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This is covert white supremacy in the guise of educational standard-keeping—nothing more, nothing less. Given the sharp increase of anti-Latino rhetoric, policies, and crimes in Arizona and the rest of the country, one should not be surprised by this madness and yet one is. The removal of those books before those students’ very eyes makes it brutally clear how vulnerable communities of color and our children are to this latest eruption of cruel, divisive, irrational, fearful, and yes racist politics. Truly infuriating. And more reason to continue to fight for a just society.
—Junot Diaz[, whose] book “Drown” was part of the banned curriculum of Mexican American Studies. Diaz won the Pulitzer prize for “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”
Quote and caption from The Progressive Magazine
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Los carteles aplican la legislación de la sangre descrita por Kafka en “La colonia penitenciaria”. La víctima ignora su sentencia: “Sería absurdo hacérsela saber puesto que va a aprenderla sobre su cuerpo”. El narco se apoya en el discurso de la crueldad (cruor: “sangre que corre”) donde las heridas trazan una condena para la víctima y una amenaza para los testigos. El jus sangui del narco depende de una inversión kafkiana de los episodios legales; la sentencia no es el fin sino el comienzo de un proceso; el anuncio de que otros podrán ser llamados a “juicio”. “Si no haces correr la sangre, la ley no es descifrable”, escribe Lyotard a propósito de “La colonia penitenciaria”. Tal es el lema implícito del crimen organizado. Su discurso es perfectamente descifrable. En cambio, la otra ley, la “nuestra”, se ha difuminado.
n+1 translates, bracketed translation mine:
[The cartels apply the legislation of blood described by Kafka in “The Penal Colony”. The victim ignores the his sentence: “It would be absurd doing so knowing that he will learn it over his own body.”] The narco relies on the discourse of cruelty (cruor: the blood that spills, says Lyotard), in which wounds trace a sentence for the victim and a warning for the witnesses. The jus sangui of the narco depends on a Kafkaesque inversion of legal proceedings; the verdict is not the end but the beginning of a trial, the announcement that others might yet be called to court. “If you do not make the blood run, the law is indecipherable,” Lyotard wrote about “In the Penal Colony.” That is the implicit slogan of organized crime. Its words are perfectly legible. Meanwhile, the other law, “our” law, has faded.
Juan Villoro, “La Alfombra Roja” in El Malpensante
n+1 has an English translation of Villoro’s essay on Narcoculture here.
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Don’t know how we missed the passing of Jose Antonio Villarreal in late January (oh yes, we were in the middle of all kinds of graduate school application madness…), but it was rather sad to hear word just today. Villareal’s Pocho was among the first works of Chicano literature to be published by a major American house. The novel is a bildungsroman chronicling the early life of Richard Rubio in depression-era Central California as he attempts to move between and negotiate polarities of domesticity, language, class, culture, ideology, religion, ethnicity, and gender. What emerges is a portrait-in-motion of a subject constituted by the rifts and distances from the culture from whence he came and the culture in which he lives, being neither fully Mexican nor fully American. Spanning from the Mexican Revolution to the Second World War, Pocho renders a tale of the encounters, sentiments, and reflections that make up becoming-ethnic in the United States.
For a little more, read Villarreal’s obituary in the Siskiyou Daily News, while Cal State L.A.s’ Roberto Cantu offers an informative appraisal of Villarreal’s work at La Bloga.
Image: Siskiyou Daily News
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I have often wondered if the formal ruptures in a great part of our twentieth-century literature, its linguistic violence, its fractured levels of appeal and questioning structures, although undoubtedly the result of Western cultural modernist influences, do not profoundly owe themselves to the need to reach the blockaded readers gnawing at the shores of the text. Is it not possible that those non-readers are our secret and omitted coeditors, white shadows that, however unseen, are always there waiting to materialize? Is the sheer weight of that unexpressed universe, of those millions of mute voices, not always silently present and intermingled in every cloistered word that is born in Latin America?
Ariel Dorfman, “Introduction” Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction, [Duke University Press, 1991] xiii.
lo que sea
Ubicado en Berkeley, CA
