Former Futures and Absent Histories in María Cristina Mena, Rosaura Sánchez, and Beatrice Pita Renee Hudson CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 19, Number 2, Fall 2019, pp. 69-92 (Article) Published by Michigan State University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/732383 Access provided at 5 Sep 2019 13:11 GMT from UMass Boston Former Futures and Absent Histories in María Cristina Mena, Rosaura Sánchez, and Beatrice Pita Renee Hudson University of Massachusetts Boston AS RAMÓN SALDÍVAR HAS THEORIZED , TWENTY - FIRST - CENTURY ETHNIC WRITERS increasingly turn to what he calls “historical fantasy,” a new mode tasked with “narrat[ing] the emergence of transnational, cosmopolitan, economic, and cultural orders whose desperate inequities are most readily experienced by persons from diasporic, transitory, and migratory communities in the borderlands between the global north and south who lack recognition under dominant ideas of social membership” (2011b, 594). While Saldívar examines how historical fantasy operates across ethnic literatures and is invested in locating it as a contemporary mode of these literatures, his description emphasizes the centrality of the borderlands to his theorization of historical fantasy. Reading CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2019, pp. 69–92. ISSN 1532-687X. © 2019 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.  69 70  Former Futures and Absent Histories in Mena, Sánchez, and Pita outside of his strict periodization invites us to consider the major movements across the borderlands—central among them the Mexican Revolution—that have informed the emergence of historical fantasy. Elsewhere Saldívar adds that historical fantasy “is a way of describing the ‘something more’ that the literary works I refer to as postrace fictions do in linking fantasy, history, and the imaginary, the imaginary history, in order to remain true to ethnic literature’s utopian allegiance to social justice” (2012, 14). Although Saldívar’s explanation reveals his investment in postracial aesthetics, which names a temporal shift in the nature of race and racism rather than a space free of racism, María Cristina Mena’s imaginary histories of the revolution demonstrate that such historical fantasies and their attendant preoccupations with ethnic literature’s relation to social justice have been part of U.S. ethnic literatures well before Saldívar’s periodization. A proto-Chicana feminist figure, María Cristina Mena, who was born in Mexico but fled in 1907 before the Mexican Revolution (1910–17), is a figure whose contributions to Chicanx literature remain largely unexamined.1 Publishing in the prestigious, modernist Century Magazine as well as more women-focused venues, such as Cosmopolitan and Household Magazine, Mena published the majority of her short stories between 1913 and 1916. An elite Mexican whose parents were of European descent, Mena’s work explores U.S. imperialism in Mexico, Aztec mythology, the changing roles of women, and the Mexican Revolution.2 Writing for white audiences in the United States, Mena had to negotiate how to represent Mexico during a turbulent time.3 Although her background was privileged, she was still subject to prejudices faced by Mexican exiles living in the United States during and after the revolution. Mena became alien to her homeland—there is no evidence that she ever returned to Mexico—suggesting that her relationship to her country was largely speculative, most likely gleaned from newspapers and letters from friends still in Mexico. Although I am myself imagining Mena’s relationship to Mexico, what we do know is that throughout her career Mena grappled with Pan-American issues while living in the United States (Toth 2013, 337). In short, Mena’s writings about Mexico and the revolution are necessarily speculative, as her status as an exilic subject requires her to draw connections through memory as well as, in key ways, anticipation and prediction, the two Renee Hudson  speculative models we see at work most prominently in her short stories. In arguing that Mena’s writings on the revolution are speculative fictions, I draw upon Aimee Bahng’s capacious understanding of the term, which she uses “not to identify a genre wholly distinct from science fiction, but to use a more expansive term that might include related genres such as fantasy, horror, and historical fiction; and that highlights the speculative mode of the ‘What if?’” (2017, 13). In considering the “What if?” I argue that Mena is a speculative precursor to later Chicana speculations, particularly for contemporary Chicanx literature, such as Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s novella Lunar Braceros 2125–2148 (2009).4 I contend that both Mena, Sánchez, and Pita engage with what Reinhart Koselleck has alternately called futures past, superseded futures, or former futures (1985, 3). In theorizing former futures, Koselleck highlights the relationship between “a given present and its condition as a superseded former future” (3), or what he calls “the onetime future of past generations” (11). In other words, Koselleck theorizes futures that were imagined but never were. Building on Koselleck, I look at how Mena, Sánchez, and Pita look to former futures to imagine better futures than those given to us by the Mexican Revolution and the Chicano movement. To that end, I consider why Mena focused on the period that led to the revolution, Porfirio Díaz’s rule, from 1876 to 1911 in “Doña Rita’s Rivals,” first published in Century Magazine in 1914, and subsequently allegorizes the revolution in a seemingly timeless space in “The Sorcerer and General Bisco,” which was published in the same magazine in 1915. In so doing, I suggest that she displaces her explorations of the revolution to the time period before it begins or considers the revolution in fantastic modes without a clear sense of time. In short, Mena explores former futures to locate moments where the revolution went wrong. In much the same way that Mena critiques the Mexican Revolution and anticipates the antirevolutionary machismo of the Chicano movement, Sánchez and Pita critique the Chicano movement by rendering it as an absent history in Lunar Braceros. As I will show, Sánchez and Pita frequently draw upon revolutionary histories in the Americas to inform their revolutionary vision of the future, but the former futures they return to do not include the Chicano movement. This absent history—as another form of historical 71 72  Former Futures and Absent Histories in Mena, Sánchez, and Pita fantasy or what I argue is this archive’s special mode of speculative fiction— suggests a reading of the Chicano movement as complicit with the ongoing oppression of Chicanxs and Latinxs more broadly in the United States. In their turn to speculative fiction, Sánchez and Pita also implicitly indict the Chicano realist novel for its collusion with heteropatriarchy in the United States as they point to and challenge the limitations of the social visions that attend the writing of Chicano realism’s most celebrated figures, including Jose Antonio Villarreal and Oscar Zeta Acosta. In