Few who are acquainted with recent Chicana literary and critical production would dispute its status as an activity with political implications and consequences. What gets elided in begging the question of politics, however, is the very real, specific, yet contingent set of pressures felt by Chicana writers who consider their work to be part of a greater political project. Chicana feminist political identity must be subject to the process Ernesto Laclau has described, in which the “conditions of existence” and “dislocating adulterations” of social and political identity are risked and constituted (New Reflections 36). This is an absolutely crucial step in securing any kind of future at all for the field of Chicana/Chicano Studies, where, I would argue, political historiography has been hoist by its own petard.

Typically, Chicana political struggle, in and out of the literary field, is represented as a set of negotiations between white, middle-class feminism, which has tended to insist on the priority of gender over racial, ethnic, and class-based analysis, and male-dominated Chicano cultural nationalism, which has tended to dismiss any critique of unequal gender relations as “selling out,” or a breach of cultural integrity. The third obvious issue, the question of Anglo patriarchy's position within this struggle is, at this late date, taken as a given; in this regard, then, Anglo patriarchy is Chicana feminism's only coherently recognizable enemy.

In this context, I want to argue that critiques of Chicana cultural work come down to questions of political authenticity. I'm referring here to a much larger and more interesting question than merely “who is more Chicana (or feminist) than whom?” That question, which has taken up and continues to take up so much of our energy, is really only a subset of a larger set of valences of “the authentic.” The argument that the real Chicana can be more effective, or has more “authority” than the fake Chicana, is based on the following set of assumptions: first, that political energies have a specific and instantly recognizable set of vectors; second, that those vectors can be stunted, shunted, and even turned against their agents, and that political space, time, and energy can be “wasted”; and finally, that some spaces, times, or fields of production are inherently political and others aren't—that is, that some political work isn't “authentically” political at all and may, in fact, lead to an inauthentic and dangerous politics of concession and cultural corruption. Even after the dust has settled over some of the more poisonous confrontations within the Chicano Movement of the 1970's and early '80s, “political” Chicanos and Chicanas can still be heard to say that certain Chicanas' so-called “romance” with American feminism, most broadly conceived, distracts them from the more important work to be done in the name of Chicano/Chicana politics.

This rhetoric constructs Chicana feminism as a “waste of time.” It is the sort of critique that can be closely aligned with what Renato Rosaldo has described as the “pureza” ethic of Chicano cultural nationalism, that set of “cultural” priorities which can only be verified as it correlates to the interests of blood—that is, of racial reproduction, and the consolidation of an “autonomous, homogeneous, and coherent” culture (Rosaldo 85) and, thus a racial and political authority.

What interests me about the two positions I have characterized above (the one that prioritizes gender over other categories of analysis, and the one that prioritizes “ethnicity” or racial origin over other categories) is the way that they are claimed equally as the key determinant of the Chicana crisis. But the image of the Chicana writer navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of Chicanismo and white feminism distracts from or obscures another, equally important obstacle to her political “success,” which only comes into view when we think about issues of political “authenticity” in relationship to creative activities such as writing. I would locate this obstacle in the tendency of insurgent political movements, like feminism and Chicano nationalism, to assimilate the word to the act. I don't want to generalize about all political movements in this regard, or even all strands of chicanismo and feminism, but in many articulations of this politics, the Word, especially the literary Word, is taken as merely symptomatic. That is, it is understood as a referent to a “purer” political desire or meaning, rather than a political act among many, with its own set of rules, trajectories, limits, and strengths. An example of this would be the phrase I have often heard coming from both students and more seasoned activists: “It's time to stop talking and start acting!”—as if talking were separate from action, and as if action were only action if it had certain characteristics. Most simply, it boils down to the supposed difference between theory and praxis; between writing and doing, between “talking” and “walking.”

