3
"Rancho Mexicana, Usa" Under Siege

As the title The Brick People (1988) suggests, Alejandro Morales's historical novel details the construction (or constructed nature) of a unique society—a workers' enclave that provided the labor to build one of the world's preeminent brick manufacturers. Documenting the importation of Mexican institutional and cultural forms by the Anglo Simons family with an eye for lo real maravilloso , Morales's novel offers a new form of historiography more sensitive to the manner in which specific groups are cultivated into dependent relationships vis-à-vis the dominant social classes and castes. Thus pursuing a version of the "dependency critique" associated with figures like Immanuel Wallerstein, Henrique Cardoso, and Enzo Faletto, Morales explores the manipulation of social pathologies and the political unconscious by southern California's entrepreneurial class as it builds what numerous Chicano historians have termed a "perpetual underclass" of Chicano laborers.^[1]

Readers need only look to Morales's preceding novel, Reto en el paraíso (1983), to find such interests in hegemonic manipulation laid bare. As George Mariscal has noted with reference to Reto en el paraíso , Morales's notion of resistance should not be taken as "merely a question of repudiating the values and philosophies of [one's] class enemies, but rather of some much more complicated process of self-analysis whereby [critics] attempt to detect and eradicate the ideological infection inevitably present in [themselves] as well."^[2] Through his principal character, the architect Dennis Berreyesa Coronel, who literally builds the Orange County paradise from which he must be excluded, Morales probes in Reto en el paraíso both the appeal and the impossibility of accommodation; as the architect discovers, "El chicano es una omisión." As Morales demonstrates in both Reto and The Brick People , Mexicanos and Chicanos are funda-

mental for the construction of Anglo utopias, paradises which are from beginning to end monuments of dependency.

As a means of expanding the historical dimensions of this critique in The Brick People , Morales focuses on the Anglo importation of the Mexican hacienda model of labor management. In large part the action of the novel evolves from the initial desire of Walter Simons, one of the brickyard owners, to discover what makes Mexicano workers tick. Walter craves insight into hacienda labor management not for humanitarian purposes but rather because he wants to harness—and profit from—the anger he reads on the faces of the workers who make it to the United States. To this end he travels through Mexico with another, more esteemed representative of U.S. capitalism and exploitation—William Hearst. What Walter sees on this trip is so incredible as to be fantastic. During one of the first nights of the trip, Walter wanders away from the main compound of Hearst's hacienda—a hacienda prophetically named "Rancho Mexicana, USA" in order to make it clear that Anglo economic prowess can rewrite national boundaries at will. While stumbling about, Waiter comes across what appear to be large insects eating the putrid entrails of a dead horse. Before Walter can respond to this scene in any significant way, a band of Hearst's horsemen ride down on the "insects"—actually starving Mexicanos—and one of the novel's many massacres ensues. As we learn later, these Mexicanos—seen as insects by Walter—had not received permission to eat the rotting flesh and were therefore punished. Initially aghast at such inhuman treatment, Walter quickly defers his humanitarian concerns, succumbing instead to the pleasures acquired through the profits of this system of exploitation. It is not an accident that this sublimating seduction is also a literal seduction. Although a Malinche figure helps Walter strategically displace the "magical reality" of the situation, readers cannot fail to see how this woman, like the other women workers, is motivated by a desire for survival in a patriarchal economic system that gives her little that could be called choice.

If a process of betrayal through translation occurs (the archetypal crime attributed to La Malinche), it takes place when Walter returns to the United States equipped with his new management tools and ready to fashion his own "Rancho Mexicana, USA." Locked into

competition with his brother Joseph, Walter applies his newfound knowledge to his own brickyard in the hopes that he might make it the most efficient in the world; the principle that will govern this new project is the creation of an indentured, dependent workforce. Operating firmly in the tradition of the patriarchal family, Walter provides the workers with various benefits, privileges which ultimately solidify the workers in their indentured status; he constructs homes, a school, and a store, meanwhile extending credit so that the workers may buy into the lifestyle of consumption. The stipulations that accompany these favors are simple: no one may purchase goods except at the company store, regardless of the prices one might find there; debts may come due at any time; and no questioning of the system, at any level, will be tolerated—a point reinforced by a constant show of potential, if not actual, force.

In this way The Brick People documents the adaptation of the hacienda system for the larger purposes of creating an enclave of dependency. A trained Latin Americanist, Morales depicts this translation of power with a twist, inasmuch as the Foucauldian disciplinary techniques initiated by the Anglo ownership—including panoptic strategies for "observing" the workers—are ultimately turned back on the bosses during subsequent magical realist moments of revenge. Morales thus depicts the Anglo translation of dependency in order to suggest a more complex strategy for reading and responding to border transactions.

Translating Dependency

Morales opens The Brick People with an epigraph drawn from Carlos Fuentes's Terra nostra (1975), an epigraph which reads, "The world dissolves when someone ceases to dream, to remember, to write." Fuentes's dictum is presented by Felipe, the Second's chronicler, a character loosely modeled on Cervantes. As you would expect, this character holds a privileged place in Terra nostra , a position built on the chronicler's ability to counteract the historical amnesia that defines the despotic project attributed to Felipe. Ultimately, this ethic of historical rethinking fuels Terra nostra's wide-ranging mobilization of arcane and heretical memory arts drawn explicitly from Frances Yates's study The Art of Memory (1966), among others.^[3] Morales, in turn, uses this epigraph to frame his novel's project because

he wishes to emphasize the recovery of an alternative history: that of the Simons brickyards in Los Angeles during the first half of this century.

