El Grito Research Articles

Movidas after Nationalism: Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez and Chicana Aesthetics

ABSTRACT This essay traces the Chicana feminist rhetoric of prominent activist Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez in the late 1960s. I argue that Longeaux y Vasquez’s Chicana movida(s), the enactment of feminist sensibilities amid gendered repression, erupted the exclusive boundaries of Chican@ nationalism birthed during the 1969 Denver Youth Liberation Conference. Her rhetoric generated an expansive inclusivity that resonated, although it did not necessarily align, with Chicana movidas emerging in the 1970s and 1980s. An analysis of the aesthetics of her feminist rhetoric in the Chican@ movement newspaper El Grito del Norte highlights at once the rhetorical inventiveness of a Chicana activist grappling with the inclusion of Mexican American women in Chican@ movement(s) and variations in Chicana movidas constituting Chicana rhetorical history. In Longeaux y Vasquez’s feminist rhetoric, we witness a Chicana movida that invented inclusion from the premises of exclusion marking Chican@ nationalism.

CATÁSTROFE PERSONAL Y COLECTIVA EN DOS NOVELAS SOBRE LA CRISIS ARGENTINA DE 2001: <i>EL GRITO</i> DE FLORENCIA ABBATE Y <i>LA INTEMPERIE</i> DE GABRIELA MASSUH

This article analyzes two Argentine novels that dialogue with the events of the economic, political and cultural Crisis of December 2001 in Argentina: El grito (2004) by Florencia Abbate and La intemperie (2008) by Gabriela Massuh. This work focuses on how these texts narratively construct the social and the intimate, the public and the private, based on the figure of the catastrophe. In this sense, I propose to read these novels as a correlation between personal and collective catastrophe. Finally, I am interested in observing, in terms of writing, some political and formal differences that these novels present.

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

Corriendo las vallas alrededor del testimonio: reescrituras del género a partir del pacto facticio y la voz medial del periodista/narrador

En el presente artículo, el primero de un proyecto extenso sobre el género testimonial chileno y venezolano contemporáneo, se pretenderá un acercamiento a este formato a partir de cuatro textos que han sido leídos como investigaciones periodísticas: El despertar de los cuervos. Tejas Verdes el origen del exterminio en Chile (2013) de Javier Rebolledo, Ingrid Olderock. La mujer de los perros (2014) de Nancy Guzmán, El grito ignorado (2012) de Ibéyise Pacheco y Abril golpe adentro (2009) de Ernesto Villegas. Para esto se ocuparán dos registros: la presencia del elemento de facción, que alude a la elaboración de una trama narrativa y a la problematización de los personajes testimoniantes en ella, con lo cual se estaría vinculando estructura y contenido; y la intromisión de la voz de un periodista/narrador en el testimonio. Como soportes teóricos se trabajará a partir de las nociones de Albert Chillón, Roland Barthes, Nora Strejilevich y Carolina Pizarro-Cortés, entre otros autores.

Third World Radicalism

This article examines the University of California at Berkeley Chicana/o Studies Movement between 1968 and 1975. The first section contextualizes how the Free Speech Movement (1964) and the Third World Liberation Front (1968–1969) set the stage for the advancement of Ethnic and Chicana/o Studies. The second section offers a historical examination of the Chicana/o Studies Movement and explains political conflicts between the university administration and their internal struggles. The final section examines the role of the El Grito publication and how it impacted the development of the Chicana/o Studies discipline. Finally, this paper examines how the culture of empire utilized neocolonialists to destroy the radical student voice and prevented the creation of an autonomous Chicana/o Studies Department.

