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Borderlands, Humor, Literature, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Movement, Politics

Troubadours and the Production of Early Chicano Literature

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by Dorie Perez

Pulling from a historically oral tradition, Chicano Literature sought to create and analyze texts of the Chicano cultural output that advanced during the social movements of the 1960s and into the 21st Century. Attempts to codify the literature of Chicano Studies into its own canon often sought to legitimize its study by turning oral tradition into the written word, the medium used most by the Humanities. This process of making “legible” work from Chicano scholars previously unrecognized by the academy framed such work as both cultural expertise and political argument.

The Center for Humanities’ final seminar for the Fall 2014 semester was led by Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez who presented his paper “Of Modern Troubadours and Tricksters: the Upside-Down World of José Inés García”. Martín-Rodríguez writes of the work of Chicano scholars in the 1980s to reclaim their discipline’s written past by doing literary “recovery,” looking for the beginnings of a Chicano movement found in works previously ignored in the development of the canon. Thus, literary histories of previous scholarship are vital to work to shift the analysis of academic literature away from its Eurocentric focus. The medium of such critique was the novel and social history, yet other genres such as poetry, letters and humor are where social commentary from the fringes are best received.

Understanding poetry as a medium – short pieces with big impact – is central to the analysis of José Inés García, whose work has been virtually ignored by Chicano scholars. In the vein of recovery and through the poetry, Garcia’s work is identified by Martín-Rodríguez as significant to the development of Chicano literature, voicing issues of identity and social tension that would serve as the core ideas of subsequent Chicano authors. This recovered history is remarkable – very few copies of García’s work exist. Other poets like Bartolo Ortiz and José Díaz from the same time frame (early 20th Century) often used self-publishing to produce their work, sold door-to-door by authors eager to seek an audience within their own community. The entrepreneurial schemes to get their work read and published show the innovative ways in which this early cohort sought recognition. Calling himself “El trovador moderno,” or the modern troubadour, García’s writing extended to journalism. He edited El Progreso and La Cronica, local Spanish-language newspapers in the American South West.

The inversions that make José Inés García’s work so compelling are contextual as well as literary; García suffered an accident in mid-life, leading to permanent blindness that did not hinder his work as editor, translator and poet in New Mexico. He was also raised Protestant in an ethnic enclave of New Mexico, something of an outlier in traditionally Catholic Hispanic circles. His winking inversions continue in his focus on trickster figures, a literary trope used often to make light of intercultural tensions and difference. The transformation of gender roles happening during a time of social upheaval also captured his attention, producing several works that play on themes of gender. Given such topics, the early date of such work remains significant in its analysis of social change. Martín-Rodríguez was able to capture this recovery, adding to scholarship on forgotten figures central to Chicano Literature’s literary corpus and style.

Language, Merced Seminar in the Humanities

Rethinking The Patient-Doctor Dialogic

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by Dorie Perez

The interaction between a patient seeking medical care and a doctor seeking to understand both the biomedical and human-emotional imperative behind a sick person’s quest for help is no small thing. For the second-to-last seminar in our series, Dalia Magaña presented her linguistic study of the doctor-patient interview. 23 Spanish interviews in the United States between a doctor and patients seeking to address the problem of mental illness were used as her data.

These medical encounters are compounded by issues of cultural competency, agency, and the creation of identity around health diagnoses. Magaña applies linguistic analysis to these encounters on two fronts: 1) language that reflects interpersonal shifts in the medical interviews and 2) trans-cultural strategies utilized to accommodate or fill in the gaps of non-English speaking patients. The cultural context and social expectations of the patient are central to the medical experience, especially as previous studies have shown that patients seeking care with providers in their primary language almost always get a better quality of care. Such documented disparities in care are also compounded by the specific health needs that the larger Latino population in the U.S. face, such as diabetes and high blood pressure and the issues of accessibility that such medical care necessitates.

The situational dynamics of the interview itself must also be considered within its cultural context. Magaña focuses her analysis in this chapter on register – the field, tenor and mode of interactive language. The language’s utility itself, explicitly as the practical use of particular words and phrases, is the other fundamental part of her analysis. She argues that it is this situational analysis of language, not just the cultural context specific to the biomedical encounter, that can lead to an increased understanding of what makes a more efficient, situationally-attuned medical visit and thus, better health outcomes overall.

As there are no book-length linguistic works on doctor-patient interactions on Spanish spoken in the U.S., this paper offered a detailed description of the language (using Register Theory), with a significant emphasis on trans-cultural interactions. Jargon-heavy discussion mystifies treatment for patients afraid to seek clarification and reinforces the social differences between patients and the doctor. The burden is placed on the doctor to make discussion of their work less technical, removing the trappings of specialized technological discourse that are so celebrated in the biomedical field. The social agency of the doctor bears the responsibility for creating, through language, an informal atmosphere. According to linguistic and social theory literature, fostering such an engaged exchange encourages patients to speak freely. In this moment, the dynamics of the dialogue between patient and doctor privileges the patient.

