The American West: The West as Froniter

Question for Discussion: What do Rodriguez, Andzaldua, and Pena mean by "the border" and border-crossing"?
Is the American West really an open, fluid cultural
border?

Reading: Rodriguez, "Mexico's Children";
Anzaldua, "Selections from Borderlands";
Limerick, "Meanwhile, La Frontera" ;
Pena, "Documented/Un-Documented"

Video: Born in the USA (1984), Born in East L.A. (1987),
Cheech Marin, "Born in East L.A." ; Los Lobos, "How
Will the Wolf Survive?"(Los Lobos Tape). Make sure you bring working cassette player.

Response Paper : How does the Indian's mythic story
of the West contrast with the "Mythic American West"?
Do these Indians intentionally tell their story of the West in order to challenge every point of the Anglo-American story? Is the Indian's Mythic West a counter-myth to the Anglo-American Mythic West? (1-2 page paper due on Monday, Feb. 23.)
( See Anglo-American vs. Indian Stories on
the American West )

"La frontera: The idea of the frontier as borders."
.................Patricia Limerick

"For several decades, some historians have earnestly campaigned to redefine the frontier as a contested zone of cross-cultural meetings."
Limerick (p. 79)

"The struggle of borders is our reality still...The adventure of frontiers is our fantasy;
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands

"We (Latinos in the United States ) don't want to be a mere ingredient of the melting pot. What we want is to participate actively in a humanistic, pluralistic and politicized dialogue, continuous and not sporadic, and that this occur between equals that enjoy the same power of negotiation.

For this "intermediate space" to open, first there has to be a pact of mutual cultural understanding and acceptance, and it is precisely in this that the border artist can contribute."
......................Gomez-Pena

The West as Borderlands

Maps: Frontiers, Frontera, & Borderlands

Map of American Indian Tribes, 1600 (in-class)
Map of the Spanish West 1820 (in-class)
Map of Mexican West 1840 (in-class)
Map of U.S. West 1850 (in-class)
Map of American West 1860 (in-class)
State Map of the 20th Century American West
(in-class)
Map of Different sub-regions in the West (in-class)
Racial Demographics in the West (in-class)
Where do Spanish-speaking People
live in the U.S. (in-class)
To All Indigenous Nations of Aztlan
Population per Square Mile in the West
The West from Space at Night

Borderland Studies
U.S. Mexican Borderlands/ Frontera
Border and Latin America Information
Borderland Studies: U.S.-Mexico

Turner and the Uses of the Frontier

The AmericanWest.com (in-class)
Turner's Frontier Thesis of American
History (in-class)
Turner: The Significance of the Frontier
in American History (1893)
Turner: The Problem of the West (1896)
John Gast, American Progress (1872) (in-class)
Explanatory Text used to market the
American Progress lithograph (in-class)

Disneyland's Frontierland and the West
as Frontier

Disneyland's Frontierland (in-class)
Frontierland Postcard (in-class)
Frontierland Shooting Gallery (in-class)
Frontierland Trivia
Walt Disney World's Frontierland
The Space Frontier Foundation Online (in-class)

Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (in-class)
Turner and the Uses of the Frontier (in-class)
Disney's Frontierland and the West (in-class)
John Gast, American Progress (1872) (in-class)
Turner's Frontier Mythology of the West
( in-class)
Paticia Limerick's Vision of the West as
a Place undergoing Conquest. (in-class)
Anaya: The Future of the Multicultural West:
The West as multicultural Borderlands (in-class)
Whites are now a Minority in California (2001)
English Losing Ground (Nov. 2008) (in-class)
U.S. Population Clock (in-class)
Projected Population of the U.S. in 2050 (in-class)
U.S. Population Projection: 2005-2050
Anzaldua, The Southwest as Borderland (in-class)
Anzaldua's diagram of the West as
La Frontera (in-class)
Limerick, The West as La Frontera (in-class)
La frontera: The Idea of the West
as Borderland (in-class)
Lyrics to "Born in the USA"
Lyrics to "Born in East LA
Born in East LA (1987) : Internet Movie Database
Lyrics to "Coming to America"
Lyrics to "Will the Wolf Survive"
Maps: Frontiers, La Frontera, and Borderlands
(in-class)
Borderland Studies (in-class)
Spanglish: Internet Movie Database
Plot Summary for Spanglish (in-class)
Gomez-Pena, The West as UnDocumented
(in-class)
Rodriguez, Mexico's Children (in-class)
To All Indigenous Nations of Aztlan

Rodriguez, Mexico's Children

"Consider my father: when he decided to apply for American citizenship, my father told no one, none of his friends, those men with whom he had come to this country looking for work. American citizenship would have seemed a betrayal of Mexico, a sin against memory."

