# 044
Legally Absent, Hauntingly Present:Ghost Stories of the Undocumented in Contemporary Chicana/o Fiction
How Chicana/o Fiction Haunts the Discourse of Citizenship
It is commonly thought that the law represents or reflects society. However, as critical legal scholars have made clear, the law imposes its own logic on the world and shapes it accordingly.[1] In doing so, the law’s rigid knowledge categories render particular experiences, emotions, and histories mute because such a system cannot translate them. It is at these moments of imposition and mistranslation that certain subjects (both people and topics) are sentenced to death and relegated to a zone of (legal) unintelligibility. But the power of the law is not complete. What has been murdered can also be resurrected. Unauthorized experiences and knowledges that cannot be translated into the law’s language of equivalence and neutrality may become “ghosts” in the sense that they become powerful forces in other cultural arenas. According to Avery Gordon, these ghosts produce structures of feeling that resist turning particular experiences into the abstract, fixed social forms that methodologies regard as “significant.”[2] It is
important to remember that these ghosts do not passively moan on the perimeters of interpretive edifices. Quite the contrary, they chip away at the structures of meaning that have excluded them, hoping for entry and resurrection. In the case of the Chicana/o community, the discourse of citizenship has produced ghosts in Chicana/o narratives of the undocumented. The legally enforced dichotomy between citizen and the undocumented has led the Chicana/o writers in this chapter to write about the spectral by-products of citizenship and political borders.
We begin to understand how the disjuncture between the Chicano/a community and the law has created a ghostly borderlands when we realize that many Chicano families and communities are composed of both legal and illegal residents. Furthermore, continuing Mexican migration to the United States has made it difficult for “legal” Chicana/os to use the benefits of their citizenship or legal residency to make a neat and painless division between themselves and the undocumented. Even legal Chicana/os realize, as they walk in their neighborhoods and eat at the family table, that they make their lives and homes with people who are legally absent—dead in the face of the law. This is not insignificant. Whether citizens or legal residents, Chicana/os are not unaffected by the INS. INS agents may raid the neighborhood, the workplace and even the home to cart away neighbors, coworkers, and family; Chicana/o U.S. citizens may even find themselves mistaken as undocumented.
This situation has created the need for an alternative space from which to articulate concerns that resist the logic of abstraction and the amnesia of the law. As this dissertation has continually argued, fiction provides one such alternative space by embracing what the law cannot imagine. Similarly, Lisa Lowe and Avery Gordon see fiction as a site that gives voice to what official legal discourse (Lowe) or formal methodologies (Gordon) cannot represent. For Gordon, fictions “enable other kinds of sociological information to emerge” because it is not “restrained by the norms of a professionalized social science, and thus often teaches us, through imaginative design, what we need to learn but cannot quite get access to with our given rules of method and modes of apprehension.”[3] Lowe sees literature and other cultural practices as the ground from which to launch a counternarrative to official discourse:
Because it is the purpose of American national culture to form subjects as citizens, this distance created […] alternative cultural site[s], site[s] of cultural forms that propose, enact, and embody subjects and practices not contained by the narrative of American citizenship. […] I have insisted on […] present[ing] a model for interpreting literature and culture as social forces, as nodes in a network of other social practices and social relations.[4]
This chapter hopes to examine the particular ethical nature of fiction as an alternative site. In doing so, as this project has continuously argued, fiction as a counternarrative is transformed into a site of ethical deliberation.
By “ethics” I do not mean morality, with its emphasis on an adherence to a code of conduct. In fact, contemporary Chicana/o borderlands ethics works against codification and more towards disruption. It advocates, to use Zizek’s formulation, letting what is foreign enter the legal edifice in order to create new norms and, more importantly, new universal criteria by which to judge such norms. In doing so, contemporary Chicana/o fiction gives voice to an ethical imperative for the United States to form a new relation between itself and Latin America, one that involves weakening borders and blurring the distinction between citizen and noncitizen. Not surprisingly, the law has ignored this imperative for the sake of its own coherence. As a result, Chicana/o literature has become one of the main sites to imagine a new democracy based on an ethics that avoids transferring the dynamics between nations states to the level of community. In other words, this particular hospitality asks people to approach each other as neighbors and not as members of nations.
In the fiction of Helena Maria Viramontes, Daniel Chacon, and Guy Garcia, this disruptive “foreign” element is represented by the figure of the haunted/haunting undocumented immigrant, who has the fantastic power to merge people and places. This chapter will focus on how these Chicana/o authors have chosen to eschew a realist strategy for representing the plight of the undocumented. While these fictions of the undocumented deal with very real social inequities, the power to create an alternative understanding comes from occupying the space between realism and fantasy, and between politics and ethics. Haunting thus becomes a strategy to voice the legally “impossible” ethical call; “impossible” not because it is doomed to fail, but because at the present it is unimaginable for the U.S. government to create a borderless society and universal rights regardless of citizenship or legal status.
