This dissertation explores the question: What does Aztlán sound like? Informed by decolonial

feminist theory and sound studies concepts, I consider listening as a new praxis with which to

remember complex narratives of belonging and citizenship against the assimilating force of

national forms and political limits. This interdisciplinary research engages the idea of Aztlán, the

mythical homeland of the Nahuas, and the imagined solidarity it mobilized in 1960s activism as

a Chicana feminist concept with a history of generative interventions that challenge its

nationalist logic. Taking up the contested notion of Aztlán as historically marginalizing to

women and la joteria, I use a method of listening to “tune in” to multiple, heterogeneous, and

alternate histories of Chicana/o belonging in the musical and literary soundscapes of Greater

Mexico. This work explores the diverse audible markers of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship

and migration that circulate in the Chicana/o musical, literary, performance and new media

objects I examine. I argue that through the soundscape, Aztlán becomes a plural concept.

“Sounding Aztlán” is organized as four linked discussions that test the portability of sound as a

new interpretive method and epistemology for Chicana/o Studies, sound studies, and decolonial

feminism: Ch. 1, “Tuning In to Coalition: Listening to This Bridge Called My Back,” revisits

the foundational feminist text, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of

Color. I think of Bridge as an artifact of coalition, a multiplicity of radical voices embodied in

its very form. Just as the act of writing for women of color is connected to life, the stakes of

being heard are high. I claim that there is an aural dimension to Bridge beyond the textual that

has to do with perceptions of the sound and noise women of color make. Practicing a decolonial

feminist "listening," this chapter engages Bridge anew as a soundscape of coalition. Ch. 2,

“Decolonial Feminist Soundscapes in Post 1980s Chicana Literature,” and Ch. 3, “Soundtracks,

Chicana Butches, and East L.A.: Verónica Reyes’s Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered

Lives and Raquel Gutiérrez’s The Barber of East L.A.” posit that literature is noisy and therefore

calls for the reader to listen as a new mode of interpretation. The soundscapes in Chicana/o

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narratives have not been fully engaged in prior readings of the poetry, fiction, and drama by

Sandra Cisneros, Luis Alfaro, Estella Gonzalez, Raquel Gutiérrez, and Verónica Reyes. I argue

that literature becomes a site for hearing creative sonics of subjectivity, coalition, and queerness.

Against the dominant imaginary of Aztlán, feminist solidarities, decolonial feminist poetics,

butch/femme histories, alternative music scenes, and East Los Angeles become audible in these

post 80s literary Chicana representations. Ch. 4, “Performing América On The National Stage,”

examines a repertoire of three Chicana/o performances of “The Star Spangled Banner” by

contemporary pop/rock, mariachi, and banda musicians. I take Jimi Hendrix’s iconic 1969

performance at Woodstock as a jumping off point to explore how dissonant moments between

the visual and aural performance of nation captured on social media provide openings for

multiple interpretations of citizenship. When the national anthem becomes part of the Chicana/o

repertoire, what map of the Americas is sounded through these Chicano performances of the

national anthem? These performances highlight meaningful disruptions, tensions, resistances,

and variations on the theme of América.

This dissertation investigates the development and contradictions of the discourse of mestizaje in its key Mexican ideologues and its revision by Mexican American or Chicana/o intellectuals. Great attention is given to tracing Mexico's dominant conceptions of racial mixing, from Spanish colonization to Mexico's post-Revolutionary period. Although mestizaje continues to be a constant point of reference in U.S. Latino/a discourse, not enough attention has been given to how this ideology has been complicit with white supremacy and the exclusion of indigenous people.

Mestizofilia, the dominant mestizaje ideology formulated by white and mestizo elites after Mexico's independence, proposed that racial mixing could be used as a way to "whiten" and homogenize the Mexican population, two characteristics deemed necessary for the creation of a strong national identity conducive to national progress. Mexican intellectuals like Vicente Riva Palacio, Andrés Molina Enríquez, José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio proposed the remaking of the Mexican population through state sponsored European immigration, racial mixing for indigenous people, and the implementation of public education as a way to assimilate the population into European culture. I argue that although Mexican Americans inherited this Eurocentric formulation of mestizaje, by the mid-1960s their specific social position as a negatively racialized and economically exploited population in the United States allowed self-identified Chicana/o activists and intellectuals to depart significantly from, and in some cases, clearly critique inherited Eurocentric conceptions of racial mixing and racist views of indigenous people.

