The Mixed Race Project: Anzaldúa, Ozeki and Morales

by Ash Kestler

Gloria Anzaldúa’s, “La Concienca De La Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness,” explains the process of how a mixed race person transcends the consciousness of duality and enters the mestiza consciousness. Jane-Takagi-Little, Ruth Ozeki’s main character in My Year of Meats, provides a lens to examine the “alien” borderland identity that Anzaldúa envisions and one way it is restructured to fit a specific hybrid character. In junction with Jane, the character Gregory1, from Alejandro Morales’ Rag Doll Plagues, challenges the specificities and goals of the mestiza but directs his readers to the same colonial history and problems with in institutionalized racism.

Ozeki and Morales locate their protagonists differently. Ozeki uses My American Wife! to illustrate Jane as a cultural mediator for Japanese housewives and American beef distributor, “BEEF-X.” Jane’s location literally between the two countries, and ethnically part of each, adds to the mestiza’s “perpetual transition.” (Anzaldúa 140) Gregory is located inside a hegemonic spectrum directly tied to imperial powers. His role in Rag Doll Plagues is not so ambivalent. By the end of both novels, Jane escapes the “state of perplexity” (Anzaldúa 140) induced by hybridity while Gregory ceases to go beyond recognizing his function in racialized society. This realization is part of Morales’ mixed race project and the first step in achieving Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness. Morales present a challenge to the mestiza consciousness, as he does not present the need to transcend duality, if he offers alternatives, is debatable. The closing statement, “I am no longer me. I am transfigured into all those that have gone before me…” (Morales 200), suggests that Gregory has adopted a new consciousness but one that is particular to his ancestry- of duel heritage. The “ancient tear” he sheds conjures the history of tension between his colonizer/colonist ancestry. Gregory insists upon a consciousness that looks back in time at historical injustice, while Jane looks forwards to a creative mestiza production, both however, stem from the same racial ambivalence.

The first step in gaining the mestiza consciousness begins as the subject realizes hybridity as a “dual or multiple personality plagued with restlessness.” (Anzaldúa 140) (Ozeki 9) Ozeki’s first-person descriptions of Jane, as a tall, “half” Japanese “freak;” “a cultural pimp,” (Ozeki 9) and “a hybrid or a mutant,” (Ozeki 51) mirrors what Anzaldúa calls the “struggle of the flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war.” (140) This notion reinforces Jane’s tendencies to relate her indecisive qualities and feeling of ambiguity to her “polysexual, polyracial,” identity. Morales fashioned Gregory with his own insecurities concerning his racial plurality. In the second book, “Delhi,” Gregory consistently compares himself to Sandra. She is “perfect and beautiful (75) while he is “fragmented” and “invisible.” (79) Both Jane and Gregory refigure the mestiza identity, or at least the inherent ambiguity as correlative to their physical appearance.

Anzaldúa explains, that in order to achieve the mestiza consciousness, a person must move beyond the ambivalent phase and proceed through an “often painful emotional event.” (Anzaldúa 141) This moment, Anzaldúa reiterates, is where a third consciousness (mestiza) is “added,” and while it “remains a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion.” (141) In My Year of Meats, Jane’s ‘emotional event’ is her miscarriage. It is what solidifies her research on DES, and what eventually leads to her making a documentary, which she had been previously too indecisive to pursue. Ozeki has Jane rediscover identity through the documentary, and uses it as a metaphor for mixed-race. “In the Year of Meats, truth wasn’t stranger than fiction, it was fiction. Ma says I’m neither nor there…half documentarian, half fabulist” Ozeki writes. “Maybe sometimes you have to make things up, to tell truths that alter outcomes.” (360) The truth, explored in Jane’s documentary is a half-truth – semi-fictional, similar to her own identity. More interesting is that her creative production is part of a Japanese-American genre of literature, much like her child would have been. Her miscarriage, or “emotional event,” is what led her to this creation, and the mestiza consciousness, which Ozeki defines as a vacillating truth that Jane becomes comfortable navigating in the end.

