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Doing the Hemisphere Differently: A Response to Ralph Bauer

As someone trained in postmodern theory, feminist theory, Chicana/o studies, and political activism, my focus on the later periods of American literature seemed inevitable. After all, the intellectual formations and identities I study did not exist prior to 1848, maybe not even prior to 1968. A focus on the present often coincides with a longing for history, a somewhat naive hope that history will provide the “facts” that underlie the contemporary. This is why my students always want me to give them history lectures. This is why scholars in Chicana/o studies, like myself, keep turning back to writers like Marı́a Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832– 95) in search of a foremother, when Ruiz de Burton herself would never recognize what Chicana/os mean when they talk about the Americas, identity, race, or the borderlands. Contemporary Chicana/os and Ruiz de Burton would not get along very well at all, in fact, but this disharmony is usually suppressed in order to create a genealogy for Mexican-descent writers in the US. It is true that scholars in my field often turn to the past only in its relation to our present (as in the Heath Anthology’s “exclusive geographic focus on those colonial territories that would later become the US”). We are hopeless postmoderns. Does this make us unfaithful to our origins? Ralph Bauer might say “yes.” However, I have never been very committed to faith. It is good to be reminded that the US is a recent minority in the hemisphere, and I find Bauer’s argument to be vitally important. I totally agree that we need to rethink the orientation of American studies, which, even in its hemispheric modes, is still