the Chicano family through Perfecto – a largely redemptive male figure – and through Petra, the acculturated Chicana mestiza at home in her sexuality. 89 system as fuel for the economy, I examine an unexplored but related incident in which Viramontes employs this metaphor of the tar pits to describe migrant bodies as tools. Petra’s meeting of Perfecto, the man in whom Petra will put her faith as protector of her family though he is not her husband, accompanies another kind of meeting: that of Petra and her five children and the driver of a Bermuda who has stopped for gas at a labor camp store. With this meeting, Viramontes extends further the metaphor of the tar pits for violence done to migrant bodies when the language she uses to describe Petra is similarly used for the rag that cleans the man’s car. Despite Petra’s insistence that her “mismatched” clothes are less the spectacle than shield against the “hot tempered sun” (106), Viramontes makes clear the connection between Petra’s blue clothing and man’s blue rag as he uses and then discards it (106). As with Estrella’s realization late in the novel that migrant bodies are used to fuel the economy but do not share in its wealth, Viramontes has Petra recognize her own immobility as it is contrasted with that of the car owner’s; while she does not explicitly make the connection Estrella will near the close of Under, Petra certainly understands how the man’s mobility exists because of her own immobility – were it not for migrants, Petra suggests, the man would not have the luxury of “travel[ing] from one splat dot to another [on a map]” (105). Like the blue rag, migrants are easily used and disposed of by the system and its consumers. Petra’s recognition of own immobility as a gas pump is suggestive of how the land and migrant bodies have been mined primarily for economic profit. Even at a young age, Viramontes’s protagonist understands that her (im)mobility as a migrant farm worker is such that movement is for a better wage and not for the freedom implied by Petra’s description of the car as it travels from one place to another. At various moments in the novel, Estrella associates the mother Petra’s body and its immobility with the landscape; this is why, for example, Petra’s varicose veins resemble for Estrella “vines choking the movement of her [Petra’s] legs” (61). Importantly, this image of immobility provided for by migrant farm work follows from contrasting images of movement not unlike that of Petra and the Bermuda: while railroad ties permit the movement of some, the image they produce for Estrella – that of Petra’s cesarean scar – implies not mobility but immobility as the result of multiple births (59). I will return to the connection Estrella makes between Petra’s scar and the land later in this chapter, but for the purposes of this discussion I want to emphasize how, for Viramontes, the violence done to migrants is both physical and psychical, with Estrella’s description of the railroad ties/Petra’s scar indicative of both immobility and the dislocation migrants feel throughout much of Under though many have ties to the land. As Estrella stands on the railroad ties resembling Petra’s scar, Viramontes clarifies that for her protagonist standing on the “in-between” (59) is the result of a colonizing history whereby Chicano/as came to occupy an indeterminate space – not recognized or valued as citizens despite their long-held ties to the land (what is meant, in part, by Viramontes’s association of the railroad ties with Petra’s caesarean scar.) To further illustrate this displacement, Viramontes follows Estrella’s occupying of an in-between space with a little league baseball game in which running for home plate is analogized to Estrella’s indeterminacy of and search for home; Viramontes demonstrates with this analogy how lack of a home site (both locally and nationally) produces in Chicano/as such as Estrella a sense of dislocation so great that even U.S. citizens of Mexican descent fear la migra or the immigration police.10 This

10 Viramontes explored this issue in earlier work as well. See Viramontes’s oft discussed story “The Cariboo Café” in The Moths and Other Stories for more on how Chicanos fear la migra or, as they are called in “The Cariboo 90 is why, then, Viramontes further analogizes the baseball game to Estrella’s indeterminacy: with the bright lights resembling la migra’s headlights and the fence around the field a stand-in for the wire fence that lines the U.S/Mexico border, Estrella “[tried] to remember which side she was on and which side of the wire mesh she was safe in” (59-60). It is this fear of la migra that leads Estrella to question, “Where was home?” (60). The answer Viramontes provides is such that Estrella learns from Petra upon returning to the labor camp bungalow that she is “not an orphan” (63), with “mother” represented by Petra but also the land Estella labors upon daily. The anti-colonial narrative Petra constructs for Estrella, one in which the former remaps Chicano/a subjectivity onto the land, signals in Under the shift from Chicano/as as tools of the state to Chicano/as’ reappropriation of this image. Viramontes demonstrates this shift when Estrella’s first impulse upon arrival at the bungalow is to use Perfecto’s pry bar to “teach someone a lesson” (61). Although it is not until later in the novel that Estrella puts Perfecto’s tool to use, Viramontes suggests at this moment in Under that Estrella has realized the urgency of action. Like Viramontes who understood by 1990 that representing the barrio was not enough for Chicana feminist writers, Estrella reinforces here her earlier assertion, “No sense talking tough unless you do it” (45). For Viramontes’s protagonist, “talking tough” must accompany action. This is why, then, Estrella can find meaning in Perfecto’s pry bar: unlike the lines on the chalkboard at the migrant school, which are empty signifiers for Estrella, Perfecto’s tools are significant because Perfecto has imbued them with meaning. In other words, Perfecto has activated for Estrella another kind of language, namely the embodied language Debra Castillo finds significant about Viramontes’s fiction.11 It is as a result of this embodied language, or the meaning derived from assigning “names that went with the tools” (26), that the lines on the chalkboard are transformed for Estrella from empty signifiers to words with weight and meaning such that the “script A’s that [had] the curlicue of the pry bar” (24) make sense only after Estrella has “weighed [in her hand] the significance [the pry bar] awarded her” (26).12

A Reappropriation of “Tools”: From Instruments of the State to Tools of Social Action Perfecto’s tools are among those Viramontes uses to reappropriate the state’s image of Chicano/a migrants as tools of agricultural production as they convey to Estrella the means by which she might “build, bury, tear down, rearrange, and repair” (26). By replacing the metaphor of “tools” for the migrant farm worker with embodied language, Viramontes provides Estrella with alternative uses for “tools” – in Under those of social action (being able to “tear down” and “repair” the state’s image of Chicano/a migrants), historical excavation, and remapping Chicano/a subjectivity onto the land. Critics interested in Under such as Cecelia Lawless have already examined how Estrella uses tools in the novel, with “tools” here to denote a gestural language in which objects give weight and significance to Viramontes’s protagonist. For Lawless, Estrella employs these tools to create a home site in the novel, or to legitimize her

