Expository Writing: Shaping Information Diane Ackerman

Even before I read books by Chicanos or Mexicans, it was the Mexican movies I saw at the ­drive-­in — the Thursday night special of $1.00 a carload — that gave me a sense of belonging. “Vámonos a las vistas,” my mother would call out and we’d all — grandmother, brothers, sister and cousins — squeeze into the car. We’d wolf down cheese and bologna white bread sandwiches while watching Pedro Infante in melodramatic ­tear-­jerkers like Nosotros los pobres, the first “real” Mexican movie (that was not an imitation of Eu­ro­pe­an movies). I remember seeing Cuando los hijos se van and surmising that all Mexican movies played up the love a mother has for her children and what ungrateful sons and daughters suffer when they are not devoted to their mothers. I remember the ­singing-­type “westerns” of Jorge Negrete and Miguel Aceves Mejía. When watching Mexican movies, I felt a sense of homecoming as well as alienation. People who ­were to amount to something didn’t go to Mexican movies, or bailes or tune their radios to bolero, rancherita, and corrido music.

The ­whole time I was growing up, there was norteño music sometimes called North Mexican border music, or ­Tex-­Mex music, or Chicano music, or cantina (bar) music. I grew up listening to conjuntos, ­three- or ­four-­piece bands made up of folk musicians playing guitar, bajo sexto, drums and button accordion, which Chicanos had borrowed from the German immigrants who had come to Central Texas and Mexico to farm and build breweries. In the Rio Grande Valley, Steve Jordan and Little Joe Hernández ­were pop­u­lar, and Flaco Jiménez was the accordian king. The rhythms of ­Tex-­Mex music are those of the polka, also adapted from the Germans, who in turn had borrowed the polka from the Czechs and Bohemians.

I remember the hot, sultry eve­nings when corridos — songs of love and death on the ­Texas-­Mexican borderlands — reverberated out of cheap amplifiers from the local cantinas and wafted in through my bedroom window.

Corridos first became widely used along the South Texas/Mexican border during the early conflict between Chicanos and Anglos. The corridos are usually about Mexican heroes who do valiant deeds against the Anglo oppressors. Pancho Villa’s song, “La cucaracha,” is the most famous one. Corridos of John F. Kennedy and his death are still very pop­u­lar in the Valley. Older Chicanos remember Lydia Mendoza, one of the great border corrido singers who was called la Gloria de Tejas. Her “El tango negro,” sung during the Great Depression, made her a singer of the people. The ­ever-­present corridos narrated one hundred years of border history, bringing news of events as well as entertaining. These folk musicians and folk songs are our chief cultural ­myth-­makers, and they made our hard lives seem bearable.

I grew up feeling ambivalent about our music. ­Country-­western and ­rock-­and-­roll had more status. In the 50s and 60s, for the slightly educated and agringado Chicanos, there existed a sense of shame at being caught listening to our music. Yet I couldn’t stop my feet from thumping to the music, could not stop humming the words, nor hide from myself the exhilaration I felt when I heard it.

There are more subtle ways that we internalize identification, especially in the forms of images and emotions. For me food and certain smells are tied to my identity, to my homeland. Woodsmoke curling up to an im­mense blue sky; woodsmoke perfuming my grandmother’s clothes, her skin. The stench of cow manure and the yellow patches on the ground; the crack of a .22 rifle and the reek of cordite. Homemade white cheese sizzling in a pan, melting inside a folded tortilla. My sister Hilda’s hot, spicy menudo, chile colorado making it deep red, pieces of panza and hominy floating on top. My brother Carito barbequing fajitas in the backyard. Even now and 3,000 miles away, I can see my mother spicing the ground beef, pork and venison with chile. My mouth salivates at the thought of the hot steaming tamales I would be eating if I ­were home.

Si le preguntas a mi mamá, “¿Qué eres?”

“Identity is the essential core of who we are as individuals, the conscious experience of the self inside.”

