José F. Aranda Jr., The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948 by José F. Aranda Jr John Alba Cutler (bio) José F. Aranda Jr., The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948. University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. 272. While Latinx and Chicanx literary studies have made little impression on modernist scholarship, José F. Aranda Jr.’s new book, The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948, shows what a vital contribution Mexican American literature can make to our collective understanding of modernity. Aranda argues that early Mexican American writing illuminates what Walter Mignolo calls “colonial difference,” which Aranda defines as “the space where those who are the targets of colonialism create strategies to [diagnose] and resist their own subjugation” (2). Because “these versions of colonial difference are de-linked from the nation-state,” they make visible what Aranda terms “modernities of subtraction,” or “a peculiar mode of modernity whose darker side, coloniality, operates at a greater distance from the rationalizations and promises of Enlightenment ideology” (2). Modernities of subtraction, Aranda contends, offer a distinct and challenging paradigm for understanding early Mexican American literature; at the same time, they emblematize the challenge that Mexican American literature poses to American studies. Without fully reckoning with the colonial difference of Mexican American literature, Aranda argues, we cannot hope to understand the nature of American modernity. Aranda’s book unfolds over five chapters, each of which examines a set of texts from a different site or “place” of Mexican American modernity. The first two chapters examine the legacy of the Vallejo family and the transition to US modernity in California; the third chapter looks at New Mexico via the autobiography of the Apache warrior Geronimo alongside Miguel Antonio Otero Jr.’s tendentious biography The Real Billy the Kid (1998); the fourth chapter reconsiders Jovita González’s writings about Tejano folklore; and the fifth chapter analyzes the barrio [End Page 136] through a newly recovered novel by Mexican writer Jorge Ainslie, first serialized in La Prensa in 1934–35. Place is crucial to Aranda’s analysis because it allows us to see the uneven and differential modernities depicted in Mexican American writing. Each of these places has its particular history of Spanish colonization, and Mexican American writing shows the imbrication of US colonization over that prior colonial moment. Taking up the framework of the philosophy of liberation from thinkers such as Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and others, Aranda equates this imbricated coloniality with the very condition of modernity. For Mexican Americans, it is subtractive because US modernity has meant deterritorialization, disenfranchisement, proletarianization, and cultural marginalization. Aranda’s approach allows him to wrestle with a persistent difficulty in Chicanx and Mexican American literary history, namely, how to interpret the work of early Mexican Americans who professed political attitudes that seem retrograde or reactionary by the standards of later generations. In these cases, Aranda argues that it is important not to allow the nation-state to overdetermine our reading. In the case of Francisca Vallejo, for example—whose early twentieth-century poetry and radio broadcasts Aranda analyzes in chapter 2—pastoral nostalgia does not represent accommodation to the racial and cultural norms of US modernity, even though it dovetails with many of those norms, including the presumed superiority of whiteness and the importance of European civilization in cultivating the land. Aranda maintains that we should understand Vallejo’s nostalgia instead as evidence of what Carey McWilliams famously termed “fantasy Spanish heritage,” but not in the service of accommodating US racial norms. Instead, Vallejo’s nostalgia attempts to resist the encroachment of US modernity by asserting a prior moment of Spanish modernity/coloniality. The value of these early texts emerges from both the critiques they make of US modernity and the contradictory terms their critiques employ. They should not be dismissed for failing to anticipate the radical politics of the Chicano Movement, nor should they be uncritically celebrated as proto-political precursors to the Movement. Rather, they exemplify, among other things, the conflicts and contradictions in the passage from one settler-colonial regime to another. As this discussion implies, one of the book’s notable features...