Xikan@ Blank@

Jacio | Queer {Xočiua} | she/they Trying to syncretize indigenous philosophy with post-modern eco-feminist theory (and screaming about it)

[estrellasrojas]

thoughts on latinidad and mestizaje

Oh god this is a minefield. Latinidad is rightfully criticized for its racial-civilizational implications of allegiance with Europe, though I don’t think we’re gonna have much success with eliminating América Latina as the popular name for the region.

The alternatives people suggest as the “true” name instead are also mythic themselves, like using Anahuac, Abya Yala, or Turtle Island to refer to all of the Americas. Each of those names were never meant to be that broad and were meant to refer to specific places which were the worlds of specific peoples. Not that the Pan-Indiegnous politics they’re tied to should be discouraged, but that it doesn’t entirely get around the problem and it doesn’t make sense to insist on those as direct alternatives to America/América.

The idea of the Americas emerged because many regions were united into a single region by European colonialism, they were positioned a certain way relative to the “Old World.” The name derived from Amerigo Vespucci already implies that origin. I don’t think we can undo the imperial continental unification implied by it, but we can contest it and turn it. This is what José Martí and Rodolfo Kusch meant by distinguishing between America and (Nuestra) América, focusing on the distinction between “Anglo” and América “Latina” but also on the racial and class divide within “Latin” América.

This also gets to the issue of mestizaje. In the U.S. a lot of “latinos” embrace it uncritically because it seems to be an obvious alternative to U.S. racism’s obsession with hard and fast racial lines, and for Chicanos especially because it seems to be a means to embrace indigenous ancestry as an alternative and original claim to continental unity and the right to migration that precede the U.S. Obviously this gets implicated in settler colonial dynamics especially in the retrospective mythologization of the history of northern New Spain/Republican Mexico. This also leads to indigenista LARP where the idea of being a multiracial people ends up becoming the idea that we are the descendants of Natives and therefore can make Native political claims ourselves.

This is where it gets complicated. This rhetorical move of mestizaje pushes towards the dispossession of actual living Native communities, since we are still mestizos who are civilizationally de-indigenized, but I’ve seen a lot of people react to it by basically calling for mestizos to be categorized the same way as Anglos and Spaniards. This way of drawing the lines might be useful polemically, but it limits strategy and ignores the process of de-indigenization that could even turn Natives into political mestizos or ladinos.

This is where you have to account for two sides of a critique of mestizo consciousness, since we do in fact have what can be described as a mestizo consciousness for better or for worse. On the one hand, yes you need to critique the delusion that we are Europeans, which drives and is driven by self hatred and self denial. On the other hand, the mythology of Native ancestors, especially Mexica, is an integration into Mexico’s state mythology and colonial foundations. Spain itself claimed continuity with the Mexico-Texcoco monarchy. This kind of thing is not decolonization.

Decolonization for mestizo consciousness would mean reconnecting but with full awareness of ourselves as de-indigenized and with an understanding of indigeneity as based on ways of living and active communities. In some cases reconnecting is not feasible. This is the case for me, I know the pueblos and peoples that my ancestors are from but the connections are distant by generations now and the living traces in my own family are limited to a handful of heterodox beliefs within otherwise Catholic belief like reincarnation and animal souls. Basically I don’t think it would be appropriate, because my only connection is by descent, so called blood lineage. I refuse to make any blood claims, and I don’t think anyone else should either. This is where decolonization has to take a predominantly negative and critical form, for me affirmation is limited.

That’s fine with me, as I’m a very pessimistic and critical person. But many Chicanos would see this as lacking a foundation and a ground. This is where we need to understand the ultimate end of decolonization and communism alike, remembering and being true to the earth, to nature, to life. This is also the through line in political Pan-Indigenism, because it’s what people find in common across their nations. This is really the point for these politics, and I think it’s what’s missing in a lot of the North American debates about latinidad and mestizaje that have been going on for the past decade. Guilt is not the point, nor is self justification. The point is to live in a way that affirms life, which means something different and specific for each person

[xikanaua]

Art, Logic, & Linguistics

This morning on my walk to work I find myself considering the personal meaning which I find behind desiring the creation of art, as well as the meaning of art creation which existed during the periods of history where the transmission of ideas would be severely limited compared to today. What I see as a major concept that attributes meaning to art is: memetic transmission.

