Chicana/o indigenism draws from a wealth of source material, directly and indirectly, acknowledged and unacknowledged, creating cultural narratives that rely prominently on mythic accounts drawn from anthropology and archaeology. This study is about the complications and paradoxes of Chicana/o literary indigenism, most especially this reliance on the mythic. Focusing on Chicana/o critical discourse as it is articulated in the academy, fiction, poetry, and essay, Blood Lines examines a uniquely Chicana/o practice of valorizing the Indian. At the same time that I set out the distinct character of Chicana/o literary indigenism, I also place these writings within the context of dominant narratives of the Indian in the Americas, including Anglo-American and European modernist primitivism and the indigenismo of the post-revolutionary Mexican state. Made possible by the "techniques of knowledge" and "strategies of power" (Spivak, "Subaltern" 274) that previously assured subaltern silence, Chicana/o indigenism must be understood as yet another stage in the history of the representation of Indians.

Even as Chicana/o indigenist discourse puts forth its critiques of racial domination, colonial violence, and land removal, it remains embedded within the very "circuits" of knowledge and power that have advanced imperialist agendas. Gayatri Spivak calls it the "imbrication of techniques of knowledge with strategies of power" ("Marginality" 59), suggesting that modes of learning and claims of knowledge are informed by discourses of control and domination. Stuart Hall provides additional useful instruction on this topic as he addresses the question of cultural identity and representation. Challenging the simple binary of the Présence Africaine and the Présence Européenne in the Afro-Caribbean, he argues that the two are never exclusive, instead existing as mutually informing and transforming. He contends, however, that it is the European presence that has fixed the Black subject "within its dominant regimes of representation: the colonial discourse, the literatures of adventure and exploration, the romance of the exotic, the ethnographic and traveling eye, the tropical languages of tourism, travel brochure and Hollywood . . ." ("Cultural" 233).

Hall's list ranges from the documents of colonial administrators and religious authority figures to accounts penned by explorers and travelers in colonial outposts and settler sites. Consider another context, for example, the documentation of the conquest of the Americas. Here, we find the recordings of Nahua myth, the translations and transcriptions of Aztec codices, the accounts of pre-Conquest civilization extracted from Native informants, and the first-person accounts of military and religious campaigns. These texts over time entered public discourse and attained, in many cases, the status of scientific observation. "The ethnographic and traveling eye" gained legitimacy as its narrative production was institutionalized in the fields of anthropology and archaeology. All of these narrative forms, from the documents of colonial administration to the unsanctioned accounts of those operating outside the institutions of state and religious power, have left their traces in the "tropical languages" popularized by contemporary touristic and media discourses.

Such texts perpetuate the colonial discourses that defined colonized subjects, established and legitimated the institutional power exerted upon them, and, often, unwittingly, eternalized the presence of those subjects. But we must not lose sight of Hall's major point above, and that is that European representations of Black subjects have become "a constitutive element" of Black self-representation. In other words, such administrative and travel narratives not only instantiated the image of the colonized periphery in the minds of those in the colonial center, but also worked to produce identity for the very Indigenous subjects objectified in these accounts.

The Significance of Myth

Chicana/o indigenism is deeply influenced by these European and Anglo-American "regimes of representation," which structure Chicana/o indigeneity to an extent. It is impossible to consider pre-Columbian religion and history outside the context of their presentation. The artifacts that often engender indigenist response are accessed visually through museum exhibits, as well as through photographic and other forms of reproduction found in art books, anthropological texts, and explorer narratives. Thus, indigenism interlocks with the circuits of knowledge and power that I refer to above and that are evident in the distribution of pre-Columbian myth. The sustained and explicit use of myth in Chicana/o indigenist texts connects indigenist thematics to one of those circuits, specifically, anthropological discourse. Myth has been a primary realm of anthropological research and representation, from the translations of cave paintings and codices to attempts to collect the stories of a "vanishing race" in the western plains of the United States. In the case of the region known today as the state of Mexico, Western fascination with myth and its subsequent role in the circulation of information about Indigenous cultures and histories is evident in the numerous texts about the country, including the amateur anthropological travel accounts, which have taken the mythological as organizing theme.

Books like Neil Baldwin's 1998 Legends of the Plumed Serpent: Biography of a Mexican God, a tour through the "remote ruins" of Mexico, point to mythology as the defining feature of Mexico's pre-Conquest past, with almost complete disregard for Indigenous populations of the present. In recalling his decision to write the book, arrived at while lazing on the Isla Mujeres in some form of margarita-induced reverie, Baldwin recounts his dissatisfaction with the quality and quantity of materials designed to introduce the tourist to Mexico's past. Speaking about the site of Uxmal, he writes:

There was no mythic background for the place, no sense conveyed of the intrinsic, underlying meaning, which predates the usual descriptions of what invading Spaniards saw and did when they arrived in the sixteenth century. (3)

Baldwin intends to address his concern by charting the trail of Quetzalcoatl in the archaeological ruins of Mexico. His remedy for the dearth of information is precisely this focus on the mythic, an apparent antidote to the "usual descriptions" of European invaders. It is myth, Baldwin suggests, rather than history, that reveals the essence of the country; it "predates" European accounts of the history of the Conquest and conveys "intrinsic, underlying meaning." It is through myth that we attain our deepest understanding of Indigenous Mexico, as we abandon the false constructs of European historical narratives and arrive at the essential. What Baldwin does not account for is that the fundamental meanings he purports to offer the reader are for the most part merely the explanations of non-Indigenous social scientists.

Indigenous mythologies have also received a fair amount of critical attention in the Western academy. The prominence of anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss in the theorization of myth makes evident the anthropological concern with the mythic. One could say that mythology is the province of anthropologists, who have expended a great deal of effort collecting and assembling myth and folklore as a way to explain primitive cultures. From the expansive four-volume Mythologiques to the condensed series of radio talks found in Myth and Meaning, however, Lévi-Strauss also advocated for an understanding of the role of myth in contemporary Western society. He rejected the idea that myth is simply the product of "primitive" thinking unable to move beyond the utilitarian aspects of existence, the search for survival, the struggle for the "next whole meal," and, in this proposition, he departed greatly from the theories of another prominent anthropologist, Bronislav Malinowski. Lévi-Strauss understood myth as language and also as something different, a form of speech more complex than other linguistic forms or expressions. Using the Saussurean terms "langue" and "parole," he describes the first as the "structural side of language . . . belonging to a reversible time" and the second as "the statistical side of language . . . being non-reversible" (Structural Anthropology 209). Myth, he explains, is a combination of the two and bringing together these "time referents" creates a "third referent": "the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future" (209). Myth, therefore, both acknowledges and dismisses history; it is at once "historical and ahistorical" (210).

Lévi-Strauss' attempt to import linguistic methods into the study of myth has been roundly critiqued, as has his idea that myth depends upon a structural rigor and mobilizes systems of signification of which its tellers are unaware. Although Jonathan Culler is convinced by Lévi-Strauss' structural approach when used to read groupings of myth that share a similar meaning, he remains decidedly unconvinced of the broader application of Lévi-Strauss' method. Most significantly, argues Culler, the anthropologist fails to provide evidence about meaning, ignoring the vital role that linguistic competence plays in the theorization of linguistics. "More than anything else," Culler writes, "it is the lack of data about meaning that vitiates the analogy with linguistics, for in the study of language the structural and the semiological cannot be dissociated: the relevant structures are those which enable sequences to function as signs" (49). Lévi-Strauss' method may bring together myths from vastly unrelated cultural contexts to reveal meaning, but it offers nothing to explain what the differences between those myths actually mean. In Culler's estimation, Lévi-Strauss invents meaning as he makes his argument for the structure of myth; however, the viability of that structure relies upon community understanding of its conventions. The fact that "[w]e know little about how to read myths" (Culler 51), that readers have no competency in Lévi-Strauss' system because meaning is contrived only by/in the quest to determine structure, means that myth, finally, is left unexplained. What Culler does grant Lévi-Strauss is ample credit for approaching "mythology as an institution" (50), and attempting to understand myth beyond the level of the local and the individual. Andrew Von Hendy similarly notes the contribution Lévi-Strauss makes by "establishing 'myth' as an object of study in its own right" (250), only the first of a series of accomplishments that Von Hendy ascribes to Lévi-Strauss.

