Too often critics fixate on multicultural literature’s identity awareness. They become disproportionately preoccupied with the cultural discomfort immigrants face as they reconcile contradictory aspects of selfhood into a stable, multicultural identity. It’s all the rage to dissect literature through the frame of identity politics, the study of the shared injustices suffered by specific social groups. But beware; identity politics can misconstrue immigrant literature.

To appraise the immigrant experience as a journey toward self-concept can be incredibly formulaic, sentimental, and cliche. The study of self-identity certainly has power to enlighten, so I do not wish to demean those authors and critics who devote scholarship toward identity exploration. Nevertheless, I dislike the manner in which naive, unrelenting, and sweeping identity politics can eerily transform a multicultural work into little more than a nostalgic (Western) coming-of-age novel, in which the protagonist tackles adventure, conflict, and pain in his or her quest for maturation (replete with the entertainment value of exotic characterization and curious trumpery, of course).

Like Porochista Khakpour, I suspect that American publishers deserve some blame for carving this “maudlin” archetype of immigrant literature. Market demand has an amazing chokehold on publishing companies. Most American readers expect one of two approaches to immigrant literature: romanticization or politicization. Many perceive the immigrant experience romantically. To them it is a journey from intimidation to liberation, from servitude to autonomy, from poverty to wealth. They expect a slow, emotionally-charged maturation process in which a sympathetic protagonist pacifies his/her homesickness for the old country by grasping hold of the American dream and overcoming prejudice in city ghettos.* The rest typically anticipate a political commentary, one which emphasizes the discriminated, marginalized, and misunderstood fate of immigrant groups. These readers anticipate the tale of the disillusioned immigrant, a man or woman who fled to America for refuge only to encounter the same ethnic strife, economic oppression, and political friction he or she fled rampant in the United States.

Although audience expectation plays a large role in the archetypal frame that American publishers impose on multicultural literature, publishers have proven they can downplay the sentimental and/or cultural realism of outdated archetypes in response to the crisis in the Middle East and post 9/11 global tension. (Of course, there is much more room for growth; for instance, I’d love to see migrant accounts of third-world migration to less traditional havens or more contemporary transnational narratives.) Nevertheless, our critical approach must shift as well. To holistically appreciate multicultural literature, I believe you must step beyond the frame of the formulaic identity crisis whenever possible because it implies an absolute beginning and endpoint, a narrative too simplistic for today’s global realities.

Gloria Vando’s Promesas: Geography of the Impossible presents just such an opportunity. While Vando beautifully portrays that discomforting immigrant identity, as a Puerto Rican post-immigrant, Vando views her identity as symptomatic of a larger conflict. Vando frames her own conflicts as arising from contradictions between cultural promises and cultural realities. Her poetry tackles the “disparity between [the] promises and reality” of both Puerto Rican and American culture. As a Puerto Rican immigrant, Vando lives a life of multiple estrangements. Puerto Rican islanders stiff-arm the mainland Ricans, yet mainland Ricans find an “American” identity improbable and unwieldy because of Puerto Rico’s commonwealth relationship with the USA. It’s a tale of transnational gone sansnational. Through two poems in particular, Vando voices her frustration with not only a suspended identity but also–dare I say, more importantly–the manner in which each country’s reality undermines their own mythic culture.

In “Nuyorican Lament” Vando begins by announcing:

San Juan you’re not for me.

My cadence quails and stumbles

on your ancient stones:

*

there is an inner beat here

to be reckoned with–

a seis chorreao, a plena,

an imbred ¡Oyeeee!

and ¡mira tú! against which

my Manhattan (sorry

wrong island) responses fall flat.

Vando continues with a lush explanation of her personal history and instinct to embrace this island which fails to reciprocate. Her closing stanzas depict the bitter injustice the island’s betrayal leaves on her tongue.

And now, you see me here,

a trespasser in my own past,

tracing a faint ancestral theme

far back, beyond the hard rock

rhythm of the strand.

I walk down El Condado, past

Pizza Huts, Big Macs and

Coca-Cola stands

listening for a song–

*

a wisp of a song–

*

that begs deep in my heart.

“Commonwealth, Common Poverty,” the second poem I want to highlight, grapples the universally unsavory dimensions of the American reality. The poem, dedicated to Zoltán Sumonyi, deals so broadly with the immigrant experience and the conflicting interpretations of that experience that I feel justified in posting the poem in its entirety below.

A visitor comes form Hungary as from outer space

dropping into my Midwestern world with poems

about himself and that bracketed place he hails from.

