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In the beginning and unto the end was and is the lung: divine afflatus, baby's first yowl, shaped air of speech, staccato gusts of laughter, exalted airs of song, happy lover's groan, unhappy lover's lament, miser's whine, crone's croak, illness's stench, dying whisper, and beyond and beyond the airless, silent void. A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.-Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh
In the United States, where ideas about race and identity politics emerge from the fine specificity of the one-drop rule, notions of hybridity, creolization, mongrelization, and metissage are difficult topics. Within a Mexican context, by contrast, mestizaje (racial mixture) helps form the core of a nationalist discourse. Indeed, one reason the Zapatista revolt has so taken the Mexican national imagination is that Mexican culture since the Revolution has sought staunchly to praise the working classes, the campesino, and the indio-the mixed heritages of race and class that form Mexican identity.
Of course United States society and culture has always been more creolized than the one-drop rule admits. Mestizaje in Mexico also proves much more complex than the official discourses valorizing the indigenous suggest. It is these multiple registers-simultaneous praise, celebration, and condemnation-with which writers and critics wrestle (Gabriel-like) when asserting the mestizaje of Chicano ethnic identity. In articulating notions of mestizaje, Chicano cultural objects help trace the varied and vexed paths of racial identification. This identification engages the continuing dialogue among United States ethnic, social, and national discourses.
Tracing History
Chicano mestizaje represents the trace of a historical material process, a violent racial/colonial encounter. Such encounters have characterized the socio-cultural dynamics of the Americas since first contact with Europe. Chicano mestizaje derives from a complex history involving a sense both of dispossession and empowerment, a simultaneous devaluing and honoring of indigenous ancestry. Needless to say, the formation of a mestizo Chicano consciousness is complicated and elaborate. At the risk of seeming to oversimplify, I suggest that three historical moments mark critical points in the conceptualization of Chicano cultural and racial mestizaje.
The first is the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521 and the subsequent enslavement, genocide, and oppression of indigenous populations. As with so much that...