What interests me most about Lévi-Strauss' approach is what the anthropologist had to say about the relationship between myth and history, which explains my choice of quotations in representing his work. Similarly compelling as we consider the interaction of myth with history is literary critic Roland Barthes' analysis, in which he defines myth as a "third level" of language. He elaborates this idea as a "second-order semiological system," one that takes the sign of the first-order semiological system of language as its signifier:

[M]eaning loses its value, but keeps its life, from which the form of the myth will draw its nourishment. The meaning will be for the form like an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness, which it is possible to call and dismiss in a sort of rapid alternation: the form must constantly be able to be rooted again in the meaning and to get there what nature it needs for its nutriment; above all, it must be able to hide there. It is this constant game of hide-and-seek between the meaning and the form which defines myth. (Mythologies 118)

Thus, according to Barthes, myth again is form, rather than content, a speech type, rather than the concept or idea itself. The tenacity of mythic speech is derived from its ability to deploy or reflect at will a meaning held in perpetual reserve. Myth is parasitic, drawing its life force from vapid "meanings" that persist despite their apparent worthlessness. And although any and all myth surely have historical origins, those origins are forgotten or discarded in the dissemination of myth. Yet, myth hides nothing; it is not sneaky or intentionally deceptive; it is, in fact, quite plain and straightforward. Its primary purpose is to naturalize its intentions, not to hide them as it "transforms history into nature" (128). Even more than Louis Althusser, who never actually defined his use of the term "myth," Barthes renders myth virtually synonymous with "ideology . . . by talking as if 'ideology' were something subsisting in practice entirely in its myriad networks of cultural 'mythologies'" (Von Hendy 290). Moreover, what distinguishes Barthes' structuralist analysis of myth is its basis in a popular sense of myth as "widely propagated lie," a theoretical mobilization of the term inaugurated by Althusser (Von Hendy 290). From Barthes' perspective, the confusions and untruths enacted by myth are the workings of bourgeois ideology, which must be permanently and vigilantly critiqued.

These contested propositions—that myth is a form of speech, that it reactivates the sign as form to initiate a further system of signification, that it depends upon history even as it erases it, and that it renders its motivations as part of a natural order—nevertheless can help us to discern the complexities of Chicana/o indigenist use of myth. Chicana/o indigenism relies upon an already established signifying order, one launched by the narratives of travel and exploration and later professionalized in the consolidation of anthropology as an academic discipline. Chicana/o expressions of literary indigenism mobilize cultural conventions, investing them with new meaning. The Coatlicue statue that Anzaldúa presents, or the Aztec and Maya cosmogony that the poet Alberto Urista, more commonly known as Alurista, calls upon, bring with them not the unique historical fullness of the civilizations that created them but rather accepted notions about the pre-technological, the pre-modern, the pre-Christian, and the primitive. That all these ideas express something about people and societies that existed in the Americas before the arrival of the English, the French, and the Spanish is unquestioned and critical for the purposes of Chicana/o indigenism. As the sign is redeployed as a signifier in this second-order system of myth, the new meaning attached to it says something now about Chicanas/os specifically, about their ancestral knowledge, about cultural genealogy, but most importantly about their historical primacy.

A recent example proves illustrative. In her address to the 2003 Modern Language Association convention in San Diego, MLA president Mary Louise Pratt invoked Coatlicue in an attempt to recognize, or perhaps honor, the oppositional geographic entity of Aztlán, homeland of Chicanas/os:

We're in the heart of Greater Aztlán, and in that spirit I'd like to call tonight on the company of one of its most gorgeous and powerful deities, Coatlicue, goddess of life and death, mother of the meditative plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, of the war-like Huitzilopochtli, and of his sister and archrival Coyolxauhqui. Coatlicue is recognized by her skirt of serpents and her necklace of skulls and hands. In this beautiful carving, recovered in 1790 when the main plaza of Mexico City was being paved, she has been decapitated, and a two-headed serpent has appeared where her head was. I'd like to imagine her tonight as a work of border art, standing on la linea, looking both ways. (417)

She identifies Coatlicue as a goddess of Aztlán, a discursive move made possible by Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, published in 1987. Pratt introduces Coatlicue as a goddess of duality, presiding over life and death, giving birth both to the god of peace, Quetzalcoatl, and the god of war, Huitzilopochtli. Coatlicue also functions as a bridge across the U.S.-Mexico border, so very present yet also remarkably absent in the border city of San Diego, especially in its downtown convention district. Farther south, however, the militarization of la frontera and the toll it takes in human lives is evident in the barbed wire fences and guard towers of the port of entry, as well as in the traffic signs designed to warn motorists of women and children who might appear in the middle of the freeway in flight from la migra. Pratt's political reference to San Diego as "the heart of Aztlán" counterbalances her reference to Coatlicue's emergence in the form of a statue recovered from underneath the Zócalo in Mexico City. Pratt thus introduces a transnational Coatlicue, who originated in the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and has become a goddess of Aztlán, the mythic mother of Chicanas/os. Such a rhetorical maneuver would have made little sense and, in fact, may have not been possible without the precedent set by Anzaldúa, who claimed and refigured Coatlicue in a form designed to empower Chicanas. Yet, Pratt's mobilization of the symbol of Coatlicue neglects to acknowledge Anzaldúa's initial intervention into pre-Columbian myth and its post-Columbian reception and, in this omission, says much about how effectively myth works and how quickly even its most recent transformations evaporate from memory.

Literary Primitivism and Mexico

The mythic in Chicana/o literary indigenism is entwined with literary primitivism, which finds its own sources in the narratives of anthropology and archaeology. Primitivism has been considered, to a large degree, as an art-historical term, which William Rubin, co-organizer of the 1984 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) exhibit, "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art, defines as the "interest of modern artists in tribal art and culture, as revealed in their thought and work" (1). In his deft critique of Rubin and co-curator, Kirk Varnedoe, Hal Foster challenges the "tribal-modern affinity" that is the organizing theme of the show. Despite the acknowledgment of modern interest in "tribal art and culture," according to Foster, the curators' more central goal is to position tribal and modern art alongside each other and to diminish the sphere of influence from tribal to modern. As an example, Foster cites MOMA's use of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as set piece for the show displayed in tandem with African masks, which have frequently been identified as source material for the painting. The argument for affinity, however, "runs that Picasso could not have seen these masks, that the painting manifests an intuitive primitivity or 'savage mind'" (46). Furthermore, and perhaps most damning, is that the show suppressed the history of colonialism and the bribery, trickery, and theft that made primitive art available to Europe.

Rubin's use of the term differs from cultural and/or chronological primitivism, in which practitioners celebrate instinct, simplicity, and an unmediated relationship with "nature" over "civilization," which is equated with the advent of capitalism, industrialism, and technology. Such beliefs may or may not be coupled with a glorification of a "golden age" of history, or "pre-history." They may find expression in the adoption of artistic forms and styles of so-called primitive peoples. Across these definitions, however, it seems that Maximillian Novak's assessment of primitivism in the eighteenth century continues to hold true in that it is "the idealization of a way of life that differs from our own in being less complicated, less polished, and less self-aware" (456).

Perhaps the most radical forms of cultural and chronological primitivism combined can be found in the deep ecology and some anarchist movements, which reject civilization and its oppressive mechanisms of capitalism and patriarchy. Fundamentally influenced by the writings of John Zerzan, these movements are called variously anarcho-primitivism, the anti-civilization movement, radical primitivism, or anti-authoritarian primitivism (See John Moore). Such iterations of primitivism demand the rejection of technology to reverse and overcome the damaging effects of a regimented and repressive division of labor designed in accordance with class and gender hierarchies. Deep ecologist and anarchist philosophies seek to combat the alienation of the worker that results from the segmentation and specialization of labor, which these philosophies identify as the foundation of modern civilization.

Apart from deep ecology and anarchist thinking, most versions of Western primitivist philosophy do not promote an actual "return" to modes of living that preceded civilization. Instead, as in the context of modern art, primitivism more likely attempts to incorporate, emulate, reproduce, or, by some accounts, appropriate the artistic forms of the "non-Western," or "tribal," peoples to which Rubin refers. In other cases, the emphasis is more explicitly on the idea of the primitive given human form: the tribal person, the African chieftain, the Caribbean "voodoo doctor," the Indian warrior and medicine wo/man, the Native woman, the Noble Savage. All versions of primitivism, however, rest to some degree upon this sort of imagining. They might idealize the pre-historical human who existed and thrived outside of the repressive confines of modern civilization or the anonymous Native artist/craftsman whose work expresses the sensibilities not of the individual but of the community to which that person belongs. We find primitivist projects that idealize an excavated ancestor whose visage, corporeal existence, and belief systems are accessible only through the documentations of his/her dispossessor. These documentations include images of goddesses and gods deemed worthy of preservation and legitimated in the present through the academic disciplines of archaeology and art history.

