Home on the border in Ana Castillo's "The Guardians": the colonial matrix of power, epistemic disobedience, and decolonial love

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 HOME ON THE BORDER IN ANA CASTILLO‘S THE GUARDIANS: THE COLONIAL MATRIX OF POWER, EPISTEMIC DISOBEDIENCE, AND DECOLONIAL LOVE MALGORZATA POKS University of Silesia malgo[email protected] Received 25 April 2017 Accepted 22 December 2017 KEYWORDS Ana Castillo; decoloniality; US-Mexico borderland; The Guardians; home; epistemic disobedience PALABRAS CLAVE Ana Castillo; descolonización; frontera México-Estados Unidos; The Guardians; hogar; desobediencia epistémica ABSTRACT After 9/11, more than ever in the history of the United States of America, security and domesticity have become paradoxical antonyms in racially and ethnically mixed areas, like that of the US- Mexican border. The borderland‘s history is further complicated by the issue of illegal immigration and its corollaries, such as strict border control and mass deportations of ―aliens,‖ as well as the rising crime rate. Even though it is protected by a fence and monitored by heavily armed border patrols, the area‘s notoriety for narcosmuggling, human trafficking and femicide keeps growing. Paradoxically, the more drastic the security measures used, the more dangerous the borderland becomes. In her 2007 novel The Guardians, Ana Castillo suggests that tighter control itself is responsible for criminalizing the border. Focusing on a Mexican American woman‘s search for her brother lost during an illegal crossing, the novel presents a complex dynamic between security and domesticity. The following article attempts to trace this dynamic through the epistemic lens of decolonial methodology. RESUMEN Después del 11-S, más que nunca antes en la historia de los Estados Unidos de América, la seguridad y la domesticidad se han 120 Malgorzata Poks Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 convertido en antónimos paradójicos en zonas de abundante mezcla racial y étnica como la frontera entre México y EE. UU. La historia de la zona fronteriza se ve complicada, además, por la cuestión de la inmigración ilegal y sus distintos corolarios, como por ejemplo el estricto control aduanero existente, las deportaciones en masa de ―extranjeros‖ o el aumento de los índices de criminalidad. Incluso aunque se halle protegida por una valla y aunque esté monitorizada por patrullas fronterizas fuertemente armadas, la ya notoria reputación del área por el contrabando de drogas y personas, así como por el feminicidio, sigue empeorando. Paradójicamente, cuanto más drásticas son las medidas de seguridad empleadas, más peligrosa se vuelve la frontera. En su novela de 2007, Guardianes de la frontera, Ana Castillo sugiere que el recrudecimiento del control fronterizo es en sí responsable de la criminalización de la zona fronteriza. Centrándose en la historia de una mujer mexicanoestadounidense que busca a su hermano perdido durante un cruce ilegal de la frontera, la novela presenta una compleja dinámica entre seguridad y domesticidad. El presente artículo tiene como objeto explorar esta dinámica a través de la lente epistémica que ofrece la aplicación de una metodología decolonial. Although born and raised in Chicago, Ana Castillo (b. 1953) currently lives in El Paso, Texas, a border city which lies at the intersection of three states: Texas, New Mexico, and Chihuahua. Across from El Paso, on the opposite side of the Río Grande River, lies its twin city: Ciudad Juárez. Along with Las Cruces, the two form a metropolitan area known as El Paso del Norte, or Pass of the North. Since mid-1500s it has been a major, and for the initial 300 years the only passage from Mexico City to the North American southwest. What in the past used to serve as a major corridor for trade between natives and colonial merchants still functions as an important passage to the north but in a dramatically reconfigured context, the principal cargo being drugs, weapons and, last but not least, undocumented aliens. While El Paso has the reputation of one of the safest large cities in the United States, Juárez is its opposite. Since 1993 it has been associated with ongoing gendered violence; by 2012 there were already 370 confirmed cases of femicide committed in Ciudad Juárez, most of them unsolved to this day. In 2006, just before Ana Castillo‘s novel The Guardians came out, it became the epicenter of Home on the Border in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians… 121 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 Mexico‘s drug war 1 and quickly earned the reputation of the crime capital of the world. Interviewed on Fox News, Charlie Minn, an independent U.S. documentary filmmaker notable for his Juárez trilogy, said: ―in 2010 there were more murders in Juárez than the 9/11 attacks. Since 2008, we have had over 10,000 murders in Juarez, which is 40 percent greater than both of our Middle East wars put together.