Morales challenges the mestiza consciousness by not shifting “out of habitual formations,” (Anzaldúa 141) or constructions of race. Part of the mestiza project is to de-fragment the self and “reinterpret history.” (Anzaldúa 142) Morales uses Gregory to re-tell the colonial history, present and future of Mexico as a mixed race person. While Rag Doll Plagues can be seen as a reinterpretation of sorts, Morales purposely plants himself around faux-scientific ideas relevant to the history of colonial imperialism, and constant dualities. More importantly, Morales’ project is focused on revealing the ‘diseased’ state of mixed race people under colonial power, not transcendence. In the third book, “Lamex,” Morales satirizes the notion of purity with the MCM- “Mexican City Mexican,” who are farmed for blood and are now encouraged to reproduce only to aid the ‘higher existence.’ (194) This section highlights the hierarchies of society and the reality of history. “In a matter of time,” Gregory says, “ Mexican blood would run in all the population of the LAMEX corridor. Mexican blood would gain control of the land it lost almost two hundred and fifty years ago.” (195) Morales extends the blood motif revealing that the only way the ‘browning’ of this society would occur, would be under forced institutionalized settings.

Morales complicates Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness, by showing how identity and reality is based on mainstream societies’ beliefs. In “Delhi,” Sandra’s condition with AIDS is very similar. Morales depicts her as being unable to creatively produce or perform because of her communities’ pre-conceived notions of AIDS. Morales manifests a world where people are constantly defined by an ‘other.’ In the opening paragraph of Rag Doll Plagues, Morales contrasts his view of Mexico city, a place rampant with the “immoral racial mixtures of humanity” with descriptions of Gregory as a “loyal physician,” riding in a elegant carriage. (11)Immediately, Morales reveals the vertical structure of society, illustrating Gregory being hoisted in a palanquin on tameme shoulders, at that point raised physically and morally above everyone in Mexico City. These visceral images are always centered on making the reader aware of the disadvantages attached to mixed-race people. In this respect, Morales’ writing emphasizes Steven Masami Ropps’ point; ignoring race is “misguided at best.” Morales forces readers to digest race viscerally with the bloody history still in tact. Ropp assigns to the “multiracial project” a “recognition of the persistent and pervasive role of race, not only…white racism but also as it manifests throughout the thinking of all participants in a a racialized society.” (269) Ozeki, provides an ambiguous approach – extremely fitting for a mestiza.

Ropp and Anzaldúa are not necessarily incompatible and neither are Ozeki and Morales. The recognition of racial tension is the key aspect of self-awareness for both Jane and Gregory. However, the mestiza offers a new way of thinking – a new conscious “of the borderlands,” and Morales and Ropp value identity and it’s history as means of challenging social norms. Morales is brilliant in pointing out the numerous misconceptions about race, purity and disease, that as an informed reader, it is easy to qualify as abnormal, or at the least inhumane. By the end of Rag Doll Plagues, Morales has created a quasi-realistic situation. Blood farms for MCM’s seem plausible when paired with the colonial history recounted in “La Mona.” Ozeki also evokes the colonial history of enslavement, forced labor and rape evident in mixed race ancestral past. However, Jane steps outside of the ‘other’ and becomes self- defining. Through Jane, the mestiza path is redefined, but laid out as a process that begins at ambiguity and ends with a hybrid progeny- a documentary symbolic of the mestiza’s “new mythos.” (Anzaldúa 141) In both novels, the mixed race project is aimed at ending the cycle of “rape, violence and war,” (Anzaldúa 141) which unfortunately is synonymous with the history of the racially mixed.


1 “Gregory” refers to all three Gregory’s (or Gregario) in “Rag Doll Plagues,” as I understand each of them as an extension of one another (historically and structurally.) I will refer to them in unison unless otherwise stated.