Toward a Genealogy of Chicana Activist Mourning

Sandwiched between Santana's ritual murder and the drive-by shooting at the conclusion, American Me presents one potentially positive option to viewers, the only alternative vision which appears to recognize the most important historical forces shaping the community. This option is reified in Julie's woman-headed household. The sense of empowerment which Julie supposedly represents at the end of the film is crucial inasmuch as Olmos uses his final scenes to set up a contrasting vision between the families of the barrio. What Olmos's contrast conveys is that some families may be able to keep their kids off the streets and away from gang activity like the drive-by shooting. We thus see Julie leaving her son in the care of her mother while she goes on to the night school courses she has desired, not for her own personal gain, but as part of a revolution through education.

The difficulty with this scene is that, even though it avoids the fatalism of the martyr and Malinche metanarratives, the promise it would convey lacks historical depth. The audience knows that Julie has dreams; it does not know how Chicanas in her position go about realizing their goals against such overwhelming social, political, and economic barriers. The problem is a crucial one because the film so effectively details a melancholia which would condemn the Chicano community to a repetitive sublimation of festering wounds. And we cannot ignore that Olmos's representation of this sublimation has a particular homosocial foundation which places Chicanas in a unique situation "outside the loop" of entitlements reserved for

men. With such an economic manipulation of desires, we are forced to ask how a character like Julie can be taken as a potentially reformist force. There simply is not enough of a sense about how she would manipulate her historical situation, nor how she would build on a communal legacy of activism by other Chicanas and Mexicanas. Despite Olmos's response to critics like Father Boyle, films like Stand and Deliver and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez will not act as correctives for the dynamic of despair revealed at the conclusion of American Me .^[30] Only works which focus on the interaction among legal rhetoric, the sublimation of mourning, and the roles of gender and sexuality will offer that type of intervention.

The materials which could support a genealogy of Chicana activist mourning have recently been working their way into academic circles—a result of important archival efforts carried out principally by Chicana historians and similar explorations by Chicana artists. To suggest what such a genealogy might look like, we will consider evidence from three critical periods: (1) the post-treaty U.S. colonization; (2) the post-World War II consolidation of Mexican-American civil rights efforts; and (3) the contemporary post-Chicano nationalist context. In each of the historical contexts explored here, Mexicanas and later Chicanas have worked together to effect a social process of mourning during a time of critical political transformation. In this manner, they have thus created their own gendered "subtext" to the United States' official legal record, its Mexicano/Chicano male collaborations, and the sublimation it promulgates. This point deserves highlighting because it suggests why I choose to reapproach these Chicana materials in terms of mourning, a focus not often pursued by Chicana cultural critics who have worked hard to write themselves out of the stereotypes that can be associated with mourning as a Chicana's gender-bound work.^[31] In this vein, mourning may be framed as a largely private affair, usually situated in the home, an understanding reinforced by larger cultural icons, like La Llorona, icons that perpetuate the notion that a Mexicana's or Chicana's purpose is wholly bound to her offspring, even to the point of irrational and dangerous attachment, as is played out in popular versions of the Llorona legend.

Recognizing these difficulties, I have chosen to pursue the study of Mexicana and Chicana mourning because it appears that there are crucial ways in which social conventions are violated in these

grieving practices, yielding very important acts of resistance and coalition building. In what follows, I undertake the process of working through the complex negotiations between U.S. legal discourse and these aspects of Chicano culture because I find that the project of historical recovery and interpretation—dealing with what has been lost to the present—involves reading how U.S. institutions have consistently functioned in opposition to Mexicana and Chicana mourning practices. In fact, a full understanding of U.S. history is, as Breitwieser suggests, quite likely dependent on a better conception of how such alternative means of dealing with loss have been accommodated as institutions have taken new reactive stances. It is in this spirit that I will shortly turn to an examination of wills, testaments, funerals, and artistic representations of the same in order to consider what is at stake in the Mexicana and Chicana pursuit of a socially and politically situated grieving.