Foster provides a concise review of the primitive in Western culture as historically "articulated . . . in deprivative or supplemental terms" (58). Thus, the primitive is either abject barbarian or spiritual guide, pre-literate, pre-historical, culturally simplistic, or "a site of originary unity, symbolic plentitude, natural vitality" (58). Primitives are most often viewed as a source of regenerative energy, Sally Price points out, because they are "imagined to express their feelings free from the intrusive overlay of learned behavior and conscious constraints that mold the work of the Civilized Artist" (32). In the first extensive study of primitivism and art, Robert Goldwater also suggested the guiding logic behind the modernist desire to dig deeper into the collective psyche:

It is the assumption that any reaching under the surface, if only it is carried far enough and proceeds according to the proper method, will reveal something "simple" and basic which, because of its very fundamentality and simplicity, will be more emotionally compelling than the superficial variations of the surface; and finally that the qualities of simplicity and basicness are things to be valued in and for themselves: In other words, it is the assumption that the further one goes back—historically, psychologically, or aesthetically—the simpler things become; and that because they are simpler they are more profound, more important, and more valuable. (251)

This idea of profound simplicity stands in direct challenge to the meaningless complexities and ruptures of modern civilization and so the primitive has served many purposes since its emergence in the Enlightenment period. Indeed, from Montaigne to Rousseau to D. H. Lawrence to Georges Bataille, versions of primitivism have long been used to challenge accepted versions of the civilized. The primitive is structured as opposition; through its image, "Western" culture is revealed as spiritually lacking, morally corrupt, misdirected, and self-destructive. In its earliest formulations, primitivism—the transvalorization of the "non-civilized"—questioned the politics and policies of dominant cultures. Writers and artists continue to appropriate the idea of "the savage," of which the Indian is a version, as a vehicle for social critique, using it to express dismay over progress and modernization and to advance arguments for simpler, less complicated modes of living premised on a "return" to more "natural" philosophies of existence. Communitarian social structures and relaxed social mores, especially as related to sexual practices (although primitivist discourse has been decidedly heterosexist and patriarchal), are features of so-called primitive society glorified by writers past and present.

The primitive exists, in part, as a means through which and against which non-primitives define themselves and their own cultural contexts. This discourse that defines and appropriates Native cultures functions, ironically, to maintain the place of "the West" in the evolutionary order. Even if Western society is found to be corrupt and empty of "real" meaning, it continues to retain its place as civilized in relation to primitive societies and, in fact, is made the more enlightened precisely because of this recognition of the value of the "uncivilized." In their attempts to celebrate Indigenous cultures, primitivists identify features or practices that might be collected and imported into a Western context to make civilized life richer. In few cases do primitivists actually want to adopt fully a primitive lifestyle. The primitive, rather, is an exotic symbol that can be used to represent "man" in a condition of nature, as in the writings of Montaigne, or unconscious drives, as in the work of D. H. Lawrence. Academics, philosophers, and other writers have imposed an arduous task, that of charting a path of redemption for Europeans and European-Americans.

Mexico and Primitivism

In studies of modernist primitivism, little attention has been given to the place of Mexico as a site for European spiritual and cultural redemption, perhaps, in part, because European and Euro-American representations of Mexican culture emphasize a fascination with death that is traced back to pre-Conquest religious practices of human sacrifice. Goldwater, who was the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, an early historian of modern art, and considered one of the first experts in the study of African art, writes in Primitivism in Modern Art that because the Aztec and Inca civilizations had "long been destroyed and their lands occupied," they did not offer living examples of primitive simplicity (266). These societies did not conform to modernist ideas of the static nature of primitive societies or answer the need for contemporary examples of the perceived "immemorial" character of the primitive. Benjamin Keen, following Goldwater's lead, also contends that because of the "relatively high degree of formal complexity" of ancient Mesoamerican societies, discernable particularly in Aztec artifacts, Mexico had less influence than Africa and Oceania on modern primitivism (510).

Rubin, former director of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, writes in the introduction to the catalog for the 1984 MOMA exhibit, "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art, that he considers Aztec art to be more "archaic" than "primitive" and more logically grouped with Egyptian art. Rubin bases this assessment on the apparent strict levels of hierarchy and specialization in Aztec social structure. It is, rather, the arts of "tribal" Africa and Oceania that are more properly classified as "primitive," whereas Aztec, Maya, and Toltec art, according to Rubin, issues from "court" cultures (74-75 n.14). These particular Mesoamerican civilizations, he writes, were exceptions in the context of pre-Columbian cultural forms, which, for the most part, have much more in common with what is more properly deemed "primitive" in the art world. Although he does acknowledge the interest in pre-Columbian art among modern artists, he argues that the influence emanated from the "Archaic sculpture of the Aztec, Maya, Toltec and Olmec cultures" (74-75 n.14). Barbara Braun concurs with the previous assessments to a degree when she argues that although they had been circulating in Europe as curiosities and exotica since the sixteenth century, "Pre-Columbian artifacts were never central to the 'primitivist revolution'; unlike African objects, they played no important role in Picasso's generation of Cubism" (38). Rubin includes a rather lengthy footnote documenting Picasso's ambivalent responses to "what he called 'l'art aztèque,' by which he meant the whole of Columbian art as he knew it" (333 n.5). In one case, in a conversation with Rubin, he calls pre-Columbian art "boring, inflexible, too big . . . figures without invention" (75 n.15). Yet Rubin quotes from a collection of interviews and conversations in which the Hungarian-born French photographer Brassaï documents Picasso's reaction to a photograph of pre-Columbian art: the "'Aztec head' makes Picasso pause abruptly, and then he cries: 'That is as rich as the façade of a cathedral'" (75 n.15).

Braun also notes, however, that in the late nineteenth century, pre-Columbian artifacts began to "[inspire] Western designers, artists, and craftspersons to incorporate and imitate them in their own work" (21). She credits Paul Gauguin's interest in decorative arts to the inspiration he received from exhibitions at the Paris Expositions of 1878 and 1889 (38). The display of pseudo-ancient Mexican material culture was especially notable in 1889, where the ambitious, if anthropologically, architecturally, and historically confused Aztec Palace was constructed at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Vincent Van Gogh early expressed an interest in primitivism, most immediately recognizable in his praise of ancient Egyptian art, but also documented in his curiosity about "the tropics." Although he did not see the History of Habitation display at the 1889 Exposition, he did see an image of a simulated ancient Mexican structure designed not by Mexicans, but by a French architect. Van Gogh wrote to Emile Bernard that "I saw in one of the illustrated papers a sketch of ancient Mexican dwellings; they too seem to be primitive and very beautiful" (Read 48). It was Gauguin's and Van Gogh's announcements of their own fascinations with the primitive that launched an interest in Aztec art in the 1930s, according to Rubin.

Ethnographic and archaeological information about pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, however, had been circulating in Europe for some time. Braun brings together a wide-ranging list of travelers, explorers, tycoons, and amateur archaeologists who began producing textual material in the early nineteenth century. Among these was the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled to Mexico in 1803, where he convinced authorities to disinter the statue of Coatlicue, which had been reburied shortly after it was excavated in 1790. Braun credits his work, Vues des Cordilleres, et Monuments des Peuples Indigenes de l'Amérique, part of a thirty-volume series on America, with "reshap[ing] the European vision of ancient Mexico and stimulat[ing] further explorations" (26). The photographic and other reproductions of Désiré Chanay, who in 1857-58 visited several Maya archaeological sites in Mexico, were also significant in the dissemination of visual images and narrative descriptions of ancient Mesoamerica. Unlike France, Britain did not attract public support for the study of pre-Columbian artifacts, but in 1822, William Bullock, "collector of natural and ethnographic curiosities and a showman" (Braun 30) organized a show of antiquities that he had brought back from Mexico. This show, staged in London's Piccadilly Circus, peaked the interest of Lord Edward Kingsborough in pre-Columbian manuscripts and was influential in the production of his encyclopedic Antiquities of Mexico, which later served as a source for Diego Rivera (Braun 31, Brown 139). The most impressive British collections were amassed by Henry Christy and Alfred P. Maudslay. Christy's collection provided the basis for the British Museum's pre-Columbian permanent collection when it acquired a bequest in 1865. In the 1860s and 1870s, Braun writes, the first ethnographic galleries including pre-Columbian artifacts emerged in Paris and London, and in 1850, the Louvre opened its first Americanist exhibition containing approximately nine hundred objects. The Louvre collection, however, was eventually dismantled (31).

The first significant explorer from the United States was John L. Stephens, who traveled with Frederick Catherwood in the Yucatán and Central America during the period 1839-42. Stephens produced two volumes from these forays, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, and both enjoyed immense popularity among the U.S. reading public. Catherwood's illustrations, engravings, and daguerreotypes remain the "most famous depictions" of the Mayan ruins partially because, Braun notes, William Prescott championed them in The History of the Conquest of Mexico (32). The expeditions of Stephens and Catherwood were especially relevant in a time when the United States was struggling to establish its unique presence in relation to Europe. Thus, the artifacts of pre-Columbian civilizations, like the Indian mounds located within U.S. borders, provided material with which the country could assert an ancient patrimony to rival anything Europe had to offer. This type of collecting, in Braun's formulation, "became symbolic capital for both cosmopolitan status and confirmation of a national culture tied to the land" (32).