And though the gift he brings is veiled, submerged

in allegory and myth, I recognize myself. Say

to him: this poem you read is about me. He smirks.

*

He has read his poems before and not been heard.

He is weary, somewhat cavalier. His body is taut like

a gymnast’s. His eyes form flat black mirrors of distrust

adjusting to what he perceives as enemy turf. It’s August.

He sheds his jacket, rolls his sleeves above his biceps.

A pulse in his temple keeps rhythm with his words.

*

He tries again, leads me as he reads. I see us both,

two generations earlier, perhaps three, running down once

familiar streets with new strange names, and I am plagued

by what I might have been had nothing changed,

had Teddy’s boys not made it to the top of San Juan

Hill. Like him I, too, yearn for connections

*

between my parents’ world and this one, long for

a tie, cut short by strangers–does it matter

that his were Russians, mine American; or that

his lines allude to Greeks and gifts of death, while

mine–because our history has yet to be revamped–

still lament the Massacre of Ponce? Here we sit

*

in a Kansas City motel, hearing what we say

translated by a man we have to trust–could be

a friend, could be a secret agent–a clean-cut man

in a banker’s suit who keeps his jacket on,

claims he walked from Budapest to freedom, and

converts our pain into passionless sounds. Yes,

*

here we sit, feeling as our ancestors surely felt

the day their world shifted in its global socket

and everything they cherished perished in the quake,

leaving them disfranchised, disconnected from

their past, from each other, from themselves. How

they must have searched then for a look, a gesture,

*

a familiar word to ease their terror: the arch of a brow,

a jawline–something to bind them to their captors,

something so slight it might have gone unnoticed

had all remained whole. And we, their progeny, now

sit here immersed in Russian and American symbols:

we, their future, have become what they most feared.

“Commonwealth, Common Poverty” provides an opportunity to explore more than identity politics (the marginalized and marginalizing). It brings to mind questions regarding the conflict between cultural memory and cultural history, the shape of constructed communities, and the mythic claims one’s personal past introduces. It is this kind of inquiry that attracts me to multicultural literature and begs me to defend it against increasingly outdated and archetypal perceptions of it.

*

*I will say too much if I attempt to issue a rebuttal to this idealism. Suffice it to say that these perceptions are built on the misguided presupposition that all human beings equally value the prodigal amounts of liberty and wealth this country affords its citizens. Too few recognize that many immigrants are seeking some opportunity rather than this opportunity.

I catch myself appreciating Santiago’s novel on both an academic and personal level. Academically, I respect the range of material Santiago introduces and explores. Her first novel makes Puerto Rico a home. I found that refreshing. Often American migrant novels detail the distressing conflict between the migrant community’s expectations for America and the painstaking pull of homesickness and cultural isolation; typically, the novels emotionally climax in hard-won, familial affection for America. Santiago’s work explores her own migrancy in three different books; this allows the first novel to convincingly establish the joys and sorrows of life before America. In some respects WPR feels as much an emigrant novel, detailing a slow, necessary, and miserable divorce, as it is an immigrant one. Against the background of Esmerelda’s turbulent life, America presents more than an economic advantage but an opportunity for reinvention and release. Although America is not the solution to the Santiago family’s tumult, America affords Esmerelda distance from one way of life and the opportunity for another she may not have found otherwise.

Personally, and much more than other Puerto Rican works, WPR made Puerto Rico uniquely accessible to me. As a third-generation Puerto Rican immigrant (more precisely, post-immigrant or post-colonial), I carry a characteristic thirst to return and retrace what I feel I should already know. WPR cracks the door open to a past I’ve been unable to see or hear. Ironically, we are speaking of such a small opening that I scornfully laugh at my own pleasure in that sliver of space in the door frame. In reality, it wasn’t Puerto Rico that clarified (after all, Santiago writes of life on the opposite side of the island from where my father’s family would have lived), but life on the island and as a Puerto Rican. To my surprise, I identified with this proud, misfit Esmerelda in more ways then I care to admit online.

Last week I professed ignorance with some frustration in response to my Puerto Rican coworkers’ questions about my family. “Don’t worry.” They smiled wryly. “Not knowing the truth about your family…that is being Puerto Rican. I don’t think any of us really know who are Papi is.”

* There is some danger in unchecked self-identification with migrant literature. See “Anzaldúa’s Mestiza: Now You See Me, Now You Don’t.”

