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LEGALLY ABSENT, HAUNTINGLY PRESENT:
GHOST STORIES OF THE UNDOCUMENTED IN CONTEMPORARY
CHICANA/O FICTION
How Chicana/o Fiction Haunts the Discourse of Citizenship
It is commonly thought that the law represents or reflects society. However, as critical legal scholars have made clear, the law imposes its own logic on the world and shapes it accordingly.
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In doing so, the law’s rigid knowledge categories render particular experiences, emotions, and histories mute because such a system cannot translate them. It is at these moments of imposition and mistranslation that certain subjects (both people and topics) are sentenced to death and relegated to a zone of (legal) unintelligibility. But the power of the law is not complete. What has been murdered can also be resurrected. Unauthorized experiences and knowledges that cannot be translated into the law’s language of equivalence and neutrality may become “ghosts” in the sense that they become powerful forces in other cultural arenas. According to Avery Gordon,
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See Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991); David Theo
Goldberg, Michael Musheno, and Lisa C. Bower, eds ., Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies
(Minneapolis: U of Minnessota P, 2001); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical Race Theory,
2d ed., (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000); and Carl Gutierrez’s Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race,
Rhetoric, and Injury (New York: New York UP, 2001) and Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano
Culture and Legal Discourse (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995).

these ghosts produce structures of feeling that resist turning particular experiences into the abstract, fixed social forms that methodologies regard as “significant.” 2 It is important to remember that these ghosts do not passively moan on the perimeters of interpretive edifices. Quite the contrary, they chip away at the structures of meaning that have excluded them, hoping for entry and resurrection. In the case of the Chicana/o community, the discourse of citizenship has produced ghosts in Chicana/o narratives of the undocumented. The legally enforced dichotomy between citizen and the undocumented has led the Chicana/o writers in this chapter to write about the spectral byproducts of citizenship and political borders.
We begin to understand how the disjuncture between the Chicano/a community and the law has created a ghostly borderlands when we realize that many Chicano families and communities are composed of both legal and illegal residents. Furthermore, continuing Mexican migration to the United States has made it difficult for “legal”
Chicana/os to use the benefits of their citizenship or legal residency to make a neat and painless division between themselves and the undocumented. Even legal Chicana/os realize, as they walk in their neighborhoods and eat at the family table, that they make their lives and homes with people who are legally absent—dead in the face of the law.
This is not insignificant. Whether citizens or legal residents, Chicana/os are not unaffected by the INS. INS agents may raid the neighborhood, the workplace and even the home to cart away neighbors, coworkers, and family; Chicana/o U.S. citizens may even find themselves mistaken as undocumented.
2 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1997).
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This situation has created the need for an alternative space from which to articulate concerns that resist the logic of abstraction and the amnesia of the law. As this dissertation has continually argued, fiction provides one such alternative space by embracing what the law cannot imagine. Similarly, Lisa Lowe and Avery Gordon see fiction as a site that gives voice to what official legal discourse (Lowe) or formal methodologies (Gordon) cannot represent. For Gordon, fictions “enable other kinds of sociological information to emerge” because it is not “restrained by the norms of a professionalized social science, and thus often teaches us, through imaginative design, what we need to learn but cannot quite get access to with our given rules of method and modes of apprehension.” 3
Lowe sees literature and other cultural practices as the ground from which to launch a counternarrative to official discourse:
Because it is the purpose of American national culture to form subjects as citizens, this distance created […] alternative cultural site[s], site[s] of cultural forms that propose, enact, and embody subjects and practices not contained by the narrative of American citizenship. […] I have insisted on […] present[ing] a model for interpreting literature and culture as social forces, as nodes in a network of other social practices and social relations.
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This chapter hopes to examine the particular ethical nature of fiction as an alternative site. In doing so, as this project has continuously argued, fiction as a counternarrative is transformed into a site of ethical deliberation.
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Gordon 25.
4 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke UP, 1996) 176.
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By “ethics” I do not mean morality, with its emphasis on an adherence to a code of conduct. In fact, contemporary Chicana/o borderlands ethics works against codification and more towards disruption. It advocates, to use Zizek’s formulation, letting what is foreign enter the legal edifice in order to create new norms and, more importantly, new universal criteria by which to judge such norms. In doing so, contemporary Chicana/o fiction gives voice to an ethical imperative for the United States to form a new relation between itself and Latin America, one that involves weakening borders and blurring the distinction between citizen and noncitizen. Not surprisingly, the law has ignored this imperative for the sake of its own coherence. As a result, Chicana/o literature has become one of the main sites to imagine a new democracy based on an ethics that avoids transferring the dynamics between nations states to the level of community. In other words, this particular hospitality asks people to approach each other as neighbors and not as members of nations.
In the fiction of Helena Maria Viramontes, Daniel Chacon, and Guy Garcia, this disruptive “foreign” element is represented by the figure of the haunted/haunting undocumented immigrant, who has the fantastic power to merge people and places. This chapter will focus on how these Chicana/o authors have chosen to eschew a realist strategy for representing the plight of the undocumented. While these fictions of the undocumented deal with very real social inequities, the power to create an alternative understanding comes from occupying the space between realism and fantasy, and between politics and ethics. Haunting thus becomes a strategy to voice the legally
“impossible” ethical call; “impossible” not because it is doomed to fail, but because at the
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present it is unimaginable for the U.S. government to create a borderless society and universal rights regardless of citizenship or legal status.
