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Borderlands and the “biblical hurricane”: Images and Stories of Latin American Rhythms of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Davíd Carrasco*
Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School

Extract

Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering.

Type
ARTICLES
Copyright
Copyright © President and fellows of Harvard college 2008

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References

1 Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (trans. Gregory Robassa; New York: Harper Perennial, 2004) 416.

2 For a cogent discussion of cultural “bumping” in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands see Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States (Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1996).

3 Samuel P. Huntington, Who are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

4 Michael D. Jackson, “Beyond Biograpy and Ethnography,” HTR 101 (2008) 377–97.

5 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1995) xiii.

6 Virgilio Elizondo, The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet (Boulder, Colo.: University Press of Colorado, 2000) xxii

7 Carlos Veléz-Ibáñez, Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest (Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1996) 3.

8 Ibid.

9 Albert Camarillo, “Alambrista and the Historical Context of Mexican Immigration to the United States in the Twentieth Century,” in Alambrista and the US-Mexico Border: Film, Music and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants (ed. Nicholas Cull and Davíd Carrasco; Albuquerque, N. Mex.: University of New Mexico Press, 2004) 14.

10 Ibid, 14.

11 Ibid., 27.

12 Jackson, “Between Biography and Ethnography,” HTR 101 (2008) 380.

13 Octavio Paz, “In Search of the Present” Nobel Lecture delivered 8 December 1990 (can be viewed at: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-lecture-e.html) 1.

14 Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 1999) 155.

15 Ibid., 3.

16 Ibid., 3.

17 Ibid., 4.

18 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992) 7

19 Questions of Cultural Identity (ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996) 3.

20 Munroe Edmonson, ed. The Ancient Future of the Itza: The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin, (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas, 1992) xx.

21 Ibid., 44–45

22 William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) 272.

23 Ibid., 274.

24 Ibid., 274.

25 Ibid., 277.

26 Jonathan Z. Smith, The Harper Collins Dictionary of Religion (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) 1042.

27 Inga Clendinnen, “Ways to the Sacred: Reconstructing ‘Religion’ in Sixteenth-Century Mexico” History and Anthropology 5 (1990) 109.

28 Taylor, Magistrates, 61

29 Ibid., 61

30 Anita Brenner, Idols behind Altars (New York: Harcourt, 1929).

31 Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole and James Lockhart, The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega's Huei tlamahuiColtica of 1649 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 67. The phrase ine Nahuat is “oacico itic altepetl.”

32 Ibid., 89. The phrase in Nahuatl is “Auh huel cenmochi izcemaltepetl olin.”

33 This approach to altepetl has been emphasized by James Lockhart in Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indian (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

34 Xavier Noguez, “Altepetl,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures (ed. Davíd Carrasco; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 13.

35 Davíd Carrasco, “Prologue,” in The Future is Mestizo, by Elizondo.

36 Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (Colombia University Press, 2000) 187.

37 See page 373 of this article.

38 Ken Mills and William B. Taylor, Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resource Books, 1998) 148.

39 Mills and Taylor, Colonial Spanish America, 149.

40 Kris Lane, Quito, 1599 (Albuquerque, N. Mex.: University of New Mexico Press, 2002) xi.

41 See Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) for an extensive discussion of these various categories.

42 For a superb summary of the cultural significance and criticisms of La Malinche, see Sandra Cypess, “La Malinche as Palimpsest,” in History of the Conquest of Mexico by Bernal Diaz del Castillo (ed. Davíd Carrasco; Albuquerque, N. Mex.: University of New Mexico Press, 2008).

43 Karen Powers, forthcoming.

44 Powers, forthcoming.

45 Elizabeth Wilder Weismann, Mexico in Sculpture 1521–1821 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950) 5.

46 See my “The Future is Mestizo: We Are the Shades,” in The Future is Mestizo, by Elizondo, xvii-xxvi.

47 Huntington, Who Are We?, 129.