ABSTRACT
The two novels under examination in this chapter, John Rechy’s the Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez and Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love, in varying degrees could be said to feature the U.S. postcolonial chickens coming home to roost. Both novels to some degree represent the results of Manifest Destiny, the ideology of conquest that would take the nation not only to the ends of the continent, but to far Pacific lands. By comparison, Rechy’s vision is more sociological and Hagedorn’s more personal in nature. In Rechy’s novel, the U.S. policies that resulted in the acquisition of Hispanic-American lands, either by force or through barter, and then displaced many of the inhabitants, provide the roots for the economic strife and violence of present-day Los Angeles, as an American citizen of Hispanic descent finds herself caught economically between the new immigrants and the Anglo-American paranoia over illegal immigration. She also finds herself caught between the claims of the power structures, the codes that Foucault discusses, that have controlled her life and the life she must lead. She finds herself caught between multiple subject positions; Rechy’s novel, perhaps more explicitly than any other novel treated, demonstrates some of the possibilities inherent in Soja’s conception of thirdspace and literary texts. Hagedorn’s novel features a young Filipino woman who finds herself identifying with American cultural exports, in the form of music, to the extent she attempts, consciously or not, to shed her cultural identity. Although very different in content, in space and in time, The Gangster of Love possesses a, perhaps, surprising similarity in structure to Yezierska’s Bread Givers in that the past becomes more important the more the characters move away from it, become more American. The present thereby becomes enriched through the past. To different degrees, the characters in Rechy and Hagedorn’s novels attempt to find thirdspaces between competing claims on their identities, spaces that, if not peaceful in a social sense, are at least peaceful in a personal 110sense. These two novels take the form of a journey, literally and metaphorically, but the temporal linearity of the journeys becomes enriched by pasts that help the characters re-imagine the present. More important, both authors take imaginative leaps to re-imagine the American urban time-space in a postcolonial world.
