THE GLOBAL BORDER: TRANSNATIONALISM AND CULTURAL HYBRIDISM IN ALEJANDRO MORALES'S "THE RAG DOLL PLAGUES"

Abstract

By starting with two quotes from Deleuze and Guattari, I am trying to situate the topic of this essay in a broader context, which deals with questions of language usage, minority discourses, cultural hybridism, and the relation between vernacular and hegemonic cultures in the Americas. In Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of the linguistic aspects of this issue, the notions of be coming and deterritorialization are most relevant. As they have explained, becoming is to be understood as a process, a potentiality that always pertains to the minoritarian. In the case of languages, as the two epigraphs I chose suggest, minor ones are potential agents of the major language's entering into a becoming-minoritarian of all of its dimensions and elements (Deleuze and Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus, 106). In other words, minor languages erode, as it were, a major language from within, deterritorializing it, breaking up its system's supposed homogeneity. In their discussions, Deleuze and Guattari often exemplify their arguments by referring to the case of English as subverted by African Americans' speech (A Thousand Plateaus) and by analyzing Kafka's use of German for his writings (Kafka). What would happen if we extended Deleuze and Guattari's analysis to the relation between English and Spanish in Chicano/a literature? Is their argumentation useful for a consideration of Chicano/a languages and literature? These are questions that have lingered in my mind for a while, growing into the starting point for this essay. They are questions that, no doubt, will re quire at best a controversial and as yet provisional answer. The second of the epigraphs, in particular, seemed to me to be particularly open to generat ing a polemical response when extended to the field of Chicano/a languages and literature. After all, Deleuze and Guattari's seeming rejection of the dialect and the patois looks like a major blow to the idea of linguistic difference that was so dear to Chicano/a writers during the height of the Chicano movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and that is indeed still quite alive and well among many Chicanos/as. A large number of works from the 1960s and 1970s were written in Chicano/a Spanish, and many more have been written in that language in more recent years. By so using Spanish, Chicano/a writers have often been able to stress their difference from main

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