In giving the realm of imagination and fiction an ethical force, this chapter also endeavors to question the conflation between ethics and realism. There is currently a group of post-positivist realist literary scholars--many of them women, people of color, and/or queer—who use the concept of “experience” to launch a politically laudable attempt to expand the notion of the universal in order to give experiences by people of color an epistemic authority. Their arguments promise to contest the work of conservative critics who invoke the universal to eradicate identity politics. One of the most sophisticated of these critics is Walter Benn Michaels, who accuses identity politics of fixing people to a particular subject position with a singular perspective. According to
Michaels, such positioning makes debate an impossibility because there is no right or wrong; it is, after all, simply a matter of where one stands in society, so to speak. In his article, “The Shape of the Signifier,” Michaels gives the following example: Suppose you are traveling on foot, and you see indentations on the ground. However, once you are in an airplane one thousand feet above the ground, you realize that these indentations form a line from a poem. You cannot say which interpretation is correct because it is all a matter of perspective: it all depends on where you stand. This, he explains, is how identity politics prevent debate: it all becomes a matter of the perspective from where you stand.
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Through this example he creates a causal chain: if you are seduced by the appeal of shape then you have to appeal to perspective, which in turn becomes an appeal to the identity of interpreter. Walter Benn
Michaels, “Shape of the Signfier,” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (Winter 2001): 266-283.
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Post-positivist realists, on the other hand, employ the term “universal” for more radical ends. They claim that knowledge that comes from occupying a certain subject position is not partial; it can explain an entire social network. Their work contradicts claims like those made by Michaels because, for them, subject position does not produce a “local knowledge.” As Mingh T. Nguyen explains: “My claim, put otherwise, is that personal experiences of people of color […] refer outward, beyond their specific racial and ethnic contexts, to the general features of the one social world we all inhabit.” 6 Not only is this knowledge “universal,” it also creates a moral imperative to cultivate “our ability to perceive with creative attention the fine details of another person’s suffering and vulnerability, to vividly picture ourselves in another person’s place, [in order to] […] expand our moral imagination, making ourselves more likely to respond with morally illuminating and therefore a just sort of response.” 7 It is only when we accept the epistemic importance of marginalized people’s experience as knowledge that we can begin the project of having our “social and political theories, such as our theory of justice
[…] be concretized within the narrative ties of human relationships.” 8
Unfortunately, post-positivist realist literary critics have based fiction’s ethical force (its moral imperative) on its ability to represent “real/personal” experience, thus coming dangerously close to ignoring the imaginative and textual aspect of fiction. Paula
Moya’s definition of “experience” is a good example of this tendency:
6 Minh T. Nguyen, “’It Matters to Get the Facts Straight’: Joy Kogawa, Realism, and Objectivity of
Values,” Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, eds. Paula Moya and
Michael Hames-Garcia (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000) 190.
7 Nguyen 190.
8 Nguyen 199-200.
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Experience here refers to the fact of personally observing, encountering or undergoing a particular event or situation . By this definition, experience is admittedly subjective. Experiences are not wholly external events; they do not just happen. Experiences happen to us, and it is our theoretically mediated interpretation of an event that makes it an experience.
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The above definition of experience, with its emphasis on “real experience,” or experience that one personally undergoes , raises the question of how such literary critics approach events, feelings, and insights that are born in the imaginative realm of fiction? This conflation of “personal experience” and “moral imperative” runs the risk of ignoring the ethical importance of fiction’s and imagination’s power to give voice to things that do not exist in reality in order to create a powerful critique of our present circumstances. As this dissertation has continually asserted, fiction provides one of the few sites available both
(1) to dramatize the ethical distance between “what is” and “what ought to be” and (2) in doing so to imagine what would be an ethically correct vision of the world that at present does not exist. The Chicana/o writers examined in this chapter move away from a dependence on real, personal experience and towards imagination in order to create a fictional world to address the experience of racism and injustice of a community rather than an individual . Only imagination and the fantastic, as the ghost stories in this chapter will demonstrate, can merge individual histories and experiences, self and other, in order to create an allegory of community formation.
9 Paula Moya, “Postmodernism, ‘Realism’,and the Politics of Identity: Cherrie Moraga and Chicana
Feminism,” Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, eds. Paula Moya and Michael Hames-Garcia (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000) 81. My emphasis.
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The Fantastic Site of Justice in Helena Maria Viramontes’s “Cariboo Café”
In Helena Maria Viramontes’s short story, “Cariboo Café,” justice can only be achieved through a departure from reality and entry into the haunted imagination of a grieving mother, whose son has been kidnapped and murdered by a totalitarian Latin
American government. Rendered spiritually homeless by her son’s death, the mother illegally crosses the border into the United States and becomes an undocumented worker.
As Dean Franco, in “Re-placing the Border in Ethnic Literature,” astutely notes, “the border crossing of the protagonists [in “Cariboo Café”] is matched, even instigated by, the border crossing of U.S. foreign policy.” 10
Franco uses “Cariboo Café” as a means of expanding the notion of the borderlands in order to propose that through its intervention in Nicaragua and Central America, U.S. foreign policy during the eighties (though not only then) could itself be termed a politics of the borderlands, acknowledging the porousness, even the interconnectedness, of the region. Although a malignant and cynical version to be sure, such a borderlands foreign policy, already implied in Borderlands/La Frontera, structures our relation to the border as much as the postmodernity of the border region.
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Consequently, in this story, to transgress reality is also to transgress both borders and the law in order to bring to light and put on trial U.S. complicity in the political violence of
Latin America.
10 Dean Franco, “Re-placing the Border in Ethnic American Literature” Cultural Critique 50 (2002): 120.
11 Franco 120.
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In this story, the grieving mother wanders the streets of an unnamed city in the
United States, where she encounters Macky and his sister, undocumented children who are lost in the streets. In her imagination, space and time warp; Latin America and the
United States blend, and Macky and her dead son fuse. In her fantasy, she believes that her son has been resurrected, and that she has been given a second chance to protect him.
Happily, she resumes her role as mother and takes the children to the Cariboo Café for dinner.
