Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging

Latinidad

Transnational Cultures in the United States

This series publishes books that deepen and expand our knowledge and understanding of the various Latina/o populations in the United States in the context of their transnational relationships with cultures of the broader Americas. The focus is on the history and analysis of Latino cultural systems and practices in national and transnational spheres of influence from the nineteenth century to the present. The series is open to scholarship in political science, economics, anthropology, linguistics, history, cinema and television, literary and cultural studies, and popular culture and encourages interdisciplinary approaches, methods, and theories. The series grew out of discussions with faculty at the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University, where an interdisciplinary emphasis is being placed on transborder and transnational dynamics.

Carlos Velez-Ibañez, Series Editor, School of Transborder Studies

Rodolfo F. Acuña, In the Trenches of Academe: The Making of Chicana/o Studies

Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, Zapotecs on the Move: Cultural, Social, and Political Processes in Transnational Prespective

Marivel T. Danielson, Homecoming Queers: Desire and Difference in Chicana Latina Cultural Production

Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Lisa Jarvinen, The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking: Out from Hollywood’s Shadow, 1929–1939

Regina M. Marchi, Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon

Marci R. McMahon, Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art

A. Gabriel Melendez, Hidden Chicano Cinema: Film Dramas in the Borderlands

Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom

Luis F. B. Plascencia, Disenchanting Citizenship: Mexican Migrants and the Boundaries of Belonging

Maya Socolovsky, Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging

Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature

Explorations of Place and Belonging

Maya Socolovsky

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Socolovsky, Maya, 1973–

Troubling nationhood in U.S. Latina literature : explorations of place and belonging / Maya Socolovsky.

pages cm — (Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States) (American literatures initiative)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8135-6118-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8135-6117-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8135-6119-6 (e-book)

1. American literature—Hispanic American authors—History and criticism.2. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Hispanic American women—Intellectual life. 4. Hispanic Americans in literature. 5. Belonging (Social psychology) 6. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 7. National characteristics, Latin American, in literature. I. Title.

PS153.H56S63 2014

810.9’928708968—dc23

2012040277

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2013 by Maya Socolovsky

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

For my children Ilan, Amia, and Gali, and in memory of my father, Victor Socolovsky

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Troubling America(s)

1. Spaces of the Southwest: Dis-ease, Disease, and Healing in Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls and Face of an Angel

2 .Mestizaje in the Midwest: Remapping National Identity in the American Heartland in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo

3. Colonization and Transgression in Puerto Rican Spaces: Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Line of the Sun and The Meaning of Consuelo

4. Memoirs of Resistance: Colonialism and Transnationalism in Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, Almost a Woman, and The Turkish Lover

5. Tales of the Unexpected: Cuban American Narratives of Place and Body in Himilce Novas’s Princess Papaya

Postscript. The Illegal Aliens of American Letters: Troubling the Immigration Debate

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

Acknowledgments

This project has benefited from the contributions of many individuals as over the years I have worked in collegial environments that have sustained and nurtured my interests and my writing. In particular, I am grateful to Kate Flint for guiding me through my dissertation on U.S. Latina literature at Oxford University; to the late Gay Wilentz for her mentoring and support of my early scholarship; and to Marta Caminero-Santangelo, whose intellectually rigorous reading of the manuscript and astute feedback helped crystalize and enrich my ideas. She has been invaluable to this project’s fruition.

Earlier versions of some chapters of this book appeared originally in various journals. An earlier version of the chapter on Sapogonia appeared as "Borrowed Homes: Homesickness and Memory in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia" in Aztlán 24.2 (1999), pp. 73-94. An earlier version of the chapter on Face of an Angel appeared as "Narrative and Traumatic Memory in Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel" in MELUS 28.4 (2003), pp. 187-205. An earlier version of the chapter on The Line of the Sun appeared as "Telling Stories of Transgression in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Line of the Sun" in MELUS 34.1 (2009), pp. 95-116.