As our species' physical survival has become all but guaranteed on a global scale, our physical genetics have become less relevant towards that survival. The next-grandest goal of humanity can then become ensuring another kind of survival – the survival of ideas through history, through time, through the 4th dimension.

Genetics ensure the physical surival through time, they act as the carrier of the flesh through the 4th dimension. Less-elucidated humans and cultures in less-elucidated times of history might have led themselves to believe that this was the ultimate way for an individual to achieve immortality: start a blood lineage. I would rebut that belief.

Memetics shape the way that a culture forms, and then how that culture is propagated. The survival of ideas through time, the survival of specific patterns of neural pathways which make the same kinds of connections at various points throughout history. This kind of "immortality" can live beyond one's individual body or culture, and can influence the way that the entire world views the human image. But memes are as fickle as the medium they use to travel.

Genes, at the very least, are consistent; DNA provides a very physical and (mostly-)immutable blueprint for the human form, and I thank the universe for its existence every moment in which I continue to exist. A homo sapien can possess genetic mutations which are common, of course, but for the mostpart a homo sapien will be born much alike all other homo sapiens. A common foundation of data organization within the chaos of the cosmos.

{ I'm thankful that the human mind began accepting other mammals as familiar entities tens of thousands of years ago. May the study of other lifeforms help to expand our acceptance towards all beings which possess the spark of life in this universe. But I digress. }

Memes in the Lithic era would have had to have been passed through word-of-mouth: generation-to-generation, or in fortunate instances, clan-to-clan. This would have limited the amount of memetic mutation, but I'm sure as with physical genetics, neural memetics have standard and (indirectly-)observable "mutations" which come from heuristics and biases inherently present in the observer of the meme. This kind of mutation is something that we see *very* frequently in the hypermodern era, however these kind of heuristical mutations may have likely been concentrated along major socio-cultural borders in historical eras.

Memes in the post-writing era have much stronger staying power to be preserved through history, as humanity provides flesh for the knowledge to bind to. Physical flesh, we as humans understand. On the universal scale, our paper is macro-, like us. It is larger than the quantum, and it is smaller than the celestial.

{ I would say that humanity has a closer connection to our stars than to our fundamental particles, perhaps due to their co-existence with us as macro-level beings who experience physics-as-we-(normally-)know-them. Humans, of course, love to obsess over what we cannot understand, and so I am extremely empathetic towards those who *do* feel connected to the subquanta. But I digress. }

There is perhaps a difference to be observed between writing-as-fact and writing-as-literature. When writing is done to preserve facts, it is to serve the function of taking a quantifiable piece of the universe and giving it flesh; giving a fact the body which it needs to exist through time, independent of a human host. When writing is done for literature, it is to evoke emotion in others; I would say that this is the case of attempting to give an emotion flesh. The deepest desires of all humans stems from recognition; stems from the hope and the prayer that in the infinite vastness of the universe, another consciousness will experience a neural impulse which resonates at a frequency which contains an entire existence. Or at least the shadow of an existence, a memory.

Then we come to hypertext memes. Memes which travel at the speed of light around the globe. Shaping the minds of people from nearly every culture on earth.

In history, memes would only spread globally if they were divine, crystalline entities representative of much more than themselves. Cultural artifacts, both material and ritualistic, invoked to display the depth and breadth of the human spirit. Everything from the presence of the Great Pyramids to the traditions of Kabuki Theatre.

And so, perhaps one of my major complaints of my time might be that these hypertextual memetics are irreverent. The only apparent merit for evolutionary fitness seems to be "how quickly can this idea spread", which is incidentally quite cancerous.

When learning Nawatl, it is clear through its linguistic form that, for example, "tlakatl" means not only "human", but it also has the equal meaning of "it is a human". The existence of a human being is proof of the existence of a human being. While seemingly tautological, taking this fact at bare-face value does help elucidate a bit of Nawatl thought & philosophy.

