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Abstract
Inspired by the ‘feminist geniuses’ of the methodology and critical inquiry of Black radical traditions traced in the genealogy of Cedric Robinson's scholarship, and invoking a decolonial analysis through writings of radical Chicana/Mexicana intellectuals, this essay honors the life, struggles and radical imaginations of Chicana feminist writer, political theorist and organizer Magdalena Mora (1952–1981). Reading regional US 19th century histories - in the south and the southwest next to each other, and juxtaposing these with late 20th century social movement activity in the US southwest, traces trajectories of the dreams of dignity and freedom we carry in our hearts to make real in our lives.
Notes
1. I write as a Chicano historian involved in social movements in Arizona, recovering and healing from the hauntings of my own living patriarchal ghosts, and working with other self-identified cisgendered men to engage our accumulated privileges and traumas, hauntings, fears and potentialities.
2. Blackwell cites Chabram-Denersian (Citation1993) for this insight.
3. In footnote 17, Quan cites ‘Conversations with Avery F. Gordon (July 2000)’.
4. I use the term USian inspired by Asma Barlas.
5. This point is made by legal precedent from 1790 forward to the Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Case; also see Hartman (1997) and Sexton (Citation2011), ‘The politics in this line [making and umpaking people] is often communicated as a chiasmus about persons made into slaves and slaves made into persons, a trope whose limitation lies in the fact that it takes for granted a term (“person”) that is unevenly intelligible in the natural rights lineage that determines what blackness means. By returning to that lineage, and in particular to the symbolic scene where the enemy combatant is made into the slave, [quoting Wagner 2009: 1–2, emphasis added by Sexton]. “I believe that it is possible to think harder and better about the predicament of the ex-slave, without recourse to the consolation of transcendence”’. To be clear, this paper sits between the ontological predicament of the ex-slave and the predicament of both indigenous and colonized southwestern USA to complicate mestzaje and Black ontology and the argument that Chicanas/Chicanos specifically are a structurally positioned ‘junior partner’ to empire (Wilderson, 2010). But that is another paper.
6. New York Times, 1922, quoted in Orozco (Citation2009) who locates the quote in Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900–1940, (Greenwood Press, 1976), 143.
7. The point is not simply about numbers, but the function of these lynching with regard to the terms of order governing race, gender, sexual, national relations along the US–Mexico border, but most specifically the terms of human dignity.
8. Hollywood did not conflate all people of Mexican national background as the same, recognizing and marking racial differences in the roles offered to the differently hued: lighter skinned Mexicans ‘were accorded honorary white identities’ (Robinson, 2009, p. 201).
9. ‘Neither Black, nor White, nor Mexican were fixed racial identities outside of the frames of mass, that is manufactured culture… At the onset of mass movie production, apartheid was the structural instrument of American capital, and American filmmakers supplied a galaxy of imagery and story lines which naturalized and popularized white hegemony…. Class and gender were contrived to privilege whiteness and demote the Others to the margins of human destiny’ (pp. 201–202).
10. For Rasquachismo, ‘the irreverent and spontaneous are employed to make the most from the least’, writes Mesa-Bains (Citation1996) as ‘… a combination of resistant and resilient attitudes devised to allow the Chicano to survive and persevere with a sense of dignity’, an (Ybarra-Frausto, Citation2011) ‘understanding of a particular aesthetic code of any particular community […that] comes out of the experience of living in that community…you make due with what you have’.
11. Other original founders included Francisco Amaro, María Cedillos, Juan Mariscal and Rafail Zacarías. Also see Santamaría Gómez (Citation1988), Chávez (Citation2002), and on mutualistas, Zamora (Citation1993).
12. Only first names are given in the original paper.
13. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), otherwise known as the Simpson (Republican senator from Wyoming)-Mazzoli Act (Democrat from Kentucky), was an important link in a long chain of labor and foreign policies masking as immigration laws. Specifically, we can trace the origins of IRCA to the reaction in the early 1970s to the various civil rights legislations and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that abolished the eugenicist-based National Origins Quota system institutionalized in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. See Ngai (Citation2005).
14. The Bracero Program was a series of binational labor agreements between the USA and Mexico, beginning during WWII and lasting more than two decades. The program lasted from 1942 to 1964; it encouraged and facilitated migration from Mexico, while limiting the rights of workers and sanctioning their exploitation by agribusiness. See Lytle-Hernandez (Citation2010) and Cohen (Citation2001).
15. Proposition 14 was a statewide initiative put forth by the UFW to protect the California's landmark 1975 farm labor law from being weakened by agribusiness; the University of California Board of Regents v. Bakke (affirmative action) decision challenged the use of race as a variable in affirmative action programs; and the Eilberg law, signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 (just one of many proposals that would be woven together as Plan Carter), had provisions that would divide families, set limits on migration specifically from Mexico and undermine workers' power. See Gutierrez (1995, Ch. 6).
16. Linking the infiltration and disruptions of social movements by the CIA, in collusion with labor union leadership, government bureaucrats and the military in Latin American to disruptions of movements in the USA, must be understood in the context of CASA being the target of infiltration and harassment by the FBI, and the larger FBI COINTELPRO operations that were under investigation at the time.
17. Carlos Vazquez, director of El Foro Del Pueblo, provided the opening and closing words; Nora Sierra, editor of Mazorca, offered a biographical sketch followed by Rob Brown singing ‘Somos’, and a presentation of the film ‘The Chicano: A Working People’ by director Richard Soto. The participants not only represented a broad base of the radical left in Los Angeles, but the very organization of the program reflected the deep cultural roots of ritual and testimonio as central to remembering and honoring the life of our friends and comrades in struggle. Testimonios included Rosa Moreno from the Brigada Antonio Maceo, a group of young Cuban-Americans that had, since 1977, organized trips to Cuba to learn first hand about the revolution; Jose Jacques Medina, former political activist in 1968 in Mexico targeted by the US authorities for deportation, represented the IBGW; UCLA Chicano historian Juan Gómez-Quiñones; Chole Alatorre from Hermandad Mexicana; and Cal State Northridge Chicano Studies professor Rodolfo Acuña shared their thoughts and memories. Thereafter, Chuy Perez remembered Mora through music, leading a chorus of ‘Hasta La Patagonia’. Lucha Corpi then read her ‘Poemas para Magdalena’. Bert Corona (also represented Hermandad Mexicana) and Carlos Vasquez concluded the evening.
† The article title is from a poem by Lucha Corpi dedicated to Mora. Lucha Corpi, Catherine Rodríguez Nieto (translator) Palabras de Mediodia/ Noon Words Lucha Corpi (Author) > Visit Amazon's Lucha Corpi Page Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author Are you an author? Learn about Author Central (Arte Público Press, 2001). That said, ‘I have translated to the English two changes. The author extends intellectual gratitude to the editors for encouraging this experimental essay, and to Lucha Corpi for encouraging words and insights. Dedicated to the living memory of Magdalena Mora’.