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]