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[Negative Xicanidades] On Xican@ Writing: Some Introductory Notes Toward a Project-in-Motion9/12/2021 On Xican@ Writing: Some Introductory Notes Toward a Project-in-Motion In a surreal blend of time between the months of early 2021, perhaps it was summer, I finished a zine called Negative Xicanidades: Terror, Becoming, and Cosmic Movements. As I one day remarked to my partner/compañerx in the middle of September, “this work took everything out of me.” As I wrote in the introduction, “El Anti-Plan de Aztlán,” to the zine, I described negative Xicanidades “as a method of heretical thinking that bridges the [sic] La Chicanada into a modality of counter-categorial practices.” It was then that I think I knew I was on to something, anything, that gave language to how I wanted to think, theorize, and practice action. Though, after this zine, my creative capacities were at an impasse, perhaps writer’s block. I struggled with my creative mind, so I started to read, journal a bit, and then I read some more. Nothing helped, so I decided to take a break from writing. After traveling to Spain to encounter Tierra Insumisa [you can find blog post on these encounters on our website], I started to get my writing-spirit back—especially as I was inspired by a certain writer named Daliri Oropeza who wrote with beautiful journalistic prose (I miss her Chilanga expressions). Though, this process took some time. After some engagement with my partner Maritza for some anarchist writing projects, getting accepted to publish my manuscript Xicanx Nomadic Register with a Texas fiction/non-fiction/poetry press, and working on an essay on Luis J. Rodríguez with the intellectual compa Natalia (among our Ch/Xicana feminist dreams), I got the courage to write seriously again—perhaps this time not a zine that takes so much out of me. I have been thinking back to why I write, what writing is, and how I can avoid the navel-gazing of writing that runs through pages of first-person accounts. I have been thinking back to my first encounters of writing for the online and print magazine La Gente at UC Los Angeles, my first experience with publishing as a quasi-journalist that struggled with the journalistic form. That was bad writing, some of it was good—one piece on Ayotzinapa was heart-work. Then I find myself here, our Xicana Tiahui blogosphere, where my blog posts proliferate and dominate, and where many writing projects became unfinished and abandoned, so many of my UC Los Angeles undergraduate writing left in their draft phase and never returned to. (My deepest apologies if I invited you to be part of a blog post, interviewed you, and that piece never saw the light.) My own erratic writing has translated into zines, book proposals, book projects, articles-in-the-work, and many abandoned projects that never see the circulation perhaps they deserve. What is writing if not an anxious relationship to the unknown? So, what are my writing plans? Well, I don’t know who reads what I write or engages what I have put out into the world. Some pieces are circulated in profound ways, and others are barely touched. Yet, I am still committed to this. For whatever reason, I write for those who find it useful, or practical—even when I speak in my most obtuse and abstract ways, and maestra Cherríe Moraga reminds me of this in her gentle feedback on my writings for her. So, I plan to write a blog series I name after my last zine, “Negative Xicanidades.” And I do this under my nom de plume White Mountain Rabbit—a name not given to me, but a name whose energies I exhibited to a Xicana Indígena spirit-practitioner some years ago. I adopted the name to write under. For this blog series, I am uninterested in perfection, or peer-reviewed affirmation. In other words, I don’t plan to edit, revise, or “work on clarity” as much as I would in other projects. This isn’t to say I want to write gibberish—but if I do so be it. I take this practice from French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who later in life wrote without attending to style or intention—he wrote too much and didn’t stop to organize it. I won’t be this erratic though, I’m not writing like I will die tomorrow, but I don’t know that either. (Plus, isn’t this kind of writing already the genre of blog writing? Perhaps Sartre was ahead of his time.) So, what do I want to write about? Why should the reader care? Well, you shouldn’t care too much—I’m only one person, and I’m not that interesting, unless you think the writing reflects that. I think you should care because I think writing does things: whatever those things might do. I read from blogs, or memoirs, or zines, and what stitches a common thread among these genres is that I read the voice of a person narrating in different genres the first-person experience. I think we write in these ways not to navel-gaze, but to share words. Though, I think for me, its to inspire a new generation, if not the old generation, to continue writing from the perspective of La Xicanada—or just their perspective from wherever it comes from. I hope more of us write our realities and write so that we can shape our futures. (I’m inspired by the vlogs that a Ph.D. student in my cohort started to share her experiences in