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"A gorgeous tapestry of cultural forms and interpretive brilliance, "Next of Kin" reopens the debate over our conflicted understandings of "la familia" in light of the challenges produced by feminism and queer studies. A must read for all those interested in Chicana and Chicano politics, fiction, film, photography, performance, and painting. Richard T. Rodriguez has given us a map with which to negotiate the twenty-first century uses of the family."--George Mariscal, author of "Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965-1975"

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Next of Kin

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

ABOUT THE SERIES........................................ixACKNOWLEDGMENTS.........................................1INTRODUCTION Staking Family Claims.....................19Reappraising the Archive................................55Shooting the Patriarch..................................95The Verse of the Godfather..............................135Carnal Knowledge........................................167AFTERWORD Making Queer Familia.........................177NOTES...................................................211BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................235DISCOGRAPHY.............................................237FILMOGRAPHY.............................................239

Chapter One

It is impossible to understand the Chicano without understanding the importance of the family.

* * * Jos Armas, "Chicano Writing: The New Mexico Narrative" (1986) The vision of la familia continues to be a form of discourse that provides Mexican Americans with identity, support, and comfort in an often hostile environment.

* * * Margarita Gangotena, "The Rhetoric of La Familia among Mexican Americans" (1994) We must move beyond a celebration of la familia to address questions of power and patriarchy.

* * * Vicki L. Ruz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (1998)

This chapter undertakes three main tasks. First, it makes a critical inventory of an archive containing manifestos, essays, poems, and artistic images from the late 1960s to the early 1990s that invoke a genealogy of la familia in Chicano/a cultural politics. Second, it unravels and rereads the complex discourses that posit family as an exemplary symbolic figure that must ultimately match silhouettes with a politically charged community and extended kinship network identified as la raza. Finally, it seeks to understand patriarchy as a system dependent upon paternal governance and heterosexual presumption in relation to Chicano/a community formations as reflected in cultural productions embracing the "militant ethos" known as Chicanismo (I. Garca 1997). The upshot is to illustrate how critical discourse on gender and sexuality allows us to critique the ways that Chicano/a cultural nationalism and notions of la familia continue to be codified by dominant articulations of masculinity.

Considering how la familia is never defined in neutral terms, the protean complexities derived from its wide-ranging communitarian import demand the attention of those with vested interest in Chicano/a cultural politics. Indeed, to reanimate la familia in the name of egalitarianism requires an unpacking of its conventional signification. In this chapter I will illustrate the ways in which la familia, as an organizing principle and symbol for cultural empowerment stemming from movement contexts, often rested upon a heteropatriarchal order. Yet because the contexts that give rise to la familia are nothing less than a series of sociohistorical starts and detours, exposing its emergence within a more complex genealogical narrative allows for comprehension of how resistance within contributes to its reconfigured political import in light of feminist and queer critique.

SIFTING THROUGH THE ARCHIVE

Begin with the now-classic manifesto El Plan Espiritual de Aztln, known by many as "The Chicano Movement Manifesto" (Pesquera and Segura 1993, 98). El Plan was the seminal stratagem for empowerment drawn up at the historic Chicano Youth Liberation Conference of 1969 in Denver, Colorado whose authors included activist Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, poet Alurista, and historian and poet Juan Gmez-Quiones. El Plan's rallying cry for political deliverance is crystallized in a four-point plan. The first point, or "Punto Primero," is an urgent call for nationalism, "the common denominator that all members of La Raza can agree upon" (Chicano Liberation Youth Conference 1972, 405). "Punto Segundo" is comprised of seven "Organizational Goals." Goal number six insists that:

Cultural values of our people strengthen our identity and the moral backbone of the movement. Our culture unites and educates the family of La Raza towards liberation with one heart and one mind. We must insure [sic] that our writers, poets, musicians, and artists produce literature and art that is appealing to our people and relates to our revolutionary culture. Our cultural values of life, family, and home will serve as a powerful weapon to defeat the gringo dollar value system and encourage the process of love and brotherhood. (405)

Furthermore, goal number seven builds upon number six's call for family as community, which would entail a call for a family politics within the realm of social movement:

Political liberation can only come through an independent action on our part, since the two party system is the same animal with two heads that feeds from the same trough. Where we are a majority we will control; where we are a minority we will represent a pressure group. Nationally, we will represent one party, La Familia de La Raza. (405)

It comes as no surprise that Chicano movement struggles should wish to enlist the family as a point of departure and return. After all, the rampant despair of disenfranchised Chicano/a communities was the motivating force behind the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. On the one hand, the families from which many Chicano student activists emerged were of poor or working-class backgrounds, a fact that jump-started in many an activist the sense of struggle. On the other hand, as Ignacio M. Garca (1989, 12) explains, young Chicano activists "believed that their own parents and grandparents had been passive and accommodating to discrimination and exploitation." In this view, these activists must render their given families apathetic to in turn recast biological kin as a social collective that took to heart their self-awareness as a political constituency. Within other contexts, one's commitment to the biological family demanded extension into the public sphere to orchestrate kinship networks with one's community in the name of carnalismo (brotherhood). In either case la familia necessarily became a constellation of forces inspiring those battles waged for political and economic justice in the name of la raza.

While the Chicano movement cannot be classified as a monolithic entity, requiring instead comprehension as a social force emerging from distinct regions and multiple social justice trajectories, the deployment of the family principle nonetheless figured prominently in various organizational practices and discursive strategies put forth by movement leaders. For example, Reies Lpez Tijerina, one of the movement's earliest leaders chiefly known for mobilizing the movement to restore land grants to pre-Anglo settlement owners, maintains that the family is the fundamental source of nourishment as well as protection from the external damage of the dominant culture. For Tijerina:

The heart of human dignity is the family. The family is the source of values, virtues, and the love that nurtures harmony and fraternity. Our mothers are the first teachers and then, the nation. Our...