At this moment the story shifts from the third-person, omniscient narrator to the first-person voice of the Anglo cook. While the woman’s grief is told from a distance, readers are given an intimate perspective on the cook’s own grief. Like the undocumented woman, he too is haunted by the memory of a son who died in warfare. In the cook’s case, his son disappeared in Vietnam and is presumed dead. This loss drives the cook to seek out surrogate sons, like Paulie, a drug addict whose only similarity to his son is that had the son lived they would have been the same age. This tenuous connection is enough to make Paulie, a character who is portrayed as half alive, a poor surrogate for the cook, who shows him kindness in a gruff and piecemeal manner.
Paulie dies of an overdose, and his death places the cook in trouble with the law.
The police overrun the café and accuse the cook of dealing drugs out of his establishment with Paulie. Although the cook lost his first son in war and the death of his surrogate son makes him a target of police threats, the cook does not rebel against the State: he promises himself that he will not to give them an excuse to mistreat him again.
Consequently, when the INS raids the factory next door and a group of undocumented
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workers run into his bathroom, he tells the INS officers, when they enter his café, where the workers are hiding.
After he has resolved not to run counter to the law, he encounters the woman and the children for the first time. As he serves them, he sees Macky, who reminds the cook of his son. When the cook encounters the boy, he becomes tender and playful. In that moment, Macky resurrects, so to speak, two sons—the cook’s and the undocumented woman’s. However, there is one critical difference between the cook’s and the woman’s relation to Macky. While the undocumented woman has successfully resurrected her son, the Anglo cook of the “Cariboo Café” cannot. The cook is kind and playful with Macky, but it is not enough. Resurrection requires the transgression of borders and the law, and the cook has chosen to cross neither of these boundaries.
That night, before going to bed, the cook sees a news report about two missing children—Macky and his sister. He recognizes the children and realizes that the undocumented woman is a kidnapper. It is telling that at the moment he resolves to call the police, the face of the woman is erased from his memory, rendering him incapable of giving evidence. The next day, the undocumented woman and the children come to his café again. The woman is transformed. Her clothes are clean and her face is no longer dirty. The cook realizes for the first time that she is beautiful. He serves them and goes to the kitchen, where he comes to a decision. With the rationalization that a family should stay together, the cook calls the police. They arrive in a military-like procession and attempt to wrest the boy from the woman’s grasp. However, the woman has come to a decision of her own: she will not lose her son again; she will fight the state. The reader is then plunged into the woman’s mind, where the city police have merged with a Latin
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American death squad. As she fights the police/death squad, the narrative calls attention to this poor woman’s lament:
The cook huddles behind the counter, frightened, trembling. Their [police men’s] faces become distorted and she doesn’t see the huge hand that takes hold of
Geraldo [her dead son/Macky] and she begins screaming all over again, screaming so that the walls shake, screaming enough for all the women of murdered children, screaming, pleading for help from people outside, and she pushes an open hand against an officer’s nose, because no one will stop the man.
He pushes the gun barrel to her face. […] I am laughing, howling at their stupidity. […] I will never let my son go and then and then I hear something crunching like broken glass against my forehead, and I am blinded by a liquid darkness. But I hold onto his hand. […] I’ll never let go. Because we are going home. My son and I.
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Whatever sympathy we might have had for the cook’s decision is shattered by the woman’s screams of pain and loss. If we had previously regarded the woman as a kidnapper, this passage effectively suspends the logic of the law in order to usher in the ethical impact of this woman’s pain. In other words, as the undocumented woman fights with all her might, scratching, biting, even throwing hot coffee at the police, there is an ethical interruption of the law’s logic that transforms the grieving mother from a criminal to a force of righteousness. Following the grieving mother’s “insane” logic, the police are not depicted as agents of good attempting to reunite a family—quite the opposite.
12 Helena Maria Viramontes, Moths and Other Stories, (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1985) 75. All subsequent references to this book will be cited parenthetically in the text.
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They are depicted as brutal agents who are very similar to the death squads in Latin
America. They are the wrongdoers.
Political forces have made it close to impossible to achieve legal redress for her son’s murder in a court of law. No court will put both the Latin American government and the United States on trial for murder. Only a fantastic site of justice allows this woman to achieve justice by putting on trial all the players (the United States and a Latin
American government) responsible for her son’s murder. Rather than dismissing her fantasy as simple insanity, the story strives to represent the fusion of the fantastic and the real as the most compelling narration of her son’s death and others like him. More importantly, it allows the undocumented woman the opportunity to resurrect her son in order to save him and achieve a sense of agency. If the law has made a legal translation from grief to grievance an impossibility, the realm of fantasy and insanity has created an understanding of death and resurrection that bring the “malignant” forces involved in the production of a borderlands into clear relief.
It is through the story’s separation between “what is legal” from “what is just” that the narrative creates an ethical “transgression of the legal norm—a transgression which, in contrast to a simple criminal violation, does not simply violate…but redefines what is a legal norm…. [and] generates a new shape of what counts as ‘Good’.” 13
Through this reversal of right and wrong, the woman’s fighting back is not presented as an act “that eludes all rational criteria”; on the contrary, the ethical vision put forward by
13 Slavoj Zizek, Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001) 170.
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the narrative asks us to “recreate the very criteria by which it should be judged.” 14
In doing so, “Cariboo Café” creates an ethical narrative space in which a foreign element
(the undocumented woman) creates an understanding that cannot obtained within the rationale of the law.
Many critics have noticed how this screaming woman resembles the mythical figure of La Llorona, but I would like to point out how she is in many ways like
Antigone, a woman who deals with the other side of resurrection: burial. Antigone is a woman who defies the State’s injunction to bury her brother. Zizek has noted that in doing so Antigone heeds the Other’s call and is consequently transformed into a Thing, something that is monstrous because it lies outside law and convention. Antigone, like the grieving mother, is “excluded from a community regulated by the intermediate agency of symbolic regulations.” 15 Similarly, the undocumented woman in this story functions as the Thing. Consequently, if we as readers sympathize with this woman’s lament and insanity, we do so by hearing the call of the Other qua Thing, which asks us to understand that justice is not always governed by the symbolic mediations of borders and the law.
