Corn, Cowboys, and Coatlicue: The Unrecognized Contributions of Mexico to United States Culture
(Presented at the International Conference of Borderlands Studies, Michigan, 2017)
Gloria Anzaldua, chicana poet and queer studies scholar, calls the Mexican/U.S. border “una herida abierta”, an open wound. In her 1987 book Borderland/La Frontera, Anzaldua gave voice the elusive, psychological burden of the Mexican immigrant experience. She calls a borderland a “vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” and poetically draws a picture of a clash of cultures based not only on ethnicity and mores, but on a tension between fundamental orientations to the world. For this paper, I was asked to try to convey an aspect of the Mexican immigrant experience. I am not an immigrant, and I am not Mexican, so the best I can do in that capacity is try to pass on to you a bit of the perspective I have gained as an outsider who has been fortunate enough to become familiar, both personal accounts shared firsthand and through writings like Anzaldua’s, with stories and emotional life of a border crosser.
As a scholar of the humanities, it is my instinct to delve directly into the philosophical aspects of the immigrant experience; to dive right into terms like “emotional residue of an unnatural boundary,” but recognizing I am a bit out of my element here, I will ease into that impending elusiveness. I am going to walk through a few aspects of the Mexican immigrant experience through discussing first in a more straightforward manner some of the contributions by Mexican culture to that of the United States. Then with the help of Anzaldua and a few others, I will try to elucidate the deeper importance of those contirbutions. My ultimate interest in this paper and this topic is to share some of my research and ideas on the topic that aim cultivate a new approach to understanding Mexican immigrants, particularly as a unique population that has been unrecognized for their many contributions to United States, but also as people who live in a sense in two worlds hold particular skills and knowledge that is rare and deeply needed in our society today.
In that pursuit, I will outline a couple of areas where this cultural influence is easily evident: in agriculture and pop culture. I will trace a couple of distinct ways that Mexican and indigenous Mexican (Nahua) culture has influenced ours. Secondly, I will attempt to convey how these and other more elusive contributions make up a specific type of creative knowledge that is held by immigrants, and gained through “borderlands experiences.” This knowledge is unique, potent, and, I believe, a potential source of social healing for our some of our deep cultural wounds.
CORN
Let’s start at the beginning. Maize, commonly known in the US as corn, was first cultivated an estimated 8000 years ago in central Mexico. Today, corn provides about 20% of the world’s nutrition, and over 1/3 of the crops distributed worldwide are grown in the United States. Corn has been the backbone of the United States’ food economy since the early settlers arrived, when corn was still consumed in it simple form. Today, corn is still a primary part of the American diet though we consume it mainly indirectly through our meat (which is fed up to 90% corn) and of course as corn syrup.
While today’s heavily modified crops hardly resemble their ancestors, it was from the indigenous Mexicans that the Europeans learned the tricky skill of cultivating corn (a process that took hundreds of years to discover and then perfect). Mexican Indios (as they often prefer to be called) also taught the conquerers of the New World the careful process necessary to make corn digestible. Of course today we still have Mexican immigrants to thank for playing a critical piece in corn and all agriculture, and so in our food economy generally, as over 70% of hired farm workers in this country are from Latin America (mostly Mexico) and many more are first or second generation citizens who travel seasonally with their families to work in the fields.
Mexican immigrants also teach us about building community. In addition to agricultural innovation and providing the bulk of labor critical to our food economy, Mexican immigrants also carry with them a natural sense of valuing community and resourcefulness that while perhaps nurtured by necessity is rare in the dominant culture of the United States. While European-style academies increasingly offer advanced, focused degrees to teach ambitious scholars hopeful to salve the damage of extreme capitalism how to develop and cultivate community values and practices, Mexican immigrants coming across the border, often illegally, effortlessly display the incredible ability to work and survive in groups. As many small communities are now attempting to do across the United States, border-crossers and migrant workers often share few resources in a way that allows them to live in smaller spaces and with fewer things than most of us find imaginable. And aside from the building fear of el migro, Immigration Control, and despite long hours of difficult labor these communities tend to report a greater level of happiness and satisfaction with life.
There is a special kind of trifold irony in the story of Mexican immigrants, who showed the forceful immigrants to their own land how to cultivate and prepare native crops so they could eat and survive, only to end up cultivating that same crop for hundreds of years into the future for those very conquerers. All while naturally living in relatively harmonious inter-dependent communities that are functional beyond a level that is only theorized in the academic realm, and only accomplished with long uncomfortable adjustment periods by homesteading “pioneers.”
COWBOYS
In addition to growing food, one contribution from Mexico we do largely consciously appreciate in the United States, is the preparation of food. While most Mexican restaurants are a bastardization of the much more refined cuisine you find in its country of origin, and in all my Central American travels I have never seen a burrito, we nevertheless as Americans share a love of “Mexican” restaurants. The Mexican contributions to our dominant culture however are more than just taco trucks, and even include things we think of as utterly American, like cowboys.
