Chicano spirituality in the construction of an imagined nation: Aztlán

Abstract

The authors focus on the creation, by Mexicans born in the United States, of an ‘imagined nation’ named Aztlán. Having arisen in the struggle of the Chicanos for recognition of their cultural citizenship, it has now found a new significance in the revival of an ancestral religiosity. This nation is based on the creation of a mythic spirituality with both political and cultural meanings. The authors analyze the symbolic efficacy for the Chicano population of various strategies:

a) the construction of a symbolic lineage based on tradition and the experience of the Aztec Conchera dance, a syncretic ritual in popular Mexican Catholicism; b) a reproduction or reenactment of the founding myths of the Mexican nation as a way to legitimize the existence of a spiritual nation that spreads over both sides of the international border; c) the appropriation of territories where the Chicanos can practice their rituals.

This article aims to describe some elements of the dynamics of the cultural movement known as Mexicanism, which has produced narratives, symbols, imaginary lineages and ritual practices that allude to the renaissance of the ancient Aztec civilization – a civilization that, until the 16th century, dominated the vast territory of Anáhuac, which covers ‘the continent of the Americas’, where the nation states Mexico and the United States of America currently have their territories.

The movement to rescue Mexicanism arose in Mexico, and has grown more in the capital city than elsewhere, but although it is a nationalist movement it has become transnationalized in recent decades, due mainly (but not entirely) to the intensive migration of Mexicans to the USA. ¹ In the US, the movement has arisen in the southern states and has constructed an imagined nation known as Aztlán, based on a revival of Mexicanism, to provide Mexican Americans who have reaffirmed themselves as Chicanos since the 1960s, with a binational identity. The movement has been classified as politico-cultural; however, we wish to highlight the aspect of Mexica spirituality that it contains, on the basis of its retaining pre-Hispanic aspects of the national Mexican cultural heritage. This is because the movement generates collective identities through the practice of rituals (circular dances) within the revival of Aztec cosmology, which regards certain practices as sacred, such as: reverence for ancestors, for pre-Hispanic deities, and, occasionally, for popular Catholicism, as well as reverence for nature and animist practices of purification and cleansing. These practices are all organized within an annual ritual cycle, which also provides initiation ceremonies and rites of passage to symbolize the different stages that the cycle of life ordains. The movement is not only concerned with a vindication of the indigenous past, but also generates a shared belief in the return of the Aztec empire, as a utopian horizon for a future civilization. As a spiritual movement it is based on the cultural project of Mexicanism, which was defined as follows by Francisco de la Peña:

A revitalist, nativist and neo-traditionalist movement marked by an affirmation of the authocthonous, by the reinvention of pre-Hispanic traditions and by a reinterpretation of the past. With a clear millenary and prophetic component, Mexicanism aspires to a restoration of precolombian civilization and the re-indianizing of national culture. ² Its ideological universe is inspired by an idealized reinterpretation of the pre-Hispanic past and by the exaltation of an archetypical image of the Indian. Rather than being an ethnic or an indigenous movement it is a cultural phenomenon of mestizo origin with strong urban roots. (De la Peña, 2002: 96) ³

The work presented here seeks to determine the role played by the rescue and invention of lineages of ancestral belief in the generation of new spiritual nations. The present article forms part of a continuing debate started in a project on the subject of transnational religions. ⁴ After comparing case studies that show examples of the transnationalization of religious expressions (African and Latin American Pentecostalisms in Europe, revivalist ceremonies of pre-Hispanic Mexicanism in the United States, cosmogonies with African roots in parts of South America and soniké Islam in France), we were able to confirm that, while they vindicated a return to ethnic and national roots, they had crossed their original borders to conquer new transnational territories, and to reconquer imagined meanings that would redefine their postcolonial citizenship in new national territories (Mary, 2012). We analyze how the reinvention of a founding spirituality (based on the myth of Aztlán) contributes to both positioning the political imaginaries of a spiritual nation and demanding recognition of a cultural citizenship for the Chicanos in the USA.

