A Mexican and its Untranslatability

I started talking to myself on my walk home the other day. I constantly do this, especially when I’m troubled by something. I guess lately I’ve been troubled by the condition of my own identity, particularly as I encounter Mexican or Chicano artists whose art touches on their relationship to popular culture, and their understanding of what Mexican art is or should be. An example of the latter would be art that is overly decorative or appropriates traditions originated and practiced in Mexico. I understand what these artists want to communicate, and I also understand how the aesthetic choices in their work relate to their cultural experiences as a Mexican or Chicano artist. However, my experience has been different, and sometimes I feel that the imposition of their work as the whole and only Mexican experience in a way obscures my own. While living in Chicago, I started questioning my own ‘mexicanness’, something I had never had to do when living in Mexico City, where my Mexican legitimacy was a given. I’ve been feeling the need to deny this part of my identity; this seems rather impossible since I am Mexican. This is the name I have been given to my experience throughout my life.

As I walked, I kept on repeating ‘Yo no soy, soy Mexicana,’ I was amazed that it seemed natural in my “first” language to both affirm and negate something (in this case my own identity) in the same sentence. So I thought, how would I translate this into English? ‘I am not am Mexican.’ I knew this wasn’t a perfect translation, but I started to become interested on the linguistic space of the Spanish language, which is not dependent of a pronoun for a verb to take place; in other words, someone can BE without the need of an I. [1]

It is not that there are no pronouns in Spanish, but rather that we don’t need or use them all the time. I know linguistic, social, and economic structures shape culture, but also through these structures we might be able to understand the differences between cultures through a historical and linguistic standpoint, as well as further comprehend how identity is and has been constructed. I immediately drew connections between the need for an “I” in the Anglo-American language to its constant need and advocacy towards the individual. [2]

This seemed to me to relate to my own experience as Mexican, where I felt my mexicanness in Mexico was a given, but here in the United States I constantly felt the pressure to justify how and why I am a white Mexican. Contrary to my experience in the United States, my intersectional identity in Mexico had never posed any trouble. Rather, the issue of concern in Mexico seems to be focused on the nature of the mix, always placing higher value on the lighter type (although that in itself can be troubling). I believe it is in this Latin American history of ambiguity and its many faceted tones, that we understand there is certainly not a one kind racial type of Mexican, but rather we are a country who, since its colonization, has been mixed and imposed a certain tonality value which unfortunately still upholds.

Latin American and North American countries come from different cultural genealogies. These different genealogies are derived from both of their colonizing settlers. That is specifically, Roman Catholic Iberia for Mexico and Germano-Protestant England for the United States of America.

While in the U.S. history, race mixing was seen as an aberration and many segregation strategies were applied, including anti-miscegenation laws, which were ruled unconstitutional until 1967 by the U.S Supreme Court in the famous case Loving v. Virginia. These laws enforced racial segregation by prohibiting and deeming as a felony any sexual intercourse and interracial marriage between different races, particularly those that concerned the mixing of a white person with someone from another racial group.

Similarly, in Mexico’s history many segregation strategies were also applied, though very differently that in the U.S. Mexico embraced an ideology of mestizaje. Meaning, a racial and cultural synthesis from almost the beginning of what I would rightly say a violent conquest. This does not mean, that there was and there is no racism, segregation, and classism in Mexico; but rather that because of the way it was historically handled through its legislation, that way we view race and the way it operates is very different from the Anglo-American perspective. I would even say, that race for Mexicans is a sort of malleable category. For the Mexican, race is and has been historically mixed with classism. During the New Spain era racial classifications were immediately applied with legal rights attached to each where unfortunately the whitest maintained the highest value in the racial hierarchy (see Image 5). Nonetheless, the important distinction I want to make is that though both countries maintained a high value for whiteness and purity, the domination strategies perpetrated by the Roman Imperialism was one of mixed racial classification (which is still one of segregation but allowing interracial marriage to take place as long as there is a hierarchical system supporting, designating, and localizing the origin or mix of each person), while the Germanic strategy implemented in the U.S. was one of segregation accompanied by anti-miscegenation laws that made it very difficult for any interracial mixing to take place. Simply said, race for the Mexican is a sort of grayscale, and historically this was appropriate as long as one could name the kind of "grey" they were born into.

