The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Through the centre of this unknown region, fully as large as New Eng-land, courses the Rio Grande, which can more correctly be compared to the Congo than the Nile the moment that the degraded, turbulent, ignorant , and superstitious character of its population comes under examination .-JOHN G. BOURKE, "The American Congo," Scribner's Magazine (1894) U.S. Army Captain John Gregory Bourke (1846-1898) was one of the earliest ethnographers of the Mexican and Amerindian Southwest. His birth and death marked two of the most important years for U.S. continental and hemispheric expansion between the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the Spanish-American War (1898). Both his ethnographic work and his experience as an army officer allowed for close, though never disinterested, observation of the borderlands between Mexico and the United States. They repre~ented for him a contact zone where Amerindian and Mexican cultures ceded to the "American" imperial designs of nation: westward migration, colonization, and the waves of violence that characterized continental expansion. 1 Published in the popular Scribner's Magazine, "The American Congo" captured an emerging national identity that could consider Mexican difference incommensurate with American reality by naturalizing the stigma that made "Mexican" a racial term rather than one of national, cultural, or ethnic identification. 2 That today we continue to view the West as a tabula rasa imbued with meaning through migration from the East is instructive of the degree to which national memory offers compelling but furtively incomplete ways to participate in a national symbolic order that excises as much as it claims to assimilate. 3 INTRODUCTION Public-sphere representations like Bourke's did not, as many would have it, suppress an inchoate Mexican American identity: they fabricated one for public consumption by giving visual and emotive texture to a people rendered foreign in their own cultural topography. Bourke's ethnographic work in the borderlands of the American imagination created what may perhaps be the first summative ontology of people under scrutiny by confounding the population's being with his disciplinary knowing. Their ontological status is displaced by his epistemological errancy; their being and his knowing position the Mexican population outside the nation's symbolic imaginary. Superimposing Africa in America, his "Congo" is both a space within the parameters of his America ("as large as New England") and a symbolic place rendered outside reason. Bourke's explicit purpose in "The American Congo" was to present "the readers of Scribner's an outline description, both of the territory …