The inherently revisionary nature of Morales's project—a fundamental link with Terra nostra —and the quality of social realism have led the novel's best readers to gauge its success in terms of its accomplishments as a protest work. For example, Mario García has written the most thorough critical review along these lines, surmising finally that, although the novel does expose the horrors of race and class dynamics in the Southwest, it fails inasmuch as it conveys only the limitations of collective action.^[4] Ultimately, García faults Morales for not having chosen to pursue a historical story of collective success. The point is important because García conveys a particularly resonant notion of political efficacy; according to this vision, protest novels should affirm collective struggle by holding out hope through positive examples.

García suggests that these are Morales's parameters for success as well, assuming that Morales is still situated within the strategies of the Chicano Movement. However, The Brick People is not, properly speaking, a product of the movement; it was published in 1988, well into a period of critical reevaluation. Hence, for Morales's principal brickyard worker, Octavio Revueltas, faith in conventional means of change is at best dubious, and this sense carries over to hopes placed in union reform as well. As we learn about Octavio, "He disliked the word hope. Hope, he believed, was a concept of oppression used by the dominant society to rule the mass of people . . . Hope was a void, a holding zone used to control" (188-89). Working in the frame of social realism, this passage could be read as a call to action, a call which is dealt a death blow with the subsequent failure of the unionization undertaken by the brickyard workers. Thereafter, Morales's protagonist moves into what appears to be an insulated space, a domestic space in keeping with the American Dream, according to García.

This movement into an apparent individualism mirrors what readers might assume about Ralph Ellison's protagonist, Invisible Man: that he too fails to fully engage Ellison's social realist political issues. The comparison between the works grows even more apposite if we stop to consider that readings of each of the novels have often overemphasized the role of social realism; though popular,

critical assertions of escapism into an insular space and into individualism make sense only as long as we forget the competing modes of reading called forth by the novels themselves. These modes not only supplement but also challenge the priority often given by critics to social realism. For Ellison, that competing mode is constituted by the symbolic references he builds in throughout his novel to the African-American trickster tradition as well as other "heretical" discourses or frames of reference.^[5] While I cannot rehearse here the resulting complications for Ellison's political dialogues produced by this symbolic aspect, especially as he addresses interlocutors like Richard Wright, let me simply suggest that "protest" becomes a much more difficult process when understandings or projections of reality become infected with overdetermined meanings, meanings that must be taken into account if writers and readers are to deal with the manipulation of desires described by theorists of institutional power, including Michel Foucault.^[6]

Readers should have these difficulties in mind when considering the role of lo real maravilloso in The Brick People , and especially the role of the insects, which appear to wreak a kind of revenge on Anglo capitalists throughout the novel. A similar preoccupation with insects may be found in Oscar Zeta Acosta's works, giving readers one context for understanding the apparent import of the insects; in the cult novel Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), Chicanos and disenfranchised peoples in general are affirmed as an unstoppable natural force. Cockroaches, printed in the margins of the text, further this sense of omnipotent power. However, this power is significantly compromised at the end of the novel (as I shall discuss later), when Acosta's protagonist reflects that his political strategies may have been manipulated from the very start by the likes of Los Angeles's Mayor Yorty, who privately counseled the protagonist to pursue violent action from the outset. The original episode with Mayor Yorty and its remembrance at the end of Acosta's novel raise questions about the efficacy of Chicano political strategy and its latent manipulation that are also taken up by Morales as he builds his own symbolic "magical layer" into his text. This revision of political literary strategies, similar to that produced by Ellison, is grounded in presenting a collision of worldviews.^[7]

In Morales's case, this collision takes part both in the cultural tradition supported by the Cuban Casa de las Americas publishing

and research enterprise and in the critique of modes of dependency identified by scholars like José Saldívar (Dialectics of Our America ).^[8] Like Ellison, Morales develops a combination of social realism and specifically situated heretical symbolism. However, as long as the two worlds of meaning—the social realist and the magical—are resolved into separate spheres, it remains fairly easy to consider the symbolic a purely escapist, fantastic force. What happens in The Brick People , and at the end of Acosta's novel, is quite another matter—hence the importance of the phrase "When worlds dissolve." The "magical" in Morales's novel is not a textual effect to be categorized among others in whatever anatomy of literary techniques. This tendency to narrow the practice's implications in fact explains why many North American attempts to define "magical realism" have been unsuccessful.^[9] As Saldívar notes, lo real maravilloso has a fundamentally extraliterary component that comes into view only when critics recognize the magical as a specifically situated response to institutional discourses in the New World, especially legal, scientific, and anthropological discourse.^[10]

In the hands of authors like Carlos Fuentes, lo real maravilloso reveals institutional languages as perpetuators of particular worldviews, ontologies that appear inescapable only so long as their legitimacy remains a sheltered part of a political unconscious. The representation of ontological struggles in these works thus promotes a rethinking of historiography, and particularly the manipulation of desire within differing historical representations. The Brick People is written squarely in this "American" tradition, a fact underscored when readers consider the novel's embattled ontologies.