Café,” “the polie.” The story Macky and Sonya’s father tells his children of la migra is one where “the polie is men in black who get kids and send them to Tijuana” (63). For this father, “the polie” “hate” Chicanos (63). 11 For more on embodied or gestural language, see Castillo’s essay on Viramontes’s fiction in Border Women: Writing from La Frontera. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 149-67. 12 I must make a distinction here between “abstract speech” and “talking tough.” Estrella’s use of the latter differs in that it accompanies action – “talking tough” provides for Estrella the tool she needs to put Perfecto’s pry bar to use at the clinic. I argue later in this chapter that Estrella acquires this tool from Maxine, significant given how Estrella associates “talking tough” with the working-class Maxine and the power she affords to her. While critics consider Estrella to “talk tough” by using Perfecto’s pry bar, I suggest that “talking tough” is not replaced by Perfecto’s tool but must necessarily accompany it. 91 discourse as a migrant farm worker (361). My understanding of “home-site” in Under necessarily differs from Lawless’s in that I regard this home-site as Estrella’s having reappropriated the use of the barn from a site that houses migrants’ labor to a communal and collective site that houses all migrants. In this way, I do not read the home-site as simply “linguistic refuge.” I also understand this site as Viramontes’s alternative to existing social and economic systems. To best illustrate the effect advanced global capitalism has had on migrants and their labor, Viramontes emphasizes in her novel how colonization of the fields for economic profit is reproduced by violence done to migrant bodies such as Alejo’s and Petra’s. The image of the tar pits in its representation of migrants as fuel for the economy and the veins choking Petra’s legs like vines reflect for Viramontes how the system has reduced migrants to “just bodies” or “working bodies.” In order to reappropriate this image, Viramontes has Estrella reappropriate the meaning of tools – by putting tools to use, Estrella responds to what the system has done to the Chicano/a when she imbues tools with new meaning, or when she uses tools to act against the state’s measures. It is significant, then, that Viramontes has Estrella employ tools of social action, historical excavation, and remapping of Chicano/a subjectivity onto the land at moments when Estrella realizes that migrants are “used up” and “[ripped] into pieces” (Under 75) by the system. Of these moments, I am most interested in the pivotal clinic scene of Under and Estrella’s ascendency of the barn at the novel’s close. Critics have read the former, or what transpires when Estrella and her family take Alejo to a clinic after he has been sprayed by pesticide, as Estrella’s call to action. For these critics, the treatment Estrella, her family, and Alejo receive at the clinic prompts Estrella to use Perfecto’s pry bar to communicate to the Anglo nurse what speech has not. Estrella’s activation of this embodied language is the result of her reappropriation of “tools” – here those given to her by Perfecto, Alejo, Petra, and, I argue, by Maxine. Earlier I suggested that Perfecto’s tools for Estrella are such that she might “tear down” and “repair” the state’s image of migrants as fuel for the economy. It is at the clinic that Estrella puts Perfecto’s tool to use, primarily because abstract speech alone has failed to convey to the Anglo nurse how the money rendered for service is necessary for gas to take Alejo to the hospital. The nurse charging Estrella and her family for what they already know despite Estrella’s many attempts to communicate how paying the clinic fee will make impossible Alejo’s chance of treatment suggests how the nurse is complicit in migrants’ domination. Viramontes reinforces this role for the nurse when the language she uses to describe the biplane that poisoned Alejo similarly describes items on the nurse’s desk: the “porcelain statue of a calico kitten with a little stethoscope, wearing a folded white cap with a red cross between its too cute perky little ears” (141). In both instances, the biplane with its cross-shaped shadow and the nurse’s kitten statue provide for Viramontes the state’s image of migrants as tools, as each represent how institutional forces (government, medical profession, Catholic church) reduce migrants to just bodies – the reason why Viramontes has Petra analogize the instruments used in the clinic such as cotton balls and scales to migrants as instruments of the state for agricultural production (139). For Petra, the image of Alejo “dragging his bare feet” (139) towards the scale as if “the remaining flesh on his bones was too heavy” (139) prompts Petra to think of rocks in cotton sacks, both those used in the fields and “the cotton sacks of [Alejo’s] bones, his eyes, his stomach, his pockets” (139). To expose such a history of violence enacted on Chicano/as, Viramontes highlights at the clinic Petra’s association of Alejo’s body with the colonized landscape; it is significant, then, that Petra uses Alejo’s bones as a metaphor for this violence,

92 since throughout Under Viramontes intends for bones to emphasize, as they represent the tar pits of the novel, the death, destruction, and violence done to migrant bodies (Burford 25). Alejo is the first migrant in Under to envision the tar pits; at the moment when the biplane sprays him with pesticide, Viramontes’s piscador closes his eyes and imagines sinking into the tar pits where he is engulfed by tar: “Black bubbles erasing him. [. . .] Thousands of bones, the bleached white marrow of bones. Splintered bone pieced together by wire to make a whole, surfaced bone. No fingerprint or history, bone. No lava stone. No story or family, bone” (Under 78). Alejo’s repetition of “bone” reinforces for Viramontes this violence enacted against Chicano/as as the erasure of the animals and people who died in the tar pits “parallels this history of those who die from pesticide exposure: their histories are all too often unacknowledged by dominant discourses” (Burford 23). When Alejo asks Estrella, “Makes sense don’t it, bones becoming tar oil?” (Under 87), Viramontes questions how for consumers the political economy remains invisible. In other words, when Alejo makes the connection between bones in the tar pits as they become oil and later gasoline for consumers, Viramontes challenges consumers’ inattention to migrants’ immobility as it sharply contrasts with their own; like the bones in the La Brea tar pits, migrants are “stuck” as their labor is fuel for an economy driven by consumers. At the clinic, it is the Anglo nurse who clearly remains unaware of this political economy, or that Alejo’s sickness results not from dysentery, which the nurse suggests, but from what a migrant calls “daño of the fields” (93). In a series of verbal exchanges that prove ineffectual for Viramontes’s protagonist, both the Anglo nurse and Estrella attempt to convey to the other the reality of their situations; repeatedly, Estrella asks the nurse whether the family might pay in trade as the nine dollars for the clinic fee are needed for gas to take Alejo to the hospital in Corazón. Each time Estrella proposes that Perfecto repair damage to the clinic (the toilet needs fixed, the poles need recemented), the nurse dismisses Estrella, insisting that she understand, “I gotta pick up my kids in Daisyfield by six” (146). What Estrella understands, that it “seemed to her unfair” (147) the nurse should charge the family for what they already know, is that abstract speech alone will not communicate to the Anglo nurse the family’s desperation. Following the nurse’s repeated insistence that she leave to pick up her children, Estrella realizes for the first time Alejo’s connection between bones and gasoline for consumers: “The oil was made from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse’s car from halting on some highway, that kept her on her way to Daisyfield to pick up her boys at six” (148). Not unlike Viramontes, Estrella questions at this moment how the nurse can remain unaware of a political economy whereby migrants’ labor provides for the fuel needed to keep the nurse “moving on the long dotted line on the map” (148). Since speech alone has failed to make visible to the nurse this political economy, Estrella silences the former as she activates embodied language; in activating this language, Estrella reappropriates the use of “bones”: from a metaphor of violence done to migrants and their bodies to the remapping of Chicano/a subjectivity onto the land that is the result of historical excavation. For Estrella to convey to the Anglo nurse that she and other Chicano/a migrants have claims to those many dots on the map, Viramontes has her protagonist employ the tools Perfecto, Alejo, Petra, and Maxine have imbued with significance. Earlier in this chapter I argued that Perfecto’s tools are such that Estrella might tear down and repair the state’s image of migrants as tools of production – at the clinic an image reinforced by the nurse’s failure to recognize the reality of violence inflicted on farm workers daily as the result of pesticide poisoning. When Estrella uses Perfecto’s pry bar to dismantle the nurse’s image, she raises questions about the reality of this violence against migrants as she demonstrates how “talking tough” is necessary to communicate such a reality.

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Perfecto’s pry bar accomplishes for Estrella two things: first, it enables her to underwrite the anti-colonial narrative Scott Beck and Dolores Rangel read as significant to Under, namely when Estrella uses the pry bar to shatter items on the nurse’s desk such as the kitten statue, and second, it provides for Estrella the action to accompany “talking tough.” In other words, at the clinic, Estrella puts to use her earlier assertion, “no sense talking tough unless you do it” when her demands for the Anglo nurse – “give us back our money” (149) – are met by Estrella “[slamming] the crowbar down on the desk” (149). After the nurse relinquishes the nine dollar clinic fee to Estrella, Viramontes’s protagonist surmises that she “did not feel like herself holding the money. She felt like two Estrellas” (150). Norma Alarcón might suggest, as she does about female characters in Viramontes’s The Moths, that “two Estrellas” signify the self- determination that comes from Estrella’s recognizing of gender as an oppressive cultural construct (87). For critics such as Arianne Burford and Cecelia Lawless, the tools Petra provides to Estrella are those of the domestic, which, for these critics, Estrella identifies when she explains that of these Estrellas, “One was a silent phantom who obediently marked a circle with a stick around the bungalow as the mother had requested” (Under 150).13 In part, Burford and Lawless’s reading of Petra’s having imparted to Estrella domestic tools helps explain what of gender Estrella recognizes as oppressive, specifically that Estrella has been silent and obedient like Petra in the construction of this home-site in Under. To put this differently, what Burford and Lawless understand as domestic tools needed for the creation of this home-site, I understand as the oppressive cultural constructs of gender Alarcón gestures towards in her essay on Viramontes’s The Moths. I argue in this chapter, then, that what Petra imparts to Estrella by way of this home-site are not domestic tools but the ability to remap Chicano/a subjectivity onto the land. In this way, I read the mark Petra makes around the bungalow as suggestive of how Petra remaps a cartography of the landscape by staking claim to it, much as she did earlier in Under when she “pointed a red finger to the earth” (63) and told Estrella, “You are not an orphan” (63). What Petra provides for Estrella is best understood not as domestic tools as it is for Burford and Lawless but the remapping of Chicano/a subjectivity onto home-sites beyond the bungalow. I labor on this distinction because the domestic tools Burford and Lawless understand as significant to Estrella’s call to action in Under are those Estrella finds oppressive – they produce for her an image of a “silent” and “obedient” Estrella. Petra may demonstrate to Estrella how to create a home-site, but her tools are limited because she is constrained by a belief in patriarchy and Christianity. Although Petra’s sexuality – that she lives with and is pregnant by a man not her husband – demands of critics a more nuanced reading of gender in Under, this sexuality does not offer Estrella a feminist model she might use to get out from “under the feet of Jesus” and patriarchy at the novel’s close. I argue in this chapter that it is not Petra but Maxine whose feminist model enables Estrella to ascend the barn by the close of the novel. Earlier in this chapter I suggested that unlike Latimer, Viramontes is not so quick to vilify Maxine. On the one hand, Maxine’s inclusion in Under reflects shifts in blue collar labor that gave rise to a “new” working-class in competition for low-wage work by the 1990’s. Yet Maxine satisfies a larger narrative function: she articulates to Viramontes’s protagonist the language Estrella needs to “talks tough” if she is also to act near the close of Under. For Burford, Viramontes’s novel intervenes in feminist movements with its emphasis on those