Prior to the emergence of universities as the primary repositories of archaeological knowledge, it was, as Braun's overview summarized above makes clear, the museum that housed these knowledges. Museums were, according to Elizabeth Hill Boone, "the homeland of anthropology and archaeology" (329). In France, the Trocadero has been a place of signal importance for the modern public's access to ancient Mesoamerica. Harvard's Peabody Museum, endowed in 1860, became the "premier center of Pre-Columbian studies" (Braun 33) in the nineteenth century, and other important institutions included the emerging Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History. In the case of Britain, the British Museum was and continues to be a preeminent site of access for specialist and non-specialist alike.

The sculptor Henry Moore provides confirmation not only of Western artistic fascination with pre-Conquest Mexico, but also of the degree to which museums, and the British Museum in particular, function to instantiate versions of the primitive in the minds of their viewing audiences. Furthermore, articles in scholarly and popular journals, as well as book-length works provided details of archaeological expeditions, theories about life in pre-Conquest Mesoamerica, and, most importantly for Moore, reproductions that he modeled throughout his life. Texts drawn from this archive proved invaluable to Moore, who consulted them as "sculptural pattern books, providing him with a repertory of images during the formative decade of his art" (Braun 98). Braun draws from Donald Hall's profile of the artist in a 1965 New Yorker series, noting that Moore was "something of a scholar of ancient Mexican sculpture" (97, n.17, 131). Rejecting Mayan sculpture as too similar to the Western tradition (Braun 107), Moore focused almost exclusively on Aztec sculpture, producing numerous works that not only evoke, but also clearly imitate particular Aztec artifacts. These works include masks; a series of sculptures entitled Mother and Child, the first carved in 1922; Snake (1924), a virtual replica of an Aztec coiled serpent; and the Reclining Figure series, famously modeled after the Chacmool, which appears throughout pre-Conquest Mesoamerica. In keeping with conventional primitivist values, Moore intended for the "primordial vitality" of Aztec art to "miraculously infuse new life into modern art" (Braun 111).

In a 1941 essay, "Primitive Art," Moore offers his definition of the term he takes as his title, elaborating on it by narrating a "memory-journey" through selected galleries of the British Museum as he laments its closing (presumably during World War II). The sculptor attributes his knowledge of pre-Columbian art to his wanderings in the halls of the Museum, writing that "[e]xcepting some collections of primitive art in France, Italy and Spain, my own knowledge of it [primitive art] has come entirely from continual visits to the British Museum during the past twenty years" (269). On Mesoamerica in particular, he says that "Mexican sculpture, as soon as I found it, seemed to me true and right . . . . Its 'stoniness,' by which I mean its truth to material, its tremendous power without loss of sensitiveness, its astonishing variety and fertility of form-invention and its approach to a full three-dimensional conception of form, make it unsurpassed in my opinion by any other period of stone sculpture" (270). In his own reproductions of the Chacmool figure, Moore always feminizes his reclining figures, and in doing so, resituates his work in the realm of Western artistic conventions. His recumbent females are passive figures that always look past the viewer. Their bodies are openly displayed, breasts prominent and pubic areas exposed, as if offered for consumption. "It is the old idealization of the female as a passive object of desire," Braun writes, "available to the determining male gaze as a symbolic release for lust, anxiety, and terror" (119). This represents, in Braun's final analysis, a "domestication of the primitive to Western culture by fusing its raw vitality, gravity, and mystery with familiar, acceptable content, such as the female figure, and conventional (sexist) attitudes towards it" (119).

This rehearsal of the relationship between the work of one of the most highly acclaimed modernist artists and the Aztec artifacts he sought out documents the impact of pre-Columbian culture in the post-Columbian art world, to draw upon the title to Braun's book. In Moore, we see the example of an artist searching for and then replicating what he believed to be truer forms of expression. Interestingly, in Braun's critique of Moore, we find a curious acceptance of the terms that primitivist thinking sets for itself, the vitality, the "spiritual fullness" that Foster earlier noted, the "mystery" of the unknown. But, more importantly, in the works of Braun, Foster, Rubin, and other art historians and critics, we have also been alerted to responses to pre-Columbian art—from Van Gogh, Picasso, and Moore—that suggest a rich variance of opinion among some of the most celebrated artists of the European modern period, even if none of them were motivated to claim Mexico as Gauguin did Tahiti.

Considering Indigenism

The term "indigenism" would seem to oppose primitivism as the former issues from a place of racial identification with, rather than strategic distancing from, the "other." In Chicana/o writing, the term indigenism has been used to refer to texts that privilege and valorize Indigenous ancestry and culture. Indigenism, however, has a complex history of negative criticism in Latin America. In the philosophy and practices of the post-Revolutionary Mexican state, "indigenismo" often refers to public policy initiatives spearheaded by mestizo intellectuals, such as anthropologist Manuel Gamio, that pursued the explicit objective of "social realignment between the races" ("New Conquest" 143). Critical understandings of indigenista policies reveal the strategies of inclusion to be aimed at de-racinating Indians, rather than redefining social legitimacy to include Indigenous communities and rectify the deep inequities in Mexican society. When outlining a "working policy for our study," in the May 1, 1924, issue of The Survey Graphic, Gamio writes that as the director of the anthropological branch of the Department of Agriculture, he is organizing "systematic efforts towards racial understanding, towards a fusion of the different cultures, towards linguistic unification and economic equilibrium . . . . We are convinced that it is only in this way that we may hope to achieve a coherent national consciousness, a true patria" (144). Couched in terms of hygiene, literacy, and economic readjustment, the project with which he has been charged and given the name "The New Conquest" is designed in such a way as to find little of value in the "backward civilization" (194) of the Indigenous communities of Mexico. Another Mexican anthropologist, Guillermo Bonfil-Batalla, well-known for his challenging of Mexican state indigenism, writes that "[i]ndigenismo did not contradict in any way the national plan that the triumphant Revolution had been crystallizing: to incorporate the Indian, that is, de-Indianize him, to make him lose his cultural and historical uniqueness" (116).

"Indigenism" also describes the stylistic appropriations of Indigenous cultural forms and traditions by non-Indigenous artists and intellectuals. It differs from primitivism in that the practitioners of indigenism have ancestral and cultural ties—however weakened by the passage of time—to Indigenous people. The origins of mestiza/o, according to Enrique Florescano, lie in seventeenth-century "growing creole compulsion to identify themselves with the soil on which they lived and with the remote past of its original inhabitants" ("Creation" 82). In the late sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown blocked the collection and study of codices that could have preserved many more pre-Conquest histories. From the time of the Conquest, the collection of pictographic documents had been undertaken by missionaries, such as Juan de Tovar, Toribio Motolinía, and Bernardino de Sahagún, and the prevention of this practice had disastrous consequences for the Indigenous historical record in Mesoamerica. Some manuscripts escaped the Spanish authorities, Florescano writes, and these were "jealously kept by the descendants of the ancient native nobility and used as testimonies authenticating their lineage and patrimonial rights" ("Creation" 82). But by 1780, Spanish authorities were beginning to support Creole examination and interpretation of pre-Conquest culture and history, which included excavations at Palenque (Florescano, "Creation" 84). Unearthed monuments, such as the monoliths excavated from the Templo Mayor in the Zócalo of Mexico City, were preserved, even if that meant reburying them, which was the case with the statue of the goddess Coatlicue. The statue was reinterred because of Native responses to its presence, which included pilgrimages and displays of devotion that jarred religious and other authorities. Florescano points out that the functionaries in charge of the excavation and presentation of the artifacts to the public tried to transform a "living part of the beliefs and religious practices of the Indigenous population into an archaeological document" ("Creation" 86), ignoring the cultural practices and community beliefs of living Indigenous subjects. At the same time, these Creole elites appropriated an Indian past in order to construct a national identity and provide a logic for Creole occupation of Native land. The reception of the Coatlicue statue at the time of its excavation is an important marker in historicizing the contradiction that remains at the center of Mexican state indigenism.

Although Mexican indigenismo preceded the Revolution, as an artistic trend it reached a zenith during Mexico's immediate post-Revolutionary period. Diego Rivera offers perhaps the most prominent example of a Mexican indigenist sensibility in his public murals commissioned by the Mexican state to adorn, for example, the halls of the National Palace and the Secretary of Public Education Building. Rivera brought images of the Indigenous into his panoramic visual narratives of Mexico and offered to the public astounding depictions of the agricultural, social, and technological sophistication of a once-dominant civilization. Both in artistic expression and public policy, indigenista activity by prominent artists, politicians, and writers was considered to elevate Indians, to be executed on behalf of or in defense of them. For someone like Gamio, whose Forjando Patria (1916) is a founding text of state indigenism, incorporating the Indian both strengthened Mexican national culture and provided Indigenous subjects access to the benefits offered by a modernized, homogenized nation-state, enabling them to move beyond their "backward" existence. Public policies designed to acculturate Indians—most especially through the institutions of schooling, anthropological projects, such as Gamio's world-renowned stratospheric excavations at Teotihuacan, and artistic projects, like those in which Rivera and other muralists participated—contrived to make past greatness visible and cement public acceptance of the desirable characteristics of Indigenous cultures. These approaches, however, belie the basic premise of Mexican state indigenism: the only good Indian is the mythic Indian.

