Edward Vidaurre and the Politics of the Cholo Strut

ABSTRACT

I chart paths for navigating the contemporary political moment via the work of the working-class barrio poet Edward Vidaurre. The take-away from his work is a form of confrontational poetic activism or what I call the politics of the cholo strut. Vidaurre creates a counterculture via poetry to resist white-racist-capitalist propaganda and ideology. The cholo strut is not a criminal act but flags defiant subjectivity and points to an emancipatory politics that enacts militancy and yearning for utopia. Via the politics of the cholo strut, I seek to explode the limits of mainstream political science research on Chicanx politics in terms of whose voices are included and what counts as legitimate knowledge. Vidaurre’s work, I argue, opens new vectors for radical political reflection via code-switching and bridging while also staring into the abyss via the poetry of poverty.

Acknowledgments

For comments on a previous draft I thank Clyde Barrow, Matt Gonzalez, Marcelo Hoffman, Muriel Bruttin, and Dalaina Heiberg. I also thank the participants on the “Representation and Recognition” panel at the 2020 Western Political Science Association annual meeting. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ For research on the rise of Donald Trump, neoliberal hegemony and what to do about it see Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Alain Badiou, Trump (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019); William E. Connolly, Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Nancy Fraser, The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond (New York: Verso, 2019); William W. Sokoloff, Confrontational Citizenship: Reflections on Hatred, Rage, Revolution and Revolt (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017).

² See Romand Coles, Visionary Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). See also Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

³ According to James Diego Vigil, “a cholo is not always a gang member” but a “gang member is always a cholo.” See James Diego Vigil, “Cholo! The Migratory Origins of Chicano Gangs in Los Angeles,” in Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, ed. Jennifer M. Hazen and Dennis Rodgers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 57.

⁴ For Eric Olin Wright, the “ideal of ‘real utopias’ embraces the tension between dreams and practice.” He continues: “a vital belief in a utopian ideal may be necessary to motivate people to set off on the journey from the status quo in the first place.” See Eric Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (New York: Verso, 2010), 6. For the concept of everyday resistance, see Bradley J. Macdonald’s “Border Signs: Graffiti, Contested Identities, and Everyday Resistance in Los Angeles,” in The U.S. Mexico Border: Transcending Divisions, Contesting Identities, ed. David Spener and Kathleen Staudt (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998). For the need for a utopian turn in political theorizing, see also Sokoloff, Confrontational Citizenship.

⁵ There are no references to cholo in the following texts as they exceed the grid of intelligibility of mainstream political science. See Rodney E. Hero, Latinos and the U.S. Political System: Two-Tiered Pluralism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). See also Ronald Schmidt et. al., Newcomers, Outsiders & Insiders: Immigrants and American Racial Politics in the Early Twenty-first Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).

⁶ Cholo subculture shares some similarities with other youth subcultures in Southern California including punk rockers, skate boarders and surfers.

⁷ For more on the dynamics and complications of cholo identity as performance of outsider status see Victor M. Rios and Patrick Lopez-Aguado, “’Pelones y Matones’: Chicano Cholos Perform for a Punitive Audience,” in Performing the U.S. Latina and Latino Borderlands, ed. Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter J. García (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). For Rios and Lopez-Aguado, “cholo style is intentionally oppositional to the mainstream,” 388. Cholos take on “criminalized personas as a form of resistant empowerment, transforming themselves into something local elites see as dangerous as opposed to exploitable,” 388. Youths “adopting cholo styles are commonly registered in gang databases used to determine eligibility for gang enhancements and injunctions that mandate prison time,” 397.

⁸ See https://www.etymonline.com/word/cholo (accessed December 25, 2020).

⁹ I thank an anonymous reader of this article for this point.

¹⁰ See Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Sydney: Wentworth Press, 2019).

¹¹ See Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or The Whale (New York: Macmillan Press, 2016).

¹² See Owen Hanson, https://foothilldragonpress.org/270019/intersections/from-pachuco-to-cholo-embracing-the-badge-of-delinquent honor (accessed December 25, 2020).

¹³ Recall the Juan Martinez (e.g., Down AKA Kilo) 2007 pop culture song “Lean Like a Cholo” in the album “Definition of an Ese.” For the criminalization and marginalization of cholo youth see Victor M. Rios, Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

¹⁴ The absence of the cholo from Latinx research in the discipline of political science could be explained by the view that the cholo is disengaged from the standard forms of political participation.

¹⁵ Thank you, Alyssa Serna.

¹⁶ See Rodolfo F. Acuňa, Anything but Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1996), x.

