Insider/Outsider Practices: Denise Chavez is a real Chola

So I lost all of my documents a few days ago when my computer crashed and I’ve had to re-write all of these blogs. In a way I’m glad that happened. After last night’s class and Deb’s presentation on Bennet I am seeing Denise Chavez’s work through a different lens. Denise Chavez is from Las Cruces, NM. She is a Nueva Mexicana in the truest sense. Espírtu of the Southwest and a good La Llorona fearing mujer. A product of her landscape, Chavez takes the stage and commands the audience’s attention with the forceful presence of the Organ Mountains. During her performance at the Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Lecture Series, Chavez stressed the importance of belonging to the land from which we came. She told stories about growing up in New Mexico and she read a piece reminiscent of Jimmy Santiago-Baca. It’s hard to write about Denise Chavez’s because it is so embedded and situated in being a Chicana from New Mexico. Every aspect of her screams New Mexican but that quality is indefinable. I remember last semester in ENG 540 I was tasked with presenting Martín and Meditations. Since we had been talking about insider/outsider practices I thought it would be an opportune moment to deconstruct and imagine how an insider might read that text as opposed to an outsider. This presentation failed tremendously because it was nearly impossible for an outsider to ‘imagine’ being an ‘insider.’ The experience, socialization, historical/political context, linguistic knowledge, code-switching strategies, and everything else involved in being an insider is so vastly complex that an outsider cannot access or acquire the persona of an insider by merely trying to ‘imagine’ what it may be like and if they did try to artificially enact insider practices the exercise becomes reductive. To complicate this even further, if knowledge is always contingent and rhetoric is always situated in some knowledge framework then the linguistic and social practices of an insider discourse community, like that of the South Valley or Southern New Mexico, rely on the a shifting knowledge. What I mean is if we shape knowledge and knowledge shapes us (a dialectical process) and we communicate based on this shifting structure then even insider discourse communities are not static but always changing. How is it ever possible for an outsider to acquire insider practices if those practices are ever-changing? This is what I see in Denise Chavez’s work. It would be easy to say that she uses New Mexican insider cliché’s like references to green chile, mariachi music, baptisms, el chupacabra (or el chups as his friends like to call him), and low-riders but Chavez is referring to these uniquely New Mexican traditions in ways that only insiders can appreciate. However, this quality, this insider use of traditional aspects of being New Mexican, is hard to define. I think perhaps a good way to illustrate this is Deb’s explanation of Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter.’ Our traditions, our unique New Mexican-ness, the artifacts that make the people from here New Mexican are our vibrant matter. Chavez knows this and uses these artifacts to generate meaning and connections to our land. We New Mexicans are part of an ecology, we thrive on ritual, and the non-human aspects of our culture (our environment, our traditions, our chola y cholo –ness, our “mira you know what I mean, or no, vato-hombre y que?) are just as important as the human ones. The vibrant matter is generative and foundational to who we are.