Through the practice of ritual dances, myths and sacred symbols, Mexicans in the United States have been able to generate the consciousness of a spiritual nation around a rehabilitation of the foundation myth of Aztlán (the place that the Aztecs started from on their pilgrimage to Tenochtitlán), which nourishes the feeling and the concrete realization of an imagined nation that today unites Mexican populations living on both sides of the US–Mexican border. ⁵ We shall describe how this (poetic-symbolic) account of an imagined nation is in turn sustained by cultural strategies for rescuing folklore, as well as by a conquest of memory, and of public spaces like the Chicano Park in San Diego, California. These spaces, as well as artistic demonstrations and political actions, have acquired an almost religious mystique, which contributes to the sociodicy of cultural citizenship, based on the postcolonial utopia of a return to Aztec origins, and this then breathes life into the current construction of the promised land of Aztlán.

We are particularly interested in studying how the imaginary of the land of Aztlán is sustained, helping to create the territory of a binational imagined country, through the sacralizing ritual of sanctuaries of Mexicanism, which function as nodal points ⁶ , and articulate a cultural space that is fragmented by the border separating the two modern nation states.

The recreation of Aztlán reaffirms a territory beyond the borders, legitimizing itself by reference to both the colonial territory defined by the Spanish Conquest as New Spain, and the precolonial domain, which was part of the Aztec empire. However, beyond historical justifications, this account in its turn provides an impulse for various ritual ceremonies centered on the practice of the Aztec/Mexica dance, whose performance capacity provides them with an indication that the practitioners might really be the inheritors of an ethnic-racial lineage descending from an ‘original’ nation, that of the inhabitants of Aztlán, who have now become Xicanos (the Mexica spelling of ‘Chicanos’). In particular, the case of the ceremony to celebrate the anniversary of the most important sanctuary of Mexicanism in the United States, Chicano Park in San Diego, organized by groups of Chicano dancers, provides us with ethnographic material to demonstrate the symbolic efficacy of these cultural strategies. The choice of this particular festival in this place is based on a strategy of multi-sited ethnography conducted to appreciate the cultural transformations that the ritual movement of the Aztec dance is undergoing as it transnationalizes. Chicano Park represents the nodal point of the transnational circuit of Chicano Aztec dancers, and of the ceremony where the ritual cycles of the dance groups interviewed converge. The wealth of ethnographic analysis acquired is justified by the need to understand the way in which ancestral rituals reinvented in our time contribute to the creation of new spiritual nations, which in turn occur in a framework of transnational conflicts.

Although in our case there is transnationalization caused by migration, this is not its only vector, as we also have a mobile frontier, which, as the Chicanos complain, cut through and displaced the native populations, who are now called foreigners (aliens). We share the concern expressed by Ulric Beck (2006) that ‘behind the façade of a nationality … transnationalizations are operating’, and these take place in three senses. First, we shall attend to what Bourne noted about the transnationality of the US nation, in which there are multiple ‘hyphenated-identities’ such as Polish-Americans and Mexican-Americans, who continue to hold on to the characteristics that relate them to a particular place of origin (Bourne, 1916). Second, we will observe the phenomenon of ‘transnational nationalism’ as we study the way in which the dance is inscribed in a binational circuit, for which ‘the origin narratives are revived’ (Capone and Mary 2012). Third, we shall follow up the sense in which the dancers, beyond the community of migrants, recreate nodal spaces for a binational country that is constantly re-inventing itself through the rituals.

I’m not from here, and not from there; a Chicano from Aztlán

Yo soy Joaquín, perdido en un mundo de confusión …

I am Joaquín, lost in a world of confusion,

caught up in the whirl of a gringo society,

confused by the rules, scorned by their attitudes,

suppressed through manipulation, and destroyed by modern society.

(Yo soy Joaquín, by Corky González, 2001: 16)

‘Not from here and not from there’ is an expression that illustrates the status of Mexican-Americans as regards their identity and their citizenship. The feeling of not belonging as transmitted in the poetry of Yo Soy Joaquín (I am Joaquín) leads to the need to affirm an identity of one’s own, a binational identity: that of the Chicano. Since the 1960s, there has been a cultural-artistic-political movement among the Chicano in search of their roots as the heirs of an imaginary pre-Hispanic lineage. This movement also led to citizens’ political action that reclaimed territories and above all demanded recognition for their civil rights. There is no doubt that the Chicano movement is a strategy par excellence for the acquisition of cultural citizenship which, in Rosaldo’s terms, means ‘attaining the right to be different (in terms of race, ethnicity, or native language) with respect to the norms of the dominant national community, without compromising one’s right to belong, in the sense of participating in the nation-state’s democratic processes’ (Rosaldo, 1994: 57).

