At The New Inquiry, Chris Chen Interviews Wendy Trevino

Poets Wendy Trevino and Chris Chen talk at The New Inquiry about Trevino's Commune Editions chapbook, Brazilian Is Not a Race, which "excavates a history of racial violence at the borders of the U.S. and beyond," and how a radical Chicana politics might better be formed by solidarity in political struggle. An excerpt from this interview, titled "Mexican Is Not a Race":

CHRIS CHEN. ...The way in which you describe the discordant relationship between race and culture is to me one of the most striking passages in the chapbook: “We are who we are/To them, even when we don’t know who we/Are to each other and culture is a/Record of us figuring that out.”

WENDY TREVINO. I think it’s important to understand that racial identity is an imposition first and foremost, a “we” defined not by us–who might have less in common than not–in order to make “us” legible to colonizers, slavers, capitalists, the state–who “we” are racialized in relation to. I think about how the transatlantic slave trade abducted people of different ethnicities, people who spoke different languages, people with different religions and traditions, and imposed on them–those who survived–a single identity.

Of course, this isn’t the end of the story. This “we” is also negotiated by us, too. In thinking this way, it’s very hard for me not to feel uncomfortable about Vasconcelos and Anzaldua’s embrace of a “we” based on a shared multiracial identity as emancipatory for those of Mexican heritage–as if racialization, enculturation and (to be real in the case of Anzaldua) acculturation are all the same thing. And yeah, the subsequent obfuscation of those negotiations I’m talking about is a huge problem, if our aim is the eradication of racism.

CHRIS CHEN. Whether the poems are excavating the retaliatory vision of the 1915 “Plan of San Diego,” the revolutionary plot by radicals in South Texas to seize the Southwest from the capitalist United States, or attending to the political radicalism of figures like Ricardo Flores Magón, the chapbook seems to turn toward a relatively less well-known history of Mexican and Mexican-American groups in the U.S. South and Southwest, including the Magonistas and participants in the 1910 Mexican Revolution, who coordinated a militant response to the lynchings and massacres carried out by vigilantes, federal troops, and the Texas Rangers.

The first time I read about the “Plan of San Diego” was in a 1976 speech by the August Twenty-Ninth Movement, a Chicano political group based in Los Angeles that was trying to look back to this early-20th century political moment in the U.S. Southwest for examples of a combative, and simultaneously anti-racist and anti-capitalist politics. Why were you interested in this history?

WENDY TREVINO. I see the radical tradition, in which Ricardo Flores Magón and the “Plan of San Diego” play such significant parts, as a much more promising blueprint for struggle than the celebrations of hybridity offered by Vasconcelos and Anzaldua. As I’ve already said, the only negotiations I believe are possible between the managers of race and those who are racialized require that those who are racialized return the violence inflicted upon them. The radical tradition I turn to goes even further. It is not interested in “negotiating,” but seeks to abolish existing relations of power completely...

Read it all here. You can find the interview in Spanish as well, thanks to a translation by David Rojas Azules.