¹⁷ For Raúl Homero Villa, police harassment was a given in the barrio. He notes that a Chicanx boy was arrested forty-six times and no charges were ever made against him. See Raúl Homero Villa, Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000), 70.

¹⁸ See Rodolfo Rosales, The Illusion of Inclusion: The Untold Political Story of San Antonio (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000), 29.

¹⁹ See Rodolfo F. Acuňa, Occupied America: The Chicanos Struggle for Liberation, (New York: Harper Collins, 1972), 196.

²⁰ Edward Vidaurre, I Took my Barrio on Road Trip (McAllen, TX: Flower Song Books, 2018) (hereafter B); Chicano Blood Transfusion (Donna, TX: Flower Song Books, 2016) (hereafter CB); Insomnia (McAllen, TX: El Zarape Press, 2014) (hereafter I); Beautiful Scars (McAllen, TX: El Zarape Press, 2018) (hereafter BS).

²¹ On these and related themes see José David Saldívar, “Towards a Chicano Poetics: The Making of the Chicano Subject, 1969–1982,” Confluencia 1, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 10–17. See also Adolfo Ortega, “Of Social Politics and Poetry: A Chicano Perspective,” Latin America Literary Review (Spring 1977): 32–41. See, finally, Patricia Sánchez-Flavian, “Language and Politicized Spaces in U.S. Latino Prison Poetry, 1970–1990,” Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe 27, no. 2 (May-August 2003): 114–124.

²² Individuals who look “Mexican” are interpellated as criminals, drug dealers and rapists. On Chicanx identity as something born in rebellions, strikes, riots and not based on blood and an essence see Jean-Luc Nancy, “Beheaded Sun (Soleil cou coupé),” trans. Bruce Gold and Brian Holmes, Qui Parle 3, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 41–53.

²³ For an example of a middle-class bias, see Rodolfo Rosales, The Illusion of Inclusion: The Untold Story of San Antonio (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000).

²⁴ Cy Twombly words as cited in Kate Nesin, Cy Twombly’s Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 89.

²⁵ See The New Yorker, January 7, 2008.

²⁶ See Plato’s Republic, Book X, trans. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 1992). See also Timothy W. Burns, “Philosophy and Poetry: A New Look at an Old Quarrel,” American Political Science Review (May 2015): 326–338.

²⁷ I located seven articles with poet or poetry in the title in APSR.

²⁸ Data on “Politics, Literature and Film” and “Foundations of Political Theory” drawn from https://connect.apsanet.org/groups/type/sections/on August 23, 2020. In Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy, I found approximately ten articles on Walt Whitman.

²⁹ For Rodney Hero, this is an issue that has plagued Latinx politics for decades. For Hero, “cultural pride or cultural nationalism has not been sufficiently powerful to provide a clear-cut, action-oriented political program.” See Rodney Hero, Latinos and the U.S. Political System: Two-Tiered Pluralism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 7–8.

³⁰ For some related points on language, building community and rebellion see Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). For more on creativity in inhospitable conditions, see Denise M. Sandoval, “The Politics of Low and Slow/Bajito y Sauvicito: Black and Chicano Lowriders in Los Angeles, from the 1960s to the 1970s,” in Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition, ed. Josh Kun and Laura Pulido (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 186. Hydraulic switches to raise and lower the car emerged to prevent police harassment. California’s vehicle code stipulated that no part of a car can be lower than the bottom portion of a wheel rim. The switch allowed the lowrider to be raised when police appeared than lowered when the police were gone.

³¹ For these and related themes see Marlene K. Sokolon, “The Illiad: A Song of Political Protest,” New Political Science 30, no. 1 (March 2008).

³² For a discussion of “perilous masculinity” as it applies to cholo culture, see Victor M. Rios and Patrick Lopez-Aguado, “’Pelones y Matones’: Chicano Cholos Perform for a Punitive Audience,” in Performing the U.S. Latina and Latino Borderlands, ed. Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter J. García (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2012), 395–6.

³³ For Victor Davis Hanson, Mexicans in California must either completely assimilate and liquify in the melting pot or they will remain in separatist tribes. See Victor Davis Hanson, Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (New York: Encounter Books, 2007). For insightful comments on this issue see Cristina Beltrán, “Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies and the Challenge of Mestizaje,” Political Research Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2004): 597–607. For a classic statement on Chicano politics see José Angel Gutiérrez, The Making of a Chicano Militant: Lessons from Cristal (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).

³⁴ For the value added by a commitment to utopia see Jill Dolan, “Performance, Utopia and the ‘Utopian Performative,’” Theater Journal 53 (2001): 455–479. See also Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). See, finally, Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces, 2013.

³⁵ See Guillermo Gómez-Peňa, Warrior for Gringostroika: Essays, Performance Texts and Poetry (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 1993), 43.