"For three or four generations now, Mexican villages have lived under the rumor of America, a rumor vaguer than paradise. America exists in thousands of maternal prayers and in thousands of pubescent dreams. Everyone knows someone who has been. Everyone knows someone who never came back."

"Mexico, mad mother. She still does not know what to make of our leaving. For most of this century Mexico has seen her children flee the house of memory. During the Revolution 10 percent of the population picked up and moved to the United States ; in the decades following the Revolution, Mexico has watched many more of her children cast their lots with the future; head north for work, for wages; north for life. Bad enough that so many left, worse that so many left her for the gringo."

"A true mother, Mexico would not distinguish among her children. Her protective arm extended not only to the Mexican nationals working in the United States, but to the larger number of Mexican Americans as well. Mexico was not interested in passports; Mexico was interested in blood. No matter how far away you moved, you were still related to her."

"No wonder that Mexico would not entertain the idea of a "Mexican American" except as a fiction, a bad joke of history. And most Mexican Americans lived in barrios, apart from gringos; many retained Spanish, as if in homage to her. We were still her children.

As long as we didn't marry."

"Chicanismo blended nostalgia with grievance to re-invent the mythic northern kingdom of Aztlán as corresponding to the Southwestern American desert. Just as Mexico would only celebrate her Indian half, Chicanos determined to portray themselves as Indians in America, as indigenous people, thus casting the United States in the role of Spain .

Chicanos used the language of colonial Spain to declare to America that they would never give up their culture. And they said, in Spanish, that "Spaniards had been oppressors of their people."

"Chicanos never expected Spanish to become a public language co-equal with English. But by demanding Spanish in the two most symbolic places of American citizenship -- the classroom and the voting booth -- Chicanos were consoling themselves that they need not give up the past to participate in the American city. They were not less American for speaking Spanish; they were not less Mexican for succeeding in America . "

"Success is a terrible dilemma for Mexican Americans, like being denied some soul-sustaining sacrament. Without the myth of victimization -- who are we? We are no longer Mexicans. We are professional Mexicans. We hire Mexicans. After so many years spent vainly thinking of ourselves as exempt from some common myth of America, we might as well be Italians."

Limerick, The West as La Frontera

"In the idea of la frontera, there is no illusion of vacancy, of triumphal conclusions, or of simplicity. As the writer Gloria Anzaldua puts it, the United States-Mexican border is "where the Third World grates up against the First and bleeds." It is a unique place on the planet's surface, a zone where an industrialized nation shares a long land border with a nation much burdened by poverty, "Ambivalence and unrest," Anzaldua says, "reside there and death is no stranger." Any temptation to romanticize la frontera -- as a place of cultural syncretism, a place where the languages of Spanish and English have learned to co-habit and even merge -- runs aground on the bare misery of poverty in the border towns."

"The idea of the frontier is extremely well established as cultural common property. If the idea of la frontera had anywhere near the standing of the idea of the frontier, we would be well launched toward self-understanding, directed toward a realistic view of this nation's position in the hemisphere and in the world. "The struggle of borders is our reality still," Anzaldua writes ...:"The adventure of frontiers is our fantasy still; the struggle of borders is our reality still."

"The lesson of these references is this: the whole package of frontier and pioneer imagery has ended up as widely dispersed intellectual property. One could argue, as I probably at other times would have argued, that African Americans would he well advised to keep their distance from the metaphors and analogies of conquest and colonialism, that there are other and better ways to say that someone was a person of principle, innovation, and determination, without calling him a pioneer."