— Kaufman⁹

Nosotros los Chicanos straddle the borderlands. On one side of us, we are constantly exposed to the Spanish of the Mexicans, on the other side we hear the Anglos’ incessant clamoring so that we forget our language. Among ourselves we don’t say nosotros los americanos, o nosotros los españoles, o nosotros los hispanos. We say nosotros los mexicanos (by mexicanos we do not mean citizens of Mexico; we do not mean a national identity, but a racial one). We distinguish between mexicanos del otro lado and mexicanos de este lado. Deep in our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in. Being Mexican is a state of soul — not one of mind, not one of citizenship. Neither ea­gle nor serpent, but both. And like the ocean, neither animal respects borders.

Dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres.

(Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are.)

— Mexican saying

Si le preguntas a mi mamá, “¿Qué eres?” te dirá, “Soy mexicana.” My brothers and sister say the same. I sometimes will answer “soy ­mexicana” and at others will say “soy Chicana” o “soy tejana.” But I identified as “Raza” before I ever identified as “mexicana” or ­“Chicana.”

As a culture, we call ourselves Spanish when referring to ourselves as a linguistic group and when copping out. It is then that we forget our predominant Indian genes. We are 70–80% Indian.¹⁰ We call ourselves Hispanic¹¹ or ­Spanish-­American or Latin American or Latin when linking ourselves to other ­Spanish-­speaking peoples of the Western hemisphere and when copping out. We call ourselves ­Mexican-­American¹² to signify we are neither Mexican nor American, but more the noun “American” than the adjective “Mexican” (and when copping out).

Chicanos and other people of color suffer eco­nom­ical­ly for not acculturating. This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity — we don’t identify with the ­Anglo-­American cultural values and we don’t totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nadie. Pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy.

When not copping out, when we know we are more than nothing, we call ourselves Mexican, referring to race and ancestry; mestizo when affirming both our Indian and Spanish (but we hardly ever own our Black ancestry); Chicano when referring to a po­liti­cally aware people born and/or raised in the U.S.; Raza when referring to Chicanos; tejanos when we are Chicanos from Texas.

Chicanos did not know we ­were a people until 1965 when César Chávez and the farmworkers united and I Am Joaquín was published and la Raza Unida party was formed in Texas. With that recognition, we became a distinct people. Something momentous happened to the Chicano soul — we became aware of our reality and acquired a name and a language (Chicano Spanish) that reflected that reality. Now that we had a name, some of the fragmented pieces began to fall together — who we ­were, what we ­were, how we had evolved. We began to get glimpses of what we might eventually become.

Yet the struggle of identities continues, the struggle of borders is our reality still. One day the inner struggle will cease and a true integration take place. In the meantime, tenémos que hacer la lucha. ¿Quién está protegiendo los ranchos de mi gente? ¿Quién está tratando de cerrar la fisura entre la india y el blanco en nuestra sangre? El Chicano, si, el Chicano que anda como un ladrón en su propia casa.

Los Chicanos, how patient we seem, how very patient. There is the quiet of the Indian about us.¹³ We know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue, we’ve kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture. But more than we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the eons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they’ve created, lie bleached. Humildes yet proud, quietos yet wild, nosotros los ­mexicanos-­Chicanos will walk by the crumbling ashes as we go about our business. Stubborn, persevering, impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will remain.

The Reader’s Presence

1. ‑Anzaldúa links her dentist’s literal use of the word tongue to a meta­phorical meaning. What connotations do the two senses of the word share? How does the ­tongue-­as-­organ/tongue-­as-­language pun relate to the quotation from Ray Gwyn Smith and questions of cultural silencing?

2. ‑Anzaldúa peppers her En­glish prose with untranslated Spanish words and phrases. How does this formal innovation influence the reader’s experience of the text? How does the reader’s experience mirror Anzaldúa’s own in ­En­glish-­speaking America? In what ways might this technique underline the writer’s insistence on the importance of keeping different languages active and alive?