‖ El Paso-Juárez, a major point of entry from Mexico to the U.S. and the second largest bi-national metropolitan area on the US- Mexican border, is also one of the most heavily patrolled border crossings. In 1993, Operation Hold the Line put 400 agents in the El Paso area, on a 20-mile stretch of the border, in an attempt to combat illegal immigration. Instead of discouraging would-be crossers, however, the militarization of the border has forced them to seek alternative, much more dangerous routes, like those across the Sonora desert. As a result, immigrant deaths have soared and human smuggling, according to El Paso Time, ―is the second largest illicit activity in Mexico after drug trafficking‖ (L. Figueroa). Moreover, the high-security barrier between the US and Mexico, which started to be erected by the Bush administration in 2006 with the aim of containing crime, corruption, and illegal immigration, is often blamed for contributing to the escalation of violence rather than praised for the hoped-for enhancement of border security. On both sides of the border there are voices arguing for the dismantling of the fence and the legalization of drugs in the U.S. as steps necessary to stop the narcos‘ lethal turf rivalries and thus return some normalcy to the troubled region. 2 It is there, in that problematic area, that Ana Castillo sets her 2007 novel The Guardians. The author recalls the moment when the idea for the novel was born: I was hoping for ―inspiration‖ from my new surroundings, the desert landscape of Southern New Mexico. One early morning while drinking coffee I contemplated the Franklin Mountains, which I can normally view from my house in the desert. [...] I began to wonder 1 ―The war began in Juárez around 2008, when the cartel based in Sinaloa, the marijuana- and opium-growing areas close to the Pacific Coast, moved in on the local organization, which controlled valuable smuggling routes. Since then, conflict has spread across much of Mexico‘s north, as various cartels, street gangs and crooked police units battle in a void of legitimate authority‖ (Rice). 2 See, e.g., Chacón, and Casey and Watkins. 122 Malgorzata Poks Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 what it would be like to be a person trying to cross over those mountains to the U.S., during that freezing previous night and who might still be waiting for safe passage. There are any numbers of perils in such a crossing — from mountain lions to criminals preying on such poor people. A novel begins with a query. The query for me was not that first contemplation but what followed: What would it feel like to be a person on this U.S. waiting for a loved one who is attempting to cross over? (Wehbe-Herrera) Not surprisingly, in his review of the novel, Sergio Troncoso, another creative writer from El Paso, claims that ―Castillo‘s most important accomplishment in The Guardians is to give a unique literary voice to questions about what makes up a ‗family,‘ Mexican-American or otherwise, where an independent soul can find redemption, particularly in a hostile world.‖ The novel, which Ana Castillo started writing in 2005 and published in 2007, captures the moment of Juárez‘s dramatic transformation into the capital of crime and lawlessness. Its major protagonists live on the U.S. side of the border, but cross over to Juárez for a variety of reasons. All of them—the attractive Chicana widow Regina and her Mexican nephew Gabo, Regina‘s Chicano sweetheart Miguel and his ex-wife Crucita, as well as Miguel‘s grandfather, Abuelo Milton from Chihuahuita, El Paso‘s old Mexican barrio—are catapulted into the city‘s various undeclared wars because of either personal tragedies or the adoption of activist lifestyles. Despite the multiple processes of violence disrupting family life in the El Paso del Norte region, they struggle to maintain a semblance of domestic stabilities and protect their kin from danger. Reading the border through the theoretical lens provided by decolonial criticism, this article will focus on the interplay between domesticity and insecurity in the El Paso-Juárez area as presented in Ana Castillo‘s novel. In what follows I will first situate Chicanos/as within the modern/colonial matrix of power and theorize decolonial thinking and doing. Next, I will illustrate how those concepts resonate with the perspectives of the subalternized protagonists of The Guardians who struggle to overcome the Manichean reality of salvation for ―ethnoclass Man‖ and damnation for the colonized. In their effort to put an end to what Maldonado-Torres calls the modern/colonial paradigm of war, the epistemically disobedient subjects attempt to reclaim agency, restore the logic of the gift, and build a better future for all in the open wound of the borderland. Home on the Border in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians… 123 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 COLONIALITY OF BEING AND DECOLONIAL/BORDER THINKING In many important aspects, the US-Mexican borderland came into discursive prominence in 1987, with Gloria Anzaldúa‘s powerful theorization of that region as ―una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds‖ (25). That wound, formed in the 16th century with the Spanish invasion and appropriation of the area identified with Aztlán, the mythical homeland of the Aztec people, has been kept open by a succession of insurrections, wars, rebellions and vigilante activities, lynching, race hatred, economic deprivation, glaring social injustices, ethnic and sexual oppression, forced deportations of non-Anglo inhabitants and, most recently, the ―al-Qaedizing‖ (Miller) of immigrants from south of the border. In ―The Homeland, Aztlán,‖ the opening essay from her collection Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa calls the inhabitants of the borderlands los atravesados. She explains with bitterness: Gringos in the U.S. Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens—whether they possess documents or not, whether they‘re Chicanos, Indians or Blacks. Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot. The only ―legitimate‖ inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger. (16) The ―aliens‖ who cross the Rio Grande are stigmatized as subhuman on the basis of their racial characteristics. Paradoxically, as Anzaldúa reminds us, the southwest is the home of Chican@s, the historical descendants of the mestizo race born at the time of the Conquista, a race that has continued to propagate through intermarriage with Mexicans and North American Indians. It is this race that keeps returning home to Aztlán, claims Anzaldúa, only to find itself rejected by the Anglos who stole and appropriated a major part of the Mexican land: ―Faceless, nameless, invisible, taunted with ‗Hey cucaracho‘ (cockroach). Trembling with fear, yet filled with courage, a courage born of desperation. Barefoot and uneducated, Mexicans with hands like boot soles gather at night by the river where two worlds merge.‖ Those few who make it past the border, however, become ―[r]efugees in a homeland that does not want them‖ 124 Malgorzata Poks Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 (Anzaldúa 34). In this bitter reflection Anzaldúa puts her finger on a node of oppressions resulting from coloniality understood as an ongoing structure. Appropriation of land, racial profiling, intimidation, hate speech, poverty, invisibilization, classism—these are some of the classical manifestations of the modern/colonial paradigm of war, as will be demonstrated later. To those whose family life, work, and everyday existence are disrupted by the artificially erected and heavily policed border, an attempt to ―live sin fronteras‖ (Anzaldúa 217) seems the only viable survival tactic. To construct a home in such a politically contested and ethically problematic area, one must be ready to renounce the stagnation and timid security of gated communities and choose the calculated risk of freedom. Los atravesados cross lines, physical and metaphorical; they transcend divisions, challenge limitations, and dare to dream of a better, more just world in which life counts over profit. Castillo‘s novel The Guardians opens with this dedication: ―To all working for a world without borders and to all who dare to cross them.‖ Despite the rather short-lived successes of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the American Southwest has remained a problematic homeland for non-Anglo residents and an openly hostile place for undocumented aliens. The failure of El Movimiento to bring about a permanent transformation of reality, and thus to heal the colonial wound, can be explained by recourse to Argentine semiotician and decolonial critic, Walter Mignolo‘s claim that, operating as it does within Western epistemology and without questioning its assumptions, civil disobedience can merely lead to reforms, but never to the transformation of an unjust system (―Epistemic Disobedience‖ 15). To achieve that, to elevate life over profit and solidarity over competition, one must realize that coloniality is inseparable from modernity; that the very foundations of modern/colonial knowledge, laid out by white European males who held power at the dawn of the modern era, guarantee the perpetration of the epistemic, ontological, and economic privilege of the West and the continuing colonial and neocolonial exploitation of its ―other‖: the Third World, constructed as economically and epistemologically underdeveloped. In other words, the point of departure for a lasting transformation of society should be what Mignolo calls epistemic disobedience. An epistemologically Home on the Border in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians… 125 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 disobedient subject deconstructs the ―hubris of the zero point‖ 3 of Western epistemology: the illusion that knowledge constructed in one of the six modern languages 4 by white-bodied subjects geographically located within the developed world (Sylvia Wynter uses the term ―ethnoclass Man‖ [26])—is universally valid. It certainly is not valid for peoples occupying other geographical locations and inhabiting other-than-white bodies. Speaking from the midst of their lived experience, an experience formed by the racist gaze, epistemologically disobedient subjects