Citizenship, Cultural Citizenship, Equality and Governance

I. Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit" (a protest poem written by Lewis Allen--Abel Meeropol--in 1938 and recorded by Holliday in 1939)




II. Law and the Subaltern Body

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (MARB), The Squatter and the Don (1885)

After the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, "Black Codes" were outlawed but actual protection from second or tertiary citizenship in practice was quite different. The extant historical material documents this with considerable detail. Take, for example, the finely crafted response of former slave Jourdan Anderson to his former "owner's" letter demanding that he return to work on the same farm where Anderson had been a slave.

We discussed last week how MARB's The Squatter and the Don (1885) ultimately failed to entice a broad Anglo-American readership to consider the fundamental "whiteness" of "Spano-Americans" (Chapter II). This week we will discuss this failure in relation to the categories of "aesthetic representation" and "philosophical ethics," specifically the category of "normative ethics" in philosophical discourse.

In preparation for our discussions you will need to review the following items below as well as the above links as needed. Some useful questions to ponder:

1. How does our methodological model for literary analysis (TCI Method) help us understand MARB's investment in representing Mexicans as "Spano-Americans"?

2. Should aesthetic representation (such as MARB's The Squatter and the Don) be bound to normative ethical codes? Why or Why not?

3. Ken Gonzales-Day's artistic and scholarly work attempts to grapple with the haunting specter of racism, African American slavery, lynching, and its fundamental relationship to Latinos in the United States after "the American 1848" (recall/review your notes from Victoria and Zuley's presentation). Gonzales-Day's work--as evidenced both by our assigned reading of his work and Isela's presentation--asks us to ponder our relationship to this history through aesthetic contemplation beyond scholarly understanding. Be prepared to discuss Gonzales-Day's visual and scholarly meditations about this haunting in relation to MARB's Squatter and the Don (1885), and the homework questions assigned for his "Erased Lynching Series."

4. Given the examples we have discussed of Latino "citizenship" vs. "cultural citizenship" ("subaltern" citizenship), How does José Martí extend the concept of "rights" in hemispheric terms? Why? To what ends?

5. Given the U.S. example, and U.S. expansionism in the XIX century in particular (e.g., Mexico-US War), why is Martí so invested in understanding the concept of "governance" in "Nuestra América"?

6. What is Martí's relationship to the problematics of race and education?

7. What would good governance look like for José Martí?

For review prior to coming to class:

Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV)

[Remember that the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. It was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House on January 31, 1865, and adopted on December 6, 1865. On December 18, Secretary of State William H. Seward proclaimed it to have been adopted. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted after the American Civil War.]


The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.

Section 1

This section was also in response to the Black Codes that southern states had passed in the wake of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States.The Black Codes attempted to return former slaves to something like their former condition by, among other things, restricting their movement, forcing them to enter into year-long labor contracts, prohibiting them from owning firearms, and by preventing them from suing or testifying in court.

III. Preview:
Precious Knowledge
Some, but not all, of the Mexican-American studies classes in TUSD open with a poem written by Luis Valdez, of Zoot Suit and La Bamba fame. The poem is called "In Lak Ech," a Mayan phrase that was used as a greeting; the poem in some ways mirrors the golden rule.

Luis Valdez's poem:

"In Lak Ech"

Tú Eres mi otro yo / You are my other me.

Si te hago daño a ti / If I do harm to you,

Me hago daño a mí mismo / I do harm to myself;

Si te amo y respeto / If I love and respect you,

Me amo y respeto yo / I love and respect myself.