³⁶ See Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, “I am Joaquin/Yo Soy Joaquin” (New York: Bantam, 1972). See also Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, ed. Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016). See Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

³⁷ For these and related themes, see Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, Starving for Justice: Hunger Strikes, Spectacular Speech, and the Struggle for Dignity, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017). See also Rodney Hero, Latinos and the U.S. Political System (1992).

³⁸ For Acuňa, “the arts unify a people,” in Anything but Mexican, 1996, 14.

³⁹ See Stephanie Sauer, The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016). See also Raúl Homero Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000), 184–186.

⁴⁰ See Homero Villa, 2000, 185. See, finally, Ruben C. Cordova, Con Safo: The Chicano Art Group and the Politics of South Texas (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2009).

⁴¹ On his acts of vandalism, womanizing, addiction to spectacles and other transgressions see St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Sheed, (Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 2011). See also François Villon, The Testament, trans. Mortimer (Richmond, UK: Alma Classics, 2013).

⁴² See Chon A. Noriega, Shot in America: Television, the State and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

⁴³ See Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, “Poetry is not a Luxury” (New York: Crossing Press, 1984), 37. See also Sonia V. González and Lorna Dee Cervantes, “Poetry Saved my Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes,” MELUS 32, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 163–180. See, finally, Adrienne Rich, Poetry and Commitment: An Essay (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007).

⁴⁴ This concert took place at Payne Arena in Hidalgo Texas on November 2, 2019. There were also some troubling aspects including the sexual objectification of women on stage, degrading references to “whores” and other insults mouthed by Snoop Dogg and directed at “ugly” and “fat chicks” in the audience.

⁴⁵ Major U.S. multinational corporations (e.g., Wal Mart) make billions in profits and depend on cheap labor and subsidize slave wages for their employees with instructions for them about how to garner government assistance. Wal Mart gets a free ride and reaps billions in profits at taxpayer expense. See https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-top-employers-of-medicaid-and-food-stamp-beneficiaries.html (accessed December 28, 2020).

⁴⁶ For some interesting connections with these ideas and the power of relation see Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 1997.

⁴⁷ See Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 13.

⁴⁸ See Guilleremo Gómez-Peňa, Warrior for Gringostoika, 1993, 51.

⁴⁹ See Victor M. Rios on the dilemmas pertaining to cholo masculinity in Human Targets, 2017.

⁵⁰ For the complete ruling on the case, see https://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/15/15-9504.pdf (accessed December 7, 2020).

⁵¹ See U.S. Senate Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearing as documented in Matt Flegenheimer et. al., “Seven Highlights of the Gorsuch Confirmation Hearing,” The New York Times, March 21, 2017.

⁵² See Stephanie Kirschgaessner and Jessica Glenza, “’No Accident’ Brett Kavanaugh’s Female Law Clerks ‘Looked like Models,’ Yale Professor told Students,” The Guardian, September 20, 2018.

⁵³ Kavanaugh also apologized to Senator Klobuchar during the hearing. See https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/09/28/brett-kavanaugh-amy-klobuchar-drinking-apology-tsr-bts-vpx.cnn.

⁵⁴ For the irreverent politics of urine as it pertains to the cynics, see Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II; Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, ed. Gros et. al. (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 262.

⁵⁵ For urine defined see https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=5915.

⁵⁶ See Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

⁵⁷ The reader may recall another deployment of urine in the photograph “Piss Christ” by Andres Serrano, and the National Endowment for the Arts controversy pertaining to it. See http://100photos.time.com/photos/andres-serrano-piss-christ.

⁵⁸ San Bene is an abbreviation for the city of San Benito, Texas on the U.S. side of the borderlands with Mexico.

⁵⁹ This statement occurred at a Presidential press conference pertaining to the corona virus pandemic. See Matt Perez, “Trump Rages Over a Simple Question: ‘I’d Say that you are a Terrible Reporter’” in Forbes, March 20, 2020.

⁶⁰ For some innovative ideas on this see William E. Connolly, Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy Under Trumpism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

⁶¹ A prank inflated numbers of possible attendees at Trump rally. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-tulsa.html (accessed December 26, 2020).

⁶² For how this point pertains to radical politics via the investigation, see Marcelo Hoffman, Militant Acts: The Role of Investigations in Radical Political Struggle (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019).

⁶³ Perhaps not all objects of disgust are meant to be recuperated (e.g., the police and la migra). I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

⁶⁴ It is important to acknowledge power relations in some of these right-wing contexts. Vidaurre teaches me that remaining open to transformation is also important and that the opposition between resistance or submission limits the full range of political strategies. I thank the anonymous reader for suggesting this point.

