C h a pt e r O n e

The Translingual Book

In order to begin examining the ways in which translingual po-­

A etics contests settler monolingualisms in Anglophone North America,
I will—­indeed, must—­consider the case of Spanish in the United States.
Discussions of linguistic difference and of language politics in the US in the
twenty-­first century tend to refer, whether implicitly or explicitly, to Spanish.
Spanish, after all, is the native language of 41 million US Americans, and is spo-
ken by an additional 11.6 million bilinguals. Despite this demographic density,
monolingual tendencies in the disciplinary formation of US literary studies have
meant that scholars of US American literature who do not work in fields such
as Latinx or Chicanx literatures persistently neglect to consider the presence
and position of Spanish in the US.1 This disciplinary replication of and adher-
ence to US monolingualist formations colludes with the casting of Spanish as
the poster language of linguistic nativism. That is, the persistent depiction of
Spanish as a “foreign” language in the US is reflected in literary scholars’ failure
to consider the relationships between Spanish and English as they are depicted
in literature or to frame these relationships as a fundamental condition of US
literary production. While US literary studies implicitly portrays the English lan-
guage as longstanding, historical, continuous, and “native,” dominant discourses
within the field align with broader cultural discourses that portray Spanish as
emergent, contemporary, and immigrant—­and as an ethno-­linguistic difference
that is merely personal or cultural.2 Discussions of literary uses of Spanish or of
the relationships between Spanish and English are, then, generally confined to
subfields, which, like the language itself, are imagined as subordinate, minor, and
particular.
In this chapter, I undertake a shift away from the characterization of Span-
ish as a present-­bound immigrant language in the United States in order to
26 • ch a p t er one

demonstrate the necessity of framing Spanish simultaneously as a colonized

language within the US and as a colonial language in the hemisphere. That is,
the diminishing and containment of Spanish in US literary studies conceals
the fact that Spanish, like English, arrived in the Americas long ago as a tool
of consolidation and conquest. The texts that I will examine in this chapter do
not negate US Latinx communities’ understandings of themselves as colonized
peoples.3 However, they complicate this perspective by calling attention to the
temporal and spatial overlay of different colonial, racial, and national histories
and ideologies.4 These works acknowledge the conditions of US imperialism
that have historically brought and continue to bring Spanish-­speaking popula-
tions within the borders of the United States. They also work to reframe domi-
nant representations of the Spanish language through a palimpsestic layering of
histories of Spanish colonization, Latin American states’ colonial relationships
to their territories and subjects, and contemporary US imperialism. Paying par-
ticular attention to the violence enacted at the meeting points of these distinct
formations, the works I read here frame the relationship between Spanish and
English not as a strictly national or US question but as one that requires the
tracing of hemispheric and transnational histories. In order to unpack multiple
and simultaneous colonialisms, these works recast the seeming opposition be-
tween Spanish and English in contemporary geopolitics by placing this struggle
within the infrastructures of Indigenous communication technologies.5
This chapter examines two book arts–based poetic projects: Instan (2002),
which was created by the US-­based Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña,
and Codex Espangliensis (1998, 2000), collaboratively produced by the Mexican
American performance artist and poet Guillermo Gómez-­Peña with visual art-
ist Enrique Chagoya and book artist Felicia Rice.6 Each of these books veers
away from the bilingual aesthetics that characterize literary representations of
spoken vernaculars and from the code-­switching patterns typically inscribed
in novels.7 Instead, Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña stage linguistic difference through
the form of the book itself. That is, Instan and Codex Espangliensis combine the
structures of the Western book with other forms, drawing upon the Andean
khipu and the Mesoamerican codex, respectively. The khipu and the codex—­
a system comprised of carefully knotted, colored strings and a painted
screenfold—­require that readers undertake movements in three-­d imensional
 The Translingual Book • 27

space in order to derive meaning from them. Appropriated and refashioned in

Vicuña’s and Gómez-­Peña’s works, the khipu, the codex, and the movements
required to decipher them become physical, performative engagements with
Indigenous communication technologies and with the colonial histories that
have largely prevented these from being considered as books or as having the
capacity to transmit knowledge.8
In drawing upon the khipu and the codex, Instan and Codex Espangliensis
foreground a writing and reading body—­or, perhaps more properly, a meaning-­
making body—­whose gestures produce relationships with an otherness that
is limited neither to the human nor to the subjective. Rather, this otherness
broadly includes entities such as languages, communication technologies, and
the knowledge systems that they contain. In attending to the ways in which
these two poets adapt the form of the Western book, I engage the historical con-
vention of associating the book with the human body. Not only were medieval
manuscripts written on vellum, a treated animal skin, but the parts and func-
tions of contemporary books are named after bodily structures—­even the most
ordinary, mass-­produced books have spines, bleeds, heads, tails, and so on. Many
book artists engage this historical association, using conventional homologies
between body and book to frame encounters with books as embodied, tactile
meetings with a human or human-­like other.9 The syncretic, translingual books
I consider here reimagine the conventional association between body and book
in ways that escape the intersubjective logics of witnessing and recognition
that ground contemporary theoretical discussions of precarity. I argue that
Vicuña’s and Gómez-­Peña’s adaptations of the Western book produce a differ-
ently embodied relationship to it, which enables them to represent colonialisms
as ongoing, spatiotemporally overlapping processes that are apprehended in
and shape the body: they are profoundly physical. Most importantly, in working
through the materiality of the book, Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña represent encoun-
ters with otherness in ways that do not resolve into meetings between persons
or subjects. Rather, their syncretic books emphasize materiality and tactility,
prioritizing the body over the abstractions of the person or the subject. Vicuña
and Gómez-­Peña obliquely recount long histories of colonial violence that have
produced and continue to produce conditions of precarity for Indigenous bod-
ies, communication technologies, and knowledge systems. In foregrounding
28 • ch a p t er one

bodies and knowledge systems alike, these translingual books propose an ethics
that is not based in a relationship between self and other, but in a much wider
network of relations that cannot be reduced to the unit of the individual person.
I read these two works’ attention to embodiment and emphasis on Indig-
enous communication technologies as reframing the questions of precarity that
have recently engaged scholars across a number of fields: I suggest that when
taken together, they provide an opportunity for rethinking discourses of precar-
ity through the lens of settler colonialism. While Vicuña in particular explicitly
engages the discourse and terminology of precarity, both poets step away from
the framing of precarity as a presentist crisis narrative describing the disag-
gregation of a previously whole self or subject. I offer a rethinking of precarity
through Vicuña’s articulation of lo precario, which she has explored in sculp-
ture, performance, and text for nearly fifty years: unlike precarity’s emphasis
on the attrition of selfhood, lo precario describes bodily vulnerability and high-
lights capacities for relation, but it focuses on nonsubjective and at times even
nonpresent entities. Vicuña constructs analogies between body and book in
order to represent an encounter with otherness that is protected from the fore-
closure into subjectivity that takes place within discourses of recognition and
witnessing. Reading her work alongside Gómez-­Peña’s, I show that this transla-
tion into subjectivity affirms the colonial knowledge systems that produce con-
ditions of precarity for Indigenous peoples, languages, and knowledge systems.
That is, Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña do not frame their works as representing and
bearing witness to the plight of a precarious Indigenous other; instead, their
texts draw upon Indigenous communication technologies in order to de-­center
the singular, individual, and independent selfhood that the Indigenous other
is prevented from achieving. Moreover, their appropriations and adaptations of
these communication technologies foreground embodied practices of convey-
ing knowledge and making relation. What is precarious in their works then, is
neither the self nor a witnessed other, but the bodies and knowledge systems
that have been and continue to be threatened.
Working through a translingual poetics materialized in the form of the book
itself, Vicuña’s and Gómez-­Peña’s hemispherically oriented works represent
competing colonialisms, paying particular attention to the violence produced
 The Translingual Book • 29