refusing to reference the Chicano movement, then, I argue that Sánchez and Pita write against these canonical Chicano realist novels and turn to speculative fiction to resist realism’s complicity with misogyny and homophobia in this particular Chicano literary tradition, a move that is anticipated in a much earlier moment by Mena. In pairing Sánchez and Pita with Mena, I contend that Mena offers a specifically Chicana form of speculation that predates and anticipates such later Chicana speculations, thus emphasizing the centrality of Chicana imaginaries within the genealogy of Chicanx speculative fiction and extending its periodization long before typical accounts that start with Ernest Hogan’s Chicano sci-fi writing. In resisting Chicano realism, Chicana speculative fiction writers consider how former futures can imagine more liberatory presents by writing outside both received histories and conventional literary histories. MENA’S STORIES OF THE REVOLUTION Because they require working toward an unknown, better future, revolutions are inherently speculative.5 In Mena’s writing on the revolution, she offers an early critique of revolutionary politics to anticipate and foreclose its potentially regressive tenets. This aspect of Mena’s work is evident in “The Sorcerer and General Bisco,” Mena’s most explicit work of speculative fiction, which uses fantasy to examine how easily revolutionaries could be seduced by foreign interests in much the same way that Díaz’s presidency modernized Mexico by shackling the country to foreign interests, particularly the United States, and increased class disparities between landholders and workers. With the influx of foreign capital, wealthy Mexicans grew wealthier while the poor lost their land and migrated from their villages to find work. In the story, Renee Hudson  a woman from the upper class, Carmelita, flees the home of her husband, Don Baltazar Rascón, who the narrator suggests murdered his first wife to receive her inheritance from her brother and guardian, Aquiles de la Vega. Forced into marriage with Don Baltazar, Carmelita runs away with Aquiles in the hopes of escaping Don Baltazar’s magical influence and, in so doing, runs into General Bisco, a leader of the revolution. As Tiffany Ana López and Amy Doherty argue, the story can be read allegorically such that General Bisco represents Pancho Villa and Don Baltazar Rascón represents either Díaz himself or the United States (Doherty 1997, 100 n. 9). Given that Díaz fled the country in 1911 and died in 1915 as well as that Mena’s work demonstrates a sustained critique of U.S. imperialism, I suggest that in all likelihood, Don Baltazar represents U.S. interests. As part of his plan to attack a seaport, General Bisco decides to use Don Baltazar’s hacienda as a base. Once at the hacienda, Don Baltazar forces General Bisco to stare into a crystal ball, which he then uses to hypnotize the general. As the general stares into the crystal ball, Don Baltazar gains his trust by insinuating himself within the field of battle: “always in the background of the picture lurked the figure of Don Baltazar Rascón, faithful, beneficent, indispensable, a modest custodian of wisdom and conjurer of fortune. To all of which the muscles of El Bisco’s face responded with a fluctuation of appropriate expressions” (Mena 1997, 106). Framing himself as a faithful supporter of General Bisco and, thus, of the revolution, Don Baltazar hopes to save his hacienda from the revolutionaries and continue to preside “as absolutely as any medieval baron” (101). If we read Don Baltazar as a representative of the United States, then Don Baltazar emerges as a steadfast supporter of Mexico; in planting this idea in General Bisco’s mind, he hopes to forestall the revolutionary potential General Bisco exemplifies and maintain the status quo in which Mexico remains reliant on the United States. In ruling the hacienda like a “medieval baron,” Don Baltazar illuminates Mena’s double critique. In the first, she critiques the hacienda system with its reliance on peonage and, thus, inequality. In the second, she likens Mexico’s position to the United States as that of a peon to a hacendado. General Bisco only emerges from his trance with Carmelita’s return to the hacienda. There, Carmelita tells the general, “‘By this cross I saw him work the 73 74  Former Futures and Absent Histories in Mena, Sánchez, and Pita magic with you! My dream was a true dream, sent by God. You looked in the crystal, and he commanded you to close the eyes, and you obeyed him. And you saw all that he commanded you to see, and he stole away your will, your understanding, all your natural feelings’” (Mena 1997, 110). In this moment, Carmelita is not only a revolutionary but a visionary. Familiar with Don Baltazar’s magical manipulations, she uses her own magical gifts to intervene on General Bisco’s behalf. In casting Carmelita in this role, Mena emphasizes the need for the revolution to incorporate women. In the story, General Bisco is described as “a man of action” (103), which contrasts with Carmelita’s role as a woman of vision. In Mena’s framing, the revolution needs both to succeed both in terms of strategy and, more explicitly, to fend off both the entrenched hacendado class and the United States. Carmelita’s role in the revolution signals yet another departure from convention as her relationship with Aquiles departs from the form of foundational romance articulated by Doris Sommer in which national romances bridge differences—and in so doing, contain them—through the discourse of love (1991, 6). In nineteenth-century Latin America, for example, miscegenation and intermarriage were necessary for national consolidation because, through romance, creoles eliminated the threat posed by indigenous peoples, thereby laying a claim on the land (Sommer 1991, 15). Rather than depict a relationship between Carmelita and General Bisco that would consolidate power and potentially neutralize the revolution, Mena stages the relationship between two people from the same elite class. While this can be read as a return to regressive politics or as Mena’s own unwillingness to sever ties with her own class, I suggest that, as an elite, Mena offers a critique of the society in which she was raised. For Mena, the revolution cannot just come from below; it must also create change among the upper classes. In imagining a more liberatory revolution, in “Doña Rita’s Rivals,” Mena returns to romance to consider what it would mean for revolutionary politics. As Fredric Jameson observes, the “romance paradigm” offers “the salvational or redemptive perspective of some secure future” (1981, 103). Romance is about projecting a future during an unsettled present and, in so doing, redeeming the past through the fantasy of a happy future. While “Doña Rita’s Rivals” fits less easily into narrow conceptions of speculative fiction, I Renee Hudson  consider how this story forms a speculative prehistory to the revolution, in the mode of historical fantasy. Fantasy is central to Mena’s speculations because, as Rosemary Jackson reminds us, fantasy is “part of a nostalgic, humanistic vision,” in which