Perhaps because many Native American tribal cultures are matriarchal, matrilineal, and traditionally tolerant of homosexuality and transvestism, Native American feminist writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, or Paula Gunn Allen have not been subjected to the kind of withering attacks that Asian American and Mexican American feminists and gay writers have received from their straight male counterparts. In the work of writers like Maxine Hong Kingston or the gay Chicano novelist John Rechy, the claims of ethnicity occasionally come into conflict with the claims of gender or sexuality. These writers are doubly marginalized: by mainstream U.S. culture on the basis of ethnicity, and by both mainstream U.S. culture and their own ethnic subcultures on the basis of gender or sexuality. The playwright and novelist Frank Chin has bitterly attacked Kingston for choosing the claims of feminism over the claims of ethnicity in The Woman Warrior. He accuses her of betraying her culture and of playing to Western stereotypes that undermine Chinese masculinity. Similarly, in an autobiographical collection of poems, essays, and stories entitled Loving in the War Years (1983), the lesbian Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga takes aim at the misogyny that prevents a true sense of “Chicano community” from being achieved: “There is a deeper love between and amongst our people that lies buried between the lines of the roles we play with each other…. Family is not by definition the man in a dominant position over women and children…. The strength of our families never came from domination. It has only endured in spite of it—like our women.” 52
Misogyny, however, is not the only problem for writers like Moraga who are multiply marginalized. Women of color encounter discrimination from men of color on the basis of gender, and from other women on the basis of color. The groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1983), which Moraga edited together with Gloria Anzaldúa, began as “a reaction to the racism of white feminists.”53 Dedicated to the task of demonstrating that “we are not alone in our struggles nor separate nor autonomous but that we—white black straight queer female male—are connected and interdependent,” the anthology brings together prose and poetry by straight and gay African American, Asian American, Chicana, Latina, and Native American women. Moraga and Anzaldúa describe This Bridge Called My Back “as a revolutionary tool falling into the hands of people of all colors.”54 It is a text that demonstrates that the goal of setting emergent American literatures into a comparative framework—a framework that highlights similarity without losing sight of difference—is not just a scholarly imperative, but also a cultural necessity: it is the necessary precursor to the reconception of the idea of “America” that is the goal of emergent writers in the United States.
Anzaldúa has written what, in both formal and thematic terms, is arguably the most radical autobiography produced by a late-twentieth-century American emergent writer. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) is a hybrid text written partly in prose and partly in poetry, partly in English and partly in Spanish, and it brings the issue of hybridity immediately to the fore. “I am a border woman,” writes Anzaldúa in the book’s preface: “I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican (with a heavy Indian influence) and the Anglo (as a member of a colonized people in our own territory). I have been straddling that tejas-Mexican border, and others, all my life. It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape.” Motivated by her “preoccupations with the inner life of the Self, and with the struggle of that Self amidst adversity and violation,” Anzaldúa’s text demonstrates that for someone like her—the book’s jacket describes her as “a Chicano tejana lesbian-feminist poet and fiction writer”—personal narrative is political narrative: to understand her personal identity she must unearth the mythic and historical foundations upon which it is built, and explore a complex cultural inheritance drawn from the civilizations of the Aztec, the Spaniard, and the Anglo. Hers is an identity wracked by the contradictions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, but—like Walt Whitman before her—she embraces these contradictions. Anzaldúa imagines the borderlands as a space where mainstream systems of classification break down: “To live in the Borderlands means you are neither hispana india negra españa / ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed.” Borderlands/La Frontera depicts the borderlands as a place of unspeakable violence, but also a place of incredible promise, a place that cannot be tamed by hegemonic culture, a place where new selves and kinds of selves can be born: “To survive the Borderlands / you must live sin fronteras / be a crossroads.”55
For writers and critics of late-twentieth-century emergent U.S. literatures, the borderlands would become a powerful trope. What these literatures have in common is the desire to negotiate the borderlands between traditional cultures, to live without frontiers, to become a crossroads where Wittman Ah Sing (Chinese American and American playwright) can meet Walt Whitman (American bard and gay American) in order to collaborate in the making of what Whitman called “the greatest poem”—America itself.
2
Nineteenth-Century Roots
In N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), the Native American protagonist, Abel, is brutally beaten without provocation by a Chicano policeman named Martinez. Richard Rubbio, the Chicano protagonist of José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959), first learns about racism by observing the way his friends discriminate against a Japanese boy named Thomas. And midway through John Okada’s No-No Boy (1946), a young Japanese American veteran named Kenji realizes that instead of finding ways to unite to achieve common goals, America’s minority cultures continually find ways to discriminate against one another and even against their own members:
the Negro who was always being mistaken for a white man becomes a white man and he becomes hated by the Negroes with whom he once hated on the same side. And the young Japanese hates the not-so-young Japanese who is more Japanese than himself, and the not-so-young, in turn, hates the old Japanese who is all Japanese and, therefore, even more Japanese than he.
Kenji tries to find a “pattern” that can be “studied” so that “answers” can be “deduced,” but all he is able to conclude is that “the world was full of hatred.”1 What he does not manage to articulate is the fact that the dis-unity of America’s marginalized cultures evident in these three novels is no accident. It is, instead, the result of a divide-and-conquer strategy of comparative racism, in which racial and ethnic groups are measured against not only the gold standard of Anglo-Saxon “whiteness” but also against one another, so that they can be assigned positions of relative inferiority. These positions shift over time depending on the threat that these groups are seen to pose to the mainstream. For example, from the mid- to the late nineteenth century, the Chinese were seen as a “degraded” race while the Japanese were held in relative esteem; by the end of World War II, these positions had been reversed. Comparative racism has been an abiding feature of popular discourse and (until relatively recently) of legislation in the United States, and nowhere more evident than in the late-nineteenth-century debates and acts surrounding the question of which non-white immigrants and resident aliens should be allowed to become citizens of the United States.
The writer Frank Chin’s autobiographical essay, “Confessions of a Chinatown Cowboy” (1972), opens with a description of one of his cultural heroes, an old-timer named Ben Fee: “His hometown, Chinatown San Francisco, has forgotten the name of Ben Fee and the man he was, for its own good. In New York he’s what he was in Frisco, but more so, a word-of-mouth legend, a bare-knuckled unmasked man, a Chinaman loner out of the old West, a character out of Chinese sword-slingers, a fighter. The kind of Chinaman we’ve been taught to ignore and forget if we don’t want America to drive Chinatown out of town”2 Eager to assimilate into mainstream U.S. culture, Chinese Americans, according to Chin, traded in heroism for humility. They have forgotten the role that their ancestors played in the heroic settling of the American West. Vilified from the late nineteenth century until World War II as unassimilable aliens, Chinese Americans would be cast in the role of the “model minority” after the war, in contradistinction to those minorities—particularly African Americans and Chicanos—who were growing increasingly militant