Amber Jensen (South Dakota State University): The Migration of Masculinity in Victor Villaseñor’s Macho!

Stuart Hall describes cultural identities as “points of identification” that, though rooted in the past, are “[f]ar from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past.” Instead, he argues, “they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power.” In this paper, I will discuss Victor Villaseñor’s novel, Macho! (1997), in light of Hall’s understanding of cultural identity. The novel tells the story of Roberto, a young Mexican man, whose perception of what it means to be macho, ser un hombre, transforms as he migrates to the US for the first time. Though the novel has been criticized for trying to do too much, Roberto’s experiences with violence and harsh living and working conditions, as well as his encounters with American farm bosses, union protestors, and both documented and undocumented Mexican migrant workers sagaciously create space for the multiple macho identities that can develop on the borderland between US and Mexican culture.

Hyper-masculine, macho stereotypes are often inauspiciously applied to representations of Mexican men in the US, Mexican, and Chicano cultures. However, as Matthew C. Guttman realizes in his study of machismo in Mexico City, “[e]ither we can accept that there are multiple and shifting meanings of macho and machismo, or we can essentialize what were already reified generalizations about Mexican men in the first place.” By exploring the “multiple and shifting meanings” of macho that Roberto carries with him across the US border and back to Mexico in Villaseñor’s novel, I hope to open up a conversation about the multiple hybrid realities and identities created on the borderland between these two historically, economically, and politically bound countries.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Theorizing Diaspora. Eds Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 236-37.

Gutmann, Matthew C. The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. Berkeley: U California P, 1996. 241-42.

Mary Carlson (South Dakota State University): “Get Your Ass to Mars”: The Clash of Middle East Values and Cosmopolitan Ideals in Total Recall .

Paul Verhoeven's 1990 movie, Total Recall is a story that revolves around a protagonist secret agent with replaced memories and a confused identity (Douglas Quaid/Hauser); the film's narrative highlights many of the ideas within Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism (2006). Some of these ideas include the need to take responsibility for other cultures that cannot defend themselves (in this case, mutants of the planet Mars who have evolved from lack of air and poorly constructed Mars domes). Also, the film stresses that tolerance aids co-existence, as well as the existence of ever-occurring change within cultures.

Melani McAlister defines moral geographies as: “[...] deeply historical and highly contested products, forged at the nexus of state power, cultural productions, and sedimented presumption” (5). This paper will show that these mutant/Middle Easterners have changed their moral geographies from supporting colonization of Mars to opposing forced labor to support the American war effort. Since the film heavily revolves around the memory of the protagonist, I will address the idea of historical amnesia as a way to justify imperialism and war.

Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics In A World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006.

McAlister, Melani. Introduction. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle

East Since 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 1-42.


Nancy Preteau (South Dakota State University): Unmixing the Melting Pot: Exploring White-Ethnic Enclaves in Spring Came on Forever.

The United States has long been referred to as a melting pot, as a country that “transform[s] the foreigners into indistinguishable Americans in a generation or two at more,” especially in the 1800s and 1900s (Vecoli 1). In order to perpetuate a melting pot in the United States, one would assume that cultures would have intermingled and intermarried, thus creating the patchwork American. However, the white-ethnics that immigrated to the United States and settled in rural areas did not always willingly give up their cultural tendencies, nor did they often leave the safety of ethnic enclaves established throughout the United States. This idea complicates the concept of the melting pot: if these white-ethnics in rural America showed such hesitation in assimilating and intermingling, how did the United States become the mixture it presently is?

Bess Streeter Aldrich demonstrates this tendency to create enclaves and hold on to a cultural heritage in her 1935 novel Spring Came On Forever; the novel traces the lives of five generations of German-Lutheran immigrants from 1866 to 1935 and shows a varying willingness to abandon German culture and become the melted American. The text proves an interesting study of the formation of America from the Nebraska territory.

Works Cited

Aldrich, Bess Streeter. Spring Came On Forever. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985.

Vecoli, Rudolph J. “European Americans: From Immigrants to Ethnics.” International

Migration Review. 6.4 (1972): 403-434.

Total Recall. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. TriStar Pictures, 1990.