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Becoming a Chicanx Studies Intellectual: Love, Struggle, and Critical Inquiry – Part I The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know? —Fred Moten The words of Fred Moten, as spoken in an interview in the pages of The Undercommons, spoke deeply to me as I began to assemble an image, a theory, and a method of my own intellectual questions as a doctoral student in Chicanx Studies. The recognition of the other’s “fucked up for you” is as imperative now as ever, as it was in the surging recognitions of post-1968 movements that sought more than a recognition from colonial-capitalist overseers. My yearnings for coalition are rooted in my deep study of third world liberation struggles, U.S.-based third world feminisms, the American Indian Movement, the Black Power Movement, El Movimiento Chicano, and the Zapatistas who are an organization of Maya and campesino pueblos building an autonomous government—part of a wider congress of Indigenous people and an Indigenous governing council spilling over the national-territorial boundaries of México (¡rompimos el cerco!). The coalition of struggle I desire to emerge in my own context as a caminante Xicano is more than the material struggle against global capital and is one flowering in the intellectual struggle of the university—though not of it. This is not without its troubling. Being trained as a Chicanx Studies scholar, I have incessantly felt a need to situate myself and my politics in academia as I traversed the history and contemporary forms of Chicanx Studies in the ivory tower—research institutions that pull in funding from curious war machine sources and global capital investment. As much as my younger self wanted to be in opposition to the university, I find myself itching for how we might seriously think of these spaces as real terrains for struggle—as decolonial theorist Roberto D. Hernández notes in his 2015 essay on students, spacetime, and radical historiographies.[1] I have these inner conflicts of not being outed in my university as a “radical” or “oh, he's an anarchist” or “that guy is too cynical.” Being questioned about my status in relation to the university, being in it and not of it, forever negotiating my employment and the sources of funding I re-apply to founded by a quasi-Nazi (Ford Foundation), I find myself also letting the inner conflict dissipate and disappear. I have learned that I have no patience for the detractors, the critics, the respectability politics of those who uphold the values of the settler colonial and neoliberal university built on stolen land. I simply have no time for it. Since the days of my undergraduate studies and student organizing for political education, I have felt a burn-out like no other—holding together a fragile reality and picture of the self. I encounter many worlds in the university, some small and some large—many with a conservative impulse to domesticate radical struggle, a desire for trenchant reformism, a betrayal of differential social movement. My body aches with the wounds of defeatism, of the capitalist realism that has such a strong hold over the average student. The student desire for the new has meant the defeat of the old, and this cycle has meant historical amnesia. I have seen the cognitive dissonance of tensions (full of ambiguous lines of resentment), where undocumented students denounce a body of Latinx students in MEChA as “Chicano nationalists,” or recognized American Indians denouncing a dishonestly named “Latin American Indigenous group” as “fake Natives.” These tense agonistic relationships produce a misrecognition or a failure to generate coalition. It is these experiences that injure me, make me feel dread at the prospect of solidarity where a refusal to embrace each other is at the heart of the dialogue—many times the monologues that have no real sense of struggling for or toward emancipatory politics. It wasn’t so long ago that my political commitment to Palestine and Palestinian liberation caught the attention of a Zionist-funding smear campaign and website that collects data and social media on students and faculty who speak against the state-sanctioned violence and dispossession tactics of the settler colonial state of Israel in occupied Palestine. These “blacklist” sites associate the politics and vociferous positions against Zionism and Israel to the rhetoric of terror and a support of terrorism. The rhetorical strategy of Zionism is to take historical suffering and structures of death (the Holocaust of Europe) as the rationality to their violence and political hegemony over the lives of “stateless” Palestinians who are the condition of their (Zionist Israelis) existence—Palestinian people are the libidinal barriers to the completion of settlement. Finding myself on a site like that created susto in my