Lauren Berlant has demonstrated that talk, or speech, has historically received its political saliency in a highly masculinized and abstracted public sphere, in which the voice of the agent is sacralized as political and public by its very dislocation from the body (176). In the context of this history, it makes sense that the embodied agents left behind, usually women and minorities, might insist on a kind of reverse assimilation, defining the force of words only insofar as they refer to the mouths or acting bodies from which they issue. We can recognize in this move a powerful resistance to disembodiment, and a powerful redefinition of the public sphere as a world of bodies, acting. However, the insistence on assimilating the word to the act, and in so doing separating out the “act” as the thing with meaning in the public sphere, has some undesirable consequences. It leaves Chicana artists who consider themselves activists to struggle with a very limited political vocabulary in the present, and leaves them facing a hazardous future.

This is true despite the fact that both the Women's and Chicano Movements have allowed ample space in their respective rhetorical repertoires for the power of cultural production, or “representation,” to advance a collective political cause. An obvious example of this would be the deployment by author Corky Gonzales of his epic poem of Chicano history, “Yo Soy Joaquín/I Am Joaquín,” as a kind of Movimiento rallying cry for young Chicanos and Chicanas. Another example would be the white feminist “discovery” and appropriation during the 1970s of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” as a text that could reshape the American “feminine” consciousness of health, marriage, and female bodies.¹ Even in these examples, however, the terms of the relationship between cultural production and representation (art, literature, music, criticism) and “politics” remains narrowly circumscribed. Both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Joaquín” were considered “political” because they raised consciousness among their readers, and gave those readers a way to focus their desires, demands, and priorities; in this sense, these now-classic critiques of power relations in a racist and sexist America were meant as a way into a more “active” critique, in a more saliently political realm.

The distinction between the word and the act becomes a defining one when it comes to deciding what it is that can serve a cause effectively. Ironically (or perhaps not!), the same “politics” which distinguishes between theory and practice places the highest premium on those literary texts determined to be most emphatically gesturing across the presumed “gap” between word and act, and deprivileges those texts which don't appear to be making such a gesture. In this context, Chicana authors Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Ana Castillo have all observed in various contexts that their critical and artistic work on sexuality, especially lesbian sexuality, has generated criticism for its “individualism,” “self-centeredness,” privatism, and quietism; especially by Chicanos, this work has been termed counterproductive—a sell-out to Anglo-feminist introspection, and even dangerous—a drag on collective and “public” consciousness and action. Examples of the work attacked in this way include Loving in the War Years, Borderlands, Cisneros's House on Mango Street, and Castillo's The Invitation, to which I'll return in a moment.

Feminists have been less quick to attack explicitly this sort of Chicana cultural work; instead, they are either warmly (but nevertheless aggressively) assimilative, or silent, neither including nor excluding Chicanas by name, as Beatriz Pesquera and Denise Segura put it (100). Indeed, Norma Alarcón has pointed out that the impact of Chicana writing “among most Anglo-American [feminist] theorists appears to be more cosmetic than not” (29); the wide use in feminist courses of the literary anthology This Bridge Called My Back, whose editors are Chicanas and whose contributors are women of color, might not signal any critical interrogation of gender as it is differentially determined across race and class lines, then, as much as it demonstrates the “common denominator” theory of universal gender oppression at work in our classrooms (31). The test for feminist authenticity when it comes to Chicanas, Alarcón suggests, is whether or not those Chicanas can be made “intelligible” as feminists (as opposed to whether feminism can be made to square with Chicana discourse and experience). Castillo's work has been especially resistant to this assimilation because of what I would characterize as a calculated coyness when it comes to the nature of the sexuality she inscribes in her poetry and prose. Her early “erotica,” as she describes the poetry of The Invitation, rarely specifies the gender of its unnamed lovers; the title poem, for instance, names only “I” and “you, and in so doing, her poetry purposely erases one conventional marker of the political.

When she does name women, Castillo's refusal to name them “lesbian”—indeed, her refusal to take that name for herself in print—further signals her resistance to those political markers. Similarly, Castillo's The Mixquishuala Letters, So Far from God, and Women Are Not Roses elaborate close relationships among women, strongly suggesting their erotic charge, while staunchly refusing to “name names.” Castillo thus opens herself to the suspicions of readers who might read her silence as, at best, a veil that confounds political readings, and, at worst, a sign of total absence from the political scene.

