Texas at El Paso from 1981 to 1989. Of those
years, Mora remarks that ‘‘I was fortunate to
work on issues of outreach to women and to the
local Mexican American population... For those
of us committed to extending the opportunities
of the university to our community, it was a frus-
trating but exciting time to participate in that
gradual transformation’’ (Nepantla4). ‘‘Nepantla’’
is a Nahuatl word meaning ‘‘place in the middle,’’
and Mora makes it clear she not only recognizes
herself as having come from such a physical
place, the Tex-Mex borderlands, but also from
such a psychic and cultural place as a Mexican-
American. Mora seeks in her writing, as well as
her life, to conserve the generative tension of the
dynamic plurality that is borderland existence. ‘‘I
am in the middle of my life, and well know,’’ she
declares, ‘‘not only the pain but also the advantage
of observing both sides, albeit with my biases, of
moving through two, and, in fact, multiple spaces’’
(Nepantla6).
One of the dangers of a segment of the nat-
ural conservation movement is the recovery or
preservation of a small section of a larger bio-
region. Tourists can then visit that parcel and
experience nostalgia for the rest that was allowed
to be destroyed. One can see the same danger
evident in urban historical preservation, partic-
ularly in historically ethnic areas being crowded
out by skyscrapers and highways. As Tey Diana
Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero observe in the
Introduction toInfinite Divisions,‘‘since many
freeways in large urban areas were built in the
barrios, the freeways often run along Chicano
residential areas. In addition, they may have also
destroyed much of the older sections of the bar-
rios, thus destroying traditions’’ (32). And in
such urban renewals/removals, one often sees
that the buildings preserved as representative of
a particular cultural heritage are ones that are of
interest to tourists and tourism promoters rather
than inheritors of the culture.
But Mora is well aware of the danger of token
wilderness preserves andPotemkin-village merca-
dos and warns against any idea of recovering the
Mexican-American heritage as curio or artifact: ‘‘a
true ethnic of conservation includes a commitment
to a group’s decisions, itsdevelopment and self-
direction’’ (Nepantla30). Just as the ecology move-
ment warns that biological diversity is crucial to
biotic survival, Mora warns that cultural diversity
is crucial to human survival, since it actually helps
to maintain diversity in general:
Pride in cultural identity, in the set of learned
and shared language, symbols, and meanings,
needs to be fostered not because of nostalgia or
romanticism, but because it is essential to our
survival. The oppressive homogenization of
humanity in our era of international techno-
logical and economic interdependence endan-
gers us all. (Nepantla36)
Human diversity can be maintained only
when cultural conservation is practiced by the
marginalized and subordinated groups who
defend and recover their heritages in order to
generate their futures. Many of the essays in
Nepantlafocus precisely on the issue of cultural
conservation, even as they embody such a prac-
tice. Mora rightly emphasizes the conservation
of Chicano/a and Latino/a cultures, but does not
stop there. She also addresses respect for, and
awareness of, other cultures internationally and
the differing degrees and kinds of effects that
dominant U.S. culture has on subordinated cul-
tures within the U.S. and worldwide.
Mora’s first book of poetry,Chants, demon-
strates some of the ways by which the recovery
of heritage dimension of cultural conservation
may be realized. Part of such recovery requires
the retelling of old tales and the untelling of old
interpretations by others of one’s culture. For
Southwestern Latinos, onesuch untelling involves
embracing the Indian heritage of the mestizo/a, in
opposition to the imposition of the ‘‘Spanish’’ her-
itage as the primary cultural determinant. Mora
opensChantswith the poem ‘‘Bribe.’’ In it she
retells the story of the ‘‘long ago’’ practices of
‘‘Indian women’’ to seek inspiration for their weav-
ing arts from ‘‘the Land.’’ She then claims those
traditional practices as part of her own heritage
through ritual imitation: ‘‘Like the Indians / I ask
the Land to smile on me, to croon / softly, to help
me catch her music with words’’ (7). But it is not
only an imitative relationship of artistic practices,
weaving and writing, that she claims; she also
claims a parallel relationship with the personifiedTHE PEOPLE AND THE LAND INTERWEAVEIN MORA’S CONCEPTIONS OF CULTURAL
CONSERVATION AND THE WORD-HEALING OF
POETRY.’’
Uncoiling