The Core and Peripheries of Our National Narratives

A Response from IH-35

Bibliographic Data

ID7399217
AuthorsJorge Cañizares-Esguerra (0000-0003-0509-8185, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume112
Issue5
Pages1423-1431
Publication date2007-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1086/ahr.112.5.1423
OpenAlexW2972537074
LanguageEN
Citations received8

From my home in Austin, Texas, I can peer down IH-35, a congested highway that sharply divides the city in two. To the west and north stretch dozens of upper-middleclass white suburbs. To the east and south, visitors are greeted by taquerias, washaterias, and trocas (trucks) with flags. Given the many physical and linguistic barriers that keep them apart, one would be tempted to assume that these two Austins have little in common. But the economy has a way of stubbornly bringing them together: Thousands of Mexican gardeners, waiters, cooks, janitors, and construction workers cross IH-35 every day to work in the booming western section of the city.1 I hear and speak all over town. The construction workers and janitors with whom I often chat seem out of place on campus. Many are most likely illegal, have thicker accents than my own, and wear tattoos of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Outside a handful of classrooms, their language is the currency of laborers, not learning, and their history belongs at the margins. The historical narratives that students learn on campus acknowledge these workers as dwellers of the borderlands. At cocktail parties in west Austin, where I am often addressed as Jose and Jesus, and where it is automatically assumed that I am in the Spanish department, it is difficult to convince anyone that there is nothing borderly about these southeastern dwellers and that we should be taking a closer, second look at their tattoos to understand, say, the history of colonial Boston. These are charged political times in Texas as well as in the rest of the country. Talk-radio hosts insist that the foreign ways of these millions of illegal aliens are gnawing at the foundational AngloProtestant values of this country and that the debate should ultimately be about culture and history. My conversation with Professor Gould is part of this larger debate. I share most of his views and have little with which to disagree. Yet I do come to the topic from a peculiar personal experience, as an Ecuadorian whose children have been born and raised in this country, and it is here where our interpretive differences ultimately lie

Art · Currency · FLAGS register · Linguistics · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Nothing · Sociology · White (mutation · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media · Rhetoric and Communication Studies