In general, then, critics have for the most part failed to consider Chicana artistic production as distinctively political work. Perhaps because they have gained more attention from Chicanos and Chicano Movement proponents—even if that attention has consisted largely of being told to put up or shut up—Chicana writers evidence more anxiety about their relations to their ethnic “communities” than to feminist or women's groups. This is not to say that Chicanas are, as a group, content with their relationship to feminism; only that they're not as anxious about expressing that discontent. On the other hand, the anxiety around the question of political and artistic membership for Chicanas is revealed in documents like the charter declaration of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), a group of Chicanas in higher education whose aims include “bridg[ing] the gap between intellectual work and active commitment to our communities.” The foundations of that bridge, according to the MALCS manifesto, are “a tradition of [Chicano and Chicana] political struggle,” and values “deriving from where we came”: “labor camps and barrios, where sharing our resources was the basis of survival” (MALCS Declaration, June 1983). These somewhat romantic gestures toward working class “roots” speak to an ongoing crisis of political authenticity within the Chicana intellectual and artistic communities. We see this crisis brought home when we examine the work of particular Chicana writers; the rest of this paper will focus on two of these authors, Cherríe Moraga and Ana Castillo, whose struggle to reconcile the posited distinction between artistry and activism helps to reveal the limitations of that distinction.

Moraga declared in Loving in the War Years that in claiming the “right to passion” (136) and the right to write about it, she was engaging in an inherently political act, even as it was read by her compadres as a betrayal of a particular politics. She insisted that whether or not her practice and her representation of Chicana lesbian sexuality marked her as una vendida, La Malinchista, in the eyes of Chicanos, the connections she had made with women across racial and ethnic lines, through sex, through writing, and through the fact of her bi-racial body itself, only made her more of an asset to Chicanismo—in other words, she was a Chicana, and a feminist, because of, not despite, her “half-breed” blood and “marginal” sexuality. This identity is articulated quite literally through the tongue and lips, the two images Moraga uses to posit the continuum between the word and the act: “la lengua que necesito / para hablar / es la misma que uso / para cari-ci-ar” (Loving 149).²

In sharp contrast to Loving, where Moraga claimed linguistic, ethnic, and sexual hybridity as a politically salient and viable subject position, The Last Generation, her more recent collection of autobiographical essays and poetry, insists that a subject isn't a subject until she has confessed a loyalty. The very title, The Last Generation, suggests very clearly what loyalty Moraga has arrived at. This book is a eulogy for a dying race, and Moraga has cast her lot with the “lost tribe”:

I am that raging breed of mixed-blood person who writes to defend a culture that I know is being killed. I am of that endangered culture and of that murderous race, but I am loyal to only one. My mother culture, my mother land, my mother tongue, further back than even she can remember.

(128-29)

This identification with the mother culture has certain implications for her art, and her understanding of that art's relationship to “politics,” as well. In “War Cry,” Moraga historicizes Chicano literature as it “responded to a stated mandate: art is political” (57). After describing the flowering of Chicano art under that mandate, she mourns the passing of a truly political art in the face of the “neutralizing” forces of middle-class and marketplace concerns, which are reinforced, she argues, by the academy. Even as she asserts that “a writer will write with or without a movement,” however, it is clear that Moraga believes that writing gains not only its intelligibility, but meaning itself solely in the context of an already-established “community-based and national political movement” (58). Literature responds, in other words, to an extra-literary mandate; when it becomes non-responsive, as Moraga tells us it has, it is no longer useful. “Political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere,” she asserts, and later adds wistfully, “what we will be capable of producing in the decades to come, if we have the cultural/political movements to support us, could make a profound contribution to the social transformation of these Américas” (58-59).

Moraga's literary trajectory, which moves her from understanding her writing as a moment in a “cultural/political movement” to seeing it as merely supplementary to a larger, a priori, and more important field of action, is directly related to her revised understanding of her relationship to her “culture.” The distinctive feature of this culture, in The Last Generation, is its coherence, its intelligibility, and its finite spatial and temporal parameters, which can be perceived from a great distance—in fact, a distance of centuries. Moraga's culture is indigenous, ancient, and artifactual. It is not an unfolding, dynamic and contested process in which writing-as-discourse has as much agency as “stated mandates” or explicit injunctions; instead, it is a solid object of nostalgia, a flash of “pureza” in otherwise muddied waters, a “sacred” antidote to the “stain” of Moraga's mixed immigrant blood (131). Most importantly, the mother-culture is a stern reproach to the present-day ineffectuality of artists who also call themselves Chicanas—in the “political” sense of that word.

