Abstract
This essay examines the transnational racial and ethnic politics of Marie Arana’s American Chica and Braulio Muñoz’s The Peruvian Notebooks, two literary writings that feature characters who navigate Peruvian, US American, and Latinx connections. As each text’s characters migrate between Peru and the United States, they perform a range of regional, ethnic, and cultural identities that are circumscribed within US American and Peruvian national markers, and in so doing, they expose the myth of national homogeneity. I utilize performance as a theoretical lens through which to examine, first, characters’ transmissions of multiple identities and embodied conflicts and, second, an understanding of ethnic and racial categories as constructed. I investigate the extent to which performativity can function as a space through which to explore alternatives to the otherness that is imposed on transnational subject positions that challenge the boundaries of Latinidad.
Resumen
Este ensayo examina la política transnacional, racial y étnica de American Chica de Marie Arana y The Peruvian Notebooks de Braulio Muñoz, dos obras literarias cuyos protagonistas navegan por conexiones peruanas, norteamericanas y latinas. A medida que los personajes de cada texto migran entre Perú y los Estados Unidos, desempeñan una serie de identidades regionales, étnicas y culturales circunscritas dentro de los marcadores nacionales de la identidad norteamericana de Estados Unidos y la peruana y, al hacerlo, revelan el mito de la homogeneidad nacional. Utilizo la performatividad como lente teórico por el cual se puede examinar, primero, las transmisiones de múltiples identidades de los personajes y sus conflictos personificados y segundo, una compresión de las categorías étnicas y raciales según construidas. Investigo hasta qué punto la performatividad puede funcionar como un espacio por el cual se pueden explorar alternativas a la otredad impuesta sobre las posiciones de sujeto transnacionales que desafían los límites de la latinidad.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I use the term “Latinx” throughout this essay in order to engage with the expansiveness and inclusivity of this linguistic signifier. My use of this term intentionally invokes its challenging of reductive binaries and its attempt to recognize the intersecting identities of the subjects it serves to identify. In addition to viewing the “x” as a disruption of gender binaries, I echo Ed Morales’s argument in his 2018 book, Latinx, to also emphasize that “Latinx” may serve to counter and destabilize discourses of race, specifically the persisting reliance in the US on a black-white binary. I maintain the use of other varieties of Latinx (such as Latina, Latino, and Latino/a) as they appear in the texts that I cite or reference.
This study recognizes the foundational work on the nation-state and national identity that troubles the usage of national categories, given the differences that mark the multiple constituencies that make up the so-called nation-state (see, for example, García Canclini 2014; Grewal 2005; and Socolovsky 2013; among many others). Still, I use the terms “US American” and “Peruvian” in order to mimic, problematize, and trouble their usage within the two literary texts that I analyze.
Taylor borrows from Guillermo Gómez-Peña to describe performance as “an existential condition. An ontology” (2016, p. 5). She synthesizes multiple definitions of performance to suggest its function as “a practice and an epistemology, a creative doing, a methodological lens, a way of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world” (p. 39). Her study cites Jesús Martín Barbero, who views performance studies as “a theoretical, methodological, and strategic space in which to think through the multiplicities of conflicts that traverse the body” (qtd. in Taylor 2016, p. 202).
According to de la Cadena, even Andean intellectuals in Peru who were active supporters of the national project of indigenismo distanced themselves from mestizos by highlighting the latter’s immorality and lack of education and disregarding the former’s phenotypic features, in this way “[distinguiendo] a los intelectuales de piel marrón de los cholos ignorantes” (2014, p. 71). While de la Cadena’s analysis shows that attitudes towards mestizaje have changed over time, she argues that, still, they remain ambivalent at best (she juxtaposes, for example, the support of a national project of mestizaje by the APRA [Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana] political party in the 1940s, and indigenista writer José María Arguedas’s critique of “amestizamiento” during the same decade) (2014, pp. 78–80).
Oboler also demonstrates how the meaning of cholo has changed over time in Peru (2005). She identifies the “growth of the indigenous migrant population in Lima over the past thirty years … their development and control of the informal market, and … the rise of a ‘cholo bourgeoisie” as factors that contribute to the current perception of cholos as hard-working (2005, pp. 80, 82). Still, Oboler writes, though cholos are “no longer so readily perceived to be ‘involved in those things,’ such as drugs, … the television and newspaper images and accounts often seem to point to the contrary” (2005 p. 82).
See No soy tu cholo (Avilés 2017); De dónde venimos los cholos (Avilés 2016); the write-up of his lecture given at the University of Maine, “Cholo in Peru, Latino in the United States” (Bradenday 2017); and his interview on Lima’s local television show, La voz del 21, on racism in Peru (Racismo en el Perú. nd).
Avilés opens his collection of vignettes about racism in Peru and the United States, No soy tu cholo, by recalling a conversation he had with a Mexican friend in Maine. Avilés’s friend questions the author’s self-proclamation as “cholo,” since, according to the former, “se llama cholos a cierto tipo de gángsteres jóvenes mal vestidos con pantalones anchos y collares llamativos,” a description that does not fit the Peruvian Avilés (2017, p. 42). Here, Avilés speculates about the differences and possible confluences of the meaning of “cholo” in Peruvian and Mexican and Mexican American/Chicanx contexts, a complex and fascinating topic that provides fruitful ground for further investigation and analysis. See McGee—who, broadly, defines cholismo as “a working-class youth subculture that developed in the Chicano and Mexican neighborhood of Los Angeles during the 1960s and then spread to Mexican border cities by the 1970s” (2018, p. 75)—as well as Klahn (1997), Ruiz (2009), and Tabuenca Córdoba (1995, 2003) for studies on the meaning of “cholo” in Mexican and Mexican American historical settings.