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If “Cariboo Café,” through the character of the undocumented woman, strives to have the reader respond to the call of the Other qua Thing, then the cook represents the
14 Zizek 170.
15 Zizek 163
16 For Zizek a ‘respect for Otherness’ is a resistance of any act that reduces the gap between ethics and politics, and between the unconditional and the conditional. In contrast to a mere legal gesture, the ethical act comes in the form of accepting the duty to transgress a norm in response to an Other’s call.
Consequently, pragmaticism (bending the law to the demands of life) and rigid legal formalism (an unconditional adherence to the norms of the law) are two sides of the same coin: “they both exclude the notion of transgressing the norm as an ethical act, accomplished for the sake of duty” (171).
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opposite response: he approaches the Other qua Third. In other words, he can only mediate his relations with others through the law. Unlike the woman who reunites her family by fighting the police and breaking the law, the cook can only reunite his family symbolically through the mediation of the State: he calls the police.
However, it would be a mistake to see the cook as simply an Anglo agent of the
State as some critics have done. Ellen McCracken, for instance, states that whereas “the
Central American woman heroically gives her life to save her surrogate son from what she believes will be capture by a military regime, the cook works together with the repressive force, informing the police about his surrogate son Paulie just as he tells them about other undocumented restaurant customers.” 17
However, in her attempt to align the cook with the authorities, she flattens the complicated manner Viramontes addresses issues of community, family, and the State. Even critics who recognize the cook’s vulnerability in the face of the law conflate the cook and the State. For example,
Saldivar-Hull points out that the “great irony here is that this man [the Anglo cook] is almost as much a victim of the capitalist system as are the undocumented workers. […]
This Anglo-American man has been similarly victimized by the imperialistic urges of a
U.S. government that led the country into a war in Southeast Asia.” 18
I, on the other hand, agree with Gutierrez-Jones and de Franco, and would argue that the cook, like the undocumented workers he serves, is also part of this borderland/liminal space, despite his citizenship. While McCracken, Harlow, and
17 Ellen McCracken, New Latina Narrative (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1999) 51-52.
18 Sonia Saldivar-Hull, “Sites of Struggle: Immigration, Deportation, Prison, and Exile,” Criticism in the
Borderlands, ed. Calderon and Saldivar (Durham: Duke UP, 1991) 218.
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Saldivar-Hull, use his cooperation with the authorities as a sign of the cook’s complicity with the State, de Franco sees this as coercion. Referring to the passage where the cook tells the INS agents where the undocumented workers are hiding, de Franco proposes that,
Pointing to the bathroom points him [the Anglo cook] out as a subject of police surveillance and coercion and underscores his status as a liminal figure. […]
Critically, her [the undocumented woman’s] resistance revises the café owner's acquiescence, but we learn that anger toward the coercive authorities springs from a similar well for both, for he too has lost a son, missing in action in the Vietnam
War.
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Critical legal studies scholar Carl Gutierrez-Jones takes this issue of coercion to pose a more provocative interpretation. For him, when the cook calls the police to reunite another family in order to reunite his own, “his recourses to the police are undercut by
[…] a recognition of the law’s hegemonic control over his decisions.” 20
In order to assert that “Cariboo Café” dramatizes two kinds of “decisions,” I want to focus on this issue of “hegemonic control” which forms a particular decision in both
Anglo and Chicana characters. One decision asks readers to think outside the logic of the law and beyond what they know as reality in order to imagine a justice that cannot be articulated by the present legal structure. The second decision involves submission to the authority of the State and allowing its laws to regulate one’s exchanges with others. In fact, if we compare “Cariboo Café” with “Neighbors,” another story in the collection that
19 Franco 124.
20 Gutierrez-Jones 120
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involves the second decision (calling the police), we can see how Viramontes avoids simplistic binary representations of the Anglo as State agent and Latina as State resistor.
In “Neighbors,” it is Aura, an elderly
Chicana character who calls the police to intervene on her behalf and make the Chicano gang members stop disrespecting her.
When she sees the police arrive in military fashion and violently arrest the boys, she immediately realizes her error in calling the police to mediate her relations with her neighbors. In both “Neighbors” and “Cariboo Café,” Viramontes crafts stories that deal with characters whose pain has been caused by the State. While the cook’s pain and loss of his son is the result of U.S. foreign involvement in Vietnam, Aura’s pain is caused by city development that has further fragmented and isolated the Chicano barrio. The barrio residents are held in stasis by a lack of opportunities in the midst of expressways and speeding cars whose movements—ironically and tellingly—have been made possible by the near destruction of Chicano neighborhoods. In Raul Hombrero Villa’s insightful
Barrio-Logos, he reads the works of Viramontes and other Los Angeles writers as an engagement with a dysfunctional L.A. urban milieu that has been “produced not only by freeway construction but by the range of infrastructure redevelopments constituting the brave new expressway world of Los Angeles.” 21 This “expressway generation of barriological writers [have taken] it upon themselves to document and deconstruct in various narrative modes.” 22
21 Raul Hombrero Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin: U of
Texas P, 2000) 15.
22 Raul Hombrero Villa 115.
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In a chapter entitled, “Phantom Exile,” Villa reads Viramontes’s “Neighbors” as a story that demonstrates how communal space and relations have been destroyed by the construction of an expressway system that relegates the barrio and its inhabitants to a ghostly, death-like existence. In Villa’s reading of “Neighbors,” the name of the elderly protagonist, Aura, is an indication of her presence/absence, as someone who is a “livingdead entity” and whose body is “more phantasmatic than corporeal.” 23
However, if we use it as a “companion” story in order to illuminate issues of ethics and politics in
“Cariboo Café,” we can see how both death and movement function similarly in both stories. To form a bridge between the two stories, I want to focus on the moment in
“Neighbors” when the elderly woman, Aura, tired of the incessant loud radio playing of a group of gang members, calls the police to get them to stop.