The Chicanos have had to reaffirm and fight for recognition of their double identity, and their dual citizenship. On the one hand, their citizenship changes as they cross the border to the United States, where a Mexican is classified as ‘Hispanic’, and a racial classification by color is impressed upon him or her, degrading the person by defining him as a foreigner (alien) on the basis of his skin-color being brown (moreno). ⁷ Likewise the terms for making an ethnic classification acquire a racial sense, which they do not have explicitly in Mexico. Thus, for Mexicans in the United States, adopting an identity like that of belonging to the Chicano or Aztec ‘race’ allows them to join a citizens’ political movement whose aim is to gain recognition as citizens belonging to an ethnic minority. ⁸ On the other hand, the Chicanos also do not feel that they are recognized as Mexican citizens by people in Mexico, who may call them ‘pochos’ because of their bad Spanish and because they have lost their Mexican ‘manners’. As one of the muralists put it:

It hurts us when Mexicans hear us speak and they say we are not Mexican any more. But it’s obvious we are, because as Chicanos we have in common everything that is in Anáhuac, which covers the whole continent of the Americas, and we are the inhabitants of Aztlán, located in the South of the United Sates and the North of Mexico; it is the Place of Water. (interview with Chicano muralist Carmen Kaló, 21 April 2010)

The sense of a ‘Mexican’ national identity and ethnicity changes across the border, as every national regimen has its own definition of citizenship based on differentiated concepts of cultural otherness. ⁹ In the case of Mexico the colonization of power was established on the basis of a differentiation of origins, creating a segmentation of castes of an ethnic type, in which privileges were related not only to race but also to territorial origins; hence during the time of the Spanish colony, the Spaniard from Iberia had more privileges than the Creole (in this case a Spaniard born in Mexico). Currently the term ‘ethnic’ in Mexico refers only to native (‘Indian’) peoples, linked to a (usually rural) territory, who share a cultural tradition that is distinguishable mainly (but not exclusively) by language. Nevertheless, ‘Indians’ are strongly discriminated against culturally, and marginalized economically. In Mexico to be recognized as a citizen is linked to being mestizo ¹⁰ , and indigenous people are discriminated against, but the values are inverted when Mexicans cross over into the USA because although most of them are mestizos, they find that being an ‘Indian’ on the other side of the border provides access to the recognition that is granted to someone who is a Native American, hence the possibility of being recognized as a citizen.

Although it is constantly noted that migration and mobility contribute to a weakening of the features of national and ethnic authenticity and identity, in our case study of the Chicano movement (formed by people of Mexican descent residing legally or illegally in the USA) they are also factors in the reinvention and recovery of ancient ethnic lineages, such as that of Neomexicanism, although their meanings and aesthetics are reinterpreted from different national regimes of otherness (Segato, 2007). In the context of globalization, and for the most part in the context of frontier lands, the ‘purely ethnic’ has become one of the most flexible instruments of cultural invention, and the global is definitely incorporated into the apparently more archaic forms of the ‘indigenous community’(Galinier and Molinié, 2006: 9). Migration flows generate deterritorialization, but this in turn provokes a need to belong locally in the new national territory, which means the roots of identity, and in particular of ethnicity, multiply instead of disappearing, and are displaced to other territories (Capone, 2004).

In this sense, assuming a Chicano identity means having a supra-ethnic identity ¹¹ , based on the imaginary construction of a nationalist ethnicity, covering the ancient mythical land of Aztlán, and joining the current territories of the two federal nations, Mexico and the United States of America, which are separated by one of the longest borders in the world. Aztlán as a foundation myth takes form where Mexica spirituality is practiced on lands it has conquered in the USA, for example, Chicano Park in the urban area of San Diego, California; but it has become an ethnoscape, (Appadurai, 2003), thanks to its architecture, the way it is used by ritual Aztec dance practices, and the way its murals objectify a mythical lineage and history that recreate an idealized Mexico based on the plastic and the aesthetic ideas of an Aztec ‘Imperial Indian’ (Gallinier and Molinié, 2006) and the choreographies of Neo-mexica spirituality.

This case illustrates how the reinvention of origins may well produce essentialized hybridizations of ethnic founding lineages.

