ABSTRACT
The disillusion with the utopian dream of national independence is clear in Africa and India. The African movement beyond the nation state into a transnational or supranational network of connections and the critique of the Indian nation in postRushdie writing show the extent to which the dream of nationhood was disappointed. A very dierent utopian function emerges when a people with no hope of a separate nation state imagines a nation as a people rather than a structural entity. This is the case of the Chicano people in the US1 who frame their culture with both ethnic and geographic location around the utopian concept of Aztlán. Chicano utopianism deserves a case study of its own because Aztlán combines, more comprehensively than any other utopian vision, the combination of memory, culture, location and the anticipatory consciousness of heimat: it is both utopia and utopianism. A Chicano nation state exists “Nowhere” because it can never come about. But the identication of the myth of Aztlán with both the Chicano people and the Southwest of the US suggests that the concept of nationhood remains prominent in Chicano consciousness. Aztlán occupies a “real,” although uid site based in the unbounded space of the borderlands. As such it is describable by Foucault’s term: heterotopia. The concept of heterotopia has seen a surge in popularity in recent times, coinciding with the spatial turn in cultural studies, because it provides a way of conceiving the identication of cultures, particularly marginalized ones, with place.
