Posting 10: Cultural Change and Cultural Conflict in the Twentieth-Century West

Also see my comments on Marty's blog posting.

My comments on:
Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places
George J. Sanchez: Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945
David G. Gutierrez, "Significant to Whom?: Mexican Americans and the History of the American West," Western Historical Quarterly (November 1993)
David R. Lewis, "Still Native: The Significance of Native Americans in the History of the 20th-Century American West," Western Historical Quarterly (November 1993)

Sanchez and Deloria have two different interpretations of the cultural encounters in the twentieth-century West. Deloria sees bi-polar cultural conflict ("Indian and non-Indian people"). But Sanchez sees no such bi-polar cultural conflict; instead he sees a process of adaptation in becoming Mexican American. Guitierez also frames his essay in a bi-polar opposition of cultures ("ethnic conflict"), with Mexican Americans fighting to overturn stereotypes and imposed cultural narratives (though he does give a positive nod to Camarillo's work revealing the diversity of Mexican-American experience) and his essay more akin to Deloria's view than that of Sanchez in that respect. Lewis also addresses Deloria's themes of stereotyped representations of Indian peoples and their importance in myths of white Americans and the refusal of whites to let Indians become modern.

Sanchez's main themes are diversity of experience and agency. Agency is important to Sanchez, as with Castaneda in "Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History" but he does not use the cultural criticism method and he writes without Castaneda’s presentism and her "contest of cultures." According to Sanchez Mexican Americans, particularly those of the second generation, assumed a new ethnic identity. He shows that there were struggles within as well as without the Mexican-American community. Mexican Americans adopted different cultural strategies and there was a diversity of cultural/family experience. They did not define themselves in opposition to the dominant culture, but instead sought ways to integrate into it without denying or losing their Mexican heritage. His emphasis is on the individual agency of Mexican-Americans; government cultural programs and the Church hierarchy were not effective--individual choices were far more important in shaping Mexican-American identity. Also, he explains how this cultural change occurred without social mobility. And the emphasis is on cultural change, not cultural conflict. There is a theme of social justice, but it is far more muted that in Deloria, Castaneda, or Kaminsky.

Deloria's main theme is Native Americans fighting against representations of Indians in American culture that have stereotyped them as primitives prone to violence. The main opposition in Deloria’s book is between the real Indian culture, engaging with modernity, and the mythic Indian culture of white American imagination (their "cultural expectations"), acting as a tool of domination. He shows how Native Americans worked both within and against these cultural expectations, and how Indians who did not conform to cultural expectations, who challenged the narratives, helped to show the fictitious nature of "the stories that insisted on racial difference." But Deloria's themes are presentist because he uses the style/technique of cultural criticism, similar to Amy Kaminsky in "Gender, Race, Raza" and Castaneda. Also he has a theme of desiring to overturn injustice, and Deloria even seems to express resentment that African Americans have been culturally incorporated as Indians have not--Indians have been used as symbol/representations but none of their cultural productions have been incorporated into the mainstream culture.