Interrogating the University Archive - Recovering Voices of Victimization and Resistance |
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If the university archive is the place in scholarship and research through which all other points must pass, can other forms of cultural memory be discovered, particularly for the universities situated in the American Southwest? Rather than just aspiring to ascertain rare printed texts, can the university archive affirm other aesthetic and cultural texts that lie outside of the purview of Western research value-standards? Although this may demand confronting strenuous intellectual issues, it behooves university archives to be attentive to the contested texts of the racialized “Other,” particularly those vernacular verbal genres linked to migration, exile, diaspora, and borderlands. To address these questions, a new interracial ethnic alliance needs to tell our myths of origin and our stories of victimization. These remain “the powerful imperative of a powerful form of resistance” (Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 35). Indeed, the voice of the “Other” is not heard in official archives, wherein certain forms are prioritized above others, but within “genealogies, within the landscape, within weavings and carvings, even within the personal names that many people carry” (107). In the period of the antebellum South, for example, Mark Anthony Neal reminds us that “black culture found expression in the slave quarters, in the church, and most notably and brilliantly in the field under the watchful eye of the overseer” (2). As a person of Mexican descent, I hear the interior voice of my meztiso-self in the speech genres of Mexican border culture. By listening to the cuentos, rezos, chistes, and border corridos, I allow, in Les Black’s words, “the out of place a sense of belonging” (xxix, 140). Thoroughly imbued with orality, the border poet takes precedence in shaping my Mexican religious-cultural identity. In Anzaldúa’s words, “These folk musicians and folk songs are our chief cultural myth-makers, and they — made — our — hard — lives — seem — bearable” (61). In other words, alongside the dateable records lie a specific mythopoetic-oral tradition that also informs, either consciously or unconsciously, how Latinos/as of the American Southwest shape their Mexican identity. This storytelling tradition is also expressed through visual artistic productions such as Mexican retablos and ex-votos and Chicano/a public art. Rather than satisfy the scientific rules governing self-identification, some Latinos/as make use of a geocultural instinct to give meaning to their identity. For the thousands of Japanese Americans confined to internment camps during World War II, religious belief, various dance forms, the playing of traditional musical instruments, and rock gardens became revived modes of cultural resistance. Gary Okihiro, a scholar of comparative ethnic studies, states the following:
Okihiro claims that this poetry records the barren landscape of camp life — the barbed wire fence, watchtowers, and sentries; the searchlights, fingerprinting, and cataloging; mass feeding; interrogations on loyalty-disloyalty; and a dull, regimented life (232). When the message of resistance inscribed in this poetry speaks to us, are we offered a new way of understanding cultural resistance, imprisonment, and colonization in the Bible? Indeed, the value of our contested stories lies not in their “exotic” otherness but in the ability to decolonize minds occupied by the colonizers’ various cultural presumptions and persuade those who occupy the Euro-center to allow for the existence of other, equally legitimate centers. |