Before she makes the call, Aura gathers her courage and asks the gang members if they would please turn down their radio. In response, one of the boys laughs at her and opens a beer, telling her that they are home. Soon all the boys are laughing at Aura:
It was their laughter and her inability to even stand on her own two feet that made her call the police. […]
The world was getting too confusing now, so that you had to call the police to get some kindness from your neighbors . […] But when the police arrived, she fully realized her mistake. The five cars zeroed in on their target, halting like tanks in a cartoon. The police jumped out in military formation, ready for combat. (Viramontes 108)
One of the boys tries to escape from the police. He climbs Aura’s fence and falls on one of her rose bushes. Scratched and bleeding, he runs to Aura’s door, yelling and pleading
23 Villa 118.
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with her to help. Frightened, she refuses to open the door. A few days later, the gang retaliates and destroys Aura’s well-tended garden. The flowers that she had inherited from her mother’s own garden have been destroyed. Graffiti is sprayed everywhere, marking her garden as the gang’s domain. The story ends with Aura clutching her grandfather’s gun, which he used in the Mexican Revolution, aiming at the door, ready to defend herself from the gang’s further retribution. Although the cook’s and Aura’s motivations differ, the results of calling the police are the same: the police turn the communal space into something that resembles and recalls other war zones (Latin
American death squads, the Vietnam War, and the Mexican Revolution).
The cook and Aura interact with the Other qua the Third: they attempt to interact with their neighbors by calling on a symbolic authority, in this case the police, to regulate their exchanges with others. In connecting Aura from “Neighbors” and the cook from
“Cariboo Café,” the stories show how individuals may call on the power of the law, but it is soon clear that the State carries out its own will. In other words, individual intent may mobilize the police, but the legal machinery operates above and beyond interpersonal relations. By resorting to the law, the cook and Aura, show themselves to be trapped by and blind to the context of their suffering. The tragedy in each of these stories is how these characters call the police hoping to regulate communal relations that the State itself has put in jeopardy. Only the “insane” undocumented woman captures the full context to her suffering by transgressing reality and the law.
The Empty Legal Space and the Place of Community/Family in Daniel Chacon’s
“Godoy Lives”
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As Lisa Lowe points out, the discourse of citizenship actively works to repress the history of migration. It is in the act of being “represented as a citizen within the political sphere […] [that] the subject is ‘split off’ from the unrepresentable histories of situated embodiment” because such an embodiment would “contradict the abstract form of citizenship.” 24
However, due to the steady migration of Latinas and Latinos into the
United States and the close proximity of Latin America, Latinos have a long history of resisting citizenship’s requirement that we contain our identities within the boundaries of the nation. Consequently, the political becomes unethical when the nation’s claim to territory can only be accomplished by arresting the back-and-forth movement across borders; to end such movement would tear apart the relational fabric of Chicano/Mexican communities and families. When it comes to the question of Latinos in this country, the
United States is uncomfortably faced with a critical question, What are the political and ethical effects of having a group of people unable to imagine or narrate community and family solely within the borders of the United States?
Political borders are supposed to be sites where the rules are unquestionably applied in order to draw a line between nations and peoples. At first, Daniel Chacon’s story, “Godoy Lives,” follows this logic and in fact goes one step further: the border not only divides the United States from Mexico, it also separates Chicanos from Mexicans.
Here, the Chicano INS officers, not the Anglos, are the people who most diligently guard the border. However, as the story progresses, “Godoy Lives” reminds its readers that these divides can also be sites of ethico-political deliberation which, as Thomas Keenan points out in Fables of Responsibility , force one to question
24 Lowe 2.
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the most canonical and well-established definition of the political, the distinction between friend and enemy, we could also say that it reopens the question of politics as that of responsibility itself, the space and time of differences and thus of guards and rights, the right to question and to pass. […] [The border/frontier] is a chance for politics. […] It is the idiom and the possibility of the other, of the one who arrives.
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“Godoy Lives” is a story about a man who dies but whose green card lives on. Juan, a private timid man, is given a dead man’s green. All he knows about Godoy, the dead man, is that his father caught him having sex with another man and disowned him. Juan, a scared, timid man, goes to the border and picks a line where a white officer barely looks at the IDs held before him. The line passes quickly, until a Chicano INS officer replaces him. The Chicano is mean looking and suspicious. When it is Juan’s turn, the Chicano
INS officer asks him three times to repeat his last name. Juan is sure that this man has somehow guessed that he is not Godoy. Suddenly the INS guard exclaims “Cousin! It’s me!”
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The interrogation, this questioning of Juan’s name and his right to enter, suddenly becomes a family reunion between a Chicano INS officer and an illegal Mexican alien.
Not only does Pancho, the INS officer, allow Juan to enter the United States, he invites
Juan to enter his home. There is a clearly gleeful tone in the narrative; not only is the
Chicano INS agent incapable of guarding the borders of the nation against the undocumented, he cannot even keep them out of his home. Daniel Chacon’s short story,
“Godoy Lives” mocks any Chicana/o’s attempt to use his or her benefits of citizenship to
25 Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997) 11.
26 Daniel Chacon, “Godoy Lives” Chicano Chicanery (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2000) 7.
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create a boundary between him- or herself and Mexican nationals. The discourse of citizenship and borders is supposed to establish a distance between what is domestic
(here) and what is foreign (over there). “Godoy Lives,” however, collapses the distance between Mexico and the United States by highlighting their contiguous relation through an undocumented man’s adoption into a Chicano family.
As Chicano fictions, like “Godoy Lives,” make clear, the green card produces a different kind of distance: the distance between family/community and the nation. For example, Latino ethnographer Ralph Cintron sees identification cards and government documents “as signs of distance […] that came into being precisely because of a lack of face-to-face interactions.”