Some, such as Bonfil-Batalla, have identified the problems with indigenism in the identities of its practitioners. It was non-Indians who devised indigenismo and decided "[t]he definition of what is 'good' and 'bad' in Indian cultures, what is useful and what should be discarded[. This] was not, of course, a matter in which the opinion of the Indians themselves counted. It was a matter, like all indigenista policy, in which only the non-Indians, the 'nationals,' those who exercised cultural control in the country and hoped to extend it further, had a voice" (Bonfil-Batalla 117). Historian Alan Knight echoes to some degree this perspective when he writes that "[p]ostrevolutionary indigenismo thus represented yet another non-Indian formulation of the 'Indian problem'; it was another white/mestizo construct . . . part of a long tradition stretching back to the Conquest" (77). Indigenism functions, according to the readings of Bonfil-Batalla and Knight, as an exercise in subjugation through which the dominant white/mestizo population was able to solidify and extend its control over Indigenous communities. Writing of indigenist literature, the Peruvian critic José Mariategui claimed that "it is still a mestizo literature and as such is called indigenist rather than indigenous. If an indigenous literature finally appears, it will be when the Indians themselves are able to produce it" (274). Bonfil-Batalla seems to hold out for a similar possibility, as his quotation above suggests that an indigenist policy directed by Indigenous people, one that takes into account their opinions and interests, would be viable, but he would call this philosophy and social practice "Indianismo/Indianism."

In the context of the United States, Ward Churchill offers a decidedly unconventional approach to the idea of indigenism. In his essay, "I Am Indigenist: Notes on the Ideology of the Fourth World," he advocates for an indigenist framework organized around action, rather than identity: "I have identified myself as being 'indigenist' in outlook. By this, I mean that I am one who not only takes the rights of indigenous peoples as the highest priority of my political life, but who draws upon the traditions—the bodies of knowledge and corresponding codes of values—evolved over many thousands of years by native peoples the world over" (Struggle 403). Churchill's anti-colonial indigenism depends upon a prioritized political commitment to Native rights as well as access to a cultural ethos handed down not only through filial ties, but also as part of a global reservoir of traditional knowledges held by Indigenous peoples. Churchill continues: "[T]he beginning point for any indigenist endeavor in the United States centers, logically enough, in efforts to restore direct Indian control over the huge portion of the continental U.S. which was never ceded by native nations" (415). What we find in this form of indigenism is again the emphasis on a traditional past that is able to inform a present course of action. Churchill, however, weds this aspect of his indigenism to the Native land rights struggle, claiming that the initiation of any truly indigenist project must begin in the effort to restore Native control over Native land. The place of "tradition" in this iteration of indigenism is left unexplored as Churchill places most emphasis upon activism and land reclamation. Yet, his use of the term "indigenism" suggests that he is unaware both of its complex history and of its interpretation by anthropologists and historians. Citing Bonfil-Batalla as a "proponent," Churchill redefines indigenism, transforming it into a leftist mode of action. This transformation, however, is based upon a misreading of Bonfil-Batalla, a misrecognition of the context and the purpose of the anthropologist's work.

Churchill cites Bonfil-Batalla's Utopia y Revolución: El pensamiento político contemporáneo de los indios en América Latina, which he accesses through Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Indians of the Americas. Bonfil-Batalla published the Indigenous political writings in Utopia y Revolución to demonstrate the concept of panindianismo, a term he uses to describe the autonomous political organizing of Indigenous peoples, distinguishing it against the indigenism of the non-Indigenous. The political philosophy that Churchill outlines in "I Am Indigenist" would be called "Indianism" by Bonfil-Batalla. But the mestizo context of Bonfil-Batalla's work, in which many average non-Indigenous citizens "look Indian" and most people are biologically descended from Indigenous people, markedly differs from Churchill's Anglo North American frame of reference. Bonfil-Batalla is invested deeply in the argument that Mexico is essentially Indian, even though that Indianness is denied by many mestizo Mexicans, who, according to Bonfil-Batalla, associate being Indian with a negative primitive state of being "lazy . . . ignorant, perhaps picturesque, but always the dead weight that keeps us from being the country we could have been" (19). The anthropologist wants to emphasize the historical processes of de-Indianization that have produced cultural mestizos, people who are somatically and biologically, in terms of racial mixture and physical appearance, not really so different from the Native people who are segregated into separate social realms. As Bonfil-Batalla forces mestizo recognition of the persistence of the Indigenous in Mexican society, he also attempts to urge modern Mexico to reclaim indigeneity. This means, therefore, that all mestizos are potential Indians.

The distinctions become even more muddied and complicated when one considers closely the role of a mestizo academic such as Bonfil-Batalla in taking charge of defining who is or can be Indian and conceptualizing Indigenous political movements. Having taken his translated citations from Dunbar-Ortiz, Churchill nevertheless overlooks the critical formulation Dunbar-Ortiz advances as she presents Bonfil-Batalla in her own text. Focusing on the platform of the Indigenous Regional Council of the Cauca (CRIC/Columbia), Dunbar-Ortiz points to the organization's elucidation of "deviations" in Indigenous movements. The CRIC document reads as follows:

La primera desviación, conocida por algunos como "racista" o "indigenista," consiste en darle absoluta primacía a los aspectos específamente indígenas de la lucha, sin cuestionar en general el sistema clasista de dominación ni la situación de dependencia del imperialismo.

[The first deviation, known to some as "racist" or "indigenist," consists in giving absolute primacy to specifically indigenous aspects of the struggle, without generally questioning the classist system of domination or the imperialist system of dependence.]

***

Se forma organizaciones muchas veces con una ideología mística, que orientan las luchas contra el "blanco" en general y hacen alianzas más fácilmente con las clases dominantes y sus instituciones que con los demás explotados. El imperialismo mismo impulsa frecuentemente estas organizaciones que contribuyen evidentemente a desviar las luchas indígenas y a dividir las fuerzas populares.

[Many times organizations are formed with a mystical ideology that orients the struggles against "whites" in general and makes easy alliances with the dominant classes and their institutions that also exploit the indigenous. Imperialism itself frequently drives these organizations that clearly contribute to the derailment of indigenous struggles and the division of the power of the people.]

***

La segunda desviación es contraria a la anterior y se presenta cuando organizaciones políticas o gremiales pretenden imponerle al indígena sus programas y esquemas organizativos sin tener para nada en cuenta [without considering] su realidad propia.

[The second deviation is contrary to the first and is present when political or union organizations try to impose upon the indigenous their own programs and organizational plans without considering indigenous reality.] (302)

CRIC views indigenism as a myopic approach to the complex challenges that Indigenous communities face. In their broad sketch of deviations of indigenism, they identify the failure to address class oppression because of a sole emphasis on race, a reduction of the multiple layers of oppression experienced by Indigenous people. Furthermore, the cultural arrogance of non-Indians who presume to know what is best for Indians is exposed by CRIC as a form of the very imperialism that reduced the status of Natives in the first place. Finally, CRIC points to opportunistic appropriations of Indigenous causes used to advance non-Indigenous agendas.

It is not entirely evident that CRIC would implicate Bonfil-Batalla in this critique, but Dunbar-Ortiz obviously does: "It is not clear why Bonfil chose not to deal with CRIC's explicit critique of the ideology reflected in his essay, which CRIC describes as one of the two 'deviations' in the indigenous movement" (86). She does not elaborate her claim, although she later acknowledges Bonfil-Batalla's "solidarity and unqualified support" that, unfortunately, "has not translated itself into theory or strategy" (90). This solidarity can be seen in Bonfil-Batalla's role in organizing the Barbados Symposium in 1971 and his signing of the Declaration that emerged from those meetings. The Symposium was held under the combined sponsorship of the World Council of Churches and the Ethnology Department at the University of Berne, Switzerland. The document it produced, called the Barbados Declaration, was endorsed by the World Council of Churches and signed by eleven anthropologists. It both formally exposed the continued colonial domination of Native peoples of Latin America and condemned religious missions and the profession of anthropology as perpetuations of the system of colonial rule. Dunbar-Ortiz, while recognizing the positive effects of the Declaration on the pan-Indian movement, nevertheless sees in the document evidence of the "combined power of the churches through their missions, and of anthropologists, through their field-work, over the lives of American Indians" (60). Bonfil-Batalla's participation in a symposium on Indigenous peoples that included little, if any, Indigenous participation, and the role he and other anthropologists played in defining the situation of Natives in Latin America and prescribing, to the extent that the Declaration does, solutions for redefining the relationships among Indigenous peoples, the state, the church, and the profession of anthropology, certainly leaves him open to the charge that he allied with dominant institutions of power, rather than with the Indigenous communities that they controlled.

