Expatriate Citizenship: Mexico de afuera and Josefina Niggli's "Step Down, Elder Brother"

The 21st-century institutional emergence of Latina/o Studies developed within the legacy of academic and social activism during the civil rights movement of the late twentieth century. As a result, the legacy of the civil... [ view full abstract ]

The 21st-century institutional emergence of Latina/o Studies developed within the legacy of academic and social activism during the civil rights movement of the late twentieth century. As a result, the legacy of the civil rights movement often occludes the myriad cultural activities by Latina/os of decades earlier. These earlier cultural movements frequently diverged from the interpretative models laid out by the civil rights movement and thus are often disregarded or omitted from literary and cultural histories. In an effort to bridge that historical discontinuity, this panel turns to the early twentieth century to examine how Latina/os created cultural and political projects and how those ideas are articulated within aesthetic objects. Each paper examines a different aspect of the period.

John Alba Cutler offers a test case between the early 19th century, where standard criteria of literary value are insufficient for understanding the function of Latina/o writing, and the later 20th-century, in which the rise of literary institutions established those criteria. He analyzes how early Spanish-language newspapers framed various literary texts, as well as a close reading of one of those texts—Amado Nervo’s poem “El Guerrero”—to demonstrate how working class Latinos participated in the production of literary value.

David Colon focuses on the historiography of the 1931 celebrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s 400 year anniversary, which were charged with polemical conflicts in the period immediately after La Cristiada (1926-1929), the violent uprising of Catholics against the secularist and anti-clerical Mexican government post-Revolution, to posit a theory that this cultural “reanimation” (Matovina) of Juan Diego after La Cristiada was etiological of what he terms a “juandieguista masculinity” in 20th-century Mexican-American literature.

Alberto Varon examines the extra-national ideology of “mexico de afuera,” particularly as it emerges in the work of Josefina Niggli, as a structuring force of Mexican American manhood. His paper contends that Niggli offers a way of understanding U.S. race relations both domestically and abroad, and that the novel stages Mexican American manhood as both national and global citizenship.

Collectively, the panelists examine how Latina/o creative expression was more divisive and divergent than how it was presented during the civil rights movement, and thus provide some possible models for continuity between past and present. The panelists demonstrate the multiple negotiations around Latino creative expression; the connection between form, content, and political projects; as well as how each study intervenes in the cultural construction of gender and sexuality.

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