Beatrice Pita (2009)—in chapter 4 I explore how bodies interact with and mediate geographic, planetary, and political spaces. In chapter 3 I consider what it means to ground the body in specific places or to depict bodies as being out of place, but the novels in chapter 4 inspire an exploration of what it means for the body to both physically constitute and be physically constituted by space.
Situating the body as an object among objects, my chapters create a material archive, a network through which to reimagine the racialized body. Each chapter advances a way of reading the body in relation to different epistemes—time, form, planetary consciousness, and bio- and cyber-technology—that bring us back to at the same time they appear to move us away from racial considerations. I offer, within these pages, a way of reading that sees the body as doing something other than representing a set of racialized experiences. Santa Anna’s wooden leg may be directly tied to the experiences of a specific community, but racial immanence and the ways of reading that it makes possible are transportable.
To illustrate that claim, and by way of closing, I turn to King of the Hill, the animated series about the Hill family, their friends, and their adventures in the fictional town of Arlen, Texas, which ran on the Fox network from 1997 to 2009. “The Final Shinsult,” the thirtieth episode of King of the Hill, aired on March 15, 1998, just a few years after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994.15 In “The Final Shinsult,” Santa Anna’s leg is making a cross-country tour of the United States before being returned to Mexico, and Arlen will be its last stop. Bobby Hill’s middle school is performing a play about the leg and planning a field trip to visit it at the Arlen Museum. Bobby’s father, Hank, convinces his own father, Cotton, to help chaperone the trip. Cotton, who has recently failed an eye exam to renew his driver’s license, is thrown into even more of a rage when he learns of the leg. “You see, Bobby,” he yells, “your daddy’s generation is giving away everything we fought for!” The “Shinsult” of the episode’s title refers to Cotton’s anger about the leg as well as the ongoing humor the series finds in Cotton’s diminutive stature. “A man who gave his shins to win the Second World War,” explains Hank’s friend Dale, “has earned the right to drive an automobile.”
Later in the episode, the museum director stops the school bus as it is leaving and accuses the children of having stolen the now-missing leg. Hank heaves a beleaguered sigh and tells the children that he will now close his eyes and wants to see the leg when he opens them. He turns his head and opens his eyes to gaze into the distance, where he sees Dale and Cotton sneaking away from the museum. Cotton has Santa Anna’s leg strapped to one of his own, the other is strapped to Dale’s, and the two men hobble toward Dale’s car as if competing in a three-legged race. When Hank later confronts them, Cotton and Dale refuse to tell Hank where the leg is, revealing, after Hank leaves, the leg’s hiding place on a makeshift altar in a broom closet, sporting a fuzzy pink slipper, surrounded by holiday lights and empty beer bottles.
When the police finally come for the leg, Cotton tells them, as he resists arrest, “I need that leg for leverage in my negotiations with the Mexican government!” The leg is, however, eventually returned to Mexico in a ceremony at the Arlen Museum. City officials formally hand the leg to a retired Mexican army captain who, like Santa Anna, is missing a leg. “When he straps on Santa Anna’s leg and walks it from our flag to his it will be officially returned to the Mexican people,” Bobby’s mother, Peggy, tells him. The captain straps on his leg and begins to walk, but before he can reach the Mexican flag the leg shatters under his weight. “Hey, wait a minute,” says Bobby’s friend Joseph. “That’s the leg I made for the play.” The episode closes with Cotton in Mexico exchanging the original leg for a driver’s license.
We can read “The Final Shinsult” as exemplifying how Santa Anna’s leg continues to resonate as a sign of NAFTA-induced economic anxiety, the giving away to Mexico of everything the United States feels it has rightfully earned. We can also see the leg in this episode as the objective correlative of national desire. As Cotton’s body fails him, his investment in the Mexican prosthesis increases, with the result that his desire for the leg tells us more about his own feelings of inadequacy than it does about US-Mexico relations. Such insights are not novel, nor do they employ novel methods. I offer these analytic options as a call to reconsider the work of reading.
In King of the Hill Santa Anna’s wooden leg gestures toward the collective frailty from which grounds a new political imaginary might emerge. Joseph’s papier-mâché leg cannot support the political theater of international relations surrounding its return. A different kind of theater surrounds the original leg, however. Dale and Cotton’s altar is a performance of devotion demanding embodied, cooperative action that remains off camera. We do not see them building it together, but the way they clink their cocktail glasses together as they look at the altar suggests that it was a joint effort. The original leg binds characters to each other, draws them into a web of historical and physical concerns. In a moment of comic relief, the leg physically unites Dale and Cotton as their bodies stumble awkwardly as one. Similarly, the idea of the leg unites Cotton with the Mexican captain at the ceremony in Arlen, and both men are connected—across time, space, and national borders—with Santa Anna. At the same time, the episode flatly refuses maudlin readings of disability by depicting the leg as a token of material exchange that allows Cotton to finally get his driver’s license, thus achieving his longed-for freedom and mobility.
Desire is tricky, though, and how can we ever really be sure what Cotton longs for? “The Final Shinsult” reminds us that if we are reading to learn about the other, we are reading, most likely, to learn what we already think we know, to see what we want to see. What, then, does Santa Anna’s leg mean? That, at the end of the day, is not a particularly useful question. Whether in P. T. Barnum’s circus or on King of the Hill, representations of the leg will tell us about their representative moments, not the leg itself. And yet, there is still a leg there. An encounter with the leg produces a certain kind of affective experience with Chicanx resonance. What can we say about that experience? About the leg? Why do they matter?
These are the questions I grapple with in Racial Immanence. This book is a critique of representational reading and a searching out of other ways to think about the value of race and ethnicity in the arts. Within these pages, race becomes immanent and speculative, a historical node or catalyzing agent of the different trajectories my objects trace. The corporeal in Racial Immanence becomes transcorporeal; the human body becomes not a metaphor for subjectivity, but a way to articulate a philosophy of transformative and leveling interconnection.
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RACE
Dagoberto Gilb’s Phenomenology
Because something serious was going to happen. He knew it, knew it in his bones.
—Dagoberto Gilb, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña
In 1790, during a project to level the zócalo in Mexico City, workers uncovered the Piedra del Sol (Sun Stone), a massive stone monument to the Aztec calendar that Alonso de Montúfar, the second archbishop of Mexico from 1551 to 1572, had ordered buried sometime around 1559. Though a few Europeans had likely seen the Sun Stone around the time of the conquest of Mexico, and Diego Durán, the Dominican friar who in the sixteenth century produced some of the best-known accounts of pre-conquest Mexico, appears to write about it in his History of the Indies of New Spain (1581), by 1790 it had been long forgotten. Since 1790, however, the Aztec Sun Stone has become one of the most famous archeological objects in the world, puzzled over by scholars and venerated by mystics and seekers.
The Sun Stone is everywhere and nowhere, endlessly reproduced on all manner and size of objects, yet fundamentally unknowable and mysterious.