at their intersections. These texts refuse the presentist tropes that character-
ize discussions of Spanish in the US and their focus on Latinx “emergence.”10
Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña instead turn to questions of temporality and history,
materializing these in the form of the book itself. Their works go beyond the
US’s structuring linguistic division by incorporating an array of Indigenous and
European languages and by excavating etymologies from ancient Greek and
Latin. Using the techniques of book arts to combine the khipu and the codex
with the Western book, Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña contain the division between
English and Spanish within the frameworks of Indigenous communication
technologies. Rather than rearticulating a binary relationship of oppression
between the US’s two most commonly spoken languages, the poets highlight
the interconnection between them as similar, if often opposed, European set-
tler strategies.
It should be said, however, that Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña are relatively privi-
leged art-­world figures and that their appropriations of Indigenous communica-
tion technologies tend to situate these technologies as remnants of a vanished
past, belonging to no one in the present.11 Although these works do not mean-
ingfully contribute to the critical project of Indigenous sovereignty, I contend
that Instan and Codex Espangliensis are able to speak to experiences that are
not their authors’ own and to say more than their authors’ personal positionings
might suggest. I argue that reading Instan and Codex Espangliensis together
reveals a materialized translingual poetics, in which indigeneity is at the cen-
ter and Indigenous communication technologies are foundational. Vicuña and
Gómez-­Peña similarly use these technologies, drawing upon histories that pre-
date the formation of settler colonial states. Their rematerializations of the book
stage encounters with otherness that refuse to resolve into a meeting of sub-
jects or persons. Instan and Codex Espangliensis place the linguistic and textual
histories of colonialism at the center of their inquiry, and they seek to avoid
the privileging of the individual that subtends colonial discourse. For both, the
formal and material enactment of a dialogue with Indigenous communication
technologies provides a robust alternative to contemporary discourses on pre-
carity: they de-­center the subject, reject the presentism of crisis, and emphasize
continuities of vulnerability across histories of settler colonialism.12
30 • ch a p t er one

Precarity and Lo Precario

In the introduction to this book, I explained that while certain schools of con-
temporary poetry, such as the poetics of witness, salve the wounds of violence
by translating social nonpersons into poetic persons, translingual poetics, in a
variety of ways, refuses to perform this translation.13 Rather, I suggested that
the requirement that others—­a lready subjected to transformative violence—­
appear in the form of the person in order to receive recognition or redress valo-
rizes the category of personhood and its underlying structure of exclusion. This
translation into personhood empowers the witness to rewrite and transform
the other, according to the witness’s own concept of what constitutes a person.
The fundamental imbalance of power between the witness and the other who
is witnessed is an insufficient foundation for ethics. Not only has this framing
of ethics produced a hierarchized relationship between self and other, it also
imposes an anthropocentric limit on the ethical relationship, framing it as an
encounter between two human individuals.
The bodily encounter with a (not-­quite-­)human other that is often staged
in artists’ books places these works in dialogue with twentieth-­century philo-
sophical discussions of witness, which, in the aftermath of the Shoah, sought
to examine how the self comes into being in relationship with an other.14 Foun-
dational to this body of thought is the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who
sought to show that human relation is intrinsic and foundational to subjectivity.
Grounding his work in phenomenological description, Levinas claims that the
“I” discovers its own particularity when it is singled out by the gaze of the other.
Levinas frames this face-­to-­face encounter as the basis of a dialogical sociality,
in which the self is constituted not simply through the other’s direct address
but through the very feeling—­perhaps anticipatory—­of being summoned by
the other. Levinas’s philosophy has been taken up by other philosophers, par-
ticularly Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, as well as by poets such as Carolyn
Forché, as the foundation for an ethics or a poetics of witness. While these en-
gagements with his philosophy differ from one another in important ways, they
similarly conceive of witnessing not as a mimetic recounting or narrative, not
as an act of memory, but as a response to the fundamental call of the other, in
the manner of an ethical or political act. These more recent theories of witness
 The Translingual Book • 31

also describe the self as grounded in the existence of the other, arguing that we
come into being as selves in and through our encounters with others. However,
these theories depart somewhat from Levinas’s in that they suggest—­especially
in Butler’s case—­that the self is comparatively stable while the other, having
been subjected to violence, is basically rendered inchoate as a result of their
suffering. Butler proposes that from the witness’s position of relative security,
the witness can repair or transform the other, conferring normative personhood
upon them and allowing them to reenter into circuits of recognition.15
While the term precarity is freighted with widely divergent valences and
traces its theoretical trajectories through ethics, psychoanalysis, communica-
tion theory, economics, and political science, theories of precarity are typically
structured as presentist crisis narratives describing the disaggregation of a pre-
viously whole and stable subjectivity. Alternately conceptualized as a diffuse
affect connected to the dissolution of the capitalist fantasy of the good life, as
a description of dependency, need, and the relational condition of social being,
and as a process of social and economic redistribution, theories of precarity em-
phasize the unequal but spreading distribution of risk and vulnerability across
populations.16 Precarity is generally understood to refer to the casualization
of labor in post-­Fordist economies and the contemporaneous collapse of social
welfare in Europe and the United States. Most theorists describe it either as an
acute crisis of the present or as a somewhat more longstanding phenomenon
beginning in the 1970s.17 The term tends not to be used to describe more long-
standing conditions of violence, nor is it typically used to name the colonial
violence that threatens the futures of Indigenous languages and communities.
Although theories of precarity differ significantly in their emphases and ap-
proaches, they typically describe two figures: a non-­or less-­precarious witness-­
mourner and a vulnerable other undergoing some form of dissolution. Moreover,
they tend to propose that a broadening or an extension of circuits of recogni-
tion is the solution for the distribution of violence that precarity names. The
witness-­mourner dynamic is most evident in ethico-­psychoanalytic accounts
of precarity such as Judith Butler’s. Butler describes precarity as the capacity
of a previously whole or stable self to be “undone” by another in witnessing
their spectacular vulnerability.18 What was formerly whole comes apart, and
precarity describes this fragmentation, dissolution, and transformation. Butler
32 • ch a p t er one

draws upon and critiques the work of Levinas in order to suggest the political
and ethical utility of mourning; in the face-­to-­face encounter with the other,
with the radical contingency of the other’s existence, mourning, she contends,
expands “the boundaries that constitute what will and will not appear within
public life, the limits of a publicly acknowledged field of appearance” (xviii).
Butler explains that in order for mourning to take place, a recognizable face
must appear, the face of another who has suffered, if not succumbed to, extreme
forms of violence. Butler’s theory of precarity relies on the presence of a witness
who can observe and testify to the appearance of the face of the other. This
witness then becomes a mourner and, in mourning, makes the other’s face ap-
pear within public view. The witness’s mourning can be understood as a public
performance: it draws the face of the other into “public life” and into the realm
of public discourse. The witness’s recognizable selfhood or personhood comes
apart in mourning, and this public performance of the witness’s own undoing
makes the other’s precarity seem more and more unacceptable to the majoritar-
ian sphere. As the witness’s own selfhood is undone and destabilized through
their encounter with the other, however, the two arrive at a more ethical rela-
tionship. Through witness and mourning—­and, therefore, through the other’s
violation—­self and other come to realize their dialogic coconstitution, the ab-
solutely fundamental nature of their coimbrication and dependence. Butler’s
work exemplifies a commonality among theories of precarity, which is that they
proceed from and require the secure selfhood of a witness figure, whose emo-
tional undoing is unacceptable even though the direct violence enacted upon
the other is—­until the witness’s performative mourning reframes it—­generally
tolerable.
Vicuña’s engagement with precarity stands at a distance from such elabora-
tions of the concept. Rather than theorizing a foundational intersubjectivity
or describing the actions of a (comparatively) secure witness or mourner, Vi-
cuña frames bodily vulnerability as a question of relation, offering a differently
grounded sense of ethics. Her concept of relation is at once more expansive
and more materially grounded than the foundational Western abstractions of
self and other seen in the philosophical literature on precarity and witnessing.
That is, Vicuña emphasizes the ways in which bodies, objects, languages, and
knowledge systems come together and depend upon one another. Working al-
legorically, through sculpture and performance, she suggests that relationships
 The Translingual Book • 33