Chicano/a discourse of mestizaje and indigeneity is not an uncritical reproduction of dominant Mexican mestizofilia and indigenismo, it is a collective, and sometimes deeply personal, exploration of mixed race ancestry that sought to recuperate, and in some cases, center the indigenous. Chicano/as' historical and practical context made some of their claims to indigeneity, including those dealing with spirituality, not only oppositional, but also decolonizing. Through an interdisciplinary approach grounded in Chicano/a studies, this study critically examines a broad array of texts by Mexican and Chicana/o intellectuals, including political speeches, historical texts, and literature.

ABSTRACT: The heart of my project lies at the praxis of life/art. I call miXtopia the sites where performance art blurs the line between life/art, where life is self-consciously in performative mode. At the life/art crossroad (X), life turns from mundane to marvelous in critical and creative performances. The X in miXtopia opens up passages between narrative and body through which I enter and exit at the crossroad of extra-text and inter-text between the real and fiction.

MiXtopia is a concept I have coined based on the practice of “art as life itself” where the mundane crosses into the marvelous, and the “souls of folk” meet at these and other crossroads. MiXtopia is conceptualized by fusing theories of third, non-binary spaces and methodologies taken from performance art. Like Allan Kaprow (1960s) and Judith Butler (1990), I stretch the definition of performance art by thinking of life as performance. Moreover, I reconfigure the third as mixed or hybrid being, object, or space to embody and describe a performative mode that operates through what I identify and name as a mixed-multiplying principle. The principle operates in the transnational and translational borders of Okinawa as other sites that are within the contexts of colonial, imperial and racial legacies of the world order. In this study, decolonial Okinawan cultural practices are explored through the non-binary theoretical and methodological framework of miXtopia, which brings into view the colonial, imperial, and racial elements of the tripartite relationship between Okinawa, America, and Japan, and complex forms of resistance and cultural persistence with respect to these. My theoretical neologisms aim to render elements of Okinawan culture legible as decolonial projects. MiXtopia merges critical ethnic studies analysis and performance art praxis to illuminate life as the crossroads of critical and creative performance in Okinawa, against histories of cultural and political imperialisms.

This dissertation explores questions of embodied knowledge, power and consciousness through the study and practice of Anahuacan ceremonial dance. Danza – also known as Danza Azteca, Danza Mexica, Danza Tolteca-Chichimeca, or Mitotiliztli, Macehualiztli and Chitontequiza – is a rich tradition of Indigenous and syncretic dance rooted in transnational movements across Mexico, Central America and the United States. Reflections are offered on the nature of danza as a human movement system and as a social, cultural, political and spiritual movement. Centered in critical and comparative Ethnic Studies, theories of decoloniality, and “theory in the flesh” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983) this work thinks from and about danza as an embodied modality of Anahuacan science, art, spirituality and activism. Research has been conducted through transdisciplinary, scholar-practitioner methodologies: combining analysis of archival sources, secondary research and Indigenous and Performance Studies approaches to ethnography, creative writing and “research as ceremony” (Wilson 2008). Body chapters consider questions of decolonial aesthetics, poetics, ethics and philosophy of science through danza theory and praxis. Evidence demonstrates the necessity of integrating embodied, communal and ceremonial ways of knowing into existing critiques of epistemology, cosmology and cultural memory. Re-membering to relate, danza serves as a medium of intergenerational and community-based healing for Indigenous Latinx, Xicanx communities in Abya Yala.

This dissertation examines the Texas Mexican musical genre known as conjunto and its concomitant social world. In this work I situate conjunto within a broader context of Mexican American cultural production, Texas Mexican popular music, and the shared histories of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. As a social history, the dissertation traces the development of the genre and its practitioners across the twentieth century to the present. I examine interactions of power; expressions of identity; and constructions of race, class, and gender through movement (dance), performance (instrumentation and playing), and place (the dancehall or nite club) within and around San Antonio and South Texas. I argue that conjunto is an embodiment of Xicanx thought and knowledge, an everyday act of resistance and reaffirmation.

