2.4 (October 2002): 387-391
© 2002 National Communication Association

Transformation and Liberation Amidst Racist-Assimilationist Forces

Michelle A. Holling

Jacqueline M. Martinez. Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity: Communication and Transformation in Praxis. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. xvii + 133 pages. Bibliography and index. $70.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

Over the last twenty years a body of work recognized as Chicana feminist scholarship, across various fields of study, continues to proliferate and to offer new understandings of Chicanas’ experience in the context of dominant U. S. society. Evidence of Chicana feminist scholarship exists in literary works and critical analyses, in critical interrogations of cultural productions, and in feminist theorizations, to name but a few areas. Throughout many of these works, the foregrounding of and examination of Chicanas’ experiences highlights that which has been ignored or marginalized within historical and/or intellectual works, and produces theoretical understandings of intersecting forms of oppression. In concert with such efforts is Jacqueline Martinez’s Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity. Her book deepens our understanding of how transformation and liberation are (and, can be) achieved at the level of individual consciousness. The individual consciousness is not an end in itself, but rather it is a beginning and, indeed an important step to challenging oppressive forces in society. Martinez attends to racist-assimilationist forces, though not to the exclusion of other forms of oppression, that cause damage to individuals’ sense of self.

Her exploration of racist-assimilation and her identification of transformative possibilities of individual consciousness reveal themselves in several ways, one of which is her reliance on phenomenological theory and methodology. In the preface, Martinez provides a succinct and clear articulation of her employment of phenomenological procedures and recognizes its potential limits. Revealed throughout the six chapters composing the book is the appropriateness of phenomenology to the effort. Her use of phenomenology provides an approach to examining the “terms within which certain possibilities of human existence . . . come to be actualized in the lived experience of persons” (x). Second, and related to the first point, is Martinez’s integration of her own personal experiences, which she engages and consistently puts into question. The import of her personal experiences is how they assist in exemplifying aspects of phenomenological concepts; thus, she presents her experience “not as a model, ideal, or exemplar of a ‘Chicana’ but simply as the example to which [she is] necessarily tied” (xiii). Third, possibilities of transformation are present in Martinez’s incorporation of Chicana scholarship, which highlights the ways Chicanas have struggled against various oppressive forces.

In chapter 1 Martinez explicates her position in the academy, her position in the social world, and her theoretical and methodological orientation that bring forth the current work. The generative nexus of the work gives a way to understand Martinez’s “border crossings.” She is quick to underscore the cautiousness with which she invokes the term as it is “anything but a popular concept of 1990s academic theorizing for those whom the border is anything but” (2). Her focus on racist-assimilationist forces as a dominant force in U.S. society is one that leads to a provocative question: “What makes the difference between those who see through the oppressive practices of a given social place and time and those who come to internalize the logics that inform those practices?” (18). A distinguishing factor is the role of the American Dream mythology. It is one that holds out hope to individuals that ascending into a higher socioeconomic class status is possible as well as desirable and simultaneously, the dream serves to remind individuals of their inabilities, if they have yet to achieve the dream (21-22). Thus, the American Dream works to inculcate a racist practice such as the necessity of shedding one’s cultural and ethnic distinctiveness in order to garner the “American Dream.”

Chapter 2 is a lucid account of the spiraling movement across and between three modes of consciousness—unknowning-knowing, pre-knowing-knowing, and knowing-unknown—through which Martinez’s personal, familial, and ethnic histories and experiences are used to explicate the workings of each consciousness. The uniting of histories with modes of consciousness is to demonstrate the ways that “racist-assimilationist forces of culture function across generations” in order to begin counteracting them (33). Martinez illustrates this point by discussing an individual who is “in-communication-with” a sociality that teaches the inferiority of a person’s native tongue, Spanish for instance, leading to a rejection of one’s native language. However, the point at which the individual discards the dominant culture’s message and seeks to reclaim her language reflects a claiming of her ethnic self and a challenge to the assimilation process (44). Additionally, Martinez notes that her own familial-cultural heritage is a primary signifier of her ethnic self (44). Martinez’s discussion of two ways that an individual may experience her/his “ethnic self” invites the following questions: Is the apparentness of one’s ethnic body only visible to others when (and, if) it falls within the parameters of stereotyped notions of what is or constitutes an “ethnic body” (44) as in skin color, surname, or native language? And, if so, then for individuals who perceive and experience themselves as occupying an ethnic body, and yet their ethnic body fails to be recognized, how do they receive acknowledgment and affirmation of their ethnicness? In short, is the process of coming to see the ethnicness that one presents to the world exist largely (or, only) at an internal level?