This work was supported, in part, by funds provided by the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Charlotte. At UNC Charlotte there are also numerous colleagues and friends both in the Department of English and the Latin American Studies Program who offered encouragement and support; I especially thank Tony Jackson, Jennifer Munroe, and Paula Connolly for their careful comments and advice on earlier versions of the manuscript. At Rutgers University Press, I have been fortunate to work with Katie Keeran, whose thorough reading and comments helped me vastly improve the project, and Lisa Boyajian, whose efficient and patient editorial assistance helped guide me smoothly through the publication process.

I am also grateful to my parents for exemplifying the drive and work ethic that it takes to complete this kind of project, and for embedding in me both their native and adopted tongues, Spanish and Hebrew. Most important, my gratitude goes to my partner, Gordon Hull, who read and critiqued substantial early versions of this work. His unwavering patience, generosity, and scholarly and domestic prowess know no bounds. Finally, this book is dedicated to my children, Ilan, Amia, and Gali, who bring me such joy each day, and to my late father, Victor Socolovsky, who experienced multiple diasporas in his lifetime, and must have also known something of what it means to be with, and without, a place of belonging.

Introduction: Troubling America(s)

In June 2009 the culinary magazine Gourmet ran a feature entitled Fiesta Forever. Shot in real time with real people—no casting, no script, no backup food—the spread photographed Cuban-born cook and restauranteur Maricel Presilla’s annual barbecue in Palisades Interstate Park, in Alpine, New Jersey. The event, which also promotes Presilla’s two restaurants, is a giant affair where as many as sixty people show up to cook, dance, and devour dozens of dishes, and honors Presilla, whose all-out Latin gathering of family and friends of all ages is the ultimate outdoor party, a perfect example of why we are all in love with grilling. The editors believe that this is a rare opportunity to shoot a grand version of el barbecue.¹ The twenty-four-page spread, offering vivid photographs and recipes with relatively little text, is presented to readers as a chance to spend a day in [Presilla’s] world, with her food. Readers are gently urged, You’re invited, too.² The message of the feature is clear: the magazine’s readers can experience Latin America vicariously by gazing at photographs, studying recipes, and reproducing them in their own homes. Presilla, in her own words, extends the invitation: I want to take everyone on a winding journey through Mexico, through Central and South America, to show them the artisanal cooking there, the cooking ordinary people do. The feature writers note that Presilla effortlessly pulls guests into her own orbit, which, on this day, closely resembles a Mexican market.³

Of course, this orbit unfolds right in the United States. Although readers are encouraged to feel that they are on a traveling vacation in Latin America, voyeuristically able to experience a foreign culture and its delicious cuisine with their Gourmet passport in hand, the event takes place within the national and political borders of the United States. This U.S. state park in New Jersey is transformed, for the duration of the fiesta, into Mexico. Two months after the issue ran, the magazine printed a perhaps predictable angry reader’s response to the Fiesta Forever feature. This reader, a self-described longtime regular subscriber, explains why she will be tossing out the June issue: Let’s see . . . what will I serve my guests from this issue? How about slab bacon adobo made with four pounds of bacon? I’ll serve it with refried black beans made with ten Mexican avocado leaves. I can hardly wait for the July issue. What will your staff dream up for a Fourth of July barbecue—maybe there will be some great Mongolian or Ethiopian recipes your readers can use as they plan celebrations for Independence Day. This is the United States of America, not Latin America.⁴ Other than the glaring xenophobia of this response, what is startling is the way that Latin America functions as a scapegoat for U.S. anxiety about its cultural and national identification. In other words, for this reader a porous border between the United States and Latin America opens the floodgates to other foreign influences. Such Latin Americanization of the United States represents the nation’s potential cultural dissolution: the sarcastic reference to Mongolian and Ethiopian influences signals the way in which the presence of Latin America in the United States spurs fears of other foreign invasions and potentially threatens the very roots of the nation’s foundation. We may begin by celebrating Latinos in the United States, cautions the reader, but before we know it we will be marking the United States’ most patriotic national holiday with radically foreign presences.

