Together, Marisela Treviño Orta’s Braided Sorrow, Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints, and Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad provide spaces for Chicanas’ mourning, which critiques structural forms of oppression that differentially effect loss and injury in marginalized Chicana/o
communities. Loss in all three works can be observed on a thematic level, such that these works belong to a catalogue of cultural productions that position loss as a recurring phenomenon for Chicana/os, beginning with the decimation of indigenous communities by the Spanish and extending into the 21st century in the US with systemic forms of violence.145 Noting and
attending to this emphasis on loss, my project examines how Chicanas’ public mourning grows out of different sites of loss that bear a relationship to structural and/or interpersonal forms violence. In these sites of loss—the borderlands, a farmworker community, and the barrio— Chicanas engage public mourning as a means of resistance, actively pointing towards mourning as a political endeavor.
The public mourning of Chicanas constitutes onerous emotional and intellectual labor. At its basic level, the public expression of grief asserts the existence of emotional pain and declares a rupture produced by loss; both of these assertions posit loss as something deserving of attention and response. Bearing witness to loss or social injury, Chicanas’ public mourning and its politics intervene in daily life activities, though it may not necessarily lead to any concrete social or
145 This statement does not reify loss as a defining characteristic of Chicana/o cultural productions, lest it might circumscribe loss as something that can never be mitigated. But, I do see loss as a persistent subject matter with which Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural producers engage on both abstract and tangible levels, related to histories of colonization, the rise of Spanish and Anglo-American empires, political disenfranchisement, social alienation, as well as processes of assimilation, to name a few.
political changes. In conceptualizing mourning as a political act, however, this dissertation does not rest on the argument that mourning might be “so emotionally powerful that [it] threaten[s] to overwhelm political order” (Alford 7) and obliges sociopolitical change for disenfranchised Chicana/o communities. To theorize about mourning’s political efficacy using affect alone might problematically rely on optimistic assumptions about empathy and morality as leading forces for transformation. And, while empathy is a desired response from individuals who have knowledge about or proximity to a loss that is not their own, empathy is but a kernel for igniting protest aimed at transforming structures of power and their injustices. As I have demonstrated, Chicanas express their grief in various forms, and the labor of mourning is more than a simple public display of an emotional state.
The specific works I examine convey mourning as a cultural, social, and political project where Chicanas recast what it means to actively respond to and engage loss and injury. Their public expression of grief amplifies political consciousness and cultivates political agency in the service of elevating Chicana/o loss as a matter of civic resistance and protest. Public mourning is an active and political response that forges questions, concerns, and meaning about loss (tangible or physical), and, as such, it compellingly re-centers loss in spaces and contexts where it is mitigated, silenced, disavowed, made invisible, or altogether erased. My project concludes that, in acts of public mourning, Chicanas become political agents who disrupt the silence or
disavowal of loss and social injury; reject the privatization of mourning; deliberately mourn in public spaces; question whose losses “count”; defend the grievability of Chicana/o bodies; challenge the social invisibility of loss; urge public recognition; and demand both responsibility and accountability from state authorities. In these ways, Chicanas’ public mourning acts have larger political implications, and they position Chicanas as leaders in their communities in the
pursuit of social change. And yet, these acts of public mourning, as much as they carry forth political implications, may not always achieve social change. Notwithstanding, the structural injustices revealed by public mourning shift the discourse around grief and loss for these Chicana/o communities to focus on political shortcomings in need of transformation.
Scholarly Contributions
Most immediate, my project uniquely brings Braided Sorrow, Heroes and Saints, and Electricidad in conversation with one another to explore what public mourning looks like in various spaces and what its implications are for Chicana/os, especially for Chicanas who
spearhead the labor of mourning in these works. While Moraga’s Heroes and Saints has garnered lots of critical attention from scholars, the literature on Orta’s Braided Sorrow and Alfaro’s Electricidad is still growing; thus, this project contributes to the literary criticism of these plays, with special attention to their respective historical, political, and social landscapes. I provide a new lens through which to interpret how these works forge a politics of public mourning that, incidentally, correspond to the spirit of protest associated with the Chicano Movement as well as with the political resistance that guided the beginnings of Chicana/o theatre. Inasmuch as there is an understanding that Chicana/o communities differentially experience loss and social injury, the juxtaposition of these three plays makes the case that distinctive Chicana positionalities confront long-standing structural injustices through public mourning in their own ways. Whether in the US-Mexico borderlands, in a California farmworker community, or in a barrio on the East Side of Los Angeles, Chicanas publicly express their grief in different forms, but they all defy the idea that mourning is a passive activity or something to be overlooked in light of more flagrantly political acts. Mourning has not been absent from Chicana/o texts, but focused
discussions on the political functions of Chicana/o mourning are limited in literary criticism and theory.