Abstract

Border Encounters: American Cultural Politics and the U.S.-Mexico Border

byJennifer Andrea Reimer

Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor José David Saldívar, Co-Chair

Professor Laura E. Pérez, Co-Chair

Border Encounters: American Cultural Politics and the U.S.-Mexico Border is a transnational, interdisciplinary cultural study of the contemporary U.S.-Mexico border that argues for the critical role of the international border in the racial past, present, and future of the Americas. Through critical readings of contemporary photography, music, fiction, and poetry, this dissertation shows how the border is not only a contact zone for Mexican, white, and Native peoples, but also a more heterogeneous geography that includes a fluid set of diverse racialized subjectivities. I bring together a distinct collection of multiracial cultural texts to demonstrate how they interrogate issues of nation, race, and belonging through the representation of certain critical terms and issues related to the U.S.-Mexico border and the borderlands studies (immigration; feminicide; trafficking; NAFTA; maquila labor; the structural inequalities between the United States and Mexico, and the trope of boundary crossing, among others). By grounding literary, visual, and musical analyses in the material realities of the borderlands, Border Encounters engages the U.S.-Mexico border as a complex site of innovative cultural production while simultaneously revealing how global operations of power work through the series of specific geographies we call the borderlands.

In the first section, I bring together a series of experimental cultural texts in order to demonstrate how a diverse group of artists use innovative aesthetics to comment on material realities in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I begin with an analysis of the transnational collaborative photo-textual book, Here Is Tijuana! by Fiamma Montezemolo, René Peralta, and Heriberto Yépez (2006). Expanding transa's field of reference from Tijuana to the greater U.S.-Mexico borderlands, my second chapter reads Harryette Mullen's epic poem, Muse & Drudge, as a text of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I conclude this section with a comparative analysis of experimental fictions by Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes and Asian American writer Karen Tei Yamashita. The second section compares and contrasts representations of the U.S.-Mexico border by two different white artists in order to explore the under-theorized relationship between whiteness and cultural production in U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Chapter Four turns to Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy and argues against reading McCarthy as a "revisionist" Western historian, and critiques McCarthy's sexualized representation of Mexican women on the border as a dominant, if ambivalent, white masculine narrative. By contrast, my final chapter analyzes the lyrics and musical forms of the Roger Clyne & Peacemakers, a contemporary rock band from Tempe, Arizona, identifying how the band advocates for a peaceful cross-cultural coexistence.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary decolonial, queer women of color cultural analysis of Xicana representations of trauma. My examination of theatrical texts relies on a decolonial U.S. Third World queer and feminist methodology. Through this methodological lens, I situate Chicanas as (neo)colonial subjects by focusing on the colonial, imperial, and psychosocial context for Chicana trauma. I detail physical and ontological violence perpetrated upon people in the Indigenous Americas, especially in what has become Mexico and the southwestern United States. I also synthesize mental health statistics that quantify the psychic effects of colonial and imperial changes upon displaced peoples. Xicana plays and performances, I argue, aptly illuminate the embodiment of this locura, a psychosomatic and spiritual dis-ease rooted in colonial and imperial collective and intergenerational trauma. The primary texts for my analysis are Cherríe Moraga’s drama The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, Adelina Anthony’s performance Las Hociconas: Three Locas with Big Mouths and Even Bigger Brains, and Virginia Grise’s play blu. These texts, I posit, illustrate how colonialism, internal colonialism, and imperialism have created subjects. I conceptualize what I term “subjects of trauma” through these three cultural productions that each make visible the social, political, and economic injustices experienced by Chicanas—many of whom live within internal colonies—in the United States. I interrogate the decolonial tactics that queer Xicana feminist playwrights employ to re-create themselves as subjects and subsequently alleviate psychic pain. I maintain that Xicana feminist theater promotes self-healing vis-à-vis self-making, as it theorizes our subject positions and intersubjective self-hood and, through consistent revisions of what have become traditional narratives, reminds us of the possibility of “decolonizing our selves” by remaking our selves.

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