question the colonial matrix of power which sustains the modern/colonial status quo. Mignolo explains that the colonial matrix of power is ―a complex conceptual structure that guided actions in the domain of economy (exploitation of labor and appropriation of land/natural resources), authority (government, military forces), gender/sexuality and knowledge/subjectivity‖ (19). Shifting the geography of reason and foregrounding the living, experiencing body in the process of enunciation is synonymous with decolonial thinking. Since the decolonial subject is located at the border of Western and non-Western knowledges and engages with the world from the places and historical experiences of her or his body (the Cartesian ―I think therefore I am‖ is displaced by the formula ―I am where I do and think,‖ Mignolo, Darker Side 78), decolonial thinking is necessarily a form of border thinking. José David Saldíar usefully reminds us that within Chicano/a Studies pensamiento fronterizo emerges from the critical reflections of (undocumented) immigrants, migrants, bracero/a workers, refugees, campesinos, women, and children on the major structures of dominance and subordination of our times. Thus envisaged, pensamiento fronterizo is the name for a new geopolitically located thinking from the borderlands of Americanity and against the new imperialism of the USA. To think decolonially is to think from the borders of languages, religions, epistemologies; it is to think from what W.E.B. du Bois and Frantz Fanon theorized as double consciousness and Chicana writer and activist Gloria Anzaldúa called the consciousness of the mestiza. (339) 3 Expression coined by Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez. 4 I.e., languages spoken by the modern/colonial nations: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English, German, and French. 126 Malgorzata Poks Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 Thinking from non-western categories of thought—which implies detachment form the logic of western modernity—is a ―necessary step for imagining and building democratic, just, and nonimperial/colonial societies‖ (Mignolo, ―Epistemic Disobedience‖ 2). The lived experience of the colonized, the Fanonian damné 5 or condemned of the earth, is expressive of her coloniality of being. As argued by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, this experience is governed by the naturalization of the ―non-ethics of war.‖ With the invention of race 6 at the dawn of the modern/colonial era and the subsequent establishment of the colonial difference, the damné, relegated to the sub-human and sub-ontological category, started to be perceived as disposable—an obstacle to progress—therefore endlessly killable and rapeable. Maldonado-Torres explains: War is the opposite of the an-archical relation of absolute responsibility for the Other that gives birth to human subjectivity. The obliteration of the trans-ontological 7 takes the tendency of producing a world in which war becomes the norm rather than the exception. That is the basic meaning of the coloniality of being: the radical betrayal of the trans-ontological by the formation of a world in which the nonethics of war become naturalized through the idea of race. The damné is the outcome of this process. Her agency needs to be defined by a consistent opposition to the paradigm of war and the promotion of a world oriented by ideals of human generosity and receptivity. This is the precise meaning of decolonization: restoration of the logic of the gift. (―On the Coloniality of Being‖ 260) Castillo‘s novel invites such a decolonial, interventionist reading. Epistemologically disobedient, the major characters of The Guardians persistently question the colonial matrix of power and build a literal and metaphorical home on the border, a viable 5 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, 1963. 6 In ―Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,‖ Anibal Quijano explains that the idea of race was used to naturalize the relations of domination imposed by the Europeans on colonial peoples. ―The idea of race is literally an invention. It has nothing to do with the biological structure of the human species. Regarding phenotypic traits, those that are obviously found in the genetic code of individuals and groups are in that specific sense biological. However, they have no relation to the subsystems and biological processes of the human organism, including those of the neurological and mental subsystems and their functions‖ (575). 