This feathery study purports to break new ground in American literary studies by emphasising the term ‘hemispheric’ in its subtitle. It approaches Mexican American literature beyond the confines of US history, looking at the way in which authors of the last 150 years have understood concepts such as race, space and nation as part of a global perspective. Unfortunately, the volume delivers little that is truly original.
Its author, Marissa K. López, is a professor of English at the University of California in Los Angeles. Early on, she recognises her own limitations by announcing that such hemispheric investigations have been around for decades, although under various disguises. Her objective, therefore, is to make it apparent. Her argument is that Chicanos have understood themselves not as part of one but of several nations and that the constant border-crossing should be seen as a manifestation of that international perspective.
To accomplish her task, López organises her material into three historical moments: the fever for independence in Latin America in the nineteenth century, which coincided with the quest for territorial expansion by the United States; the Mexican Revolution of 1910; and the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. She analyses these moments through the prism of authors whose writings are about what is today the United States. The first of three parts of the book is about ‘Latinidad abroad’ – that is, intellectuals from Spain and Latin America whose travels and memoirs through the United States employ categories such as race to view their own societies – and ‘Mexicanidad at home’ – about Mexican authors in the United States who do the reverse. The figures at play are Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Travels in the United States in 1847), Lorenzo de Zavala (Journey to the United States of North America), Vicente Pérez Rosales (Times Gone By) and Mariano Vallejo (Memoirs of the Vallejos).
In the second part, called ‘Inhabiting America’, López reflects on the work by María Cristina Mena (The Collected Stories of María Cristina Mena) and Daniel Venegas (The Adventures of Don Chipote), authors who ‘inhabit “America” at the same time that the United States is inhabiting Latin America’. And with her dissertation on Jovita González (Caballero, co-authored with Eve Raleigh), López discusses the possibility of going beyond paradigms like assimilation or Anglo supremacy in order to embrace a third option which she sees as ‘total spiritual uplift’ of the kind promoted by Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (The Cosmic Race).
The third and final part is called ‘American Diasporas’. It looks at the way Chicanos address issues of identity by reacting to the tension resulting from a government that criminalises immigration, and by exploring the way that the plight of other Latinos such as Central Americans in the United States complicates the status of Mexican Americans. In this section López reflects on Ana Castillo (Sapogonia), Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Desert Blood), Martín Limón (The Door to Bitterness) and Mario Acevedo (The Nymphos of Rocky Flats and The Undead Kama Sutra).
The limitations of Chicano Nations are evident when one considers its target audience. While seeking to expand the field of Chicano literary scholarship by discussing authors whose view is global, López undermines her effort by selecting from an essentialist shelf of authors. Some exceptions are Sarmiento, the author of Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism and one of Argentina's presidents, and Pérez Rosales, the Chilean politician and traveller. Almost all the rest offer a Weltanschauung that looks at the hemisphere through a frighteningly small window or, worse, by means of a pseudo-multinational view that is less about genuine openness than it is about sheer posturing.
This problem is highlighted in the conclusion of Chicano Nations, entitled ‘…Walking in the Dark Forest of the Twenty-First Century’. In it López briefly discusses the work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his avant-garde theatre project, La Pocha Nostra. Bizarrely, Gómez-Peña remains a dandy in Chicano scholarship in spite of the fact that his innovative work dates back to the 1980s. In the last couple of decades, his oeuvre has been nothing if not trite and repetitive, portraying itself as ‘border-crossing’ when in fact its rhetoric reinforces narrow-minded conceptions of the boundary that separates Mexico from the United States. López, in her conclusion, falls prey to this lazy thinking by suggesting that each of us ‘determines the value of our own history’ and that ‘race, space, place and nation are all states of mind’.
Since their inception during the civil rights era, Chicano studies have been marred by small-mindedness and internal dissent. The drive to see beyond the local parameters is allowed expression only to be vilified as a form of treason. López is part of a generation of academics – one that includes Kirsten Silva Gruesz and her book Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton University Press, 2001) – which seeks a more cosmopolitan approach to Latino and in particular Mexican American literature. This is to be congratulated. The problem is her writing style: it obfuscates the English language through the use of jargon (‘national imaginary’, ‘the limits of the abstract’, ‘remapping Chicana/o time’), eclipsing rather than revealing meaning. The pomposity undermines the value of literary criticism, making it elitist, not to say solipsistic – that is, anything but global.
(A curious note: In Chicano Nations, López embraces the term ‘Chicana/o’. This adjective tacitly rejects the gender-specific nature of Romance languages, choosing instead to turn it into an ideological banner. However, the title happily omits the ‘a/o’, assuming, perhaps, that the concept of nation is masculine – which, ironically, it isn't in Spanish.)