Morales opens The Brick People with an anecdote that defines an avenging force. Recalling the ghostly apparitions of a widow, Doña Eulalia, who had been terrorized by Anglo land grabbers, an anonymous waiter tells the brickyard developer, Joseph Simons, that the doña had thrown herself into a pit and turned herself into "indescribably large insects . . . millions of brown insects" after having discovered her murdered family (11); the doña had prophesied that this transformation would occur should harm come to her family. To further our sense that her pronouncements hold latent significance, the waiter adds that the doña "understood the earth in a special way and possessed powers of the earth" (11). Such powers are evident to those witnessing the transformation at her death:

"Horror choked the people as they watched the insects overtake them, spread out, and cover El Rincon" (11). This anecdote—based on an actual memoir dating from the period of U.S. colonization—sets a context for two important elements repeated throughout the novel: (1) images of workers falling—like the doña—into excavating pits and (2) images of Anglos literally choked with horror by a proliferation of "insects."^[11] The novel uses this initial episode to write the manipulation of dependency, and the "magical" responses it receives, into the doña's prophecy. Although the prophecy is written into yet another mythology later, when the Mexicana El Eco attributes California's earthquakes to Quetzalcoatl's displacement of Anglo-European colonizers (55), the import remains essentially the same.

This "import" is not simply a fantastic wish for justice; however, to fully understand it, we must first consider what is at stake for the Anglo-controlled institutions in the novel. Walter Simons structures his brickyard to separate and observe the workers, thereby exercising a policing function that is ultimately meant to shackle any political action. Such panoptic manipulation is only confirmed by Walter's decision to collapse the functions of foreman and sheriff. As Foucault has suggested in Discipline and Punish , one purpose of panoptic techniques is to control a population by getting its members to internalize certain desires and self-imposed restrictions, a point mirrored in Mariscal's observations with regard to Morales's works. In fact, the novelist is keenly aware of this process; hence, he emphasizes moments like Octavio's payday dispute, when Octavio challenges his paymaster because his check has been manipulated without his knowledge. Responding to Octavio's raised voice, William Simons shoves Octavio out of the payline with a blow from his rifle butt. What follows is a subtle comment on the distribution of power:

The tension subsided as Octavio walked away. . . . The men who were closest had observed the altercation. Some saw only the violent manner in which William had used his rifle. . .. The men had tensed up and no one knew where the battering of a fellow worker would lead. Their eyes followed Octavio, watching to see what he would do. [The paymasters] were sensitive to the unified energy of the workers. They could feel their power and their anger. A dangerous moment had passed and only the men in power had recognized it. The workers had simply lived it. (171-72)

Power here, as in Foucault's description of Bentham's Panopticon, is exercised through forms of recognition that are essentially specular. Thus, the administration's power, a disciplinary observation of workers in line, is disrupted by a retaking of the gaze as the workers focus on Octavio. Although various Mexicano steps toward collective action in the novel will attempt to harness the "unconscious power" suggested here, what wins out repeatedly, at least on the level of social realism, is meritocracy: some individuals self-consciously opt to "sell out"; others simply prepare defensively for their own isolated survival within the context of dependency.

However, the insects that populate the novel in plaguelike fashion offer, albeit on a symbolic level, their own form of disciplinary observation, their own form of panoptic control. Just as the doña escapes the surveillance of her pursuers, who "have been watching her for some time" the workers likewise threaten to transcend the cultural and economic dependency established by the management and the larger Anglo society. Doña Eulalia ruptures these supposed borders, creating an omnipresent force that asserts its own brand of justice. In a more conventional context, the workers threaten to violate the borders—both behavioral and geographical—that have been defined for them with the creation of the brickyard enclave that controls their "Americanization" and ensures a measure of harmony with xenophobic neighboring communities. In their case, the threat posed coincides with their desire to achieve full status as citizens. Those Mexicanos who would leave to work their own farms, or to buy their own homes, represent for most of the Anglos outside the brickyard an invading force analogous to the doña's insects.

Placing this central aspect of the novel in its contemporary context, it is likely that Morales is reacting to conservative political pressures, like those we have noted attending the English-only movement, not to mention recent attempts to limit immigration or to repatriate Latino immigrants. Never far beneath the surface of these arguments is the fear that shifts in political demography will stealthily disenfranchise Anglos. As I noted in the previous chapter, such a revelation was at the core of Linda Chavez's controversial resignation as president of the U.S. English (USE) organization, a move she made after a secret memo, written by a senior USE official, was leaked to the press; Chavez herself described this memo as "anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic" (Califa 326). Keeping this context

in mind, we may read the "otherworldly" forces in Morales's text as analogues for very significant demographic changes, especially in the Southwest.^[12] It is, after all, the very fecundity of the insects, and the sterility of the Anglos, that portends the most basic change in the novel.

However, if my assertion is correct and Morales's "magical" practice is in part a response to institutional processes, what are the implications for institutional change in the wake of such demographic disruptions? May we read Morales's use of the magical as an empowering myth? As a means to think in terms of the potential group power coming with demographic shifts? If so, is the method of lo real maravilloso itself an attempt to circumvent institutional discourses that legitimate meritocratic values? Again, I think we must begin answering these questions by considering what is at stake in the political unconscious.