These differing perspectives on indigenism draw attention to its various and competing definitions, considered by Bonfil-Batalla, Knight, and others in terms of public policy, by Dunbar-Ortiz to be "Indian advocacy," and by CRIC to be romanticized, exploitive, and reductive approaches to such advocacy. Prior to Churchill and Dunbar-Ortiz, Jack Forbes took up issues of Native history and social reality from a broad North American perspective. His 1973 study, Aztecas del Norte: The Chicanos of Aztlán, is an analysis of the place of Chicanas/os within the identity category of "Indian," providing reprints of selections of writings by and about Mexicans that help to advance Forbes' claim that the "Aztecas del norte . . . compose the largest single tribe or nation of Anishinabeg (Indians) in the United States today" (13). Like Churchill, Forbes advances a favorable conception of indigenismo, defining it as "placing emphasis upon the native heritage" (149). He writes that "Indigenismo has perhaps triumphed in some areas of thinking, but a so-called mestizo view of Mexico's heritage seems to be the basis for current Mexican national unity" (149). Mestizaje, according to Forbes, represents a privileging of the European components of the mixture that produced Mexicans and a disavowal of Mexican indigeneity. To claim mestizo identity, Forbes writes, is to "affirm white descent. A mestizo (according to the racist caste system) is, after all, not a lowly indio. He is at least part-white and, therefore, part-civilized, una persona de razón" (202). To affirm the Indigenous, according to Forbes, would be an indigenist act.

Forbes puts forth an intriguing option for the reclamation of indigeneity by mestizos, an option that draws its motivation from the historical transformations of Mexican communities in the United States, which include political acts of solidarity with Natives. An important example is his discussion of Analco, the 1680 union of "indios y chicanos" to resist Spanish oppression (72-76). What Forbes does not do is rely upon the mythic to relate the facts of Chicana/o indigeneity. Although he does often refer to Native spiritualities, particularly the commodification and consumption of those spiritual traditions by the non-Indigenous, and to the ways in which people practice those spiritual traditions, he does not attempt to inhabit or advance them within the pages of the text. When Forbes addresses ancient Mexican literature, his focus is on the Nahuatl language, the beauty of poetic Nahuatl, and the ease it lends to intellectual expression rather than its mythic elements (33-34). More compelling, however, is Forbes' claim the first use of the term "Aztlán" in 1962 to signify a Chicano homeland.

Chicano Indigenism and the Symbol of Aztlán

Aztlán is perhaps the most enduring feature of Chicano indigenism, whether initially introduced into an activist lexicon by Jack Forbes or by Alurista, as is most often claimed by Chicana/o scholars. This symbolic ancestral home was a complex negotiation of identity because Aztlán encompassed not only the Mexican in Mexican-Americans, but an aspect of Mexicanness that had been particularly degraded: the Indian. A mythic symbol retrieved from Aztec codices and sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of the Conquest, Aztlán places Chicanas/os at the origins of the Mexican nation, in a pre-national moment that is distinctly and inarguably indigenous. Politically, Aztlán foregrounds the history of Mexican dispossession and occupation at the hands of Anglo-Americans and reconfigures the U.S. Southwest as a "homeland denied." Chicanas/os also took up a term that scholars argue is closer to what the people who in the nineteenth century became known as "Aztecs" probably called themselves: Mexica.

Early writings by Alurista and Armando Rendon, among others, argue that Indigenous cultural and racial ancestry had been denigrated in people of Mexican descent in the United States. These writers and artists looked to an Indian past to instill cultural and racial pride as they recovered a history that existed before Spanish and Anglo conquests. Chicanas/os were elevated from their positions as conquered people, "illegal aliens," and perpetual foreigners and found new identities as descendants of the original inhabitants of the region. We might locate the "official" emergence of indigenism in the preamble to "El Plan de Aztlán," presented at the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in 1969. Through various outlets, Chicana/o indigenism has promoted pride in Indigenous ancestry, recovered cultural traditions of language and spirituality, and disseminated historical narratives of dispossession and conquest. It has brought all of this to bear upon the Chicana/o claim to historical primacy in the United States. The poet Alurista conceptualized the indigenist agenda in the poem that later became the preamble to "El Plan." He pursued this agenda in poetic work that followed the conference, such as in the collections Nationchild Plumaroja (1972) and Floricanto en Aztlán (1976).

Alurista, whether motivated by the example of Jack Forbes or not, imported the term "Aztlán" (the ancient Mexica site of origin) from Conquest-era codices and immediate post-Conquest era accounts of the Spanish occupation and colonization of Mesoamerica. Following Alurista's lead, many activists, indigenist or not, adopted this usage. Luis Leal has laid out the contours:

As a Chicano symbol, Aztlán has two meanings: first, it represents the geographic region known as the Southwestern part of the United States, composed of the territory that Mexico ceded in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; second, and more important, Aztlán symbolized the spiritual union of the Chicanos, something that is carried within the heart, no matter where they may live or where they may find themselves. (8)

The metaphysical connotation of Aztlán is preeminent, according to Leal's definitions. However disputed the geographic claim might be, the homeland as a spiritual concept elides challenges to historical primacy and recasts Aztlán as a sentiment that creates community.

Most scholars of the Mexica believe Aztlán, if an actual geographic space, was located in Mesoamerica, somewhere north of Mexico City, as Matos suggested to Carrasco. For many others, the term has more mythical than geographic significance and is understood as symbol or metaphor, as an Edenic—to use a familiar Judeo-Christian term—place of origins. For Chicanas/os, however, establishing location has at times been paramount. Seizing upon the idea of "north of Mexico," early Chicano indigenists placed Aztlán north of the contemporary U.S.-Mexico border in the southwestern United States. Aztlán is a valuable concept in a history of migration that establishes a pre-Conquest Indigenous "Aztec" presence in the western and southern border regions of the United States. In asserting that the ancestors of the Aztecs originated in what is now Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, Chicanas/os claimed their place in a pre-Conquest, pre-settler, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. They were thus to reposition themselves in a dual manner, gaining legitimacy as not only having preceded Anglo-American settlement of the United States, but also as having been present, in an ancestral sense, at the founding of the Mexican nation.

Rafael Pérez-Torres writes that "[t]he idea of a Chicano mythic 'memory' manifested in ethnopoetic expression represents less an unproblematic recuperation of indigenous culture than a complex cultural construction of self-identity" (Movements 176). True, Chicano indigenism, which I take as the referent of the first part of Pérez-Torres' sentence, is indeed complex, cultural, and constructed. What is more interesting about the quotation, however, is the ambivalence it manifests even as the writer privileges the more generous reading of indigenist practices. The structure of the sentence directs our attention to its latter half and the characterization of indigenism in positive terms. What may escape notice, however, is that Pérez-Torres does define indigenism also (and perhaps, after all) as "an unproblematic recuperation of indigenous culture." Although he emphasizes the second half of the sentence by diminishing the descriptive force of the first (the use of "less . . . than"), indigenism nevertheless is, according to the grammar of the sentence, the "unproblematic recuperation" and also the "complex cultural construction." Being "less" of something does not obviate the characteristic altogether. But we might not want to dwell too long upon the problematics of practices that are taken to be "unproblematic," and so we might be inclined, following Pérez-Torres' lead, to deny, even as we affirm, the full range of the complexity of Chicana/o indigenism.

Conquest Histories and Indigeneity

Ambivalence is also at the core of Chicana/o claims to historical primacy in the U.S. Southwest. In addition to the argument that issues from indigeneity, Chicanas/os also assert rights to the region through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its provisions guaranteeing land grants assigned by the Spanish crown: "[I]n the nineteenth century, Texas courts regularly considered the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as it applied to Spanish and Mexican grants made before March 2, 1836" (Griswold del Castillo 85). Because Mexican titles were often not honored, many mestizas/os lost their land to Anglo-American settlers in local campaigns of removal that effectively completed the Anglo conquest of Greater Mexico. The treaty is thus viewed as part of an illegal expansion of the borders of the United States that submerged the historical precedence of mestizas/os in the area. But the two claims to the Southwest, rather than complementing each other, contradict and compete, despite the idea of historical primacy that lies at the foundation of each. On the one hand, Aztlán is an assertion of land rights based on an Indigenous myth, and, on the other, the treaty rights afforded by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo are mestizo claims based upon a Mexican national identity and the settler privilege bestowed by Spanish and Mexican land grants. Chicano oppositional discourse uses both of these narratives.

