Outsiders Within and Undisciplined Messiness: Writing Trans-Cultural Subjects in Latina/o Studies

At a recent promotional event for the new edition of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga proclaimed that the kind of writing that brings down institutions is intimate, hard, and usually makes people uncomfortable. I... [ view full abstract ]

At a recent promotional event for the new edition of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga proclaimed that the kind of writing that brings down institutions is intimate, hard, and usually makes people uncomfortable. I tend to agree, and I embrace discomfort as a sign of productive transformation. Implicit within Moraga’s remark was the suspicion that writing by feminists of color has become “safer,” more digestible within the academy as (un)disciplines like Latina/o Studies become institutionalized. She was calling for the audience to shake things up again, to find our own “hard things” and bring them to the fore. I wonder what this means for non-Latina/os, like me, working within Latina/o Studies? If I am intimate about my own experience as a white woman in the field, where does that place my writing? Will I offend if I am hard, honest, and make people uncomfortable? I have been asking myself these kinds of questions with increasing frequency since I was promoted to full professor and find myself institutionalized as the Latina/o Studies “expert” in my department. In an effort to examine what it means to bear such authority as an outsider within Latina/o Studies, my recent writing approaches the field from an angle that includes my own experience alongside the Chicana and Latina writers I study. How does this multi-focal and trans-cultural approach fit with the (increasingly pan-ethnic) logics of Latina/o Studies today?

Simply focusing on my unearned privileges as someone with white skin would keep white privilege and myself at the center of the conversation, which is why I have generally avoided Whiteness Studies. I’ve been thinking instead about empathy, dialogue, and shared physical encounter as alternate approaches for demonstrating what my particular perspective has to offer the field and for highlighting the permeability between subjects in my work. Echoing Trinh Minh-ha’s idea of “speaking nearby” to unravel the conventional mode in which researchers objectify their subjects, I have written a letter to a missionary nun who worked in Latina/o communities, a cycle of poems enacting a shared yoga practice with the words/ideas of Gloria Anzaldúa, and a personal interview-discussion with Aurora Levins Morales about healing justice and corporeal ecologies. I envision these new pieces as performances of trans-corporeal empathy: focusing on subjects intertwined through shared conversation, movements, breath, and environments. I pose this kind of messy, vulnerable, and sometimes incoherent experimentation as an alternative to the implicit narcissism of memoir or the implicit mastery and empiricism of the self-effacing essay. Rather than summarizing the content of my recent writings at the Latina/o Studies Association conference, I propose to focus meta-critically on research and writing methods -- my own and others I’ve found compelling, like AnaLouise Keating’s post-oppositional writings, Maya Christina González’s children’s books, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s many experimental forms -- in a discussion about the effects of incorporating cross-cultural messiness into identity-based fields like Latina/o Studies.