Bustamante qtd. in Taylor 2016, from Maris Bustamante, “Picardía Femenina,” https://revista.escaner.cl/node/383.
References
Alcalde, M.C. 2018. Peruvian Lives Across Borders: Power, Exclusion, and Home. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Alvarez, S.E. 2014. Introduction to the Project and the Volume/Enacting a Translocal Feminist Politics of Translation. In Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas, ed. Sonia E. Alvarez, Claudia de Lima Costa, Verónica Feliu, Rebecca J. Hester, Norma Klahn, and Millie Thayer, 1–36. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Arana, M. 2001. American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood. New York: Bantam Dell.
Avilés, M. 2016. De dónde venimos los cholos. Lima: Seix Barral.
Avilés, M. 2017. No soy tu cholo. Madrid: Debate.
Berg, U. 2015. Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. New York: New York University Press.
Bradenday, F. 2017. Cholo in Peru, Latino in the United States. Lecture by Marco Aviles. Maine Campus: The University of Maine’s Student Newspaper, 2 October. https://mainecampus.com/2017/10/cholo-in-peru-latino-in-the-united-states-a-lecture-by-marco-aviles/.
Castillo, D. 2005. Redreaming America: Toward a Bilingual American Culture. Albany: SUNY Press.
de la Cadena, M. 2001. The Racial Politics of Culture and Silent Racism in Peru. Paper presented at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development Conference, Racism and Public Policy. Durban, South Africa, 3–5 September.
de la Cadena, M. 2014. El racismo silencioso y la superioridad de los intelectuales en el Perú. Racismo y etnicidad: Serie diversidad cultural 5: 54–97.
García Canclini, N. 2014. Imagined Globalization. Trans. George Yúdice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
González, R. (ed.). 2010. Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Grewal, I. 2005. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Heredia, J. 2009. Marie Arana’s American Chica (2001): Circular Voyages in the U.S./Peruvian Archipelago. In Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-First Century: The Politics of Gender, Race, and Migrations, ed. J. Heredia, 109–130. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Heredia, J. 2013. South American Latino/a Writers in the United States. In The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, ed. Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio, 436–443. London: Routledge.
Heredia, J. 2016. Migrating to the City: Negotiating Race and Gender in Marie Arana’s Lima Nights. Hispania 99 (3): 459–470.
Heredia, J. 2017. Transnational US Latino/a Literature: From the 1960s to the Twenty-First Century. Hispania 100 (5): 167–172.
Heredia, J. 2018. Mapping South American Latina/o Literature in the United States: Interview with Contemporary Writers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Inda, J.X. 2000. Performativity, Materiality, and the Racial Body. Latino Studies Journal 11 (3): 74–99.
Klahn, N. 1997. Writing the Border: The Language and Limits of Representation. In Common Border Uncommon Paths: Race, Culture, and National Identity in U.S.-Mexican Relations, ed. E. Jaime, O. Rodríguez, and Kathryn Vincent, 123–141. New York: SR Books.
McGee, A.M. 2018. Chicanos, Anglos, and Cholos: Subverting Constructions of Border Subjects in Crosthwaite’s Estrella de la calle Sexta. Diálogo 21 (2): 69–81.
Morales, E. 2018. Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture. New York: Verso.
Moreman, S.T. 2009. Memoir as Performance: Strategies of Hybrid Ethnic Identity. Text and Performance Quarterly 29 (4): 346–366.
Muñoz, B. 2006. The Peruvian Notebooks. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Oboler, S. 1990s. The Foreignness of Racism: Pride and Prejudice Among Peru’s Limeños in the 1990s. In Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos, ed. Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler, 75–100. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Omi, M., and H. Winant. 2015. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge.
Paerregaard, K. 2005. Inside the Hispanic Melting Pot: Negotiating National and Multicultural Identities Among Peruvians in the United States. Latino Studies 3 (1): 76–96.
Racismo en el Perú. nd. conversamos con Marco Avilés autor de “Noy soy to cholo” #Lavozdel21. La voz del 21. https://youtube.com/watch?v=sOjgqZHvz6k. Accessed 11 Aug 2019.
Rincón, B.L., and S. Oboler. 2013. Citizenship. In The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, ed. Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio, 133–142. London: Routledge.
Ruiz, J.S. 2009. Cholos y ciudadanos en El gran preténder. Casa del tiempo 26 (27): 59–64.
Sandoval, C. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Santiago, S. 2007. A Reconstructed Life, a Deconstructed Lie. Santa Fe New Mexican, 2 February, 52.
Socolovsky, M. 2013. Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Tabuenca Córdoba, M.S. 1995. Viewing the Border: Perspectives from “the Open Wound”. Discourse 18 (1/2): 146–168.
Tabuenca Córdoba, M.S. 2003. The Rearticulation of the Border Territory in the Stories of Rosario Sanmiguel. In Ethnography at the Border, ed. Pablo Vila, 279–305. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Taylor, D. 2016. Performance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Viego, A. 2007. Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Martínez, C. Transgressing twoness: The performative possibilities of Marie Arana’s American Chica and Braulio Muñoz’s The Peruvian Notebooks. Lat Stud 18, 195–217 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00244-w
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-020-00244-w