13 For more on how Petra imparts domestic tools to Estrella, see Lawless’s essay on homing devices in Under in Women Writers and the Politics of Home. Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes, Eds. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996. 361-80. 94 interlocking systems of domination bell hooks considered unexamined by Anglo feminism (24). In her essay, Burford argues that Viramontes intends for Anglo women in Under to “reflect the reality of racism and a history of divisions between women” (27). The problem with this reading of Anglo women in Under is that Burford considers for her analysis only the Anglo nurse at the clinic and the Anglo migrant school teacher who makes Estrella acutely aware of her class difference. Burford deduces from Viramontes’s descriptions of these women that alliances between Anglo and Chicana women are absent in the novel, with Viramontes using the Anglo nurse to “urge her Anglo readers to not be like the Anglo nurse” (25). This chapter differs from Burford’s essay in that it posits Maxine’s friendship with Estrella as an alliance Viramontes suggests possible between Anglo and Chicana women; that both Maxine and Estrella are working-class (what distinguishes Maxine from the Anglo nurse or the Anglo migrant school teacher) is significant given how Chicana feminist writers such as Sandra Cisneros among others have identified with Anglo working-class women on the basis of their shared experiences with class (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock, Eds. 303).14 Readers are introduced to Maxine Devridge early in Under; in many ways, this white migrant allows for Viramontes to humanize Estrella and her family as the Devridges were among those migrants who “the other [migrant] families pitched tents as far away from . . . as possible” (Under 28). The explanation Viramontes provides for why migrant families such as Estrella’s kept their distance from the Devridges is, in part, that the latter stole crops for sale outside the labor camps. While on the one hand Viramontes relies on stereotypes of the Anglo working- class reinforced by popular and critical discourse, e.g. white and reactionary, Viramontes also suggests that she intends for her description of Maxine to do more than simply humanize Chicano/a migrants such as Estrella. From this initial description, Viramontes has Estrella emphasize how Maxine “blurt[ed] out Kingdom Come or Christ Almighty whenever the sun was too hot or the drinking water ran out [in the fields]” (28). Viramontes’s inclusion of Estrella’s observation is dually significant: first, it reflects how Maxine is not constrained by Christianity like Petra or Estrella, and second, Maxine’s language foreshadows the kind Estrella will use when she “talks tough” at the clinic and upon taking leave of it. In what is an easily overlooked moment in Under between Estrella and Maxine (with the exception of Latimer critics of Under have neither mentioned nor explored Maxine or her role in the novel),Viramontes reinforces her protagonist’s belief in Christianity at the same that she questions this belief by introducing among Estrella’s reading materials – a catechism chapbook given to her by her godmother – Maxine’s comic books. The subject of these books, that an Anglo girl is in love with a photographer aptly named “Clicker,” is suggestive in that it provides for Viramontes the lesson Maxine teaches to Estrella about female empowerment. When Estrella finally reveals to Maxine the subject of her comic books (the assumption is that Maxine is illiterate), Maxine proclaims, “Figured it had to be over some man” (31). After work in the

14 When asked by Feroza Jussawalla which writers have influenced her work significantly, Sandra Cisneros identified among the male Latino writers of the 1960s Merce Rodoreda, a Catalan woman writer, and “American working class women writers” such as the Anglo working-class writer Pat Ellis Taylor (303). Cisneros makes clear in her interview with Jussawalla that Anglo working-class women writers such as Ellis Taylor work within her “same agenda” (it is interesting to note that Cisneros does not consider mainstream black feminist writers such as Toni Morrison to work within this agenda). In other words, Cisneros considers these writers “doing something”, namely using their work to expose social realities of class (304). For more on Latina women invested in forming alliances with Anglo working-class women, see Mirtha Quintanales’s “I Come with No Illusions” and “I Paid Very Hard for My Immigrant Ignorance” in Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (148-9 and 150-6 respectively). 95 fields, Estrella and Maxine retire to read Millie the Model. During these brief moments of rest, Maxine often chides Estrella for her being circumscribed by a belief in patriarchy; when Estrella asks Maxine, “You think ‘cause of the water our babies are gonna come out with no mouth or something?” (33), the latter responds, “Looky you. Thinkin’ about babies ‘ready” (33). For Maxine, who understands her mother’s multiple births as having “too many mouths to feed” (33), mothering is as undesirable as farm work. Although Estrella insists that Maxine “was in love with Clicker, the photographer, but wouldn’t admit it” (33) and is therefore equally constrained by patriarchy, I want to argue that with her resistance to mothering and refusal to admit desiring Clicker, Maxine has also refused to become a “woman” who is framed by Clicker’s photographic eye. In her reading of Cherríe Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost, Norma Alarcón suggests that the heroine Marisa desires to take up her great-grandfather’s camera eye rather than be framed by him (93). Viramontes has a similar explanation for Maxine, namely in that she desires not Clicker but the power of his gaze. In part, it is because Maxine refuses to be framed by patriarchy (Clicker) and the church (comic book rather than catechism chapbook) that she is able to provide Estrella with a model for getting out from “under the feet of Jesus” and patriarchy by the novel’s close. At the clinic, Viramontes rehearses Maxine’s lesson for Estrella when she has her protagonist think, “Alejo’s body resisted [help with walking], and she did not want to think what she was thinking now: God was mean and did not care and she was alone to fend for herself” (139). In this moment Estrella begins to question seriously her belief in patriarchy and the church as she finds both Alejo and God complicit in her domination. Viramontes reinforces how for Estrella this move towards female empowerment arises at the clinic when Estrella adopts Maxine’s language to “talk tough” to the Anglo nurse, to Alejo, and to God himself; when asked by Petra what the Anglo nurse means when she says “corazón,” Estrella replies, “Sweet Jesus. We gotta take [Alejo] to the hospital in Corazón” (142). Not simply coincidental, I argue, Estrella’s use of “Sweet Jesus” is modeled on Maxine’s “Christ Almighty” or “Kingdom Come.” Viramontes might support this reading since she has her protagonist use the phrase twice more: once with Estrella’s recognition of her “two Estrellas” (150) and again when Estrella challenges Alejo en route to Corazón (151). In the first of these instances, Viramontes contrasts an image of Estrella as a silent and obedient “phantom” with the Estrella who “talks tough” like Maxine and who uses Perfecto’s pry bar to make the Anglo nurse listen. Importantly, from the second image Estrella associates the “sweaty” nine dollars in her hand that paid the clinic fee with “the swamp between her legs” (150). At this moment, Viramontes suggests that Estrella’s actions are the result of not domestic tools but female empowerment, with the “swamp” between Estrella’s legs indicative of her emergent sexuality. Under the Feet of Jesus begins with the question, “Had they been heading for the barn all along?” (3). For Viramontes, Estrella’s move towards female empowerment by the novel’s close is frequently marked by the image of the barn, with Viramontes insisting in her interview with Gabriella Guitiérrez y Muhs that the barn signifies in Under the “power” of female sexuality (126). (The barn also signifies a distinctly communal space that might house Chicano/a migrants, one that is built by cooperative systems and not systems of domination.) I have argued in this chapter that Estrella’s reclamation of this power has to do with Maxine and the working- class feminist model she presents to Estrella for getting out from “under the feet of Jesus” and patriarchy. This is why, then, I privilege in my discussion of the barn those moments when Estrella associates the barn with Maxine and the power she affords to her.