between animate and inanimate entities—­from individual bodies to natural

elements to languages and knowledge systems—­a re all part of the ethical re-
lationship and can all be made to suffer conditions of precarity as a result of
colonial violence. That is, her articulation of lo precario attends to the ways in
which violence does not simply threaten selves or populations but threatens
ways of perceiving and understanding the world.
Vicuña’s five-­decade exploration of lo precario, begun in Chile in the mid-­
1960s and continued after her move to New York in 1980, avoids the humanis-
tic and anthropocentric approaches that characterize most theoretical articula-
tions of precarity. Rather than framing precarity as the present-­tense crisis of
the self ’s disaggregation, Vicuña’s sculptural and filmic works describe lo pre-
cario through a bodily vulnerability imposed across and through a long colonial
history. Vicuña does not position either herself or the viewers of her texts as
witnesses or mourners whose spectacular grief shores up protection for a vul-
nerable other. Instead, her works augment the relationships among languages
and cultures, among animate and inanimate entities, attending to the material-
ity of the body and to the materialization of discourse in the book and in other
communication technologies.
Vicuña’s exploration of lo precario is most visible not in her poetry but in
her precarios—­t iny, sculptural constructions that she has been producing since
1966. Created from man-­made and natural objects such as twigs, feathers, string,
bones, sticks, pencils, and other items of litter, they signify a bodily fragility
that is not simply or exclusively human. These little sculptures are vulnerable
to the environments in which they are installed: ocean tides, pedestrians, and
river currents threaten to shift their composition or to destroy them entirely.19
In this way, the precarios resonate with contemporary definitions of the word
“precarious” that emphasize exposure to hazard and risk; however, Vicuña also
underscores the precarios’ connotations of ritual and offering, their ancient re-
ligious roots. Her film Kon Kon (2010), an experimental documentary, demon-
strates the construction of the precarios. In the film, Vicuña returns to the site of
her first outdoor works, the beach in southern Chile where the Aconcagua River
flows into the Pacific Ocean and from which the film takes its name. Vicuña
gathers scraps of detritus: bits of plastic, feathers, sticks, shells, string, bones,
wires. Tying these together, she forms delicate little sculptures, which stand in
a momentary state of equilibrium, temporarily holding in balance the elements
34 • ch a p t er one

of which they are built. Vicuña installs these little precarios in the sand, where
they flutter in the wind. She places the precarios close to the water. For a few
moments, the precarios remain erect, almost seeming to shudder with the effort.
But soon, waves begin to touch them. Forced toward the shore, then sucked back
into the surf, the tiny structures sway and are soon overwhelmed by the waves.
Their small size seems to predict their destruction, and the camera watches pas-
sively as little bundles of sticks and bright feathers wash out to sea. Erased by
their environment, the precarios are evocative of what was, of what has been,
and of the vulnerability of small entities in relation to larger forces. In her writ-
ings on the precarios, Vicuña emphasizes that the word “precarious” takes its
etymology from the Latin word precarius, which refers to what is obtained by
prayer. Etymological connotations of supplication are intimated by the sculp-
tures, which often seem like small offerings. That is, these small constructions’
installation augurs their destruction: the precarios are consistently sacrificed to
forces more powerful than themselves.
Unlike the shredding of the self that is common to most theoretical accounts
of precarity, Vicuña’s articulation of lo precario emphasizes relationships be-
tween dissimilar elements. Most frequently, these sculpture-­performances are
interpreted as allegorical representations of historical vanishing, from colonial-­
era massacres to twentieth-­century histories of terrorism and disappearances
in South America.20 Juliet Lynd suggests that, in these sculptures and other
works, Vicuña offers an “aesthetic solution for her nation’s troubled and trou-
bling memories of dictatorship and its unresolved relation to its brutally pro-
duced diaspora.”21 While I agree that a certain allegorical resonance is crucial
to the precarios, I take the relations among the objects in these little sculptures
and their ephemeral, distinctively non-­human character as the most critical fea-
tures of Vicuña’s articulation of precarity. What is precarious in her works is not
a human or would-­be human other subjected to annihilating violence. Rather,
the precarios suggest that what is precarious is a set of possible relationships
and the worldviews—­implicitly Indigenous—­in which these are foundational.
These relationships are not articulated through reference to the human, the
person, the subject, or the self. Rather, Vicuña’s performative installations of
the precarios make clear that what is put at risk, over and over again, is not an
individual other, or even a population of others. Rather, Vicuña’s use of small,
 The Translingual Book • 35

generally valueless objects that evoke animate, living bodies (feathers, bones,
twigs) as well as inanimate, nonliving entities (string, wires, bits of plastic) sug-
gests that a broader, more expansive set of relations involving, but moving be-
yond, the human has already been made and is constantly being made precari-
ous. This relationship, for Vicuña, is the foundation of ethics.
Although Lynd grounds the precarios primarily in the violence of neoliberal
governance, the destruction of each individual precario—­the feature of their
performative installation that links the individual pieces to form a series—­
points to a much longer history of violence. This repetition allows Vicuña to
frame lo precario as a longstanding condition rooted in the structures of co-
lonialism. By refusing to represent this history from the position of the wit-
ness, however, Vicuña does not limit her consideration of colonial violence to
the human scale. If her sculptures articulate momentary, partial connections
through the joining of strings, feathers, and bones, her poetry investigates and
expresses lo precario by combining multiple languages and communication
technologies and by exploring (or creating) etymological connections between
them. In this way, her refusal to hew to the positions of the self and the other
enables a consideration of precarity or of vulnerability that extends beyond the
scale of the subject in order to frame language, discourse, and their materializa-
tion in communication technologies as other sites of colonial violence. In what
follows, then, I will argue that in Vicuña’s poetry, as in Gómez-­Peña’s, the use of
multiple languages establishes a colonial condition; it does not offer a represen-
tation of personal speech. The use of Indigenous communication technologies
to house this translingual poetry creates a physical encounter with history, a
partial relationship to an incompletely available past. Although Gómez-­Peña’s
work appears to be more confrontational than Vicuña’s, I will demonstrate that
Instan and Codex Espangliensis embody a variety of forms of encounter with
and embodiment of history through their uses of the khipu and the codex.