3. ‑Anzaldúa champions Spanish as the language of Mexican Americans. Spanish, of course, was brought to native Mexicans by colonizing conquistadors. The writer also distinguishes numerous dialects of Spanish and “Spanglish” as tongues in their own right. Cultural identity, in Anzaldúa’s formulation, seems at once a unified and a divided entity. How does this condition compare to the one suggested by Richard Rodriguez’s “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” (page 239)? For all their differences of politics and style, are there ideas held in common by these ­Spanish- and ­En­glish-­speaking Americans? Do you think these writers would agree with your assessment?

1Ray Gwyn Smith, Moorland Is Cold Country, unpublished book.

2Irena Klepfisz, “Di rayze aheym/The Journey Home,” in The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, eds. (Montpelier, VT: Sinister Wisdom Books, 1986), 49.

3R. C. Ortega, Dialectología del Barrio, trans. Hortencia S. Alwan (Los Angeles, CA: R. C. Ortega Publisher & Bookseller, 1977), 132.

4Eduardo Hernández-Chávez, Andrew D. Cohen, and Anthony F. Beltramo, El Lenguaje de los Chicanos: Regional and Social Characteristics of Language Used By Mexican Americans (Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1975), 39.

5Hernández-Chávez, xvii.

6Irena Klepfisz, “Secular Jewish Identity: Yidishkayt in America,” in The Tribe of Dina, Kaye/Kantrowitz and Klepfisz, eds., 43.

7Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, “Sign,” in We Speak in Code: Poems and Other Writings (Pittsburgh, PA: Motheroot Publications, Inc., 1980), 85.

8Rodolfo Gonzales, I Am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1972). It was first published in 1967.

9Gershen Kaufman, Shame: The Power of Caring (Cambridge, MA: Shenkman Books, 1980), 68.

10John R. Chávez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest (Albuquerque, NM: U of New Mexico P, 1984), 88–90.

11“Hispanic” is derived from Hispanis (España, a name given to the Iberian Peninsula in ancient times when it was a part of the Roman Empire) and is a term designated by the U.S. government to make it easier to handle us on paper.

12The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo created the Mexican-American in 1848.

13Anglos, in order to alleviate their guilt for dispossessing the Chicano, stressed the Spanish part of us and perpetrated the myth of the Spanish Southwest. We have accepted the fiction that we are Hispanic, that is Spanish, in order to accommodate ourselves to the dominant culture and its abhorrence of Indians. Chávez, 88–91.

Karen Armstrong

Is a Holy War Inevitable?

Karen Armstrong (b. 1945), a noted expert on the world’s religions, spent most of the turbulent 1960s as a cloistered nun in a strict Catholic convent. This experience inspired Through the Narrow Gate (1981) and The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004), both of which retrace her early life story. In between, Armstrong has written numerous books on religious themes, concepts, and conflicts, including The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity’s Creation of the Sex War in the West (1986), Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (1988), Muhammad (1992), The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2000), and Buddha (2001). Armstrong’s ­best-­selling 1993 book, A History of God, is still widely read and has been translated into sixteen languages. She has written three tele­vi­sion documentaries and collaborated with Bill Moyers on the tele­vi­sion series Genesis. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Armstrong has frequently lectured and written about Islam.

“An extraordinary thing happened after 9/11,” Armstrong says. “The American people descended on the bookstores and swept everything on Islam off the shelves. That is very positive. . . . Americans are curious in that way, and when I went round lecturing, people impressed me with their ­tough-­minded desire to try to come to terms with all this.” Her article “Is a Holy War Inevitable?” — written for GQ magazine in 2002 — delineates between the “intransigent and fundamentalist voices that fill us all with fear” and the voices of moderate Islamic thinkers.

Although uncertainties remain about the causes and effects of the terror that has gripped the Western world since September 11, one fact is clear: We are feeling the onslaught of a nihilistic Muslim rage. How deep are its roots, and how far might it go? Many Western leaders and thinkers, struggling to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Muslims, see the rage rooted in Islamic cultures. Some feel a civilizational inevitability: that Islam is entirely incompatible with Western culture and that the West has long been heading for a major confrontation with the Islamic world.

