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Legal Rhetoric and Cultural Critique
An Institutional Context for Reading Chicano Narrative

This study begins with the assumption that certain historiographic tenets impose themselves every time we propose or consider arguments about affirmative action and other socially progressive types of institutional reform. Particularly at the university level, students and faculty alike have become attuned, in terms of their perception of equity, to certain limiting expectations, not the least of which is meritocracy.^[1] Developing a rhetorical-legal resistance to dominant principles like meritocracy fuels the institutional revisions undertaken by Chicano artists. Confronting particular legalistic modes of thinking, the Chicano artists considered here argue that it is impossible to approach the most obvious questions about equality without critically examining the subtle positions many people take as givens regarding how social justice itself is constructed. These artists begin by recognizing that such assumptions are very much bound up with our immersion in legal rhetoric via a seemingly endless reproduction of legal interactions in mass culture. From news reports of actual cases to Judge Wapner to Madonna's First Amendment self-aggrandizement in Truth or Dare , we are almost continually pummeled "politically unconscious" with concepts about the composition of social justice. Most explicitly, Chicano artists reveal the manner in which such concepts impose particular limitations on group analysis.

To follow this point out in greater detail, we may build on the work of Critical Legal Studies (CLS). Mark Kelman, for instance, has argued that liberal-legal conventions dictate the ground rules for thinking about social justice and institutional problems. According to Kelman, these liberal-legal modes of arguing about social re-

vision encode certain parameters for considering social agency and responsibility, parameters which work at the expense of alternative methods, especially those that are group oriented. Considering this displacement, Kelman notes:

Legal discourse . . . need not bring out underlying policy or philosophical dilemmas; it may well suppress their presence through unconscious manipulation of material that allows us to believe that we are "solving" a case by applying settled or noncontroversial decision norms to "facts" that are found without reference either to norms or to a subconscious urge to avoid thorny issues. (289)

In response to such limiting ground rules, Chicano narratives challenge the presuppositions of inquiry by asking questions which present, and therefore codify, nonlegitimate problems, problems which resist legal-institutional imperatives. Thus, an author like Cherríe Moraga is able to critique the particular position imposed on Chicanas who must contend with unique forms of discrimination that simply will not be acknowledged in a courtroom because the institution strategically separates considerations of race from considerations of gender.^[2] Responding to similar difficulties within the law, Kelman maintains that one of the most significant tasks facing the CLS movement is the need to look beyond the explicit workings of ideology in legal texts and instead to develop a critique of the latent mainstream rhetorical forces which radically police alternative cognitive processes (274-75).

Kelman notes that mainstream legal scholars in the United States have long depended on a model of the relation between the legal and social spheres which draws on the ideology of liberal functionalism. Laws, in this model, reflect society and develop according to transformations in mores, social conventions, and so on. CLS writers have done much to dismantle this overly simplistic notion of reflection; in doing so, they have underscored the relative autonomy of legal institutions and hence their ability to shape social thought. Although the methodologies pursued by these critics are varied, including Marxist, feminist, and deconstructive approaches, the emphasis throughout tends to fall on the legitimating force of legal culture—its ability to structure interpretive processes. Of course, the implications of such an overall finding are profound, accounting in part for the tremendous impact of CLS work (at least outside the law schools where it was initiated).

Perhaps the best of these new inquiries take the form of dialogic interactions rather than occasions to lay legal-rhetorical grids over other disciplines. Anticipating the difficulties which must be faced as we turn to the complex terrain inhabited by Chicano artistic critiques of the law, we will turn to the literary realm and John Guillory's argument about academic institutions in "Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate," an argument that significantly complements the CLS understanding of institutional autonomy. According to Guillory, schools, like the courts, maintain social inequalities but actually "succeed by taking as their first object not the reproduction of social relations but [rather] the reproduction of the institution itself" (496). What we learn as we study such complementary processes is that the strength institutions exhibit over time rests on a sum total of complex practices which displace potentially disruptive rhetorical options by formally prohibiting such disruptive practices. Hence, certain eternal verities—often articulated in the realm of values—take a defensive posture against rhetorical strategies recognizing historical change. While both the school and the court produce a means of accessing the traditions of culture and law, these institutions perpetuate specific relations to both which differ for different people. Chicanos recognize this precise state of affairs when they both protest for better educational programs and move toward declining graduation rates, when they both support civil rights activism and express fear about legal institutions. Their experience consistently tells them that they will be treated differentially—that is, as Chicanos, not as race-neutral citizens. Even so, their concomitant awareness of the very real gains that have been won through protest and rights activism induce a certain hope and further offer a crucially important opportunity for the construction of resistant communities.^[3] It is with these stakes in mind that Chicano artists most frequently struggle with legal culture; even in the most radical, most utopian experiments, what is at issue is the potential for altering institutions which perpetuate specific social relations, relations rooted in class, gender, sexually, race, and ethnic hierarchies. In this sense, criticism of legal representation hangs in the balance, but so does an activist strategy of legal and cultural enfranchisement.

If, as I am arguing, a battle is taking place in which rhetorical options severely limit the conception and institution of reform, then perhaps no site of contestation could make a better starting point

than the law school itself—a site which stands out as the most obvious juncture of the academic and judicial institutions. The contestation of ideas (especially alternative ones) and the subsequent certification of "appropriate thinking," both typical of the school in general, work together in the law school environment to ensure the continued vitality of specific legal-rhetorical tools. This situation is entirely in line with larger institutional processes of canonization, processes which celebrate key texts in order to foster certain interpretive practices (legal, literary, etc.). While reverence for the canon itself perpetuates the notion of "sacred" banks of knowledge, canonical interpretive processes at the same time validate particular historiographic approaches, often by virtue of a canon's own self-legitimating metanarrative. Precedence, both in the academy and in the court, may thus be read as an interpretive end in itself. Hence, as Kimberlé Crenshaw has noted, the law school classroom exercises an overarching Anglo, upper-class worldview that is coded as "objective" and "perspectiveless" even while it posits a history of race-neutral social interactions.^[4] The process as a whole masks the clearly "interested," if denied, hegemonic foundation. In turn, minority students find their experiences and their histories displaced as they are forced by teachers and peers either to acquiesce to a properly "distanced" mode of thinking or to become sources of subjective, emotional (sometimes coded "hysterical") testimony about racial problems, which are, of course, supposedly peripheral to the larger workings of the "objective" classroom and the essentially race-neutral machinery of the law. This pedagogic situation, much like the environment created by antidiscrimination law itself, tells members of minorities that, as rhetorical participants, they may succeed only by walking a very fine line in which majority interlocutors are dangerously introduced to alternative metanarratives that challenge directly the belief in the "objective" processes which the majority holds so dear.^[5]

Theories emphasizing the force of legitimation processes have been the mainstay of CLS efforts. Giving this focus his own particular twist, Kelman addresses the interplay of legitimation and rhetorical strategies at the conclusion of his recent work A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (1987). An introduction to "a cognitive theory of legitimation," this final chapter reframe the CLS approach, diverse as it is, by training our attention on the limits perpetuated by legalistic

"rhetorical understandings of the world." Offering a set of "ways in which legal thinking is prone to be an effective justificatory ideology," Kelman thus provides a "cognitive" approach to the law which focuses on its rhetorical manipulation of thought processes. According to this approach, the power of the law to create cognitive strictures affects law students and lay people to the extent that they are "'afflicted' with legal thinking," an affliction which makes "counterhegemonic thoughts harder to think" (269). Supporting this claim, Kelman sets out six ways in which legal thinking attempts to disrupt counterhegemonic considerations:

(1) reification; (2) conflation of the potential legal solubility of a problem with the existence of a problem; (3) synthetic individualism (a belief that social relations can be understood only as the sum of readily comprehensible individual relations); (4) "take and give" (giving the appearance that the system is less harshly oppressive or biased than it could be); (5) denial of political stress through the use of technical thought; and (6) the privileging of libertarian poles in the face of contradictory political pulls. (269)

Although Kelman identifies counterhegemonic thoughts with "critical" stances in general, his specific definitions of the six strictures implicitly align modes of resistance with "transformative thought," thought which challenges the preconditions of legal discourse's ideal notion of the world: a place of "self-determined subjects, expressing consistent, unambivalent, and unexceptionable desires, seeking their ends in a private world of voluntary transactions freed from force or nonnatural necessity by a state that imposes only clear rules against illicit force, using rules both because it fears becoming forceful itself and because people should know precisely what is expected of them" (290).

According to CLS scholars, this liberal worldview is perpetuated in the law not simply by "misdescription" but by "a system of (largely legal) thought that portrays the ideal as nothing more than the summary of routine rhetorical starting places . . ., ordinary ways of dealing with and apprehending the world" (Kelman 290). While the CLS approach to legitimation has crucially informed subsequent Critical Race Studies (CRS) theories, one finds in Kelman's typification of the CLS project the principal point of disagreement; specifically, CRS scholars take issue with what they see as an overvaluation of legal legitimation. As CRS scholars perceive the situation, CLS

theories of legitimation have too quickly dismissed the role of minority worldviews. Crenshaw has offered the most thorough evaluation of this situation. In the critique she develops of the CLS tendencies in her essay "Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law," she finds that the almost exclusive focus on discursive legitimation misses the larger dialectical processes by which hegemony and outright material coercion work together to maintain cultural and social dependency. At stake is the appropriate interpretation of Antonio Gramsci's work, an interpretation that she argues must account for the inextricable links between distinct material and ideological conditions. For Crenshaw, it is simply not sufficient to assume that legal discourse, as powerful as it may be, has the ability to totally dictate the existence of racism or minority perspectives. Hence, she takes issue with the CLS assumption that legal legitimation forces minorities literally to begin again every time they try to sustain an alternative worldview; as Crenshaw suggests, such worldviews are alive and well, informing minority activist and grassroots organizations even while material and ideological contention continues.

