Remaking the Heart of Aztlán

 

In a pretty amazing accident of good timing, Melina’s very recent essay “Growing Up Chicana in the Heart of Anaya’s Aztlán” (2021) gives our conversations an edge and focus. The piece is a tribute to the great educator and writer Rudy Anaya, of course a major influence on the emerging Chicano literary movement of the 1970s, a man particularly treasured in Albuquerque, his homeplace, and a longtime mentor to Melina. As someone who was bookish, a reader, Melina’s tribute to Anaya is an occasion to consider the impact of coming-of-age narratives on young readers, like her. As a middleschool girl she read his second novel Heart of Aztlán, and the vivid hope of the story, about Aztlán “being in the heart” was just romantic enough for a youthful mind. Even though, she cuts in, her own youth “was no romance.”

Allowing this critical piece to turn personal, she tells us: “Soon I would become a teen mother, like my sister and mother before me, and my grandmother and great-grandmother before us. We lived the realities of growing up Hispanic and female in Albuquerque, not so much in the Aztlán of Anaya’s fiction.”  She moves out of the voice of “the scholar,” “authority,” and resituates this homage to Anaya on Chicana feminist grounds. The task of the essay then is to balance her appreciation for the roadmap for political consciousness provided in Anaya’s work and in coming-of-age tales centered around Chicano young men with the gendered challenges and expectations she and the women of her family knew from their own lives. The challenges are still there and her work as a Chicana feminist is to make those challenges her business. For Melina’s scholarly bio, see here.

Don’t be misled, by my framing introduction here, that we launch instantly into these weighty matters immediately. No! Along with Jesse Alemán, the man Melina married who is a Chicano Studies scholar and presently Associate Dean of Graduate Students at UNM, both of them had our spot set up on their airy back porch. Melina brings out a tray of chips and two dips: one a chunky fresh avocado mix and the other a blend of mango, jalapeno, onions, and tomatoes. There are drinks too, colorful. And Jesse has dinner marinating for a BBQ. Lightness, and humor, and especially Melina’s laughter! These sounds and feeling mark the moment as one of friends returning to one another, reminding me of other dinners, our long evening after Elena Valdez’s wedding in Las Vegas, NM, laughing at who can remember what while sharing stories of parenting.

I begin above because Melina repeatedly invokes a sense of place as indelibly mixed in with domestic life and legacies of teen motherhood, along with herself as a young thinker. Someone searching in the world of ideas and texts for ways to be and know, the exception to the rule of the teen mom legacy who in fact continued education as a first gen college student, and then completed post-graduate study. Questions about “the where” thus have to do with regions of the mind and educational aspiration superimposed over places of homelife and motherhood. They do not map easily onto one another. No surprise perhaps that the piece above about Anaya puts on the table the larger problem of teen pregnancy in New Mexico, the fact the state has one of the highest pregnancy rates in the country and ranks fiftieth (!) in overall child wellbeing. These concerns come up in our interview time and again.

So we do not begin, as we have recently here in several blog posted interviews, with “place” as a hallowed natural world place, a source of well-being through smells, air, histories of family stories interwoven into a tradition of belonging that should be nurtured, protected, and handed on. Melina will not tell you that story.

Hers is a different story of transformations of the mind and of her relations to family in a place she has lived all her life, where her young adult children and grandchildren live today.

 

The Where of Here:  Albuquerque

 Krista Comer  We are so pleased to be here in Albuquerque!  I thought we’d begin with the “where of the here” but since you’ve shown us such beautiful refreshment and welcome. . .  I thought we might bring that pitcher over here, put it on camera.

Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán  Yeah, I’m gonna drink out of this [gestures to pitcher, laughs]. This is my specialty drink. It is a watermelon agua fresca with some lime juice, a squeeze of agave and some tequila. It’s a very nice and fruity and festive drink.  And look at how pretty it is!

Krista Comer  [nodding]. It’s beautiful.

Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán.  Yeah. This comes from my kitchen.

Krista Comer.  It’s perfect for “the where of the here.”  It’s hot in Albuquerque!

Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán Yes!

Krista Comer.  What a refreshing drink for the backyard in the summer. And Jesse Alemán is here too [on porch, out of earshot].

Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán.  We’ve been hosting here for 18 years. We got married in 2003, the same year we moved into the house. The house has changed, the kids are grown up. And now my son has kids. So we have grandkids coming to the house now. And it’s just amazing how fast time changes. 18 years ago, I was a different person. Obviously, I was a younger, we were just starting, the kids were little. In and of itself, that was going to be an adventure, being a new family, a “blended family.

