Abstract
I was motivated to begin tracing the origins of hatred against Mexican women in this society when, repelled and curious in the summer of 1992, I learned of a brewing controversy at UCLA. A fraternity manual had been sent to The Daily Bruin, the student newspaper, citing a fraternity initiation ceremony at which the invited had sung “Lupe.” It was not the first instance of racially derived or misogynistic speech at a fraternity, nor would it be the last. I knew that at U.C. Davis, in 1976, a song also entitled “Lupe” had surfaced among the Alpha Gamma Rhos, who today have a lounge in the Alumni Center dedicated to them and who back in the 1970s amplified their initiation ceremonies with the following recitation:
LUPE Twas down in Cunt Valley, where Red Rivers flow
Where cocksuckcrs flourish, and maiden heads grow.
Twas there I met Lupc, the girl I adore
My hot fucking, cocksucking Mexican whore.
Now Lupc popped her cherry, when she was but eight
Swinging upon the old garden gate,
The cross member broke and the upright slipped in,
And she finished her life in a welter of sin
She’ll fuck you, she’ll suck you, she’ll tickle your nuts,
And if you’re not careful, she’ll suck out your guts.
She’ll wrap her legs round you, till you think you’ll die
I’d rather cat Lupc than sweet cherry pic
Now Lupe’s dead and buried, and lies in her tomb,
While maggots crawl out of her decomposed womb,
The smile on her face, is a sure cry for more,
My hot fucking, cocksucking Mexican whore.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Heroine to some, ill-bred to others, mad or damaged to certain congresspeople, Anita Hill, in those days of interrogation and then in the weeks that followed, took up a torch that she has not laid to rest, and most of the money she garners serves to support other harassment cases in the courts. See Anita Hill’s memoir, Speaking Truth to Power (New York: Anchor Books, 1998).
See, on experience as evidence, the rich literature beginning with Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
See Matt Mier, Mexican American Biographies (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988) on Chipita Rodriguez. On Karla Fay Tucker, see “Texas v. Karla Faye Tucker: ‘A Question of Mercy,’” http://www.courttv.com/legaldocs/newsmakers/tucker. For a transcript of Karla Faye Tucker’s final statement, as broadcast on CNN on February 3, 1998, the day of her execution, see http://www.cnn.com/US/9802/03/tucker.text/. See also the Crime Library’s online article by Joseph Geringer, “Karla Faye Tucker: Texas’ Controversial Murderess,” http://www.crimelibrary.com/classics3/tucker/. The U.S. News website has perhaps the most comprehensive list of articles and television reports on the Tucker case; see “Karla Faye Tucker”s Last Hours?” http://www.cnn.com/US/9802/03/ tucker/.
See Deena J. González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially chapter 2.
See, for example, Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999). Also see
Antonia Castaneda, “Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western Women’s History: The Discourse, Politics, and Decolonization of History,” Pacific Historical Review 61 (November 1992): 501–533.
Begin with Patricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987). Also see Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
For the argument, traced as Chicana-derived or grounded, see Pérez, The De-colonial Imaginary 22–27. For a different reading, see Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992), 145–146, on the brilliance of replacing the goddess To-nantzin with the Virgen de Guadalupe, on the ways a nation of “bastards” (the Indians and mestizos) became a nation of legitimated, hyphenated peoples—in effect, Spanish-Mexicans.
To see what I mean by a “butch,” lesbian reading, see Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Sor Juana’s Second Dream (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).
Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek (New York: Random House, 1991).
Susan Stryker, paper delivered at Pomona College, 1994 and her recent book, Gay by the Bay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). On Catalina de Erauso, see Michelle Stepto and Gabriel Stepto, Memoir of a Basque Lieutenant Transvestite in the New World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
See Deena Gonzalez, “Chicana Identity Matters,” in Antonia Darder, ed., Culture and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1995), reprinted in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 22:2 (fall 1997).
See Jane Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1987).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2003 Alicia Gaspar de Alba
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
González, D.J. (2003). “Lupe’s Song”. In: de Alba, A.G. (eds) Velvet Barrios. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04269-9_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04269-9_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-6097-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-04269-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)