body and a long-struggle with the coatlicue state, paralyzed by such horrific acts of disparagement against critics and organizers who exhibit solidarity with Palestine. The Palestinian struggle for me, a Chicanx Studies scholar-in-the-making, was a crucial struggle to be in solidarity with, despite these campaigns to invoke fear and intimidation. One feels how this political burden weighs on the body as even my own critiques against el mal gobierno of Mexico under the crusade of la cuarta transformación of the Andrés Manuel López-Obrador administration that sanctions the violence against pueblos originarios with the average Mexican sympathizing and supporting such actions toward “modernity.” Though I have narrative here in mind (on my Chicanx Studies intellectual labor), my title will betray you and your expectations. Negative Xicanidades is a workshop, a virtuality of my thought in blog form—tending to the raw material of thinking to put in its structure, many times resisting that form. I think of it as an experiment, as a rasquache practice of stitching bad words, abstract sentences, abandoned ideas, and gestating theories—of connecting the circuits of one’s mind into the flows of the body and the emotion of my feelings. I want to betray that this intellectual excursion is coherent and that it tells a story of linear progress. Chicanx Studies, as it forms in institutions for higher education, for me was and is a kind of intellectual federation of hubs that think with the common epistemological project that emerged in, from, and for El Movimiento and continues to re-define and re-adjust to the contemporary moment and the struggle for an emancipatory present. The project of Chicanx Studies for me, in its unstructured and non-institutional existence as a body of knowledge in scholarly and community literature bridges together the experiential and the theoretical, the lived reality and the philosophical. As I noted with other colegas (Karla Larrañaga, Juan de Dios Pacheco Marcial, and Veronica Mandujano) in a recent academic publication (Ethnic Studies Review) based on a roundtable we presented at the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, I was concerned with a critical inquiry that I observed as the “politics of being”—as noted and propelled by Caribbean cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter. My critical logic behind this determination and inquiry to engage “ontological” dimensions of Chicanx Studies was in the face of the kind of existential horizons I have engaged in my own graduate study. In my digressions to understand myself in relation to the big questions of our own project—suspending here debates about discipline, field, or interdisciplinarity—I looked to those in the emergent inquiries of an eclectic Xican@ Studies to situate myself. Throughout my studies, I have looked to Xican@ Studies scholars such as Jennie M. Luna, Roberto D. Hernández, Susy J. Zepeda, and others who have a clear orientation of situating and describing the expressions of Xicanidades or La Xicanada in ways that show an outlining of difference without a total separation. The “X-” in Xican@ becomes its own ground of inquiry, an event or shift in consciousness that many have identified and taken seriously, while others misappropriate it to include it into their repertoire to obscure the particularities of difference. From Ana Castillo’s Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma in 1994, Roberto Rodríguez’s The X in La Raza in 1996/97, or to Cherríe Moraga’s more recent collection of essays/poetry A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness in 2011, non-academic intellectuals and philosophers have and are taking up these questions to invite and multiply the inquiries into La Xicanada that is reshaping how we understand the self-in-collective that leads to an investigation of material and spiritual conditions, that thrusts the body into action and transformation. Many times, it is a re-inscription of nationalism, but other times it is queer and contends with the zero-degree existence of a people negated Indigenous subjectivities. Committed to a “public voice” not hiding behind academic paywalls, Patreon subscriptions, or inaccessible university presses, I blog, podcast, and create zines with my fellow travelers and compañerxs of the Chicanx World-Making & Futurities Project—an autonomous “think-tank” or collective for political communication. The writing in a blogosphere and a blog series such as this one—with my alter ego or summoned voice—permits me to write with an unruly passion and unapologetic musing. These genres of thought, of communicative dissemination, or of the spirit of unrestricted (i.e., blog and podcast) and underground knowledges (i.e., zines), facilitate a commitment for open interchanges of community-based knowledge. They become part of a