Archivization and Its Alternatives: Toward a Critique of Chicana/o Religions and Spiritualities By Joseph Mark Morales A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor José David Saldívar, Co-Chair Professor José Rabasa, Co-Chair Professor Laura Elisa Pérez Professor Marcial González Spring 2012 Abstract Archivization and Its Alternatives: Toward a Critique of Chicana/o Religions and Spiritualities by Joseph Mark Morales Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor José David Saldívar, Co-Chair Professor José Rabasa, Co-Chair In this dissertation, I attempt to clarify a problem (i.e., how to think Chicana/o religion and spirituality in light of debates on the archive in South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies?) rather than propose a new approach to the question of the interpretation of Chicana/o religions (e.g., how to understand the relationship between Chicana/o cultural production and religious thought, practice, experience, expression, and so forth?). In chapter 1, I consider the pros and cons of the history of religions and Chicana feminist thought as critical approaches to Chicana/o religion and spirituality. I conclude with the proposition that subaltern studies – and in particular, Spivak’s notion of reading archivally – might add to the critical works of Davíd Carrasco and Laura E. Pérez. Chapter 2 examines Carrasco’s attempt to link the history of religions to Chicana/o literary and cultural studies. I conclude with the assertion that such an approach may run the risk of reifying the religious/secular divide as hermeneutic foundation. In chapter 3, I turn to Pérez’ distinction between secular religious studies and the politics of Chicana spirituality. I conclude with the suggestion that Chicana/o religion and spirituality might be read as a question of the archive. Chapter 4 argues that a critique of archival memory is central to debates on religion and spirituality in Chicana/o literary and cultural studies. I conclude with an exploration of archival silences within the Bancroft and Ethnic Studies libraries at the University of California, Berkeley. 1 PREFACE This dissertation can be situated between two statements. The first is: “The subaltern might serve as a signifier for . the ‘unspeakable.’”1 And the second is: “By the concept of elsewheres, I understand spaces and temporalities that define a world that remains exterior to the spatio-temporal location of any given observer.”2 If the former suggests subalternity is “outside” conventional modes of expression and representation, the latter suggests “the world” can be defined as irreducible spatio-temporal difference.3 My task is twofold: to affirm meaningful representations of the “unspeakable” and at the same time to deny the possibility for representing spaces and temporalities as anything other than an “untotalizable totality.”4 In this dissertation, I focus on the relationship between archivization and representations of Chicana/o religion and spirituality. In Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (2007), Laura E. Pérez has demonstrated that “the politics of the spiritual” should be a site of critical reflection for Chicana/o literary and cultural studies. Pérez argues that “spiritual beliefs and practices – however varied these may be – generate social and political effects that matter.” In this regard, I explore the import of Pérez’ observation that “the politics of the spiritual for many Chicana/os is linked to a politics of memory.”5 In the first place, how to 1 José David Saldívar, Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), xviii. 2 José Rabasa, Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 1. 3 Saldívar, Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico, xviii-xx; and Rabasa, Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World, 1. 4 Saldívar, Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico, xviii-xx, xvii; and Rabasa, Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World, 1. 5 Note: Pérez’ observation re: the nexus between “the politics of the spiritual” and “a politics of memory” forms part of her argument in “Spirit, Glyphs” – the first chapter of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities. In “Spirit, Glyphs,” Pérez rightly observes: “The linkages within imperialist and racist thinking between the spiritual, the female, and peoples of color are what make the conditions for talking about women, particularly women of color, and the spiritual, especially difficult.” On the other hand, Pérez observes likewise: “Conjuring and reimagining traditions of spiritual belief, traditions whose cultural differences have been used by discourses of civilization and modernization to justify subjugation and devaluation, are conscious acts of healing the cultural susto: that is, the ‘frightening’ of spirit from one’s body-mind in the colonial and neocolonial ordeals, the result of which is the ‘in-between’ state of nepantla, the postconquest condition of cultural fragmentation and social indeterminacy.” For Pérez, the “curandera (healer) work” of many contemporary Chicana writers and artists is ultimately “inseparable from questions of social justice, with respect to class, gender, sexuality, culture, and ‘race.’” “´Membering the spirit” acts to “interrupt the reproduction of gendered, raced, and i theorize colonial and postcolonial memory production? In the second place, how might theorizing colonial and postcolonial memory production contribute to a redefinition of Chicana/o religion and spirituality? Scholars such as Gastón Espinosa and Mario T. García have assumed that representations of Chicana/o religion and spirituality are unique,6 but in fact they can be linked to the question of the relationship between the South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies groups and Chicana/o literary and cultural studies.7 I argue for a critique of archival memory by analogy with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s thesis in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988).8 (Note: I argue “by analogy” in the spirit of “intellectual bridge building in decolonial thought.”)9 As opposed to “the additive model” of sexed politics of spirituality and art.” For example, Pérez examines “the invocation and reworking of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican notions of art and art making represented in glyphs, codices, and the Mexica (‘Aztec’) figures of the tlacuilo (glyph-maker) and the tlamatini (sage, decoder of the glyphs).” Thus, as I understand it, “the politics of the spiritual” (e.g., “citing or constructing culturally hybrid spiritualities”) can be linked for some Chicana/os to “a politics of memory” (e.g., “their mapping of pathways [back] beyond the alienation and disempowerment of the nepantlism of today’s cultural and geographical deterritorializations”). See Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 297, 18-49 passim. 6 E.g., Espinosa and García focus on “unique religious expressions that have been shaped by the Mexican American experience.” See Gastón Espinosa and Mario T. García, eds., Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 4. 7 Saldívar, Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico. Also, see Marcial González, Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form: Race, Class, and Reification (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 40-76. 8 Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever,” review of Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, by Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida, and “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Diacritics 30, no. 1 (spring 2000): 25-48. 9 In this dissertation, I explore Derridean “deconstruction” as a form of “postcolonialism” and/or what Walter Mignolo calls “desobediencia epistémica.” E.g., re: the former see Robert J. C. Young, “Subjectivity and History: Derrida in Algeria,” in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). Re: the latter see Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); in the context of Walter Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica: Retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad y gramática de la descolonialidad (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo, 2010). On the other hand, it is arguable that such a project runs the risk of a “dis-encounter” – specifically, a further ghettoizing of US women of color feminist and queer decolonial thought. As Laura E. Pérez observes, “Ghettoized as minority women’s or queer reading, U.S. women of color feminist and queer decolonial thought remains largely ‘unknown,’ uncited, or unengaged in the work of Latina/o and Latin American male thinkers and dominant cultural Euro-American feminists, with the notable exception of queer male scholars, like Luis León,