Cowboys are the most unsuspected and perhaps most ironic contribution of Mexico to pop culture, as we more readily associate them with the patriotic Texans like those who fought for our country at the Alamo, but indeed the original boot wearing, cow-herding, big hat sporting tough guys were Tejanos, original Texans, that is before the border, in this case, crossed them, making them Americans. “Vaqueros” as they are called in Mexico have been working on ranches and dancing with thumbs hooked in belt loops to slow, sad narrative songs called corridos long before the Americans were crying in their beers to country music or wearing oversized belt buckles. Much like the U.S. learned corn from the Nahuas, then appropriated it and used the domination of the entire continent’s food economy to subjugate Mexicans to that power-flip, we adopted a Mexican persona we admired and over time it became connected to some parts of anti-immigrant culture.
In addition to some of our most masculine idols, Mexican culture has filled a gap in our mythical feminine iconography as well. Competing in popularity with the original Virgin Mary, the Mexican apparition of the virgin, Our Lady of Guadalupe, has been an inspiration in a number of pop culture arenas. Her mestiza (that is ethnically mixed) nature and connection to indigenous goddesses has an appeal to Americans, particularly women, who are thirsty for a figure who expresses an intersection of cultures and religious traditions.
The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe has been employed in the burgeoning movement of independent spirituality; she embodies the comfort of the Mother Mary and the select church values people want to retain from their upbringing, while also representing the flexibility of the Chicana liminality described by Anzaldua. Outside, or at least on the fringes, of her canonized identity, Guadalupe has been re-imagined by Anglo and Latino artists who bend her image to make her sexualized, warrior-like, or even homosexual. Again drawing from the flexible, varied identity of this particular apparition of Mary, those seeking healing from the wound caused by rejection of the church for being too outspoken, contrarian, or queer, use an archetypal revisioning of Our Lady to reclaim a connection to the sacred by carving out a space for themselves in the otherlands, the borderlands, between sacred ideals and profane realities.
COATLICUE
That brings me to what I would regard as the most critical contribution of the Mexican immigrant to US culture now, a special kind of familiarity with liminality, with in-betweeness, the ability to survive, and even innovate under pressure. Professsor of Religious Studies at Harvard, Davíd Carrasco writes about “borderland epistemology,” suggesting that “people who underwent colonial domination created new forms of knowledge that contained elements, to varying degrees, of African, European, and indigenous worldviews and rhythms of life.” These new forms of knowledge are conceived and nurtured in borderland spaces which are today places where these cultures are still heavily merging – and wrestling. Los Angeles, New York City, and the liminal towns spread across the Southern border of the United States that are still caught in the identity crisis that we bestowed upon them when our border crossed them 160-some years ago.
Anzaldua’s poetic account of her life and people elucidate the idea of “borderlands epistemology” as being informed by both colonizers and the colonized. She writes: “La mestiza constantly has to shift in and out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move towards a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes” (101) The goal-oriented approach is that of the colonialist, if we are borrowing Carrasco’s terminology. Anzaldua’s “divergent thinking” could be traced to “cyclical thinking” - a term that is used pejoratively in our world, but which is commonly used by scholars to describe the unique advanced logical structures of the ancient Nahua and Maya civilizations.
Anzaldua does not talk about cyclical thinking directly, but she incorporates all of these ideas when she draws on the values of her Aztec ancestors by embracing what she calls the “The Coatlicue State.” Coatlicue or “snake skirt” is an Aztec creator/mother goddess with a hideous appearance and a tragic story. She is an archetypal creation/destruction goddess, something akin to Kali of the Hindu pantheon. Coatlicue gave birth to all celestial beings and also Huitzilopochtli the patron god of the Aztecs just before being killed by her other 400 sons who were vindictively mislead to believe she was lying about the immaculate conception of her hero son.
To Anzaldua, Coatlicue represents “a synthesis of duality” – a merging of two worlds, but more specifically a way of adapting and really thriving in the suspended state of living between two worlds. Anzaldua’s presentation of the psychological task of living in “stasis” (that is, not urgently goal oriented), without becoming immobile is a nuanced and thoughtful description that is meaty in its murkiness, the way that Heidegger’s call for us to be dwellers-in-the-world as opposed to setting-upon it feels true and brilliant despite, or maybe because of, being always a little evasive to reason. Anzaldua suggests to borderlands people, speaking mostly to women, who are her target audience - that they can learn from Coatlicue to adopt “a third perspective- something more than mere duality or a synthesis of duality.” Here, she is setting up an escape route from Western rational thought and proposing a new ideology, one that will be foundational for the “borderland epistemology” Carrasco is seeking.
