Cholos, Chúntaros, and the ‘Criminal’ Abandonments of the New Frontier

Abstract

By advancing what I am calling the new frontier of the United States and Mexico as central in the formation of subjectivities, this article foregrounds two contemporary figures: ‘cholos’ and the ‘chúntaros.’ The former is how a particular group of youths, who called themselves Barrio Libre or the Free ’Hood, self-identified and the term is often common shorthand for ‘gang’ in much of the Americas. The term speaks to the premiere figure of an anxiety about unchecked, undocumented, and criminalized racial and cultural flows in the Americas. The cholos of Barrio Libre preyed on ‘chúntaros,’ the provincial ‘hick’ of an increasingly urbanizing, migrating Mexico. ‘Chúntaros’ has also become a term for the alien bodies that pass through daily projects of state sovereignty at the margins of two states, specifically United States and Mexican intensifying militarized policings and their dramatic abandonments. In this article, I situate these practices within the history of largely unacknowledged racisms in Mexico, tied to projects of mestizaje.

Keywords:

• Mexico
• state
• race
• frontier
• criminality

While I am, of course, solely responsible for any errors or misinterpretations, I greatly appreciate the feedback and support of Ramón Gutierrez, Korinta Maldonado, Jonathan Hill, the anonymous reviewers of an early draft of this article, the participants at the conference “New Frontiers of Race,” and the editorial staff at Identities.

Notes

1. To historicize such practices of the Mexican state, see Lytle Hernández (2006).

2. The cholos of Central and North America should not be confused with those of South America (see Weismantel 2001).

3. Gamio was a student of Franz Boas but did not share his views on race. Boas' well-known antiracist views, his early support of the NAACP, and his experiences of anti-Semitism are well documented (Stocking 1982). Boas's position was steeped in German counter-Enlightenment thought and drew upon a rigorous historicity that refigures the question of Otherness in terms of temporal, rather than cultural, alterity. His emphasis on environmental factors questioned the principles of racial hierarchy and white supremacy rooted in the Lamarckian intellectual climate at the turn of the century (Bunzl 2004; Gamio 1916; Stocking 1982 (1968)).

4. Such close collaborations of anthropology with projects of state rule provoked a strong response among later generations of Mexican anthropologists (Gonzalez 2004; Warman 1970).

5. Most terms from Latin America that refer to United States Latinos, such as “gusanos” or “pochos,” rely upon the metonymy of the “rotted body.” My thanks to Rolando Romero for pointing this out and for his help with the etymology of this chúntaro.