In addition to making contributions to the study of Chicana/o dramatic texts, my project participates in disrupting the pathologization and/or medicalization of mourning, joining scholars like David Eng, Anne Cheng, and José Esteban Muñoz. I treat mourning as something politically productive, and I reclaim it as a viable means for resistance in Chicana/o communities. This endeavor therefore rejects dominant psychoanalytic discourses around mourning that limit mourning’s generative capacities. Moreover, my project contributes to the field of Chicana/o Studies, broadly speaking, by putting together Chicana/o plays in dialogue with recent
scholarship about mourning that has developed out of the field of political science. In particular, political scientists have theorized mourning as a tool to address and critique the shortcomings of American democracy, and they have argued for the reparative possibilities of mourning, which can help animate US politics towards a better, more just future. While the recent scholarship on the politics of mourning in political science treats disenfranchised communities, the vast majority of scholars are guided by an evident black and white binary that, consequently, excludes brown bodies.146 My project maintains a critical focus on the plights of Chicana/os in critical
conversations about mourning and its political value. Chicana/o Studies, too, can participate in framing understanding of the politics of mourning.
On a larger level, this project theorizes public mourning as an undervalued means through which Chicana/os can critique grave structural problems but also nurture political aspirations that envision a more just world. In the face of loss and social injury, it is important for Chicana/o communities to embrace grief and to mourn their loss, rather than eschew this emotional labor because it seems insignificant. Mourning allows us to meditate on our human condition. When we suffer a physical or abstract loss, our world is involuntarily changed, in
146 Several political scientists, like David McIvor, have written about the social impacts of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the ways it has elicited public mourning in response to the deaths of black men and women.
some cases shattered. More than this, however, our experiences of loss are interlaced with our political lives; the personal is political. Our personal experiences are rooted in larger social, economic, and political structures, and, as a result, so are our losses and injuries. Put simply, to mourn is a political act. When we make our mourning public, we can begin to condemn the structures from which losses and injuries emerge, as my project shows. Furthermore, public mourning can help orient our politics to pursue dignity, equality, and justice.
Where can and should Chicana/os carry out the labor of public mourning? This labor can take place almost anywhere, but, as my project suggests, issues of (in)visibility might determine in which spaces mourning should take place. I would also like to propose that this labor can materialize in theatre spaces. It is no coincidence that the Chicana/o works I selected for this project are all texts written for the stage; if they were not meant to be staged, then these works would take on other forms and genres, like novels or poetry. I see the theatre as a valuable space for public mourning, because it is a space where grief can be felt, expressed, and embodied. Theatre arts engage in doing as much as representation. It is a space where private mourning can literally become public, and, as such, it is a space that can store and transmit information about experiences of loss. In an effort to illuminate the broader social and political import of public mourning acts, and to better illustrate that the theatre might be understood as a distinctive space for these acts, I briefly turn my attention to a recent work of theatre in Puerto Rico that evolved out of the loss wrought by the natural disaster that was hurricane María and its subsequent “unnatural” disaster, or the US government’s response to the hurricane.
Given my focus on Chicana/o communities in this dissertation, the consideration of public mourning using theatre in Puerto Rico might seem incongruous. However, there is an argument to be made about a shared legacy of colonization and imperialism between Puerto
Ricans and Chicana/os.147 In Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle for Liberation (1972), Rodolfo Acuña discusses internal colonialism as part of the Southwest’s historiography. He explains,
Central to the thesis of this monograph is my contention that the conquest of the
Southwest created a colonial situation in the traditional sense-with the Mexican land and population being controlled by an imperialistic United States. Further, I contend that this colonization-with-variations is still with us today [the twentieth century]. Thus, I refer to the colony, initially, in the traditional definition of the term, and later (taking into account the variations) as an internal colony. (Acuña 3)
Acuña argues that the Southwest is a colony within an Anglo-American empire; his reference to “colonization-with-variations” has to do Mexican American experiences of social, economic, and political forms of subordination following Anglo-American conquest. This internal colonial theory148 relates to a larger colonial paradigm that elucidates the relationship between the US and Puerto Rico. In America’s Colony: The Political and Cultural Conflict between the United States and Puerto Rico (2007), Pedro A. Malavet explains that “Puerto Ricans’ cultural nationhood conflicts with their external reality: the U.S. control of their territory” (3). Indeed, Puerto Rico is a “cultural nation” with territorial status that lacks legal and political sovereignty (Malavet 4),
147 Since both Puerto Rico and the Southwest territory were formerly indigenous, they share a history of double colonization and imperialism—first by the Spanish and then Anglo-Americans.
148 Regarding the historiography of the Southwest, the internal colonial model has been both dismissed and accepted by scholars. In the preface to the second edition of Occupied America, Acuña himself would later note, “I have reevaluated the internal colonial model and set it aside as a useful paradigm relevant to the nineteenth century but not the twentieth” (1981; vii). In large part, this had to do with his consideration of the number of Mexicans in the twentieth century who were crossing the US border and did not experience the oppression resulting from territorial conquest. In “Ideological Distortions in Recent Chicano Historiography,” Tomás Almaguer echoed the idea that the experience of American Americans in the 19th century did not extend into the 20th century, and he also argued that internal colonial theory did not adequately consider class. Nevertheless, literary critics including Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Emma Pérez have engaged, rather than dismissed, ideas of internal colonialism. Elaborating on Gloria
Anzaldúa’s attention to race, class, and sexuality as axes for understanding a colonial condition, Saldívar-Hull understands internal colonialism in relation to gender and mestizaje in “Feminism on the Border: From Gender Politics to Geopolitics.” Likewise, Emma Pérez engages “coloniality’s imaginary and psychic implications with respect to material, tangible conditions” (6-7) in The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, Theories of Representation and Difference (1999).
