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Freeways and Free Speech, Rail Cars and Rancheras: Geographic and Linguistic Mobility in Contemporary Mexican and Mexican-American Cultural Production

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Freeways and Free Speech, Rail Cars and Rancheras: Geographic and Linguistic Mobility in Contemporary Mexican and Mexican-American Cultural Production Freeways and Free Speech, Rail Cars and Rancheras: Geographic and Linguistic Mobility in Contemporary Mexican and Mexican-American Cultural Production By Regan Lee Postma Submitted to the graduate degree program in Spanish and Portuguese and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson Stuart Day ________________________________ Vicky Unruh ________________________________ Yajaira Padilla ________________________________ Jorge Pérez ________________________________ Ben Chappell Date Defended: May 17, 2011 ii The Thesis Committee for Regan Lee Postma certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: Freeways and Free Speech, Rail Cars and Rancheras: Geographic and Linguistic Mobility in Contemporary Mexican and Mexican-American Cultural Production ________________________________ Chairperson Stuart A. Day Date approved: June 10, 2011 iii Abstract This dissertation considers mobility in contemporary Mexican and Mexican-American cultural production (1960s-2000s) and specifically demonstrates how characters utilize creative language to induce an alternate mobility in instances when geographic movement is limited, coerced, or impossible. The analysis of novels and plays highlights the possibilities of human agency via deployments of voice (poetry, song, code- switching, storytelling, parody, and protest, among others). These deployments allow characters to move emotionally to desired places and, in certain situations, to participate in larger social movements against injustices. The first chapter centers on the use of music and poetry as an alternate way of moving in two plays by Hugo Salcedo, El viaje de los cantores (1990), based on the lives of male migrants who die in a boxcar on their journey to the US, and Sinfonía en una botella (1990), on Mexican citizens who attempt to cross the border in automobiles only to find themselves stuck in gridlock traffic. Chapter 2 considers what I term “narrative motion” in Carlos Morton’s play Johnny Tenorio (1983) in which a Chicano Don Juan code-switches, and in María Amparo Escandón’s González and Daughter Trucking Co. (2005) in which truck-driving protagonist Libertad tells stories to her fellow inmates, taking them on the highways and back roads of the US during their prison “book clubs.” The third chapter analyzes what I call “vocal derailments” through the use of orality and parody in Emilio Carballido’s play, Yo también hablo de la rosa (1966), and his novella, El tren que corría (1984). In these works spoken language is used as a way of questioning and thereby moving against national discourses that leave certain Mexican citizens behind. Chapter 4 considers the connection between creative language and action in the farmworker movement by analyzing the use of the künstlerroman (artist’s) genre in …y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971) by Tomás Rivera and Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) by Helena María Viramontes. I demonstrate the way the works underscore the need for artists in the movement to continually move against injustice in the fields. This study adds to studies on migration and literature by highlighting the diversity of (im)mobile experiences in Mexican and Mexican-American cultural production and by signaling the possibilities of the tactical voice for those in limiting circumstances on both sides of the border. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my committee for their help over the past years with this project: Stuart Day, Vicky Unruh, Yajaira Padilla, Jorge Pérez, and Ben Chappell. I am also grateful for the unofficial support and mentorship of Rob Bayliss, in whose seminar I began developing the section on Johnny Tenorio, Tony Rosenthal, whose Santa Fe postcards and hallway chats kept me inspired, and George Woodyard, who showed me the possibilities of kindness and scholarship. I also wish to recognize my undergraduate professors, Dan Murphy, Marilyn Moriarty, and Kathleen Nolan at Hollins University, and Jesus Montaño at Hope College, for their encouragement and support. It was in these years that I learned to love the study of literature and culture and that I began to understand its value. I thank my family, especially my Aunt Nikki for her many letters, and my brother Blake, for his lengthy phone conversations. I appreciate Thad Holcombe, Linda Watts, Hal LeMert (whose forthcoming book on story I look forward to reading), and my many other friends at the ECM who have helped me to think about the wider significance of my research and teaching. For good colleagues and friends, Stacy Lutsch, Elizabeth Villalobos, Emilia Barbosa, and Hernán García. And for Rodridgo, who kept me moving. I appreciate and thank all of you. v To my Grandmother Ruby, who was not allowed to drive the truck or to paint a canvas. But who showed me the beauty of creative, everyday resistance in