When I say I’m Mexican to another person in the United States, without any explanation, the moment always evolves to a certain expression of suspicion. It is not that they always ask ‘but how come you are white’, it is that you can see it in their faces. Sometimes I get the passive/aggressive question or statement but ‘your English is so good’, or ‘why is your English so good?’ or ‘but you don’t look Mexican.’ Although comments like this have a deeper value system imbedded in them, I sometimes am amused and annoyed by the fact that ontology and phenomenology are still constantly wedded as if they were the same thing. And no, looking and being are not dependent on one another. The fact that I am perceived as white does not invalidate my mexicanness, even if we live in a perceptual world.

In this sense it is as if I am accepted as almost white, as if I have a free pass and an acceptance card into every place that is white and westernized. However, this free pass seems to come with certain conditions like ‘be careful to not have a thick accent that will betray your otherness’ or ‘be cautious to not make too much scandal or show of impropriety.’ Certainly, this kind of passing, as a “pure white” requires vigilance and self-censorship, in which sometimes I am caught feeling as if I belonged to no particular national identity. Neither Mexican, because my skin color betrays me, nor Swiss-German(my dad’s family side) because I don’t speak the language or share the culture, neither European because I speak American English, nor American because I have a thin accent.  It seems as if wherever I go I have the ability to pass but encounter a barrier of some sort when the aspects of my otherness comes to light. It is an almost passing, where I can be everything and nothing at the same time.

I am not saying that this tendency of otherness, as something that betrays you and renders you an outsider, is only found in the United States. This tendency for me, started to display itself since early childhood. I remember when I was a kid I used to be teased for what my friends thought of as too-proper language. I would say words like simpático, instead of buena onda, or use the word chaqueta instead of chamarra.[3] My mom used the same words. She was not born in Mexico City but rather 40 minutes away by car in Toluca, Estado de México. She was from a provincial town, and thus the language she used sometimes othered her from the cosmopolitan Mexico City. I inherited this. Recently, while researching the changes of Spanish language, and its clash with English and the resulting Spanglish, I came along Ilan Stavan’s dictionary. This dictionary is a revolutionary text in the sense that it is legitimating what was once thought to be, and in some places still is, a bastard language. While I scrolled through the words, I saw the word Chaqueta as a word that comes from an alteration/modification of the word jacket in English. I was surprised to see this. How did a Spanglish word come to be used at least 40 years ago in my mom’s home?

I became interested in this word, because for me when I was little it was an othering word in the sense that it did not pertain to the colloquial/hip use of language that my childhood friends spoke. Its etymology appeared to be from Old Spanish, a “proper” Spanish that was mostly used by older people, whose Spanish still tried to secure as much of the purity of the Cervantes tongue as possible. The subsuming of such a “bastard” word, into a “pure” Spanish language category interested me. In my conception and understanding of the word chaqueta, I was being teased because of its formality, a certain formality/otherness that was not compliant with the norm of children’s use of language.  I loved finding this out. On the most banal level it meant my childhood friends framing of my language and thus myself was wrong all along. They were wrong about me. I was not this uncool, too formal and polite little girl that used the proper Spanish language of her parents. Yes, I was talking in my mother’s tongue at the time, but that language ended up being far away from what is considered the “correct” or “proper” Spanish. It was already “bastardized.” This moment reminded me that the connotation and assumed origin of words varies constantly depending on the place and people you are with. Suggesting that a presumed origin of a word or a persona might be more convoluted that what one might assume it to be.

***

I encounter the switch-code between Spanish and English both to be helpful in some instances but also detrimental. Code-switching is a term in linguistics that designates when a subject alternates within two or more languages, usually requiring the speaker to be fluent in both. Code-switching allows me to understand things through multiple scopes simultaneously, but it creates a gap where I sometimes feel insecure around both languages. This insecurity is not holistic; it depends on my own levels of comfortability of the use of language in certain linguistic spaces or conversations. For instance, it is easier for me to communicate in Spanish when it is related to something emotional. Either a mundane conversation with a friend or a desire that needs to be manifested in the spoken word. In a certain sense, I feel more comfortable expressing myself in Spanish as a day-to-day language. 