Figuras autoficcionales de la “memoria herida” en la dramaturgia argentina posdictatorial

En las diferentes cartografías de la dramaturgia argentina posdictatorial es factible observar, entre múltiples lineamientos poéticos, un eje morfotemático constante: la indagación en la “memoria herida” (Ricoeur) según las representaciones genealógicas de los vínculos madre/hija o abuela/nieta. Estas relaciones intersubjetivas se proyectan, por ejemplo, en prácticas teatrales autoficcionales, cristalizadas en identidades femeninas que operan como puentes estéticos hacia lo ominoso del tiempo pasado. Por consiguiente, este artículo se propone analizar y comparar –desde una perspectiva descentralizada– los procedimientos dramatúrgicos y figuras autoficcionales representativas de dos regiones marginales en los discursos historiográficos dominantes: 1) en el Noreste Argentino, la obra Jamuychis… el grito (2002) de Patricia García y Flavia Molina; 2) en la Patagonia Argentina, el texto de Pewma-Sueño (2007) de Miriam Álvarez. Este estudio permitirá reconocer los posicionamientos identitarios y poéticos de mujeres artistas que optan por estrategias escénicas de autoficción, con el fin de comprender –según palabras de Ricoeur– aquel pasado que se confunde con el presente.

El Grito de Sunset Park: Cop Watching, Community Organizing, and Video Activism

This article focuses on cop watching by the Brooklyn-based group El Grito de Sunset Park to provide a case study that illustrates how working-class communities of color are integrating digital technology and media-making practices into their organizing against policing, gentrification, and state disinvestment of services. The article identifies such community media as a nodal point of resistance where local communities organize against global neoliberal forces negatively affecting them by creating alternative modes of representation that counter dominant narratives about them and incorporating media-making practices into their collective organizing for self-determination.

The Vietnam War and Chicana/o Environmentalism in El Grito del Norte (1968–73)

The Vietnam War and Chicana/o Environmentalism in El Grito del Norte (1968–73) Emily Cheng (bio) This essay addresses El Grito del Norte (EGDN), a Chicana/o nationalist newspaper published in Española, a small working-class town in northern New Mexico, from 1968 to 1973. The paper was originally formed to support the politics of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), the organization led by Reies López Tijerina that in the 1960s and 1970s sought the restoration of land grants established under the Spanish and Mexican governments. Written and run by women, the paper was founded and edited by Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez (known previously as Elizabeth Sutherland), whose socialist and third-world feminist politics shaped the paper's concern with the connections between rural Chicana women of New Mexico and other women of color in the US and abroad.1 Though the paper was committed to Chicana/o issues grounded in New Mexico, it soon moved away from its original role as a mouthpiece for the Alianza to include reports on indigenous issues in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. EGDN was, in Martínez's words, the "only one" of "about twenty Chicano newspapers … that was completely international."2 Of particular importance was the newspaper's reporting on Vietnam, which made it exceptional among a Chicano press in the 1960s that, George Mariscal notes, "was largely silent on the topic of the war in Southeast Asia."3 The paper's coverage included a special issue on North Vietnam by Martínez, a five-part series by Valentina Valdez explaining Vietnam and the war to readers, articles addressing Chicanos serving in the military by Enriqueta Vasquez that appeared in "El Soldado Razo Today" and her column, "Despierten! Hermanos," reports on the military events of the war, poetry by Ho Chi Minh, and a report on the Chicano Viêt Nam Project, a solidarity organization.4 While other scholars have written about the newspaper's concerns with land in New Mexico and, to a lesser extent, its third-world feminist politics, I examine how these aspects of the paper come together with its internationalism [End Page 55] to represent a distinctive and radical "environmental" politics. I do not mean to argue that the writers and activists who contributed to EGDN identified themselves as environmentalists or to attach this label to them. What I do want to argue is that, in contrast to the mainstream environmental movement that emerged in this period, these women writers possessed an environmental understanding that fundamentally engaged social justice, particularly around issues of race, gender, and imperialism. The environmental epistemology in EGDN was shaped by, but moved beyond, the long-standing relationship between Mexican-origin people, land, and nature in the US Southwest that was central to Chicana/o nationalist politics, as I discuss through Vasquez's article "La Santa Tierra." In considering Vietnam as another site in which to explore and understand the violence the US empire inflicts on land and colonized people, EGDN made connections between the US Southwest and Vietnam that developed its alternative environmental lens. Approaching the North Vietnamese as fellow peasants, or "campesinos," whose harmonious relationship to the land was being attacked by US imperialism, the newspaper made womanhood central to forging this relationship between Chicana/o and North Vietnamese anticolonialism. The feminist politics of "global sisterhood" facilitated the writers' interest in Vietnam, and their access to direct encounters with Vietnamese women through the international women's peace movement. The women writers of the paper also deployed a gendered lens that highlighted the role of women in environmental resistance to masculine military violence and symbolically established similarities between the two communities through idealized portrayals of rural, domestic life. With its attention to the lived human relationship to land, EGDN offered an alternative to notions of land that were central to mainstream American environmental thinking, which generally assumed the "separability of the human and natural realms … expressed through a melancholic attitude linking natural plenitude with human absence."5 In this mainstream tradition, land has been considered through the ideal of wilderness, and the human realm predominantly characterized by the individual relationship to the land through possession...

