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Article Excerpt
IN THE 1980S AND 1990S, Chicana/Latina feminist cultural activists who were critical of U.S. intervention and imperialism in Central America engaged in the production of what I have called "solidarity fictions," or "fictions of solidarity." During those decades, the United States provided military and economic aid to Central American regimes, particularly in E1 Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, to fund wars of genocide and general destruction. As a consequence, many Central Americans sought asylum in the United States as refugees, political exiles, and immigrants. In the heat of that moment, Chicana/Latina writers and critics began to document the deaths, displacements, and border crossings of thousands of Central Americans fleeing civil wars fought between U.S.-supported right-wing governments and leftist guerrilla organizations. Their work produced a narrative of solidarity voicing critical feminist readings of the United States as an imperialist and neocolonial power, thus participating in the construction of a transnational Third World, or "Women of Color" cross-border, anti-colonial feminist discourse and movement. Engaging with transfronterista feminist discourses, agendas, and practices, these solidarity narratives, however, might now be examined in the context of the transnationalization of Chicana feminisms in the 1980s and 1990s when Central American(a)s through their own struggles, histories, and agencies contributed to the radical transformation and politicization of U.S. Latina/o communities.
In this essay, I revisit the production of Chicana/Latina feminist narratives identified with anti-imperialist struggles and hemispheric solidarity movements in Central America in the 1980s and 1990s. (1) Through their texts, transfronterista feminists such as Gloria Anzaldua, Ana Castillo, Carole Fernandez, Graciela Limon, Demetria Martinez, Cherrie Moraga, Lourdes Portillo, Nina Serrano, Alma Villanueva, and Helena Maria Viramontes, among others, not only challenged U.S. hegemony in the Western hemisphere, but also resisted the enforcement of multiple borders across the Americas (2). In the process, they transnationalized Chicana/Latina struggles, histories, discourses, and feminisms beyond the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. However, their tmnsfronterista feminist logic and anti-colonial imperative, while appealing to transnational Third World feminist struggles and affinities, produced a "fiction of solidarity" predicated on Chicana/Mexicana subjectivities. Examining the production of many of these solidarity fictions, and especially Portillo and Serrano's film, After the Earthquake, and Martinez's semi-autobiographical novel, Mother Tongue, this essay seeks to shift the primary focus of Chicana/o resistance, resilience, and hybrid borderizations that has shaped many Chicana/Latina narratives about the wars in Central America and to rethink transfronterista alliances and narratives in the Americas from a Central American subjective location.
CHICANA SOLIDARITY WITH CENTRAL AMERICA
The particular historical context explored in this essay is the intersection, as of the 1980s, of Chicana/Latina cultural activists, who took on anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles against forces that would undo the promise of cross-hemispheric feminist solidarity and affinity building. This contact zone of sorts permitted Chicana writers, scholars, and activists to challenge borders imposed by U.S. imperialism and border regimes, starting with 1848, when the northern territories of Mexico were territorialized (taken) by the United States. Henceforth, if not before, the Caribbean and Central America, each in their own turn, have been subjected to U.S. imperialist and empire-building forces. (3) Situated within this conflicted history, Chicana, Latina, and Central American feminists may be said to share a common imperialist history and anti-imperialist struggle, or what Anzaldua identifies as "a broader communal ground among Latinas/os." (4) In this hemispheric borderlands of sorts, Chicanas, Latinas, and Central Americanas may participate in the elaboration of cross-border, or transfornterista, affinities, alliances, and solidarities. It is at this juncture that Chicana/Latina transfronterista feminists produce a unique mixed blend of solidarity fictions to forge alliances and work across geopolitical borders, bridge local and global struggles, and challenge neocolonial and imperialist forces at work across the Americas.