            On the other hand, English for me is established on a more mentally framed platform. For instance, every time I try to explain a theoretical framework, or a thought that exists outside the emotional aspect of language, one that contains a certain distance from my own selfhood, I revert to thinking and speaking in English. To a certain extent, my connection and use of Spanish functions in different spaces. This might be because my learning and experience of such subjects were introduced in English. However, the reality is that it is not only my comfortable levels on a academic environment that are shifted towards English, but also, that I would not be able to have these kind of conversations in Spanish without having to recur to English first as a way of thinking and then translating it into Spanish. The problem here lies when one doesn’t know or there doesn’t exist a translatable word, or conversely, when a word in a certain language has multiple meanings but its translation has only one.

Speaking both languages and having lived in both countries has allowed me the privilege of being able to make swift mental turns from one language into another, pushing my language and its frameworks to its limits, without having to submit to the linguistic and social grid of a particular place. It has shown me that not all things are easy to translate, because no place, language or experience is the same. I have learned that the meanings of words are always changing and that to designate a fixed value to anything or anyone is to prohibit oneself to experience the beauty that exists in the exploration of its multiplicity.

[1] “A type of clause in which a ‘subject’ is talked about or modified in some manner, is observable in every linguistic system. All speech operates with subject–verb–object combinations. Among these, the sequences ‘verb–object–subject,’ ‘object–subject–verb,’ and ‘object–verb–subject’ are exceedingly rare. So rare, as to suggest an almost deliberate violation of a deep-rooted ordering of perception.”

George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 174.

[2]  Interesting might be to note that English has no official institution that is responsible for its language. For instance in Spanish we have the Real Academia Española, that though it specifically focuses on the Spanish from Spain it is still affiliated with other hispanophone national language academies in order to promote linguistic unity within and between various Spanish speaking territories.

[3] Simpático= a) nice, b) Likeable, c) Pleasant

  Buena onda= a) cool, b) having a good vibe

  Chaqueta= a) jacket, blazer

  Chamarra= jacket

Some Fragmental Writing Concerning Myths and Subjectivity

Let me start by explaining what I call the Subject as Symbol. The subject as Symbol is a “self” inherently representing oneself. It creates a symbol or a conception of ONESELF in order to mediate between one’s inner and outside world. But most importantly, the thing that this subject assumes is a notion of oneself. A general image of one’s body, one’s brain, and one’s soul as one. 

Similarly, cosmic myths, which belong to a science called cosmology, the study of the order of the universe, require the subject to fully insert oneself as One into the narrative.  Subject to subject representations are integral to the conscious image of a self.  According to German philosopher and cognitive scientist Thomas Metzinger consciousness requires a notion of time, having a past, present and future, in order for the subject to be able to identify and predict certain events. In other words, memory is required in order to have a consciousness. However, all of this is an illusion if you consider that the present and a presence, in the Now, is already a mode of representation in itself.

Of course representation is necessary, in a way the only way we know the world is through representation. Our vision of reality and knowledge has been and still is based through the representational model. Yet, consciousness, which as discussed, functions through the representational model, is without an actual center that can be pinpointed. It is a dynamic, relational and multidirectional process that does not occupy a fixed location. This perspective can help us to further unravel and demystify these appearances by seeing them as functional representations, rather than as things that have their own given nature.

...

So, what are the ethics behind disrupting the narrative of myths?

The division between politics and ethics has always been a blurred one, especially when concerning the subject. In the 90’s there was a view of interpreting the subject through multiplicity. This view started as a promising one, one that attempted to lie outside binaries and exclusionary practices where we would see and live the world outside or without a Universalist truth. Nonetheless, this attempt was in my opinion a failure, since the neoliberal market took advantage of this mode of thought and adapted it to suit its economic needs, causing the subject to celebrate and reproduce a plurality of identities with no concern on the ethics or history behind each one of these cultures.

We always tell stories, to others and to ourselves. As the famous phrase by the American novelist Joan Didion says “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” There is a deep relationship between myths and the self through language. It is in our cosmologies, (the myth-making) that we have established ourselves at center of space and time. Maybe it is one of the powers of myth that arises from its skill of articulating an existential need for identity, of situating the I. The narrative of the myth resolves question like where do we come from? Why are we here? What should we do? In other words, questions that are related to our “origin”, meaning, morality and destiny have no possible objective answer. Maybe it is unavoidable to stay away from the representational model, still I would like to encourage more efforts of spontaneity in order to help decenter ourselves from space and time.  