The Chicano claim to be the legitimate heirs of the Aztec lineage of the ancient inhabitants of the land of Anáhuac, and as such they negotiate in each country the contents of their Chicano racial-cultural identity, which is at the same time Native American and Mexican indigenous: as Indians, as a race, as natives, and as binational Mexican and USA citizens.

Aztlán is an imagined nation. In other words, it is built on the idea of an inclusive community that allows individuals to feel they are a part of it, without knowing each other and even though it is impossible for them to meet face to face (Anderson, 1993), one that transcends the national frontiers of Mexico and the USA. This nation is based on the re-creation of a mythical land, called ‘Anahuak’ by the founders of the Mexicanist movement that arose in Mexico City in the 1940s. Later, in the latter half of the 1960s, Mexicanism was taken up again by the Chicano, who were engaged in a struggle for their civil rights to be respected in California. In 1965, the political side of the Chicano movement was effervescing. The unions of grape farm workers, headed by Chicano leader César Chávez, students belonging to the Aztlán Chicano Student Movement, MECHA, and young people belonging to the Mexican American Youth Association, MAYA, demanded that courses on Mexican history and culture be included in Californian schools, while the members of the Mexican National Female Commission joined up with the paramilitary movement of the Brown Berets, inspired by the Black Panther Party, to defend their culture and demand recognition of their civil rights.

It was in the context of this effervescence in the Chicano movement that a poem called El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (Spiritual Project of Aztlán) was first presented, in 1969, during the Chicano Congress in Denver, which claimed that the territory of the south of the USA was the mythical birthplace of the Chicanos:

In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal ‘gringo’ invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán, whence came our forefathers, [are] reclaiming the land of our birth … With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. ¹²

Soon the idea of an Aztlán nation became part of the Chicano movement and the focus of its political union and cultural identity (Ortiz, 2007: 132). Although Aztlán is an imagined nation, it does have pre-Hispanic historical support, which serves to legitimize the movement for rescuing the ancestral memory, on the basis of three historical facts: 1) according to the notion that the American continent was populated through migrations from the north to the south, the place of origin that the Mexica peoples came from (those who were later to found Tenochtitlán in the centre of Mexico and who were the creators of the Aztec empire) would be in some unspecified place in North America, named Aztlán by the founders of the Aztec empire, and subsequently identified by the Chicano movement as a territory with no border somewhere between Mexico and the USA; 2) the fact that in the recent past the states that are now the southern states of the USA were part of Mexico, during the viceroyal period of New Spain: it was not until 1821 that they gained their independence, and after the war between Mexico and the United States (in 1848) they came to form part of the USA; 3) the migrant flow (some of it legal but most of it ‘illegal’ or undocumented) of Mexicans to the US, which intensified with the Bracero program of the 1940s, has created a population of Mexicans who move back and forth across the border and settle on either side, and might be thought of as a diaspora community, which allows social links and mutual commitments to be maintained between spaces that are not physically contiguous but have a ritual continuity in time (De la Torre, 2009: 23): the new national border cut across land that had previously been part of the Mexican nation state. Those who lived there suddenly found their citizenship changed, and from being natives they became foreigners in their own land. In particular there were ethnic groups who were divided by the Mexico–USA border. ¹³ Thus it may be seen that the construction of the nation of Aztlán reveals an intention to reconquer memory as well as territory.

Our work will propose that by means of the practice of the dance and thanks to the celebrations held in sanctuaries of Mexicanism like Chicano Park, the construction of a sense of identity lived and practiced in a particular place develops, and it recreates the imaginary of Aztlán, as the place of origin and the destination of an imagined community (Anderson, 1993). In this case, it is not a compact identity created from the State, or from one aspiring to be consolidated in the future (Chatterjee, 1996). ¹⁴ On the contrary, the dancers in particular and the Chicano in general are actors situated on the margins of states, who still manage to generate ‘counter-narratives of first nations and inverted and essentialized forms of nationalism’ and, as in the case of Aztlán, ‘create a transnationalism from below’ (Smith and Guarnizo, 1998).

The conquest of Aztlán in San Diego: The case of Chicano Park

I am Joaquín

Who bleeds in many ways.

The altars of Moctezuma I stained a bloody red.