What has precipitated this dramatic shift in Moraga's theorization of art and politics? I believe it goes back to the idea of “conditions of visibility”—those discursive limits which allow certain configurations of identity to come into view, and force others back into muddy darkness and unintelligibility. The lips and the tongue of Loving in the War Years brush up against those limits, but it seems clear that Moraga was not satisfied, ultimately, with what stabilizing effect they afforded her in terms of identity, probably because they so insistently called that stabilization itself into question. In a moment when the words they formed had not yet been naturalized as “political,” perhaps their whispers sounded too much like silence for her.

Ana Castillo seems to have arrived at a similar conclusion with the publication of her latest work of non-fiction, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. The first chapter of Massacre is all about representation, and Castillo is careful to link political with artistic representation in the figure of the Chicana, the “mestiza/Mexic Amerindian” who has been excluded from fully participating in all modes of social and cultural life, including book production and publication (1). Again, her work implicitly calls up questions of what Rosaldo calls “cultural citizenship,” which Castillo rightly claims to reclaim. And her chosen mode for reclamation appears to be writing, which she identifies as important, revolutionary, political. In fact, her graduate work at Chicago was derailed, she tells us, by the very silence of the indigenous woman's pen or voice in both “creative literature and ethnographic documentation” (7), implicitly acknowledging the history-making force of writing. But Massacre, taken as a whole, betrays a deep anxiety about the legitimacy of her claims on and for writing and literary production. Castillo, “torn between the Chicago obrero roots of [her] upbringing and [her] egocentric tendency toward creative expressions” (Massacre 1) implicitly opposes “expression” to real labor. In the acknowledgements section of Massacre, she similarly hesitates, writing that “those who are unable to dismiss the idea that revolutionary work and action is by its nature inferior to work that conforms to the standards of the status quo—in this case, the academy—may rest easy” that Castillo was required to conform to rigorous academic standards in completing her doctoral thesis at the University of Bremen in Germany (ix-x). Whereas her statement about her obrero roots may be read as innocently nostalgic, here Castillo finds it necessary to defend, quite explicitly, writing against the real standard-bearer, “revolutionary work and action.”

For me, at least, Castillo's shift toward a new hierarchy of action and art, in which action takes precedence, is accompanied by a precipitous waning of wit and playfulness. These elements of play had been hallmarks of her writing—indeed, of its very Xicanisma. The promiscuous mixture of literary and cultural traditions that marked So Far from God, for instance, or the webby texture of The Mixquiahuala Letters, which offered readers at least four strategies for getting through the text: “for the conformist,” “for the cynic,” “for the quixotic,” and “for the reader committed to nothing but short fiction” (9, 11) reflect a deep engagement with the “disputed, torn, intertextual … syncretic” nature of Chicana identity and culture.

In Massacre, Castillo writes that she had known of the risk of not being taken seriously when she originally embarked upon her poetic project. The Invitation

was created out of my sobering experiences as a Movimiento Latina. Sobering because I felt my physiology was demeaned, misunderstood, objectified … I anticipated that the men within el Movimiento Latino, as conscienticized and as “liberal-minded” as they believed themselves to be, would look upon my invitation to discuss sexuality with all the inhibitions set upon society centuries ago. They would do as men have done to women throughout the ages whenever we embark on the subject of our sexual desire: they would not take my endeavor as serious intellectual discourse.

(122)

Thus, I don't think the new “seriousness” and didacticism evident in Massacre is coincidental: it seems part and parcel of Castillo's desire to have text, as much as desire, be taken seriously—that is, to be taken as politically motivated, salient, and effective.

