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Latino_a_Thought_Culture_Politics_and_Society_----_Chapter_11_Queer_AztlC3A1n_The_Reformation_of_Chicano_Tribe-1.pdf

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Queer Aztlán: The Reformation of Chicano Tribe

Cherríe Moraga

According to Moraga, “Chicanos are an occupied nation within a nation, and women and women’s sexuality are occupied within [a] Chicano nation.” Indeed, if the quest for cultural citizenship means being accepted by the dominant culture, what happens when the dominant culture is “your own culture” and, moreover, a traditional, patriarchal, and homophobic culture? Once again we are confronted by the question: Who are the people? In this essay, Moraga addresses one of the frontiers of political identity in Latino/a culture. When El Plan de Aztlán was conceived, “lesbians and gay men were not envisioned as members of the ‘house.’” They were, and still are, considered illegitimate children of the Chicano family. As we have discussed, this position deploys a particular set of desire relations, “a critical position to address those areas within our cultural family that need to change.” Moraga also touches on issues of bio-power: human bodies that are denied their rights as moral entities, who are raped physically and psychologically, and exposed to violence and illness. She raises a variety of critical questions about the degree of radicalism and acceptance of the Other, even within those who see themselves as oppressed; the good and the bad of Chicano and other nationalisms; relations with American Indians; sovereignty; and separatism.

* * *

How will our lands be free if our bodies aren’t?

—Ricardo Bracho

At the height of the Chicano Movement in 1968, I was a closeted, light-skinned, mixed-blood Mexican-American, disguised in my father’s English last name. Since I seldom opened my mouth, few people questioned my Anglo credentials. But my eyes were open and thirsty and drank in images of students my age, of vatos and viejitas, who could have primos, or tíos, or abuelitas raising their collective fists into a smoggy East Los Angeles skyline. Although I could not express how at the time, I knew I had a place in that Movement that was spilling out of barrio high schools and onto police-barricaded streets just ten minutes from my tree-lined working class neighborhood in San Gabriel. What I didn’t know then was that it would take me

Latino/a Thought : Culture, Politics, and Society, edited by Francisco H. Vázquez, and Francisco H Vazquez, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucr/detail.action?docID=1662974. Created from ucr on 2021-10-07 02:48:34.

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another ten years to fully traverse that ten-minute drive and to bring all the parts of me— Chicana, lesbiana, half-breed, and poeta—to the revolution, wherever it was. My real politicization began, not through the Chicano Movement, but through the bold

recognition of my lesbianism. Coming to terms with that fact meant the radical restructuring of everything I thought I held sacred. It meant acting on my woman-centered desire and against anything that stood in its way, including my Church, my family, and my “country.” It meant acting in spite of the fact that I had learned from my Mexican culture and the dominant culture that my womanhood was, if not despised, certainly deficient and hardly worth the loving of another woman in bed. But act I did, because not acting would have meant my death by despair. That was twenty years ago. In those twenty years I traversed territory that extends well

beyond the ten-minute trip between East Los Angeles and San Gabriel. In those twenty years, I experienced the racism of the Women’s Movement, the elitism of the Gay and Lesbian Movement, the homophobia and sexism of the Chicano Movement, and the benign cultural imperialism of the Latin American Solidarity Movement. I also witnessed the emergence of national Chicana feminista consciousness and a literature, art, and activism to support it. I’ve seen the growth of a lesbian-of-color movement, the founding of an independent national Latino/a lesbian and gay men’s organization, and the flourishing of Indigenous people’s international campaigns for human and land rights. A quarter of a century after those school walk-outs in 1968, I can write, without reservation,

that I have found a sense of place among la Chicanada. It is not always a safe place, but it is unequivocally the original familial place from which I am compelled to write, which I reach toward in my audiences, and which serves as my source of inspiration, voice, and lucha. How we Chicanos define that struggle has always been the subject of debate and is ultimately the subject of this essay. “Queer Aztlán” had been forming in my mind for over three years and began to take concrete

shape a year ago in a conversation with poet Ricardo Bracho. We discussed the limitations of “Queer Nation,” whose leather-jacketed, shaved-headed white radicals and accompanying anglo-centricity were an “alien-nation” to most lesbians and gay men of color. We also spoke of Chicano Nationalism, which never accepted openly gay men and lesbians among its ranks. Ricardo half-jokingly concluded, “What we need, Cherríe, is a ‘Queer Aztlán.’” Of course. A Chicano homeland that could embrace all its people, including its jotería.1 Everything I read these days tells me that the Chicano Movement is dead. In Earl Shorris’

Latinos, the Anglo author insists that the Chicano himself is dead. He writes, “The Chicano generation began in the late 1960s and lasted about six or eight years, dying slowly through the seventies.” He goes on to say that Chicanismo has been reduced to no more than a “handshake practiced by middle-aged men.” Chicano sociologists seem to be suggesting the same when they tell us that by the third generation, the majority of Chicanos have lost their Spanish fluency, and nearly a third have married non-Chicanos and have moved out of the Chicano community. Were immigration from México to stop, they say, Chicanos could be virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the population within a few generations. My nieces and nephews are living testimony to these faceless facts. I mourn the dissolution of an active Chicano Movement possibly more strongly than my

generational counterparts because during its “classic period,” I was unable to act publicly. But