My back of Indian slavery was stripped,

Crimson from the whips of masters

Who would lose their blood so pure

When revolution made them pay,

Standing against the walls of retribution. (González, 2001: 24)

Chicano Park is a territory conquered by the Chicano for the Chicano. It is in what used to be the heart of the Logan area of the city, a neighborhood that had more members of the Mexican community living in it than any other in San Diego, California, from the 1920s to the 1970s. This is a space that is crossed by many layers of history, which create a kind of palimpsest of territory. ¹⁵ Before the Spanish Conquest, what is now the county of San Diego was territory of the K’miai tribe, whose descendants still live on Californian land on both sides of the border. Then, from 1769 onwards, it was colonized by Spaniards and during the 19th century it became an important center of population for Mexicans (Griswold del Castillo, 2007b). In 1848 San Diego became part of the United States of America and it was recolonized by Anglo-American migrants, later accommodating migrants from different parts.

Yankee settlers then swept in by the tens and thousands, and in a matter of months and years overturned the old institutional framework, expropriated the land, imposed a new body of law, a new language, a new economy, and a new culture, and in the process exploited the labor of the local population whenever necessary. (Leonard, 1960: 296)

In 1920, after the Mexican Revolution, San Diego received waves of immigrants, who settled with the native Mexican residents in the Logan Heights area. This neighborhood remained a hinterland of Mexicans in California throughout the 20th century, and as an ethnic group they managed to resist constant attempts to Americanize them in schools and factories, and even at home. In the 1960s, many Mexicans lived in the Logan District and worked in fish canning, grape picking and city services. They organized unions, such as the Canning Workers Union, and neighborhood associations, built their Catholic churches, and undertook important union struggles. The lady who is currently captain of the Tolteca Aztec Dance Group of Aztlán remembers an event that marked the identity of the Chicanos:

We found out that the Highway Patrol wanted to create a place for parking their vehicles, and then all of us from the community went to the place and defended it by forming human chains to stop them doing it. It was at that time, in 1970, that we decided to defend the land which is where Chicano Park is today. In 1973 Señora Herminia Enríquez, whom I consider to be one of the first ‘San Diego Toltecs’ ¹⁶ , brought the Aztec Dance from Mexico to the USA and the Toltecs rehearsed it in what today is the Cultural Center of the Race in Balboa Park. ¹⁷ (Interview with Rosa Olga Navarro, 12 July 2008)

In 1970 the Mexicans defended the bridge providing access to Coronado Island as though it were their own, and underneath it they built what is known today as Chicano Park. A non-place ¹⁸ devoted to traffic, anonymity and the production of amnesia, was conquered and converted into a place of identity, a mirror of history and a space for Chicanos to interact.

The Plan of Aztlán envisioned a Chicano nation, an entry seemingly to be achieved via separatism. Separatism was not a feasible course of action, however. Instead, protest – strategy of the powerless – and community control became the operative daily strategies in the community. In the spring of 1970 such strategies led to the ‘taking’ of land that ultimately became the site of a new park – Chicano Park. Through this action, ‘the myth of Aztlán metamorphosed to reality’ on a piece of land in San Diego’s oldest barrio ¹⁹ , Barrio Logan. (Ortiz, 2007: 134)

Today, in spite of the decline the Logan barrio has suffered, due partly to the fact that many of its inhabitants have been forced by high taxes to leave, it is not only a park for sports and culture but at the same time a work of urban art; Chicano artists took up where the movement of Mexican revolutionary muralism had left off, laying out on their walls a type of public art that records and recreates in plastic terms the genealogy and history of the Chicano. The Chicano style takes up Mexican emblems diffused principally through cultural nationalism, but nostalgia causes them to undergo an aesthetic transformation that emphasizes the features of a pre-Hispanic past, favoring color over design and making the nationalist sentiment folksy, even to the extent of recreating a kitsch aesthetic that is subsequently commercialized for sale to tourists. Finally, as it is created outside Mexico, it introduces new combinations that would be unthinkable in Mexico, desecrating and banalizing the symbols consecrated by nationalism and Catholicism (for example, linking Benito Juárez, the icon of a secular society, with the Virgin of Guadalupe, emblem of a Catholic nation). ²⁰

The walls that can be seen from the Chicano Park were painted by various Chicano artists – some of them students, others activists or dancers. It is where the epic history of the Chicano people is displayed artistically on walls. It is a public project for creating an imaginary identity, which also asserts the right of the Chicano to their own territories; as they say, ‘the park is our home’, and as a creator of identity it supports demands for the civil rights of the Mexicans to be respected, on the grounds that they are the ancient inhabitants of Aztlán.

