Suspending the Desire for Recognition: Coloniality of Being, the Dialectics of Death, and Chicana/o Literature by Jorge Manuel Gonzalez A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Chair Professor Laura E. Pérez Professor Abdul JanMohamed Professor Marcial González Fall 2011 Suspending the Desire for Recognition: Coloniality of Being, the Dialectics of Death, and Chicana/o Literature Copyright, 2011 By Jorge Manuel Gonzalez Abstract Suspending the Desire for Recognition: Coloniality of Being, the Dialectics of Death, and Chicano/a Literature by Jorge Manuel Gonzalez Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory University of California, Berkeley Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Chair Writing, as Abdul JanMohamed posits in relation to Richard Wright’s literature, is an alternative manner of negating negation. “Negating the negation” in this sense must be understood dialectically, as a methodology of the oppressed seeking to transcend social negation from a continuous colonial logic that seeks to alienate, exploit, and reify racialized existence. The function of writing for historically marginalized communities, then, is a symbolic gesture that often takes the place of the act of physical resistance seeking recognition –as the Hegelian master/bondsman or Marxist proletariat/bourgeoisie models would describe—from exterior dominating forces. The desire to be recognized is displaced by the desire to know and critique the capitalist world’s oppressive forces, especially the forces of racial alienation and gender subjection. The turn to affirm the self from within is manifested in the novels, poems, and plays of people of color in the Unites States and former colonies around the world. This dissertation examines Chicana/o literature produced between 1968 to the turn of the century to deconstruct the process of racial alienation and the struggle for “dis-alienation” represented in the critical imagination of writers who occupy the position of what Ramon Grosfoguel (2005) has referred to as “colonial racial subjects.” The objective is to articulate a philosophical, theoretical, and literary account of the extent and manner in which death (actual, symbolic, and social), violence, and the continuity of the logics/ethics of domination shape the existential horizon of the Chicana/o experience to establish a conceptual grounding for the “coloniality of Being.” This dissertation reads how the persistence of colonial logic and the West’s monopoly on the meaning and value of ‘Being’ has a dynamic relation with figurative renderings of racialized identity, alienated labor, death, violence, love, and war by Chicano/a writers whose literary production spans from the 1970s to the turn of the 20th century. Suspending the Desire for Recognition proposes that the existential concerns and the critiques embedded within Chicana/o literature are responses to the pathology of recognition endemic to modernity, the legacies of colonialism, and its persistent logic/ethic of domination in the modern era. Understanding literature as an important tool for the critique of society, this dissertation highlights the literary production of Oscar 1 “Zeta” Acosta, Luis J. Rodriguez, and Cherríe Moraga, key writers within the Chicano Studies canon whose autobiographies, novels, and plays help us explain the way in which death and violence are fundamental to the existential crises of Chicana/os who have lived through the socio-political realignments of the late 1960s through the present. The dissertation pays particular attention to the existential and psycho-political implications of Chicana/os subjectivities sutured in a social context which claims that the violence of racism is a problem overcome in the Civil Rights Era while institutional repression continues to subjugate Chicana/os and a rise intra-community violence is particularly evident. 2 Para mis padres, mis hermanas y hermano, y todos los que me han dado apoyo, amor, inspiración, y fuego para seguir adelante. La gente vive! La lucha, sigue, sigue… La lucha, sigue, sigue… i Table of Contents Suspending the Desire for Recognition: Coloniality of Being, the Dialectics of Death, and Chicana/o Literature Dedication i Preface iv Acknowledgements vi Vita viii Introduction Chicana/o Literature and the Critique of Coloniality 1 PART ONE The Lived Experience of ‘Brownness’: Of Oscar Zeta Acosta, “Coloniality of Being,” and the Critique of De-humanized Brown Existence 15 Chapter 1 The Failures of Humanizing a Brown Buffalo 17 Chapter 2 The Dialectical Function of Death in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Autobiography of Brown Buffalo 40 PART TWO The Value of Brownness: Critique of “Racialized Estranged Labor” and ‘La Vida Loca’ in Luis J. Rodriguez’s Music of