Consider, for instance, what happens when Walter Simons wife, Edit, attempts to define the status of "her" Mexicanos for a sociologist interviewer. In a moment of distraction, Edit notes, "I must confess a strange thought that just came to me . . . Mexicans, like cockroaches, are extremely adaptable. They will survive anything. Many might perish but there will always be survivors to propagate the race. They're just like cockroaches" (126). The interview is instructive precisely because it reveals the basis for the latent fear encoded in the supposedly "altruistic" project of hacienda management that the Simons have conceived. Edit's own inadvertent prophecy appears to be supported by the unchecked gaze of the insects who pop up throughout the novel. This gaze, a reversal of the dominant culture's surveillance, acts as an intervention constituting a corrective framing for the paranoia which threatens to isolate Mexicano readers from their community. Unable to affect directly the panoptic institutions of the Anglo society, Morales, like Valdez, relies on the uncanny ability of panoptic structures to be turned back on the internalized desires engendered by those who control the strategies of the institutions.

Although The Brick People 's reversal of the gaze is explicitly communal and therefore a reversal with a difference, the threat remains of falling back into a simple reversal, of not making something of the institutions distraction. The seeming power of such omnipotent vision may easily be turned into a means not of opposing proper

places and institutional omnipotence but of reimposing their inevitability. Morales writes this danger into the novel when he treats the diametrically opposed readings received by the company photograph of the workers. Repeatedly, the men who make up the workforce interpret the photo through the filter of company ideology: for them the photo is a monument, a symbol of their freely given participation in "a great working family" (119). Presumably by virtue of their unique position in the power hierarchy—the family within the family—the women whose husbands are represented in the photo see something much different: for them the images reflect only despondency and mistreatment. As Milagros Revueltas tells her husband, Damian: "It is a photograph filled with repression. The men are stiff, tense, as if they were dead. . .. It is a photograph of sad prisoners, of tired slaves. Of men angered for being where they are at. As if they are forced to do what they do, not want to do" (119). Pascuala Pedroza offers a similar interpretation to her husband, Gonzalo, adding, "You can have your photography; it is an exercise of another world. I'm afraid that someone, if they want to, could burn it and you too would burn" (120).

The critical interpretations offered by these women are almost immediately silenced, yet in their brief surfacings it is clear that an apparently ontological battle is being waged and that the power clearly rests with the hacienda management, which can literally remake and destroy worlds by virtue of controlling the workers' desires (consumerism, albeit indebted, being the ideal).^[13] Assuming that such control is challenged by the novel as it poses its own manipulation of the gaze, how are we to understand this "resistance"? How, ultimately, can Morales's discursive experiments match up against both the discursive and nondiscursive barriers posed by the dialectical cooperation of hegemony and coercion? In considering this question, we might first review some current theories regarding the exercise of power in society.

Tactics of Resistance

Like law (one of its models), culture articulates conflicts and alternately legitimizes, displaces, or controls the superior force. It develops in an atmosphere of tensions and often of violence, for which it provides symbolic balances, con-

tracts of compatibility and compromises, all more or less temporary.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Michel Foucault's studies of institutional discourses have fueled important debates within the field of cultural studies on issues of representation. These debates may in turn be particularly important for Chicano critique as it gauges its potential for resistance in the context of seemingly omnipotent institutions, which, as in the architectural history noted at the close of the last chapter, provide virtually no grounds for positing an alternative collective agency. While Foucault's analysis of subtle hegemonic techniques has positively reinforced "the concrete analysis of particular ideological and discursive formations, and the sites of their elaboration" his extreme valuation of loosely contingent institutional forces has led a chorus of cultural critics to argue that Foucault underestimates everyday, and particularly consumer, practices.^[14] In "The Discourse of Difference: Foot-noting Inequality" Rosa Linda Fregoso defines succinctly one of the most fundamental problems in this regard when she argues that any representation of "social formation" experience must offer a more adequate account of inequality than is found in most Foucauldian projects. Citing the Mexican cultural critic Nestor García Canclini, Fregoso notes, "If all that we see is disseminated power, it is impossible to hierarchize the actions of different 'instances' or 'apparatuses': the power of the transnationals is not the same as that of the head of the family" (185).

Such recognition of hierarchies allows cultural critics to drive a wedge in the seeming omnipotence of Foucauldian institutional power and thereby achieve a more subtle conceptualization of the relations between critical categories and lived experience. The undervaluation of this problem, as Stuart Hall notes, may have dire effects, inasmuch as it implicitly forces Foucault into a notion of historical transformation that appears naively symptomatic.

Foucault so resolutely suspends judgment, and adopts so thoroughgoing a scepticism about any determinacy or relationship between practices, other than the largely contingent, that we are entitled to see him, not as an agnostic on these questions, but as deeply committed to the necessary non-correspondence of all practices to one another. From such a position neither a social formation, nor the State, can be

adequately thought. And indeed Foucault is constantly falling into the pit which he has dug for himself. For when—against his well-defined epistemological positions—he stumbles across certain "correspondences" . . ., he lapses into a vulgar reductionism, which thoroughly belies the sophisticated positions he has elsewhere advanced. (71)

Absorbed into the shadows of institutional agency, everyday practices which might subvert such apparently omnipotent forces remain on a broad but essentially unrecognized level in Foucault's accounts. As Foucault's critical narrative records the desire for change, it assumes the necessity of radical historical breaks built on symptomatic reactions to historical forces which remain so general as to appear mythic.