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more deeply, I mourn it because its ghost haunts me daily in the blonde hair of my sister’s children, the gradual hispanicization of Chicano students, the senselessness of barrio violence, and the poisoning of la frontera from Tijuana to Tejas. In 1992, we have no organized national movement to respond to our losses. For me, “El Movimiento” has never been a thing of the past, it has retreated into subterranean uncontaminated soils awaiting resurrection in a “queerer,” more feminist generation. What was right about Chicano Nationalism was its commitment to preserving the integrity of

the Chicano people. A generation ago, there were cultural, economic, and political programs to develop Chicano consciousness, autonomy, and self-determination. What was wrong about Chicano Nationalism was its institutionalized heterosexism, its inbred machismo, and its lack of a cohesive national political strategy.2 Over the years, I have witnessed plenty of progressive nationalisms: Chicano nationalism,

Black nationalism, Puerto Rican Independence (still viable as evidenced in the recent mass protest on the Island against the establishment of English as an official language), the “Lesbian Nation” and its lesbian separatist movement, and, of course, the most recent “Queer Nation.” What I admired about each was its righteous radicalism, its unabashed anti-assimilationism, and its rebeldía. I recognize the dangers of nationalism as a strategy for political change. Its tendency toward separatism can run dangerously close to biological determinism and a kind of fascism. We are all horrified by the concentration and rape camps in Bosnia, falsely justified by the Serbian call for “ethnic cleansing.” We are bitterly sobered by the nazism espoused by Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican Convention in which only heterosexual white middle- class voting Amerikans have the right to citizenship and heaven. Over and over again we are reminded that sex and race do not define a person’s politics. Margaret Thatcher is a woman and enforces the policies of the Imperial whiteman and Clarence Thomas is Black and follows suit. But it is historically evident that the female body, like the Chicano people, has been colonized. And any movement to decolonize them must be culturally and sexually specific. Chicanos are an occupied nation within a nation, and women and women’s sexuality are

occupied within Chicano nation. If women’s bodies and those of men and women who transgress their gender roles have been historically regarded as territories to be conquered, they are also territories to be liberated. Feminism has taught us this. The nationalism I seek is one that decolonizes the brown and female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth. It is a new nationalism in which la Chicana Indígena stands at the center, and heterosexism and homophobia are no longer the cultural order of the day. I cling to the word “nation” because without the specific naming of the nation, the nation will be lost (as when feminism is reduced to humanism, the woman is subsumed). Let us retain our radical naming but expand it to meet a broader and wiser revolution.

Tierra Sagrada: The Roots of a Revolution Aztlán. I don’t remember when I first heard the word, but I remember it took my heart by surprise to learn of that place—that “sacred landscape” wholly evident en las playas, los llanos, y en las montañas of the North American Southwest. A terrain that I did not completely comprehend at first, but that I continue to try, in my own small way, to fully inhabit and make

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habitable for its Chicano citizens. Aztlán gave language to a nameless anhelo inside me. To me, it was never a masculine

notion. It had nothing to do with the Aztecs and everything to do with Mexican birds, Mexican beaches, and Mexican babies right here in Califas. I remember once driving through Anza Borrego desert, just east of San Diego, my VW van whipping around corners, climbing. The tape deck set at full blast, every window open, bandana around my forehead. And I think, this is México, Raza territory, as I belt out the refrain . . .

“Marieta, no seas coqueta porque los hombres son muy malos prometen muchos regalos y lo que dan son puro palos. . . .”

That day I claimed that land in the spin of the worn-out tape, the spin of my balding tires, and the spin of my mind. And just as I wrapped around a rubber-burning curve, I saw it: “A-Z- T-L-A-N,” in granite-sized letters etched into the face of the mountainside. Of course, I hadn’t been the first. Some other Chicano came this way, too, saw what I saw, felt what I felt. Enough to put a name to it. Aztlán. Tierra sagrada. A term Náhuatl in root, Aztlán was that historical/mythical land where one set of Indian

forebears, the Aztecs, were said to have resided 1,000 years ago. Located in the U.S. Southwest, Aztlán fueled a nationalist struggle twenty years ago, which encompassed much of the pueblo Chicano from Chicago to the borders of Chihuahua. In the late sixties and early seventies, Chicano nationalism meant the right to control our own resources, language, and cultural traditions, rights guaranteed us by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed in 1848 when the Southwest was “annexed” to the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War. At its most radical, Chicano nationalism expressed itself in militant action. In the mid- 1960s, Reies López Tijerina entered a campaign against the Department of the Interior to reclaim land grants for New Mexicans, resulting in his eventual imprisonment. In 1968, nearly 10,000 Chicano students walked out of their high schools to protest the lack of quality education in Los Angeles barrio schools. The same period also saw the rise of the Brown Berets, a para-military style youth organization regularly harassed by law enforcement agencies throughout the Southwest These are highlights in Chicano Movement history. To most, however, El Movimiento, practically applied, simply meant fair and equitable representation on the city council, in the union halls, and on the school board. I’ve often wondered why Chicano nationalism never really sustained the same level of

militancy witnessed in the Puerto Rican, Black, and Native American Movements. Certainly violence, especially police violence, was visited upon Chicanos in response to our public protests, the murder of journalist Rubén Salazar during the National Chicano Moratorium of 1970 being the most noted instance. And like other liberation movements, the Chicano movement had its share of FBI infiltrators. In 1969, El Plan de Aztlán was drawn up at the First Annual Chicano Youth Conference in

