Further Reading on Arizona

To get a better sense of the Tucson Mexican American Studies program and its shut-down:

A list of books banned by Tucson Unified School District (TUSD). (This web site has extensive coverage of the shut-down. Click around if you are interested.)

The Arizona Ethnic Studies Network, which supports the Mexican American Studies program closed by HB 2281.

Sandra Soto's article, co-authored with legal scholar Miranda Joseph, Neoliberalism and the Battle over Ethnic Studies in Arizona. The article recounts how Soto's 2010 Convocation Speech at University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences was met with anti-Mexican racism by "injured" audience members who, like the law HB2281, would remove any mention of race or ethnicity from even the supposedly intellectually open and politically productive space of the University.

Borderlands 2

Post your comments on the reading from Borderlands/La Frontera below.

A Donkey Knows More Than You

(Hey y'all, Daniel here. Josh couldn't post his blog post due to technical difficulties, so I posted it for him instead. The following is a blog post from Josh Martinez.)

My 10 year old cousin told my tia that she didn't like mexicans.

As I think of her now, I am filled with a strange sense of recognition and pain. Her pretty bright blue eyes, blonde curly hair (like her mother's), and pale skin.

How would she even have a clue?

My introduction to my own mother culture was actually a similar experience, though notably separate. I recall at one point asking my mother if I we were white.

My mom has dark, thick, wavy hair that I've seen roll to her shoulders or, when her taste changed, would lay obediently at her chin in straight-ironed falls. Her dark eyes I've seen simmer with pride or in anger but always with a strength that paralyses. And her skin a shade like mine, not quite white, but weda.

My mother told me to check Hispanic in the little box. She told me that we were american. And that really was the extent of it. Even now, my understanding of my culture is full of holes and patchworks.

From what I understand of my own family tree, I'm third generation american. My grandparents were born in San Antonio where they went to public school. The building where my grandfather went to school still stands, out in a small patch of land on the outskirts of Losoya, where my tias y tios still live and where I've popped fireworks every July 4th and New Year's Eve with cousins while the men drink and cook and the women talk and fuss over the children. My grandmother has told me stories about picking okra as a young girl, and how to this day she hates the smell of coffee because it awoke her to another morning in a field. More stories about cruel teachers who would "discipline" kids who spoke spanish during class or at lunch or in the halls. But also happy stories about football games, or sock-hops, while fishing through an old yearbook. To this day my grandmother rarely speaks spanish to me while my mother knows enough to get by, and what's left in me are terms of endearment and slang.

What I'm getting at here is that I know what Anzaldúa is saying when she talks aboutmujer mala. Though I am male, I feel I have an appreciation of cultural tyranny. I've been called white boy, wedo, gringo. I've been lectured for not knowing spanish. I've had spanish been used to exclude me from conversations, and I've been made to feel guilty from Latinos for assimilation. What choice did I have? Three years of public school spanish taught me numbers and a, e, i, o, u el burrito sabe mas qué tú.

My sister was born May 2005 and has a beautiful mocha shade across her face. While reading this week's text, I thought of mi hermanita. I doubt she will have any idea about a shadow-beast within her, she will be strong and won't take that kind of crap, but I do wonder about her self-identity.Borderlands gives me something I wish for her, a female rite of defiance to cultural change. La Chingada (or Malintzin) seems to me a patron saint for rebellious women, and while she did betray her race and helped the Spanish eliminate much, if not all, of the Aztlán people, it makes for a very interesting mini-series I'm thinking about writing and pitching to Showtime, who you can always count on to shamelessly include sex and violence exactly where it belongs. 

Close, yet Alien.

You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I begin with a bit of prose.

But I once knew a girl who reminded me of sage and mesquite, yet tried to always cover it in a musk of pink roses. Some days, the roses were white, though I could always see their browning edges. She wasn’t like those soft, tame petals that were as silken as filly noses. She wasn’t covered in dagger-ish thorns blatantly worn, nor did she flirt with elegant strangers decorated in pearls.