In order to coax a less symptomatic, more subtle notion of the interaction between institutional forces and historical change, Michel de Certeau responds to Foucault by setting forth an understanding of the relationship conditioned by practices not wholly controlled by, though potentially inhabiting, institutions. Responding specifically to what he conceives as Foucault's overvaluation of the "privileged development" of panoptically informed social organizations, de Certeau argues that

a society is . . . composed of certain foregrounded practices organizing its normative institutions and of innumerable other practices that remain "minor," always there but not organizing discourses and preserving the beginnings or remains of different (institutional, scientific) hypotheses for that society or for others. (Practice of Everyday Life 48)

Implicitly attempting to balance the experiential and structural approaches to cultural studies identified by Stuart Hall in "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms" de Certeau builds on the strengths of both projects, pursuing subtle forms of experientially oriented agency while remaining sensitive to the structures which latently condition the construction of agency. Historical transformation thus becomes not a cataclysmic event, not a utopian moment, but a subtle process of repetition and change in struggle. This pursuit is very much in line with Chicano rhetorical experiments which offer in their production and consumption alternate social "hypotheses" or worldviews in conflict.

One of the clearest examples of this sort of alternative practice is described by Gerald López as he recounts his and his community's everyday experiences of legal constitutions—Mexican and U.S.—during his youth in East Los Angeles. Locating constitutional texts in a material, political struggle rather than in a transcendent set of values, López focuses on the way in which Chicanos received such texts as rhetorically limiting:

In our experience, constitutional interpretations and constitutional decisions reflect the provisional containment of fighting, not its transcendence. As Chicanos see it, through a constitution, we in this country publicly announce that "for the moment, there's no battle here," not always confident the words will create, much less reflect, the reality. ("Idea of a Constitution" 164)

As López points out, this alternative reception more than anything else defines the unique reading of constitutions performed by the many Chicanos who refuse to monumentalize the creation of such documents. The interpretation of constitutions involves from this perspective a recognition of the complex historical investments in inequality that are only obfuscated by either a sentimental faith in "the grand tradition" or a blanket overvaluation of institutional power.

Such recognitions often come with a normative desire that social life might find "a rhythm that may, to varying degrees in different areas of society and culture, be open to the interaction of norm and transgression, rule and exception, centrality and liminality, commitment and criticism" (LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory 181). Hall suggests that a critic might attempt to "work through" the extremes attending culture studies—the pressing needs to study both lived experience and conceptions of institutional power—by recognizing the common effort made by critics to expose and think the "latent."^[15] Such projects would include seeking out undervalued practices, including rhetorical practices, and cutting "into the complexity of the real, in order precisely to reveal and bring to light relationships and structures which cannot be visible to the naïve naked eye, and which can neither present nor authenticate themselves" (Hall 67).

De Certeau locates such practices by distinguishing between "strategic" and "tactical" activity. The former is constituted by

the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that become possible as soon as a subject with will or power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as a base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed. (Practice of Everyday Life 35-36)

In contrast, tactical actions are defined by their very lack of a "proper place." The advantage of this itinerant existence lies in the freedom it confers; the movements of the tactic act like guerrilla combat engagements. A tactic thus stands out as "a maneuver 'within the enemy's field of vision' . . . and within enemy territory. It does not, therefore, have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole within a distinct, visible, and objectifiable space. It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow" (37). Within such a context mobility and survival, let alone success, become virtually synonymous. Inasmuch as the strategic depends on the panoptic structures analyzed by Foucault to maintain a mastery of sight over the terrain, tactics "must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers" (37).

Chicanos work such strategies into their narratives by parodying the way they claim to expand vision, to "transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces," thereby reinforcing the "power of knowledge." When, for instance, Luis Valdez dominates the opening set of Zoot Suit with a front-page newspaper reproduction, blown up to fill the stage, it is exactly this strategic manipulation of the visual that he parodies. The tactic turns the strategy's weakness against itself, in Zoot Suit 's case by demonstrating that "power is bound by its very visibility"; the redirection of the audience's gaze to bring the newspaper reporter under scrutiny could thus be taken as paradigmatic of the tactical approach.^[16]

Although de Certeau's distinction between strategy and tactic may yet appear rough, the study contributes greatly to inquiries about rhetorical force and hegemony in general.^[17] Numerous Chicano narratives and CRS efforts attempt to develop just such a tactical rhetorical approach (Williams's work stands out as a very suc-

cessful example, as does Crenshaw's revision of rights discourse). Arguing that such projects begin to "work through" forces and structures promoting dependency, I read them as building on the tactical/strategic differentiation that de Certeau articulates in response to Foucault.^[18] Without such a distinction, notions of historical transformation threaten to become their own parodies and, worse, to feed into a liberal sentimentalism which suggests that change will occur in some cataclysmic or utopian event regardless of resistant agency.

Focusing on the sociopolitical contexts and events which inform Chicano studies, we may thus ask what form the process of "working through" takes in Chicano narratives. While this question might be approached in a variety of ways (by analyzing narrative production and consumption, its dialogic appropriation of voices, etc.), I would suggest that a danger may attend the attempt to address seemingly omnipotent institutions with the psychoanalytic concept introduced by Hall. In a sociopolitical context in which Anglo/Mexicano interactions have been conditioned by a long history of inequality, the "working through" of dependence, resentment, and fear may require a significant rethinking of the psychological concept itself and of the reception of its larger context, psychoanalysis.^[19] I would also emphasize that in some political contexts effective resistance may not be served by immediately attempting to move beyond the terms of a hierarchical binary relation (i.e., by "working through"); in certain cases a political agenda may in fact be best served by reversing a hierarchy. Contexts may exist in which reversal fills a crucial tactical function. Specifically, I think we can gain a greater critical understanding of complex tactical maneuvers undertaken by Chicano artists by examining how their narratives have appropriated the panoptic power of Anglo oppressors, at times conceiving of la reconquista , a symbolic retaking of the land, and at times reinforcing hegemonic assumptions.