collective voice or a project that searches for a sense of life and not exactly a mode of representation. My starting point being Moten’s now notorious exposition on the coalition, I am attempting to think by way of my own experience as an “academic” what it means to become a Chicanx Studies scholar and intellectual thrust and thrown into a long-standing network of other intellectuals who might find my kind of inquiry alarming. Because this is a broad inquiry into my encounters of the project and its sometimes controversial displeasures, I will be writing a three-part blog post(s) to make sense of what I hope to unearth and give flesh. These are extended reflections, or an autohistoria-teoría. I think much of my writing is making sense of Chicanx Studies, as much of my early youth and undergraduate student writing is full of textual resonances that attempt to grasp an image or language that understands the emergence of Chicanx Studies. This writing then extends what I think Chicanx Studies is and my dreams for what it can do and how it can do it. “Part I” shares what I have already started here: excursions into how I situate myself in Chicanx Studies, between a “public” voice and an “academic” voice—extending into the intellectual labor I am involved with (i.e., negative Xicanidades). “Part II” will be a response to how I understand Xican@ Studies by providing a reading, critique, and a movida against the grain of specific academics that disavowal Chicanx Studies and its inquiry into indigeneity. Part III ends with a speculative description of my project as a doctoral student at the level of a dissertation, a way to sift through how I hope to crack the academic wall of potential and possible audiences—in other words, how I want to share my academic labor beyond the academic text. I desired to write because I want to be transparent with my endeavors in the intellectual struggle. The social text of the blogger is a curious machine. Chew on the words but remain skeptical, I am still part of the division of labor that makes capital possible, even in these fleeting lines that desire escapes…a flight beyond the war machine of university-funded operations—my mind and its immaterial labor is entangled in its web of knowledge as commodity. How do we de-commodify Chicanx Studies as an object of knowledge or student potentiality? * * * I have been enamored by the Zapatista spirit from Los Angeles to San Diego, from Oakland to Oxnard, from Galveston to Brooklyn. These tiny rebellions live in my heart as they connect through a network of love, intimate collectivity, and the tough work of building autonomous movements. These are the caracoles without form as physical space, and if they exist as physical, they are extending a new wave of autonomous spaces. This is where I dwell in coalition, where I entangle my struggle. As an academic-in-training, one finds themselves questioning their role, their position, and their contradictions. I find myself rooted in and in movement with an ensemble of university student workers, professors, and undergraduates yelling, “abolish the police!” or “abolish the UC!” or I am in seminars where we take theory and practice to task: where the Marxists are confronted with the abolitionist anarchists, where ideologies collide as we speak another language to make sense of struggle in and out of the university. Coalition here is made, fragile but made. These are the conflicts that generate thinking for me. In being advised, trained, and mentored by decolonial feminist philosopher and teacher Chela Sandoval, I have learned a different ethos and a philosophy of liberation that is rooted in what Sandoval calls the “mind/body/emotions matrix.” Her theoretical genealogy reaches back to the radical movement of US third world feminism as she engages a loving reading of Western philosophers and theorists. The mind/body/emotions matrix is the “matrixing” of all the senses, the neurological pathways, and the living body that confronts signs. It is to make writing of these interconnections, these circuits of desire that cuts across fictive divides between mind, body, and the emotions. As the mind/body/emotions matrix encounters a sign, one endeavors to “meta-witness” as a struggle to read a sign anew—in response to feelings, affect, and critical thinking. It is a creative activity that unearths new meanings and new possibilities of connecting with the other—another mode of enacting coalition as Sandoval requires a process of ceremony to do this collective work. The meta-witnessing synthesizes with the witness of the other. It forges a new making of liberatory potential with new images, signs, and feelings. This method has helped me think of my own work in becoming Chicanx Studies intellectual, but also too how I might de-professionalize my work and do other modes of activity that require new