The roots, first, are not as ancient as some of the pundits imagine. But they are substantive. Since the late 1960s, the Islamic world has been convulsed by a fundamentalism that seems to fill Muslims with an atavistic rage against the West in general and the United States in par­tic­u­lar. During the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1978–79), we saw mass crowds clutching copies of the Koran and yelling “Death to America!” We heard the United States denounced as “the Great Satan.” Though the level of enmity toward the West has decreased in Iran, in other circles it has become more intense, as the attacks of September 11 painfully show. Still, in the aftermath of that tragedy, the word fundamentalism has frequently been used imprecisely and in ways that are misleading. It is often equated with extremism and terror, but in fact only a tiny proportion of religious fundamentalists resort to violence. The vast majority are simply struggling to live truly religious lives in a world that seems increasingly inimical to faith.

Fundamentalism is often described as a Muslim phenomenon, but during the twentieth century this militant type of piety erupted in every major faith worldwide, so that we have not only Christian fundamentalism but also Jewish, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist and even Confucian forms. The first fundamentalist movement developed in Christian circles in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, whereas fundamentalism did not appear in the Muslim world until the late 1960s. This is not surprising, since fundamentalism is essentially a revolt against modern secular civilization. In almost every region where a ­Western-­style society has established itself, a religious counterculture has grown alongside in conscious reaction. That is why fundamentalism appeared first in North America, the showcase of modernity, and could develop in the Middle East only after a degree of modernization had been achieved.

Fundamentalists seek to drag God and religion from the sidelines to which they have been relegated in a secular polity and pull them back to center stage. Every fundamentalist movement I have studied, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation — a conviction that the liberal, secularist establishment wants to wipe out ­religion. This is as true of militant Christian groups in the United States as it is of Muslim extremists in Egypt and Iran. Fundamental­ists believe they are fighting for survival, and when people feel that their backs are to the wall, they can lash out violently like a wounded animal.

One thing we in the West have to learn to appreciate is that disenchantment with modern society is fairly widespread. Those of us who enjoy modern society and value its freedoms and privileges need to realize that not everybody shares our enthusiasm. We must reflect seriously on the ubiquity of this fundamentalist disaffection. In Britain, where there is little interest in traditional faith, there is virtually no fundamentalism, because people do not express their discontent in a religious manner. But British soccer hooliganism reveals the same brew of emotions that fuels many fundamentalist movements: ­pent-­up rage, frustration, a desire to belong to a clearly defined group, burning humiliation and a sense of lost prestige that on occasion can erupt into shameful ­violence.

These fears may seem irrational, but the history of fundamentalism shows that this aggressive new religiosity is not going to go away. Attempts to suppress fundamentalism simply make it more extreme. September 11 showed that the people who feel compelled to take part in this battle for God are moved by a level of distress, anxiety and, sometimes, fury that no society, no government, can safely ignore.

It wasn’t always like this. When Muslims first became fully aware of Western modernity, they seemed to “recognize” it at a profound level. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, almost every single Muslim intellectual was full of admiration for the new West. Islamic thinkers of the day wanted their countries to be just like Britain and France. In 1906 many of the leading ulama (religious scholars) in Iran joined secularists in a revolution demanding a constitution and parliamentary rule modeled on those of Eu­ro­pe. Any system that could reduce the tyranny of the shahs was clearly compatible with Shiite Islam. The ­nineteenth-­century Egyptian writer Rifa’ah ­al-­Tahtawi was enthralled by the ideas of the Eu­ro­pe­an Enlightenment, which reminded him of the teachings of the great Muslim philosophers. He loved the way everything worked properly in Paris, was impressed by the systematic education of French children and the literacy of the common people. In India, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) tried to adapt the ideals of Islam to modern Western liberalism. He founded a college at Aligarh, where Muslims could study science and En­glish alongside their traditional Islamic subjects. This would help Muslims live in a modernized society without becoming inferior copies of the British, since they would retain a sense of their own cultural identity.