authors “look back to a lost moral and social hierarchy, which their fantasies attempt to recapture and revivify” (2009, 1). In Mena’s writings on the revolution, her turn to fantasy and romance speaks to her need to reclaim the former futures made possible at the revolution’s inception and act as a clairvoyant who can forestall the revolution’s failings by anticipating them. Mena not only anticipates the revolution’s shortcomings but also how central and powerful fantasy would become for contemporary ethnic writers. In departing from the realism of the Mexican novel of the revolution and early Chicano texts, Mena speculates by displacing her rumination of the revolution onto the period just before it began, during Porfirio Díaz’s regime.6 By moving into prehistory this way, Mena opens up new ways to imagine the revolution and the history that flows out of it into the present. Mena begins “Doña Rita’s Rivals”—and her critique—by demonstrating how the taxonomizing impulses of positivism influence Doña Rita’s worldview: “The females of a family of shawl—de tápalo—do not aspire to decorate their heads with millinery, for the excellent reason that God has not assigned them to the caste de sombrero. Their consolation is that they may look down upon those de rebozo” (Mena 1997, 70). In this description, class status is imagined as static and unchanging; it is “assigned” by God. Yet, a certain degree of mobility—or imagined mobility—exists in how different castes play with the clothing that signifies their social status. For example, the ladies of shawl, who are closest to the ladies of rebozo, do not wear the rebozo, but ladies of hat, who are two castes above the ladies of rebozo, do so to signify their authenticity. By wearing rebozos, the high-caste ladies of hat perform and demonstrate their authenticity to maintain their national identity at “country feasts.” This act of costuming reveals a notion of class in which those at the bottom—the ladies of rebozo—are imagined to have greater access to national culture. Thus, national identity is the fantasy here as the women of the highest caste wear rebozos to access an indigenous past to which they do not have access. As this story was written during the revolution, Mena suggests that national identity itself becomes a fantasy, the staging ground from 75 76  Former Futures and Absent Histories in Mena, Sánchez, and Pita which Mexicans—in this case, elites—understand their relationship to both the past and the future even as the revolution disrupts conventional understandings of both. The greater access that marks the people of rebozo also reveals a primitivist approach to social structures in which the lower one is in the social hierarchy, the closer one is to indigeneity such that the people of rebozo are fully aligned with indigeneity and presumed to have a closer relationship with both the land and national culture and, thus, the past. That their concerns are set aside is clear from Mena’s ironic description of their role under Díaz’s reforms, as she writes, “The social superstructure, with its mines, plantations, and railroads, its treasure-house cathedrals, and its admired palace of government, rests on their backs—for they are the people, prolific of labor and taxes—but otherwise they do not count, unless it be with God” (Mena 1997, 73). Noting that the people of rebozo do not count, the narrator remarks that they are “prolific of labor and taxes,” which points to the paradoxical insignificance of the people of rebozo. That is, they only contribute labor and taxes; they only contribute the two things necessary for the country to run, in Mena’s ironic phrasing. However, because “otherwise they do not count,” Mena satirizes the elites’ view that the superstrucuture overdetermines the base rather than recognizing the revolutionary potential of the base. The story’s initial romance revolves around Doña Rita’s son, Jesús María, and Alegría. Jesús María’s letters to Alegría exist alongside the goals and aims of the Mexican Revolution, highlighting the ideological discrepancies between Jesús María’s emergent revolutionary consciousness and his mother’s advocacy for the status quo. Jesús María, we learn, courts Alegría “with all the delicacy of his caste, and a little more” (Mena 1997, 72) while simultaneously emphasizing the keywords of the revolution, “reforma electoral, complimiento de garantías constitutionals, civilización para los peones, ¡Mejico para los Mejicanos! ” (72) (electoral reform, compliance with constitutional guarantees, civilization for the workers, Mexico for Mexicans!). In short, Jesús María promotes a democratic Mexico for the people, founded on land reform. For Doña Rita, Jesús María endangers “his future by concerning himself about the base fortunes of los enredados” (73). On the one hand, this statement speaks to Jesús María’s refusal to socialize with the upper classes because of his beliefs. Renee Hudson  Yet, this phrase, in referencing Jesús María’s “future,” also points toward class extinction, as he is the “sole surviving hope of a line the perspective of which vanished among the lords and priests of an extinct civilization” (72). To preserve his future, Jesús María must preserve his bloodline; by engaging in a romance with Alegría, Jesús María risks not only his family line but also his social ranking. His potential extinction draws attention to who counts as Mejicano in the formulation “¡Mejico para los Mejicanos! ” Based on Jesús María’s political ideals and that such an uprising threatens his family line, “Mejicanos” signify the indigenous and lower classes. By aligning Mexicanidad with indigeneity, Jesús María calls into question his authenticity and national identity. This alignment reveals the essentialism of the lower classes and the precarious claim to the land and Mexicanidad that Jesús María and Doña Rita affirm. While Jesús María may secure his identity as a Mejicano through marriage to Alegría and, later, her sister, Piedad, he then loses his social ranking: class extinction leads to racial extinction. The revolution’s threat to Doña Rita’s social standing and national identity coincides with the threat to the national body politic (figured as upper class, borne on the backs of the lower classes) posed by a democratic Mexican state as the revolution’s aims undermine Doña Rita’s claims to Mexicanidad. Shortly after eliminating the danger posed by Alegría, Doña Rita turns her attention to Jesús María’s nationalism: “Having thus converted her dead rival into a powerful ally, she turned a cautious front toward her living rival, whose formidable name was Patria, and soon she was giving hospitable ear to her son’s dreams for the regeneration of his unhappy country” (Mena 1997, 77). Because Jesús María sees the revolution as the opportunity for regeneration, his conception of generation differs starkly from his mother’s, which is predicated on generation through perpetuation of the current system. Jesús María, instead, conceptualizes regeneration as possible via insurrection but also via romance with los enredados. Crucially, this differing standpoint on Mexico’s future also carries with it a differing