Returning to the CLS scholar Mark Kelman, we may recall his argument that the rhetorical presuppositions of legal discourse displace "counter-hegemonic thoughts," making them simply "harder to think" (ILL 269). Of the presuppositions Kelman outlines, two are pertinent in relation to panoptic mechanisms: (1) synthetic individualism (including the limitation or displacement of specific forms of group agency) and (2) "the conflation of the potential legal solubil-

ity of a problem with the existence of a problem" (ILL 269). In both cases the crucial rhetorical operation may be considered in terms of the mechanics of sight; inasmuch as seeing serves as a metaphor for recognition—of groups, of specific problems—panoptic control is at stake. As a concrete way of spelling out what is involved in these two strategic forms of denial (of legal-rhetorical "disappearing"), an examination of Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982) will provide a best-selling example of their uncritical repetition by a Chicano writer. Before entering into a reading of Rodriguez—to date one of the most widely published Chicano authors—I will offer a more developed description of those modes defined by Kelman that predominate in Hunger of Memory .

In the mode of synthetic individualism, "social relations can be understood only as the sum of readily comprehensible individual relations" (Kelman 269). Liberalism is, in this regard, committed both epistemologically and politically "to the notion that groups are artificial, that they can be understood or analyzed only by reference to the individuals who compose them."^[20] Such a presupposition has very significant consequences for potentially transformative legal arguments which recognize the interests of specific social groups—for instance, issues of affirmative action and institutional racism. The liberal orientation of U.S. legal discourse resists claims to recognize such group approaches and instead reasserts these claims as antagonisms between particular individuals. Hence, the Supreme Court, in its 1976 decision in Washington v. Davis , insists that relief pertaining to institutional racism will be granted only if individual intention may be aligned with a racist action. In cases like this one, a certain form of contractual protocol takes over in which legal actors are understood solely as transparent individuals working in a limited time frame. Such limitations effectively delegitimate considerations of long-term historical discrimination by one group against another (discrimination founded on identification with a group); thus, past and present social inequalities appear to be "natural," and the widely divergent, racially specific results on employment examinations at issue in the case become invisible.^[21] The maintenance of social inequality through these limitations ends up being a way of guarding the status quo.

Such rhetorical constructions play an essentially anesthetizing role; they dull the pain of unresolved issues and contradictions in

the law that would, if acknowledged, open radical perspectives on the law. Paraphrasing the CLS scholar Duncan Kennedy, Kelman goes even further, suggesting that the notion of "natural rights" itself defers a socio-existential conflict.

What is too painful to face is that we both need and abhor others, for they both form and destroy us; give us all meaningful power and subject us to their domination. . . . What "rights consciousness" allows is for us to believe that we have solved this problem. We will fuse with people as long as they respect our rights. . . . That rights are in some deep sense so indeterminate as to be illusory—that the problems of fusion and separateness inevitably recur in defining rights, which may demand in an oscillating contradictory fashion more or less concern for others, more or less capacity to call on others to be concerned for us—never fully negates their fundamental mediating role. (ILL 289)

According to Kennedy's argument in "The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries," rights—or, more properly, battles over interpretations of rights—rely on a critical blindness. However, in the critical vein suggested by Crenshaw, readers would do well to question the manner in which such rhetorical battles are reinscribed by Kennedy into an individualistic orientation, as happens when he defines the underlying conflict as existential. As Patricia Williams has noted in another context, members of marginalized social groups may take on a wholly different interpretation of battles over rights when those battles are seen historically as one of the few (however imperfect) vehicles to enfranchisement in U.S. society.^[22]

The tendency to overvalue the individualistic is, however, quite strong, and it is only made stronger by the publishing industry's sponsoring of marginal writers who celebrate meritocracy and melting-pot philosophy at the expense of the historical analysis of inequality. For instance, Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory , a text engaged in exactly this sort of anesthetizing self-mutilation, is the quintessential example of an argument traversing cultural capital in the two senses (educational and legal) which I have emphasized. By situating a legal polemic in an educational context, Rodriguez's autobiography symptomatically combines parallel rhetorical drives aimed at reinforcing the limitations of agency inherent in U.S. liberalism. Asserting his, and everyone's, right to assimilate, to become a "public individual" (26), Rodriguez plays the discourses in such a

manner as to make himself the ultimate receptor, a virtual tabula de la raza . By accepting this role and promoting it as a model, Rodriguez legitimates the great variety of institutional panoptic functions which would make us prisoners of anonymity. Ultimately, his scenario of the private, ethnic self being sacrificed to inevitable public acculturation dominates his view.

To those who would assert their difference through alternative, community-based notions of subjectivity, the seemingly inevitable response to the world Rodriguez describes is paranoia. As one might expect, the young Rodriguez, the child still somehow organically connected with his culture, conveys the experience of paranoia through concrete, if unanalyzed, reactions to his parents' marks of social difference. In particular, Rodriguez's reaction to his father's difficulties in communication reveals an extreme sensitivity to the public's gaze and to its (dis)approval. The problem is compounded by the anger Rodriguez exhibits toward his parents, anger provoked when they immerse him in English, thereby initiating a supposedly inevitable sacrifice of cultural and familial ties to educational success. In the beginning Rodriguez expresses this anger by attempting to make his parents feel intellectually inferior (a motivation supposedly overcome in Rodriguez's maturity, when he realizes that they are in fact intelligent, albeit in a "native" sense). Soon he recognizes a more subtle means of hurting his parents: instead of seeking direct confrontation, he cuts them off from his school life and successes (successes which mean so much to them) by imposing silence; he becomes, in his own words, "Mr. Secrets."