Denver, Colorado, calling for a Chicano program of economic self-determination, self- defense, and land reclamation, and including an autonomous taxation and judicial system. By

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the mid-1970s, suchradical plans had gradually eroded in the face of a formidable opponent— the United States government—and Chicano nationalism as a political strategy began to express itself more in the cultural arena than in direct militant confrontation with the government. Another reason for the brevity of a unified militant movement may be the heterogeneity of the

Chicano population. Chicanos are not easily organized as a racial/political entity. Is our land the México of today or the México of a century and a half ago, covering thousands of miles of what is now the Southwestern United States? Unlike the island of Puerto Rico whose “home- land” is clearly defined by ocean on all sides, Aztlán at times seems more metaphysical than physical territory. As a mestizo people living in the United States, our relationship to this country has been

ambivalent at best. Our birth certificates since the invasion of Aztlán identify us as white. Our treatment by Anglo-Americans brand us “colored.” In the history of African Americans, when the white slave owner raped a Black woman, the mixed-blood offspring inherited the mother’s enslaved status. Over a century later, mixed-raced African Americans overwhelmingly identify as Black, not as mixed-blood. But the history of Mexicans/Chicanos follows a different pattern. The “Spanish-American” Conquest was secured through rape, intermarriage, the African slave trade, and the spread of Catholicism and disease. It gave birth to a third “mestizo” race that included Indian, African, and European blood. During colonial times, “Spanish-America” maintained a rigid and elaborate caste system that privileged the pure- blood Spaniard and his children over the mestizo. The pure blood indio and africano remained on the bottom rungs of society. The remnants of such class/race stratification are still evident throughout Latin America. Chicano Nation is a mestizo nation conceived in a double-rape: first, by the Spanish and

then by the Gringo. In the mid-19th century, Anglo-America took possession of one-third of México’s territory. A new English-speaking oppressor assumed control over the Spanish, Mestizo, and Indian people inhabiting those lands. There was no denying that the United States had stolen Aztlán from México, but it had been initially stolen from the Indians by the Spanish some 300 years earlier. To make alliances with other nationalist struggles taking place throughout the country in the late sixties, there was no room for Chicano ambivalence about being Indians, for it was our Indian blood and history of resistance against both Spanish and Anglo invaders that made us rightful inheritors of Aztlán. After centuries of discrimination against our Indian-ness, which forced mestizos into denial, many Mexican-Americans found the sudden affirmation of our indigenismo difficult to accept. And yet the Chicano Indigenous movement was not without historical precedence. Little more than fifty years earlier, México witnessed a campesino- and Indian-led agrarian and labor movement spreading into the Southwest that had the potential of eclipsing the Russian Revolution in its vision. Political corruption, of course, followed. Today, the pending Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada marks the ultimate betrayal of the Mexican revolution: the final surrender of the Mexican people’s sovereign rights to land and livelihood. Radicalization among people of Mexican ancestry in this country most often occurs when the

Mexican ceases to be a Mexican and becomes a Chicano. I have observed this in my Chicano Studies students (first, second, and third generation, some of whose families are indigenous to

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Aztlán) from the barrios of East Los Angeles, Fresno, and all the neighboring Central Valley towns of California—Selma, Visalia, Sanger, the barrios of Oakland, Sanjo, etc. They are the ones most often in protest, draping their bodies in front of freeway on-ramps and trans-bay bridges, blocking entrances to University administration buildings. They are the ones who, like their Black, Asian, and Native American counterparts, doubt the “American dream” because even if they got to UC Berkeley, their brother is still on crack in Boyle Heights, their sister had three kids before she’s twenty, and sorry but they can’t finish the last week of the semester cuz Tío Ignacio just got shot in front of a liquor store. My working-class and middle-class Mexican immigrant students,3 on the other hand, have not yet had their self-esteem nor that of their parents and grandparents worn away by North American racism. For them, the “American dream” still looms as a possibility on the horizon. Their Mexican pride sustains them through the daily assaults on their intelligence, integrity, and humanity. They maintain a determined individualism and their families still dream of returning home one day. A new generation of future Chicanos arrives everyday with every Mexican immigrant. Some

may find their American dream and forget their origins, but the majority of México’s descendants soon comprehend the political meaning of the disparity between their lives and those of the gringo. Certainly the Mexican women cannery workers of Watsonville who maintained a two-year victorious strike against Green Giant in the mid-eighties, and farm workers organized by César Chávez’s UFW in the late sixties and early seventies are testimony to the political militancy of the Mexican immigrant worker. More recently, there are the examples of the Mothers of East Los Angeles and the women of Kettleman City who have organized against the toxic contamination proposed for their communities. In the process, the Mexicana becomes a Chicana (or at least a Mechicana); that is, she becomes a citizen of this country, not by virtue of a green card, but by virtue of the collective voice she assumes in staking her claim to this land and its resources.

Plumas Planchadas: The De-Formation of the Movement

With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation.

