Throwing Shade to the West: la enseñanza en Aztlán, Cherríe Moraga

Throwing Shade to the West – La enseñanza en Aztlán1

Cherríe Moraga

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA

If anything is most vital, essential, and absolutely important in Native cultural philosophy, it is this concept of interdependence: the fact that without land there is no life, and with a responsible social and cultural outlook by humans, no life-sustaining land is possible —Simón Ortiz2

So, this is where we begin. On the edge of a kind of extinction. The knife edge, el filero, in itztli. We begin with what has been broken in the first place. We begin with five and a quarter centuries of genocide, ethnocide, de-Indianization, the theft of Native lands, the reservation system, Indian boarding schools and too many trails of tears to map; the separation of familias, the rape of Native women on and off the reservation; an endless litany of poverty and its death call of diabetes, heart-disease, and suicide.

The rupture continues south with the forced migration of pueblos originarios – ICE raids, detention camps, NAFTA and its femicidal rampage along la frontera, thousands of native mexicanos, hondureños y guatemaltecos fleeing forced prostitution, drug cartels, and empty bellies, only to arrive at the U.S. border scratching entry at an impenetrable wall of bifurcated state—sanctioned ignorance.

Let us begin with the truth that through-out the globe, Indigenous values, world views, and ways of life are being systematically eroded and disappeared through the single objective of profit at all human costs and at nature’s expense. Let us acknowledge that this also means us who are at loss.

As a Xicana and a writer and a teacher now old enough to be ‘elder’ if not wise enough to be ‘an elder,’ I have a stake in believing that our indigenous identities (some we can name and some we cannot) might serve to draw us a roadmap home to a decolonized education and livable future. This is truly what El Plan de Santa Bárbara may have asked of us fifty years ago. As such, these are notes to a larger reflection, in conversation with others, on the revolutionary promise found in such ‘return,’ not as some easy nostalgia, but as evolving social and political engagement with value systems in accord with nature. The right to live in a world of reciprocal relations to one another and our planet has been systemically denied us through a world his-tory of land grabs— small and large, as large as the globe itself. As Simon Ortiz explains it, “The greatest and most horrible trauma Indigenous peoples of the Americas have experienced and endured… has been the loss of place… due to loss of land.”

1 This developing essay grew out of the Verbal Kaleidoscope — First Writers and Scholars in Indigenous Languages and Literatures Conference, sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara. April 4, 2018. 2 “Introduction” in Speaking for the Generations – Native Writers on Writing. Sun Tracks Books, 1997, p. xii.

The recovery of ourselves as a pueblo outside of the neoliberal agenda of the nation-states in which we reside, requires living in pro-found regard to ‘place:’ its original inhabitants – the flora and fauna and faces of the land– as well its histories of uninvited occupation witnessed from the vantage point of the highest summit to the dark belly of the deepest waters. For Xicana[x] Aztlán was once our place of mythic and historical memory, a collective uprising of recovered yearning for a pre-invasion homeland.3

Margaret Kovach in Indigenous Methodologies writes, “Stories will wait for us until we are ready. Then they will reveal themselves in purposeful, powerful ways, and when this happens, we are in the midst of the sacred.”4 Was it not an American Indigenous and decolonial impulse which erupted from the collective unconscious of Xicana[x] in the late 1960s that resurrected the memory, the myth and the story of Aztlán? How prophetic were the metaphor imaginings of those young estudiantes in 1968 to recall “Aztlán” as homeland; to uncover a story of mythic pro-portions that made ‘place’ for the displaced in our own original landscape as Xicana[x] in the U.S. Southwest.

There was no thievery in this gesture of return. For us, Aztlán was the poetic metaphor and the geographical reference point that allowed Xicana[x] to remember/reclaim our Indigenous histories and identities, alongside recognized Native tribes. Myth and story and their harmonious instincts draw from something beyond BIA nomenclature and Mexican American border-state wounds. Aztlán refuted nation-state ideologies mandated by colonial geopolitical borders. It countered the erasure of our indigenous ethnicity that dismissed us as ‘just another immigrant population.”

Fifty years ago was an especially clairvoyant moment at the apex of el movimiento Chicano, even as so many mistakes were made. The confusion over our resurrected usage of Vasconcelos’ La raza cósmica is one example where the Mexican modernist text, fundamentally flawed by racial and class prejudice, rendered the Indian part of us burro and European brain. Still, el movimiento caught onto the phrase. The critique came later as did the objections to Aztlán – more metaphor than material, they complained. Y con razón, because Aztlán was fundamentally a poet’s imaginary, but one which energized a very real political movement.