Although, as I have suggested, Chicana scholars (and Chicano scholars generally) have tended not to frame their analyses in terms of the La Llorona motif or in terms of mourning conflicts generally, examples of these types of inquiry do exist. For instance, the Viramontes short story discussed in the last chapter, "Cariboo Cafe" may be read as a quite insightful study of the politics of mourning, a study which brings specific allusion to La Llorona together with an assertion that barrio police tactics mirror the use of "disappearance" in Central America. Other contributors, including José Limón and Monica Palacios, have added both academic calls to reevaluate La Llorona's political potential and humorous reworkings of the legend in a Chicana lesbian context.^[32] In addition to these efforts, we may also note works like Replies of the Night , Sandra Hahn's tribute to both her grandfather and to the Days of the Dead, a tribute rendered "using computer graphics and digital voice-reproduction" in order to parallel "the cognitive process of revivifying him in her own mind."^[33]

Such practices approach the politics of mourning in ways that do not rely on the cultural iconography associated with La Llorona. Instead, the examples considered here often have a more pragmatic bent inasmuch as institutional tools—actual wills, testaments, or their simulacra—become the chosen means of contestation. In this sense, these Mexicanas and Chicanas are, like their Argentine counterparts, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, holding up representations

of loss, or grieving material, so that they may coalesce around the process itself, as maimed as that process might be by institutional forces.^[34]

Recently published material supports the contention that Mexicanas and Chicanas in the Southwest have a long history of manipulating their circumstances through the use of legal documents, especially wills and testaments. Hence, critics like Angelina F. Veyna have demonstrated the crucial roles played by official records, records often initiated at the request of interested women parties.^[35] Likewise, Deena F. González documents first the dire poverty and political disenfranchisement experienced by Spanish-speaking women in a burgeoning Anglo capitalist system and second the resistant strategies adopted by these women as they built on a Mexican tradition wherein women often held property in their maiden names—property which could be disposed of without a husband's signature ("Widowed Women of Santa Fe" esp. 35). Among other things, such research points to an important history of politicized mourning in which these women used Anglo institutional practices to define both their dealing with loss and their resistance to post-treaty Anglo rule.

As González notes, many Spanish-Mexican unmarried women found themselves forced into accommodations with relatively wealthy Anglo men who radically devalued the labor provided by these women even as general prosperity and inflation hit record rates. Hence, "by the 1870s intermarriage had become a custom with important ramifications for a community experiencing a Euro-American onslaught. It offered Spanish-Mexican women—women with few choices and limited means—a degree of stability" (43). Even though many women did choose interracial marriage as a means of coming to terms with the post-treaty shifts in power, this was certainly not the only option. As González argues,

The unmarried woman who wrote wills pointed to another solution. The majority did not marry the immigrants; these women displayed minimal interest in easing men's transition to life in a new society. Instead, they sought stability in their own worlds; they sought to impose order on a world increasingly changed by easterners and their ways. For more and more of these women, the act of writing a will offered a measure of control over their circumstances. Spanish-Mexican women had followed the custom for generations; worldly

possessions, however meager, required proper care. The custom took on added significance in the postwar period. Its assumption of stability contrasted sharply with an enveloping sense of disorder; it promised children a continuity, a certainty, their parents lacked. (44)

Although the language of the wills suggests that these women were using the documents to order "their lives around people first, institutions second," what becomes apparent from González's revisionist history is that the women were growing increasingly aware of the collusion between church and state in the newly colonized lands.

In response, the wills gained a clearly political valence, solidifying an important collaboration between the women's private and public lives. The wills were therefore a means of using the forum provided by the courts both to dispose of one's possessions and to officially mark the significance of one's life. The process itself had crucial ramifications:

The witnesses brought into the courtroom were almost always other women, relatives or friends, and reliable. Altogether, a minimum of five people knew what a will contained. If the judges were suspect, at least the community knew a person's final wishes. Never much of a secret, the written document now conveyed a strong public message to residents and newcomers alike; it was an act of faith, but it had its practical side as well. (46)

While there is an obvious economic context for understanding this resistant practice, one that addresses the essential coercion such women faced, the will making may also be read as part of a key transition in a larger social worldview. Here I depart from Gonzá-lez's project to recall the emphasis that psychoanalysis places on the necessary rebuilding of reality that occurs as people mourn.

By effectively controlling their wills and the public legitimation of the wills, these women were in an important sense gaining power over the process of mourning and the remaking of reality that mourning entails. While González avoids such larger and potentially abstract explanatory metanarratives, she does suggest this power when she notes, "Irrespective of religious meaning or other symbolism, the document laid a life to rest, giving a dying woman (the majority said they were gravely ill) a sense of order and perhaps revivifying her" (46). Such revitalization may best be recognized as we acknowledge the meaning gained by will making as an essen-

tially social practice, one built on the strength of family and cultural community. With this social context in mind, we may assume that will making was a useful subsistence strategy for women facing coercive, hegemonic manipulation, especially where this manipulation worked through legal rhetoric by forcing the widows to purchase their salvation with appropriate monetary sacrifices to clergy and lawyers alike.^[36]

