Later in the episode, the museum director stops the school bus as it is leaving and accuses the children of having stolen the now-missing leg. Hank heaves a beleaguered sigh and tells the children that he will now close his eyes and wants to see the leg when he opens them. He turns his head and opens his eyes to gaze into the distance, where he sees Dale and Cotton sneaking away from the museum. Cotton has Santa Anna’s leg strapped to one of his own, the other is strapped to Dale’s, and the two men hobble toward Dale’s car as if competing in a three-legged race. When Hank later confronts them, Cotton and Dale refuse to tell Hank where the leg is, revealing, after Hank leaves, the leg’s hiding place on a makeshift altar in a broom closet, sporting a fuzzy pink slipper, surrounded by holiday lights and empty beer bottles.
When the police finally come for the leg, Cotton tells them, as he resists arrest, “I need that leg for leverage in my negotiations with the Mexican government!” The leg is, however, eventually returned to Mexico in a ceremony at the Arlen Museum. City officials formally hand the leg to a retired Mexican army captain who, like Santa Anna, is missing a leg. “When he straps on Santa Anna’s leg and walks it from our flag to his it will be officially returned to the Mexican people,” Bobby’s mother, Peggy, tells him. The captain straps on his leg and begins to walk, but before he can reach the Mexican flag the leg shatters under his weight. “Hey, wait a minute,” says Bobby’s friend Joseph. “That’s the leg I made for the play.” The episode closes with Cotton in Mexico exchanging the original leg for a driver’s license.
We can read “The Final Shinsult” as exemplifying how Santa Anna’s leg continues to resonate as a sign of NAFTA-induced economic anxiety, the giving away to Mexico of everything the United States feels it has rightfully earned. We can also see the leg in this episode as the objective correlative of national desire. As Cotton’s body fails him, his investment in the Mexican prosthesis increases, with the result that his desire for the leg tells us more about his own feelings of inadequacy than it does about US-Mexico relations. Such insights are not novel, nor do they employ novel methods. I offer these analytic options as a call to reconsider the work of reading.
In King of the Hill Santa Anna’s wooden leg gestures toward the collective frailty from which grounds a new political imaginary might emerge. Joseph’s papier-mâché leg cannot support the political theater of international relations surrounding its return. A different kind of theater surrounds the original leg, however. Dale and Cotton’s altar is a performance of devotion demanding embodied, cooperative action that remains off camera. We do not see them building it together, but the way they clink their cocktail glasses together as they look at the altar suggests that it was a joint effort. The original leg binds characters to each other, draws them into a web of historical and physical concerns. In a moment of comic relief, the leg physically unites Dale and Cotton as their bodies stumble awkwardly as one. Similarly, the idea of the leg unites Cotton with the Mexican captain at the ceremony in Arlen, and both men are connected—across time, space, and national borders—with Santa Anna. At the same time, the episode flatly refuses maudlin readings of disability by depicting the leg as a token of material exchange that allows Cotton to finally get his driver’s license, thus achieving his longed-for freedom and mobility.
Desire is tricky, though, and how can we ever really be sure what Cotton longs for? “The Final Shinsult” reminds us that if we are reading to learn about the other, we are reading, most likely, to learn what we already think we know, to see what we want to see. What, then, does Santa Anna’s leg mean? That, at the end of the day, is not a particularly useful question. Whether in P. T. Barnum’s circus or on King of the Hill, representations of the leg will tell us about their representative moments, not the leg itself. And yet, there is still a leg there. An encounter with the leg produces a certain kind of affective experience with Chicanx resonance. What can we say about that experience? About the leg? Why do they matter?
These are the questions I grapple with in Racial Immanence. This book is a critique of representational reading and a searching out of other ways to think about the value of race and ethnicity in the arts. Within these pages, race becomes immanent and speculative, a historical node or catalyzing agent of the different trajectories my objects trace. The corporeal in Racial Immanence becomes transcorporeal; the human body becomes not a metaphor for subjectivity, but a way to articulate a philosophy of transformative and leveling interconnection.
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RACE
Dagoberto Gilb’s Phenomenology
Because something serious was going to happen. He knew it, knew it in his bones.
—Dagoberto Gilb, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña
In 1790, during a project to level the zócalo in Mexico City, workers uncovered the Piedra del Sol (Sun Stone), a massive stone monument to the Aztec calendar that Alonso de Montúfar, the second archbishop of Mexico from 1551 to 1572, had ordered buried sometime around 1559. Though a few Europeans had likely seen the Sun Stone around the time of the conquest of Mexico, and Diego Durán, the Dominican friar who in the sixteenth century produced some of the best-known accounts of pre-conquest Mexico, appears to write about it in his History of the Indies of New Spain (1581), by 1790 it had been long forgotten. Since 1790, however, the Aztec Sun Stone has become one of the most famous archeological objects in the world, puzzled over by scholars and venerated by mystics and seekers.
The Sun Stone is everywhere and nowhere, endlessly reproduced on all manner and size of objects, yet fundamentally unknowable and mysterious. It is an irregularly shaped basalt slab weighing 24.5 tons, out of which has been carved a disk with an 11’5” diameter. The disc comprises a series of concentric circles containing an unidentifiable face in the middle surrounded by images of human hearts, glyphs representing previous suns, or worlds, and signs for the twenty days of the Aztec ritual calendar beginning with Cipactli (Alligator) and ending with Xochitl (Flower).1 Around the outer edge of the Sun Stone are two xihcoatls (fire serpents), tails meeting at top, faces confronting each other at bottom (figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1. Piedra del Sol (Sun Stone), Museo Nacional de Antropología. Photo by El Comandante.
These images have long absorbed researchers, though in the years immediately following its rediscovery scholars primarily debated how the Sun Stone was used and for whom it was created. The past century of scholarship, as Khristaan Villela, Mary Ellen Miller, and Matthew Robb explain, has dwelt mostly on iconography and ideology, with scholars parsing the meaning of the stone’s many glyphs and learning to sit with the impossibility of knowing for certain who or what is at the stone’s center. According to Villela, Miller, and Robb, this shift of attention from use to ideology is due to the assumed transparency of Mesoamerican calendars. Ross Hassig, however, in Time, History, and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico, argues that Aztec temporality is both more and less complicated than scholars have previously thought.
The Aztecs, like all Mesoamerican cultures, maintained two calendars: a 260-day ritual calendar (the tonalpohualli) and a 365-day solar one (the xihuitl). The Sun Stone contains glyphs associated with the former, though the two calendars were imbricated. Hassig describes the Aztec calendar as “composed of multiple, interlocking cycles of days, building into still larger cycles, until the culmination of 52 years, which itself repeated endlessly” (159). The fifty-two-year cycle was called a xiuhmolpilli and could be bound into the huehuetiliztli, or double calendar round, forming, according to Hassig, the temporal building block of Aztec historiography, which had a definite cyclical cast (8). Hassig, however, warns against granting cyclicity too much importance, arguing that there is ample evidence that the Aztecs operated with linear historical understanding and manipulated time