What is particularly troubling about the CLS elision is that it seems to repeat, although with clearly more sympathetic intentions, the law's larger denial of minority claims. As Crenshaw argues, it may well be that the CLS theory of legitimation is limited exactly to the extent that it misapprehends the rhetorical role of its own legitimation critique; thus, the emphasis on legitimation may speak far more effectively to an Anglo, upper-class audience which struggles not only against legal-cultural indoctrination but also against a basic ignorance about minority experiences and perspectives. Perhaps most important for the purposes of the study at hand is Crenshaw's argument that no understanding of legal-cultural legitimation can effectively describe the radical projects undertaken by minority artists and critics without situating itself in a dialectical process that includes explicit, material coercion. As Crenshaw and the Chicano artists and critics attempt to convey, it is only with such a dialectical outlook (legitimation and coercion working in concert) that we may properly interpret a legal system which rhetorically obscures judicial error, abuses of force, disenfranchisement, and social inequality—issues which could act as motors for social change.

Legal rhetoric most often reacts to these potential motors for

change by engendering a passivity (most strongly felt in society's dominant groups) through the perpetuation of a basic confusion about how rules in society function. By portraying order in society as dependent on the continued legitimacy of rules, people come to assume "that the rules make us do good rather than that we sometimes collectively choose to do the good things we do when applying rules or even when we don't" (295). Battling such habits by which people may be induced to abdicate their power is, of course, a central concern for those who seek Chicano enfranchisement. Hence, Chicano and Mexicano activist organizations, including the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), have used legal rights discourse against such pacifying tendencies, although such legal struggles have at times yielded uncertain results, as I will detail in the pages to come.^[6]

What is certain is that the counterhegemonic collective action pursued by LULAC, and to a greater degree by MALDEF has had a particularly resistant role in a liberal-legal system which privileges individual agency—a fact which, in a different register, echoes Crenshaw's observations. It is likewise no accident that explorations of collective action are repeatedly taken up in Chicano narratives which are keenly sensitive to the machinations of legal culture. In the taxonomy Kelman provides, "synthetic individualism," or the assumption that groups may always be reduced to their individual members, suggests the complex position that individual agency assumes as the liberal system imposes limits on Chicano conceptions of collective action. Recognizing this situation helps us to understand the difficulties of instituting affirmative action; the strictures articulated by a fully legitimated cognitive practice of synthetic individualism (strictures validating meritocracy and the creation of contracts between autonomous individuals) will of course deny claims of institutional racism that cite collective histories of segregation, discrimination, coercion, and any attendant cultural effects. Depending on entrenched oppositions between "freely" acting individuals and a "regularizing" government charged with overseeing the public, the liberal system displaces collective approaches to institutional racism by sustaining apparently self-evident rhetorical categories. Hence, despite the seeming contradiction, affirmative action itself, after only a brief tenure, may be severely limited in the

courts on grounds entirely consistent with mainstream legal practice. In response to such conflicts, the CLS and the more refined CRS projects propose a working through of "the sort of confusion legalistic practice engenders" in an effort to come to terms with the highly complex mechanisms which obscure counterhegemonic interpretive strategies; the difference between the projects is finally the supposition in the CRS arguments that these legal mechanisms are but a part of a larger systematic underdevelopment carried out along a primarily racial, as opposed to legal, dynamic.

The example provided by Crenshaw's work is in line with other recent writings that may be termed part of the CRS initiative, writings which attempt both to challenge and to move beyond the historical and racial decontextualization of academic-legal discourse. For instance, Gerald López's recent book Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano's Vision of Progressive Law Practice (1992) offers a thorough critique of reformist strategies which would maintain the professional distance between law office and community and thereby protect the hierarchy of power that activist lawyers may enjoy as they inadvertently set themselves up as autonomous agents of the law dispensing rights (23-24, 75). Arguing that counterhegemonic or "nonlawyerly" solutions to problems come about from nonlawyerly contact, López suggests that working with culturally specific stories of a community can help an activist lawyer step into a new role as translator (as opposed to dispenser). In such a role, lawyers may learn as well as teach, benefiting both from their acquaintance with the legal system and from the street savvy which community members bring to their understandings of the problems at hand. In the latter instance, lawyers may thus profit by utilizing the interpretive potential of Chicanos who have learned in their role as subordinates how to read their bosses' power and how to adjust for their own benefit (59). A book made up largely of exemplary stories—stories evidencing just such profitable interchanges at the community organization level—Rebellious Lawyering both theorizes and enacts a rhetorical strategy which builds on worldviews found within Chicano communities.

In a similar vein, Patricia Williams's Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (1991) has critiqued the limiting legal rhetoric which constitutes a denial of self and authority in the African-American community. Reviewing her experiences of racism through

a study of the process by which her attempts to relate those experiences were negated by journal editors, Williams attacks racial denial as it is propped up on the basis of style, on postures of neutrality and objectivity, and on the basis of verifiability.^[7] Ultimately, López and Williams have chosen to pursue local, case-study approaches which, by opening both an autobiographical and a collective rhetoric, refuse to obscure the interpreter's (perhaps more properly, the translator's) role in engaging events and collective issues. Such local focus, combined with the rhetorical transgression of professional forms, in turn allows a new mobility, one that has the potential to radically disrupt institutional pursuits and thereby open the door to worldviews other than those canonically sanctioned by legal institutions.

Crenshaw also works toward defining this mobility as she takes issue with the arguments offered by Critical Legal Studies. As she notes, CLS scholars tend to approach questions of domination by considering how legitimation (the process by which the social order is accepted) restrains potentially subversive or transformative social conflicts and antagonisms ("Race, Reform, and Retrenchment" 1352). From the CLS position, reform begins with an essentially negative action, with de legitimation or what has been termed the "trashing" of the rights system as a whole:

The vision of change the Critical scholars express flows directly from their focus on ideology as the major obstacle that separates the actual from the possible. Because it is ideology that prevents people from conceiving of—and hence from implementing—a freer social condition, the Critics propose the exposure of ideology as the logical first step toward social transformation. ("Race, Reform, and Retrenchment" 1354)

Convinced that the CLS approach best describes the manner in which the white dominant majority seduces itself into accepting the existence of racial coercion (1358), Crenshaw argues that a reevaluation of this ideology—including the role of civil rights discourse—needs to better accommodate the perspective of minority communities. Attempting to map out just this sort of alternative approach to rights discourse, Crenshaw finds that a much more ambivalent picture comes to the fore, one which weighs important gains for minority communities against the larger co-optation of the civil rights

movement, a co-optation which has led to the increasingly popular notion that racism no longer exists in the United States.^[8] In large part, Crenshaw's more complex vision of rights discourse is founded on the notion that a fundamental indeterminacy inheres in the legal rhetoric. Noting that statements defining this nation's attitudes toward racial equality have aimed primarily at reforms of a symbolic nature, Crenshaw argues that a crucial rhetorical mobility has opened up for minorities, one which should not be discounted too quickly:

Removal of . . . public manifestations of subordination was a significant gain for all Blacks, although some benefited more than others. The eradication of formal barriers meant more to those whose oppression was primarily symbolic than to those who suffered lasting material disadvantage. Yet despite these disparate results, it would be absurd to suggest that no benefits came from these formal reforms, especially in regard to racial policies, such as segregation, that were partly material but largely symbolic. Thus, to say that the reforms were "merely symbolic" is to say a great deal. These legal reforms and the formal extension of "citizenship" were large achievements precisely because much of what characterized Black oppression was symbolic and formal. (1378)

Emphasizing that "formal equality is not the end of the story," Crenshaw is careful not to overvalue such mobility even as she is wary of treating it too pessimistically. As a critic convinced that transformation must reshape existing institutions as well as culturally constructed worldviews, Crenshaw contextualizes this mobility, proposing that minorities working on the law find themselves on a purely relational terrain. The struggle for recognition and an institution of nonmajoritarian concerns—a struggle which anchors minority power and accounts for minority discontent—must exist in the same world that activists stand against.^[9] In such a shared terrain, resistance and survival itself often depend precisely on mobility because (despite the promise held by liberal-legal rhetoric) no utopian, race-neutral space exists to yield sanctuary.

In Patricia Williams's work, the rhetorical reframing of such shared terrain permits a complex psychological refiguring of her experience of language and the past, a refiguring which locates historical transformation not in the abstract, Olympian halls of the academy or the courtroom but rather in intimate locales. In this

vein, she describes how her family members still carefully walk around long-vanished furniture that once stood in her grandmother's room; comparing these habits to pressures of race not acknowledged by the law, Williams evokes complex social pathologies through powerfully resonant anecdotal passages. In this manner, her strategy is analogous to López's: both rework stories in order to bring disparate worlds together—in conflict. Communities are thus understood not in terms of purifying consensus (the assimilation model) but rather in terms of conflictual renegotiations (ongoing migrations).^[10]

What is implied by such a reframing of experiences of racism, especially when they are presented in intensely personal formats? As Alan Freeman has argued in "Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine," one conventional manner of delegitimating instances of racism as legal issues relies on a constrained notion of the perpetrator's intention (limited in time and agency) to the exclusion of the victim's or victimized group's experience, thereby seriously restricting recourse to action within the liberal system.^[11] Taking up the larger CRS goal of approaching the law from the more complex orientation of the minority community, Williams's self-proclaimed "guerrilla legal writing" disrupts the stability of the conventional rhetorical configuration noted by Freeman, asserting instead the applicability of different rhetorical possibilities, of different interpretive strategies, including the politically personal perspectives of the victims of racism.