The First "Chicano" Journal: El Grito, A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought

Article on one of the earliest journals published on Chicano or Mexican-American experience in the United States, El Grito, A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought ; it describes early issues, and the emphasis on issues of inequality and injustice in editorials and other articles. Founded in Berkeley, California, the independent publishing venture succeeded under Quinto Sol, which published some of the earliest Chicano novels. The article concludes with a discussion on the little change evident, four decades later, in improving issues involving lack of equity in Latino educational attainment.

El Grito del Norte, Chicana/o Print Culture, and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism

Writing in El Grito del Norte, Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez connects the forging of an egalitarian future society and citizenry to the new revolutionary political consciousness emerging across the world at the close of the 1960s. She turns to revolutionary Cuba, in particular, to identify the basis for this radical consciousness and the new world it will create. The anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics of the Chicano Movement are revealed in the rich radicalism of the New Mexico–based newspaper El Grito del Norte. The newspaper played a pivotal role in recasting the local and ethno-nationalist politics of the Chicano Movement as a crucial part of the international struggle for revolutionary change. However, El Grito del Norte did much more than simply internationalize the views of El Movimiento: it helped to impart an anti-imperialist tone and character to Chicana/o radicalism.

The Color of Water: Observations of a Brown Buffalo on Water Law and Policy in Ten Stanzas

This article invokes Chicano Movement lawyer, Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, and his literary persona of the “Brown Buffalo” to bring the perspective of LatCrit Theory into exploring and understanding the rights, remedies, and policies associated with water resource management. Perhaps owning to water’s scarcity, humans have developed complex and sophisticated legal regimes surrounding the use, acquisition, and distribution of water as a resource. Accordingly, this article is meant to draw attention to some of the ways that law has directly contributed to an unequal and inequitable distribution of water problems; including access to domestic water supplies, maintenance of water and sewage infrastructure, contamination of drinking water, and safe levels of floodplain occupancy. Although such problems have been associated with developing countries and their subordinated racialized communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they are present as well among certain communities of color in the United States. Yet, outside of a very narrow range of exceptions — namely environmental justice and the water rights of political and cultural minorities such as American Indians or Hispanos in New Mexico — legal scholars or policy makers of the United States who think about, study, and write about race or water law rarely if ever address the racial intractability of these problems. The article argues that water organizations and legal institutions are too often color-blind in their legal and policy orientation. The article is organized in five parts; each introduced by stanza or stanzas of an original poem, El Grito de la Agua, I penned in preparation for my plenary remarks at the Fifteenth Annual LatCrit Symposium held in Denver, Colorado in October 2010. As such, it has been republished in 1 University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review 107 (2011). The article is not meant to be exhaustive, but merely suggestive of the many insidious ways that water law and policy creates, reinforces, and reproduces the Brown, Black, White, Red, and Yellow color lines that have become so salient a feature of social inequality in the modern world. It highlights, as well, the across-the-board neglect about the racial impact of water rights and administration by not only main stream policymakers and academics, but by progressives and the LatCrit project in particular. By invoking Acosta’s Brown Buffalo, I hope to begin a lasting conversation about water, race, and the role of water lawyers and policy makers in an ever thirsty world.