7 Difference between Being and exteriority. The damné belongs to the sub-ontological, that is, it lies below Being and is therefore ―negatively marked as dispensable as well as a target of rape and murder‖ (254). Home on the Border in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians… 127 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 alternative to the exploitative ways of the west. As they improvise lifestyles resistant to the ―civilization of death‖ manifest in U.S. neocolonialism, the protagonists not infrequently fall back on folk wisdom and the cultural traditions of la Raza to root their existence in the communal rather than the individual, and to reestablish the good life as an alternative to modernity‘s techné. All in all, they dismantle the non-ethics of war with their preoccupation with justice and a decolonial love politic, 8 which Maldonaldo-Torres paraphrases as ―the principle of receptive generosity‖ (―On the Coloniality of Being‖ 260). In his major publication, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, the critic elaborates on this notion. The damné, he writes, ―cries out in horror‖ in the face of the […] modern/colonial ―deathworld‖ and aspires—through the decolonial praxis of love, […], through an ethic of the liberation of life […], and through a decolonizing and liberatory politics inspired by the ―decolonial attitude‖–to create a transmodern world ―in which many worlds fit‖ and where the global dictatorship of capital, property, and coloniality no longer reign. (244) The four narrators in the Castillo novel depict their world as one in which war has become the norm rather than the exception; still, they refuse to accept the war as normative. Affirming love and absolute responsibility for the Other, they annul the sub-ontological difference that keeps the damnés in the hell of coloniality and overcome the binaries that make wars possible. Castillo‘s Xicanista/o and Anzaldúa‘s new mestiza/o, vested in the protagonists of The Guardians, emerge as decolonial philosophers in the sense that Maldonado-Torres gives to this concept: they improvise ways of thinking and doing that ―promote open and embodied human interrelationality.‖ For this very reason ―decoloniality can be understood as first philosophy: it is the effort to restore love and understanding‖ (―Outline‖ 22). 8 Decolonial critic Chela Sandoval develops the idea of ―decolonial love‖ as a technology for social and political transformation; she defines decolonial love as ―a shared practice of hermeneutics of love in the postmodern world‖ (4). 134 Malgorzata Poks Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 soul rather than abandon the ensnared children of God. As noted by Alexia Schemien, his name links him with the biblical archangel Gabriel, a messenger from God and guardian whose task is to protect lost souls. Thus, despite the risk he incurs by exposing himself to the world of sin and crime, Gabo offers to help his friend Jesse with math, coaches him in basketball, even invites Jesse home for a meal, all the while trying to demonstrate what a real family means. But the person he is especially sympathetic to is Tiny Tears, the scowling girl nobody loves, behind whose thick makeup Gabo senses ―a very scary girl‖ (46). Yet, Gabo appears to be getting nothing in return. Los Palominos fail Gabo as a substitute family. They betray his trust at the crucial moment when his father‘s whereabouts are identified. Likewise, the Church he desires to serve as a Franciscan monk lets him down. The local priest and Gabo‘s confessor, Juan Bosco, finds life in celibacy too demanding, plans to marry his long-time mistress to establish a real family. Gabo is shaken by this betrayal; however, true to his name, he remains loyal to those he has been entrusted with, desiring to transform the long night of their damnation into the light of salvation—in both earthly and spiritual sense. As the novel ends, this teenage mystic facilitates Juan Bosco‘s conversion and resumption of pastoral duties, finds a loving family for the neglected baby of Tiny Tears, saves the baby‘s mother from disaster through sacrificial, decolonial love, 10 and gives his aunt an adopted granddaughter. Although still a minor, Gabo becomes a spiritual father-figure, offering his biblical neighbors a new lease of life—at the cost of his own. His substitution becomes literal. His love for those who ultimately kill him is powerful enough to break through the legacy of colonial violence and stop the violence against the nonwhite bodies, even if only for a moment. This moment allows a glimpse of another world, a world in which the sub-ontological difference dissolves. 10 Another celebrated instance of decolonial love is the story of Oscar De León‘s death in the cane field in Junot Díaz‘s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. For an insightful analysis see Yomaira Figueroa 41-58. Home on the Border in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians… 135 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 FATHERS IN THE GRIP OF THE COLONIAL MATRIX OF POWER: FROM MACHO TO NEW MESTIZO Miguel Betancourt is a Chicana activist and history teacher who attempts to decolonize the knowledge he passes on his students. He is the male equivalent of Regina, the queen of the borderland, but as an educated American male and son of military officer, he inhabits the zone of privilege, which makes his struggle against the colonial matrix of power more problematic and his credentials more ambiguous. For one, being born to a man who worked for the notorious School of the Americas, also known as the School of the Assassins, Miguel feels implicated