The guerrilla writing offered by Williams and López (and its theoretical elaboration in Crenshaw's work) has important corollaries in the literary realm, as evidenced in the works of minority authors who serve witness to the more pragmatic effects of the legal and educational institutions. Inasmuch as works of minority artists mirror the "guerrilla writing" I have been describing, they critically review historically situated interactions with the court and with the academy. Like the legal scholars discussed above, these artists appropriate rhetorical options in order to alter a cognitive framework and in so doing recondition reception itself. Academic interaction

between literary studies (or more conventionally cultural contexts) and the law has, of course, taken off during the recent years. It is possible to conjecture a variety of reasons for the emergence of the legal sphere as a central component of U.S. culture (including the consolidation of the academy's role as a perpetuator of nationalism in the face of a displacement by mass culture). Whatever the reasons, these comparative analyses now suggest a dialogue between legal and literary institutions which previously was hindered by the supposedly distinct reading strategies of these disciplines. As suggested by Kelman, Crenshaw, and Guillory, one outcome of this dialogue includes a rethinking of canonicity and tradition and their role in reproducing a particular rhetorical constellation crucial to an institution's functioning. At stake are definitions of inequity that pit the experience of systematic injustice apart from the experience of merely "accidental" or "coincidental" injuries, as might occur when certain groups of students or particular types of works fail to meet assumedly neutral standards of excellence.

In large part, the film Stand and Deliver (1988) is about exactly this sort of rethinking. A narrative detailing the unorthodox yet highly successful teaching methods of a math instructor at East Los Angeles's Garfield High School, this docudrama (directed by Ramón Menendez) tells how the Educational Testing Service attempted in 1982 to disallow an entire class's exceptional Advanced Placement scores on the grounds that a conspiracy must have occurred for the Chicano students to have all performed so uniformly well. As the film reveals, the scores were reinstated when the Educational Testing Service was forced to admit that it was Jaime Escalante's unique, noncanonical pedagogy, and not an unfair advantage, that affected the scores. If we think of the narratives Escalante wove into his math lessons—for instance, his contextualizing of "zero" as a concept originating in pre-Columbian culture—we begin to appreciate the power of guerrilla tactics. Such stories have an impact not simply because they rewrite history for Chicano students, although this fact surely empowers the students by making the math their own. The very incorporation of the culturally specific stories radically remakes canonical education for these students; living history becomes part of a supposedly cold and distant knowledge, even as history itself transgresses its traditional boundaries.

A history of this retaking of historiography, Stand and Deliver is an example of guerrilla tactics, one which approaches the question of neutral standards in order to demonstrate that, even with an educational system so biased toward the worldview of Anglo upper-class children, it is possible to create successful rhetorical alternatives.

By positing a crucial distinction between reading institutional histories in order to recover elided participants, events, and perspectives, and reading the histories in order to explore how they might rethink historiography and the battle over historical rhetoric itself, I argue throughout the course of this study that more attention should be devoted to the ways in which Chicano historiographic assertions (complete with their own notions of effective change) challenge canonical interpretive practices and the broader effects of underdevelopment. Such study may be engaged fully only if we understand the ways in which the academic framework is ideologically structured around liberal-legal notions of agency, notions that give priority to understanding struggles between individualistically vested interests and pluralistically based consensus rather than to understanding historically and culturally situated conflicts as they pertain to the dependency of social groups.

To sketch the limitations of institutional change as they have affected Chicano studies specifically, I will begin this chapter by examining arguments regarding Chicano canon formation; by doing so, we may both consider the structures which underlie conventional rhetorics of race and pose the following interrelated problems: (1) What pressures have come to bear in the process of defining a Chicano alternative to the canon? (2) What rhetorical conventions from traditional literary history are worthy of appropriation? (3) What new methods of organization should be explored? As a bridge to this more specific approach, it will be helpful to consider the larger context of race as a criterion within U.S. literary studies. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., points out that race has remained a "persistent yet implicit presence" in twentieth-century literary criticism.^[12] According to Gates, the peripheral existence of racial issues should not be taken as a sign of their unimportance as viable categories of interpretation; instead, the status of racial issues "on the border" of literary studies must be regarded as a sign of their assumed status (8-9). Although mostly unrecognized, this borderline quality

does in fact play a crucial role in the production of the canonical identity. Insofar as racial issues have acted as the impure elements to be purged or sacrificed, they admit a certain cultural demarcation between the "legal" and the "illegal," between sociopsychically ingestible and noningestible subjects.^[13] However, the ritual sacrifice has had its price. In The Poetics and Politics of Transgression (1986), Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have formulated this debt in terms of "a psychological dependence (on the part of the sociosymbolically high, or the hegemonic culture) upon precisely those others who are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level." According to Stallybrass and White, the core culture incorporates the peripheral symbolically, "as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life," and it is in this sense that "what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central" (5). With such a conception, we may start to rethink the often contradictory forces that affect the reception of race and racially coded subjects.

Stallybrass and White's theory is particularly useful for examining conventional adoptions of Chicano material in hegemonic contexts inasmuch as it helps explain the apparent contradiction posed by the production of highly popular cinematic stereotypes—including seductive yet criminally prone Chicanos—within a society that politically underdevelops their real-life counterparts. Once identified as part of a larger sociosymbolic "contract" described by Stallybrass and White, this figurative exploitation begins to reveal key elements, or constitutive relations, inherent in the construction of the hegemonic worldview (and hegemonic subjectivity generally). These constitutive relations, including the "criminal" scapegoating of Chicanos, purposefully negate the potentially transformative aspects to be found in Chicano narrative practices by legitimating particular types of reading practices. Resistant practices are thus selectively underdeveloped while stereotypes of the culture, ones which satisfy a certain token and erotic function, are fostered. Given that the academy's reading of Chicano resistance must face similar pressures, more dialogues need to be undertaken which will encourage an explicit self-examination of the academy's complicity; among the critical levers which would assist such debates, the implications for canon formation posed by Chicano works remain indispensable.

Chicano Canon Formation

When the validity itself of the applicability of the term Chicano is under severe question not only in the community but also among writers, can we rightfully expect there not to be a questioning of what the value of ethnicity is in a text or even of which values are more or less authentic?
Juan Bruce-Novoa, "Canonical and Noncanonical Texts"

Published in 1986, at a time when reevaluation of the Chicano movement was in full swing, Juan Bruce-Novoa's article "Canonical and Noncanonical Texts" stands out as a landmark attempt to sketch a history of Chicano canon formation. While acknowledging the need to recognize institutional and particularly canonical processes affecting Chicano literature's reception (an inevitable result of editorial and curriculum decisions), Bruce-Novoa finds little in the way of a contemporary critical consensus capable of answering the basic questions which confront Chicano cultural studies. According to Bruce-Novoa, these questions include (1) how should the literature be differentiated from mainstream literature? (2) how will the recognition of Chicana writers redefine the literature? and (3) how should specifically alternative literary institutions be developed? The first issue—that most thoroughly treated by Bruce-Novoa—imposed itself with some force after the disclosure of racial impersonation by Daniel James, who published the award-winning novel Famous All over Town as "Danny Santiago," a supposedly Chicano writer, in 1983. A crucial moment for the burgeoning field of Chicano literature, this scandal brought national attention to the process of defining Chicano identity. Even so, it is far from clear that an improvement in the general understanding of Chicano issues has been achieved, especially given the responses by prominent members of the academy, most notably Roberto González Echevarría's claim that no harm had been done since literature is about lying anyway.^[14] On other occasions, however, sincere efforts have been made to understand the status of non-Chicano writers who are quite successful at conveying a sensitivity to Chicano perspectives. For instance, Antonio Márquez has argued that John Nichols's novel The Milagro Beanfield War (1974) deserves "insider" status even though the author "fails the blood test" (qtd. in Bruce-Novoa 127). In trying to

resolve these disputes and thereby lay down certain guidelines, a number of critics have suggested formal categories such as "chicanesque writing" to designate works by "almost-Chicanos."^[15] In addition, Raymund Paredes has argued for a notion of learned ethnicity, using the example of Chester Seltzer, who married a Chicana and settled in El Paso, hence making, in Paredes's opinion, a successful crossing of cultural boundaries (75). Such attempts to set boundaries have a distinct cultural legacy, being a distant extension of Spanish colonial legal practice wherein defendants were initially presented to the court with a verification of their racial/blood status; as in the current literary context, the interpretation of transgression and censure depended on racially coded parameters.

One can easily sympathize with Bruce-Novoa's ironic, if somewhat desperate, tone as he recounts this contemporary situation—a tone which is particularly evident at the close of his essay. The penultimate paragraph of the argument lists a collection of valuable authors, authors whom Bruce-Novoa asserts deserve critical attention; then a final statement quickly reasserts a division between "practicing canonization" and "criticizing the process," cutting off the rapid citing of appropriate works. While his sense of urgency is clearly situated in the political pressures which Chicano narrative must address within the academy, I would argue that Bruce-Novoa's relatively traditional assumption of a split between creating and interpreting the canon contributes to his predicament. This final dichotomy promotes a judicial vision of Bruce-Novoa criticizing the canonical process from a "disinterested," if latently ironic, position. However, the complexity of Bruce-Novoa's many implicit positions within his essay denies this vision. While it is true that at various points he refers to the consensus of critics and of the reading public in general, his clearly subjective attitudes regarding these opinions remain relatively clear. For example, looking back on the constraining and centralizing ideology of the Chicano movement during the 1960s and 1970s, Bruce-Novoa turns to the works of John Rechy and Oscar Zeta Acosta, noting the manner in which these novelists convey a subtle but clear subtext of criticism directed at the overly restrictive ideological criteria that often accompanied utopian notions of Chicano identity.

