EN-COUNTERING THE OTHER DISCOURSE OF CHICANO-MEXICANO DIFFERENCE

Abstract

In this period in which Mexicans in the borderlands are being constructed as aliens and sources of cheap deportable labour (not makes of intellectual traditions which encourage transnational area studies and theoretical reflections in the US), it is important to remember that not only people but also ideas cross Mexican–American borders. It is doubly important to scrutinize those intellectual movements that cross state-sanctioned borders while restricting social possibilities and movements. In this article I consciously assume this charge by focusing critical attention on an influential venue of transnational(ist) travel (On the road to Octavio Paz/On the Road to Chicano) within cultural productions that laid the foundation for an ‘alternative’ Chicano studies epistemology and tradition in the early 1970s. Drawing on disparate cultural studies traditions and the deconstructive insights of Chicana feminists and activists, I encounter the patriarchal dynamics, conceptual idioms, political investments (nationalism/familism) and essentialist difference that undergirded this intellectual formation and its construction of Chicana/o identity. In the process I argue that this formation not only rendered the desired form of political exceptionalism, but also served to distance Chicanas/os from the political and intellectual claims of Chicanas, Chicana feminists and other women and people of colour. However, as my concluding section demonstrates, this circulation of theories was – to use the language of Clifford – ‘cut across’, interrupted and contested by other theories in circulation during the same period that offered different claims to representation, different forms of transnational travel, and other possibilities for imagining social political and intellectual relations.

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