In the charting of a Chicana/o politics of oppression, Indigenous heritage has been foregrounded as the defining feature of Chicana/o racial identity. Within most political communities and among individuals that would self-define as "Chicana/o," ancestral ties to the Spanish conquistador are consciously rejected to oppose a dominant U.S. Eurocentrism. Chicanas/os are marked by Indigenous ancestry, which at times announces itself through phenotypic and other physical markers. Yet, Indian ancestral lines exist alongside and are combined with Spanish and Anglo-European lineages, not to mention those that emerge from Africa and Asia. Yet, Chicanas/os conceptualize their otherness through other cultural markers as well. Spanish linguistic identity is at once the sign of otherness in relation to a dominant Anglo power base, even as it also reminds of a history of assimilation. Although many Chicanas/os identify as Spanish speakers, this identification is complicated by the fact that a good portion of Chicanas/os are not fluent in Spanish, are passive-fluent, or are at best uneasy with their knowledge of the language. Furthermore, the centralization of a Spanish linguistic identity has failed to account for, on one hand, the fact that many Chicanas/os are alienated from the Spanish language and, on the other, that virtually all Chicanas/os are alienated from the Indigenous languages of their ancestors. Each of these lines of identification is made the more complex because they rely upon necessary disavowals.

These markers of otherness, Indigenous ancestry and an affiliation with the Spanish language, exist in tension with one another. At the same time that they are able to represent cultural phenomena of mestizaje, they also allude to histories of conflict, domination, and subjugation. It is the Spanish domination of a Native indigenous population that has prompted the rejection of Spanish ancestry within Chicana/o critical discourses dating back to the movement period of the 1970s. Interestingly, however, it is the Anglo conquest of the U.S. Southwest in the nineteenth century that has figured most powerfully in positioning Chicanas/os politically as conquered and dispossessed.

There are ample and legitimate reasons for this privileging of the Anglo conquest over that of the Spanish during the Chicano movement. Lorena Oropeza interprets the rejection of Spanish ancestry as a rejection of the standards of whiteness in favor of ideals of cultural sophistication and physical beauty that better reflected the ethnic pride of Chicanas/os (83-85). This abandonment of the claim to European ancestry enabled solidarity with Third World peoples under assault by United States and European military power, such as the Vietnamese, along racial and ideological lines. The perceived supremacy of European civilization was overtly challenged as Chicanas/os organized politically as a vanquished group that had been dispossessed by the Spanish and sought to revitalize a suppressed cultural patrimony.

The effects of the Anglo conquest were, and continue to be, visible in the Chicana/o present, as evidenced by the stark facts of segregation apparent in virtually all avenues of social life in the United States. This segregation is expressed socially and economically in a racialized division of labor that persists even as Chicanas/os become more educated and upwardly mobile. It is evident in political power structures as, in 2005, we witnessed the inauguration of the first "Hispanic" senators in U.S. history, and we had to make sense of the appointment of a Mexican-American from South Texas to the position of U.S. Attorney General under the Bush administration and the ongoing command of another Mexican-American from South Texas over the ground troops occupying Iraq. The persistence of ideologies of segregation also emerge in educational curricula throughout the country, although perhaps most astonishingly in South Texas where predominantly Mexican school administrations and faculty continue to impose Eurocentric course materials upon their predominantly Mexican-descent student populations.

The Anglo conquest, therefore, holds a central position as the defining moment of mestiza/o dispossession in Chicana/o academic and literary discourse. Quite simply, mestizas/os did not exist as a people prior to the Spanish conquest, owing their very emergence to that historical fact. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to position Chicanas/os as the people conquered by the Spanish even though Chicana/o Indigenous ancestry is easily and definitively traceable back through post-Conquest history, with some asserting that Chicanas/os are actually more racially Indian than Spanish. Yet another fact is that cultural indigeneity has been largely either relinquished or deracinated through the politics and policies of colonization, and that history is much harder to delineate. Nevertheless, the focus on Anglo settlement and subsequent removal of Indians and mestizas/os forges a productive connection between present-day Chicanas/os and Conquest-era Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. And, on the first day of the year 1994, yet another avenue of Indigenous reclamation was made available to U.S. Mexicans.

Indigenous Resistance at the Century's End

When the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) rebelled against the Mexican state on January 1, 1994, it brought Mexican Indians into the forefront of the U.S. activist consciousness. Indians again became symbols of contemporary resistance at a defining moment. The North American Free Trade Agreement took effect at the beginning of 1994, officially inaugurating the era of globalization and transnationalism, although by some accounts, that era began with conquest and colonialism during the Age of Exploration. Recognizing a potential for affiliation, the EZLN named and called upon Chicanos specifically in their communiqués, extending a cross-border summons to join the movement and begin organizing. The editorial of the first edition of the EZLN newspaper El Despertador Mexicano, published on December 31, 1993, for example, is addressed to "Mexicans: workers, campesinos, students, honest professionals, Chicanos, and progressives of other countries" (36-36). Indeed, it is easy to locate in Zapatista rhetoric a powerful elaboration of Chicana/o critiques of U.S. economic and political domination. This recognition of a group of people characterized as Mexican on the U.S. side of the divide invites identification with the Zapatista uprising that rests upon shared social and political objectives and shared history.

María Jimenez, a board member of the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico, reported that the Zapatistas "have a special bond with Chicanos/Mexicanos living in the United States" (Gonzáles and Rodríguez). Upon returning from the First International Forum for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism in the Lacandón jungle in the summer of 1996, Jimenez reported that the Zapatistas held a separate meeting with a delegation of Chicanos/Mexicanos from the United States. The Zapatistas, she said to journalists Roberto Rodríguez and Patrisia Gonzáles, considered the interactions with Chicanos and U.S. Mexicans a "priority relationship" and "recognize that Chicanos/Mexicanos in the United States live parallel lives—of exclusion and discrimination in their own homelands" (Gonzáles and Rodríguez). By acknowledging the U.S. Southwest as Chicana/o homeland, Zapatista rhetoric provided a contemporary referent for the indigenism that long characterized Chicana/o discourse, even as the Zapatistas themselves engaged in the continued mythification of the non-Indian revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata. The cross-border alliance is an example of the potential linkages between contemporary Indian politics and Chicana/o activism. Considering the geographic location of U.S. Mexicans, solidarity with the EZLN could be viewed as a transnational Indigenous struggle, another episode in the history of Indian resistance.

The Zapatista hailing of Chicanas/os also strengthens and, in some cases, activates an oppositional indigeneity that asserts its origins in the pre-contact Mesoamerican civilizations from which the rank and file of the Zapatista Army are also descended. Hector Carreon, writing for La Voz de Aztlan about Chicana/o participation in the Zapatista march into the Zócalo in 2001, notes that its significance lies, in part, in a reverse migration, "a re-return from Aztlan to the 'Heart of Mexico' where around 1325 AD the Mexicas founded Tenochtitlan. To have made this entrance into El Zocalo in the company of the Zapatistas and hundreds of thousands [of] indigenous brothers and sisters made the event particularly dramatic. It was as if we were recapturing Tenochtitlan after 'La Conquista'" (www.aztlan.net/zocalo.htm). Carreon invokes the ancient Aztec peregrination narrative that in a Chicana/o context establishes mestizas/os as Native both in the U.S. Southwest and in Mexico. Because the myth details a Mexica/Aztec migration from a place to the north of Mexico City/Tenochtitlan, Carreon recasts the Chicana/o accompaniment of the Zapatistas to the Zócalo as a repetition of that original migration. When he calls the journey into the Zócalo a "re-return," however, Carreon perhaps confuses his signifiers, misrepresenting Tenochtitlan as the original homeland. The march into the Zócalo, according to the logic of the Chicano Aztlán narrative, is, in fact, a "re-migration," a reproduction of the original ancient Mexica journey. The importance of locating the source of Chicana/o indigeneity in the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan, however, is to activate claims to Indigenous origins that emanate from Mexico, which are more available to Chicanos, on one hand, because of their perceived status as immigrants, and, on the other, because of the more recognized claim to indigeneity in the United States made by American Indians. Chicana/o indigenist narratives, such as Carreon's, directly address the historical processes of ethnocide that weakened identifications with Indigenous communities and disengaged processes of cultural transmission.