In the final lines of the essay, Bruce-Novoa's "corrective" project receives explicit treatment as he argues that "our rather incestuous

focus has prevented us from looking beyond the circle of recognized or recognizable Chicano writers to find new and possibly important authors" (132). In the course of the essay, this "incestuous focus" is discussed in terms both of a particular, legitimated group of texts and of prevalent reading criteria or methods. Bruce-Novoa responds to the former by incorporating "new" works, yet at the same time—and this is the point I wish to underscore—he revises criteria, thereby exceeding his implicit division between "practicing" and "critiquing" canonization.

Before considering how this secondary, though very important, revision comes about, however, we would do well to define the dynamic which appears to affect the alternative critical project. For instance, the downplaying of the links between practice and critique has affected other "marginal" reworkings of canonization in a manner which leads me to believe that pressures within the separate emergent fields, and the academy at large, at best promote an indirect approach to discussing the criteria invoked and at worst silence the problem after it has been dutifully noted.^[16] Given the opportunity for tokenization which confronts cultural critics if they do not address how Chicano narratives resist hegemonic assumptions about reading, future interpretations need to take up explicit discussion of how Chicano narratives challenge accepted criteria. As overworked as canonization arguments may seem, the paucity of critical material on the "new" works alluded to by Bruce-Novoa indicates that it would be most beneficial at this time to reevaluate reading methods in precisely this fashion. Considering the association Bruce-Novoa suggests between the perception of debilitating change and the perpetuation of incestuous conformity to "safe" texts legitimated by the Chicano nationalist project, it may be that the continual influence of Chicano narrative as a viable force depends on the sort of institutional rethinking which opposes canonical criteria at the service of monological or utopian ideology.

Returning to the specific question of Bruce-Novoa's implicit revision of reading techniques, the greatest value of his article lies in its indirect reevaluation of historically situated racial identity as a criterion. Bruce-Novoa grounds this reevaluation on an explicit censure of race when it is treated as a "monological absolute" (126).^[17] Although Bruce-Novoa tends to defer to other critics, or to the anonymous pressures of the reading public—even while making the no-

tion of a "prueba de sangre " (blood test) an implicit object of satire—it would appear that, given his endorsement of John Nichols's exclusion, he does continue to support Chicano heritage (both cultural and genetic) as a criterion (128). His further elaboration of "an inner circle" of "must read" authors also suggests that an "author who deals directly with 'Chicano subjects' per se" should take precedence over others (130). These assumptions have predominated in subsequent treatments of Chicano narrative, and, although specific methodologies may vary, this overall consistency reflects a certain "pragmatic essentialism" (i.e., an essentialism chosen as one strategy among others) that goes hand in hand with a desire not to lose the historical specificity of a diverse community.^[18]

It would initially appear, then, that Bruce-Novoa's stance, in terms of the primacy of racial issues (the author's heritage and subject matter), remains consistent with the tenets of the larger Chicano movement. However, two aspects of the essay significantly challenge the earlier canonical practices: (1) the turn toward historically situated critical analysis that assumes more than a principally "celebratory" role for the critic and (2) the assumption of a more dialogic relationship between conceptions of race and issues of class, gender, and sexuality. These aspects taken together call for more subtle elaborations of the politics engaged by the narratives and may in fact demand that the canonical/noncanonical approach be reframed in such a way that "inclusion" as a goal is supplanted by the implementation of reading strategies that better serve the elaboration of Chicano perspectives and history (even while such strategies might make use of non-Chicano texts). Such an approach is exactly what we find in more recent studies of Chicano narratives like José Saldívar's Dialectics of Our America (1991). Identifying a global development of dependency stemming from the rise of capitalism, Saldívar reads Chicano narratives beside Latin American works and "new historicist" critical efforts in order to demonstrate a counterhegemonic historiography with a pan-American basis. Likewise, in The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (1991) María Herrera-Sobek significantly rethinks the inclusion/exclusion dynamic by rereading the appearance of (and the historical basis for) women as subjects of both Mexicano and Chicano corridos (ballads). Through archetypal analysis she develops an alternative historiography, one which, by virtue of its experimentation, opens doors to aggressive, self-

confident women throughout Mexicano and Chicano history and art. Both Saldívar's and Herrera-Sobek's works suggest a movement toward new critical practices which, by reevaluating and restructuring previously accepted historiographies, transcend the limitations noted by Bruce-Novoa.

As is the case with Herrera-Sobek's work, an important part of the cultural critique undertaken by much Chicana feminist analysis involves working through the implications of the colonial and post-colonial legacy of prueba de sangre for the Chicana community. Without question, the vexed issues that Chicana artists have raised have changed the face of Chicano studies, forcing more than inclusion-oriented amendments to syllabi and programs. In works like Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), readers find a crucial rethinking of Chicano history, one which reformulates content and structure to make gender and sexuality issues primary. Here, as in numerous other recent Chicana narratives, the legacy of La Malinche —the "traitorous" translator who aided Cortez and who became the "mother" of Mexico's mixed-blood race—is appropriated as a means of confronting the masculinist utopian desires of racial and political purity. With the specific context of Chicana activism in mind, we may see how this "blood-testing" legacy needs exactly this sort of displacement; it has repeatedly asserted an incestuous "monological absolute of race" in the face of growing demands for consideration of the unique position occupied by women of the community.^[19]

Complex approaches to Chicano studies like Anzaldúa's, Herrera-Sobek's, and Saldívar's work from the premise that long-embedded cultural and psychological manipulations have informed structures of power in the New World, structures which have often stemmed from legal practice and have in turn affected historiography generally. Looking to the "origins" of such conflict, Ramón Gutiérrez has recently offered a study of marriage and sexuality in the colonial context that rethinks the play of desire and power, implicitly into the era after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.^[20] Attempting to address how Chicano artists and cultural critics have in turn reacted to such hegemonic manipulations, Ramón Saldívar elaborates a theoretical point of departure in Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990). Saldívar uses contemporary Marxist criticism to delimit a semantic space for Chicano texts. According to Saldívar, a

text does not simply reflect a society or express an ideology; rather, it may intervene and add its own individual voice as well, in some sense transforming the society out of which it has grown. I take this understanding of a narrative's interaction with its historical situation as fundamental. Foremost, it assumes that Chicano narratives carry out a cultural practice that has the potential to reformulate institutional issues, including the continued legalistic marginaliza-tion of Chicano communities.

While any number of institutions might be explored for the kinds of systematic discrimination I have associated with legal and literary practices, the question of how these alternative strategies might be "worked through" will no doubt depend in large part on the particular sociopolitical contexts they address. Even so, such cultural reforms, when linked to claims for Chicano narrative, need to challenge wherever possible the insulating vestiges of canon formation which continue to affect publishing and curriculum agendas even while the popularity of the "canonical debate" wanes.^[21] As Bruce-Novoa demonstrates, this sort of insulation is exactly what may take over when Chicano cultural critics accept agendas in which the "celebration" of Chicano voices instills a potentially anti-intellectual stance. Such stances are particularly troubling since they seemingly feed off of the antipathy toward critical thinking promoted by recent conservative government administrations, bodies which would constitute the supposed political opposition. Below I take up the academy's larger participation in this antipathy, as evidenced by E. D. Hirsch's "cultural literacy" movement and his disavowal of "critically oriented" pedagogies; however, I turn first to the skeptical reception of theoretical projects in the Chicano academic community so that I might more clearly situate my own project.

The assumed political imperatives of Chicano communities have often been held up by critics who ask whether theoretical perspectives ultimately detract from the messages conveyed by the works under study. Perhaps one of the most explicit statements in this regard comes from Tey Diana Rebolledo, who finds that "we [Chicano critics] have talked so much about theory we never get to our conclusion nor focus on the [primary] texts" (131). Noting Bruce-Novoa's essay and the "desperate search for a theoretical/critical discourse in which to situate what is happening to us," Rebolledo surmises that our involvement in "intellectualizing" costs us "our

sense of our literature and therefore our vitality." While "intellectualizing" has many meanings as Rebolledo uses it, judging by her conclusion, the project's most destructive aspect is the production of critical labels, labels which deprive the literature of vitality and passion while silencing Chicanas in particular. Although one of my greatest concerns is that the study I have undertaken here reach diverse audiences with similarly diverse expectations, my own experience of both Chicano and Chicana narratives has reinforced my impression that they have themselves been consistently theoretical, if by theoretical we understand a form of discourse which comments on its own and other forms of discourse. Other critics, including Rosa Linda Fregoso and Ramón Saldívar, have come to similar conclusions regarding Chicana efforts specifically, arguing that Chicana work "is counter-hegemonic to the second power, serving as a critique of critiques of oppression that fail to take into account the full range of domination."^[22]

As I see the situation, then, the excitement of Chicano theoretical activity lies exactly in its movement beyond encyclopedic categorization and into an analysis of the various processes by which Chicano art has engaged in dialogue with and commented on the artistic and nonartistic languages circulating around it. In general, it may in fact be much more problematic to take on the role of critic as celebrator/ventriloquist than it has appeared in the past; as Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd have suggested, cultural critics now find themselves at a juncture where the choices between pursuing "archival" work and theoretical interpretation may no longer be steadfastly maintained. JanMohamed and Lloyd sum these difficulties well in their introduction to Cultural Critique: The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1987):