We needed to purchase the house before we got married because I had already been married before. That’s where the kids come from. You know, terrible credit. All kinds of domestic things, baggage, carried over from the previous marriage. We were under the gun and really trying to get into something before we actually got married so that Jesse would be the sole owner and they wouldn’t take into account my own credit background. We got into the house the day before we got married. It was very intense. So much has happened here.  We raised our kids and now we have our grandkids coming over and we looked everywhere in the city.

I grew up in the South Valley, so I had an attachment to the valley and never really lived in the city proper, though I came to school in the city. It’s very close. We were just looking everywhere and we discovered that this neighborhood is where my dad grew up, in this area of the city.  At the time he grew up it was on the outskirts, it was like the edge of the city. Technically we’re in Northeast Heights, in terms of Albuquerque geography. A lot of people refer to it as the “Northeast Whites,” that’s the kind of reputation this part of the city has. But there are a lot of Chicanada, a lot of people of color, a lot of kind of blue-collar, middle working-class people.  We didn’t expect that or anticipate it, but that’s the way this city works, Albuquerque is metropolitan, it’s a city-city.  But it’s also a small town. You can have a small town feeling to it, and you end up knowing someone, or you end up knowing an area better than you thought, because it’s a very small town, but spread out.

Krista Comer.  Listening to you about “the where of here,” it’s a domestic place, it’s a place for family, we’re at your home, we’re in your backyard.

Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán Absolutely.

Krista Comer  And also it’s a place of feminism, of feminist advocacy and feminist thinking.  In terms of places you feel you belong, or places that you feel you don’t belong, I wonder how people claim or feel welcomed in a place, or how they make themselves feel at home in a place? You talk in the piece of writing about “Growing Up” that you lived in Albuquerque all your life, but still, it’s not always straightforward what “place” means.

Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán  I’ve never lived anywhere else. And I’ve lived here, and only here, for very domestic reasons. I was in a first marriage, it didn’t last, it wasn’t very healthy. It wasn’t a good relationship. I had two kids out of it. So it’s kind of like a life sentence. That sounds awful to say, but I made decisions in my life when I was young when my brain wasn’t fully formed, having kids at 18 and 19. Being an adult without being ready to be an adult. That is also a part of the place where I grew up, because being a teen mom was the family tradition, passed down for generations. What would be an interesting project to figure out is to trace it, even in my own family, I know it goes back at least three or four generations,

Krista Comer.  In the piece we read, you say life can seem at times unpredictable, but retrospectively you look at life, and there are predictable patterns that are actually predictive of certain outcomes.

Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán. What “belonging” was was really conflicted, getting pregnant young and getting married because that’s the solution, right? If you get pregnant, you got to get married, because the thinking is very Catholic.  You can’t have a baby out of wedlock, that’s unthinkable. So there are certain traditions that we adhere to in a very complicated way. That’s how we belong in a certain community. There was a moment for me, long after I decided to leave my first husband and get a divorce, where I realized that I never felt like I had a different choice. That collective identity felt familiar, because from my mom and my sister to my cousins, to my niece to myself, you know, we’re all going through the same experience.

Krista Comer  It was a lifecycle, a normative lifecycle?

Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán  Absolutely. There’s those narratives about having your consciousness raised. Going to school, being the first in my family to go to college and actually take that seriously. And also to become aware. That is what happened with my own journey becoming Chicana. I wasn’t a Chicana before college. I didn’t have that awareness, consciousness, or critical thinking that one has to undergo in order to feel comfortable claiming that identity. There’s a certain point where you can take control over your identity, rather than your identity controlling the terms of your life. And that, to me, is what it means to be Chicana. But what’s that leap? It does raise the question of what happens when the droves of girls who don’t become Chicana, don’t find a place for themselves in the way that I found one. They don’t come to that awareness. We have a huge high school dropout rate, and education isn’t really valued on a collective scale in this state. Of course, then we say they were under educated and I would even say, in my own family, that’s true. So, it’s not like the first generation makes it to college, and then everything just lifts up. It’s a much harder struggle, and I’m dealing with it with my own kids.

There’s that first gen that makes it but there isn’t always a path, following it.  So it feels lonesome and lonely. Because having awareness actually can make you dis-identify from your community of origin. In some ways, you have to, I had to, in order to grow as a person, and to get out of those patterns of unhealthy behavior. I use my first marriage as an example. The person was abusive, and we were not good to each other. But even after we were divorced, I had already internalized a lot of that negative attitude and did something to myself psychologically that it takes a long time to get out of.

