ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION“Witnessing: The Fragmented Reality of Militarization and Displacement of Chicana/o Latine Communities”

ByMarisol Cuong

Doctor Of Philosophy in Literature

University of California San Diego, 2024

Professor Gloria Chacón, Chair

This dissertation anchors an interdisciplinary approach to magnify relationalities through narratives in urban communities from 1960 to 2022. I draw on Chicana/o and Latine cultural productions to underscore a fragmented reality that centers community critical witnessing as a contestation to systemic violence targeted at and disproportionately impacting communities of color. “Witnessing: The Fragmented Reality of Militarization and Displacement of Chicana/o Latine Communities,” proves that contrary to being bystanders to the systemic deaths that surround the Chicana/o Latine communities, Chicana/o Latine’s critical witnessing actively negates the normalization of violence. I rely on the different narrative aesthetics (eg. novel, episodes, art, memoir) to showcase the act of bearing witness as a refusal to hide away from systemic violence and instead confront it at its core. In what follows, I illustrate marginalized communities' interconnected and relational experiences, to examine their common threads of militarization, displacement, and sexualization while showcasing resilience in narratives. Chapter one, “Settler Colonialism the Militarization and the Militarized'' examines Alfredo Véa Jr.’s novel Gods Go Begging (1999), which addresses settler colonialism through the militarization of Chicanos during the VietNam War (1954-1975). Through the critical witnessing of a Chicano soldier, this chapter draws attention to the 80,000 Mexican Americans being drafted and placed on the frontlines, returning to face more discrimination, displacement, and death. Chapter two, “Gendered Violence and Life-making as Insurgency,” juxtaposes an episode of a TV series Chicago PD “Promise” and a mural “Entre Todas Las Mujeres: A Vanessa Guillen Mural [Among all the women: A Vanessa Guillen Mural]” as exemplary narratives that engage in critical witnessing Latinas’ deaths. I problematize common narrations that link the Latina body as a marker for exploitation and overt sexualization. Read as cultural productions, these texts make it evident that violence against women relies on the interrelated processes of racialization, exploitation, sexualization, and militarization. In chapter three, “(Memoir)alizing” I take the memoir The Undocumented Americans (2020) by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio and “The Power of the Vote,” an episode from the Netflix series Immigration Nation, to examine the paradox of value placed on undocumented Chicana/o Latine bodies within the United States. I contrast undocumented people’s narratives in life and posthumously after having served as first responders in times of crisis following the events of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan. Critically witnessing in this chapter on the one hand demonstrates the flaws of granting citizenship while also in a literary sense critical witnessing comes to exist through the genre of a memoir. Through (memoir)ializing this chapter illustrates undocumented displaced communities' deaths and their bodies as beyond “living death” and or “socially death”. Instead, it seeks to honor the Chicana/o Latine undocumented community as creators of resilient epistemologies that fail to normalize violence.

The intensification of [im]migration to the United States during the first two decades of the 21st century has prompted artists to produce a number of projects addressing this human reality, of the most immediate and compelling is the fictionalization of this migration by contemporary Mexican authors who discuss the role of the Mexican State and transnational criminal networks in negotiating the enfranchisement of human trafficking enterprises that capitalize off migrant bodies as they embark a journey north. This dissertation project examines how migrant figures and voicesare illustrated, interpreted, conditioned, and [re]imagined into works of Mexican fiction published between 2006-2018. Relatedly, the discussion brings to bear the methodological approach of interweaving of journalism, testimonio, and fiction, to ethically relate accounts of migration. Informed by Sayak Valencia's Capitalismo Gore: Control económico, violencia y narcopoder (2010), Jason De León’s Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015), and Wendy A Vogt’s Lives in Transit: Violence and Intimacy on the Migrant Journey (2018) this dissertation asks, how does the fictionalization of violent events, such as the kidnapping, mutilation, and burning of migrant bodies provide spaces for collective reflection while maintaining migrants’ humanity at the core? How does fiction contribute to the recollection of a cultural archive that seeks to defend the lives of Central American migrants in the 21st Century? This project proposes that narratives criticizing Mexican state corruption, modes of hyper-violence, and the commodification of the migrant body as merchandise, not only denounce human rights violations, but do so by simultaneously risking employing figurative language that dehumanize and stereotype, unmasking hegemonic discourses of Mexican nationalism.

