Abstract
This essay explores how Latina/o students become professionalized in the university—how their pursuit of middle-class social mobility often goes hand in hand with a shameful disavowal of their working-class, racialized identity and an adoption of what I term an “affective anemia” toward Latina/o immigrant laborers. First, I examine how higher education can promote and foster this affective anemia as the requisite for success. Second, I show how literature, particularly the Chicana nepantla poetry of Pat Mora, can allow upwardly mobile Latina/os to recover or maintain “brown affect” and embrace a cultural and class in-betweenness, as well as an affective identification with underprivileged workers. Using an affect studies lens to explore the possibilities of the nepantla third space that Chicana/os occupy between American and Mexicans cultures, I argue that this brown affect serves as a cure for the neoliberal soul-sickness of the professional workplace.
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Notes
According to Clara Román-Odio, nepantla was first used to describe the painful in-between space, the site of an emergent hybrid culture that resulted from the clash between Aztec and Spanish cultures. Chicana/o writers and theorists, however, have particularly used the term to refer to the third space that Chicana/os occupy between American and Mexican cultures as well (Román-Odio 2013, p. 52). Gloria Anzaldúa described a nepantlera as a “unique type of visionary cultural worker,” who, because she lives within and among multiple worlds, develops a “perspective from the cracks” (Keating 2006, p. 9).
Neoliberalism refers primarily to the twentieth-century resurgence of nineteenth-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. These include extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.
Before his untimely passing, Muñoz was developing these theories of brown affect into a larger book project. Also see Muñoz (2006).
For the purposes of time and space, I must limit the number of Pat Mora’s poems on domestic workers that I can examine here. But there are many such others, such “Mexican Maid,” which delves into the poignant thoughts of a doméstica named Marta who crosses the border every day to work in the United States (1984, p. 36). In the poem “Graduation Morning,” Mora captures the affective nature of working as a transnational child care provider—a type of work, she shows, that involves the self completely and does not allow a “nanny” to extricate her feelings and life from the labor even long after the labor is complete (1984, p. 34). The poem “Illegal Alien” depicts a middle-class Chicana speaker who narrates her conversation with her domestic worker, a Mexicana from Ciudad Juárez named Socorro. While the speaker sits down at home to write her poems, Socorro cleans her house; the poem is thus interested in addressing the social polarization between these two women and the vexed relationship between them (1984, p. 40).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editor, Lourdes Torres, and the anonymous peer reviewers at Latino Studies for their careful reading and excellent suggestions, including the expanded consideration of the role of the neoliberal university in students’ assimilationist impulses. Mil gracias.
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Guzmán, G. Healing the affective anemia of the university: Middle-class Latina/os, brown affect, and the valorization of Latina domestic workers in Pat Mora’s Nepantla poetry. Lat Stud 15, 458–475 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0087-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0087-6