One aspect of the struggle between hegemonic culture and minorities is the recovery and mediation of cultural practices which have been and continue to be subjected to institutional forgetting. Thus archival work is essential to the critical articulation of minority discourse. At the same time, if this archival work is not to be relegated by the force of the dominant culture to the mere marginal repetition of exotic ethnicity, theoretical reflection cannot be dispensed with. Such theory would be obliged to provide a sustained critique of the historical conditions and formal qualities of those institutions which have continued to legitimize exclusion and marginalization in the name of universality. (8)

At stake here is the justification for assertions of resistance, whether this resistance is located in particular works of art, in criticism, or in more general "practices." One familiar means of ascribing a resistance value to particular works involves recourse on the critic's part to a notion of cultural hegemony, a critical construction which offers an index of a work's political force by exposing its "target." The persuasive quality of notions of cultural hegemony varies greatly; the notion may, for instance, reduce the complexity of narratives and practices identified with a dominant culture, thereby ignoring aspects of internal contestation that could make such works and practices worthy of appropriation or manipulation within a resistant/minority agenda. As Rebolledo suggests, it too often appears as if such adoptions of weak conceptions of hegemony are an uncritical reaction—albeit conditioned by politically committed stances—to those limited rhetorical tools critics find, or do not find, at their disposal. (Literary scholars, for instance, may face such a problem when they react to the methods of their formalist predecessors.) In turn, awareness of such potential limitations fuels Lloyd and JanMohamed's call for a theoretically sensitive approach to the study of interactions between dominant and nondominant cultures. In addition to asserting the need for more subtle notions of how "historical conditions and formal qualities" interact, these calls have, like the CLS and CRS movements, accused institutions of reproducing modes of thought that reinforce cultural forgetfulness and denial. The two assertions, brought together, suggest that more theoretical work needs to be undertaken in determining how historiography legitimates certain rhetorical modes, thereby perpetuating the outlooks and interests of the dominant culture.

Like Kelman, JanMohamed and Lloyd project resistance as an ability to free nonlegitimated options—to challenge, if not escape, those aspects of rhetorical conditioning which perpetuate hegemonic institutional designs.^[23] Such freedom is purchased by demystifying a system of legitimation and thereby cutting into the denial and justification it maintains. Inasmuch as such resistance-oriented study constantly finds itself dealing with issues of compromise—control through legitimacy continually asserts itself—cultural critics are compelled to fight their struggles from within contested territory; their tactics are not those of an opposition with its own proper space and history but rather those of the guerrilla insurgent,

striking under cover, dissembling, relying on mobility.^[24] Even with this imperative to maintain minimal visibility, open affiliation with institutions is sought in such accounts as the critic attempts to represent "minority" perspectives and thereby affect inescapable institutional contexts; thus, in JanMohamed and Lloyd's passage we note the insistence from the outset that the history of legitimation can be regained, that the denied practices and works may be recovered. With this desire for recovery (we may recall Williams's defense of rights discourse in this light), they solidify, however provisionally, a means of translating between the cultural designs of different groups.

The incentive to read Chicano narratives for how they might rethink historiography and the battle over rhetoric itself becomes all the more pressing as we consider the ways in which these narratives might easily be assimilated into an academic framework that is ideologically structured around notions of pluralism, notions that give priority to humanistic universalism and liberal-legal consensus rather than to historically situated cultural conflict. Of course, cultural criticism leveled at the history of this academic pluralism may be instructive in itself; however—as many minority authors seem to agree—other institutional realms may be equally or even more revealing. In particular, the legal realm has received extensive attention from minority artists; one thinks of the legal polemic embodied within the African-American slave narrative, the Japanese-American literature of internment, and the Chicano and Native American literatures of disenfranchisement, to name only the most obvious.

There is of course a significant reason why interactions with the legal realm receive this treatment by artists attempting to work through the historical designs of the dominant culture while recovering and reworking their own minority culture; the law, especially as it is played out in the courts, offers a detailed register of how "official" history functions within a society, revealing what evidence and rhetorics will be deemed admissible or functional in judging a contested event. As evidence of such historiographic and theoretical concern, one need only consider how often critical works by minority artists replace questions of guilt and innocence with queries about motivations and the production and reception of testimony. In such works, minority authors supplement projects aimed at di-

versifying culture or at recovering "lost" strands of history by de-mystifying not only the more obvious political agendas of institutions but also the rhetorical construction of modes of thought which promote a denial of minority designs. Working from this perspective, I assume that by accepting a less "incestuous" and more conflictual field for considering reading methods, Chicano studies might institute critical practices more properly addressed to the reading of narratives historically situated on the margin, narratives which must contend with refashioning their positions from within a field of Anglo institutional forces. To gain a full sense of how these forces work in concert to consolidate cultural interpretive options and of how they are in fact constructed in a dialectical response to "marginal pressures," I will turn now to E. D. Hirsch's "cultural literacy" project, a project which has had, without doubt, a tremendous impact on lay and professional notions of educational and legal reform.

Constituting Culture: E. D. Hirsch and the Neoconservative Strategy

There is, of course, a very good reason why the principle of cultural revision [in the United States] should parallel our principle of legal change and constitutional reinterpretation. They are fundamentally similar. The Constitution has biblical status for the nation.
E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy

In the best-selling Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1988), E. D. Hirsch, Jr., proposes to open access to culture by giving it an encyclopedic conformity; at the same time, though, he evades questions about his approach's possible complicity in maintaining institutional privileges for certain segments of society. In particular, by focusing on the nature of data selection (accentuating the role of the "founder") and its transparent reception (accentuating the passivity of the reader in all but the most schematic terms), Hirsch presumes a problematic literacy scenario, one which does not go beyond the sociological model of "learning to read." He thereby avoids asking how the differential acquiring of literacy is itself an aspect of the social reproduction of inequalities. While these limitations in Hirsch's approach may be apparent in a general

sense to many readers, a fuller understanding may be gained by exploring the more subtle manipulations he must make to justify his efforts; here one should not lose sight of the fact that Hirsch is in some sense unique in that he attempts to justify his admittedly conservative defense of canonicity in historical terms. Limiting the broader history of literacy, including the concept's institutional implications, Hirsch's argument appeals to a circumscribed set of rhetorical gestures; these gestures repeat conflicts between reader-response and intentionalist interpretive paradigms, thus strategically limiting the boundaries of inquiry; in this manner the process of interpretation and adjudication is controlled a priori. By presuming to set social groups (for Hirsch the "reading public") into a democratizing process, yet effectively denying any real burden to the present function of educational institutions, Hirsch's "reformist" agenda fails to reconceive the problem of social inequality in any significant way.

One of the rhetorical strategies invoked by Hirsch to facilitate his conservative reform—Hirsch claims his method is "conservative" only in its technique, not in its politics—involves a conflation of functions located in diverse institutions. Ultimately Hirsch funnels institutional bodies as distinct as the schools and the courts into a particularly broad project, serving a grand principle: the achievement of "the fundamental goals" set out by "the founders at the birth of the republic" (145). For Hirsch, all U.S. institutions have legitimate purposes insofar as they reinforce "efficient communication" of the politically unifying cultural understandings which guarantee a secure nation-state (i.e., a communication whose efficiency relies on reducing difference). Inasmuch as Hirsch openly acknowledges the political efficacy of the cultural reform he supports, his argument, maintaining as it does the inclusion of the legal sphere in the cultural, offers a unique opportunity for studying the processes of denial by which contemporary neoconservative educational reformers have reconstructed a notion of cultural tradition.^[25] His writings thus allow us to study a larger displacement of problems of method, particularly as these problems pertain to the reading of contested historical events.

In his preface, Hirsch proposes that political liberty requires educational conservatism. Assuming that only access to a common body of information will allow society's disadvantaged to better

themselves, Hirsch suggests that a homology exists between cultural access and political engagement. This liberating homology is founded on Habermas's notion of consensual agreement, a scenario in which morality and truth reveal themselves in the "ideal speech situation." While Habermas recognizes that such ideal situations may be difficult to achieve in everyday contexts, he insists (as does Hirsch) that the possibility of proposing them, through counter-factual logic, indicates an ideal, consensual foundation for language. Reworking this approach, Hirsch's homology assumes that, in a nation-state where members gain access to the basic body of cultural material, social amelioration will follow. A concomitant supposition—that political reform will follow from the inclusion of texts "representing" socially marginalized peoples—marks a similar form of political sentimentalism, one which likewise projects changes without adequately theorizing how the variety of discursive and institutional practices involved might deter, or even co-opt, attempts at reform.

Critiquing the homology of cultural representation and political engagement as well as canon-reforming rhetorics of inclusion and exclusion, John Guillory has pointed out that such critically "weak" constructions rely on particularly problematic notions of literacy. The criticism is particularly apposite in Hirsch's case, inasmuch as his literacy is supposedly achieved simply by possessing shared symbols and the shared information the symbols represent (xiv-xv). Premised on a banking concept of understanding, Hirsch's notion of literacy assumes that a recipient passively appropriates "cultural capital," a term Pierre Bourdieu has suggested to describe the use of canonically designated works to create a self-sustaining intellectual economy within the academic institution (La Distinction ).

