The
message of the clip is about living a hybrid identity. This hybridization is
often expressed with a hyphen, as in “Mexican-American.” Living the hyphen
means being both and because of being both being really neither in the sense of
being the same as those who are only one or the other. Yet both the one (Mexican)
and the other (American) contribute aspects to an identity that is not so much
conflicted as contested with the results of the contest very often being a
constantly shifting dynamic tension between the two. There is a corresponding
dynamic tension within each of the two that is often exacerbated by this
tension between the two. The Mexican is both Indian and Spaniard, both
conqueror and conquered, blended together into someone who owes some essential
part of who they are to each side of that polarity. The corresponding tension
within the American pole is not as explicitly referenced but the narrator, I
think, feels this tension as well. The majority of modern Americans of
non-Mexican heritage are descended from persons who lived in foreign lands and
spoke a foreign tongue when The Mexican-American War made more than half of
Mexico suddenly American. Many of the most ardent nativists of today are the
descendants of the very immigrants earlier nativists feared would destroy
America. My people were the exception. My ancestor Richard Roberts fought in
the American War of Independence but my grandfather’s grandfather fought for
the Confederacy, fought not to be an American, and I am only an American
because he and Jefferson Davis lost, just like Santa Ana.
One
“I
grew up between two cultures, the Mexican with the heavy Indian influence and
the Angelo as a member of a colonized people in their own territory.” I got to know two graduate
students in International Relations while I was attending Northern Illinois
University in DeKalb. Both were from the Indian Sub-continent and I got to know
them well based on many long conversations comparing their life experiences
with my own. We all lived in a licensed student-house off campus that we dubbed
the “UN” after counting heads during one such conversation and realizing that,
with only about 20 people living there, we had representatives from seven
nations. Both were heavily influenced by Post-colonialism and I am struck as I
listen to the video at how similar their experiences growing up in an
independent nation with a colonial past were to the experiences of this
“frontier woman” growing up in a part of America which is contested culturally.
The British left more than their language in India. They also left institutions
and patterns of thought and feeling that did not originally develop on the
sub-continent but are now so much a part of the life and culture of the
sub-continent as anything which did.
Two
It’s not a comfortable territory to live
in, this place of contradictions.
Once
again we see a reference to tension and stress. But these references speak more
to stress as in challenge than to distress as in something which is finally
harmful and prevents us from becoming what we would otherwise become. This
challenging stress is something different, something more like the pressure
that turns a lump of coal into a hard, bright diamond. This pressure can
destroy, but anyone who survives it intact becomes something as strong and
brilliant as anything a human can become. She is describing hybrid vigor. In
biological terms, “hybrid vigor” refers to a cross between closely related
species that produces an offspring much more impressive than either parent; the
liger, a cross between a lion and a tiger, is one example< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSx_x5FkY2w >. She is acknowledging the
challenges involved in the border condition but also asserting that meeting
those challenges creates someone who enjoys the advantages of a cultural
variety of hybrid vigor.
Three
“Living
on borders and margins, keeping intact one shifting and multiple identity and
integrity is like trying to swim within a new element, an alien element.
This
stress is an instance of the social becoming internalized as the psychological.
Balancing all the elements of one shifting and multiple identity in order to
maintain the integrity of a self that expresses all those contractions is the
defining challenge of being a border woman. However, these same tensions fuel
the dynamic that keeps this creature of borders and margins vital and vibrant.
This border creature is an existentialist by necessity of her condition. The
new, alien element she moves through is a new way of life and a new way of
being in the world that she creates as she goes along just by existing, just by
finding a way to live out all the different things she is and comes from in a
single life that owes this or that to some past way of life but is, finally, something
new.
Four
There
is an exhilaration of being a participant in the further evolution of human
kind, in being worked on.
It is a
mistake to think of the border condition as that of being pulled into the past,
in opposite directions, by clashing cultures. It is more a matter of being
pushed by several pasts which do not dovetail into a present condition in which
all must be made to dovetail. Only then can the single individual who is the
equal inheritor of all those sometimes incongruous heritages achieve the only
kind of authenticity that such an inheritor of multiple and sometimes incongruous
heritages ever can achieve. This kind of authenticity is never a matter of
reproducing one past faithfully, of becoming what any singular heritage would
demand, but of being true to several heritages all at once in a way that
requires embracing each in a form modified to allow the simultaneous embrace of
all the others. Becoming what the human capital of several heritages pooled
together makes possible is never a matter of reproducing the past unchanged but
of being changed into something new.
Five
I
have the sense that certain faculties, not just in me but in every border
resident colored or non-colored, and dormant areas of consciousness are being
activated, awakened.
Homo sapiens
is the most “plastic” of all species. Human cultures differ immensely more one
from another than any two beehives, anthills or even baboon troops ever could.
All other species are far more fixed than ours. Our cultures change over time
in response to both changed conditions and the influence of other cultures in
ways unique to our species. This, in turn, makes every human culture unique in
terms of the patterns of thought, feelings and behavior that become norms and
create the “normal” human of that culture; each culture is a different way of
being human.
Whenever
a culture radically changes, a new kind of human is born. Sometimes, new
cultures are born like creole languages from the mutual influence of two
cultures in a culturally contested border zone. A new way of being human
emerges in such cases. Different human abilities reside in different cultures.
To say that Homo sapiens is immensely plastic and creates unique cultures is
also to say that each new culture awakens human potentials to know and do that
may be utterly new in human history. At very least, the new kind of human
created in that border zone will find that they can do and know in ways alien
to both of the cultures whose dynamic tension created them; they are a new
normal impossible to fully imagine from inside either of the two older
cultures.
Six
Strange huh? And yes the alien element has
become familiar, never comfortable, not with society’s clamor to uphold the
old, to rejoin the flock, to go with the herd. No, not comfortable, but home “I have been straddling that Tejas\Mexican
border and others all of my life. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the
prominent features of this landscape. However, there have been compensations
for this Mestizo and certain joys.
The new
human creating a border culture as she goes along will always exist within a
double-bind of dual misinterpretation. She will be neither fish nor fowl and
misunderstood by both the fish in the water and the fowl of the air. “How does
that thing fly”, the fowl will demand. The fish will self-servingly assume, if
she lingers on the surface of the water or beaches herself on the shore, that
she is so bad at being a fish that she can’t help but turn herself into a fish
out of water. Call the “alien element” she inhabits land. The birds will think
that it is a nice place to visit but that they would not want to live there; no
self-respecting bird would. The fish will see it as the place of death and
assume that the new creature is distraught and attempting suicide. She will
become the object from both sides of the fear and loathing that each side feels
for the other. Neither fish nor fowl will ever imagine the compensations
involved in sunbathing on the beach or digging for clams.
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