In giving the realm of imagination and fiction an ethical force, this chapter also endeavors to question the conflation between ethics and realism. There is currently a group of post-positivist realist literary scholars--many of them women, people of color, and/or queer—who use the concept of “experience” to launch a politically laudable attempt to expand the notion of the universal in order to give experiences by people of color an epistemic authority. Their arguments promise to contest the work of conservative critics who invoke the universal to eradicate identity politics. One of the most sophisticated of these critics is Walter Benn Michaels, who accuses identity politics of fixing people to a particular subject position with a singular perspective. According to Michaels, such positioning makes debate an impossibility because there is no right or wrong; it is, after all, simply a matter of where one stands in society, so to speak. In his article, “The Shape of the Signifier,” Michaels gives the following example: Suppose you are traveling on foot, and you see indentations on the ground. However, once you are in an airplane one thousand feet above the ground, you realize that these indentations form a line from a poem. You cannot say which interpretation is correct because it is all a matter of perspective: it all depends on where you stand. This, he explains, is how identity politics prevent debate: it all becomes a matter of the perspective from where you stand.[5]
Post-positivist realists, on the other hand, employ the term “universal” for more radical ends. They claim that knowledge that comes from occupying a certain subject position is not partial; it can explain an entire social network. Their work contradicts claims like those made by Michaels because, for them, subject position does not produce a “local knowledge.” As Mingh T. Nguyen explains: “My claim, put otherwise, is that personal experiences of people of color […] refer outward, beyond their specific racial and ethnic contexts, to the general features of the one social world we all inhabit.”[6] Not only is this knowledge “universal,” it also creates a moral imperative to cultivate “our ability to perceive with creative attention the fine details of another person’s suffering and vulnerability, to vividly picture ourselves in another person’s place, [in order to] […] expand our moral imagination, making ourselves more likely to respond with morally illuminating and therefore a just sort of response.”[7] It is only when we accept the epistemic importance of marginalized people’s experience as knowledge that we can begin the project of having our “social and political theories, such as our theory of justice […] be concretized within the narrative ties of human relationships.”[8]
Unfortunately, post-positivist realist literary critics have based fiction’s ethical force (its moral imperative) on its ability to represent “real/personal” experience, thus coming dangerously close to ignoring the imaginative and textual aspect of fiction. Paula Moya’s definition of “experience” is a good example of this tendency:
Experience here refers to the fact of personally observing, encountering or undergoing a particular event or situation. By this definition, experience is admittedly subjective. Experiences are not wholly external events; they do not just happen. Experiences happen to us, and it is our theoretically mediated interpretation of an event that makes it an experience.[9]
The above definition of experience, with its emphasis on “real experience,” or experience that one personally undergoes, raises the question of how such literary critics approach events, feelings, and insights that are born in the imaginative realm of fiction? This conflation of “personal experience” and “moral imperative” runs the risk of ignoring the ethical importance of fiction’s and imagination’s power to give voice to things that do not exist in reality in order to create a powerful critique of our present circumstances. As this dissertation has continually asserted, fiction provides one of the few sites available both (1) to dramatize the ethical distance between “what is” and “what ought to be” and (2) in doing so to imagine what would be an ethically correct vision of the world that at present does not exist. The Chicana/o writers examined in this chapter move away from a dependence on real, personal experience and towards imagination in order to create a fictional world to address the experience of racism and injustice of a community rather than an individual. Only imagination and the fantastic, as the ghost stories in this chapter will demonstrate, can merge individual histories and experiences, self and other, in order to create an allegory of community formation.
The Fantastic Site of Justice in Helena Maria Viramontes’s “Cariboo Café”
In Helena Maria Viramontes’s short story, “Cariboo Café,” justice can only be achieved through a departure from reality and entry into the haunted imagination of a grieving mother, whose son has been kidnapped and murdered by a totalitarian Latin American government. Rendered spiritually homeless by her son’s death, the mother illegally crosses the border into the United States and becomes an undocumented worker. As Dean Franco, in “Re-placing the Border in Ethnic Literature,” astutely notes, “the border crossing of the protagonists [in “Cariboo Café”] is matched, even instigated by, the border crossing of U.S. foreign policy.”[10] Franco uses “Cariboo Café” as a means of expanding the notion of the borderlands in order to propose that
through its intervention in Nicaragua and Central America, U.S. foreign policy during the eighties (though not only then) could itself be termed a politics of the borderlands, acknowledging the porousness, even the interconnectedness, of the region. Although a malignant and cynical version to be sure, such a borderlands foreign policy, already implied in Borderlands/La Frontera, structures our relation to the border as much as the postmodernity of the border region.[11]
Consequently, in this story, to transgress reality is also to transgress both borders and the law in order to bring to light and put on trial U.S. complicity in the political violence of Latin America.