This study examines the current resurgence of the witch, or la Bruja, in Chicana/ Latina/ Indigenous/Caribbean cultural production. I argue that women are connecting the history of witch-hunts with the oppression of their own communities and are reclaiming la Bruja for political purposes. This phenomenon points to a growing feminist consciousness among young women that the dark history of persecution of witches as women who resist patriarchy can be equated with the intensification of attacks on women’s rights and on nature as a whole under the current phase of neoliberal capitalism. These historically based issues are inspiring cultural production that engages with this recognition of the past. Thus, I connect the historic women-led resistance to the colonial regime in the Americas that sought to obliterate native religious practices and healing knowledge by deeming it “devil worship,” to the contemporary call by women of color through cultural texts to reclaim la Bruja. This project considers work produced by or about Indigenous, Chicana/Latina and Caribbean female artists, writers, filmmakers, rappers, poets and zine-makers that speaks to the challenges faced in their communities by drawing on Indigenous and African healing knowledge that once would have been deemed brujería. I view altars and offerings as symbolic of a Bruja aesthetic in the context of feminist poetry and an art zine produced by the L.A Chicana collective, Mujeres de Maíz. I examine the work of Zapotec rapper, Mare Advertencia Lirika, and her song and music video, “Mujer Maíz,” and consider the maize diviner in the video as symbolic of a Bruja-healer. I also look at the history of hexing and poisoning as a form of resistance by enslaved women to examine two digital brujería (witchcraft) texts by Caribbean women who use the witch trope to hex Trump, alongside the novel, Daughters of the Stone by Afro-Puerto Rican author, Dahlma Llanos Figueroa. Finally, I analyze the documentary, Catching Babies, about a birth center in the US-Mexico borderlands and discuss the role of midwives, victims of witch-hunts in Europe and the Americas, to argue for humanizing birthing options. Ultimately, this study shows that la Bruja in cultural production is a response to gender inequality, gender violence and attacks on women’s rights under neoliberal capitalism and that Bruja knowledge is as relevant today as it was in the past, as life as we know it —humans, plants and animals—face an existential threat.

Early gender and sexuality scholars established that the Isthmus Zapotec societies organize around womanhood and tolerate gender and sexual variance. However, their literary tradition has been dominated by male authors, and Zapotec women and sexual variant authors were only able to find the right conditions to see their literary works published only after the turn of the twenty-first century. Historically, there have been many reports of domestic violence and trans/homophobia accounts that the well-known description of the matriarchal nature of the Zapotec people has come into question. The dissertation delineates the expansion of both the Western and the Zapotec literary traditions by analyzing contemporary Zapotec works that challenge colonial notions of gender and sexuality by sharing the perspectives and lived experiences of Zapotecs living in the present. These texts foreground how these Indigenous writers negotiate and navigate the borders of gender and sexuality between Zapotec cosmovision and the modern views of the hegemonic Mexican society. A theoretical consideration of these literary works using the perspective of Coloniality of power can help reframe the relationship between colonialism and gender and sexuality. In addition, a reading o f these works based on kab’awilian (double gaze) strategies will be useful to describe how these authors negotiate their existence between the mainstream Mestizo culture and their Zapotec cosmolectics; as well as to exist between the normalized patriarchal violence of Mexican and Zapotec cultures and the solidarity safe spaces they can find in the communities they choose to love. One of the main arguments is that these literary works offer a deeper first-person insight to the nuances of the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in an Indigenous nation from Oaxaca, México, than any other of the works produced about their people and their culture by multiple artists, scientists, and writers. The dissertation examines the works of writers from two different generations. I named the first generation “Guie’ Xhuuba’” (isthmus jasmine) and includes Natalia Toledo Paz, Irma Pineda Santiago, Víctor Cata, Gerardo Valdivieso Parada, and Lukas Avendaño. The next generation of zapotec writers is called “Siadó’ Guie’ Ru’” (morning flower, sunrise) and includes the works of Yadira del Mar, Elvis Guerra, and Paula Ya López.