"Tonalli", the heat of our Sun{, or even perhaps more broadly, the entropy of the universe,} is understood to contribute to the uniqueness of each individual human being's soul upon birth. And upon death, it is understood that a human's soul is returned to the same realm which (most of )humankind is returned to; a place where the souls of ancestral humans exist so long as they are remembered, and where those souls await reconstruction. On a fundamental level, it sounds as though Nawatl metaphysics included a concept (or is open to the interpretation) that matter and energy are one and the same, and are in a constant celestial cycle of conversion between each other.

If I gaze upon my hand, matl, it is clear that the hand exists, matl, "it is a hand". In most circumstances, it's probably not relevant that the hand stems from cells in my body which grow via the instructions encoded within its DNA. But, technically, every single time that an individual is referring to a hand - saying that a hand exists -, there are implicit background facts which also exist: "it is a hand" refines itself as "it is a hand which belongs to an individual of X ancestry and contains DNA received from parents Y&Z".

When giving flesh to concepts or ideas or emotions, one wants to ensure that the face (ixtli) of the flesh is representative of the facts which it contains. And the ability of the ixtli to reflect these emotions accurately is what allows it to be a more-divinely-constructed entity within the universe.

Under this set of criteria, the greatest works of human achievement are those which are unique in ways which possess roots, those which are founded in deep fertile cultural soil which speak to the uniqueness of the entire culture to which it originally belonged.

And so we exist in the midst of the Digital Renaissance. Digital media transmits at lightspeed, not only visually like in painted art or linguistically like in literature, but also tactilly in how they invoke ritualistic patterns of unified hand/body/avatar movement. For example, the ixtli of a video game may at first appear to be simple, but its substance can contain multiple interweaving storylines, or even several branching timelines, exploring the limits of human imagination while also invoking a media-derived culture within the individual.

[Written: July 14, 2023 | 1-Toçtli, 8-Qawtli]

[xikanaua]

Introduction

¡Piyali mochitin! (Greetings to all!)

The name i use in the land of hypertext is Jacio, and i am 1st-generation usamerican-born Mexican diaspora. My father was born in Guanajuato, my mother was born in Michoacan. Most other generational knowledge which one should normally be imbued with has been lost in my case, due to colonialism and cultural genocide. I extend solidarity to fellow Xicanas who are in similar positions.

From my perspective, it has become evident that a post-modern, post-european philosophy - when developed without consideration towards global indigenous viewpoints - has been leading the world toward ruin. Therefore, i have started the personal process of de-colonizing the information present in my mind. I've begun this process over the past few years by studying the different kinds of indigenous knowledge belonging to the cultures of Mesoamerica (Anawak), North America (Turtle Island), and South America (Abya Yala), and internalizing them to conceive of an "alter-modern" worldview [1]. I've primarily focused my attention on the knowledge of Anawakah societies, due to my ancestry.

I want to use this blog to become more educated through the community which already exists here, to share some of my newfound knowledge with others, and to post random musings that i hope will be as fascinating to others as they are to me~ c:

{ If you, dear reader, see anything in my blog that you disagree with or want clarification on: my askbox is open! I'm willing to admit when i'm wrong, and also willing to admit when i haven't phrased things clearly enough! I want to foster a sense of community learning and open communication with all who are genuinely curious~<3 }

[1. I personally consider an "Alter-modern Philosophy" to be a framework which accepts the empirically-derived body-of-knowledge which has resulted from the time periods of European "Scientific Revolution"/"Enlightenment"/"Modernity", but which rejects the current reality of neocolonialism-through-capitalism as some kind of 'natural endpoint' for (post-)modernity.  I believe that syncretism of modernity with both pre-contact and contemporary indigenous worldviews is essential to the creation of alter-modern futures and philosophies which would allow life to flourish upon land that has been ravaged by capitalism's post-modern irreverence. The scientific methods which existed in indigenous cultures have long been misunderstood within colonist-imposed structures. Such methods must supersede the influence of the post-modern sciences which hold nothing in this world as sacred.  This footnote is way too long lmao. TL;DR: Historical Materialism == Good]