Seeking this type of innovative approach in scholarship, Harvard professor Michael Jackson echoes this point, calling - indirectly- for the integration of “borderlands epistemology” into the academy. He writes “We need novel forms of academic writing and interdisciplinary thought that place non-European and European epistemologies on the same footing.” What for Anzaldua is more of an issue of reclaiming dignity for her people, becomes - a couple of decades later - to a long-tenured Ivy League professor a matter of ethical scholarship. Jackson believes that the anecdote to the reductionist tendency that has plagued cultural studies since modernity and well before lies not as much in postmodern-style self-awareness and learned cultural sensitivity as it does in listening to the voices that lie naturally in between: the voice of the immigrant, the voice of the borderlands.
Jackson writes that borderlands “suggest sites of intransitive, unstable, and intersubjective meanings that call into question the kinds of reductive and essentializing language that make human experience appear to be coterminous with the conventional categories of religious, cultural, or social identity that people use in representing their experiences to themselves and others.” That is to say, the excess of reason and aversion to blurred boundaries that is a staple of our academic system can be stepped outside of (as we often talk of doing in cultural studies) through adopting viewpoints from people who dwell in naturally liminal spaces.
Anzaldua in her writing is rebelling against similar intransitive meanings when she writes about the border as the U.S. invention of “a dividing line…something that is set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them.” But remember, when she speaks of the immigrant experience – the experience of people who live the borderlands, she uses terms like “vague,” “undetermined,” and “emotional residue,” as if to say that the European style decisive boundary divisions, a very rational attempt to a perceived problem, has only served to create a blurry, messy, very indecisive place. It is as though 25 years before him, she is agreeing with Carrasco that there is a particular kind of flexibility natural to the borderlands that is born not just from the dominant cultural tradition that lives there, but which is in fact exacerbated by the oppression of rigid boundaries forged and forced by a foreign and inescapable authority.
The boldness of Anzaldua’s work is that she is able to claim her nature and her people without perceptible anger but with humbling courage when. In an effort to find redemption in the unique psychological space she shares with her fellow borderlands people, she declares: “There is a rebel in me – the Shadow-Beast. It is a part of me that refuses to take orders from outside authorities” (38). What she did not fully perceive is how much that spirit of rebellion would eventually be looked to as a way to redeem the validity of scholarship, and that in fact it was that rebellious spirit that the United State has subtly envied and borrowed from day 1.
It is important to see that there is a particular brand of rebellious creativity, born out of necessity, that comes to us from Mexico and that is heightened in borderlands communities, and that we have adopted as part of the American psyche. The indios who learned to cultivate corn in mass acted in defiance of the gods, who were supposed to be the sole providers of food, which in the early native mind grew only at their – the gods’- will. The Aztecs were rebels who took agriculture into their own hands. The Aztecs are commonly thought of as intensely religious, known worldwide for their elaborate sacrifices to the gods. I argue that there is a surplus of evidence that shows the Aztecs were experiencing something akin to the European Enlightenment, but while they did not shirk the gods altogether, they followed their thirst for empire as far as they thought they could push it, amping up the level of human sacrifice as a way to appease the gods as they simultaneously quite openly defied them through technology and hubris.
And of course, what more American rebel is there than the cowboy? Well, this figure clearly emerged from the southwest borderlands. And of his brand of rebellion, this loner we all love so much, he couldn’t be more Mexican. What embodies the essence of the beautiful tragedy of life on the borderlands more than a traveler, rejected by society, who is tough enough to endure long months in the elements with few resources and only the sun and moon to guide him, but who also has an emotional side that is only satisfied by hearing touching stories of simple people’s lives?
My point here is that while Mexican immigrants have brought with them icons and knowledge of how to subsist on this continent, there is a deeper, philosophical, psychological way that we have adopted from them that is deeply wound into the core American identity. We have been influenced by Mexico and borderlands ideology since the beginning of our country’s existence, and as Carrasco and Jackson argue for borderlands epistemology in the academy, I will argue that it is time to embrace this liminal space in our culture generally. Dominated by an over-emphasis on short-sighted goals in our politics and increasingly blind to the binds of humanity as we build the walls higher of our social silos, hiding from the messes we have created, I think there is no better time to take a clue from Anzaldua and learn to be in stasis – that is without charging toward a goal but with emphasis on reflection or deep knowing. Perhaps it is time to learn from borderlands knowing and learn to dwell in “life in the shadows,” as Anzaldua says where the “struggle is inner” – inside our homes, inside our schools, inside our communities, inside ourselves.
Anzaldua writes in a poem that: “To survive the Borderlands / you must live sin fronteras / be a crossroads.” As we become increasingly separated, borderlands begin to overcome us, as our borderlands once overcame Anzaldua’s family. They are the boundaries that are growing between us politically personally, in our families, in our neighborhoods, everywhere, and it is critical that we, as scholars and as humans, begin to learn how to “be a crossroads” between them.