From Modern Primitivism to Chicana Radical Feminism

In presenting themselves as the inheritors of Indigenous cultural patrimonies, Chicanas/os reconstitute social structures that have defined them as immigrants in the modern era, establishing their historical presence in North America as Native. Yet, Chicana/o indigenism is contained by the European and Anglo-American "regimes of representation" that provide the structure in which Chicana/o indigeneity is assembled. The attempt at authenticity through Indianness cannot help but interlock with authority and the "circuits of knowledge and power" (Spivak, "Subaltern" 274) represented by the textual histories I sketched broadly earlier. Blood Lines seeks to illuminate the links between Chicana/o indigenist writing and other literary traditions that also represent Indians. These include, for example, anthropological and archeological research, art history, modernist primitivism, and Mexican state indigenism. The literary strategies used by Chicana/o indigenists and modern primitivists rewrite European archeology and anthropology and reconceive Mesoamerican ancient history. Anzaldúa, as I will show, rewrites Burland and Forman to accommodate a feminized Aztec mythos that succeeds the indigenist nationalism represented by Alurista, Valdez, and Rendon. D. H. Lawrence answers William H. Prescott's conflicted response to Aztec culture—his horror at the gruesomeness of blood sacrifice and simultaneous romantic fascination with the "golden age of Anahuac"—by reviving the pre-Columbian pantheon of a vanished race. Similarities that may surprise us exist between the discourses of modernist primitivism, as evidenced by Lawrence, Chicano indigenist nationalism, and the Chicana indigenist feminism consolidated by Gloria Anzaldúa, and make clear the fact that these discourses drew from and were even propelled by a fascination with pre-Conquest Mesoamerica. This fascination began with the looting of Indigenous material objects—the plastic arts and cultural patrimonies of Conquest-era societies—at the moment of European arrival in the Americas.

Chicana/o interest in Mesoamerica is made possible in part because of this complex history of "discovering," excavating, collecting, cataloging, preserving, and stealing. The textual readings that follow explicate examples of Chicana/o indigenism found in nationalist and feminist writings, attempting to place Chicana/o literature within this history and yet resist the conflation of the multiple contexts and motives. Although the relationship between Chicana/o indigenism and European primitivism does not lessen the reality of an Indigenous history, in considering that relationship we are confronted with the broad range of discourses that represent Indians, a persistent feature of which is the reliance on myth.

A primary goal of Blood Lines is to highlight the intertextualities that exist between Chicana/o formulations of indigenism and these other artistic and textual traditions. Proceeding in a chronological manner, I begin with an analysis of the "Mexican period" of the British novelist, D. H. Lawrence. A major literary figure who produced a significant body of work on Mexico, the most familiar example being his novel The Plumed Serpent (1929), this well-known and widely-read modernist writer pursued actively his interest in myth and the Aztec pantheon, also significant themes in Chicana/o indigenism. Chapter One, "Mexican Myth and Modern Primitivism," takes his work as an example, situating Lawrence within the context of broader trends in modernist primitivism, the expatriate presence in Mexico in the 1920s, and Mexican state indigenismo. Bringing together biographers' accounts with Lawrence's correspondence and fiction, this chapter engages an analysis of The Plumed Serpent that focuses on the novel's privileging of European subjectivity and authority as the main characters pursue cultural revitalization, spiritual advancement, and political resistance through the emergent Cult of Quetzalcoatl and its revived Aztec pantheon.

Chapter Two, "The Mesoamerican in the Mexican-American Imagination," addresses male-centered Chicano movement politics and the use of indigenist themes. Armando Rendon's Chicano Manifesto (1971) offers a straightforward appropriation of Mesoamerican mythology in his adoption and redeployment of the Aztec peregrination narrative and the cycle of the Fifth Sun to establish the Chicano claim to the U.S. Southwest. More inventive are the indigenist writings of Luis Valdez and Alurista. Valdez's 1967 play The Dark Root of a Scream is unique in its emphasis on, rather than omission of, ritual human sacrifice as he reinvents the practice as an act of barrio empowerment. His 1973 Pensamiento Serpentino, a long poem presented as an indigenist treatise, offers additional examples of Valdez's manipulation of Mesoamerican mythic symbols and themes. Finally, I take up published and unpublished work of Alurista, looking in particular at his use of indigenism to challenge economic as well as racial forms of oppression. I examine the alterations made to his original preamble to "El Plan de Aztlán," his unpublished platforms for the development of Chicano Studies, and a 1974 play entitled Dawn. Alurista adopts Mesoamerican symbols and mythic figures as teaching tools to communicate to audiences the degenerative influences of corporatism, capitalism, and consumer greed, all of which are attributed to Anglo America. Despite the constructive uses of myth, transformative potential is held in check by each author's ultimate inability to imagine women beyond the confines of the very ideological strictures he attempts to expose and disassemble.

Chapter Three, "From La Malinche to Coatlicue: Chicana Indigenist Feminism and Mythic Native Women," describes how the Chicano (male) version of the Indian was transformed by feminists into a figure of women's resistance. This section assesses the trope of "'the' Native woman" in Chicana feminist discourse, beginning with the revision of La Malinche in the context of nationalism and charting her development into the theoretical "Native woman" of 1980s Chicana feminism. Focusing on two foundational texts, Adelaida del Castillo's originary essay on La Malinche and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, I show how the Indian is feminized and redeployed in the critique of racism, sexism, and homophobia. This chapter situates Gloria Anzaldúa's mestiza-indigenist constructions in the context of and in conversation with modernist primitivism and its critically underacknowledged fascination with Mexico and culminates my argument that the characteristic form of Chicana/o indigenism is myth.

Chapter Four arrives at what I call the "contra-mythic," texts that operate in ways that reject, resist, and deconstruct the mythic. "The Contra-mythic: Refashioning Indigeneity in Acosta, Cervantes, Gaspar de Alba, and Villanueva" calls attention to texts that pronounce the ambiguity of Chicana/o ancestry and demonstrate analytical methods that challenge the naturalization of identity. Such texts refuse to essentialize Indigenous origins, instead deploying self-conscious, unsettled performances of conflicted mestiza/o identities. The works of Teresa Palomo Acosta, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Alma Luz Villanueva enable alternative ways to read and write the Indian into the Chicana/o past and present. Ultimately, these texts make clear that, rather than being mere birthright, Chicana/o indigeneity is the result of purposeful and political acts of self-creation and critique.

Calling upon the history of a glorious Indigenous past, Chicano movement discourse introduced the Indian as a symbol of Mexican-American disenfranchisement and resistance. The use of the Indian has continued to the present as Chicana/o activists, artists, and authors have recovered a variety of Indigenous cultural traditions to elaborate political agendas and identity formations. The particular challenges I see with regard to Chicana/o Indigenous history are as follows: to acknowledge the contemporary realities of Native peoples in the United States, as well as in Mexico; to recognize the centrality of land rights in American Indian politics; to reconsider the historical and social erasure of the Indian in the mestizo and yet recognize the ways, rhetorical and material, in which mestizos obliged that erasure. As I have shown, there is history of appropriation and redefinition of indigenismo within a U.S. North America outside of Chicana/o critical discourse, as the examples of Churchill and Forbes demonstrate. Chicana/o indigenism similarly does not acknowledge critiques of that tradition within a Latin American, particularly Mexican, context.

This study is about the complications and paradoxes of Chicana/o literary indigenism, most especially the reliance on mythic pre-Columbian pantheons to advance claims of ancestry and land rights. My argument is that Chicana/o indigenism creates cultural narratives of Indianness that rely most prominently on mythic accounts drawn from anthropology and archaeology, and, as it most often does, myth here supplants history. Nevertheless, through indigenism, Chicanas/os have been able to place themselves in an oppositional historical context and to generate discourses of social change because of that positioning.

A Word About Terms

Readers might notice that, beyond initial uses, I have not used quotation marks to call attention to my ideological position on the concepts "primitive," "civilized," "other," "savage," "tribal," and "Indian." I do want make clear that I consider these to be just that, concepts, and not references to actual groups of people. I have used quotations marks initially to make clear my distance from the terms and my awareness of their status as constructs rather than legitimate designations. Using the convention of "scare quotes" would rightly imply my sense of irony, suspicion, disapproval, mistrust, and probably much more depending upon the context. But the continued use of that tactic throughout the essays that follow would very quickly, I am sure, become tiresome, distracting, even annoying. Instead, I choose to trust the interpretative skills of readers, who, I believe, are easily capable of perceiving the multiple valences of such terms. The capacities of these terms to refract multiply, I fear, would only be dulled by the excesses of the punctuation tactic.

Additionally, I have chosen to use "Indian" to refer to the Western idea of Indigenous cultures and peoples and "Indigenous" and "Native" to refer to the actual groups of people or individuals. At times, I have chosen "American Indian" when the context seems appropriate—for example, when discussing movement activities of the 1970s—and also with an understanding that many Natives in the United States choose that designation over others. I am similarly aware that "Indian" is also used in communities, its viability indicated in the title of one of the most widely-read of Indigenous periodicals, Indian Country Today. I have chosen, however, not to use it to designate people.