In these interviews, the subversion of traditional hierarchies of power, reflected in the social status of medical doctors and the specialized medical knowledge they embody, happens due to the fact that patients spend the majority of the medical encounter talking about their own experiences. This emphasis on the patient’s lived experience is significant and necessitates the employment of trans-cultural strategies by the doctors. Each encounter is timed, and most of the encounter spent talking is done by the patient who uses this interaction to clarify their positionality by expressing what’s important to them in a time of medical crisis. The interview is bounded in other ways, with limited interruptions by the doctor as well as informal language used to put patients at ease add to the strategic component of such encounters. Magaña’s use of register theory is helpful here as it is topsy-turvy in the variables it considers important in an interview, identifying how linguistic choices that both patient and doctor make to convey their experiences and knowledge can be empowering.

Anthropology, Global, Merced Seminar in the Humanities

Ritual Spaces: the Caves of Belize

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by Dorie Perez

In the Maya tradition, caves were believed to be the entrance to the underworld, where people could make offerings to gods for rain, better harvests and health. Building on advancements in archeological scholarship on the Maya that had archeologists shifting focus away from large-scale built monuments to smaller areas of ritual practice in the 1990s, Marieka Arksey, a 2014-2015 Center for the Humanities Graduate Fellow, centered her study on three years’ worth of empirical fieldwork in the jungles of Belize. A fourth-year doctoral student in the World Cultures graduate group, she has focused on the ritual practices of the Terminal Classic Maya outside of the entrances of caves as a way of creating a more naturalized sacred site than the monumental temple structures being erected in the same time period.

Cave mouth

 

 

Mouth of cave site at Las Cuervas, Belize where Arksey did her work (2014).

 

The built environments of large-scale civic centers were translated to the spaces outside of caves as exceptionally potent places for communion with the forces that were thought to give life to ancient Maya societies. Arksey’s study shows that the discovery of man-made modifications to the areas directly outside of caves made them look more ordered and utilitarian. These modifications were created to look natural and occurring spontaneously, as though stemming from the cave itself, making clear the importance of the naturalistic aesthetics of the cave even as they are reformed through human interaction. Using fragments of ceramics, obsidian, chert, quartz, jute, and speleothems  to show that ancient rituals did indeed occur here, and type-variety analysis of the ceramics to place the age of modifications to the Terminal Late Classic period (between 700 and 950 CE), she is able to make an argument that these spaces have been created specifically for an extension of the rituals  taking place inside the caves.

Cave site map Belize(1)Map of archeological sites in Arksey’s doctoral research (2014).

Arksey argues that the ‘collapse’ of the Terminal Classic Maya in the Southern Lowlands likely involved a loss of faith in the ruling elite and led to the adaptation of rituals in and around caves to offset that loss of faith.  If rituals taking place within caves were failing to provide sought after results, elites would begin to use open spaces outside of caves for the first time in order to allow for much more public observation.  This adaptation of ritual may have allowed them to better appease their followers. Arksey showcased visual evidence of modern rituals still occurring outside some sites by modern Maya in Belize, reinforcing her argument that these sites are still recognized as cosmologically and historically significant and adding to the literature on the Maya response to cultural disruption.

Site shovel map

Arkesy’s presentation touched on interdisciplinary questions about cultural conception, the use of physical space and the significance of such academic work in relation to the history of the field of archeology itself. Sholeh Quinn, Associate Professor of Iranian History, added a layer of nuance in her role as discussant – the cultural output of the Maya and the significance of the work on cave rituals understudied in that area of Central America was emphasized as an important point of analysis that furthers the understanding of ancient cultures as systematized human reaction to a changing world.

 

Global, Humor, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Performance, Politics, Religion

Humor and Transgression in Mexican Stand Up

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By Dorie Perez

Dr. Raquel García, a newly minted doctoral graduate visiting Merced from our sister UC campus, UC Davis, presented work that was part of her recent doctoral defense and long-standing research project. She writes about the political nature of Mexican comedy as something transgressive, a newly popular form of entertainment that comes to Mexico by way of the traditional North American comic’s role as entertainer-come-social commentator. Yet the tropes of stand-up comedy that many American audiences are familiar with – the Jerry Seinfeld-style routine of humorous critique offered up to a crowd looking for both commonality and shocking amusement- are new to Mexican audiences, even in the boundary-pushing performance arts community within Mexico’s cosmopolitan districts. It is a testament to cultural diffusion and the growing space for social critique in a country with strict rules about private and public spheres that stand-up’s popularity as a medium is growing.