in the crimes committed by the military in the long war of modernity/coloniality. To atone for his father‘s contribution to it, he intends to rewrite the history of American triumphalism from the underside of modernity and entitle it The Drug Wars of Latin America: Building Drug Empires. As an expert in the field, Miguel is quick to make connections. He knows that the School of the Americas ―trained more than sixty thousand soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America, in counterinsurgency and combat-related skills since 1946. Its graduates became experts in torture, murder, and political repression‖ (Castillo, The Guardians 32). With time, the skills of the SOA graduates became attractive to Latin American drug lords, who were willing to pay huge amount of money to recruit them. Betancourt‘s Chicano consciousness has been stimulated by his training as a historian. More than anyone else, he realizes that the U.S. has created many of the problems Mexico and the whole of South America are struggling with. Although the U.S. has depended on slaves and immigrants to build its power, it still reserves the full benefits of citizenship to Anglos while denying them to minorities, and closes its borders to political and economic refugees from the south. ―How long can the United States contain what its counterproductive prohibitions have wrought‖ (151), wonders Miguel. He realizes that the U.S. demand for narcotics feeds the growth of Mexican crime and the weapons obtained in the U.S. in exchange for drugs make the dirty wars in Mexico even dirtier. Moreover, even with the 24/7 surveillance imposed on borderland areas and augmented after 9/11, the state cannot guarantee security to those who live there. Maintained by U.S. taxpayers‘ money, the so-called borderland security looks more like a military mobilization: ―they have motion sensors, helicopter sweeps and night-vision goggles. 136 Malgorzata Poks Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 They are better equipped for combat than the boys at war‖ (124), quips Miguel, exposing the national narrative of border security as a lie, a cover-up of the actual war against subalternized ―others.‖ His political activism is informed by epistemological disobedience. Highly critical of dividing lines and security fences, Miguel is among those who work for a world without walls, a world valuing life against corporate interests. Even the U.S. economy, as he believes, would be better off without the government‘s protectionist policy. Rather than stealing jobs from ―true‖ Americans, immigrants fill in a niche nobody else wants to fill. Besides, Miguel is convinced that the real issue is not about the influx of people as it is about ―jobs being snuck out‖ (125), by which he means the established practice of transferring American assembly plants to the free trade zone of the Mexican side of the border to benefit from the availability of cheaper, unskilled labor. ―If the country made it easier for professional immigrants to come in, the competition would possibly drive professional salaries down. Thereby equalizing the distribution of wealth‖ (125), speculates the historian. The only son of Colonel James Mason III, Miguel grew up with a stern and often absent father, which may account for his emotional inhibitions and the inability to communicate with female partners. Like most American men growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Miguel relied too much on his macho self (Castillo, The Guardians 187); he had problems with showing emotions or even feeling them. In the 1980s, Robert Bly‘s Iron John was enjoying a cult following in North America. Drawing on Jungian archetypes and ancient folk wisdom expressed in the legend of Iron John, Bly taught men how to reconnect with their feminine side. Miguel briefly experimented with healing his male psyche by joining a group of men chanting, praying, drum beating, and sweating in a sweat lodge—which was an important step toward delinking from western modernity and reconnecting with forgotten pre-modern traditions. The fact that some men in the therapeutic group admitted to being abusive husbands is illustrative of yet another facet of the colonial paradigm of war: the loss of self-dignity caused by the racist gaze, the impossibility to defend their women from abuse and provide for the family resulted in internalizing the sense of inferiority, to which Chicanos often responded with violence. Venting their rage on women, doubly oppressed and completely defenseless, they could uphold the illusion of being masculine enough to win a fight. According to Anzaldúa, the machismo of modern men ―is an Home on the Border in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians… 137 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 adaptation to oppression and poverty and low self-esteem.