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‘My tongue doesn’t believe in boundaries’: A®tivism Across the US/Mexico Border

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Rethinking Identities Across Boundaries

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the work of Mexican American slam poetry a®tivists who question embedded narratives about borders and separation, national identity and belonging, and language(s), becoming powerful agents and advocates of social justice and change. Against the background of the polarized rhetoric describing Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants as illegals or criminals, a®tivists use the anti-elitist language of resistance. In the chapter, critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics are used to shed some light on how the militarized border wall, reinforced by former US President Donald Trump, can be virtually penetrated. A®tivistic performances, which crisscross genres from a gendered perspective, may help navigate and document the complexities of the border since they constitute a counter imaginary, generate healthier relationships across the border, allow community healing, and fight de-humanization.

This chapter is the result of a collaboration between the two authors. More specifically, Lorena Carbonara wrote the sections “Introduction” and “Linking a®tivism with la conciencia de la mestiza”, while Dora Renna wrote the section “‘My tongue doesn’t believe in boundaries’: A Linguistic Analysis of Border(s) (De)construction in Mexican American Slam Poetry”. The section “Conclusion” was written by the authors together.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jesús Barraz and Melanie Cervantes founded the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area-based Dignidad Rebelde, whose work they describe as ‘grounded in Third World and indigenous movements that build people’s power to transform the conditions of fragmentation, displacement, and loss of culture that result from histories of colonialism, patriarchy, genocide, and exploitation’. https://dignidadrebelde.com/.

  2. 2.

    ‘“Chicano/a”, defined in simplest terms, refers to people of Mexican ancestry living in the United States; it is most often used in reference to those born and raised on US soil. In the fullest sense, however, the terms “Chicano” (male) or “Chicana” (female) [or Chicanx, unisex term, ndr] carry profound political and social implications and have changed in meaning over the course of the past two centuries. Indeed, intense debates continue over the terms’ precise definition, whether or not they should be used at all, and, if so, in what context. The experience of Chicanos/as as both a conquered and an immigrant people shapes outside understandings and misunderstandings, as well as responses—to the word as well as to the people—in mainstream American society. As distinct from the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino”, which include all Spanish-speaking peoples and all peoples of Latin American ancestry (such as Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Hondurans, for instance), Chicano and Chicana refer specifically to Mexicans. They therefore stand for a unique historical experience and sociocultural legacy, as Chicanos/as can be seen as both a conquered and an immigrant people’ (Leonard and Lugo-Lugo 2013, n.p.).

  3. 3.

    See https://www.cbp.gov/document/stats/us-border-patrol-apprehensions-mexico-and-other-mexico-fy-2000-fy-2020. Accessed 30 May 2022.

  4. 4.

    This paragraph shows Anzaldúa’s use of language, her choice of expressing herself in English and Spanish, and also in some native languages throughout Borderlands/La Frontera. Given the importance code switching and code mixing have for the author, in terms of identity, politics and poetic, the Spanish expressions in the text were not translated.

  5. 5.

    While the multimodal aspects of slam poetry are certainly worth studying, the scope of this chapter is the poems’ lyrics since, in most available recordings, there is scarce visibility of the audience and setting.

  6. 6.

    Mercedez Holtry (Albuquerque, New Mexico) is a renowned slam poet, writer, student, and feminist (Simpson 2019); Anacristina Chapa is a slam poet and dentistry student (Bush 2018). At the time their poem was released, Paola Gonzalez and Karla Gutierrez were respectively 17 and 18 years old, and were students at the Animo Inglewood Charter High School (Literary riot 2016); Angelica Maria Aguilera is a teacher and slam poet living at the border separating El Paso (US) from Juarez (Mexico) (Mota n.d.). Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet and poetry teacher, and a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion (Brown n.d.).

  7. 7.

    The analysis was not centered on sentences because, given the hybrid form of this poetry, it seemed suitable to privilege its by-definition spoken nature, and sentences are not the most appropriate unit for spoken language (Butt et al. 2000). Punctuation in the reported examples was added to ensure readability.

  8. 8.

    Clauses including Spanish switches were also considered.

  9. 9.

    Looking beyond the scope of this chapter, the lines of these a®tivists spark countless possible research directions, for example, linked to the use of code-mixing and rhetorical figures (especially metaphors).

  10. 10.

    Her references to walls are subtle, and always linked to language. For example, when talking about the time her family migrated to the US, Brown says that her mother could not use Spanish, and so she could not ‘make a home outside of her body’ (2018, 01:06). Her mother’s own body becomes the wall her language cannot trespass. Indeed, Brown herself states that she has to learn Spanish again, as if she was confined on the other side of this invisible wall. More on this crucial part of the poem can be found in example (7).

  11. 11.

    For the original declaration see Trump (2017).

  12. 12.

    According to Aguilera, in 2005 the company CF Flags outsourced the production of starts and stripes flags south of the border, and many workers, especially women, were found dead on their way home after long hours of work. While outsourcing to Mexico is a widespread reality, albeit recently reformed (see Oetterich 2021), we were not able to retrieve information on outsourcing by CF Flags in particular.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Calabria, Rende (Cosenza), Italy

    Lorena Carbonara

  2. University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy

    Dora Renna

Authors
  1. Lorena Carbonara
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  2. Dora Renna
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Correspondence to Lorena Carbonara .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK

    Claudia Capancioni

  2. Gabriele d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Pescara, Italy

    Mariaconcetta Costantini

  3. University of Macerata, Macerata, Italy

    Mara Mattoscio

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Carbonara, L., Renna, D. (2024). ‘My tongue doesn’t believe in boundaries’: A®tivism Across the US/Mexico Border. In: Capancioni, C., Costantini, M., Mattoscio, M. (eds) Rethinking Identities Across Boundaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40795-6_3

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