“You can be both the apple and the hand who holds it”: Aztlán and the Politics of Storytelling in Anaya’s Heart of Aztlán and Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale

Year 2006, Issue: 23, 49 - 64, 01.04.2006

Pablo Ramírez

Abstract

The Chicano manifesto El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, which was presented at the Liberation Conference in Denver in 1969, posits an Aztec/indigenous origin in the Southwester United States. In doing so, they cast the Chicana and Chicano community as the rightful inheritors of the land. This embrace of this indigenous homeland, as Pat Brady explains, “enabled Chicana/os to analyze the United States in terms of its imperialist practices and thus to connect with other land-based struggles across the globe. […] In a sense a turn to Aztlán […] challenged the naturalized boundaries of the United States by positing an even more ‘natural’ claim to land through references to ancestors and cultural antecedents.”1 Despite the political usefulness of this homeland concept, this nationalist claim to land became a declaration of an “authentic” Chicano identity. Chicano nationalism tended to submerge internal differences in the name of union and promote patriarchal control of family and community as a necessary political stratagem for Chicano liberation. From its very inception, however, nationalist politics and its literature came under critique by Chicana feminists for its heteronormative and masculinist vision of community. As feminist critic Norma Alarcán points out, Aztlán implied “the need to ‘repossess’ the land, especially in cultural nationalist narratives, through scenarios of ‘origins’ that emerge in the self-same territory, […] producing in material and imaginary terms ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic,’ ‘legal’ and ‘illegal subjects.”