the oldest US colony with over a 400-year history of colonization. Scholars have rigorously examined the ways in which US colonialism has had extensive implications on Puerto Rican culture and identity149; nationhood and citizenship150; as well as poverty151 and economic development.152 In 2017, the colonial relationship between the US and Puerto Rico would become a focal point for discussing the aftermath of hurricane María, pressing Puerto Ricans to think about political sovereignty and to aspire toward self-sufficiency. As one journalist put it, “María taught us how deep the seed of colonialism is planted inside us and of how little importance we are to the [US] empire” (Torres Gotay 88).
The Mo(u)rning after María: Making Loss Count in ¡Ay María! (2017)
As a category four storm, María devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017; it destroyed the territory’s electrical grid, damaged hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings, and killed thousands of people. This account of the island’s devastation, of course, has been met with denial at every turn. Nearly two weeks after the hurricane, US President Donald Trump egregiously downplayed María’s fatal consequences, noting that only sixteen individuals had lost their lives. By Trump’s account, María was not deemed a “real catastrophe” like hurricane Katrina was in 2005. In December 2017, the official death toll rose to 64, according to public safety officials on the island. Nevertheless, Puerto Ricans maintained that the truth about María’s consequences, especially regarding the death count, was not being reported. Indeed, a year later, the local
149 For more on the construction of national identity in Puerto Rico, see Jorge Duany’s The Puerto Rican Nation on
the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (2002).
150 On the subject of Puerto Rico’s ambiguous political status, see Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico,
American Expansion, and the Constitution (2001), edited by Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall. 151 See Susan S. Baker’s Understanding Mainland Puerto Rican Poverty (2002).
government accepted 2,975 as the official death count. Yet, a study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that even this number was grossly underestimated. Researchers at Harvard, in collaboration with colleagues in Puerto Rico and the University Colorado School of Medicine, found that there were an estimated 4,645 additional deaths that were not counted as disaster-related deaths.
The initial underestimated death count, as well as the discrepancy between the official count and additional deaths estimated by the aforementioned Harvard study, has only served to emphasize the matter of structural negligence. After all, the storm itself did not kill thousands; it was a series of failures on the part of local and federal governments following María that created conditions of possibility for Puerto Ricans to “drow[n] in bureaucracy and institutional neglect” (Bonilla and LeBrón 4). Of course, scholars and investigative journalists have revealed that María’s (un)natural disaster and its effects on the island ought to be read as “the product of a long-standing colonial disaster” (Bonilla and LeBrón 11), contextualized in Puerto Rico’s “long history of structural vulnerability and forced dependency” (Bonilla and LeBrón 5). Accordingly, Nelson Maldonado-Torres contends that to unpack María’s aftermath requires a “significant engagement with Caribbean decolonial thought and decolonial thinking at large” (340), for María is not really a crisis, he argues, but a disaster whose outcomes are telling of previously- made decisions guided by or subject to colonialism. If María is not a crisis but, instead, a disaster whose outcomes are steeped in the historical roots of colonialism, then the hurricane has “lifted a ‘veil’ covering [past and existing] Puerto Rican realities” (Gregory 152).
Puerto Ricans, who have long understood and experienced the implications of colonialism as citizens of a US territory, still mourn the loss of family members, friends, neighbors, homes, and livelihoods. Meanwhile, in the past two years since the hurricane hit the
island, federal government officials have co-opted narratives that deny Puerto Rican grief and mourning. These narratives carry forth an agenda of dismissing loss and destruction as well as the critique of US state failures and negligence. Further, public media outlets have dismissed or “moved on” from covering the hurricane’s aftermath, engaging in a project of forgetting that contributes to the exacerbation of Puerto Rican loss and devastation. How can this denial of death and devastation be interrupted and challenged? What spaces do Puerto Ricans have to negotiate their traumas and loss? How can recovery efforts really take hold when that which needs recovery has not yet been rightfully witnessed, acknowledged, and assessed? These are the questions that anchor my discussion of the larger value of public mourning in relation to Puerto Rico and the place of theatre.
Rather than attending to the opening night of a play she produced in Puerto Rico, Mariana Carbonell was instead attending to María’s damage in October 2017. In this process, Carbonell began to conceive of the empty spaces across the island as bare stages or opportunities “to relieve some of the population’s anguish and trauma” (Carbonell 39). She eventually
recruited actors for these empty stages. These actors would collectively contribute to writing and performing ¡Ay María!, an interactive theatre piece of tragicomic vignettes and songs, under the direction of Maritza Pérez Otero (Carbonell 39-40). According to Amauta Marston-Firmino, Mickey Negrón and other artists aimed to visit all of the island’s municipalities to perform the play (4). In the play, neighbors come together in the aftermath of the hurricane to procure basic