The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao suffers, charmingly, from a near total lack of nuance. It tells the reader exactly what to think of it, Oscar, and the Dominican Republic in didactic prose and with even more aggressive footnotes glossing the action and explaining the many historical and popular culture references. Even after the novel’s publication Díaz did not stop unpacking for his readership, annotating, for example, sections of the novel online.5 These notes enjoyed a warm reception in the popular and scholarly press, but they can be read as obfuscating just as much as they reveal. What if we thought about them as resisting, rather than inviting, interpretation?
Díaz’s footnotes in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao prioritize the act as much as the subject of writing, and on alt.Latino Díaz emphasizes the knitting as much as the knitted. His formulation shifts the focus of the conversation from object to action. This is the same move that political theorist Cristina Beltrán makes in The Trouble with Unity when she titles her conclusion “Latino Is a Verb.” People identified as Latinx, she writes, “do not represent a preexisting community just waiting to emerge from the shadows. Instead ‘Latino politics’ is best understood as a form of enactment, a democratic moment in which subjects create new patterns of commonality and contest unequal forms of power” (157). On the one hand, Beltrán sounds here like one of Díaz’s clueless intellectuals; on the other hand, her discussion of “enactment” as creating new modes of political community grants import to Díaz’s knitting and provides a new way of understanding his politics of form.
In Racial Immanence I attend to form as a mode of political action along the lines Beltrán describes. My primary vehicle for these explorations is the human body and the role it plays in Chicanx cultural production at the turn of the 1980s into the 1990s. Of course, artists attended to the body before the 1980s, but bodily meditations increase so significantly by the end of the twentieth century that, in addition to establishing a genealogy of corporeal musings, Racial Immanence asks what about this period prompts such marked attention to physicality in Chicanx arts. By theorizing Chicanx artists’ uses of the body, Racial Immanence makes a historical argument about how Chicanx cultural production responds to late twentieth-century neoliberal encroachments on the economic, political, and social lives of communities of color. In so doing, I also put forward different models for thinking through how “Chicanx” and “Latinx” signify in the twenty-first century and how these concepts can be socially and politically leveraged.
Abstractions
Interlude 1: The Leg
The Battle of San Juan de Ulúa began in the early morning hours of December 5, 1838, when the French navy landed 1,500 men on the shore at Veracruz. It led to a decisive French victory in the 1837–1838 “Pastry War” between France and Mexico.6 In the frenzy of the fight, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, commander of the Mexican forces at Veracruz, was severely wounded in his left leg with shrapnel from a cannonball that also killed his horse. The leg was amputated below the knee the next day and returned to Mexico City, where it was blessed with a Te Deum and buried (East, “Wooden Leg” 51). Some time after that, Santa Anna visited the New York City offices of Charles Bartlett, a prosthetics manufacturer, who built a custom-designed leg for the general (Carl Johnson 1).
It was a beautiful leg made of lightweight, easy-to-maneuver cork, and fitted with a swivel joint at the ankle to allow for natural range of motion (Carl Johnson 3). Santa Anna was surely sorry to lose it on April 18, 1847, when Samuel Rhoades, John Gill, and Abraham Waldron, members of the Fourth Illinois Infantry, stole it at the Battle of Cerro Gordo during the 1846–1848 US-Mexico War.7 The Fourth Infantry was assigned to attack Santa Anna’s troops, who held a key mountain pass blocking the US Army’s advance into Mexico City. Santa Anna escaped the surprise attack, but was forced to desert his carriage, which held, along with his leg, $18,000 in gold and a lunch of roast chicken. Upon discovery of the carriage, Rhoades, Gill, and Waldron ate the chicken, turned the gold over to their superior officers, and took the leg back to Illinois as a spoil of war.
Santa Anna’s amputated leg suffered the vagaries of his political misfortunes. After he lost political power, the leg was reportedly stolen from its tomb, dragged through city streets, and left at a garbage dump (East, “Cork Leg” 169). His prosthetic leg, however, remained in private, US hands for decades, enjoying adventures of its own. Its captors charged ten cents a head to view it in Illinois, but the leg also apparently traveled. Correspondence suggests that it was displayed in London’s Crystal Palace (East, “Cork Leg” 169) and news reports indicate that P. T. Barnum had it on view in his American Museum in the years immediately following the war (Harris 62). The State of Illinois gained possession in the early twentieth century, and the leg received little attention until 1942, when the state assembly passed a resolution to return the leg to Mexico. This much-protested resolution was never carried out. Instead, the leg was put into storage until 1974, when the Illinois National Guard included it in a mobile historical display that traveled to Washington, DC, in observance of the American Bicentennial (Carl Johnson 5). After that it was put on permanent display in the Illinois adjutant general’s office in Springfield, in which city visitors today can see Santa Anna’s wooden leg presented in a diorama replicating its scene of capture at the Illinois State Military Museum.
The story of Santa Anna’s wooden leg comprises most of the elements of my argument in Racial Immanence. The leg could be read as a parable of US-Mexico relations, but Mexico has its own conflicted relationship with Santa Anna and never launched an aggressive campaign for the leg’s repatriation. The leg on display in Illinois, moreover, is prosthetic, not flesh of Santa Anna’s flesh, and it was made in the United States. The Fourth Illinois Infantry captured a representation of a representation (figure I.1). P. T. Barnum presented America with a vision of its desire to possess a Mexico of its own manufacture, undermined by the ambiguous “nature” of the leg and the controversial character of the man to whom it was attached. The leg, therefore, cannot be read representationally. Let us consider it instead as an occasion to accept Hames-García’s invitation to think of race beyond subjection and disempowerment, to see the prosthetic limb as an unknowable illusion, a shade of human form that cannot be grasped, the circulation of which knits other objects together in ever-shifting patterns of the real.
A key question for me in Racial Immanence, then, is whether or not it is possible to think of race as something more than a human construct, to see Santa Anna’s leg as something other than a surrogate limb. What if, I wonder, inspired by the artists gathered within these pages, race is something real and material that nevertheless eludes language? Can we think of race without subjection? Can we imagine the body—can we imagine Santa Anna’s leg—not as indexing a racially managed subject but as an object among objects? How does Chicanx cultural production help us think of race as something that exceeds the individual, and what are the political and ethical implications of that imagining?
Figure I.1. A life-sized diorama at the Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield, of US soldiers capturing Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna’s wooden leg. Photo courtesy of the author.
To explore these questions, in writing Racial Immanence I have had to fight my own desire to interpret; I have instead forced myself to linger in the experience of reading to sense how chicanidad is not represented but produced in moments of textual engagement. Rather than make meaning, I have