Ambivalent Mestizaje

Abstract

This essay examines the complex legacy of Chicanx encounters with the enduring sixteenth-century “idea of Europe”: that is, Europe as an epistemic category signifying the modern “civilized” Western world. Chicanx intellectuals contest the presumption that Europe is the enlightened antithesis to Mesoamerica. But Europe has always occupied a vexed status in the Chicanx literary imagination. Even Alurista’s seminal 1971 collection of cultural nationalist poetry, Floricanto en Aztlán, involves an eclectic blend of the Spanish Golden Age literary mode of “desengaño” (an ecclesiastical form of demystification) and the Nahuatl “In Xochitl In Cuicatl” (Flower and Song) ritual poetics of transcendence. Chicanx life writing has never resolved this paradoxical filiation with Spanish culture, which persists as a specter. This essay recovers and reassesses select twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chicanx testimonial journalism, autobiographical fiction, memoir, archival documents, and an opera to show how various Chicanx invocations of Spain involve predictable as well as unexpected encounters, exchanges, and alliances that illuminate a profound ideological dissensus in Chicanx self-fashioning. These variously globalized Euro-Chicanx syntheses, or Euro-Chicanidades, pressure teleological models of Chicanx ontology and epistemology and gesture toward post-Chicanx and broader post-Latinx modalities that portend a global Latinidades paradigm.