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Prior to her action at the clinic, Estrella finds herself drawn to the barn but for reasons she cannot quite articulate, except when she is warned by Perfecto to stay away – “You’re not my papa” (Under 27). Estrella’s resistance to Perfecto and his attempts to keep her away from the barn represents the start of Estrella’s move towards female empowerment, yet at this point in the novel such resistance is not to patriarchy but to Perfecto. (Perfecto cannot tell her to stay away from the barn, only her father can.) Viramontes reinforces this reading when she has Estrella refuse to tear down the barn at Perfecto’s suggestion not to replace patriarchy with female empowerment but to prove to Perfecto that he’s not her “papa” (27). The shift for Viramontes’s protagonist arises with Estrella’s evening spent with Alejo, the piscador she and her family take to the clinic after he is sprayed by pesticide. Although on this night Estrella has yet to dismantle and rebuild the image of the barn as a space of female empowerment, she recognizes in the barn the possibility of such a space; after having remembered Petra’s warning of the power of the moon’s alignment with the sun (ovulation), Estrella “looked out to the barn” (69). For the first time in the novel, Estrella has made the connection between the barn and female sexuality and its power, finding upon taking leave of Alejo that “she became suddenly startled by the moon and the harelip boy and the No of the mother” (71). Critics interested in Under generally read the novel as Estrella’s coming-of-age, with her friendship/relationship with Alejo the novel’s focal point. (It is ambiguous in the text whether or not Estrella sees beyond to the man in Alejo.) What is absent from these critics’ readings is how by the close of Under Estrella has replaced her belief in Alejo with female empowerment, particularly since Alejo is, like God, complicit in her domination. I argue, then, that Viramontes demonstrates how Estrella, as she has not yet recognized her “two Estrellas,” comes to tear down and rebuild the barn as a female space only after she explicitly connects it with Maxine. This is why, for example, Estrella’s interactions with Alejo, as the latter is symbolized by a Coke bottle, do not prompt Estrella to rebuild the barn, only to tear it down: Estrella agrees to help Perfecto dismantle the barn with his promise to take Alejo to the clinic. For Estrella, the barn represents female sexuality but not yet female empowerment, which Viramontes makes clear when she has her protagonist associate the barn with the strength of her thirst for sexual license, here represented by the Coke bottle/Alejo – “The blue bottle and the brand cola and pulp of the moon over the cedar shakes of the barn wouldn’t have been so strong if she wasn’t so thirsty” (75). At the clinic, resistance for Estrella is reconceived as Viramontes’s protagonist adopts Maxine’s language – “Sweet Jesus” for the latter’s “Christ Almighty” – to replace her belief in Alejo and the license he provides for her with “fend[ing] for herself” (139). (Estrella learns later in the novel that “fending for herself” must not come at the expense of her family and community.) I suggested earlier that Estrella has the ability to “talk tough” and act at the clinic because of the tools she has been given, most notably those from Maxine and Perfecto. When Estrella realizes at the clinic that she felt like “two Estrellas,” the second reflective of Maxine’s feminist model, Estrella understands that neither God nor Alejo can enable her to act. As Estrella leaves Alejo at the hospital in Corazón, she entertains her sisters Cookie and Perla by parting the automated glass doors of the hospital as if she were Moses parting the Red Sea (156). I want to emphasize how in this brief moment, one in which Estrella’s sisters remark on how their “big sister had the magic and the power in her hands to split glass in two” (156), Estrella recognizes a power not contingent upon either God or Alejo. In many ways, this is why upon returning home to the bungalow Estrella’s movement ultimately leads her to the barn. (For Perfecto this movement takes him further from his “real home” in Mexico and for Petra to her statue of Jesucristo).

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Perfecto Flores, the largely redemptive male figure of Under, spends much of the novel trying to get back “home.” When he meets Petra at the migrant store and tells her, “Trust me,” he fails to consider that Petra will do just this: for Petra, Perfecto, the man who came with his tools and stayed, is the protector of her family though he is not her husband. Until returning to the bungalow from the hospital in Corazón, when Petra watches Perfecto from the window as he thinks of leaving, the mother of Under has put as much faith in Perfecto as she has in Jesus. As she stands watching Perfecto, Petra thinks, “Perfecto’s back was to her. He leaned on the hood of the car and she wanted to see his eyes. Trust me, she remembered Perfecto saying, but the only trust she had now was in Jesucristo” (164). Petra’s move towards her Jesus statue provides for Viramontes an opportunity to question Petra’s faith in Jesus and the church, particularly when she has the statue of Jesucristo break at Petra’s feet after Petra uses the create upon which Jesucristo rests as leverage for standing. (The implication being that faith in the church provides for unstable footing). Critics such as Ellen McCracken among others have convincingly argued that for Viramontes this moment suggests that “the traditional ethnic strategy of prayer and recourse to the protection of a deity” (183) can be replaced with a new model. I have demonstrated in this chapter that the model Viramontes considers most effective for getting out from “under the feet of Jesus” and patriarchy is the working-class feminist model Maxine presents for Estrella. This is why, then, Estrella takes leave of the bungalow for the barn when Petra’s statue of Jesucristo breaks.

Barn as Home-Site: Alternative to Existing Political-Economic Systems At key moments in Under, Estrella thinks of running to Maxine but, in her absence, goes instead to the barn (Under 89). Viramontes’s association of the barn with Maxine and this model of female empowerment becomes most pronounced at the close of Under, when Estrella ascends the barn after having again replaced a belief in patriarchy and the church with the working-class specific feminism she adopts from Maxine. Viramontes insists as Estrella walked to the barn that her protagonist “knew what to do” (171). For Viramontes, who arms Estrella with work trousers and this “other self” (172), Estrella must ascend the barn to implement Maxine’s feminist model but also to remap Chicano/a subjectivity onto such a space, or to reappropriate the barn and its use as a home-site for Chicano/a migrants. (Estrella takes from Maxine’s model its female and working-class component and from Petra’s her charge to create a home-site beyond the bungalow.) I want to emphasize that before Estrella does this work Viramontes has her protagonist kick a Coke bottle when it interferes with her climb (it shatters below) and then realize “how high she had climbed” (174). Earlier in this chapter I suggested that the Coke bottle symbolizes Alejo and the sexuality he awakens in Estrella; when Estrella shatters the Coke bottle (as she did the Anglo nurse’s kitten statue at the clinic), and with Petra’s Jesucristo statue in pieces, Estrella replaces a belief in patriarchy and the church with female empowerment. This is why, when the Coke bottle shatters and Estrella continues with her climb, Viramontes’s protagonist insists, “Whatever resistance there was gave way to [my] back” (174-5). Finally able to break free from the hold of patriarchy and the church, Estrella emerges from the barn onto its roof and is amazed by the stars’ brilliancy in the sky. For Dan Latimer, Estrella’s ascendancy of the barn is reflective of Under as a narrative of upward mobility (333), with Estrella’s climb resembling Viramontes’s climb up the social class ladder. It is important to understand, however, that even as she stands atop the barn, Estrella does not leave it. Like Esperanza Cordero in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street who by the novel’s close remains in the barrio, Estrella does not escape the fields for the ivory tower of Cornell as Latimer