relationship to land, as Doña Rita demonstrates her concerns “by pointing out the indolent and pious resignation of the dear Indios, and wondering naively whether education, property rights, and an audible voice in government might not spoil their Arcadian virtues and dispel their truly delightful picturesqueness” (78). Even as Doña Rita 77 78  Former Futures and Absent Histories in Mena, Sánchez, and Pita perpetuates the role of the lower classes as aesthetic objects, she also imagines the land is prelapsarian and Edenic, suggesting her investment in a fantastic, mythological history that offers a stable present and anticipated future grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Her commitment to this tradition leads her to roundly dismiss what would become the aims of the revolution: “education, property rights, and an audible voice in government.” However, this view of the land is at odds with the actual working conditions of the poor, a point of contention between Jesús María and his mother and the staging ground for the imminent uprising. The Arcadian sentiment toward los enredados persists in Alegría and Piedad’s names because their meanings—happiness and piety—suggest a greater access to virtue, particularly as each woman emerges as a tragic figure, Alegría because of her suicide, and Piedad because of her role as a “fallen” woman, the prostitute La Palma. Jesús María (who is explicitly named as a savior figure) projects his desire for Patria onto the lower-class bodies of both Alegría and her lookalike, Piedad, which reifies the relationship between the lower classes and the struggle of the Mexican Revolution (that is, the peones are presumed to have an inherent right to land simply because they work it, which reinforces primitivism and essentialism). In short, for Jesús María, romance with both women signifies his adherence to political struggle, which is explicitly marked in sexual terms: “The girl’s murmured wonder came from a heart much moved, and Jesús María wept as he told her how he had once dreamed of working for the regeneration of Mexico, but how he had failed in the test of manhood, and was now a broken creature whose dreams lay all behind him” (Mena 1997, 85). This scene, which emphasizes the melodramatic aspects of romance, also enforces Jesús María’s mandate to save Mexico at the same time it places Piedad in a support role. The concept of regeneration is tied with Jesús María’s masculinity as “he had failed in the test of manhood.” Following Jesús María’s confession, “they began to discuss plans; and presently he was all on fire with a new scheme of patriotic service” (Mena 1997, 85). That is, Piedad, in igniting Jesús María’s sexual desire, simultaneously ignites his revolutionary desire, a point that is nowhere more explicit than in his own free indirect discourse: “Why might not he, the rejected, pull the rags of his life about him and set out to fertilize the soil of freedom with his songs?” Renee Hudson  (85). Notably, the figuration of desire here is also stated in terms of the land as Jesús María “fertilizes” the “soil of freedom.” Yet, problematically, the regeneration of Mexico through his fertilizing stems from the same exploitative and benevolent impulses that inform the hacienda system in the first place.7 As Jesús María’s actions demonstrate, identity here is a fantasy with fluctuating terms and impulses (exemplified by the rift between him and Doña Rita). By turning to this moment just before the revolution, Mena examines this former future to imagine other possibilities as well as emphasize the contingent nature of the revolutionary history that leads to the present. For Doña Rita, Jesús María’s desire for los enredados signifies his abandonment and betrayal of both Doña Rita and his social caste. This sense of betrayal and abandonment is tied explicitly with purity as Doña Rita “blamed herself for having introduced the pollution of which she now despaired of ever ridding the house of Ixtlan, and she wished passionately that her son had died before her arrival at his bedside with that daughter of Judas” (Mena 1997, 86). The reference to the pollution of the house of Ixtlan echoes Doña Rita’s earlier fear of class extinction and her subsequent death at the end of the story. Whereas the story ends with the possibility for a successful exogamous relationship, Jesús María’s infantilizing of the lower classes—“the children of time” (85)—and his desire to spread his seed stems from the same exploitative and benevolent impulses as those represented by Don Rómulo in “A Son of the Tropics.”8 Jesús María’s imperialist impulses and Doña Rita’s anxiety both speak to the larger issue of how race is conceptualized during the revolution, as phrases like ¡Mejico para los Mejicanos! conjure the imagined community of a unified, homogeneous people against the complex intersections of race and class that continue to divide Mexico. The speculative romance of a society free from racism and class antagonism, as the example of Jesús María elucidates, actually relies on the presumed authenticity of the lower classes to serve the needs of the elite. The interchangeability and iterability of both Alegría and Piedad underscores this sense of homogeneity and service, as each woman exists to arouse Jesús María’s political fervor. Though each woman presumably authenticates Jesús María’s commitment to the lower classes, they also define the limits of his intention to incorporate indigenous peoples as part of his political ideals. 79 80  Former Futures and Absent Histories in Mena, Sánchez, and Pita As women of shawl, Alegría and Piedad occupy a closer space to indigeneity— enough to authenticate Jesús María’s stated aims—without actually forcing him to imagine what a ¡Mejico para los Mejicanos! framework would actually look like, thus embedding Mena’s critique of the revolution by satirizing Jesús María’s commitment to los Mejicanos. In this way, Mena reveals the unstable foundations of the revolution through the fantasy of national romance as the essentialist, nativist logic that informs the latter plagues the former. Thus, Mena satirizes the “authentic” relationship to the land and reveals how the call to arms—¡Mejico para los Mejicanos!