A Poverty of Relations

Abstract

After reading Rag and Bone (2001), the most recent installment in Michael Nava’s Henry Rios series, the following question confronted me: Must we have yet another invocation of familia as the political, social, artistic, and economic staple of Mexican American culture? For too long we have retreated to family as the bastion of Mexican American culture, a refuge from which the encroachment of the “dominant” culture and its multiple oppressions might be escaped. It is less the reductive simplicity of the binary opposition between “dominant” and “subordinate” that provoked me than the notion that familia is a safe haven, an outside to society’s structuring power relations. Understood in this manner, familia has been the operative trope for forming Chicana/o social movements, once again missing the multiple ways in which family can itself be oppressive and generating a nostalgia for a family structure that might save us from the wicked world. More than a decade ago, Norma Alarcón instructed us to be wary of the family structure and the “crisis of meaning” its “engendering process” generated for the “female-speaking subject that would want to speak from a different position than that of a mother, or a future wife/mother.”¹ Drawing on Kristeva’s critique of the symbolic contract, Alarcón offered a new course for the “dissident (female) speaking subject”: “The speaking subject today,” she writes, “has to position herself at the margins of the ‘symbolic contract’ and refuse to accept definitions of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ in order to transform the contract.”²