University of Arizona Press

La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City

farhana — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

In her historical work La Calle, Otero focuses on the city of Tucson’s elimination of the Mexican cultural center known as “La Calle” in the late sixties. While this event may seem minor in the grand scheme of things, Otero successfully argues that the incident was in fact proof of a bias against Tuscon citizens of Mexican descent and representative of a far larger problem.

No other United States city has remained under Mexican control as long as Tucson, which was not fully acquired by the U.S. until 1856. As a result, the city retained both a people and a culture that reflected its prolonged ties to Mexico. While the Mexican flavor was initially used as a means to attract Caucasian tourists, the city later began a plan to “revitalize” the city by eliminating such centers of Mexican culture as La Calle, a downtown area populated by small locally owned boutiques, Latin flavored restaurants, and the Plaza movie theater, which showed films in Spanish. The city of Tucson chose to eliminate this popular downtown destination in favor of replacing the area’s attractions with chain stores and strip malls designed to attract suburban Caucasian visitors, believing such a change would mean a higher profit for the city.

The bias towards Mexican-Americans also went further with realtors not selling them homes to keep them out of Caucasian neighborhoods, and restrictive mortgage policies. Otero makes her case by culling local city records and utilizing the oral history from city residents who experienced firsthand the changes made to Tucson during the sixties. Otero’s evidence clearly points to a policy rooted in a belief that Mexican Americans were second class citizens and that historical monuments tying Tucson to its Mexican history were not worth saving.

As a whole the book does a good job at pointing to the larger issue of the political implications of city planning. Otero quotes feminist geographer Linda McDowell who stated “Places are made through power relations which construct the rules that define boundaries. These boundaries define who belongs to a place and who may be excluded, as well as the location or site of the experience.”

We may take for granted that the arrangement, boundaries, as well as what is deemed worth preserving, within the cities we reside in may most likely have been influenced by racism, classism, and sexism.

Written by: Adrienne Urbanski, February 21st 2011

Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico

mandy — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Monica Diaz

University of Arizona Press

After the Spanish invasion of Mexico, the invaders converted the existing noble class of Indians to Catholicism so that the church could regulate the lives of its subjects and help the Spanish colonial administration. The noble class in colonial Mexico had special status and though never equal to the Spanish, they sometimes allied with them against the indigenous people. The nobles wanted to maintain their status and property, they had education and language, and the Spanish wanted to use them as intermediaries to govern the natives. Women lost power and authority under Spanish rule, but noble women tried to maintain their place, at least in the convent.

Many nobles quickly converted to the Catholic religion but women were unable to enter convents except as servants until 1724 when a convent was established specifically for noble indigenous women. Their lives were even more restricted than the Spanish nuns, and their regime in the convent resembles torture more than worship. Monica Diaz, author of Indigenous Writings from the Convent, argues that the women maintained their identity as Indians and nobles by defining themselves in opposition to the Spanish nuns, and when the Indian convent was threatened by allowing Spanish nuns to enter, the noble indigenous women used the tools of language that the colonial system had given them to their advantage.

The author’s stated intent was to focus on the structure of discourse and the agency of the Indian nuns during the battle to keep the convent for Indians. The nobles relied on the colonial focus of “otherness” that had been used to discriminate against them, to argue that the convent should exclude Spanish nuns, a separate but equal argument, but of course they weren’t equal. The argument put the church into a tough spot to claim on the one hand that the Indians were capable of being nuns but on the other hand that they were incapable of running their own convent. The church wanted to minimize the antagonism, because they wanted to continue to control the women and manipulate them as a model minority. Because the church insisted on hierarchy and ethnic difference, the Indian women could use those same arguments to their benefit.

Diaz compared the writings of nuns and priests to show how the priests re-wrote the women’s work and published it without attribution. However, few writings by noble Indians existed so most of the data was from Spanish nuns. A chapter about sermon writing illustrated that when priests talked about Indian nuns, they eliminated any personal history and portrayed their good behavior as a miracle and their main positive attribute as obedience.