27
Cintron further suggests,
Being a member of a state is not the same thing as being a member of a community, a people, or a tribe. Membership in one of the latter does not necessarily entail a writing act that declares a relationship between an individual and the abstraction the individual belongs to. In contrast the state cannot exist without these recorded relationships. The management of individuals via the state, then, is a major function in which writing and other recording devices have been put.
28
Although legal documents are supposed to close the gap between the individual and the
State and authenticate their relationship with one another, these documents create a type of vacuum—an empty slot, so to speak. This empty space is born from the redundant nature of these documents in which a picture of a person is accompanied by a list of
27 Ralph Cintron, Angels’ Town, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997) 56-57.
28 Cintron 52
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physical characteristics: “One set of identifications mirror another set and both are meant to be mirrors of the real person being verified by an agent of the institution.” 29 However, the only object or objects being pointed to is the document itself or other documents. The undocumented have a long history of inserting their own set of representations in this borderlands between individual and the State. Chacon dramatizes the emptiness of this legal space by making the reader understand that the legal space is also a phantom space whose legal purposes can be derailed and overridden by family ties.
The shift from the border to the home transforms the name “Godoy” from legal identity to a name that comes attached with a life story and a set of relations. When Juan begins to hear the family stories of Miguel Godoy’s life, the line between his identity and the dead man’s become blurred. In Pancho’s home, when Juan sees photos of Godoy and
Pancho as children on a horse ranch, “the similarities between that child and how [Juan] remembered looking as a child were so great that it spooked him, as if he had had two lives that went on simultaneously. He almost remembered that day playing cowboys.” 30
At the dinner table, Pancho, the INS agent, begins to tell tales of Godoy as this great man who would fight with the bigger boys and who was admired by all the girls. Juan, a timid man who lacks Miguel Godoy’s self-confidence, develops a desire to insert himself in these stories: “Juan relished the stories, picturing it all and almost believing that he had done those things”(14). The story ends with Juan about to be introduced to Godoy’s mother. Juan fears he will be exposed as a fraud, but it turns out that she is senile; she can no longer distinguish between family and strangers.
29 Cintron 56
30 Chacon 11
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With Juan/Godoy’ return, the family’s ethical break, caused by the father’s homophobia, will be mended. The restoration of the family’s relational fabric will have two effects: Godoy’s mother will stop her grieving and Juan/Godoy will receive the inheritance that she has been holding for him. When Juan/Godoy aggress to be a partner in Pancho’s business ventures, this money can then be channeled back into the rest of the family. The ethical break in the family has transformed a simple green card into a haunted space that has been vacated by the living and capable of being occupied by complete strangers.
However, Juan’s acceptance of these new family relations is ethically ambiguous because it is not clear if he will continue his obligations to his family in Mexico. The question one is left with is, does Juan as Godoy mend old ethical breaks as he creates new ones? The other disturbing question is, what identities are killed in order to bring another identity to life? It is significant that in Juan’s assumption of Godoy’s identity, the unsanctioned gay identity disappears. While Juan gains Godoy’s memories, confidence, and inheritance, he does not acquire his sexual desire for men. Juan’s Godoy is clearly straight. In fact, he falls in love with the sister of Pancho’s wife, thus tightening the family circle even more closely. Because the narrative stops short of completely merging
Juan and Godoy, the gay man who is not brought back to life continues to haunt this story. Despite the story’s intentions, the repression of homosexuality gives the discourse of citizenship the power to create a number of unsettling effects that the story cannot seem to contain. We are forced to ask ourselves, how does the family work in conjunction with—rather than against—the discourse of citizenship and borders? As we stated above, the discourse of citizenship and borders represses certain histories.
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Similarly, how does the family repress certain histories, like homosexuality, for the sake of its own coherence? Although the text does not resolve the ethical issues it raises, what is clear is that the text refuses to narrate Juan’s border crossing strictly through the political vocabulary of legal and illegal. Instead the story brings in issues of ethics to subvert the inside-outside logic of politics and therefore erase distinctions between legal and illegal, family and stranger.
In both “Godoy Lives” and “Cariboo Café,” it is grief that gives the undocumented the fantastic power to merge people and places, thus weakening the borders of the self and the nation. Both stories enact this resurrection through the fusion of the dead and the living and the subsequent transformation from stranger to family member. It is the weakening of self boundaries in the face of another’s grief that creates an allegory of Chicano/Latino community formation. It is these stories’ dependence on fusion and porous self boundaries that defuses Benn Michaels’s other line of attack: identity politics balkanizes the social map and creates fixed subject positions with particular perspectives. Contrary to Benn Michaels’s assertion that identity politics leads to the formation of a rigid subject position with a fixed and singular viewpoint, the above work by Chicana/o writers depends on the abolishment of rigid subject positions in order to advance a political agenda through narrative. These works of fictions narrate and imaginatively theorize community based not only on porous borders between nations, but porous borders between people.
In fact the political commentary of these stories reaches its full strength through the merging of a series of dichotomies: reality and fantasy, self and other, legal and illegal, the United States and Latin America. These Chicana/o writers use the undocumented migrant to render both personal/bodily and national
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boundaries unstable, thus creating an entry in the legal edifice’s armor. They take this tiny opening and consistently widen it until by the end of the narrative the divide between citizen and noncitizen, Latin America and the United States, seem not only surmountable, but also patently illusory and false.
The Undocumented Woman’s Power of Disarticulation: Faith Versus Politics in
Guy Garcia’s Skin Deep
In Guy Garcia’s Skin Deep, it is the protagonist David Loya’s grief over the plight of an undocumented woman, Josefina, whom he has never met, that causes him to sever his connections with the law and the political arena. In the end, he returns to
Mexico, guided only by Josefina’s haunting presence in his dreams and by his grandmother’s stories. Originally published in 1988, Guy Garcia’s novel, Skin Deep, is in many ways a repetition of Richard Rodriguez’s memoir, Hunger of Memory
, but with a difference.