Translingualism sans Poetic Speaker

Vicuña’s career-­long attempt to articulate an ethics not rooted in the relation-
ship between self and other begins to suggest the ways in which her book Instan
steps away from and recasts discussions of language politics and bilingualism
36 • ch a p t er one

as they currently exist in the United States. These discussions, as I have shown,
are generally presentist and work through a juxtaposition between English and
Spanish. They tend to ignore not only the conditions of US imperialism that
that have historically brought and continue to bring Spanish-­speaking popula-
tions within the borders of the United States but also the hemispheric condi-
tions of colonialism in which English and Spanish alike function as tools of
conquest. Although Instan stages encounters between English and Spanish,
these encounters are distinctly impersonal; Vicuña refuses to frame the use of
Spanish as exemplifying a linguistic or ethnic difference understood as personal
or cultural. Instead, Vicuña’s specific enactment of translingual poetics—­which
includes but goes well beyond the juxtaposition of English and Spanish—­at
once acknowledges the power imbalance between the two languages within
the United States and frames both languages as exemplifying settler monolin-
gualisms. Instan intersects and conjoins histories of competing colonialisms and
pays particular attention to the violence enacted at their meeting points. That is,
the book complicates US Latinx communities’ self-­understandings as colonized
peoples by calling attention to the temporal and spatial overlay of different
colonial, racial, and national histories and ideologies.
Importantly, these overlays are represented through translingual stagings
of colonial encounter. While Vicuña avoids centering her text in the perspec-
tive of a single poetic speaker, Gómez-­Peña employs the opposite strategy,
flooding Codex Espangliensis with personae whose schlocky, over-­the-­top, and
deliberately inauthentic textual performances reveal the commodification of
individual selfhood under neoliberal multiculturalism. Vicuña emphasizes the
translingual condition of all language, undertaking dense and imaginative
etymological investigations into the convergence points among English, Span-
ish, Latin, and various Indigenous languages. She examines cognate words as
indicators of historical conflict and points of relation and refuses the structure
of personal testimony. From a somewhat different perspective, Gómez-­Peña’s
language strategies combine spoken vernaculars to the point of untranslat-
ability, using personae and characters to perform self-­consciously stereotypical
representations: “Spanglish, Franglé [sic], and Gringoñol are linguas francas; and
monoculture is a culture of resistance practiced by a stubborn or scared minor-
ity,” he writes.22 Gómez-­Peña’s textualized performances refuse to exteriorize
 The Translingual Book • 37

their speakers’ interiority for readerly consumption; instead, selling cultural

materials to the highest bidder, they emphasize the predations of US capital,
diagnose cultural conditions such as the “new world border,” and detail the vio-
lence that characterizes relationships between the US and its Latin American
neighbors. In refusing to provide an accessible poetic speaker, the two poets
trouble the assumption that an authentic voice lies behind the artistic product
and refuse the dominant practices of witnessing that limit considerations of
violence to the scale of the human. Both use translingual poetics to sketch a
wide and broad, if somewhat diffuse, network of hemispheric relations; their
linguistic combinations draw out historical and contemporary moments of colli-
sion and confrontation and trace continuities and repetitions of violence across
time and into the present.
Vicuña’s Instan weaves different languages and traditions together, limning
the precarious space between apparently stable and separate language systems.
The book combines simple drawings and poetry and focuses on shared ety-
mologies and cognate words. In particular, Vicuña directs her attention to the
fraught historical moments when words cross from one language into another.
Although it mixes English and Spanish, then, Instan is not exactly bilingual;
rather, the book relies heavily on Indo-­European, Greek, and Latin etymologies,
and includes some words from the Indigenous languages spoken in Vicuña’s
native Chile, particularly Quechua. Even when Vicuña restricts herself to the
use of English and Spanish, or to only one of these two main languages, she
alters words and invents neologisms in order to increase the connections among
her linguistic sources. Rather than realistically representing the speech of any
particular group, Instan uses etymological play and visual strategies to focus on
historical points of connection. Vicuña constructs invented poetic forms using
cognate words and etymological links, quite literally drawing words and lan-
guages into relationship. Her hand-­d rawn poems, printed in pale, greyscale text,
operate according to the Quechua concept of hatunsimi, which Vicuña glosses
as a “pregnant word,” or an especially rich linguistic register.23 The brief, ellipti-
cal pieces, some of which are shaped as spirals and constellations, condense
meanings drawn from multiple languages into the smallest parts of speech.
The conceit of Instan is that it explores the word that forms its title: Vicuña
aims to document this word’s history, its philosophical implications, and its
38 • ch a p t er one

function as an English-­Spanish cognate. According to Vicuña, the word “in-

stan” first appeared in Spanish in 1490. A new word coincident with the colonial
invention of a new world, “instan” teems with meanings from two languages.
Vicuña explains that Instan “was born as a cognate, un cognado potens in search
of a middle ground, a language that would be readable or unreadable from both
[English and Spanish]” (emphasis in original).24 Indeed, the Spanish and English
definitions of “instan” are highly contrastive: in Spanish, it is the third-­person
plural of the infinitive “instar,” which means “to urge, [or] press.”25 Especially
associated with political demands, the verb “instar” often refers to encouraging
someone to do something. The English word “instar,” however, is a largely obso-
lete term with decorative implications: “to set or adorn with or as with stars.”26
Of course, a more obvious English word is evoked by the title of Vicuña’s book:
“instant.” The title exemplifies the way that the poems throughout the book
create connections between divergent meanings and distant etymologies. These
cross-­linguistic connections, however, are often esoteric and difficult to parse.
“Acting as a riddle,” Vicuña explains, “each word [gives] birth to the next, open-
ing up to reveal ancient or future meanings.” Placing her focus on individual
words and the movement between them, Vicuña deemphasizes the speaker or
poetic subject and instead calls attention to relationships between languages.
Vicuña’s attention to cognate words is especially obvious in the first two sec-
tions of the book, “gramma kellcani” and “el poema cognado / the poem.” She
explains that she conceives of “the word” as more than “just a door.” Rather, the
word functions as “a bridge between the two [languages].” In order to make this
bridging function clear, Vicuña turns to visual strategies, inserting spaces and
extra letters into words that appear to be Spanish in order to demonstrate their
similarity to words in English: “insi / nua t / ción,” “nave / ga t / ción,” or “salva
t / ción.” However, she also uses cognates in more complicated ways, creating
meanings that must be read across languages:

mei
del migrar

changed
heart
 The Translingual Book • 39

the in me
grant
ing

me
life

Although most of the words in this poem are easily recognizable as simple
words in Spanish and English, others are more difficult to locate. In her glos-
sary, however, Vicuña offers a creative etymology, showing the importance of
Indo-­European root words. She explains that “mei” is “the root of change,” “gra”
is “heart,” and therefore “migrant” means “changed heart.”27 When we attend to
the poem’s sound patterns, the significance of this etymological play becomes
even clearer: the pronunciation that is represented by “mei” reappears four times
in this passage, in the words “mei,” “migrar,” and “me.” In this way, the “root of
change” remains consistent across the shifts between languages. The imagery
of the heart is also consistent, as the word “heart” appears once and the spell-
ing “gra” occurs twice, in “migrar” and “grant.” The line “the in me” also evokes
the heart in a metaphorical sense, so that what is within “me,” the “heart,”
“grant[s] . . . me / life.” However, “in me / grant” is also a pun on the Spanish word
“inmigrante,” a cognate for the English word “immigrant.” Reading across the
two languages, it becomes clear that it is the changed heart within me, the
inmigrante, that grants life; the etymological “root of change” and the “heart”
appear together in this translinguistic pun. Subtle shifts in spelling and sound—­
from “mei” to “mi” to “me,” from “in” to “ing”—­happen within and across the
languages. Like the etymologies Vicuña so frequently cites, the poem’s sound
dwells in the space between English, Spanish, and their Indo-­European roots;
and the poem is unreadable from the perspective of any one language alone.
The final section of Instan also suggests the significance of cognate words.
This section, “dixio nary a diction,” is an idiosyncratic key to the words in the
text that are not in English. Its title, a Spanish-­English pun, aurally evokes the
Spanish word diccionario (dictionary) in order to suggest translation and equiv-
alence. But it also signals the impossibility of a shared parlance: the phrase
“nary a diction” could mean that there is never a diction, or else, paradoxically,
40 • ch a p t er one

