Courting the Consensual Fantasy

As suggested in the last chapter, Chicano utopian revisions have been the site of a complex battle with legal rhetoric. As early as the 1880s Mexicano authors like Mariano Vallejo were considering their disenfranchisement under the American regime in light of a projected utopian past, a time worthy of nostalgia when cherished values remained unthreatened and conflicts were avoided by recourse to an essentially benevolent patriarchal tradition. Not surprisingly, early texts like Vallejo's bolster their rhetorical authority to posit such utopian visions by turning to various legal documents and legal rhetoric, confirming both the authority of the Mexicano historian and the superiority of the lost society, of the imaginary landscape.^[1]

The tendency lives on in the earliest academically sponsored Mexicano scholarship, which strategically posits a similar utopian past; hence, in Américo Paredes's With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), we read claims for the essentially utopian political life of Nuevo Santander—what is now the Mexico/ Texas borderlands. According to Paredes, it is exactly this utopian governance that inspires the resistant corrido tradition, and perhaps its most famous example, "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" (1901). As with Vallejo's celebration of life before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the landscape portrayed by Paredes appears to remain pure by virtue of its insulated "patriarchal system," which "not only made the border community more cohesive, by emphasizing its clanlike characteristics, but also minimized outside interference, because it allowed the community to govern itself to a great extent" (12-13). As Renato Rosaldo notes in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (1989), Paredes carefully builds on the Cortez legend, and the resistant force the ballad took on, to praise an ancient

ideal of manhood associated with the lost "corrido century" (roughly 1830-1930). Summarizing this vision, Rosaldo recalls: "Descendants of the primordial patriarchs, these country men live in the old style. Unaided by microphones, their voices carry across the pasture and make their listeners feel muy gallo, literally very rooster, very male fighting cock, with rising hackles" (155).

Likewise, Cortez's "deeds as a warrior horseman confer the aura of medieval nobility," his shouts echoing with the "grandeur of the medieval epic" (155). Rosaldo acknowledges that these overtly masculine heroics have been significantly reworked by subsequent Chicano and particularly Chicana narratives; however, I will linger on Paredes's particular form of nostalgic remembrance because it is instructive in regard to Chicano representations of, and interactions with, consensual rhetoric.

For example, when Rosaldo takes up the question of resistance in Paredes's text, he emphasizes that Paredes "uses a nostalgic poetic mode to depict his Garden of Eden" in which "manhood" could be "endowed with the mythic capacity to combat Anglo-Texan anti-Mexican prejudice" (151). Here the utopian is implicitly posited as a reaction distinct from Anglo-Texan attitudes and, by implication, from Anglo-Texan legal rhetoric. It is precisely the potential complicities defined in this account—complicities between Mexicano resistance and Anglo-Texan racist ideology—that require further consideration. What subtly distinguishes Paredes's rendition of the pre-treaty era from Vallejo's is a fundamental emphasis on the con-sensual purity and egalitarian nature of Nuevo Santander. Thus, from the opening pages of With His Pistol in His Hand , readers are asked to measure the value of the earlier society on the basis of the minimal military presence, as if this absence of overt displays of force guaranteed a more democratic society (albeit one still nominally patriarchal).

This refinement or streamlining of the legal-rhetorical agenda—from Vallejo's citing of legal documents and language as a means of legitimating the previous society, to Paredes's positing of a consensual fantasy on a par with mainstream legal apologists—marks a crucial shift in what are distinct masculine-oriented notions of resistance. What readers find is a tendency to adopt increasingly specific Anglo legal assumptions while constructing "forms of resistance"; hence, we discover in Paredes's version of the pre-treaty era an amal-

gam of historical perspectives that nonetheless symptomatically emphasizes the ideals of the U.S. legal tradition. Taking this tendency into account and returning to Bruce-Novoa's claim about the entrenched "incestuous focus" of Chicano literary studies, we may now consider problematic nationalist notions of community in the light of this history of positing utopian forms of resistance that weld "benevolent" masculine rule to U.S. legal thought.

Building on this context, we may reread Chicana narratives and their strategies—which struggle against oppression both inside and outside Chicano culture—in terms of the growing tendency evidenced by Chicano authors to adopt the legal ideology of consent. In this manner, we may begin rethinking one important type of collaboration between the aims of the dominant society and the "Mexican-American generation" of political activists and their successors as well as the critique this collaboration has received from Chicana artists.^[2]