Few celebrate the Christmas holidays as extensively as the Boricuas, whose traditions closely intertwine with those of the Catholic Church. Boricua Christmas consists of a month of consecutive holiday feasts. So, regardless of the every-growing influence of the United States on both Puerto Rico’s emigrants and the island, Boricua Christmas has been slow to homogenize:

• December 16-24th: Puerto Ricans celebrate Misas de Aguinaldo, a series of early morning Catholic masses which prove almost exclusively song services. These song services include religious and traditional aguinaldos (Puerto Rican Carols) which are labeled villancicos to separate them from their more rowdy counterparts. Unlike the majority of Puerto Rican celebrations, this tradition originated in Mexico and then spread to the Carribean.
• December 24th: At midnight, Misa de Gallo (the last Misa de Aguinaldo) provides a weighty climax complete with carolers, crèche, and candles. Of course, Nochebuena is Christmas Eve. Boricuas gather for celebrations, encouraging the excessive consumption of lechón asado (pit-roasted pig) and pasteles, that stretch late into the night.
• December 25th: Navidad proves more similar to the typical American celebration as it came from the States. Houses are decorated with lights. Santa spreads his good cheer. Nativity scenes crowd a corner of the home or yard (although nacimientos, scenes with the Three Wise Men/Los Reyes, hold more prominence than they are typically given in America). Caroling, or parrandas, plays an important role too. Puerto Rican parranderos creep out late in the night and assault unsuspecting households by waking them with aguinaldos (often criollo in flavor) at their doorstep. Each home that suffers a surprise joins the party of parranderos and the group continues throughout the neighborhood, growing louder and larger the longer they sing. This year even our Philadelphia newscast included video footage of Ricans’ rowdy carolling. The holiday meals include a feast of arroz con gandules, plátanos, and more pasteles. (Where it is possible, spit-roasted pig often fills the air with fragrance all day too.) Custard, nougat, and sweet rice fill the dessert menu.
• December 28th: Dia de los Inocentes also includes a feast. Traditionally, it’s quite carnivalesque, full of tricks and treats that remind one of April Fools’ Day in the States. (Horribly ironic, considering the religious significance of Herod’s Bethlehem massacre.) Few Boricuas celebrate it as such anymore because the tradition was much more strongly tied to the canarios, their ancestors from the Canary Islands. At most, it is a day of foolery.
• December 31st: Año Viejo includes fireworks and late night parties which climax at midnight when the chimes signal a new year. In honor of the literary, many Puerto Ricans participate in a reading of (the sentimental and humorously sexist) “El Brindis del Bohemio,” an occasional poem marking the holiday spirit. In Philadelphia (as on the island, I hear), Boricuas rush into their driveways or onto the streets in order to honk their horns or sound firecrackers in honor of the new year.
• January 5th: Víspera de Reyes, the eve of El Día de Reyes, honors the three Wise Men, as sainted and named by the Catholic Church. Traditionally, this day parallels the spirit of an American Christmas Eve. Children bounce with anticipation of the Kings’ midnight visit. Each child places a shoebox, filled with grass, cabbage, or other greenery for the traveling horses/camels to munch on, beneath their bed. On top of the bed of grass, the children place a gift wish list for the Magi. All children are admonished to be well-behaved and quick to sleep so that they do not scare away the Kings’ horses.
• January 6th: On Día de Reyes, Puerto Ricans remember the Wise Men and their adoration of Christ. Día de Reyes, it follows, parallels the mainland celebration of Christmas. Children awake at ungodly hours to discover a wealth of gifts beneath their bed, thanks to the generous Baltazar, Melchor, and Gaspar (yes, our Three Wise Men or Los Reyes Magos). Relatives bring boxes from beneath their own beds, filled with gifts which happen to be intended for the children whom the relatives are visiting. At some point, the family passes rosca de reyes, a beautiful ring of bagel-like breakfast bread decorated with candied fruit. The next three days include feasts in celebration of each Wise Man, backed by the legend and sainthood bestowed by the Catholic Church:
• January 6th: Saint Gaspar (Emperor of the “Orient”) Day
• January 7th: Saint Melchor (Sultan of Arabia) Day
• January 8th: Saint Baltazar (Nubian and Ethiopian Ruler) Day
• January 15th: Las Octavitas, a celebration in honor of the faith of the Wise Men, serves as a prelude to la Cuaresma (Lent) for the religiously observant. During this time Puerto Ricans also visit the homes of those who came to their own during the holidays. Today January 15th signals that it is time to take down the decorations and pack them away for another year. (As you can imagine, the secularization of these holidays typically shortens the celebrations to a two-week period, beginning Christmas Eve and ending on Kings’ Day.)