El Grito and the Tea Party

This article uses California’s long history of migration to question efforts by local Tea Party activists to push for an anti-immigration law modeled after Arizona’s notorious S.B. 1070. Focusing on Mary Hunter Austin’s description of a multilingual, transborder celebration of el Grito de la Independencia (Mexican Independence Day) in the Owens Valley in 1903, the article argues that the Tea Party’s anti-immigrant ideology relies on a flattening of history to cast migrant workers as outsiders and naturalize Anglo dominance of the region.

Good-Bye Revolution—Hello Cultural Mystique: Quinto Sol Publications and Chicano Literary Nationalism

The year 1970 marked presentation of First Annual Premio Quinto Sol Literary Award to Tomas Rivera, an associate professor of Spanish at Sam Houston University in Huntsville, Texas. Sponsored by Quinto Sol Publications, a recently established independent Chicano press in Berkeley, Premio Quinto Sol represented first literary prize promoted nationally for best fictional work authored by a Mexican American. The award and publication in 1971 of Rivera's y no se lo trago la tierra / ... and earth did not part as a bilingual edition marked a watershed moment for Quinto Sol and Chicano Movement, one that followed on heels of Quinto Sol's 1967 founding of El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought, first national academic and literary Mexican American journal in United States, and its 1969 release of El espejo--The Mirror, first anthology of Mexican American literature. The efforts of Quinto Sol had a powerful impact on El Movimiento's attempts to mold a national Mexican American culture and community through production and dissemination of a critical discourse, literature, and art labeled exclusively Chicano. The institutional claims, editorial decisions, and sympathies of Quinto Sol, along with literature and art it popularized within Chicano Movement, played a leading and influential role in establishing what Michael Denning terms a formation. For Denning, who follows Raymond Williams in applying concept, a cultural formation comprises a and an aesthetic ideology, with former signifying the infrastructure of any cultural initiative, while latter represents the conscious and unconscious ways of valuing that a cultural formation develops and inculcates, its 'aesthetic,' its sense of what is good, true, and beautiful, which is rarely straightforward and uncomplicated (202). By mid1970s, cultural politics and ideology prompted by Chicano Movement radicalism expanded to include several independent publishing outlets and numerous national newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals, not to mention institution of Chicano Studies and Ethnic Studies programs on college and university campuses across California and Southwest. Quinto Sol and intellectuals, artists, and writers associated with it proved vital to this historical, political, and cultural process. The texts distributed by Quinto Sol from 1967 to 1974 stand as earliest and perhaps most influential scholarly and literary works of Chicano Movement participants struggling to forge an autonomous and self-sustained intellectual and creative space for development and self-definition of Chicano community. Shortly after receiving El Premio Quinto Sol, Rivera confessed that contest and award revelo entonces que nosotros los chicanos teniamos vida que buscaba forma [revealed to me that we Chicanos had life in search of form] (Chicano 5). Life in search of form, an account of Chicano literature to which Rivera would continually return, draws attention to significance of printed word in formation of a Chicano collective identity and self-knowledge. Likewise, Rivera, who worked closely with Quinto Sol throughout early 1970s, underscores El Movimiento's outlook on necessity and key function of unbiased artistic and academic venues for publication. For editors of Quinto Sol, fight for self-determination, self-government, equality, justice, and political autonomy--rooted in what Lorena Oropeza describes as a transition from politics of supplication to politics of confrontation (49) that occurred during Vietnam War era-had to be waged not solely in fields, on streets, and in barrios, but also in intellectual and literary circles of Academy and publishing industry. Universities, colleges, and mainstream presses discriminated against Mexican American communities through exclusionary policies and prohibitive practices as well as through production and distribution of scholarship and creative fiction that promulgated racist ideologies, stereotypes, and images. …