—“El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán”

El Movimiento did not die out in the seventies, as most of its critics claim; it was only deformed by the machismo and homophobia of that era and co-opted by “hispanicization” of the eighties.4 In reaction against Anglo-America’s emasculation of Chicano men, the male- dominated Chicano Movement embraced the most patriarchal aspects of its Mexican heritage. For a generation, nationalist leaders used a kind of “selective memory,” drawing exclusively from those aspects of Mexican and Native cultures that served the interests of male heterosexuals. At times, they took the worst of Mexican machismo and Aztec warrior bravado, combined it with some of the most oppressive male-conceived idealizations of “traditional” Mexican womanhood and called that cultural integrity. They subscribed to a machista view of women, based on the centuries-old virgin-whore paradigm of la Virgen de Guadalupe and Malintzin Tenepal. Guadalupe represented the Mexican ideal of “la madre sufrida,” the long-

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suffering desexualized Indian mother, and Malinche was “la chingada,” sexually stigmatized by her transgression of “sleeping with the enemy,” Hernán Cortez. Deemed traitor by Mexican tradition, the figure of Malinche was invoked to keep Movimiento women silent, sexually passive, and “Indian” in the colonial sense of the word. The preservation of the Chicano familia became the Movimiento’s mandate and within this

constricted “familia” structure, Chicano políticos ensured that the patriarchal father figure remained in charge both in their private and political lives.5 Women were, at most, allowed to serve as modern-day “Adelitas,” performing the “three fs” as a Chicana colleague calls them: “feeding, fighting, and fucking.” In the name of this “culturally correct” familia, certain topics were censored both in cultural and political spheres as not “socially relevant” to Chicanos and typically not sanctioned in the Mexican household. These issues included female sexuality generally and male homosexuality and lesbianism specifically, as well as incest and violence against women—all of which are still relevant between the sheets and within the walls of many Chicano families. In the process, the Chicano Movement forfeited the participation and vision of some very significant female and gay leaders and never achieved the kind of harmonious Chicano “familia” they ostensibly sought. To this day, although lip service is given to “gender issues” in academic and political

circles, no serious examination of male supremacy within the Chicano community has taken place among heterosexual men. Veteranos of Chicano nationalism are some of the worst offenders. Twenty years later, they move into “elderhood” without having seriously grappled with the fact that their leadership in El Movimiento was made possible by all those women who kept their “plumas planchadas”6 at every political event.

A Divided Nation: A Chicana Lésbica Critique

We are free and sovereign to determine those tasks which are justly called for by our house, our land, the sweat of our brows, and by our hearts. Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent.

—From “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán”

When “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” was conceived a generation ago, lesbians and gay men were not envisioned as members of the “house”; we were not recognized as the sister planting the seeds, the brother gathering the crops. We were not counted as members of the “bronze continent.” In the last decade, through the efforts of Chicana feministas, Chicanismo has undergone a

serious critique. Feminist critics are committed to the preservation of Chicano culture, but we know that our culture will not survive marital rape, battering, incest, drug and alcohol abuse, AIDS, and the marginalization of lesbian daughters and gay sons. Some of the most outspoken criticism of the Chicano Movement’s sexism and some of the most impassioned activism in the area of Chicana liberation (including work on sexual abuse, domestic violence, immigrant rights, Indigenous women’s issues, health care, etc.) have been advanced by lesbians. Since lesbians and gay men have often been forced out of our blood families, and since our

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love and sexual desire are not housed within the traditional family, we are in a critical position to address those areas within our cultural family that need to change. Further, in order to understand and defend our lovers and our same-sex loving, lesbians and gay men must come to terms with how homophobia, gender roles, and sexuality are learned and expressed in Chicano culture. As Ricardo Bracho writes: “To speak of my desire, to find voice in my brown flesh, I needed to confront my male mirror.” As a lesbian, I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies or intimacies of Chicano gay desire, but we do share the fact that our “homosexuality”—our feelings about sex, sexual power and domination, femininity and masculinity, family, loyalty, and morality—has been shaped by heterosexist culture and society. As such, we have plenty to tell heterosexuals about themselves. When we are moved sexually toward someone, there is a profound opportunity to observe

the microcosm of all human relations, to understand power dynamics both obvious and subtle, and to meditate on the core creative impulse of all desire. Desire is never politically correct. In sex, gender roles, race relations, and our collective histories of oppression and human connection are enacted. Since the early 1980s, Chicana lesbian feminists have explored these traditionally “dangerous” topics in both critical and creative writings. Chicana lesbian- identified writers such as Ana Castillo, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Naomi Littlebear Moreno were among the first to articulate a Chicana feminism, which included a radical woman-centered critique of sexism and sexuality from which both lesbian and heterosexual women benefited. In the last few years, Chicano gay men have also begun to openly examine Chicano sexuality.

I suspect heterosexual Chicanos will have the world to learn from their gay brothers about their shared masculinity, but they will have the most to learn from the “queens,” the “maricones.” Because they are deemed “inferior” for not fulfilling the traditional role of men, they are more marginalized from mainstream heterosexual society than other gay men and are especially vulnerable to male violence. Over the years, I have been shocked to discover how many femme gay men have grown up regularly experiencing rape and sexual abuse. The rapist is always heterosexual and usually Chicano like themselves. What has the Gay Movement done for these brothers? What has the Chicano Movement done? What do these young and once- young men have to tell us about misogyny and male violence? Like women, they see the macho’s desire to dominate the feminine, but even more intimately because they both desire men and share manhood with their oppressors. They may be jotos, but they are still men, and are bound by their racial and sexual identification to men (Bracho’s “male mirror”). Until recently, Chicano gay men have been silent over the Chicano Movement’s male

heterosexual hegemony. As much as I see a potential alliance with gay men in our shared experience of homophobia, the majority of gay men still cling to what privileges they can. I have often been severely disappointed and hurt by the misogyny of gay Chicanos. Separation from one’s brothers is a painful thing. Being gay does not preclude gay men from harboring the same sexism evident in heterosexual men. It’s like white people and racism, sexism goes with the (male) territory. On some level our brothers—gay and straight—have got to give up being “men.” I don’t

mean give up their genitals, their unique expression of desire, or the rich and intimate manner in which men can bond together. Men have to give up their subscription to male superiority. I remember during the Civil Rights Movement seeing newsreel footage of young Black men