Nation states do not make a people, except through generations of dominant narratives, enforced by penal codes, patriarchal religions, monolingualism and state-regulated education systems. Such narratives erase the histories, origin stories, ethical values, societal economic structures and spiritual practices of original peoples. This is achieved the most egregiously through eradication of the very language in which these ways and means were originally transmitted.

In the United States cross-cultural exchange seldom occurs along an even planting field of cultivation. It is always an imposition of power, where individualism, private property, competition, white and male privilege, along with compulsory and dominant heterosexuality and gender conformity. As

3 For the purposes of this essay, I spell Xicana[x] with an X as the first letter to signal a Xicanismo identified with Indigenous principles and intention. I end the spelling with the “a *x+” to acknowledge the hard-won “a” of our identities as women en el movimiento and “x” to reflect the inclusivity of all genders. 4 4 Ibid., p.33

Raza what our original cultures held true and sacred in regards to each of these areas of identity and social practice may seem by the twenty-first century utterly remote and quite alien to us; for the loss of ‘entitlement’ to one’s original land base, and our cultural dislocation from it, has proven to be the most effective way to dominate a people.

Today, many Xicana[x] in the Southwest can name their indigenous origins and have gradually begun to reclaim them (whether federally recognized or not). They are Apache, Tohono O’odham, Yoeme (Yaqui), Chumash, Kemayaa, Tongva y más. Conversely, the “hispanicization” of Mexican Americans and Latinos with its obligatory cultural amnesia in regard to our Indigenous (including lo africano y lo asiático) inheritance seems to be on the rise from within and with-out. In response, I confess an almost singular agenda as a Xicana artist and teacher since the turn of this century: to help my students recover authentic ‘place’ in their own lives.

It is impossible to describe what it means to find place—to feel, finally, that you might just belong to something larger than your own personal and conflicted story. For me (and quite privately, as there was no ‘place’ for this queer mestiza in the early days del movimiento), Aztlán as my sacred and profane grounding. My spiritual (land) base. It housed my Spanglish language, my náhuatl imaginings and my queer silences. Perhaps it spoke to the subtle and subliminal messages of my own Native origins in the deserts of Sonora or the pure thrust of the mestiza conciencia I inherited from my 19th century Mexican American upbringing in the shadow of the Old Mission San Gabriel. I remember the first time I returned to the Sonora desert at the mere age of eight. I promise you, the saguaro, the ocotillo, the mesquite sang to me. Old, very old songs. I credit the concept of Aztlán for igniting in this (sub)urban Mexican American the ánimo to search for home— lugar/hogar— in the first place. With or without male acknowledgment, I/ we claimed our “Queer Aztlán.”5

I do not know the songs of the Chumash along the coastal lands where I reside today. I do not know the songs of the Tongva where I was raised. But I did grow up with mixed-blood Indian peoples with Spanish last names, just like my cousins and tíos y tías – el mismo apellido que llevo yo ahora. And I was compelled to return. So, like our collective ancestors and so many of my generation, I went south, placing my own little patitas on that map of descent into my meXican[x] origins.

Re-search. It requires embodied engagement. It is to stumble upon the sacred in the act of return. It is to get well and whole again—not individually (as West would have it in the privacy of therapy) but collectively. As Xicana[x] writers/artists/activists, we research for a people. My eyes fall upon the female warrior figure, Itzpapálotl, the Obsidian Butterfly, painted into the far corner of el mapa de Cuauhtinchan.6 She tumbles out of the cavernous mouth of Chicomóztoc and leads our Chichimeca ancestors in their journey from the primordial origins of the Seven Caves of the Nahua peoples into the world. Was it not my Xicana feminist writer’s impulse to claim this warrior woman

5 “Queer Aztlán – The Reformation of Chicano Tribe” in Loving in the War Years – Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. South End Press, Boston, 1983. 6 No 2. Sixteenth century, Cuauhtinchan, Puebla. In Cave, City and Eagles Nest, edited by David Carrasco and Scott Sessions. University of New Mexico Press, 2007.

as my original birth mother? Was this not also what motivated the Chicana feminist reclamation of Coyolxauhqui? Are we not the dismembered sisters of our movimiento brothers? Is this not the same disabling sexism and queer phobias we experience along el camino rojo that we walk today?