Krista Comer. I deeply appreciate this conversation. The impulse can be to claim places that affirm us, and we want to go there, or they affirm family and family traditions, especially traditions that are pushed to the margins by normalizing white settler culture. It can be harder to put on the table the way in which we disaffect from places because to have survived them required steps that actually took you away.

Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán.  Identifying myself as a Chicana, that’s not a word that my mother or father or sisters are familiar with, or identify with. There’s a lot to be said about understanding the importance of disassociating ourselves from places, so that we don’t come to think that we own a place. That’s our responsibility as intellectuals and academics and educators: to not claim a place in order to own it, but to understand that we’re dwelling here, temporarily. There are traditions that tie us to this place [Albuquerque], but those traditions are tied to histories of violence, conquest, conflicts that divide people.  My family, they carry on a very colonialist narrative about belonging here, and being here for seven generations past . . . As someone who identifies as Chicana, it’s not a narrative that I accept as true, but I understand it is a prevailing narrative that defines this place and that people associate with it. That’s how they feel like they belong. But in identifying as Chicana, I separate myself from it and my own family, which again, can be alienating. But it’s important to contest those [Spanish settler colonial] narratives.

Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán.  You had a question about how you belong in a place? Is it a feeling? Is it a memory? Because, it’s funny, I often forget that I’ve been in a place until I actually go to the place. One story memory that I have is when I first went to Madrid, NM, with Jesse. He asked me if I’d ever been to Madrid before, and I said, no, I don’t think I’ve ever been there. So we go, we get there. And we sit down in a bar, and all these memories start to come back. I think I’ve been here before, I have been to this place, with my ex-husband. Because it’s a biker bar. We used to go because he was part of a biker club with his dad, and we would go on Sunday drives, which I never liked. I’m cerebral. I’ve always been an intellectual even before I was an intellectual. So the last thing I want to do is spend a Sunday afternoon on a motorcycle. But there was a kind of motor memory, I had this extreme—like a vision—remembering that I’ve been here. It was so intense that it made me sick. So the way I’ve learned how to cope with certain traumas has been to forget. You forget, but then you don’t forget. Because once you get there, then it’s like seeing a picture, and it revives all these memories. I’m very sensitive, I feel through my gut. Literally, so everything just… all my lunch came up.

There are places or sites of trauma, original sites of trauma. They are tied to my family and to these very intimate childhood places and homes where I grew up. I continue to return to them in my dreams and so I’m very much attached to place. But it’s not always celebratory.

 

Chosen Kin, Chicana Feminism, New Stories for Girls

 Before it’s time for the BBQ, before the rain that’s teasing actually lets down and waters everything, Melina and I are musing about reshaping relationships along lines more chosen than inherited.  Meaningful relationships with women today often take place in other women’s homes, kitchens, at the kitchen table.

Sharing stories, photos, work and art.  The term “feminism” has not be an automatic or obvious one for Melina to claim, and developing relations with women of like minds is part of her current feminist journey.  These women are friends who are chosen family – comadres, sisters, grandmothers. She has sought them through her work, and her interests as a Chicana academic. Most of them are older, and we keep talking about younger women, the younger women we want in our lives.

Melina tells me that for her, Chicana has “feminist” built into the term.  In contexts of the Southwest, Chicana implies a critique of settler Spanish colonialism. Unlike Rudy Anaya’s gender order, Chicana perspectives doubt whether marriage structures and traditional family structures are going to hold everything together.  The reality of the institution of marriage and motherhood, its structure of gender inequalities in domestic realms, means that for many Mexican American mothers, the ideal of family without gender hierarchy is not a reality. Chicana feminist analyses of family identify the perils of institutions of motherhood for both girls and for boys who grow up without a sense of alternative possibilities.  Fortunately Melina’s son has grown up with alternatives.

Where do girl readers find stories of alternative lives?  Melina talks about not finding a book that really spoke to her particular experience as a young girl. Probably they existed but she didn’t have access to them. The book that she did have was Heart of Aztlan. Later House on Mango Street.  If Mango Street was authored by someone who was “nobody’s wife and nobody’s mother” (as the book jacket famously proclaimed), what wisdom did it offer the girl who is not to be single or without children?

Melina gives us a different story through sharing her own life, it’s a story that offers a different kind of counsel and wisdom than Mango Street.  Through scholarship, teaching, and leadership as a faculty at UNM, she provides pathways for young women and men whose stories, too, may be different