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carrying protest signs reading, “I AM A MAN.” It was a powerful statement, publicly declaring their humanness in a society that daily told them otherwise. But they didn’t write “I AM HUMAN,” they wrote “MAN.” Conceiving of their liberation in male terms, they were unwittingly demanding the right to share the whiteman’s position of male dominance. This demand would become consciously articulated with the emergence of the male-dominated Black Nationalist Movement. The liberation of Black women per se was not part of the program, except to the extent that better conditions for the race in general might benefit Black women as well. How differently Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech resonates for me. Unable to choose between suffrage and abolition, between her womanhood and her Blackness, Truth’s 19th-century call for a free Black womanhood in a Black- and woman-hating society required the freedom of all enslaved land disenfranchised peoples. As the Black feminist Combahee River Collective stated in 1977, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” No progressive movement can succeed while any member of the population remains in submission. Chicano gay men have been reluctant to recognize and acknowledge that their freedom is

intricately connected to the freedom of women. As long as they insist on remaining “men” in the socially and culturally constructed sense of the word, they will never achieve the full liberation they desire. There will always be jotos getting raped and beaten. Within people of color communities, violence against women, gay bashing, sterilization abuse, AIDS and AIDS discrimination, gay substance abuse, and gay teen suicide emerge from the same source—a racist and misogynist social and economic system that dominates, punishes, and abuses all things colored, female, or perceived as female-like. By openly confronting Chicano sexuality and sexism, gay men can do their own part to unravel how both men and women have been formed and deformed by racist Amerika and our misogynist/catholic/colonized mechicanidad; and we can come that much closer to healing those fissures that have divided us as a people. The AIDS epidemic has seriously shaken the foundation of the Chicano gay community, and

gay men seem more willing than ever to explore those areas of political change that will ensure their survival. In their fight against AIDS, they have been rejected and neglected by both the white gay male establishment and the Latino heterosexual health-care community. They also have witnessed direct support by Latina lesbians.7 Unlike the “queens” who have always been open about their sexuality, “passing” gay men have learned in a visceral way that being in “the closet” and preserving their “manly” image will not protect them, it will only make their dying more secret. I remember my friend Arturo Islas, the novelist. I think of how his writing begged to boldly announce his gayness. Instead, we learned it through vague references about “sinners” and tortured alcoholic characters who wanted nothing more than to “die dancing” beneath a lightning-charged sky just before a thunderstorm. Islas died of AIDS-related illness in 1990, having barely begun to examine the complexity of Chicano sexuality in his writing. I also think of essayist Richard Rodríguez, who, with so much death surrounding him, has recently begun to publicly address the subject of homosexuality; and yet, even ten years ago we all knew “Mr. Secrets” was gay from his assimilationist Hunger of Memory.8 Had he “come out” in 1982, the white establishment would have been far less willing to promote him as the “Hispanic” anti-affirmative action spokesperson. He would have lost a lot of validity . . . and

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opportunity. But how many lives are lost each time we cling to privileges that make other people’s lives more vulnerable to violence? At this point in history, lesbians and gay men can make a significant contribution to the

creation of a new Chicano movement, one passionately committed to saving lives. As we are forced to struggle for our right to love free of disease and discrimination, “Aztlán” as our imagined homeland begins to take on renewed importance. Without the dream of a free world, a free world will never be realized. Chicana lesbians and gay men do not merely seek inclusion in the Chicano nation; we seek a nation strong enough to embrace a full range of racial diversities, human sexualities, and expressions of gender. We seek a culture that can allow for the natural expression of our femaleness and maleness and our love without prejudice or punishment. In a “queer” Aztlán, there would be no freaks, no “others” to point one’s finger at. My Native American friends tell me that in some Native American tribes, gay men and lesbians were traditionally regarded as “two-spirited” people. Displaying both masculine and feminine aspects, they were highly respected members of their community, and were thought to possess a higher spiritual development.9 Hearing of such traditions gives historical validation for what Chicana lesbians and gay men have always recognized—that lesbians and gaymen play a significant spiritual, cultural, and political role within the Chicano community. Somos activistas, académicos y artistas, parteras y políticos, curanderas y campesinos. With or without heterosexual acknowledgement, lesbians and gay men have continued to actively redefine familia, cultura, and comunidad. We have formed circles of support and survival, often drawing from the more egalitarian models of Indigenous communities.

