Carmen Boullosa’s Texas (2013) is a NHN set in the Texas-Mexico border. Divided into two parts, this narrative explores the events that surrounded Juan Nepomuceno Cortina’s uprising in Brownsville and Matamoros in 1859. These two Rio Grande Valley border towns alluded in the novel with the literary names of Bruneville and Matasanchez are depicted along with an amalgam of interacting characters that recreate the precarious reality of the people inhabiting the region during the years following the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. As it was revealed in the previous chapter, Fr. Parisot O.M.I. bore witness to the lawlessness, violence, and racial intolerance created at the
time.105 These tensions were, on the one hand, followed by responses such as
Nepomuceno Cortina’s and other attempts to resist the loss of rights and opportunities generated by the new nation model introduced by Americans.106 This environment set the stage for a continuous interaction of religions: Mexican Catholics would begin to be outnumbered by newcomers from multiple faiths and races, and thus were forced to assert themselves in the face of new competing discourses. This borderland experience is prominently featured in Boullosa’s neo-historical portrayal of Texas through her over two hundred interacting characters. These characters and her narrator share, engage, react, and debate their ideas and stories as they experience the actions of Juan
Nepomuceno Cortina against the racial oppression and injustice that escalated into the historical events such as his raid of Brownsville. Such events will be subject to an ethnographic analysis; however, this connection to the field of cultural anthropology needs to be explained before returning at the study of religion of the Rio Grande Valley.
The notion of an anthropological approach to the study of a NHN novel, or a fictional work in general, is rooted in the possibility of exploring, criticizing, and
recreating reality through literature. After all, the discipline of cultural anthropology has defended the idea arguing that anthropologists are interpreters of cultures (Langness and Frank 18). Clifford Geertz was the first anthropologist to explore on the subject in the 70s with his Interpretation of Cultures (1973), where he argued for the interpretative study of cultures. In the decade that followed Geertz’s work such as James Clifford,
105 Rippy, J. Fred, provides another account of the violence, intolerance, and tension found in the Rio
Grande Valley during the years that followed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. See, 91-111.
106 Other examples of responses are explained by Treviño in his The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno-Catholicism in Houston (2006). See, 42-80.
George E. Marcus, Michael M. J. Fisher began to call for a push towards interpretation that would account for the multiple waves of significant inherent to the study of cultures. According to a recent study of anthropologist Dan Rose, this experimentation would amount to the creation of ethnographies based on the relationship between literature and anthropology; a practice that in turn would lead to the creation and use of a polyphonic, heteroglossic, multi-genre construction (219). This hybrid anthropological endeavor set itself apart from traditional ethnographies as it implied the “dissolution of boundaries between literature, sociology, anthropology, critical theory, philosophy cinematography, computer sciences, and so on” (220). In other words, the new anthropological writing, or ethnographic novel, would create a bridge between various disciplines that dwell in the human condition. This creation however has yet to be systematically theorized despite the existence of over thirty years of discussions about the relationship between fictional creations and cultural anthropology (Laterza 125). Though there is certainly a consensus about its place as a bridge between disciplines, current formal theorizations are limited to what can and cannot be accomplished through Elizabeth Fernea’s broad definition of an ethnographic novel.
In her article “The Case of Sitt Marie Rose: An Ethnographic Novel from the Modern Middle East” Fernea defines the new creation as:
a text, like other literary texts, that in the course of presenting a fictional story creates a setting (or physical and social context), characters (or people), plot and action that the reader judges to be authentic in terms of the particular cultural, social, or political situation portrayed. If the reader
judges the text to be authentic, he or she then no only will accept any messages explicit or implicit in the text itself but will also find information about matters outside the text itself: matters of love and death, the appropriate conduct of life, and the proper direction of culture and society. One must also make the distinction between an ethnographic novel, written by an outsider about an other, and an ethnographic novel written by an artist from within the culture. (154)
This broad definition confirms the abolishment of disciplines but fails to account for the multi-genre description that Dan Rose had foreseen in the 80s and Vito Laterza still warns about in his recent study of 2007. 107 Such void explains the lack of an established cannon of this particular genre of ethnographies, a void that becomes evident when compared to the already discussed NHN. Taking this into account, it is necessary to revisit Rose’s observations concerning the future of ethnographic writing because he proposes a set of characteristics that can be useful tools in the study of the novels analyzed in this dissertation. His observations will be contextualized with the broader description provided by Fernea. The aim will be reconciling Ainsa and Menton’s notions of the NHN with notion of an ethnographic novel. Through these observations it will becomes clear how these new ethnographies bridge the separation between the social sciences in the study of the Catholic experience in the Rio Grande Valley.
107 Vito Laterza would in fact dwell on the limits of ethnographic novels in his analysis of the novel Madumo, a Man Bewitched (2000). See, 131-132.