Although Hirsch remains vague about the role of context and selection when discussing the transmission of cultural capital, a certain historically oriented rhetoric does make its way into his discourse and ultimately sets him apart from many fellow reformists inasmuch as he at least acknowledges some responsibility for explaining cultural legitimation as a historical process. In terms of addressing how early U.S. cultural texts were selected for canonization, Hirsch posits a point of cultural homogenization early in American history, a formation which Hirsch claims has remained largely unchallenged, although his normative warnings against

present cultural fragmentation betray his confidence on this point (90). Anxious to posit the arbitrariness of the homogenization, Hirsch implies that politically invested selection of materials, as a historical factor, was absent from this apparently golden age, an age when—for Hirsch at least—class, gender, and race hierarchies were invisible.

A similar form of denial develops as Hirsch discusses appropriate reading contexts while situating the consumption of canonical materials. Describing the "young student's" absorption of a cultural base, Hirsch acknowledges the inability of the inexperienced receptor to orient a broad range of information in a meaningful manner, at least initially. According to Hirsch, the student will acquire a context through experience in, and out of , school. When, however, it becomes necessary to contend with the social factors affecting educational performance, Hirsch is quick to deny the importance of extracurricular experience (114-15); to grant this range of influences legitimacy would lead of course to questions about the larger, nonacademic hurdles restraining academic "success" in particular segments of the population. Hence, the larger historical context of education is schematized, but only in a global fashion which defuses questions about racially determined academic access and performance. Considering the educational impact on such social inequalities would disrupt Hirsch's ideal speech scenario, the very paradigm that supposedly guarantees the various qualities Hirsch associates with literacy: justice, liberty, and equality. Ultimately, social inequalities become recognizable only when we relinquish Hirsch's national security agenda, an agenda which institutionally legitimates the ideal scenario at the expense of minority-group perspectives.

Turning to research on verbal communication, Hirsch argues for the (re)homogenization of culture (and for the deemphasis of political differences) by claiming that "knowing about prototypes [also termed stereotypes or schema by Hirsch] is essential for understanding how we apply past knowledge to the comprehension of speech " (51; my italics). Rather hastily transferring this finding to the context of reading, Hirsch credits readers in general with a limited flexibility in selecting appropriate stereotyping models through which to compare and make sense of material in a text. However, Hirsch proceeds to defend his extensive cultural imperative (i.e., the need for

acquaintance with a national set of stereotypes) by reasoning that the process of consuming information could become too halting (i.e., not sufficiently economic) if a strain on the reader's short-term memory made the search for a given stereotype less than automatic (53). The change in focus, from everyday, simple speech situations to supposedly reflective reading, allows Hirsch a very tenuous space for overstating the pitfalls of short-term memory (texts can be, and often are, reread). Further, this shift from speech to reading contexts encourages a notion of reading and understanding based on a particularly limited exchange of transparent information: readers become passive receptors seeking deposits, exercising choice only in a fleeting, virtually automatic realm of short-term cognition. While it is not difficult to see the advantages of Hirsch's program for employers seeking an easily trainable, politically dependent work force, it may be less obvious that the program is determined not by a concern for the intricate problems of literacy but rather by Hirsch's reverence for a concept of nationalism which he recognizes "is rooted in a certain kind of division of labor, one which is complex, and persistently, cumulatively changing" (73). For Hirsch, it appears that in the face of the difficulties posed by changing divisions of labor, the complexities of readers', consumers', and workers' interpretations must be sacrificed, inasmuch as they must yield to the model of transparent exchange (a model which, as Kelman notes, is fundamental to the law's utopian vision). Reduced interference between administrator and subordinate thus becomes the over-arching goal in a "necessarily" hierarchized system of economic circulation.

In cultural terms, a collaboration with Hirsch's project takes place when it is assumed that canonical texts somehow relate "plain meanings," an assumption that masks the relationship of a text to the reading practices which perpetuate the canon. As Guillory has noted,

canonicity is not a property of the work itself but of its transmission, its relation to other works in a collation of works. . . . Whatever the relation of the work to its initial audience, it must certainly have other relations as a canonical work, and these are the relations mediated by the form of the canon. The failure to make this distinction is the condition of every invocation of tradition, the supposed reproduction of cultural values by the monuments of culture. (494)

Keeping this point in mind while considering canonical practices, we should look skeptically on the logic of tradition, a logic which posits canonicity as some essential aspect of a text, if we hope to understand the very apparent dangers for Chicano narratives of co-optation and ghettoization; this is particularly true of attempts at canon creation for nonhegemonic traditions. There is perhaps no better example of such dangers than Hirsch's own defense of canonicity. By proposing to codify an extensive encyclopedia of cultural knowledge, and by emphasizing the transparent exchange model of communication, such defenses may well only consolidate already existing institutional practices while perpetuating a larger denial of minority worldviews.

Inasmuch as Hirsch's liberation scenario (cultural conservatism breeds political freedom) self-consciously defends the homology between cultural representation and political engagement by setting forth a particularly capacious anatomy of reading and understanding, it affords a unique opportunity to critique the rhetorical mechanics of a mode of interpretation which synthesizes both legal and literary practices. Through such a critique, we may begin to consider the ways in which dominant institutional discourses are re-created in Hirsch's text in new combinations that may reveal the long-standing complicities between these discourses.

Transporting the Liberal Force/Consent Dichotomy to Cultural Historiography

Hirsch's most explicit development of a coextensive literary and legal hermeneutics may be found in his essay "Counterfactuals in Interpretation." Anthologized in Sanford Levinson and Steven Mailloux's Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (1988; hereafter ILL ), the essay is situated among a variety of debates focusing on the interpretive relationship between the Constitution, its framers, and its present-day readers. Throughout this collection, contributions are united by an interest in the necessary translation which takes place between different historical contexts; whether the articles engage rhetorical politics, the lawmaker's intention, historically situated reading conventions implicit within texts, or arguments about the transcendent attainment of an objective per-

spective, all assume explicit positions with regard to historical understanding as such.

In Hirsch's essay the translation between temporal contexts takes two forms: (1) the "responsible communication" approach, identified with counterfactual logic, and (2) the "interpretation-as-exploitation" approach, identified with "unconstrained accommodation" of a text to concerns located in the interpreter's present. While both models emphasize the role of the reader, Hirsch distinguishes the latter as the form tending toward "intellectual simplicity," the form which "never has to submit to the uncertainties and complexities of historical speculation" because "[interpretive] decisions are based ultimately on nothing more stable or open to inquiry than the preferences of those readers who happen to be in power." Quite unlike the affirming approach Hirsch brings to bear on the "arbitrary" rise of American culture in Cultural Literacy , his assumptions here mark arbitrariness of choice as a chief intellectual defect; even so, Hirsch acknowledges that such "exploitation of what comes down from the past is a way of making something valuable out of the past" (ILL 57), a notion very much in keeping with the concept of cultural capital and the larger claim I have made that Cultural Literacy is more concerned with creating a malleable workforce than promoting literacy. Underlying Hirsch's distinction between his models is the notion that the complexities of counterfactual interpretation may significantly overcome the arbitrary interpretive impositions of those "who happen to be in power." While Hirsch's essay argues that "a context of intellectual freedom" makes the exploitation model "unacceptable," Cultural Literacy suggests that in actual historical circumstances both models tend to operate simultaneously, even in complicity; at least this would seem to be the message as the book becomes more explicit about the process of legitimation which grounded the consensual model quite literally on the arbitrary one.

Hirsch's codification of these particular models itself marks a crucial step in the process of limiting interpretive practices. What is at stake is not—as Hirsch would have us believe—discovering the more correct approach, the one which will more honestly approximate the character of a historical person or event. The sort of local truth either of the methods might claim remains secondary to the larger assertion of the methodological dichotomy. Inasmuch as this binary pairing re-creates the force/consent dichotomy (transposed

to arbitrary power versus counterfactual reasoning and, assumedly, agreement), it fulfills the first objective of liberal institutions: legitimation both of coercion and of the hegemonic process itself.^[26]

This institutional self-preservation drives Hirsch's argument inasmuch as it leads him to posit once again an ideal communicative scenario. However, in this instance Hirsch is much more explicit about the historical models which would ground the idealized exchange. The initial historical model offered by Hirsch assumes that, by appealing to an admittedly otherworldly transhistorical significance (grounded in the rather simplistic notion that "one has to have a lot of relevant knowledge" [ILL 63]), a reader may correctly translate a text into an unstable, present frame of significance. At the conclusion of the essay, Hirsch outlines his second, larger model of history, of which the first is but a part. In this larger model an explicitly religious notion of intellectual historical progress is premised on the Christian theory of biblical accommodation. Here Hirsch argues that both legal and literary canonical practices follow the same model of historical progress, in which "valid" advancement may be determined by the fidelity of particular interpretations to sacred "ur-texts," including the Constitution. By positing such unquestioned ur-texts, Hirsch fosters an approach which limits questions about how different argumentative starting points (points other than liberalism) might occasion different notions of historical change. Of course, cultural collaborations between literary and legal precedence play a crucial role in this regard.

The notions of continuity and transformation found in the essay, valid though they might seem in the majoritarian rhetorical context, are insufficiently sensitive to the legitimating institutional problematics we have been considering.^[27] As Mark V. Tushnet has noted in a different context, such liberal-rhetorical mechanics drastically affect the construction of historical understanding itself, positing a self-negating enterprise. Concerning liberally grounded historiography, Tushnet argues that "interpretivism and neutral principles attempt to complete the world view of liberalism by explaining how individuals may form a society"; however, "the communication assumptions of conservative social thought" form "the only coherent basis for the requisite continuities of history and meaning" (ILL 195). As exemplified by Hirsch's liberal attempt to reform education, the notion that a consensus can always be reached about the plain

meanings articulated in key texts relies on a reassertion of socially conservative notions, notions presuming "that we can understand what we think and do only with reference to the [dominant] social matrix within which we find ourselves" (ILL 195). Such an assertion posits a fundamentally reactive posture. While the turn to the social matrix, as Hirsch would construct it, necessarily and purposefully denies those interpretive pressures brought to bear by marginalized social groups, the rhetorical move nonetheless reveals an inevitable response to those pressures.