98 argues. Instead, Estrella transforms the barn from a repository of migrants’ labor to a home-site based on communal and cooperative systems. In this way, Estrella remaps Chicano/a subjectivity onto the barn by claiming it as a communal space from which she might “summon home all those who strayed” (176). In part, it is that Estrella learns to “trust the soles of her feet, her hands, the shovel of her back, and the pounding bells of her heart” (175) that she produces for migrants a home-site in the barn. Yet readers must remember that at any moment this home- site could collapse should Estrella lose her footing (175). Standing still, then, is not an option for Viramontes. Given global shifts in the economy, Chicano/as must act like Estrella if they are create alternative economic systems in the advance of Chicano/a liberation. Ultimately, and with the tools Estrella provides her with, Viramontes is able to create with Under a house of words with rooms as big as barns (70). She not only houses Chicano/as in the house of fiction, but she also affirms for readers the social activist tools they might use in their advance of Mexicano/a and Chicano/a civil rights. The tools Estrella provides to Viramontes – those of social action, historical excavation, and the remapping of Chicano/a subjectivity onto the land – are such that Viramontes is able to create with Under a space in which to house Chicano/as in the house of fiction. Yet Viramontes extends further the metaphor of the house when she reinforces in Under how inaction – standing still atop the house – will prove disastrous. The only solution, Viramontes suggests, is direct action. Latimer’s argument, then, that Under is less an exploration of social and economic realities facing migrants as it is Viramontes’s personal apology for leaving the fields, ignores how Viramontes employed Under as her own social tool. By not having Estrella leave the fields – to work for the United Farm Workers (UFW), for example – Viramontes ensured that her protagonist and migrants like her would not be her “instruments” but people to whom she “stayed true” (Dulfano 648) throughout the novel. In many ways, it is Viramontes’s recognition that life for a rural migrant farm worker often precludes involvement in the UFW (dissemination of information not widely available in rural areas) that signals Under not as personal apology but validation for migrant farm workers – what Viramontes meant when she told Isabel Dulfano, putting migrants first worked “because I have had people who normally would not read this book, who did read it” (659). That Viramontes enabled migrants to see themselves reflected in Under is indicative of a working-class writer committed to her subjects: not as instruments or tools but as people using tools for class struggle and social change.

99

Conclusion Towards a New Theory and Practice

On the popular social networking site Facebook, the interest group Queers for Economic Justice lists as its mission an increased awareness of how most queers are not white and wealthy, or those who stand to benefit most from liberal policies of inclusion, but are non-white and disproportionately of the working-class.1 Queers for Economic Justice, along with non-profit organizations such as the Audre Lorde Project in New York or SisterSong in Atlanta, have been responses to identity politics movements primarily localized around single-issues or categories. For organization such as these, identity politics movements have lost sight of their progressive vision and instead have served, however unwillingly, the interests of global elites who use their ideologies and energies to advance the spread of capitalism worldwide.2 Both Cathy Cohen and Hester Eisenstein have pointed to organizations like Queers for Economic Justice as the direction identity politics movements must take if they are to truly improve the lives of those on the margins.3 In other words, and as Cohen has insisted with respect to queer interest groups, organizations should have as their praxis “issues of economic exploitation that move beyond class issues bound to gay and lesbian identities, such as domestic partnership, to other class issues that structure the lives of ‘queer’ people more generally” (57). For Cohen, this means that gay and lesbian organizations, as they encourage corporations to include domestic-partner benefits on their agendas, must demand that they also include on their agendas questions concerning the workplace environment of queer workers in particular but all workers more generally (57). If gay and lesbian organizations are to achieve their progressive vision of a just society, then they must expand the scope of their agenda to include those issues now considered by many to be tangential to gay and lesbian identities. Organizations such as Queers for Economic Justice formed because national identity politics movements became increasingly driven by liberal policies of inclusion that extended only to those able or willing to assimilate and conform. Because people experience discrimination or oppression at the intersection of multiple identities, and because many people at the margins consider inclusion as a worthy cause but not at the expense of other issues affecting their lives, identity politics must begin to understand how participation in the free-

1 For more on Queers for Economic Justice and its mission, see the organization’s Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Queers-For-Economic-Justice/18201778500?v=info and its Web site at http://www.q4ej.org. 2 Cathy Cohen confirmed this shift in identity politics when she noted how the Human Rights Campaign – a national gay and lesbian organization – endorsed conservative former senator Alfonse D’Amato in the New York senate race. Other gay and lesbian organizations have followed suit, causing Cohen to conclude that the limits of identity politics “have never been more apparent”: the Log Cabin Republicans’ honoring of Ward Connerly, the “black frontman for California’s antiaffirmative action Proposition 209; the increased corporatization of our national organizations, with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force receiving and eventually returning a ‘gift’ from Nike, which sells apparel produced in sweatshops, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation accepting a ‘gift’ from Coors, whose corporate, union-busting parents have long supported right-wing causes” (Out at Work 52). Urvashi Vaid came to a similar conclusion, arguing that “the economic assumptions that underlie our movement are uncritically promarket, procorporate, and probusiness far more than they are prolabor” (235). 3 Cohen, Cathy. “What is this Movement Doing to My Politics?” Out at Work: Building a Gay-Labor Alliance. Kitty Krupat and Patrick McCreery, Eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 52-9. Eisenstein, Hester. Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009. Subsequent references to Cohen’s essay or Eisenstein’s book will be cited parenthetically in the text. 100 market will not lead to liberation. Queers for Economic Justice, as an organization that operates on the premise that queer issues are fundamentally issues of class, advocates an alternative to liberation not contingent upon or complicit with global capitalism. Such an alternative, which ultimately puts socialism back on the agenda, rests on the fact that inclusion has not changed the systems that exploit and disenfranchise marginalized people, but has meant that corporations and employers can use inclusion and its rhetoric to justify lower wages and foster divisions among workers. What is needed, then, is not a politics of inclusion but a politics informed by the lived reality of gender, race, sexuality, and class as each is mutually reinforcing. The result of such politics, the organization Queers for Economic Justice attests, will be the formation of “an economic system that embraces sexual and gender diversity.” The kind of economic system Queers for Economic Justice envisions is one Leslie Feinberg argued for as early as 1993, namely a system in which collaboration and cooperation replaces competition of the marketplace. In Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, the protagonist, Jess, stands before gays and lesbians at a pride rally in New York City and asks, “Can’t the we be bigger?” Jess indicates with her question how gay and lesbian organizations must expand the scope of their emancipatory thrust beyond issues of gender and sexuality; more specifically, and as Jess implies, such organizations must fight for all those oppressed or exploited regardless of sexual orientation. Jess’s charge, I argue, is largely a response to how identity politics movements had become, by the 1980’s, complicit with neoliberalism and their goals compatible with the goals of corporate globalization. Hester Eisenstein has made a similar suggestion about mainstream feminism, insisting in her book Feminism Seduced that the contemporary feminist project has (un)willingly “aid[ed] or abet[ed] the strength and power of neoliberalism, or free- market capitalism” (viii). For Eisenstein, mainstream feminism has become compatible with neoliberalism because it posits liberation as contingent upon participation in the free-market, or that women will be free from gender constraints through access in the workplace. The reality has been, however, as Cohen and others have shown, that inclusion “in and of itself will not make things different” (54), as inclusion stands to benefit only a small minority, leaving many perpetually at the margins. Necessary, then, is a fundamental assault on the political-economic systems that exploit female and minority labor and continue to keep wages low for all workers. Organizations such as Queers for Economic Justice have recognized this need, precisely because a changed political climate in the 1960’s and 1970’s coincided with changes in the U.S. economy. While a segment of women and minorities benefitted from these political and economic changes, many did not. Understanding the link between the rise of identity politics movements and the growing participation of women and minorities in more flexible labor markets in the wake of global shifts is crucial for understanding how global elites have used the project of identity politics movements to advance capitalism worldwide.4 If this is the case, if the ideologies and energies of identity politics movements have been co-opted by global elites, then how can these movements realistically achieve a progressive vision for a just world?