In this story, the grieving mother wanders the streets of an unnamed city in the United States, where she encounters Macky and his sister, undocumented children who are lost in the streets. In her imagination, space and time warp; Latin America and the United States blend, and Macky and her dead son fuse. In her fantasy, she believes that her son has been resurrected, and that she has been given a second chance to protect him. Happily, she resumes her role as mother and takes the children to the Cariboo Café for dinner.
At this moment the story shifts from the third-person, omniscient narrator to the first-person voice of the Anglo cook. While the woman’s grief is told from a distance, readers are given an intimate perspective on the cook’s own grief. Like the undocumented woman, he too is haunted by the memory of a son who died in warfare. In the cook’s case, his son disappeared in Vietnam and is presumed dead. This loss drives the cook to seek out surrogate sons, like Paulie, a drug addict whose only similarity to his son is that had the son lived they would have been the same age. This tenuous connection is enough to make Paulie, a character who is portrayed as half alive, a poor surrogate for the cook, who shows him kindness in a gruff and piecemeal manner.
Paulie dies of an overdose, and his death places the cook in trouble with the law. The police overrun the café and accuse the cook of dealing drugs out of his establishment with Paulie. Although the cook lost his first son in war and the death of his surrogate son makes him a target of police threats, the cook does not rebel against the State: he promises himself that he will not to give them an excuse to mistreat him again. Consequently, when the INS raids the factory next door and a group of undocumented workers run into his bathroom, he tells the INS officers, when they enter his café, where the workers are hiding.
After he has resolved not to run counter to the law, he encounters the woman and the children for the first time. As he serves them, he sees Macky, who reminds the cook of his son. When the cook encounters the boy, he becomes tender and playful. In that moment, Macky resurrects, so to speak, two sons—the cook’s and the undocumented woman’s. However, there is one critical difference between the cook’s and the woman’s relation to Macky. While the undocumented woman has successfully resurrected her son, the Anglo cook of the “Cariboo Café” cannot. The cook is kind and playful with Macky, but it is not enough. Resurrection requires the transgression of borders and the law, and the cook has chosen to cross neither of these boundaries.
That night, before going to bed, the cook sees a news report about two missing children—Macky and his sister. He recognizes the children and realizes that the undocumented woman is a kidnapper. It is telling that at the moment he resolves to call the police, the face of the woman is erased from his memory, rendering him incapable of giving evidence. The next day, the undocumented woman and the children come to his café again. The woman is transformed. Her clothes are clean and her face is no longer dirty. The cook realizes for the first time that she is beautiful. He serves them and goes to the kitchen, where he comes to a decision. With the rationalization that a family should stay together, the cook calls the police. They arrive in a military-like procession and attempt to wrest the boy from the woman’s grasp. However, the woman has come to a decision of her own: she will not lose her son again; she will fight the state. The reader is then plunged into the woman’s mind, where the city police have merged with a Latin American death squad. As she fights the police/death squad, the narrative calls attention to this poor woman’s lament:
The cook huddles behind the counter, frightened, trembling. Their [police men’s] faces become distorted and she doesn’t see the huge hand that takes hold of Geraldo [her dead son/Macky] and she begins screaming all over again, screaming so that the walls shake, screaming enough for all the women of murdered children, screaming, pleading for help from people outside, and she pushes an open hand against an officer’s nose, because no one will stop the man. He pushes the gun barrel to her face. […] I am laughing, howling at their stupidity. […] I will never let my son go and then and then I hear something crunching like broken glass against my forehead, and I am blinded by a liquid darkness. But I hold onto his hand. […] I’ll never let go. Because we are going home. My son and I.[12]
Whatever sympathy we might have had for the cook’s decision is shattered by the woman’s screams of pain and loss. If we had previously regarded the woman as a kidnapper, this passage effectively suspends the logic of the law in order to usher in the ethical impact of this woman’s pain. In other words, as the undocumented woman fights with all her might, scratching, biting, even throwing hot coffee at the police, there is an ethical interruption of the law’s logic that transforms the grieving mother from a criminal to a force of righteousness. Following the grieving mother’s “insane” logic, the police are not depicted as agents of good attempting to reunite a family—quite the opposite. They are depicted as brutal agents who are very similar to the death squads in Latin America. They are the wrongdoers.