Alternative Rhetorical-Legal Strategies, Chicano Narrative, and Cultural Resistance

As one might suspect, most of the essays collected in Interpreting Law and Literature describe historical understanding in a similarly binary manner: their models of interpretation either (1) suppose the possibility of consensual agreement about the advancement of certain traditions (based on the reader's access to transhistorical conventions, intentions, plain meaning, etc.) or (2) deny such a possibility, instead supporting visions of atavistic power struggles in which relativism invites a chaotic field of competing subjectivisms. Exceptions to this binary limitation may be found in the final section of the anthology, which is entirely devoted to revisionary methodologies instituting a more rhetorically sensitive approach to interpretation. These essays argue primarily for case-study analyses which would implicitly elaborate on Kelman's investigations of denial mechanics and of displaced counterhegemonic modes of thought. These approaches suggest a program of study that would reframe apparent critical impasses, inherent in liberalism, with different rhetorical options in order to reapproach problems of adjudication and interpretation.

In the case of James Boyd White's essay "Judicial Criticism," the primary critical impasse to be explored concerns the conflict between rights of privacy and government intervention, as it was raised in Olmstead v. United States (the 1928 case which initiated questions about wiretapping). Rather than asking questions about the "correctness" of the opinions handed down, White instead asks how the two primary opinions offered by Justices Taft and Brandeis

constitute a "conversation" that defines "us." While "us" is coded variably—the term is associated with courtroom actors, individual citizens, the community, and the Constitution—two presuppositions stand out in White's development of the question. First, courtroom interpretation has a performative aspect which calls into being certain rhetorical roles which are often assumed uncritically; second, the implications of this performative aspect extend far beyond the boundaries of the court and in so doing present questions about the responsibility extending to all participants—but particularly the judges—to engage rhetorical practices that create opportunities for significant dialogical conflict. Celebrating Brandeis's opinion, White argues that one particular rhetorical practice initiated by the justice opened such doors: the incorporation of a vernacular voice. As a response to Brandeis's attack on Taft's literalist reading of the Constitution, this incorporation of the vernacular points, according to White, to a more democratic, dialogic engagement of society's voices. Inasmuch as such engagement is understood as unendingly conflictual, White poses it as a process of continual translation taking place through changing rhetorical presuppositions.

The judge and accepted legal procedure, of course, dictate to a great extent the rhetorical options of any given proceeding and thereby condition processes of translation or mock dialogue. However, as Crenshaw points out in "Race, Reform, and Retrenchment," beyond the results of particular decisions—even beyond the mass-media reproduction of legal thinking within society at large—there lies an arena where notions of social justice and social interaction are conditioned by powerful racial dynamics. While there is ample evidence of the existence of these racial dynamics (statistics treating education, poverty, incarceration, employment, institutional partici-pation—just to name some of the most obvious), there is also ample evidence that these racial dynamics are maintained through processes of denial and legitimation, processes which are very much dependent on aspects of legal rhetoric. It is for this reason in particular that Chicano artists often focus on legal interactions with the dominant culture; while their goal in re-creating legal events is often received as a form of historical "correction" (with supposedly limited significance because of the topical nature of the subject matter), such an understanding misses the radical aspects of the engagements. As I will demonstrate, these aspects are manifold, yet clearly

linked by a rhetorical manipulation of cultural translations and mock dialogues drawn from the official record of historical-legal performances. Hence, in works like Oscar Zeta Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit (1981), and Robert Young's Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1983), interpreters only begin to understand the more subtle aspects of the projects once they take into account the ways in which the works—via a focus on the production of testimony rather than on questions of guilt or innocence—offer their own dialogically attuned formal responses to the historical mock dialogue of the courtroom. What I am describing is far from a "trashing" of the law in the CLS sense, although the Chicano critical process certainly works from a finely tuned skepticism. However, as we will find throughout this study, the Chicano artists and critics considered here build on legal ideals in order both to critique the shortfalls of the legal process and to offer their own revised processes, often embedding them within the subtle formal structures of the works themselves.

Law may well serve as a tool of repression but it may also be used to project a radically new form of legality that cannot be achieved within present institutions.
Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative

Treated as participants within the broader scope of cultural critique, Chicano narratives are frequently assumed to manifest resistant approaches to the discourses of institutions controlled by and for the dominant Anglo culture. Ramón Saldívar's recent study of Chicano literature, for instance, focuses on the narrative strategies employed by Chicano authors to demystify the relations between minority cultures and dominant culture; in doing so, he offers a conflictual notion of history which stresses an inevitably ideological "dialectics of difference." In this dialectics, "resistant" or "oppositional" aspects of culture gain significance inasmuch as Saldívar suggests an inversion of priority in which a society's dominant cultural center comes to be defined, even—to an extent—controlled by those marginalized cultural pressures to which it reacts (10-11). Saldívar, in turn, subtly describes such resistance as negotiations acted out in

narratives he has selected—narratives which constitute one historically organized trajectory of Chicano culture. As he notes with reference to Oscar Zeta Acosta's novel Revolt of the Cockroach People , legal relations may become, among the variety of institutional dynamics studied by Chicano authors, a potentially liberating field inasmuch as they may be manipulated to offer new conceptions of social justice through a revision of historical understanding in general. Building on this notion, Saldívar takes up the more specific question of how particular disenfranchised groups address the rhetorical continuum between translation and mock dialogue. Within Chicano narratives devoted to legal questions (such as Revolt of the Cockroach People ), one would expect a more focused endeavor centered on questions of how liberalism refuses to recognize the perspective of marginal groups and victims of racism; this project would oppose the manner in which the courts decide racial issues by focusing on an individual perpetrator's explicit actions. However, beyond such critiques an even more basic proposal surfaces; as Saldívar notes of Acosta's novel, this proposal takes the form of refiguring adjudication.

In this refiguring the objective quest for the truth (perpetuated by the myth of the court's neutrality) is replaced by a conception of the trial as a performance where success is gauged by a cultural group's ability to gain a measure of control over the rhetorical options which will be deemed legitimate. Conceiving of resistance in this way, these artists transcend more simplistic notions of resistance as opposition to an autonomous "system." What is gained is a clearer recognition of the rhetorical mechanisms functioning alongside more obvious ideological stances and of the more subtle options for engaging in negotiations with dominant culture; even as these artists assert the potential for change, they counsel, as do the CRS writers, a guarded approach, recognizing that resistance is often effectively restrained within the confines of the liberal-legal tradition with its tendency to look on historically marginalized social groups as artificial constructions.

The critical demeanor toward liberalism, informing a wide range of Chicano texts, subsequently extends to the most basic ideological representations of the law's function. For instance, mainstream U.S. legal thinking supposes that the public's consent to "the rule of law" is essential if the system is to work successfully—if it is to achieve

justice. Such legal thinking assumes foremost that a choice exists between force and the solicitation of consent. Since the history of Anglo and Mexicano/Chicano interaction is one of territorial occupation through legal manipulation working in concert with violence, it comes as little surprise that consent, as framed in the mainstream manner, is significantly challenged by Chicano texts: consent cannot be the cornerstone of justice where choice has not played a significant role. This is doubly true of the representation of consent in Chicana narratives, where the critique of the force/consent dichotomy is embedded in a larger dismantling of patriarchal manipulations. In both Chicano and Chicana narratives, the consent/force dichotomy exists, from the nonlegitimate victim's perspective, as a rhetorical tool promoting discrimination at the very least, and most often outright disenfranchisement.

In terms of a tactical appropriation of legal discourse, an appropriation which elaborates both a general rhetorical approach to group power and specific consensual twists, Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit offers a particularly rich example as it reexamines the zoot suit riots which occurred in Los Angeles during the early 1940s. The play and its film adaptation focus on a trial in the 1942 death of a youth at a Los Angeles swimming hole (Sleepy Lagoon) popular with Chicanos who were essentially barred from public swimming facilities. What made the prosecution of the Sleepy Lagoon case unusual, and the aspect that Valdez focuses attention on, is the scapegoating of an entire "gang" by the courts and media; twenty-two youths in all were tried on conspiracy charges during courtroom proceedings that could at best be called biased.^[28] Valdez's treatment of these proceedings is scathing, but, as Charles Ramírez Berg points out, Valdez's most innovative response may in fact be the creation of El Pachuco, a Chicano version of a trickster figure who also acts as a kind of "one man Greek chorus."^[29] This cynical figure accompanies the audience through the crime, trial, and appeal, complementing the more earnest leader of the gang, Henry Reyna, in a way that suggests a mirroring of the antithetical relationship Chicanos feel toward the law: an ardent suspicion juxtaposed to a steadfast faith in civil liberties. The two characters carry on a bantering dialogue about the law throughout Zoot Suit ; they thus act as cultural translators who expose for the audience the complex psychological turmoil that is finally placed in the audience's lap as Valdez, by offering multiple endings, forces the viewer to "join the action."