—results in a static nationalism incapable of overcoming the differences that factionalized the revolution, thus forestalling any sort of transamerican solidarity. In her critique of the fantasy of national romance, Mena demonstrates how such fantasies shape political identities and national futures; in the case of “Doña Rita’s Rivals,” romance forecloses and dooms the future rather than imagining new possibilities. LUNAR BRACEROS While Mena satirizes the relationship to the land later exemplified by the role of Aztlán in the Chicano movement and questions the ability of the revolution to incorporate indigeneity, in Lunar Braceros, Sánchez and Pita interrogate the relationship to the land through the redrawing of borders and queer the national romance through a reimagining of biological and chosen forms of kinship. They do so by critiquing Aztlán as a revolutionary formation and demonstrating a commitment to historical knowledge rather than a reliance on romanticized notions of revolution. As Lydia, the protagonist in the novella, remarks halfway through Lunar Braceros, “Historicize, historicize, Frank says, recalling the words of an almost forgotten 20th century literary critic” (Sánchez and Pita 2009, 58). The quote, of course, refers to Fredric Jameson’s famous dictum from The Political Unconscious (1981) to “always historicize!” (9). The structure of the text, which Pedro, Lydia’s son, describes as “nanotexts with lunar posts, lessons, bits and pieces of conversations, and notations with friends” (Sánchez and Pita 2009, 5), formalizes the commitment to historicization, as the nanotexts are all that Pedro has left of his mother after she leaves to go north to foment revolution. Lydia’s nanotexts Renee Hudson  emerge as a primer in revolutionary thought, history, and tactics, with references to everyone from the nineteenth-century Cuban national hero Jose Martí to the early twentieth-century Peruvian socialist José Carlos Maríategui. Noticeably absent from this history, however, is any mention of the United Farm Workers (UFW) labor union or to the Chicano movement more broadly. The absent history of Chicano class struggle is a significant lacuna of the text that I argue strategically informs the “former futures” Sánchez and Pita draw upon to create their future history.9 In Lunar Braceros, Sánchez and Pita describe a dystopian future in which the world map has been redrawn. How that map has been redrawn references, without naming, Aztlán, the pre-Columbian home of the Aztec people that became a central tenet of the Chicano movement, as Aztlán roughly corresponded to the lands ceded to the United States after the Texas Annexation, the Mexican–American War (1846–48), and the subsequent signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The signing of the treaty meant that Mexico lost about half its land to the United States. In reclaiming Aztlán as a homeland during the Chicano movement, Chicanos argued for a prior, legal right to the land. The reconfiguration of the geopolitical landscape in Lunar Braceros offers a critique of Chicano cultural nationalist politics through the implied critique of Aztlán. According to the history lessons given in the novella, there was a “military coup d’etat in the United States in 2068, when a sector of the armed forces rose up against a U.S. Congress that had finally figured out that the New Imperial Order [NIO] was undermining national interests” (Sánchez and Pita 2009, 8). As the NIO was “made up of the ten dominant multinational consortia” (8), the novella demonstrates the tension between national interests—which are often aligned with cultural nationalist interests—and multinational capital. This coup d’état then gave rise to a number of new geopolitical configurations, including the Cali-Texas nation-state, the RusoChinese Confederation, and the European Community. In its orientation, Lydia describes Cali-Texas as comprising “several of the northern Mexican states” (Sánchez and Pita 2009, 6) in addition to “the former U.S. Southwestern states: Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, California, Nevada, as well as Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii” (6). We eventually learn that “Canada and Mexico had no other option but to 81 82  Former Futures and Absent Histories in Mena, Sánchez, and Pita become part of the Cali-Texas commonwealth” (12). Later, the novella clarifies that the rest of Mexico “was still ‘independent,’ but only in name” (31) as the newly formed commonwealth “pretty much controlled the entire area all the way down to Colombia” (31–32). In short, what began as a reclaiming of the lands ceded by Mexico to the United States that roughly corresponds to those lands considered to be part of Aztlán quickly turned into a form of hemispheric hegemony as signaled by the change from nation-state to commonwealth. Sánchez and Pita render this claim visible when Lydia remarks, “Only Venezuela and Ecuador had resisted attempts to create an Américas Commonwealth. Bolívar must have been turning over in his grave, no doubt” (32). Here the Simón Bolívar allusion references the first union of independent nations in Latin America from Spain, Gran Colombia, which included present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama as well as parts of Brazil, Peru, and Guyana. As Lydia’s narration suggests, an Américas Commonwealth belies Bolívar’s efforts to create a free Latin America and leaves only a Cali-Texas Commonwealth that is hemispheric in the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine rather than in the Bolívarian sense. Whereas the new geopolitical landscape reflected the betrayal of the promise of Aztlán and, to a certain extent, that of Bolívar’s vision, the institution of reservations further reveals that majorities are not enough to ensure a just and equal society. As Lydia describes, the reservations are “a type of population control camp mechanism. They were started to keep the homeless and the unemployed off the streets and off welfare” (Sánchez and Pita 2009, 13). She points out that “the creation of Cali-Texas didn’t mean the end of plans for these Reservations” (30); rather, “despite the fact that we Latinos long ago had become the majority population in the new Cali-Texas nation-state, we, along with blacks, Asians, Native Americans and poor whites, made up the majority of those put away in these Reservation camps after 2090 since most of us had no capital, no jobs, and no connections” (30). Even though Latinos are the majority population in the reclaimed Aztlán, the numbers are not enough to combat the institutionalized racism and classism that prevents people of color and poor whites from improving their socioeconomic conditions. Much like we saw in Mena, the superstructure here overdetermines the base. Renee Hudson  The novella’s indictment of representational politics as the solution to inequality is further confirmed by the fact that Cali-Texas is “mostly a Latino-led government” (Sánchez and Pita 2009, 31) whose presidents, Villar-Gómez and Perusquillo, do not close the reservations, leading Lydia to remark, “ultimately capital can undo any ties or links on the basis of race, ethnicity, language or color. Remember, Pedro, it’s the system” (31). As Angie Chabram-Dernersesian observes in her review of the novella, “the rise of a new Latina/o identified nation state (Cali-Texas) dedicated to supporting the interests of capital and the global NIO’s (multi-national consortiums) openly promotes repression and the incarceration of poor, unemployed and homeless Latinas/os, African Americans and Whites” (2010, 192–93). Sánchez and Pita make the transhistorical links clear between the Latino-led government’s betrayal and the founding trauma of conquest in their depiction of Bob Cortés, the head of communications who surveils them while they are on the moon. His last name aligns him with Hernán Cortés, suggesting an enduring legacy of land theft, colonization, and capitalism. While Lydia illuminates how capital poisons potential solidarities based on cultural similarities, the coalitional politics