Glocal Matters: A Responseto Jose E. LimonRichard T. Rodrguez

I want to thank Jose E. Limon for not only sharing his work

with me but also providing a valuable critical context in which to

situate my recent thinking, teaching, and scholarship on Latino/a

studies in general and Latino/a literature in particular. One of the

most valuable aspects of Limons article, motivated by Cheryl

Temple Herrs Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From

Ireland to the American Midwest (1996), is the insistence upon

an abiding and fulsome respect for and rendering of the complex-

ity of local cultures in comparison to others in the world while

recognizing that all are in constant but critical interaction with the

global. I want to argue that a Latino/a studies scholarship that

reifies a boundary between transnational or global analytic frame-

works and localized dynamic cultural processes runs the risk of

overlooking or discounting the means by which the global is often

reassessed from the purview of the local. The strength of a critical

regionalist perspective is that it takes the transnational and global

seriously, yet refuses the propensity to bypass local historical and

cultural phenomena.

Take, for example, the region of the US Midwest. If we pay

attention to the trajectory of Latino/a studies as well as the Latino/a

literary history emerging from it, what we see are not mutually

exclusive Chicano/a and Puerto Rican cultural histories that can

only be merged under a university-orchestrated, financially man-

ageable field, which might alternatively be mobilized, with

attachments to Latin America, under the banner of an against the

grain critical globalization. Instead, we can map a complex social

history that grasps the glocalthat is, the intertwined function

of the global and the localwhose key coordinates are provided

by a critical regionalist practice. Indeed, the historical antecedents

Richard T. Rodrguez is Assistant Professor of English and Latina/Latino Studies

at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of a

forthcoming book on kinship discourse in Chicano/a cultural politics since the

1960s.

doi:10.1093/alh/ajn008Advance Access publication February 13, 2008# The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Forpermissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

[W]e can map a complex

social history that grasps

the glocalthat is, the

intertwined function of

the global and the

localwhose key

coordinates are provided

by a critical regionalist

practice.

of a uniquely Latino/a Midwest literary landscape (often unknown

or forgotten) are exemplary of such a practice.

Consider then Revista Chicano-Riquena, whose first issue

was published in the spring of 1973. The journal was the brain-

child of Luis Davila and Nicolas Kanellos, who were at that time

faculty at Indiana University (Kanellos at the Northwest Campus

in Gary and Davila at Bloomington). Based in the Midwest until

its relocation to Houston in late 1979, Revista Chicano-Riquena

published prose, poetry, literary criticism, interviews, reviews, and

art. The journal served as a seminal critical vehicle for the creative

writers, artists, and critics who helped define the historical par-

ameters of Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Latino literature and cul-

tural studies. While the journal could be read as simply linking the

emergent expressive cultures of Chicanos in the Southwest and

Puerto Ricans on the east coast, its title signals for me something

deeperthe complex community formations particular to the

Midwest region of the US.

In other words, conjoining Chicanos and Puerto Ricans in

the context of this journal should be seen as more than an exercise

in comparing the migrational experiences of the two distinct popu-

lations or identifying similarities in colonial/neocolonial histories.

Rather, it reflects the coexistence of these two groups in a

common public sphere. Thus, a critical regionalist perspective

allows for assessing the cross-fertilization of Mexican-American

and Puerto Rican histories and shared lives in Midwest towns and

cities like Chicago, broaching a politics of both collaboration and

conflict connected byto name but a few examplesqueer

kinship formations, intermarriage, shared labor practices, and

resistance to state violence. While the Winter 1977 issue edited by

Puerto Rican poet David Hernandez, famously titled the Nosotros

Anthology, would focus exclusively on Chicago Latino cultural

production, Revista Chicano-Riquena would also take the position

of critical regionalism seriously as evidenced by the journals

occasional special issues spotlighting specific locations from

Wisconsin to Texas, Houston to New York City.