poetic postcards and piles of postage stamps. vi Table of Contents Introduction Climbing Fences with Words: A Transnational Framework for Linguistic Mobility (1) Chapter 1 Turn Up the Volume and Sing Along: Geographic and Melodic Mobility in El viaje de los cantores and Sinfonía en una botella (28) Chapter 2 Narrative Motion and Agency in Johnny Tenorio and González and Daughter Trucking Co. (74) Chapter 3 Vocal Derailments: Critiquing the National Narrative of Progress in Yo también hablo de la rosa and El tren que corría (124) Chapter 4 Moving Against Injustice in the Fields: The Artist’s Voice in the Farmworker Movement (159) Afterword Con Safos: Going Places with Words (198) End Notes (204) Works Cited (223) 1 Introduction Climbing Fences with Words: A Transnational Framework for Linguistic Mobility In the last decades human movements around the globe have increased dramatically. These movements include not only migrants traveling from Latin America, Asia, and Africa to places like the United States and Western Europe, but also the movements of students, business people, victims of human trafficking, backpackers, commuters, retirees, and refugees. John Urry in Mobilities underscores that the amount of travel continues to increase, with an expected one billion legal international arrivals worldwide in 2010 compared to 25 million in 1950 (3). This number does not include increased travel within cities, territories, and nations nor does it take account of undocumented migration. Not surprisingly, contemporary Mexican and Mexican- American/Chicano1 cultural productions consistently engage this increased movement through the inclusion of various forms of mobility as central themes. In Mexican author Emilio Carballido’s play Yo también hablo de la rosa (1966), and his novella El tren que corría (1984), characters derail trains or are left behind by them and desperately search for ways to get on board. This interest in mobility evidences itself along the US/Mexico border in Hugo Salcedo’s play Sinfonía en una botella (1990) in which cars wait in long lines attempting to pass through checkpoints. It again appears in the US Southwest in the appropriation of flatbed trucks as stages by El Teatro Campesino, in the cars blessed by the priest in Tomás Rivera’s novella …y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971), and in the big rig that Libertad (a.k.a. Mudflap Girl) drives in González and Daughter Trucking Co. (2005), a novel by María Amparo Escandón. 2 Mobility commonly has been related by the middle and upper class in Western society to freedom and progress. The idea of “going places” geographically connotes economic, social, and often educational advancements. Curiously, the Oxford English Dictionary underscores this freedom in its definition of mobility: “ease of freedom of movement; capacity for rapid or comfortable locomotion or travel.” Significant to this study are the words ease, freedom, and comfortable.2 Mobility communicates both the ability to move from one location to another as well as the possibility that one can make the journey, and without great travail. This freedom has become especially pronounced since the advent of the automobile. Mike Featherstone, in his introduction to Automobilities, draws attention to the sense of autonomy provided by this particular vehicle: “The promise here is for self-steering autonomy and capacity to search out the open road or off-road, encapsulated in vehicles which afford […] speed and mobility” (1- 2). The vehicle and its associated sign-values of independence and progress have become intertwined in the American psyche, as Cotten Seiler in A Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America notes. For Seiler, the US narrates itself ever “in forward motion” and concerns itself with this movement in tangible ways, such as the consumption and constant use of motor vehicles (8-9). Having a vehicle, and in certain communities an American-made vehicle, serves as a marker of national identity. This dependence on the automobile points to the ways that mobility is a term marked by social and economic privilege, and even national belonging. In contemporary American society, it is not uncommon to hear references to the US as a nation of immigrants, harkening back to the days of the pilgrims. Tim Cresswell, commenting on migration in the national imaginary, signals however that these 3 celebrated migratory movements at the “heart of collective identity” most often refer to “the mobility of white European migrants” (On the Move 180). Thus, the positive connotations of (im)migration associated with US national identity connote northern European immigrants and, while excluding Native peoples from this imaginary, also exclude those more recent immigrants. Movements to the US, as well as those within the nation’s borders, are welcomed by society depending on the racial, class, or gender identity of the people involved. It is not simply individuals, but rather entire demographic categories, as Jeremy Packer suggests, that are marked as dangerous (9). Given this diversity of experiences with movement, the idea of mobility cannot stand in consistently as a marker of social and economic progress or freedom.
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