Chicano Park has a Mexican presence. People speak Spanish. Mexican food is sold (fritangas and tacos). There is Aztec dancing. And the Virgin of Guadalupe is there, along with the colors of the national flag. Though the elements might be typically Mexican, once it has been reproduced on the stage of an American city, with an aesthetic that exaggerates features alluding to whatever is ‘Mexican’, the Chicano style has the appearance of a fiction, and a condensed quality that no longer exists in Mexico today. Thus Chicano Park is more than a space gained, a territory conquered by the Chicano movement. As well as being a park for sports and recreation, it is a territory of identity that fulfils the function of providing a reference, and a sense of belonging, to the Mexicans living in San Diego, California, and especially to those who live in the old Logan barrio. For many of the Chicano it is a kind of sacred place and they look after it to protect it from decay and urban vandalism. Although it is a public park, it is also a territory of the Chicano, an ethnoscape (Appadurai, 2003) that materializes the imaginary of Aztlán within the urban landscape.

We shall describe how this imaginary is narrated in the literature as the genealogical account of a lineage, and how it is displayed in the murals of the park; how this imaginary is embodied through the dance, allowing participants to physically experience immersion in it and to express a cultural difference as members of the Aztec ‘race’; how it is given mystique and a sense of the sacred through ritual practices in the course of the year and following the life cycles of the Chicanos; and how this imaginary establishes and recreates places where the myth of the promised land becomes plausible again.

The genealogy of the people of Aztlán

I am Joaquín.

I must fight and win this struggle for my sons,

And they must know from me who I am.

La raza! Mejicano! Latino! Chicano!

Or whatever I call myself, I look the same,

I feel the same, I cry and sing the same. (González, 2001: 28–29)

There is a concrete kiosk in the center of the park, painted on the outside with Aztec reliefs and the colors of the Mexican flag (red, white, and green), which is known to the Chicano as ‘El Teocalli’ (the House of the Gods, in Nahuatl). Of great significance is the fact that the ceiling, inside the teocalli, is painted with a mural representing the foundation of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire, which shows an eagle devouring a serpent in the middle of a lake. According to the myth, the establishment of the empire started with the migration of Nahua tribes from an undefined place called Aztlán in the north of the American continent to a place that had been promised to their leader by the gods, which they would recognize by the appearance of an eagle devouring a serpent. The tribes recognized the prophetic sign in the middle of a small island in Lake Texcoco, in the Valley of Anáhuac, on the central plateau of what is now Mexico. According to the myth, it was this sign that legitimized the appropriation of the territory by those who were to become the Aztecs.

The eagle and serpent, on the one hand, and the Virgin of Guadalupe, on the other, are both emblems of the Mexican nation. The first is of pre-Hispanic origin and became the emblem of civic nationalism, while the second image was used by the Roman Catholic Church to appeal to Spaniards, Indians, and Creoles under the same banner, and was appropriated by the insurgent independence movement.

The representation of this founding myth of Mexican nationalism in the heart of the space conquered by the Chicano movement in the city of San Diego re-signifies and re-enacts the myth: the appropriated territory is not only the ancient Valley of Anáhuac; it now covers the original North, which had seemed to be undefined but now has a name: Aztlán, which is defined as the place inhabited by a race that disregards the current political frontier between two nation states, in its constant flow back and forth, with its new symbolic center now in place there. In Aztlán, as one of the most significant phrases on the Chicano Park murals puts it: ‘No human being is illegal. Our history must be told.’

And what is the history of the inhabitants of Aztlán that must be told? What we have is an account that proposes the existence of a contradictory identity, imagined on the basis of bits of the historical narratives of both Mexico and the United States, and on the multifarious aspects of the experience of Mexican migrants in US territories, dominated by exploitation, defenselessness and uprootedness, which are at the heart of the political struggle and the cultural resistance of the Chicanos. Probably the most popular example of this narrative is the work of the poet Corky González, I am Joaquín. First recited when the Chicano movement emerged in the 1960s, it was read again, by his daughter, during the 40th anniversary celebrations of Chicano Park. It is possible to identify among its contents some of the principal symbols and heroes of these stories, which make up a genealogy for the Chicano race, the Aztlán race, and have in turn been put on display in the murals, which turn the bridge where Chicano Park is located into a kind of holy book.