"This is the curious conclusion that these headlines forced on me: a positive image of the frontier and the pioneer is now implanted in nearly everyone's mind. It would not surprise me to see headlines referring to an American Indian lawyer as "a pioneer in the assertion of Indian legal rights," "pushing forward the frontier of tribal sovereignty," even though it was the historical pioneers who assaulted those rights, even though it was the pioneers' historical frontier that charged head-on into tribal sovereignty."

"The frontier of an expanding and confident nation; the frontier of cultural interpenetration; the frontier of contracting rural settlement; the frontier of science, technology, and space; the frontier of civil rights where black pioneers ventured and persevered; the frontiers between nations in Europe, Asia, and Africa; la frontera of the Rio Grande and the deserts of the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico -- somewhere in the midst of this weird hodgepodge of frontier and pioneer imagery lie important lessons about the American identity, sense of history, and direction for the future."

Gomez-Pena, Documented/ Undocumented

"I live smack in the fissure between two worlds, in the infected wound: half a block from the end of Western Civilization and four miles from the start of the Mexican-American border, the northernmost point of Latin America . In my fractured reality, but a reality nonetheless, there co-habit two histories, languages, cosmologies, artistic traditions, and political systems which are drastically counterposed. "

"As a result of this process I have become a cultural topographer, border-crosser, and hunter of myths. And it doesn't matter where I find myself, in Califas or Mexico City , in Barcelona or West Berlin ; I always have the sensation that I belong to the same species: the migrant tribe of fiery pupils."

"Our deepest generational emotion is that of loss, which comes from our having left. Our loss is total and occurs at multiple levels: loss of our country (culture and national rituals) and our class (the "illustrious" middle class and upper middle). Progressive loss of language and literary culture in our native tongue (those of us who live in non-Spanish-speaking countries); loss of ideological meta-horizons (the repression against and division of the left) and of metaphysical certainty."

"That the Anglos themselves aren't also an "ethnic group," one of the most violent and anti-social tribes on this planet? That the five hundred million Latin American mestizos that inhabit the Americas are a "minority"?

"Between Chicanos, Mexicans, and Anglos there is a heritage of relations poisoned by distrust and resentment. For this reason, my cultural work (especially in the camps of performance art and journalism) has concentrated itself upon the destruction of the myths and the stereotypes that each group has invented to rationalize the other two."

"We (Latinos in the United States ) don't want to be a mere ingredient of the melting pot. What we want is to participate actively in a humanistic, pluralistic and politicized dialogue, continuous and not sporadic, and that this occur between equals that enjoy the same power of negotiation.

For this "intermediate space" to open, first there has to be a pact of mutual cultural understanding and acceptance, and it is precisely in this that the border artist can contribute."

Anzaldua, Southwest Borderlands

"The actual physical borderland that I'm dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy."

"The switching of " codes " in this book from English to Castillian Spanish to the North Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling of Nahuatl to a mixture of all of these, reflects my language, a new language-the language of the Borderlands. There, at the juncture of cultures, languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized; they die and are born. "

"The Aztecas del norte ... compose the largest single tribe or nation of Anishinabeg (Indians) found in the United States today . . . . Some call themselves Chicanos and see themselves as people whose true homeland is Aztlan [the U.S. Southwest]." 2

"The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country -- a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an un-natural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants."

"Gringos in the U.S. Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens -- whether they possess documents or not, whether they're Chicanos, Indians or Blacks. Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot. The only "legitimate" inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger."

"In the 1800s, Anglos migrated illegally into Texas, which was then part of Mexico , in greater and greater numbers and gradually drove the tejanos (native Texans of Mexican descent) from their lands, committing all manner of atrocities against them. Their illegal invasion forced Mexico to fight a war to keep its Texas territory. The Battle of the Alamo, in which the Mexican forces vanquished the whites, became, for the whites, the symbol for the cowardly and villainous character of the Mexicans. It became (and still is) a symbol that legitimized the white imperialist takeover. With the capture of Santa Anna later in 1836, Texas became a republic. Tejanos lost their land and, overnight, became the foreigners."

"The border fence that divides the Mexican people was born on February 2, 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. It left 100,000 Mexican citizens on this side, annexed by conquest along with the land. The land established by the treaty as belonging to Mexicans was soon swindled away from its owners. The treaty was never honored and restitution, to this day, has never been made."