that emerge in the novella seek to cross barriers of “race, ethnicity, language or color.” Latino-led governance might not be enough to create an equitable society, but the novella is at pains to demonstrate the value of cross-racial alliances in the face of capital. Such a focus on cross-racial alliances offers yet another implied critique of the Chicano movement. As Curtis Marez outlines in Farm Worker Futurism (2016), César Chávez betrayed the coalitional politics of the UFW by visiting the Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1977 despite an earlier UFW resolution condemning the dictatorship (2016, 109). As Marez also observes, Chávez’s support for Israel also prevented the UFW from working more closely with the Black Panther Party (108), who supported Palestine. Given these circumstances, I suggest that Sánchez and Pita work to create a diverse group of revolutionaries to imagine future cross-racial solidarity. To that end, the lunar braceros who are part of Lydia’s team are composed as follows: Lydia (Mexican), Frank Ho (Mexican and Chinese), Leticia and Maggie, who are both Latina, Betty (Filipina), and Sam and Jake, both of whom are black. Later in the novella, two workers from the mining camp, Tom (Latino) and Jeb (black), assist the team. The composition of this group of lunar braceros 83 84  Former Futures and Absent Histories in Mena, Sánchez, and Pita reflects the populations alienated by the UFW. I have identified Lydia as Mexican because nowhere in the novella does she identify as a Chicana even though the historical background of her family extends from Spanish rule in California to the present day. In fact, the word “Chicano” only appears in the text once, and then it’s in reference to Frank, who Lydia describes as “Chinchicano” (Sánchez and Pita 2009, 52) to reflect his racial mixture rather than a political history or orientation. In other words, “Chicano” is the word that cannot be named in the text because the former futures the novella resurrects to imagine liberation exclude the Chicano movement with its romanticization of indigeneity and, via the UFW, its refusal to extend liberation to other people of color. As an alternative to Chicano, then, Sánchez and Pita theorize cholas/os as a class-based, rather than cultural nationalist, collectivity. In one of her dialogues with Pedro, Lydia historicizes the term, describing how it “originally referred to the urbanized indigenous population, to people who left the Indian community to work in town” (Sánchez and Pita 2009, 62) then, “as times changed, and Latinos became the majority population, with a large population of Latino-Blacks and Latino-Asians in the country, working class residents of all the barrios and ghettos became largely known as cholos. The term no longer applied only to the youth, but to the population at large” (63). Eventually, “those who were unemployed and sent to the reservations, of whatever ethnic designation, became known as ‘cholos’” (63). In Lydia’s genealogy, “cholo” preserves its reference to indigeneity and latinidad even as it comes to eventually refer to anyone of a particular class, the disenfranchised, the unemployed, the homeless. Thus, when she tells Pedro, “if as indians or cholos we have been oppressed, it will be as indians or cholos that we will rise up” (63). Significantly absent in this formulation are Chicanos, which further clarifies that for Sánchez and Pita, a new term and a new history of liberation are needed to imagine their future history. Central to this new history of liberation is Chinganaza, the utopian Commons that signal the return of urbanized cholos and cholas to their indigenous roots.10 Roughly translated as “hugely fucked,” Chinganaza ironically stands out as a space uniquely capable of resisting the advance of multinational capital and “becomes a metonym for a collectivist revolutionary Renee Hudson  paradigm that fuses an agrarian utopia with hyper-technological realities” (Olguín 2016, 229). Although Lydia clarifies that it doesn’t follow the preColumbian Incan division of land (Sánchez and Pita 2009, 19–20), she does emphasize how Chinganaza is part of a longer history of indigenous resistance. As she explains, “What we have in Chinganaza, Pedro, was won over many years. It all began at the end of the 20th century when Indians in South America, especially in Ecuador, and in the Cantón of Guamote, rose up to demand their lands, their linguistic and cultural rights, and their political rights” (21). For Lydia, Chinganaza’s struggle and communal vision offers a revolutionary future for which to strive. She ties this history to that of Pacomio, the indigenous leader who led a rebellion against the Spanish missionaries: “It will be a collective struggle, a class struggle. What Pacomio tried to do oh so many centuries ago, the Indians in Chinganaza have achieved and now we too must attain this freedom from exploitation on the reservations in Cali-Texas” (118). In making this claim, Lydia illuminates the similarities between the missions and the reservations, with Chinganaza as the utopian counterpart to these dystopian spaces. As a descendent of Pacomio, Lydia has resistance in her blood, which allows her to imagine her relationship to the past through her heritage as well as her future through Pedro. However, Lydia also understands the importance of chosen kinships, and the Commons she imagines in Chinganaza depend on these relationships. Indeed, the novella is at pains to create family ties beyond biological kinship. For example, Pedro’s birth results from multiple and intersecting kinship formations. The first of these formations is Lydia’s relationship with Gabriel, her former lover who was killed in Brazil because of his activism. However, before Gabriel’s death and Lydia’s trip to the moon, he and Lydia had fertilized eggs stored at a cryonics lab so that even if one of them died, they could still have a child together. The second formation is Lydia’s relationship with Frank, with whom she could not have children because the nuclear exposure on the moon left them both sterile. Because Lydia cannot carry a child, Leticia serves as her surrogate, thus adding Leticia and Maggie as another kinship formation and set of parents for Pedro. Finally, once everyone leaves to participate in the revolution, Tom and Betty stay behind to raise Pedro and their own adopted indigenous child, Guamán. Through this 85 86  Former Futures and Absent Histories in Mena, Sánchez, and Pita complex mapping of kinship formations, then, Sánchez and Pita suggest a communal form of parentage that queers the family structure. These relationships also depend on cross-racial romantic relationships, not only between Lydia and Frank but also Tom (Latino) and Betty (Filipina). Lydia mentions that “Sam and Jake ended up partnering with two Ecuadorian women and live on the outskirts of Chinganaza” (Sánchez and Pita 2009, 119), which further underscores the indigenous connections the lunar braceros make on Earth in addition to the cross-racial dynamics at play, given Sam and Jake’s blackness. Kristy L. Ulibarri argues that “this dissolution of the heteronormative construct