⁶⁵ For the importance of learning in new and unpredictable ways see Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001).

⁶⁶ See William W. Sokoloff, Political Science Pedagogy: A Critical, Radical and Utopian Perspective (Cham: Switzerland: Palgrave, 2020).

⁶⁷ Health care workers are denied breaks for lunch and not paid for overtime. Hospitals understaff departments to maximize profit. See https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/legal-regulatory-issues/nurse-alleges-new-york-hospital-denied-breaks-overtime-pay.html. See also https://www.quality-patient-care.org/by-the-numbers-nurses-are-being-understaffed-by-hospitals/.

⁶⁸ All Republicans oppose raising the minimum wage. See https://www.vox.com/2019/8/16/20807610/raise-the-wage-act-15-minimum-wage-bill.

⁶⁹ Ellen Degeneres sat next to George W Bush at a National Football League game and was criticized for it. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/08/ellen-degeneres-defends-watching-football-with-president-george-w-bush/(accessed September 5, 2020). Even though I applaud the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi who threw both of his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press conference, this confrontational approach might not always be the best option. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/12/14/years-ago-an-iraqi-journalist-threw-his-shoes-george-w-bush-instantly-became-cult-figure/(accessed September 5, 2020).

⁷⁰ See Sokoloff, Political Science Pedagogy, 2020.

⁷¹ See Donald J. Trump, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (New York: Threshold Editions, 2015).

⁷² See Cory Wimberly, “Trump, Propaganda and the Politics of Ressentiment,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 1 (2018): 179–199.

⁷³ Trump, Crippled America, 2015, 128.

⁷⁴ Trump, Crippled America, 2015, 5.

⁷⁵ See https://www.businessinsider.com/woman-who-complimented-trumps-smile-is-actually-leaning-toward-biden-2020-10 (accessed on December 7, 2020).

⁷⁶ Connolly, Aspirational Fascism, 2017, xvii.

⁷⁷ Gómez-Peňa, 1993, 177.

⁷⁸ Nina Simone, “Funkier than a Mosquito’s Tweeter.” See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GsCHQkulr4. Accessed on August 22, 2020.

⁷⁹ Vidaurre, Beautiful Scars, 38.

⁸⁰ Neoliberal resilience flags toughness but this only applies to the precariat. Neoliberal elites ask to be bailed out with taxpayer money (e.g., corporate welfare) during economic downturns. They also seek government protection from lawsuits. See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-liability/corporate-america-seeks-legal-protection-for-when-coronavirus-lockdowns-lift-idUSKCN223179. In contrast to the ideology of neoliberal resilience, Vidaurre’s resilience combines anarchic irreverence, defiant insubordination and truth telling.

⁸¹ See Samuel P. Huntington, Who are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005). Huntington advances the thesis that Mexican immigrants are unassimilable. In contrast to blacks/browns, whites are innocent, work hard and virtuous. For these and related themes see Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 30.

⁸² For the blurring of the boundary between the police and the military see Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone, Books, 2017), 25. See also Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).

⁸³ See Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the US Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 62.

⁸⁴ See Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 57.

⁸⁵ See https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/01/12/577673191/trump-wishes-we-had-more-immigrants-from-norway-turns-out-we-once-did. See also https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations-n836946.

⁸⁶ I am thinking of racial profiling, the normalization of excessive force and in some cases torture. See https://www.aclu.org/issues/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border-patrol-abuses.

⁸⁷ See “The Creeping Criminalization of Humanitarian Aid,” The New Humanitarian, June 7, 2019.

⁸⁸ See Michel Foucault, “The Birth of Biopolitics” in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997).

⁸⁹ See https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/13/17971702/melania-trump-interview-abcnews-i-dont-really-care-do-u-jacket.

⁹⁰ I thank the anonymous reader for suggesting this point.

⁹¹ See Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (New York: Penguin, 2018).

⁹² Chua, Political Tribes, 2018, 8–9, 7, and 209.

⁹³ See Ian Haney López, White by Law, 139. Georgia imposed the death penalty on blacks who murdered whites at twenty-two times the rate for black who killed blacks. For these and related themes see also Ian F. Haney López, “Is the ‘Post’ in Post Racial the ‘Blind’ in Color Blind?” Cardozo Law Review 32 (2011): 815.

⁹⁴ See Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011).

⁹⁵ See Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012). See also https://www.childrensdefense.org/policy/resources/soac-2020-income-inequality/(accessed on September 5, 2020).

⁹⁶ For the thematic of possibility and impossibility, see Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

⁹⁷ For a creative deployment of the imagery of tattoos and a touching book about compassion see Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (New York: Free Press, 2010).