A creation myth establishes a reason for being; it establishes our significance. Professor David Adams Leeming writes concerning myths function in history “As such it is often used to help individuals or groups to regain health or order. When we are broken, we return to our origins to become whole again, whether on the psychiatrist couch or in the shaman’s hut.” This is absurd; you are telling me that in order to become “whole” I need to return to my origins, but if we understand anything, is that no one can return to the past, we can only remember it, and although remembrance is in the now, it is always a recreative selection made according to hunches or principles that refer back to us as the central character. So why would I participate in this? Why would I give authority to a verbal construct of the past?

.... 

A book is more than an object or a material reality. Literary critic Georges Poulet argues that through the act of reading, or rather through the absorption of reading, our subjectivity is altered and possessed by someone or something else, in particular the author.

Due to its linear narrative, the myth similar to Poulet’s theory of the act of reading as a double consciousness, where another self, the author takes over, performs a similar but opposite relationship. The creative function of the myth allows the subject to insert him or herself in the narrative as the mythmaker. Its re-creative power allows the I to insert oneself in the infinite I AM. In this sense, each person’s understanding of the mythological world becomes an active re-vision, rather than a passive taking-in. After all, this allows one to position oneself as a world creator, where the boundaries between the self and the world are potentially suspended.

Lemming writes, “When the patient sits in the sand painting and has the creation myth recited over him by the shaman, he is returning to the womb of nature in the hope of being reborn into nature’s wholeness, of reenacting the creation myth in his own life.”

If by reciting a myth one were able to see, feel, and understand oneself fully related to the world, then wouldn’t one to an extent become the mythmaker and the world his myth?  Isn’t this mythmaker tendency visible in religion? For instance, in Christian religion at the end of the congregation, in what is called the Eucharist, the priest drinks the wine, which is symbolic to the blood of Christ and you eat the bread that is symbolic of the body of Christ. This whole rite has also a certain re-creative power similar to that of a creation myth. A myth requires the human being to constantly re-create it. It is not a rehearsal; it is re-enacting a narrative that acts through speaking, writing and ultimately acting-out.

The problematic that resides in re-enacting such a linear narrative or a symbolic representation, beyond their questionable validity is that they are easily adapted as a doctrine for truth. In Poulet, I am possessed and thus I am replaced. But maybe by making the mythic narrative somehow obtuse, I stop to be constrained in this way. I still must create my world, to frame it somehow to understand my inner world in connection to the outer world, but maybe not as a given. This is the political or ethical promise that resides in language and possibly also in the fragmentation of origin myths.

Temporal Distance in the Translation of the Subject and Performance Art (Reenactment)

This is only a short writing section of Subjects in Translations, a project I have been working with both visually and academically for the past two years. 

I would like to bring forward temporality, and specifically temporality in a subject in translation. In chapter 3, Subjects in Translation, I briefly mentioned the big gaps of time that translation has to overcome. For instance, it is very difficult to translate a text like Don Quixote, written in 17th century Spanish and translate it to the 21st century in that “same” language. It is sometimes even more troublesome to translate a text with such a time difference into another language. First of all, it is a transformation in the reader, a transformation that must somehow bridge time divide. Second of all, it asks the question: how to reconcile the unrenconcilable? Meaning, how do you reconcile all of the cultural differences that arise from different languages, and still add into the mix a few hundred years of distance? How would one stay faithful to something that, in all its meanings and diversions, has no exact translation to how you relate to the world today? When scholars say that translation is trying to achieve “an impossible” that nonetheless has to be done, they mean that one cannot stay fully faithful to the original meaning and also that one cannot stop time. A subject can relate to the past, find that which is still meaningful to the life he has lived and lives today; but one cannot reenact something without there being a difference to at least a certain degree.