of family does not consign utopian potential to the figure of the child, Pedro” (2017, 87) but rather to his mother, Lydia. In this way, Ulibarri contends that the novella “does not forward a reproductive futurism” (87). Ulibarri compellingly and convincingly argues that Lydia, the “lost radical mother stands for the unimaginability of actual revolution under late capitalism by keeping these actions absent from the narrative” (88) and points to the fact that at the end of the novella, we learn that Pedro has not seen his parents in eight years. For Ulibarri, “this silence represents both the possibility of ongoing revolution and also the possibility that the corporate state has ‘silenced’ them all. This ambiguity is significant, because it produces the queerness of both open potential and closed futurity. Furthermore, this queer ambiguity does not hinge on the Child but on Lydia’s absence” (93). I would also add that the absence of the portrayal of revolution in the novella, both in the form of the potential ongoing revolution as well as the novella’s refusal to depict the insurrection on the moon—all Lydia says is “in the end it all turned out, more or less, as we’d planned” (Sánchez and Pita 2009, 103)—is qualitatively different than the absent history of the Chicano movement. The refusal to depict revolution aligns with the novella’s resistance to Chicano realism, which, in depicting revolution, also depicts homophobia, as is the case in José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1989), and misogyny in the case of Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1972), as revolutionary spaces in the latter are either without women or feature sex scenes with underage girls. In these texts, homophobia and misogyny foreclose the alternative forms of kinship—and thus history—that are the site of new historical and future imaginaries in the novella. In refusing the conventions of a novelistic Renee Hudson  denouement, Sánchez and Pita reject masculinist notions of closure in favor of the feminist forms of open possibilities Lydia represents. In drawing upon revolutionary histories outside of the Chicano movement and in refusing to name such terms as Chicano and Aztlán, Sánchez and Pita’s absent histories rely on class-based theorizations of cholas/os to imagine a liberatory Commons based on queer forms of kinship and affiliation. CHICANA SPECULATIONS AT THE END OF THE WORLD The feminist forms of possibility Sánchez and Pita theorize illuminate how revolutionary writings like Mena’s are central to recuperating a longer lineage of such Chicana speculative fictions as Lunar Braceros. Much like Sánchez and Pita, Mena also refused and critiqued the masculinist views of revolution in her own time. In writing against the realism of the novel of the Mexican Revolution and early Chicano novels, Mena demonstrates the failures of these earlier revolutionary movements, whereas Sánchez and Pita imagine new forms of coalitional politics grounded in historical understanding. Failure undergirds Mena’s understanding of and relationship to the Mexican Revolution such that the closest Mena ever comes to imagining a vision of the future is what Justin Mann calls “world-breaking.” For Mann, world-breaking describes how “black speculative fictions eschew such regenerative narrative closure, instead offering elliptical or transcendent imaginaries” (2018, 16) that “warp time, space, and reality to transcend the known world” (16–17). Such a vision of world-breaking emerges in Mena’s last published short story on the Mexican Revolution, “A Son of the Tropics,” which was published in 1931, after the revolution had ended. As Amy Doherty observes in her introduction to The Collected Stories of María Cristina Mena, Mena most likely began writing this short story in 1914, but it was published much later by Household Magazine (Doherty xliv n. 27). Regardless of whether or not the end of the revolution led to a shift in Mena’s thinking about it, “A Son of the Tropics” marks a significant departure from “Doña Rita’s Rivals” and “The Sorcerer and General Bisco.” In “A Son of the Tropics,” a rebel leader, Rosario, plots “to make an example” (1997, 144) of the hacendado, Don Rómulo, on whose hacienda he grew up. To that end, he kidnaps the Don’s daughter, Dorotea, to force the Don to 87 88  Former Futures and Absent Histories in Mena, Sánchez, and Pita negotiate with the rebels. However, during this meeting he learns that Don Rómulo is in fact his father. Unable to accept this information, he then grabs three bombs the rebel Tula made from doorknobs. Throwing the final bomb at his feet, Rosario commits suicide: “The son of Remedios was seen no more. In dust and detonation he vanished from human ken” (150). In engaging in this act of world-breaking, Rosario exemplifies an unwillingness to live in a world where revolution is predicated on the subjection of women. As Mena’s stories demonstrate, sexual exploitation names the egregious acts committed under Díaz’s regime and perpetuated by the revolution, from sexual coercion, which we saw with Carmelita and Don Baltazar, Jesús María’s romanticization of the lower classes that exploits women, and, finally, a hacienda system in which not only were women expected to work, but were also expected to be sexually available to their masters. As a child of such a union, Rosario would rather end the world, as exemplified by one of the doorknobs he first throws against a cliff before using another on himself. This final story demonstrates that Mena’s future imaginary is ultimately a pessimistic one that indicts the complicity of men with both the conditions that led to the revolution and the revolution’s ultimate failure. Refusing any form of reproductive futurism, as demonstrated by Rosario’s suicide, Mena suggests that what is needed is an entirely new beginning. Yet, Mena’s antireproductive futurism here does not have the liberatory potential Lee Edelman outlines (2004). Because the founding trauma of conquest and colonization has had a lasting impact, in “A Son of the Tropics,” Mena’s world-breaking writes against a future overly determined by these continued effects. Sánchez and Pita, meanwhile, offer a new hope in the periodization of their novella, which is from 2125 to 2148. While September 16, 1810 marks Mexican Independence Day, the holiday was first celebrated nationally in 1825, suggesting that the novella’s beginning happens 300 years after this national celebration of independence. 