that there is “not a single one”—­that there are many.28 What is striking about
Vicuña’s glossary, however, is that although it is clearly constructed to antici-
pate and respond to the needs of an English-­speaking readership, it actually
excludes most phrases written in Spanish, representing only a few key words
and concepts. The entries do not focus on translational conveyance of meaning
but instead call attention to etymology and to the ways in which etymological
connections demonstrate the relationships between languages. Many of the
words Vicuña does define in this final section are Indigenous words, and the def-
initions she provides are largely drawn from seventeenth-­century dictionaries,
whose historical provenance serves as a reminder of the role of language and
translation in colonization.29 Rather than tracing equivalencies between lan-
guages, Vicuña’s use of these historical sources reflects the unevenness among
them. The title of the second section of Instan, “el poema cognado / the poem,”
also reveals this inequality. Longer and more specific in Spanish than it is in En-
glish, this title distinguishes a “cognate poem” from a “poem,” offering different
information in each language. The Spanish portion emphasizes relationship
and translation, but the English one, tellingly, does not. Instead of claiming the
right to articulate her individual combination of the parts of difference, Vicuña’s
linguistic combinations point to the deployment of different languages within
historical and ongoing colonial projects and to the profoundly different ways
that English, Spanish, and Quechua have been impacted and transformed by
their encounter.
Gómez-­Peña’s work is generally considered to exemplify the flourishing of
a confrontational, multiculturalist performance aesthetic in the 1990s. Codex
Espangliensis partakes of this syncretic, in-­your-­face approach, and uses linguis-
tic, performative, and textual strategies that may seem entirely unrelated to
Vicuña’s spare, small-­scale, and hand-­d rawn works. Poetry, however, forms the
basis for many of his performance pieces; in fact, Gómez-­Peña self-­identifies as
a poet and has written numerous commentaries on the use of Spanglish in his
texts, although his poetry has received minimal attention from literary crit-
ics. This self-­described use of Spanglish only begins to suggest the variety of
languages and vernaculars—­and the dense multilingual punning—­included in
his poems. Many of Gómez-­Peña’s texts include not only Spanish, English, and
French but also Latin and Nahuatl, along with his aforementioned use of other
 The Translingual Book • 41

spoken vernaculars such as “Franglé and Gringoñol”: perhaps this accounts for
the critical neglect of his literary output. Like Vicuña, Gómez-­Peña combines
words translingually, creating neologisms and colloquialisms that prioritize
opaque untranslatability over authentic testimony. Although Gómez-­Peña often
uses personae and deploys the effect of personal speech, he also relies heavily
on stock characters and collective pronouns that flatten the speaker’s individu-
ality and highlight the commodification of ethnic literatures under neoliberal
multiculturalism.
Gómez-­Peña’s works share Vicuña’s tendency toward idiosyncratic cultural
mixture, which they use to create at times surprising unities across geographic
and cultural distances. In his more recent works such as Codex Espangliensis,
Gómez-­Peña moves yet further from individualized self-­expression and into
a dense fusion of languages, visual poetry, and book arts. This collaborative
project, completed with the visual artist Enrique Chagoya and the book artist
Felicia Rice, draws together many of Gómez-­Peña’s prior performance texts, as-
sembling these into an artist’s book modeled after the Mesoamerican codex.30
Codex Espangliensis, as its title suggests, points to histories of syncretism, pas-
tiche, and adaptation, using these to challenge the tropes of certainty and stabil-
ity through which we typically understand the subject or self. The book exploits
stereotypes and blends Indigenous and settler cultures, folkways and technol-
ogy, emphasizing the “violent juxtapositions of languages [and] characters . . .
[that] replicate the feeling of vertigo produced by my/our ongoing border cross-
ings.”31 Rice’s careful design features the codex’s amatl paper and distinctive red
and black ink, while Chagoya’s imagery combines Superman and Mickey Mouse
with images from Mesoamerican codices and seventeenth-­century European
engravings. The work as a whole rejects multiculturalism, framing it as a fac-
ile form of relation that serves to conceal ongoing colonization. Gómez-­Peña’s
poems, at the levels of language and material text, work to articulate the rela-
tionships between neoliberal multiculturalism and colonialism, bringing these
underexamined relationships into the foreground.
Codex Espangliensis deliberately rejects the authenticity of the self in favor
of aggregate, variegated personae that register not only as multiple but as in-
authentic or even fake. Enfolded within the span of Codex Espangliensis’s vi-
sual chronicle, repeated patterns of conquest and economic exploitation depict
42 • ch a p t er one

colonialism as at once historical and contemporary, as a form of violence that

repeats over time while adapting and changing. The book’s title satirically fuses
English, Spanish, and Greek in a way that frustrates intelligible meaning in any
particular tongue.32 The first morpheme in the word Espangliensis derives from
the word España (and could also refer to stereotypical mispronunciations by
native speakers of Spanish), while the Greek suffix “-­sis” may refer to sickness.
Between these is the morphemic element, “angl[o].” The title addresses present-­
day confrontations between English and Spanish and also references longer
histories of confrontation and conflict that are not limited to the relationship
between the two but that speak as well to the spread of the two languages
across the Americas. That is, the use of the suffix “-­sis” frames both “España” and
“Anglo,” whether singly or in their combination, as a disease, an inflammation
in need of treatment and cure.
Codex Espangliensis combines Gómez-­Peña’s older poetry and performance
texts with visual imagery and advertising slogans; about three-­quarters of the
book is written in English, with the remainder in Spanish, in the stylized Span-
glish of Gómez-­Peña’s performance personae, and in French. The characters
familiar from Gómez-­Peña’s performance work—­his “Meriloco” street vendor,
his Aztec colonist Europzin Tezpoca, and others—­provide the text that accom-
panies the visual images contributed by Chagoya. In one panel, part of the
“Auctioning the New World” sequence, text runs vertically down the left-­hand
side of the image in Spanish and horizontally across the top of the image in
English. Various parts of it are labeled “Meriloco Voice,” so that the poem func-
tions as a kind of script to be performed. If a merolico is a street vendor selling
potions, notable for the performance style of his demonstrations, Gómez-­Peña’s
“meriloco” goes a step further: this figure welcomes his audience, the “esti-
mado publico emigrante // en busca de la única respuesta” (esteemed emigrant
public // in search of the only answer), to “Tijuana/Nirvana” and proceeds to
offer them deals:

10 dollars a poem

postcard included

life in Gringolandia,
 The Translingual Book • 43

Excerpt from Codex Espangliensis, by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Enrique Chagoya, and

Felicia Rice (City Lights Books, 2000).

a cheese TV talk show

10 video lessons on
misinformation

stop the performance!

This poem refuses the conventions of authentic multicultural representation.