As a Protestant, third-generation puertorriqueña, I find certain Rican traditions startlingly logical (e.g., gift-giving on Día de Reyes). During the holidays, some Protestant celebrations share many of the same elements as these Rican traditions: song services, crèches, nativity plays, worship gatherings. Of course, a deeper look reveals a deliberate, theological divorce from Catholic sainthood, masses, rites, etc. That being said, many Protestants have separated themselves from all but stark observations of any religious holiday in reaction to the grandiose, liturgical traditions of the Catholic Church (which most Protestants believe to be largely heretical in its teachings and observances). In the home, modern Protestant celebrations involve little more than a nativity, the reading of Luke 2:1-20, and a tree. P. and I wonder over the ironic juxtaposition of Protestant hesitation in the development of distinctive, religious celebrations and the loud rally cries to “keep Christ in Christmas” or “make” Jesus “the reason for the season.”

Last Sunday P. and I taught the children in our church during the service. The Bible passage was the-one-and-the-same Adoration of the Christ. We incorporated a living crèche into the lesson, epilogued by an explanation of the Bethlehem massacre and discussion of divine sovereignty. It’s so easy to stop with what is familiar (Mary, Joseph, and the manger) and forget the wealth and breadth of detail the story of Christ’s nativity relates. This experience led me to toy with the idea of gingerly Protestantizing Día de Reyes by adopting the aspects which religiously affirm our own creed and celebration of the gospel. Yes, I’ve thoroughly analyzed the irony my bald, communal reconstruction of Día de Reyes would prove, but it’s to no avail. I just don’t mind if I do.

Borderlands/La Frontera has always had an ironic reception. Typically, white, feminist literary scholars lap it up (accepting it as an extension of their own identity theories), while the Latino/a academicians acknowledge Anzaldúa with cool reserve (with hopes of offsetting her extensive reliance on artistic license). Anzaldúa’s strength in B/LF doubles as a weakness. When read as a work of literature, B/LF embodies migrant angst. When read as a work of theory, its ambivalent use of terms transforms it into a discomforting, theoretical paradox. Although Anzaldúa’s representation of Chicano/a history and culture may leave something to be desired, her unique message deserves close dissection.

In “Cultural Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the Non-Unitary Subject,” Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano mediates between the justifications for these extreme receptions Anzaldúa’s work earned. Yarbro-Bejarano strives for a didactic neutrality, guiding rather than rebutting per se. Her exploration drove me to re-read B/LF with more attention, as I hope others will also do. To that end, I want to share Yarbro-Bejarano cautions against two pitfalls for the reader: (a) an eagerness to separate Anzaldúa’s theory from its contextual community and (b) a temptation to universalize la frontera experience. The opening paragraph of B/LF, characteristic of the author’s succulent, lucid prose, entices one to fall prey to both misguided applications:

The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country–a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.

Anzaldúa’s powerful writing leaves the reader with an emotional recognition of la frontera even if one must admit to being unfamiliar with the Chicano/a reality. While her contextual exploration is quite specific, it is easy to dabble in broader applications of her vivid (if unfortunately exhausted by postmodernists) borderland existence.

It is easy to assume that the terms of Anzaldúa’s own argument (boundaries, miscegenation, crossing, territory) fluidly fit within the dialogues taking place around other theory campfires which also seek to undermine binaries. But Anzaldúa’s ideas should probably be seen as part of a specific, original whole (lesbian, Chicana identity) rather than the theoretical conventions of another identity critic. Contextually, I suspect that Anzaldúa, to her credit or vice versa, writes as an island, solemn in its utter individuality. At the time of publication, B/LF was a bit of a lone reed (both by intention and default, I suspect).

Adjacent to these considerations, I want to piggy-back Yarbro-Bejarano’s cautions against any reading which would naively universalize B/LF’s identity issues. If I could state it better myself, I would, but Yarbro-Bejarano does so beautifully:

Anzaldúa’s Borderlands exemplifies the articulation between the contemporary awareness that all identity is constructed across difference and the necessity of a new politics of difference to accompany this new sense of self…[but] while Anzaldúa’s writing recognizes the importance of narratives of displacement in the formation of her subjectivity, she is also aware of the material conditions of existence, the real histories of these narratives.

Anzaldúa does not seem to be prolonging self-migrancy for post-modernity’s sake. Her identity battle involves more than self-displacement. It’s rooted in a specific, contemporary, cultural, and historical American identity battle. As such, I feel Borderlands/La Frontera will remain seminal even once its relevance to 21st century Americans fades. Re-read it if you get the chance. It deserves some appreciation.