Because the noble Indians could write in the style of the oppressor, the author argued that they had agency other indigenous women did not have. According to Diaz, they knew how to create and manipulate alliances, they understood hierarchy and power struggles, and they used this to defend the Indian-only convent. She claims that the elites found a way to maintain their political autonomy by creating a place in the new religious order. The point of the book is that the noble women adapted to new reality but maintained an Indian identity. Since few writings of the noble Indians survived, the sample is quite small and the author’s assumptions and deductions are not fully supported. Whether the actions of the women were positive agency or defensive survival and whether they maintained their Indian heritage is questionable. As with most academic books, one must stumble over the style of writing and use of words.

Written by: Dianne Post, February 16th 2011

Each and Her

mandy — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Valerie Martínez

University of Arizona Press

It can be easy and convenient to forget facts learned and impressions made about our southern neighbor, Mexico. Because I like to think of myself as conscious and conscientious of both international news and poetry, I was surprised by my recent discovery of Each and Her by Valerie Martínez. A widely anthologized poet and former poet laureate of Santa Fe, Martínez has been recognized for a career’s worth of community outreach and education, and even for translating Uruguayan poetry.

On the back cover of Each and Her, Martínez’s mentor, Joy Harjo, admires the poet's elegance, metaphor, and noble purpose: “They were roses, those tender girls broken against the edge of the border between Mexico and the U.S. They were our sisters, our daughters, our nieces, granddaughters; they are us… There can be no more silence. These poems make an opening in the pathway for justice.”

I must agree; this is one of the most lovely and thought provoking elegies I have read in a while. Martínez bestows a quiet honor on the lives of nearly 500 victims (since 1993). She does this by encompassing their names in her larger meditations on the cultivation of roses, and on representations of cultures that value (or devalue) those who are vulnerable, female, and poor.

Each and Her is, essentially, a book-length poem; there are seventy-two numbered, title-less meditations that follow a starkly written introduction to the paramount problem: many females, often students or factory workers, have been (and continue to be) murdered in or around Juárez and Chihuahua, Mexico. Martínez’s objective, page-long prologue tells us that the murders are linked by evidence of sexual violence, torture, or mutilation, and that the numbers each year are steadily rising (from twenty-eight in 2004 to eighty-six in 2008). The problem is getting worse, and in its background we see a drug and labor trafficking culture, and exploitation in the maquiladoras, the export assembly plants where some of these girls are employed. In one of her many numeral-rich poems, Martínez cites the number of girls and women who currently work in that industry:

472,423
while they can be hired legally
at the age of 16, it is common for these girl-women
to get false documents
start work at 12, 13, 14

Martínez arranges beautifully sparse facts next to rich details that mesmerize with their quiet reality (“Amalia went back to Juárez / dirt floors/ sheets for doors/ Coca-Cola in small bottles/ in wood crates stacked/ bundles of tortillas and tamales/ out the front window/ pesos and dollar bills/ crushed on the ledge”). Moments like these, and small poems like “this / way” or “I refuse” helped me contemplate the horror (“right breasts severed / left nipples bitten off”) while holding onto glimpses of how these women and girls may have lived before they were tortured and killed (“crush of the crowded Juárez market / Malia is first / hand clutching mine/ Grandmother behind / tethered to Mom”).

I admired how Martínez incorporated found poems, such as selections from the Orthodox veneration of the Virgin Mary and Eve and “the missive / from the attorney general / of the state of Chihuahua,” into the same long poem as her narrated lesson on worthy ancient women: “finally, a great throng of women deserving to be named, some as Greeks, some as muses, some as seers, for all were nothing more than learned women held and celebrated…” Whether suggesting the beauty and toil of flower harvesting labor, evoking the motif of sisterhood, or considering the working conditions of women, as in poem "36." (“a typical maqui working schedule/ 60 hours per week/ typical daily wage—$8.29”), Martínez left me amazed at the breadth of her careful poetry.

The emotion of each experience—of a girl-woman and her loved ones—is nodded to and transcended. Martínez understands that the deep icon of the rose radiates out from what mathematicians or ethicists can understand about these brutal murders. I was literally propelled through these poems by a need to privilege these lives with my attention, by a kind of reverent curiosity about these girls’ and women’s stories, and by the utter pleasure of Martínez’s lovely, sparse, and thoughtful language. Justice often comes through awareness and empathy, and the way that Valerie Martínez reverently and tenderly handles her collection of meditations about this terrifying cultural pattern buoys the possibility of justice, and hopefully, a remedy.

Written by: Julie Ann, January 21st 2011