On Recovering and Rethinking Our (Non-Chicano) Antepasados

Genaro reflects on the politics of writing on historical figures who do not line up easily with the leftist politics of today. "I've written on early figures who are--or at least, were--quite politically problematic for most... [ view full abstract ]

Genaro reflects on the politics of writing on historical figures who do not line up easily with the leftist politics of today.

"I've written on early figures who are--or at least, were--quite politically problematic for most Chicano literary scholars and activists. Many of them discouraged any work on these vendidos, insisting that our scholarship should focus entirely on figures like Gregorio Cortez, Tiburcio Vasquez, Joaquin Murietta and other such masculine heroes of resistance (women? forget it. Most of the male writers and critics had little interest in women as anything more than sainted mothers and obedient wives), but I believed then, and now, that resistance operates in complex and usually simultaneous iterations of opposition in accommodation, in the survival strategies of appeasement, patience, and careful but double-voiced utterance that made/make possible a future for those as yet unborn to the realities of political hegemony, fear and dislocation. My readings insisted upon a more expansive understanding of the perilous situation in which our 19th and early 20th century antepasados --men and women-- lived after the American armies, followed by the American political and economic machinery which tried to crush the our people in this terrain we so heroically and hollowly called Aztlan from the 1970s onward. I argued in My History, Not Yours that this battle for survival was waged in an environment of terror and that our people did the best they could to save the world for us."