Both Richard Rodriguez and the fictional David Loya have attained a college education and advanced degrees. David Loya left the barrio of East L.A., went to
Harvard College and graduated from Harvard Law School. He then obtains a position at a top New York law firm. Like Rodriguez, David Loya’s education and subsequent upward class mobility have separated him from his parents. David realizes that he could never repay his parents for the sacrifices they made. He felt that “by fulfilling their dreams for his success in a world they could never know or enter, he had simultaneously
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betrayed them.” 31
Guy Garcia uses the figure of the undocumented Mexican immigrant to bridge this gap between Mexican parents and Chicano son. Haunted by an undocumented woman’s suffering, David Loya will abandon his privilege and reconnect with the barrio and his parents.
When the reader is first introduced to David Loya, he is disgusted with his job as a highly-paid corporate lawyer. The firm is hired to litigate a patent case concerning a satellite, which would involve both parties in lengthy, expensive litigation. By the time the case is resolved, the technology will have become obsolete, rendering the decision useless. David Loya commits professional heresy when he sends a memo that strongly recommends that the firm not take this case. He fails to understand that what is important are billable hours, not fairness or utility. His superiors suggest that he take a vacation.
David realizes that neither his presence nor his absence would make “any difference, the briefs and meetings and citations seemed to have a will of their own. The wheels of justice would go on and on without him”(Garcia 10).
Just as David begins to make plans for his “vacation,” he receives a call from
Kurt, his Harvard roommate and the son of a prominent California senator. He is running his father’s re-election campaign and he has run into a problem: an undocumented
Mexican maid, Josefina Juarez, has stolen some very important papers that could cost the senator the election. Kurt has tried to find Josefina, but people in the barrio will not talk to Anglos; he needs David to serve as an intermediary. As David progresses in his
31 Guy Garcia, Skin Deep (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 35-36. All subsequent references to this book will be cited parenthetically in the text.
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search, he realizes that Josefina is not a criminal but a rape victim. Through this stark contrast between the innocent undocumented woman and the corrupt, rapist politicians, the text represents the vulnerability of the undocumented in any encounter with the legally enfranchised. The plot is moved forward by David Loya’s search for Josefina and her unborn child, who comes to represent both the violent confrontation between legal and illegal residents and the promise of a politically disruptive force.
David’s search for Josefina is complicated by the fact that a barrio gang, the M-1
Boys, headed by a leader called Huero (whose name phonetically resembles the Spanish word “guero,” which means blonde man), are threatening to disclose Josefina’s rape and pregnancy to the press. Huero claims he wants justice. He is willing to keep quiet about
Josefina’s rape if the senator agrees to change his re-election platform to include better housing, more schools, and higher welfare payments for the Chicana/o community. Just as David is close to finding Josefina, the senator’s hired thugs beat her and make her miscarriage; she loses her will to live and commits suicide.
Josefina is caught between two political players, Huero and the Senator. As a political tool, she holds the promise of disrupting the political system and making it vulnerable to the demands of the barrio. But in the end that promise is never realized because she commits suicide. While death takes away her “political” power, it is as a haunting presence that the figure of the undocumented woman gathers her disruptive ethical power as a transcendent Other. For Levinas, anchoring the community in God is the surest way of having transcendence enter politics, thus preventing the community from becoming totalitarian. As Simon Critchley, reading Levinas, states,
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Transcendence enters into politics in the relation to the singular other, the being who interrupts any synoptic vision of the totality of social life and places me radically in question. The community remains an open community in so far as it is based on the recognition of difference, of difference of the other to the Same: community as difference affirmed through Yes-saying to the stranger.
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Josefina Juarez, who begins the novel and disappears after the first chapter, is very explicitly aligned with religious transcendence. This connection almost makes her a stock character of the Mexican immigrant: she wears a shawl; she has a rosary in her hand; and she is praying to the Virgen de Guadalupe . It soon becomes clear, however, that depicting Josefina in such overtly religious tones aligns her with a higher power in order to ascribe a transcendent ethical power to undocumented Mexicans.
During most of his search for Josefina, David marvels at tales of this woman’s incredible faith. He remembers that when he was in Rome, he visited St. Peter’s
Cathedral. Looking at the architecture, he felt a sense of awe, not for God, but for man’s monumental efforts to transcend his own mortality. Ashamed, he realized that he could understand God intellectually but never believe. The sight of any church made him feel guilty of his heretical doubt. Josefina’s faith becomes both a source of fascination and envy for him: “Walking past the scuffed pews of Our Lady of Guadalupe, David tried to imagine Josefina Juarez kneeling at the altar and envied her. She had been able to find refuge here. Whereas all David could feel was the unease of an interloper whose very presence was a mockery of something sacred and unknowable”(Garcia 58). It is
32 Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, [1992]
1999) 219.
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significant that it is the Church that offers the illegal immigrant and not the assimilated
Chicano a sanctuary and feeling of refuge. For most of the novel, the Church will function as the antithesis to the realm of politics. Part of David’s return to the barrio involves abandoning his materialist stance and resuming a more spiritual relation to his community.
David’s loss of faith began when his family travels to Mexico and brings back his aunt and cousin to Los Angeles. At the border, David is afraid that he will be mistaken for Mexican and resents his Mexican cousins for coming with his family, “as if their very presence in the car has somehow tainted his family” (Garcia 110). In the car ride back, his cousin seduces him, which causes him to feel both repulsion and desire. He continues to have sex with his cousin until one day she asks him if he loves her. He lies, and says yes. She then tells him that they should get married. Afraid of such a commitment, David buries his mother’s ring in the backyard, knowing that his parents will blame his cousin and aunt and kick them out. It is at this moment of betrayal that David moves from faith to reason:
That night he prays for God’s forgiveness and help. But David knows God isn’t listening. […] God will not help him get Lupe and her mother out of the house.