She pretended, of course, with all her will and finesse, though I’m not convinced she ever did cast us away. She was not afraid of going home, but of being forced to stay there. She expected its rejection, its confirmation that she would be nothing (as well she should be) and that was something she could never forgive. But she was never quite able to forsake that smooth, dark smell of wilder places that were so uncouth in her circle of rosy friends.

She broke my heart.

What is so wrong with our sagebrush and mesquite that pearls and roses can destroy them? Why did embracing the wilderness mean being tamed? Couldn’t we be wild in this wild place and still be loved?

We met a small borderland of our own, my family being from New England and hers being rooted in the Texas hill country. When we first met as children, she couldn’t speak a single word of English and I certainly didn’t know Spanish, but we managed to figure out hide-and-seek with little effort. I suppose we each wanted what the other had, too. I thought she was exotic, mysterious, and I couldn’t fathom why she would ever want what I had. She wanted the American Dream, whatever that may be: a normal, nuclear family with a very cushioned lifestyle. She wanted to be normal. I didn’t.

In retrospect, neither of us had ever understood the other, and that ended in a pile of broken glass.

We both had Catholic families. We both received the same messages that La Frontera discusses. The three, possibly four choices women have as they drift through this world. That men are like children, like animals, even when women are portrayed as carnal, too (17). Why did we see each other so differently? She thought I had a perfect, calm life, I thought she had a perfectly adventurous one. What we didn’t see is that we were stuck with the same cultures swirling in and out of each other, where commonality seemed to be alien.

The article was frustrating. It was frustrating because I don’t know Spanish, forcing me to seek out an old friend to ask desperately to help me understand. It was frustrating because it told me about repressions I already feel, from a destiny of a mother and wife to being told that my entire nature is not appropriate for this world. It was frustrating because it made me feel like I don’t belong to this land, that I don’t belong to Texas or a movement or a plight. It made me feel very close and very alien. The same feeling I always had with her. Close, yet alien.

In one swoop, one quote illustrated all of these frustrations for me. “For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior.” (page 19)

Is it only the lesbian of color who can rebel in this fashion and with such atrocity to her native culture? What ‘ultimate rebellion’ can the white (?) lesbian make? Is all of this perhaps closer to religion, region, class which cultures perpetuate along racial lines, along borderlands? Can we ever accept each other?

Who are we, anyways?

Gay Liberation, Limits of Identity

Comment below on the reading from Annmarie Jagose's Queer Theory: An Introduction.

Tragic Bitches

Comment below on the selections of poetry from Tragic Bitches: An Experiment in Queer Xicana & Xicano Performance Poetry.

Memories and Movies

“This would be a great movie!” I thought to myself as I ended the last few pages of Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.

Pretty much at a loss for words, I had to sit and ponder what it would be like to be David and hide my sexuality when all I really want to do inside is feel warm and cozy.  As I finished the book another thought that popped in my head was, no wonder “they” use to think being gay was a disease or mental illness in earlier times. David and his personality is the perfect definition of why exactly that thought even occurred.

Enough of my tangent on movies and crazy people, to tie this into a class discussion, the ending section of this book reminded my heavily on the presentation we just had of Heather Love and the feeling of “Backwardness.” David showed signs of not only going backwards by sleeping with another woman to make himself feel better but also of shame and guilt by succumbing to the same act of going back to Hella. To feel this low, this disgusted by the thought of your own self-loving someone else is truly a heartbreaking thought to think about. Giovanni, towards the end of the book reminded me of a lonely child; jumping from one person to the next because he needed someone. A sense of belonging is what I truly got that Giovanni wanted, when maybe all along it was simply to be loved by David.  Who knows? Signs of an unhealthy relationship are written all over the two. The whole story, through its ups and downs was an even more romanticized version of “your first encounter of the gay world” and “your first love” all tied into one. No matter how much you might want to forget your “first” time doing whatever, with that one person who broke your heart; at the end of the day, its something that you will carry with you for the rest of your life. Even if all you want to do is forget it.

Remember how you felt when you told him or her you first liked them? Loved them? Remember when you kissed? Memories are what this book is made up of and for David and Giovanni you can’t get the good without the bad.

(sorry for the late post, I had publishing issues)