One final aspect I wish to highlight about chapter 2 is the care and compassion that Martinez conveys in sharing the details of her father’s experiences. She notes there are moments when she has felt a sense of betrayal and been angry at her father regarding his silences surrounding his upbringing. However, with time she recognizes that her anger is not toward her father but “of a racist culture that denies its own acts of oppression and continues to use Mexicans and Mexican Americans as scapegoats” (53).

The process of transformation and liberation suggested in chapter 2 are addressed further in chapters 3 and 4 wherein Martinez focuses on the construction of “the Chicana lesbian” and explicates the liberatory possibilities suggested in Gloria Anzaldúa’s “la conciencia de la mestiza.” The Chicana lesbian’s location is based on exclusions that work to make her unintelligible; and yet, the exclusions are what give way to “potential sites of radical transformation” (62). Also, the Chicana lesbian, as located in a space of radical ambiguity, forces an interrogation of binaries such as “assimilationist versus nationalist and complicitous-traitor versus loyal-culturalist” (60). One such example is reflected in Martinez’s discussion of Cherríe Moraga, whose experiences illustrate the ambiguities and the possibilities of liberation that permeate the location of a Chicana lesbian. Later, in chapter 4, Martinez delineates key aspects of Anzaldúa’s “la conciencia de la mestiza.” La conciencia reflects liberatory possibilities for human consciousness through steps such as “taking up a counterstance,” a first step that compels individuals to engage “with the flesh of the lived body and its shared material contact with the world”; “taking inventory” to see what one inherits from previous generations and ancestral connections; and recognizing how colonialist and assimilationist practices operate (85-90). The purpose of such steps is to transform that which oppresses and subdues human consciousness in order to bridge the borders that exert violence on one’s intrasubjectivity all in an effort to allow for new emergent intrasubjectivities.

Finally, the last two chapters reflect an emphasis on the transformative possibilities provided by Chicana scholarship and dialogic communication. With the former, Martinez highlights the work completed by Chicana feminists and activists, “the first mestiza border crossers” (111), of the Chicano movement. Their contributions make possible Anzaldúa’s “la conciencia de la mestiza,” advance theoretical and methodological approaches, provide an understanding of how they struggled against racist-assimilation, and contribute to Chicana/os’ process of cultural recovery. With the final chapter, Martinez’s dialogue with a colleague speaks to the process of “being-in-communication-with.” Her dialogic engagement invites readers to listen in to her conversation—one that encompasses personal expressions of how each woman came to experience and to consciousness about ethnic identification, and about the ways racism and classism seeps into one’s life.

In closing I want to encourage individuals who have an interest in challenging the variegated forms of oppression that manifest in the lives of racially-ethnically or otherwise marked persons, to read Martinez’s book. The insights she provides about the assimilation and de-assimilation process within and across familial generations extends other work that explores similar issues with regard to Mexican American identity (see for example, Johnson, 1999). In addition, her work adds an important contribution to the field of communication—a privileging of Chicana feminist scholarship and what it has to offer to communication scholars’ theoretical and methodological endeavors. Certainly, work by Flores (1996), Holling (2000), and Palczewski (1996) reflect the import of Chicana scholarship and its contributions to rhetorical studies. And, Martinez’s book demonstrates the ways that Chicana feminist scholarship informs the application and use of phenomenology such that when combined powerful enunciations of the potential for individual transformation and liberation come forth. How might individuals continue to expand the process of transformation and liberation beyond individual consciousness to broader social and cultural changes? Addressing such a question may provide a point to build on that which Martinez’s book offers.

Michelle A. Holling is assistant professor of Speech Communication at Syracuse University.

References

Flores, L. A. (1996). Creating discursive space through a rhetoric of difference: Chicana feminists craft a homeland. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 82, 142-156.

Holling, M. A. (2000). Extending critical rhetoric and feminist theory: Rhetorical constructions of Chicana subject/ivity, identity and agency. Unpublished dissertation. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.

Johnson, K. (1999). How did you get to be Mexican?: A white/brown man’s search for identity. Philadelphia: Temple University.

Palczewski, C. H. (1996). Bodies, borders, and letters: Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Speaking in tongues: A letter to 3rd world women writers.” Southern Communication Journal, 62, 1-16.