Danizete Martinez, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, received a $15,000 UNM Center for Regional Studies Graduate Fellowship for 2008-09. The CRS fellowships foster studies about New Mexico and the Southwest that bring together historical and contemporary questions/issues/problems concerning the people of New Mexico, as well as projects that connect New Mexico to other cultures and regions of the Americas, Spain and Québec.
Photo: Danizete Martinez
Martinez’s dissertation, “The Chicana/o Grotesque: National Origins, Subversive Traditions, and Bodies of Resistance in U.S. Southwestern Literature,” directed by UNM English Professor Jesse Alemán, investigates the origins and influences of the Chicana/o grotesque and how it functions in Chicana/o literature.
The “grotesque” is an aesthetic category usually tied to European art history and literary production that describes everything from bawdy folk culture and haunting landscapes to ornate architecture and gothic literature, Alemán said.
“However, Danizete’s dissertation makes the compelling case for a uniquely Chicana/o ‘grotesque’ rooted in the social history and literary legacy of Mexican American displacement, dispossession, protest and the identity crises that arise from being stuck between worlds.
The ‘Chicano/a grotesque’ is a result of the Southwest's uneven history, but it's also an aesthetic and cultural form of protest that resists the complete dismemberment of Chicano/a individuals and communities across the region,” he explained.
By exploring the grotesque and its hemispheric connections to Latin America and the U.S. South, and by examining the familial resemblances between the European aesthetic, her project considers how the grotesque has a distinctive and unique lineage within Chicana/o cultural history.
Examining the pre-nationalist, nationalist, and post-nationalist writings of such writers as Daniel Venegas, Arturo isles, Miguel Méndez, Alejandro Morales, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Luis Valdez, Rudolfo Anaya, Lucha Corpi, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Gloría Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, and Ana Castillo, to show how the grotesque emerges as an organic form of Chicana/o cultural expression that can be used as an analytical tool for Southwest studies in general. For her, the grotesque can be found in artifacts, ideas, humor, practices, buildings, statues, rascuache art forms, music and rituals throughout the Southwest.
For example, a prominent Chicana/o migration myth tells how the god Montezuma dismembered a monstrous flying beast before disseminating his people across the U.S., while our own UNM campus houses the grotesque artwork of Luis Jiménez, whose large scale fiberglass statue, “La Fiesta,” greets the university community and visitors with a peculiar depiction of Mexican-American popular culture that exaggerates bodily form and color perhaps to announce the Hispanic presence on campus.
By gaining a better understanding of the grotesque as an aesthetic category, Martinez argues, we can gain a better sense of the multi-variations of Chicana/o identity as it oscillates between cultures, languages and histories.
For more information contact Gary Harrison, Department of English, UNM garyh@unm.edu, 277-6347.
Media Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at September 3, 2008 01:45 PM