After announcing, in the confessional mode which permeates the text, his intention to hurt his parents, Rodriguez describes a conversation with his mother: "'Tell me all about your new courses.' I would barely respond, 'Just the usual things, nothing special.' (A half smile, then silence. Her head moving back in the silence. Silence! Instead of the flood of intimate sounds that had once flowed smoothly between us, there was this silence.)" (51). Although the master narrative of Rodriguez's text would explain this episode as part of an inevitable social change, what becomes more and more clear in the autobiography is that Rodriguez's resentment is fueled not by a "typical" process of assimilation but rather by an over-reaction to immersion in the educational system; Rodriguez "overlooks" the fact that he lived in an Anglo community, attended a

predominantly Anglo school, and therefore had no notion of what many Chicanos experience: Spanish as a public language and ethnicity as a social bond. Consequently, he becomes convinced of the inevitability of either/or choices regarding immersion. Reacting to the seeming rejection by his parents symbolized in their early blanket refusal to speak Spanish, and identifying with society's dominant rhetoric of synthetic individualism, Rodriguez attempts to carve out a new identity for himself, an identity which he achieves by symbolically sacrificing his parents who represent ties to a group situated beyond the liberal binary of individual versus public.^[23]

This technique of imposing an aggressive silence finds a parallel in Rodriguez's larger argument about affirmative action, in which he criticizes the program for not being sufficiently radical; while the evaluation is conditioned by Rodriguez's failure to conceive of group interests, it is also informed by his tendency to conflate the existence of a problem with the ability to find a remedy for it within the assumed set of viable social interactions. Ramón Saldívar has noted that Hunger of Memory 's response to affirmative action is conditioned by Rodriguez's failure to "conceive of a form of subjectivity that would draw upon existing social practice, the life of the collective folk (of la raza )" ("Ideologies of the Self" 33). Saldívar appropriately concludes that the narrative significantly misconstrues the sociopolitical contexts it would engage by giving meaning to social events only insofar as they are connected to Rodriguez's private life and outlook. In repeated epiphanic passages, Rodriguez does in fact hope to build pathos, as well as justification, for the acculturation which accompanies his education. Each of the epiphanic instances is constructed around Rodriguez's ironic failure to discover a remedy for silence; in his repeated fatalistic confrontations with his own people, he takes his failure to speak, to engage the "other," as a sign of a determinate social force outside of his control. Failing to find remedy in speech, Rodriguez ignores the problem of creating meaningful dialogue between different segments of la raza , instead ascribing the problem the status of an impossibility. In this manner, the problem as well as the social group is pushed out of sight, made unrecognizable. As Saldívar notes, the issue is Rodriguez's failure to imagine a more critical manner of engaging his sociohistorical context; rather than developing more subtle interactions between

his private sell his public sell la raza , and the dominant Anglo society, Rodriguez has created a portrayal of himself which enacts a symptomatic response to his legal context, unconsciously reproducing its dominant ideological strategies.

Duncan Kennedy's discussion of William Blackstone highlights one particular aspect of Western European legal ideology animated by Rodriguez, giving a historical perspective to the conflation of recognition and remedy.^[24] According to Kennedy, an evolution has taken place in legal thinking, an evolution in which Blackstone's original, essentially descriptive, defense of a legal system of writs was reconceived by legal positivists in tautological terms. To assert the value of the writ system, Blackstone argued that each "preexisting right" incorporated into the system found a remedy there as well. The consolidation of the legal positivist movement was then supported by a misreading which took Blackstone's understanding of the relation between rights and remedies to be totalizing. Thus, the recognition of a problem came to depend on the preexistence of a remedy. The power of such a reformulation lies in its ability to negate competing voices from outside the legal establishment, voices which might challenge the tautological approach, thereby opening the interpretation of both rights and remedies. Inasmuch as synthetic individualism dominates legal thinking, notions of rights and remedies are thus effectively limited, undercutting claims by groups who suffer discrimination. Focusing on the protection of individual rights at the expense of group action, the courts have indeed chosen to ignore long histories of racism because, in terms of legitimate remedies, the injuries of reverse racism are simply more easily corrected and more consistent with U.S. legal thinking.^[25]

Lo Real Maravilloso and Displacements of the Strategic

With the rereading of social practices offered by de Certeau, we may claim that a radical revision of Foucault's understanding of social power has taken place in which a seemingly new ontological space opens, one latent with potential resistance in the form of everyday practices and tactical maneuvers. Likewise, it is crucial to understand that Rodriguez's uncritical repetition of legal ideology, despite

his claims to representativeness, does not typify Chicano cultural texts; instead, such "tactical" texts tend to manifest far more resistant approaches to the discourses of institutions controlled by and for Anglos. This critical demeanor extends to the very basis of hegemonic notions about the function of the law. Again, Chicano history is the story of territorial occupation through legal manipulation working in concert with violence; hence, it comes as little surprise that "consenting social relations," as framed in the mainstream manner, are significantly challenged by Chicano narratives which underscore a system of dependency veiled by a larger ethic of historical amnesia.

