I’m starting to sink my teeth into some sources that might lead me in a sensical direction for my project, and along the way I’ve come up with several new ideas and buzzwords. These discoveries all lead me to ask myself the same question, though: how do I tie this into transnational history–is it even possible? Right now I’m reading a book by Martha Menchaca called Recovering History, Constructing Race in which Menchaca approaches history with a ‘racial history’ perspective and methodology. Books like this tend to incorporate an ethnographic approach, and I like ethnography–I’d love to try to bring in an ethnographic edge to my project, but I don’t know if the result would be the piece of transnational history I’m looking for. Chicano’s live a transnational reality that gives them a certain liminal ‘otherness’, and this can manifest itself geographically if you zoom your scale in on the border and border studies. That being said, there is a rich cultural history that can be found here.
Let’s try to apply transnational history. Menchaca explains that the ‘Mexican American’s indigenous past is situated both in Mexico and in the Southwest [of the United States]’ (25). In addition (or perhaps because of this), migration is also engrained into their indigenous past, and in the case of Chicano indigenous identity, it differs from its Mexican counterpart–and it goes back to before the Aztecs.
Aztlán is a Nahuatl word which means “the land to the north; the land from whence we, the Aztecs, came.” There’s sort of a tension here, though, because this land, Aztlán, is located right (this is where it gets interesting and transnational, so bear with me)….
Seems complicated that It gets even more complicated. During the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in 1969, Alberto Baltazar Urista (Alurista, as he is known professionally) stated:
In the spirit of a new people…we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán, from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny…With our heart in our hand and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo* Nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the Bronze Continent, we are a Nation. We are a union of free pueblos. We are Aztlán. (cited in Rendón 1971:10).
From here we get the idea of the “Hispanic Homeland” and we have all of these Chicano organizations such as Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) and The Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) (are these transnational organizations?). Believe it or not, a fair number people and organizations, particularly ones of Chicano descent and affiliation, actually want this land reclaimed as the Hispanic Homeland.
To me this looks like a potential transnational hotspot given the almost constant flow of people that dates back to prehistory, the existence of an identity that affiliates with two nations and ethnic backgrounds equally (at least in theory), and dispute over a giant piece of land and the nation to which it belongs.
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*A person of combined European and Amerindian descent (https://www.britannica.com/topic/mestizo)
http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-myths-legends-americas/lost-city-aztlan-legendary-homeland-aztecs-002550
Menchaca, Martha, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin, 2001).