The reader recognizes that the magazine is not simply traveling southward, but that the expectation to reproduce such recipes in one’s own home in the United States also signals the geographical border’s movement northward. In such a way, Latin American cuisine enters, albeit by invitation, the domestic spaces of the United States, and threatens the dominant culture’s definition of the nation. By ingesting foreign food, the collective, cultural body of the nation could become unrecognizably othered. Significantly, the letter also shows the United States’ ambiguous and troubling relationship with Latin America. The reader, after all, takes pains to separate the United States from Latin America (This is the United States of America, not Latin America). In this context it would be hard to imagine a similar need to differentiate the United States from, say, Ethiopia or Mongolia; even though the reader has already cast them in our imaginations as potential cultural threats, their extreme otherness renders their presence as an almost unimaginable endpoint. But it does bear reiterating, for her, that Latin America, crouching on the edges of the United States, is a contiguous and familiar/foreign neighbor always-already within the United States itself.

Although this letter appears to be just a single xenophobic incident, the magazine’s decision to print it shows the extent to which conversations about nationhood are fraught and ongoing in popular culture. The letter is an example of a much broader and deep-seated anxiety about U.S. expressions of nationhood, which depend on historical and contemporary articulations of citizenship and belonging that forge connections between cultural, geographical, and political identities. Frequently, popular articulations of U.S. identity are based on certain notions of geopolitical nationhood stemming from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: manifest destiny, colonization, conquest, expansion, and the acquisition of land and property have in contemporary times allowed the nation to imagine itself as separate from, opposed to, and distinct from its Latin American neighbors. The late nineteenth-century rhetoric of nationalism within Latin America itself also historically supported this separation, exemplified by José Martí’s 1891 essay Nuestra América, where he emphasized transnational interactions rather than comparative histories of individual Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America, bringing them together through their desire to differentiate themselves from their powerful neighbor to the north.⁵ This geopolitical nationalism that understands Latin America as spatially and geographically separate from the United States, however, is also part of a broader cultural separation, both perceived and real, that turns Latinos/as within the United States, almost no matter their national origins, legal standing, or historical continuity in the country, into outsiders.

What happens, then, when U.S. Latino/a writers, who occupy, as Ilan Stavans notes, a liminal zone, a Latin America inside the United States, enter the conversation?⁶ How do they challenge that rhetoric of cultural unbelonging, and what impact might that have, for example, on current debates about immigration and citizenship, which are clearly about practices of exclusion, inclusion, and membership in the nation? In response to mainstream or popular understandings of U.S. nationhood, I argue in this book that Latino/a literary narratives imagine a collective geographical, political, and cultural presence, where Latin America becomes part of, not apart from, the political and national identity of the United States. As they imagine the United States as part of a broader Americas, the writings I explore clearly trouble imperialist notions of nationhood, in which political borders, and a long history of intervention and colonization beyond those borders, have come to shape and determine dominant culture’s writing and defining of all Latinos/as as other to the nation.

That is, I show how Latina writers contest the prevailing national imaginary, constructing major revisions of national identity that de-emphasize and even at times disregard geopolitical and cultural borders in order to reimagine the United States as part of the larger Americas. The texts are all concerned with the central idea of national interpenetration, reimagining a transnational space of the Americas that is born out of an oppressive history of U.S. domination. In other words, according to these works, the United States cannot be understood separately and apart from Latin America, suggesting that the rigid national boundaries of exclusion by which nations operate are arbitrary and fictional constructs. Of course, while all the texts under discussion strongly suggest the imbrication of the United States within Latin America, and Latin America within the United States, they do so in different ways and with different foci. Some explore the national and political border between the United States and Latin America, some present the damaging effects of neocolonialism and the possibilities of resistance to it outside the geographical borders of the United States, while others attend to the psychological trauma of having a marginalized second-class status within the United States.

One of the implications of this reexamination of U.S.–Latin American relations is to legitimate Latino belonging within the United States. In a sense the texts can be read as attempts to counter current anti-immigration rhetoric, which links illegal presence to larger cultural threats posed by the foreign culture of Latinos/as more generally. The Gourmet reader’s fears—that domestic and public spaces are becoming part of Latin America, that such a transformation of place will dismantle not only the nation’s cultural integrity but also its political integrity, and that such cultural invasions signal the loss of stable borders—demonstrate the various ways that Latino/a cultural presence and politics intersect in conversations about national identity. This introductory chapter outlines the salient features of the broader popular and political environment of anxiety out of which many Latino/a writers write, while the book’s postscript turns to recent political discourses in order to explore how they interpellate Latinos/as as criminal figures within the immigration debate. The intervening chapters do a material literary analysis of the literary texts in question, showing how they can be read as strategic interventions in these cultural moments. Such literary writing, which can of course be understood in light of the cultural context to which it responds, is in itself a practice of cultural resistance.