Instead, its deliberately inauthentic speaker declares multiculturalism itself “a
nostalgic T.V. series” and a “permanent collection” in which racialized artists
are displayed so that mainstream viewers can safely experience difference. At
times, other voices interrupt the speaker, “stop[ping] the performance” to further
disrupt any illusion of authenticity. Using diverse conventions of advertising—­
from auctioneering to street-­level sales performance—­Gómez-­Peña satirizes
expectations of sincerity and access that shape audience responses to the
44 • ch a p t er one

racialized poetic speaker. In their place, he offers a commodified version of pub-

lic voice, whose personhood is for sale to the highest bidder. Placed next to im-
ages of Minnie and Mickey Mouse, Wonder Woman and Superman, the center
cannot hold: “Este dialogo // West of what? / North of / what?” is printed in large
letters on one panel, followed by a much smaller declaration, that “U.S.-­Mexico
relations have always been mediated by $, sex, literature, fear and involuntary
humor.” While this declaration seems to posit Mexico and the US as two stable
poles, Codex Espangliensis consistently and insistently undercuts both, using
the tactics of “$, sex, literature, fear and . . . humor” to create flexible, untranslat-
able, and dynamic combinations that demonstrate the colonized condition of
Chicanx subjects, as well as Mexico’s own historical relation to its territory as
a colonial power.
In Gómez-­Peña’s work, movement between languages signifies relation, but
relation does not have the positive valence seen in Vicuña’s work. Rather, re-
lations of dominance, violence, commercialism, and insincerity take pride of
place. Translingual practices usefully animate the jagged edges dividing groups
and cultures, and they trace the boundaries of intelligible communication. Al-
though Gómez-­Peña tends to strike a more confrontational, perhaps stereo-
typically masculine, posture than what appears in Vicuña’s gentle and quiet
performances and texts, the relations of dominance that are at the center of
his oeuvre concern the intense physicality of economic domination and the
commodification of selfhood under neoliberal multiculturalism. Like Vicuña’s
Instan, Gómez-­Peña’s poems are characterized by a principled refusal to offer
smooth access to the poetic speaker: they challenge readerly assumptions that
an authentic voice lies behind the artistic product. His linguistic combinations
animate the intersections of multiple and competing colonialisms and suggest
that while history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it often seems to rhyme. As
I will show in the next section, Instan and Codex Espangliensis also draw upon
Indigenous forms and concepts and especially upon Indigenous communica-
tion technologies such as the khipu and the codex. These textual precedents
materialize the poems’ translingual composition through the adapted, syncretic
transformations of the conventional Western book. As Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña
draw attention away from the consciousness of the unique poetic speaker, they
emphasize an analogy between physical body and text that positions language,
 The Translingual Book • 45

discourse, and knowledge systems as dependent upon the living bodies and
cultures that produce them. In this way, they suggest not only that human
bodies and selves are vulnerable to colonial violence but that one of the most
important effects of colonial violence is its dramatic narrowing of the scope of
knowledge and of the possible forms of communication.

Syncretic Books
In his book The Networked Wilderness, Matt Cohen demonstrates that by re-
conceptualizing colonial encounters in terms of communication technologies
and networks of signification, we can better understand how historical inter-
pretation depends upon assumptions about the nature of communication. The
settler colonial belief that Indigenous peoples were fated to colonization, for
example, depends in large part upon a belief that Indigenous peoples lacked
sophisticated information systems and communication technologies, depend-
ing solely upon unreliable oral communication systems for the transmission
of knowledge. When the full range of communication technologies used by
Indigenous peoples is actually considered, however, such myths of Indigenous
difference—­which function to exculpate settlers by framing colonization as
inevitable—­become increasingly untenable. Vicuña’s and Gómez-­Peña’s engage-
ments with Indigenous communication technologies, while certainly appropria-
tive, offer a robust acknowledgement of the sophisticated materials and forms
of Indigenous communication. By constructing their representations of colo-
nialism through reference to Indigenous communication technologies, these
artist-­poets de-­center the colonizing perspective and its grounding of ethics in
the relationship between individual selves. Instead, they work to consider the
effects of colonial violence from a perspective that combines a consideration
of bodily vulnerability with an examination of the impacts of colonization on
Indigenous texts, information systems, and knowledge.
For both Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña, the materialization of translingual poetics
in the form of the book enables a reconfiguration of the conventional analogy
between the Western book and the body. Both authors use this reconfigura-
tion to move away from the dominant Western framing of ethics as based in
the relationship between self and other; in various ways, their texts formulate
46 • ch a p t er one

an alternate ethics based upon a broader, less anthropocentric concept of rela-

tion. By turning to Indigenous communication technologies, which they use in
their own idiosyncratic, invented ways, Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña reconfigure
the bodily gestures through which reading takes place, requiring that readers
turn, manipulate, and enfold ourselves within their books. These movements
create an embodied relationship to otherness that is not based on an encounter
between human selves but exists in relationships between animate and inani-
mate entities, with language, and with knowledge systems.
While it is impossible to generalize across the huge diversity of Indigenous
communication technologies employed throughout the Americas, in compar-
ing poetic and book arts adaptations of just two, it is useful to note Elizabeth
Hill Boone’s explanation that, unlike alphabetic writing, making speech visible
was not often the goal of writing in the Indigenous Americas. That is, while
Indigenous communication technologies documented and established ideas,
they did not generally attempt to replicate a specific, set sequence of words.33
Codices, for example, differ from the Western book in several crucial respects.
First, Mesoamerican codex writing uses a pictorial system of images, which are
structured to create visual messages that can be acted out during interpretation.
Considered to be semasiographic, the majority of images contained in codices
do not correspond to particular words but signify thoughts, ideas, and imagery,
or a combination of these. Conventions regarding symbols and their arrange-
ment allow for consistency in interpreting codices, but, depending upon the
tradition in which they are situated, codices are open to a range of meanings
and interpretations.34 While Spanish colonists destroyed many codices, they
also adapted Indigenous scripts and transcribed Indigenous languages to teach
Christianity, to address legislative concerns, to recover Aztec history, and to
extirpate idolatries.35 Relatedly, rather than creating a word-­for-­word rendering
of speech, most theorists believe that the khipu preserved important informa-
tion that its maker would recite while physically interacting with the string
text. Contemporary theorists suggest that the khipu’s production of meaning
relies upon the positions of its strings and knots relative to each other, and some
believe that its meaning is both created and deciphered through the physical
motions of its makers, who would orient and reorient their bodies in relation to
the colored knots and strings. In their groundbreaking work on khipu, Marcia
 The Translingual Book • 47

and Robert Ascher explain that the composition of the khipu takes place in
space and that its “spatial arrangement . . . carries a large portion of the stored
information.”36 The khipu’s tactility is wholly unlike any concept of writing in
which two-­d imensional signs are inscribed on flat surfaces; thus, it was largely
disqualified from consideration as a writing system by colonial authorities.
Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña use the performative qualities and the comparative
freedom from chronological sequence that they attribute to their Indigenous
precedents to create texts that can be performed and interacted with in a variety
of different ways. The movements that Instan and Codex Espangliensis require
in order to be deciphered refuse the presentist, polar construction of the rela-
tionship between English and Spanish that is espoused in the US. They frame
the relationship between English and Spanish within the structures of Indig-
enous communication technologies, such that these languages no longer appear
as fundamental or as cultural common ground. Instead, their incorporations of
Indigenous communication technologies and their adaptations of gestural read-
ing practices evoke persistent relationships of inequality between north and
south and between Indigenous and settler cultures. Most importantly, Vicuña’s
and Gómez-­Peña’s engagements with Indigenous communication technologies
foreground bodily vulnerability as an effect of colonial power. Much as Vicuña’s
precarios draw diverse elements into a fragile and temporary relationship, a deli-
cate sculpture that can easily be crushed or swept away, her poetry creates tenu-
ous, weak links among Spanish, English, and other languages. Using the khipu
to hold these together, her work evokes lived conditions past and present in
ways that resonate with and even anticipate contemporary theoretical accounts
of precarity. But if Vicuña emphasizes bodily fragility, Gómez-­Peña is especially
attentive to borders and capital: he places economic policies such as NAFTA
within a long colonial history in order to suggest a broad-­based vulnerability to
the colonizing forces of neoliberal globalization. These works analogize body
and text in order to emphasize a vulnerable, dehumanized, and even absent
body that has already suffered and is yet suffering. In continuity with long-
standing traditions in Latin American conceptual and performance art, these
book arts–based, translingual works make a vital contribution to theoretical
discourses on precarity by placing Indigeneity and colonialism at the center of
their analysis. Rather than testifying to the plight of the precarious other, these
48 • ch a p t er one