4 The fundamental difference between contemporary identity politics and earlier radical proletarian movements is that the latter challenged features of American capitalism at a time when capitalists targeted many women and minorities as part of a more flexible labor pool. Contemporary identity politics movements, as their goals are compatible with corporate globalization, have failed to recognize how the demand for inclusion in the marketplace has coincided with the exploitation of many women and minorities, in part because these movements reflect the class of the people who dominate them. 101

Answers to this question can be found in the work of organizations like Queers for Economic Justice and, perhaps more surprisingly for some, in the progressive trade-union movement, the latter of which put GLBT clauses on the agenda as early as the 1970’s (Sweeney Out at Work 28). John Sweeney, past president of the AFL-CIO, made a convincing case for trade-unionism as an effective alternative to liberal policies of inclusion when he noted how, in the absence of federal laws guaranteeing rights and protections to GLBT workers, trade- unionism, with its emphasis on collective bargaining and equality, “may be the most effective way to guarantee gay and lesbian workers the same protections and benefits other workers take for granted” (29). The growing alliance between organized labor and female, queer, and/or workers of color (evident by labor’s agenda to include issues of race, gender, and sexuality at the bargaining table) is suggestive of what can happen when national identity politics movements have as their praxis an understanding of identity as it is lived – not as autonomous categories of socioeconomic organization but as the total set of interrelations that condition and shape it in its multiple intersections. I argue that identity politics movements must put socialism back on the agenda and, in doing so, must return to the radical proletarian vision social politics movements had in the 1960’s through early 1980’s. To do this work requires such movements to reassert class as a dominant mode of analysis for changes in society (rather than exclusively discourse and ideas) and thus recognize how globalization has had disastrous effect on most women and minorities since the early 1970’s. The latter is particularly necessary given the current corporatization of identity politics within and outside the academy. I maintain that literary studies, as it is concerned with “race, class, gender,” must not reduce class to race and gender. Rather, the field must retain this class component as it helps explain why inclusion or, as it is coded in the academy as “multiculturalism,” has not fundamentally changed the systems that exploit and disenfranchise many women and minorities. The easy explanation for why identity politics movements moved away from an earlier radical proletarian past has to do with their postmodern turn, or how an emphasis on “culture” (race, gender, sexuality) and distrust of “grand narratives” such as Marxism undermined a systematic analysis of capitalist systems (Eisenstein 2). This postmodern turn, as it has undermined any sustained analysis of the political-economic systems that exploit and disenfranchise marginalized people, has recast race, gender, and sexuality as more significant than class. Contemporary identity politics movements and most academic fields have been driven by postmodernism in recent years, but the limits of postmodernism have never been more apparent, evidenced by the rise of organizations like Queers for Economic Justice and by scholarship such as Eisenstein’s Feminism Seduced. The timeliness of this work given the effect globalization has had on many women and minorities suggests for both identity politics movements and most academic fields a turn back towards class as foundational to social identity. This turn towards class analysis, R. Jeffrey Lustig has argued, would require identity politics movements to recognize liberal policies of inclusion as but “calls only to get more members from [its] own group in corporate headquarters and state legislatures” (What’s Class 59). In other words, the trouble with inclusion by itself is that it does not address most structural causes of inequality for marginalized groups, or what Hazel Carby has identified as “the relations of power and domination” (193) that become lost when issues on the agenda are bound up with narrowly defined constructions of identity. For Carby, literary studies must question whether or not the field’s theories have become compatible with, rather than a threat to, these systems of power and domination (193). The question Carby asks of critics, then, is why a focus on identity 102 has increasingly meant the “total silence about, and utter disregard for, the material conditions of most [marginalized] people” (193). Carby asked this question of critics in 1992, nearly two decades before Hester Eisenstein demonstrated how the goals of mainstream feminism were entirely compatible with the goals of corporate globalization. The publication of Eisenstein’s study further reveals the shortcomings of this postmodern turn in the much of the humanities. Since many radical female and minority writers/activists have been vocal about the social implications of their work – what the writers of this study refer to as its “usefulness” – literary critics must resolve this disconnect between emphasizing identity while ignoring class as it is lived through race, gender, and sexuality. For both literary studies and identity politics movements, the move to put class on the agenda (or for the trade-union movement to put race, gender, and sexuality on the agenda) offers a useful starting point for understanding how class is lived through other areas of experience. Of these efforts, of which there are many, I am most interested in two: recent initiatives by the trade-union movement, and the work of organizations like Queers for Economic Justice. I also recognize as an important starting point the push by academics such as Carby for administrators and professors to “forge alliances across forces in this society that will significantly halt and reverse the declining number of black, working-class, and poor people among university student bodies and faculty” (194). The current trade-union movement and organizations like Queers for Economic Justice represent but two initiatives to develop a progressive politics that uses social identity as the basis for class struggle and social change.5 Kitty Krupat and Patrick McCreery’s collection Out at Work: Building a Gay-Labor Alliance begins with the belief that “sexual rights can be pursued most effectively through a radical coalition between the labor and LGBT movements” (xi). Writers in this collection share in this belief as their essays attest to how the workplace can represent a common ground for struggle, namely because in thirty-nine states (as of 2001) employers may legally fire workers if they are known or thought to be gay (xvii). Progressive trade-unions have long recognized the need for queer workers to have the same rights and protections other workers take for granted. In 1983 the AFL-CIO passed a resolution condemning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Fourteen years later the AFL-CIO recognized Pride at Work – an organization of GLBT union members – as an official constituency of the AFL-CIO, which gave GLBT workers a voice in determining labor’s agenda (Sweeney 25). Similar constituencies exist for female and minority workers, with both groups having moved into leadership positions within the labor movement in recent years. Lesbian trade-unionists such as Teresa Conrow, who has a foot in both labor and queer movements, concluded from her experience in the former that “unions have been able to prove that taking on issues related to homophobia at work has built union strength, not weakened it” (137). As her own proof, Conrow provides two examples in her essay from Out at Work: in the first, only one steward of a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local in Oregon resigned from training over increased visibility of GLBT issues in the union, while the local recruited many stewards in the process; and, in a movement that is fighting its own bureaucratization, Pride at Work marks a turn away from business unionism with the vast

5 I turn to the trade-union movement and Queers for Economic Justice specifically because recent initiatives by both illustrate how social identity – in this case queer and/or transgender identity – can be used in the advance of class struggle and social change, not at the expense of these goals. 103 majority of its members and top leaders rank-and-file activists and not union staff or elected officials (137). The successes queer and other vulnerable workers have achieved in the labor movement should take on added significance for critics who retain an image of the Left as the bastion of white and reactionary men. More specifically, Pride and Work, for example, should make clear to critics that popular images of the Left and the working-class are, as Nikhil Pal Singh has insisted, “hangovers from antecedent times” (67). When the economy shifted away from its industrial base in the early 1970’s, it required an “ideal” workforce to meet the demands of service, agricultural, and unskilled manufacturing work. White and male workers, having shifted along with the economy, comprised a flexible workforce already disproportionately made up of women and minorities. In this way, images of the Left or working-class as white and male do not reflect the reality of class as it is lived through race, gender, and sexuality, nor are these images consistent with the composition of the working-class in the U.S. Since it began in 2003, Queers for Economic Justice has remained steadfastly focused on the lived reality of class for queer people, particularly those in poverty. The organization’s work, as it is informed by the needs of queers of the working-class, has as its praxis issues of class that structure queer peoples’ lives more generally – what Cathy Cohen finds absent in national gay and lesbian organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Whereas the HRC has been primarily committed to marriage equality for GLBT people, Queers for Economic Justice has been critical of such narrowly defined interests of the HRC, in part because queers who reject monogamy or form alternative family structures have been demonized by the HRC and its calls for liberal policies of inclusion. In the face of the current economic crisis, which has had a profound effect on the more disadvantaged members of the working-class, Queers for Economic Justice has instead localized its work around programs aimed at helping queers in poverty, primarily because the organization recognizes access to safe housing and employment with a living wage as more pressing issues than the right to marry. Unlike the HRC, Queers for Economic Justice demonstrates how identity politics can have a progressive politics that uses – and, in fact, is based on – identity as the axis of class struggle and social change. This kind of politics does not require queer or other marginalized people to ignore issues bound up with their identities such as marriage equality. Rather, it means that a progressive vision of a just society will not be actualized until identity politics movements return to a more holistic understanding of identity – that is, until identity politics movements understand identity not as discrete units but as the total set of interrelations that condition and shape it in its multiple intersections. This kind of politics also means that such movements would undergo yet another shift: from single issues back to an agenda in which precedence is given to confronting and reimaging the political-economic systems that govern our lives. Queers for Economic Justice, as its goals are to create a political-economic system that embraces and celebrates sexual and gender diversity, represents this new wave in identity politics. If the limits of identity politics have never been more apparent than they are today, then a similar shift must occur in most academic fields that have recast race, gender, and sexuality as more significant than class. As with organizations like the HRC, this shift would mean for academics and literary critics in particular that they again understand class as lived through social identity (and, related to this, that social identity is foundational to class.) Janet Zandy and Michelle Tokarczyk, among others, have argued in much of their critical work that class is often