"In the 1930s, after Anglo agribusiness corporations cheated the small Chicano landowners of their land, the corporations hired gangs of mexicanos to pull out the brush, chaparral and cactus and to irrigate the desert. The land they toiled over had once belonged to many of them, or had been used communally by them. Later the Anglos brought in huge machines and root plows and had the Mexicans scrape the land clean of natural vegetation. In my childhood I saw the end of dryland farming. "

"One-fourth of all Mexicans work at maquiIadoras; most are young women. Next to oil, maquiIadoras are Mexico's second greatest source of U.S. dollars. Working eight to twelve hours a day to wire in backup lights of U.S. autos or solder miniscule wires in TV sets is not the Mexican way. While the women are in the maquiIadoras, the children are left on their own. Many roam the street, become part of local gangs. The infusion of the values of the white culture, coupled with the exploitation by that culture, is changing the Mexican way of life."

"One out of every three is caught. Some return to enact their rite of passage as many as three times a day. Some of those who make it across undetected fall prey to Mexican robbers such as those in Smugglers' Canyon on the American side of the border near Tijuana . As refugees in a homeland that does not want them, many find a welcome hand holding out only suffering, pain, and ignoble death."

"Those who make it past the checking points of the Border Patrol find themselves in the midst of 150 years of racism in Chicano barrios in the Southwest and in big northern cities. Living in a no-man's-borderland, caught between being treated as criminals and being able to eat, between resistance and deportation, the illegal refugees are some of the poorest and the most exploited of any people in the U.S. It is illegal for Mexicans to work without green cards. But big farming combines, farm bosses and smugglers who bring them in make money off the "wetbacks"' labor--they don't have to pay federal minimum wages, or ensure adequate housing or sanitary conditions. "

"The actual physical borderland that I'm dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy."
Gloria Anzaldua, Preface to Borderlands

"[For Turner], the fronier is a symbolic line of division between wilderness and human culture, backwardness and progress, savagery and civilization."
Limerick, Something in the Soil (p. 75)

"For several decades, some historians have earnestly campaigned to redefine the frontier as a contested zone of cross-cultural meetings."
Limerick (p. 79)

"The conquest of new frontiers for the betterment of our homes and families is a crucial part of our national character....There are those who thought that the closing of the Western frontier marked an end to America's greatest period of vitality. Yet we're crossing new frontiers every day.....[The space shuttle astronauts] "reaffirm to all of us that as long as there are frontiers to be explored and conquered, Americans will lead the way"
President Reagan, 1982

"The adventure of frontiers is our fantasy; the struggle with borders is our reality still."
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands

To All Indigenous Nations of Aztlan, 2004

PUEBLO DE AZTLAN, Chicanos Mexicanos, Native Nations of Aztlan, our movement and people yearn for, justice, democracy, self-determination and liberty. This hermanas y hermanos is an undeniable reality.

Aware that the colonizer, has hidden our history, culture and identity, converting the colonization of "America" into a "Discovery", and burying in the deepest corner of our mind that horrendous act of inhumanity, as if it never happened.

In addition to the colonization by Europe, Chicanos / Indigenous People of Aztlan, have also been subjected to USA settler colonialism, disguised as the Mexican American War. This second colonization deepened the subjugation of La Raza, converting us into an internal colony, "strangers in our own land", and slaves to USA Industrial Capitalism.

Now, after 512 years of resistance to colonization. Our people continue to struggle for liberty, sovereignty and self-determination. We are the result of that inhumane act of barbarism, and the triumph of a new people. We know who we were and what we are.

We uphold that, Mexico, Central / South America and Aztlan are, "The Bronze Continent", La Patria Grande, and state once and for all that, we, ARE NOT IMMIGRANTS!

We are Chicanos and Aztlan hungers for liberation. Aztlan lives, in our communities and barrios, in our schools and universities and in our hearts and minds, WE ARE AZTLAN!

And there can't be any rest until Aztlan becomes that awaited truth. We make no apologies for affirming our national identity as Chicanos and our struggle for our Land, AZTLAN....