Sophie Calle, the French artist and writer, did a piece in 2007 called Take Care of Yourself. This artwork consisted in the gathering of 107 women’s interpretation of a break-up letter she received by e-mail by her boyfriend. Every one of the 107 women was asked to interpret the letter depending on what their field of profession was. For instance, a judge (unknown name) interprets the letter as a contract, as a voluntary agreement by both parties. She says, “Taken as a whole, this letter clearly illustrates the fact that the conduct of an amorous relationship is not so different from the negotiation and performance of a banal lease.” Another interpretation is that of Arlette Farge, a historian and specialist in the eighteenth century, who responds to the breakup letter by transferring the “boyfriend” (author of the letter) to a person that she could analyze as belonging to the eighteenth century. Of the other 105 interpretations that make up the analysis of the piece, the only one that is missing is the one of the recipient/artist herself.  If we interpret this is a psychoanalytic framework, we could potentially say that the artist is trying to avoid to give one meaning to an event (receiving the breakup letter); an interpretation that ultimately and potentially be considered as a defense mechanism because of the gesture towards intellectualization/analyzation (find a reasonable explanation) of a breakup. Instead, Sophie Calle decides to allow other woman to interpret the break-up letter through their professional field, relinquishing her own read.

However, other professions don’t produce an analysis with much veracity. For instance, Catherine Carone, a crossword writer, decides to transform this letter into a crossword. What I find interesting in producing a crossword out of a letter is that it is limited to specific words and also to a specific language, so the words are required to fit and match on the places assigned. Indeed, at the bottom of the solved puzzle in Sophie Calle’s book Take Care of Yourself we read a small warning saying, “This interpretation cannot be translated into English.” Most of the interpretations that originate out of the interpretation of the breakup letter seen above are interpretations that are generative. Not only in the sense that they made up something more out of the original thing; but also that they remain open for others to do the same thing with them. However, the puzzle functions in a different, more rigid, often closed level; it makes a translation impossible.

A crossword has specific rules. For instance, the form it contains is usually that of a square grid. The purpose is to fill the white squares with letters that form the meaning of a word of a previous clue given by the author. The clues that are given usually have some set rules as well. If one would give a clue of a PC key with only a three-letter option, the puzzle solver would actually end up with several possibilities (ALT, TAB, ESC etc.). In order to determine which one of this is the correct one, one would have to decipher another word from the crossword, where one of the words fills in one of the letters for this one, making the puzzle a form of contingency. Thus, unveiling the “correct” answer for this particular box composed of letters that form a word. Certainly there is a connection here between the Structuralist theory of the sign and the crossword puzzle.

According to Saussure, the relation between the signifier and the signified is ‘arbitrary’, meaning there is no connection between the form or phonetic component of a word and its concept. The most common example to the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified is that of the word cat. When one hears or reads the word C-A-T (the signifier), one realizes its has no connection with the visual image at the back of our heads (the signified). That is a four-legged creature, with whiskers that has a furry quality to it. The word cat, tells us nothing about the thing itself. It is empty of meaning, in the sense that it really says nothing about how the four-legged furry creature looks, sounds or behaves.

The impossibility of the translation in a crossword puzzle happens when you have a word that must signify the clue as a whole in relation to what each letter signifies. It is confusion between both semantics and semiotics. In semiotics, a sign has a meaning, which ultimately is something other than itself. However, the clue here becomes extremely important because it provides further signification. It opens up a possibility of multiple answers through a question. Regardless of finding the “correct” answer that needs to fit each white square with a letter to form a word that satisfies the clue in the crossword grid, the clue’s real purpose is to ask the question what might this be?  However, the possibility of answering the clues is multiple, even if its placement or ultimate answer contains only one “correct” word to satisfy the initial question. If we understand the crossword in a metaphorical sense, the clue opens up a question while the literal placement of the grids to the answer are what limits this question towards only one answer. The grid is the framing we make for a multiplicity of answers, it is how we attempt to situate, delineate, and inbox the beauty and possibility of understanding ourselves as a multiplicity by instead reducing it to only one “correct” answer.

The task of the translator is very similar to the paradigm of the crossword. Why? Because the translator has the impossible duty to decide what word or word(s) might be the most adequate for the original and the language it is being translated to, as well as the specific time that one is translating for. It is considering at least two different cultures. Many times it is even more than two, not because there are more than two languages that are being considered, but rather because culture is dependent on its time and so is its language. Moreover, the translator follows the ‘original’ like the clue in the crossword, in the sense that he has to analyze it both word by word and in its entirety. The good translator is able to “make swift mental turns from one language into another”, without submitting to the originals grid. He creates his new crossword grid; one that though it has a similarity to the other (in this case the original), its form could not be more fitting to the time and place of the language he is translating into.