The textual mourning encoded in wills is of course complemented by the sociosymbolic language which animates our experiences of funerals. I emphasize this sociosymbolic aspect because funerals may, and often do, transcend their putatively metaphysical focus, thereby suggesting how survivors should read their historical circumstances—the Chicano Moratorium might, for instance, be thought of in this regard, although such a method of interpretation may well be applied to more conventional funeral practices as well.^[37] One of the more effective uses of such a mourning context developed from just such a manipulation of a funeral's power to define historical issues. With support from family members, and particularly her sister, Sara Moreno, Beatrice Longoría created what was to become a nationally and internationally reported struggle over how Mexicanos would be received in the post-World War II United States.^[38]

The episode began with the death of Longoría's husband, Félix, in a battle that occurred in the Philippines during 1945. After being buried in a military cemetery in southeast Asia for nearly four years, the body was sent back to the United States for a proper funeral. However, when Beatrice pursued arrangements in Félix's hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, the manager of the Rice Funeral Home, T. W. Kennedy, Jr., refused to cooperate, claiming, "We just never made it a practice of letting them [Mexican Americans] use the chapel and we don't want to start now"^[39] Rather than acquiescing to this discrimination, Beatrice Longoría stood her ground. Enlisting the aid of prominent friends, including Dr. Hector García, head of the GI Forum, she and her sister initiated contacts which quickly led to a publicity campaign that dramatically underscored the outrageousness of the funeral home's refusal. Although both Mexicanos and Anglos were horrified that an event like this could take place, the general reaction among Anglo-Texans in Three Rivers was defensive, if not outwardly belligerent and threatening—a

fact underscored by the intense harassment received by Félix Longoría's father as the Anglo elite of the town moved to undercut the widow's power, trying but failing to get the father to sign a prepared statement denouncing her actions.^[40] Later, when a Texas House of Representatives investigation was held, Beatrice Longoría and her family testified with the full awareness that their safety itself was precarious.^[41] Although Senator Lyndon B. Johnson interceded early on in these affairs to offer Longoría a military funeral with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery, the impact of the case was far from played out. As Manuel Peña argues,

The Longoría incident was thus important because, while it was by no means the first time that Mexicans had mobilized their resources to right what they considered a wrong committed against them, it did serve to highlight (to act as "catalyst" for) the intensifying civil rights activities that marked the post-war phase of the Mexican in the United States. (22-23)

With this courageous decision, one no doubt met initially with some fear by all involved, Beatrice Longoría and her supporters helped turn a seemingly local act of discrimination into an opportunity to coalesce an emergent Chicano political conscious (Peña 21). Groups including LULAC, the GI Forum, and the Community Service Organization found in Longoría's example support for a new method: "a strong emphasis on direct action—especially on active participation in politics" (Peña 22). Certainly any number of incidents might have played the "catalytic" role the Longoría case did; yet the Longoría situation was unique in its power to unite people in outrage and action.

This impact must in large part be ascribed to the special role of mourning as a social process. The funeral home director's statements were read by newspaper audiences of the time as more than a defense of a discriminatory custom with limited application. Instead, the nature of the mourning shared throughout the United States in this postwar period made it possible to rework, in whatever small way, the place of Mexicana worldviews vis-à-vis the society as a whole. A good portion of the dominant Anglo population was able, to a degree, to empathize with the Longoría family, and Beatrice in particular. At the same time, the extensive remaking of reality brought about by the postwar mourning created a context in

which both Mexicanos and non-Mexicanos had a greater potential to conceive of new social dynamics, dynamics loosened, though certainly not freed, from a history of discriminatory "custom."

The corrido which developed around the Longoría incident, "Discriminación a un Mártir" (1949), offers an indication of a critical transformation in popular Chicano historiography as well, a change again reflecting the power of the mourning context manipulated by Beatrice Longoría and her collaborators. Detailing this transformation, Peõa argues that the style of the Longoría corrido marks an important shift in the development of corrido rhetorical strategies. Contrasting "Discriminación a un Mártir" to the turn-of-the-century "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" Peña demonstrates a movement away from an earlier glorification of the epic hero and toward the representation of a group reaction to victimization, a group reaction which parallels the coalescing political strategies of organizations like LULAC.^[42] While LULAC maintained essentially accommodationist or "melting pot-oriented" political strategies, we see in this artistic transition a mirroring of changing political approaches, approaches slowly moving toward new interventionist group dynamics that focus on the manipulation of legal rhetoric specifically.

