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Free write on "Can the Subaltern speak?" "El Requerimiento" and "Como reconstruir la conciencia de los subalternos?" (Spivak, Spain, Kaliman)

Spivak: The Subaltern cannot speak, or at least, cannot "utter" in ways the West/Colonizer can understand.

"El requerimiento:" Letter from the King and Queen and spain to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, to be read everytime the Spanish/Conquistadores established a colony. Tells the story of how God created the world and its people, of how God gave the ruling rights over to el Papa, who in turn granted ruling rights and gave land to the King and Queen. (A circle of self legitimation?) Therefore, all peoples must obey the king and queen, or suffer the concequences.

Ricardo Kaliman: Briefly talks about the intersections between The Subaltern Studies group based in India, and the Grupo de Estudios Subalternos Latinoamericanos (GESLA). Talks about the irony of how the United States (as center) serves to distribute and connect two marginal (periphery) groups that otherwise might not have connected: India and Latin America. Cautions readers that this flow of information might get distorded (through selection, translation, interpretation, etc.) in its way to Latin America. Critique that the US Latin Ame. group, has concluded that "de que tratar de entender al subalterno es siempre e inevitablemente un modo de colonizarlo." This article seek to enter into the discussion started by Spivak, by adding, "How to reconstruct the conscience of the subaltern?" y "como reconstruir una conciencia en general?" He points out scholars are not even equipped/capable(?) of even reconstructing the consciousness of the elite group, of which there's plenty of primary sources. Even when one gathers testimonios, how do "we" interpret and then represent them. Sometimes people lie, specially when they don't trust the ethnographer, at others, the "informant" makes her/himself important and central to the narrative. how the hell you know, given that ethnographers can never enter someone else's shoes when the ethnographer is backed up by institutional/economic power that the subaltern does not have. peace.

Can we apply the models of Coloniality of Power and Subalternity to people of color in the United States?

The models of internal colonialism and neocolonialism have been used to describe the socio, economic and political status of people of color in the United States. Scholars coming from African American studies and Ethnic Studies (i.e. Robert Allen, Mario Barrera, Rodolfo AcuÒa) originally deployed such models responding to an emerging (cultural) nationalism among people of color. Currently, these models do not hold much currency, partly because of an effective critique coming from feminist and other groups excluded from the type of nationalism practiced during the 60s and 70s, and partly because postmodernism and post-colonialism questioned many assumptions on what these models had been built. It is my judgment that people of color have now been left without an effective model to understand their place (read: to cognitively map their existence), first, in the United States, and secondly, in the world. Which lead me to ask the following question, can marginalized people of color use the models of coloniality of power and subalternity given that they reside within the boundaries of the worldís super-power? Can we classify poor/working class people of color as ìsubaltern?î Are Latin@s, Blacks, Native Americans under the coloniality of power?
In opposition to the assimilation model that sought upward mobility for ëminorityí groups, cultural nationalist groups sought separation and self-determination (at least in their rhetoric), and in the case of Chican@s/Latin@s and Blacks, even linked their struggles to independence and revolutionary movements in the third world. In this respect, these movements had a vague notion of the workings of a world-systems. By seeking separation, U.S. nationalist movements were renouncing the ìmasterís houseî and all its benefits. In a sense, nationalist saw themselves as ìfield negroesî (Malcolm X) and the ìfieldî extended to the third world (hence peopleís refusal to fight in Vietnam). I do not seek to romanticize U.S. nationalist movement, but point out that at least these groups did not sought incorporation into the worldís super-power, they articulated themselves as colonized peoples against capitalism (again, even if only in feeling and rhetoric).
If each society has its subalterns, this must also be true to the United States. I would say that poor people of color, especially those that are undocumented, suffer a subaltern status. The coloniality model cannot be easily applied to ethnic communities in the United States. As it has been developed, coloniality can only apply to entire nations. Only nation-states can be colonized, not ethnic groups without geopolitical borders. Even so, it can be argued that ethnic groups take the status of coherent entities, these can be legal (i.e. census, Affirmative Action, anti-discrimination laws), cultural, political and social. To conclude, the coloniality of power and the subaltern models have a lot to contribute to Ethnic Studies.

i finally got around to reading Anderson's Imagined Communities. I have to say that i miss judge the guy. here's the passage that made me wink:
"It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely back-handed way when he wrote that 'Or l’essence d'une nation est que tons les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses.” With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that 'Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.' The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates 'invention' to 'fabrication' and 'falsity', rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. In this way he implies that 'true' communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined." (Anderson).

what i like about this passage, is that he is not equating imagined with false, but with creation, and that he leaves open the possibility that smaller communities are not imagined, but maybe real, since people do know each other. Anderson's analysis of nationalism has everything to do with European nations, but little to do with the Cultural nationalism as formulated by those who imagined alternatives. missing from his book, as maybe it should be, is the perspective of subalter peoples, including indigenous peoples. communities that are not just imagined, but are linked by real bonds of blood, culture, language, ancestry, etc. current first world nations are the result of imperialism, not all communities are this. how about indigenous peoples in all the americas?

"Some yolias transformed specifically into 'birds of the heart,' but others took the physical form of other winged creatures. In the Florentine Codex, Sahagun says that, four years after death, the dead became hummingbirds, other birds with precious feathers, or a wide variety of butterflies that drank the nectar of flowers, as did the hummingbirds."

I been reading the natural history of the soul in ancient mexico by Jill Leslie McKeever Furst, for inspiration. its been revealing, to say the least. although she tries to justify a lot of the beliefs with scientific/medical facts, and by doing so, questioning the spiritual dimension. She states: "I believe that susto generally has a physiological rather than a psychological, religious, or spiritual origin." (122)

still, this book is great information for those wanting to know more about how the indigenous people of central mexico understood the soul. (but take everything with a grain of salt and question the authority and assumptions, as always.)

the discussion about "Susto" or Soul Lost is specially fruitful.

XXXXXingón

Dorothy Robert’s Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty illustrates the complex connections between gender, race, class and how they come into play in black women’s reproduction rights. She argues that population control programs that target women of color cannot be analyze without the context of colonization and slavery. Roberts identifies three central themes to her book: “[t]he first is that regulating Black women’s reproductive decisions has been a central aspect of racial oppression in America,” “[s]econd, the control of Black women’s reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty,” “[f]inally, in light of the first two themes, we need to reconsider the meaning of reproductive liberty to take into account its relationship to racial oppression.” (Roberts 6)
A must read for anyone interested in furthering the fight for social justice.

Marx for beginners
by RIUS
this guy gets 5 XXXXXingó
"to possess possessions, a man will "sell himself" to have what another has. But it never dawns on him–that the more he gets, the less he keeps of himself..." (Rius 82)
Any person (not just man, and obviously not just white men) who sells her/his labor power to buy what capital produces, becomes a compulsive consumer (i don't think we can escape buying from the market, at this moment ??) and because working means renting the body, and in a sense, our life-time, than we don't have much for ourselves. we get to keep less of ourselves, we don't dream, write, create art, spent time with the family. "The things you own, end up owning you." (who said this, besides Fight Club)
for a while i was skeptical about marx/ism, but i have come to see its immense value,
as well as its limitation (i'm not about to go calling myself a marxist) but i do recognize that a lot of revolutionary movements have been deeply influenced by Marxism. so, check him out.

I'm now reading/have recently read: Marx for beginners and Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies i don'k know where to put it all, i just have a cabezita bien chiquita, think about it. how is our brain able to pack so much information?