The embrace of critical regionalism evidenced in Revista

Chicano-Riquena would lead to its renaming as The Americas

Review in 1986. In the spring issue of that yearthe first to reflect

the name changethe editorial information reveals that Kanellos

is now identified as publisher while the editors are Julian Olivares

and Jose David Saldvar. Preceding the journals contents is a

statement by the editors explaining the journals new name. They

note that while the journal is aware that Chicanos and Puerto

Ricans remain the dominant Hispanic groups, it has extended

the boundaries of who might qualify for inclusion as a way to

184 Glocal Matters: A Response to Jose E. Limon

grasp the greater presence of a diverse Latino population

(Olivares and Saldvar 4). The editors fittingly rely on Jose Marts

organizing principal of Nuestra America. They write:

Now, in order to publicly embrace all US Hispanic groups in

creative brotherhood, para dar voz a Nuestra America, Our

America, Revista Chicano-Riquena becomes The Americas

Review. Many of our old readers may think that la Revista

has disappeared but this is not so. The change, in name only,

retains the old spirit, con mas vigor aun: to publish the best

in English and Spanish. The Americas Review is dedicated to

the creative expression of El Pueblo Hispano, Our Hispanic

People, and committed to our inclusion in the tradition of

American letters. Y as perduraremos. (4)

According to the editors, then, the newness of the journal relied

principally on opening up membership to El Pueblo Hispano to

in turn expand the boundaries of American literary history. And

while the journal would make occasional nods to Latin America, it

remained committed to foregrounding US-based Latino/a literature.

While the cultures of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and now other

Latino groups were put in dialogue with transnational, hemi-

spheric, and global concerns, the complex dynamics of their local

circumstances were deeded equal significance.

Limons quarrel with Jose and Ramon Saldvar, for example,

reveals how a hurried globalizing reading of . . . complex regionalexperience does not reveal the full outcomes of a regionalist

engagement with the global. In other words, the effort made by

both Saldvars to read globally comes up short by misreading what

is thoroughly taking place locally, therefore resulting in missed

opportunities to set in dialectical motion the global and the local.

The inattention to local complexities and contradictions thus

negates the possibility of understanding how the local might in

fact initiate sturdy linkages with the global to, therefore, jumpstart

the figure of the glocal. Yet, while no doubt hurried, I would

maintain that the Saldvars appraisal of Americo Paredes recog-

nizes the local even if an acute attention to warranted detail isnt

fully provided. That is to say, the border matters propelling their

critical investigations fundamentally emerge from the cultures of

US-based Latino and Latina (or more precisely Chicano and

Chicana) writers and artists. To my mind, this clearly distinguishes

Jose and Ramon Saldvar from scholars who, when adopting the

interpretative tendencies Limon names as the transnational, the

post-national, andin some quartersborder theory, feel

the need to altogether sidestep the local in favor of the global for

American Literary History 185

fear of being read as provincial, outmoded, or lacking in

theoretical sophistication. So while Limon insists that their work

requires more attentive examination in regard to critical regional-

ism, I want to make the case that at the heart of their work still

liesand has since the early days of their critical interventionsa

profound concern for historical, cultural, and political matters

anchored in the local, an unflinching awareness of how place

influences space.

That said, it is my hope that Limons arguments will be

taken up by scholars, particularly those committed to Latino/a lit-

erary and cultural studies. To be sure, a critical regionalist

approach to Latino/a communitiesas I believe I have shown

holds the capacity to throw light on the complexity of local cul-

tures reflected in shared social spaces (which are not always

shared in the spirit of solidarity) that are already or on their way to

becoming unmistakably glocal. At stake is ensuring that we pay

close attention to what is taking place, as Chicano art historian

Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (another advocate of the glocal) puts it, on

the groundthat is, the approximate location of the glocal,

indisputably the most productive region one could possibly

examine.

Works Cited

Olivares, Julian and Jose David

Saldvar. The Americas Review. The

Americas Review 14 (Spring 1986): 4.

Ybarra-Frausto, Tomas. The

Undocumented History of

Chicana/o Art. Conference on

American Art Histories and

Transdisciplinary Practices. University

of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 21

April 2007.

186 Glocal Matters: A Response to Jose E. Limon