Williams concludes that “berdachism is a way for society to recognize and assimilate some atypical individuals without imposing a change on them or stigmatizing them as deviant.”11
In contrast, the history of the term “homosexual” indicates that it was used precisely to stigmatize some people as deviant and to attempt to impose change on them. The course of Western scientific research into the nature of homosexuality was profoundly influenced by Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s treatise Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), which depicted homosexuality as a pathological condition. Krafft-Ebing devoted a hundred pages in the first edition of the treatise to a discussion of “antipathic sexual instinct”; he would adopt Kertbeny’s term homosexualität in subsequent editions. Rejecting the contention that homosexuality was in any way “natural,” he argued that the only “natural” sexuality was procreative, heterosexual sexuality. A prominent dissenter from Krafft-Ebing’s position was Sigmund Freud, who wrote in his “Letter to an American Mother” (1935) that “homosexuality assuredly offers no advantage[,] but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest in development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.).”12 Freud never formulated a coherent, fully developed theory of homosexuality, and the fact that the homosexuals who came to him for treatment were suffering from mental illness led many of his followers to ignore his belief that “homosexual persons are not sick,” a statement written in 1903 in a letter to the Viennese newspaper Die Zeit.
One such follower was the immigrant novelist and literary critic Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955), who was a champion of Freudian approaches to literature. In his memoir, Up Stream: An American Chronicle (1922), Lewisohn described his assimilation into U.S. culture, which he criticized for its “Neo Puritan barbarism.”13 In his critical work, Lewisohn sought to reinterpret the U.S. literary tradition through a Freudian lens, which led him to describe “the whole of our modern literature” as “a single act of rebellion” against Puritan doctrines.14 A Jewish American scholar, Lewisohn argued strenuously for the transformative impact that immigrants should and would have on U.S. culture, declaring in Up Stream that “the notion of liberty on which the Republic was founded, the spirit of America that animated Emerson and Whitman, is vividly alive to-day only in the unassimilated foreigner, in that pathetic pilgrim to a forgotten shrine.”15 And yet, in formulating his canon of great American literature seven years later in Expression in America (1929), Lewisohn saw fit to exclude Whitman’s poetry, which he described as “enervating … and unendurable,” primarily on account of what he took to be its author’s immorality:
I, at least, range myself morally—if not aesthetically and philosophically—with those who out of a sound and necessary instinct, the instinct after all of life and its continuance, rejected the barren homosexual and his new-fangled manner of neither speech nor song. 16
For Lewisohn, rebellion against Puritanism had its limits, and these were marked by homosexual practice. Lewisohn’s objections anticipated the cultural situation of the late twentieth century, in which U.S. culture largely accepted the tenets of multiculturalism except when it came to gay culture.
Occupied America
The first U.S. Naturalization Act (1790) enabled “free white persons” who had been in the United States for as little as two years to be naturalized in any U.S. court.17 Immigrant blacks—and later immigrant Asians—were not intended to be naturalized, and the act made no citizenship provisions for non-whites who were born in the United States. Whether or not a free black could be a citizen depended upon the state in which he or she was living, until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 established uniform national citizenship.
Mexican Americans, however, had already learned that mere citizenship did not guarantee the protection of rights for those who are non-whites. As a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, Mexico ceded all of its territories north of the Rio Grande to the United States—territories that spanned the present-day states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and half of Colorado. Although approximately 2,000 of the area’s Spanish-speaking residents chose to relocate to Mexico, more than 80,000 remained on their lands and automatically became American citizens, though they were allowed to maintain their language and cultural traditions. Article IX of the treaty guaranteed Mexicans remaining in the Southwest “the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States according to the principles of the Constitution; and in the meantime shall be maintained and protected the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction.”18 Commenting on the signing of the treaty, the Mexican diplomat Manuel Crescion Rejón gloomily predicted that “our race, our unfortunate people will have to wander in search of hospitality in a strange land, only to be ejected later. Descendants of the Indians that we are[,] the North Americans hate us, their spokesmen depreciate us, even if they recognize the justice of our cause, and they consider us unworthy to form with them one nation and one society.”19
The Mexicans who stayed to become American citizens were treated as second-class citizens: they constituted an ethnic minority within American national culture, and they were soon victimized by unscrupulous white Americans. “A pre-Civil War type of carpetbagger moved into the territory to make his fortune,” writes the Chicano fiction writer and scholar Américo Paredes, “preying upon the newly created Americans of Mexican descent. The Mexican’s cattle were killed or stolen. The Mexican was forced to sell his land; and if he did not, his widow usually did after her husband was ‘executed’ for alleged cattle rustling. Thus did the great Texas ranches and the American cattle industry begin.”20 Naturalized Mexicans in California also found themselves treated as second-class citizens. Though they outnumbered Anglos in the territory at first, the discovery of gold near John Sutter’s mill led to a massive influx of migrants to California. In 1849, the Mexican population of California was 13,000, while the Anglo population had ballooned to 100,000. As a result, Anglos were able to control the state legislature and enacted discriminatory laws aimed at Mexicans. An anti-vagrancy act popularly referred to as the “Greaser Act” defined as “vagrants” all persons “commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish or Indian blood … and who [were] armed and not peaceable and quiet persons”; a foreign miner’s license tax of twenty dollars per month was in effect a tax on miners perceived to be Mexicans, since the bulk of the fees collected were taken from Spanish-speaking miners, including those who were in fact U.S.-born citizens of Mexican extraction.21
The roots of twentieth-century Chicano literature lie in the tradition of resistance that originated during this period as a response to what Mexican Americans still consider to be the “occupation” of America by the U.S. government. The period that began with the Texas uprising and closed with the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was the heyday of the Mexican American corrido, a form of folk song that came to dominate the popular culture of the Southwest. The corrido is a narrative ballad, usually anonymously composed, and sung or spoken to musical accompaniment. Related to ballad forms such as the copla, the décima, and the romance, which had been brought by the Spanish to Mexico, the corrido flourished during the hundred years that followed the Texas uprising, particularly in the border region south of Texas where relations between Mexican and Anglo-Americans were particularly troubled. In contrast to earlier ballad forms, which generally dealt with incidents from daily life, the corrido emphasizes drama and conflict, particularly the resistance of an individual to forces of oppression.
True to its name, which is derived from the verb correr, “to run,” the corrido generally offers a swiftly paced story, most often told in stanzas of four eight-syllable lines. In his groundbreaking study of the corrido,