This study fills an important gap in our understanding of Latina literary production. While critics have generally agreed that U.S. Latina literature talks back to mainstream notions of U.S. and Latino/a identity, critical literature has not significantly explored how recent U.S. Latina literature’s talking back has engaged with questions of belonging to the nation. Insofar as these Latina narratives demonstrate their belonging by reimagining the U.S. national and political identity as part of a collective that includes Latin America, they also encourage a rethinking of the space and place of the United States. Here, and for much of this book, I understand place broadly as referring sometimes to physical location, land, and geography, and sometimes to cultural practices and experiences. This literal and figurative understanding of place does not imply that geographic place and cultural practice/experience are the same things. It does imply, however, that they always intersect in ways that are important to our understanding of both of them.

To understand place in both figurative and literal terms allows the categories to constantly invoke one another, so that an analysis of physical landscape, for example, never loses sight of the cultural and/or bodily experiences that occur in that landscape. Conversely, in a discussion of bodily trauma that reads the traumatized body as figuratively placed or displaced, the impact of physical landscape on that experience remains immediate. This kind of reading is particularly important because it allows us to understand the blending of the United States and Latin America as a process whereby geographical landscapes, cultural practices, and narrative spaces all become intersecting aspects of national identification and experience.⁷ Through this broader conceptualization of place, the relational, lived, and cultural experiences of belonging to a nation-space and its geographical terrain become important sites of resistance.⁸

As the remainder of this introduction demonstrates, such imbrication of U.S. national identity through tropes of spatiality is both prevalent in contemporary discussions of Latinos/as and has deep historical roots. In contemporary discussions the threat supposedly posed by an increasing Latino population is often figured in geographical terms, constructing national identity not just in terms of attitude or birthplace but also through the location and presence of cultural and physical differences. Many human and social geographers, then, are surprised that in the United States, place and space as hermeneutical tools for reading literature, particularly with regard to constructions of nation, have been generally understudied and undertheorized.⁹ Emphasizing the importance of reading place, Edward Soja reminds us that life-stories have a geography too; they have milieux, immediate locales, provocative emplacements which affect thought and action. The historical imagination is never completely spaceless.¹⁰

Critics of minority literature in particular have long understood how space and place are politically and ideologically determined as social constructs that must be examined for the hegemonic structures of power that often determine and shape them. Communities resisting dominant culture, of course, might use place or space for oppositional or radical practices. For example, critical attention to Chicana literature has focused on geographical displacement and recognized the possible intersections of spatial and social structures of power. Chicana writing, with its critical engagement in borderlands subjects, readily lends itself to a hermeneutics that theorizes space and interprets landscape as part of social and cultural discourse:¹¹ Mary Pat Brady proposes that the Chicana texts she examines are counter-cartographies or spatial narratives that challenge norms.¹² Looking at U.S. Latina literature under a panethnic grouping in the chapters that follow, I build on this critical interest in Chicano/a literary representations of space, asking what sorts of national narratives about land, the body, and storytelling are produced when cultural, political, and geographical experiences of place intersect, and exploring the ways that the literature creates, suggests, or reveals radical social changes.

The chapters thus show how particular examples of U.S. Latina literature, written between 1989 and 2004, respond to, counter, and trouble dominant culture’s delegitimation of Latino presence in the United States and then rethink contemporary national and literary U.S. identity on that basis.¹³ I examine a group of feminist texts that are representative of the U.S. Latina literary boom of the 1990s and 2000s, during which an emerging group of writers became prominent in mainstream and academic circles. My selection of women writers is intentional: as Tey Diana Rebolledo’s discussion of southwestern Chicana and Hispanic women writers notes, the physical landscape of that region is inseparable from the women’s sense of survival and identity.¹⁴ Building on this analysis, I understand contemporary Latina writers to be continuing the practice of early Hispanic women writers, who talked back—through cultural descriptions—to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo writers, travelers, and inhabitants who regarded the Southwest as virgin territory. Women, who historically inhabited interior domestic spaces as well as the exterior land, were perhaps particularly well positioned to imagine place—and understand their survival on it—as an infusion of cultural practice and physical geography. Thus I read, in contemporary Latina literature, experiences of the body, of trauma, and of storytelling—as experiences of and in place, where acts of cultural and physical belonging to the nation become inseparable and collective.

