Curtis Marez

Signifying Spain, Becoming Comanche, Making Mexicans: Indian Captivity and the History of Chicana/o Popular Performance

SINCE AT LEAST THE 1960S, MANY CHICANAS/OS HAVE ENGAGED IN A KIND OF ideological archeology, attempting to reconstruct genealogical relationships between their present and a distant pre-Columbian past. Just as certain African American nationalists turned toward Egypt for cultural cues, in recent decades Chicana/o intellectuals and cultural producers have looked to ancient Indian civilizations for inspiration. One of the most famous examples is the work of Luis Valdez, for both the plays he helped to produce with El Teatro Campesino and his subsequent films such as Zoot Suit and La Bamba are filled with Mayan and Aztec themes and images. More recently Gloria Anzaldúa has employed a related image repertoire in her influential articulation of a “new mestiza consciousness.” Despite their important differences, both Valdez and Anzaldúa participate in a larger project I would call an indigenismo of the antique. Such discourses generally focus on the Spanish conquest of Mexico, singling out in particular the fall of the Aztec empire as the primal scene of Chicana/o identity and as a paradigm for the subsequent conquest of the territory now known as the U.S. Southwest. By claiming descent from aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas, Chicanas/ os counter the claims of manifest destiny and white nativism. A famous lithograph by Yolanda M. López elegantly makes this case. Selfconsciously recalling U.S. military recruitment posters featuring Uncle Sam, the lithograph depicts an Aztec warrior who points at the viewer and rhetorically asks, “Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim?”