Like all of the institutionally oriented interventions studied here, readings of the resistance associated with the Longoría episode must contend with co-optation, and specifically with the homosocial designs that have forced stories about women, like Beatrice Longoría and her sister, into the shadows of both "American" and Chicano histories. While Longoría's actions receive scant attention in such histories, if they receive attention at all, few of the documents that remain regarding the affair record much in the way of her more subtle motives. However, although her statements from this period are notable for their decorum, they remain steadfast assertions.^[43] Hence, when the scandal hit full force and the Three Rivers elite as well as many noted Anglo-Texans attempted to save face by wooing the burial back to the town, Beatrice stood by her decision to have Félix honored at Arlington, thereby leaving the weight of the nation's criticism on the original racist actions.^[44] Also, with regard to the resistance embodied in Longoría's actions, it should be noted that her original wish to make use of the funeral home for Félix's services was itself unusual, inasmuch as custom at the time usually placed such an event in the privacy of the Mexicano home (N. Williams 79-

82). Hence, from the outset Beatrice Longoría's actions were implicitly rebellious because they were marked by a potentially dangerous inroad into the public space of the Three Rivers chapel.

Stories like Longoría's come to our attention now primarily because of recent research efforts—a fact which brings us to the contemporary context and the fiction of Patricia Preciado Martín, a Chicana historian and short story author. I will focus on her story "The Ruins," collected in her Days of Plenty, Days of Want (1988), to explore its unique merging of mourning politics and historiographic concerns. The brief plot of this narrative follows a young Chicana, Alma Romero, as she pursues forbidden excursions to a ruined convent in her South Tucson barrio. Designated comically as the site of all manner of perversions, the former convent is portrayed as the home of temptation itself by Alma's mother, a woman whose Catholicism is valued for the strength it provides her even as those around her look to other sources of inspiration. Building on the Spanish meaning of her name, "soul," Alma's questing among the ruins revises the traditional Catholicism of her home and community. The ruins attract Alma not because she longs for a spiritual past but rather because she is interested in their new inhabitant, a character very much concerned with historical and political matters, including social protest. Working again in the allegorical vein, Preciado Martín names this character Doña Luz (roughly "Lady Illumination").

A potential source of inspiration for Alma, Doña Luz's history embodies resistance: "She had been, in her more youthful and vigorous days, a thorn in the side of several generations of bureaucrats and attorneys, having laid claim, with faded documents and dog-eared deeds, to several acres of land where the multi-story government complexes now stood in the heart of the city" (16). This image of resistance is reconfirmed in the story as the omniscient yet cordial narrator describes Doña Luz's subsequent attempts to save her ancestral family adobe from modern-day Anglo land-grabbing (the "progressive city council" had decided to make way for "a multi-level parking garage"). "In a last desperate show of defiance" Doña Luz had "thrown herself down in front of the wrecking ball," an act that provoked "a rash of negative publicity and a spate of sympathetic letters that had proved embarrassing to the city fathers" (15). Even though the demolition goes ahead, effectively ending the life of her elderly mother, there remains in Doña Luz a sense of struggle

that is both historically and magically based. During one of Alma's secret journeys to the ruins, Doña Luz appears as if a ghost before her, yet a ghost with a notion of history more real than the city's own.

This ontological blending is of course a critical technique used by many of the Chicano artists I have considered, artists who wrestle with the dictates of institutional denial by creating transgressive stories linked to magical realist techniques. Again, Patricia Williams succinctly describes the evocative power of such blending when she argues that, despite the institutional denial of minority worldviews, issues of race always linger like apparitions that are maneuvered around even as they are "officially" disclaimed.^[45] "The Ruins" supports the notion that two women also live a complex ontological existence and that the processes of mourning play a crucial role in the collaboration they fashion with regard to the fragments of elided Chicano history that circulate about them.

Doña Luz takes Alma to a small hovel in the ruins, a hovel that at first appears to be lined with white moths. On closer inspection, Alma begins to see instead small white scraps of paper on which are scrawled bits and pieces of Chicano history. As Doña Luz whispers to Alma,

This is the history of our people which I have gathered together—the land grants and the homesteads and the property transfers; the place names of the mountains and the rivers and the valleys and the pueblos; the families and their names and their issue; the deeds, honorable and dishonorable; the baptisms, the weddings, the funerals; the prayers and the processions and the santos to whom they are directed; the fiestas, religious and secular; the milagros and the superstitions. (18)

Doña Luz builds on Alma's interest and brings her to the ruins precisely because she wishes to declare her final will and testament:

"Tú estás encargada de todo esto. . . ." Alma, still grasping her bony hand and surveying with wonder the testament of Doña Luz, felt the warmth of that hand flow into her being like water being poured. . .. "This is my legacy. But I am old and failing. I entrust it to you lest it be lost and forgotten." (18)

Building on the practice of resistant Mexicana will and funeral construction, Preciado Martín presents a tale about the transmission of histories and about the potentially unifying mourning that is part

of any historiography. In addition, the story revises the genealogy of resistant Chicana mourning I have attempted to sketch out here by making the work of the Chicana historian—Doña Luz—the narrative focus. Preciado Martín's own career as a historian adds to this symbolic level of meaning, inasmuch as "The Ruins" invites young Chicana readers to accept the legacy which is her project.