Preguntas. Todo lo que tengo son preguntas. Questions that emerge from what, at times, seems empirically obvious, but, more importantly, intuitively answered. Perhaps this moment in history es una apertura en el camino, the road back to a 21st century Aztlán. When we think back fifty years to the Plan de Santa Bárbara, what was called for, at its heart, was a “sovereign” education. Five decades later, I wonder about how far away we may have ventured from that original calling. When I consider the state of Chicana[x] Studies, it seems we are more often in conversation with the West than with one another. Much has been achieved, but much has been lost along the way.

We stand at the precipice of two great seismic shifts on this planet requiring equally great shifts in our collective consciousness as a people. One: mass dislocation: and, two: the disappearing land mass. What compels this writing is the future. We are in a race against time they tell us, while the corporate elite burn the midnight oil, designing ways to burn more oil to see who might colonize Mars first. Any reparation of, and to, this planet will not occur by competitive plot lines but by completely altering our world view where what we understand as ‘invention’ may be standing right behind us. We turn around, ‘throwing shade’ to the West, receiving the en(light)enment of our ancestors. Let us learn from the Pacific Islanders, whose land base is shrinking beneath them, how to prevent the seas from rising. Ask the Inuit and the polar bear as they together mark the melting glacier. Invite the scientists to listen and learn.

As I write this, my cell phone signals “flash floods” (again) in the yesterday droughtlands of the central coast, as mudslides creep over highways and duffle bags are kept packed and ready for the run. From every corner of the world, millions of people are forced into migration by global warfare and global warming equally. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports that there are over 10 million stateless people in the world. Perhaps today as Raza, (in) migrantes y pueblos originarios, we need Aztlán more than ever.

We have arrived at a turning point. Xicanos have turned to Northern native traditions to find spiritual grounding and some kind of place in a colonized America. We have come to know the sweat lodge and the sundance, and have learned to keep a ceremonial fire burning. In the same way, northern Natives were first introduced to la medicina peyuta from Native teachers of the South. Mexica danza and its ceremonial structures continue to engage young Xicana[x]s in their pursuit of a less colonial god. In spite of reservation systems, enrollment cards, and de-indianization, these knowledges continue to be exchanged among Indigenous and mestizo peoples of this continent. We remember the old ways of cross-cultural interchange and remap the trade routes of precious stones for seeds, eagle feathers for quetzal.

Still, as geopolitical borders begin to mean less and less with globalization, nation-states become more nationalistic. But such divisions cannot be sustained, nor can disciplinary divisions in our learning and teaching practices. The threat of extinction on the horizon poignantly marks a call for return, a return to a world view to see holistically the interconnectedness of all sentient beings,

the elements of nature, the four directions, and the existential cry of the cosmos. Such systems of knowledge may very well provide the very tangible tools of action to save the planet.

As Latina[x]s educated in the U.S. schools, we speak English; and as peoples once colonized by los españoles, many of us speak Spanish. Some of us may be privileged to speak or remember our native language as the first sound upon our mother(s’) tongue. We move through the world with these double and triple cultural identities five hundred years in the making. They continue to inform what we know and how we interact with the ‘West.’ But daily we are told these home and pre-colonial knowledges are of little value. We learn to distrust what we know and our first teachers.

Linear knowledge is only-half-knowledge. The body is not separated from the mind but is the holistic bearer of knowledge. Our work as artists and educators is to generate sites of learning where what one carries in their DNA, in ancestral stories, and in a collective history is treated as intelligence. Through the oral tradition and critical conscienced readings, through engaged multigenerational community study and art practice, through the use of simple rituals to cultivate the contemplative, the student practitioner may begin to access embodied knowledges (theory in the flesh) not publicly recognized by most academic disciplines, art and performance scholarship, nor Western literatures.7 Such approaches to learning may be what is fundamentally missing in the creation of a truly decolonized education.

“Coyote cantando en la noche” . Fotografía. Antonio Valle.

© 2019 by Cherríe Moraga. Not for reproduction or distribution without written permission from the author or her representative. Stuart Bernstein. stu-art@stuartbernstein.com

7 A basic tenet of This Bridge Called My Back – Writings by Radical Women of Color by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.