of current and voltage upon which, as Jane Bennett describes in Vibrant Matter, the US electrical grid is based (26). Race, in this analogy, is like the play of active and reactive power guiding the rhythms of current and voltage, intangible, but very, very real.
Omi and Winant, similarly, say that they “cannot dismiss race as a legitimate category of social analysis by simply stating that race is not real” (110). Race has real social consequences, they argue, even if it lacks a biological root; for them, race is both “located on the body” and “the means by which power is ‘made flesh’” (247). Like Omi and Winant, I see race as both noun and verb but understand it to be in rather than on the body. Race, this is to say, might not be locatable in the biological real, but it is nevertheless, I argue, a form of physical, affective experience that catalyzes personal and political change in the world. If race is merely an abstraction of geopolitical power, and the human body is a mutable, historically contingent phenomenon, then what, I ask in Racial Immanence, to make of the attention to disease, disability, abjection, and sense experience increasingly visible in Chicanx visual, verbal, and performing arts at the turn of the 1980s into the 1990s? What can this attention to physicality tell us about the real, political stakes of Latinx cultural production?
Answering questions like these demands a reading method that neither privileges nor essentializes the distinction between reader and text, that sees their imbrication and understands that Díaz’s “larger identity” is a red herring. Though it has received the most critical attention, identity is not what matters in Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize–winning tour de force The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which explores the history of the Dominican Republic through a science fiction–obsessed Dominican American protagonist. The titular Oscar is ni de allí ni de allá, from neither here nor there, steeped in US popular culture but living always in the shadow of his skin and the story of his mother’s country. Oscar’s identity is a distraction from the real matter of latinidad, which asserts itself less as a matter of content than of form.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao suffers, charmingly, from a near total lack of nuance. It tells the reader exactly what to think of it, Oscar, and the Dominican Republic in didactic prose and with even more aggressive footnotes glossing the action and explaining the many historical and popular culture references. Even after the novel’s publication Díaz did not stop unpacking for his readership, annotating, for example, sections of the novel online.5 These notes enjoyed a warm reception in the popular and scholarly press, but they can be read as obfuscating just as much as they reveal. What if we thought about them as resisting, rather than inviting, interpretation?
Díaz’s footnotes in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao prioritize the act as much as the subject of writing, and on alt.Latino Díaz emphasizes the knitting as much as the knitted. His formulation shifts the focus of the conversation from object to action. This is the same move that political theorist Cristina Beltrán makes in The Trouble with Unity when she titles her conclusion “Latino Is a Verb.” People identified as Latinx, she writes, “do not represent a preexisting community just waiting to emerge from the shadows. Instead ‘Latino politics’ is best understood as a form of enactment, a democratic moment in which subjects create new patterns of commonality and contest unequal forms of power” (157). On the one hand, Beltrán sounds here like one of Díaz’s clueless intellectuals; on the other hand, her discussion of “enactment” as creating new modes of political community grants import to Díaz’s knitting and provides a new way of understanding his politics of form.
In Racial Immanence I attend to form as a mode of political action along the lines Beltrán describes. My primary vehicle for these explorations is the human body and the role it plays in Chicanx cultural production at the turn of the 1980s into the 1990s. Of course, artists attended to the body before the 1980s, but bodily meditations increase so significantly by the end of the twentieth century that, in addition to establishing a genealogy of corporeal musings, Racial Immanence asks what about this period prompts such marked attention to physicality in Chicanx arts. By theorizing Chicanx artists’ uses of the body, Racial Immanence makes a historical argument about how Chicanx cultural production responds to late twentieth-century neoliberal encroachments on the economic, political, and social lives of communities of color. In so doing, I also put forward different models for thinking through how “Chicanx” and “Latinx” signify in the twenty-first century and how these concepts can be socially and politically leveraged.
Abstractions
Interlude 1: The Leg
The Battle of San Juan de Ulúa began in the early morning hours of December 5, 1838, when the French navy landed 1,500 men on the shore at Veracruz. It led to a decisive French victory in the 1837–1838 “Pastry War” between France and Mexico.6 In the frenzy of the fight, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, commander of the Mexican forces at Veracruz, was severely wounded in his left leg with shrapnel from a cannonball that also killed his horse. The leg was amputated below the knee the next day and returned to Mexico City, where it was blessed with a Te Deum and buried (East, “Wooden Leg” 51). Some time after that, Santa Anna visited the New York City offices of Charles Bartlett, a prosthetics manufacturer, who built a custom-designed leg for the general (Carl Johnson 1).
It was a beautiful leg made of lightweight, easy-to-maneuver cork, and fitted with a swivel joint at the ankle to allow for natural range of motion (Carl Johnson 3). Santa Anna was surely sorry to lose it on April 18, 1847, when Samuel Rhoades, John Gill, and Abraham Waldron, members of the Fourth Illinois Infantry, stole it at the Battle of Cerro Gordo during the 1846–1848 US-Mexico War.7 The Fourth Infantry was assigned to attack Santa Anna’s troops, who held a key mountain pass blocking the US Army’s advance into Mexico City. Santa Anna escaped the surprise attack, but was forced to desert his carriage, which held, along with his leg, $18,000 in gold and a lunch of roast chicken. Upon discovery of the carriage, Rhoades, Gill, and Waldron ate the chicken, turned the gold over to their superior officers, and took the leg back to Illinois as a spoil of war.
Santa Anna’s amputated leg suffered the vagaries of his political misfortunes. After he lost political power, the leg was reportedly stolen from its tomb, dragged through city streets, and left at a garbage dump (East, “Cork Leg” 169). His prosthetic leg, however, remained in private, US hands for decades, enjoying adventures of its own. Its captors charged ten cents a head to view it in Illinois, but the leg also apparently traveled. Correspondence suggests that it was displayed in London’s Crystal Palace (East, “Cork Leg” 169) and news reports indicate that P. T. Barnum had it on view in his American Museum in the years immediately following the war (Harris 62). The State of Illinois gained possession in the early twentieth century, and the leg received little attention until 1942, when the state assembly passed a resolution to return the leg to Mexico. This much-protested resolution was never carried out. Instead, the leg was put into storage until 1974, when the Illinois National Guard included it in a mobile historical display that traveled to Washington, DC, in observance of the American Bicentennial (Carl Johnson 5). After that it was put on permanent display in the Illinois adjutant general’s office in Springfield, in which city visitors today can see Santa Anna’s wooden leg presented in a diorama replicating its scene of capture at the Illinois State Military Museum.
The story of Santa Anna’s wooden leg comprises most of the elements of my argument in Racial Immanence. The leg could be read as a parable of US-Mexico relations, but Mexico has its own conflicted relationship with Santa Anna and never launched an aggressive campaign for the leg’s repatriation. The leg on display in Illinois, moreover, is prosthetic, not flesh of Santa Anna’s flesh, and it was made in the United States. The Fourth Illinois Infantry captured a representation of a representation (figure I.1). P. T. Barnum presented America with a vision of its desire to possess a Mexico of its own manufacture, undermined by the ambiguous “nature” of the leg and the controversial character of the man to whom it was attached. The leg, therefore, cannot be read representationally. Let us consider it instead as an occasion to accept Hames-García’s invitation to think of