 Crossword clues are consistent with the answer. For instance, if the clue is in the past tense, the answer will also be in the past tense. This is a big and important difference with how translation functions. Often, a translation does not have the luxury of operating consistently with the original. One of the impossibilities of making a translation is that it has to bridge time and meaning into another language; It is not consistent in its time or place with the ‘original’. Its inconsistency is what makes translation an impossibility both in regards to matching the original word by word, but also, and more importantly, by containing the possibility of transferring something that has been lost in time and making it relevant now, to the contemporary reader. 

C.S. Peirce defined ‘the sign’ as “something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity.”  In other words, that the sign is a relation between the form of the sign, the object and the interpreter. A word acquires new meaning by being identifiably different from other words in a language, even though such a configuration of words has actually no existing meaning. Let’s take as an example: Catherine Carone’s interpretation of Sophie Calle’s break up letter (Image 1), as a way of understanding why this form of interpretation is non-generative in a translation context.

The word A-M-O-U-R, which is located in line two, and starts on letter D of the grid. This word is connected by the letter of M (forming another word AMI), O (Forming the word NO), U (forming the word QUATRIEME) and R (forming the word URNE). If we tried to fit in the same space the word AMOUR (love in English), we would have one empty square, the word AMI (friend in English), would not even intertwine with any of the arbitrary signs of the word AMOUR. It would also require two more empty squares for the letters to be able to accommodate the word ‘friend’ in the English language. There is no possible way of transposing this exact form puzzle, designed specifically for the Francophone language to ever match the English language. There is no relationship between the order of letters forming a specific word on to the idea of what that word occupies the space of.

My question is what does this multiple interpretations in Calle’s piece have to do in relation to the breakup letter she received? Plato in his dialogues Timaeus writes, “We now learn that the copy is not self-subsistent; it needs the support of a medium, just as a reflection requires a mirror to hold it”(I am tempted to say nothing except the relationship a canvas might have to the painting). The paint, the color palette, the subject matter that a painting has, will vary in each canvas, it is not meant to mirror the canvas, it is meant to be generative. What Calle offers us is a medium for interpreting, it is a white canvas in which we, the interpreters are supposed to construct meaning out of something that is clearly inexplicable, and more so if we were to explain it only through one answer.

The truth is that sometimes in order to understand something you have to get some distance, you have to see it either from another perspective, or by ceasing to be, to an extent, although not fully in it. In a similar manner, Calle decides to take some distance from the breakup, to allow other women of all ages to interpret it, translate it. To transform it both visually and linguistically, and also to destroy it for her. In this manner, she allows for an opening of interpretations where the feminine experience broadens and allows her interpreters to occupy and perform a world of possibilities out of a letter that ultimately could have no meaning whatsoever. In this manner, Calle’s artwork becomes an invitation to construct meaning as well as becoming a performance of translation. 

Performance art, particularly reenactment, stresses the struggle of epistemological and ontological problems. These problems are related to the possibility and impossibility of repetition. In this sense the categories of reenactment in performance and in literary translation investigate the way in which one might understand a thing of the past by its impossible repetition. Though the concern of both performance art and translation studies is similar, the way they approach it, is very different. A translator tends to focus on how a text might be transposed into another language, another time, and another culture. A performance reenactment on the other hand, questions our interpretation of history through the repetition of a particular event, person, or thing. It breaks up with the linear narrative of history, through the impossibility of attempting to repeat a particular event in time. It asks the questions like: How to represent the time of another generation? How may a reenactment function within our own temporal economy?

Sophie Calle’s piece(s) Take Care of Yourself, opens up a platform on which, through multiple interpretations, a formerly incommensurable event, may be turned into some kind of comprehensible information or generative gesture by the production of multiple interpretations, repetitions and permutations. Translation, on the other hand, finds in the multiplicity of idioms an impossibility of having a true translation. The search for a “true translation” is a requirement for the construct to be somehow legible, ordered and coherent. It is through this impossibility that translation is able to generate a space where through the deterritorialization of languages, we might be able to re-territorialize the language, outside of a territory. In other words, through fragments we may find a new way of understanding our own subjectivity through multiplicity.