‖ Importantly, according to the author of Borderlands/La Frontera, the modern understanding of the word macho is far from its original meaning: ―For men like my father, being ‗macho‘ meant being strong enough to protect and support my mother and us, yet being able to show love‖ (105) In the context of the gendered violence about to erupt on the Mexican border in the 1990s, Miguel‘s story contains another important element of decolonial critique. In western cultures, in which men are expected to be tough and unemotional, weakness and manifestation of feelings are deemed feminine; they must be repressed. From this symbolic violence (against the inner woman), there is only one step to actual violence against actual women, especially women who try to assert their self-worth or are economically more successful than their male partners. This is one possible explanation of both the Juárez femicides and the puzzling fact that the Mexican authorities are surprisingly unable or unwilling to solve the crimes. Most of the murdered, raped, and mutilated women were poor maquiladora workers 11 whose growing financial self-reliance threatened the traditional distribution of gender roles in the deeply patriarchal Mexican society formed by the colonial matrix of power. Miguel‘s grandfather, Abuelo Milton, is a good example of a male who has successfully, albeit belatedly, integrated the inner woman. As a young man he used to be a Mexican American macho in the good sense of the word: honest, straightforward, possessed of self-dignity, protective of his family and able to speak truth to power if needs be. Besides, he never drank alcohol and brought his full wages home. When serving in the army, Milton got into a fight with his superior over the U.S. racial oppression of Mexicans and was dishonorably discharged. He tells Regina what happened afterward: I came back [to El Paso], and since I was never any good at taking orders and needed to be my own boss, I opened up my own business. Right here in downtown El Paso. It was just a cantinita, un lil hole in the wall, you could even say. But I‘ll tell you what, it 11 ―The maquiladora industry,‖ writes journalist Andrew Rice, ―grew in response to a United States government decision in the 1960s to drastically limit the number of Mexicans crossing the border for seasonal farm work. Mass unemployment followed, and Mexico enticed American manufacturers to new free-trade zones along the border, shielded from United States taxes, unions and wage requirements.‖ 138 Malgorzata Poks Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 made me a good lil profit most of my life—between los braceros, las cantineras, and the gringos looking for a good time, my lil bar stayed open every day except Christmas. I even opened on Easter Monday. My old lady never liked that, pero ni modo. She liked that our hijos always had shoes on their feet. She liked that we never went hungry. (73). Milton had one weakness, one that counted as proof of masculinity in the macho culture of his day, and that was sexual promiscuity. Until the mobilization of Chicana Power in the late 1970s and much beyond that, Mexican women knew they were expected to tolerate their husbands‘ infidelities as part of their community‘s cultural makeup. But the older, wiser Milton has grown more vulnerable. Now he has compassion for his late wife, 12 is no longer afraid of showing emotions or engaging in sentimental talk, and, although still appreciative of beautiful women like Regina, he expresses his engagement through compassionate care for her brother and her nephew. This older Milton is not only concerned about his grandson Miguel and his substitute grandson Gabo. In his all-Mexican barrio of Chihuahua he watches daily the colonial matrix of power at work. In parking lots, across churches, near fast food outlets Milton sees day laborers display their muscles to passers-by hoping to find employment and observes Mexican women advertizing their homemaking skills. In Chihuahua drug peddlers, thugs, and immigration officers spread fear, the latter strangely oblivious to the presence of undocumented workers in the chile harvest season; dead bodies are discovered lying in the streets in the mornings; shootouts take place. Milton is genuinely troubled by this display of patriarchal arrogance. His grandson, Miguel, is another example of a man who has finally managed to integrate the inner woman against the dominant culture‘s devaluation of the female other. Even though divorced, he still lives next to Crucita and their two children, on the opposite side of the road, and participates in family life; he takes care of the kids when his ex-wife is away working, and spends time with them as a way of keeping up family values. When Crucita is kidnapped and eventually located in a coyotes‘ den, naked, raped and heavily drugged, Miguel rushes to her help and pledges to pay for her 12 ―My poor wife. She knew it, too. But back then, it was expected of a man to have, well, you know, a life outside his home,‖ says Milton (74). Home on the Border in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians… 139 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 recovery, exposing a rare compassion for the woman who kept ridiculing him. Although already envisioning a life with Regina, he does not deny his feelings for and obligations to