104 left out of the conversation, either in the triumvirate of identity or as an area of experience.6 This study goes one step farther as it offers possible reasons why, aside from its postmodern turn, literary studies has increasingly turned away from class analysis and toward discourse and ideas, even though deindustrialization and globalization have meant that most women and minorities in particular suffer under current political-economic systems. By pointing to structural rather than simply social forces that exploit and disfranchise marginalized people, which is to say reasserting in this discussion of racism, sexism, and homo- and/or transphobia its class component, I understand the texts examined in this study to challenge central features of American capitalism that are mutually reinforced by mass ideology. Because patriarchy, as with heterosexualism, has been a central ideology of capitalism, female and/or queer consciousness threatens to undermine capitalist systems in radical ways, in part because being female and/or queer enables (or should enable) one to more clearly see through and outside the structures that govern and normalize people’s lives under capitalism. Black and Chicana feminists recognized this fact as early as the 1970’s and 1980’s and, in this way, their movements were closer to the Left than previously realized. If it is the case that social politics movements and their “cultural wings” were de facto working-class movements, then such work must be excavated for its working-class content. What might be gained from examining this work for its repressed proletarian tradition? A number of critics, from Tim Libretti to Janet Zandy among others, have answered this question in ways consistent with the impetus of this study – that a focus on class as it is lived through race, gender, and sexuality provides for an understanding of identity closer to how it is lived.7 I extend further this answer when I demonstrate for critics how the rise of social politics movements and their “cultural wings” coincided with shifts in the nature of blue collar work and its workforce, or how assaults on institutionalized racism, sexism, and homo/transphobia were matched by calls to replace existing political-economic systems as they exploited and disenfranchised the more disadvantaged members of the working-class. In this conclusion, I want to extend again this answer to propose that a more nuanced understanding of identity and its many constructions is a useful starting place but is not enough. Because the writers I examine in this study challenged neat demarcations between writer and audience and between esthetic and political intent, their work, as it has as its praxis issues of class, must be used by critics as tools of class struggle and social change. bell hooks offers critics in Teaching to Transgress three ways to do this work: beginning with her belief that “often individuals who employ certain terms freely – terms like ‘theory’ or ‘feminism’ – are not necessarily practitioners whose habits of being and living most embody the action” (62), hooks implores critics to engage in the practice of theorizing or “engaging in feminist struggle” (62). This means, for hooks, that critics who take women or other minorities as their subject must

6 For more on how class has been generally ignored or obscured in contemporary literary criticism, see in particular Janet Zandy’s book Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. See also Zandy’s essay “The Making of American Working-Class Literature” in Literature Compass 5:1 (2008): 42-57. See, too, Michelle Tokarczyk’s 2008 book Class Definitions: The Lives and Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna UP. 7 For more on Tim Libretti’s work to excavate this repressed proletarian literary tradition, see his essays “Rethinking Class from a Chicana Perspective” in Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color, Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, ed. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. 200-27; and “Sexual Outlaws and Class Struggle: Rethinking History and Class Consciousness from a Queer Perspective” in College English 67:2 (2004): 154-71. 105 write in a way that is accessible to such groups as doing so enables and promotes feminist (and anti-racist/anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist) practice. If, as hooks puts it succinctly, theory “cannot be shared in everyday conversation,” then it “cannot be used to educate the public” (64). In this way, hooks makes no distinction between theory and praxis, particularly as theory makes it way into the university classroom. As a response to critics who have “internaliz[ed] the false assumption that theory is not social practice” (65), hooks sees the classroom as one of the most revolutionary sites to enact theory’s radical potential. Yet hooks is quick to caution that interventions to challenge the status quo cannot happen if we as academics “are not willing to interrogate the way our presentation of self as well as our pedagogical process is often shaped by middle-class norms” (185). Rather than to accept the premise that class is not relevant or, at best, only able to be addressed in simplistic ways (184), academics who recognize how race, gender, and sexual privilege have empowered some more than others must similarly recognize how class privilege has granted “authority” to some voices more than others (185) – even if these voices are their own. The latter is not easy to do as it means admitting how much of academic life has been organized around the “tendency to focus only on the thoughts, attitudes, and experiences of those who are materially privileged” (185). When they share their perspectives, academics and students of/from the working-class subvert this tendency, but so can other academics and students when they interrogate their own class privilege. Working-class pedagogy in the highly selective institution, when it is most effective, does not displace or decenter the class privileged student so much as it creates a space of mutual sharing, or what Renny Christopher has described as the classroom as place where “true exchange” can take place among texts, teacher, and students (Teaching 214). The need for such a place, however, arises out of another need – that is to productively integrate working-class experiences into middle-class life at the university. Psychologists such as Barbara Jensen have found that working-class students often experience a painful disconnect between their working- class homes and communities and the middle-class world of the university, the latter of which has demanded of working-class students that they adopt bourgeois attitudes and values or risk being deemed unacceptable by their professors and peers.8 In a space where working-class students are not encouraged to talk about how class has shaped them, in part because the university has been viewed as a golden ticket to the middle-class, the university more often alienates and silences than it does celebrate and embrace working-class students.9 The reality for working-class students at the more highly selective institution is that their needs, psychological and otherwise, are not always met by university administrators and professors; for bell hooks, this fact has been accentuated by the lack of interrogation of how pedagogical processes are shaped by middle-class norms. Michelle Tokarczyk has found, like