When we return to The Invitation, we see, as with Moraga, just how closely the body of text and the body of desire are linked. In the title poem, the narrator speaks of desire as composition: “On some afternoon / prose will become / Movements / in perfect coordination / from hips to hips / lines will run along the curve of your spine / on and on.” Her poetry, like Moraga's, aggressively collapses the distinction between the word and the (sex) act, between palabras y Movimientos, and the poem's title solicits a reading of the text as a social and public gesture (and an implicitly political one), even as it represents a private invitation.

It is the materiality of the word that both Moraga and Castillo have uncovered in their poetic work on sexuality—a materiality that metonymically touches the materiality of the Chicana body, and of its desire. The essays of Massacre are haunted by this materiality, in the sense that they return again and again to it as a subject of discourse, in essays like “La Macha: Toward an Erotic Whole Self,” yet refuse the poetics it seemed earlier to demand. Like Moraga, Castillo has decided that the hermeneutic vulnerability presented by the poetic form presents too great a risk for politics. In the case of La Macha, the Latina who desires Latinas, gone are the sly evasions and gaps of her fiction and poetry. We are left with flat statements of opinion and fact about Latina lesbian sexuality, culled, we are assured, “after a lifetime of observation and interaction with Mexicans, Tex-Mex fieldworkers, Mexican City urbanites, the young women with whom I grew up and with whom I went to school, and from my professional and personal associations as an adult” (136).

Castillo, like Moraga, speaks of rootedness, of the importance of discovering the bases and the reasons for machismo, for capitalism, and for indigenous feminine power. Moraga abandons the “hybrid” shape and color of her words and bodies in order to “re-member the severed serpent … not out of nostalgia but out of hope” (Last 190). But nostalgia for lost and whole origins is exactly what Moraga and Castillo do embrace. This nostalgia is identical with their rejection of the absences, the omissions, the incompletions of language, text, and embodiment, so that in The Last Generation and Massacre of the Dreamers, our most accomplished Chicana authors find themselves writing against writing, talking against talk, tying their own tongues.

I would hate to be confused here with those critics who like to argue that the more explicitly political writers become, the less interesting, literarily speaking, they are. In a discipline which has from its very beginnings (in the work, say, of Américo Paredes on los corridos) worked hard to expand critical notions of what is aesthetically and rhetorically interesting and important, such arguments are obviously not very useful. But in inverting those arguments, it must be acknowledged that the authors I have considered here have reinstated a distinction between political speech and political action that has historically rendered the brown body, and especially the brown female body, invisible and inaudible in the public sphere. It seems absolutely necessary, then, for a forward-looking Chicana identification, one which can lay legitimate claim to cultural citizenship in a larger America, to reject these authors' rejections, and look forward to the sound, the feel, and the force of talk.

Notes

1. See Susan Lanser for a remarkable discussion of the way the Gilman renaissance has obscured the tendency of second-wave white feminism to “universalize” the category of woman without regard for factors like race or class.

2. “The tongue that I need to speak with is the same one I use to touch” (my translation).

Works Cited

Alarcón, Norma. “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism.” Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Ed. Héctor Calderón and José D. Saldívar. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 28-39.

Berlant, Lauren. “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life.” The Phantom Public Sphere. Ed. Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 173-208.

Castillo, Ana. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. New York: Plume/Penguin, 1994.

———. My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems. New York: Norton, 1995.

———. The Mixquiahuala Letters. 1986. Anchor/Doubleday: 1992.

———. So Far from God. New York: Plume/Penguin, 1994.

Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 1-26.

Laclau, Ernesto. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verson, 1990.

———. “Power and Representation.” Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture. Ed. Mark Poster. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.

Lanser, Susan S. “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America.” Feminist Studies 15 (1989): 415-441.

Moraga, Cherrie. The Last Generation. Boston: South End Press, 1993.

———. Loving in the War Years. Boston: South End Press, 1983.

Rosaldo, Renato. “Fables of the Fallen Guy.” Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Ed. Héctor Calderón and José D. Saldívar. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 85-93.

Segura, Denise A., and Beatriz Pesquera. “There Is No Going Back: Chicanas and Feminism.” Chicana Critical Issues. Ed. Norma Alarcón, et al. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1993. 95-115.