This notion that U.S. Latina literature can impact our definition of the nation, and undermine popular conceptions of Latinos/as by reimagining the United States as part of the Americas, builds on critical work on U.S. Latino/a literature that has long engaged with questions of American national identity. Whether writing on Mexican American, U.S. Puerto Rican, or Cuban American literature, critics agree that the literature counters and challenges mainstream culture in various ways, and that to this end, it has become a vital component of that culture. In addition, the idea that a nation is, to an extent, an imaginary construct and cultural fiction, and that its literature—any of its literature—can thus play a role in the construction of nation, is widely recognized in critical circles.¹⁵ Juan Flores points out that it is becoming clear that any discussion of an ‘American community’ must be inclusive of Latinos and cognizant about the existence of a ‘Latino community’ intrinsic to historical discourses about U.S. culture,¹⁶ while José David Saldívar, exploring the contact zones of the U.S.-Mexico border, problematizes the notion that the nation is naturally there and thus questions how hybrid U.S.-Mexican borderland subjects disrupt the nation.¹⁷ As I illustrate in more detail in the next section, nations—in particular, the United States—frequently define themselves through imagined others, and Mexican American and other Latino communities, as longtime definitional others to the United States, in turn produce texts that challenge the Anglo world through their rethinking of place, belonging, and imaginative geography.¹⁸ There is no doubt, then, that U.S. Latino/a literature, no matter its national origins, radically transforms the constitutive fabric of the United States so that the boundaries and borders of the United States become stretched and Latinized.¹⁹ As Ramón de la Campa puts it, it is widely known that the nation has always been an arresting point for American Latinos.²⁰

Thus the ways in which all Latinas posit new versions of cultural and political identity in order to assert their belonging to the nation is, I argue, a central feature of the literature I explore in this book. The significance of these texts’ re-placing of Latinos/as as members of the U.S. nation should be eminently clear: when the history of the Americas becomes, as it does in the narratives, part of the history of the United States, and when the geography of those histories—the location in which they occur—becomes foregrounded, the United States’ demarcation of foreign (illegitimate) and native (legitimate) presence in the nation is undermined. The United States’ troubled relationship with Latin America becomes, in these literary texts, constitutive of the entire hemisphere’s transnational and collective identity.

Critical Discourses of National Unbelonging

In discussing U.S. Latino/a identity we need not only to differentiate between the various origin-groups (Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban) but also to consider the discourses that, in naming Latino communities in the United States, have to an extent homogenized them. Critics have debated extensively on the appropriateness (or not) of the terms Latino and Hispanic to convey the various Spanish-speaking national groups resident in the United States. Suzanne Oboler, for example, considers the emergence and implications of the term Hispanic in the context of the United States, noting that despite the historical differences between each national-origin group, their lives are affected directly or otherwise by the use of the term Hispanic to characterize them in the United States.²¹ Indeed, in using the label U.S. Latina myself I am aware that I might appear to be asserting a panethnicism that collapses distinct national identities. The terms Latino and Latina connote an element of transnationalism as they assimilate members of various Latin American subgroups living in the United States into an imagined, transnational cultural and communal formation.²²

