Illness

I begin with one of the first novels published in English by a Latino/a writer: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885). This novel uses illness as a symbol of the ways in which the Anglo-American takeover of the US Southwest (following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) disempowers the Mexicans who had been living in the region for centuries (like Ruiz de Burton’s own family). Repeatedly, the male characters in the novel are struck down by the Westwardly expanding capitalist culture of Anglo-America. In the beginning of the novel, we learn that James Mechlin, one of the white allies of the Mexican californio ranchers, had “undermined” his “constitution” by “a too close application of business” in New York; in Southern California (which is represented as a “perfect climate” full of “health-giving trees” and devoid of “malarial fevers”), living on the pastoral Alamar ranch, Mechlin recovers his health (Ruiz de Burton 1885: 67, 70). Yet the influx of Anglo squatters to the region brings disaster to this healthful lifestyle. Mechlin’s son is shot by an Anglo squatter, suffering something “far more terrible than death”: “the horror he felt at being a cripple” (1885: 274). The word “cripple” is used throughout the novel to signify a loss of power; it is horrible because it is induced by injury and witnessed by the still healthy minds of those deprived of their accustomed corporeal integrity. Don Mariano, the patriarch of the noble Alamar family,

is described as being “crippled” when the railroad is not extended into San Diego, cutting him off from commerce with the rest of the United States and devaluing his investments. Ultimately, Don Mariano loses the ranch, and he and James Mechlin die within days of each other. This crippling radiates out to the rest of the californios, including both of Don Mariano’s sons. (Gabriel is crushed by a load of bricks when he’s forced to work as a “hod carrier,” and Victoriano loses control of his legs when caught in a snowstorm with the cattle, rendered “a perfect gentleman from my knees up, but a mean chicken, a ridiculous turkey, a kangaroo, from my knees down” (1885: 316).) The novel’s attachment to illness and as a metaphor resonates with an idealized femininity that appeared in literature and culture in the (Eastern) United States in the nineteenth century: weakness and delicacy were valued as traits fitting for middle-class women who were increasingly consigned to the domestic sphere while their husbands entered the growing (and corrupting) world of industry and commerce. Perhaps Ruiz de Burton is highlighting the pre-industrial gentleness of Mexican California by embracing a more effeminate Latino masculinity in opposition to the unprincipled and abrasive manhood of industrial capitalist Anglo-America. (Indeed, in our first glimpse of Don Mariano in the novel, his “mild and beautiful eyes” wear a sad gaze as he contemplates the coming of Anglos with names like Gasbang and Hogsden (1885: 62-3).) Disabling the californio ranchers highlights the social decline brought with the Anglo settlers. A century later, dispossession from the land still shapes much literature by US

writers of Mexican descent. Since one of the founding political events of the Chicano/a movement was the United Farmworkers’ boycotts, illness caused by the use of pesticides in capitalist agriculture is a common motif in Chicano/a literature. One of the most noteworthy examples is Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), in which the character Alejo is sprayed in the orchards while stealing peaches at the beginning of the novel. His growing illness draws him into the family of the protagonist, Estrella, and the climax of the novel arrives when Estrella’s family brings Alejo to the medical clinic. The clinic available to the farmworkers turns out to be a dilapidated trailer with one white nurse in attendance. The race-and classbased friction between the nurse and her patients is symbolized by a jar of cotton balls that looked “too white, like imitation cotton” to Estrella’s mother, who also compares the clinic’s scale to “one used for measuring the weight of picked cotton,” the scale that would determine “what she would be able to eat, the measurement of her work” (Viramontes 1995: 136). It turns out that the clinic is unable to help Alejo because there is neither doctor nor laboratory there. When the family has to part with its last $9.07 to cover the $10 fee the nurse charges them, Estrella smashes the decorations on the nurse’s desk with a crowbar, taking the $9.07 back to buy gas to drive Alejo to the hospital. (The gas Estrella imagines coming from the ground up bones of laborers since “bones made oil and oil made gasoline” (1995: 148).) They are forced to abandon Alejo, penniless, inside the hospital; as its magic automated glass doors close behind him, the family returns to the farm to earn more money. Medical institutions, like agribusinesses, emerge as sterile, emphatically white, profit-driven Goliaths that consume the bodies of Mexican-American laborers. Cuban-American writer Cristina García, in her first two highly acclaimed novels,

uses illness and injury as vehicles through which to highlight how the Socialist state

in Cuba and Capitalism in the United States mark the bodies of their citizens. In Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Celia and her daughter Felicia are brought down (with mental illness, breast cancer, syphilis, and exhaustion) by their allegiance to faithless lovers and La Revolución in Cuba. In contrast, Celia’s other daughter, Lourdes, who lives in exile in New York and owns an expanding bakery operation, is endowed with robust embodiment. Yet the health Lourdes enjoys through Capitalism is mocked rather than celebrated: her appetites (both alimentary and sexual) are excessive, and she is rendered grotesque in her “size 26 white uniform with wide hip pockets,” with flesh “hanging from her arms like hammocks,” devouring sticky buns or summoning her husband for sex “by pulling vigorously from a ship’s bell” (García 1992: 17-21). Though she is miraculously able to lose 118 pounds and to fit into a “size-six Chanel suit with gold coin buttons,” this physical discipline disappears in the face of a Thanksgiving turkey (1992: 172-3). In The Agüero Sisters (1997), Reina’s body is metaphorically nationalized after an accident in El Cobre (a mining town named for Cuba’s patron saint and thus a symbolic site of the nation). She is electrocuted while serving the state as an electrician, and her charred skin is replaced by a patchwork of “experimental skin grafts” taken from various donors (García 1997: 35). Her exiled sister Constancia is not ill, per se, but she does experience a certain form of “disfigurement.” When she wakes one morning to discover that her mother’s face has replaced her own, her body is occupied by her Cuban past. This undesired transformation is psychologically troubling, to be sure, but it also turns out to be financially lucrative for marketing Constancia’s line of nostalgic makeup products, Cuerpo de Cuba. Like Lourdes in Dreaming in Cuban, Constancia is a highly successful capitalist in the United States but this success comes at the cost of alienation from herself. It is surely reductive to claim that the state determines the wellbeing of its citizens’ bodies, and García’s often humorous accounts poke fun at this reductive understanding. Yet her device of using bodies as symbols of economies sheds critical light on the term “body politic.”