affects—ones I interweave with negative Xicanidades. I hope to provoke coalition in this naming. * * * One of the ways I think with negative Xicanidades is not to be contrarian, nor for it to become a term and method for the criticism of everything “positive”—it was to think publicly, and in the motion-toward-clarity, if not digging for some impression of concrete speculation of mystifying grounds of knowledge—i.e., sometimes things don’t “reveal” themselves to us. The negativity of the anti-method was not a pessimism nor a nihilism, but the use of hope as beyond affect and emotion, beyond the mind but of the body—to think hope in the language of life rather than the discipline of militancy or national liberation—that is to say, to think from below and to the left as a heretic of the modern/colonial world. Hope is a motion-of-the-body-in-difference. My conception of a negative Xicanidades refuses a crammed or even partial definition, as it traverses in the process of its own transformation as a register to think, to do, to feel. I mentioned early on in this blog series that it was a method of heresy, to think through counter-categorical proposals. It is an embodiment, a disembodiment, an alert “within” to think of a “without” in the world. The zine from where this term emerges and flowers is a root to either return to and cultivate, or it is a rhizome to see grow and expand in new lines of flight. Either way, or not at all, the non-idea, the non-concept, the non-method, the non-expression of negative Xicanidades is to generate not the revelries of self-critique or positive critique, I don’t want to fathom criticism—but I think it’s to affect otherwise. An open non-philosophical proposition, or a philosophical desire for struggle in the dialectic toward liberation or an emancipatory now, negative Xicanidades disobeys linearity, teleology, and truth. Perhaps negative Xicanidades in its boundless and unruly forms means something of a consciousness or meta-ideologizing. I want it to be a human act of desire, a function of not letting it flee into the abyss of non-knowledge in a cynical way or as a floating signifier. I want negative Xicanidades to be a tool, or a cutting, or a becoming. It might be possible that it escapes even me, its articulator, as I rejoice in its spirit to become a collective naming, a term beyond my comprehension, a planetary word for a heretical worlding. Or it remains in the void, it is no difference for me as I observe it in motion, in its entropy of intensities. Its multidimensionality, multitemporality, and multiplicity of decolonial lines of desire re-form it as Tamoanchan, a vision or prefigurative place of struggle--a communism of love. It’s meaning for me and for us is in the hands of the land, a cosmo-poetics of the Earth as a relation. Now, I don’t want to trouble the reader with my ponderings that are abundant with curiosity or alienation. I want to provoke you dear reader in ways that make sense, to make my wor(l)ding sensible. My erratic thoughts are not for novelty’s sake, I have no stake in the new as that which will provoke revolution for the few or the literate. I am more interested in action, and negative Xicanidades is already an act of the mind, of the body, and of the emotions—its mapping of emancipatory politics was and is in motion toward an unknown horizon in the embodiments of its actors in the concrete human reality, in the spirit of their ceremony—I am merely its scribe. I want to turn to a question that situates my own becoming as a Xicano and one that has been curious about the post-Movimiento articulations of Xicanismo—a radical tradition from cultural struggle. In my intellectual excursions to chart a Xican@ consciousness in its oppositional forms I have identified at least four dominant trends that map a complex, rooted mode of consciousness that suggests brevity but also limits. They are based on a topography of oppositional consciousness that weave a strong resonance with other past movements (please excuse meticulous wording):
These are different in a variety of ways and depart from Chela Sandoval’s original formulation of the forms of oppositional consciousness that emerged from U.S. third world feminist struggle: separatist, revolutionary, equal rights, and supremacist (that then calls upon the differential). What negative Xicanidades re-generates for La Xicanada are four otherwise modes of consciousness (not exhaustible nor limited to); the following as oppositional, but also desiring an egress beyond the faculties of separatism, one that also overcomes the singularities of supremacism:
It’s from this topographical conjuncture that I posit the fifth oppositional consciousness (as an emergent differential) as an alacrán/scorpion in the expression of a decolonial line of energy. Think for a moment the image and embodiment of el alacrán. It is a patient organism; a wise predatory arachnid that touches Earth and desires sustenance, life in motion as its craws the terrain of its territory. It’s claws or pinchers are a deadly, protective force, with its curved tail erecting a stinger of life-taking venom that attacks its prey or its hunter. Its shape evolved to defend its exposed back, an exoskeleton that represents its open viscerality, its knowing and senses. It is an insect known across the planet, as it emerges in the cultural awareness of human collectives. It is a transversal, Earth-bound being that has in many cultures exhibit a reverence to its lifeform. From Chicano music to the Arab-Islamic world, el alarán functions as a sign of differential invocations or intuitions. From the lands of Durango, el alacrán is a vital mythology, presence, and abundance to the people of the land. Duranguenses are constantly becoming-alacraner@s, with surging numbers of people from los pueblos being stung, facing death, and many attempting to not eradicate but tame this small creature that causes minor human suffering. Yet, el alacrán cannot be tamed—we continue to be stung, continue to honor the body of el alacrán (in Durango you find el alacrán in amber, or imprinted on belts, or turned into sculptures from metal wires). It is an admirable, genuine minor antagonist for the Mexican, Duranguense people. For us el alacrán represents and embodies the ancient myths, images, and symbols from Nahuatl-language, metaphysics, or cosmologies, particularly from early Mexica/Azteca cosmogonies in relation to Malinalxochitl. A Naguala, or shapeshifter (trickster), Malinalxochitl was described as an “evil witch (bruja)” in early interpretations of the founding of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. In these accounts, she/they is rendered as sister to Huitzilopochtli and was abandoned by the tribe because of her trickster acts. For us then, Malinalxochitl represents the outcast—with her/their command of serpents, scorpions, and other insects of the subterranean world, of the uncivilized ordinary world, seen as heretic and trickster, a nomad without a tribe for protection. El alacrán is thus an extension of betrayal via abandonment, of a worthy adversary of two interconnected forces (the undomesticated wild and creative beauty of virtue), or, in my reading, a decolonial way to read against the grain of counter-hegemonic articulation, a mode of seeing from below—of seeing two apposite forces working together in the chaos to see harmony, to witness the complexity of the Earth/cosmos. The figure of el alacrán, in kolotl, is a differential trickster. * * * How far must we fall from the Tree of Knowledge to suggest or gesture that our roots to a tree are what not makes us of a place, that which does not make us whole? An original act of dispossession and erasure—a two-fold process of land and labor, inculcated by processes of racialism, class, education, and religious conversion; the list goes on. The use of the nopal tree, sweet sustenance in the desert of the real, of the inhospitable Earth—revealing life as emergent despite the cruelty of environment. Perhaps this is an overdetermined metaphor, yet it runs through my metaphoric lifeblood as my ancestors were created through the barren deserts of northern México. One of the anxieties that incapacitates me is writing itself—its public circulation that confronts mixed criticism or reception, in the hands, eyes, and reading of those I never meet nor dialogue with. What is writing if not a letter for all without reciprocity? Perhaps this is a true gift to the other, or damnation. Either, neither; it breaks in the line between both logics—it is an unknown. I have come this far in this alacrán writing to think otherwise about my position in relation to the university—my commitment to cultivating a voice that is not of academia. This turns me to the speculative power of my doctoral project-in-motion, where I find myself in a conundrum to locate what we mean by “Chicanidades” or “Xicanidades.” I am lost between the debates of a political consciousness or a cultural identity—or was it the oppositional being in relation to power or the negation of a such an existential condition to affirm a positive becoming? I am in search for questions worth asking, stakes worth defending. The next turn of this writing desires to put form to this search for an inquiry. From Anisq’oyo, Where the Ocean touches Land, And the Sun breathes Life, Chalchiuhtlicue… Tonatiuh… Huehueteotl. In gratitude. White Mountain Rabbit _____ [1] Link to journal can be found here: https://tupjournals.temple.edu/index.php/kalfou/article/view/58
*this blog is sponsored by The Chela Sandoval Institute for Radical Bio-Semiotics*
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November 2022
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