8 For more on this disconnect, as well as Jensen’s solutions for helping working-class students at the university, see her essay titled “Across the Great Divide: Crossing Classes and Clashing Cultures” in What’s Class Got to Do with It?: American Society in the Twenty-First Century, Michael Zweig, Ed. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. 168-84. 9 The literature on working-class students’ often negative experiences at the university have been chronicled by a number of critics among them Mike Rose (Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Underprepared), Sherry Lee Linkon (Teaching Working-Class), Renny Christopher; Michelle Tokarczyk (“Promises to Keep: Working Class Students and Higher Education”), and Pam Annas among others (“Literature as Window, Literature as Mirror: Working-Class Students Meet Their Own Tradition”). Fore more on the silence on class in university classrooms, see also George Lipsitz’s essay “Class and Consciousness: Teaching about Social Class in Public Universities” in Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere. Amitava Kumar, Ed. New York: New York UP, 1997. 9-21. 106 hooks, that “some faculty at state and less elite private institutions refuse to acknowledge that their students have unique needs. Rather than try to adapt teaching techniques and school policies to first-generation college students, these faculty behave as though they were indeed teaching at an elite university” (What’s Class 162). Institutional barriers faced by working-class students, hooks and Tokarczyk suggest, are insurmountable for some, particularly those students unable or unwilling to assimilate or to accept the myth of meritocracy that structures much university life. What is needed, then, is not a solution that helps working-class students assimilate or deal with existing barriers but a solution that abolishes (rather than tinkers with) those very barriers that have long kept working-class and minority students out of the university. One solution, Hazel Carby has proposed, requires university administrators and professors to forge alliances across forces in society that will halt and reverse the declining number of minority and working-class students at the university (194). For Carby, this work has meant for the materially privileged members of the academy that they confront how they have (un)willingly “sustained and supported apartheid-like structures that maintain segregation in housing and education in the United States” (195). “Such systems of segregation ensure,” Carby argues, “that the working-class will not encroach on the privileged territory of the middle and upper classes or into the institutions that are gatekeepers and providers of legitimized access to power, universities included” (195). Carby identified this link between “systems of segregation” and the declining number of minority and working-class students at the university in 1992. Although minority and working-class students have entered the university in increased numbers since this time, their presence has been largely concentrated in community colleges and four-year state schools rather than at elite or private institutions. For those minority and working-class students who make it to more highly selective institutions, the experience can be alienating, as bell hooks recalls in much of her scholarship. How do we as academics and teachers help working-class students at more highly selective institutions when their class backgrounds are not readily apparent even as their race and/or gender differences might be? Amber Hollibaugh, an organizer and writer whose work centers on HIV-AIDS and sexuality, has defined the conditions many working-class and minority students find themselves in at universities, though the parameters of her work have been localized around queer workers in the trade-union movement: “If people are terrified of speaking out, of ever articulating the particularities of their own lives, they won’t sign a union card. They won’t speak up when there’s a grievance. They won’t shut a line down. Their spirit is broken precisely in the place where they need to have a voice” (Out at Work 61). If we replace queer workers with working-class students, and replace the workplace with the university, we can begin to understand how helping working-class students necessarily requires that we first acknowledge the tacit agreement that talking about class and class difference is unacceptable or irrelevant at the university. Once we have admitted how middle-class norms shape our pedagogical processes, we can then develop a practice of theorizing in the classroom that meets the needs of all students. The university where I teach began offering full-tuition need-based aid to students whose families earn less than $35,000 annually. This initiative, started in 2007, has since served over 300 recipients out of a population of 16,000 students. In fall of 2009, I conducted a survey of these recipients and their experiences with class at the university.10 The questions I asked them

10 This study was approved by the Internal Review Board of the university in 2009, including the right of the researcher to quote directly from recipients’ responses. In using these responses, I have quoted recipients verbatim, 107 were largely based on my assumption that class difference was not addressed at the university or, if it was, that it was addressed in a simplistic way, that is, in terms of income only. Out of 300 students, I received just five responses to my survey; lack of responses were suggestive of how the highly selective institution where I teach had not been a receptive place for these students to talk about how class had shaped them in ways that were different from their more class privileged peers. The breakdown of recipients was as follows: when asked in what class bracket the student would place his/her/hir family, one recipient selected “lower middle-class” and four selected “working-class.” The recipient who selected “lower middle-class” later identified as “working-class,” using both terms interchangeably. I asked recipients thirteen questions and requested that they provide demographic information. What I gathered from their responses was that their institution had made small steps to improve their experience at the university, but these recipients overwhelmingly concluded that the institution had not done enough. All recipients, regardless of race, gender, or geographical location, suggested for university administrators and professors that they recognize the unique needs of their students, particularly when those needs are complicated by differences of race, gender, and class – what an African-American recipient put simply as, “Stop denying class diversity doesn’t exist.” One recipient, a 20-year-old white working-class male from a small town, noted how at a university that values the study-abroad experience, “faculty should incorporate into their thinking and planning of assignments student class standings. Studying abroad is not financially impossible, but who has the money to spend on studying abroad?” Although this recipient did not provide information about what course had not taken into consideration “class standings,” it is reasonable to assume that the student had taken classes where “thinking and planning of assignments” were based on the assumption that students would or had already studied abroad – that is, that all students in the classroom had the means to do so. This same recipient responded to the question, “in what ways have you felt accepted or rejected at the university?” by returning to how faculty “expected” students to study abroad, and how this expectation made him feel “alienated” in the classroom. Feelings of alienation and/or rejection dominated these recipients’ responses. For white students, of which there were four of five, these feelings were palpable in and outside the classroom and had primarily to do with differences of income e.g. students did not have the means to compete with materially privileged peers. Of these four students, however, two noted that their sense of alienation also resulted from faculty assumptions about ability and preparedness of their students. Both females from rural areas, these recipients urged faculty to “remember that not all students arrive from the same place” – an assumption that led the second recipient to conclude, “I have often felt rejected within the classroom as I feel that I did not have the opportunity to fully develop my analytical, writing, and communication skills in high school as much as expected by [university] professors and other [university] students.” For this student, having come from a high school that did not adequately prepare her for college (lack of funds, limited resources, few or no advanced placement courses) put her on unequal footing with her peers at the university, yet this fact went unnoticed by faculty and was reflected in the planning and execution of their courses. except in cases where clarification or emphasis has been needed. In using these students’ responses, I in no way assume that these responses are representative of all working-class students at the university. 108

The African-American and female recipient of this survey identified the source of her alienation or rejection to result from class and race differences, which is not surprising at a university where the student body is predominantly white and of the middle- or capitalist-class. When I asked this recipient, “What does class mean to you?” the student described class in a way consistent with her white counterparts:“To me ‘class’ means a certain classification where you are judged based upon your surrounding environment, lifestyle, and culture” (emphasis mine). Notice the similarities between the African-American recipient’s response and that of a white female from the Midwest: “Culture of the working class is completely acceptable through their own eyes but may be looked down upon from the upper middle class” (emphasis mine). Both recipients feel judged for their class and suggest that for them being of the working-class is not valued by the dominant culture but is rather demonized or, at best, marginalized. In the case of the African-American and female recipient, this class judgment is also racialized, as the student remarked on how her roommate freshman year “locked and stored away every thing [sic] [she] owned as if [the recipient] were a thief.” This recipient goes on to write that “later as the year progressed [the roommate] told [her] how she went through [her] Facebook page to see if [she] was violent or loud.” White students of privilege, however, were not the only students by whom the recipient felt judged; other “multicultural students” were “battling against one another because one may have been raised in a struggle while others had not.” The African- American and female recipient identified some “multicultural students,” like her roommate freshman year, as “opponents,” concluding that at the university “each culture is separated into income class subcategories.” Another recipient remarked on the need to recognize class differences among students of the same “culture,” here coded as race, when he pointed out, “Just because you are in a certain culture does not mean you are rich like the others.” The dynamics Hazel Carby identified in 1992, that is the declining number of minority and working-class students at the university despite “multicultural” initiatives, bear out in these recipients’ responses in their suggestion that “we talk about diversity a lot in the classroom but just as statistics; never as a reality of beings.” For the African-American and female recipient, “diversity” means either being the “only black student in the classroom” or, conversely, having “multicultural” students “battle with one another.” For white recipients, “diversity” doesn’t seem to exist because the university operates under the assumption that “students are supposed to be rich and have no money problems at all.” The students I surveyed suggested that efforts to “diversify” the student body have meant that more disadvantaged students enter the university, but that they feel alienated by a system that continues to be shaped by middle-class norms. All of the five respondents to this study urged administrators and professors to recognize that class diversity exists at the university and to change policies e.g. study abroad and courses, based on this fact. As one recipient put it, “I think that we need to stop thinking of class diversity as such a taboo topic. The reaction I have received from many teachers, students, and fellow staff is that we can’t talk about ‘being poor’ or ‘rich’ and how those differences have shaped us. This is part of the problem.” If working-class students had a space where they might talk about how “class affects who a person is and how they [sic] approach life,” then they might begin to feel “they aren’t alone in feeling and thinking the way they do and that its [sic] okay to have had a different childhood experience from their neighbor.” I created such a space in a first-year writing course on working-class women writers in the spring of 2008. One student, who I later learned was a recipient of the initiative program, contacted me after the semester ended to say that my course helped her take pride in her “roots.” A cursory glance at her writing that semester clearly revealed her need to work through her 109 anxieties about being working-class at a highly selective institution. By her last essay, it was apparent that she had exchanged her class shame for pride, the transformation coded in her essay as a conversation between the country singer Gretchen Wilson and Bone from Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina: “you can spend your life fighting who you really are or you can embody it. Be proud.” By having our theories reflect class as it is lived through race, gender, and sexuality, and by practicing this theorizing in the classroom, we create spaces that celebrate rather than silence our students.

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