Indigenismo: The Re-Tribalization of Our People In recent years, for gay and straight Chicanos alike, our indigenismo has increased in importance as we witness the ultimate failure of Anglo-Americanism to bring harmony to our lives. In Ward Churchill’s Struggle for the Land, he describes an “Indigenist” as someone who “takes the rights of indigenous peoples as the highest priority,” and who “draws upon the traditions . . . of native peoples the world over.” Many Chicanos would by this definition consider themselves Indigenists, subscribing to an indigenismo that is derived specifically from the traditions of mechicano indio peoples. Since the early seventies, Chicanos have worked in coalition with other Native American tribes and have participated in inter-tribal gatherings, political-prisoner campaigns, land-rights struggles, and religious ceremonies. Chicano Nation has been varyingly accepted as a tribe by other Native American peoples, usually more in the honorary sense than in any official capacity. The Indigenous Women’s Network, for example, has included Chicanas since its inception in 1984. Most Chicanos can claim, through physical traits alone, that we are of Native blood (we

often joke that Chicanos are usually the most Indian-looking people in a room full of “skins”). The majority of us, however, has been denied direct information regarding our tribal affiliations. Since our origins are usually in the Southwest and México, Chicanos’ Indian roots encompass a range of nations including Apache, Yaqui, Papago, Navajo, and Tarahumara from the border regions, as well as dozens of Native tribes throughout México. Regardless of

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verifiable genealogy, many Chicanos have recently begun to experience a kind of collective longing to return to our culture’s traditional indigenous beliefs and ways of constructing community in order to find concrete solutions for the myriad problems confronting us, from the toxic dump sites in our neighborhoods to rape. “Tribe,” based on the traditional models of Native Americans, is an alternative

socioeconomic structure that holds considerable appeal for those of us who recognize the weaknesses of the isolated patriarchal capitalist family structure. This is not to say that all Native Americans subscribe to the sametribal structures or that contemporary Indians fully practice traditional tribal ways. Few Native peoples today are allowed real political autonomy and self-determination. Tribal governments are corrupted by U.S. interference through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. military, the FBI, and the U.S. Department of Energy. In essence, however, the tribal model is a form of community-building that can accommodate socialism, feminism, and environmental protection. In an ideal world, tribal members are responsive and responsible to one another and the natural environment. Cooperation is rewarded over competition. Acts of violence against women and children do not occur in secret and perpetrators are held accountable to the rest of the community. “Familia” is not dependent upon male-dominance or heterosexual coupling. Elders are respected and women’s leadership is fostered, not feared. But it is not an ideal world. Any Indian on or off the reservation can tell you about the

obstacles to following traditional ways. The reservation is not indigenous to Native Americans; it is a colonial model invented to disempower Native peoples. The rates of alcoholism, suicide, and domestic violence are testimony to the effectiveness of that system. Chicanos, living in the colony of the U.S. barrio, have the same scars: AIDS, drugs, brown-on- brown murder, poverty, and environmental contamination. Nevertheless, the present-day values and organized struggles of traditional Native communities throughout the Americas represent real hope for halting the quickly accelerating level of destruction affecting all life on this continent.

Madre Tierra/Madre Mujer: The Struggle for Land10

Journal Entry I sit in a hotel room. A fancy hotel room with two walls of pure glass and pure Vancouver night skyline filling them. I sit on top of the bed and eat Japanese take-out. The Canadian t.v. news takes us east to the province of Quebec, to some desolate area with no plumbing or sewage, no running water, where a group of Inuit people have been displaced. To some desolate area where Inuit children stick their faces into bags and sniff gas fumes for the high, the rush, the trip, for the escape out of this hell-hole that is their life. One young boy gives the finger to the t.v. camera. “They’re angry,” an Inuit leader states. “I’m angry, too.” At thirty, he is already an old man. And I hate this Canada as much as I hate these dis-United States. But I go on eating my Japanese meal that has somehow turned rotten on my tongue and my

bloody culpability mixes with the texture of dead fish flesh and no wonder I stand on the very edge of the balcony on the 26th floorof this hotel looking down on restaurant-row Vancouver and imagine how easy and impossible it would be to leap in protest for the gas-guzzling Inuit

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children. The primary struggle for Native peoples across the globe is the struggle for land. In 1992,

500 years after the arrival of Columbus, on the heels of the Gulf War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the entire world is reconstructing itself. No longer frozen into the Soviet/Yanqui paradigm of a “Cold” and invented “War,” Indigenous peoples are responding en masse to the threat of a global capitalist “mono-culture” defended by the “hired guns” of the U.S. military. Five hundred years after Columbus’ arrival, they are spearheading an international movement with the goal of sovereignty for all Indigenous nations. Increasingly, the struggles on this planet are not for “nation-states,” but for nations of people,

bound together by spirit, land, language, history, and blood.11 This is evident from the intifada of the Palestinians residing within Israel’s stolen borders and the resistance of the Cree and Inuit Indians in northern Quebec. The Kurds of the Persian Gulf region understand this, as do the Ukrainians of what was once the Soviet Union. Chicanos are also a nation of people, internally colonized within the borders of the U.S. nation-state. Few Chicanos really believe we can wrest Aztlán away from Anglo-America. And yet,

residing in those Southwestern territories, especially those areas not completely appropriated by gringolandia, we instinctively remember it as Mexican Indian land and can still imagine it as a distinct nation. In our most private moments, we ask ourselves, If the Soviet Union could dissolve, why can’t the United States? Dreams of the disintegration of the United States as we know it are not so private among