2148 marks 300 years after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In other words, the novella is bookended by two significant dates in Mexican history. While the first date clearly points to independence following a successful revolution, the second is more ambiguous because it resulted in Mexico losing a significant portion of its territory. That said, this final date, coupled with Pedro’s decision to search for his Renee Hudson  parents, suggests that 2148 will also result in another radical redrawing of the map, one that favors the Commons à la Chinganaza rather than the hemispheric hegemony of Cali-Texas. In this way, perhaps it is not the residents of Chinganaza who are “hugely fucked” but, rather, the governments who continue to support and enforce multinational capital. By situating Mena within speculative fiction traditions, I have demonstrated how she anticipates later Chicana writings that use speculative fiction to contend with revolutionary movements. Through her representation of revolution, Mena reevaluates the central tenets of Chicano and Mexican political consciousness. Mena’s work satirizes the “authentic” relationship to the land that would form the core of Chicano nationalism in the 1970s through conceptions of Aztlán. As Marissa López cogently argues, examining how Mena’s work emerges during the time of the Mexican Revolution reveals the moment when “Chicana/o literature incorporates the idea of its own race” (2011, 17). Such a proto-Chicana identity encourages us to excavate Mena’s contributions to Chicanx literature from within the revolutionary tradition that undergirds it. As I have demonstrated, reading Mena alongside Sánchez and Pita allows us to trace lines of continuity and affiliation among Mena’s short stories and such texts as Lunar Braceros.11 Considering Mena as a speculative precursor to Sánchez and Pita also illuminates how these authors are in kinship with one another. Reading these authors alongside each other recalls Lydia’s vision for a Commons in which bloodlines—here Chicanx genealogies—link the past with the future, but chosen forms of kinship bind the Commons together. We might even say that within the realm of literary history, Mena is Sánchez and Pita’s former future, or a superseded site of revolutionary potential that Lunar Braceros speculatively resurrects as part of the ongoing work of the Chicanx feminist political imagination. NOTES 1. Throughout this paper, I use Chicanx and Latinx to refer to these populations in broad terms. I use the more inclusive “x” to acknowledge that many people in these groups do not 89 90  Former Futures and Absent Histories in Mena, Sánchez, and Pita fit into the gender binary. However, when referring to men specifically, I use the terms Chicano or Latino as necessitated by the text. I do the same for terms such as Chicana and Latina. This is to allow for the nuances required in examining a feminist writer like Mena who does not appear to be invested in queerness in the same ways that Sánchez and Pita are. 2. By examining the articles and advertisements that surrounded Mena’s short stories in Century, critics such as Amy Doherty demonstrate how Century articles often reflect U.S. imperial interests (2001, 167). In contrast, Doherty argues that Mena uses the genre of local color writing to combat such articles, further commending Mena for her diverse representations of Mexicans, a perspective lacking in Century. Margaret Toth additionally asserts that Mena “de-exoticizes” her Mexican characters (2009, 97), while Charlotte Rich provides a nuanced reading of how Mena deploys Bakhtinian “double-voicing” (2001, 205) to offer multiple perspectives and achieve ironic distance. Thus, in contrast to Raymund Paredes’s infamous comment that Mena “knew what Americans liked to read about Mexico, so she gave it to them” (1982, 50), more recent critics establish the complexity of Mena’s position at Century and situate her work within this context. 3. Reevaluating the historical period in which she wrote as well as the oppositional strategies available to her in these journals, such critics as Tiffany Ana López consider how Mena negotiated her role at Century Magazine, while Amy Doherty situates Mena’s Century publications within the articles and advertisements that surround her publications. While Charles Tatum and Paredes negatively read the way she shaped how audiences in the United States understood the Mexican Revolution (Toth 2009, 92), López demonstrates that Mena’s publications in Century indicate increasing levels of radicalism (1994). Rather than reading this as a shift in Mena’s thinking, López asserts that this was an intentional move on Mena’s part as, knowing the biases of Century’s primarily white audience, Mena had to lay a foundation for framing her depictions of Mexico and the Mexican Revolution. 4. Such a reading contrasts sharply with the two waves of literary criticism that dominate understandings of her work. In the first, such critics as Tatum and Paredes critiqued Mena for her “obsequious” depictions (Tatum 1982, 33) and pandering to American audiences (Paredes 1982, 50). 5. As Ernest Hogan remarks, “Once people’s minds are opened up, new realities become possible. And I’m not just talking about speculative fiction. It is about speculating, thinking, so that we can start doing things differently. I think the word for this is Revolution” (2015, 133). 6. While it is outside the purview of this article, I would like to note that several authors displace concerns about revolutions onto the periods leading up to them. We can see this in Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War (1988) and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), both of which imagine alternate futures for the Filipino People Power Revolution of 1986 by ending their novels with events that correspond (but modify) those that happened in 1983, the year that catalyzed the revolutionary movement. 7. Jesús María’s desire to fertilize recalls “A Son of the Tropics,” where the product of the relationship between a wealthy hacendado and a peon becomes an unproductive repro- Renee Hudson  duction because reproduction does not beget equality, and Rosario, the hacendado’s bastard son, ultimately commits suicide. 8. While “A Son of the Tropics” offers the possibility for reproduction and regeneration among the revolutionaries because of Tula’s desire for Rosario, this potential is foreclosed by Rosario’s suicide. In short, not only do each of these romances fail, but the possibility for reproduction also fails. 9. Citing John W. Campbell Jr., Lysa Rivera writes that “future history enables sf writers to situate their imaginary futures somewhere along a projected historical time line, one that often begins during or shortly after their real-life historical moment and extends into the future” (2012, 418). 10. While my reading focuses on an examination of the Commons in Lunar Braceros, Ana Ma Manzanas and Jesús Benito offer a fascinating discussion of the camp in the novella, arguing that “like the prisoners within the boundaries of another interlocking space, Reslifers seem to move back and forth across the connected geography of removal and relocation, from the heritage of colonialism into an imaginable future. There will always be a camp, a reservation, or a site to segregate whoever cannot fit into the latest version of a master map” (2014, 99). 11. While it is out of the scope of this article to do so, I would also add Cherríe Moraga’s play The Hungry Woman (1995) to this lineage, especially since Moraga also critiques the Chicano movement and Aztlán. REFERENCES Acosta, Oscar Zeta. 1972. Revolt of the Cockroach People. New York: Vintage Books. Bahng, Aimee. 2017. Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 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