projects mark relations of inequality among their languages—­not only English

and Spanish—­and trace the lines of force that dictate and demarcate who lives
and who dies.
Vicuña’s sculptural and performance art is often staged without an audience
and runs the risk of vanishing without documentation. Her work does not eas-
ily fit into established critical categories, meaning that it often escapes notice.
Gestures such as placing her vote at the foot of a glacier or depositing one of
her precarios in a puddle’s rush toward the nearest drain may register as merely
naïve or simplistic, if they register at all.37 Through these practices, however,
Vicuña rejects an empiricist model of what constitutes knowledge, drawing in-
stead upon forms, techniques, and ideas that are popularly framed as nonknowl-
edge and are therefore devalued. Similarly, Instan requires an adaptable reader,
one who can pick up the dropped threads of an argument, entwine languages,
and knit visual and verbal reading strategies, constantly reorienting themselves
in relation to new information, new textual strategies, and new points of inten-
sity. This book also focuses on what seems to constitute non-­or anti-­k nowledge,
attending to parts of speech, imaginary connections between words and lan-
guages, and Vicuña’s own, somewhat fanciful interpretation of the functioning
of the khipu. In Instan, as in her earlier book QUIPOem (1997), her large-­scale
installation El Quipu Menstrual (2006), and other works, Vicuña’s formal refer-
ence to the khipu brings together ideas of body, space, and time; she explicitly
analogizes the khipu’s structure with structures in the body in order to augment
the connections between them. Vicuña’s interpretation of the form and function
of the khipu, however, is somewhat idiosyncratic: for her (though not for ethno-
historians), one of the khipu’s key affordances is that it is a form that allows for
its own undoing.38 As Vicuña explains, the khipu “embraces its own dissolution,
the possibility of being reknotted, rewritten many times over.”39 Thematizing
bodily engagement and interaction, she uses this potential for unknotting as
a formal precedent for her own work and for its structures of repetition and
intensification. Vicuña imagines the body as a khipu, or a cord that binds dispa-
rate entities—­times, places, texts, forms, and songs—­holding these in a visceral,
momentary, suspended but importantly embodied unity, like her little precarios.
Although many of Vicuña’s sculptural and installation works use knotted
strings that directly reference the khipu, the fact that Instan is written on
 The Translingual Book • 49

paper and published as a book distances it somewhat from its formal referent.
However, many of the short, hand-­d rawn poems in the early sections of the
book function pictorially, as calligrams, and require that readers turn the book
sideways and upside down, reorienting it in relation to their bodies in order to
decipher the patterns of letters that make up the drawings’ whorls and spirals.
Some of her poems are specifically structured as pictorial representations of
khipu. In the clearest of these, Vicuña draws the phrase “el instante es la cuerda
vital” across two pages. The top of the page functions as the central strand of
the khipu, and each letter in the phrase dangles from it by a single drawn line,
resembling a string. This depiction of the khipu entwines bodily materiality,
spatial relationality, and temporality; tellingly, for Vicuña these meanings un-
fold as a definition of “el instante,” the instant. In her glossary, Vicuña specifies
that “cuerda” should be understood to mean both “cord” and “chord” (ironically,
a false translation based on the English homonyms), suggesting that the “cu-
erda vital” is something that is sounded, as well as something that joins or ties.
Of course, the word “cord” also refers to structures in the body that resemble
strings—­the vocal cords, the spinal cord, the spermatic cord, the umbilical cord,
and so on.40 As opposed to the conventional analogy between body and book,
then, Vicuña creates an analogy between body and khipu. This poem imagines
the instant of physical encounter between the living cords and chords of the
body and the khipu. The use of the top edge of the book to represent the “vital”
central strand of the khipu places it directly in readers’ hands, positioning the
book, at its intersection with the khipu, as the site of a bodily encounter with
a knowledge system that is unfamiliar but that has structures and attributes
much like those found in the body itself. Much as the khipu has been occluded
as a writing system, however, Instan uses this subtle meeting of body and khipu,
and the analogy between them, to suggest that like the khipu some bodies
might lose out over time.41 Bodies are also vulnerable to being unknotted or
undone to the loss of their vital form, integrity, and meaning.
Elsewhere in Instan, Vicuña maps the body in the “Fingerprint whorls, / breath
and sound” and in the movement of the stars; her text depends upon a tactile,
physically active, three-­d imensional reading practice that recalls the composi-
tional and readerly activity of the khipu-­maker. Instan adapts the khipu’s reli-
ance on relative placement, using this as a way of organizing the relationships
50 • ch a p t er one

Excerpt from “gramma kellcani (the drawings),” as it appears in Instan by Cecilia

Vicuña (Kelsey St. Press, 2002). Portions of Instan are included in Cecilia Vicuña:
New & Selected Poetry (Kelsey St. Press, 2018).

between the sections of the text and as a way of actively involving the reader
in the poems’ constructions of meaning. Each section of the book repeats and
intensifies concepts and images from the other sections: the work moves from
a series of esoteric drawings, through increasingly expository poetic texts, and
ends with a final section that resembles a fragmentary essay, written in more
and less complete sentences. Not only must the book be turned and manip-
ulated in space to a greater degree than conventional books, but as the text
progresses, images and phrases reemerge and are extended across the different
sections of the book. This structure, which Vicuña calls “time bending,” alters
and reconfigures each word and image as the book goes on. Rather than nar-
rowing and specifying meanings, however, new connections and definitions
unfold with every return. Each section of the book serves as a fluctuating refer-
ent for the next: forward movement through the book always entails backward
 The Translingual Book • 51

movement through its earlier sections; having read something in a prior section
does not guarantee its finitude or its fixity. Drawing upon the khipu’s imagined
potential for unknotting and reknotting, Instan emphasizes suppleness, vari-
ability, and availability for reworking. Much as this text is unreadable through
a single language, its fleeting and vulnerable ideas and meanings are perceived
and explored through bodily gestures that go significantly beyond the looking
and page-­turning required for a conventional Western book. Vicuña constructs
a practice of bodily relationship, reminding readers that the translingual con-
nections she traces do not apply only to words or to languages but operate at
the level of communication technologies. These intersections are not mere ac-
cidents or effects of coexistence, still less flights of artistic fancy. Rather, they
are impositions of historical and contemporary colonial power.
If Vicuña’s use of relative placement emphasizes bodily interaction with
the text, incorporating the form of the khipu into the structures of her po-
etry, Gómez-­Peña’s Codex Espangliensis draws explicitly on the Mesoamerican
codex, using it to adapt the physical structure of the book itself. This book-­
codex hybrid opens into a twenty-­one foot screenfold that extends to envelop
the reader’s body. In Codex Espangliensis, Gómez-­Peña describes the book as
a “post-­Columbian Spanglish comix/codex.” The original hand-­painted edi-
tions were produced on the amatl bark paper used prior to the introduction
of European papers, and collaborator Felicia Rice’s accordion fold mimics
Mesoamerican codex technologies. Maintaining the format of pre-­Hispanic and
colonial codices, the fourteen panels of this text form a fictional environment
of cultural encounters, tensions, and clashes among various historical and con-
temporary Indigenous traditions, European encounter narratives, religious and
political icons, and mass-­market popular entertainment heroes. Codex Espan-
gliensis takes these two-­d imensional texts and images and uses them to create
a three-­d imensional historical chronicle that must be physically manipulated
by the reader: the presentation of images and text is, at least to a certain extent,
within the reader’s physical control. That is, readers have numerous possibilities
for how to extend and manipulate the codex and can determine the pace and
the presentation of text and images in a variety of different ways. However,
given its length, Codex Espangliensis also enfolds readers’ bodies within its over-
whelming physical expanse and its historical scope.
52 • ch a p t er one