First there is Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor and symbol of the greatness of the pre-Hispanic indigenous past. The Virgin of Guadalupe makes her appearance, venerated in the Catholic Church during the colonial period and associated with the indigenous deity Tonantzín, thus configuring the most powerful symbol of Mexico’s cultural syncretism and of the nation’s identity (Lafaye, 2002), which is reasserted by the Chicano over and above their religious beliefs. Next is Juárez, the first indigenous president of Mexico, followed by the 1910 revolutionaries, such as Villa and Zapata, as well as the painters Diego Rivera and Clemente Orozco, who were committed to the revolutionary cause. The genealogy of the Chicanos continues, and we can see the inclusion of figures such as Martin Luther King – a symbol of the fight for the civil rights of minorities in the USA – and his admirer Cesar Chávez, a Chicano union man fighting to defend the labor rights of minorities through the National Farm Workers Association in the 1970s. We can also see images of Latin American socialist revolutionaries such as Ernesto Che Guevara, who is linked in the mural to the more recently added Zapatista National Liberation Army, EZLN.

The nationalist symbol of the eagle and serpent reappears in other spots in the park, and in the narratives that explain the complicated process of its appropriation and construction, one of which refers to the choice of a site near the teocalli for the temazcal – ceremonial steam baths overseen by K’miai natives from Southern California and Northern Mexico. The (female) captain of the dance group Toltecas en Aztlán told us of the appearance of a snake when they were selecting and cleaning the place ready to draw a circle on the ground where these important rites were to be held, within the large vacant space they had conquered. The appearance of the serpent was interpreted as a sign of the truthfulness of the founding myth of the ancestral Aztec nation, and of the Mexican nation, thus legitimizing anew the appropriation of the territory by the Chicanos.

The Aztec dance as an embodiment of the race

As a counterpoint to exploitation and cultural invisibility within the US, Mexicans and Chicanos represent the greatness of the mythic Aztec civilization, outstanding not only for constructing grand pyramids but also for living in peace with itself and with nature, and unite the central aspiration of the Mexicanist movement – to restore the greatness of Aztec civilization – with the pacifist, ecologist, and even New Age sensibility that permeated the Chicano movement from the 1960s on. At the same time, if the Mexicanist movement made the Aztec/Conchero dance a practice of popular Catholicism and its principal recourse for reconstructing the ritual apparatus of ancient Anáhuac, seeing in the dance a means for the transmission of indigenous traditions ²¹ , within the Chicano movement the dance acquires a fundamental role: it is the inherited tradition which if practiced grants the certainty of belonging to an ancestral lineage; it is the sign of belonging to a race that becomes the Chicano-Aztec, it is a way to affirm and to feel in your own body a real cultural difference and at the same time its spiritual and aesthetic wealth:

This shield I will carry

As an ensign of greatness.

In my dance I will fight;

I dance what I dance and always will dance.

This beautiful ritual I shall teach you.

How pleasant is the ritual

That I shall carry with me in my blood;

I am one who exists and shall never cease,

And my whole life will be a dedication

For first is my dance,

Which I inherited from the RACE.

(Dancer’s Prayer, from mural in Chicano Park)

As a result, the dance has become a strategy for gaining visibility and for making political demands, thanks to its participation in the various mobilizations, gatherings and marches in defense of Chicano labor and civil rights, and the rights of illegal migrants on either side of the border.

Ritual calendar of Chicano Park

Chicano dance groups have appropriated the Conchero/Aztec dance as a ritual practice in what they consider to be the land of Aztlán. They reproduce the dance festivals of Mexico, such as the feast of Guadalupe on 12 December; but as well as reproducing the customary practices, they have recreated and developed together with, or sometimes parallel to, the Mexicanists dancing on Mexican soil, festivals and homages that are no longer just a mirror image of those in Mexico but form new nuclei of significance to the narrative of members of a Chicano race, the race of Aztlán. Following Conchero tradition, a reciprocal relation is developed: the group hosting the festival is expected to attend the festivals to be organized next by the guest groups who assume this as their ‘obligation’, and in this way a dense network of ‘conquests’ or mutual favors is developed, which implies forms of collective ritual social activity throughout the year. But it is from this point of view that the central importance of Chicano Park is to be seen, not just because of its symbolic density as the capital of Aztlán, but as the place where the various circuits of dancers from both sides of the border converge – in other words, because of its ritual density. The activities in Chicano Park make up a new ritual calendar which contemplates first the principal symbol of Aztec and Chicano genealogy, Cuauhtémoc, who is celebrated simultaneously by a pilgrimage to his sanctuary in Ixcateopan, Guerrero (Mexico), where his remains are thought to lie; in April, Chicano Park itself is fêted, as a symbol of the conquest of Aztlán: on 22 April every year the conquest of the park is commemorated, with an important festival bringing the Mexico-American population together, with performances of Chicano music, theatre, rituals, dancing and pictorial folklore. The Feast of the Sacred Family, featuring dances and temazcal, is held in the summer.