So David stops praying and kneels instead at the altar of reason. […] Most important of all, to worship at this church David needs neither sacraments nor the
Bible nor divine forgiveness. All he has to do is think. (111)
When David turns away from God and the spiritual realm, he also betrays his Mexican relations. In order for David to reconnect with the community he must return to the spiritual.
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Josefina’s ghost reconnects David Loya with the spiritual world, and the text’s ending reflects this turn. It moves from the world of corrupt politics to a world of myths, dreams, and memories. The book ends with a dream of Josefina guiding him back to
Mexico and a childhood memory of his grandmother in the garden. The grandmother tells him that the family buried their gold in Mexico to hide it from Pancho Villa, but that they never found it again. Perhaps when he returns to Mexico, he will be the one to rediscover his family’s inheritance and keep it.
Josefina’s suffering at the hands of a politician creates two ethical disruptions: first, she makes the California political process vulnerable to the demands of the barrio; and second, in disrupting this political process, she also disarticulates David Loya’s assimilationist values. Using Emmanuel Levinas’s definition of the ethical, Josefina functions as an ethical force that interrupts totalized politics and unquestioned political assumptions. Levinas calls this disruptive ethical force “Saying,” which disrupts and interrogates one set of values in order to create a new, more ethical set of values, which themselves are also vulnerable to disruption. Similarly, the novel first presents David’s materialist values, which have begun to be questioned but not abandoned; they form an uninterrogated Said. It is Josefina’s haunting presence that will interrupt David’s life; this interruption, or Saying, causes David to interrogate his assimilationist values thoroughly and abandon them. David renders himself vulnerable by falling in love with the absent Josefina, or rather he falls in love with her plight as an undocumented woman.
It is this love that makes it impossible for David to create a break between the undocumented and himself. In one of the final scenes, Kurt, the senator’s son, tells
David that David is part of the enfranchised, powerful, and largely Anglo elite. David
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replies that if killing an innocent were what it takes to remain in the club he would rather not join. By the end of the novel, a new set of values—a new, justified Said—has emerged. Unfortunately, it is not clear what political viability, if any, these new values possess because in the end David eschews the political realm altogether in favor of myth, dreams, and memory.
Furthermore, the sole representation of Chicano political activism is an ambivalent one. The Chicano political leader, Huero, is not a hoodlum but an intelligent, educated man. Like David Loya, he too went to college. He even worked as a high school teacher for a few years. He tells David,
“I went to college, you know. […] I could have been like you if I had wanted to. I could have crossed the line and never turned back. You and me, we’re not so different, really. We’re brothers under the skin. […] Not the brown skin people that others see. […] The layer just below it. The skin we live in. […] That’s why
I quit teaching. […] I realized that I was actually telling my kids to put on somebody else’s skin, a skin that could never stretch enough to fit them.”(Garcia
149)
For Huero, education serves as an ideological tool that is used to constrain Chicanos. It is clear that Huero represents the other path available to intelligent, educated Chicanos.
Instead of taking advantage of his education to assimilate—or as he puts it, “cross the line and never turn back”—he becomes a revolutionary force in the barrio. In doing so, he functions outside the official political arena and beyond the two-party system. For
Huero, party distinctions are irrelevant for the Chicano community since both parties submerge the needs of the barrio to advance an Anglo agenda.
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Despite Huero’s grassroots political activism, the text cannot avoid making his political action appear as another form of totalitarianism. The M-1 Boys, as both a political force and a gang, have established their power by claiming the barrio as their territory. They may inspire respect and gratitude, but they also inspire fear in the residents. While the text may claim, through Huero, that there is no distinction between
Democrats and Republicans, it also seems to gesture at the possibility that, whether it is a grassroots organization or an established political party, there are no truly innocent parties in the realm of politics.
Josefina, like the other ghosts in these stories, makes it difficult for Latina/os like
David Loya to blithely accept the rhetoric of democracy. The ethical obligations that these ghosts represent make it difficult for Latina/os to become (legal) subjects—entities with impermeable self boundaries and intentions that do not change in the face of an other. The law assumes that individuals function as “self-determined subjects, expressing consistent, unambivalent, and unexceptional desires. […] People in this mode presumably seek ‘their ends in a private world of voluntary transactions freed from force or unnatural necessity by a state that imposes only clear rules against illicit force.” 33
It is this legal logic that, as Patricia Williams points out, has transformed words like “freedom” and “choice” [into] forms of currency. They function as the mediators by which we make things equal, interchangeable. It is therefore not
33 Kelman as qtd in Guttierrez-Jones 171.
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just what “freedom” means, but the relation it signals between each individual and the world. It is a word that levels difference .
34
In other words, while the law proposes subjects with intact and knowable desires, the ghosts in these works fight against such self-contained subjects in order to build an ethnic unity among strangers through loss and the gaps in the legal edifice.
The works of fiction examined in this chapter use the figure of the undocumented migrant to imagine the ethical impact of interruption. In this manner, their narratives of the undocumented reflect how the contemporary Latina/o community has resisted the primacy of identity as citizen in order to advocate for the undocumented and promote an ethical call that opposes any distinction between the United Sates and Latin America, citizen and noncitizen. By narrating the plight of the undocumented through the trope of haunting, Viramontes, Chacon, and Garcia use fiction power’s to create impossible visions (insanity) or events (merger) in order to imagine a different conception of family and justice that the “reality” of laws and borders makes “impossible.” The ghost stories written by these Chicana/o writers voices the legally “impossible” ethical call that would close the divide between Latin America and the United States. It is “impossible” not because it is doomed to fail, but because at the present it is unimaginable for the U.S. government to create a borderless society and universal rights regardless of citizenship or legal status.
34 Williams 31. My emphasis .
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