With the expansion and diversification of Latina/o communities in the United States and with the hemispheric coalition building of feminists across the Americas as of the 1980s, Chicana/Latina feminisms begin to be (re)shaped by the larger spectrum of Latinidades and the increasing complexities of heterogeneous Latina struggles. The work of Sonia Saldivar-Hull is exemplary. In her essay, "Feminism on the Border: From Gender Politics to Geopolitics," and again in her book, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature, she describes the agenda of transfronteristas, or cross-border feminists, as challenging power dynamics that directly structure women's lives in the physical and symbolic Chicana/Latina borderlands. Saldivar-Hull argues that Chicana and Latina feminist practices must foreground the possibilities of forging "internationalist connection with women in Latin American and other Third World countries." According to Saldivar-Hull, mestizas throughout the Western hemisphere are linked by their historic positions within multiple forms of exploitation, oppression, and resistance, as well as by their "struggles against the hegemony of the United States," that is, U.S. imperialism. Consequently, Chicanas/Latinas in the United States are in a position to build "transnational solidarity with other working-class people who like all non-indigenous tribes are immigrants who come to the United States." In an act of solidarity, Saldivar-Hull concludes Feminism on the Border with a brief epilogue focusing primarily on the testimonial voices of Maya Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, Honduran labor activist Elvia Alvarado, and Bolivian mining community leader Domitila Barrios de Chungara. (5)
Following Saldivar-Hull and other cross-border feminists, other Latina feminist scholars set out to produce "flesh and blood theory." (6) For example, fusing personal stories into collective testimonios of struggle, members of the Latina Feminist Group in Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios collaborated in the writing of intersectional stories and theories, bridging scholarship in the areas of race, class, gender, sexuality, generation, nation, among other things. In another collaborative work, titled Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, Chicana scholars also engaged in testimony, dialogue, and feminist theorizing. The use of the autoethnographic method and the "testimonial process" by the Latina Feminist Group, as well as the dialogical exchange produced in Chicana Feminisms, made evident the kinds of affinity politics, discourses, and practices taking shape across the Western hemisphere at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Similarly, in meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands, cultural critic Rosa Linda Fregoso talks about "the contact zones and exchanges among various communities on the Mexico-U.S. border, living in the shadow of more than 150 years of conflict, interactions, and tensions." Produced in neocolonial and imperialist contact, the borderlands are sites of not only violence, but moreover "transculturation, hybridity, and cultural exchanges." The X in the word meXicanas in the title of Fregoso's book marks, thus, the ever expanding site of intersecting histories, identities, social practices, engagements, and practices of solidarity between Mexicanas and Chicanas. The slash (/) between Chicana/Latina like the X in meXicana marks the site of contact, affinity, and solidarity as well as the site of intersections, negotiations, and differences between Chicana and Latina feminists. As Fregoso explains, meXicanas, as of the 1980s, navigate spaces of encounter between Chicana, Mexicana, and other Latina women, drawing strength from "a shared history of exclusion and subordination within the cultural and political practices of various patriarchal nationalisms, those emanating from the nation-state (the United States) as well from nationalist, antiracist movements (the Chicano nation)." (7) Along these lines, Chicana/Latina border feminists find engagement or solidarity around issues of immigration (documented and undocumented), disenfranchisement, struggles, and tactical/differential alliances. In this contact, they actively produce cross-border social identities aligned with trans/national struggles. (8)
U.S. CHICANA/LATINA TRANSNATIONAL NARRATIVE INTERVENTIONS
The politically engaged work of Latina transfronterista feminists such as Anzaldua, Castillo, Fregoso, Martinez, Moraga, Saldivar-Hull, Chela Sandoval, to name only a few, set the course for the production of a vanguard of Central America-identified literature by Chicanas in the 1980s and 1990s. At the height of the U.S.-funded civil wars in Central America, a first-wave, vanguard U.S. Latina/o Central American-allied literature comprised the following works: Viramontes's "The Cariboo Cafe," Villanueva's The Ultraviolet Sky, Castilo's Sapogonia, Fernandez's Sleep of the Innocents, Limon's In Search of Bernabe, and Martinez's collection of sanctuary poems titled "Border Wars: 1985" and "Turning" in Three Times a Woman and her novel Mother Tongue. Filmic texts included Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas's El Norte, Portillo and Serrano's Despues del Terremoto/After the Earthquake, and other various documentaries, mock-documentaries, and narrative films. Like other solidarity workers, Serrano (a writer-activist and independent media producer of Colombian descent) and Portillo (a long-time Chicana filmmaker) could trace back their collaboration to the Central American peace and solidarity movements during the 1980s. The film After the Earthquake along with other texts identified here were among the first produced by U.S. Chicanas/Latinas in solidarity to express a growing concern among Latinas/os about the civil wars in Central America. Such texts produced significant points of affinity for a reception audience critical of U.S. intervention in Central America and elsewhere.
Indeed, in a speech delivered in 1990 at California State University, Long Beach, and later published as "Art in America con Acento," Moraga urged Latinas/os to ask themselves, "How can I, as a Latina, identify with those who invade Latin American land?" (italics in original). She elaborated that, while Mexico was invaded in 1848, "[t]oday, nearly a century and a half later, the Anglo invasion of Latin America has extended well beyond the Mexican/American border." She...
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