Ultimately, though, I agree with Stavans’s preference for the term Latino because it has not only . . . proven to be the most neutral and the least exclusive term [as compared to ‘Hispanic,’ ‘Hispano,’ ‘iberoamericano,’ ‘Latin,’ and ‘Spanish-speaking’]; it is also favored by Latinos.²³ A further advantage of the nationality-derived term Latino/a or U.S. Latino/a becomes clear in David Hayes-Bautista and Jorge Chapa’s description: a geographically derived national origin group, that has been constantly and consistently viewed and treated as a racial group, in both individual and institutional interaction while in the United States.²⁴ For my purposes here, this understanding of the term Latino/a is particularly appropriate not only because of its attention to geographical origins but also because of its constructedness by the outside as a racial and national other in the United States. One certainty emerges from discussions: the terms, whether we use Latin, Latino, or Hispanic, are made in the United States by a combination of dominant culture’s acts of interpellation and acquiescence from the group in question, as part of the nation’s continually evolving identity negotiation.²⁵

Because of the homogeneity invoked by these terms, it is especially important to recognize the distinctions between nation-groups. Individual and group experiences among Latinos/as obviously vary not just because of national origin and history but also because of a variety of other factors, including (but not limited to) the time of and reason for migration to the United States (if indeed there was a migration), the U.S. authorities’ and public’s reception of the group, and the group’s legal standing in the United States. In fact, as Oboler has noted, some scholars suggest that together with social and cultural differences, the various national groups’ respective citizenship status also differentially affects local and national concerns and experiences. Thus the political issues currently raised by the issue of immigration . . . take on a different institutional connotation for Mexican immigrants than they might for Cuban exiles and refugees.²⁶

Popular culture obviously focuses a great deal on undocumented immigration from Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico geographical border, and the presence of Mexicans both at that border and across the entire United States. De Genova points out that migrant illegality itself has become a spatialized social condition that is inseparable from the particular ways that Mexican migrants are likewise ‘racialized’ as ‘illegal aliens’—as invasive violators of the law, incorrigible ‘foreigners’ subverting the integrity of ‘the nation.’²⁷ If dominant anti-immigrant discourses about Mexican immigration frequently assume a specific racial character,²⁸ then the border, ostensibly the site at which illegality is formed, becomes the origin of this racialization, and the stage upon which limited rights to full U.S. citizenship become expressed.²⁹ In addition, the border functions as a site of exceptionality, a place where illegal bodies can fall victim to the emergency provision that empowers the state to act outside the constraints of law, permitting it to adopt extreme measures in its defense, including violence against its own citizens.³⁰ And according to Gilberto Rosas, the borderlands’ condition of vigilantism, illegality, and exceptionalism is also thickening, no longer remaining geographically fixed in the southwestern United States but spreading beyond it in the form of nationwide racial profiling; as he points out, Heightened anxieties about policing the territorial border often translate into heightened anxieties concerning those who resemble ‘immigrants’ within the nation-state.³¹ Racial profiling and racialized citizenship extend figuratively beyond the geographical borderlands, thus informally governing all those who appear potentially illegal.³²

As a result of this racialization of undocumented status, Mexican Americans who are U.S. citizens (through birth or naturalization) or legally resident in the United States can also experience some of the stigma attributed to illegal immigrants. Their national identity is thus significantly determined by a sense of unbelonging, an unbelonging that operates both at the border and throughout the geographical space of the country. Leo Chávez argues persuasively that U.S. Mexican citizens have been represented as the quintessential ‘illegal aliens,’ and that their social identity has been plagued by the mark of illegality, which often renders them, in public discourse, into criminals and thus illegitimate members of society undeserving of social benefits, including citizenship.³³ Particularly important for my discussions on Mexican American literature in chapters 2 and 3, Chávez also interprets this illegitimacy as a spatialized displacement, noting that as Mexicans are rendered out of place, they are often thereby constructed in popular culture as a threat to national identity.

This process dates at least back to the nineteenth century: after the United States’ 1848 colonization of northern Mexico, approximately 80,000–100,000 Mexican nationals were deprived of their Mexican nationality and became U.S. subjects, if not citizens.³⁴ Almost immediately these new U.S. subjects were racialized as nonwhite, and that, together with the particular nature of Mexican migrant patterns into the United States, established a precedent for recognizing all Mexicans in the United States as nonwhite, secondary alien-citizens.³⁵ The development of immigration control laws meant that Mexicans entering into the United States could be illegal as well; in fact, the idea of illegal Mexicans as criminals has been pervasive since the 1920s. Like current discourse, the 1970s also imagined