North American Indians. The dissolution of the Soviet Union has given renewed impetus to seccessionist thinking by Indians here in the United States. One plan, the “North American Union of Indigenous Nations,” described in Ward Churchill’s book, calls for the reunification of Indian peoples and territories to comprise a full third of continental United States, including much of Aztlán. Not surprisingly, Chicano Nation is not mentioned as part of this new confederacy, which speaks to the still tenuous alliance between Chicano and Native American peoples. Nevertheless, the spirit of the plan is very much in accord with Chicano nationalists’ most revolutionary dreams of reclaiming a homeland, side by side with other Indian Nations. If the material basis of every nationalist movement is land, then the reacquisition, defense,

and protection of Native land and its natural resources are the basis for rebuilding Chicano nation. Without the sovereignty of Native peoples, including Chicanos, and support for our land-based struggles, the world will be lost to North American greed, and our culturas lost with it. The “last frontier” for Northern capitalists lies buried in coal and uranium-rich reservation lands and in the remaining rainforests of the Amazon. The inhabitants of these territories—the Diné, the North Cheyenne, the Kayapó, etc.—are the very people who in 1992 offer the world community “living models” of ways to live in balance with nature and safeguard the earth as we know it. The great historical irony is that 500 years after the Conquest, the conqueror must now turn to the conquered for salvation. We are speaking of bottom-line considerations. I can’t understand when in 1992 with 100

acres of rainforest disappearing every minute, with global warming, with babies being born without brains in South Tejas, with street kids in Río sniffing glue to stifle their hunger, with Mohawk women’s breast milk being contaminated by the poisoned waters of the Great Lakes Basin, how we as people of color, as people of Indian blood, as people with the same last

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names as our Latin American counterparts, are not alarmed by the destruction of Indigenous and mestizo peoples. How is it Chicanos cannot see ourselves as victims of the same destruction, already in its advanced stages? Why do we not collectively experience the urgency for alternatives based not on what our oppressors advise, but on the advice of elders and ancestors who may now speak to us only in dreams? What they are telling us is very clear. The road to the future is the road from our past.

Traditional Indigenous communities (our Indian “past” that too many Chicanos have rejected) provide practical answers for our survival. At the Earth Summit in Río de Janeiro in June 1992, representatives from “developing countries,” and grassroots, Indigenous, and people-of- color organizations joined together to demand the economic programs necessary to create their own sustainable ecologically sound communities. In a world where eighty-five percent of all the income, largely generated from the natural resources of Indigenous lands and “Third World” countries, goes to twenty-three percent of the people, Fidel Castro said it best: “Let the ecological debt be paid, not the foreign debt.” And here all the connecting concerns begin to coalesce. Here the Marxist meets the

ecologist. We need look no further than the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to understand the connection between global ecological devastation and the United States’ relentless drive to expand its markets. NAFTA is no more than a 21st-century plot to continue the North’s exploitation of the cheap labor, lax environmental policies, and the natural resources of the South. The United States has no intention of responding to the environmental crisis. George Bush’s decision to “stand alone on principle” and refuse to sign the Bio- Diversity Treaty said it all. Profit over people. Profit over protection. No sustainable development is possible in the Americas if the United States continues to demand hamburgers, Chrysler automobiles, and refrigerators from hungry, barefoot, and energy-starved nations. There is simply not enough to go around, no new burial ground for toxic waste that isn’t sacred, no untapped energy source that doesn’t suck the earth dry. Except for the sun . . . except for the wind, which are infinite in their generosity and virtually ignored. The earth is female. Whether myth, metaphor, or memory, she is called “Mother” by all

peoples of all times. Madre Tierra. Like woman, Madre Tierra has been raped, exploited for her resources, rendered inert, passive, and speechless. Her cries manifested in earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions are not heeded. But the Indians take note and so do the women, the women with the capacity to remember. Native religions have traditionally honored the female alongside the male. Religions that

grow exclusively from the patriarchal capitalist imagination, instead of the requirements of nature, enslave the female body. The only religion we need is one based on the good sense of living in harmony with nature. Religion should serve as a justification against greed, not for it. Bring back the rain gods, corn gods, father sun, and mother moon and keep those gods happy. Whether we recognize it or not, those gods are today, this day, punishing us for our excess. What humankind has destroyed will wreak havoc on the destroyer. Fried skin from holes in the ozone is only one example. The earth is female. It is no accident then that the main grassroots activists defending the

earth, along with Native peoples, are women of all races and cultures. Regardless of the so- called “advances” of Western “civilization,” women remain the chief caretakers, nurturers, and

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providers for our children and our elders. These are the mothers of East Los Angeles, McFarland, and Kettleman City, fighting toxic dumps, local incinerators and pesticide poisoning, women who experience the earth’s contamination in the deformation and death occurring within their very wombs. We do not have to be mothers to know this. Most women know what it is to be seen as the Earth is seen—a receptacle for male violence and greed. Over half the agricultural workers in the world are women who receive less training and less protection than their male counterparts. We do not control how we produce and reproduce, how we labor and love. And how will our lands be free if our bodies aren’t? Land remains the common ground for all radical action. But land is more than the rocks and

trees, the animal and plant life that make up the territory of Aztlán or Navajo Nation or Maya Mesoamerica. For immigrant and native alike, land is also the factories where we work, the water our children drink, and the housing project where we live. For women, lesbians, and gay men, land is that physical mass called our bodies. Throughout las Américas, all these “lands” remain under occupation by an Anglocentric, patriarchal, imperialist United States.