Both the dramatic and cinematic versions also shift the audience's focus away from the ostensibly central crime of a Pachuco gang, turning the audience's critical gaze instead on the variety of historical "crimes" which were perpetrated against the Chicano community by a xenophobic Anglo society caught up in wartime paranoia and primed for scapegoating. Although a conventional courtroom drama builds toward the revelation of the guilty party, in this work the audience's gradual recognition of a possible murderer is crucially displaced by Valdez's interrogation of the multitude of panoptic strategies exercised by the press and the courts; these strategies distort the cultural image of the Pachuco, purposefully misrepresenting it in order to exacerbate existing racial tensions (the historical criminalization of the zoot suit apparel is but one sign of this effort). Henry never deliberates about assuming the guilt of the implicit murderer (his brother Rudy) because the option would alter nothing in terms of the community, in terms of the power dynamic being played out between groups; Henry and the other gang members know that, whatever the moral implications of Rudy's act, the institutional process desires a scapegoat foremost.

The problem of Rudy's guilt remains irrelevant because the courts do not present a viable remedy; Valdez thus displaces Rudy's role in order to sustain one version of a Chicano community perspective. The move is, of course, crucial inasmuch as one of the larger efforts undertaken by the film includes turning a very cautious eye toward the interpretive process at play. Reading the "move" becomes more complex as we consider the particular rhetorical pressures which necessarily attend definitions of a Chicano community or its perspective. Such a "homogenizing" process (creating a Chicano worldview) may help crystallize certain perspectives and points for a non-Chicano audience whose primary work is making the cultural translation between their own cultural/historical contexts and the film's. In an analogous manner, the unification may be received by Chicanos as empowering in the sense defined by Crenshaw when she defends the civil rights movement as an era in which African Americans with great differences were able to form strong affiliations as they infused rights discourse with their own interpretive priorities. However, there also exists the possibility that such a uniting might re-create the problems identified with Hirsch's analysis. On this score, Zoot Suit and the community it creates are clearly open to question in terms of the representation of Chicana desires.

Perhaps the most interesting character with regard to the question of Chicana representation is Bertha, a raucous Pachuca who could well play a dangerously aggressive role in the narrative were it not for her virtual disappearance early on. Both Bertha and the traitorous "Marijuana" (a Malinche figure brought to life as the subject of one of the play's songs) are contained by Della, a Chicana, who, despite her claims for self-respect, plays a relatively submissive, even self-sacrificial role as she awaits her love, Henry Reyna. Such displacements of aggressive Chicana figures—certainly not limited to Valdez's work—systematically suppose that the most important conflicts for Chicanos are those engaged by men. As I will demonstrate in the final chapters of this study, such assumptions in fact reveal a form of male bonding that is fundamental to the maintenance of male social privilege; for now, though, my primary concern will be analyzing texts in terms of the power dynamics they engage while they favor often problematic notions of "the" Chicano community.

Throughout Valdez's film, the masculine-coded battle for power is associated with a struggle for recognition between the competing perspectives presented by the play. This struggle is quite literally played out in terms of winning control over an audience's gaze. Foucauldian readings of panoptic institutional strategies have taught us a great deal about how processes of hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgments combine to produce the modern synthetic individual; Valdez's accomplishment includes a demystification as well as an appropriation of these strategies, strategies which the FBI and other agencies used widely and quite explicitly during both the Pachuco and Chicano nationalist periods.^[30] In the play, the gazes controlled by the press and the courts take on an increasingly obvious, increasingly defensive role; the character of the reporter in particular becomes all the more desperate to win the attention of the various audiences (on the set and off), seemingly in response to Henry's growing refusal to accept the part of scapegoat. Strength here comes to be defined by how well characters resist the paranoia inspired by the apparently omnipresent observation.

In this manner, the judge—manipulating the power conferred by the gaze—forces the defendants to present themselves in a slovenly, unkempt manner, far from the image of sartorial care characteristic of Pachucismo. The court's revision represents a multifaceted strat-

egy. While the mandatory filth carries a moral message contributing to the gang's "criminality" the revision also penalizes the Pachucos for expressing solidarity through a semiotic code of dress expressing cultural difference itself. The "rewriting" of the zoot suit apparel marks a systematic colonization of, in a broad sense, a community language. Far from irrational expressions of racism, such institutional manipulations aim to reconstruct the available rhetorical options of a given community in a homogenizing manner similar to that described by Kelman with reference to the effects of legal thought.

Propelled by the apparently all-powerful court and press, the attacks on Pachuco solidarity hope to destabilize by accentuating the sort of paranoia that the Pachucos must relive each time they remember being stripped in public by gangs of roving servicemen during the riots. (Paranoia is of course not paranoia if they really are out to get you, as Anglo gangs were out to get Pachucos at the time.) However, Valdez goes beyond the representation of the historical efforts of the institutions (however paranoia-inspiring they might have been), portraying machinations of an extended fantastic order. In the theatrical version of Zoot Suit , for instance, a collapse of identities exacerbates the sense of a totally connected system. One of the only hopes for differentiation in this system, at least in the first act of the play, exists in the contrast between Edwards and Smith, the two officers who initially interrogate Henry about the death. An anomaly, Edwards appears willing to entertain Henry's perspective; yet very shortly one finds that the actor playing Edwards has become Henry's official persecutor by assuming the role of the hanging judge. The change bears out El Pachuco's seemingly paranoid reading of the earlier interrogation scene, in which he advises Henry not to trust Edwards but rather to look to the latent significance of his assimilationist yet racist language. Although E1 Pachuco is apparently omniscient, his role as a paranoid reader has its limits as well, limits self-consciously explored in both versions of Zoot Suit ; repeatedly, the existential isolationism El Pachuco advocates for Henry as a means of survival becomes a central source of conflict between the two. It is telling, however, that El Pachuco circumvents the height of this conflict by asserting his ability to manipulate the action of the play—by redirecting the audience's gaze toward a Chicano community's perspective on the riots.

In addition to his complex role as a paranoid reader, then, El Pachuco acts as a paranoia-inspiring panoptic force in his own right. The play and the film in fact begin with his transgression of the theater's traditional visual flow; he literally turns the gaze back on the audience, making it the object of his amusement. In both the cinematic and theatrical versions, the control suggested by this change in the dramatic gaze is then exercised by Pachuco through various extradiegetic manipulations of scenes.^[31] Such acts culminate as El Pachuco interrogates the other primary manipulator of gazes in the film, the reporter. Chasing the reporter through the audience, rematerializing at various points in the crowd to circumvent his escape, El Pachuco turns the reporter's—and by extension the press's—power against itself by attacking its racism while it is exposed; here we find guerrilla mobility expressed in its most literal form.

This reversal of the gaze, premised as it is on Pachuco's fantastic mobility, intervenes to constitute a corrective framing for the paranoia which threatens, in Foucauldian fashion, to isolate Henry from his community. Denied the ability to alter significantly the institutions of the Anglo society, Valdez turns to a guerrilla strategy of social transformation, one that relies on the weakness of panoptic techniques: their dependency on anonymity. Reversing the gaze, turning it back on institutional designs, Valdez thus effects a reversal with a difference. The distraction created within the official panoptics, and the group appropriation of power, affords a precarious site for Chicano activism, for writing an alternative ending to the institutional script of synthetic individualism and its history. While a potentiality is written into Zoot Suit at its close with the collective rewriting of the play, a rewriting made possible by the critical space opened between the press (which attempts to gain the last word) and the various members of the Pachuco community who offer their own readings, the threat remains of not moving beyond the stage of reversal, of not significantly affecting the legal institution or the patriarchy that it helps maintain; the seeming power of the gaze may easily be turned into a means not of opposing hegemonic spaces and histories but of gaining a masculinist entitlement, a point we will explore further in chapters 4 and 5 as we take up the limited representation of Chicanas in male works and the critiques of "consensual" dynamics in Chicana narratives.

To the extent that individual, group, sexuality, and gender dynamics are affected by the legal thought addressed in Chicano narratives, an understanding of why particular artists might accept the consequent risks must begin with a more rigorous understanding of the diverse rhetorical mechanisms against which Chicano resistance is situated; only then can we fully appreciate the difficult process of cultural translation. This work begins when we reframe questions about resistance by recognizing the subtle rhetorical influences underlying more explicit ideological practices; as Kelman suggests, these influences place restraints on conceptions of change while they perpetuate particular institutional designs. Nowhere is this type of metadiscursive criticism more apparent than when we turn to consider the role of the law and legal rhetoric that dominates Chicano narratives; such a great variety of these narratives the-matize legal interactions and injustices that, on reflection, one could be tempted to mark the legal-critical moment as a defining thematic of the art. The examples I develop in subsequent chapters are particularly rich in that their forms as well present subtle challenges to the paramount hegemonic voice of their settings. I emphasize this formal experimentation because I believe, as Ramón Saldívar has argued, that some of the most effective resistance set in motion by Chicano narratives derives from a challenging of hegemonic modes of thought which are subtly embedded in formal conventions.^[32] As the narratives critique the historically dominant language of rights in U.S. society (with all its formal implications), they set in motion what may be translated as a Foucauldian approach to power and its disciplinary techniques, an approach which constitutes a truly radical literacy. Like Foucault's subtle reading of the interplay between the development of prisons and the rise of such techniques in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), these works often link more explicit institutional moments—for instance, trials—to latent sociopsychological forces that, along with material coercion, encourage both Chicanos and Chicanas to participate in their own disenfranchisement even while legitimating the process for those who gain privilege through it.^[33] In the next two chapters, we will consider these latent forces in specific case studies that will provide a more subtle sense of the dialectical tension between the designs of the Anglo and Chicano communities.