García identifies several key elements at play in her analysis. García discusses the role of performance as its own manifestation of transgression from socially-accepted norms in Mexican society. The play-acting, the “just kidding!” qualifiers that comedians add to their politically astute analysis of historical inequities in Mexican society are indeed played for laughs, but their meaning is clear. A strong critique of the role of political and governmental corruption in everyday life, including the dominant power regimes of the narcotic-trafficking cartels that run great swaths of Mexico’s countryside are main targets, even as the comedians themselves equivocate their jokes as mere humor. Comedians Horacio Almada, Manuel Nava and Jürgen Scritto are included in García’s analysis, and her observation of their practice adds an ethnographic layer of analysis to the discourse they have created that reads as a new modality of resistance. All three comedians are centered in Mexico City, and they maintain a social media presence as a way to both reach out to transnational audiences and re-inscribe their work as social commentary meant for both the Twittersphere and the political landscape they live in as Mexican citizens.

In a heavily Catholic country, Almada’s humor that centers on the dogma of the Church and its frequent hypocrisies is a high wire act, yet the responsive nature of his audiences (seen as Youtube footage in García’s presentation) shows that he’s struck a vein of truth that many share and are even eager to have deconstructed. In a passionate fury, he acts out both the argument of the devoted and that of the priest admonishing his flock, asking about heaven and hell and wondering where he will go if he refuses to commit murder but misses Sunday mass. García includes this bit as a moment signifying the comic’s role as arbiter of truth, or rather, a shared frustration, that many social-media savvy, contemporary Mexicans enact within the confines of a more traditional society. Through comedy, García  argues, the pressure valves of duty and propriety are released for both Mexican audiences and a socially-aware comic eager to showcase his vision of the world gone topsy-turvy.

Fashion, Gender, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Movement, Politics, Religion, Shakespeare

“Unquiet Women” and the Act of Subversion

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by Dorie Perez

The subtle differences between the terms inversion, subversion and perversion, presented by seminar discussant Matthew Kaiser, are usually glossed over in speech, terms used interchangeably to mean “othering” or change as a process of fragmentation. The idea of inversion as a movement, often smaller-scale acts than violent political upheaval, is an interesting take on social change and something Susan Amussen presented in her analysis of Early Modern historical works in late September 2014.

Amussen presented what will be one chapter of a book tentatively called “Turning the World Upside Down: Gender, Culture and Politics in Early Modern England,” which builds on the work of her late husband, the historian David Underdown. Continuing the topsy-turvy theme of the Merced Seminar in the Humanities series for Fall semester 2014, she writes of “unruly women” and other deviants who dared to challenge convention in Elizabethan England. “Mannish-women and womanish-men,” patriarchs that failed to uphold their place as lord and master, among other kinds of usurpation of male authority were targets of John Swetnam, a pamphleteer in 1640s England whose social critique often morphed into full-scale misogyny. Pamphlets were the blog post of their era, read and responded to by intellectuals of all stripes; Swetnam’s back and forth argument with other writers, including quite a few female intellectuals, has held up as an example of the transhistorical tension between idealized expectations of womanhood and the subversive play of gender politics in an increasingly changing world, continuing today unabated.

The global social politics of the Early Modern era were present in the Shakespearean play The Taming of The Shrew (1592), a prime example used in Amussen’s analysis of subtle inversions of gender roles that fueled a discourse of inversion from within a dichotomized world of male/female, rich/poor, and young/old – dichotomies first discussed by Mikhail Bahktin in Rabelais and His World (1965). A royal (or rather, royal-adjacent) sex scandal involving the dissolution of Frances Howard’s marriage to the Earl of Essex in 1613 and subsequent remarriage to the Earl of Somerset fueled fears of subversive female comportment, especially when the perversions of witchcraft were said to be involved. Witchcraft, excessive interest in fashion and makeup, as well as sexual desire, were acts by women to subvert their roles at home, in the streets and at Court. Dress was the process by which identity was encoded, and through that signification, the inscription of idealized roles and behaviors. Any subversive activities strayed into the grey area between the normative and empirical Woman, according to a Foucauldian analysis, destabilizing social norms by way of inversion, perversion and subversion.

Dress, and therefore, womanhood, came under intense scrutiny in the Jacobean literary landscape, where any sense of otherness – foreign silks, mystical allusions, ostentatious luxury- was regulated by social stratification. Yellow hoods, and the color itself, were the sign of prostitutes and other fallen women, using the identifiers of the day as an inverted ladder to another social role available to them. The gender boundaries Amussen analyzes are clearly bounded entities regulated by social interaction and royal decree, yet somehow simultaneously inverted on a daily basis in regular acts of autonomy. They, in turn, set the stage for social relationships and tensions that then spill into the geopolitical arena. Amussen’s analysis ultimately concerns these genre-crossing “disorderly women” and their “failed patriarchs,” by whom social norms were transgressed, even as they worked to upkeep them.