Friday from the Archives: “Carolina Outlier: An Interview with María DeGuzmán” by Joan Conwell with photography by María DeGuzmán in NCLR 2013
Dr. María DeGuzmán is a professor in the English and Comparative Literature Department, the Director of Latina/o Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the author of Spain’s Long Shadow and Buenas Noches, American Culture. She has written on Latina/o literature and Queer Latina cultural production. In addition to being a scholar-activist and founder of the first Latina/o Studies program in the Southeast, she is a poet and conceptual photographer whose work has been exhibited locally, nationally,
and internationally.
Conwell: In your book, Spain’s Long Shadow, you talk about how the construction of Anglo American identity is almost a reflection of Spanish culture.
DeGuzmán: Yes, one third of it was Mexico, and Spain was all over the Southern border. Look at the names of the states: Colorado, Arizona, Nuevo México, California, Florida all have Spanish names; they all were Spanish territories. The huge Louisiana Purchase, before it was French, it was Spanish. So really, Spain is part of the US identity. That has just continued. Mexico is part of the US identity. Latinas/os are an integral part of US identity. They’re not foreigners; they’re not something foreign; they’re something that’s been there all along. St. Augustine is the oldest city; the first printing press in the Americas was actually a Spanish printing press; and the first book written in what would become the US was written by a Hispanic; so there are tremendous ironies that come out of our lack of historical knowledge, and I get on my soapbox about it.
Well, I think it does make a difference because what was considered the Old Guard of Southern literature
is still thought of as male, even though, among the classics, there are so many women writers.
It’s crazy because there are so many classic Southern women writers – Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor.
Eudora Welty and Margaret Mitchell
There’s so many. Because there’s this constant erasure of women’s contributions under patriarchy. And we definitely still live under patriarchy, especially in this country – when you look at our Senate and House of Representatives, you realize how patriarchal the whole thing is. It seems to me that unless we insist on our contributions, they’re going to get away from us. So at least if we try to insist, then something will be left over by the time the erasure’s been done.
We didn’t get into how what you’re doing with the photography involves reflections and mirrors. And refractions. That’s where I really started to see the overlap, or what I thought was the overlap between the scholarly textual work and your photography. It was not even just in the text itself, but in the reflections of it.
Well, I suppose you could say, that is what interests me about art: What is art? Art is a refraction of our experience; it’s not a reflection. To say it’s a reflection is to subordinate art into a kind of secondary realm, which is very dangerous – which I think is one of the reasons we don’t really support the arts, because we think, “Oh art, isn’t that nice?” It’s something that we do when we run out of things to do, and my point is to go way back to the question of agency, that art is a refraction in the sense that it isn’t a mere reflection. We bend
our experience into something else in conveying it artistically. And it comes around. What we produce in the art has the possibility of bending our experience again and creating a new reality.
Read the entire interview on ProQuest and add the NCLR 2013 issue to your collection.