Rice’s rendering of Gómez-­Peña’s writings in red and black ink situates text
as well as image within the stylistic traditions of the codex and participates in
the cultural syncretism in which the codex has long played a part. The tactility
of the book and of the codex is emphasized by Rice’s unique design: although it
opens from right to left, opposite of the conventional Western book, the pages
run in the conventional order. Upon opening the book “backward,” one must
flip immediately to the “end” in order to begin reading. Although the subtitle
suggests a conventional historical narrative that will run “from Columbus to the
Border Patrol,” Codex Espangliensis uses the possibilities afforded by the codex
to suggest that histories run in multiple directions. Lacking pagination, the pan-
els of Codex Espangliensis can be folded so as to hide and reveal portions of the
text. Multiple configurations for reading are possible: the book can be arranged
as a frieze or as a circular sculpture; or its pages can be flipped and read in
beginning-­to-­end order. The structure of the whole emphasizes dislocation and
disorientation in time, incorporating a vast range of historical referents, from
preconquest imagery to Spanish colonialism, from Mexican Independence in
1821 to US territorial encroachment, from the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
to twentieth-­century Chicanx activism and finally to NAFTA. The meriloco
voice uses the conventions of auctioneering to offer commentary on these re-
peating waves of colonialism: “querrido waspano, waspito, waspero, waspback,
señorrida nalgosajona, turista cultura, clepto-­Mexican impresario, descubridor
de nuevos mundos, we got everything you ever wished to possess who said
200? who said 300? who said 500?” These numbers could refer as easily to years
(two hundred years ago, five hundred years ago) as to amounts of money. The
meriloco voice offers “everything you ever wished to possess” to the highest bid-
der, auctioning off elements framed as “culture” or “the past” to be bought and
consumed by various descubridors—­waspitos and clepto-­Mexican impresarios
alike. Framing discovery, purchase, and domination as repetitive tropes, Gómez-­
Peña activates the form of the book as a key means through which to suggest
that colonialism cannot be reduced to past events disconnected from the pres-
ent. The echoes between the violences enacted in different eras, represented
through the unfolding structure of the codex, make clear that colonialisms are,
instead, structural.
Working against the dominant tendency to describe colonialism as a set
of historical events, Chagoya and Rice’s use of mixed fragments from various
 The Translingual Book • 53

historical eras negates the possibility of historical progress, or of redress. Like

an earlier generation of codex-­based works produced by Chicanx artists, Codex
Espangliensis explores processes of reconstruction in a kind of “cultural archae-
ology.”42 This work emphasizes bloody struggle, though often with a wink: in
one panel, Nezahualcoyotl, an Aztec king, warrior, and philosopher, struggles
against Superman and Wonder Woman; the accompanying text describes the
Aztec colonist Europzin Tezpoca, one of Gómez-­Peña’s performance characters,
who discovered Europe and named it after himself. In another panel, the Virgin
of Guadalupe appears next to an anatomical illustration of a woman’s torso.
Wonder Woman, embedded inside it, points a machine gun outward. “Will the
predatory Statue of Liberty devour the contemplative Virgin of Guadalupe,” the
accompanying text asks, “or are they merely going to dance a sweaty quebra-
dita?” Engravings by Theodor de Bry from Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima
relación de la destrucción de las Indias are augmented by spatters of red blood,
a literal presentation of corporeal vulnerability. The collage of historical and
contemporary references coarticulates Spanish and US colonialisms, framing
violence as a continuity across time that is intensified when colonialisms in-
tersect and compete. The juxtaposition of images places multiple events on a
single plane, suggesting that in history there may not be repetition, but there is,
as Gertrude Stein would say, insistence. The simultaneous visibility of multiple
epochs creates an atmosphere of tension and uncertainty. Although the subtitle
suggests that the book depicts history in sequence “from Columbus to the Bor-
der Patrol,” the reading experience is significantly more layered and condensed:
Spanish soldiers attack, Mickey Mouse rides by in a tank, and Superman stands
about, doing nothing.
Codex Espangliensis combines time periods, using the contemporary moment
to create new glyphs for the past and using historical codices and pop-­cultural
sources to write the conditions of the present. By using an adapted codex form
to convey and communicate this representation, Gómez-­Peña, like Vicuña, at
once demonstrates the profound effects of conquest, which sought to eliminate
the codex as a legitimate form of communication, and depicts indigeneity as
resisting and outlasting repeated attempts at its elimination. In emphasizing
communication technologies, Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña de-­center the subject or
the human in their representations of colonialism, likening threats to knowl-
edge and the technologies through which it is conveyed with the body’s own
54 • ch a p t er one

vulnerability to violence. Their representations of bodily vulnerability, how-

ever, stand in dramatic contrast to recent discussions of precarity and demon-
strate the necessity of rethinking the concept through its robust elaborations
in Latin American and US Latinx cultural production. The temporary loose
unity and the ephemerality of Vicuña’s precarios offer a radical reimagining of
the emphasis on witness that has dominated recent discussions of precarity;
like Gómez-­Peña, she demonstrates that contemporary conditions of insecurity
must always be thought of in relation to colonialism. These authors’ uses of
Indigenous communication technologies, while perhaps idiosyncratic, de-­center
the singular, stable self and its presentist timeframe. In turning to communica-
tion technologies that survived colonization, Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña move
away from contemporary Western epistemologies, contextualizing translingual
poetics among other traditions.
However, in reading Vicuña’s and Gómez-­Peña’s works and in describing their
emphases on indigeneity as fundamentally different from its colonizing cul-
tures, my argument in this chapter risks at least one possible critique that I want
to address before moving on to consider other texts and problems. Vicuña’s and
Gómez-­Peña’s appropriations of Indigenous communication technologies could
be criticized as cementing an essentialized Indigenous difference, materialized
in textual forms that are not really used for communication in the present (and
that are freely available for artistic or poetic appropriation). Moreover, by using
these communication technologies, positioned as artifacts, to symbolize his-
tory, Vicuña’s and Gómez-­Peña’s works run the risk of erasing contemporary
Indigenous peoples and furthering the project of colonization by reducing In-
digenous cultural materials to symbols of difference to be activated within non-­
Indigenous artistic and philosophical contexts.
There is, I believe, some truth in these critiques. However, in refusing the
binary between English and Spanish that structures contemporary conversa-
tions about language in the United States and in emphasizing colonialism as
the fundamental condition of literary and artistic production in the US and in
the Americas more broadly, Vicuña’s and Gómez-­Peña’s texts depict colonial
languages—­both English and Spanish—­as engaged in an ongoing struggle of
attempting to overwrite Indigenous languages and knowledge systems. The
emphasis that both authors place on Indigenous communication technologies
 The Translingual Book • 55

suggests the violence as well as the limitations and the failures of the various
colonialisms that each depicts. Although the technologies that each poet en-
gages are not commonly used in the present, the very inclusion of these tech-
nologies within each work can also be read as suggesting the ongoingness of
Indigenous resilience, albeit from a somewhat disconnected perspective.
Because these texts avoid precarity’s testimonial approach to the presenta-
tion of individual suffering, their materialization of translingual poetics in the
form of the book allows a broad but careful tracing of the effects of colonial vio-
lence. That is, Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña, perhaps in spite of themselves, attend to
the fact that it is not only individuals who are impacted by colonialisms and by
the spread of settler monolingualism. Both demonstrate that languages, com-
munication technologies, and knowledge systems also suffer. In asserting this
broadened conception of the effects of violence, Vicuña and Gómez-­Peña call
for a rethinking of the ethical relationship that would conceive of relation as
something more substantial than the encounter between two privatized selves.
Although they do not avoid essentializing Indigenous victimhood and differ-
ence, they nonetheless share a conviction that the solution to colonial violence
will not grow from the philosophical foundations of settler colonial thought.