is just one method in the genocidal repertoire enabled by
2 what Walter Mignolo calls the “two entangled concepts”
Americas
Alexandra T. Vazquez
Imagine carrying a gargantuan landmass, capped by
glaciers, across your shoulders, the way people pose with
reptiles at Coney Island. “Americas” is an impossible
wonder to take on. This heavy expanse of a sign has the
tendency to weigh down even the most ebullient. It means
nothing and everything. America is named and narrated
after the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci— a
figure whose unverifiable itineraries continue to stump
historians across the centuries (Lush, date unknown;
Arciniegas 2002; de las Casas 2010). Although he was
not the first to encounter all that lay west of Europe, nor
are his voyages fully substantiated or substantiatable,
the ancient continents were made his attribute by the
German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who
imposed it on his 1507 in utero rendering of the world,
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the Universalis Cosmographia (Hébert 2003). The naming,
a grandest of prizes given to this grandest instance of
fronting, carries in it a mystifying credit, a grotesque
trophy, a cartographer’s stamp. Americas has tried hard
to shorthand and eradicate vast and dynamic Indigenous
conceptions of space and time. As a catch-all, it supports
a lazy and willful forgetting of Tawantinsuyu (Quechua
for the four regions of the Inca Empire) and Anáhuac
(Nahuatl for the Aztec’s “land by the waters”). Why
these names don’t roll off all our tongues suggests the
unfamiliar and unrelenting consonants roiling under
our collective surface. This imposition of the Old World
and all its diseased baggage atop the New, the actual and
discursive annihilation of what and who was here before,
10
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of “modernity and coloniality” (Mignolo 2005, 2011;
Quijano 2007). Americas is a utility for the making-vague
and making-available of history and all its submerged
players so that the New World can be easily wedged into
the Old World’s narrative of progress, within which
we’ll include area studies. In other fields that hold up
the North American academy, “The Americas” is what
the field of English, and English discipline, will do just
about anything to repress, or make a special issue of, even
and especially when it allows for “American Literature”
(Saldívar 1991; Brady 2002; Gruesz 2002).
And yet, Americas is one of the dozens, if not hun-
dreds of New World signs (like the “New World”) that
require an “and yet” after an acknowledgment of its fero-
cious development and usages. The “and yet” turns up
voluminous, insurgent actions that have long been pre-
pared for any annihilating project. It is a creative hold-
ing place for that which takes in and moves in the words
of Sylvia Wynter (1995, 7), “beyond the premises of both
celebrants and the dissidents.” And yet, although the
term’s ambiguity has facilitated violence, its very am-
biguity can and has made possible the wondrous avail-
ability of Americas for other means. It is warranted and
needed when there is a clear line between the us and the
them (Martí 2002; Montero 2004). It can be a baroque
altar for study that insists on all the racial, ethnic, gen-
dered, and classed histories that have been lived, danced,
and sounded across national paradigms; a way of retain-
ing the complications and unpredictable effects of the
“coloniality of modernity” without leaving anyone or
anything out. There are as many senses of Americas as
there are Americans. There is no way to take singular pos-
session of it, even if that is the shared and singular aim of
many. Americas suggests all parts north, central, south,
and the archipelagos that spindle out from its corners. It
 is an ongoing, collective process that reveals just how the
New World formed and forms the Old. Take the posthu-
mous rebellion by the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and his
generous minimalist experiments in world-making that
shook up the America pavilion at the 2007 Venice Bien-
nale (Spector et al. 2007). Evoked in whatever language
or paralanguage, Americas can hold a mangrove tangle
of Afro/Hispano/Luso/Franco/Indo/Sino/Creole phonics
and accompaniments. To use “Americas” or “Américas”
might not matter as it can’t ever be fixed or made into
a satisfactory pronoun with orthographic correctives.
Regardless of whether one wants the word to represent
and make legible its internal differences (or not), there is
still the fact of all the unfamiliar and unrelenting accents
roiling above our collective surface. Americas rustles the
singular and plural at once.
And yet, how to take all this in? And just as hard, how
can we ever hope to notate all that Americas retains and
refrains? Herein lies the possible transformative power
of approaching and reproaching the keyword. “Dance
to the hurt!” as Earl Lovelace (1998, 14) once wrote.
Americas requires the setting up of ghetto blasters on
every corner of every sentence. All that makes it and is
Copyright © 2017. New York University Press. All rights reserved.
made up by it in music expands the repertoire of theory
and theorists we associate with the Americas in Latina/o
studies. Music allows for us to pick up the ends of the
hemisphere’s vertical lines and work them into a helix,
double-dutch style, where all, but especially girls, have
made beautiful movements. Hear a most palpable in-
stance in Rita Moreno’s version of “América,” after and
through Chita Rivera, in that standard penned by Ber-
nstein and Sondheim for West Side Story. This song, an
overheard castaway that deserves and requires further
listening, is mistakenly shrugged off—via its women’s
chorus—as assimilatory fodder. In Moreno’s telling, af-
ter Rivera, there is a palpable aesthetics developed by
immigrant women who make do and find ways to stay
AmerICAs
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alive despite all that works against them. They set us up,
to sample the great phrase by Frances R. Aparicio, for
“listening to the listeners” (Aparicio 1998). This song is
performative anticipation of and feminist trouble for El
Plan de Santa Bárbara that followed (Chicano Coordinat-
ing Council 1969). Several decades later, this “América”
is made the primary sample and activist grounds for an
anthem that marked the conquest’s quincentenary: Los
Fabulosos Cadillacs’ 1992 “Quinto Centenario” (Play
it!). Their version of this brutal anniversary occupies
the Broadway standard version of “América” so that we
may listen to the volatile marrow established by some
of its past performers. The song leans on this primary
songtext as a rumbic invocation, uses it as a suitcase
to carry the ska bomba that jumps out of it several
bars later. And when the song shows most of its cards,
one will need to jump up and down, hard. The an-
them reveals how Americas can’t help its myriad punk
anti-assimilationisms.
Americas is a sound system: its components, tangled
wiring, and conch shells conspire to make immersion the
only way in. “Do It Properly,” instructs the house super
group 2 Puerto Ricans, a Blackman, and a Dominican—
just a few of the company members who turn our ears to
the inter-American grounds that are always in search of a
vocal. To tend to and aerate these grounds, Americas de-
mands that its scholars (whether musician, balloon seller,
professor, nurse) be ready for anything; to do Americas
properly means always keeping the dance circle flexible
enough for all and any kinds of exits and entries. It in-
sists that we change direction, if not give up on the idea
of direction once and for all, as Louise Bennett’s (2008)
“Colonisation in Reverse” has for so long taught us. Amer-
icas might denote a particular geography, but it is also the
kind of anti-cartographic object, curricular and aesthetic
and alive, that gets us toward a more expansive sense of
place and time and people.
alexandra T. Vazquez 11