As this "new" critical orientation opens, however, so does the opportunity for colonization. It is an unfortunate possibility that, by making such latent connections apparent, critics may extend the range and control of existing panoptic structures. To give the notion of Chicano tactical responses an aspect of resistance, and thereby to respond to this problem, we may recall that de Certeau poses tactics as "calculated actions" (Practice of Everyday Life 37). Rather than exploring the nature of this tactical intention , de Certeau comments instead on the more abstract reflections cast by tactics, including their temporal orientation (38-39) and their supernatural quality: tactical practices "circulate without being seen, discernible only through the objects that they move about and erode." They "are the ghosts of the society that carries their name. Like the spirits of former times, they constitute the multiform and occult postulate of productive activity" (35). Reminiscent of Patricia Williams's "ghost furniture" produced by elided race issues that mainstream legal practice must constantly fumble around, de Certeau's rhetorical displacement ultimately takes his argument to a metacritical level:

The imaginary landscape of an inquiry is not without value, even if it is without rigor. It restores what was earlier called "popular culture," but it does so in order to transform what was represented as a matrix-force of history into a mobile infinity of tactics. It thus keeps before our eyes the structure of the social imagination in which the problem constantly takes different forms and begins anew. (41)

Countering Foucault's emphasis on institutional power, de Certeau claims a potential quite similar to that located in the Fuentes epigraph to The Brick People . Thus, de Certeau finds in Foucault an

"imaginary landscape of inquiry" that takes on "an overall corrective and therapeutic value in resisting . . . reduction" of the power dynamics studied (41). Even if Foucault overemphasizes the omnipotence of institutions, his approach "at least assures" the presence of alternative perspectives, albeit "as ghosts" somewhat less consciously posed than those offered by Williams.

Pushing the claim even further with regard to Chicano narratives, we may consider the omnipotence attributed to both Anglo institutions (the hacienda, the courts, the media) and the "magical realist" responses (the revenging insects, El Pachuco) as homeopathic rhetorical manipulations whose value lies, in part, in their emphasis on the constructed character of panoptic, disciplinary tools.^[26] By thus engaging a "magical" practice that has—as Saldívar has demonstrated—a particular cultural and historical trajectory, Morales writes a novel that is balanced at that border site where Chicano responses to institutional dependency may be played out, especially with regard to current immigration policy and to the northern appropriation of the hacienda. Like the Rain God at the close of Arturo Islas's novel of that title (1984), the suggestions of witchcraft in Ana Castillo's Sapogonia (1990), and the cockroaches that infiltrate the pages of Acosta's works, these ghosts play on the rhetorical organization of the dominant institutional apparatuses (especially, in these cases, the legal) in order to gain at least the potential for la reconquista , for retaking control of the landscape.

To the extent that this reading applies to Morales's project, it confirms the position taken by George Mariscal when he argues that the novelist reworks utopian elements embedded in the Chicano nationalist movement. Hence, we may consider Morales as a post-movement writer who revises the utopian Aztlán—the goal of the reconquest. As Mariscal points out, the implications of Morales's work are such that "[i]f there is to be a Chicano utopia, it will not be Aztlán. . . . On the contrary, instead of a place it will be a process, a process founded on differences, a continual activity in which difference does not threaten the concept of paradise but instead serves as its founding principle" (82). The impulse here recalls Bruce-Novoa's desire for a less incestuous notion of reform in that for both authors the object of censure is the utopian promise held out by the Chicano movement, a promise which, according to their readings, fueled a problematic collapsing of differences among Chicanos in

an effort to formulate an overriding concept of the community.^[27] In this light, the drive to "monumentalize" the numerous political affiliations of the 1960s and 1970s may be read as an overreaction to the U.S. beliefs in individualism and meritocracy promoted in no small part by legal culture. As Mario García has suggested, the movement itself may be fully understood only when taking into account its critical-legal antecedents in the Chicano civil rights movement of the preceding "Mexican-American" generation.^[28] From this historical perspective, we begin to see how the accommodationist demands for reform—for instance, LULAC's argument that "Americans of Mexican descent" be counted and therefore educated as "whites"—altered in the later, more radical movement to create an insulating separatism. Although this unifying vision did enable very important coalitions and reforms, its insufficient incorporation of bonds addressing the diversity of the community has led to a progressive erosion of collective action.^[29]

For Morales and numerous other postmovement writers, then, one critical task has been representing a more successful means of coming to terms with nonhegemonic group thinking and identity, especially notions of groups not anchored in hierarchies. Utopian visions are thus not wholly discarded, nor are they wholly endorsed, at least not in their formerly dogmatic variations. Instead, as I have argued here, authors like Morales tend to complicate utopian promise by suggesting it be read as "a process founded on difference." What typifies a utopian process ? Some of the most famous Western utopias—for instance, Thomas More's 1516 version—are foremost an opportunity to imagine a perfect state government and, perhaps most important, a perfect understanding of laws. If we combine this legal reform imperative with the critique (and manipulation) of panoptic techniques evident in Chicano narratives, we find a process analogous to that described by de Certeau when he demonstrates that critics of institutions may employ their own "counterpanoptic" techniques in order to screen what are actually tactical maneuvers, alternative interpretive practices promoting the worldviews of those who are not equal.^[30]