the Mill 63 Chapter 3 Alienation, Racialized Estrangement, and Chicano/as as Colonial Labor 66 ii Chapter 4 Death, Violence, and the Colonial Wounds of the Salcido Family in Luis J. Rodriguez’s Music of the Mill 77 Chapter 5 “It’s Their World” and “Figuring a Way to Exist in it”: The Search for Meaning in a Vacuum of Value and the Dialectics of Death in Luis J. Rodriguez’s Music of the Mill 99 PART THREE De-Colonizing Love/Decolonizing Being: Cherrie Moraga’s War of Love 112 Chapter 6 Love’s Wars: Loving and the War Years and the Critique of Love As Domination 115 Chapter 7 Sacrifice of the Primal Mother/Sister: Decolonial Horizons and the Dialectics of Death in Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea 130 References 148 iii Preface South Central Los Angles, although currently undergoing significant socioeconomic changes, has historically been one of the most violent and poverty stricken places in the United States. Its poverty and violence has been brought to the awareness of mainstream America through the African American experience in movies such as Boys in the Hood (1991) and Menace to Society (1993), however, these compelling pictures cannot be thought to contain “the whole picture,” as it were, of the violent and homicidal environment that South Central Los Angles has been. We can locate a visual register that functions under a black/white binary in the cinematic representation of South Central because the brown experience, the experience of Chicana/os, Mexicanos, and Centro Americanos within this urban space, has been omitted from the cultural record. This observation is not meant to make a claim of legitimacy in what some call the “Oppression Olympics,” it is rather a fact that needs to be considered with seriousness and critical attention. I bring this observation to bare here because as a Mexican immigrant and self-proclaimed Chicano, my own upbringing in this section of Los Angeles’s urban landscape left a significant impression on my sensibilities and future political and intellectual development. The fear of—and as some describe my research interests: attraction to—have both held me back and pushed me forward towards the attainment of knowledge. It may disconcert some to know that children who grow up with death and violence at their side, who are socialized to perceive it as something as “just and necessary” as truth and sunshine, often are very aware that this proximity is related to their racialized and poor status. My own awareness of racism and the power of whiteness came through stories of border crossings. As children we would hear about the treacherous hikes through the desert and about how horrible coyotes could be if they turned out to be thieves or rapists, but we also heard about being beaten by migras, about being humiliated and harassed for being Mexican. My sisters and I were sparred the experience because my parents had sense enough to understand we were much too young to endure such crossing. We were also lucky to have fallen into the hands of an honest and kind coyota who even after not being able to find my mother for 5 days after we had crossed with someone else’s documents and having a 27 day old newborn she could sell on the black market had sense and heart enough to return to the motel where the original deal was made to cross me to find my mother. It is difficult to not to want to understand why such risks were necessary to reach South Central once I was old enough to be conscious of them. I was aware of my racialization as Mexican from an early age because U.S. immigration in those days, as ICE is today, were known to raid apartment buildings, corner stores, sweatshops, and industrial workshops throughout South Central. I cannot deny being scared of getting picked up by those light-green vans and also fearing that my parents may be inside those vans on their way to Tijuana, Mexico. I often remark that my interest in the nature and structure of death came early when at around age 10 I would stay up, not being able to sleep, wondering about what iv happens when we die. I would think about the apparent loneliness of death, its coldness and permanence, and would panic. I cannot say this wonder was not related to the fear I had that my father would kill my mother during his “macho man” drunken, violent fits. Thinking of death overwhelmed me when I thought of loosing my mother at the hands of my father. Death became a sociological matter when as a teenager I began to see that police officers saw me with disdain and as a possible threat to the public at large. During this period South Central went from being a childhood paradise—I say this because I had no point of reference to understand the lack around us—to become an abysmal place that could swallow me up and spit me out dead.