In November the Day of the Dead is celebrated. Mexican civic holidays are celebrated throughout the year, as are the various rites of passage developed by the Mexicanist movement, such as Sowing the Name (or Aztec Baptism), and Being Tied to the Mast (or Marriage). Additionally the Mixcoatl and Fuego Nuevo group, captained by two Chicano women, performs a rite of passage for 15-year-old girls, called Xilonen, whose object is to make them aware of their role as females in the family and the social life of the Chicano community, and in the conservation of their cultural roots, and to get them to commit themselves to it.

Conclusions

We can see from these practices how Chicano Park is historically and symbolically fundamental for the Chicano movement. But it is also a place where the Chicano imaginary is recreated, the genealogy of the race displayed in their murals; by spending time in the park people are able to recover elements of a Chicano culture with which to build a cultural ethnoscape that is activated in the demonstrations and ritual celebrations. The Aztec dance, in turn, plays a fundamental part in these, not just as the recreation of folklore that shows a difference of culture, but as an experience that helps to fix in one’s own body the sense of belonging to the Aztec lineage, hence to Aztlán, which acquires the proportions of a mythical spirituality. The park becomes the sanctuary of a territory that is both foundational and prophetic in the capital of the imaginary Aztlán. Within the struggle for political and social recognition by Mexicans in the USA a religious sensibility has been developed that is based on the mythical recreation of memory and the re-conquest of ancestral territory.

The case presented here illustrates the symbolic efficacy played by Chicano spirituality in the construction of a binational spiritual nation. Paradoxically, although this spirituality is not exempt from the fictionalized imaginary of the Imperial Indian, or from New Age sensibility, it has contributed to imagining, expressing, and incarnating a movement of binational cultural citizenship which favors coexistence with a spirituality that nourishes the political imaginary of a binational spiritual nation.

We can conclude that Chicano Mexicanism is not only an ideological political movement, as it completely fulfills the aspects that have to be present, according to Geertz (1966), to make it a religion. It is also worth pointing out that in our example the factual nature of this symbolic order is achieved through a combination of the dialectic between symbolic objectivization (the political conquest of the space where Chicano Park has been created, a symbolization of the sacred spaces inside it, and the conquest of memory through mural painting and the practice of folklore) and the inner experience of symbols linked to states of mind that occur through the dance. In this ritual practice the living experience of the corporeal performance allows a link to be made to the shared experience of conceiving oneself as a race, while at the same time it is interiorized to confirm that one’s belonging is to an Aztec lineage. This experience, which is referred to by Thomas Csordas as embodiment, is reached through the practice of the ritual dance, as this activity is an act of performance that both confirms the ethnoscape as a practiced place (de Certeau, 1990: 32) and allows the symbols that are present to be incorporated in a living experience, creating ‘emotional transmutations’, and above all granting a sense of being in the world (Csordas, 1994). This creates adscription to an emotional community (the dance group) and this in turn is inscribed in a realistic way in the imagined community of the spiritual nation of Aztlán.

The invention of the spiritual tradition of the Chicano race has acquired a spatial dimension in Chicano Park, a territory ‘conquered’ for the recreation of the mythical origin of Aztlán, epically narrated in the murals, and incarnated in the bodies of the dancers, so as to forge an imagined community (Anderson, 1993), but unlike the modern nations Anderson describes, Aztlán, does not need to be brought into existence by a printing press or the creation of a State. It is a ‘post-colonial transnation’ (Mary, 2012) based on the recreation of pre-modern ethnic demarcations, which paradoxically re-arise to face the needs of post-modern times.