In the Islamic world, however, disenchantment with the West and its accelerating form of modernity became more widespread during the twentieth century. What is it about modernity that fills so many people all over the world with visceral dread? Modernization, we are apt to forget, is a traumatic pro­cess. In Eu­ro­pe and the United States, it took us some 300 years to develop our secular and demo­cratic institutions. Starting in the sixteenth century, we began creating a new form of civilization. Eco­nom­ical­ly, it was based not on a surplus of agricultural produce, as all premodern civilizations had been, but on technology and the constant reinvestment of capital. This enabled us to reproduce our resources indefinitely and thus freed us from the constraints of the more vulnerable traditional agrarian cultures. But because this was such a major social ­undertaking, it required change in almost every sphere of life — po­liti­cal, social, economic, intellectual and religious — which was often accompanied by pain and bloodshed. Po­liti­cal institutions had to be altered to accommodate these new conditions. In the West, it was found, by trial and error, that a modern state had to be demo­cratic, secular and tolerant — but this trial and error had grave costs. Eu­ro­pe and America both witnessed revolutions, which ­were sometimes succeeded by reigns of terror. As we made the painful rite of passage to modernity — which did not come into its own until the nineteenth century — we experienced fearful wars of religion, genocide, persecution of minorities, exploitation of workers in factories, ­despoliation of the countryside and anomie and spiritual disorientation in the slums of the newly industrialized cities. Today we are witnessing similar distress in developing countries that are now in the throes of this transformation.

In Eu­ro­pe and America, the emerging modern spirit had two main characteristics. The first was in­de­pen­dence. Modernization was accompanied by declarations of in­de­pen­dence on all fronts: po­liti­cal, religious, scientific and intellectual. People could no longer be constrained by coercive governments or churches; they had to have the freedom to follow their ideas and projects wherever they might lead, a luxury no previous society could afford. The second characteristic was innovation. The West also came to accept — even value — institutionalized change. In the more vulnerable premodern economies, it had always been more important to conserve what had been achieved. But now the people of the West came to find a virtue in the pace of change — we ­were always creating something fresh and breaking into uncharted realms, and despite the inherent difficulties, this gave our lives a wholly new excitement. Instead of looking back at past achievements, we ­were continually thrusting forward into the future.

The modernization pro­cess has been very different in the Muslim world. Modernity came not with in­de­pen­dence but with po­liti­cal and economic subjection. Muslim countries ­were colonized by the Eu­ro­pe­an powers, organized into mandates or protectorates and reduced to a dependent bloc. Instead of innovation, their modern experience was one of imitation, since Western countries ­were so far ahead that Muslim modernizers could only copy us. Lagging behind and endlessly trying to play ­catch-­up, Muslim countries found their own way to modernity. Because the pro­cess has been so different, so too has been the end product. Demo­cratic, liberal, secular societies could not automatically emerge in these more problematic circumstances.

Modernization has also been too rapid in the Muslim world, and inevitably, the new ideas have not been able to filter down gradually to all sectors of the population as they did in the West. Muslim countries have been split unhealthily into two camps: an elite, who have received a ­Western-­style education and can understand the new norms and institutions, and the vast majority who have not. Because the pro­cess has been so accelerated, the secularization of society, the separation of religion and politics, has been experienced by religious people as a deadly assault. Thus when Atatürk (1881–1938), the found­er of the Turkish republic, was creating modern secular Turkey, he closed all the madrasahs, the colleges of Islamic education, abolished the orders of Sufi mystics, which had played a crucial role in the social and spiritual lives of the people, and forced the Sufis underground. Men and women ­were compelled to wear Western dress, because Atatürk wanted the country to look modern. In Iran the shahs had their soldiers go through the streets, taking off Muslim women’s veils with their bayonets and tearing them to pieces. In 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi gave his soldiers orders to shoot at hundreds of unarmed demonstrators at the holy shrine of Mashhad who ­were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress. His son Muhammad Reza shot down hundreds of madrasah students who dared to protest against his dictatorship, and leading clerics ­were tortured to death, imprisoned or exiled. In such forceful circumstances, secularism is not the liberating polity we have experienced in the West. It is invasive and frightening, an attack on one’s way of life.