In this manner, the story may be reread as a kind of will in its own right—a testament to others who would likewise use mourning and historiography to remake reality. Taking up this legacy entails exploring lives and events that have been subjected both to forgetting and to pathological sublimation. The historian's work must thus contend with the often ambivalent successes afforded despite these institutional barriers. Hence, at the conclusion of the story,

[W]ithout warning, a tornadolike gust blew open the unlocked door of Doña Luz's hovel. The airborne flakes blasted in with a ferocious-ness, and then Alma saw, helpless and aghast, that the shreds of precious paper, in an avalanche of blinding whiteness, had metamorphosed into giant white moths again. They quickened with life and took to the air in a dizzying funnel of flight. Blowing snow mingled with blowing paper and rose and fell and then eddied into a blizzard of memories. And then the memories and the spirit of Doña Luz fluttered out the open door in a thousand swirling fragments in the direction of the south wind somewhere west of Atzlán. (20)

The sense of loss that pervades this conclusion is charged with a variety of meanings. While the "actual" historical materials appear to be lost along with the doña, the self-consciously symbolic register of the story (what it has to say about how we interpret) suggests that Alma gains something crucial from this ancestral woman about the process of constructing history itself. It is thus possible to read "The Ruins" as a story about successful mourning, a story that asks its readers, and its Chicana readers in particular, to find, as Alma does, the essentially enriching nature of Doña Luz's relationship to her own past through something very much like a funeral.

An outcast, even at times within her own community, Doña Luz comes to represent a person who can live with her history, even as that history and the doña's reactions to it are pushed into a liminal (though not ahistorical) ontological existence. In Preciado Martín's story, then, we find one Chicana passing to another, not so much the fragments of history, not the stories themselves, but rather a lesson

about how to read noncanonically, against the institutional grain. Here a space and a time is created for the construction of history (and the play of mourning) that is grounded in Chicana bonding, in the sharing of a sense of vocation.

Taken together, these different Mexicana and Chicana efforts to revise mourning suggest a political trajectory often elided or underdeveloped within masculine-focused Chicano culture and certainly within practices of mainstream institutions. Pursuing further the questions about desire and consent raised by authors like Ana Castillo, Cherríe Moraga, and Helena Maria Viramontes, we find that the methods of reading undertaken in this chapter significantly complicate our picture of legal-rhetorical practices—especially as grounded in Critical Legal and Critical Race studies—by demonstrating the diverse functions played by sexuality and gender as these affect political/resistant affiliations within communities. Reading the implications of the Chicana critique back through Revolt of the Cockroach People and American Me , we confront a tendency toward an "incestuous" male focus in Chicano studies in order to build on issues of "homosocial" dynamics. These issues, in turn, yield a better understanding of the "resistant" group affiliations modeled in the male works, affiliations that help define routes of access to patriarchal privilege.

In an overview of Chicana efforts to reformulate the function of mourning, we subsequently see how wills, testimonials, and funerals are manipulated to rethink processes of historiography and male-oriented activism. Overall, the arguments offered here demonstrate that the incestuous focus identified by Bruce-Novoa is actually better thought of as homosocial performance, in other words, as part of a larger "economy" of desire following the routes of legal-cultural rhetoric manipulated between men both inside and outside the Chicano communities. By contrast, in the Chicana efforts we find a complex and subtle history of resistance to these collaborations. Here we recognize that Chicanas have not tended to pursue representations of the more obvious legal interactions, including "benchmark" trials, but have instead developed insightful readings of the play of desire, rhetoric, and power.

Like the Mothers and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the women contributing to this genealogy pursue "a process of reconstructing history, of recovering identity" not only of individuals but also of a people (Arditti and Lykes 465). As has been the case in Argentina in the wake of a legacy of "disappearances" the restitution modeled in the Mexicana and Chicana efforts "is an act which is psychically foundational, based upon the articulation of truth and justice" (Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, qtd. in Arditti and Lykes 465). However, where "the fullest meaning" of restitution "is simply to cease being disappeared ones" in the Argentine context (Arditti and Lykes 465), a potentially more radical assertion with regard to mourning is at work in the Mexicana and Chicana projects. Here, a basic remaking of reality, suggested most explicitly in Preciado Martín's ontological blending, and an outright assertion of competing worldviews dominate the political horizon.