APA Newsletters

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2

Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy

Reviews

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Jacqueline M. Martinez, Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity: Communication and Transformation in Praxis (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, Pub., 2000)

Linda Martín Alcoff
Syracuse University

"Be true to your face" - Jackie Martinez

In this book, Jacqueline Martinez has made a major contribution to the theoretical understanding of the construction of Chicana, lesbian, and Latina experience in the United States. In particular, the book offers a sustained and thoughtful discussion about the serious ethical and epistemological dilemmas that persons with hybrid racial and ethnic backgrounds must face. Some years ago, before we had ever met, it so happened that Jackie Martinez and I had both spoken from the floor at a panel discussion on race and identity issues and had both used we/they, both/and constructions in order to speak as both white Angla and Latina. A prominent theorist in the room took the occasion to group our comments together as examples of the critique of authenticity, rather presumptuously I thought, but in actuality our explanations had been prompted less by post-structuralist commitments than by the driving need to be honest about our hybrid positionality. Afterward, Martinez and I met for lunch and had a conversation that I believe was transformative for both of us. We were at a similar point in our academic lives in that we were terribly interested in the newly developing work on race and ethnicity but wondering whether we could presume the authority to speak as Latinas or to contribute anything of our own problematic experience as Latinas to the work. In our conversation that day, I believe we gained courage from each other to see just what we might have to contribute.

Martinez and I both have an Anglo parent, both spent substantial parts of our childhood in predominantly white neighborhoods and schools, and both lacked complete fluency in spanish. Speaking as a Latina given such a background raised both ethical and epistemological questions: what could we legitimately claim to know? And wouldn't there be the danger that our speaking might silence others with more of a right to speak, just in the fact of taking up the few, very few, discursive spaces allocated to Latinas in the public domain? We certainly wanted to avoid taking any privileges intended to redress discrimination, because neither of us felt we had been discriminated against.

At the same time, I remember wondering at the certainty Martinez had in this view of her experience. She had a spanish surname, and one that was common to Mexican-Americans, an especially discriminated against group. She'd grown up in the southwest, where the Anglo population is very aware of the "signs" of Mexican identity, subtle or not. And to me, Martinez looked unmistakably Mexican: short, brown, with thick dark hair. Why, then, did she feel like an imposter?

Subsequently, as I ruminated on her situation, I began to take a fresh look at my own. Though I was given an Anglo surname shortly after I came to the United States from Panama and was adopted by my Anglo stepfather, everyone knew of my background, and my sister and I were regularly introduced as my mother's "latin daughters." This was in Florida, where there was a highly developed constellation of meanings around the concept of being latin. And my sister resembles Martinez, in fact, and received regular and intense amounts of discrimination both within the family and outside of it, as I witnessed. I began to realize that, while our background experience does not represent the majority Latina experience, it may yet hold important lessons that could be useful to understanding the formation of racial identity.

Moreover, the other element that Martinez and I shared in our background experience was being born to that generation, and to the particular milieu within that generation, that was determined to have their children assimilate to the white Anglo norm as far as possible. The strategy our parents believed in-on both sides-was that our best interests lay in just this project of assimilation. And there were both pragmatic reasons given-in terms of dealing with this society as it is and not simply as we wish it was-as well as more troubling reasons, such as racial self-hatred and acceptance of the vicious mythologies about inferior latin cultural attributes. Thus, in our lunch conversation that day, as much as we shared a desire to avoid ethical or epistemological presumptions, we were also committed to reversing the forced assimilation process each of us had undergone as children. We would no longer participate in the concealment or down-playing of, as Michelle Cliff put it, the identity they taught us to despise.

Since that time, Martinez has begun to turn her ethnographic skills to the issue of complex identities, and the correlated problems of authority, authenticity, and self-presentation. This book includes revisions of some of the first essays she wrote on these topics as well as new material. Overall, Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity is an excellent work of political phenomenology, offering a phenomenology of racial embodiment, of assimilated identity and the attempt to "de-assimilate," and of mestizo consciousness. In some respects, it is less a work of Chicana feminism than of Chicana phenomenology, though she foregrounds issues of gender throughout and has illuminating points to make about the connections and disconnections between negotiating life as a lesbian and as a Chicana. The main contribution of the work is to provide a phenomenological account both in theory and in practice: the theory of embodied consciousness, of perception, and of the phenomenology of racism both internalized and external; but this is fleshed out through readable narratives about her own particular experiences as Chicana.

Martinez develops a general phenomenological approach to the experience of having an oppressed identity, as well as a semiotic analysis for the exploration of the sign systems within which racialization processes and racialized communication develops. She reflects insightfully on the complex danger as well as utility of integrating personal experience with the attempt to develop general theoretical explanation and description. And she articulates with impressive reflexivity the experience of de-assimilation engaged in by so many of our generation, not just by Latinos but also by other non-white groups in the United States.

Martinez argues that, in order for the phenomenological method to be useful for elucidating the conditions of oppression, it must begin with critique. It cannot attempt to bracket out interpretation or achieve a pure description but must recognize that phenomenological description is always interpretive. Once it has accepted this, the method of phenomenological description can begin to assist the process of critiquing the cultural norms that produce the lived experience in racially stratified societies. At the same time, the advantage of using phenomenology is that it requires suspending the social categories of experience we generally take for granted, such as race, ethnicity, and sexuality.

Martinez provides a phenomenological description of her coming to consciousness as Chicana, and thus of her attempt to unravel the assimilation process so integral to the development of her identity. She describes this transformation as an achievement, consciously pursued rather than passively experienced, and as a fundamental alteration in perspective "made possible by critically engaging the fact of my own life within the historical context of conquest." She describes it as a perspectival change that was accompanied by concrete, material alterations in embodied experience. But she also acknowledges that "that achievement could not erase my knowledge and lived experience from all those moments prior to the formation of that new critical consciousness" nor could it eliminate the "great deal of ambiguity" that remains with her politics of identification in relation to her ordinary, everyday life (91). Others who have written memoirs about their complex identities, such as Judy Scales-Trent, have argued that such intersectional experience and the ability to move as an insider, even to a partial degree, between various racialized communities can shed enormous light on the extremely strange racial coding practices in our society. Martinez's work upholds this claim, but she also develops an account of the racial meanings developed within the intersectional identity itself, using it to put the spotlight not only on more "normative" identities but on the racialized experiences of the hybrid identity.

I hope this book will initiate more philosophical analyses of racialized experience, the usefulness of phenomenology for cultural critique, and the politics of de-assimilation. I hope, also, that it will enlarge the discursive spaces within which many more Latinas/os can engage with philosophy. Toward this end, I hope readers will consider adopting this book for courses that address phenomenology, identity, Latino issues, race and ethnicity, the politics of experience, and feminist theory.

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APA Newsletters

Spring 2001 Volume 00, Number 2

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2