academia ((I’m thinking that maybe I can share more about my Ph.D. student experiences more too))—this form of sharing words, via a vlog, is another kind of writing.) * * * In community college, a student-friend lent me their copy of On Writing by Stephen King and the first volume to A Song of Ice and Fire called Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. The King book did one thing for me: it invited me to read my favorite authors so I can learn how to write. The Martin book did something else: read broadly and read popular books too. This last summer I did not read everything I had hoped for. As a Ph.D. student, I wished I read a bit more—though, my advisor Chela Sandoval wrote in a progress report on my status that I should enjoy the slowness of a graduate program. So, I read a few small books ranging from John Holloway’s San Francisco lectures, an odd, yet influential book called Occult Features of Anarchism, a devastating critique of capitalism via Xenofeminism, to Kindred by Octavia Butler. And I am on my way to finishing up Anarchism in the Philippines alongside The Weird and the Eerie that I am reading with my partner. All this plus the skimming, reading of notes, and attentive orientation to some seminars work I did in the last two years to prepare for an exam in my program. I guess I did enough. I share this to say that I have learned to re-cultivate my love for the word—however damaged it gets sometimes. So, for this blog series, I hope to write with a negative Xicanidades perspective—a heretical form of thinking and doing and feeling. If you haven’t already, check out my zine on the same topic. My coming to that zine was from some thinking I was doing for maestra Cherríe Moraga’s seminar on “The Latinx Public Voice” coupled with my reading of Eugene Thacker’s work called The Horror of Philosophy. It was also a kind of reconciliation with myself as the previous zine to that was much more pessimistic, outrageous, and unapologetically naïve in many ways—yet I stand by it. Heresy of the Spirit was a zine that erupted from my own disappointment with how La Chicanada was discussed in popular social media platforms. I wrote that one in the heat of a moment, and it contains some peculiar thoughts that probably should have stayed in draft form—yet I own up to my thinking and its detours, however I might feel after the fact. In this blog series, I hope to do a bit better. This small introductory note is to outline a bit of what I aspire to do, but with life, it will probably end up deviating at times, shifting content or form, speaking to an insurgency that from whatever comes out of the theme or topic my hope is that it will surge in the guise of “negative Xicanidades.” I cannot gauge what I will discuss, but if I write about it, I’m usually passionate about it. I hope to relate to La Ch/Xicanada of all ideological orientations, political philosophies, and societal desires a kind of blog writing that fuses the personal with the political—how radical Black feminists taught me. I aspire to write here in this blogosphere from my own “theory in the flesh” as Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa formulated it in This Bridge Called My Back. As Chela Sandoval interprets it in Methodology of the Oppressed: it’s “a theory that allows survival and more, that allows practitioners to live with faith, hope, and a moral vision in spite of all else (pg. 7). I cannot promise anything but to speak from my truth. As I currently read, with a sense of awe and anxiety, Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Restless Dead, I cannot and will not believe that we can only conceive of authoritative writing as solely in academic books. I challenge myself to practice a disappropriation—how do I write in the collective “we”? Perhaps this is a question for another post. For now, please excuse my tangent. As I write this, it is September 11, 2021. I remember Chile. I remember the failures of the U.S. government. I remember the death wrecked by accumulation by terror (Joy James). Also, “Chairman Gonzalo” of the infamous Shining Path died—may we remember the dead and the survivors of failed acts of “communism” that were nothing but violence against the people. We must envision another kind of communism—one that proliferates joy, not death. As I end this introductory note, the Esquadrón 421 of autonomous Zapatista territories are returning to North America as La Extemporánea prepares and flies out to Tierra Insumisa. Seeds of rebellion are being planted and are flowering… Perhaps I’ll invite the compas from the Chicanx World-Making & Futurities Project to join me in writing for this series. Who knows what can happen? c/s From the California central coast, Territories called Anisq’oyo, Chumash lands. White Mountain Rabbit [Negative Xicanidades]
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Here we post our writings of thoughts we have, essays we have written, poetry, social commentary, news reports, polemics, and other kinds of writing. We hold it valuable to our hearts the written word in the spirit of the huehuetlahtolli, and we aspire to be intellectually on point as well as accessible to our gente from the barrio to the academy. Archive
November 2022
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