the mother of his children. Moreover, as Miguel renounced his ties with his father and the world of military might his father represents, he has accepted the financial insecurity that marks, in a more radical fashion, the lives of the condemned. A reasonable person from a world of privilege would try to secure his own life first and think about the needs of others later. But Miguel is a new man, a male equivalent of the new mestiza, and another exponent of decolonial love in Castillo‘s novel. Miguel gives away his father‘s substantial inheritance, makes regular donations to human rights organizations, has provided in advance for his children‘s education and signed the house over to them, ―just in case I get terminally ill and want to give up my last dime to the Mother Theresa charity‖ (The Guardians 203). Miguel‘s priorities are clear: in his life others are more important than profit or financial security. His obligation is to all people, but most of all to victims of his country‘s declared and undeclared wars. All in all, Miguel has undergone an ontological decolonization and finally freed himself from the legacy of his father‘s collusion with the military and economic crimes of the U.S. Opting out of the modern/colonial death-world in which he was born, Miguel becomes a figure of reconciliation and works for a world ―where many worlds fit,‖ a world where rigid demarcation lines would ultimately collapse. In his opposition to war and his pursuit of a world governed by the ideals of generosity, Miguel is an ideal partner for Regina. DECOLONIAL LOVE For the damné, as Maldonado-Torres argues in his revision of the Heideggerian Dasein, death is a constitutive fact of existence (―On the Coloniality of Being‖ 251). The non-white bodies, marked as killable, rapeable, and endlessly exploitable, are therefore unprotected or insufficiently protected by law. To them the way to authenticity leads not through encounter with, but an avoidance of death. Eventually, however, rather than authenticity, the goals of the damné are decolonization and ―des-gener-acción‖—the latter signifying action that breaks with the gender oppression instituted and maintained by colonial domination. Decolonization and ―desgener-acción‖ involve ―the aperture of one‘s self to the racialized 140 Malgorzata Poks Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 119-143 other to the point of substitution,‖ writes Maldonado-Torres. He clarifies: ―[s]ubstitution occurs when one‘s identity is teleologically suspended and when one offers one‘s life to the task of achieving decolonial justice: that is, a justice oriented to the trans-ontological dimension of the human. [...] Such justice is inspired by a form of love which is also decolonial (―On the Coloniality‖ 260-61). In other words, decolonial love, a love which makes the humanity of the person of color visible, opposes the paradigm of war and opens the Fanonian ―world of the you.‖ In the Castillo novel Gabo‘s substitution is literal. Desiring to save the girl nobody loves, he eventually gives up his life for hers. Gabo‘s prayer has been answered; he has been found worthy of saving this ―lost soul‖ through his identification with the suffering Christ and his own redeeming death. Humanized by the tragedy she has caused, Tiny Tears has a chance to mature and reform her ways. Regina is devastated by grief, but she overcomes her instinctual drive for revenge and forgives her nephew‘s murderer. She hears Gabo speak to her through his favorite passage from St. Matthew‘s gospel: ―For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you‖ (216). As a reward, she accepts Gabo‘s last gift: the gift of a family. Having lost her nephew, Regina is given a substitute: Tiny Tears‘s daughter becomes her adopted granddaughter Gabriela. The logic of the gift has been restored. When Regina and Junior, her husband-to-be, were kids, they established the Secret Order of the Holy Dove. Before Junior left for Vietnam, he entrusted Regina with the care of ―all the innocent creatures‖ (209). The mature woman recollects as ―walking home that day from the chile plant where I worked that year, I pretended all the pajaritos, dogs, cats, horses, roosters—any animals I passed— were in my charge‖ (208). The innocent creatures in her charge right now are victims of the colonial matrix of power: racism, systemic injustices, greed, and an overall repression of the feminine. These are, first and foremost, the tough but surprisingly fragile Tiny Tears and the fragile Gabriela. Next, although she is confused about her feelings for Miguel, the novel‘s ending suggests that they may be reunited, as the Chicano activist has finally come out of the overwhelming shadow of his father and cares for Regina in a special way. Together with the old abuelo, they are a family-in-the-making. United by the lines that divide, they keep constructing a home on the border. Home on the Border in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians… 141 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017) Seville, Spain. 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