La Causa Chicana: Entering the Next Millenium As a Chicana lesbian, I know that the struggle I share with all Chicanos and Indigenous peoples is truly one of sovereignty, the sovereign right to wholly inhabit oneself (cuerpo y alma) and one’s territory (pan y tierra). I don’t know if we can ever take back Aztlán from Anglo-America, but in the name of a new Chicano nationalism we can work to defend remaining Indian territories. We can work to teach one another that our freedom as a people is mutually dependent and cannot be parceled out—class before race before sex before sexuality. A new Chicano nationalism calls for the integration of both the traditional and the revolutionary, the ancient and the contemporary. It requires a serious reckoning with the weaknesses in our mestizo culture, and a reaffirmation of what has preserved and sustained us as a people. I am clear about one thing: fear has not sustained us. Fear of action, fear of speaking, fear of women, fear of queers. As these 500 years come to a close, I look forward to a new América, where the only

“discovery” to be made is the rediscovery of ourselves as members of the global community. Nature will be our teacher, for she alone knows no prejudice. Possibly as we ask men to give up being “men,” we must ask humans to give up being “human,” or at least to give up the human capacity for greed. Simply, we must give back to the earth what we take from it. We must submit to a higher “natural” authority, as we invent new ways of making culture, making tribe, to survive and flourish as members of the world community in the next millennium.

Notes An earlier version of this essay was first presented at the First National LLEGO (Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization) Conference in Houston, Texas, on May 22, 1992. A later version was presented at a Quincentenary Conference at the University of Texas in Austin on October 31, 1992.

1. Chicano term for “queer” folk. 2. To this day, there are still pockets of Chicano nationalists—mostly artists, poets, and cultural workers—who continue to

work on a local and regional level. 3. UC Berkeley’s Chicano/Latino immigrant students have not generally encountered the same degree of poverty and

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exploitation experienced by undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants. 4. Further discussion of the “hispanicization” of the U.S. Latino can be found in Cherríe Moraga, “Art in América con

Acento” in The Last Generation, (Cambridge, MA: South End Press). 5. The twenty-five-year-old Chicano Teatro Movement is an apt example. Initiated by Luis Valdez’ Teatro Campesino, the

teatro movement has been notorious for its male dominance even within its so-called collective structures. Over eighty percent of the Chicano Theatres across the country are directed by men. No affirmative-action policies have been instituted to encourage the development of Chicana playwrights, technicians, or directors. In recent years, however, there has been some progress in this area with the production of a handful of Chicana playwrights, including Josefina López, Evelina Fernández, Edit Villareal, and this author. To this day, gay and lesbian images and feminist criticism are considered taboo in most Chicano theatres.

6. The image alludes to Chicano cultural nationalists who during the seventies neoindigenist period sometimes wore feathers (plumas) and other Indian attire at cultural events.

7. In contrast to the overwhelming response by lesbians to the AIDS crisis, breast cancer, which has disproportionately affected the lesbian community, has received little attention from the gay men’s community in particular, and the public at large. And yet, the statistics are devastating. One out of every nine women in the United States will get breast cancer: 44,500 U.S. women will die of breast cancer this year (Boston Globe, November 5, 1991).

8. See Rodríguez’ essay “Late Victorians” in his most recent collection, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father.

9. This was not the case among all tribes nor is homosexuality generally condoned in contemporary Indian societies. See Ramón A. Gutiérrez “Must We Deracinate Indians to Find Gay Roots?” Outlook: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, Winter 1989. 10. I wish to thank Marsha Gómez, the Indigenous Women’s Network, and the Alma de Mujer Center for Social Change in

Austin, Texas, for providing me with statistical and other current information about Indigenous peoples’ struggles for environmental safety and sovereignty, as well as published materials on the ’92 Earth Summit in Brazil. 11. The dissolution of what was heretofore the nation-state of Yugoslavia, composed of Serbs, Slovenes, Croats, Albanians,

and Macedonians, including the Muslim and Orthodox religions, represents the rise of bitter nationalist sentiment gone awry. It is a horror story of ethnic and cultural nationalism turned into nazism and serves as a painful warning against fascist extremism in nationalist campaigns.

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Questions

1. Moraga claims that at the height of the Chicano movement in 1968 she was “a closeted, light-skinned, mixed-blood Mexican-American, disguised in [her] father’s English last name.” She also claims that she began her politicization, not through the Chicano movement, but through “the bold recognition of [her] lesbianism.” This led to a “radical re-structuring of everything [she] thought [she] held sacred.” And this, in turn, delivered her to political action “because not acting would have meant [her] death by despair.” a. Is there some kind of connection between political action and despair? b. Do you recall other examples in which despair led to political action? c. Have you ever been confronted by some kind of realization that forces you to

reexamine your most sacred beliefs? d. Have you ever felt that you must hide your beliefs (about anything) in front of your

family or friends, as if you were wearing a “political disguise”? 2. It took Moraga a quarter of a century after the walkouts in 1968 to find a place “among la

Chicanada” (the Chicano people). Though not a safe place, this is the “original familial place” from which she is compelled to write, to reach her audience, and which serves as a source of inspiration, voice, and struggle. Do you have or can you imagine a place that serves as a cradle for your thoughts and feelings and voice?

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